Amazon Picks 20 Finalists For 'HQ2' Second Headquarters Location (nbcnews.com)

bigpat writes: Amazon took in hundreds of proposals and narrowed it down to twenty places for its "second" headquarters, with up to 50,000 new jobs promised in the next 15 years and millions of square feet of office and research space. The cities include: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Montgomery County, Maryland, Nashville, Newark, NJ, New York City, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Toronto and Washington D.C. Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate the feasibility of a future partnership that can accommodate our hiring plans as well as benefit our employees and the local community." The company said it would make its decision later in 2018.

Comments

I don't understand why cities compete

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't understand why anyone would want their city to win this. Your taxes will go up to bring in Amazon, and that gets you... what?

The way the EU has structured things, with incentives for relocation being illegal, seems far superior.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[hey!]

It brings in jobs, and the workers pay taxes. At least that's the theory.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Some of the cities/states are offering transferable/refundable tax credits. That's a fancy way of paying cash. And those property taxes would have been gathered otherwise. The land would be worth less than when Amazon had a headquarters on it, but it would be taxed.

Plus, some of these cities are promising serious cash outlays on infrastructure... Amazon specific infrastructure.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[Anonymous Coward]

It brings in jobs, and the workers pay taxes. At least that's the theory.

Except that it never actually happens that way. The taxes paid by those new workers don't come anywhere close to the tax revenue that the city loses. Never has, never will.

I find it quite sad that cities won't tell Amazon to fuck off and instead are falling all over themselves to give away billions of dollars to a huge wealthy company that already has plenty of money and could easily build a new headquarters without a penny in "tax breaks".

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[ScentCone]

I don't understand why anyone would want their city to win this. Your taxes will go up to bring in Amazon, and that gets you... what?

Because... they're going to spend billions of dollars wherever they settle, and there will be thousands of jobs. And those people will be buying lunch, hiring plumbers, paying oceans of income and property taxes, and otherwise bumping up the regional economy in a huge way. To say nothing of the local contractors, vendors and other service providers who will along for the ride. I can't think of too many cities that wouldn't want that boost in their local economies and the ability it brings to attract a thousand other businesses into the same orbit.

The way the EU has structured things, with incentives for relocation being illegal, seems far superior.

And it's exactly that sort of control over your town's choices and economic life that makes many people absolutely recoil at the notion of EU-style nanny statism.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Well, it's not secret. They post videos of their new robots (I'm guessing once the patents are issued).

But that's not relevant to this particular topic. This Amazon facility is for the engineers, not the supply chain workers.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[gfxguy]

Maybe it's not just about a city getting more in tax dollars - maybe decreasing unemployment, even if many of the workers relocate to the city, you still have ancillary services they need - like restaurants, shopping, entertainment. Yes, it also increases traffic and makes a lot of other things worse - so it depends on what the city wants out of it.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[Junta]

It is complicated.

Much of the time, the revenue that the city 'loses' is revenue that otherwise wouldn't exist. A company either would pay, say 20 million in taxes under 'normal' rules, but arrange to only pay 3 million, it is said they 'gave' them 17 million dollars. However the alternative for the city was not 20 million, it was 0 (or maybe from alternative taxpayers, but for many of these places they got enough empty space that amazon does not exactly bump other more profitable companies out.

On top of the employment and immediately indirect benefits that the politicians like to tout, it's also a rationalization to get some public works spending through. I know that at least one of those metropolitan areas has been trying for many years to build some sane transit improvements, but the citizens never have the stomach and would rather sit in traffic two hours a day than see money spent to improve it. Amazon can become the justification to spend money on those projects.

Of course, this is all hugely unfair still and favors big businesses with leverage and is another way that economic power gets focused to a handful of leaders at a handful of companies. The consequences of capitalism exacerbated by technology that facilitates really fast information travel and logistics to make it feasible to consolidate to gigantic powerful companies that grind all competition to dust.

  It can also be greatly disappointing. There was a small town that agreed basically to let a big datacenter take of residence basically without paying any taxes whatsoever, and in very real terms went into the red building infrastructure required by the company to make the deal. It was admittedly great for the construction companies in the short term, but as soon as everything was built, they became upset because that gigantic facility under normal conditions had maybe a dozen employees. They were imagining in their heads what a textile plant of that size would hire 30 years ago and instead got to be the suckers that happen to have a big datacenter that contributes nothing to the employment or economy of the area.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[supremebob]

I think that the only reason that Toronto is on the list is so Amazon can extort federal tax breaks along with the state level tax breaks everyone is offering. I'd imagine that a thinly veiled "cut our taxes some more or we're moving our HQ to Canada" threat would work pretty well with the current administration.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[ScentCone]

not because they're offered my money to do it

And you're the one scolding other people for not understanding things?

You have your town, with local residents and businesses paying their usual taxes. Along comes the possibility of a big new employer drawing in lots of local business activity, creating new jobs and a huge new wave of tax revenue collected from employees, property taxes, local business revenue from new employees, and the taxes on that new revenue. In order to encourage all of that into happening, the locals decide to offer to collect somewhat less of some particular taxes or fees than they might otherwise, knowing that the net result is a much larger new take of tax money and economic security. Somehow you think this is money being actually taken out of your pocket. That's exactly the sort of cognitive problem that results in someone thinking that bureaucrats in Belgium know best how to handle - with uniform policies - the activities in a Frankfurt factory and the operations of a goatherd on an island in Greece.

Re:Considering none of them often work...

[greenwow]

I agree. Those places probably won't even work the required 16 hours a day Mon-Thu much less the 12 hours required Fri-Sun.

Re:All in blue (or about to be blue) state shithol

[ScentCone]

I wonder why? You red-state folks seem to [sic] warm and welcoming...

In my experience, the people you meet in most red states are wildly more affable, warm, friendly, and polite than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue. Your comments is a sure sign that you never get out of your holier-than-thou bubble and echo chamber. Give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised that the people you hate are actually a lot nicer than the people you feel you're supposed to like because they vote the way you do.

Most of EU has parliments

[rsilvergun]

which are much better systems of Democracy. Our system was built from the ground up to protect the interests of the wealthy (especially land owners, but mostly because at the time being wealthy meant owning lots of land). We're not really a democracy. We've got dozens and dozens of systems in place to make it so we look like one but at the end of the day the laws don't reflect popular opinion. Heck, our head of State lost the popular vote by 3 _million_.... And that's just one example. There's our Senate, built from the ground up as a buffer between the population and wealthy land and slave owners. There's Gerrymandering. There's all manner of flavors of voter suppression. I could go on but the depressions making me want to stop...

That's the excuse

[rsilvergun]

the reason is bribes, which are essentially legal here in the form of Political Action Committees, campaign donations and jobs handed out after completion of a term in office. If we were sane we'd regulate PACs, only let people donate to candidates they can vote for and even then limit the amounts and give anyone who served a significant public office a pension for life and require them to retired without owning stock.

Not a theory

[SuperKendall]

It brings in jobs, and the workers pay taxes. At least that's the theory.

As someone who pays state income and sales taxes, I assure you it is no theory.

Even if you give a company a lot of tax breaks there is by necessity a TON of revenue brought to a region that has any large company. It's not just the workers, but all of the support that goes into a large office - construction, office supplies, cleaning, etc.

On top of that a few larger businesses generally attract other businesses to the region as well. It has a halo effect when a large company someplace well enough to set up a large office there,

Re:All in blue (or about to be blue) state shithol

[MellowBob]

Your comments is a sure sign that you never get out of your holier-than-thou bubble and echo chamber. Give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised that the people you hate are actually a lot nicer than the people you feel you're supposed to like because they vote the way you do.

And that's how you got Trump. We voted for him because of people like you.

Re: All in blue (or about to be blue) state shitho

[buddyglass]

No doubt the set of white people willing to live and work in an urban environment where there are brown people is self-selected to skew blue. But having a much higher concentration of non-white voters who skew blue doesn't hurt either. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this map, but, if accurate, then the only city in Texas where the whites voted Blue was Austin. Dallas and Houston, then, which went to Clinton, must have done so because of the brown vote.

Re:All in blue (or about to be blue) state shithol

[DNS-and-BIND]

See? This is the sort of ignorant, political cheap shot the Left loves so much. They don't need to actually visit these places and talk to the people, they can just say things that they KNOW are true because they read it on the media. It's not going to get any better until the Left decides it has compassion for the little people, and I don't see that happening. It's just too satisfying to speak truth to the powerless.

Re:All in blue (or about to be blue) state shithol

[Attila Dimedici]

In my experience, the people you meet in most red states are wildly more affable, warm, friendly, and polite than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue.

...as long as your skin is the same color as theirs.

It is interesting that you think that. My sister is very left wing. A few years ago she moved to Portland, Oregon, at least partly because it is such a left wing city. She was shocked to learn how racist the city is. I had to bite my tongue when she made that comment over a family dinner when she came home to visit, because anyone who studies the history of the progressive movement knows how racist it has always been.

Re:Not a Theory, Just Bullshit

[lgw]

which means its almost fully automated with a minium support staff on hand just to keep the automation running

Amazon pays its Seattle employees a total of $25 billion. That's a lot of taxes. Billions of dollars of new housing was built, so there's all that new property taxes as well. Seattle has certainly come off well from the Amazon HQ there, budget-wise. Plenty of people don't like Seattle as a big city, of course, and prefer its older, more quiet version, but in terms of dollars for the city there's no argument.

Re:All in blue (or about to be blue) state shithol

[Attila Dimedici]

That explanation would make sense except the examples of racism she gave were from the left wing political establishment of the city...you know those supposedly "more liberal and accepting" people who implement the policies so beloved by the left.

My sister explicitly stated that her experience is that the majority in Portland are racist.

It should come as no surprise that progressives are racist. They always have been. The KKK was founded as the militant arm of the Democratic Party. The founder of Planned Parenthood was a eugenicist who spoke at KKK rallies and Planned Parenthood today has more clinics in minority neighborhoods than not. Woodrow Wilson resegregated the U.S. government and screened the movie "The Birth of a Nation" (the 1915 one) in the White House.