'Amazon's HQ2 Was a Con, Not a Contest' (recode.net)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: To dozens of cities across the United States, Amazon's widely publicized search for a "second headquarters" looked like thousands of new jobs, up for grabs. To Pivot co-host Scott Galloway, it now looks like a "ruse." "I lease office space all the time for my businesses and I always tell my real estate agent, 'We can lease any office in the world as long as I can walk there from where I live,'" Galloway said on the latest episode. "Amazon is now talking about having three headquarters, Seattle, Crystal City and Long Island City. The Bezos's also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles.

"This was never a contest," he added. "It was a con meant to induce ridiculous terms that they then took to the cites all along that they knew they were going to be in." In other words: By soliciting bids from lots of place where it was never going to move, Galloway alleges, Amazon was probably able to get more tax breaks from the pre-determined "winners." "I would bet, Kara, that when they pick two cities and they went to 2 and 3, they didn't say, 'Well, only half our headquarters is going there, so we're going to let you cut the tax subsidies and incentives in half,'" he explained. "This just has ill will written all over it, and I think people started to figure out what was going on ... It's the Olympics on steroids. A lot of high fives and ribbon cutting, and then 10 years later, we realize it was a bad idea."

Comments

I regret reading TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally, like so many slashdotters, I skip the article and read the comments.

This time I made the mistake of reading the article (as Chicago was one of the cities used in the ruse, I was interested in reading a detailed bit of journalism on Amazon's malfeasance. Instead I get an inane interview with someone who knows (or whose comments certainly indicate) he knows nothing about politics, has a superficial knowledge of other matters, and while I agree with his suspicions about Amazon, doesn't really offer up much insight.

I expect the comments in slashdot, when they eventually arrive, will be far more information dense than the tripe in TFA. What a waste of time.

Tax exemptions are almost always a bad thing

[WillAffleckUW]

One of the problems in Seattle's South Lake Union is that 2/3 of all the buildings are paying no taxes, so there are no funds to support infrastructure costs, so it ends up getting subsidized by the rest of the city.

Every time I hear someone new say how great it is, I ask them where they live. Chances are they don't even live in Seattle, so they don't realize what the real impact is.

By the way, we have no state or county or city income tax, or capital gains tax on stocks, so it's not like we get any real money to pay for all this.

Re:Tax exemptions are almost always a bad thing

[whoever57]

Apparently, your personal biases are more important to you than facts:

Aviva Chomsky, a professor at Salem State College, states that "Early studies in California and in the Southwest and in the Southeast...have come to the same conclusions. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are more likely to pay taxes than they are to use public services. Illegal immigrants are not eligible for most public services and live in fear of revealing themselves to government authorities. Households headed by illegal immigrants use less than half the amount of federal services that households headed by documented immigrants or citizens make use of."[36]

National Public Radio (NPR) wrote in 2006: "Supporters of a crackdown argue that the U.S. economy would benefit if illegal immigrants were to leave, because U.S. employers would be forced to raise wages to attract American workers. Critics of this approach say the loss of illegal immigrants would stall the U.S. economy, saying illegal workers do many jobs few native-born Americans will do."[26]

Professor of Law Francine Lipman writes that the belief that illegal migrants are exploiting the US economy and that they cost more in services than they contribute to the economy is "undeniably false".[37] Lipman asserts that "illegal immigrants actually contribute more to public coffers in taxes than they cost in social services" and "contribute to the U.S. economy through their investments and consumption of goods and services; filling of millions of essential worker positions resulting in subsidiary job creation, increased productivity and lower costs of goods and services; and unrequited contributions to Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance programs."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...