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New York Mayor Says Amazon Headquarters Debacle Was 'an Abuse of Corporate Power' (cnn.com)
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is still upset that Amazon isn't coming to New York. De Blasio attacked the company Sunday for canceling plans to build a second headquarters in Queens last week. From a report: "This is an example of an abuse of corporate power," de Blasio told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press." "Amazon just took their ball and went home. And what they did was confirm people's worst fears about corporate America." He made similar comments in a New York Times op-ed Saturday. Amazon canceled the deal just months after announcing plans to split its new, second headquarters between New York and Virginia. The Seattle-based company, which is trying to grow its footprint at home and abroad, spent a year reviewing hundreds of "HQ2" proposals from all over North America before settling on the two regions.
[...] On Sunday, de Blasio, a Democrat, said New York offered Amazon a "fair deal," and blamed the company for making what he called an "arbitrary" decision to leave after some people objected. "They said they wanted a partnership, but the minute there were criticisms, they walked away," he added. "What does that say to working people that a company would leave them high and dry simply because some people raised criticisms?"
[...] On Sunday, de Blasio, a Democrat, said New York offered Amazon a "fair deal," and blamed the company for making what he called an "arbitrary" decision to leave after some people objected. "They said they wanted a partnership, but the minute there were criticisms, they walked away," he added. "What does that say to working people that a company would leave them high and dry simply because some people raised criticisms?"
Amazon don't want to pay tax. They want to profit from doing business in a developed country. They just don't feel the need to help pay to maintain one:
$11.2 billion in profits means you pay -0.1% federal tax. Nice.
Amazon are scum with no regard for their customers' (or is it products') privacy.
(1) Archiving/mining/sale of purchase data
(2) Selling facial recognition systems to police agencies worldwide, including in less than savory places
(3) Normalizing always-on microphones in people's homes.
I hope this is only the beginning of the backlash against Amazon and Jeff "Pic Dick" Bezos -- the ideal end game would be a big 'ol trust busting party, as was held for AT&T in the early 1980s. Split Amazon up into 10 or so companies, then move on and do the same to Google and Microsoft.
>"New York Mayor...' 'This is an example of an abuse of corporate power,' de Blasio told NBC"
I suppose all these major "incentives", bonuses, express permitting, promises, tax cuts, state-funded infrastructure for private benedit, and other such things are not "an example of an abuse of government power"?
If you are both a player and the referee, you can't complain when your opponent leaves with the ball.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
NYC makes offer to Amazon, Amazon negotiates, NYC gets ready to make loads of concessions to entice them into contract, people scream bloody murder, NYC cancels contract, Amazon walks away, NYC -> *pikachu surprised meme*
This is your fault NYC government. Not Amazon's. Yours. And while yes, you put way too much on the table in the first place, that too is your fault, not Amazon's. You could have walked away first, could have turned them down... oh wait, you actually did, but now you wanna be butthurt because Amazon accepted your rejection instead of begging you to take them back.
This is purely your fault for making terrible deals in the past to "bring jobs" to NYC. This is purely the fault of every city that has done this and created this ridiculous reality where corporations can shop around for the best deals... you are a government, not a retail business! STOP SELLING US OUT! Jobs are NOT worth it if they do not help the economy in your city/county/state. When you drop all corporate taxes for X years you are hurting your state, every time. They have no incentive to stay, so when the tax breaks are over, hey, time open a new HQ an reduce workforce to skeleton or less in the last place! And you can't stop it. So, stop doing that. Stop corporate welfare. Stop tax break incentives that last for years. You want an Amazon HQ, give them 1 year. ONE. A year of no taxes while you set up and get going, then business as usual - pay your taxes or walk on, son. Do that for everyone else. Heck, do that for NEW businesses as well! Attract that start-up! Incentivise small business growth! Anything but giving giant corporations that already pay almost no taxes yet another tax break.
An yes, i'd go so far as to charging additional tax on these massive businesses wanting to move into an area. The amount of public resources is way out of balance with the taxes they'd pay even without any tax breaks.
I'd have more sympathy for Amazon if they were paying taxes instead of sucking on the public tits everywhere they want a physical presence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
That is the bottom line.
Corporatism != Free Market
Why don't you go ask Ms. Occasional-Cortex why she and her peers lead a rage mob at them when Amazon was willing to move into a community that has an average income of $15k and create jobs there? None of the "criticisms" were sober and civilly expressed. It was typical Twitter culture rage mob with over-the-top rhetoric, vilification, etc.
And then you wonder why Amazon politely says "no, you can fuck right off and die" and leaves? Truth is, if AOC and co had been civil and demanded that the benefits package be cut in half, then had been otherwise welcoming, Amazon would very likely still be moving in. This is real life, not Twitter. You don't have Jack Dorsey and his biased admins padding your safe space every night while you sleep. There are consequences.
that there weren't as much "campaign contributions" to politicians and "gifts" to local "civic" leaders as they expected.
It wasn't general outrage.
It wasn't democracy.
It was the same arrogant, ignorant loudmouths who think they know better, doing their normal crap of forcing people to do "what's best for themselves":
POLL: Majority of New Yorkers Supported Amazon Moving to NYC
...
A significant majority (56 percent) of all New Yorkers approved of the plan while 36 percent disapproved. Among New York City residents support was slightly stronger at 58 percent.
Support was most pronounced among minorities: 70 percent of black voters approved while just 25 percent disapproved, and 81 percent of Latinos approved compared to 17 percent who disapproved.
So a bunch of white entitled suburban "progressives" thought they knew what's best for actual working-class blacks and Latinos.
And they fucked it up.
Imagine that.
The number of jobs that companies promise in exchange for tax breaks has always been a lie. The actual jobs are always a small fraction of what was originally claimed, and the promised increase in revenue to the cities never actually shows up.
If a municipality or state makes an agreement here to get new business relocated, then they should be putting in hard requirements into the deals. Ie, reduce the taxes only if the promises are kept, increasing them proportionate to how far apart the promises and reality actually are.
Politicians weasel out of this though. When the jobs don't show up the politicians never takes the blame, but just passes it along to the company ("how was I to know they didn't consider a handshake to be binding?") or to an opposing party ("they undermined me at every turn!").
Look at my big surprised face.
Now just watch the other businesses that supply the Other People's Money that prop up de Blasio's bourgeois socialism start to decamp to less crazy jurisdictions and New York will be right back where it was in the 1970s: broke, crime-ridden, and ready to elect Republicans again.
The original proposal was for a second Headquarters with 50,000 new jobs. But, there were two 'winners' each with 25,000 new jobs. So bait and switch, big time. So is it sort-of Headquarters 2 and 3 or HQ 2.0 and HQ 2.5. Amazon did not follow through with their promised prize.
It's worse than that. Companies often get massive investments into the infrastructure that they will need to use, which often isn't included in the original deal. Power, water and sewer, transportation, etc. The rationale is that there's budget for improving those things anyway, and might as well improve them for the company which will now have thousands of employees and a giant building complex using all that.
This means that communities which aren't near the company and which had been earmarked for infrastructure upgrades now lose out, so the company can benefit.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
New York ranks No. 1 in losing residents to other states
https://www.bizjournals.com/ne...
They are leaving. I quote:
Looking at New York City specifically, the area with the largest percentage of residents lost to other states came from the zip code 10075, in the Upper East Side, which faced a 9.3 percent decrease in its population from 2015 to 2016
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
It seems to me like a LOT of people involved with or impacted by this Amazon HQ being in, vs. leaving New York are just running off emotions and assumptions?
To determine if this was a "good deal" for NY taxpayers, you have to look at many factors and crunch all the numbers. I'm confident the likes of Cortex didn't do so, but I question if DeBlasio did either?
I mean, you have to calculate impact of the extra traffic it generates .... the extra demand on public utilities like electric power, sewer and water. You obviously have to look at how much you gave Amazon in tax breaks and benefits, vs. how much they'll really benefit the public with new jobs. (How much will you collect in taxes from the people they hire?) And if the deal wasn't struck with a clause in it that required Amazon STAY there for a number of years -- you have to try to take an educated guess about the long-term future. Many times, companies take advantage of these deals to put a business in a state, only to pull back out as soon as the perks expire.
I don't know if the HQ was a good deal of Queens or it wasn't .... but the people making the decision should sure know, and I'm not confident any of them do?
When the rednecks meet the people with 47 genders. They should televise that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In my State those sort of tax breaks are tied to the actual creation of the jobs, and are received retrospectively. So when they lie about how many jobs they'll create, they're also lying to themselves about how much of a tax credit they'll get.
The Wisconsin thing worked the same way. In the end they don't get their tax breaks, they only got media reports saying they did.
The company got an option to create jobs and get a tax break.
So, instead of paying an estimated $25 billion in taxes they were going to pay $22 billion, after working out a deal with Super Mario Brother Jr. But, the former bartender objected about Big Evil Amazon getting a $3 billion check from the taxpayers. In the end, New York is going to get $0 billion instead. Great job. I repeat, folks, an economics degree! The people of New York elected that scatterbrain, and they simply deserve who they elected.
The stupidity of Ms. Occasional-Cortex is irrelevent.
Amazon paid $0 federal income tax on profits of $11 Billion. Actually they paid less than zero, they got a $129 Million tax refund. Pretty nice, eh? That's two consecutive years of zero federal tax paid.
If you think they aren't going to do the same exact thing to New York and Virginia, you're dumber than that former bartender.
Organized labor and having to hire public housing residents.
Who wants to become full union and have to get told who to hire by a gov?
Hire on merit and grow as a brand.
Find a state and city that welcomes innovation and jobs.
Not a state that places demands on needing a union and who to hire.
Once a gov says who to hire, the next part is how many to hire.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You wanted them to come and be your live in whipping boy, and when you bragged to your usual audiences about how badly you were going to whip them, they reconsidered for some mysterious reason.
Amazon has paid hundreds of millions in state and local taxes. That is why matters to New York state and New York City, not *federal* taxes.
What does that say to working people that a company would leave them high and dry simply because some people raised criticisms?
What does it say? It says companies care a lot about their reputations. It says that companies don't want to set up shop where even a small minority object. It says that companies, even very large ones, can't afford to piss off their customers.
And most importantly, Mayor de Blasio, it says that you don't have a right to those jobs. People get to make deals and they get to walk away from them if they change their minds. Perhaps you should think about that a little harder the next time you offer a sweetheart deal to some company.
hell, you said so in the first paragraph. The Gov't of NYC was ready to bend over backwards. Excuse me, let me rephrase that, they were ready to bend the taxpayer over backwards.
The NYC taxpayers, OTOH, took exception with what amounted to handing Amazon $3 billion dollars in return for some jobs that may or may not materialize and that, even if they did, might end up going to folks brought in from out of state. They're the ones that shut down the deal by loudly protesting and making it clear that if their "leaders" went ahead with the giveaway there'd be a blood bath at the polls next election.
Like I said on the last NYC Amazon thread, Bully for them. It's high time we start standing up to these corporate A-holes and taking our country back from them.
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NY politicians cost the neighborhood billions in tax dollars (Hint there's CITY income taxes) lost property tax revenue, lost sales tax revenue, lost taxes on all the businesses that would have provided infrastructure on this
And idiots that lost out are celebrating the fact their politicians were too damn greedy and demanding bribes from Amazon .
How do you know if the current mayor of New York City is a Republican?
The city doesn't smell like urine.
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NY State is offering companies 10 year tax amnesty to relocate to NY. They aren't getting many takers.
Texas, on the other hand is the latest escape destination for CA corporations, is seeing explosive job growth.
The Queens location would have been good for Amazon and the city, but AOC wanted a scalp, so those 25K jobs are going elsewhere.
Tennessee and VA thank AOC for her help in generating job growth in their states.
Ken
Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose at age 27. That is not an indicator of a person whose opinions you should base your life on.
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What New York politician did NOT tell Amazon to take a hike? So Amazon takes a hike as ordered and now it's "not fair" that they did???? How absurdly hypocritical.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Let's say Amazon never paid incme taxes in NY State, for the sake of argument, so what? Every one of those 25K employees would have paid their income taxes, that alone is a huge net win for NY State and Queens.
Ken
from a company with a history of not paying taxes.
The expected outcome, based on prior experience, is that Amazon would have pocketed their subsidies and then when they dried up left.
This isn't Job Creation, it's Job Extortion.
Nice right wing talking points ya got there, BTW. Even worked in some AOC there even though she had nothing to do with it except personally opposing the deal. Do you work for a right wing think tank or just parrot everything they tell you to for free?
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Amazon doesn't want to build HQ somewhere where they are going to be picketed, attacked and vilified. Even if those attacks come from a vocal minority, in the age of social outrage that is not good for business. So they'll go somewhere where they are going to be welcome, or just spread their employees across different places to diversify their locations and reduce the risk being targeted by outraged people. How does this surprise anyone? I'm neither defending or attacking anyone here, just stating this was the obvious logical outcome.
This is why we need to make sure all levels of government affected by such actions are involved.
Yes the US style of government is slow and clumsy. However, companies will need to work with them, to help make sure that they are indeed providing such a side effect benefit to the community, while they use that location to make gobs of money.
People who live a few hundred miles north of New York City know the cost of having a big company being center of a community, only for it to leave devastating the community.
GE use to be centered in Schenectady NY (Near Albany). GE made Schenectady the City of Lights, and was the Silicon Valley a hundred years ago. While GE still has a presence there, it is a shadow of its former self. Where many engineers have been laid off decades ago, turning the city into a run down post industrial city, with its last hopes in a revitalization is a casino. With the Hudson River still polluted for hundreds of Miles from GE's free capitalist actions.
Jobs are good, however the company needs to be sure they are also working for the community, for a long term plan. While not a company doesn't need to be hyper Green, they need to follow and volunteer to perform reasonable environmental protection, and not just leave the city, because they found a better deal the city over in the next decade.
They are cities that are run down, because they were built up for a population that it no longer can achieve, it is far more expensive to maintain a big structure, with a smaller tax base.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You know, New York isn't really a Blue State. Just because the President elections and senate will tend to be Blue, The house of representatives will often get a good mixture of Democrat and Republican. New York, is a large state, with a lot of Rural areas, and a lot of people who are Very Red. I can drive up the roads and I see Trump Signs. Yellow Don't Tread on me, Tea Party Flags, Signs fighting the "New York Safe Act" on gun control. You will actually see more of these then Blue advertising.
New York is actually a purple state, It is just New York City is such a large city, that it makes elections based on the entire state vote trend Blue.
The Governor while a democrat, and has been on the news lately bashing Trump, has a conservative streak in him, often managing the State Senate keeping it a Republican majority for a long time. The state senate had switched recently. Mostly because Trump is such a bad excuse for a human being, and too many Republicans are ditching their values to support him. So there was a backlash. However I don't see this a long term issue. After Trump leaves office, the Republican party, would get back to their traditional talking points and probably regain power again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Greed driven corporations are pretty bad, I'll give you that.
However, they don't hold a candle to the corruption and abuse of power your typical politician wields.
Watching a politician pretending to be all righteous against $subject is most amusing.
I'm sure they'll find some red state willing to give them a few billion for hopes and promises
Good luck finding 25,000 intelligent tech workers in Oklahoma.
This is why we need to make sure all levels of government affected by such actions are involved.
Even better, the government can just keep their snoot out of location decisions, and corporations can make the decision based on business efficiency rather than bribe size.
"free capitalist actions"
Let's not mix up capitalism, which is an economic framework, with (lack of) government regulation.
We can have capitalism with environmental and other regulation. Companies that pollute are freeloaders because the public pays the costs they should have incurred.
When government allows companies to pollute like that, it is asleep at the wheel or corrupt. So please take your communist agenda somewhere else, we will fix the EPA after the guy that was supposed to drain the swamp gets flushed out and a real leader gets elected.
They are taking those jobs to TN & VA, I'm sure people will be willing to move to either for a good-paying job.
Ken
ALL expenses, and that includes all taxes, become part of the cost of doing business and are passed-on to the consumer as part of the cost of the goods and/or services provided by the consumer to the customer. Money passed-on to the CEO and the share holders also count as expenses and are also passed along to the consumer. Government penalties for bad corporate behavior are also passed along to the consumer.
Leftists simply refuse to recognize these most-basic facts of normal bookkeeping as they call for business taxes, and penalties on businesses, etc. The only way to punish a corporation for bad behavior is to go after the executives PERSONALLY, but that would run counter to the basic leftist anti-evil-corporation narrative. The lefties never actually want to go after the executives themselves and the money they got from the corporations because so many of those very wealthy executives are themselves leftists (Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Buffet, etc)
NY State is offering companies 10 year tax amnesty to relocate to NY. They aren't getting many takers.
That offer doesn't include NYC. Of course a company would rather relocate to Austin than Utica.
It's not that I do't care about your remark, it's just that it doesn't matter.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This from the politicians in the main city of a state where the governor is extorting financial institutions into denying services like insurance and banking to non-profits that don't sit on their approved side of politics. NY politicians have absolutely ZERO room to complain that a company which finds setting up shop there to be distasteful is somehow "abusing" them. Nonsense.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Most states are actually purple... even California & Texas when you start looking further into candidate positions in the House. But this isn't something that can create scandles and football like sensational news so we get a B&W Red/HeeHaw/Conservative/Repub/TP vs Blue/Tooot/Liberal/Dem/Social talking points that can only divide our nation and never progress to a middle ground that democracy intended.
The reality is that it's a huge range and the extremes shown by the media is a very very small group that the rest of us should really just ignore and get work done. People clumped together as Dems or Reps across state lines usually have more differences than similarities. As a population we arent a two party system. We are just cliff noted as such.
Politics is and should be local. And should be better covered locally. The media needs to stop discussing national politics because they suck at it and tend to over summarize & give a spotlight to those that actually represent no one.
The rednecks already have 47 genders, but they also have an unwritten agreement never to talk about them.
Yes, politics should be covered locally. However, the news industry is consolidating around a few large left-right-wing-nut companies. Those companies won't be covering local news without infected it with national politics.
Those are on hold as Pecker is convulsing over having his plea deal abrogated by the Feds for being involved in a blackmail effort. And Nat. Enq. doesn't really care about the pictures, they only wanted to stop the Wash. Post's (Bezos owns it) investigation into the corruption between Saudi Arabia and the Nat. Enq. They also wanted to make Agent Orange happy.
The blackmail is how the Nat. Enq. and Agent Orange view the world, they assumed Bezos was open to blackmail and that he was somehow directing the Wash. Post's investigations. It's straight out of Hollywood's version of how the Mafia works. That's the depth of their understanding about how to influence. Bezos turned the tables on them and now they look like the childish schoolyard bullies they are. Bezos turned their pictures into worthless trash.
When was the last time the state voted for an R for president? 1984 Regan v. Mondale. Pockets of rural Rs don't make a D state any less Blue.
Just another day in Paradise
Sorry, the government officials had a meeting of the minds with Amazon when the deal was struck.
Others, who had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PROCESS, had no actual skin in the game, and likely didn't understand what was being done here (AOC) AT ALL came in and basically stuck their noses where they weren't wanted.
Now, 25K jobs. GONE.
Tax revenues in the billions. GONE.
Smooth fuckin' move...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
also from the bizjournals.com article comes this confusing sentence, which indicates NY state ranks in a tie (with NJ) for 4th in net outward migration.
In terms of percentages, New York ties with New Jersey at minus-0.9 percent in terms of net migration. It is closely followed by Connecticut, with minus-1 percent net migration, and Illinois and North Dakota tied for third with a minus-1.1 percent change in migration.
hi!
Well, until recently, the New York state government had Republican majorities. Even Republican Governors now and then. So that D majority in New York City must be pretty slim statewide, and not be enough to reliably overcome the gerrymander (either intentional or because of the 'natural' distribution of rural/urban counties) that determines control of the statehouse.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
The mainstream media is where the blame lies. They have put AOC on a pedestal despite the fact that she - by Bill DeBlasio's own statements - has no basic understanding of how things work. She and her ilk have been lionized by the media and the resistance against all things Trump without actually vetting her knowledge or abilities. Now she crows about the benefits of losing 25,000 good jobs plus all the feeder jobs. And the NYT is still gushing about how they dodged that terrible capitalism bullet. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com] You know the left has gone insane when uber-Leftist Bill DeBlasio rants about how unfair it was that Amazon decided they were not welcome and left for more warmer climes. Pull your head out dude, your sycophant lackeys ran them off. Didn't you get the memo? Amazon is the new capitalist Boogeyman of the left.
The media has gone full-on crazy. They place anyone on a pedestal that wants to be part of the Trump resistance regardless of their competence, experience, integrity or understanding. That's why we get nonstop stories on self important thought leader racists and imbeciles like Jussie Smollet, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren and demigods like the six month messiah Michael Avenatti. How did all that Avenatti worship work out for them? Still "bogus"? The media loves crazy so much that you would think that Trump would be their Gender-Neutral-Upright-Homonid-of-the-Year.
Perhaps my view is squewd, because I live in a town which had its economy collapse overnight, because a company who wasn't well regulated, decided to pollute the water supply.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cue a Life in Hell cartoon, where little Bongo is standing there on a chair, caught witb cookie crumbs on his mouth, "It was an abuse of corporate power."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Let's hope New York's citizen uprising means the beginning of the end for corporate welfare queens extorting taxpayers for a free ride.
The best summary of what really goes on in these "negotiations" was provided by a Toronto real estate lawyer at one of the public meetings held when Amazon claimed to be considering the city for its second headquarters.
The lawyer said people shouldn't get bent out of shape over what provincial and city politicians were promising Amazon, because there was no way they were going to set up shop in Toronto anyway. The sole purpose of talking to Toronto was to see how much the city would offer in concessions. Because they weren't seriously considering Toronto, Amazon could just keep pushing and pushing to see how much they could get. When Toronto finally threw up its hands in disgust, Amazon would take the last offer and wave it under the nose of the next sucker on their list, and say, "This is what we walked away from. What will YOU give us?"
The lawyer's funniest (and probably most accurate) remark concerned how to sort out the places that had some chance versus those that had no chance. "Find out where the CEO has a summer home. Draw a hundred kilometre circle around it. Cities inside the circle have a chance. Cities outside it are sucker bait".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Just to make a few things clear:
Amazon didn't pay taxes this year dispite profits because it invested excessively in prior years, and is still writing down that deficit. If you run a business, and it takes many years and a lot of money to R&D, engineer, construct, and operate your business, you get to carry over the red ink from one tax year to another. Think about massive operations like an Oil Refinery, or power station, or a chip fabrication facility that take YEARS to construct. The total cost is very high. The losses in the construction tax years are carried over into the profit tax years until the balance is 0.
Amazon didn't actually pay taxes this year because their deficit was so high from all the expansion they have done. Many tax policies are very short sighted, but this one I whole-heatedly agree with because it encourages investment in long-term projects and is far-sighted in contrast to most other tax policies. Their tax-deference balance is significantly less now, and will soon start to pay taxes on profits. This is the same situation as GE and a lot of the other funny "0% tax rate" fake-news stories you read about. I say fake-news because every reporter writing about tax rates on corporations is smart enough to know that not all investment cycles fit into a tax year.
What I do have a problem with is these large companies working with the local governments to get tax-breaks. That in my opinion should be illegal. It is a subsidy. Instead the corporations should be forced to ask for tax rate changes so all companies get the same rates. Small competitors are effectively at a disadvantage because they don't enjoy the same tax breaks as the large companies can negotiate for. It makes for an un-fair playing field.
Yes. It is called a "carry over loss". Speak to your tax consultant.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The entire situation is absurd. After the LOTR orc-like invasion on the Supreme Court after Kavanaugh, and all the reactive violent protesting after not getting their way each and every time (including the 2016 Presidential election), they call Amazon a petulant child for walking away from a bad business deal.
New York could basically be compared to Darth Vader while Amazon is Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, where Vader alters the deal and says "Pray I do not alter it further."
When Amazon gets there, New York says they want Amazon to pay for all these extra programs and all this nonsense and on top of that AOC wouldn't give them a $3 billion tax break because the money is better spent elsewhere, even though them walking away from the deal means they won't be paying any taxes whatsoever, as usual proving AOC to be enormously ignorant.
Amazon simply made a good solid business decision to walk away from a bad deal.
The attitude of AOC and the other "activists" that were dead-set against Amazon coming to NY had made their decision long before any negotiations took place. Their misguided hatred of corporations that most "blame the man" poor people types have caused what democrats always do-- To assume mal intent on the part of the person you're about to have a discussion with so it is impossible to have a good discussion because one side is already convinced you're trying to screw them over.
Furthermore when Amazon said they made it a hostile environment to do business they hit the nail on the head with democrats. Hostile environment.
Feminists create a hostile dating environment, where you have to walk on eggshells to not get a false sex assault / harassment / rape accusation.
SJWs create a hostile social environment where you have to walk on eggshells to not offend anyone.
Corporate hating types create a hostile business environment where they want to take as much as they can from a rich corporation without giving anything in return.
In fact, people like AOC want to take as much as they can from everybody else while giving the absolute minimum they can in return. Don't believe me? Try to sell stuff on Craigslist or FB Marketplace-- The kingdom of lowballers.. They will try to get you to sell it for the lowest you possibly will accept and even con you by saying they have some incredibly low amount of money right now that they could show up in your house in an hour and buy it for, and it's like less than half of what you were asking for, which is already 30% less than you could get on eBay or Amazon.
- Alex