Holding up Amazon (an internet-only business for most of its existence) as an example is disingenuous at best. Amazon didn't have any sort of brick-and-mortar retail establishments until recently in its history. There were no stores to be profitable or not profitable. Uber doesn't have stores either. When you compare apples to oranges, it's stupid to be amazed that they're not identical.
In a brick-and-mortar franchise, you turn a profit consistently or you end up on the chopping block. That's how business works. Stop wasting everyone's time trying to say otherwise because the facts disagree with your fact-free opinions.
Detroit is a shithole because a ton of jobs left the area. Your "solution" to Detroit having way too few jobs is to increase the minimum cost to employ those residents for new businesses. The poor broke people who can't move because they're broke and desperately need jobs are making $0 at their current non-existent jobs and you think the minimum wage is going to help them by giving them a forced raise at the job they don't have. That's just plain stupid. It'll inflate prices for essential goods and make life even harder for them though, an absolute unavoidable economic fact about minimum wage hikes that you care nothing about. YOU are the one forcing them to "live under a bridge and eat potatoes."
"If your business doesn't pay a living wage, your business doesn't deserve to exist" you say, but wages don't exist in a vacuum. There are two columns in that big master ledger, debits and credits, and someone has to actually produce money to pay out these wages. Only a fool thinks that forcing a business to give everyone in the business a raise results in more money in those workers' pockets. What you're really saying is that if a single job doesn't pay enough money for a worker to survive comfortably on that single job's wage, the worker doesn't deserve to have access to that job as an option. Those people in Detroit that you're economically fucking with a rake from the comfort of your keyboard would love to have access to a job, even if a single job doesn't pay their full rent and bills. As is typical of ignorant people, you don't actually care about solutions to their problems, only ways that you can exploit their plight to beg sympathy for your political agenda. A lower or abolished minimum wage suddenly means Detroit is full of ready and waiting workers that can begin to pull themselves out of poverty, not poor people that live off the dole because of your moralizing on their behalf, moralizing that they didn't ask you for and don't need.
"Randians?" Lovely attempt at labeling, but nothing more than ad hominem fallacy. I've read Nickel and Dimed. I get that it sucks to live at minimum wage because I've done it, but again: wages don't exist in a vacuum. When you change something in a complex system, it has network effects across the entire system. The minimum wage blocks unskilled, poor, very young and old, and significantly disabled workers from doing work. But hey, it keeps those pesky poor uneducated blacks from competing with whites in the labor force, so I guess your secret need to codify racism through the legal system is succeeding wonderfully.
If you really want to dip your big internet penis into anecdotal evidence, I know an older woman who was in a massive car crash that left her with an arm (that is somehow still functional) that literally hangs from the skin and a brace because they can't fix the bones inside without making it even worse; she has asked me to let her know if anyone has any kind of job that she can do for them at her home, even if it's for $2 an hour, even if it's just stuffing envelopes, because she wants money and wants to be a productive member of society and can't just go "learn to code." The minimum wage forces her to stay home and do no work for anyone, even though she wants to work, even though she is capable of doing so, but isn't capable of doing work that's worth $15 an hour. You and those who support your "living wage" lie are the reason she is unable to work.
You don't care one lick about these sorts of people. You only care about your ideology and your Utopian vision, free of such pesky aberrations that prove your entire sweeping soulless philosophy to be objectively harmful to society as a whole.
Good thing you're free to leave Detroit. The minimum wage exists to price people out of the market. Originally black people, but today it includes young and elderly people too. Only people who already have enough wealth can justify their employment under higher wages. If anyone's sucking the corporate boot-tip, it's you.
> pretending like people can't say "no" to justify the state's authoritarian tit remaining in the mouths of grown adults
0/10 troll bro, try again. If a 16 year old wants to take a $3/hr job they should be allowed to do so. If the minimum wage is $7/hr then they can only take that job illegally and get paid under the table with zero taxation...which is exactly what happens today.
I know about the studies. I'm not talking about the studies. I'm talking about the need to abolish minimum wage in its entirety and the underemployment problem that comes from increasing wage floors. Are you responding to the correct comment?
Because it's so easy to just quit and go somewhere else, especially when it's not you that would have to do the quitting and manage your family in the aftermath./s
Minimum wage needs to be abolished, not raised. Medicare for all, though? Sign me up, but require records of vaccination and citizenship or at least permanent resident status to access. People who talk about Seattle's minimum wage "not losing jobs" completely ignore the reality of underemployment that results from such policies.
They're not getting the same total pay. Whole Foods average pay for cashiers and deli workers is $11-$12 per hour; a $15 per hour minimum wage with a 30 hour to 20 hour reduction per week is $30 less per week and constitutes a 10% weekly pay cut. One must make $10 or less an hour for the hourly increase to $15 combined with losing 33% of hours per week to maintain the same net wage after the change. People who parrot "less hours for the same pay is awesome" seem to miss how huge of a deal the "same pay" part really is in that assertion. And, unless the worker's work shift times are sufficiently predictable, the person losing 10% of their total pay may not have the flexibility to find another job to make up for that lost income without outright quitting the job they just "got a raise" for.
That discussion isn't really about companies slashing hours to avoid paying benefits, it's about the slashing of hours resulting in potential loss of benefits as a side effect without regard to whether the employer did so intentionally. The "30 to 20 hours" thing in the original post was an anecdotal example from one worker, so it doesn't necessarily represent what's going on here either. It's great that Whole Foods gives benefits to all workers instead of only full-timers, but that isn't necessarily true at some or even most of the companies forced to pay higher wages. However, let's roll with the example we have.
If we completely ignore the potential loss of benefits, the irrationally optimistic vision of "less hours at the same rate of pay" still falls completely flat because a 50% wage increase is required to fully reverse the pay loss stemming from a 33% cut in hours. It is unlikely that the workers affected by this $15 minimum wage, when averaged together, made $10 or less an hour, and Glassdoor says the average base salaries for cashiers and "prepared foods team members" is $11-$12 an hour. Using the lowest of those figures, $11 * 30 = $330/wk, $15 * 20 = $300/wk. That's a 10% pay cut.
"armada" said "the same money for fewer hours of your life is a freaking raise" but I wouldn't call a 10% pay cut a raise. For someone making $1,320/mo to now make $120/mo less, that's a hell of a lot of lost wages and those people are really going to be hurting under this benevolent new minimum wage.
That's not how business works. Individual stores must be profitable to stay open. If I have 100 stores and 5 are consistently in the red for a year, I'm not going to effectively operate an inefficient charity by keeping those open and making less money. That's just stupid. Anyone who goes "muh multi-billion dollar megacorp could subsidize the store" is demonstrating clear ignorance about fundamental aspects of how a retail business works.
Healthcare benefits are required at 30 hours per the ACA but not at under 30 hours, so I'm not sure where you're coming up with "hours worked are not enough that the employees qualify for most benefits." Where's the argument falling apart? The law governing the health benefit requirements says the argument is sound.
It's not the same though. 30 to 20 hours also means potential loss of benefits since they're only required for full-time workers, which has a somewhat mercurial definition but is defined by healthcare.gov as "Any employee who works an average of at least 30 hours per week for more than 120 days in a year." Further, 30 to 20 is a 33% drop in hours; unless there is a 33% raise involved, that's a net loss in pay, plus the loss in healthcare benefits (which is a portion of the overall compensation package, a.k.a. "pay") must be considered. The reduced hours also has a rarely mentioned side effect: overtime kicks in at over 40 hours of work, so while a 30-hour worker has a chance of overtime if temporarily working more due to business spikes or a co-worker quitting, now they're very unlikely to hit that threshold. Workers are also expected to work harder and faster under the higher wages because they're more expensive, which can be far more stressful on the worker than if the worker did the same amount of work over a longer period of time.
But hey, now you have more free time to sleep and figure out how to make ends meet on your reduced net pay, right?
I'm not suffering from a false analogy. People are misunderstanding what I'm saying (and for some, they don't understand what they're saying in the first place.) I'm not talking about going into debt which, however "magical," is a separate action. I'm talking about people treating a negative line item as if it's already a realized gain. That's it. I'm not saying anything even remotely more complex than that, and certainly not on the multi-paragraph levels that are being explored in some responses to me. I'm not saying that what you're talking about is wrong by any means. My entire point is that a discount line on an invoice can't be treated as cash in the bank. I'm not interested in discussing other ways get that cash into the bank. I'm not here to talk about the $27B amount not necessarily being accurate; the Amazon deal and its specifics are largely irrelevant. I'm exclusively talking about a specific failure of logical thought that seems to be disturbingly widespread.
I get that you're trying to flesh out things, but my entire point is that a discount line item on an invoice isn't spendable money simply by not sending the invoice. People treat that money like it's being spent when that's not the case. What you're saying is about the Amazon deal and it's fine, but I'm not talking about the Amazon deal. I'm talking about reading "tax incentive" as "money the government is spending." Granted, if you send a $30B bill and then cut the billed entity a check for $3B, it's no different in practical application than billing them for $27B, but there aren't only two possible states here because the third state is shutting it all down. This is only about Amazon because that's the most recent example, but I'm talking about a general concept.
The problematic assertion I'm targeting is "why are we giving them $3B in tax incentives when we could spend that $3B on so many other things if we shut down this deal?" If the deal is shut down, a magical $3B check doesn't go into the state's bank account, the state gets precisely $0.00. There is no $3B to spend, not if you kill the deal and not if you give the tax incentives as part of the deal either. You'd have the $3B if you refuse to offer those incentives in the first place, but that's not what AOC and some people here on Slashdot arguing with me are saying, and Amazon flat-out isn't coming without that incentive, so that possible path is completely out the window. That leaves (A) give the $3B incentives to net $27B in tax revenue or (B) shut down the deal and get $0B in tax revenue. At no point in the realm of possible outcomes does that $3B ever exist as spendable money, yet people are arguing with me until they're blue in the face that it is totally spendable money.
Yeah, the "tax incentives to attract businesses" thing needs to go, but as I said in another comment, it'll have to be banned federally because if some places do it then ALL of them have to play the game.
I don't know if they are or aren't. I'm NOT going to defend Amazon, I'm just here to point out the silliness behind treating a discount on an unsent invoice as if you already have the money and can spend it. The bigger problem is that this incentives system is done all over the country. It needs to be made illegal on the federal level, but until it is, some places do it causing others to have no choice but to do it too.
Your link says: "Opportunity costs represent the benefits an individual, investor or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another." The burden of proof that a better alternative exists is on you. List the businesses that are lining up to come to New York that'll a bring better deal in aggregate than Amazon was going to bring to the table. You're the second person now to show up and spout "muh opportunity cost" with nothing to show for it. Opportunity cost doesn't matter if there is no other opportunity to consider. With zero evidence presented that Amazon would have killed off other opportunities that have greater overall value, it seems that you're the armchair economist here. Perhaps you could try harder and actually enlighten us plebs instead of linking to Investopedia and expecting everyone to think you're smart because of it.
On top of your failure to provide any evidence to back your assertions of an opportunity cost mattering, you also fail to understand that you can't "commit" $3B that you don't have in the first place. For someone who is so authoritative in their tone, you sure don't seem to understand that you can't spent money you don't even have. Not sending a bill is different from giving away money. You'll find that out when you don't have anyone to send a bill to. In the absence of proof of a better set of investments (you know...that thing you didn't provide) it all falls back on a very simple concept that anyone with half a brain can understand: "something" is greater than "nothing." Oh, and unrealized hypothetical possibilities don't pay the bills either.
What alternative investment opportunities would be lost if Amazon HQ2 comes to New York that exceed the value brought by Amazon HQ2? Provide verifiable sources. We'll wait.
"AOC would not be advocating for less bureaucracy."
You're right. The point is that she said the same stupid thing that you did. I generally like your comments but on this particular subject you've eaten your foot.
"People that believe this should not have credit cards."
I was talking about checks. Try to keep up.
"They are going to work for other companies that will pay the full $30B in taxes."
OK, sure. List those other companies and how much each one will be paying in taxes. Most companies aren't beating down the door to locate in New York, one of the most expensive and crowded places in the Americas.
What does that have to do with people talking about spending money that doesn't exist? I'm complaining about people talking about how "that money could be spent on better things" when the money in question is non-existent. I'm not going to pretend to be a hot-shot economist, but anyone who has an understanding of how invoices and payments work can see that a discount on an invoice isn't spendable money whether you send the discounted invoice or don't send an invoice at all. Opportunity cost has nothing to do with that particular complaint.
Are you Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in disguise? $3B in tax incentives is not the same thing as a $3B tax credit. There's a huge difference between writing a $3B check and not sending a $3B invoice in the first place. In one case you're spending money, in the other you're just not getting the money to spend. See, the $3B invoice you don't send still nets you $27B in paid invoices, so you end up with a huge net positive. It's no different than a 10% discount for a big customer that gives you lots of bulk work. You can't spend the discounted money because you don't fucking have the money in the first place.
I swear to dog, anyone who thinks that the money "lost" in a discount "can be spent on something else" needs a severe beating with a clue-by-four.
Yeah, sure, whatever makes you feel better bro. I'm not breaking any rules, so I don't see the problem. I modify what I say so it passes the filter's criteria, which supposedly is the point of having a filter in the first place. Perhaps you'll enlighten me with your authoritative internet comment etiquette expertise, though.
Oh, but you get "points." I don't know what the exchange rate is for "points" to real money. Probably similar to the exchange rate for "exposure." Gamification in order to entice free labor is fucking bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Holding up Amazon (an internet-only business for most of its existence) as an example is disingenuous at best. Amazon didn't have any sort of brick-and-mortar retail establishments until recently in its history. There were no stores to be profitable or not profitable. Uber doesn't have stores either. When you compare apples to oranges, it's stupid to be amazed that they're not identical.
In a brick-and-mortar franchise, you turn a profit consistently or you end up on the chopping block. That's how business works. Stop wasting everyone's time trying to say otherwise because the facts disagree with your fact-free opinions.
Detroit is a shithole because a ton of jobs left the area. Your "solution" to Detroit having way too few jobs is to increase the minimum cost to employ those residents for new businesses. The poor broke people who can't move because they're broke and desperately need jobs are making $0 at their current non-existent jobs and you think the minimum wage is going to help them by giving them a forced raise at the job they don't have. That's just plain stupid. It'll inflate prices for essential goods and make life even harder for them though, an absolute unavoidable economic fact about minimum wage hikes that you care nothing about. YOU are the one forcing them to "live under a bridge and eat potatoes."
"If your business doesn't pay a living wage, your business doesn't deserve to exist" you say, but wages don't exist in a vacuum. There are two columns in that big master ledger, debits and credits, and someone has to actually produce money to pay out these wages. Only a fool thinks that forcing a business to give everyone in the business a raise results in more money in those workers' pockets. What you're really saying is that if a single job doesn't pay enough money for a worker to survive comfortably on that single job's wage, the worker doesn't deserve to have access to that job as an option. Those people in Detroit that you're economically fucking with a rake from the comfort of your keyboard would love to have access to a job, even if a single job doesn't pay their full rent and bills. As is typical of ignorant people, you don't actually care about solutions to their problems, only ways that you can exploit their plight to beg sympathy for your political agenda. A lower or abolished minimum wage suddenly means Detroit is full of ready and waiting workers that can begin to pull themselves out of poverty, not poor people that live off the dole because of your moralizing on their behalf, moralizing that they didn't ask you for and don't need.
"Randians?" Lovely attempt at labeling, but nothing more than ad hominem fallacy. I've read Nickel and Dimed. I get that it sucks to live at minimum wage because I've done it, but again: wages don't exist in a vacuum. When you change something in a complex system, it has network effects across the entire system. The minimum wage blocks unskilled, poor, very young and old, and significantly disabled workers from doing work. But hey, it keeps those pesky poor uneducated blacks from competing with whites in the labor force, so I guess your secret need to codify racism through the legal system is succeeding wonderfully.
If you really want to dip your big internet penis into anecdotal evidence, I know an older woman who was in a massive car crash that left her with an arm (that is somehow still functional) that literally hangs from the skin and a brace because they can't fix the bones inside without making it even worse; she has asked me to let her know if anyone has any kind of job that she can do for them at her home, even if it's for $2 an hour, even if it's just stuffing envelopes, because she wants money and wants to be a productive member of society and can't just go "learn to code." The minimum wage forces her to stay home and do no work for anyone, even though she wants to work, even though she is capable of doing so, but isn't capable of doing work that's worth $15 an hour. You and those who support your "living wage" lie are the reason she is unable to work.
You don't care one lick about these sorts of people. You only care about your ideology and your Utopian vision, free of such pesky aberrations that prove your entire sweeping soulless philosophy to be objectively harmful to society as a whole.
Good thing you're free to leave Detroit. The minimum wage exists to price people out of the market. Originally black people, but today it includes young and elderly people too. Only people who already have enough wealth can justify their employment under higher wages. If anyone's sucking the corporate boot-tip, it's you.
UNDERemployment is not UNemployent.
> pretending like people can't say "no" to justify the state's authoritarian tit remaining in the mouths of grown adults
0/10 troll bro, try again. If a 16 year old wants to take a $3/hr job they should be allowed to do so. If the minimum wage is $7/hr then they can only take that job illegally and get paid under the table with zero taxation...which is exactly what happens today.
I know about the studies. I'm not talking about the studies. I'm talking about the need to abolish minimum wage in its entirety and the underemployment problem that comes from increasing wage floors. Are you responding to the correct comment?
Because it's so easy to just quit and go somewhere else, especially when it's not you that would have to do the quitting and manage your family in the aftermath. /s
Minimum wage needs to be abolished, not raised. Medicare for all, though? Sign me up, but require records of vaccination and citizenship or at least permanent resident status to access. People who talk about Seattle's minimum wage "not losing jobs" completely ignore the reality of underemployment that results from such policies.
They're not getting the same total pay. Whole Foods average pay for cashiers and deli workers is $11-$12 per hour; a $15 per hour minimum wage with a 30 hour to 20 hour reduction per week is $30 less per week and constitutes a 10% weekly pay cut. One must make $10 or less an hour for the hourly increase to $15 combined with losing 33% of hours per week to maintain the same net wage after the change. People who parrot "less hours for the same pay is awesome" seem to miss how huge of a deal the "same pay" part really is in that assertion. And, unless the worker's work shift times are sufficiently predictable, the person losing 10% of their total pay may not have the flexibility to find another job to make up for that lost income without outright quitting the job they just "got a raise" for.
That discussion isn't really about companies slashing hours to avoid paying benefits, it's about the slashing of hours resulting in potential loss of benefits as a side effect without regard to whether the employer did so intentionally. The "30 to 20 hours" thing in the original post was an anecdotal example from one worker, so it doesn't necessarily represent what's going on here either. It's great that Whole Foods gives benefits to all workers instead of only full-timers, but that isn't necessarily true at some or even most of the companies forced to pay higher wages. However, let's roll with the example we have.
If we completely ignore the potential loss of benefits, the irrationally optimistic vision of "less hours at the same rate of pay" still falls completely flat because a 50% wage increase is required to fully reverse the pay loss stemming from a 33% cut in hours. It is unlikely that the workers affected by this $15 minimum wage, when averaged together, made $10 or less an hour, and Glassdoor says the average base salaries for cashiers and "prepared foods team members" is $11-$12 an hour. Using the lowest of those figures, $11 * 30 = $330/wk, $15 * 20 = $300/wk. That's a 10% pay cut.
"armada" said "the same money for fewer hours of your life is a freaking raise" but I wouldn't call a 10% pay cut a raise. For someone making $1,320/mo to now make $120/mo less, that's a hell of a lot of lost wages and those people are really going to be hurting under this benevolent new minimum wage.
That's not how business works. Individual stores must be profitable to stay open. If I have 100 stores and 5 are consistently in the red for a year, I'm not going to effectively operate an inefficient charity by keeping those open and making less money. That's just stupid. Anyone who goes "muh multi-billion dollar megacorp could subsidize the store" is demonstrating clear ignorance about fundamental aspects of how a retail business works.
Healthcare benefits are required at 30 hours per the ACA but not at under 30 hours, so I'm not sure where you're coming up with "hours worked are not enough that the employees qualify for most benefits." Where's the argument falling apart? The law governing the health benefit requirements says the argument is sound.
It's not the same though. 30 to 20 hours also means potential loss of benefits since they're only required for full-time workers, which has a somewhat mercurial definition but is defined by healthcare.gov as "Any employee who works an average of at least 30 hours per week for more than 120 days in a year." Further, 30 to 20 is a 33% drop in hours; unless there is a 33% raise involved, that's a net loss in pay, plus the loss in healthcare benefits (which is a portion of the overall compensation package, a.k.a. "pay") must be considered. The reduced hours also has a rarely mentioned side effect: overtime kicks in at over 40 hours of work, so while a 30-hour worker has a chance of overtime if temporarily working more due to business spikes or a co-worker quitting, now they're very unlikely to hit that threshold. Workers are also expected to work harder and faster under the higher wages because they're more expensive, which can be far more stressful on the worker than if the worker did the same amount of work over a longer period of time.
But hey, now you have more free time to sleep and figure out how to make ends meet on your reduced net pay, right?
0/10 troll bro. AC can't reading comprehension and you call that victory. "I am bleeding, making me the victor!"
I'm not suffering from a false analogy. People are misunderstanding what I'm saying (and for some, they don't understand what they're saying in the first place.) I'm not talking about going into debt which, however "magical," is a separate action. I'm talking about people treating a negative line item as if it's already a realized gain. That's it. I'm not saying anything even remotely more complex than that, and certainly not on the multi-paragraph levels that are being explored in some responses to me. I'm not saying that what you're talking about is wrong by any means. My entire point is that a discount line on an invoice can't be treated as cash in the bank. I'm not interested in discussing other ways get that cash into the bank. I'm not here to talk about the $27B amount not necessarily being accurate; the Amazon deal and its specifics are largely irrelevant. I'm exclusively talking about a specific failure of logical thought that seems to be disturbingly widespread.
I get that you're trying to flesh out things, but my entire point is that a discount line item on an invoice isn't spendable money simply by not sending the invoice. People treat that money like it's being spent when that's not the case. What you're saying is about the Amazon deal and it's fine, but I'm not talking about the Amazon deal. I'm talking about reading "tax incentive" as "money the government is spending." Granted, if you send a $30B bill and then cut the billed entity a check for $3B, it's no different in practical application than billing them for $27B, but there aren't only two possible states here because the third state is shutting it all down. This is only about Amazon because that's the most recent example, but I'm talking about a general concept.
The problematic assertion I'm targeting is "why are we giving them $3B in tax incentives when we could spend that $3B on so many other things if we shut down this deal?" If the deal is shut down, a magical $3B check doesn't go into the state's bank account, the state gets precisely $0.00. There is no $3B to spend, not if you kill the deal and not if you give the tax incentives as part of the deal either. You'd have the $3B if you refuse to offer those incentives in the first place, but that's not what AOC and some people here on Slashdot arguing with me are saying, and Amazon flat-out isn't coming without that incentive, so that possible path is completely out the window. That leaves (A) give the $3B incentives to net $27B in tax revenue or (B) shut down the deal and get $0B in tax revenue. At no point in the realm of possible outcomes does that $3B ever exist as spendable money, yet people are arguing with me until they're blue in the face that it is totally spendable money.
Yeah, the "tax incentives to attract businesses" thing needs to go, but as I said in another comment, it'll have to be banned federally because if some places do it then ALL of them have to play the game.
I don't know if they are or aren't. I'm NOT going to defend Amazon, I'm just here to point out the silliness behind treating a discount on an unsent invoice as if you already have the money and can spend it. The bigger problem is that this incentives system is done all over the country. It needs to be made illegal on the federal level, but until it is, some places do it causing others to have no choice but to do it too.
Your link says: "Opportunity costs represent the benefits an individual, investor or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another." The burden of proof that a better alternative exists is on you. List the businesses that are lining up to come to New York that'll a bring better deal in aggregate than Amazon was going to bring to the table. You're the second person now to show up and spout "muh opportunity cost" with nothing to show for it. Opportunity cost doesn't matter if there is no other opportunity to consider. With zero evidence presented that Amazon would have killed off other opportunities that have greater overall value, it seems that you're the armchair economist here. Perhaps you could try harder and actually enlighten us plebs instead of linking to Investopedia and expecting everyone to think you're smart because of it.
On top of your failure to provide any evidence to back your assertions of an opportunity cost mattering, you also fail to understand that you can't "commit" $3B that you don't have in the first place. For someone who is so authoritative in their tone, you sure don't seem to understand that you can't spent money you don't even have. Not sending a bill is different from giving away money. You'll find that out when you don't have anyone to send a bill to. In the absence of proof of a better set of investments (you know...that thing you didn't provide) it all falls back on a very simple concept that anyone with half a brain can understand: "something" is greater than "nothing." Oh, and unrealized hypothetical possibilities don't pay the bills either.
What alternative investment opportunities would be lost if Amazon HQ2 comes to New York that exceed the value brought by Amazon HQ2? Provide verifiable sources. We'll wait.
I have no idea what you're talking about, but now I know Anon is interested in young gay Republicans so that's nice.
"AOC would not be advocating for less bureaucracy."
You're right. The point is that she said the same stupid thing that you did. I generally like your comments but on this particular subject you've eaten your foot.
"People that believe this should not have credit cards."
I was talking about checks. Try to keep up.
"They are going to work for other companies that will pay the full $30B in taxes."
OK, sure. List those other companies and how much each one will be paying in taxes. Most companies aren't beating down the door to locate in New York, one of the most expensive and crowded places in the Americas.
What does that have to do with people talking about spending money that doesn't exist? I'm complaining about people talking about how "that money could be spent on better things" when the money in question is non-existent. I'm not going to pretend to be a hot-shot economist, but anyone who has an understanding of how invoices and payments work can see that a discount on an invoice isn't spendable money whether you send the discounted invoice or don't send an invoice at all. Opportunity cost has nothing to do with that particular complaint.
Are you Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in disguise? $3B in tax incentives is not the same thing as a $3B tax credit. There's a huge difference between writing a $3B check and not sending a $3B invoice in the first place. In one case you're spending money, in the other you're just not getting the money to spend. See, the $3B invoice you don't send still nets you $27B in paid invoices, so you end up with a huge net positive. It's no different than a 10% discount for a big customer that gives you lots of bulk work. You can't spend the discounted money because you don't fucking have the money in the first place.
I swear to dog, anyone who thinks that the money "lost" in a discount "can be spent on something else" needs a severe beating with a clue-by-four.
Yeah, sure, whatever makes you feel better bro. I'm not breaking any rules, so I don't see the problem. I modify what I say so it passes the filter's criteria, which supposedly is the point of having a filter in the first place. Perhaps you'll enlighten me with your authoritative internet comment etiquette expertise, though.
Oh, but you get "points." I don't know what the exchange rate is for "points" to real money. Probably similar to the exchange rate for "exposure." Gamification in order to entice free labor is fucking bullshit.