Brontoforumus

beatbandito wrote:I'm actually really disappointed about this, I was ready to see just how much damage teamsters would end up doing there.

Some unions supported the deal, and even those who had been opposed appeared willing to work with Amazon if the company agreed to not actively work against the unionization of their employees in New York.

An Amazon representative, during one City Council hearing, pointedly said the company would not agree to such terms.

Derek Thompson wrote:The larger truth is that corporate subsidies, including the $3 billion package offered to Amazon, are often pernicious and usually pointless. Studies show that these sorts of measures “have no discernible impact on firm expansion, measured by job creation.” Yet every year, local governments spend more than $90 billion to move headquarters and factories between states, a wasteful zero-sum exercise whose cost is more than the federal government spends on affordable housing, education, or infrastructure. In the most garish example of corporate-welfare absurdity, Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing company, solicited up to $4 billion in subsidies from Wisconsin in exchange for a factory and tens of thousands of workers. Now it’s an open question whether that facility will ever get built.

But even the less garish examples are galling. New York City doesn’t have an employment problem; it has a housing-affordability problem. Yet the original language of the Amazon deal used tax breaks that might have gone to infrastructure or low-income housing investment in the Long Island City region. While it’s hard to draw a direct line between corporate handouts and foregone public spending, the fact that states and cities cannot run persistent deficits or print their own currency, like the federal government can, implies that tax dollars lavished on corporations limit the amount of money available to other public projects. Meanwhile, the New York City subway is a disaster, and tuition is rising at the City University of New York system.

Yet the original language of the Amazon deal used tax breaks that might have gone to infrastructure or low-income housing investment in the Long Island City region.

Mongrel wrote: too-far-left