[Svoka]

What's wrong with giving Amazon billion dollar for building an office? Just to put it in perspective, lets say they would create 30000 jobs with average pay of $80000/year. That is $2.4 billion in just salaries over single year. According to random tax calculator I found online it is about 0.7 billions in taxes every year. This is crazy ROI. If I could put money which would have 70% safe yearly return that would be insanely awesome investment.

[hprotagonist]

foxconn made very similar promises in wisconsin. that worked out really poorly indeed.

GE made similar promises in boston. that’s worked out really poorly indeed.

[thereisnospork]

And amazon's incentives were tied to the number of jobs and how much they paid.

[hprotagonist]

so were GE’s.

[thereisnospork]

So how did Boston get fleeced? (genuinely curious, not overly familiar with the GE situation.)

[hprotagonist]

kind of a slow moving crap fest. They’re going to repay some tax breaks, at least in theory, but we’ve dropped 160mil into renovations for a site that probably will never happen.

https://www.universalhub.com/2019/ge-give-back-87-million-ta... , https://www.universalhub.com/ge has a long running chronology.

[pas]

Amazon would have to first hire those people. And the NYC labor market is already pretty efficient and saturated. It would basically push a lot of IT and related job wages up, for not much direct benefit - other than dumping a big cashflow on the city. (Which pushes up real estate and other prices.)

I'm not saying having HQ2 there would have no positive effects, it'd have absolutely contributed to the growth of the tech scene. But it'd have probably accelerated the arrival of other problems, which is something the city might not be ready to tackle.