[KingMob]

We decided it was ridiculous to offer $1.5 billion in incentives when we would never recoup that, so we protested.

Amazon paid no federal taxes last year (https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/16/amazon-p...), and probably would have figured out how to pay little corporate state tax. At the promised level of 25,000 jobs with an average $150,000 salary, the city (but not the state) would have only seen an extra ~$150mil in income taxes.

There's lots of ways to run the projections and factor various costs/benefits, but few of them would have resulted in a 10x improvement in the offhand estimates.

It was a bad investment for the city the same way most sports stadiums are.

[Grue3]

So what is the city doing with $1.5 billion that you freed up?

[TheCoelacanth]

Nothing, because it's not actual money that they have. It's money that Amazon would have owed had they moved there that they would have given back.