| > Most voters are not paying to the nitty-gritty of legislation that their representative votes on. Sure, nobody suggested that they were. Voters pay attention to the high-level policy platforms of their representatives. > As you said, these are partisan times and voters mostly just vote for "their guy" (or gal). Yes, and "their guy (or gal)" are not arbitrarily chosen. The average voter chooses their representatives based on whether they think the representative is advancing the causes they care most about, or fighting against the causes they most disagree with. > They still got it from the Virginia location and they found out what other cities were willing to offer them. Sure, and that's what the residents/voters of Virginia sought out — local economic surplus. > More importantly, because of their size they were able to make demands that smaller businesses could not - so it's not like all businesses benefit from these lower taxes. This isn't necessarily true. Amazon, utilizes its economies of scale just like any other comparable institution. Unions can make demands that individual employees cannot, large nations can make demands that smaller nations cannot, Medicare might be able to make demands that smaller insurers cannot, etc etc. Most relevantly, small businesses themselves form industry associations that exert political force. And unlike power consolidation in labor unions or state actors, corporate consolidation is typically earned — people voluntarily engage with Amazon because it provides goods & services cheaply and reliably. > And dozens of stories like this play out nationwide every year, without much coverage. This is standard operating procedure when Walmart opens a new location. No they don't, this isn't even a falsifiable argument. |
I mean this is pretty common knowledge re: Walmart, I'm amazed you're even arguing about. But here you go:
"While it was not feasible to contact local officials in all 3,000-plus communities in which Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores are located to find other subsidy deals, we did take this approach for all of the company’s distribution centers that are in operation or are being developed. We found that 84 of the 91 centers have received subsidies totaling at least $624 million. The deals, most of which involved a variety of subsidies, ranged as high as $48 million, with an average of about $7.4 million. As with the stores, a considerable amount of information on the size of the subsidies is not available, so the real total is certainly much higher."[1]
https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/w...