[moron4hire]

Amazon HQ2 is an excellent example. Even though I live in the DMV, I found it ridiculous that Amazon selected Crystal City in which to build. Not even actual DC! What sense did it make to not select NYC, outside of a sweetheart tax break package that Amazon famously made cities compete over like some kind of perverse reality TV show?

Maybe the solution is a federal ban on local tax breaks for anything not classified as a small business. Of course, such a thing would be impossible. But we really need to end this asymmetric warfare between sophisticated, global scale corporations and the comparatively podunk municipalities those corporations easily fleece on these deals.

Maybe a major city like NYC has enough sophistication built into their local politicians due to just their shear scale to be able to handle this sort of negotiation. That's a really big "Maybe". But other major cities like DC (even though AHQ2 didn't even land in DC, DC has it's own fair share of being duped) have proven they don't have that and time and time again they get taken for a ride. We need to level the playing field for local politicians, many of which are basically just the high-end middle class/low-end upper class middle-management type career people who don't have anywhere near the background support and army of lawyers that a major corporation brings to the battlefield. They're in it for either the backend deals they can make with local real estate developers or some quaint notion of "doing their part," either way they aren't part of a global scale Hydra beast with more money than God to be able to handle these cases.