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I mostly agree with your sentiment (as I understand it), but I think your approach is overly simplistic. Specifically, this:

> If communities want to mortgage certain parts of their cities, that is their prerogative.

That (usually) works OK for small communities with residents paying for their decision, for example a condo complex community debating whether to build a pool or a playground. For HQ2-scale projects the decision to mortgage parts of a city is done by bureaucrats that have no long-term financial stake in the result: they are here today, gone tomorrow. Letting them decide such things (often in secrecy) is way too cavalier. My 2c.

> is done by bureaucrats that have no long-term financial stake in the result

This is true in many cases (and not in others, such as sports team funding which are often voted on). If we want to have a more nuanced discussion about transparency and direct representation on financial decisions of a certain size (a hot button issue concerning being able to vote on property taxes in my state), that would be reasonable. But it's hard to have these kinds of discussions with pro-tax/anti-company-concession advocates shouting so loudly.

In the meantime, on the scale of politicians with less representation to their constituency, using a federal level mallet is the exact opposite of representative. The city I live in gave large tax breaks and land to companies moving in, seemingly unfairly so compared to existing local companies, but if most of us didn't like the outcome (which most of us do and applaud their appetite for growth/prosperity) we'd have no problem running the mayor and councilmen out of town.

And with the mayor run out of town, you'd still be left holding the bill.

Of course, as I might be with a new road project or any other commitment. As is Amazon even if their CEO is fired. I suppose I don't understand the relevance of pointing out the obvious here. If we're asserting fraud, that is a different discussion, otherwise we live with decisions by decision makers, some beyond their term.

> For HQ2-scale projects the decision to mortgage parts of a city is done by bureaucrats

Requiring these sorts of subsidies to be approved by a majority of a city's voters wouldn't be a bad restriction to put in place. I'm a New Yorker, and I'm fine with the blood money we had to pay to ensure we got Amazon. But I'd feel much better if I knew it was supported by a majority of voting New Yorkers.

You voted on it by proxy: electing your officials who approved the deal.

If local officials, elected by local residents, are not allowed to make such decisions, then who is?

What about residents? Olympic bids for example have been way less popular with the residents then with the officials, recently.

Local officials are not coming out of thin air - local residents are the ones who are electing local officials.

You are moving gloal posts. Residents have more legitimacy than officials. And often differen views, cf. Olympic applications.

I'm not sure how did you reach this conclusion. My position is: locality needs to be in charge of these decisions. From my perspective, the easiest way to that is to treat local officials as a proxy to local residents.

Now, you can argue that "some decisions" must be subject to a popular vote of local residents, but this is not the argument that I was engaging with - it's more of an implementation detail of "locality needs to be in charge of these decisions" principle.

Agree completely. To some people, the tradeoffs between having Amazon come with a couple tax breaks and not having Amazon come at all is worth it. Nobody put a gun to the heads of these city officials - everyone knew what was going on and city officials went along willingly.

If Amazon had chosen Detroit or some city in America's heartland, the national press would have been praising Amazon for "spreading the wealth". Instead of getting mad at Amazon, policy makers should look at why Amazon chose these locations and seek to replicate these conditions elsewhere.

It's anti-competitive against companies too small to pull this type of stunt though.

It feels wrong to have everyone playing by different rules. Why should my small business across the street pay for Amazon's public services because they're able to make every city in the country race to the bottom?

Why should you pay more than the person getting the bulk discount for buying more items at a time? Why should you pay more than the person that negotiated the better car deal? That's what's happening here, a negotiated bulk discount. You can argue negotiations and discounts are unfair, but I'd argue it's unfair to outlaw conditional discounts at this high of a level. And even if you and the majority of your peers believe it is unfair, you can only vote in officials that agree, but luckily those in other communities than you can disagree about fairness and have it their way too.

Except that the law is not supposed to be a car deal but supposed to be the same for all actors.

Or do you also think you should be able to pay to ignore all laws in general?

If I follow your logic, I think a fair tool for cities and state should be the possibility to have tariffs for everything coming from outside the city/state. So now to attract Amazon not only can you say "if you come here you won't pay tax" but more importantly you can say "if you DON'T come here we will tax 50% of every sale you make in our city". Now suddenly I think many people here would not sound so keen on the idea.

It's doggone impossible replicating cities that became central shortly after the creation of the United States, or even earlier. If Amazon had picked Austin or Pittsburgh you might have had a better argument, as those are seen as up-and-coming tech hubs. Instead, they boringly chose cities that are already central to American economic and political life.

The argument for Austin or Pittsburgh isn't too different than an argument for NYC or Washington, DC.

My point is that there are cities in the United States that attracting talent, creatives, and business investment and instead of crying foul, we should learn about what they're doing and seek to replicate it.

If Amazon had chosen Austin or Pittsburgh, plenty of people would still be complaining, although Maybe not as much as NYC and Washington.

They would be complaining for fueling rent prices and gentrification in those cities. But the complaint about NYC/DC is that they are cities that have been well-established for centuries, which makes the whole contest seem like a sham that was rigged in favor of predetermined winners from the beginning.

>> If communities want to mortgage certain parts of their cities, that is their prerogative.

This is not the community choosing to do so via, say, a referendum. This is an elected official making these decisions on behalf of, and without any input from, the community.

You might say, "but that's why we elect politicians!" But it's not so simple. People elect politicians to run the everyday affairs. A megacorporation asking your city for incentives in return for jobs and massive investment should be regarded as an extraordinary occurrence, and should be decided via a public vote.

It's not an extraordinary occurrence though, your state probably already hands out billions in subsidies, investments, and no recourse loans.

If you don't trust your representative to act in your best interest in a negotiation then that's what's broken.

>>It's not an extraordinary occurrence though, your state probably already hands out billions in subsidies, investments, and no recourse loans.

Not to a single entity.

> should be decided via a public vote

Completely agree, but I am having a hard time reconciling that with my belief that if a citizenry wants to remove the handcuffs of its leaders to make these moves, they should be able to. I think transparency in public spending and negotiations is what we should be asking for at a higher level.

those same bureaucrats make billion dollar promises to public employee unions that are not sustainable but you won't see nearly the protest against that as with this deal. pension deals that are given for promise of reelection support. promises the politician won't have to be there when the city, state, or county, cannot pay them out. This is happening all across the US with estimates in the hundreds of billions of unfunded liabilities.

tax breaks to corporations at least have the promise of taxable income directly or indirectly later on. so if we are to claim there need to be limits on those types of expenditures we need to be honest and make it for all promises above a certain dollar amount.