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Comment by bepotts | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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