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Comment by quxbar | Hacker News Reader

One part I don't see people is explaining: are the NYC tax breaks amazon is getting out of line for the revenue they're bringing in? Cuomo is touting a 9-to-1 and that seems like a pretty sweet deal even if they're somewhat fudging the numbers.

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Echo your question. I would note that it seems that the tax breaks weren't negotiated as some special package for Amazon specifically -- actually, most of the incentives (or about $1.5B) are coming from existing programs run by NY state and NYC that reward companies based on square footage of office space created and number of jobs created. So, arguably, Amazon would have gotten those incentives anyway even if they had moved to NYC without all the fanfare of the HQ2 process.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/13/amazon-tax-incentives-in-new...

Out of line with previous deals. Look at what wasn't offered to Google when they bought/built their office

Google is one data point, I'm asking what the average/distribution is. Do banks get more? I can find some examples that point to this being normal: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/ny-...

That's a great source, and directly counters the "nobody else got subsidies" argument:

Subsidies for NYS:

Subsidy Total: $34,026,482,575

Number of Awards: 127,154

Earliest year of data: 1980

This is an unfair comparison, Amazon would've put HQ2 in Manhattan if they didn't get the tax deal. The tax break is specifically for bringing jobs to long island city.

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