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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I don't see it as a "what can you do for me". A lot of Amazon's interest were aligned with that of many New Yorkers. Both Amazon and most New Yorkers want to have a strong transportation system and a diverse economy that doesn't just rely on taxing bloated financial bonuses to pay for services. They also want New York to be an in-demand tech hub with a deep labor pool and be a place where people actually want to live. Cities should strive to be places where employers want to invest. We aren't talking about handing over duffle bags of money to Bezos. They agreed to offset some of NYC's exorbitant taxes and regulations that make this city hostile to many businesses. And supposedly the incentives were available to any employer of that size. The fact is that having a large Amazon hub in NYC would greatly benefit the city and its denizens

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If skyscraper-studded Manhattan is hostile to businesses, I am really curious what a city friendly to businesses looks like....

It's possible the studding of skyscrapers occurred before the hostility, right?

Sure, but Manhattan is not a ghost town either. The usual crop of employers is present, there's certainly no surfeit of supply on the commercial real estate market, etc. There are cities with mostly-empty skyscrapers and overly ambitious commercial centers. NYC isn't one of them.

For the past 24 hours I've been a bit befuddled, like "Amazon would have brought sorely-needed employment to [checks notes] New York City."

Graftopolis?

What?

If Amazon wanted a strong transportation system they could have demanded some of their tax break went towards that. They did not.

NYC is already the second largest tech hub in the nation, as well as a global leader in a wide variety of industries.

If anything, Amazon moving in, and this I doubt, would have made it less affordable than it already was to live here.

Given the broken nature of the subway in NYC that money would have gone to the state government and been spent on god only knows what boodongles and not on imporving transport in NYC

Even now the upside people are apparently angry at Albany for being too focused on the city. It makes no sense to me. This is clearly not true and yet everyone panders to those people.

NYC population is 08.6M

NYS population is 19.85M

Just the city is forty percent of the population. If you add the surrounding areas, you'll be a majority (I think they'd want things done in the city). How does the city not have better representation in the state assembly? How does upstate keep getting away with swindling the city?

Would it? Silicon Valley used to be a great place to live for normal people. Now it's hell for anybody who isn't rich.

As James Damore recently tweeted: "Amazon abuses its near-monopoly to bankrupt its competitors by selling at a loss, threaten brands with counterfeits until they sell on Amazon, and use third-party merchants’ data to undercut them. All while being subsidized billions by the government." https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1094985319575969792

I'm of two minds on this issue, but: how can the city have good mass transit if there are no tax dollars to pay for it?

One factor is that NY pays 5-10 times more than comparable cities to build its mass transit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

All the same, having Amazon come in with a $3B break doesn't do much to move the ball forward.

and in return for all that money, they receive the sewage waterfall: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/penn-stations-latest-...

Honestly, why is this so hard when so much of the rest of the developed world manages to do it so well?

The fact that NYC's transit runs 24/7 makes things really hard to fix, upgrade, change, etc.

Yeah, I heard raw sewage flows through Penn Station so often that people aren't even surprised anymore. Not rare at all.

New York, the wealthiest, biggest city in the country can have good mass transit by properly spending the money it already collects.

New Yorkers already pay tremendous tax dollars yet we have the mass transit that we do. The idea that there are no tax dollars is a myth. The funds are simply siphoned off to some other who-knows-what, and the remaining is poorly spent. The purported Amazon tax base would have likely been spent the same.

I'm under the impression that Amazon has never been a big taxpayer.

Their employees still pay tax though. With tech wages as high as they are it is probably non-trivial amounts.

I am not advocating for big businesses evading tax mind you. Just suggesting it would probably still be a boon for the state tax income if a bunch of tech wages migrated to the NY tax base.

And also make less demands on the social services

NY has city income tax too ranging from 2.907% to 3.876%

The average salary was to be 150K, which I feel is likely to be well within the margin of a desire for minimization.

0 federal income tax for 2018.

They don't make that much money. their profit margins suck.

10.07 B net income in 2018 [1] is not my idea of "[not] mak[ing] that much money"

[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials

Which is precisely why I included the word "margin"

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