
The Path Amazon Rejected - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/amazon-new-york-bill-de-blasio.html
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o10449366
If Blasio wanted to fight for the deal he could have done more publicly
instead of dealing with Amazon in the background. It's easy to wipe your hands
clean of the deal when you take no strong stance. This piece just reads as
"everyone is to blame but me."

~~~
Nrsolis
Everyone knows that AOC was worried about the residents in her district
getting priced out and moving away.

It's much less certain she could hold that seat if she was forced to listen to
actual middle-class families instead of the low-income group she's
representing now.

~~~
brandmeyer
One of the great cons in American political discourse was convincing everyone
that _they_ were middle class.

Working poor @ 30k/year? Middle class.

Technological Individual Contributors @ 200k/year? Middle class.

Small business owner with $1M in assets? Middle class.

Nowadays, every politician can claim to be enacting policies for The Middle
Class (TM), and they aren't obviously lying.

~~~
Nrsolis
Leaving aside the fact that different regions of the countries have different
levels of comparative living costs and wealth...

The simple fact is that most people ARE middle-class. The bottom income 25-30%
of working-age people contribute little to nothing to income-tax receipts. The
top 5% in each region have enough assets to live comfortably but carry
approximately 70% of the income tax burden. When you get to the top 1%, it's
something like 46% of all income-tax receipts IIRC.

So....the folks in the middle carry the burden of the rest of that load.

FWIW, My numbers are approximate but close enough for this discussion. Since
tax policy most directly affects people in the middle, it's very important to
get it right. Since tax policy for the very rich affects things like
investment and business formation, you don't want to tax those income
generators to death. For the bottom, you want them to benefit from the
programs in place so they can join the ranks of the middle class and pay
something back.

But you assertion that nobody (or very few) is middle class anymore I think
doesn't align with the facts.

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pseudolus
I think the general consensus was that New Yorkers genuinely wanted Amazon to
come to NYC but just didn't want the city and state to pay anything. The
optics for subsidies were particularly horrible - the richest man in the world
obtaining billions of dollars on behalf of a company with one of the largest
market capitalizations in the world. How do you overcome that? Timing is
everything and had Amazon's offer been on the table 4-5 years ago the outcome
would probably have been different. As it is, since 2008 there's been a
festering resentment of companies and while tech companies escaped a lot of
that resentment resent issues with Facebook and Google have tarred the entire
sector.

~~~
qpotlpus
The tax break argument always seemed like a red herring to me. I live in NYC
and was excited for Amazon coming but most of my friends were against it
mostly out of a vague “stick it to the system” mentality. Somewhat ironic
since most of these friends are in households earning in guessing around/in
excess of 250k. Not one of these people gave a moment of thought about city or
state budgets/deficits before and it is unlikely they will do so again.

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ninth_ant
> Amazon’s HQ2 bidding war exemplified that injustice. It’s time to end that
> economic warfare with a national solution that prevents corporations from
> pitting cities against one another.

That’s a truly odd statement from someone who directly participated in and
then “won” that same bidding war.

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tyler-
What sort of jobs did Amazon have in mind for the locals in LIC (if any)? Were
they considering providing tech training to hire them into software
development roles? Or did they have in mind lower paying jobs? The bigger
question is how can tech companies incorporate locals? What sort of training
efforts can they provide to those without tech backgrounds? Would they train
them in bootcamp style programs, to fail them at the leetcode interview phase,
or is there pipeline that could incorporate non-tech folks into such roles?

~~~
product50
There is bound to be a lot of trickle down effect. If there are high paying
jobs, that will create low paying jobs (such as restaurants, services,
construction etc.) in order to support high paying jobs. The only exception to
this is when the housing supply doesn't deep up with jobs demand. But in LIC,
with Queens in the vicinity, housing supply should not be a big issue for some
time.

~~~
perl4ever
I don't understand why people who believe in economic "trickling" think it's
local and doesn't cross state lines.

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product50
Amazon did the logical thing. It chose to NYC initially, not because it had
some benevolent intent to improve the city's crumbling infra or create more
jobs for its union workers, but because it fit their selection criteria nicely
and their were tax benefits. The infra and job part would come regardless of
which city Amazon chose and had nothing specific to Amazon's selection of NYC
itself. Now that NYC is rescinding on the benefit part and increasingly it
looks like the local & state govt are not able to control the public backlash,
despite majority of New Yorkers supporting the deal (and the support for this
deal is even larger among minorities), then pulling away is the natural
outcome.

This is a competitive market and there are enough cities in US who are willing
to bend backwards for 25k high paying jobs and prospects it offers (including
becoming future tech hubs). NYC loss is bound to some other city's gains.

