I don’t know. I think it might just have been too expansive for the city.
That’s what the media spin might be but that’s not what actually happened.
I mean… I saw a bunch of people with exactly that mistaken impression, so it did in fact happen.
Yeah. Hipsters.
Here’s the thing about local politicians: They don’t like feeling bigfooted or evaded. Council members who may have been persuadable turned hostile when Amazon showed little interest in further conversation about how to mitigate the traffic congestion and rising housing costs that could have ensued when thousands of highly paid tech workers flooded Queens.
“If they were interested in being a partner, then they would engage in dialogue and conversation about these issues,” said Brooklyn Council Member Brad Lander. “Amazon doesn’t want the rules we’ve democratically set. They want a monopolistic version.”
Edit: Maybe if Cuomo had included the local politicians in the negotiation this could have been avoided. But it’s easier (read: lazier) to blame it on the scary “left.”
Bullshit on amazon pulling out for “local opposition”. The opposition was the start of the kabuki dance where they glad hand some local unions, spread a little local cash, promise local “unskilled” labor some jobs, maybe token money for affordable housing, and things roll along.
Reports were that the dance was already playing out with unions lining up and deals being worked out. Maybe the real reason will come out eventually, but that wasn’t it.
Part of the incentive package was, in fact, paying money to Amazon – a half-billion dollar grant to help cover their construction costs. But yes, most of it was tax breaks.
The taxes from 25K highly paid employees isn’t going to make or break New York. As a New Yorker, I put it in the “nice to have” category. But if they’ve decided that they’d rather not deal with New York politics for the next several decades (an entirely reasonable decision), that’s fine by me.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. I believe Amazon was qualifying for existing breaks, ones already in place not a bunch put in there just for them.
None of this justifies keeping the community out of the loop though. Traffic concerns are common concerns, not just for big cities. As is housing prices. They should not have kept everyone in the dark just to avoid confrontation.
Giving them tax breaks is paying them money.
But consider that a capital grant in this case is for construction costs.
That means it isn’t going to Amazon, it’s going to your construction companies.
Edit:
Also, i was mistaken. It was actually going to be a minimum of 25k jobs, and the starting salary for those jobs was going to be 150k, minimum.
That would have been a mountain of new taxes for new York on the income alone, not even counting the increased economic activity.
And what of the costs of building up infrastructure and new housing? That’s a mountain of new expanses to go with those new taxes.
Also, factor in Amazon was just in the news for not owing a dime in Federal taxes for last year. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of how much these corporations actually pay in taxes, especially when they’re lured to an area with massive tax breaks and incentives.
The jobs would be a win for the region, though, there is that.
If Amazon avoids paying a half billion dollars to construction companies because the public have agreed to pay it, that money is going to Amazon. It’s cost avoidance, which falls to their bottom line.
I’ve read tweets and the like from some New Yorkers who claim the issue with the area is not a lack of jobs and job demand it’s a lack of infrastructure and affordable housing. So Amazon coming to Queens or wherever would not have addressed those most pressing problems but would have exacerbated them.
So is Amazon not coming to the area a win or a loss? I can’t figure it out! The whole situation is a highly complex issue and as much as we want to boil it down to one summary sentence it’s pretty difficult to do so.
I live in NY, though not in Queens. My brother-in-law and his wife live very near to where this was going to happen.
My own opinion: it would probably have been a net positive in terms of revenue over the long haul (given the assumption that Amazon is a pretty reliable partner, unlike, say, Foxconn), but it would have represented a very big net negative in terms of standard of living and environmental/social factors for the people already living in the area.
Those new jobs would NOT have been going to local residents. Maybe a few janitorial jobs and the like, but the vast majority would have been people moving into the area, driving up prices and property values/taxes, gentrifying, and in general driving the residents out or down.
I haven’t fully researched this, but from my opinion as a tech worker in NY:
- I would never want to work for Amazon. They have a terrible reputation as an employer (cutthroat competitive culture, mandatory long hours, etc.)
- The tech job market in New York is pretty strong right now. We don’t particularly need another employer coming in to pick up slack capacity at the moment (who knows by the time they were actually done though)
- That being said, NYC doesn’t really need to spend money on attracting talent. Plenty of people already want to be here, I don’t really see an expanded Amazon presence (since it’s not like they don’t already have offices here) making the difference.
- You need to compare the projected Amazon growth to the baseline organic job growth over the same time when figuring the value.
- Amazon would be a competitive pressure on hiring here in NYC, which would be bad for my current company. Since I don’t want to work for Amazon, it’s probably a net negative for me personally.
- I have 0 confidence that the public transit infra would not have scaled well or quickly enough.
I don’t have any particular insight on the gentrification debate, but there’s enough written about it that I believe there are some legitimate issues there.
Flores has no background in journalism but has worked for years as a Republican political operative. Some of her recent roles before working for the Trump administration include acting as deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, deputy communications director at the Republican National Committee, Election Day operations manager for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and political director of Texans for Ted Cruz.
I don’t understand - was Kellyanne Conway not interested in the job?
See! This is how you compromise. If Donald Trump and the right wing label you as Fake News, you gotta meet them in the middle and put one of their cronies in charge of your coverage.
Charlies Pierce sums it up pretty well.
When you are sane:
“In a span of three days in January of this year commencing on January 19, the Post engaged in a modern-day form of McCarthyism by competing with CNN and NBC, among others, to claim leadership of a mainstream and social media mob of bullies which attacked, vilified, and threatened Nicholas Sandmann, an innocent secondary school child,”
Very good.
The Sandmanns’ suit asserts that the newspaper “bullied” Sandmann in its reporting “because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ souvenir cap.”
It calls Phillips “a phony war hero [who] was too intimidated by the unruly Hebrew Israelites to approach them, the true troublemakers, and instead chose to focus on a group of innocent children.”
So good.