Seems like a great urban slogan: “We won’t use taxes to bribe wealthy corporations who never provide the jobs they promise - instead we’ll use taxes to pay for roads and schoolteacher salaries!”
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Good one!
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Thank god the guy who is worth $100,000,000.00 is gonna get a good deal for himself.
I would hate to see someone like that get a bad deal for the rest of us.
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It was completely unrelated to this post. Fuck Amazon.
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Well I’m sure that Amazon management will use the extra money to increase wages, right?
They aren’t giving anything “back” to Amazon.
They are taking money from the workers and handing it to the bosses. It’s tax farming, ala pre-revolutionary France.
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Well I guess this makes me feel marginally better about the 1/2 billion $$$ wet kiss Portland gave to Phil Knight…
Was the blanket contaminated with smallpox viruses?
(Edited to correct mispeling1).)
1) That’s how it should be spelled.
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You need more zeroes, buddy.
@Mister44 is right. There is some hysteria going on here. These people are not taking a very business-minded approach to this. It’s turning into an Olympics host city style contest, where cities compete to see which can do the most damage to itself.
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What is this, some kind of suicide pact?
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OK, so. Everyone on both sides of the political spectrum likes to talk about the Chicago murder rate. Well, it’s tied to unemployment, shocker:
The city stands to gain as many as 50k jobs if it becomes Amazon HQ2, and the loss in tax revenue might be worth it for the bite it takes out of the crime rate.
Not having all the data on hand (like how much all that extra, overly brutal policing costs) it’s hard to say for sure, but I can see a scenario where it’s worth every penny of lost revenue.
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If necessary to make it effective, we should have a Constitutional Amendment that prohibits governmental entities from offering special considerations to corporations, sports teams and other organizations to draw them to locate in a specific area. I suspect that given adequate budget for lawyers any international competitor of Amazon could get these spiffs declared improper by the WTO.
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Ya missed three zeroes, there, bub!
I dunno… a fellow whom owns 100 billion dollars and offering an almost 2 billion dollar enticement is rather insulting IMO 
Can somebody at BoingBoing do a little reporting on the ways that places already do this? I have just heard about Kentucky’s “job assessment fees” that takes the taxes that workers pay and gives it to companies as “incentives.” I would love to have Cory’s keen analytical eye turned to the problem.
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Honest question. What is the major incentive for a city if they basically ignore taxing in such a manner?
No note needed, as a Chicagoan I can tell just from that statement that you don’t live in Chicago. /sigh
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Does this count as Feudalism 2.0? I know there’s no obligations to peasants/employees but it seems like something you’d do if you were a landlord that demanded a percentage of the peasantry’s crops.
It actually boggles the mind why this happens.
If I were to own a fortune 500 company, I would gladly make deals on our corporate taxes with various municipalities, counties, towns, cities, and states for us to expand or grow there. The deal would not be to lower or pay zero taxes…but to control where the tax monies specifically go!!! If I move my company or expand to your town or city, I want there to be good schools and roads, I want a viable police and firefighter corps to service the community…I want good schools for my employees’ children. I want it to be a great place to live for my associates! I’d negotiate a requirement and annual review that percentages of our taxes are going to the infrastructure of the community. Additionally, I would require reserving a percentage of the funds to go to the top 3 choices of the associates who live in that town/city/state. I would have them vote each year on a list of items that those dollars could help fund and allow them to decide the top 3…so that I know our associates voices are represented as denizens of the community.
Clearly this is why I am NOT a billionaire CEO.
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