> It’s also not worth it because, as San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg wrote in his letter declining to submit an Amazon proposal, “it’s hard to imagine that a forward-thinking company like Amazon hasn’t already selected its preferred location.” Thus, the public bidding war is just a ploy to squeeze out additional subsidies, to play cities off one another. “Blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style,” Nirenberg wrote.<p>Pretty smart of that mayor to see through this.<p>Two things bother me with this. 1) It's not applied fairly. If Amazon gets a tax break to locate in CityX then I should also be able to get the same tax break to locate my business there. I'm okay with different cities and states competing in the form of different tax rates and services, but these special deals have to stop. 2) The United States really needs to start behaving as a single country in the best interest of the whole United States. These jobs would still be created somewhere without tax breaks, and we'd <i>all</i> be better off if that happened. Instead we are all collectively worse off in this model where we negotiate against ourselves.
Okay, that's fine as long as it also becomes illegal for local governments to shake down the well-off and their companies by voting to raise taxes on them.
Put more succinctly, whomever wins this, loses. Small business will wind up paying for Amazon's share of the taxes.<p>We all lose when this happens.
There are clear benefits to both Amazon and the winning city were the transaction to occur, and no loss other than status quo were it not to. This is not bribery.