<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/09/02/amazon-offers-to-hire-7000-if-california-waits-on-sales-tax/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/09/02/amazon-off...</a>
is the correct link
On top of the ridiculous sales tax bill have you seen the Babysitter bill? <a href="http://www.theunion.com/ARTICLE/20110830/BREAKINGNEWS/110839991/-1/RSS" rel="nofollow">http://www.theunion.com/ARTICLE/20110830/BREAKINGNEWS/110839...</a> It is a bill being considered that says that if you hire a babysitter, you've got to provide breaks every 2 hours (which means you've got to hire another babysitter), plus pay for workman's compensation and keep track of taxes.
I wonder if there isn't a hidden threat there, too... That they'll pull jobs from California if they don't get their way?<p>They're obviously able to choose where the jobs go, or this offer wouldn't make sense at all.
It was just a few weeks ago I was watching Steve Jobs give his pitch for Apple's new campus in California -- at one point Jobs broke out the idea that the benefit to the state was Apple paying their taxes. In other words the way a company is a good corporate citizen is by increasing the tax base. What's sad here is that Jobs was talking about payroll tax, not even sales tax. The right thing for Amazon to do is to collect that tax instead of cheating the kids of California. Also special deals for big companies (be it Amazon or Walmart) are always unfair to small companies that don't get the same breaks. If you're going to give a sales tax holiday to anyone it should be startup companies in California that can use the boost.