Does it mean that everybody has the same taxes and the same governmental benefits/incentives? For examples, if somebody buys an electric car (in California), they get government subsidy and the benefit of unrestricted use of a carpool lane. I don't get this if I don't buy that car. Should I protest this? How about if I put my money in 401k/IRA, it doesn't get taxed, but if I invest it in my own brokerage account, it does? Isn't it laws not applying equally to all people?
You can say - well, the government wants to encourage certain behavior and thus different behaviors have different tax consequences, different benefits and so on. Well, what if the government wants to encourage behavior of commercial mega-corporations investing in specific areas?
I personally would gladly give up all encouragement of behaviors in favor of simple, plain and transparent tax system that is not being used as social engineering too. Good luck passing that through the legislature. And if this doesn't happen, targeting specifically Amazon deal makes little sense.
If carpool lanes were built for the exclusive use of Patrick Stewart, widely loved though he may be, as an inducement to live in California, then yes, we would have the same problem.
> Good luck passing that through the legislature.
Social change is hard, it doesn't mean it's not worth discussing.
There has been periodic political interest in fixing this, and some regions have actually opted out:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/15/shoul...
I don't think they've nailed the right formulation yet for a broader fix. Definitely a hard problem. But if economists universally oppose some practice, and it's also widely unpopular, it's not the craziest thing to imagine a potential for change.
> And if this doesn't happen, targeting specifically Amazon deal makes little sense.
I'm not targeting one deal specifically, all of these arrangements bother me. But if that's the incentive that happens to dominate the news it will frame the conversation. If the media blitz was about the breaks Tesla got in Nevada, that would be the backdrop here.
Amazon created this media circus with the competition, it gets to be the poster child for the broken system. It's not that big of a hardship, no one is calling for Amazon to be broken up or fined to fix this broader issue.
That's not true - a lot of companies get such kind of deals, all the time. Some even mentioned in this thread.
> If carpool lanes were built for the exclusive use of Patrick Stewart, widely loved though he may be, as an inducement to live in California
If Patrick Steward would bring California several billions in income by living there, then maybe giving him private lane would be a good deal.
> Social change is hard, it doesn't mean it's not worth discussing.
It's worth discussing, but nobody would listen to a proposal for reducing government economic meddling. Everybody love to pile on Amazon and such, but when they go to vote, they ask politicians "bring us jobs". How do you think that would look like? It looks like this - politicians hustle so they can say they brought jobs. In the next election the New York mayor - if Amazon thing works out - would say to his opponent "ok, I brought X thousands of jobs and Y billions of income to New York, here's the list of deals I arranged. What did you do for New York?". And the electorate would listen and support that. So how could they not do it?
> But if that's the incentive that happens to dominate the news it will frame the conversation.
That's the problem. The government meddling happens all the time, but we only discuss it in "outrage of the day" format. But in this format it can never be fixed. Even if somehow enough people become outraged that the deal falls through - Amazon has a long line of mayors willing to do the same. And vast majority of people outside of the "outrage of the day" format think that's exactly what the government is supposed to do. So what's the point of being outraged here? Nothing would change, because that's what people want!
Large retail companies are ubiquitous in our society. It takes a certain degree of socioeconomic privilege to be able to choose not to buy things from them.
Amazon is a great company in a lot of ways, not great in some other ways, and none of that has anything to do with my opinions on local governance.
Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, this Amazon story isn't really about Amazon anyway.
Now if you weren’t a price or convenience-sensitive consumer who didn’t shop on Amazon out of moral conviction, I would at least respect your perspective. But if you shop on Amazon, I’m not sure you get to quote Yogi Berra.
This is about the game, not the player.
Though now I'm misquoting Ice T too...
Opportunity costs?
You list several benefits, but benefits don't tell us where a choice ranks in the list of possible alternatives.
For example, the alternative where we get all those benefits, but where there weren't any incentives at all, seems strictly better. Why not that?
You'd probably protest that it's not realistic. We can't get there in the current system, where powerful companies can play states and municipalities off of each other and require the best incentives before they are willing to make any useful choices.
But a lot of us think that system sucks.
When the powerful have opportunities to rewrite local policies on the fly, it doesn't feel right. Doesn't matter how many benefits there are.
This isn't a new or irrational ideal. Much of the Western canon on governance obsesses about the importance of the rule of law: the idea that the laws should apply to commoners and kings (or powerful companies) equally.
It's a principle a lot of people hold very dearly, and are unwilling to sacrifice for a few temporary benefits that we might have been able to achieve anyway, if we just had a better system in place in advance.