One factor is that NY pays 5-10 times more than comparable cities to build its mass transit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

All the same, having Amazon come in with a $3B break doesn't do much to move the ball forward.

and in return for all that money, they receive the sewage waterfall: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/penn-stations-latest-...

Honestly, why is this so hard when so much of the rest of the developed world manages to do it so well?

The fact that NYC's transit runs 24/7 makes things really hard to fix, upgrade, change, etc.

Yeah, I heard raw sewage flows through Penn Station so often that people aren't even surprised anymore. Not rare at all.

New York, the wealthiest, biggest city in the country can have good mass transit by properly spending the money it already collects.

New Yorkers already pay tremendous tax dollars yet we have the mass transit that we do. The idea that there are no tax dollars is a myth. The funds are simply siphoned off to some other who-knows-what, and the remaining is poorly spent. The purported Amazon tax base would have likely been spent the same.

I'm under the impression that Amazon has never been a big taxpayer.

Their employees still pay tax though. With tech wages as high as they are it is probably non-trivial amounts.

I am not advocating for big businesses evading tax mind you. Just suggesting it would probably still be a boon for the state tax income if a bunch of tech wages migrated to the NY tax base.

And also make less demands on the social services

NY has city income tax too ranging from 2.907% to 3.876%

The average salary was to be 150K, which I feel is likely to be well within the margin of a desire for minimization.

0 federal income tax for 2018.

They don't make that much money. their profit margins suck.

10.07 B net income in 2018 [1] is not my idea of "[not] mak[ing] that much money"

[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials

Which is precisely why I included the word "margin"