Who is Amazon extorting in either of these cases? If you have a problem with Amazon following the federal tax code that's existed longer than they have, perhaps you should take it up with your congressional reps.

The point isn’t whether Amazon should or shouldn’t be paying a Federal taxes, it’s whether—given this prior behavior—we would expect them to pay state or city taxes, instead of finding or creating a loophole to get out of them.

There are a lot of large businesses headquartered in New York. They all seem to be pretty smart. If there are widespread tax loopholes out there, others surely have taken advantage of them by now. If they had, you would see outrage articles on that as well.

> If there are widespread tax loopholes out there, others surely have taken advantage of them by now. If they had, you would see outrage articles on that as well.

Given the response to Amazon doing so is "how dare you complain about Amazon using these loopholes, it's their fiduciary duty to bilk the government out of all the money it can", I don't think there would be widespread publicity to other companies using loopholes.

Instead we'd have people like you trying to shut up anyone talking about them.

I'm not trying to shut anyone up. Please don't be rude. I'm wondering why all the blame is directed at Amazon when they sought to take advantage of (mostly) pre-existing programs. If the problem people have is with tax subsidies in general then isn't the government the real issue here?

> I'm wondering why all the blame is directed at Amazon

The first step is recognizing that there's a problem.

> If the problem people have is with tax subsidies in general then isn't the government the real issue here?

Maybe the problem people have isn't with tax subsidies. Maybe their problem is who the subsidies are being given to? People are realizing that Amazon isn't a good corporate citizen, and I don't think anybody thinks Amazon needs these subsidies.

It's inevitable that tax subsidies, if available, will go to companies that can negotiate the best for them. Large enterprises have more lobbying power, and more ability to play cities against each other. So I think there's little hope of city officials finding the best corporate citizens to subsidize.

How do you design a subsidy program that actually benefits everyone if one of the criteria is likability? The more grey areas you introduce into a program like this, the more cronyism and corruption kicks in which more than likely results in an inefficient use of taxpayer money.

Cap the subsidies by revenue. A trillion dollar company doesn't need handouts, if they can't make profits on that scale of revenues they are inefficient and that capital should be re-routed elsewhere.

Most of those large businesses didn't preface the building of their headquarters with a very public dog and pony show of shopping for tax subsidies.

Lots of shady tax related shenanigans happen in NYC, particularly in real estate development. Sometimes they get called out, and sometimes they go unnoticed for years/decades until new information draws the public eye to them.