The idea of those incentives is to lessen the difficulties of expanding into your city and in return they are moving to your city. For a small company these might be large difficulties, for a company the size of amazon they are very small in comparison.

Thus, the only reason it is "in your best interest" is a prisoner's dilemma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

Any city has two options: A) hurt yourself by making big concessions, B) don't do that. (Obviously also various degrees of A, but that does not matter in the following).

Ideally for your city and all cities, every city goes with B) and you get the deal by virtue of what should matter (existing infrastructure, location,...). However, if another city "caves" and offers A) they improve their chances, so what happens is that all cities offer A). That decision is "in your own best interest", but everybody is worse off than if nobody did that (same for bribery and paying "protection money" to the mafia).

Thus, yes I am opposed to Amazon receiving the benefits of these programs. However, instead of repealing them outright, they should include a ceiling.

Let's take this argument to its logical conclusion. NYC charges all residents an income tax to live in the city. Most other cities don't have such a tax, and this leads to the same prisoner's dilemma. Hence, every city should now be morally obligated to charge the same income tax that NYC does. Similarly for state income taxes as well.

If that sounds absurd, I certainly think it is. Local governments shouldn't be trying to "profit" by taxing its residents and companies. The whole purpose of local taxes is to best serve local residents and companies. If a city/state can better serve its people by lowering its taxes or by offering tax credits for specific programs, it should certainly do so, even if there's no competition involved. There is no prisoner's dilemma here.

To carry out your analogy, you order from Amazon because they’ll deliver for you. In this case, New Yorkers suspected that the jobs would go to outsiders, the property values would skyrocket and push locals out, and Amazon’s nasty history of vertical integration would be a threat to existing business owners. This deal was scuttled by the people who represent regular, working class Queens residents—not the people who saw dollar signs and dreamed of overflowing NYC tax coffers. Cuomo and DiBlasio had probably already promised those tax revenues to their buddies for all kinds of sure-to-fail projects.

I voluntarily hand over my money to AWS for them to provide a product. The government is not forcing me to hand money to them.

>For the same reason you hand over your cash in order to buy stuff on amazon.com or run things on AWS. Not because Amazon deserves your money, but because it's in your own best interests to do so.

I wouldn't have thought that I need to pay companies to exploit my local labor pool. I'm not buying something from them. They're buying something (work) from me.