It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

Re:It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town by fjp on Friday February 22, 2019 @11:20AM (#19226543)

It's about people getting priced out of their homes, their neighborhoods. Just from the news of Amazon, people in adjacent neighborhoods were told by landlords their rents would be increased significantly upon lease renewal.

People grow up in their neighborhoods and are connected to them and proud of them. Their are ways to bring up a neighborhood without pricing its residents out of living there.

The main issue that progressives took with all of this is that Amazon pays $0 in federal tax, demanded $3 billion in local tax breaks, and offered very little enforceable things in return.

We can't just let huge companies run around asking major cities to bend over for them and offer up their money and their souls for almost nothing in return.

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Re:It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town by vonmoltke on Friday February 22, 2019 @11:34AM (#19226650)

> Amazon pays $0 in federal tax

Citation to actual financial statements needed. Their most recent 10-K indicates they paid $1.2B in total taxes.

> demanded $3 billion in local tax breaks

No, they didn't. At least $2.5B of that is on the table for any company that wants to build and office for 25,000 people in LIC.

> offered very little enforceable things in return

Not sure what you mean here. The majority of the tax breaks are directly tied to headcount or construction. No hiring/construction == no credits.

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Re:It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town by CPLX on Friday February 22, 2019 @01:52PM (#19227974)

> At least $2.5B of that is on the table for any company that wants to build and office for 25,000 people in LIC.

Right. Leaving $500MM in cold hard taxpayer dollars to build a building for the richest guy in the world so he could promptly compete with local businesses. Which, to be clear, was not something a lot of those taxpayers were happy about.

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Re:It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town by vonmoltke on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:10PM (#19229139)

$500MM is not $3B, and you don't get to lie about the amount just because you think its still a big number.

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Re:It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town by jakelazaroff on Friday February 22, 2019 @01:17PM (#19227629)

Amazon paying $0 in 2018 federal taxes was widely reported. Here's one citation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/15/amazon-ta...

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Re:It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town by vonmoltke on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:09PM (#19229132)

That article is citing the same ITEP report that was posted here, a report which does not cite its sources. I'm not trusting ITEP to be any more unbiased than the Tax Foundation.

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