It's a race to the bottom, though. The entire premise of subsidizing e.g. an Amazon datacenter is that Amazon needs a datacenter, and it's going to be built somewhere, so you need to offer them a lot of money if you want the jobs in your state/city. It's not a question of if the "desirable behavior" of opening a datacenter and "creating a lot of jobs" is going to happen or not, just a question of where. So there's this whole competition between locations to offer the greatest possible tax break, but it doesn't actually have any bearing on Amazon's overall desirable behavior. We're just giving them tax breaks for doing their normal business.

Sure, and I broadly agree that there's a collective action problem here; it's just that accurately understanding and addressing that problem requires a different level of analysis that's removed from raw anger about "handouts."

Sure, I agree with that.

Agreed. You get what you incentive for. You get what you optimize for. Jobs and housing will always be incentivized. because they are needed everywhere. It is always why corporate taxes are setup to be paid after expenses and personal taxes are setup to be paid before expenses (generally).