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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Does anyone else feel like Amazon made out like a bandit?  The company probably always planned on expanding operations to New York and DC area.  By styling it as an open beauty contest for a second headquarters (which it wound up not being), Amazon got some incredible give aways it would never have otherwise ($2 billion worth).[/quote]

Plus they have granular data about every other city that threw their name in the hat to compete. Current city demo/info and [b]future plans[/b].  :roll: [/quote]

I'm fully confident Amazon knew from day 1 it was going to pick a DC location but wasn't 100% sure where the second location would be or even if there would be a second headquarters and the whole search was mainly to figure out if and where the second headquarter should be. None of us were expecting two headquarters.

But there's something off about how this whole thing was done. Not quite honest. And as you pointed out, they benefited from a huge amount of free data and confidential information supplied by all the bidding cities and even potentially played cities off each other to build up the incentive packages (which would ultimately be paid by the taxpayers). Bezos is likely laughing all the way to the bank. If I were the Dems I would be looking into a congressional investigation simply to make sure nothing illegal had happened here.

I don't see Amazon coming to DC as a benefit, to be frank. We're not exactly starving for high paying jobs, and it just means more people with the same incomes chasing after even fewer goods and resources, which only drives up prices and making the region even more unaffordable. I saw a study from the LSE quoted in a commentary the other day that showed how attracting more high paying jobs to places like London and New York were a form of a tech tax unto themselves because they resulted in driving up rents and cost of living substantially. So what if you make 150k working for Amazon in NYC or DC when once you've paid your rent and taxes and the higher COLA you're really not better off, or even potentially worse off, than someone making 100k in a lower cost, lower tax city like Nashville or Atlanta. The real bad news is that the people who make less than you are now even worse off. [/quote]

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