" One of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags on a long shelf of punching bags is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Mr. Trump says (tweets) that Amazon rips off the Post Office, should be investigated, blah, blah, blah. The animus likely has more to do with the impossibly wealthy Mr. Bezos’s purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post at a price ($250 million) that would be like the rest of us buying a roadside antique. He has since let what seems like a battalion of Post writers spend their days tormenting Mr. Trump.
So when you look at the two places Amazon picked for its new semi-headquarters, an admittedly conspiratorial case could be made that after all the high anxiety of the selection process, Mr. Bezos picked Queens, N.Y., and Arlington, Va., as a big you-know-what to Donald Trump.
Queens is where Mr. Trump grew up and where his father Fred got his start in the business that became the Trump empire. As of this week, Mr. Bezos is the new king of Queens, wallowing in more New York tax subsidies than the Trump Organization ever dreamed of when building its gold-plated towers. Mr. Trump may never set foot in Queens again so long as the Amazon logo looms like an ISIS flag planted in his lost homeland.
Meanwhile, if you look out from the White House and down across the Potomac River, you can catch a glimpse of the great commercial white elephant called Crystal City in Arlington, Va. All of a sudden in President Trump’s backyard, Mr. Bezos is the most famous, if not the biggest, real-estate developer in the Washington area.
We wonder if the prospective 25,000 Amazon workers coming to Long Island City in Queens are in on the joke. Across New York’s political spectrum—though not including Mayor Bill de Blasio or Gov. Andrew Cuomo—the site selection is something that does not compute.
Even Queens’s own super socialist, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is aghast at the more than $2.5 billion in tax breaks and construction grants the city and state are giving Amazon.
Gov. Cuomo said Tuesday: “This is a big money-maker for us—costs us nothing, nada, niente.” This remark belongs in the annals of Democratic tall tales. It depends on the meaning of “us.”
By “us” Mr. Cuomo means the politicians who will collect Amazon’s tax revenue. The “us” for whom the cost of this is “nada” does not include the millions of wage slaves in New York who supply the likes of Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio with tax payments every April to fund the tax breaks “they” give to a Jeff Bezos.
In a bizarre moment of honesty, Mr. Cuomo let the cat out of the tax bag Tuesday when he said the subsidies were needed because a “level playing field” doesn’t exist between high-tax states like the one he runs and low-tax states like Texas.
Visitors to New York remark all the time about the astonishing number of high-rise condominiums under construction in the city. The politicians like to cite the mushrooming condos as evidence of the city’s “vitality.”
This is the reality: Politicians from both parties green-light developers’ seemingly endless condominium construction because to them every unit in those buildings represents just one thing: a taxpayer pod.
The people who live inside New York’s taxpayer pods, like the new Amazon workers, are essentially revenue robots, who will pay a New York City income-tax rate of nearly 4% and a state tax rate of almost 7%. But there’s more: Mr. Bezos is also sending his new workers to a state that no longer has a full federal deduction for state and local taxes, making the tax bite worse than those low-tax states.
As to New York’s street-level energy, it is real enough and for many worth the high price of admission. But most of that vitality—restaurants, museums, music, sports events, clubs, cocktail bars—comes out of after-tax income. New York’s politicians don’t build condos to the clouds because of that stuff. They want people like the arriving Amazon workers, with their estimated average salaries of $150,000, to pay for all the other dumb financial deals they’ve made, primarily contracts with public workers unions.
A recent issue of Crain’s New York Business noted that the city’s annual comptroller’s report estimates that “retired New York City workers’ future health costs will be $103 billion. The city has set aside only $5 billion, projected to last until 2026, and plans to pay-as-you-go thereafter.” Even Batman can’t solve that problem for Gotham.
Those public-union legacy costs are the reason no money is available to rebuild the city’s famously deteriorated commuter infrastructure—
pot-holed streets that would embarrass a Third World country, a catch-as-catch-can subway system and crumbling train tunnels into and out of New Jersey. No dummies, Amazon’s negotiators got the city to agree to let it build a private helicopter pad at the new site so it can fly workers over the gridlocked streets.
But hey, it beats Crystal City. "
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