Make This Amazon Charade Illegal
This perfectly sums up how I feel about governments bribing companies with our money to set up shop in our towns. I’m not talking about giving a small mom and pop a loan to get off the ground, that’s fine. But doling out money and tax breaks hand over fist to multi-million or billion dollar companies like Amazon or the con man sports team of the moment has no place in a properly functioning society. Yeah, I know.
Companies like Amazon build new headquarters and other facilities because they have a business need to do so. If a business has a business need to build a business facility, you do not need to pay the business money to do so. The fact that it has a business need means that ultimately it will make money by doing so. There is no charity involved here. The only thing that every damn city in America is bidding on here is the right to have a business facility located in a certain place. You do not have to be a genius to see that, in aggregate, from a national perspective, this is a losing game for the public. If we did not give private corporations any free public money, they would still build their business facilities, because doing so is a necessary part of doing business, which is what businesses do. Furthermore, taxes are what we charge for public services. By giving Amazon tax breaks, you excuse them from paying (a lot) for public services. As a result, either public services will suffer, or the rest of us will pay more to make up the difference. This is charity money being spent to enrich the richest man in the world. It is the worst possible use of public funds.
