John Oliver took on economic incentives Sunday on Last Week Tonight. Economic incentives, as Oliver explains, are the tax breaks state and cities are willing to give corporations for the privilege of hosting them; basically, how far they are willing to spread their cheeks when CEOs start talking about bringing jobs to town.
One great example of this is Amazon, and the nutty bidding war the company’s search for HQ2 has inspired. As Oliver mentions, towns all across the U.S. are engaging in humiliating stunts, from Stonecrest, Georgia, which offered to rename itself after Amazon, to San Antonio, Texas, which tried to neg it into bed. But worse than the stunts are the economic incentives. New Jersey, for instances, offered $7 billion in tax breaks to attract the retailer. As Oliver points out, that’s $7 billion that wouldn’t be available for things like roads, schools, and hospitals, not to mention Chris Christie’s family vacations.
“We’re basically throwing money down a hole and hoping it brings us prosperity,” Oliver says, “which is the exact business model of a fucking wishing well.”
Shockingly, when the Puget Sound area submitted a proposal to host HQ2 (because apparently one Amazon just isn’t enough), they didn’t offer any new tax credits. Instead, they pointed out that because Washington doesn’t have either a personal or corporate income tax, it would still be cheaper to expand locally than to move some place that actually taxes their corporate parasites. It seems unlikely to work when so many other places are willing to open both their hearts and checkbooks to Amazon without any baggage, but maybe it could happen. Jeff Bezos says he considered founding Amazon on a Native American reservation to avoid taxes; when that didn’t work out, he chose the next best thing, with the next lowest taxes, instead.
