A couple of days ago, I heard that, after Amazon decided not to put its east coast headquarters in Long Island City, New York, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoiced at the “victory” and remarked that the $3 billion New York would have “spent” could be used by the state to create their own jobs. Here’s part of what she said:
“If we were willing to give Amazon…$3 billion for this deal we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to.”
When I heard that my palm hit my forehead so hard I got a headache.
AOC has recently complained on Twitter about all the people making fun of her, but saying things like that makes it clear she has no idea how tax credits and incentives work. New York didn’t have $3 billion they were “willing to give Amazon.” They were simply offering to let Amazon keep up to $3 billion dollars in taxes they WOULD HAVE PAID on revenue made in the state.
The key words are “WOULD HAVE,” but thanks to the New York legislators who torpedoed the deal and AOC, who was cheer-leading the effort, there will be no taxes generated and no jobs created. The official estimate was that 25,000 jobs would be directly created, each with salaries north of $115,000 per year, and another 67,000 jobs created in companies who would serve as vendors for the gigantic campus Amazon was planning to build. Multiplied billions of dollars in economic activity would have reaped in taxes for the city and state many times the $3 billion tax credit offered to cement the deal.
Now all of that is gone and even far left Democrats like defacto-socialist New York Mayor DeBlasio and Governor “let’s-kill-babies-even-after-birth” Cuomo are harshly critical of those who made the deal go away. Men like these two were probably looking at the Amazon deal to save them, because New York’s tax and regulatory environment is so inhospitable to business that many have already left New York City. The failure of the Amazon deal just highlights the approaching crisis, not just for the budgets of NYC and the state, but of left-wing fiscal policy in general.
For a minute, I couldn’t figure out how someone could even think the way AOC apparently thinks, but then I remembered that leftists / liberals / Democrats / Socialists / Communists / Fascists believe there is a finite supply of money, kind of like matter and energy, it can’t be created or destroy, it can only change location. So if Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the richest man in the world this year, has billions of dollars, someone else has to have less.
What should be obvious, but apparently isn’t, is that Amazon.com didn’t exist before, and the wealth that has been created has not been taken from anybody, but is new wealth that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. The same can be said for companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Netflix and Twitter, plus a whole pile of lesser-known companies. Just because YouTube exists doesn’t mean NBC is gone. YouTube certainly does siphon off some eyeballs from traditional media, so they have had to adjust, but that doesn’t mean there is no longer any money for the traditional outlets. YouTube didn’t steal NBC’s slice of the pie; the media pie is just bigger.
And that’s the part that AOC and her fans don’t understand: Companies like Amazon are not exploiting people and taking their money. They are generating NEW money and making the nation’s total GDP larger. Like I said, that should be obvious, but for some people, even people with economics degrees like AOC, it isn’t.
And that’s without even talking about the “Green New Deal.” Democrats racing to imitate socialists from AOC to Bernie Sanders may live to regret it.
So I’m not the only one with a headache.
