Originally Posted by Rochard

I originally thought the same thing too. Then I thought about it. I don't think we are looking at the bigger picture.

Amazon doesn't come to a town and set up shop, and the city, county, and state benefits. In fact, just the opposite. Instead, Amazon comes to a town and negotiates to get them the best possible tax deal. Amazon strong arms them and ends paying little to no taxes. At the same time the city has to pay to maintain the infrastructure, police, fire, etc... When a single business has 25k employees, the police department has to devote more time, manpower, and resources to that location... Which they are not being paid for. At the same time, these 25k are ripping up the roads which have to be maintained which aren't being paid for by Amazon.... If a pipe breaks and floods the street, Amazon doesn't pay to repair it - the city does. And if the city isn't getting any taxes from Amazon.... This can end up costing the city, county, and state tens of millions of dollars every year with very little benefit.

Even worse is the way Amazon does this. They don't negotiate so much as they strong arm, and they do it in private without citizen input. In this case, the government gave Amazon everything it wanted and got nothing in return the citizens are like "what just happened" and "why didn't we have any input in it".

We have a casino here in town and from what I understand they tried to strong arm us. The local city government stood up and said no to them. They said "go build somewhere else" knowing that they had to build on this land because it was Indian land. They built us a new fire station, bought us new fire trucks, and paid their taxes like a good local business.