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Amazon would be about to choose the winner of its second headquarters project, or HQ2.
Or should I say "winners".
It turns out that if the New York Times is right, Amazon is about to agree to split its HQ2 project between two cities: Arlington, Virginia and New York. Each city will receive 50% of the 50,000 employees and a $ 5 billion investment that Amazon promised to the winners of the project.
Wait, huh? It was not part of the plan.
If Amazon selects two cities like HQ2, as shown, everything Amazon has promised will escape. How does this differ from other cities in Amazon where she has offices, like Boston and Los Angeles?
Will they designate the two sites, hundreds of miles away, as QG2? Or are we simply supposed to regard QG2 as the entire East Coast – a town or village accessible from the Acela Amtrak service between New York and Washington, DC.
In fact, Amazon already has a considerable number of employees in the Washington area and in New York. The Times says it is the largest number of employees outside of Seattle and employs thousands of workers in every city.
Amazon is not it expanding the meaning of the word "seat" here? What is the difference between having a large satellite office in a city and what Amazon claims to call a "seat".
There may be a distinction for Amazon employees, but for the public who pays tax – who will pay a large part of the bill through the tax incentives required by Amazon – there will be will probably not have many.
Read more:People are furious after Amazon's announced decision to divide its head office between New York and Virginia after months of deliberations
Critics of the endless process of Amazon's QG2 have already questioned that a "second seat" might even exist. Splitting it into two equally sized headquarters only adds more weight to their argument that the whole process was a ploy of opposing cities to each other to maximize incentives.
This also breaks Amazon's initial mandate for the project that HQ2 be "totally equal" to the company's headquarters in Seattle. If it is separated, it is not equal.
Amazon meditated so much on its investment in Head Office 2 that the cities were ready for anything to get their chance to reach it. Amazon probably at least understood this in his calculation, and when he realized that it would be easier to count the cities that do not have jump on the opportunity to have Amazon in the backyard, the strategy has shifted to simply maximize the gains.
Although we do not yet know what tax incentives have been offered to Amazon to choose these two cities, nor what Amazon has offered in return, we can safely assume that the total of these cities is billions.
City and state leaders jumped at the opportunity to get what they considered a high-profile victory – and a clear advantage that voters would see and appreciate. The benefits to local communities and governments – economic or otherwise – are now not so obvious.
If Amazon essentially manages to steal millions of tax revenues from Virginia and New York without even giving back what they originally promised, what else are they capable of?
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