Amazon Incentives

A $2 Billion Question: Did New York and Virginia Overpay for Amazon?

It's no secret that in order to secure new business, and as a result, jobs, states and municipalities both offer up various incentives. Recently, the most public example of this has been with cities competing to recruit Amazon's new campus.

I found the most interesting element of this article to be the influence of the billion dollar incentives in Amazon's decision- or rather, the lack of it. As the article explains, money didn't talk, but resources did. The decision really came down to where labor was, and where transit is. And hindsight makes it easy to see that this was always what they wanted. While logical, it seems unfair to have put the midsize communities through the ringer, as they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in courting, only to have never had a chance.