Is AOC’s claim that New York gave Amazon $3 billion correct?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says a lot of… well, let’s just follow our grandmother’s advice that when you have nothing nice to say then don’t say it at all.

AOC’s recently claimed that New York gave Amazon $3 billion to erect its second headquarters, which comes as the website pulled out from building its HQ2 in The City That Never Sleeps.

She said:

You know, I think it’s really important that we understand that we need to invest in our economy, but we need to invest in our people, and to give away $3 billion to a company that has a history of worker exploitation that’s paying below what the cost of New York City is not acceptable for us. We need to have good jobs, and they need to come to the table as in — you know, any company that wants to come to New York needs to come to the table as an equal partner, and you look at how Google came to New York; it was not nearly as controversial as this, and I think it’s because of, they were willing to work with local communities.

What’s great is that our economy, our local economy, is already growing. So I firmly believe that if we want to take that $3 billion dollars that we were willing to give to Amazon and invest it in our local community, we can do that. We can make those jobs. We can make 25,000 jobs. But we don’t have to give away and allow our subway system to crumble so that Amazon essentially owns a part of New York City. We can create 25,000 jobs with Mom-and-Pops; we can create 25,000 jobs with companies that are willing to come to the table, but we should not be giving away our infrastructure, our subway system, our schools, our teachers’ salaries, our firefighters’ budgets, to a company that has not shown good faith to New Yorkers. And we can ask for more because we deserve more.

So, did The Empire State write a check to the online retail goliath?

No.

What the state did was give the company $3 billion in tax breaks, which is vastly different from subsidies or direct kickbacks.

It is important to point out that the government doesn’t pay for tax cuts. By making the argument, you concede that the government owns all the property in the United States and giving you some of your money back is akin to an allowance from the benevolent politicians.

Now, it would make fiscal sense if the government offset these tax cuts with spending cuts to ensure it doesn’t go into a deficit. But that’s another discussion for another day.

Amazon is just not paying $3 billion in taxes, which they shouldn’t have to – and that’s what the left is angry about. But New York didn’t have $3 billion laying around and decided to give it to Jeff Bezos instead of building disastrous subway lines or hiring more bad teachers.