Righting the Wrongs of Amazon HQ2

Some 238 cities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico responded to Amazon’s original call for proposals for its second headquarters, or HQ2. That group has now been whittled down to 20 finalists. Many of these proposals included astronomical levels of taxpayer-financed incentives—as much $7 billion from Newark, New Jersey, and $8.5 billion from Maryland. These incentives range from cash grants and property tax abatements to building a monorail for Amazon. Given that the majority of these bids aren’t public, we can only speculate on what else has been offered.

While politicians and economic developers justify incentives as part of the cost of attracting Amazon’s projected 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment, economists will tell you that such large-scale publicly funded incentives bring real and opportunity costs. This is taxpayer money that could be used to fund a wide range of programs from schools, infrastructure and parks; affordable housing or job training programs to locally-based research and development or bolster local startup ecosystems.