Amazon deal not the worst we've done

That first winter storm this week was a doozy, and it scared a lot of people off the road. But as my puppy and I stepped out into the predawn sleet, a town snowplow roared by, clearing my little suburban street. Nobody minds paying taxes for this, I thought: That snowplow driver deserves a fat overtime check when his workweek ends.

But the brain works in wondrous ways, by which I mean to say that I can't explain why my mind shifted just then to Jeff Bezos, the richest man alive. His company Amazon, which is worth $1 trillion, just got a pledge from New York taxpayers, through our elected leaders, for tax credits and outright grants worth $1.7 billion - money that we have given to state government, you know, not entirely voluntarily.

While it's true that Bezos used to flip burgers at McDonalds, it hardly seems that he needs our financial help now.

But choices about how our tax dollars are allocated are seldom simple, and there's an argument that New York and the Commonwealth of Virginia - which is similarly shelling out subsidies to get the other half of the Amazon headquarters built just outside Washington, D.C. - made right and rational choices in backing up Bezos' investment.

That's the argument offered by John Bacheller, a thoughtful public policy analyst who headed the research arm of the state's economic development agency during the administration of Gov. George Pataki.

Consider this: The Amazon project's 25,000 jobs, paying an average of $125,000 each, will add $3.75 billion in payroll to the state each year, which will yield a lot of tax dollars, not to mention the revenues from the spending power of those new New Yorkers. The taxes paid by the added Amazon employees alone will pay back the incentives we're shelling out in three years, Bacheller noted, in an independent analysis he released this week.

It was the vision of all those jobs, of course, that led 230 communities to compete for the Amazon "HQ2" over the past year. Everybody seemed to want to have Jeff Bezos as a neighbor - until he chose New York and Virginia, and the reality set in.

As things stand now, New York can't afford to rebuild its decaying subways - a state responsibility, by the way - so how can it handle the extra riders? There isn't enough affordable housing in the city now, so isn't the Amazon surge only going to bid up prices?

There are so many needs around the state - billions of dollars in unmet infrastructure repairs, shortfalls in what's needed for health care, education, housing and environmental protection - that pouring money into Amazon's coffers to enable it to build capacity to make more money seems to be a misdirected priority.

Remember, of course, that Amazon's main business of mail-order retail is contributing to the decline of brick-and-mortar stores that have for years provided jobs and tax revenues, including in upstate New York.

Yet the siren song of the HQ2 competition was too strong for any politician to resist because, as Bacheller noted, "25,000 good-paying jobs are too many to give away to another location." So every sizable community - including our Capital Region - went all out to lure Amazon.

And, anyway, we taxpayers are usually chumps when we look at how government passes out benefits, whether in direct aid or in tax breaks. Lots of the decisions our leaders and representatives make are dumber than this.

Take, for example, the federal tax cuts Congress enacted last year at the prodding of the Trump administration with the promise that ordinary Americans would be the beneficiaries. That has set the stage for trillion-dollar-a-year federal deficits, meaning our grandchildren will wind up paying for the economic boom we're now enjoying. And the benefits aren't showing up where they were supposedly aimed: Businesses are getting nine times more in benefits than they are passing on to their workers, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness, and spending 11 times more on stock buybacks than on bonuses and increased wages.

It's almost as though officials are keen to use the tax code to subsidize the political donor class. You think?

There was a time when our government seemingly didn't try to be so clever. Direct investment in infrastructure in the second half of the 20th century spurred the nation's unprecedented growth. Failing to do that now - for roads and bridges, waterways, alternative energy installations - will leave us behind other nations, even as we exhaust our taxing capacity on breaks for the big guys.

And that leaves too little for the good man in the snowplow, who I'm sure will dutifully pay his share.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Contact him at rsmith@timesunion.com.