Incentivizing dishonesty

Oh hi there, fellow New Yorker picking through the rubble after the collapse of a deal that would’ve brought up to 40,000 good jobs and solidified the city’s tech-industry leadership for a generation: Can we now talk rationally about incentives designed to attract businesses to our city and state?

No, not in the deeply disingenuous way that foes of Amazon piled on the package the company was getting to set up shop here.

First, they claimed that $3 billion was being handed out as some kind of up-front lump sum — in a paper bag, maybe? — that could be redirected to pay for schools, subways, parks, public housing. Ridiculous: Almost all the incentives were paying back a small fraction of what Amazon’s employees would be paying into public coffers, over the course of a decade.

Which is to say, fewer jobs, fewer tax benefits. No jobs, no tax benefits. And massive net gain for the city and state: nine dollars in revenue for every dollar in public spending, by design.

Second, the deal-killers suggest that the incentives were all the result of Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio bending over backward for the richest company on earth. In fact, the city’s two abatements, known as ICAP and REAP, would have been automatically offered to any other company setting up shop there. We repeat: Under law, Amazon was entitled to that $1.3 billion in givebacks.

As for the state’s money: Amazon may well have qualified anyway for the $1.2 billion in Excelsior jobs and investment tax credits it was slated to get; four other Amazon projects in the state have already benefited from the program.

Finally, a cash grant of up to $505 million to assist in the construction of Amazon’s campus, again to be doled out over time as the company raised its cranes, was essentially a pass-through so it would use union labor.

Nothing about the way any of this works is sacred. It’s fair game to consider capping benefits or restructuring how they work. It would be especially novel for the progressives in control to consider yanking project-by-project tax breaks in favor of structural changes that lower the city and state’s high tax burden. (Stop laughing.)

But the Legislature and City Council must do so strategically. After a real costbenefit economic analysis. Not in the throes of a breathless reaction to a supposed corporate behemoth bigfooting our precious city.

Are our lawmakers capable of that?