All those lost jobs
On this Valentine’s Day we mark an important 5th anniversary. It’s not a marriage, but a terrible divorce: The day five years ago when Amazon canceled its planned gigantic expansion on the Long Island City waterfront, creating its second headquarters in Queens right on the East River. The promise was at least 25,000 good jobs (with an average wage exceeding $150,000) and perhaps ballooning to 40,000 jobs.
Even the perpetually warring Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio had put aside their squabbles to work seamlessly on the proposal, which Amazon accepted, as New York came out first of 238 submissions.
The traditional five-year anniversary gift is wood, but New York’s not even getting a wooden nickel.
The culprits, as we remind people every year since that fateful withdrawal, are four politicians who thought they knew better than the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who stood to land a spot with Amazon.
We have not forgotten Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gianaris, Jimmy Van Bramer and Corey Johnson who railed against Amazon and then Amazon walked away. AOC and Gianaris still have their jobs, in Congress and the state Senate, while Van Bramer and Johnson were forced from the City Council by term limits. We certainly do like term limits. It was a lie that Amazon was going to get a big fat check from New York taxpayers. Yes, roughly saying, Amazon would pay $9 billion in taxes instead of the expected $10 billion, so Amazon saves $1 billion. But that $1 billion doesn’t exist to be put towards other purposes, as the quartet claimed. The $1 billion doesn’t exist at all, and neither does the other $9 billion. Amazon gets no tax break because Amazon pays no new taxes. And no one gets a job.
They promised that there would be other jobs created. So, five years later, how many jobs paying $150K have AOC, Gianaris, Van Bramer and Johnson created? They owe New York between 6,250 to 10,000 jobs each. Perhaps they only meant to poke and prod, not to scare off the behemoth.
If Amazon had stayed, the binding agreement with New York said that by 2024, there would 15,900 net new jobs. There are zero.
We don’t idealize Amazon, it is no cuddly corporation, but a ruthless shark, gobbling up the business of others and with a nasty anti-union streak to boot, but good jobs are still good jobs.
How long will we continue to remember this sad anniversary? Next year’s Valentine’s Day will be the sixth, when the traditional gift is sugar. For New York, it will remain bitter.