Corporate rejection doesn’t have to hurt

June 2015 marked the brewing of a corporate revolt against Connecticut. In the face of a projected tax hike, some of the most august companies to make their homes here, including GE and Aetna, said they were fed up and ready to find someplace more hospitable. Budget negotiations ground to a halt and everyone feared the worst.

The state put a serious effort into making both companies happy, meaning it promised loads of subsidies, only to be rebuffed. Three and a half years later, it’s hard to tell who wound up better off.

Start with Aetna, which said it was leaving Hartford after more than 150 years for New York City in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in tax credits. Instead, Aetna was bought by CVS, which canceled the whole thing and kept thousands of workers in Connecticut. If we can make it in Woonsocket, R.I., the pharmacy giant seemed to be saying, you can handle Hartford.

GE was at the same time making a public show of looking around at various other landing spots before deciding in 2016 on Boston. With grand plans for a shimmering new waterfront headquarters, the conglomerate was leaving small-town Connecticut behind for the big city.

In both cases, their public denunciations of Connecticut tax policy served mostly as an excuse for doing what they wanted to do anyway.

Aetna, records showed, had started looking for a different home years before it announced its new headquarters. The CEO wanted to live in New York, and Hartford, whatever its charms, is not New York.

GE, too, wanted to be someplace more interesting. “If you saw where we were in Fairfield County, it was a morgue,” their CFO told The Wall Street Journal. Then-CEO Jeff Immelt talked about getting tired of seeing deer outside his window.

Both companies set their sights on moving away from high-cost Connecticut into two of the highest-cost cities in the U.S., which ought to indicate cost wasn’t the deciding factor.

Aetna never got a chance to leave, and for GE, things haven’t gone well since it decamped for Massachusetts. On Thursday it scrapped plans for its new headquarters, reduced the number of jobs it promised to bring and gave back its financial incentives. That this happened the same day Amazon decided New York City was too much trouble has some observers lamenting the state of the Northeast business climate and counting down the days until all our jobs move to Alabama. They should calm down.

First, New York City didn’t reject Amazon; the company is free to move as many workers there as it pleases. New York City did put up a fuss about paying billions of dollars to an insanely profitable company for the privilege of doing what it wanted to do anyway. The city will be fine.

For its part, GE is on its third CEO since leaving Connecticut and is selling or cutting everything in sight. It was clear long before it became official that the new building was never going to happen. When it left Connecticut, the company was in the midst of a high-profile digital transformation, which has since been abandoned. GE makes things like turbines and may have decided it should just do what it’s best at. Boston, too, will get by.

Companies are going to go where it makes the most sense for them to go, and cost is only one factor. New York City and California are constantly derided for their high taxes and anti-business policies, and yet residents and jobs keep flowing into both.

Connecticut can’t buy a Boston or New York, but it could do more to invest in the cities we have (New Haven and Stamford, to start), and make them more attractive for people to live and work. That ultimately matters more than almost any subsidy or tax cut we could come up with.