What New York Just Lost

The below comes from my friend Peter Boockvar of The Boock Report and is reprinted with his permission. I thought it was perfectly succinct and aligned with how I feel about the situation. I am not in favor of corporate welfare and I understand the other side to some extent. But I am also a pragmatist and I think in the modern era, this is what you have to do. You have to play the game. There are giant corporations wringing concessions from cities all over America, from Boeing to Fedex, and whether you like it or not, it’s still better than the alternative – losing opportunities to other regions. If we do this sort of stuff for sports teams (and we do), then this should be much less controversial. 

Here’s Peter: 

Amazon (Atlas) Shrugged.

What NY has done has resulted in some of the following: Lost jobs. Lost job experience. Lost internships. Lost high paying jobs. Lost life experiences. Lost taxes. Lost construction workers. Lost work for architects. Lost steel, cement production. Lost plumbing supplies. Lost electrical work. Lost carpet and hard wood floor sales. Lost infrastructure improvements in the area. Lost sales at restaurants. Lost food delivery. Lost taxi, Uber, Lyft, bus and subway rides. Lost ticket sales for LIRR, NJ Transit and Metro North. Lost car sales. Lost Broadway show ticket sales. Lost Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Jets, Giants, Ranger, Islander and Devils ticket sales. Lost dry cleaning services. Lost clothing sales. Lost housing transactions and commissions. Lost furniture shopping. Lost household formation. Lost ‘my first apartment.’ Lost airline flights. Lost retail sales on any other thing spent with the money from those high paying jobs.

#EVERYONE LOST # CAPITALISM WORKS

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Josh here – lots of reasonable people disagree with me on this, including Scott Galloway and Barry Ritholtz, who points out that Google has needed very little in the way of tax breaks to pursue its massive expansion in Manhattan over the last few years. 

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