Apparently, I offended you. I am sorry to offend you. My goal is not to offend you but to mock a culture I find appalling just as I mock the concept of granting tax incentives to hugely profitable companies as offensive. Humor is how I cope with a world where daily news is talking about extreme poverty, extreme profit and very little for those - who may be like you or me well in the middle who are pawns in these games that see little to no reward and end up being 0 sum in the grand scheme of things.
yes, i could have said programmers and most people will read it as programmers but truth be told, to the good people of this town - they're going to see these programmers as elites making money off their taxes when it comes to the time to those tax revenues matter... you know, when these companies inevitably ask for more because they got it to begin with
Look, the incentives are reductions in property taxes for building a $600 million data center powered by carbon-free electricity. That's 2.5% of the total investment into the property. The city and state will still pull in tax revenue from Google in the form of property taxes over the 20+ years it will run for.
Besides that and more to your point, coming from a small town myself, they're going to see these data center employees as peers and neighbors that spend money at their restaurants, retail, and other businesses supporting the local economy.
Those benefits don't have to come at the potential cost and risk to taxpayers though. If Google needs a datacenter they should open a data center - a city shouldn't have to incentivize and already profitable company. Economics makes no sense if the success requires incentives to those already winning.
growth is good, opportunity is good - not a single one of us disputes that. Google doesn't need taxpayer incentives to grow or remain competitive.
They're getting a discount on driving up the value of land and cost of living for local people when the real winners won't be anywhere near the datacenter and the company will cary an asset on their books worth much more money than what it cost them to build on the backs of tax payers who won't have the same experience of abated property values.
at least google is honest about school taxes... so yay, they're not screwing that over but meh.. the whole policy of tax payers funding winners and losers with games only big corporations are allowed to play BLOWS.
