Think outside the box. We should dump GE so we can redirect all our bribes, I mean resources, to getting this great deal from Amazon! Sure GE will whine that they have a contract, but if there’s anything in greater supply here than software developers it’s lawyers. Let GE face the prospect of a long court fight in the unbiased Massachusetts court system. Maybe they will decide instead to sweeten their deal so it will look better than the Amazon package. Then we can take the revised GE deal back to Amazon and . . . . you get the idea. It’s competition. The same thing GE and Amazon used on us.
Please share widely!
Funny, but it doesn’t make much sense. I don’t think we have much chance of landing Amazon, but even if we did, this deal would be 50 times larger than GE so they are hardly comparable.
You think treating one corporation like shit will attract the other? I think that may be a rather childish view of what ‘competition’ means. The sad part, maybe, is that you think it not only virtuous to do this, but necessary? Why do you have take such a small, and insulting, view of Boston? Why do you think we can’t have both Amazon and GE?
Amazon HQ is in Seattle right now. Seattle,, the 15th largest Metro area, in the US is smaller than Boston, the 10th largest metro area. Seattle has Amazon and Starbucks HQ and a large portion of Microsoft. Boston would be larger than what they have now.
“Why do you think we can’t have both Amazon and GE?”
Because there is only so much of the public’s hard-earned tax money that we can give away. Even Trump got rid of Marla when he acquired Melania .
Dumping GE would not only free up resources, it would appeal to the egos of the Amazonians .Not only would the Boston proposal have groveling pols it would include humiliated GE execs slinking out of town. Who could beat that?
Extra-ordinarily small-minded. But, I guess, that’s what you get when humiliating someone is the priority. Good luck with that.
Dumping GE wouldn’t really free up any resources. Government spending doesn’t work that way and you know that perfectly well. Even if it did, I agree that it would send a horrible message if you want to attract Amazon. It seems you would rather have no big corporations here.
There’s a proven approach to economic development called “economic gardening.” It is the idea that local governments should network and build up local businesses instead of giving away tax breaks competing with other localities for outside companies. It started in Littleton, CO in the 1980s when one of their major employers left town. The city government decided to support and grow their local businesses and business infrastructure and found that they produced more jobs and more prosperity than previously.
There are many groups now supporting this idea. You can search them out online. It seems to me a much better way of going about economic development than bending over backward to Big Corps(e) like GM or Amazon with tax breaks and “inducements.”
Yeah. We already do that…. better than most, in fact. What makes you think we don’t?
But, and here’s the rub, whenever somebody notices that MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, BU, BC and Tufts are the recipients of this sort of ‘economic gardening’ they get pissy about those corporations not ‘paying their fair share..’ But did you ever wonder why both MicroSoft and Facebook, both conceived by then Harvard students and both one time potential ‘local businesses’ (which is what you are saying you want) didn’t stay here? Because we don’t bother to extend this version of ‘economic gardening’ to start-ups. Pity., no?
MIT (largest single taxpaying entity in Cambridge), Harvard (largest single employer in Cambridge) and BU (largest single landowner in Boston) all exist first to train and then to shed talent yearly. Teach them then kick ’em right out the door. MInd boggling, if you bother to think about it… Many of these talented young people want to stay around, and some have and do (BBN, Bose,Analog Devices, Akamai, iRobot) but most find it just to hard to do so (and, in fact, the above mentioned companies were all started by affiliates of MIT who wished to maintain their affiliation)
So now Marty Walsh, after years of altogether too parochial blinders, is making some high-profile noises about wooing corporations, with the added benefit that maybe the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates might actually feel invited and start their companies here, instead of somewhere else. Can’t do ‘economic gardening’ much better than that. ( and I’ve been to Littleton, Co…_)
And, while we are on the subject, let us not forget that, whatever anybody else might tell you, if there was no MIT, there would be no Amazon… or facebook for that matter.. It’s just that simple. Two MIT professors and a grad student (Bolt, Baranek and Newman) took the ideas of Claude Shannon, Paul Gallagher and Norbert Wiener (all MIT professors) and created a robust packet switching network. After Tim Berners-Lee invented the protocols that rode atop that packet switched network at CERN, he moved to MIT (where he remains to this day) to shepherd the protocols into the future. The palimpsest that is Amazon owes far far more to MIT for its very existence than to all the things Jeff Bezos has done.
Greater Bostons version of ‘economic gardening’ has been wildly successful… for the entire world. And if we bring companies into town from elsewhere, or stop the bleed of talent out, it’ll continue to be so.
I don’t know if I entirely agree that we don’t support startups, but it is true that there is more venture capital to be had on the west coast.
The most impactful things we can do to support all types of business in Boston is to provide more affordable housing and greatly improve the capacity and reliability of public transportation. Special tax deals may help, but will be secondary or tertiary considerations in getting businesses to set up shop in the Boston area.
In any case, the Amazon deal really is a unique opportunity. We are talking about 50K jobs. I cannot recall any deal remotely like it.
Any campus that can accommodate so many workers will require transportation infrastructure and close cooperation with the communities that surround it. It would require at least some public spending and strong commitment from the sponsoring cities to make it happen.
Bobs proposal is a modest one, and I truly appreciate where it’s coming from.