Governor Baker is giving away $20 million to billionaire Jeff Bezos.
From today’s Globe Business Section, we find out that Republican Governor Baker is doing what Republicans always do: take taxpayer money and give it to billionaires and corporations that don’t need it.
The Baker administration said Tuesday that it’s spending $20 million to bring Amazon, and 2,000 jobs, to a new building at Seaport Square.
It’s money that the project’s developer, Chestnut Hill-based WS Development, had last year agreed to spend on transportation improvements as part of city and state permitting for Seaport Square, a massive mixed-use development being built in the Seaport District.
The $20 million will instead come out of the state’s coffers, with the savings, along with a $5 million property tax break from the city, probably being passed along to Amazon in the form of lower rent.
This looks terrible. UMass Boston is really hurting, UMass tuition is going up, passing the hurt on to the students, and Charlie Baker thinks the best way to spend $20 million of our money is to give it to Amazon and some rich developer in Wellesley. Just after Bezos announces he wants to spend his $131 billion on space travel. Amazon does not need financial assistance from Mass taxpayers. I think Baker knows he’s moving money around in a bad way because he’s trying to be really quiet about it:
But the Amazon funding deal came as a bit of a surprise. It wasn’t approved by any state boards or mentioned in Tuesday’s press releases announcing the expansion. The arrangement was negotiated between the state, Amazon, and WS Development as part of lease discussions over the past few months. It was mentioned only after queries from the Globe about whether Amazon would receive any state incentives.
We need some oversight from the Legislature here! Get that money back.
If only we had a Democratic legislature with the kind of majority capable of easily checking a Republican governors fiscal priorities….oh wait
When my family moved to Massachusetts from New York seventeen years ago, we were not given one thin dime in exchange. If Governor Baker is a true “pull your self up by your own bootstraps” Republican, he would do the same for Amazon as was done for me. We made it. We survived. We are all contributing to the economy. Why can’t Amazon do it on their own?
What is “transportation infrastructure”? That sounds like a thing that I would have expected to be funded publicly rather than privately in the first place.
Absolutely it should be publicly funded, and means anything from keeping roads and bridges in good shape to a world class mass transit system.
I’m sure Dems never give away money do they. Can’t believe how irresponsible the Republicans are. Why doesn’t our veto-proof legislature make a law so businesses can’t take advantage like they do? One time the Dems did save Boston..er Mass.
“My feeling on this is we know what the North Star is. The North Star is attracting more innovation, more entrepreneurship to the western part of the state,” said state Sen. Eric Lesser (D-Longmeadow). “There’s a whole lot of different vehicles to do that.”
Lesser sponsored a bill creating a tax credit of 10 percent of a person’s investment, up to $100,000 a year, for angel investors who invest in technology companies in Gateway Cities that have fewer than 225 employees, at least 75 percent of whom are in Massachusetts. Gateway Cities are economically challenged cities with potential to anchor their regional economies.
Lesser said the idea is to “level the playing field” for entrepreneurs in places like Springfield, so an investor who might otherwise invest in companies in established technology centers like Boston or Cambridge will look at a company in Springfield, where the technology industry is still developing.
Former Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, vetoed an angel investor tax credit in an economic development bill he signed this summer, arguing that it is an unnecessary expense since there is already a lot of investment in Massachusetts.
Lesser said he agrees with Patrick statewide, but thinks there is room for incentives targeted at Gateway Cities. “There’s a difference between the overall level of angel investment being high in Massachusetts, and the investment level in Gateway Cities in Western Mass. being where it needs to be,” Lesser said.
The new governor, Republican Charlie Baker, is open to the use of tax incentives for targeted economic development. “Expanding opportunities for everyone in the Commonwealth, especially those in areas that haven’t seen the same success as the Boston area, is very important to the Baker-Polito Administration,” said Baker spokeswoman Elizabeth Guyton. “In the immediate future, the Governor believes regulations that hamper entrepreneurs must be reduced and looks forward to working with legislators on tax incentives and other economic development initiatives.”
Your comment confuses me.
The idea of providing a tax credit to the wealthy (because “blue sky” laws have limited “angel” investing to the very wealthy since the Great Depression) was rejected by the Democrats.
Make no mistake about it … tax cuts to angel investors benefit only the very wealthy.
Republicans like Mr. Baker give away money to wealthy while slashing goods and services to everybody else. Democrats like Deval Patrick recognize that the very wealthy don’t need any more giveaways.
The Republicans are, in fact, irresponsible. And hypocritical. And dishonest.
Deval’s record is hardly spotless. Casinos, film tax credits and biotech tax credits being prime examples of industries this state had no business subsidizing. Not to mention his work with Boston 2024 after he left office. Similarly, neither the incumbent AG or her predecessor has been particularly vigilant pursuit antitrust charges against Partners which now commands 80% market share in the hospital sector in this state. Marty Walsh and the legislature are even worse enablers of corporate welfare. We need to elect leaders willing to say no to these deals and say yes to revenue for services ordinary people use.
I don’t argue that Mr. Patrick’s record was spotless.
I agree that casinos are a disaster, as are the film tax credits.
I disagree about the biotech subsidies. That program — a total of $100M per year for 10 years — was hugely successful by pretty much all accounts (emphasis mine):
$761M in seed funding, new pharma offices, 21% growth in R&D jobs (three times the US rate). Those results speak for themselves.
That’s far more successful than we were in the late 1980s (when the AI bubble grew and burst). That’s a dramatic and positive turnaround from the massive losses that happened as hi-tech jobs fled the “128 corridor” and “Rt 3 corridor”. It’s better than we’re seeing under Mr. Baker’s administration.
Amazon is never going to do what Life Sciences have already done for the Massachusetts economy.
I was laid off from a sales management job in 1992 and tested into biotech job re-training subsidized by state government / biotech industry / and Middlesex Community College. With a stipend, I was able to graduate from the intensive one year science program with certification in biotechnology and was immediately hired as a manufacturing bio-technician by a start up company founded by a MIT graduate, Genetics Institute, developer of Factor VIII treatment for hemophilia.
The biotech industry could not get enough educated / trained manufacturing labor to satisfy the world -wide demand for their innovative discoveries. These are good paying manufacturing jobs with good benefits. After working 12 years, I was able to take early retirement at 55 with a private company pension – which was nixed the year after I retired – and flipped their generous 401k company matching stock portfolio into an IRA.
Can’t argue with that, they employ my brother and feed his family. Your anecdote is proof this industry was humming well before the late 2000’s subsidy from the Patrick Administration. As is my brothers career. He and his buddies were all hired without college degrees during the height of the dot com boom for their IT experience, and only my brother has been able to stay within the same field with regular raises and promotions. Huge boon to Cambridge and they make a huge investment in its schools. That said, would they exist and thrive without the taxpayer? I suspect the answer is yes.
My brother works in biotech and I support the industry, but I would have to see real data demonstrating that they needed the subsidies or the ROI was worth it. I will give you that it was a far better bet than GE, Olympics, film, Amazon or casinos. I do think an argument could be made they would still have flocked to Kendall Square without taxpayer subsidy.
We’ll never know. The data we have is that:
– They did, in fact, flock to Kendall Square (and Central Square, and later the Seaport district) with the subsidy
– No other industry invested in Cambridge with anything like the intensity of Biotech before or after the policy
– The research funding in Massachusetts universities has been similarly rewarding
– The more recent movements to Massachusetts, especially by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others is arguably a direct response to the explosion of the Life Sciences industry in MA.
My own anecdote is that I worked for Mitch Kapor and ON Technology at “One Cambridge Center” (next to the Marriott and adjacent to the Kendall Square T station) when it it was a brand-new building in 1988. We were the first tenants. There was simply NOTHING happening in Kendall Square during those years comparable to the boom that happened after the turn of the century.
Like I said, we’ll never know. What we do know for sure is that the policies of Mr. Patrick — including and by no means limited to the subsidies — were enormously influential in decisions like:
– The Novartis NA headquarters (in the old Necco building in Central Sq)
– The Broad Institute
– The huge MIT expansions
– The Whitehead Institute
– The flood of new Pharma buildouts all over Cambridge and now the Seaport
It’s also worth mentioning that the life sciences boom is a direct consequence of the revolution in life sciences that resulted from the effort to map the human genome that culminated at the turn of the century, the revolution in computer science that happened simultaneously, and the explosion of big data.
Cambridge in particular and Boston in general has been at the epicenter of all that in way that it was not during the growth of the computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s, and has not been since then.
It’s hard to say what caused what. Would the music industry look the way it does today if the Beatles had never happened? We can only speculate. What we know is that the Beatles did happen and that they were enormously influential.
In my view, the same can be said for the Life Sciences initiative of the Deval Patrick administration.