Amazon, Mississippi, and the Cost of Living in Society
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Amazon is going to Mississippi.
Recently the state of Mississippi passed a set of laws that would allow Amazon to set up two hyperscale data centers in the state while exempting them from corporate income and state taxes and providing them with a 3% rebate on construction costs. To keep these exemptions, Amazon needs to make an annual minimum investment of $500 million and add 50 additional jobs each year. The expectation of course is that Amazon will bring upwards of a thousand jobs to Madison County in Mississippi over the next ten years, and that this will give the area a much needed boost of economic energy.
And here’s the thing - maybe it will. Maybe Amazon will invest in green energy in the area, and the influx of cash and jobs will boost the schools and local businesses and raise the poverty rate in a state often cited as having one of the highest.
But why do they have to exempt themselves from social obligations to do it?
Several years ago, Amazon planned to build two new corporate campuses on the east coast - one just outside of DC and one in New York. This came after an extensive pitch process where cities across the country put together bids in an effort to lure Amazon to invest its massive economic energy. New York won after a pitch that offered upwards of $3.5 billion in economic incentives and tax breaks in exchange for the promise of 25,000 jobs Amazon over ten years. But after a months-long campaign led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other elected officials and activists, Amazon pulled out of the deal, citing the lack of willingness on the part of state and local politicians to work with them to “to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward.”
Data for Progress, in their analysis of the consequences of this deal, point out that the economic investments in corporate deals like this often don’t meet the scale that they promise. And while the deal might cut off certain tax breaks and incentives if and when that scale is not met, this does not account for the fact that the city has often met their end of the deal by providing significant infrastructure investment and years of economic incentives. But these deals do often have a detrimental impact on the housing market and the jobs can often go to out of state hires that push out the locals who expected to see the benefits of the tax breaks they are providing one of the richest corporations in the world.
I’m not an economic expert - I have no idea if there’s a version of this kind of deal that can really work, where the economic investment a company makes in a city or state actually matches the tax breaks and incentives they receive. I have no idea if there’s a version of this that could be worth it. But I suspect not.
Taxes are the price we pay for living in a society together. We all pool our money and use it to pay for things that help all of us - from trash collection and transportation to healthcare and schools. We all benefit from living around other people who are healthy, educated and thriving. And corporations should not be exempt from that. Corporations benefit from good schools and good roads. They benefit from healthy employees and they benefit from transportation infrastructure. It’s a lot easier for Amazon to deliver whatever nonsense we’ve ordered if the roads are smooth, if they can plug their weird spaceship trucks into a functioning electrical grid, if the traffic lights work, if the people driving in their trucks and around their trucks are awake and fed and able to navigate.
And why do we need to offer Amazon billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to bring their data centers and corporate campuses to our regions when they barely pay any taxes in the first place? Why have we decided that we should pay global mega corporations to expand their monopolies and expand their tentacles even deeper and further into our society? When did we decide we have to pay them to do what they were going to do anyway, which is find a place to expand their business and pay people to do jobs in that same place? We don’t need to give corporations cookies for existing.
Of course, it feels like a fool’s errand to expect Amazon to act like they are a part of our society. They barely act like the people who work for them are people. Amazon regularly pays almost nothing in federal taxes, pays a living wage to barely half of its workers, and is regularly cited for worker safety concerns. And yet they expect cities and states to pay for their corporate benevolence.
But it’s not a fool’s errand. We actually don’t have to live like this. We don’t have to give corporations this much control over our humanity. We can force them to pay more in taxes, to invest in the communities around them. By organizing internally and in our communities we can remind the people who run our governments and our jobs that we’re not trapped in here with them, they are trapped in here with us - we are all part of the same society and we all have the opportunity to influence each other.
AOC received (and receives) a lot of flak for pushing back against Amazon’s HQ2 plan for New York City. Did she kill the opportunity for 25,000 jobs to come to Queens? Did she destroy economic opportunities for her constituents? Or did she save them from a glut of people moving in from out of state, people who would flood the subways they’d be taking billions of dollars from and inflate housing prices in an already unaffordable city? Maybe it’s complicated, maybe it’s a little bit of both. But it is much more important to me to push back against the idea that corporations should be able to put themselves above the communities that support and build them, that they should expect to be exempt from the responsibilities of existing in a society that the rest of us bear with every paycheck.
I don’t blame Mississippi for doing their best to get Amazon to come to their state, to bring well paying jobs and infrastructure investment and economic energy to a state that sorely needs it (though why they need it and how the Amazon deal is potentially tied into the policies that put them in this position is a post for another day). But I look forward to a world where instead of exempting Amazon from paying taxes, Amazon played by the same rules as all the small businesses in Mississippi, as the teachers and firefighters and mechanics and doctors and janitors and lawyers and truck drivers who all pay their taxes because that’s what it means to live together and to rely on each other. No man is an island, and no corporate entity is either. And we’ll all be better off pushing for a world that recognizes that.
Love it Sara, keep going