Alexandria Nina Pinta Santa Maria Cortez is one of my favorite people. I just can't wait for her to have a luncheon with Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters, especially when they have to figure out the tip. Oh who am I kidding? Pelosi's going to charge that lunch to the American people. But moving on. Amazon has chosen the location of its second headquarters, splitting the location in two: one office in New York, the other in Virginia. This has Nina Pinta all kinds of outraged:

I'm not down in the trenches of New York's Long Island City. I've no idea if the people are outraged or not. But I do live in the greatter Seattle area, which is Amazon's original home. Amazon being in Seattle has generally raised everything: rent, cost of living in addition to raising wages and tax revenue. While hoisting up local businesses where employees of Amazon shop and spend their leisure time.

Okay, I'm going to pull back and look at the bigger picture the runway model for socialism is missing. She's bitching about corporatism: that is, government making deals with corporations for usually mutually beneficial reasons. In this case, Amazon moves to New York at a discount, so New York can still receive the vast income from employee income taxes taken from Amazon employees, as well as other tax revenue (sales tax, property tax, etc) from those same employees.

So actually New York will still get a lot of revenue from Amazon. Otherwise, they wouldn't have made the deal.

What's irritating is this whole Amazon ordeal proves New York knows placing a tax burden on businesses dissuades businesses from their city, but places those same burdensome taxes on every other business. A point Nina Pinta will never make.

But corporatism, favoring a big business when it won't favor others, is a hallmark of socialism and its bigger cousin communism. So what we have here is a socialist darling railing against her own preferred system of governance.

Not everyone who works at Amazon is a programmer raking in six figures. Amazon hires plenty of non-executives, and last I looked, Amazon preemptively raised their minimum wage to $15/hour.

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world. They do provide healthcare plans and "living wages" which allow people to afford rent. Granted a huge company moving into a city will naturally raise rent prices due to supply and demand, but cities try to build themselves to accommodate that demand. As is happening in Amazon's hometown of Seattle.

Nina Pinta Santa Maria Cortez is demonstrating an economics shortcoming. While also taking aim at corporatism. With the idea that somehow that same government which engages in corporatism, which makes all of its revenue by taking from these same people Cortez claims to be a champion, can save them.

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