Brunell: Resistance to tax incentives for Amazon a cautionary tale

Even though opinion polls show New Yorkers favored the deal. “Support for the new headquarters was strongest in communities of color and among working people who too often haven’t gotten the economic opportunity they deserved,” de Blasio said in arguing for Amazon to stay the course. But, Amazon pulled the plug.

While Amazon will find more friendly digs, what is happening in New York should not be ignored. There is a growing backlash to corporations among liberals.

Veteran Wall Street columnist Peggy Noonan sees a larger trend developing that is bad for our private, market-based economic system.

Noonan believes the Democratic Party is going hard left for the foreseeable future. Pew Research shows Democrats began lurching to the left beginning in 2009. Gallup says the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has jumped 23 points since 2000.

Noonan adds: “Millennials, the biggest voting-age bloc in America, are to the left of the generations before them. Moderates are aging out. It is a mistake to dismiss their leaders as goofballs who’ll soon fall off the stage. They may or may not, but those who support and surround them are serious ideologues who mean to own the future.”

Joe Parilla, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told the Associated Press that Amazon’s high-profile bidding process may have stoked the backlash. Companies usually search for new locations quietly, in part to avoid the kind of opposition Amazon received.

“There are two very energetic forms of populism in the U.S. right now, one on the left and one on the right, and neither likes Amazon that much,” said Brayden King, professor of management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “For both, Amazon is becoming a whipping boy,” King told The Wall Street Journal.

Hopefully, the lessoned learned from Amazon’s misfire will resonate with corporate executives. It is not enough to roll into town and tell government leaders to give them their best offer of tax incentives in exchange for jobs and an increase in tax revenues. A nine-fold increase in revenue is a pretty good return, but hard economic facts were overshadowed by the resentment of providing any government incentive.

Corporate leaders must engage community and political leaders regardless of their views and slog through the approval process. It is not easy and there will be bumps and bruised feelings. But just as roadbuilders carefully engineer, excavate and pave the highway before opening it to traffic, companies have to build the foundation for their projects. That’s reality today.