Final Blog: Economics & Politics- Debate Over Wealth in The U.S. and Amazon's NYC HQ

In an article posted by the New York Times from earlier this year, the discussion of how "progressives are starting to favor a new economic agenda" is looked at from both liberal and conservative viewpoints. The article focuses on how many Democrats were against the establishment of a new headquarters for Amazon in New York. The main reason many opposed the building of a corporate headquarters is because of the city's offer to give Amazon around 3 billion dollars if they were to do so. This angered many people and many Democrats in particular because of the notion of how Amazon, which is the top online store in the U.S. that is also worth more than 920 billion dollars, would be receiving a great sum of taxpayer dollars to build the headquarters. Some of the most prominent critics of the HQ were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. All of them commented on how we need to stop giving the wealthy and companies like Amazon taxpayer bribes. Senator Bernie Sanders is most known for his political ideas and policies on economic and financial reform and argues that the American Economy follows what he calls "The Reverse Robinhood Principle" which essentially takes money from the poor and distributes it to the most wealthy people in the United States. On the flip side of the progressive argument, many argue that Amazon's headquarters would have provided many more jobs to New Yorkers and help the economy grow.
To me, both sides of the debate have a fair point. Although I do believe that we should change our policies to stop helping the upper echelon of the upper class, I also see how the headquarters could have helped create thousands of jobs. I do agree that situations like this where highly valued companies and wealthy Americans are be favored and see an increase of wealth through tax cuts and taxpayer subsidies is quite unfair. However, I think that certain situations like this should receive consideration of both the possible and negative impacts on the economy. I chose this article not only because I am interested in economics, but because it relates to both economics and political views/ policies, which were both studied in class this year. The debate over how wealth is distributed in the U.S. is a very divided one and will likely be a major topic in at least the next few years in politics. Reading this article reminded me of studying the general policies of political parties. When we did this, we compared the policies and views of Progressives, Conservatives, Libertarians, and Communitarians. Looking at some of the other political concepts such as capitalism and socialism, we can identify issues in economics and easily relate them to politics. I believe that in order to understand either economics or politics, you need to have a fair understanding of the other.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/business/amazon-economy-taxes.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FEconomics&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=collection

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