While Roy Cordato has explained why New Yorkers should be pleased about Amazon’s decision to drop the Big Apple from its expansion plans, Michael Goodwin of the New York Post explores the decision’s impact on Democrats.
Democrats are fighting mad — at each other. For once, President Trump is not the prime target of their rage.
Amazon’s decision to scrap plans for an HQ2 campus in New York sent the circular firing squad into action. The blue-on-blue attacks pit the far left against the far, far left in yet another front of the party’s civil war.
In addition to sharp differences about a Green New Deal, taxes, socialism, Medicare-for-all and open borders, Dems are now split over how and whether government should work with the private sector to create jobs and boost the tax base.
The more moderates, a very relative term in this showdown, eagerly engaged in a form of crony capitalism. The $3 billion in tax incentives that Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio offered Amazon included $500 million to subsidize the salaries of construction workers. …
… At any rate, Cuomo and de Blasio forgot that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist ilk tend to see capitalism in any form as evil. Her side didn’t want Amazon to get taxpayer help and demanded instead that it be forced to contribute millions to schools and subways.
At the heart of their argument is a narrow view of private rights, one that believes government should use its immense power to make it nearly impossible for companies to operate unless they fund the pols’ social-justice and climate-change boondoggles.