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How Government Subsidies for Amazon Backfired
Episode 63 of The Fiscal Policy Podcast dives into the economic evidence on targeted government subsidies for corporate headquarters and data centers, using Amazon's HQ2 bidding war as the central case. Lucas and Luna walk through the numbers: how Virginia's promise of up to $750 million in incentives for HQ2 compares with the actual job creation and wage data. They discuss the broader lesson from a 2024 Brookings study that analyzed 30 years of state-level business incentives and found that 60% of subsidized projects would have happened anyway. Specific examples include the $8.7…
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