If Amazon comes to town, they say there will be a lot of jobs. Someone has to work there, of course. We don't know, though, whether the people will be local. Bezos might have his own people. After all, we're building him a helipad, and you can't have just anyone manage one of those things. Personally, I don't know jack squat about helipads. What color should I paint it? What do you clean it with? Should I have some guy standing around with fancy flashlights guiding the helicopters? Who knows?
Surely Bezos has someone to do that work. And if there are high paying jobs, he might have people to take them too. Maybe they'll come from Seattle. Maybe from the moon. Who knows where guys like Jeff Bezos hang out? If you want jobs created in New York, for New Yorkers, Bezos may not be your number one go to.
As it happens, I have a solution. The other day I was having a conversation with a couple of English teachers in the cafeteria. One of them suggested that Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio ought to give us the three billion instead of giving it to Bezos. This made sense to me, and on multiple levels. For one thing, I'd like to have a billion dollars. My dog goes through a lot of treats, and they don't grow on trees. Wedding gifts are getting more and more expensive, and don't even get me started about taxes.
As for taxes, you really pay a lot less when you're a billionaire. For all I know, Jeff Bezos doesn't pay anything. As we split the money three ways, each of us would have only one billion, so we might still have to pay something in taxes. We all decided, though, that we'd be willing to make sacrifices for the money. That's just the kind of people we turned out to be.
As for job creation, we all agreed that if we got a billion dollars each, we'd be willing to leave our jobs. That's three jobs right here in New York City, for locals to have. Not only that, but they'd be union jobs. Would you get that with Amazon? Almost certainly not.
Of course the governor and the mayor can fool around with a questionable company like Amazon and hope for the best. They can give the money to someone like Bezos and hope he'll do the right thing. But there is an alternative. My colleagues and I are willing to guarantee, in writing if necessary, that we'd create jobs.
Honestly I don't understand why the politicians don't come directly to us. We teachers are honest people. When we say we'd be willing to do the right thing and step aside for a billion dollars each, we mean it. All that's left is persuading the politicians.
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