For bringing business to the community. People will move to live close to the office, the company itself pays taxes in the future to the township, more traffic = more opportunities for small business. It's generally seen as healthy for an economy, but the huge downside is the environmental externalities are completely ignored.
Depending on the community, they may be required to do an environmental study which does...many things that I'm not familiar with. All I know is a lot of new buildings in my area come with lots of green space and solar panels over parking lots. And probably other green things.
One of my favorite examples: my Dad worked at a F100 company, and they moved a large group of employees to a new office building. That office building was taxed in a special "opportunity zone" that gave the employer tax credits while the employees got stuck with a new higher local income tax.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the worker should be given incentives to bring their income to an area. This allows a community to diversify economically, vs handouts to large corporations who will continually wield their business contributions against a jurisdiction to continue to obtain substantial tax breaks or other economic concessions, and when they finally leave, they do substantial harm to the community.
As a community, you then cater to workers to draw and keep them there (not maliciously, simply providing high quality of life like a community should), and they will continue to contribute to the community by way of their spending from income (on taxes and consumption) for their productive lifespan.
> Fundamentally, the problem is that the worker should be given incentives to bring their income to an area
This can be done naturally, if local government intervention is low, so there's more money for local businesses to spend, or unnaturally, if local government intervention is high, so local businesses have less decision power, and the local government spends that money on infrastructure for companies coming in who pay less tax.
I understand how it works but it just seems a zero sum game. When someone moves from city A to city B, it's more tax for city B but less for A, and it often happens in one direction than the other. Same for companies. Reminds me of the silly and meaningless "border war" between Missouri and Kansas.
Typically cities A and B fall under different local governments (states or counties or whatever), making it not zero sum for the government of city B to attract the business.
