this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
468 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
84769 readers
3607 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because unless every single state does it, they'll go to the one that doesn't.
The states are still going to make a lot of money off this, its just delayed by ~~7 years~~ by their duration.
Would you rather get money ~~in 7 years~~ when they expire and increased income taxes from building it/staffing it or nothing?
This is for anything, not just data centers. States will always fight to get the investment.
Yeah, it's a really dumb way of doing things that should be regulated as it results in essentially every major industrial site operating tax free for years because they can always play states off of one another.
Meanwhile the citizens of the state are going to spend years eating the costs of building the new infrastructure required to support the new operation.
The citizens often dont eat anything, as its usually just delayed property taxes or other similar things. Im sure thats not always the case though and maybe they are sometimes given money.
The state then gets all the income taxes and jobs from building it.
But ya, without legislating things like this away it wont stop.
Edit: oh I misread part of what you said, you meant the supporting infrastructure like if the state paid for a new substation. Im sure that does happen, that would negate the income taxes for awhile. They should make the businesses pay for that, and let them recoup that through the tax benefits. Don't take money from the tax payers to help them out.
Yeah, I meant all of the substations, roads, police, etc that will now need to have a bit more funding.
I don't know a good way of solving it, but the 'I can just go to another state' gives these companies way too much bargaining power and the net result is that all states lose out on income that they shouldn't have to have given up in the first place.
It seems absurd, it isn't like regular people can just say 'Well, I'm going to buy a house in the next county over unless you guys give me a break on my property tax' and then get to live there property tax free (though, now that I think about it, I'm sure there are people rich enough to do this too :/)
I wont build my multi million dollar mansion here thats going to staff 8 full time people unless you waive my property taxes for 2 decades.
Jesus. It probably does happen. 😭
If I ever want to know about rich people using shady tricks in order to get tax breaks, there is one content creator that always delivers: https://www.floridapoliticalreview.com/trumps-mar-a-lago-tax-break/