Writing in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein describes Amazon’s hissy fit in New York as a, “Political Mugging,” implying that somehow public comment on the deal was a mark of the lack of civility in today’s political discourse.

Of course you do, Mr. Perlstein, Jeff Bezos is paying you to write such tripe as, “There is little doubt that poor and working-class New Yorkers would have benefited from Amazon’s presence,” and, “That money would have allowed New York to quickly recoup the $3 billion in tax breaks it gave to Amazon, with plenty left over to expand infrastructure, help the needy or build more affordable housing.”

This is simply false.

Even in the most Panglossian scenarios, payback is somewhere between 75 years and never, and as to those poor and working class that Steven professes so much concern about would be driven out of their neighborhoods by increasing rents, and the small businesses that would have to pay higher taxes to accommodate those subsidies, and the services that the people that would be coming in.

There are any number of reasons to argue about either side of this argument, but bald faced lies are not a good faith argument.