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The cost of landing Amazon’s new offices: $2 billion

Amazon confirmed yesterday that it had picked New York City and Northern Virginia for its new hubs. (Nashville will get a logistics facility as a consolation prize.) But skeptics are asking whether the price tag — a combined total of $2 billion in tax credits, rebates and other incentives — was worth it.

Here’s what each location promised:

• New York offered Amazon more than $1.2 billion in incentives, and a pledge that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio would stop bickering long enough to see the project through. The city also agreed to a helipad for Jeff Bezos.

• Virginia promised about $800 million in incentives (and the all-important helipad, too). It also rebranded the neighborhoods that will host Amazon’s office as “National Landing.”

Officials from each location said that Amazon’s offices would create at least 25,000 jobs. But critics say the incentives set a worrying precedent: Bryce Covert writes in an NYT Op-Ed that other companies will now expect similarly extravagant windfalls in exchange for offices. And some local politicians have already publicly opposed the plan.