Pay one person a salary of $1m and you can pay 9 people $55k to average $150k. The average means nothing. Will there some site lead earning $20m/year bringing up the average?
The Virginia agreement actually has a clause to prevent that loophole from being abused to the $20 million/year extent. Jobs that pay more than $850k/year (adjusted upward by 1.5% per year) can only be calculated into the average as being a $850k/year job.
Quoted from page 2 of the Virginia agreement [0]: "If any of the persons holding New Jobs are paid “wages” in any calendar year in excess of $850,000, as escalated 1.5% per year, as shown on Exhibit D, the amount of wages in excess of $850,000, or the higher escalated amount, shall not be included in clause (A)."
Actually, those billions wouldn't have been taxed at all. That was part of the deal: Amazon gets all of the income taxes that are paid by their employees in the first ten years.
To be more specific, this part of the deal is called the Excelsior Jobs program. It rebates to Amazon 6.85% [0] of the wages earned by the company's employees, which effectively does mean that income taxes get paid out to Amazon (in reality, the income taxes paid plus a little more due to the NYS tax brackets [1]).
That being said, there's no city-level income tax rebate. Assuming the tax brackets currently in effect hold steady until the full 25k jobs promise was fulfilled, the city of New York would get ~3.8% of $150k * 25k jobs = ~$142.5 million/year once the 25k job mark is reached [2].
[1]: Note how the 6.85% bracket only applies to income above $215.4k; income above $1.08 million gets taxed at 8.82%; consequently Amazon will get more rebated than employees paid in income tax the vast majority of the time. See the second table of page 57: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/it201i.pdf#page=...
From a taxation perspective, that would be even better for the state, because on average a person making $1m/yr + 9 making $55k has a higher marginal tax rate than 10 people making $150k
