If there are better ways to generate it, then I'm sure they'll come to the fore. I agree that the practice is unfair and the government should pass some laws preventing it, but for the cities themselves, there's no better way to generate such job/tax growth.
If you've seen Amazon's crazy hiring for the past few years, you wouldn't doubt that they'll create a lot of jobs.
Most of those jobs would've still been created without tax breaks, though. These incentive packages are a race to the bottom, transferring taxpayer money into major corporations with dubious returns.
This is true in absolute terms, but not true at the level of each locality. Those jobs will still be created without tax breaks, they just likely won't be created here (for nearly everyone's definition of "here"). I totally agree that these incentives are yucky, but I don't think down-playing the benefits to the "winning" locality is the right way to argue against it.
If you've seen Amazon's crazy hiring for the past few years, you wouldn't doubt that they'll create a lot of jobs.