The individual flops are less important, though, than the big picture, which is that Cuomo's spending has done just about jack for upstate's overall economy. As the Investigative Post summed things up in its essential series on the governor's subsidies earlier this year:

Employment upstate has grown by only 2.7 percent during Cuomo's tenure - compared with 13.1 percent downstate and 11 percent nationally. Four of upstate's 12 major metropolitan areas have actually lost jobs since Cuomo took office.

If it were a state, upstate's job growth would rank fourth-worst in the nation, below, among others, Mississippi.

Cuomo's upstate misadventures illustrate a simple lesson: When governors try to spark growth in economically struggling areas using corporate subsidies, it tends to fail. They're simply fighting the laws of economic gravity, which lead companies to locate in parts of the country that are already thriving, because they can find talent or suppliers. There are exceptions, of course. Once in a while, a state hooks a company with incentives, and then others follow. South Carolina, for instance, has a thriving auto-manufacturing sector in large part because it cajoled BMW into locating there with a $150 million incentive package. But even when a company actually delivers the jobs it promises, it rarely leads to an industrial revival. "There are more failures than successes," Joseph Parilla, a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, told me. "It's like spending a lot for a lottery ticket and hoping it pans out."

The Amazon deal--which is the biggest incentive package Cuomo has offered yet--illustrates the other pitfall with corporate subsidies: When they "work," they're often unnecessary.

Contrary to what the governor says, plenty of companies come to New York City without a gift basket from Albany. That includes other tech companies like Facebook and Google, both of which say they don't receive state subsidies. There is a strong chance that Amazon would have felt compelled to open a large office in New York at some point no matter what, because it's already a center of media, tech, and advertising, and Jeff Bezos desperately needs to recruit top talent in those fields who would otherwise go to work at his competitors. Even if it didn't, there are plenty of other growing businesses that already employ thousands in NYC.

As for Long Island City? It was already the fastest-growing residential neighborhood in the entire country. The place is basically a canyon of gleaming and impersonal condos and rentals. If the land Amazon plans to build its new office on didn't get used for HQ1.5, it would just as likely get used for something else economically valuable--such as desperately needed new housing, without which New York will only be able to grow so much.

And that gets to the mistake at the heart of Cuomo's math. Even if the incentive package he gave Amazon convinced it to pick New York over, say, Dallas, something else probably would have grown in the company's absence. The counterfactual to consider isn't Amazon or nothing. It's probably Amazon or a bunch of new housing, or some other tech company and a smaller Amazon office. Meanwhile, the grants and tax incentives Cuomo gave Bezos have created a bad precedent that will lead more companies to demand the same.