I believe Amazon classifies all costs of software engineering under R&D.
But genuine R&D would look very similar. There isn't a good test to distinguish "I don't know how to do this thing" from "nobody knows how to do this thing". I don't have the time, resources or inclination to know what everyone else knows. And then having to second guess what the tax office thinks everyone knows, because I know they'd accept some of the things I'm doing as research. It just isn't clear where they think the line is.
How the huge mining companies get away with claiming so much is beyond me. But they do.
Not in the UK and most EU law is identical to UK.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/research_credit_basic_sec41...
(Not 100% sure this is the most up to date definition but it gives you an idea)
If we don’t understand how Amazon categorizes R&D, we can’t make a fair comparison to France.
If anything, IRS’s (very) broad definition of R&D helps France in that Amazon’s R&D spend isn’t truly R&D in the colloquial sense (or the Wikipedia definition)
In other words, Amazon’s R&D spend is likely overstated (based on what an average person would consider “R&D”)
You want to give tax breaks for real research and development of new things.
The thought of research tax breaks is that the market qualifies them as useful. Useless inventions make no money, and have no income to be taxed anyways.
Take a car, replace all the perfectly good knobs with touch screens you won’t be able to replace in 5 years. Innovation! Massive conglomerates control the internet and feed you expertly tuned rage engagement. Innovation! Smart home lights that stop working when the servers go offline. Innovation!
On and on. If the markets were rational and efficient NFTs wouldn’t have even started. Crypto wouldn’t be a thing. Printers that refuse to print black because you’re out of cyan wouldn’t exist.
Markets blow and aren’t really maximizing productive anything directly. Tangentially, occasionally, when they’re not causing cost savings that cause doors to blow off of planes to save money. Seems tenuous at best.
I think in most of your examples, you want something different than what the market values, and me too! But our values are different than the average person. I'm willing to fiddle with running a home server to do those things, but most people aren't.
> Printers that refuse to print black because you’re out of cyan wouldn’t exist.
They do because the crappy business practices let them sell at a lower upfront cost. That appeals to enough people for the company to make money.
> Markets blow and aren’t really maximizing productive anything directly. Tangentially, occasionally, when they’re not causing cost savings that cause doors to blow off of planes to save money. Seems tenuous at best.
The markets optimize for profit. That generally comes from innovations in something; products, processes, equipment, who knows. I won't pretend the markets are perfect, or efficient. What I will say is that I don't have a better proposal. Planned economies have historically turned out much worse than free markets.
I think there are compelling arguments that we're short on regulations in a fair few places. I'm more leery of arguments that the government should be making broad definitions of "innovation", it veers a little too close to central planning for my liking.
If I build a new assembly building for a new product, that roof is going to be mainstream, long lasting, cheap as I can get it, and billed to “development” because that’s exactly what it is.
You can say the same standing up a CD/CI infrastructure, writing unit tests, mundane documentation and validation processes. It’s all development, getting stuff into production and into the market.
I can't wait until we automate the people cheered this law on, out of a job.
I always felt, from outside, that anti trumpers just are against everything he does with simplistic explanation, its a good law amazon has enough money to pay their own r&d
What if the R&D is open-sourced?
Or what if the R&D would be for a product genuinely beneficial to people? Think a new drug, or infrastructure like Google Maps, etc.
For example, a new drug can take 10~16 years to get to the market, and this is intended by government regulations (there is often no way around it). One has to show the drug is safe and works against the intended disease, before one can sell a drug.
However, before you can even start this clinical work in humans, you must discover the drug first and optimize it through laboratory and animal testing. Only after that can you enter the clinical stage to test it in humans. Clinical stages are typically divided into phase 1/2/3 and each stage requires more time and money. After you complete all that, you can finally ask for approval to sell your drug at a profit from the government (US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)/ EU European medicine agency (EMA)).
This trajectory can typically be divided as follows: Drug Discovery (early lab testing) 2-4 years, $2-15M Preclinical Drug Development (advanced lab/animal testing) 2~3 years, $10-15M Clinical Stage 1 (First in human studies) 1~2 years $15~30M Clinical Stage 2 (medium-sized human study), 2~3 years, $40~60M Clinical Stage 3 (large, longer term human study), 2~4 years $100~300M.
Total: 9~16 years of research & development with a cost of $167~420M. Then finally you can sell the drug for a profit. If you are a startup focused solely on such development, you have no way (or very limited ways) to make money/profit in those 9-16 R&D years. In such a case, R&D tax benefits are really useful.
Sounds like quite a broad brush. As a former Trump voter (to my shame), I realized he's a broken clock that can be right once in a while; yet still such a profoundly net negative that I'd rather he be in jail than in office.
In particular I'm most against his record of sexual assault, association with predators, peeping at young pageant participants, boasting about such things, bending the law and policy to benefit his friends, praise for despots, his demand for loyalty over talent, and racist commentary.
The US tax code already requires that self-classified R&D expenditures be treated as capital-expenditures, and subject to a 5-15 year depreciation period.
Section 174 requires that any and all software development costs be treated as R&D expenditures, and thus capitalized/amortized.
The total tax paid at the end of the depreciation period will be the same, but the upfront tax in the first year of a given expenditure is now 5-15x higher (depending on where the work was done).
If your goal was "foment another wave of far-right nationalism in America", this is a good idea. Judging by the rest of your post, however, I don't think that's what you had in mind.