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Comment by telesilla | Hacker News Reader

Take action and sign up for the Small Software Business Owners Association newsletter and petitions to the government:

Michele Hansen is doing an incredible job here and should be recognized for it. Latest news was sent yesterday:

Republicans and Democrats finally struck a tax deal that includes a partial fix for Section 174. It includes expanding the Child Tax Credit, a key Democratic priority, with a handful of business tax issues where were Republican priorities...

Not sure if there is a public copy of that email, but the core info is on the site, it has a list of ways to get your representative's attention and a script to follow. Please call.

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They’re calling this a business priority for the Republicans when it was a Republican House, Senate and President that passed this measure.

That’s a bit too “must make it seem bipartisan” when there is a clear partisan direction.

Even when this fix is passed, it will be voted for unanimously by Democrats and only a small fraction of Republicans will vote for it.

Explain again to me how that makes it a Republican priority as opposed to a priority of the endangered species that is the Pro Business Republicans?

You should note that these sorts of tax law changes are largely a revenue game: Someone wants to cut some other tax, so they find a place to raise taxes elsewhere without thinking about the consequences. But also, the vast majority of people employed by R&D-heavy companies are Democrats, so it's hard to impute motive one way or the other.

Independent/unaffiliated voters are now 47% of the electorate in the US so that last statement probably doesn't hold water. Are educated voters, regardless of party affiliation, more likely to vote for serious candidates that focus on issue resolution over culture signaling? Sometimes, but that no longer has much to do with party affiliation.

Of those 47% independent, what fraction consistently vote for a particular party?

By definition, none of them, or they'd be identified as supporters of that party, not independents.

Party affiliation is self reported. You can be lifelong “independent” and vote straight ticket red/blue.

I'd argue that voting predominantly for one party or another doesn't identify the unaffiliated individual as a member of the party who's candidates they vote for. It absolutely doesn't identify the whole unaffiliated voting block as having any secret party affiliation. Telling the whole party system to take a hike is an active choice and it happens in counties that only allow a single political party as often as it happens in countries like the US where there are only really two choices.

I don't think that's the definition usually used for "independent" when talking about voter affiliation. US politics has a long history of people telling pollsters (and filling out voter affiliation info in actual elections) that they aren't affiliated with a specific party because political parties have generally historically been seen pretty negatively in the US. In reality, many of these self-identified "independent" voters have voting records that are heavily skewed (if not straight-ticket) to one party or another. I don't have actual numbers on what % of independents this is (I too am interested in the parent's question on this matter), but it's definitely not a "definitionally, none" answer.

Makes sense. If there's anything Republicans hate the most it's the little guy.

> Even when this fix is passed, it will be voted for unanimously by Democrats and only a small fraction of Republicans will vote for it.

Like the unanimous democrat vote to repeal the SALT limits that overwhelming impacts people in California and NY?

Nice whataboutism. What does that have to do with the topic at hand?

It's was part of the very same tax package and implemented for the same reason: It made the trump tax cuts look economically more reasonable by sticking in time delayed increases on tax burdens that would land on disproportionately on democrats. Yet democrats were unable to undo it because dem platform programs need the funding.

On what basis will it be different here? Dems are almost completely disengaged on the bill intended to fix this, almost all the activity for and against appears to be republicans.

Addicted's confident statement "Even when this fix is passed, it will be voted for unanimously by Democrats" seems misplaced and unlikely. If that were likely we would have seen broad dems support on fixing the SALT tax limits and we just didn't.

A lot of politics consists of quietly creating problems and then loudly coming in with tons of press coverage to solve it later so you look good and get reelected.

I wish there was a good way to prevent such behavior.

unrelated to anything in this thread but I've noticed a lot of tech is like that as well. lol

Thanks for linking to SBBAlliance and for the kind words! But seriously, thank me when it’s fixed. (Counting chickens before they’ve hatched, etc etc)

Sounds promising -

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/19/bipartisan-tax-bill-clears-k...

The strong bipartisan showing in the House Ways and Means Committee adds more momentum to the proposed changes, which include allowing the immediate expensing of research and development costs.

The challenge at the moment is to get Speaker Johnson to put it on the floor and give him confidence that he has the votes. Critical that everyone contacts their Representative next week to ask them to ask leadership to do so, especially if their Representative is a Republican.

Huuuuge thanks to Michele for leading the charge on this.

>a script to follow

Going on a tangent here, but I always hated this idea of reading off a script to try and lobby politicians. If I were the politician, I would ignore all such communiques as indoctrinated spam.

Totally fair! I provided a script because many people have never contacted Congress before and might not know what to say, so it’s a way to make them more comfortable with the idea. They don’t necessarily have to use it.

Now for tweets, it’s important that each tweet is unique. Otherwise it’s clearly coordinated/automated. But as a casual scroll of Twitter shows, many people hate comfortable expressing themselves through that medium.

Also, I kinda wrote a whole book with scripts (for customer interviewing)… if I didn’t provide scripts, it just wouldn’t be true to my work!

Typo - “many people ARE comfortable…”

Typically staff answer the phone. They’re making tally marks. If the script tells the staffer what the issue is and the caller’s position so an appropriate tally can be counted, it does the job.

Having worked for years in this field (at a non-profit called "Democracy In Action") I can tell you: the scripts work.

It moves the calculus of measuring sentiment from a fuzzy game of figuring out how to classify opinion to one with very clear quanta.

Good use of ChatGPT (to reword it).

Thanks for sharing this, called my representatives.

Thank you! It makes a difference.

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