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Comment by badlibrarian | Hacker News Reader

Or, more nuanced: HBO pays artists and writers and electricians $50 million to make something. It turns out to be unmarketable. So rather than throw good money after bad, he writes it off. Then uses the tax savings to hire artists and writers and electricians to make a different thing.

It's wasteful and I don't like his decisions but it's not much different from what VCs do with their expenditures.

In neither case do American Tax Payers foot the bill.

Zaslav could write it off and still dump it on YouTube. And VCs could open source all the Ruby code they bought between 2006 and 2016. But there's reasons they don't.

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False. They had animated shows already being streamed on HBO Max that they pulled and fully wrote off. They can never be accessed again. Should be considered fully destroyed.

That's different. Impairment is the same as Goodwill. Taxpayers are unaffected.

And I think we both know quite well that the stuff that was aired still exists.

I can see you are passionate about this. Tax writeoffs are paid for by the taxpayers.

Tax writeoffs by definition are taxpayers paying less. It reduces tax revenue and reduces the average tax paid by everyone. When your neighbor writes off their mortgage interest it does not raise your taxes.

If you don't like certain policies around tax deductions then argue that. I might even agree with you.

Why are you passionate about HBO Max using the destruction of artwork already produced to lower their tax bill? Many of which they bought.

Six <ul> tags upstream I all but said that HBO Max guy is an idiot. I'm personally pissed at the ACME thing. But it didn't increase your tax burden.

Fraudulently reducing tax revenue by 1 entity/individual effectively shifts the burden of taxation to everyone else who is not willing or able to commit the same fraud. At the macro level, this adds up to billions more dollars every year in the unmanageable and unmanageably-growing federal debt. The US federal government plans to spend 16% of its total spending simply on paying interest on its debt: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

So-called fiscal conservatives should be howling in Congress about this kind of thing. (Narrator: they aren't.)

It may be bad policy but it's not fraudulent.

Running a deficit can be profitable long term -- or not. It depends on how the funds are allocated. Ask Bezos.

Likewise a tax writeoff can increase tax revenue over the long term -- or not. It depends how the tax savings are applied. Ask the employees who still have their jobs.

Regardless, a media company struggling to breakeven with cartoon coyotes may not be the best starting point for an economics debate.

It's fraudulent in the sense that it's a fake loss, as you say created by clever accounting.

That's not what I said. For avoidance of doubt, allow me to rephrase the concept in the local language: paying a bunch of artists and engineers to build an app that generates minimal revenue, pulling it from the app store, then writing off the loss, is neither clever nor fraudulent.

Right, I get what you said.

I am arguing that it is in fact a fraud perpetrated against the taxpayer, even if it's not legally categorized as "fraud" at this time.

Why is writing off a loss fraudulent? This very website is funded by such actions.

They absolutely can be accessed -- all major streaming services have new episodes/movies automatically uploaded to private bittorrent trackers & usenet within hours of them going live. Of course, they content still has to be retained by those networks, but HBO Max hasn't been around so long that its contents are gone yet.

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