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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the worst things MAGA has done. Tech startups are the source of so much of our wealth, and this makes it very challenging to ever build one.

I can’t believe this still exists, and no one has changed it. We truly are governed by morons

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for anyone curious, this wasn’t specifically trump, but it was indeed a republican congress bill. texas republican was the initial sponsor and then republicans lined up to cosponsor.

this was done to fuel their tax cuts to a small group of a certain people.

you can see all of the sponsors here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/co...

It was indeed passed by Republicans in Congress (with Democrats mostly voting Nay), but it was signed by Obama (12/22/2017). Why did he sign it?

I encourage you to look closer at the "in office" section here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Thanks Obama! singing terrible bills even after he left office.

Pay attention to the dates. It was signed on 12/22/2017. Obama's last day in office was 01/20/2017. That means it was signed by Trump.

Democracy is broken… its so hard to tell who did this.

what do you mean by "sponsor"?

In the U.S. Congress when a bill is introduced in either House it needs to have one or more members to formally ask the chamber to consider the bill—they are known as the bill’s sponsors.

That sounds exactly like what the parent comment said- a MAGA bill.

It is being roled back partly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44028106

too little too late?

as we are seeing now on a number of issues, sure things can be rolled back, but that doesn't mean a return to normal.

Yes, you can kick over a bee hive, then pick it up and set it back upright, but you are not going to put all the bees back in immediately. There are long term consequences.

Off topic! Having knocked over a beehive and got 50+ stings as they crawled up my trouser leg in the dark, I can confirm.

When I got to bed, my heart was beating so hard that it kept my wife awake.

You went back to bed after being stung 50+ times by bees? That sounds like a medical emergency. I'm glad you are okay, but I'm amazed you were able to just shrug it off.

Until is is rolled back, it isn't rolled back.

A dead post below says it was biden and somehow Obama, but sibling reply link says it passed into law in 2017, not 2022, the first year it went into effect I think.

The article is pretty clear that the law was from 2017 had a scheduled start date of 2022. Although probably not the actual intended effect, it does have the effect of confusing who would be responsible for it by those who don't read past the effective date.

> Although probably not the actual intended effect

This is actually a really common intention in laws like this. Get the tax cuts during your term, and then kick the can down the road so your successor's term is marred by the bad law. If your successor wants to fix it, they need to pass a different tax to recoup the costs, and incur the publicity of "raising taxes".

I think it’s partly that and partly the fact that tax bills tend to be scored on a ten year time window. Note that this law doesn’t actually change the amount of tax that software companies can deduct, it just requires them to spread the deduction over several years. So if you’re scoring your new tax bill on a ten year window and five years into the bill this thing kicks in, then it looks like more tax is being collected in years 5-10. But that’s just an illusion because all the deductions are still there, they’re just being pushed out beyond the end of the window where they don’t “count”. At least this is my understanding.

Cashflow is king.

You’re operating cashflow decides the health of your business, not your accounting profits, not anything else.

Only the operating cashflow and whether that grows as your startup/business grows decides whether your business lives or dies, everything else is for investors, mommy and daddy for final report card.

A business operator’s #1 focus is Operating Cashflow and this tax insanity law hurts cashflow tremendously for american service businesses who need to compete with all other major economies who dont have such an insane law.

This is 100% the intended effect of leaving a bomb like this unaddressed then stalling all legislation halfway through your opponent’s term. You make them look incompetent and then you complain about how they never fix anything, even though they never get anything done because you’ve stopped cooperating. And even though you’ve stopped you can keep complaining about how they always include things you don’t like in legislation so that’s why you never cooperate. The solution is simple in your eyes: just do exactly what you want and only what you want and then you’ll cooperate. This is how a lot of a certain party was talking on the news from 2021 to 2025 when they were interviewed.

But we are great now. What else do we need?

The way this is "fixed" right now, every five years we need another round of republican government to make things great again. If only enough democrats cared to fix this.

The problem was created in the first place by republicans.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/co...

It's good to know that when the Republicans want to tax companies, people rush to defend those companies against taxation.

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