Hacker News Reader

Comment by garrickvanburen | Hacker News Reader

What inspired working to reverse this now?

I'm all for it, just curious as the law has existed for 8 years and been in effect for 3. Seemingly little interest from anyone in the tech world to put lobbying behind reversing it until this point.

What changed?

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Lobbying has been ongoing since the law was enacted. Congress came close to repealing it several times, with the House actually passing a bill to repeal it (Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024).

Just because Hacker News doesn't care doesn't mean it hasn't been a big focus of small business lobbying since before it came into effect.

The actual reason it hasn't been repealed is politics: It makes the CBO budget deficit look much worse. It seems as though neither party wants the optics.

In 2017, in order to pay for the tax legislation in Trump's first term, a provision was added that would prevent companies from deducting Research and Development costs immediately (includes but not limited to payroll costs). It required domestic R&D costs to be expensed over 5 years (really 6 years since you only get to deduct one half of your first year expenses in the first year) and foreign expenses over 15 years (really 16 years). This provision was put in place to start January 1, 2022 because they were looking for additional revenue to pay for 2017 individual and corporate tax cuts. At the time, the thinking was it would be eventually fixed (allow for R&D deductions) as they had almost 5 years to fix the provision. Due to the politics at the time, it was not fixed. Bottom line, the political stars haven't aligned until now to actually get this fixed.

That’s my question: what are the political stars now aligned?

Now is the time to strike because there is a very easy to manipulate person who will change things like this on an emotional whim.

I assume so it can be included in the Big Beautiful Bill.

And if that is the case then shame on everyone who are happy to make themselves wealthier at the expense of the poor.

People are literally going to die because of the cuts to Medicaid/SNAP in this bill.

A terrible tax bill during Trump 1 cutting taxes to anyone making lot of money and they needed to find some sort of source of income to compensate.

At the beginnning, to most people it seemed like a non-issue (oh no, amortize the costs over 5 years, cry me a river big tech etc. etc.). But now that the entire tech sector is crumbling, and nobody is getting hired, people are giving it another (well-deserved) look.

> What changed?

This post made it to the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

I, for one, had never heard of it before that.

Lots more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203869

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