anecdata: after lay off 10 months ago, I suddenly got 3 offers in July and I am employed now.
I think it's the BBB that fixed the tax code issue - just a guess.
I think it's the BBB that fixed the tax code issue - just a guess.
It was put into law in 2017 with the Republican TCJA, but section 174 was time-delayed, part of a general trick of having all of the tax-cuts and spending immediately, with any budget "balancing" items deferred as long as possible.
That's when the layoff spree started!
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/118-2024/s230
> Why didn't the Democrats
Alternate question: Why didn't the Republicans do something in the years before 2025 to fix the problem they created and which tech-company lobbyists absolutely told them about?
Democrats could've passed a bill that only included the repeal of the R&D changes, which they didn't coz they didn't want to.
Edit: rate limited coz of politically motivated downvotes, I am done here.
This is not how HN works. I posted an explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44920494.
This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story, where Republicans are somehow never to blame because they're just toddlers or forces of nature, while Democrats are always at fault because they didn't stop the Republicans from burning the house down or clean up all the poop from the carpets or whatever, in an endless and impossible race.
By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
> That wasn't a clean bill
Well, that one happens to be a bill from a Republican, I was just looking for ones that affected that tax-provision.
In any case, did you check out the table-of-contents, and not just the page-length? It may not be as minimal-as-possible, but it's all tax-related stuff.
Because only Democrats had agency when the law took effect? The president can veto any bill. Democrats passed two bills in 2021 and 2022 with zero Republican votes, zero, they could've easily included the repeal in those bills if they wanted to. They didn't coz they didn't want to, their stated policy is to raise taxes on corporations, how is this even debatable? Meanwhile the Republicans at that time had no agency. Once they got agency, they repealed it immediately, with zero Democrat votes.
Would you similarly blame the Democrats for all voting against the repeal as part of the BBB that just passed? You wouldn't and your reason would be "but the BBB contained a lot of other things apart from this repeal that the dems didn't like". Why won't you apply the same logic to the non-clean bill you brought up?
> By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
Huh, they fixed it immediately after coming to power. They couldn't fix it before the BBB because it needed to go in reconciliation because the dems don't suppor the repeal. They didn't fix it in 2019 because it wasn't even in effect yet and IIRC dems had the house. So how does the partisan vengeance allegation even make any sense?
What evidence led you to that conclusion? It feels like there's some Fundamental Attribution Error [1] going on here, where Republicans are getting a free-pass for the pain they created "because there were circumstances" (which is true) but somehow Democrats failing to remove the pain is automatically "because they wanted it that way."
I already shared some opposing evidence, that Republican-sponsored Senate bill with a repeal in it that still garnered strong (but not unanimous) Democratic support.
Here's another: Section-174 relief was originally included in the 2021 "Build Back Better" act, but--due to those tight partisan vote margins--a particular conservative-leaning Democrat (who later left the party!) decided to prevent it [0]:
> With the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) being all but dead in the Senate after Joe Manchin’s unexpected rejection of the bill, concerns remain high regarding the future of Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code. [...] But, with Senator Manchin’s refusal to support the BBBA, the legislation is now on its last breath, although the Biden administration remains optimistic that there is a chance of getting a modified version of the bill passed.
[0] https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/uncertainty-co...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
They controlled the Senate and the Presidency, and never allowed a clean bill(one introduced by Marco Rubio which was killed in the Dem controlled Senate committee) that restored the exception to come to vote. The Republicans came to power and immediately restored it, with zero Democrat votes.
Definitely a much better tax situation but also not one we would've been in if not for the TCJA, and we still have an exposed oblique (the removal of the domestic research exclusion) that could put us back in the same spot unless the software development as research section is removed.
But my colleagues are all younger than me - they are hiring people out of college too, so you can make it just keep pushing
Hopefully things are looking up for the market.
But not a surprise based on your history here on HN.
Edit: Republican Marco Rubio introduced a clean bill to repeal the changes in 2023.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
The Democrat controlled Senate blocked it from coming to a vote.
Why does HN always blame only Republicans for this change?
So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
They had the chance to repeal it before it would have taken effect.
Why do they get zero blame on here?
But the Republicans made this change to start with. That's a lot of blame. And if they did it just to create a political firestorm against Democrats later (which is exactly what they did), do we (A) recognize that politicians shouldn't be using Americans as cannon fodder to damage their political enemies or (B) blame their political enemies?
It gives advantage to bad actors.
Both sides are the same, Republicans destroy things and Democrats are not perfect in stopping and fixing them! "I am gonna support Republicans as they create problems and then blame Democrats" just makes you someone who intentionally creates problems.
There were some legendary filibusters back in the day. One famous example was when Strom Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights act by speaking for 24 hours continuously. He was not able to block the bill by continuing to speak because there are limits to how long someone is able to stand and deliver, and originally if you stopped speaking you had to yield the floor and allow business to proceed.
of the statute they wrote, voted for, and signed into law. Important note.
This process was used several times to pass key and major bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, Trump's tax bill in 2017, the big beautiful bill last month etc.
Dems did not need 60 votes to restore the R&D exemption changes. They could've just included it in the reconciliation bills they passed with just 50 votes because it qualifies as a budgetary change. That's exactly how the Republicans got it done recently after getting back in power, with zero Dem votes for this change.
You completely missed that in your comment so I was trying to add some information.
Repealing it had Republican support during the Biden term too, they even introduced a bill in2023 to repeal it which the Democrats killed.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
Democrats really wanted the changes to take place since their platform is all about higher taxes on companies and high earners.
So to answer your question, Republicans repealed it with zero Democratic votes because they included it in the once-a-year reconciliation bill. The bill that you are linking to would not have met this criteria.
That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.
There was no way for the Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. And there were multiple republican co-sponsors or even bills introduced by them to repeal the provisions. It didn't even get to a vote because the dems killed the efforts. They like higher corporate taxes so it tracks, they didn't care about the damage caused. Once the Repulicans were able to repeal it on their own, they immediately did it ASAP.
Do you have a source for this claim?
The congressional record says only that it died in the Finance Committee
Edit: Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts and arguments. Stay classy, HN.
This is not how HN works. Rate-limiting only happens when an account posts high volumes of comments that break the guidelines. It's nothing to do with downvotes or the political/idological flavor of what you post (we don't care and often don't know; all we care about is whether you're filling up threads with guideline-breaking comments, which is what ruins threads).
If you want rate-limiting turned off you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we can discuss it.
Another possibility is that it triggers when a moderator gets pissed at a single one of your comments.
The rate-limiter is applied manually when we notice that an account is posting a high volume of guidelines-breaking comments. The way we notice is by reading the threads, which we spend much of each day doing, or when we're alerted to guidelines-breaking comments by flags or by community members emailing us.
https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-news/crapo-criticizes-atte...
Needless to say, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the BBB’s ~$4 trillion debt increase.
While it is a different bill, the fact the Democrats were fine having it in the bill passed by the House in 2024 does cast doubt on this notion that they didn't try to resolve the issue.
> The Senate Finance Committee roster for the 118th Congress includes 14 Democrats and 13 Republicans, with three new GOP members recently appointed.
> https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/senate-finance-finalizes...
Hardly an unbeatable majority for Democrats on this committee. Especially since research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue.
For the 10th time in this thread, the repealing bill DID NOT need to be revenue neutral since it had Republican support, all it needed was 60 votes in the Senate. Reconciliation only applies if a yearly budget bill can get at least 51 votes but not 60.
Sorry, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. I stated the same in another comment and was downvoted. I know HN is liberal biased but it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
Is this situation right now really "unusable"? Aren't you overreacting just a tad? People might disagree with you, I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation without getting upset.
Quite literally unusable because I got blocked by HN from commenting for more than two hours coz of all the politically motivated downvotes. If you have the right politics, keep commenting!
> I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation
See above, literally not able to have one because I dared to criticize Democrats for their actions and inactions that led to tech job losses for over two years.
> People might disagree with you
I'm open to arguments but looks like people disagree with the facts that I am bringing forward, so they're downvoting to suppress them to lower visibility and to discourage me from participating on here.
It's like on Reddit when you state a plain fact 'Musk founded SpaceX' in reply to a highly upvoted comment that said 'Musk bought all this companies' and get heavily downvoted and even permanently banned in large subs by highly biased moderators.
This place is turning into yet another BlueSky or Reddit where facts don't matter and only a one sided political narrative is pushed at all times. Don't think it's worth engaging. I don't want to be in a place where my comments are deemed so terrible that I get max downvoted and then unable to comment for several hours.
Ironically, such controlling behavior and shutting down of facts, criticism of one side and conversation is leading more and more people to vote for the other side. I am now ashamed of being a lifelong liberal and won't vote democrat till people change this obnoxious partisan behavior on platforms like this one.
Hacker News is far from a bastion of left wingers, many people have complained about liberal and progressive ideas being downvoted as well. Above all, this platform isn't made for political debate, and it is not encouraged. If it makes you feel better, not a single one of my posts in all this has much or any upvotes. If you are looking for political validation, this ain't the place for it.
For example, not a single person has addressed the fact that that the Democrats platform is to raise taxes on corporations, which this change accomplished during their watch. So I have to keep bringing it up. People are downvoting facts that they don't like, for political reasons and to reduce visibility.
Anyway you're right, this is not worth my time or effort. There is no open exchange of facts or ideas, it's just party line downvoting to suppress them. It's best not to engage at all, just like all the others with alternate viewpoints that stopped engaging on here. That's what the downvoters want anyway, they win. The only way I can possibly make a difference to combat this behavior is changing how I vote at the ballot box.
> [Deductions on] research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
Even after this recent change by Republicans, increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
You misunderstand how tax exemptions work.
When you make money, you need to pay taxes on that money. However, if you spend that money in certain ways, the tax code lets you take that amount of money and _deduct_ it from your overall taxable income. Thus, you pay taxes on _less_ of the money you earned. Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
No. The Democrats added a new minimum corporate tax last time they were in power. As I have to keep repeating, their policies and actions are all about taxing companies more which why they didn't repeal the R&D exemption removal. They consider it a tax loophole that companies abuse to pay less taxes.
Kamala's proposal was to increase the minimum corporate further.
As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference.
> As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference
There were only 27 members in the committee. So all the Democrats on the committee voted against the repeal and all the republicans voted for the repeal.
How is that a negligible difference? That's a massive maximum difference between the parties, in fact it was impossible to have a higher difference.