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Comment by tru3_power | Hacker News Reader

What was the reasoning behind this change? Isn’t R&D something we’d encourage to be a tax write off since it reduces the cost of well.. R&D? Or is R&D not as important as I’m thinking?

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It was done to try and make the bill somewhat pencil out and make the national debt increase less egregious. Everyone just assumed it would be delayed forever or reversed before it could take effect, but those negotiations failed, triggering massive waves of layoffs.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

The story that I’ve heard (probably on here) is that the administration did it to make the tax bill look more balanced over the long term by phasing out that tax write-off, while giving them (or the next administration) time to reverse it before it really impacted anything. But, nobody reversed it, until this year.

That administration really didn't like tech

Why do you think they brought it back this year?

Presumably because they see the tech industry as having been brought sufficiently to heel.

It was also in part a budgetary time bomb that was set to go off in the next term. If Trump won, they would have rolled it back. As it was, there were several attempts to roll it back between 2021 and 2024 that were blocked by republicans ( https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/manufacturing/... https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4737635-senate-republica... ) so that the economy would continue to suffer under Biden.

Once Trump won and was in place for 2025, they defused it so that (they hoped) the economy would pick up.

>> Why do you think they brought it back this year?

Huge amounts of coordinated lobbying by the tech industry concentrated on three topics (crypto, section 179, ai deregulation)

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