Viewing profile — andrewlgood

Silly argument. Everything in gravitational physics goes back to Newton? Who cares about Convex Optimization if you do not undertand gravity? Math goes back to Euclid and the Greek…

Not correct. Capital Gains taxes depend on the holding period. Short term capital gains (stock held less than a year) are taxed at the same rate as salaries (ordinary income rate).…

Have you ever been a c-staff? C-staff are employees as well. Usually more expensive employees. Well run companies are trying to figure out how to win in the marketplace. To do this…

Different markets. Companies are created to allow investors to create profits selling something (things, services, etc). Companies compete with other companies to attract capital. …

Buybacks do not necessarily create an increase in stock price. Economically no value has been created. Cash on a balance sheet has simply been exchanged for shares. The people sell…

As a former Finance person, it is interesting to see the panicked attitude of programmers toward AI and the resulting loss of job opportunities. Programmers have eliminated more jo…

Every decision as to how to spend taxpayer money is political. There are always trade offs. The money could be spent on the military, enhancing social security, getting homeless pe…

This sounds very similar to the challenge that companies had implementing Six Sigma (or other statistically-based quality programs). The tools significantly helped the average pers…

The definition of capitalizable expenses tends to be the same between GAAP and tax. The depreciation schedules are frequently different.

Thank you for the clearer restatement.

Apologies, I was speaking to the more general idea of allowing firms to depreciate/amortize assets faster to juice hiring. In this case, the government ended the accelerated amorti…

For most items, there is harmony between GAAP and tax. Even though Section 174 is a tax code item, the implications of it must be properly presented on your GAAP financials. Theref…

Amortization/depreciation is actually pretty important for understanding the performance of a company. Imagine a firm buys a piece of software to run its business. In year 1 it pay…

Think of scientists developing drugs at a pharmaceutical company. They were significantly impacted by the change in deductibility.

For clarity, there is another section, Section 41, that addresses tax credits for R&D. This is still active.

Interesting perspective. Firms actually have to evaluate each year whether it is really an asset. If they determine that product is no longer useful, they would write off the remai…

IF the machinists are doing R&D, they get the same treatment as software engineers.

No. Not tied to a specific employee. The expense is simply capitalized then amortized over 5 or 15 years.

Short answer is yes. The finance team has to track each year’s expense as a “tax layer” and amortize it separately. By year 5, ignoring half-year or half-quarter conventions, if ha…

For clarity, the issue at hand is the “Big Beautiful Bill” does NOT reverse the tax treatment. The request here is to change the bill to reverse the current treatment.

That is actually why software development was allowed to be expensed prior to 2017 - to keep innovation thriving in the US. In 2017, they US simply stopped giving preferential trea…

Both parties do this to make spending bills appear smaller. This is why clean energy tax credits generally passed during Democrat administrations have to be periodically renewed.

Don’t need 60% for budget bills in reconciliation (the process of merging bills from the House of Representatives and the Senate). One of the times filibusters (which create 60% re…

I think it was more along the line that R&D had been formally encouraged with special expensing rules and in 2017 they removed the special treatment.

Exactly