OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D • Hacker News Board

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#171

Post by Thorrez » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

LexiMax wrote: post #97

WatchDog wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there is some kind of relationship to tech, political posts are generally removed from this site. You shouldn’t interpret this sites focus as the people that post here not thinking there are more important things.

I'm familiar with the voting patterns of HN users. For this reason I tend to browse HN using the https://news.ycombinator.com/active frontpage because it contains the flagged topics that certain users of this site attempt to hide, while also preserving the vast majority of interesting tech-related topics.

It's not about voting patterns. It's about the rules of HN:

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#172

Post by Thorrez » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:56 AM UTC

Teever wrote: post #108

WatchDog wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there is some kind of relationship to tech, political posts are generally removed from this site. You shouldn’t interpret this sites focus as the people that post here not thinking there are more important things.

There's no guarantee that posts related to tech that are also related to political stuff will avoid being flagged. Even when there is a relationship with tech political posts are generally removed if they don't align with a zeitgeist of modern America that seems to chose to fall in line instead of resisting unseemly actions by the new government.

The vast majority of stuff on HN I've seen about Trump and DOGE has been negative.

You seem to be saying HN will promote pro-Trump stuff and delete anti-Trump stuff. That's simply false. I can give a ton of highly upvoted anti-Trump posts.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#173

Post by phtrivier » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:16 AM UTC

It was floated a few weeks ago they this tax break's disappearance was responsible for mass lay offs in tech.

Other theory were AI and interest rates.

I'm pretty sure next rounds of layoffs will have another "good reason".

Personally, I'm still partial to my pet and hard to document theory of "when headcounts go down, share prices go up - and past a certain size and age, the goal of a massive corporation is not to build things any more, but to pay for retirements through the resale / buybacks of shares"

But, hey, BBB is singed, so everything will be awesome soon, I suppose ?

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#174

Post by cbsmith » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:21 AM UTC

sMarsIntruder wrote: post #118

ttul wrote: post #84

Meanwhile, in Canada, not only can you expense R&D, but there is a cashable tax refund that will give you back about 60% of your developers’ salaries…

I hate to see this, but you’re comparing two completely different systems. Like it or not, but Canada is much more “socialist”, you can’t expect it in any case to be like US or viceversa.

Canada is "much more socialist" in that it has socialized medical insurance. Aside from that, it's maybe a tiny bit more socialist, though one could argue it's not more socialist at all.

The systems are different, but saying they are completely different is really a stretch. There's a GST that the US doesn't have, which is, ironically, a regressive tax. If you ranked the tax code of countries by similarity to the US tax code, I'm not sure Canada would be at the top of the list, but it wouldn't be that far down.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#175

Post by phtrivier » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:21 AM UTC

charlieyu1 wrote: post #154

This bill is so random. The poker world is going doom and gloom when BBB limits the amount of gambling loss deductibles to 90% of gambling wins.

Remember when we software engineers painfully learned to _not_ do massive releases with hundred of changes that are guaranteed to create bugs ?

Well, imagine if instead we were _incentivized_ to create lots of bugs in huge releases, because it helped us ship that one important feature that the PM wanted in the middle of the garbage - and also, that we were guaranteed never to have to debug the software ever, and god forbid, to use it ?

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#176

Post by eric-burel » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:23 AM UTC

forty wrote: post #155

Galanwe wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something similar in France, the Crédit Impôts Recherche (CIR), I remember it was around 50%. I've heard it's going to disappear though, there were abuses.

"There are abuses" is really an understatement. "It's mostly abuse and there might be some legitimate beneficiaries" would be more correct.

It's hackernews, not Elon Musk's X or the French parliament, please bring sources and precise details.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#177

Post by cbg0 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:26 AM UTC

sp527 wrote: post #104

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #91

The elimination of green energy incentives is going to have a big negative effect on the economy. Those billions of dollars not only were going to new businesses and jobs, but they were joined with loans from banks and commitments from customers with the expectation that the government would be funding the remainder. This means private industry and banks will be shouldering the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars…

Any green energy project that isn't nuclear is a waste of money and resources. Nuclear is now being pursued in earnest by the tech industry itself. There's no problem here.

I suspect that in the US nuclear is being pursued by the tech industry due to the current administration, if Biden were still in the White House, the tech industry would be pushing for offshore wind and solar panels.

Nuclear is expensive and requires red tape and a long time to bring online, but the real benefit is that it can deliver power consistently all day, unlike wind and solar. I think the ideal future includes all of these plus better storage capabilities.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#178

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:29 AM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #141

me551ah wrote: post #134

I doubt if this will make much difference. Offshoring as a tactic emerged in the pandemic when companies realised that being “remote” works just as well. Sure, foreign R&D still gets amortized over 15 years (NPV ≈59 % of a full write-off, so you “lose” ~8.6 % of your R&D spend in present-value terms, and only 6.7 % of the cost is deductible in year 1, creating a 19.6 % cash-tax gap). But offshore wages are often 50–7…

This ignores the other financial and non-financial costs of offshoring: legal, cultural, temporal... a lot of the time, those close the gap. On paper, offshoring has made sense the entire time, and yet here we are in 2025 and companies still hire American devs. Not only that, they often fly in foreign devs just to pay them more here than if they had just offshored to their home country.

In addition to this, those factors contribute varying amounts to the total in any given case. So you also can't make the case that offshoring never makes sense, because in specific cases it does. But now there is a ~20% incentive for it to make sense in fewer cases.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#179

Post by rendaw » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:35 AM UTC

There's something I didn't get about the discourse about this, maybe someone can explain. The tax change greatly affected small businesses/startups with unstable revenue, right? But companies like Amazon, Google, etc are much more established companies with diversivied, stable revenue and longer term planning I'd assume - so it doesn't seem like this should have affected them as much.

The popular story currently is that the massive layoffs were due to the tax/accounting change, but in that case why the big players like Amazon etc have so many layoffs? Or is that the popular story because, while Amazon etc are large, by total employee count most people are employed at smaller business that were more affected by this?

Or was the FAANG stuff actually AI after all? The tax change story sounds more plausible to me but I can't connect everything.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#180

Post by cbg0 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 8:37 AM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #141

me551ah wrote: post #134

I doubt if this will make much difference. Offshoring as a tactic emerged in the pandemic when companies realised that being “remote” works just as well. Sure, foreign R&D still gets amortized over 15 years (NPV ≈59 % of a full write-off, so you “lose” ~8.6 % of your R&D spend in present-value terms, and only 6.7 % of the cost is deductible in year 1, creating a 19.6 % cash-tax gap). But offshore wages are often 50–7…

This ignores the other financial and non-financial costs of offshoring: legal, cultural, temporal... a lot of the time, those close the gap. On paper, offshoring has made sense the entire time, and yet here we are in 2025 and companies still hire American devs. Not only that, they often fly in foreign devs just to pay them more here than if they had just offshored to their home country.

It also has to do with how the companies handle the offshoring, as some larger corporations take the approach of just using an outsourcing company from a specific country (usually chosen by price) and assume that you can just pay a specific amount of money per developer and they will all be the same quality as the guys coming into the office.

I've worked most of my career as a remote employee and I can say that the best arrangement is when the company is as involved in hiring offshore employees as they are with hiring onshore ones. Someone working through an intermediary will always be disconnected from the company's success, as they work for an outsourcing company, and not the US corporation itself.

There are definitely a lot of discussions to be had around employee cultural fit, and I don't just mean company culture. You want a similar mindset and work ethic that your other employees have if you want a high chance of success.

We also need to talk about how some companies haven't been able to successfully adapt their processes to work with remote employees alongside the office employees and sometimes treat the offshore ones as second class citizens, which is not really a great thing.