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

If you have a huge omnibus bill that has a good thing that the representative's constituents want, and then a mountain of burning trash attached to it, and the representative votes for the bill, they can defend the vote as getting the thing their constituents wanted.

If you make them each a different bill and then the constituents want to know why they voted in favor of the hot garbage by itself, how can they answer?

I don’t think this is uniquely Canadian. And it’s usually semi-rational, if you really hate dealing with switching. Most cheaper subscription providers will give you a good deal at first, then jack up the prices when they’re bought by a major provider. New cheaper providers are founded, and the cycle continues. The cheaper prices last for two or three years, or similarly short. Most people would rather take the loss than having to pay attention to this stuff.

I am Austrian. My entire education was dedicated to the rise of fascism and how it could happen and how to make sure it never happens again.

I know what I'm seeing.

Don't believe me? What about subject matter experts that decided to flee the country? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-fasci...

Or how about an excerpt from a book written based on post-WW2 interviews of Germans? Does any of that sound familiar at all? https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm

> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

[...]

> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

Is there a more bizarre legislative process anywhere in the world?

The US Congress is practically able to pass only a single giant bill every year. To work around its own deficit rules, these bills are packed with taxation time bombs where rules have expiration dates or delayed starts several years in the future.

Then, if Congress doesn’t get around to defusing its own time bombs, you get situations like this R&D expensing fiasco where American businesses and employees pay the price. Unless the bomb is hopefully retroactively cancelled, like happened now.

On top of this madness, there’s an executive branch operating like a runaway autocracy, producing a flood of executive orders that intentionally flaunt laws and even target specific private entities (e.g. Trump’s attacks on law firms that worked for his opponents, and universities he doesn’t like).

How long can a nation function like this? If the bond market loses faith in this process, there could be mayhem. Will be interesting to see if the passage of BBB impacts US debt when markets open again on Monday.

I’ve been a part of the entire arc of offshored teams since the trend started in the late 90’s early 00’s. I’ve never seen it work. The primary issue is and always has been time zone related. While it doesn’t show to an accountant we do live on a sphere and there are implications to everyone. The solution is always to find some self contained effort for the remote centers but it never works because the entire company is pulling together and short of making the remote teams spin offs there’s no way to disentangle dependencies. And at some level even if you could management has to work cross regionally which isolates them from their center of power in the home office time zone. The root is the company is asking you to make immense personal sacrifice so they can save money if the model were to work. There is no upside to anyone other than the remote management in this situation so they burn out quickly and still fail because literally no one else in the company cares in any meaningful way. It’s unfair at its core and therefore fails.

The issues of quality and whatnot are at their core racist IMO but are made real because of the timezone issue. The norms and culture expected in the home time zones don’t translate easily and result in an impedance mismatch and a different measure of “good.” Because the remote team is isolated and unempowered they always struggle to adopt the standard of the team and to some extent can’t ever succeed in the quality space as it’ll be an ever shifting goalpost whose reasoning is effectively hidden. Then layer in the latent resentment on both sides and the whole situation is bound to fail, but the home teams have the advantage of being resident with the only management that matters.

I wish everyone involved would realize the experiment has failed. But CFOs are too powerful in most companies large enough to reasonably pull off outsourcing at all and the need for the CEO to please boards and investors who just operating off the financial statements and HBR white papers are too disconnected for why these efforts fail.

Unfortunately the current persecution of immigrants in the US will drive these arrangements more and more. Rather than on shoring local foreign talent with the collocated team, foreign talent will opt to avoid the fear society being birthed. This will lead to a strong incentive to follow talent to their home country leading to more imbalance in talent disoriented time zones. Maybe this would require everyone to figure out the above issues but I seriously doubt it. I think it’ll just make everyone less effective and not achieve anything positive for anyone.