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

#291

Post by tossandthrow » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #282

tossandthrow wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immediate expensing never should have been changed in the first place This is indicative of ignorance. There is a reason why we have these rules.

Please expound

Ofcause.

Fundamentally there are reasons why we don't allow companies to funnel all operational profits into capital assets without them paying taxes.

An analogy would be a company that used all their profits to extract gold from the ground such that they get the labor worth of gold out. In doing so they would effeciently dodge paying taxes of their profits.

Now back to your comment: you portray it is as only good that this law was changes . And in doing so you leave out these details that essentially leads to instantiating laws like these.

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

#292

Post by FirmwareBurner » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #252

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm still stunned when I see what devs are paid in Germany and southern Europe though. Are German wages really low? I thought Germany as the richest country in Europe.

They seem much lower than, say, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, etc. Eastern and southern Europe are low but also lower cost of living. A fraction of the US regardless.

I think you're only looking at big tech wages when you compare with Ireland. Norway doesn't have much of a tech industry.

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

#293

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #264

xlii wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have approx. 15 years of experience working remotely for various companies all across the globe and was always an advocate of thesis that remote work is difficult and most people aren’t cut for it and (to horror of many proponents) and on average are less efficient than on-site hires. There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_ when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy n…

If management is so poor that they can't communicate intention in writing, then I don't really see how being in office or anywhere for that matter will help. They're just flat out incompetent. I've seen the opposite of this as well, where whatever management clearly communicated is most definitely not what is going to get executed. If internal politics are blocking knowledge, access, & contribution of any employee th…

I think you're glossing a bit over the word "intention". It's certainly easy for any competent manager to communicate instructions or requirements in writing. What's hard is communicating the full scope of their intentions, including things like:

* This bit is confusing to me even as I say it - I want to keep it in mind as we move forwards in case we're thinking about it wrong.

* This requirement is really annoying and I'd love to find a way to get rid of it.

* This part is super super urgent, and if we find a way to do it faster without too many other costs we should rework the plan.

You can't "just" write these things down, both because some requirements aren't so annoying you can come out and explicitly say it and because too many parenthetical clauses start to make a document impossible to read. If they're not communicated nonverbally it's hard to communicate them at all.

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

#294

Post by rsync » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #291

tomrod wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please expound

Ofcause. Fundamentally there are reasons why we don't allow companies to funnel all operational profits into capital assets without them paying taxes. An analogy would be a company that used all their profits to extract gold from the ground such that they get the labor worth of gold out. In doing so they would effeciently dodge paying taxes of their profits. Now back to your comment: you portray it is as only good th…

Your analogy suggests a deferment of taxes paid but not elimination.

In your example, they still own all the gold and would eventually pay taxes on any liquidation.

I bring this up because I, too, am as interested in your parent to know the original inspiration for these parts of the tax code…

Further: I have a suspicion that this should be applied differently to C-corps vs. pass through entities in the same way that corporate taxes and retained earnings are…

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

#295

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #156

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…

It's not possible, really, to believe that markets are inefficient enough to pay twice the price for something in one place as another...

In all likelihood you lived through 2008, and yet you continue to believe that market "efficiency" is somehow a builtin immutable property of particular trading rules?

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

#296

Post by trollbridge » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

bgnn wrote: post #199

So US will continue subsidizing its R&D while complaining the rest of the world is doing so? What changed then?

It’s not a subsidy. They just are letting people immediately expense R&D instead of requiring it spread over 5 years.

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

#297

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

9283409232 wrote: post #265

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Score voting (or STAR) is better.

Anything is better than what we have and ranked choice voting is the most popular alternative.

If you're doing a new thing anyway then it makes no sense to do something worse instead of something better. Popularity is determined by people; make the better thing the popular one.

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

#298

Post by trollbridge » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #204

tomrod wrote: post #14

If correct, this is a good thing on a generally bad, overstuffed bill. Immediate expensing never should have been changed in the first place, and it was always weird seeing people twist themselves in knots defending it.

> Immediate expensing never should have been changed in the first place This is indicative of ignorance. There is a reason why we have these rules.

Sure, but not allowing expensing of software R&D was asinine.

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

#299

Post by trollbridge » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #192

mindslight wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twisting not required. Depreciation straightforwardly applies to every other business capital expenditure. Hire someone to put a new roof on a rental property, and you're out the tens of thousands of dollars cash while only getting an immediate deduction for one thirtieth of the value. If you were expecting to pay that cash out of income, it's effectively a realized income and then reinvestment. The recent (-ly undon…

> The recent (-ly undone) change went against decades of how things were, was crippling for medium size cashflow-positive startups, effectively increased taxes, etc. But it was really just a straightforward application of the general principles that apply to most everything else. The error was in reconciling them by getting rid of it for software R&D instead of allowing other business expenses to be deducted when the…

The immediate effect of this is that one of my customers simply cranked up the amount they can spend on R&D this year by the amount of the tax savings. Which is substantial, because they were only planning to expense 20% of what they would pay us, and budget paying about 25% in income taxes on the rest.

So out of $100,000, that’s $17,600 more in spending, or a 17.6% increase. And they can expense that extra $17,600 too.

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

#300

Post by phil21 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:00 PM UTC

xlii wrote: post #163

BobbyJo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have approx. 15 years of experience working remotely for various companies all across the globe and was always an advocate of thesis that remote work is difficult and most people aren’t cut for it and (to horror of many proponents) and on average are less efficient than on-site hires. There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_ when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy n…

I have nearly 3 decades (ugh…) now of forming fully remote startups and working remotely.

It used to be totally non-controversial and completely validated by direct personal experience that only a minority of the population is built to work remotely. It’s so silly this is even an argument when our entire society and education is built on in-person interactions.

I think the 10% number is variable depending on the org you are hiring into. A company that was never built to be remote or put any thought into how information and communication systems must be different than office? 10% may even be high. A company built from first principles with lots of thought and intentional design behind business processes being remote only? Probably much too low. It will be reflected even in the types of personalities being hired on average.

If you reach for video calls as a solution to your remote companies communication issues you have completely failed and probably would be better served with fully on-premise. This would be the first question I would ask as an interviewee for a remote role. Any company regularly engaging or encouraging this means leadership is simply trying in the worst possible way to recreate an office environment and thus you can expect nearly everything else process based to be horribly broken for a remote company. I have some other “tells” as well, but this one stands out as the simplest as it displays a total disconnect with the reality of how to build remote teams. If you can’t function like a well ran open source project you are almost assuredly doing it wrong.