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

#311

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

dambi0 wrote: post #225

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument has a problem: > They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’ It provides no way to distinguish between when the thing is happening and when it isn't. If people say you're an alarmist, by what mechanism do you evaluate whether they're correct?

Which is just as true of the argument > Probably because you've seen it repeated so much in your hyper-propaganda bubble of reddit that you've started to believe it

Except that argument admits a means to evaluate it. You take the thing repeated ad nauseam and subject it to an evidentiary requirement. Are people actually being held without habeas corpus? Are people actually being executed based on their ethnicity? If anything in this nature is happening, has the rate of it significantly increased recently or has it been going on for decades?

The last question is pretty important if your argument is "Trump is a fascist and all we have to do is get him out", because then that argument is erroneous and you have to actually change the status quo instead of returning to it.

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

#312

Post by lukeschlather » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:46 PM UTC

autobodie wrote: post #135

lukeschlather wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, sounds like it's a bunch of stupid misc. fees. So instead of just raising the minimum wage for H1Bs and indexing it to inflation, they raise taxes (and these taxes on H1Bs don't seem like a consequential funding source. They might even bring in less tax revenue than raising the H1B minimum wage to where it should be if it had originally been indexed to inflation.)

> raising the minimum wage for H1Bs and indexing it to inflation Huh? Not even regular minimum wage is indexed to inflation. What are you talking about?

In Washington state it is. But I'm talking about the minimum salary to get an H1B visa which is $60,000. Given that H1Bs are intended to substitute for skilled professionals where the prevailing wage is easily twice that these days, raising it and indexing it to inflation seems like common sense.

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

#313

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #292

CalRobert wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but there's lots and lots of no big tech US companies in Ireland. They generally don't have much equity or bonuses but the base is OK. I got 6 figures from a bunch of them in Ireland so it's possible.

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

#314

Post by llm_nerd » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

ttul wrote: post #307

llm_nerd wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 35% of eligible spend on up to $3 million, and 15% above that (15% and 15% if the corporation is not Canadian). Further, most software development simply doesn't qualify- https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/scientific-... If you're making websites or doing Shopify integrations, etc, that doesn't actually qualify. Something truly novel in AI or self driving or whatever -- sure.

This is a naive perspective. In reality, most of the software development that a typical growth company does is eligible. As one of CRA’s auditors once told me, “The general arc of your development has to meet the criteria of being technically challenging and uncertain, and you have to follow a generally scientific approach, measuring your results empirically. But if you need a web console to help with that, who are…

>This is a naive perspective.

Okay.

SR&ED had 22,758 applications last year. Software development only accounted for 40% of it. So 9000 applications from software dev firms, the majority being very small firms. That is a tiny, tiny minority of software firms in this country.

>In reality, most of the software development that a typical growth company does is eligible

No, it absolutely is not, unless you are lying on the application. And yes, a lot of people lie to get government grants and subsidies. And it works out pretty good until someone audits it and realizes that someone is making a shitty instrumentation console that absolutely no one would say advances scientific knowledge and demands the credit back plus interest and penalties.

And yes, I've seen people's absolute bullshit SR&ED applications before. I've had peers ask me to review theirs, where they do bog standard bullshit dev but read on HN how super easy it is, and they convince themselves that "everyone is doing it". Only those signatures on the form that lies about what is actually being claimed.

Again, it's awesome...until it isn't. Which is why the vast majority of software firms are not claiming this.

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

#315

Post by varispeed » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:53 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…

The idea of coming to office comes from the fact it was not practical for people to have computers and other devices at home. Now we have technology that this is no longer necessary, but of course commercial landlords and investors feel salty about it, so they lobby for this outdated now model to keep their investments artificially up.

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

#316

Post by dimal » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

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…

Won’t make much of a difference? To what?You’re only talking about whether to offshore or not. Not whether to HIRE or not.

Many companies simply won’t offshore core functions because doing product development on your core product with a team in a different time zone or from a very different culture often doesn’t work. But this will matter to companies that have laid off US engineers or avoided hiring and now won’t have that extra tax burden.

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

#317

Post by jayd16 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #187

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 exp…

The unserious and corrupt are consistently rewarded with re-election. I really have no idea how we move forward.

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

#318

Post by 9283409232 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #306

9283409232 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely makes sense. You need buy in from the public. RCV is the most known alternative and it has taken a decade to get it that far. If you want to start the work of informing people about STAR voting then be my guess but RCV is a tremendous improvement from what we have and an acceptable alternative.

Most people don't actually know anything about any of this. If they've heard of RCV at all their understanding of it is at the level of "it's something different than the status quo and supposedly better". You could swap in STAR and they mostly wouldn't even notice that you've changed anything. But you'd notice the difference in the election outcomes, in a good way.

Enough people know about it that it has been put on ballots in several states and has had strong pushes in other states while STAR hasn't at all. If you want to get outside and start informing people about STAR then please do but RCV has a decade long head start and is the path of least resistance.

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

#319

Post by mindslight » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:32 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #302

mindslight wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, a lot of that understanding was included in my recognition of the downsides. The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to be a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so that taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want people to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and keep kicking the can into the future indefinitely. Capital gains and retirement plans…

> The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to be a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so that taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want people to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and keep kicking the can into the future indefinitely. I would have to question whether that is actually a good policy. To begin with, it doesn't work unless you do it co…

> But if you allow business expenses to be deducted immediately, that's another path to having a consumption tax with a progressive effective rate curve

If I had written a longer comment, I was going to go in a similar direction. But I think it's a bit fallacious to be talking about that when it would make the tax code even more lopsided to heavily taxing wage earners. Like when you buy a car to be able to get to work, you can't even deduct that from your earnings even though it is a necessary expense for being able to earn that income. If that last part were changed - both with direct deduction of things like living expenses and also unrestricted traditional IRA contributions/withdrawals, then it would make sense to start talking in terms of moving towards a de facto consumption tax. But without doing that, it just seems like a rallying cry to further reduce taxes on the investment-owning classes.

(I'm using the word "deduct" in the business tax sense of direct subtraction, not the personal income tax sense where your expenses have to rise above the level that is otherwise a personal exemption. Being able to deduct so many specific expenses would of course end up placing a heavy bookkeeping burden on individuals, though)

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

#320

Post by nerdsniper » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

9283409232 wrote: post #301

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It absolutely makes sense. You need buy in from the public. RCV is the most known alternative and it has taken a decade to get it that far. If you want to start the work of informing people about STAR voting then be my guess but RCV is a tremendous improvement from what we have and an acceptable alternative.

Personally I think “approval voting” is almost as good as RCV but orders of magnitude easier to sell to the public.

There’s just a checkbox next to each candidate and you check the box next to any candidate you’re “okay” with. Results in the most “okay-est” candidates getting elected so when the winner is announced everyone goes “…okay.”

Also could make primaries less important, because multiple candidates from a party could theoretically run for the general election without splitting votes.

Communication is easier because in RCV the candidate who gets the most #1 votes doesn’t necessarily win which could lead to a loss of confidence in the system. Its very easy to tell the American public “this guy got the most checkmarks” and no one gets confused.