961–970 of 991 posts
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The company doesn’t have any money to pay those taxes with. If you give the company more money to use to cover its tax bill, then that further increases the company’s taxable income.
Pay less salary so you can pay your taxes? This isn't as complicated as y'all seem to want to make it.
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> Most programmers do approximately zero work that is R&D. So, what you're saying is one or more of the following: 1) The work of most programmers should not be considered R&D, and shouldn't be covered by tax schemes intended for R&D. 2) Most "software IP" in the industry is not the result of R&D. 3) You've rarely been involved in the sale of non-R&D "software IP". (Do recall that your original statement was "As anyo…
The first two statements would upset a lot of people but I think you'd find theyre arguably true. Most software products are various flavours of configuration. Unless you're genuinely leveraging some novel algorithm/hardware etc it's very hard to argue it's R&D if it's just branding on a collected bag of software various OSS/commercial companies developed. Claiming all software is R&D because you leverage OSS and put…
The unfortunate thing that kicked off this discussion was that you talked about "...[selling] software IP...". Thanks to active work by copyright maximalists [1] over the past 20+ years, the term "Intellectual Property" applies just as well to plug-and-chug Enterprise CRUD software that sells for megabucks as it does to leading-edge research projects that -like- actually have Key Personnel and die dead if those folks go away. Anyone who is capable of paying attention and has been in the industry for more than a year or three is quite aware that plug-and-chug CRUD is far more valuable than the overwhelming majority of the people who make it.
So, yeah. From that arose the confusion.
[0] ...and because I can't be arsed to go look it up...
[1] My position in brief: copyright and patents are absolutely essential, copyright terms are insanely long, and patents frequently granted when they should not
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Seriously?
Sadly, that is entirely serious. Arguably, that's the whole of politics: why should I give you something if you don't give me something? The people involved are, generally, not deep thinkers, aren't aren't thinking much beyond their direct short-term advantage. The system selects against that.
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Jesus man, how can you look at the economic history of the past 30 years and still think neoliberalism is the way to go?
Real neoliberalism (with land value tax and pigouvian tax) has never been tried.
There are some misunderstandings in the comments that seem to stem from not having read the section, so I thought it was worth referencing the actual text [0]. It's quite short and easy to read. The most important bits: * Subsection (a) requires amortizing "Specified research or experimental expenditures" over 5 years (paragraph (2)) instead of deducting them (paragraph (1)) * Paragraph (c)(3) is a Special Rule that…
This is one of the worst things MAGA has done. Tech startups are the source of so much of our wealth, and this makes it very challenging to ever build one. I can’t believe this still exists, and no one has changed it. We truly are governed by morons
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Now imagine that a restaurant buys 100 tables, 500 chairs, kitchen equipment, cutlery for 800 people, signage, a security system, and does a remodeling before opening. (Or an airline buys an airplane. Or a hotel chain builds a hotel.) Should they be able to expense all of those items that provide value for multiple years in a single year? Does software development provide value exclusively in the year it's done? Or o…
The reason that we require you to deduct an expense over years for some things is because they have a resale value that needs to be accounted for. It's not a pure expense because you have an asset with real value that came out of the purchase. Employee time has no resale value. Once used it's gone, so employee salaries are expenses, not investments. The only possible justification for the Section 174 R&D changes is t…
My understanding is that this was done in order to balance the tax bill passed by the Trump admin due to a requirement to be budget neutral. Cut tax revenue here, increase tax revenue there.
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It’s also because republicans politically punish dissent, while it is more tolerated in the Democratic Party. The consequences of “disloyalty” are higher in the Republican Party.
This might change. After party leadership got 20% of democratic senators to vote for trump’s procedural blank check, the party’s approval rating dropped to 27%. If it doesn’t change, I suspect the party will split.
Since technology has empowered centralized power while providing the tools easily repurposed to poison democracy, I suspect that democracy as we understand it will fail to compete with data driven central planning.
So maybe the question we should be asking is what flavor of total surveillance and centralized control do we want to live under?
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Under the new rules, all software development, excluding bug fixes, must be expensed in this manner. "Turn the crank" development is included. https://larsco.com/blog/section-174-updates-navigating-the-i...
Which makes sense. Software is functionally a capital asset, so really it should be depreciated across the length of the copyright term (unless the company wants to release it to the public domain to fully depreciate it early).
By your logic, the salaries of technical writers should be amortized too, because theoretically the bank operations manual could also be a capital asset.
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There's a 15-year amortization period if a US company hires an offshore developer. It's only a 5-year period if the developer is American.
Did you know that other countries have software companies too?
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If you want equalized poverty, feel free to move to the EU. Say goodbye to owning a nice house, or building any kind of wealth - that's reserved for the old money class. In the US, software is one of the few remaining ways to achieve the American dream. I came to this country to work hard and earn money.
Weird, I live in the USA make $180k yet still can’t own a house and building wealth is extremely hard. EU has better societal benefits than the US (access to healthcare, education, mandated vacation time (often starting at 3-4 weeks). The vast majority of people care about living a life without suffering. In the US this is only reserved for the rich it seems.
Exceptions are HCOL tech hubs, but comp in those places is much higher.