I'm all for it, just curious as the law has existed for 8 years and been in effect for 3. Seemingly little interest from anyone in the tech world to put lobbying behind reversing it until this point.
Lobbying has been ongoing since the law was enacted. Congress came close to repealing it several times, with the House actually passing a bill to repeal it (Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024).
Just because Hacker News doesn't care doesn't mean it hasn't been a big focus of small business lobbying since before it came into effect.
The actual reason it hasn't been repealed is politics: It makes the CBO budget deficit look much worse. It seems as though neither party wants the optics.
In 2017, in order to pay for the tax legislation in Trump's first term, a provision was added that would prevent companies from deducting Research and Development costs immediately (includes but not limited to payroll costs). It required domestic R&D costs to be expensed over 5 years (really 6 years since you only get to deduct one half of your first year expenses in the first year) and foreign expenses over 15 years (really 16 years). This provision was put in place to start January 1, 2022 because they were looking for additional revenue to pay for 2017 individual and corporate tax cuts. At the time, the thinking was it would be eventually fixed (allow for R&D deductions) as they had almost 5 years to fix the provision. Due to the politics at the time, it was not fixed. Bottom line, the political stars haven't aligned until now to actually get this fixed.
At the beginnning, to most people it seemed like a non-issue (oh no, amortize the costs over 5 years, cry me a river big tech etc. etc.). But now that the entire tech sector is crumbling, and nobody is getting hired, people are giving it another (well-deserved) look.
I'm all for it, just curious as the law has existed for 8 years and been in effect for 3. Seemingly little interest from anyone in the tech world to put lobbying behind reversing it until this point.
What changed?