Why didn't the Biden admin "fix" the rule before it took effect in Jan 2022? They passed several bills, they could've have included the repeal. It took effect on the democrats watch, because of their inaction.
Edit: Republican Marco Rubio introduced a clean bill to repeal the changes in 2023.
Because how could the Democrats be certain that the Republicans wouldn't just use the same accounting trick again the next time that they wanted to pass tax cuts via reconciliation (which would effectively let them double count the "savings"). The Republicans have shown very little good faith in bipartisan efforts over the last decade and a half (as just one example, all the R's who voted against the IRA only to then campaign on the achievements of the bill later in the year).
So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
The democrats were elected to undo the damage caused in Trump's first term. And they let the damage start and happen on their watch, because.. according to you, for the sake of political benefit while ordinary people suffered and are still suffering from losing and not getting jobs. They will probably do the same again if they're elected, intentionally keep things broken for political gains. It's sad to see people support and encourage such behavior.
If you passed it in the first place, and counted on repealing it before it would have taken effect, and failed to do so, then I blame you for passing it in the first place.
I have no problem blaming them. The biggest problem with Democrats is that they cede all their power to Republicans, and don't seem to use the power they have when they have it. You can have the best policy positions ever but you still suck if you can't capitalize on wins.
But the Republicans made this change to start with. That's a lot of blame. And if they did it just to create a political firestorm against Democrats later (which is exactly what they did), do we (A) recognize that politicians shouldn't be using Americans as cannon fodder to damage their political enemies or (B) blame their political enemies?
Dems were elected to undo damage. They chose not to because their platform is higher taxes on corporations and high earners, and ended up creating the tech downturn on their watch. Republicans came in and immediately reversed it with zero Democrats support.
Both sides are the same, Republicans destroy things and Democrats are not perfect in stopping and fixing them! "I am gonna support Republicans as they create problems and then blame Democrats" just makes you someone who intentionally creates problems.
Dems had the chance to fix it and intentionally did not. Republicans did it immediately once they had the chance. If Dems weren't elected in 2020 we'd have plenty of tech jobs now. Their fault, full stop. If Kamala was elected, her platform was even higher corporate taxes.
It's possible you need a supermajority or something to specifically "undo" laws passed by a previous session of congress - something Biden did not have.
In the Senate specifically you need 60 votes to break a filibuster. Filibustering, if we Americans remember from Civics/US Govt class in high school, happens when a senator exercises their right to speak for as long as they wish. Or at least it used to. There was a rule change a few decades ago to allow something called a “pocket filibuster” where you don’t have to keep speaking but you can block further motions on the matter. This requires at least 60 votes to break, so it’s effectively impossible to do anything in the Senate without that many votes now.
There were some legendary filibusters back in the day. One famous example was when Strom Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights act by speaking for 24 hours continuously. He was not able to block the bill by continuing to speak because there are limits to how long someone is able to stand and deliver, and originally if you stopped speaking you had to yield the floor and allow business to proceed.
Republicans supported the repeal, so 60 votes in the Senate were possible if the Dems wanted to repeal it. They didn't want to, coz they passed two reconciliation bills with zero republican votes and could've included the repeal in either one of them. Their policy is explicitly to tax corporations more. They didn't even let the clean repeal bills have a vote.
It has been a common tactic to work around the filibuster and reconciliation rules, and to repeal them later. They didn't expect the democrats to oppose the repeal so hard and destroy tech jobs on their watch. They know no one will ever blame them for it, like you can see on HN. Democrats platform is all about higher taxes on corps so that tracks with their actions, jobs be damned.
The point is that you don't need 60 votes to break a filibuster to increase or decrease taxes or make any other budget related changes in a once-a-year budget bill called the reconciliation bill. You just need a simple majority of 51 votes(or 50 plus VP to break the tie like the dems had).
This process was used several times to pass key and major bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, Trump's tax bill in 2017, the big beautiful bill last month etc.
Dems did not need 60 votes to restore the R&D exemption changes. They could've just included it in the reconciliation bills they passed with just 50 votes because it qualifies as a budgetary change. That's exactly how the Republicans got it done recently after getting back in power, with zero Dem votes for this change.
You completely missed that in your comment so I was trying to add some information.
They actually did NOT repeal the portion relevant to software development being considered research - it was actually made permanent and is pretty trivial to find by searching for "software development" against the text of the bill. What did change was an additional section to how research is capitalized, with domestic research being able to deduct immediately while other (i.e. foreign) research is subject to the amortization rules.
There are special rules called reconciliation that allow one party to pass a bill with just a majority. It can be used only once a year (hence why everything was packed into the big beautiful bill) and there are very complex and technical rules around what it can be used for.
So to answer your question, Republicans repealed it with zero Democratic votes because they included it in the once-a-year reconciliation bill. The bill that you are linking to would not have met this criteria.
It had Republican support so it would've gotten the 60 votes in Senate without needing to get reconciliation. It didn't even get a vote because the Democrats stopped it from proceeding with their control of the Senate. Their policy is all about higher taxes on corporation and high income individuals so it tracks.
> That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.
There was no way for the Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. And there were multiple republican co-sponsors or even bills introduced by them to repeal the provisions. It didn't even get to a vote because the dems killed the efforts. They like higher corporate taxes so it tracks, they didn't care about the damage caused. Once the Repulicans were able to repeal it on their own, they immediately did it ASAP.
Democrats controlled both the Finance Committee and the Senate. There was no way for Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. So it was necessarily stopped from moving ahead by Democrats despite Republican support. Another reason for the party in power blocking the vote would if the President opposed it, to prevent the scenario of Biden having to veto.
Edit: Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts and arguments. Stay classy, HN.
> Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts
This is not how HN works. Rate-limiting only happens when an account posts high volumes of comments that break the guidelines. It's nothing to do with downvotes or the political/idological flavor of what you post (we don't care and often don't know; all we care about is whether you're filling up threads with guideline-breaking comments, which is what ruins threads).
If you want rate-limiting turned off you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we can discuss it.
This can't be correct, since the system can't detect when comments break the guidelines. It's either based on flags or downvotes, or perhaps just total number of comments. It's definitely not based on karma, since I'm rate-limited.
Another possibility is that it triggers when a moderator gets pissed at a single one of your comments.
The rate-limiter is applied manually when we notice that an account is posting a high volume of guidelines-breaking comments. The way we notice is by reading the threads, which we spend much of each day doing, or when we're alerted to guidelines-breaking comments by flags or by community members emailing us.
While it is a different bill, the fact the Democrats were fine having it in the bill passed by the House in 2024 does cast doubt on this notion that they didn't try to resolve the issue.
Hardly an unbeatable majority for Democrats on this committee. Especially since research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue.
> I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue
For the 10th time in this thread, the repealing bill DID NOT need to be revenue neutral since it had Republican support, all it needed was 60 votes in the Senate. Reconciliation only applies if a yearly budget bill can get at least 51 votes but not 60.
Sorry, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. I stated the same in another comment and was downvoted. I know HN is liberal biased but it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
> it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
Is this situation right now really "unusable"? Aren't you overreacting just a tad? People might disagree with you, I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation without getting upset.
Quite literally unusable because I got blocked by HN from commenting for more than two hours coz of all the politically motivated downvotes. If you have the right politics, keep commenting!
> I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation
See above, literally not able to have one because I dared to criticize Democrats for their actions and inactions that led to tech job losses for over two years.
> People might disagree with you
I'm open to arguments but looks like people disagree with the facts that I am bringing forward, so they're downvoting to suppress them to lower visibility and to discourage me from participating on here.
It's like on Reddit when you state a plain fact 'Musk founded SpaceX' in reply to a highly upvoted comment that said 'Musk bought all this companies' and get heavily downvoted and even permanently banned in large subs by highly biased moderators.
This place is turning into yet another BlueSky or Reddit where facts don't matter and only a one sided political narrative is pushed at all times. Don't think it's worth engaging. I don't want to be in a place where my comments are deemed so terrible that I get max downvoted and then unable to comment for several hours.
Ironically, such controlling behavior and shutting down of facts, criticism of one side and conversation is leading more and more people to vote for the other side. I am now ashamed of being a lifelong liberal and won't vote democrat till people change this obnoxious partisan behavior on platforms like this one.
So your opinions are unpopular and people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again?
Hacker News is far from a bastion of left wingers, many people have complained about liberal and progressive ideas being downvoted as well. Above all, this platform isn't made for political debate, and it is not encouraged. If it makes you feel better, not a single one of my posts in all this has much or any upvotes. If you are looking for political validation, this ain't the place for it.
> people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again
For example, not a single person has addressed the fact that that the Democrats platform is to raise taxes on corporations, which this change accomplished during their watch. So I have to keep bringing it up. People are downvoting facts that they don't like, for political reasons and to reduce visibility.
Anyway you're right, this is not worth my time or effort. There is no open exchange of facts or ideas, it's just party line downvoting to suppress them. It's best not to engage at all, just like all the others with alternate viewpoints that stopped engaging on here. That's what the downvoters want anyway, they win. The only way I can possibly make a difference to combat this behavior is changing how I vote at the ballot box.
I actually addressed that in an edit to a parent post:
> [Deductions on] research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
Not sure how it addresses the fact that Democrats want higher taxes on corporations regardless of what you stated, hence they didn't act to stop this on their watch. You're just arguing that Democrats were wrong to let the R&D exception expire, which I already agree with.
Even after this recent change by Republicans, increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
> increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
You misunderstand how tax exemptions work.
When you make money, you need to pay taxes on that money. However, if you spend that money in certain ways, the tax code lets you take that amount of money and _deduct_ it from your overall taxable income. Thus, you pay taxes on _less_ of the money you earned. Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
> Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
No. The Democrats added a new minimum corporate tax last time they were in power. As I have to keep repeating, their policies and actions are all about taxing companies more which why they didn't repeal the R&D exemption removal. They consider it a tax loophole that companies abuse to pay less taxes.
Kamala's proposal was to increase the minimum corporate further.
No need to repeat yourself. Why are you getting so worked up? I think we'd all like to understand what the hold up was on these bills, but let's base that in supported facts, not partisanship.
As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference.
Two bills were passed with zero Republican votes in 2021 and 2022 by Democrats, the repeal could've been included in either if democrats wanted.
> As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference
There were only 27 members in the committee. So all the Democrats on the committee voted against the repeal and all the republicans voted for the repeal.
How is that a negligible difference? That's a massive maximum difference between the parties, in fact it was impossible to have a higher difference.
Do you have the voting records of this bill in committee? Of course there were 27 members, that's the sum of the Democrats and Republicans. That does not mean that they voted on party lines in committee.
Edit: Republican Marco Rubio introduced a clean bill to repeal the changes in 2023.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
The Democrat controlled Senate blocked it from coming to a vote.
Why does HN always blame only Republicans for this change?