If the issue is with general tax compliance of large multinationals, then congress should have done something about that. This tax rule has hit small software businesses particularly badly, so much so that it'll practically strengthen the quasi-monopoly of established players.
> strengthen the quasi-monopoly of established players.
When are we going to break the majors up already? Google should be like seven different companies. YouTube is bigger than Netflix for Christ's sake.
Demand antitrust enforcement!
There's so much value pent up and wasted in Google today that it'll be worth more as divisible parts. They're practically giving half of the value away for free and wasting it on implementing the same thing four times before cancelling it.
And Apple and Amazon...
These giants are basically stifling the US startup ecosystem and putting a valuation cap on innovation. They're also ripping apart other industries by moving in and undercutting costs with subsidized offerings detached from the underlying economics. They're like invasive species destroying the ecosystem, eating up everything, completely immune to competition. And if that's not reason enough for you, they're putting massive wage pressure on our profession.
One of the reasons small businesses have been hit so hard with this is because for then (when incorporated as LLCs), their tax rate is 37% + state + local. I live in NYC and my LLC has a combined tax rate of 50%.
An LLC can either file as a c corp and get corporate tax rates, or (sometimes) file as passthrough like as in a sole proprietorship. Or as a partnership. It gets complicated
It didn't become law (no 60 votes in senate), after Schumer sat on it for 6 (!) months. And there were earlier attempts to fix this, for example at the end of 2022 using budget/reconciliation - like what the Reps are doing here; but that was blocked by progressives because of "bad optics".
The Democratic party needs internal reform, that much seems clear to me. But since then we've had just a single term of Biden, and his administrations focus was on COVID, Ukraine, and getting CHIPS+infra bills passed.
It takes time to undo damage codified into legislation. We're still dealing with the aftermath of Reagan. But we have to stop the bleeding and take Congress back, or the size of the hill we have to scale increases drastically.
The opposite of what you're saying is "perfection is the enemy of progress", so let's move past them. I'm asking for more than "this is not the way". What is the way? How will we do this? This is critical, and we've failed to do anything since early 2022. Democrats are clearly not at all interested. My (Dem) congressman responded directly to my enquiry with "fixing section174 just wouldn't be good optics". I agree republicans can't be taken very seriously either if OB3 is the highest of highs. But we all want this fixed. So: how?
Not in a way that makes us even easier to hate, for a start. You really want a big noisy political carveout in what is already being called the largest upward wealth transfer in history? You want to find out what it's like to be in a line of work that has the reputation for having to steal from the American people to survive? We have enough of that reputation already.
If you want a better answer, tell me who our friends are in Congress this decade, and how much it matters. From what I see, the answers are "few" and "little." The Americans who don't blame us for giving Trump the country blame us for not giving him enough of a platform. The appearance of demanding favor on our part at such a moment seems unwise, but that moment does sufficiently explain why we find ourselves facing the aforementioned paucity of well-wishers.
>Not in a way that makes us even easier to hate, for a start. You really want a big noisy political carveout in what is already being called the largest upward wealth transfer in history? You want to find out what it's like to be in a line of work that has the reputation for having to steal from the American people to survive? We have enough of that reputation already.
This is bullshit. The carveout already exists and it's designed to attack software engineering specifically.
This is politics. Perceptions matter. Changing the status quo is more difficult because it is the status quo, and that also matters.
If you want to sell this change, the way to do it is to hammer on the fact that it was Trump's own TCJA that created the current situation, or that it was the machinations of a hostile Congress that so perverted the original intent of the TCJA, depending on audience. But even that is not likely to work, not in a post-"Twitter Files," post-Careless People world.
I don't know what kind of bubble you live in but if I were working this year I wouldn't be super comfortable talking about it, the same way if I had previously made the mistake of buying a Tesla I would by now have unloaded the damned eyesore even at a loss.
No one is upset to see us suffer. If you think that should change, fine. Complaining at me about it won't achieve that. I did not ask how you think things should be. I'm telling you how things are.
I don’t know what bubble you’re living in but the “narrative” here is easily defensible. “The software engineering profession has been gutted by layoffs that explicitly make them 5x more expensive to startups than lawyers, electrical engineers, and doctors. This hurts both workers and employers while benefiting nobody other than foreign firms.”
Nobody of relevance is mad people in tech get paid well. The only slice who are is a small percentage of people in housing constrained areas who attribute the housing failures of California to 5% of the SF workforce.
> I'm telling you how things are.
Claiming something is “how things are” is just assuming the conclusion and is one of the dumbest ways to engage in discussion. It’s literally, “I’m just telling you how I’m right.”
I hadn't seen they were asking for a retroactive carveout! For eight years. A decade's worth of massive, post facto tax clawback? I don't know who thought this was a good idea, but they really must not love YC or Hacker News, to put those names on the public face of this...
While the law with the tax change was passed in 2017, that specific change didn't go into effect until 2022. So it's 3 years of retroactive carveouts (2022, 2023, 2024).
This is untrue. The rule is not about taxation, but deductions/expenses. If your expenses cover most revenue, you owe little in taxes. With this rule, a particular type of expense (software engineering salaries) is no longer deductible from revenue to calculate taxable income over which taxes are owed. So you might previously owe no taxes, but now you do. The deduction might carry over to the next few years and eventually (after 6 years) you will reach the same point - assuming your salaries don't go up and your business doesn't grow. The remainder in deductions will be returned after the business stops employing software engineers. I'm not sure why anyone would want the tax code to incentivize a business outcome that all of us would consider failure.
You're confusing corporate vs personal taxes. The salaries businesses pay are meant to be deductible business expenses. The business only pays taxes over the profit after these expenses are deducted from their revenue. The person receiving the salary still owes personal taxes over the income.
We don't talk about this enough. International R&D is not offshoring of call-centers to India. International R&D is the IP for the next generation of global communication standards being owned by US-based or foreign corporations, because international (e.g. Canadian, European) standards experts/developers become un-affordable for US-based corporations and are forced to work for our "adversaries" instead. Crazy.
The way this is "fixed" right now, every five years we need another round of republican government to make things great again. If only enough democrats cared to fix this.
