You know, if you don’t understand something, it’s totally fine to not immediately comment with whatever your political instincts tell you something might mean.

Or perhaps you have some fresh insight on how the Section 174’s changes (only passed to make the 2017 tax bill revenue neutral) on amortization rules meaning only being able to deduct 20% of salaries in the year paid is in fact totally fair and how maybe all salary deductions should work like this?

If a company has a million dollars in revenue and spends a million dollars on the salaries of software developers, how much tax do you think they should pay in that year?

    1,000,000 Revenue
  - 1,000,000 Salary expense
  -----------
            0 Profit

If you said "no taxes!" we're on the same page. The new law would instead work like this:

    1,000,000 Revenue
  -   200,000 1/5th Salary expense
  -----------
      800,000 Profit

Now the company must pay taxes on 800,000 of profit, because "R&D salaries," which includes software devs, must be amortized over five years.

Note that this is an infinity percent tax rate and mostly only hits small businesses.

> this is an infinity percent tax rate

Only if you consider just one year of it, though, unless I'm missing something. You eventually get to deduct 100%, just takes five years.

Only if the company still exists in 5 years time.

Forget software for a moment, this is just about full stack devs being called r&d workers (which is questionable), but we were apparently already treating r&d for other sectors this way, and that seems just as bad. This is anticompetitive policy. Policy like this usually has an employee or gross revenue exemption for small business, when it doesn't, it is because big software corps lobbied for it to be that way to prevent competition. This is worsened by the fact that big software corps don't spend on r&d to the extent bell labs and similar used to. So most of the r&d was small shops hoping to get bought, but now this batch will get bought at cut rates to pay the taxes, and the next batch won't arrive. R&D is only asset investment for large corporations, for small shops it is their actual product. And most software dev work doesn't come close to being real research, even if maybe you had to read an ieee paper to write up an algorithm, very few people are writing those papers in comparison.

Do you think explicitly singling out software development for unfavorable tax treatment while explicitly excluding oil and gas exploration from the same treatment is "fair"?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174 (c)(2) and (c)(3)