by dang ·
Companies building software in the US were hit hard a few years ago when the tax code stopped allowing deduction of software dev expenses. Now they have to be amortized over several years.
HN has had many discussions about this, including The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 - (927 comments) a few days ago. Other threads are listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203869.
There's currently a major effort to get this change reversed. One of the people working on it is YC's Luther Lowe (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=itsluther). Luther has been organizing YC alumni to urge lawmakers to support this reversal. I asked him if we could do that on Hacker News too. He said yes—hence this thread :)
If you're a US taxpayer and if you agree that software dev expenses should be deductible like they used to be, please sign this letter to the relevant committee members: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DkRGeef2e_tU2xf3TyEyd2JLlmZ....
(If you're not a US person, please don't sign the letter, since lawmakers will only listen to feedback from taxpayers and we don't want to dilute the signal.)
I'm sure not everyone here agrees with us—HN is a big community, there's no total agreement on anything—but this issue has as close to a community consensus as HN gets, so I think it makes sense to add our voices too.
Luther will be around to answer questions and hopefully HN can contribute to getting this done!