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The appropriate analogy is:

Imagine a restaurant spends money on employees to build 100 tables, 500 chairs, etc. Those tangible goods would be capital assets, so the labor costs of building them would also be capitalized.

This change to the tax code is just bringing the tax treatment of software development in line with how every other industry is treated. IOW, it was closing a loophole. A very valuable loophole, whose beneficiaries used it to get filthy rich, and bragged about how their industry was so much more valuable than everything else, even though a lot of that value was due to the exception software was getting in the tax code.

Notably, in the current version of the budget as of 6/6, the loophole is temporarily coming back, though given the Musk-Trump feud, it's very possible it will get pulled again to try to mollify the hardline deficit caucus.




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