This wasn't my first impression of this, but the more I heard this dicussed the more I'm forming an opinion that there might be some intentional parts of this that while maybe not being good, make sense from a certain narrow perspective.
My assumption is, if tax folks in the US were looking Jealously at US companies with large Multinational presence declaring a lot of their profits abroad. They might have noticed that some of them have large dev presence in US, but through complex accounting, IP transfers, licensing and other actions are able to claim that majority of the value is generated outside of the US.
If a company had, say, 100k software devs, 50k in the US, and 50k scattered across other countries, but claimed the value of it's software was primarily in Puerto Rico and Ireland... In that case, I'd expect questions around the 50k devs in the US.
Is software dev the only activity where this is possible - no, but is currently by the far the largest and the largest growth industry.
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.
Small business software has largely been offshoring their development teams for years anyway.
For a long while now, every small US-based company I look at hiring engineers have their teams in South America or Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately by trying to "fix" this, they've caused massive US software developer layoffs. So even less tax revenues. And an even weaker economy.
Has this tax change been mentioned in any earnings calls as a reason for layoffs. Perhaps if that evidence could be found it would bolster the argument being made here. Didn't someone have all earnings call transcripts in a large database - perhaps an AI can find evidence of this?
While this modification may contribute to layoffs, the general declining economy is the real culprit — the layoffs started long before the tax code change.
There is some sense to this: It's a stealth tax increase done for budgetary reasons.
Since we tried to go to a pay-as-you-go model on bills the tax code has turned into an absolute shambles as the congresscritters look at how to tweak things to "produce" (look at the IRA withdrawals--it produced nothing, just moved some money forward one year while creating a trap that many have fallen into) the desired revenue to cover whatever the bill costs without "increasing taxes."