The US tax code already requires that self-classified R&D expenditures be treated as capital-expenditures, and subject to a 5-15 year depreciation period.
Section 174 requires that any and all software development costs be treated as R&D expenditures, and thus capitalized/amortized.
The total tax paid at the end of the depreciation period will be the same, but the upfront tax in the first year of a given expenditure is now 5-15x higher (depending on where the work was done).
Sounds like quite a broad brush. As a former Trump voter (to my shame), I realized he's a broken clock that can be right once in a while; yet still such a profoundly net negative that I'd rather he be in jail than in office.
In particular I'm most against his record of sexual assault, association with predators, peeping at young pageant participants, boasting about such things, bending the law and policy to benefit his friends, praise for despots, his demand for loyalty over talent, and racist commentary.
What if the R&D is open-sourced?
Or what if the R&D would be for a product genuinely beneficial to people? Think a new drug, or infrastructure like Google Maps, etc.
For example, a new drug can take 10~16 years to get to the market, and this is intended by government regulations (there is often no way around it). One has to show the drug is safe and works against the intended disease, before one can sell a drug.
However, before you can even start this clinical work in humans, you must discover the drug first and optimize it through laboratory and animal testing. Only after that can you enter the clinical stage to test it in humans. Clinical stages are typically divided into phase 1/2/3 and each stage requires more time and money. After you complete all that, you can finally ask for approval to sell your drug at a profit from the government (US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)/ EU European medicine agency (EMA)).
This trajectory can typically be divided as follows: Drug Discovery (early lab testing) 2-4 years, $2-15M Preclinical Drug Development (advanced lab/animal testing) 2~3 years, $10-15M Clinical Stage 1 (First in human studies) 1~2 years $15~30M Clinical Stage 2 (medium-sized human study), 2~3 years, $40~60M Clinical Stage 3 (large, longer term human study), 2~4 years $100~300M.
Total: 9~16 years of research & development with a cost of $167~420M. Then finally you can sell the drug for a profit. If you are a startup focused solely on such development, you have no way (or very limited ways) to make money/profit in those 9-16 R&D years. In such a case, R&D tax benefits are really useful.
I always felt, from outside, that anti trumpers just are against everything he does with simplistic explanation, its a good law amazon has enough money to pay their own r&d