The plan currently under consideration temporarily restores the expensing provisions of the 2008 stimulus package.
Business tax rules dealing with expensing, depreciation and research and development are, however, largely short term.
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The issue that management most often sidestepped was the expensing of stock options.
Expensing options won't lead to greater disclosure. 10-Ks are already loaded with details about companies' options programs.
Enhanced expensing more fully reflects the real cost of equipment than depreciation, raising after-tax returns on investment.
Japanese builders defer the recognition of profits until a construction project is completed, expensing everything up front.
If politicians and accountants are wise--a big assumption--they would not toy with the idea of arbitrarily expensing options.
For example, Dems could favor the tax expensing of business equipment over depreciation.
Extending 100% expensing into 2012: This continues an effective incentive for new investment.
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In a page taken from the flat-tax book, Faso wants to substitute full expensing for capital expenditures--no more depreciation schedules.
There are also proposals for a permanent research and development tax credit, temporary expensing of business investment, and payroll tax holidays.
But FASB's biggest crime against the economy and the American people came when it decided to measure the impossible: options expensing.
Advantages include increased capability, most recent updates and expensing instead of capitalizing.
The howls for expensing options emanate from the misguided notion that these instruments were a prime cause of the late 1990s bubble and corporate scandals.
And long before this recession hit -- for a decade -- middle-class families had already been expensing -- experiencing a sense of declining economic security.
The Recovery Act contained a 50 percent expensing provision in 2009.
Even if equipment expensing is scaled down with repeal of Bush-era tax cuts, there is plenty of room for 100% expenses with pre-Bush Section 179 depreciation allowances.
To be sure, many of the most recent revisions were intended to bring tax relief to small firms, such as hiring and health-care credits and larger expensing limits.
Expensing is a proper thing, not a bad thing-especially now.
Expensing is good policy: Depreciating investment outlays over time for tax purposes delays deductions that lose value with time and inflation, understating costs and overstating (and overtaxing) real profit.
Another recommendation he has is for Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Chairman Bill Gates : take the lead and start expensing options.
Bonus depreciation and increased expensing expire after 2004 and 2005, respectively--a sunset that arguably makes sense if the point is to stimulate the economy by encouraging more business investment now.
That includes an optional 15% flat tax, reducing the federal corporate tax rate to 12.5%, eliminating the tax on capital gains, abolishing the death tax, and immediate expensing for capital investment.
Will temporary expensing get capital spending back on track?
You see that in terms of the 100 percent expensing, which tells every company in the United States that they can expense 100 percent off of what they are investing this year.
Independent firms benefit from full expensing of their intangible drilling costs, while the integrated firms can expense only 70 percent of their IDCs and must write off the rest over a five- year period.
Companies resisted expensing options, especially in Silicon Valley.
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The payroll tax reduction introduced in December 2010 is scheduled to expire at the end of this year as is the 100% expensing of capital investments for tax purposes and the extension of unemployment benefits.
And millions of entrepreneurs in big cities and small towns across the country will benefit not only from the business expensing plan I mentioned, but from additional tax cuts that will spur research and development.
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