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> The arguement for this is that it would be inconsistent to do otherwise. After all, why should buying a chair from someone else be different than paying an employee to do it?

Probably exposing how little I know of accounting... If you buy a chair you have to track it and deduct it over the course of X years?! It's not just an expense the year you bought it?

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Most of the time you can decide what you want to do. There are exceptions but for most capital expenses (which salary is not despite what proponents of this change would argue), you can choose to either deduct all of it or amortize it. It also depends how you categorize expenses.

A $100 chair is unlikely to get amortized, but a $100 chair as part of $450k office remodel might.

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