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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how that will do anything:

- 25% is not enough to matter if you drop from 130k US engineer to a 40-50k outsourced

- International corporation will easily side step that since the US Corp is not paying for salaries to the foreign Corp, just dues to exploit the IP at best

So at best this would be hurtful to smaller businesses like the stupid section 174.

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Not to distract from the point you're making, but over here in <outsourcing destination> 50k is a lowball offer - at least for people with more than around seven years in the industry.

We shouldn't refrain from passing a law just because it can be circumvented or because it has partial instead of total desired effect.

It is brazenly unequal. If your company makes things for 5e international markets, and you employ international production staff, you now have to separate things you do for US consumers and things you do for non-US consumers to figure out how much of this tax you should pay, it’s an accounting nightmare, especially if you ship the same product to Us and non-US consumers. More so, your non-US competitors can still ship product to US consumers without being subject to the tax, and other companies might retaliate with a tax on US labor that targets their own market, because why not?

No, we should refrain from passing laws that are anticompetitive and unenforceable, like this one is.

Those are exactly the laws we should refrain from passing

40-50k for talent? No way. I have friends in Eastern Europe doing 120-130k USD working remotely for US companies.

the realistic best you can do for a quality outsourced engineer is $80k. Good ones go for $100k, and you can easily, easily get junior devs for that price. You can even get decent U.S. engineers for $125k outside of HCOL places.

Realistically if they are doing 20% of their US business in say Vermont, they should have to employ 20% of their workforce there. 15% in California? 15% of US head count in California. All they do is extract and hide the money. That needs to stop. Don't want to? Well your competition and new entrants will.

So if you're doing B2B business primarily within the US, you have to hire/fire a bunch of employees in different states every time you sign a new contract? That sounds incredibly burdensome.

By this logic, if a single person in Romania purchases a product from me, I must hire someone in Romania or else the transaction is unethical? Immoral?

If I only need 10 developers to make some software and sell it globally why should I have to hire more people?

There are singular companies doing extremely specialized work for entities all over the country, so this kind of logic is not going to work. It would be more realistic (but similarly problematic) to apply the logic on a national level. But what that would look like is the government issuing licenses to import based on the percentage of the company's output made domestically. That is complex to figure out, as well, and not all products are made entirely in one country. Even if they can be made all in one country, it may not be what you want your countrymen working on. I would rather see my people make cars than, say, squeaky dog toys. But some of the same skills can be used for a variety of different products too.

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