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Cost Recovery

Removing tax policy barriers can help businesses and individuals invest, work, create jobs, and lift the economy during a post-pandemic recovery without requiring lawmakers to create new spending programs. One of the most cost-efficient options available to lawmakers is to make permanent and expand the full expensing of capital investment.

While tax rates matter to businesses, so too does the measure of income to which those tax rates apply. Depreciation understates investment costs, overstates business profits, and reduces the after-tax return on the investment—resulting in less capital formation, productivity growth, and economic output. In other words, depreciation requires businesses to pay tax on income that doesn’t exist.

Removing the tax code’s bias against long-term investment by implementing a neutral cost recovery system (NCRS) for structures and full expensing for other assets is estimated to increase economic growth and job creation. Using the Tax Foundation General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that permanent full expensing and neutral cost recovery for structures will add more than 1 million full-time equivalent jobs to the long-run economy and boost the long-run capital stock by 13 percent, or $4.8 trillion.

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