Small firms are meanwhile likely to be major beneficiaries from the doubling of the annual investment allowance, which lets businesses write off capital expenditure on plant and machinery against their tax bill, to £500,000 until 2015.
So the idea of depreciation was born – writing off capital investments over time.
In that case, he said, they would not get the benefit of low capital gains tax rates or of writing off capital losses.
One concerned a Cineplex Odeon net income report that some analysts viewed as misleadingly positive; another, the company's practice of writing off capital improvements in its theaters over a period that some analysts considered too long.
Some of the tax breaks are big, including billions in credits for research and development, generous exemptions for banks that operate overseas and several that allow businesses to write off capital investments faster.
Walmart's abuse of the "accelerated depreciation" tax loophole costs US taxpayers another $1 billion per year, meaning the company gets to write off capital investments faster than they're actually used.
Staff members of the House and Senate tax-writing committees are busy putting together legislative drafts that may determine the fate of real estate's most prized tax benefits — first and second home-mortgage interest deductions, property tax write-offs, capital gains exclusions and others.
"Although the industry frequently points to its low operating costs as evidence of its market competitiveness, this economic structure is an artifact of large subsidies to capital, historical write-offs of capital, and ongoing subsidies to operating costs," Mr. Koplow said.
"The capital write-off may also cause distortions in the functioning of the stock market," he noted.
Jack Faris, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents 600,000 privately owned businesses, said the federation also wanted to see the capital write-off limits raised.
Since Mr. Faris was interviewed, the organization's chief lobbyist has called for raising the capital write-off expensing limit to $100,000 -- a proposal that indicates growing ambitions for business tax cuts.
