[BenchRouter]

> It is seriously gross that a tax reform bill that is by basically all accounts enormously, even proudly regressive is being sold to tech nerds with a marginal improvement in stock options accounting.

As with all things, worth remembering who's writing this: Fred Wilson is an extremely wealthy venture capitalist. He stands to benefit a great deal from provisions like the repeal of the estate tax.

[tptacek]

Much more directly than that, from protection of special treatment of carried interest.

[jgalt212]

The Citizen's United Ruling and the carried interest loophole have done more to subvert democracy than anything else I can think of.

[skywhopper]

Well, to be fair, _he_ won't benefit from the repeal of the estate tax. But his heirs will benefit from all the free unrealized capital gains they get to inherit and owe no taxes on.

[jalonso510]

I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s just looking out for his self interest here. If you read his post, he’s not advocating for or against the tax bill, just talking about this one particular term that affects startups.

[karthikb]

The post explicitly says:

"This means that the Senate has now made the tax reform bill a win for those who work in startups instead of a loss."

Not the provision about options - "the bill."

So he's clearly saying that the bill as a whole is better for startup employees than the current system. GP point is that the bill may now be better from one single perspective but on the whole is still much worse than what we have today due to other issues.

[pcl]

It’s a follow-up to a post from the other day that was strongly against the bill.

EDIT: here’s the older story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15686442