> It's insane that corporations failing at ventures is so incentivised that they'll fail on purpose, and we shouldn't be offering tax breaks for behavior that serves no public good
I believe the argument is that businesses would take less risks without the security provided by those tax write-offs. Presumably the increased tax revenue from businesses taking risks and having success outweighs the tax losses from risks taken, failed, then written off.
Revenue implication makes sense as a priority for a business, it should be considerably less of a priority for a government. The degree to which the tax code subsidizes whatever a business cares to try regardless of the outcome is already clearly more than adequate to give most industries massive lobbying budgets, so I don't think the economy is going to break if we stop doing it. Businesses are already significantly insulated against risks of various kinds, including in many cases criminal liability for risking people's lives. We don't need to be creating perverse incentives in the hopes of making them less risk-averse
I believe the argument is that businesses would take less risks without the security provided by those tax write-offs. Presumably the increased tax revenue from businesses taking risks and having success outweighs the tax losses from risks taken, failed, then written off.