At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this will be a rebranded Chinese phone, if it happens at all. The photo on their website [1] is a quick and sloppy Photoshop job (note identical lenses and lack of flash), and the specs and pricing are totally implausible for a US-made phone. Compare that to the 2000$ Purism charges for their comically under-powered Liberty phone [2] that is mostly US-made.

1. https://trumpmobile.com/t1-phone 2. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

It's legalized graft, not a subsidy. The tens of billions flowing into SLS do not bolster productive capability in the civilian or military aviation sector, they tie up engineers in a nonsensical, dead-end project, and totally mess up incentives on top of that.

I think you are misusing Berkson's Paradox here. It applies when you sample two extremes, i.e. when you look at the richest 0.1% and the most moral 0.1% and notice that the two appear mutually exclusive, even though they might actually be uncorrelated in the general population. When you look only at the richest 0.1% and notice their lack of morals compared to the general population, that is a legit correlation.

Yeah, seems I was wrong about that. Apparently most IFRS countries allow expensing R&D for tax purposes, regardless of accounting. Many even have an R&D superdeduction nowadays.

Sorry for the noise :(

Elsewhere in the world (under IFRS accounting rules) capitalization of R&D costs has been a firm requirement for a while. The US has been somewhat unique in allowing them to be expensed instead, until recently.