What did the government do to cause that?

More than that. You can depreciate the building (but not the land) to offset tax on the income but the bill eventually comes due because by depreciating it you’re lowering your cost basis. For example you buy a property for $150k. If you depreciate it long enough it’s worth $0. If you then sell it for $350k you have to pay tax on all $350k, not just the $200k gain in value.

However If you intend to use the proceeds from that sale to buy another investment property or properties you can do a 1031 exchange to roll your adjusted basis into the new property. Thus even when you sell it you don’t have to pay the tax.

As you might, expect tax laws are written to benefit constituencies that politicians value highly. Wealthy donors are among those constituencies.

Please explain. My intuition suggests the opposite. The company’s office is in San Jose. Presumably they have to pay high local market wages to retain workers. If they could hire remote workers willing to accept Peoria lL market wages they could conceivably get the same value of labor at lower cost.

20 years ago companies didn’t demand local workers to staff their call centers to avoid competing with the entire world. They did the opposite, contracting out to the lowest bidders overseas and firing staff in the global north.