You buy a $5,000 piece of equipment for the business in January. It's fully paid for, fully in use, doing its job from day one. So it's a little maddening to find out the tax code, by default, won't let you deduct the full cost this year — it wants you to spread that deduction out over the equipment's useful life, a little bit this year, a little more next year, stretched out for years to come. The Section 179 deduction is the IRS's exception to that rule, and it's one of the