Lankford: “…our tax code is full of loopholes, full of confusion, it’s complicated.”
Lankford also joined MSNBC Morning Joe today to discuss the
Transcript:
Mr. President, our economy is stuck. We've had between 1.4 percent and 1.9 percent growth over the last ten years. Compare that to the ten-year cycles before that over and over again all the way back to the Great Depression. Every year in a ten-year block, every group of that was three percent or more growth. We've had half the growth in our economy in the last ten years then we've had in any ten-year time period going all the way back to the Great Depression. We've got to be able to deal with that. I hear people over and over again say the regulations are choking out our business. It's driving up the cost of products for consumers. But, our tax code is full of loopholes, full of confusion, it's complicated. Deductions, when I go through to fill out my individual taxes, seem like there are deductions for everybody else but me. And people want to get that fixed. And quite frankly, no one likes paying taxes and everyone wants to make sure whatever taxes they pay are spent efficiently and are as low as possible. I can't tell them that, right now, because their spending is not on track and it's not efficient. And, I can also not tell them it's as low as possible. We need to fix that.
The tax reform that we have in discussion in the
Then we'd take out the individual mandate of Obamacare. We've already had folks that have said, what does Obamacare have to do with tax policy? Well, let me it will you very simply. The individual mandate is a tax. That's what the Supreme Court labeled it as. That's what individuals understand it to be. If you don't buy the type of insurance that
What does this mean for jobs? Well, if small businesses have a better tax code in their pass-through, they are able to hire additional people. That's more jobs. Based on where our economy is currently growing, right now, the unemployment rate has continued to drop over the last several years. At the spot they're at right now, that means there is more competition. There's more hiring, more people have to compete for those jobs. That means employers have to pay a little bit more money to get the people to be able to do it. That raises wages for people all around the country and have additional people that are not working now actually back to working. More people working are actually paying taxes. And it pays for itself. Getting a growing economy going is essential to us. And the way that you do that is you take care of the tax code for small businesses and you take care of the tax code for corporate businesses. I've had folks that have said to me if you drop the corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, what does that really do? Well, it allows the big companies as well as the small companies to hire more people, to engage in more investment, to build more factories, to buy more machinery.
That's what it allows them to be able to do, to grow their business. But on an international stage, right now, our tax code is 35 percent. If our tax code is at 35 percent, compare that to other countries that are somewhere around 22, 23, 24 percent, some of them less than that. Let me make it this simple. If you're going online to buy a shirt and you can see that shirt for
They're going to continue to move where they pay less, exactly like every American does with their online shopping. That's fixable. In the middle of all this, we've got to deal with debt and deficit. We can't ignore that reality. And one of the things that I'm still going through in the proposal that we're working through right now are things that are unrealistic in the proposal. Because at the end of the day, we have to get the economy growing again, but we've got to deal with half a trillion dollars in overspending from this government right now. We can do both. We've got to be able to do both. I am encouraging this body to take seriously a proposal to be able to deal with how we get our economy going again. Let's figure out how to get it done and then let's actually solve this for the American people.
Read this original document at: https://www.lankford.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senator-lankford-joins-colleagues-on-senate-floor-to-tout-benefits-of-tax-reform-
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