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I personally - if I were designing the tax code - would have a tax code in which Mitt Romney paid more than 13 percent, given what I know about the kind of investments he made money from.
We have a tax code that allows groups to use their political operations within the tax code, under the guise of a charity, to use undisclosed millions of dollars to do political campaigns.
The bottom line is we need a tax code that is more simpler, that is more fairer, that gets rid of the special carve-outs, the special lobbyist loopholes. That's the direction we need to go.
Like or loathe Donald J. Trump, you have to give him this: He's done more to shine a spotlight on the loopholes and fundamental unfairness of the tax code than any other American president.
The federal government needs to get off the backs of small businesses and let the private sector grow and create jobs instead of harnessing it with onerous regulations and a repressive tax code.
The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more time we have to take off work to comply with it.
Unlike the American inventions and achievements that have expanded horizons of possibility, our nation's tax code has become an excessive burden that strangles individual opportunity and economic freedom.
Simplifying the tax code and reducing administrative burdens will save small businesses money and time and let owners and employees focus less on paperwork and more on how to operate in this tough economy.
Rather than passing a thousand pages of tax reform legislation and restarting the tax code manipulation process, we should change the paradigm. It is time to eliminate the IRS and repeal the 16th Amendment.
Reagan was president and had Democrats control the House and Senate, and they reformed the tax code. Clinton was president, and he had Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole; they reformed welfare and balanced the budget.
'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.
The Clinton tax increase - which was an increase in taxes primarily on upper-income people - not only made the tax code more nearly progressive, it preceded one of the most productive economic periods in American life.
The tax code is becoming steadily more progressive, which shouldn't surprise anyone who understands power politics. It's always easier to force sacrifice on an unpopular minority than it is to ask the majority to pony up.
America's tax code is beyond repair. Tinkering with it won't work. The only hope is a bold tax-reform plan that will liberate our nation from the slow-growth status quo and jump-start a new era of American prosperity and growth.
The tax code is very inefficient. Both the personal tax code and the corporate tax code. By closing loopholes and lowering rates, you could increase the efficiency of the tax code and create more incentives for people to invest.
When Mitt Romney says he wants to reform the tax code, hold on to your wallets. We know Mitt Romney never met a tax haven he didn't like. But his new favorite tax haven is actually not the Cayman Islands - its Paul Ryan's budget.
In fact, the best thing we could do on taxes for all Americans is to simplify the individual tax code. This will be a tough job, but members of both parties have expressed an interest in doing this, and I am prepared to join them.
The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.
Our broken tax code is one of the main reasons the United States lags behind when it comes to economic growth, job creation, and competitiveness. Without pro-growth tax reform, our workers and our businesses will continue to suffer.
We shouldn't be debating whether to deal with the current code by allowing it to be extended or not. We should have a president who shows leadership and comes to Congress and says: 'You know what? We need to reform this whole tax code.'
Moreover, from reforming the tax code to our immigration system, to commonsense legal reform, President Bush put America on notice that he will continue fighting to make the country, and the world, a better place for future generations.
But what is striking about this, in a town that often talks about tax cuts, we could quite easily, Republicans and Democrats working together, do something that everybody in America desires, and that is a simplification of our Tax Code.
Simplification of the tax code would not only unlock dormant economic potential, but, in the process, it would blunt the preferred weapon of social engineers, who reward favored industries, punish success and distort economic incentives.
As chairman of the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, I continue to be inspired by President Reagan's 1985 national address to the American people as he challenged them to join him in boldly reforming the broken, complex tax code.
A four percent growth strategy means you fix a convoluted tax code. You get in and you change every aspect of regulations that are job killers. You get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something that doesn't suppress wages and kill jobs.
Our best days are in front of us. We can reform those entitlements, we can change that corporate tax code and lower it. We can put America back on track on a growth level and a growth rate that we've never seen in the history of this country.
Why would we want to keep a tax cut that's failed? Why would we not want to go back to the Clinton tax code? And why would we not want to help every family more with a health-care plan like mine? Let's help average people. Let's be Democrats.
We all want a simpler code, but tax reform is about much more. It is about ensuring that everyone pays their fair share. The tax code is also used to promote behavior that we as a nation support, such as home ownership or charitable contributions.
It is Trump who plays with the tax code to pay no taxes; it is Trump whose Trump-brand products are made overseas by cheap labor; it is Trump who hires undocumented workers from Poland to work on his projects, then refuses to pay them minimum wages.
There are three legs of the stool; spending, entitlements and making the tax code fair and equitable. That's the three legs of the stool. If we do all of those in a responsible, bipartisan way, I think the American people would all be very, very happy.
What we need to do is replace the entire tax code. I do not think it makes sense to say, 'Let's just grab money from, quote, the wealthy'... The issue is the tax code's rotten and we should start truly over with a simple code that is fair and transparent.
It is no secret that our tax code is drastically outdated and burdensome to all Americans. Fortunately, more and more people are aware daily of the inequities that arise from things such as the estate tax, and it has come to the forefront of Congress' agenda.
I know we disagree with Mr. Trump on this area. I'm hopeful that we can convince him that making our tax code more pro-growth will make America stronger, but to do that, it's not enough to simply buy American: we need to sell American all throughout the world.
Obama's view of the tax code is inherently political: Whom can we hit next? Energy companies, jet owners, bankers? Instead, the question should be how to promote economic efficiency by raising revenue without trying to manipulate corporate or personal behavior.
Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.
I believe we need a balanced, bipartisan approach to debt reduction that includes a combination of spending cuts, investments in economic growth, and simplification of the tax code that closes corporate loopholes that incentivize companies to ship jobs overseas.
When I look at Washington today, we need to bring us together. We need to solve problems, we need to rebuild our military so we can stand up to radical Islam, we need to get our economy growing much faster by throwing out the corrupt tax code and lowering the rates.
The truth is, Hillary Clinton's ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you've got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code.
The rationale for eliminating the alternative minimum tax is that such a backup system should not be necessary if the tax code is fundamentally fair and eliminates all the loopholes that made it possible for high-income taxpayers to escape taxation in the first place.
I... now see a rare opportunity to push across the goal line much of the unfinished business of America: investing in our infrastructure and workers, universal healthcare, comprehensive immigration reform and scrubbing a tax code that's out of shape and behind the times.
I was involved in the 'reformicon' effort in 2013-2014, which was explicitly, 'We can't just Xerox Reagan.' In the spirit of Reagan, actually, we could rethink things - maybe we need to think more about job-training programs, earned income tax credit, adjust the tax code.
What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he's gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father's position to benefit his supposed 'blind trust?'
President Obama has ignored or dismissed proposals that would address our anti-competitive tax code and unsustainable trajectory of federal debt - including his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - and submitted no plan for entitlement reform.
By granting 4 million undocumented immigrants social security numbers that can potentially be misused through loopholes in our tax code and voting laws, President Obama is poisoning the waters of public perception and reinforcing negative stereotypes of Latinos and all immigrants.
The Constitution authorizes Congress to tax Americans to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. But in Washington, the professional political class has hijacked that authority to rig up a tax code that provides for the well-being of Washington, not the country.
Tax reform is the legislative challenge of a generation for America. It hasn't been accomplished since 1986, when President Reagan and Congress delivered the most sweeping overhaul of our nation's tax code in American history. 2017 is the year to change that and make history of our own.
If we had a flat tax code rather than a 70,000-page document full of cronyism and favors, bureaucrats and elected officials wouldn't have the power to do you any favors. That's what we need. You would have to compete on your own on a level playing field, but that's not what the government permits now.
According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.
I want to make sure that we have a tax code that makes sure that everyone benefits, including those in poverty and those middle-income wage earners and those that have already lived the American dream as well as making sure that everyone can receive the benefits of a robust economy and not just the select few.
I think that taxes would be fair if we first get rid of the tax code. This is the ultimate solution, not to just say we're going to trim around the edges, not to say that we will try to simplify a little of this and a little of that. The problem is, replace the tax code, so we can establish tax fairness for everybody.