we re talking about tax reform and talking about health care and other issues as well that are important to the american people, when i walk outside of the room, and there are dozens of cameras waiting for us, all they want to talk about is comey. and they want to talk about president trump. and there is a strong desire amongst people who have pledged to resist on, pose, obstruct entirely, they say you can t work the president because if you work with him at all you ll normalize his presidency. even though i ll spend my day with my colleagues working on zpairm the ways and means committee is having a hearing and that process is moving, that s a reality. we can t ignore it as if it is not happening. you and i are having a discussion on this other topic. while you and i are talking on args literally the ways and means committee is on the ways of moving a tax reform process that will hopefully move our economy and protect the american worker and increase gdp. that s a good discussion to
was really shrewd. let me explain a couple of reasons why. he called the tax simplification, identifying and reducing taxes for consumers. it s going to allow the tax treasury in this tax reform process, which will take far longer than the initial august timeline, it will allow them to get to work and scrub some of those tax regulations put into effect in 2016 and see how, as they reform the tax code, what are those that are the most cumbersome. for example, as he talked about corporate taxes. some corporations are overseas because of tax breaks. let s bring the money back in to the united states. that s one. number two, when you think about the liquidation of banks or asking the financial stability oversight council to look at what are systemically risky institutions, what s really important about this is the financial stability oversight council is a representation of
thorny issue. and that really plays in here. as you pointed out, the tax rate on corporations is very high, but the effective tax rates, the rate they pay actually pay ends up being very low. and this is a really, really big problem. and, yeah, there s a ton of money, hundreds of billions of dollars sitting offshore. and corporations keep it there often in the hopes there ll be some kind of tax holiday, a moment that congress allows them to bring it back at a lower rate. there s a lot of signs that s a bad policy for a lot of reasons. you re changing the rules. and the question is whether congress can start on some sort of bigger tax reform process that will help tackle this issue. i think if you asked me three months ago and there was a fair amount of desire to do that on capitol hill, people have turned to other issues, the deficit is coming down, and tackling really, really tough stuff like tax reform, you hear about it less is the way i would put it.
of a lot of tax expenditures and loopholes. take the savings to use it to the lower the rate. we belief we could lower a rate to 28% f you find savings you might be able to go lower. right now in the tax code code there is preference for manufacturing because many people believe it has positive spillover effects the same way research and development does. in our tax reform we keep the rate a little lower at 25% but we re bringing all corporate tax rates lower. in terms of construction we absolutely want to help our housing industry out. one way we can do it that is to, you know, help solve some regulatory unearned that may keep people from refinancing and getting their first mortgage and pass legislation that would make it easier for everybody who could refinance to refinance. those are many so things we could do to help the construction industry but in terms of the corporate tax code we would very much like to see a tax reform process where we do make our tax rates more competitive wi
deductions, and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered rates generally, while broadening the base. so if that was true then, senator, why can t he just do tax deductions? republicans say they would agree to that, and not focus so much on raising the top rates? david, we have set a target of cutting $4 trillion out of the deficit over the next 10 years. $4 trillion. to reach that, the president said he needs $1.6 trillion in revenues, which is the same percentage of revenue as the simpson-bowles commission. in fact, it s a little lower. you can t reach 1.6 unless you put the upper rate for the highest income americans on the table. and include tax reform. the reason why the republicans have stuck with $800 billion is it really is their goal in this. but it doesn t reach the $4 trillion deficit reduction. congressman, what do you say about that? let me tell you what the republican goal is, is to solve the problem, economic problem. and look, the numbers don t li