Finance Hearing Statement: “Navigating Business Tax Reform”

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Tom Carper, who was a member of the bipartisan panel convened by the Finance Committee last year that focused on America’s business income tax system, released the following statement for the committee’s hearing, “Navigating Business Tax Reform.”

“In recent months, we’ve seen the encouraging numbers that signify our economy is making a strong emergence from the recession that gripped our country seven years ago. Over the past six years, the private sector has added 14.4 million jobs, and according to the Labor Department, over the past 57 weeks, Americans have filed for unemployment insurance at the lowest levels since 1973. But communities across the country are still struggling to recover from the economic crisis, and Congress has a lot of work to do to ensure that our country’s ongoing economic recovery reaches the lives of hardworking Americans and their families. Reforming our nation’s business tax system is a critical part of that effort.

“The United States needs a tax code that will help our country out-innovate and out-compete every nation in the increasingly global economy – and that’s not the tax system we have right now. Our corporate tax codes are riddled with inefficient tax expenditures and loopholes that provide too much opportunity for bad actors to game the system and avoid paying taxes. At the same time, our business tax rates are too high compared to our international competitors. We have faced a wave of inversions, prompting the Treasury Department to act quickly to stem the tide and keep business here in America.

“I’ve long said that one of the major roles of government is to foster a nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. Enacting business tax reform is a great opportunity to incentivize more companies to do business and create jobs in the United States, because our markets are robust, access to capital and labor is plentiful, and our corporate governance model is transparent and effective. But enacting comprehensive business tax reform is hard, so a sensible first step is to, at the very least, reform our international tax rules to stop inversions and reverse the offshoring of jobs and business income. It’s my hope that this hearing will help our conversations on bipartisan comprehensive business tax reform continue to gain steam, make progress and move forward.”