From The Daily Caller:
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, founded by Art Laffer, Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore, is taking the lead to restore booming growth. Moore testified before Ways and Means as to the immediate opportunity to generate booming growth by removing regulatory barriers to vastly increased energy production:
“We estimate that the value of oil and gas under federal lands that can be recovered with existing technologies like horizontal drilling and fracking is at today’s prices roughly $50 trillion. This is arguably the greatest treasure chest in world history. Not only would we massively stimulate the economy by drilling on non-environmentally sensitive federal lands…over the next 20 years the government would raise $3 trillion in revenues for Uncle Sam – at zero cost to taxpayers.”
For the longer term, the Committee proposes permanently reducing the federal corporate/business tax rate from 35 to 15 percent. This would reverse capital flight and major corporations fleeing the U.S. through corporate “inversions” with foreign companies – mergers with the surviving company gone from America.
Pfizer was the 10th largest American company when it merged overseas to become an Irish company. As Moore testified regarding corporate tax rates, “The current U.S. rate of 35 percent (federal) is the highest of all the nations we compete with. The rest of the world is closer to 25 percent [down from 40 percent in 1990] with some nations like Ireland as low as 12.5 percent. Let’s go from one of the highest rates in the world to one of the lowest and jobs and capital flows will reverse course and rush back to the United States.”
President Obama’s own tax reform commission, headed by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, concluded that, “The high statutory corporate tax rate reduces the return to investments and therefore discourages saving and investment … . The tax acts to reduce the productivity of American businesses and American workers, increase the likelihood and cost of financial distress, and drain resources away from more valuable uses.” Moore adds, “A cut in the corporate tax rate would have large effects on GDP, but minimal effects on federal revenue over the long run.” Nothing else has this kind of bang for the buck, he writes.
For the longer term, the Committee proposes a flat tax, with a broad base and rates as low as possible, like the 15 percent flat rate business tax proposed by Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. That business tax would generate so much revenue that Cruz and Paul propose to eliminate as well the corporate income tax, the Social Security payroll tax, the death tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax, and all the Obamacare taxes.