Senator Perdue participated in a panel discussion on corporate tax reform with Business Roundtable CEO, Joshua Bolten, and the Heritage Foundation’s tax expert, Adam Michel.
 
He was asked to speak on this panel because he is the only Fortune 500 CEO in Congress. During the discussion, Senator Perdue cites many examples of how lowering our corporate tax rate and cleaning up the tax code will help business compete and invest in American workers. He doesn’t talk in typical in the typical “tax reform talking points.”

Growing The Economy: “The reason you want tax reform is to grow the economy. It’s how you can ultimately solve the debt crisis longer term. Secondly, we have the lowest workforce participation rate in the last 30 years, and after 8 years of our slowest economic growth in history, we need to jumpstart the economy. There are several ways you do that. One is to push back on regulations, then you need to adjust your tax structure so you are more competitive with the rest of the world.”
 
Protecting American Workers: “The corporate tax rate and the lack of competitiveness is a penalty on the American worker…We have one of the best workforces in the world. I can speak to that because I’ve lived in Asia and Europe. Our workforce is very unique—it’s innovative, it’s self-starting, and just gets the job done—but we’ve got to take the burden off our workers. The tax burden is one of the things holding us back.”
 
Return On Investment: “In my experience as a CEO, the tax on repatriated funds kept me from investing where I wanted to invest, and that was here in the United States, in equipment, training, and helping people change from one job to another. That’s a big need in the United States as we go from an industrial age to an information age. There’s been a great loss in corporate America over the last 30 years because of profits on the sidelines.”
 
Leveling The Playing Field: “Of the two businesses I led here in the United States, one has an effective tax rate of 37% today and the other has a rate of 17%. That’s picking winners and losers, and it’s an amalgamation of 100 years of incentives. These aren’t loopholes. These are things that were voted on by Congress to incentivize businesses and individuals to invest in certain ways to get certain results.”
 
Real World Urgency: “The sense of urgency in Washington is not the same sense of urgency I lived with for 40 years in the real world. You have to get things done as fast—or faster—than your competitors. I had to compete with a little company called Nike, and another little company called Walmart. In business, you don’t think about getting things done theoretically. It is something you just do, like breathing. This sense of urgency is missing in Washington.”
 
Acting This Year: “If we don’t get tax done this year, we run the risk of disappointing the expectation that’s already built into the bond market and the stock market, and that is that something’s going to happen this year, so that it will have some impact on the second half of next year.”

Watch the video here