Skip to footer

4 ways Congress can help American businesses

The US unemployment hovers around 8.2 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is struggling to remain above 12,000. The message is clear: This recovery from the Great Recession is still fragile. Legislators should focus their attention on these four straightforward policy changes to help American commerce.

2. Simplify the tax code

While the United States has the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all developed countries, many companies escape taxes. The reason? The code has morphed into an infinitely complex tool of social engineering. It’s riddled with loopholes and exemptions. It is not surprising that special interests regularly exploit its complexities to carve out favors. Who can forget when it emerged in early March that General Electric completely avoided federal taxes in 2010?

The tax code’s complexity is a major drag on the American economy. Individuals and businesses spend enormous sums just to comply. That’s money that could be going toward productive investments.

Research from the Laffer Center finds that for every dollar collected by the IRS, taxpayers pay another 30 cents for compliance, with total tax compliance expenses sucking $431 billion from the American economy annually.

The quickest way to simplify the tax code would be to install a flat tax – one rate for personal income, another for businesses. Doing so would cut down on waste and favoritism. Hong Kong has had a 15 percent flat income tax since 1947, and it’s one of the most prosperous cities in the world. There is a lesson to be learned here.

2 of 4
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.