Issue Position: Taxes

Issue Position

Taxes are a tremendous drag on the private sector economy.

Taxes punish productive citizens, while politicians use the tax code to reward special interest groups and engage in social engineering through the skillful use of tax breaks, deductions and "loopholes".

It is no wonder that our economy continues to struggle when employers and investors must carry such a heavy tax burden. In the last few years, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly succumbed for Obama's demands for just one more tax increase.
This must stop.

Lee Bright is a strong advocate for a complete overhaul of the tax code. Our current tax code is out of date, confusing and burdensome to comply with. For many small businesses, just completing and filing a return is a serious drain on their resources, while many big businesses have used their lobbyists to cozy up to Congress and pay no taxes at all.

Lee will push for pro-free enterprise reforms to the tax structure.

Lee will start by pushing to rollback income tax rates overall after the disastrous capitulation to the Obama administration over the Bush-era tax cuts.

This should be followed by lowering the corporate income tax rate.

The U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world, especially if you include the taxes levied by many state governments. This high tax burden reduces competitiveness and hurts businesses that should be creating innovative products and technologies. More importantly, by hurting employers we are keeping unemployment high.

Next, Lee wants to stop taxing small businesses as individuals. Because small businesses usually pay taxes through their owners' individual tax returns, this subjects them to the higher personal tax rates. Instead, they should pay tax at the entity level so that Congress can lower their rate to make it equal to the reduced corporate income tax rate.

The tax needs to be simple. That's why Lee wants to eliminate the alternative minimum tax (AMT). The AMT is a complicated secondary income tax system originally designed to bump up the taxes of the rich by stripping away certain deductions. Because Congress failed to index its income threshold to inflation, the AMT now ensnares millions of middle-income families. Failure to act now will essentially mean a backdoor tax hike for millions of Americans.

Our misguided tax policy continues to discourage savings and investment. One way in particular is by sending in the tax collectors when someone dies to take a cut of the estate. This tax skews and distorts investments, as taxpayers attempt to structure their estates to keep their hard-earned and already taxed at least once money out of the hands of the government when they die. Lee will work to abolish the death tax once and for all.

Lee supports a fairer, flatter and simpler tax structure to boost economic growth, like the Fair Tax and the Flat Tax. He opposes special carve-outs that bail out some businesses at the expense of others.

Lee believes that American economy can thrive if the tax code is reformed and the overall tax burden reduced.

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