GOP’s Portman Still Working for Tax Reform

Republican Sen. Rob Portman, a member of the supercommittee on budget deficit reduction, plans to release a corporate tax reform plan early next year.

The Ohio lawmaker will base his plan on a structure that the bipartisan supercommittee negotiated before its talks collapsed last week, Politico reports.

The plan would cut the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, mostly by reducing inefficiencies, preferences, and exemptions, Portman said Monday during a talk at the American Enterprise Institute. The proposal also would tax U.S. companies only on profits they have earned domestically, allowing them to bring “hundreds of billions of dollars back to these shores” that they have earned overseas, he said.

Portman called his plan “pro-growth, deficit neutral.” It’s almost identical to the tax reform program considered by the supercommittee, which the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation judged as deficit neutral.

Portman hopes to find Democratic co-sponsors for his plan, including fellow supercommittee member and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.

In 2012, “there is a good possibility for reform,” Portman said. “I’m disappointed what happened with the supercommittee, but more determined than ever to address these issues.”

Portman, who was White House budget director under President George W. Bush, criticized Democrats for insisting that spending cuts be matched one-to-one with tax increases.

“This misses the big picture. Raising tax rates to chase soaring spending would upset a far more fundamental balance in this country — the balance between the federal government and a free and vibrant private economy,” he said. “A massive tax increase would deal a blow to the fragile U.S. economy, leading to less growth, diminished wages and fewer new jobs.