Jon Kyl: “it seems to me the amendment of the Senator from North Dakota does both too little and too much. A lot of thought went…”

“it seems to me the amendment of the Senator from North Dakota does both too little and too much. A lot of thought went into crafting the bill before the Senate by staff and members on the Finance Committee. It is hard to get this exactly right. We have done that. This is very complicated. What I mean by doing too little and too much is this: The amendment only affects about 7 percent of the products according to the Commerce Department; 7 percent of the goods and services these multinational corporations produce are imported back into the United States. That is the only part of the new deferral rule that would be affected. In that sense, it probably does not do much to accomplish the purposes of the authors of the amendment. But it does too much in the sense that anything that impedes the competitive advantage of the U.S. corporations and the quality of their products is going to hurt their ability to do business. What we have tried to do with the deferral rules is to even the balance between the European corporations, for example, and the American corporations, so our companies are not taxed more than their competitors. This would, to the extent it changes these deferral rules, impose a higher tax on American businesses than their European counterparts are required to pay. In that sense, it changes this competitive balance. It is exactly what we are trying to get away from.”