On the recordNovember 18, 2011
The folks that are buying food in McDonald's are going to pay the tax if we try to get it from McDonald's. So we know corporations don't pay taxes; they are aggregators of taxes that are paid by individuals, by consumers on the last stop. And so they're efficient aggregators of those taxes. They are actually the tax collectors on behalf of the Federal Government. The corporations that collect taxes don't pay them; they transfer it through them by the way they charge us for the $152 billion a year that it costs to comply with the Federal Tax Code. And so I find it an act of frustration to seek to try to collect taxes from corporations when what I'm really doing is adding to the administrative costs for corporations so they add the taxes and the administrative costs on to the cost of the goods that have to be competitive in this marketplace, and that makes it that individuals pay taxes. But it also means that jobs go overseas because corporations that are taxed in America are at a disadvantage to the corporations that are overseas who aren't very good aggregators of America's tax dollars, and so they have to raise the taxes here more. That's kind of the vision that I see that I would lay out here for the gentleman from Georgia. And we've got a long ways to go before America embraces the concept that I think will solve this problem.
