Chris Chocola: “Mr. Speaker, I came to Congress from the business world; and I would like to share briefly a real life experience, a…”

“Mr. Speaker, I came to Congress from the business world; and I would like to share briefly a real life experience, a real life story on the implications of our Tax Code. The smartest person I ever met in my business career was a man named Gerry Shivers. Gerry Shivers is an accountant. He works for a big accounting firm in New York, and every time our business ever even thought about entering into a transaction of any kind, we would have to call Gerry Shivers up on the phone and ask him, how do we comply with the more than 17,000 pages in our Internal Revenue Code. Every time we called him, it cost us thousands and thousands of dollars. Instead of paying those thousands of dollars to Gerry Shivers, we could have been investing in new equipment, we could have been investing in research and development, we could have been investing in our markets, and we could have been creating jobs. So, Mr. Speaker, it is time that we give Gerry Shivers a new job. It is time that this very intelligent man has a more productive life in our economy. It is time to simplify the Tax Code that no one truly can understand and comprehend, and it is time to put the billions and billions of dollars we spend every year on these costs to building our economy and creating jobs.”