Steve Largent: “Mr. Speaker, this has been helpful, because it seems that we all agree that Americans deserve a fair and simple Tax Code…”

“Mr. Speaker, this has been helpful, because it seems that we all agree that Americans deserve a fair and simple Tax Code that takes only the amount of their money that is needed to run a limited and efficient government. We all seem to agree also that our current Tax Code does not meet this test, because it not only takes too much of our money, it controls a large part of our lives. Not only does it take over 5 billion hours of our time every year and billions of dollars of our money, it controls many of the decisions in our personal lives about our savings, about our investment, about our retirement. Even how we die is decided by the Tax Code. In our businesses, when we decide whether to hire workers or contract that work out, or to buy or lease something, or to merge or to grow a business, just about everything we do in this country in some way is related to trying to manipulate a Tax Code that is so complex that even the experts cannot understand it. The only question today, the only question is, do we have the courage to set a deadline to change it; do we have the courage to give the American people a commitment, rather than 5 more years of talk?”