on rhetoric.

Personally, I'd like to see us just punt on all of the individual tax code stuff (it feels like a whole lot of change for no real difference in the end) and address our uncompetitive nominal corporate rates. Reduce corporate rates to something between 20 & 25% (I don't think it needs to go quite all the way to 20%) and run some reasonable dynamic analysis on the change, and I'd bet the cost is pretty minimal if anything. If Microsoft is able to generate $20 billion in foreign pre-tax earnings and a net operating LOSS for its US entity(s), the "cost" of a corporate tax cut for Microsoft is ZERO and could actually provide some upside if we remove/lessen the HUGE incentive for companies like Microsoft (or really, any companies with a large patent portfolio... i.e. all of tech, pharma, etc) to shift much of their profits to lower tax jurisdictions. At a 35% rate, there's a huge incentive to do just that. At 20-25%, there's not nearly as much of an incentive as you're shifting profits out of the US to similarly taxed jurisdictions.