Under President Obama, Americans have now endured six years of tax increases, endless regulation, vast new federal programs and $8 trillion in added debt. The president told us this “stimulus” would jump-start the economy. Instead, we got an anemic economy growing at barely 2% a year. Some call this “the new normal”—but it isn’t something we can accept if we are going to restore the opportunity for every American to rise and achieve earned success.

Restoring the right to rise in America requires accelerating growth, and that can’t be done without a complete overhaul of the U.S. tax code.

Today, the tax code is a labyrinth littered with thousands of special-interest giveaways, subsidies and other breaks written to favor Washington insiders. …show more content…
It penalizes people for moving up the economic ladder. It gives tax deductions for borrowing costs, thereby encouraging companies to take on too much debt and raising concerns about financial fragility, rather than having them focus on real investment and hiring.

ENLARGE
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR RF
Low growth, crony capitalism and easy debt—that’s President Obama’s economic agenda in a nutshell, and the tax code has helped make it possible. It’s past time for a change.

On Wednesday I am unveiling the plan that, as president, I will submit to Congress and sign into law as the Reform and Growth Act of 2017. My plan centers on accomplishing three major goals:

First, I want to lower taxes and make the tax code simple, fair and clear. It should be easy to understand and make it easy for people to fill out their own tax forms.

We will cut individual rates from seven brackets to three: 28%, 25% and 10%. At 28%, the highest tax bracket would return to where it was when President Ronald Reagan signed into law his monumental and successful 1986 tax …show more content…
businesses, which fosters the insidious tactic called corporate “inversions.” This is when small overseas companies buy big U.S. companies so that both can enjoy the lowest tax rate possible, costing American jobs and revenue. And we will assess a one-time tax of 8.75%, payable over 10 years, on the more than $2 trillion in corporate profits sitting overseas.

We will also allow businesses to fully and immediately deduct new capital investments—a critical step to increase worker productivity and wages. To pay for this, we will eliminate most corporate tax deductions—which is where favor-seeking and lobbying are most common—and remove the deduction for borrowing costs. That deduction encourages business models dependent on heavy debt.

When we accomplish these big reforms, the result will be a much simpler, leaner and fairer tax code.

I know that enacting these policies works because I’ve done it before. As governor of Florida, I cut taxes every single year—returning a total of $19 billion to Floridians. The state’s economy took off, growing at an average rate of 4.4%. Households saw bigger paychecks as median incomes rose by an average of $1,300. Florida’s pro-growth climate created 1.3 million new jobs. And we did it all while balancing the budget eight years in a row and increasing the state’s rainy-day fund by $8