We have the most expensive compliance system in the world. The IRS brags that they spend 35 cents for every $100 they collect. They're very efficient collectors. And the reason is they stick the real cost on you and me.

Corporations use all sorts of complex stratagems to move their profits overseas, and thus escape the U.S. income tax.

If you get rid of all these giveaways and loopholes and deductions and credits, then you can sharply lower the rates.

When it comes to taxation, Americans are still banging out letters on a typewriter and dropping them in the mail box while everybody else has moved on to texting and Instagram.

President Trump repeatedly says that "America is the highest-taxed country in the world." This is an alternative fact. We pay less in taxes, and our government spends less, as a share of our total wealth, than our counterparts in Western Europe and East Asia. But Trump is right when it comes to corporate tax rates; the U.S. corporate income tax right is among the highest in the world.

Mortgage is one of the most popular deductions. It costs the Treasury about $103 billion a year. Now that's money we could use to treat wounded veterans or reduce the deficit or fill the border. Instead, we give it a subsidy to homeowners, and it goes mainly to the richest homeowners in America, because only one third of Americans itemize their deductions. It doesn't work. Many countries have gotten rid of the mortgage interest deduction. Almost all of them have higher homeownership rates than we do.

The higher the rate, the more interest there is in avoiding the tax. Either you move or you shift your profits overseas, as American corporations have proven very good at doing.