Yeah,

and so I think that's right, and I think that's fair, particularly about the shifting the conversation, right? Because this is one of the good policy ideas that fell to the fundamentalists for a really, really long time. And I think one of the other ones that is interesting, too, to talk about and think about, unburdened by the fundamentalist kind of narrative around what it is, is on the corporate tax rate. There's some interesting stuff from the new proposal, Oren, that you talk about when it comes to that. So why does that matter? And how should we look at it differently? Yeah,

you know, the corporate tax rate is something that was cut dramatically as part of the 2017 tax cut. It was one of the few parts that was actually made permanent right off the bat. And so the rate came down from 35% down to 21%. And, you know, that actually is now current law that if no one does anything, that stays at 21% going forward. The funny thing about that 21% is that no one was really asking for it. I mean, not that the US chamber was objecting, but the sort of bipartisan push on the corporate tax rate had been to bring it down to 25, which was in proportion to what it is in most other OECD countries, wanting to make sure that we weren't putting our businesses at a disadvantage. That we went further was probably unwise and, again, quite expensive. And I think Chris made a very important point. You know, no one is looking to raise taxes just for the fun of having higher taxes, right? Sometimes we have conversations with our progressive friends who seem to have the mindset, oh, well, like, we don't like corporations, so we should have higher taxes on corporations, like to vindicate dislike or something. And that is not a good way to think about tax policy, I would say. I mean, there are some things that when you're talking about cigarettes or something, you can say we're actively using a tax to discourage a behavior. Certainly no one at American Compass is saying we should have a corporate tax used to discourage corporations, right? That doesn't make any sense. But I think the way that Chris kind of framed the conversation overall is exactly right, which is that we're trying to decide where to get our tax revenue from. And I think, again, especially from sort of a fiscally conservative vantage point, you sort of have to decide, all right, how much tax revenue do we need to raise to pay for the things we do, in fact, want to do? And then what is the best way to raise that? And the decision that was made in 2017, essentially, was to particularly move that burden away from corporations. And I don't think that's justifiable. I think, you know, to some extent, that was, frankly, a politically motivated decision. Corporations are on Team Republican and Republicans are on Team Corporation. And so, you know, we're all going to help each other out. I think as Republicans have discovered over the last eight to 10 years, corporations are not on Team Republican. Surprise. Yeah, exactly. And frankly, more importantly, corporations are not on Team America, that the major multinational corporations that are the main payers of corporate taxes are not operating with American interests in mind and, you know, do not necessarily deserve the sort of kind of like trade, right? There's like a most favored taxpayer status that we've tried to award to Wall Street financiers and large corporations. And that's just not either politically or substantively appropriate. And so I think insofar as the kind of economic case for what we were trying to do to be competitive was we should really get down to 25%. And the broader sort of political case for how do we want to approach a healthy tax base says that corporations should absolutely be a part of it. I think going back up to the 25% that we should have been targeting all along is a very welcome reform. Again, at the margin, it allows you to have relatively lower taxes elsewhere. For instance, to Chris's point on investment, right? I think a really important thing to notice is if you bring the corporate tax rate up, but extend provisions that treat investment more favorably, well, then if you're a corporation that's doing a lot of investment, your tax rate actually still will be lower, right? But we're favoring the thing we actually care about, which is the productive investment, not the ineffective proxy for it, which is just the corporate profit. And so again, if we are truly being supply-siders, that is what we should be leaning into. And I think it's just really important to highlight

the point that, and in fairness to our forebears, there was a time where you could make a plausible case that an excessively high corporate tax rate was a major reason why corporations were not investing. are not investing. And that's incredibly important just to underline because some of these groups are still talking as if the corporate rate, even at its now low 21%, is the primary reason why corporations are not investing more. And that is demonstrably false. There's a whole host of other reasons, some of which we've already talked about, our trade policy, how we've structured our globalized economy, and what we reward and punish, relatively speaking, in the tax code, as Orin just mentioned. These are more important

than the rate. It's a fun litmus test I've found if you're talking to government affairs folks, right? You say, hey, we got this big tax fight coming up. Curious, which one is more important to you guys? Are you guys more concerned about the tax treatment of investment Are you more concerned about the corporate tax rate? And, and you will find there will be those who say, we're really, you know, corporate tax rate, that's our number one. And there are those who will say, no, no, no, the expensive of investment, that's our number one. It's not perfect, but it tends to be a fairly good approximation of those companies that are doing the kinds of things that we really want and need a lot more of and those that may be doing less of it. And a good witness test for members of Congress,

too. I think it's appropriate to shout out friend of the pod, Congressman Chip Roy, who has spoken about this very specific. but this isn't coming out of nowhere just from us, which Congressman Hoye has said. We should consider raising the corporate tax rate back to 25% as long as we use that revenue to give relief to the people who really need it, like smaller businesses, working people. This is a very principally conservative member of the House of Representatives saying this. This is a real conversation that responsible and thoughtful and frankly, under the circumstances, courageous leaders are talking about.

I think that's right. And I think one of the points that is made throughout this new pay-fors document is that there are a number of corporations who were given this preferential treatment on the supposition that they will provide good jobs and they will provide for America. And we've seen, particularly over the last few years, that that simply isn't true. And so the rewarding of them, that I think you get some of this, you know, the fundamentalism of it's the 1980s and the only thing that's holding these corporations back is because our tax rates are too high. It's completely unmoored from reality. Right. And so particularly when you think about, OK, if we're going to if we're going to slap on tariffs, we've got to think about the way that we reindustrialize. How can we support that? How can we give corporations who are here, who are interested in that thing, more of a leg up to do that. Yeah.

And I think this is a tax pod, not an industrial policy pod. But I do have to mention, I think, a really interesting contrast that has now emerged over the last couple of years is just the effect that the Tax Cut and Jobs Act had versus the effect that the CHIPS Act had. The CHIPS and Science Act allocated roughly $40 billion to basically just payings in companies to build leading-edge semiconductor fabs in the United States. And for that $40 billion, we now have all five of the major global players building leading-edge facilities in the U.S. Estimate is probably bringing about $400 billion of private investment. The rate of investment as a result, not just in semiconductors, but across the entire manufacturing sector, has roughly doubled over what had been its sort of steady state for a few decades. And so we did that with $40 billion. And then you have the Tax Cuts and Job Act, which cost $1.7 trillion. And again, assuming we don't extend any of it, for which the evidence is that we got nowhere near that level of investment, not return on investment, absolute investment. And so it's very funny to me, and Chris wrote a great essay for this on just sort of how do we think about what it means to be a supply sider. It's very funny to me that you have the tax cut folks just excoriating the CHIPS Act as, you know, this is big government and it will never work. And it's like, well, I don't know, that kind of seems like the investment we were all saying that we needed. Whereas like, you also had like a policy idea that you thought would produce a bunch of investment and it didn't produce the investment we needed. So like this seems like if we actually want to do public policy that promotes investment and economic growth, probably something we should bear in mind.