Whereas not since President Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986 has a significant overhaul been made to the now 2,400,000 word individual and corporate tax codes; Whereas an average of 8,900,000,000 hours and $409,000,000,000 in expenses are spent each year complying with Internal Revenue Service tax filing requirements; Whereas 72 percent of Americans feel that the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful ; Whereas the high individual rates in the current tax code take too much hard-earned money from ordinary Americans struggling to get by, reducing the amount of their badly needed take-home pay; Whereas our outdated, worldwide tax system discourages increased investment in the United States, effectively trapping foreign earnings in other markets and fueling the migration of American businesses to lower-tax countries; Whereas the United States currently taxes businesses at the highest statutory rates in the developed world, inhibiting their ability to hire and train new workers, raise wages for workers already on the payroll, and invest in research and new equipment; Whereas it is evident from widespread research that comprehensive tax reform could prompt business investment, productivity gains, and increase output and wage growth; Whereas cross country comparisons demonstrate that effective corporate tax rates have a large and significant adverse effect on corporate investment and entrepreneurship—raising the effective tax rate by 10 percentage points reduces the investment rate by 2.2 percentage points; Whereas our current tax scheme is a complicated web of deductions, which reduce the effective rate, but create distortions and preferences (picking winners and losers), as well as onerous compliance costs