Copyright 2000 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
SECTION: PREPARED TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 5347 words
HEADLINE:
PREPARED TESTIMONY OF J.D. FOSTER, PH.D. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CHIEF ECONOMIST
TAX FOUNDATION
BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON
WAYS AND MEANS
BODY:
My name is J.D. Foster
and I am the Executive Director and Chief Economist of the Tax Foundation. The
Tax Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit research and education institution.
It was established 63 years ago to provide the American people and policy makers
with relevant, timely, and accurate information and analysis on fiscal policy
matters at the federal, state, and local levels.
Why Tax Reform?
The sustained interest in tax reform should come as no surprise. More
than any other aspect of government the federal income tax directly and
repeatedly influences Americans' lives. We may be most aware of this now during
the tax season, but every week our lives are touched and our decisions colored
by the income tax. How much should I save in my 401(k)? Should I sell some stock
and pay the capital gains tax to buy the stock I would prefer? Should I go to
college, to graduate school or night school to get a better job and earn a
higher salary if it means a much higher tax rate? Should I take out a home
equity loan to buy a car? Should I buy a home or rent? If I rent and lose the
home mortgage interest deduction, can I afford to make as big a charitable
contribution to my church, synagogue, or mosque? The income tax is like an old
machine tilling the fields of the economy, reaping a harvest of revenue for the
federal government. Fourteen years ago the Congress performed a major overhaul
through the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In the intervening years the Congress has
passed hundreds of changes in the nature of ongoing maintenance. But it has also
passed scores of changes asking the old machine to do even more: To supplement
welfare spending, to encourage saving for education, and so on. Meanwhile the
fields have changed steadily as has the pressure to produce, putting ever
greater demands on the tax machine. Even under ordinary circumstances, another
major overhaul would be past due today.
Circumstances are far from
ordinary, however. The growing breadth of the economy combined with the rapid
escalation of computing power have spawned a degree of complexity in the tax
code affecting both individuals and businesses that was unthinkable not long
ago. This complexity has led to a growing animus and distrust of the tax system,
the Internal Revenue Service, and the federal government in general.
It
is unwise to impose upon citizens any system that is torturously complex and
affects so many areas of their lives. This complexity of the code leads to a
sense of imbalance and unfairness. Some instances are obvious, like the marriage
penalty which the Congress is seeking to address this year. Others are a matter
of perception. We come to believe our neighbor knows of some twist to the tax
code that allows him to pay less tax than we do.
Circumstances are also
extraordinary because there is a growing sense that an income tax is not the
best type of tax for any country. At issue is not whether the income tax
machinery can be made to work better, but whether it is the right machine for
the job. When the income tax was advanced and adopted, it was well understood
that it overtaxed saving and investment. It was also understood that this bias
would reduce economic growth, but this was considered a reasonable price to pay
for the redistribution of income and wealth for which the income tax is so
adept. Today, the prosperity foregone is unacceptable and the transfer of income
and wealth can be achieved by other means. Further, the income tax's deleterious
effects on international competitiveness that could essentially be ignored
fifty, forty, or even twenty years ago cannot be ignored today.
To be
sure, the federal income tax is not about to collapse. There is no crisis. We
could skip fundamental tax reform, choosing instead to make repairs minor and
major and keep this old machine running a while longer. We could also have set
aside welfare reform, and foregone its many benefits. We could postpone Social
Security Reform and Medicare reform. We could choose to do all these things, but
that would not be the wise or rational choice, not when the lives of millions of
Americans can be bettered by sound reforms.
What Is "Fundamental" Tax
Reform?
The phrase "fundamental tax reform" is now code in tax policy.
To some it stands for a specific proposal, like the Flat Tax or the National
Sales Tax or the Simplified USA Tax. To some it stands for a threat to stability
and the status quo. To others it stands for an alternative set of principles
that should guide tax policy and that undergird most tax reform proposals:
principles such as simplification, fairness, and economic neutrality. As these
principles are nearly universally applauded, it is immediately clear how
extensive the changes must be for legislation to rise from being a
run-of-the-mill tax bill to the level of "fundamental" reform. The 1997 Taxpayer
Relief Act, for example, included a great many provisions, but no one would
argue that this constituted "fundamental" reform.
Neutrality and Saving
One distinguishing feature of fundamental tax reform is the meaning of
the word "neutrality". Does one mean neutral within the framework of a classical
income tax, or neutral in some other sense? Our current system is a mutated
income tax that often taxes the returns to saving even more heavily than would
be appropriate under a normal income tax. The unintegrated corporate income tax,
the capital gains tax, and the gift and estate tax are monuments to excessive
taxation. On the other hand, the federal income tax contains many features
consistent with a consumption tax, such as the pension and savings provisions
that effectively ensure that only one level of tax is paid at the individual
level on labor income that is saved.
Given its current usage, at the
individual level "neutrality" today clearly means taxing all labor income once
and only once, uniformly and consistently. In other words, for individuals
fundamental tax reform means shifting the tax base from a combination of labor
and capital income, to labor income. For businesses, it means taxing only
profits earned in the United States. Neutrality for businesses also means only
taxing economic profits rather than financial profits, which is achieved by
allowing businesses to expense their purchases of plant and equipment. Thus, it
means changing a fundamental principle on which the tax system is based.
Neutrality and Education
Neutrality also means imposing no
higher a tax burden on human capital income than on physical capital income. In
the e-world, a well- educated work force is vital. The "e" in ecommerce could
just as well represent "education" as "electronic". The New Economy is built on
technology, communications, and information, all of which have value only to the
extent employees, investors, entrepreneurs, and managers can use the technology
to communicate and process the information productively. In other words, it
depends on people with the education to use the tools effectively.
The
tax code should not create a bias in favor of education, neither should it have
a bias against education as it often does today. Neutrality means businesses
should be able to expense their physical capital acquisitions. It also means
individuals should be able to deduct in full the costs associated with their
education.
We already do this to an extent insofar as local school
systems are funded with federally tax-deductible property taxes. This same
treatment should extend to all reasonable expenses incurred by individuals
seeking to invest in their own human capital.
Pursuing Fundamental Tax
Reform
Defining the goal of tax reform leaves a remarkable number of
options from which to choose. For example, one can "scrap the code" as many
advocate, suggesting that remedial action is infeasible or impractical, and
replacing the income tax with some apparently new system. I say apparently new
because, in fact, none of the main proposals advanced to date are truly as new
and revolutionary as their advocates would have us believe.
The Congress
could achieve the essential substance of the Simplified USA Tax, for example, by
allowing an unlimited Individual Retirement Account and other pension savings,
while allowing businesses to expense all of their purchases of plant and
equipment. Similarly, while the Federal government has no experience with broad
sales taxes, it collects numerous targeted excises while most states collect
general sales taxes. Thus even a National Retail Sales Tax, clearly the most
radical of the popular proposals, and the most problematic, is not entirely
alien. The "revolution" in fundamental tax reform is not the novelty of the new
tax system, per se, but the shift in the tax base from a mutated definition of
income to consumption.
An alternative to "scrapping the code" would be
to "clean the code". It is entirely possible to achieve all the goals of
fundamental tax reform by radically amending the existing system. For example,
step one would be to allow people to save as much as they want in tax- deferred
accounts, without regard to their current incomes or to when they choose to take
the money out of the accounts for consumption. Alternatively, one could tax all
labor income however employed, and forego taxing all forms of future capital
income.
Step two would be to eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax and
all the other horrors of current law. The true source of complexity in the tax
code is not the home mortgage and the charitable contribution deductions, and
the others listed on Schedule A. For individuals the true complexity lies in the
phase-in and phase-out of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the phaseout of the
other tax credits and other bells and whistles enacted in recent years, the
phase-out of itemized deductions, the phase-out of personal exemptions, the
Alternative Minimum Tax. and the modern nightmare that is Schedule D for capital
gains and losses. For businesses the true complexity lies in the system of
depreciation allowances, the taxation of foreign source income, and the special
rules and rulings that go into defining taxable income.
Step three would
be to allow individuals a deduction for personal expenses associated with
education - to put human capital formation on par with physical capital
formation.
Step four would be to allow businesses to expense their
purchases of plant and equipment.
Step five would be to tax only income
earned in the United States, rather than seeking to cast an extraterritorial net
in a feat of veiled protectionism.
A great many other steps would be
needed to "clean the code" properly. The federal income tax is very much like a
vast mansion that has collected dust and all manner of rubbish over decades of
relative neglect, and in many areas may have fallen into disrepair. It is
possible to clean the mansion again, to repair the walls, and to modernize the
facilities. Whether one should level the income tax edifice and start over or
just give it a thorough cleaning is a tactical and political decision. The
former may be more unsettling though more thorough; the latter may appear
easier, but it is less certain to achieve the desired result.
A No-Cost
Tax Cut
Some level of compliance and administrative costs are inevitable
with any tax system. Any amount in excess of the minimum wastes the nation's
resources. It is, in effect, a tax with no offsetting benefit. Reducing those
costs is therefore equivalent to a tax cut in that it leaves more resources in
the private sector. But it is a tax cut that, at worst, leaves the Federal
government with no fewer resources than it had before.
Estimates of the
compliance costs associated with the Federal income tax often reach into the
hundreds of billions of dollars. Four years ago the Tax Foundation concluded
that a lowerbound for such an estimate was $157 billion. Today,
that figure might be closer to $175 billion. This is a lower
bound, so the actual figure is almost certainly much higher. For argument's
sake, suppose it is $200 billion.
Using the same
methodology employed to find the lower bound for compliance costs for the income
tax, in 1996 the Tax Foundation estimated the compliance costs associated with
the Flat Tax and the National Retail Sales Tax. In both cases the analysis
showed that compliance costs would fall by about 95 percent once the new plan
was fully phased-in, assuming the new tax system was enacted in its pure form.
The reduction associated with the Simplified USA Tax would be comparable. Thus,
even if transition issues and political considerations caused the percentage
reduction in compliance costs to drop to 50 percent, that still means an
effective tax cut of $100 billion annually, or
$1 trillion over 10 years. That is an enormous amount of saving
and should by itself be enough to compel legislative action.
The
International Dimension of Tax Reform
The foregoing discussion reveals
many sound reasons for pursuing fundamental tax reform, including
simplification, reducing compliance costs, improving the neutrality of the tax
code so that it is less of a hindrance to economic growth, and reducing the
intrusive aspects of the tax system into citizens' lives. Each of these has been
discussed extensively in numerous forums. including this Committee. However, the
international dimensions of tax reform, particularly the change in the
tax treatment of foreign source
income and the imposition of Border Tax
Adjustments have until recently received far less attention than they deserve.
Protectionism and the U.S. Tax on
Foreign Source Income
Subject to a
vast array of special provisions, tests, and rules, the essential features of
U.S. international tax policy are that the U.S. imposes federal income
tax on U.S. citizens' foreign earnings. The U.S. also
allows a limited tax credit against any resulting tax liability
for foreign income taxes paid. This policy goes under many
names, the most common of which is "worldwide taxation", the most accurate of
which, however, is "extraterritoriality". Most tax reform proposals wisely move
away from extraterritoriality to a system whereby only economic profits earned
in the United States are subject to U.S. taxation, a system known as
"territoriality".
Extraterritoriality violates tax neutrality as the
term is commonly used. A non-neutral tax system is hurtful to wage and job
growth because it directs our national resources of land, capital, and labor
away from their most productive and beneficial uses. A driving motivation for
tax reform must be the recognition that a more neutral tax system is in our best
interests, and this is true whether the issue is economic risk-taking, education
outlays, the level of saving, the level of investment, the forms of investment,
or the locations of investment.
The immediate effect of
extraterritoriality is to distort the pattern of international investment by
U.S. companies and therefore to reduce their competitiveness at home and abroad.
This loss of international competitiveness translates into lower shareholder
returns, but it also means a loss of jobs and lower wages at home. One obvious
consequence of the global economy is that companies must hire, invest, produce,
and sell globally. The companies that are best able to integrate each of these
activities across product lines, across functions, and across countries are the
most successful. A U.S. tax policy that distorts the pattern of activity of U.S.
companies inhibits them from maximizing their efficiency. Space limitations
prevent me from elaborating on these points. However, I have written about these
matters elsewhere in greater detail, (See "Promoting Trade, Shackling our
Traders", Tax Foundation Background Paper No. 21).
If
extraterritoriality is so harmful to U.S. interests, it is reasonable to ask why
it remains the basis for U.S. international tax policy. The answer is that its
true nature has largely been hidden behind fear mongering claims and misleading
statements. Extraterritoriality is a sophisticated, tax-based form of
protectionism. Tariffs, quotas, and other devices seek to erect a wall against
foreign goods that are in some way less expensive or of better quality than
domestically produced goods.
The only motivation for such policies is to
protect the businesses and the their employees who cannot compete fairly with
foreign goods. While some benefit from such policies, consumers and other
businesses that buy these goods must accept either lower quality or higher
prices and, on balance, the nation suffers a loss.
The United States has
long and consistently been the world leader in the fight for free trade and open
markets. This has been a hi-partisan policy and a sound policy as history has
proven time and time again. Free trade countries prosper; closed economies
stagnate. Free trade encourages each nation to do those things it does best
while giving consumers the widest array of choices at the lowest possible
prices. There are, of course, always bumps in the road and occasional
backsliding. But the broad support for free trade is remarkable, and
well-founded.
The essential goal of extraterritoriality is to ensure
that U.S. companies pay at least as much income tax on their
foreign activities as they would if those activities had taken
place in the United States. This sounds reasonable at first blush, but if this
principle is reasonable, why should we not require U.S. companies to be subject
to the same labor laws abroad as at home'? Certainly our stricter labor laws
protect our workforce, but they also raise labor costs and therefore put U.S.
workers at a competitive disadvantage. Why not subject these companies to the
same environmental laws they face at home? Again, our more stringent rules
generally protect the environment, but they also raise producers' costs. Indeed,
we have in recent years heard calls for exactly such policies, and it is no
coincidence that these same voices have also consistently been at the forefront
of the fight against free trade.
Proponents of extraterritoriality will
argue that if the U.S. fails to tax the foreign income of U.S.
companies, then the tax code will create an incentive for those
companies to shift their operations to lower-taxed, foreign jurisdictions. The
proper way to express this, however, is that eliminating the tax would eliminate
a disincentive for companies to invest globally and most efficiently, unfettered
by U.S. tax policies.
Classic protectionism seeks to erect barriers to
the importation of goods and services to protect jobs at home.
Extraterritoriality seeks to erect barriers to international investment by U.S.
citizens in the usually mistaken belief that this investment would otherwise
occur at home. Thus this tax barrier to international investment is also
intended to protect U.S. jobs.
Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of
the protectionism of extraterritoriality is not that it unfairly protects U.S.
jobs, but that it may cost U.S. jobs, on balance, and reduce wages, on balance.
As noted above, U.S. companies organize their operations on a global basis. Each
element, subsidiary, and division performs a specific set of roles and company
management strives to optimize the efficiency of each piece of the corporate
whole. The effects of a lost or foregone opportunity in one area will negatively
affect the efficiency of many of the company's operations, including those based
in the United States. Sometimes these secondary effects are minor and can be
overcome; sometimes they are highly significant. Thus a lost or foregone
opportunity due to the U.S. imposition of a protectionist, extraterritorial tax
policy will often reduce employment in a company's other operations throughout
the world, including in the United States.The U.S. has one of the best educated,
most productive work forces in the world. If a U.S. company were considering an
increase in its foreign operations, it is very likely those operations would
represent lower-wage, less productive jobs. On the other hand. the U.S.
operations that would support these low-wage jobs would tend to be higher wage,
high productivity jobs, such as those associated with research and development,
and support functions such as accounting, finance, marketing, and management.
Thus extraterritoriality protects a few low wage jobs at the expense of other,
higher-wage U.S. jobs.
The Many Roles of Border Tax Adjustments
Fundamental tax reform permits the adoption of Border Tax Adjustments
(BTAs), in the form of a rebate upon export of the U.S. business tax and the
imposition of the U.S. tax on the value of imports. BTAs are a common feature of
many national tax systems and are an important feature of the Simplified USA
Tax.
The importance of BTAs to tax policy is better recognized today in
the United States thanks to the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling
against the U.S. Foreign Sales Corporation (FSC) provisions. The FSC is an
important, though relatively modest attempt to grant an income tax rebate on
U.S. exports. Fundamental tax reform and BTAs solve the FSC problem by, in
effect, making the export rebate total, universal, and WTO compliant.
The role and consequences of BTAs, however, go well beyond replacing the
FSC. Their major effects are to enhance prospects for U.S. companies and U.S.
workers to compete globally; to offset similar provisions adopted by our trading
partners, further enhancing our international competitiveness; and effectively
to "import" tax base from abroad, thereby reducing the federal tax burden on
U.S. citizens without reducing revenues to the Federal government. I will
address each of these, briefly, in turn.
Export Rebates
An
export rebate allows a U.S. producer to exclude from taxable income the profits
made on the export of domestically produced goods and services. If the United
States adopted territoriality, then export rebates naturally address any
remaining concerns that territoriality would induce U.S. companies to shift some
operations overseas. If the United States adopted both territoriality and export
rebates, then a company would pay no U.S. tax on goods sold abroad whether those
goods are produced at home or abroad.
Business taxes are generally and
ultimately borne by the factors of production, namely labor and capital. To be
sure, there are instances in which a new tax can be shifted, at least
temporarily, onto consumers. But in an increasingly global and competitive world
economy, consumers have a great ability to opt for alternative, lower- priced
goods and services, and this is especially true in the United States because
there is very little we do not ourselves produce in quantity. Consequently,
consumers can effectively resist bearing business taxes, and hence they are
shifted back on to labor and especially on to the owners of capital.Upon initial
introduction, an export rebate would allow U.S. exporters either to enjoy higher
profits on their exports or to charge lower prices in an effort to capture a
greater market share. Once markets at home and abroad have adjusted to the new
tax regimes, the relative prices of U.S. exports would largely return to their
previous levels, and the value of the tax rebate would be shifted back to U.S.
labor and U.S. capital. Any shift of the rebate to U.S. labor would be in the
form of higher wages. Most of the shift of the rebate, however, would be in the
form of higher returns to capital that the market would translate into a larger
capital stock permitting more output for foreign markets. In other words, the
export rebate would be immediately beneficial, but it would be even more so in
the long run by raising wages. increasing jobs, and increasing the
competitiveness of U.S. exporters.
Import Levies
The counterpart
to the export rebate is the import levy on the full value of all imported goods
and services. When first introduced, some of this rebate would doubtlessly
appear as an increase in the price of imports. The vast majority of these price
increases would quickly disappear, however, as U.S. consumers and U.S.
businesses substituted domestically produced goods and services for foreign
goods and services. In large measure, the ability to substitute domestic for
foreign production would force foreign suppliers to absorb much of the tax.
As with the export rebate, once markets have fully adjusted, most
domestic prices would return to their pre-tax reform levels at least insofar as
the effects of BTAs are concerned. Once the adjustment has been completed,
importers of foreign goods and services would have shifted some of their demand
to U.S. producers, with obvious beneficial effects for domestic job and wage
growth. Thus both the export rebate and the import levy have the same effects in
terms of raising U.S. economic activity by increasing the international
competitiveness of U.S. labor and U.S. companies.
On Offsetting Exchange
Rate Adjustments
One counterargument against the foregoing analysis is
that exchange rates would adjust to offset any price effects of Border Tax
Adjustments. I believe this argument is essentially correct. What I do not know,
and what nobody knows, is how long this exchange rate adjustment would take to
occur. It could be instantaneous or, more likely, it could take many years.
Economists know a great deal about the fundamental forces of exchange
rate determination over the long run. They also know a great deal about many of
the forces that cause exchange rates to evolve over time. For example, we know
that exchange rates move to clear the markets for foreign exchange and that
these markets are buffeted by changing international capital and trade flows, by
changing expectations about how these flows will adjust in the future, by
changes in tax policies, and by changing expectations of relative inflationary
pressures.
Given all these factors it should not surprise that
economists enjoy little success predicting exchange rate movements over the next
day or two, and they do no better forecasting when!
exchange rate
movements will take place and how far they will move in the short and medium
terms. This is especially true within the context of fundamental tax reform.
Whatever influences BTAs might have on exchange rates would almost certainly and
for a long time be overwhelmed by the shifting patterns of trade and capital
flows into and out of the United States in response to changes in the incentives
to save and invest.
What we can say is that if exchange rates move to
offset fully the competitive benefits of BTAs, then the worst that can happen is
that these benefits will not materialize. Such an adjustment would likely take a
long time to occur, however, and unless and until it does the benefits will
manifest themselves and they could be very substantial.
"Importing" Tax
Base
The tax base is the amount that is subject to tax. In the case of
the income tax, for example, the tax base is the total of labor and capital
income generated in a year. The federal gasoline excise tax base is the amount
of gasoline purchased by consumers in a year. The tax base is often manipulated
to exclude certain items and in the case of the income tax to include others
more than once. The net of these manipulations yields an amount which, when
subjected to the tax rates, produces tax revenue. The growing Federal tax take
in recent years primarily result from the growth in the economy, which is
another way of saying it results from the growth of the tax base.
Repeating a basic principle, business taxes in most instances fall on
capital and labor, the factors of production. If the U.S. were to impose an
import levy in the form of a Border Tax Adjustment, this levy would also fall on
capital and labor. However, it would fall on the capital and labor of the
countries producing the goods and services for importation into the United
States. In other words, a Border Tax Adjustment import levy effectively imports
tax base from abroad, shifting some amount of the domestic tax burden to foreign
workers and foreign capital owners.
To give some idea of the magnitude
of these effects, suppose once tax reform has been enacted with its Border Tax
Adjustments that the U.S. imported $1 trillion of goods and
services a year. Assuming a 12 percent levy, that would imply
$120 billion in import levy receipts. If, when all adjustments
were completed, U.S. consumers resisted all efforts by foreign exporters to
raise prices to compensate for the import levy, then the U.S. would have
effectively imported $1 trillion of tax base and shifted
$120 billion of tax liability onto foreign taxpayers.
Of course, in some instances foreign producers would be able to force
U.S. consumers to bear some of the tax in the form of higher prices, and in rare
instances U.S. consumers would bear all of the tax. Clearly, however, such
situations would create powerful incentives for affected consumers to shift
consumption toward lower-price domestic goods and services. Thus much of the
expected decline in imports from imposing an import levy would occur in
precisely those areas where consumer resistance to the tax-induced price hikes
was incomplete.
Even if the net shift of tax liability to foreign
taxpayers were only half the amount of the hypothesized upper-bound, this would
still imply a reduction in taxes paid by U.S. citizens of $60
billion annually. Whatever the figure in a given year, the important point is
that the Congress has within its means the ability to shift tax burden onto
foreign taxpayers, providing U.S. citizens with a very significant effective tax
cut, without reducing revenues to the U.S. Treasury one cent.
Given the
reaction of many of our trading partners to our Foreign Sales Corporation
provision. one might reasonably expect them to object to the adoption of Border
Tax Adjustments. True. they would not likely be happy over this development, but
they would have no cause for complaint. Many of our trading partners, especially
the Europeans, have employed such BTAs for decades as part of their consumption
tax systems. In other words, they have been importing tax base from the United
States for many years, effectively imposing their tax burden on U.S. citizens.
By adopting BTAs, the U.S. would simply be recapturing U.S. tax base these
trading partners have claimed for all these years.
Conclusion There is a
great deal to commend comprehensive, fundamental tax reform. Most of the
problems associated with the federal income tax are well established and
virtually all of them can be effectively addressed through sound reform.
Fundamental tax reform can dramatically reduce complexity and compliance costs.
It can free individuals from much of the intrusiveness that is the hallmark of
the income tax. It can put people and education at least on par with machines by
making the tax system neutral with respect to human and physical capital
formation. It can free the economy to create more and better jobs, higher wages,
and more wealth.
Fundamental tax reform also creates a welcome occasion
to abandon a counter-productive protectionist policy of taxing foreign source
income in favor of a policy that will allow U.S. companies to maximize their
international competitiveness and thereby contribute even more to the promise of
greater prosperity at home.
It goes even further by creating the
opportunity to consider implementing Border Tax Adjustments that would further
improve .the competitiveness of U.S. labor and U.S. companies.
And, not
to be overlooked, it creates a powerful opportunity to provide American
taxpayers with an effective tax cut, both in the reduction of compliance costs
and in the importation of foreign tax base. This tax cut potentially could total
in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, without reducing receipts to
the Federal Treasury. This is literally, money left on the table that the
Congress can sweep up and bestow on the U.S. taxpayer.
END
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