Op-ed: Here’s What President Obama Can Do to Move the Nation Forward
By Senator Orrin Hatch
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/2360419-155/op-ed-heres-what-president-can-do
Today, President Obama will deliver a speech on the economy during his first visit to Utah as President. While his speech reportedly will focus on our differences, I believe we need to get beyond partisanship and find common ground. Here are several issues where we can work together to help get our economy back on track.
First, we can fix our broken tax code. Most Republicans and Democrats—including President Obama—agree that our current tax system is a roadblock to sustained prosperity. Its complexity, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness seriously impede job creation and our competitiveness in today’s global economy. What we need is a simpler, fairer tax system that promotes savings and investment and puts American job creators at a competitive advantage.
As the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, I’m leading bipartisan efforts to help lay the groundwork for comprehensive tax reform. Our Committee is making meaningful progress in numerous working groups, but if we are to succeed, it will require a real effort from President Obama as well. If the President is serious about tax reform, he needs to come to the table with a detailed plan and work with Congress in a bipartisan manner. Our entire economy could benefit.
Second, we can facilitate U.S. trade with other countries. Selling American goods and services around the world helps grow the economy and support better, higher-paying jobs here at home. By working with other countries to break down trade barriers to American products, we can increase access to new markets that benefitAmerican businesses, workers, farmers, and ranchers alike.
Right now, the United States is engaged in negotiations to formulate major new trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. To reach a final accord, we need to enact Trade Promotion Authority to establish negotiating objectives we expect the President to achieve and our international trading partners to accept. Republicans in Congress stand ready to work with President Obama and help these negotiations succeed. The President can help us accomplish this critical economic priority by making the case to his fellow Democrats.
Third, we can modernize high-skilled immigration. Earlier this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began accepting applications for only 85,000 H-1B visas for the coming year. Just like last year and the year before, we will undoubtedly hit the visa cap by next week—preventing American companies from hiring tens of thousands of high-skilled workers they need to grow their businesses, develop innovative technologies, and compete in today’s global economy. This limitation is forcing American companies to outsource their innovation centers to competitors like Canada.
Immigration reform involves some of the toughest and most divisive issues today. President Obama’s insistence on a single comprehensive immigration reform bill has stalled legislative progress on all of the important issues involved. Instead of this my-way-or-the-highway approach, we should be looking for issues where we can build broad, bipartisan agreement.
My Immigration Innovation Act—or “I-Squared” Act—is one such focused, bipartisan approach. By addressing the immediate need to provide American employers with greater access to high-skilled workers while also addressing the long-term need to invest in America’s science, technology, engineering, and math education, this legislation can help move past the current gridlock and produce a meaningful solution that helps grow our economy.
Fourth, we can reform our regulatory bureaucracy. Both the number of regulations and their combined costs have exploded in recent years. The American people are now bound by more than one million individual restrictions in the Federal Register, with a total cost of nearly $2 trillion dollars to our economy each year according to some estimates.
Every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama has supported the idea of repealing outdated and ineffective regulations. Nevertheless, efforts by successive administrations to review existing regulations have ranged from ineffective to counterproductive. As such, President Obama should support legislation like my Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome—or “SCRUB”—Act that establishes an independent commission to examine which regulations are inefficient and ineffective. The SCRUB Act would deliver on a longstanding bipartisan promise and would result in lower prices, higher wages, and more job opportunities for hardworking Americans.
The President has already embraced the broad goals of our efforts on each of these issues. I’m hopeful he will joins us as a meaningful legislative partner so we can get to work and help the American people.
