March 25, 2009 5:16PM # Obama’s Tax Commission By [Chris Edwards](https://www.cato.org/people/chris-edwards) --- SHARE The Obama administration has announced the formation of a task force to recommend major changes to the federal tax code. According to *Congressional Quarterly* today: > \[Obama budget director Peter\] Orszag said the task force will focus on three areas: tax simplification, reducing “corporate welfare” and shrinking the estimated $290 billion a year “tax gap” between taxes owed and taxes paid. Isn’t Orzag missing something here? For goodness sakes, what about about economic growth? The economy is in the crapper, America has huge competitive challenges ahead with the rise of China, and the ratio of unproductive retirees to productive workers is soaring — it’s obvious that we need to reduce government hurdles to economic growth every way we can, and the high-rate federal tax code is one giant hurdle that policymakers need to start cutting. U.S. companies are not investing in China and elsewhere because our business tax code is too complex, but because our business tax rates are far higher than just about anywhere else. ##### Related Tags [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).