BizVoice talked to both men separately this summer, asking them the same questions on policies critical to Indiana Chamber member companies and the business community at-large. (NOTE: The Indiana Chamber’s Congressional Affairs Committee has endorsed Rep. Todd Young in this race.) 

BV: What is your view on the federal tax code … are there areas you feel need attention? If so, what reforms do you see as the most important?

YOUNG: “We need to simplify the tax code. Washington needs to stop picking winners and losers through the tax code. We need to stop the double taxation of overseas income so that hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. profit can be repatriated and invested in places like Indiana to create jobs and raise wages.

“We need to lower the corporate tax rate; we have the highest rate in the industrialized world – that clearly undermines our competitiveness and has even been causing our major corporations, with all their jobs, to relocate their operations overseas. And we need to lower the individual tax rate so that families and small businesses can participate actively in the economy.”

BAYH: “We need a tax code that is certainly simpler; it costs way too much to comply with it; it’s way too complicated. One of the areas I think we can get some bipartisan agreement on would be in the area of corporate tax reform – to get the tax rate down to make us globally competitive. Currently we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, which leads to a couple of negative consequences. Number one: A lot of businesses that are globally competitive have stranded profits abroad. I think it’s in excess of a trillion dollars. So by making the corporate rate globally competitive, we would allow them to bring those profits home to invest in their U.S. operations.

“Number two: The fact that our tax code is not globally competitive creates an incentive for foreign companies to buy U.S. companies basically as a tax arbitrage (profiting from differences in how income or capital gains are taxed); it also leads to U.S. companies to re-domicile themselves overseas. By getting the tax rate down and making it globally competitive, you do away with that phenomenon.”

Read the full Q&A online.