Specifically, Republicans and President Obama both agree that the current U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent is way too high. The White House wants to cut it to 28 percent and the GOP wants it pared to 25 percent. There are other details, but politics are the only thing that really seems to be stopping both sides from meeting somewhere in the middle.
There was once a time in America when cutting taxes was a bipartisan goal. President John F. Kennedy pushed for across-the- board business and personal income-tax cuts in 1962. And when President Ronald Reagan made a similar push in 1981, he instructed his economic and political team to use Kennedy's speeches as a guide. President Bill Clinton helped create the 90's economic boom by drastically cutting capital gains taxes after his initial economic policies failed during his first term. Sadly, President Obama reversed most of those cuts and this decade's economy remaRead Moreins in neutral.
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The reality of the need for tax cuts goes well beyond Washington and multinational mergers. Turn on your TV or news radio these days and you're likely to encounter more than a few commercials touting tax break offers for businesses from state, county and city governments. Many of the municipalities making these offers are in solid blue areas, undercutting the relatively new Democratic Party fad of pretending to believe that higher taxes are patriotic or even good for the economy.
So who else will join the Washington Post in insisting on tuning out the partisan noise and focusing on the two tax proposals currently on the table?
Doing something like that is at the core of CNBC's "Rise Above" initiative and I hope that tax policy someday gets the kind of attention the news media gave to the government shutdown and sequester battles of 2012 and 2013.
But until then, we're simply stuck.
Commentary by Jake Novak, supervising producer of "Street Signs." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.