In Depth February 10, 2010, 11:10PM EST

Obama's Corporate Messaging

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So that is an example of a very hard decision and a very politically unpopular decision that from my vantage point is pro-business. And my expectation is that as the economy continues to grow, more and more businesses will recognize that.

The last point I want to make with respect to just our policies on business, generally, and this goes to your first question about the perception of us being anti-business: This year I will sign legislation that will cut corporate taxes by about $70 billion— their tax obligations will be reduced by about 10% because of bonus depreciation and some other steps that we intend to take. This notion, somehow, that we have been putting this enormous tax burden on business is just not true. It is not supported by the facts.

And even some of the more controversial proposals that we have put forward, like health care, if you actually analyzed what's on the table there, certainly small businesses are a net winner, one of the biggest winners. Because it would provide significant subsidies to them to provide insurance for their workers and allow them to pool with other small businesses and individuals to get a better rate. Large businesses who are already providing health insurance to their employees would end up benefiting from significant changes in delivery systems that would promise to lower costs over the long term.

You would be hard-pressed to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses. That doesn't mean that some people might not be happy with it, and this goes to the broader point that I was raising earlier.

I think that the two areas where we probably got the most [criticism] from the business community that are specific, as opposed to general and "we're worried about your rhetoric," one has to do with marginal rates. Now I was very clear during the campaign that for people making more than $250,000 a year, we were going to go back to the kind of rates structure that we had during Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when businesses were doing perfectly well.

I do that not for any punitive sense, but simply that I can't deal with debt and deficits in a realistic way and continue to sustain those particular tax cuts.

The second area had to do with issues of deferral and multinational practices in terms of how they deal with the tax code. We listened to some of those concerns, but the proposal that we put forward, I think, is one that the average business would say is eminently fair. If you are a business here, entirely located in the United States, and investing in the United States, and hiring workers in the United States, you are paying a 35% rate.

If you are a multinational and you are investing in India, and your workforce is in India, and your plants and equipment are in India, but your headquarters are here, you are taking deductions on all the expenses in India, but you are keeping your profits outside the United States, that just doesn't seem entirely fair. The same is true where you have companies that have 90% of their sales in the United States, but are posting 90% of their profits overseas. You get a sense there that the accountants have been busy.

Now, there are some legitimate concerns that were voiced from last year's proposal where people pointed out, well, we may be investing a lot in R&D here in the United States, but we have got to have factories or sales forces outside the United States, and you don't want to discourage [companies] from doing that. So we made modifications around some of these proposals.

But our goal here is simply to make sure that there is an even playing field between businesses who are investing in the United States, hiring U.S. workers, selling to a lot of customers here as well as overseas, and those who are operating across borders. And that is an area where there can be some legitimate debate, but certainly shouldn't be portrayed, somehow, as being anti-business.