Pillar 2: Unleashing 10x the Most Competitive Business Climate for Innovation

A robust pro-innovation policy framework drives investments to create new products and services, which creates high-value jobs and makes the United States a fierce global competitor. The United States must establish innovation friendly tax and fiscal policies in concert with reducing regulatory burdens and costs. The United States can empower business to take the lead in global innovation and effectively tackle major societal challenges by reducing investment risks, protecting intellectual property, ensuring cyber resiliency, investing in infrastructure, establishing a supportive policy and regulatory framework, optimizing for pro-growth fiscal policy, promoting research and development, and encouraging entrepreneurial activity through targeted incentives.

Recommendations

1. Reduce by 2027 the federal deficit of seven percent of U.S. GDP to historic, sustainable levels of 3.7 percent, while ensuring increased investment in the nation’s science and technology enterprise.
   
2. Restore federal investments in R&D to historic highs of two percent of U.S. GDP.
   
3. Fully appropriate the “Science” funding authorized in the CHIPS and Science Act.
   
4. Establish competitive, pro-growth tax policies with a corporate tax rate of 21 percent (or lower), and by instituting a 25 percent investment tax credit for new machinery and equipment.
   
5. Expand the Research and Experimentation Tax credit and restore expensing.
   
6. Create new tax and fiscal incentives for U.S. manufacturing, including re-shoring, new Enterprise Zones (EZs), and workforce training.
   
7. Eliminate all double taxation of U.S. corporate profits and individual income earned overseas.
   
8. Establish a “National Innovation and Infrastructure Bank” to invest in scaling emerging technologies and modernizing aging infrastructure.
   
9. Streamline and reduce regulatory costs and burdens that impede investment and growth in U.S. businesses, entrepreneurs, and communities.
   
10. Invest in public data collection agencies to increase the use of hard data for policymaking and to evaluate innovation investments and pro-growth regulations.