Well, you've said a lot. Let me start out by saying that I have always admired, insofar as I understand it, the Canadian system. It does seem to be a lot better from a policy standpoint, and I've participated in various policy discussions in Canada about the Canadian system.
Our system is no model for anything. Let's be very clear about that. But we have the factor of politics, and of course tax is just a white-hot subject in the United States and has been for pretty much my entire professional lifetime. I have told people that if you put me in a room with seven people of my selection, which would include a number of business people, I could come out of that room with a functioning tax system that would be fair and a lot simpler, but that's not the way our Congress operates and I have no influence on that whatsoever.
You're quite right in your suggestion, in what I take to be your suggestion, that the more complexity you have in the law, the more opportunity there is for tax avoidance. But this hearing is not focused specifically on avoidance generally but on tax havens specifically, and in that area I do have some specific ideas for what the United States could do to improve its performance, even given the Internal Revenue Code as it stands—that is, to address tax havens as a specific subject.