Thank you.
Well, I'll circle back and say that the reason I said that, and the reason I believe it, is that strong economic growth is absolutely essential for everything we're trying to do for poverty reduction and for generating enough revenue to pay for high-quality social programs. So steps we take that have a negative impact on economic growth are undesirable.
I refer back to the OECD studies that I discussed, saying that some of the most progressive taxes in our system—some of the ones that you would naturally and obviously think increasing would be a wise strategy or a potentially effective strategy for addressing income inequality—are also growth-restricting. The OECD has identified them as taxes that are particularly inefficient and particularly likely to restrict economic growth.
So if you raise personal income tax rates and you raise corporate income tax rates, you have these negative effects on growth, which harm people throughout the income distribution. Now that's not to say that, for revenue generation, we can't change the tax code in ways that ultimately make it more progressive but which are more growth-friendly, which I think we can.
I just think that increasing rates is generally not the way to do it. I think there are a lot of tax deductions and exemptions that benefit disproportionately high-income earners. In my brief, I suggested a comprehensive view of those deductions with an effort to try to make the tax code simpler and more growth-friendly, and ultimately, it could have a really positive effect on—