The challenge is it requires a lot of political will. Changing our tax base is extremely challenging. What we have to recognize is that China's tax model, as well as many countries' tax model--including not too far south, where we have another facility in the state of Ohio--is moving away from a tax that bases their tax revenue on value added, on income, on payroll, and moves more towards a tax based on consumption. That consumption tax isn't designed to penalize importers. It's designed to level the playing field. The goal is not to penalize manufacturers domestically, which is currently the challenge.
China gives you a full tax credit on finished goods of between 13% and 17%, essentially eliminating all taxes paid on an exported product. To your point, we can't access their cost structure on materials because there is actually an export duty on things like aluminum, copper, steel, and other base commodities. The only solution, currently, is to relocate to China. We have to recognize that if we want to stop that, we have to stop penalizing domestic manufacturing. We have to stop allowing China to have free access to our market and allowing them to continue to provide export subsidies.
The goal, as I mentioned, is to look at the implications of not just what taxes we collect, but how we collect those taxes. I think there's a strong movement always to lower taxes in general, but I'd ask the committee and the government to take a look at how they collect that tax. Try to collect that tax revenue based on an economic model that recognizes that industry and the economy are global; don't collect tax based on the value added domestically, but based on the goods traded throughout the entire economy. And that moves away from the income tax model and towards a consumption tax model.
Does that answer your question?