Beautiful. Emphasis mine:

A competitive business environment is just as essential to innovation as well-functioning markets. In the enterprise states study, we have fresh evidence of how states are fostering economic growth and jobs through their innovation. What do successful states have in common? A tax and regulatory climate that allows companies to continuously innovate, unshackled by needless delays and burdensome costs. And states that maintain a good legal reform environment can also expect hundreds of millions of dollars or more in economic activity & tens of thousands of new jobs according to our study. The right policies also attract manufacturers. Innovation gravitates toward manufacturing centers and manufacturers are some of the strongest drivers of new innovation.

But when the federal government and their tax and regulatory policies are excessive, it breeds uncertainty, slows investment, depresses new technology, drives manufacturing overseas, and puts business at a competitive disadvantage. Take taxes — you take them and you keep them — but take taxes, for example. No one would hold up America’s Byzantine tax code as a model of efficiency or clarity or an engine of economic growth. Our tax code must be restructured so that it is simple and clear, so that it spurs growth, encourages investment and efficiently generates revenues to reduce the deficit and meet our national priorities. We must enact comprehensive tax reform that broadens the base, lowers all business rates, and reduces the burdens of compliance. This reform should reduce the corporate tax rate — the highest in the world — and drive innovation by permanently extending the R&D tax credit.

We must also do away with specific tax provisions that target innovators. Like the thing that’s on the table right now: the $20 bil tax on medical devices that will take effect next year under Obamacare.  This excise tax would squelch innovation in medical technology industry, and that is just so vital to all of these new developments that are keeping us alive so long and so healthily. And, by the way, it would threaten 43,000 industry jobs that would disadvantage you as business and drive some companies and their jobs overseas.

If you can’t do it here, you’re gonna do it somewhere else.

That was Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, speaking at their Jobs summit on Wednesday. I have nothing to add. The gentleman pretty much nailed it on the head. Here’s more on the enterprise states study to which he refers.

The Economist had an interesting piece the other day, positing the question: Why aren’t we doing more to attract foreign entrepreneurs to our shores and offering more visas to potential immigrants with new ideas? But here’s another question: Do that many entrepreneurs really even want to come here and deal with our harsh regulatory climate and “Byzantine” tax code?