35% of corporate income is taxed according to statute.

But everyone knows the big boys do not pay this rate.

There are writeoffs, exemptions, subsidies, and other holes written into the code.

But there is also over-sea's profit.

GE for instance runs an over-sea's department which made 7.7 billion in purchases last year and which got taxed at a very low rate.

GE's surely not the only company taking advantage of overseas tax shelters. Google reportedly uses colorful-sounding strategies like "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" to send revenues through low-tax countries like Ireland and Holland, giving it a 20% tax rate for 2010. Hewlett-Packard says that it saves $1 billion a year in taxes by operating in some countries where it's "wholly exempt from taxes," resulting in a 21% rate. Apple's overseas cash hoard leapt from $17.4 billion in 2009 to $30.8 billion in 2010, in part because its intellectual property is owned by foreign subsidiaries.

So lets look at this.

If we reduced our rate not to 25%, but to 24% (to put us under a number of other nations), we could see our effective tax rate increase by 6% on the rich.

We could double the number of cash also being taxed, which would be quite the feat for our economy (cash returning could be used to provide jobs) and for something like... paying down the debt.