Bush says will lay out tax reform plan next week in North Carolina

By Steve Holland HAMPTON, N.H. (Reuters) - Jeb Bush will lay out a tax plan next week aimed at lowering corporate and personal tax rates and giving the U.S. economy a jolt, the Republican presidential candidate said on Thursday. Bush said he would announce details of his plan on Wednesday in Raleigh, North Carolina. He said he would seek to enable U.S. companies which have an estimated $2 trillion in cash abroad to bring that money home to reinvest in American businesses and create jobs. Companies keep those funds overseas to avoid having it taxed twice, in the country in which they are doing business and again when brought back to the United States. "The basic notion of this is to make our tax code the economic driver of investment in our own country," the former Florida governor told a town hall event in Hampton, New Hampshire. Bush did not give a lot of details about his plan, but said the idea would be to "lower the rates, corporate rates and personal rates, as low as you possibly can, eliminating as many of the deductions as you can." Republicans have long sought to pass legislation reducing the U.S. corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have talked about tax reform during President Barack Obama's second term, but the effort has stalled. "The tax code is rife with all sorts of deductions and credits and make people feel compelled to kind of follow the script rather than say 'I’m going to invest in this business,'" Bush said. Bush is a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and is one of the many contenders who have made repeated swings through New Hampshire, one of the earliest states to vote in the runup to the November 2016 election. He said small foreign companies are buying larger American companies in order to take advantage of lower rates. "I want to reverse that," he said, and do this by "eliminating the worldwide taxation of income." Bush said if the tax code can be reformed, it would lead to massive capital investment in the United States. Bush's goal is to achieve 4 percent economic growth in the United States, a level that has not been reached in years. He also said he will release the names of his major campaign donors, so-called "bundlers" who persuade a group of people to contribute money at the same time. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)