During a Senate Budget Committee hearing today titled “Tax Reform: A Necessary Component for Restoring Fiscal Responsibility,” ranking member Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) made an impassioned case for why corporate-tax rates must be significantly reduced — in addition to any general reform measures designed to simplify the tax code — if the United States wants to remain an attractive place to do business. Simply doing that, he argued, would go a long way toward bringing down the unemployment rate.

Watch:

From President Obama’s State of the Union address:

For example, over the years, a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are hit with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and it has to change.      

So tonight, I’m asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years –- without adding to our deficit. It can be done.

Senator Sessions:

The problem is far more serious than that. We have, even in real rate terms, one of the highest, if not the highest corporate [tax] rate in the developed world. Corporations are making decisions every day: where to expand, where to hire workers…

This is not academic. This is going on every day. We have an unemployment rate that is unacceptable and to have the highest corporate tax rate virtually in the world — and other nations are seeing the light in reducing it — and we remain high?

So even if we eliminate certain deductions and have a flat rate that appears lower, it seems to my simple mind that we’ve got no less real burden on the corporate community than we had before.

I believe we need to simplify, but I also think it would be a big mistake if we don’t reduce the rates. The U.K. is reducing their rates, Canada I understand is going to 16 percent, so if we’re at 28, 27 [percent] after we’ve adjusted, we’re still way above that and a company making a decision of where to produce a product might well choose another country than our own country to produce that product and cost us jobs…

The entire world is recognizing that the corporate rate is a job factor, a big job factor.