Fortunately, there is a very simple and immediately available solution. Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Rob Portman of Ohio have created a bipartisan framework for international tax reform that is supported by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Kevin Brady, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Currently, we tax a company’s foreign earnings at 35 percent when the money is repatriated to the United States. And even though the tax code allows for a deduction based on the tax paid to the country in which it was earned, the overall tax is still much higher than it would be in most other countries. We are one of the few countries in the world that asks our companies to pay a double tax on foreign earnings.

Our uncompetitive tax code is why companies have chosen not to bring their foreign earnings back to the United States, stranding an estimated $2.6 trillion abroad. It’s also exactly why companies ultimately seek corporate inversions.

The Schumer-Portman framework fixes this problem by allowing companies to repatriate all that stranded cash at a reduced rate of between 8 and 10 percent (or lower, depending on the foreign tax deduction). This tax on repatriated earnings would yield the United States huge incremental revenue — an estimated $200 billion on the $2.6 trillion now kept overseas — and would allow companies to reinvest the nontaxed portion in the United States, creating thousands of jobs. The Schumer-Portman framework also includes provisions that would stop “earnings stripping,” a method a company uses, once it leaves the country, to reduce the tax it pays on its remaining United States-based subsidiary (Mrs. Clinton’s proposal also addressed earnings stripping).

Congressional leaders agree that passing legislation according to this framework would stop inversions, so why is Congress still not acting on it? The problem is that too many politicians (and members of the press) don’t understand that there is a significant difference between “international tax reform” and “comprehensive tax reform.”

“Comprehensive tax reform” means fixing both the domestic tax code and the international tax code at the same time. But this is the quintessential fool’s errand because there is simply no consensus in Washington on how to fix the domestic piece of that puzzle. On the other hand, the Schumer-Portman framework for “international tax reform” has a bipartisan consensus now and would stop inversions by permanently fixing this country’s antiquated double tax on foreign earnings. Without this reform, this incremental tax revenue is money this country will never receive, as most of these companies will choose to leave it abroad, or more devastating, leave the country through an inversion.