Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Sunday that she was “open” to implementing Sarah Palin’s suggestion that all corporate income taxes be abolished.

“I propose to eliminate all federal corporate income tax,” Palin had said in a speech to the tea party in Iowa Saturday. “This is how we create millions of high-paying jobs… To eliminate any loss of federal revenues from this tax cut, we eliminate corporate welfare and all the loopholes, and we eliminate all the bailouts.”

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“We could go that route,” Bachmann told CBS’ Bob Schieffer Sunday. “If we went that route then we’d have to have a fundamental restructuring of the tax code. I’m open to having that debate… What we do know is that the current corporate tax rate is killing job creation.”

“So you could see a way to do that?” Schieffer pressed.

“It would be possible if we have a fundamental restructuring of the tax code,” Bachmann insisted. “But immediately what we could do is repatriation of bringing this money in from American companies that are earning the money overseas. But second, I do believe that the president at minimum should lower the corporate tax rate to 20 percent so that businesses can see that they will have a more competitive rate. We certainly could get down to a 0 percent corporate tax rate but it would mean a fundamental restructuring of the tax code.”

Later on CBS, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman suggested that Palin’s idea just wasn’t realistic.

“That’s a great political bromide,” he said.

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“How do you do it? How do you make the numbers work? All I’m telling you is I have been there and I have done that… I know how difficult it is to make the numbers work. You have got to find the revenue somewhere that you can reinvest back in the tax code to bring down the rate for everybody.”

Watch this video from CBS’ Face the Nation, broadcast Sept. 4, 2011.



