President Donald Trump flanked (l-r) by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) (Screenshot of C-SPAN video)

(CNSNews.com) - President Donald Trump met with GOP congressional leaders Tuesday on his tax reform agenda, saying in order to seize on the momentum of the 1.2 million private sector jobs created since he took office, it is “vital” to reduce the tax burden on American companies and workers.



“We pay the highest tax of any country in the world on businesses, and we can't keep doing that. Last week, I repeated my principles for tax reform. First, we must make the tax code as simple as possible. It's extremely complex. It's not fair, and it's extremely hard to understand, so we want to make it as simple as possible,” he said.





“Second, we must provide tax relief for middle-class workers and families. Third, we must restore our competitive edge, which we've lost. We're doing fine, but we lost the competitive edge. You see what's going on all over the world,” the president said, flanked by cabinet members, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.



“So we can have real job growth throughout America. We can't be the jobs magnet of the world if we continue to tax our industries at rates 60 percent higher than companies in other countries. Can't do it, and finally, we must bring back trillions of dollars that are currently parked overseas,” Trump said, estimating that there is $4 trillion can’t come back to the U.S. because of the tax code and tax rates.



The White House described the meeting as “productive,” saying that they discussed “the priority of enacting historic tax reform that is pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-worker, and pro-America.”



“The leaders reaffirmed their commitment to reducing the crushing burden of the Nation’s self-destructive tax code, which hurts our companies and our workers, and discussed their desire to make the tax code simple, fair, and easy to understand. They discussed House and Senate committee hearings on tax reform and agreed that committee activity should continue so that Congress can move to mark-ups on legislation as expeditiously as possible,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.



The leaders also discussed the need for funding the rebuilding and recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana.