Help solve the budget debate: trade off increased personal tax rates by allowing corporations to deduct dividends.

Currently corporations pay dividends from profits after taxes. Dividends received by individuals are then taxed on their personal returns. This proposal would change dividends to be an expense which would reduce corporate taxes, but then dividend income would be treated as regular income on personal tax returns, without special treatment. The benefits of this would be to eliminate double taxation, simplify the tax code, encourage corporations to repatriate foreign earnings as dividends, and help to fairly solve the current budget negotiation as double taxation is one reason for lower tax rates.