 CEOs complain about the U.S. tax rate a lot, and there's a reason for that. It's the highest in the world. Do you really expect them to just pay 35 percent to the U.S. government? Hell no. According to Capital Economics, some of America's biggest companies are holding $2.5 trillion overseas. It's just sitting there, doing nothing. And this is money the IRS just can't get its hands on. The real question is, what happens to all that money? Well President Trump has a plan. Bring that money back and pay just a 10 percent tax. Compare that to your personal tax rate and it probably sounds like a bargain. It's certainly more in line with other nations around the world. There are so many big companies holding cash abroad. Apple with $246 billion, Microsoft has $128 billion and $65 billion for Cisco. Those are just the top three names. So what happens to all that money once it's back in the U.S.? A Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey brings it all down. 65 percent of the companies say the repatriated cash will be used to pay down debt. 46 percent would use the money for share buybacks. What that's going to do is artificially boost the stock price. Now I won't bore you with all the details, but the technical term for that is financial engineering. That's both good news and bad news. I'll get to that later. Then there's the 35 percent that would use this money for capital investment. Bingo. That's where companies invest in themselves and hire more workers. Now just because the government lowers the tax rate doesn't mean companies will immediately bring the cash back to the U.S. If that's the case, the government has a trick up its sleeve and it's called the Deem Repatriation Tax. That means the U.S. can act as if the money has already been brought home and tax it that way, even if the cash remains overseas. That would give CEOs far fewer reasons to leave it there. Now oddly enough, both President Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook are reportedly supporters of the Deem Repatriation Tax. So if the job-cheering president and the CEO with the most overseas cash can agree on this, what's the holdup? Well, Washington is the holdup. It isn't just corporate tax cuts that are stalled. You may have noticed that big tax cut President Trump promised you during the campaign hasn't materialized either. Now in Trump's Twitterverse, though, it's coming. So here's my take on all of this. There's obviously gridlock in Washington, even though Republicans control all three branches of government. Nothing is getting done, at least not yet. If politicians can't agree on a total full-throttle tax reform bill, which so far they haven't been able to do in my lifetime, they should at least address the repatriation issue. If these companies simply buy back their own shares, fine, at least that boosts the stock market. And if they just use a small sum to hire workers, that's much better than watching it sit on the sidelines. But best of all, the government gets some more revenue to rebuild our infrastructure, and my vote would be fixing the New York City subway.