• Sen. Tom Coburn: Despite reports, nobody in Congress is debating Oklahoma disaster aid
• Coburn: FEMA has $11.6 billion for assistance, more than enough to help tornado victims
• But if FEMA fund runs out, Coburn will stick by policy to deny aid without cuts elsewhere
• Coburn: I opposed Sandy aid package because it was an “all-you-can-eat buffet”

Editor’s note: Tom Coburn, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Oklahoma and the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

(CNN) — Millions of Americans have been shocked by the devastation caused by the tornadoes in Oklahoma. Having toured the area, it’s impossible to put the scope of the damage in words. Not just homes but entire neighborhoods are gone.

Americans also may have been surprised to hear about a disagreement in Washington about delivering disaster aid to victims. The good news is this disagreement doesn’t exist. No one in Washington is opposing delivering aid to victims. In fact, there is no aid bill for Oklahoma to even debate.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has $11.6 billion available in the fund for assistance to victims in all federally declared disasters, and this is likely more than sufficient to help victims in Oklahoma. As the ranking member of the Senate committee that oversees FEMA, I’m confident Oklahoma will receive the assistance it needs.

The bad news is some in the media have persisted in reporting on this nonexistent funding fight — although it might happen in the future if FEMA runs out of money. My view is that focusing on funding questions now is premature and insensitive. Although I’ve never been shy about telling reporters and my constituents where I stand on tough questions, focusing on a fight that isn’t happening is crass and irresponsible journalism.

Instead of reporting the facts about disaster spending, many news outlets have used the tragedy to talk about “dilemmas,” “binds” and “divisions” among Republicans. At this point, these stories are only figments in the imaginations of a few journalists and editors who are having a difficult time keeping their opinions to themselves.

Case in point is Wednesday’s Washington Post story, where I learned about my alleged dilemma on tornado aid. But The Post buried the real news in the 15th paragraph, which reads:

“At this point, all these questions are theoretical. There is no Oklahoma disaster relief bill. There may never be one. … At the moment, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a large stockpile of funds to pay for disaster response; members of Congress estimated it at $11.6 billion.”

Parents saw daughter just before tornado

The article goes on to say that most legislators agree that the fund is adequate to handle the Oklahoma disaster, and it quotes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as saying “Right now, we don’t need the money.”

Tornado Claims Could Top $2 Billion

In other words, the real news is no Oklahoma disaster relief bill exists and, as Reid says, “we don’t need the money.”

Still, I have no objection to stating unequivocally that if FEMA runs out of money, I will encourage my colleagues to pay for any new assistance for Oklahoma, or anywhere else by reducing lower-priority spending rather than borrowing new money.

Let me explain why this principle is important. Under congressional budget rules, if disaster funds are exhausted, Congress can pass an “emergency supplemental spending” bill that does not count against that year’s budget caps.

In other words, Congress can simply borrow new money without setting priorities or making hard choices about where to cut the budget elsewhere. At a time when we’re losing $200 billion a year because of waste and duplication, not setting priorities doesn’t make sense in any circumstance. Why respond to one disaster by creating another one for taxpayers?

Some have suggested it is hypocritical for me to support disaster aid in my state after opposing the Sandy emergency aid bill for the Northeast. But my position has been the same for my entire service in Congress, starting when I pushed for offsets to the Oklahoma City bombing supplemental bill in 1995.

My position has never been to oppose all forms of disaster aid. My position has been to oppose politicians who use disasters to spend money that has nothing to do with helping victims of disasters. The hard truth is both parties have abused the emergency spending process in Congress for many years.

For instance, when the Gulf Coast was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many in Washington were appalled by my suggestion that times of tragedy and disaster are precisely the times for politicians to tighten their belts and make hard choices. One of the sacrifices I proposed was to divert funds from a $223 million bridge in Alaska — known as the “Bridge to Nowhere” — to a bridge over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. My colleagues fumed: How dare I force such choices? My response was — and is: How dare we not force such choices?

The Superstorm Sandy package, unfortunately, is another recent example. I supported a scaled-down $25 billion version of disaster aid for Sandy, but I strongly opposed a $50 billion package that was an all-you-can-eat buffet for politicians and politically connected contractors.

Much of the larger Sandy package had little to do with helping victims of the disaster. More than $5 billion was directed to the Army Corps of Engineers — more than the Corps’ annual budget. Even NASA was in on the game. NASA said its damage from the storm was minimal, but Congress wanted to give it $15 million anyway. The most revealing aspect was more than 70% of the $50 billion would not be spent for two years, which meant it was an economic stimulus package, not a disaster aid bill.

I don’t believe anyone in the Senate wants or anticipates a Sandy- or Katrina-like fight about emergency spending offsets for Oklahoma.

Still, if any politicians in Washington hope to use Oklahoma’s tragedy as vehicle for pork, don’t bother. State Rep. Mark McBride from Moore, Oklahoma, put it best this week on MSNBC: “We don’t want anything. We don’t want anything extra. We just want to rebuild our city. And whatever they can do for us they can cough up, and whatever they don’t, we`ll make it up. That`s the way we roll here.”

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sen. Tom Coburn.

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Mark Stahl/AP

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University of Michigan Health System/AP

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had hoped to make a media splash by landing a big fish rarely seen in Washington: Apple CEO Tim Cook. It released a 40-page report on the eve of the hearing, excoriating Apple’s use of “gimmicks” to avoid paying U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore income between 2009 and 2012.

Chaired by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, the subcommittee has been investigating the tax avoidance strategies of major U.S. tech firms. Last year, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were in the dock; Tuesday, it was Apple’s turn.

“Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax offshore tax haven,” Levin told the New York Times. “It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.”

At issue are foreign subsidiaries that U.S. multinationals use to manage their overseas operations. The subcommittee report says that tech companies can shuffle their intellectual property as well as earnings among such entities to shield them from America’s steep corporate tax rates.

Cook, however, denied that Apple funnels any of its U.S. profits into offshore tax havens.

The company has amassed more than $100 billion in foreign earnings, he said, because international sales of iPhones and other products account for 61% of its revenues. Apple pays taxes in the countries where its products are sold, he told the panel, adding that it is probably also America’s largest corporate taxpayer, with expected 2013 liabilities of $7 billion.

The Senate inquisitors aren’t accusing the tech companies of doing anything illegal but of cleverly exploiting loopholes in U.S. tax laws that allow them to shelter income overseas. Lawmakers want the firms to “repatriate” their overseas profits so that they can be taxed here. But the companies say that would be tantamount to taxing them twice, putting them at a disadvantage with foreign competitors who pay taxes only where their products are sold.

At a time when America urgently needs to rebuild its revenue base and continue unwinding its public debts, it’s little wonder that lawmakers cast a covetous eye on the overseas profits of U.S. firms. But while grilling CEOs may make for good political theater, it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem: America’s outdated and dysfunctional corporate tax code.

How flawed is it? Let us count the ways. First, it subjects U.S.-based corporations to a top marginal rate of 35%, among the highest in the world. Designed at a time when U.S. companies competed mainly with each other, the code now hobbles them in global competition.

Second, the code is riddled with special tax deductions, credits and exemptions, which make it both fiendishly complicated and economically inefficient. As economist Robert Shapiro noted in a recent Progressive Policy Institute study, these provisions entail significant administrative and compliance costs and, more damagingly from the standpoint of economic growth, undercut markets’ ability to allocate capital to its most productive uses. They also make the code highly inequitable as some companies get breaks while others don’t with little rhyme or reason other than how effective their lobbyists are.

Third, the United States is one of the few remaining countries (PDF) that has a “worldwide” tax system, meaning that we apply the 35% top rate to the worldwide profits of U.S-based companies: that is, on the profits made by foreign subsidiaries as well. Almost every other major economy has a territorial tax system, which taxes only the business profits earned in that country. While U.S. companies get a credit for the taxes they pay overseas, they are still liable for the difference between what they pay abroad and the higher U.S. marginal tax rate.

These glaring defects have engendered a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington for sweeping reform of the corporate tax code. The basic idea, endorsed by the Obama administration and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, is to radically simplify the code by phasing out special preferences and using some or all of the revenues to cut the tax rate. (Progress toward reform is snagged, however, on a dispute over whether any of those revenues should be used for deficit reduction.)

More controversial is adopting a territorial system. Some progressives are leery of this approach, since it would put the foreign earnings of U.S.-based companies forever beyond Washington’s reach. But as Progressive Policy Institute economist Michael Mandel notes, those foreign profits are already taxed by the countries in which the money is earned. In today’s increasingly globalized economy, it makes sense to move toward a simpler system that is easier to enforce.

Unlike Apple, U.S. lawmakers have the power to fix our broken corporate tax system. That’s probably a better use of their time than villainizing America’s most innovative and successful companies.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Will Marshall.