President Donald Trump doubled down on tax reform on Monday, making a point to bring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) into the White House Rose Garden, a major show of Republican unity.

“I would like to see it be done this year,” said Trump, speaking to the media as he gave an impromptu press conference.

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As Trump stood with McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) worked in the House to also send a message on tax reform, telling members on Monday that they could see their Christmas vacation canceled if a tax reform bill does not pass by then.

Trump has pushed tax reform as a way to stimulate long-stalled U.S. wages, which have been stagnant since roughly 1979.

One cause, many Republicans believe, is high corporate taxes on employers. Trump said the United States needs to cut its top corporate tax rate of 35 percent, which he said is hurting competitiveness.

“And we hope to be in good shape with, again, the largest tax cuts ever passed in this country. It’s going to spur business,” Trump said. “You look at other countries, what they’ve done, and we’re competing with other countries. When China is at 15 percent, when I hear that Ireland is going to be reducing their corporate rates down to 8 percent from 12. But you have other countries also reducing. We can’t be at 35 percent and think we’re going to remain competitive in terms of companies and in terms of jobs.”

The U.S. top corporate tax rate is the highest in the industrialized world, leading some governors and business leaders to complain they are losing employers to Canada, Mexico, and even Ireland. To tackle the problem, Trump decided to go for a big tax package in his first year. Trump and Congress have proposed cutting the top corporate tax rate to 20 percent, while also cutting personal rates.

But first, Trump has to try to heal the rifts between the White House and Congress. Of late, Trump has been vocal about McConnell, but not Ryan. And McConnell seemed sharply aware of that, eager to talk tax reform with the president but also adding he is trying to move the Senate along quickly to approve Trump’s judicial and executive-branch nominees.

“We’re in the personnel business,” McConnell said, reminding the journalists that the House doesn’t approve judicial and Cabinet nominees. “There are 1,200 of the president’s nominations subject to confirmation in the Senate. The House is not in the personnel business, we are.”

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McConnell may have felt pressed to explain the reasons the Senate took so long to take up tax reform and health care. Originally, Ryan and McConnell wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and pass major tax reform in the first 200 days of 2017. It did not work out for McConnell, as he saw three senators in the Republican majority kill Obamacare repeal.

Now, Trump hopes for one big legislative win before the 2018 midterm elections. Many Republicans believe their own voters will forgive the failure to repeal Obamacare if the GOP-led Congress can deliver tax cuts and reform.

Adam Michel, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said cutting the corporate tax rate would be a good way to ignite wages.

“We know that the corporate tax rate is just a cost of business,” he told LifeZette on Monday. “It gets passed on to workers and not investors.”

Investors who see high corporate taxes will try to avoid them, Michel said, by moving their business to another country, or by investing in other companies.

Corporate tax rates also allow big companies to “game” the system, he said, using deductions and loopholes as a way to pay less than competitors. Effectively, some companies pay far less than similar-sized companies, and do so by using tax attorneys, loopholes, and a variety of other tax-reduction methods. In effect, U.S. companies often use the corporate tax rate against competitors.

“The real problem is the variation in [corporate tax] rates” among U.S. corporations, said Michel.

(photo credit, homepage image: Donald Trump, cut-out and colored, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Albert Gallatin statue – U.S. Department of Treasury headquarters…, resized and faded, CC BY-SA 3.0, by Benoît Prieur; photo credit, article image: Donald Trump, cut out and colored, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)