Actually the single thing that WOULD turn it around would be to wipe out 75% of the restrictive regulations that affect business, leaving only the ones that directly affect health and safety of the workers and customers. Junk the more far-flung OSHA regs that are based on some freak accident that happened once, somewhere; junk most of the environmental regs and laws that are aimed at society-wide issues like the CFC light idiocy; junk the feel-good EEO crap and make people prove their own discrimination cases instead of presuming they're right just because they complained at all; stop propping up unions with the NLRB and new legislative proposals like card-check and let them prove their value or evaporate; and so on down the line.
Taxes you'll have to pay anywhere, more or less as the case may be, but business in the US is strangling due to the weight of regulation that makes it damned near impossible to grow one. A local or franchise service business, sure, but how many damned restaurants and detailing shops do you need? In manufacturing, at the point where a business starts getting a national or international market, it has a choice of locating or outsourcing a lot of what it does off-shore, or having its lunch eaten by relatively-unconstrained foreign competitors.
