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An influential business group is preparing to spend aggressively ahead of the legislative brawl that’s expected next year when Congress will decide whether to renew the expiring chunks of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts.
Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten told reporters on Wednesday that his group planned to drop “eight figures” while “putting its full weight behind protecting and strengthening tax reform.”
Bolton declined to specify what the spending blitz would entail, but emphasized it would be one of the largest such efforts in his organization’s 52-year history. But he said the Roundtable’s chief goal is to preserve a “competitive tax system that allows companies to grow and innovate in the US.”
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, who chairs the Business Roundtable, outlined the group’s top three priorities in the 2025 tax cliff. They included keeping the 21% corporate tax rate at its current level, maintaining a “competitive” international tax system, and strengthening incentives for domestic innovation such as immediate expensing for research and development spending for US companies.
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Donald Trump is set to meet with top CEOs at the Business Roundtable’s headquarters for the group’s quarterly meeting on Thursday as he courts support from business leaders for his reelection bid. Larry Kudlow, the former director of Trump’s National Economic Council, will interview him at the event, per Axios. He’s also scheduled to meet with House and Senate Republicans, the first time since he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Republicans in both the House and Senate are starting to chart out their agenda in the event they win control of Congress and the White House in November. Speaker Mike Johnson met with GOP senators on Wednesday to push a party-line mega-bill that sidesteps the 60-vote threshold in the Senate using reconciliation, a budgetary process requiring only a simple majority.
But the Senate GOP’s top tax-writer is largely staying mum on the party’s wish-list before November. “I’m not making any decisions on any policies that we should move on next year until we have the whole picture understood and in front of us,” Mike Crapo, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance panel, told Semafor when asked whether he’d be open to further lowering corporate tax rates.
The View From the Democrats
Democrats are already assailing the GOP’s agenda, even though large chunks of it have yet to be committed to paper. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Wednesday floor speech that Republicans want to use reconciliation next year “to gut as much of the Democrats’ middle class agenda as possible, while passing another round of costly tax breaks that cater to wealthy elites.”