‘Have their cake and eat it too’: inside US big business’s tax cut campaign

US corporations and their supporters in Washington are pushing aggressively to roll back tax policies they once endorsed, in a move that could return hundreds of billions of dollars to some of America’s biggest companies.

As congressional negotiators attempt to keep the government funded past 19 January, an agreement is emerging that ties the corporate tax breaks to an increase in support for vulnerable American families – an effort to make the deal more palatable for Democrats.

Just six years ago the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for CEOs of large US firms, described the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as “a remarkable, once-in-a-generation opportunity”. Now, the group is leading “a six-figure advocacy campaign” to roll back parts of it, according to Politico, and threatening that failing to secure new tax cuts will lead to “slower job creation, smaller wage increases and lower overall economic growth”.

An ad from the National Association of Manufacturers, another trade group, claims US companies are “investing billions into the economy” but warns that unless Congress cuts corporate taxes further, “we risk losing it all”. The organization, which in 2017 called the law “a grand slam”, predicts a million job losses over the next two years without additional tax breaks.

The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates these tax cuts would add $650bn to the federal deficit over the next decade.

“It’s the classic, ‘We want to have our cake and eat it too,’” said Sarah Christopherson of Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), an advocacy coalition. “Corporations are saying: ‘We want to keep every last one of those corporate tax cuts that we got [in 2017]. And also, we want you to double down and give us