Never Trust a CEO Who Says They Want to Help
The Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs of major corporations, was lauded by mainstream media in 2019 for pledging to prioritize the common good over shareholders. Well, now they’re demanding to protect tax cuts that disproportionately enrich CEOs.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T; and Dennis Muilenburg, then CEO of the Boeing Company, participate in a Business Roundtable discussion on “Ambitious Innovation,” on December 6, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)
Two years ago, a lobbying group representing the CEOs of the world’s largest companies declared that corporate America must change its ways and commit to building “an economy that serves all Americans.”
Less than two years later, after CEO pay skyrocketed during the pandemic, the same group has launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to protect tax cuts that tend to disproportionately benefit CEOs, according to new academic research.
Specifically, the Business Roundtable is aiming to block the popular, modest corporate tax increases in Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan that would fund public infrastructure investments across the country. The group — which includes companies that paid no federal taxes at all last year — is already running radio ads in the DC area pushing back on Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.
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