The country’s top business leaders are coming around.
The Business Roundtable, an association of leading corporate execs, says it’s OK with President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the rich as part of a fiscal cliff deal. The announcement, which follows last week’s White House meeting with a more than a dozen top bankers and financiers, is the latest sign that Obama is likely to get his way on the issue.
“We recognize that part of the solution has to be tax increases,” David M. Cote, chief executive of Honeywell, told reporters. “That’s the only thing that allows a reasonable compromise to be reached.”
In a letter to Obama sent Tuesday, the CEOs write:
Compromise will require Congress to agree on more revenue – whether by increasing rates, eliminating deductions, or some combination thereof – and the administration to agree to larger, meaningful structural and benefit entitlement reforms and spending reductions that are a fiscally responsible multiple of increased revenues.
The group had previously opposed any effort to block the extension of the Bush tax cuts for everyone.
Last week, Deloitte CEO Joe Echevarria spoke on Morning Joe about the meeting at the White House that he and other CEOs participated in. According to Echevarria, the president told CEOs that raising revenue through tax hikes would be a part of any fiscal cliff deal. “[The president] also recognized that there needed to be entitlement reform and spending cuts, so he didn’t think there was one way to get to the solution,” he said. In recent weeks, even some Republicans have acknowledged that they have little ability to stop tax rates on the rich from going up.
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