Business Roundtable and the American Petroleum Institute recently hosted a fireside chat with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and maintaining and building on it in 2025. Deloitte’s Managing Principal for Policy & Government Relations Shahira Knight moderated the discussion. 

Majority Leader Scalise and Chairman Brady highlighted the economic gains from 2017 tax reform, including increased domestic investment, job creation and wage growth across income levels. They also discussed how TCJA benefited businesses of all sizes — with emphasis on America’s small businesses — and why Congress should protect and strengthen tax reform in 2025. 

Here’s what they said:

On how tax reform opened doors for American opportunity:

Former Rep. Brady: “I think it’s really important to lay out how all those growth provisions that incentivized the business community ended up helping exactly the people Republicans care about, those working men and women, those mom-and-pop businesses.” 

Rep. Scalise: “Each of you [companies] had a story of what you were able to do for your workers. Some of you gave better retirement benefits. … This little brewery was able to give healthcare benefits to their employees who didn’t have them. That’s real, tangible benefits to blue-collar workers. … If we can tell these stories, it just reminds people why we need to do this. We’re doing it for America.”

On how tax reform spurred business investment in America: 

Former Rep. Brady: “We tracked how U.S. companies that compete here and around the world responded to TCJA. Here’s what happened: jobs, research, capital expenditures and sales all increased more in America than overseas after TCJA because we created incentives for those investments here to compete and win, but to be able to bring those profits home when you succeeded to invest in America.”

Former Rep. Brady: “We didn’t lower taxes for corporations. We lowered taxes on corporations to drive that paycheck growth, the new jobs, the opportunities to lower poverty because we knew making our free enterprise system more competitive, creating incentives for expensing, for R&D, for innovation, for hiring more would drive that growth.”

On the importance of extending TCJA provisions in 2025: 

Former Rep. Brady: “So I think lesson number one is preserve growth … at all costs, because that’s helping drive manufacturing in the U.S. That’s what helps those labor union workers and the mom-and-pop businesses on the street. Protect and preserve that growth and innovation competitiveness. Final point, another lesson here is a lot has changed since 2017, so my recommendation to every tax writer is, don’t just extend these, improve them.”

Rep. Scalise: “We’re not creating TCJA. We’re maintaining it. We’re preventing a four-and-a-half trillion dollar tax hike.”

On protecting and strengthening TCJA:

Rep. Scalise: “We cannot let [TCJA] be taken away, which it will if we just sit around and do nothing. … We’re going to make sure that we renew all of them [the expired and expiring provisions]. If we can add more to what we already have and build on top of it … We’re at 21%. Let’s look and see where else we can go. We’re definitely looking at other components, but we’re going to keep this country competitive. We’re going to continue to see job growth.”

On how tax reform is working for Americans: 

Former Rep. Brady: “Poverty just plummeted and it improved the most for the people who had been left behind under the old tax code, those without skills, people of color, those without high school educations — all of that really important group. And the final thing is, in 2019, we saw for the first time in half a century, income inequality begin to shrink. Wealth and wages for the bottom 10 and 20% were double and triple the growth at the higher end of the income level.”

Rep. Scalise: “Every income group grew. The lowest income groups did the best. Small and women-owned and minority businesses were created at rates we’ve never seen before. We had virtually no unemployment — the millions of jobs that were created, all of that was real.”

Rep. Scalise: “Tax cuts benefit everybody, but primarily it helped the lower- and middle-income people. We were losing our middle class in America, and we got it back. Millions of middle-class jobs came back to America. Companies came back to America.”