In mid-October 2012, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, hosted a luncheon on the 49th floor of the firm’s Park Avenue headquarters. The guest list was a boldface roll call of corporate executives and policymakers: Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, David M. Cote of Honeywell, the Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia and the Republican senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, among others.

The topic over lunch was “Fix the Debt,” a nascent effort by like-minded executives — all of whom had signed on to the campaign — to urge lawmakers to address the nation’s growing debt. Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton who was an inspiration for the group along with Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, had just called the nation’s debt “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.”

Mr. Dimon, along with dozens of other executives, took up the challenge. “The inability to face our fiscal reality is a concern,” he wrote in his annual letter to investors that year, lamenting the failure to adopt the Simpson-Bowles plan to reduce the debt by $4 trillion, in part by increasing taxes, closing loopholes and reducing entitlements. “I believe that if we had adopted some form of the Simpson-Bowles plan to fix the debt, it would have been extremely beneficial to the economy.”

Fast forward to this month: With a few exceptions, the community of chief executives that once championed reducing the debt as the nation’s top priority is taking up a position on the other side of the issue. They are advocating an overhaul package that will reduce corporate taxes, even though both the House and Senate plans will increase the national debt by an estimated $1.5 trillion over the next decade.