Multinational corporations are demanding a colossal tax break before they’ll “repatriate’’ billions in profits they have been hoarding overseas.

A select alliance of America’s largest companies — Cisco, Pfizer, Qualcomm, and Google, to name a few — has been pressing for a bill that would temporarily slash the federal corporate income tax on offshore profits from 35 percent to 5.25 percent — a break of 85 percent. The tax holiday would ostensibly provide an incentive to return to the US Treasury between $750 billion and $1 trillion in overseas profits the companies have been sitting on.

Using a fanciful formula assuming that every dime in returned tax revenue would subsidize a new hire, Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, predicted in a Wall Street Journal column that the tax holiday would create 2 million new jobs. He called it “a privately funded stimulus of up to a trillion dollars.’’ But as experience has shown, this scheme is less a jobs bill than a thinly veiled amnesty for corporate tax-dodging.

Yeah, right. Stimulus for themselves!!!