Billionaire banking executive Jamie Dimon said he supports soaking the rich in order to pay down the national debt.
The CEO of JPMorgan Chase said he backs the so-called “Buffett Rule” that would require anyone who earns more than $1 million annually to pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30% on their income.
Bringing down the debt, which recently surpassed $35.12 trillion, while maintaining robust spending on defense, infrastructure and earned income tax credits is “doable,” Dimon said in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Service on Wednesday.
“I would spend the money that helped make it a better country,” the 68-year-old JPMorgan chief said, adding that he favors a “competitive international tax system.”
“And you would maybe just raise taxes a little bit, like the Warren Buffett type of rule,” he said.
“I would do that. And we would be fine.”
In 2012, the Obama administration floated a policy proposal known as “the Buffett rule” whose “basic principle” stated that “no household making over $1 million annually should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay.”
The rule, which was never passed into law due to lack of congressional support, is a reference to an interview which the billionaire investor granted to ABC News outlining his views on income inequality in America.
Buffett, whose net worth was valued by Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $138 billion as of Wednesday, noted that while he paid a tax rate of 17.4%, his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, paid a rate of 35.8% of her income.
Sitting alongside Bosanek, Buffett, who showed his tax returns to the Disney-owned news operation, said: “I have never had it so good. … What has happened in recent years, we were told a rising tide would lift all boats, but the rising tide has lifted all yachts.”
Bosanek was invited by then-President Barack Obama to his January 2012 State of the Union address, where she was seated alongside Laurene Powell Jobs and then-First Lady Michelle Obama.
But the tax code appears to have become more progressive in recent years as wealth inequality has gotten worse.
For the 2021 tax year, the Internal Revenue Service issued a report which said that the top 1% of income earners paid a tax rate of 25.9% — which is nearly eight times higher than the 3.3% average rate paid by the bottom 50%.
The last time the US government recorded a budget surplus was in fiscal year 2001. At the time, the US had a surplus of $128 billion.
Since then, however, the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent war on terror, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a major recession brought on by the collapse of the housing market, the bailing out of the US auto industry, COVID-19 and other crises led to a burgeoning national debt.
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