Jamie Dimon, a billionaire banking executive, has said he supports the idea of handing out money to the rich to pay down the national debt.
The CEO of JPMorgan Chase said he supports the so-called “Buffett rule” that would require anyone earning more than $1 million a year to pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30% on their income.
Reducing the debt, which recently topped $35.12 trillion, while maintaining strong 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 this country a better country,” the 68-year-old JPMorgan boss said, adding that he supported a “competitive international tax system.”
“And maybe you could just raise taxes a little bit, like Warren Buffett does,” he said.
“I would. And everything would be fine.”
In 2012, the Obama administration launched a policy proposal known as the “Buffett Rule,” whose “core principle” stated that “no household earning more than $1 million a year should pay a lower share of its income in taxes than middle-class families.”
The rule, which was never passed due to lack of support in Congress, is a reference to an interview the billionaire investor gave to ABC News, outlining his views on income inequality in America.
Buffett, whose net worth was estimated at $138 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on Wednesday, noted that while he pays a tax rate of 17.4 percent, his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, pays a rate of 35.8 percent of her income.
Sitting next to Bosanek, Buffett, who showed his tax returns to the Disney-owned news service, said: “I’ve never had a happier life. … What’s happened in the last few years, we were told a rising tide would lift all boats, but the rising tide has lifted all the yachts.”
Bosanek was invited by then-President Barack Obama to his State of the Union address in January 2012, where she sat 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 widened.
For tax year 2021, the Internal Revenue Service released a report showing that the top 1% of income earners paid a tax rate of 25.9%, nearly eight times higher than the average rate of 3.3% paid by the bottom 50%.
The last time the U.S. government ran a budget surplus was in fiscal year 2001. At that time, the United States had a surplus of $128 billion.
But since then, the September 11 attacks and the subsequent war on terror, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a major recession caused by the housing market collapse, the bailout of the U.S. auto industry, COVID-19 and other crises have led to a growing national debt.
