Dimon: ‘Yeah, I’d Have No Personal Problem’ Paying More in Taxes

TODD: “I’m going to get a bunch of emails. I’m going to get viewers and say, ‘You know what, those fat cat Wall Street bankers, they worry about their compensation. He’s paid too much.’
DIMON: “I completely understand because I see that things haven’t gotten better for large group of people. On the compensation thing if you— there are two things to say, if you took all the compensation of all the CEOs of the top 500 companies in America it wouldn’t make a dent in this problem. So there are two things to keep in mind, you’re going to have free competition for people. You’re going to see it in sports, you’re going to see it in Silicon Valley, you’re going to see it in engineers. You’re going to see it—and that is a free market. You want that. That’s companies- people have capital sharing the wealth with somebody. But you to get the wage going you have to answer what makes wages grow. And I— at the end of the day it’s economic growth.”
TODD: “You pay enough in taxes? You think your taxes should go up?”
DIMON: “I pay about I think 50 percent of adjusted income and 40 percent, you know, I get deductions for charitable contributions, et cetera. And, yeah, I pay. But, you know, if I, let me change the question, if you said to me, ‘Would you pay 10 percent more?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah I’d have no personal problem doing that at all. Zero.’ And I understand, you know, that I should be paying more than my assistant pays or something like that. What the American public also don’t feel is that money that goes to Washington may not be properly used. So if you’re going to raise taxes for God sake make sure it goes to productive use that people know is properly done which can be infrastructure, education -- et cetera.”