Dimon: Wealth tax ‘almost impossible to do’

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in a CNBC interview this week that he thinks a wealth tax would be very challenging to implement.

“A wealth tax is almost impossible to do,” he said. “I’m not against having higher tax on the wealthy, but I think that you should do that through their income.”

Dimon added that calculating taxpayers’ wealth would be “extremely complicated,” and he argued that people would “find a million ways around it.”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has not called for a wealth tax, but several progressive candidates did so during the Democratic primary, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Biden has proposed raising taxes on the wealthy in other ways, such as by raising the top individual income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent — the rate in effect before President Trump enacted his 2017 tax-cut law — and by increasing taxes on capital gains for people with income above $1 million. Biden has also called for raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.

Dimon said that he thinks the Trump administration “did some very good things around tax reform and regulatory reform.”

He argued that some taxes, such as those on capital formation or labor, will slow economic growth, while others, like taxes on wealthy individuals, won’t have an impact on economic growth.