(The Federalist) JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had some harsh words for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is also competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“She uses some pretty harsh words, you know, some would say vilifies successful people,” Dimon said during an interview with CNBC published Tuesday. “I don’t like vilifying anybody. I think we should applaud successful people.”
Warren has made taxing the wealthy to fund her socialist programs the centerpiece of her time in the Senate and presidential campaign. Dimon said her proposed “Accountable Capitalism Act,” which forces large corporations to adhere to employee demands on electing members of company boards and company political spending, would change “the complete nature of how you run a corporation.”
“I think we have to look at [how] America was founded on free enterprise; freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable. Successful companies have lifted up society.” Dimon asserted. “If people have very specific things that we should do different, then we should think about doing them different.”
Dimon said that while he supports a negative income tax, a form of welfare where those making below a certain threshold receive pay from the government rather than paying taxes, the nation’s leading financier voiced concern about the government moving too quickly to implement broad proposals that could be counterproductive.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions when it comes to policy, and you should be very careful about what you’re trying to accomplish.” Dimon said. “A lot of government programs have been abysmal failures, and we should acknowledge that both programs need to be fixed, and those solutions didn’t work. Let’s try something different.”
This is not the first time Dimon has shared his thoughts about Warren. In June 2015, Dimon said he wasn’t sure that Warren knew how banking worked.
“I don’t know if she fully understands the global banking system,” Dimon charged at an event Executives’ Club of Chicago event. Dimon reportedly cited a meeting he had with Warren to discuss credit cards at the time of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s founding.
Warren fired back.
“The problem is not that I don’t understand the global banking system,” Warren said on a podcast with the Huffington Post. “The problem for these guys is that I fully understand the system and I understand how they make their money. And that’s what they don’t like about me.”
Warren has been far from shy about her disdain for the rich throughout her career in public service and has only ramped up her attacks on the wealthy as she chases her party’s presidential nomination proposing a series of new taxes that still come up short of required revenues to fund her impossibly expensive socialist agenda.
Warren, along with White House rival Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has pushed for a wealth tax that has become a central component of her campaign. The idea has prompted push-back from billionaires such as Leon Cooperman, who slammed the proposal as a “bankrupt concept.”
“I feel she’s taking the country down a very wrong path,” Cooperman saidon CNBC Monday. “What’s she peddling is bull. Total, complete bull. That comes from someone who believes in a progressive income tax structure, who believes the rich should pay more. I have no problem with that.”
Warren’s campaign against big banks and corporations has prompted loyal Democratic donors on Wall Street to warn the party that they would either sit the election out or back President Donald Trump if Warren were to clinch the nomination, according to CNBC.
