Jamie Dimon, above, CEO of JPMorgan Chase and the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, sounded like a guy sitting at a bar, nursing a drink with his head down:
“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it.”
John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank, admits to feeling "lonely," but has an idea:
“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said.
Brilliant!
Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman was asked if he were willing to pay more in taxes, but deftly turned the question around to lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
Translation: No, I wouldn't. If the government needs more revenue to close the yawning budget deficits they should get it from poor people.
Time for a brief history lesson.
In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, the federal budget was in surplus and the government was projected to pay off the national debt. After taxes were cut (primarily on the rich), the current deficits were created. The two wars that followed, the unfunded Medicare drug benefit and the recession didn't help matters, but the prime cause of the federal budget deficits were the Bush tax cuts.
So what happened after a Democrat was elected to the White House? Republicans and tea partiers screamed that entitlements were bankrupting the country.
(I even saw a bumper sticker the other day that said: IT'S THE SPENDING, STUPID. But it's really not; it's the revenue.)
Back to the Bloomberg piece.
Ken Langone, 76, co-founder of Home Depot, takes a more defiant tone:
“I am a fat cat, I’m not ashamed,” he said last week in a telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side home. “If you mean by fat cat that I’ve succeeded, yeah, then I’m a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat.”
Nice image. That'll help.
Wilbur Ross, 74, another private-equity billionaire, said in an e-mail that entrepreneurship and capitalism didn’t cause the financial crisis.
“Tearing down the rich does not help those less well- off,” said the chairman of New York-based WL Ross & Co. LLC. “If you favor employment, you need employers whose businesses are flourishing.”
Ah, the old "job creators" argument.
That view is shared by Robert Rosenkranz, CEO of Wilmington, Delaware-based Delphi Financial Group Inc., a seller of workers’-compensation and group-life insurance.
“It’s simply a fact that pretty much all the private- sector jobs in America are created by the decisions of ‘the 1 percent’ to hire and invest,” Rosenkranz, 69, said in an e- mail. “Since their confidence in the future more than any other factor will drive those decisions, it makes little sense to undermine their confidence by vilifying them.”
Leon Cooperman, the Omega Advisors Inc. chairman and former CEO of Goldman Sachs's money-management unit, says capitalists:
“Are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas” and provide health care to millions.
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.” (My emphasis.)
Another great image. The downtrodden 1 percent crying over their omelets at a country club in Boca Raton. Does Mr. Cooperman really think he's going to get sympathy from those who've lost their jobs, life savings or homes (or all three)?
Look, I'm not interested in tearing down the rich (or anyone else for that matter). Just let the Bush tax cuts expire so the nation can get back on a sound fiscal path.
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