CEO Jamie Dimon seems to be ok with paying higher taxes.
From the interview:
“If you said to me, ‘Would you pay 10% more?’ I would have no problem with that,” he said."
So, I’d like to talk about what a 10% hike would look like. How much money might we be talking about and what could we do with it?
Would it be enough to pay for universal health care? Cause that is all I want for Christmas.
Please share your thoughts.
First of all, what is the “very wealthy”? If nothing else we should increase revenue so we have some leeway when times are tough so our deficit doesn’t go into a death spiral, but without knowing how much the revenue would be I wouldn’t know what to spend it on, if anything. (I think that as far as effects on the economy goes, whatever “disincentive to work” there might or might not be for higher taxes in the very upper brackets would be more than made up for by the greater security of a lower deficit, so not spending the additional revenue on anything would be one option.)
Ten percentage points or ten percent of what he’s paying now? 
A 10-point hike on the very wealthy is like a 5-point hike on the whole country. Yeah, you could probably use that (+ existing Medicare taxes) to transition to single-payer.
It’s still a sweetheart deal for hotshots that are paying less than 15% now. Make it twenty points.
Leaving aside whether it’s a good idea or not, here are some quick Google search facts. The top 1% paid nearly half of the Federal income tax in 2014. According to this, the Federal government brought in over $3 trillion (for the first time) in revenue that year. I assume that all revenue includes more than income tax, but I guess we could use that as a baseline. So, in a perfect world, the answer to the OPs question would be around $300 billion more. Not enough to do everything, but still a chunk of change.
You wouldn’t, of course, GET $300 billion in additional revenue from trying to squeeze the top 1%.
One thing we could not do with the extra $300 billion is eliminate the deficit, so this wouldn’t be new money we could spend.
Regards,
Shodan
Ninja’d by XT but my link has the breakdown of the total revenue sources.
Total revenue in 2014 was a hair over 3 trillion. 1.7 trillion was income taxes and 1.0 trillion of that was FICA. CBO estimates of the 2015 deficit as of August was 426 billion. Increasing total revenue from everyone accounts for less than 2/3 of the total deficit. Collecting 10% more from a subset gets you less to a lot less depending on the definition of wealthy applied
That still leaves us solidly in deficit territory.
We could get the people who pay those taxes to bribe the congress to lower their taxes by more than 10%.
If $170B would get us Universal Healthcare along the lines of Single Payer, sign mer up!!
They only pay half of the federal income tax…so, it would be 10% of half of $1.7 trillion, or $85 billion. If you can squeeze UHC and a single payer system out of that then more power to ya. 
Thanks DinoR for parsing the numbers…I kind of figured FICA would be a big chunk of that $3 trillion.
:smack: Forgot to divide by 2.
If the US takes in 1.7 trillion in incomes and the top 1% pay 45.7% of that, it means they pay 777 billion dollars a year. An extra 10% would be 77 billion dollars. Since the government spends about 831 billion on healthcare a year and only covers half the population and extra 77 billion would not get us anywhere close to universal health care. You could pay off about a third of the interest on the current debt or have a deficit 18% smaller.
No worries. I didn’t do it in my first post because I was going for a high end ‘ideal world’ number so to set an upper baseline. That’s the most we could expect. I figured it would be downhill from there.
Even $300 billion wouldn’t get us UHC. What we COULD get with that is a really cool manned Mars mission though…
Would we have enough left over to rescue the guy who gets left there?
Not a chance…he or they would be screwed. But, we could send more than one pack of potatoes with them, so that might help…
We could use the extra money on more tax breaks for the rich …
Otherwise, go ahead … we’ll just raise your rents to cover the extra tax load …
How much could we raise if we put a 10% tax on political contributions? 
I think what often gets blurred in these discussions is a distinction between aggregate consumption of x (say health care) and how that consumption is financed. If the government took $1,000 more per month out of my paycheck but gave me “free” healthcare, I would be indifferent to the outcome even though my taxes ostensibly went up by $1,000 per month (i.e. a lot). It’s strictly a question of how my consumption is financed. And maybe because the government is so big and powerful, they can buy me $1,000 worth of healthcare for $900, so they only need to take $900 out of my paycheck and I’m actually better off by $100.
I think the real question is, how much would taxes have to go up in order for the government to be able to pay for people not currently receiving any, or enough, healthcare. I guess to answer that question you’d have to make a judgment of under-consumption of healthcare in this country, which I have no idea how to do. Presumably the number is larger than $77 billion per year, to take puddleglum’s math, but maybe not that much bigger.
So what’s stopping him?
Sure, or you could just save yourself some time and put it all in a pile, pour gasoline on it and set it on fire.
[QUOTE=Grumman]
Sure, or you could just save yourself some time and put it all in a pile, pour gasoline on it and set it on fire.
[/QUOTE]
That would only be the case if we went the UHC for $300 billion route. Might as well just light it on fire.
No but $77 billion would pay for the F-22 Raptor program with about $10 billion left over. We need more cool expensive jets to fight armies of Toyota trucks with machineguns bolted to the roof.