The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek in which he makes some interesting points about infrastructure spending and the tone coming from Washington:
I'm going to oversimplify this, but what happens with infrastructure is that the Democrats say, "Spend money. Just spend money." And, of course, we do a lot of that. A lot of people feel it just goes out to bridges to nowhere. So the Republicans are right to be questioning how the money gets spent. There are a lot of ways to do that. A lot of it, by the way, is to give it back to this mayor who knows how to do it. We don't want Washington to tell the mayor what he needs....
The Republicans are in charge, and they have not been anti-business the way you've seen the Democrats largely be anti-business for years. I think if you are going to be president, you should have the best people sitting around a table. I think it's a mistake for the American public to constantly be told that if you work for an oil company or you work for a bank, that automatically makes you bad....
I think it's a reset moment for how businesses are going to be treated: 145 million people work in America; 125 million of them work for private enterprise; 20 million work for government—firemen, sanitation, police, teachers. We hold them in very high regard. But you know, if you didn't have the 125 you couldn't pay for the other 20. Business is a huge positive element in society. But for years it's been beaten down as if we're terrible people. So I think it's a good reset...
We're talking very specifically about the need for corporate tax reform. We are driving capital overseas every single day. And you know, I think the government made a mistake to act as if the inversion was the problem. The problem is that our tax rate is so much higher than the rest of the world ... Because of that, companies are leaving their money overseas. They're reinvesting it overseas. They're buying companies overseas. ...So I think the only question is how much damage is done before we change it.
The whole interview is worth the click; he also discusses immigration, education, mortgage lending, Dodd-Frank, and minimum wage.