Jamie Dimon’s Message for the Mayor

The chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is urging Mayor Zohran Mamdani to rethink his tax-the-rich crusade to avoid an economic calamity for New York City. Will the Marxist mayor get the message? “People think that somehow being anti-business is going to help the city — it’s not,” Mr. Dimon cautions. The city is already losing some of its most talented earners, Mr. Dimon says, partly because low-tax states like Texas are luring them away.“We all want to pay fair taxes, that’s not the point, but at one point, they vote with their feet,” is Mr. Dimon’s appraisal to Bloomberg of the situation facing the city. His concerns are vindicated by reports that two titans of finance, Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Apollo Global Management’s Marc Rowan, were planning to expand operations in more business-friendly climes. It’s of a piece with “a silent wave of businesses ‘quiet quitting’ the city,” the New York Post reports.Mr. Dimon’s remarks follow a bracing dose of reality from another captain of industry, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He scored Mr. Mamdani for lavishing money on the city’s failing public schools. The city spends some 30 percent more than other cities on a per pupil basis, yet its schools suffer from plunging enrollment and low test scores. “If we ran Amazon” that way, Mr. Bezos boasted, “your packages would take six weeks to arrive” — with the wrong item delivered. Hizzoner’s class-warfare tactics, Mr. Dimon reckons, hit a low point with the social-media video that the mayor had filmed in front of Mr. Griffin’s apartment building. Mr. Mamdani’s video touted a proposed pied-à-terre levy as a fulfillment of his campaign promise to “tax the rich.” Mr. Griffin decried it as “creepy and weird.” Mr. Dimon reports that Mr. Mamdani “realized he made a mistake in naming Ken, and vilifying a name and a person.” The JPMorgan Chase chief suggests that Mr. Mamdani is taking a different tack in the aftermath of the Griffin debacle. “It’s probably why he’s seeing a bunch of us now,” Mr. Dimon says. “He’d like to maybe have a better relationship with the business community.” This is to the mayor’s credit, in Mr. Dimon’s view, as he explains that in other cases “I’ve seen mayors who make statements and they make it worse and worse and worse.”Even so, per Mr. Dimon, it’s not just the mayor’s messaging that threatens the city, but his left-wing policies. There’s a link between attempts to raise taxes on real estate and high earners, he suggests, and a lack of supply of inexpensive places to live for New Yorkers. Could Mr. Mamdani come around on the concept of free-market incentives? The questions to ask, in Mr. Dimon’s telling, are: “Why is affordable housing not there anymore? Why does this not work?”It’s good news that state budget negotiators are dropping a proposed tax on city real estate purchases of $1 million or more. Mr. Mamdani, too, has walked back a proposed hike in city property taxes that he threatened to impose if Albany lawmakers failed to impose a statewide levy on high earners. On taxes, Mr. Dimon asks, “When they say pay their fair share, what do they mean? They should give a number, and say that’s their fair share.” As far as the wealthiest are concerned, Mr. Mamdani seems to view confiscation as his ideal policy, in light of his avowal that “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” No wonder many of the city’s most successful residents and companies are eyeing the exits. Mr. Dimon, though, appears to be an optimist about Mr. Mamdani’s educability. “Hopefully he’ll learn,” the banking chief says. “I want him to do a good job. I’m not against him.”

Jamie Dimon’s Message for the Mayor

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