Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive officer of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., said America faces a “national catastrophe” from a failing educational system with high dropout rates and young people who aren’t prepared to enter the work force.
“We need to get kids getting out of high school, who go on with a job, or go on to college and that leads to a job,” Dimon said in an interview with Business Insider. Dimon’s bank last week announced a $6 million investment in education for students in the South Bronx, a notoriously blighted part of New York City.
“Business has to be involved locally with civic society, in this case schools, to get the kids trained to have a job,” Dimon said. “There are plenty of jobs out there.”
Dimon is a registered Democrat who has said he wants to stay out of party politics and focus on solutions to helping the U.S. economy, which has suffered from wage stagnation and shrinking participation in the work force in the past 30 years. Dimon is chairman of the Business Roundtable, a conservative group of CEOs formed to promote pro-business public policy.
“Most CEOs are patriotic and most CEOs can see the problems in front of them, and they want to do something about it,” Dimon said. “We don't always agree about the ways and means, but the objective? We're totally together.”
He told Business Insider he agrees with the Trump administration’s pro-business agenda and he'd like to see a society where government and business work together better.
“Corporate taxes have been driving capital and brains and companies overseas for a decade,” he said. “It has caused huge damage in investment and jobs and productivity. It was a mistake. We have to fix it. Counterintuitively, that usually helps middle-class wages, and lower-class wages and job formation.”
Business regulation is also stifling the American’s entrepreneurial spirit, which used to be the envy of the world.
“Small-business formation is the lowest it has ever been in a recovery, and it's really for two reasons. One is regulations and the second is access to capital for people starting new businesses,” Dimon said.
“We haven't built a major airport for 20 years. China built 75 in the past 10 years. It takes 10 years to get all the permits to build a bridge today. Ten years? What happened to the good old can-do America?”
Last month, Dimon said the U.S. is hurting economic growth by forcing foreign students to leave every year after earning advanced degrees in America.
“It is alarming that approximately 40 percent (this is an astounding 300,000 students each year) of those who receive advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and math” can't legally stay in the U.S., Dimon told shareholders in his annual letter. “We are forcing great talent overseas by not allowing these young people to build their dreams here.”
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