Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden paid nearly $288,000 in federal income taxes last year, according to returns he released just hours before his Tuesday night debate with President Donald Trump.
The move came following a report from The New York Times that Trump paid just $750 in income taxes in 2016, the year he ran for president, and in 2017, his first year in the White House.
Biden and his wife, Jill, along with Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, released their 2019 federal and state returns as the president contends with the political fallout from a series of Times reports about Trump’s long-hidden tax returns. The Times also reported that Trump paid no income tax at all in 10 of the 15 years prior to 2017.
The Bidens’ payment of $287,693 to the federal government in 2019 showed a substantial drop from the $1.5 million they paid in income taxes in 2018, reflecting both a decline in Biden’s book revenue and his decision to run for the presidency and a leave of absence from his academic post at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After paying $91,000 in 2016, Biden’s last year as vice president in the Obama administration, the Bidens paid $3.7 million to the government in 2017, largely because of income from book deals.
The Biden campaign has moved aggressively to capitalize on the Times reports about Trump’s tiny tax payments. The campaign released a media ad showing that nurses, firefighters and other working-class Americans pay far more in annual federal taxes than the $750 Trump tax payments described by the Times.
Trump has denied the Times report, dismissing it as “fake news” at a press conference, but he has provided no evidence to refute it.
(AP)
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3 Responses
So Trump claims to be a successful businessman but it seems he is losing money and living off capital. Perhaps he is quite the genius he claims?
And Biden claims to have spent his whole life in public service, never making anything approaching what a
junior executive gets in the corporate world, and yet he has an income that clearly marks him as among the 1%. Perhaps he learned about the modern version of the “little tin box”?
Being nostalgic for the era I was born in, Roosevelt and Kennedy were totally honest and said they were living off inherited wealth. Truman and Eisenhower lived off their salaries and had a lifestyle to match. Something has gone wrong!
We know how Biden made his money — he wrote books that sold well, and gets paid nicely for speaking engagements. Nothing unusual there at all, and nothing wrong with making money honestly and legally. He also has had an unusually modest lifestyle for a Senator; he never bought a home in Washington ever! And as of 2007 he was actually ranked as the least wealthy Senator. He has invested his earnings in a big house in a Wilmington suburb and a second home in Rehoboth Beach. Oh, and he has never owned any stocks. Totally transparent. His wife teaches at a community college.
We still know very little about Trump’s finances. He would never get a low level security clearance were he to apply for a job as a defense contractor.
Does this tax return also include illicit profits he and his crooked son made in Ukraine and China?