They had three more days to publish them. President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, reported $610,702 in income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the federal agency that collects income taxes, for 2021, the White House announced Friday. April 15. The statements were released days before the deadline for paying federal taxes, which this year was set for Monday, April 18. With a tax rate of 24.6%, the presidential couple paid 150,439 dollars in income tax, details the American executive.
In 2020, during the presidential campaign, Joe and Jill Biden declared $607,336 in income, and their tax rate was 25.9%.
The national median household income was $67,521 in 2020, and the average tax rate is around 14%, according to US Census data.
Revenue down from 2019
The Biden couple’s reported 2020 and 2021 earnings are down sharply from 2019, when they earned nearly $1 million, mostly from book sales, speeches and their posts teachers, he at the University of Pennsylvania, she at a university in northern Virginia, the Northern Virginia Community College, where she still teaches.
Statements show that Mr. Biden earned $378,333 as president — his annual salary of $400,000 less the time until the day and time of his inauguration on January 20, 2021 at noon — and that his wife received $67,116 for her education. The couple donated $17,394 to ten different charities in 2021. The largest donation was $5,000, to the Beau Biden Foundation (named after the president’s first son), a nonprofit that fights child abuse.
The Bidens also released their 2021 tax return in Delaware, where they said they paid $30,765 in income tax. The first lady released a statement from the state of Virginia showing she paid $2,721 in income tax there.
Bet on transparency
Joe Biden campaigned on transparency in his personal finances, releasing 22 years of tax returns ahead of the 2020 election, challenging Donald Trump, who for years argued that an audit was preventing him to make its tax situation public, even though the IRS has required for more than forty years that the tax returns of sitting presidents and vice presidents be published.
In 2020, the New York Times obtained Mr. Trump’s tax records and revealed he paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in the White House.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Douglas Emhoff released their 2021 tax returns. They earned $1,655,563 and paid $523,371 in taxes, a federal tax rate of 31, 6%. Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff also paid $120,517 in California income tax and $2,044 in New York income tax. The second, who teaches at Georgetown Law School, paid $54,441 in District of Columbia income tax, and the couple donated $22,100 to charity in 2021.
