For many, many months (the greatest months), Donald Trump has refused to release his tax returns. His official excuse is that he’s under an audit, but fellow billionaire Warren Buffett has said this is a terrible, non-excuse. Buffett is also under audit and challenged the Republican nominee with an offer to show his own returns if Trump would cough up his documents. But Trump ignored him, which only leads to speculation of what he’s concealing. Would the papers show that Trump’s holding a bunch of foreign debt, or would they reveal that — gasp — he’s not as rich as he claims to be?
Whatever the reason, the real estate mogul remains stubborn. And on Friday, Hillary Clinton released her 2015 tax return, which means that she’s now released fifteen years of taxes. Hillary and Bill paid a 2015 federal income tax rate of 34.2% and donated 9.8% of their adjusted gross income to charitable causes. Granted, Schedule A (page 29) reveals that $1 million (out of $1,042,000 million total) of these donations went to the Clinton Foundation, but this is still much more of a disclosure than Trump has mustered.
Very clearly, this is a move meant to pressure Trump, as her campaign site’s related blog entry is titled, “Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine release tax returns while Donald Trump defies decades-old tradition of disclosure.” Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri is quoted in the entry as praising their campaign for “setting the standard for financial transparency.” And Palmieri accuses Trump of “fake excuses and backtracking” and wonders what he’s hiding.
As indicated earlier this week, Kaine has dropped ten years of his tax returns. His 2015 federal tax rate was 20.3%, and he and his wife have donated 7.5% of their adjusted gross income to charitable causes.
Meanwhile, Green Party nominee and folk singer Jill Stein released her 2015 tax returns on Thursday. Forbes seemed pretty unimpressed by the lack of drama, but Stein, who graduated from Harvard Medical School, lists her occupation as “environmentalist.” She and her husband have an average federal tax rate of 21.6%, and charitable contributions aren’t disclosed, but Forbes “can infer that it is not a really large number.”
(Via HillaryClinton.com)