The breathless coverage over the Supreme Court decision requiring disclosure of President Trump’s financial records demonstrates the continued focus on the wrong set of tax returns. While spending years speculating wildly on the contents of Trump’s financial records, both the liberal media and congressional Democrats have ignored an important story hiding in plain sight: The legally questionable tax maneuverings of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
While allowing Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. to subpoena the president’s records in a criminal probe of Trump’s businesses, seven justices demanded additional scrutiny of congressional subpoenas for similar documents. As one report described it, the justices believed lower federal courts “did not do enough to examine Democratic lawmakers’s claims that they needed the records as part of inquiries aimed at strengthening laws combating a wide range of ills including money laundering, official conflicts of interest, and foreign influence in U.S. elections.”
That bar could present a significant obstacle for congressional Democrats. Even as party leaders indefatigably pursue Trump’s tax returns, they have scrupulously avoided answering legitimate questions about Biden’s, raising questions about their motives.
Biden Avoided Self-Employment Taxes
One year ago, Biden and his wife released tax returns covering 2016 through to 2018. At that time, the Wall Street Journal noted that, by characterizing more than $13 million of income from speaking and writing engagements as profits from two corporations rather than wage income, the couple avoided paying nearly $500,000 in self-employment taxes. Tax experts interviewed by the WSJ called the scheme “pretty aggressive” and unjustified given that the income came from their own work product, as opposed to any product or service created by a larger corporation.
The development raises several fundamental questions about Biden and his campaign. First, hypocrisy. During the primaries, Biden released campaign ads claiming “Obamacare is personal to me.” Biden and Democrats want to highlight their supposed support for Obamacare and individuals with pre-existing conditions during the fall campaign.
Of the 3.8 percent self-employment tax the Bidens avoided, 0.9 percent funds Obamacare, and the other 2.9 percent funds Medicare. As a result, Biden’s tax scheme allowed him to avoid paying $119,570 in Obamacare taxes, and another $385,280 in Medicare taxes. How can Biden claim to support Obamacare when he refused the opportunity to put his money where his mouth is and dodged the very taxes that fund the law?
Second, policy. Throughout the presidential primaries, Biden claimed that, unlike those of his Democratic competitors, his health care plan would not require a middle-class tax increase but would be funded instead by wealthy taxpayers. Yet Biden’s tax situation raises the obvious question of whether other wealthy individuals will engage in the kind of evasive maneuvers Biden used to skirt Obamacare taxes so they can avoid his new tax increases, leaving the middle class holding the bill.
Third, partisanship. The House Ways and Means Committee sued last year to obtain President Trump’s tax returns, claiming that it wants to examine the integrity of the auditing process the IRS used. But despite multiple experts calling the Biden’s tax maneuvers legally questionable, Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) has avoided answering questions about whether he will request an audit of Biden’s returns.
Biden is a corporate welfare whore….say it isnt so lunchbox Joe.
Joe Biden’s tax returns have been readily available for public inspection for years—not merely for 2016 through 2018, the release of which was only filling in the blank following his departure from public office. With such a degree of access, the following is apparently the worst anyone can come up with:
What the author neglects to mention is that virtually everyone who receives unusually high income from individual self-employment activities such as writing or personal appearances legally works within such a corporate context. The tax laws are such that a person would have to be a complete idiot to do otherwise. Is it your position that creative individuals should not have the same relief from tax disincentives that have been enthusiastically handed out to America’s money manipulators and powerful giant corporations?
If Biden’s entirely routine and legal tax strategy shocks you, you’re certainly not mentally prepared for information about Donald Trump’s financial and tax dealings.
Make all Democrats and Sanders show t heir Tax returns
Name an elected Democrat who has used his or her powers of office to openly defy the law and block any examination of their tax returns by Congress.
Trump has done this.
@Greg:
comrade greggy-poo, the ex. bi-sexual gov of ohio when he ran for the first time in office flashed his tax return for 3 seconds. wow, the people of oh. got to see john’s tax return.
-every democrap has: slut hillary, whore dog billy. oh, ask whore dog how he lost the “football for 4 weeks”? nadler, bar fly polosi and all of the democraps- dumblagio, and stud muffin cuomo all have. ask racist al sharpton why he has not paid over $20 million in back taxes but as a visitor to obama-shit wipe house for over 100 times in 8 years with numerous not logged in.
@MOS#0161:
What makes Clinton a slut?
What with all the Obama holdovers in the IRS, IF there had been anything at all in the Trump tax returns, they would have leaked them to the WaPo or NYTimes long ago.
Fact is, Dems know there’s nothing there.
What they want to do is drag out the idea their might be something there.
Later, I expect one of them will pull a Harry Reid* and make an utterly false claim from the IMMUNE floor of Congress.
*Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said he “did what was necessary” in 2012 when he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes for 10 years.
He suggested that his statement was warranted because it was effective.
“Romney didn’t win, did he?” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.
And in an interview with The Washington Post in September, Reid said that lying about Romney’s taxes on the Senate floor was “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
@Greg:
And this precisely proves the point I have been making. The one and only reason Democrats want access to Trump’s records is to peruse them and find anything they can to use to attack him. Russian collusion, obstruction, emoluments, everything else has failed and they are truly desperate.
What this proves is that people like Biden have nothing to fear from the Democrats and their lap dogs in the media. He can expose his blatant cheating and absence of charitable contributions without fear of any nosy leftist “journalist” pointing his failures out. You aren’t interested in “oversight”… you want overkill.
@Michael:
Perhaps her sluttery.
What Christopher Jacobs fails to mention is that anyone who has unusually high income from any individual creative activity will generally be advised by tax experts to incorporate rather than working as a self-employed individual. For individuals who generate very high income some years, this isn’t primarily a matter of avoiding self-employment taxes, which tops out for 2020 at $16,479. (12.4% of $132,900, which is the maximum subject to Social Security tax; those working for someone else pay 6.2%, or a maximum of $8,239 for the year, so the savings in Social Security tax really isn’t that dramatic.) Incorporating is primarily a matter of limiting an individual’s personal liability.
Any large pool of money acquired by a widely known public figure tends to become an attractive target for ambitious lawyers. For example, if someone slips on the stairs in a convention hall where you’re appearing as a highly-paid, self-employed speaker, you could suddenly find yourself personally liable as a co-defendant in somebody’s multi-million dollar personal injury lawsuit.
Joe Biden is actually proposing tax increases that would most adversely affect taxpayers such as himself. The reason is that they’re necessary to move the nation back in the direction of fiscal responsibility.
The entire playing field is presently tilted rather steeply in favor of the wealthiest, at the cost of enormous annual deficits that threaten the viability of every social program the poorest Americans and middle-class working families depend on. The forces benefiting most from the tilted playing field don’t much care, as they’re not dependent on those programs.
August 23, 2020 – 12 Tax Changes Joe Biden Wants to Make
@Greg: Biden knows (by experience) that bribes and kickbacks aren’t taxable.
Apparently Jennifer Weisselberg dropped the dime that’s eventually going to sink the Trump Organization. They should give the lady a medal.