WFB:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) saved roughly $38,000 in taxes thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Republican-passed tax cut championed by President Donald Trump which the New York Times recently admitted cut most Americans’ taxes.
Sanders released ten years’ worth of tax returns Monday night, fulfilling a long-standing promise to do so. The returns indicated that Sanders is now a millionaire, having collected more than $1 million in 2016 and 2017 thanks to the sales from his books Our Revolution and Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution.
Sanders dodged questions about his new-found wealth during a Monday night townhall on Fox, declining to say if he would pay a top tax rate of 52 percent, the highest bracket proposed during his 2016 run for the White House. He also did not respond to a question from Fox’s Martha MacCallum about if he would voluntarily give money to the government to bring his tax bill up to what he thought a fair rate was.
If he did, or if his tax plan were implemented, Sanders would increase his tax liability by nearly 30 percent, analysis of his tax returns indicates.
Sanders has not announced any substantive changes to the income tax system during his 2020 run. However, during his 2016 run, Sanders floated a comprehensive overhaul to the tax system in order to help pay for his proposed Medicare-for-All plan.
According to analysis from the right-leaning Tax Foundation, Sanders’s 2016 proposal would add four new top tax brackets with rates of 37 percent, 43 percent, 48 percent, and 52 percent, It would also add a 2.2 percent “income-based [health care] premium paid by households,” which the Tax Foundation writers say is “equivalent to increasing all tax bracket rates by 2.2 percentage points.”
Using the Tax Foundation’s estimates of Sanders’s brackets, as well as the senator’s reported 2018 taxable income of $519,529, we can estimate a total tax liability under his schema of $170,240.11. If Sanders were paying taxes under his own plan, he would be shelling out an additional $36,819.11 to the government, and have a tax liability of 32.7 percent of his income.
Luckily for his finances, Sanders does not live under his own tax regime. Rather, Sanders enjoyed a tax cut thanks to the TCJA, just like millions of other Americans. read more
I’m sure he’ll donate it to a worthy cause, being the caring and giving person that he is.
Or NOT.
To quote 0bama: “you should be thanking me”
Not that he would have paid it anyway.
Did he buy his three houses since 2016? I know he bought one but I thought he had two of them already.
And who becomes a millionaire with one book, especially a (theoretically) non-fiction book (blockbusters such as Harry Potter being the exception)? Perhaps his next book should be one telling authors how to do that.
Our federal taxes were MUCH higher this year than last year.
The one and only cause: OBAMACARE.
We made $1800 more than the cutoff for the ATPC, that triggered $9120 in taxes!!! We would have made more if we only made less!
Thanks Obama, you prick!
Burnie should be questioned at every stop on when (not if) he is going to pay HIS fair share as determined by HIS plan. He should never be let off the hook for his higher tax proposals if he won’t lead by example.
Effing hypocrite@!
And he cut a $38,000 check payable to the United States Treasury. Wait, what.