I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of reports like this one by Chris Jacobs in the Wall Street Journal in the coming months:
According to their tax returns, in 2017 and 2018 the Bidens and his wife Jill avoided payroll taxes on nearly $13.3 million in income from book royalties and speaking fees. They did so by classifying the income as S-corporation profits rather than taxable wages.
The Bidens did pay themselves “salaries†from their corporations—CelticCapri Corp. and Giacoppa Corp.—of nearly $750,000 between them over two years, and they paid full taxes on that income. But they circumvented the payroll tax on the nearly 95% of their income that remained. A tax expert interviewed by the Journal in 2019 called the Bidens’ scheme “pretty aggressiveâ€; another told the paper it served solely to avoid the payroll taxes.
Of the taxes the Bidens avoided, 2.9% of their income, around $385,000, would have funded Medicare. The other 0.9%, nearly $120,000, was part of ObamaCare and fund that law.
As I see it there are a number of different ways of viewing that including
- It’s wrong
- It’s legal
- It’s hypocritical
- Trump didn’t reveal his tax returns
but mine is it’s good to be connected. If you or I tried that dodge, we’d be audited and compelled to pay back taxes, interest, and penalties. The corporation obviously exists solely as a tax dodge. But VP Biden is confident he won’t be audited because the politics of the IRS guarantees it.
The only outrageous thing is that things like this are so common.
It’s an exclusive club and we ain’t in it.
It’s nothing new. ‘Honest graft’ I think one 19th century political hack called it. But just stop telling us it’s all good when we know damn well it isn’t.
They can be pretty sure they wont be audited because the IRS has mostly stopped auditing the wealthy. Beyond that any politician can now claim it is just politically motivated. We should never let anyone run for serious office without showing their tax returns.
“Audits of the rich continue to plunge while those of the poor hold steady, and the two audit rates are converging. Last year, the top 1% of taxpayers by income were audited at a rate of 1.56%. EITC recipients, who typically have annual income under $20,000, were audited at 1.41%.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent
Steve
The reason there will be a deluge of these revelations is that VP Biden is so much a creature of Washington. Sen. Barack Obama was a comparative outsider.