President Joe Biden and his wife Jill earned $610,702 in their first year in the White House and paid $150,439 in federal income taxes. The 2021 tax rate is 24.6 per cent, well above the average of about 14 per cent for all Americans. The total is similar to the Bidens’ 2020 returns when they reported that Biden earned $607,336 when he ran for president. Their reported federal income tax rate at the time was 25.9 per cent.
The national median household income in 2020 is $67,521, according to the US Census data. This is the second year Biden has released his tax returns from the White House, re-establishing a tradition of presidents making their tax returns public after President Donald Trump refused to do so. This year and last year, the Bidens’ earnings were down sharply from 2019, when they made nearly $1 million, mostly from book sales, speaking engagements, and their teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Northern Virginia Community College.
Jill Biden is still teaching in Virginia while serving as the first lady. The returns show Biden earning $378,333 as president — his $400,000 annual salary minus the time until noon on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2021 — and his wife, $67,116 for teaching. The couple donated $17,394 to 10 different charities in 2021. The largest donation was a $5,000 donation to the Beau Biden Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to fighting child abuse, named after their son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at 46 years old.
The Bidens also released their 2021 Delaware income tax returns and reported paying $30,765 in state income tax. The First Lady released her Virginia tax return, showing she paid $2,721 in Virginia income tax. Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff released their 2021 tax returns, showing they earned $1,655,563 and paid $523,371 in 2021 – a federal income tax rate of 31.6 %. Harris and Emhoff also paid $120,517 in California income tax and $2,044 in New York income tax.
The second gentleman, who teaches at Georgetown Law School, paid $54,441 in District of Columbia income taxes, and the couple donated $22,100 to charity in 2021. Biden campaigned on transparency about his finances, releasing 22 years of tax returns ahead of the 2020 election. It’s a direct challenge to Trump, who has argued that audits have kept him from releasing his taxes – even though the IRS has required audits of the current president and vice president’s tax returns for more than four years.
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The New York Times later obtained Trump’s tax records and reported that he paid only $750 in federal income taxes in his first year in the White House. The average tax filer paid about $12,200 in 2017, about 16 times what the former president paid, according to IRS data.