The president of the United States, Joe Biden, and the first lady, Jill Biden, entered gross $ 579,514 in 2022, according to their most recent tax return, released this Tuesday.
For this income, they have had to pay some $137,658 in federal taxes, 23.8%, the White House said in a statement.
In addition, the president and the first lady paid 29,023 taxes in Delaware, where they have a residence, and 3,139 in Virginia, since Jill Biden works as a professor at a community college in that state, near Washington.
The presidential couple also donated $20,180 to 20 altruistic organizations. The largest donation, of $5,000, was given to the Beau Biden Foundation, dedicated to fighting child abuse and created in honor of the president’s eldest son, who died of cancer in 2015.
In 2021, the Bidens reported a gross income of more than $610,000, of which they paid $150,400 in federal taxes.
In recent years, the presidential couple has declared a much lower income than in previous years, since since Biden left the Vice Presidency in 2017 until 2019 they earned about 16.5 million dollars thanks mainly to paid conferences and contracts with editorials.
The White House stressed in a statement that with the disclosure of these documents it seeks to “demonstrate once again its commitment to transparency.”
Biden’s predecessor, Republican Donald Trump (2017-2021), refused to make his statements public until a congressional committee obtained, after a long legal battle, the approval of the Constitutional Court to publish them.
The battle over those statements dates back to 2019, when the Ways and Means committee issued a legal subpoena to access that information as part of its investigation into possible tax violations by Trump.
He based the petition on a 1924 law that allows the leaders of certain congressional committees, including Ways and Means, to ask the US Treasury and Treasury Secretary to release any taxpayer’s tax returns.
Trump was the first US president since Gerald Ford (1974-1977) who did not publish his tax return every year, a tradition that his predecessors considered part of their duty of transparency and accountability to the people.
In addition to the Bidens, the White House also released the tax return of the vice president, Kamala Harris, and her husband, Doug Emhoff.
The vice-presidential couple declared an income of $456,918 in 2022, of which they paid $93,570 in federal taxes, 20.5%.
The figure is well below the more than $1.5 million that came in in 2021, when Emhoff was still working as a lawyer.
In 2022, the vice president and her husband paid $17,612 in state taxes to California and $9,697 to the District of Columbia.
In addition, they donated $23,000 to charitable organizations.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
