Washington – Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, earned nearly $142 million between 2007 and 2014, according to eight years of federal income tax returns released by her campaign on Friday.
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The returns show that the Clintons paid an overall federal tax rate of 35.7 percent during those years. The bulk of the Clintons’ income came from speeches delivered to corporate and interest groups by Bill Clinton and later by Hillary Clinton after she resigned as secretary of state in early 2013.
In a statement released by her campaign, Hillary Clinton said the couple has paid nearly $44 million in federal taxes on $141.9 million in income since 2006, and donated nearly $15 million to charity.
“We’ve come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas — and we owe it to the opportunities America provides,” she said.
Clinton’s statement did not comment on the specifics of her earnings. Last May, financial disclosures released by her campaign reported that the couple had earned more than $30 million from speeches and book royalties since January 2014.
The Associated Press has estimated the Clintons made nearly $50 million in earnings from speeches alone since 2000.
The Clintons donated 11.4 percent of their income to charity in 2014, according to her tax return. This year, the Clintons boosted personal donations to their global family charity, the Clinton Foundation, to between $5 million and $10 million.
Clinton used the occasion to reinforce her call from earlier this month for tax code reforms that would tighten restrictions on corporate profits and tax benefits for wealthy Americans. The federal tax code, she said, is “full of loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans and most powerful corporations to game the system and avoid paying their fair share.”
She has vowed, if elected, to revive a push in Congress to institute the so-called Buffett rule, named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, which would impose a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on anyone making more than $1 million a year.
Clinton also reaffirmed her pledge to close the “carried interest” loophole in federal taxes if elected president. Carried interest, or the share of profits from an investment fund paid to the fund manager, is taxed as the lower capital gains rate of 15 percent instead of as ordinary income, which could range between 20 and 36.9 percent.
She has also advocated for raising the tax on capital gains to as much as 28 percent for short-term investments.
Hillary certainly knows what she’s talking about when she talks about the problem of “income inequality.”
Don’t Hillary say she was “broke” ? Oif mir gezugt to be so broke!
There’s much about her I don’t like, but to be fair, in this particular regard, she and her husband are shining role models for claiming more than 10% in charitable deductions, and for paying their full 35% tax rate without playing games. I read a few months ago that the average wealthy american pays only about 10% in taxes, and only claims about 2% to charitable deductions.
Just common poor folks.