President of the U.S.A Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden earned nearly $620,000 in 2023, their tax returns show. published on Tuesday by the White House.

According to the documents, the Bidens’ combined income for 2023 was $619,976, of which they paid $146,629 in federal income tax at a rate of 23.7%.

In 2022, Biden and his wife earned slightly less – $579 thousand 514.

It is noted that the president and first lady sent $20,477 in donations to 17 charitable organizations last year.

The Bidens also paid $30,908 in income taxes in their home state of Delaware, and Jill Biden paid $3,549 in income taxes in Virginia.

Meanwhile, the total income of US Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, according to documents published by the White House, for 2023 was $450 thousand 299. In the declaration for 2022, they indicated a comparable amount – $456 thousand 918.

The Biden administration noted that the president has already shared 26 years of tax returns.

The White House has reinstated the practice of releasing the president’s and vice president’s tax returns as a show of transparency. Former President Donald Trump refused to disclose information about his income.

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Original of this material

© “Russian Forbes”06/16/2021, Photo: Getty Images

In the four years before he was elected president of the United States, Biden earned more than $17 million. However, his net worth is estimated to be less than half of that amount. Where did the rest of the money go and why, despite earning millions, Biden failed to get rich?

In January 2017, on the day America’s first billionaire became president, middle-class Joe Biden boarded an Amtrak train from Union Station in Washington to Delaware. At that time, he had a modest fortune, quite typical of a man who had worked in elected positions all his adult life. Biden’s capital was estimated at $2.5 million and consisted mainly of pension savings and real estate. But he expected to increase his income soon. And so it happened – by the end of 2017, Biden and his wife Jill earned $11.1 million. The next year they received another $4.6 million, then $1 million in 2019 and $630,000 in 2020.

The story of how Biden became rich by leaving the vice presidency and using his fame to sell books and give speeches has been told many times. But a closer look at the numbers raises a question no one has asked yet: Why isn’t Biden richer? If someone started out with $2.5 million and made $17.3 million during booming markets, one would expect their personal wealth to be more than $8 million. So what happened to Biden’s money?

So, $7 million went to taxes, another $1.3 million to charity, $180,000 to pay servants and approximately $80,000 to pay interest on the mortgage. Subtract that, and we still end up with a figure several million higher than Biden’s estimated net worth.

A review of Biden’s financial statements, real estate records and salary records puts it at $8 million. There is a possibility that Biden, who shares his fortune with his wife Jill, gave some of the money to other family members. Or maybe he just spent it all. To bring his fortune down to $8 million, the current US president had to spend an average of about $2,000 a day during the four years that he spent in retirement.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Biden’s finances.

You can learn a lot about how a president will manage public money by looking at how he manages his own. Donald Trump may belong to a party that prides itself on fiscal conservatism, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of his financial history, with huge debts from extravagant but failed projects, could immediately tell that this guy is unlikely to carefully monitor the national budget. Trump wasn’t paying attention: Even before the pandemic, the budget deficit had jumped 68%, largely due to massive tax cuts that benefited wealthy individuals and corporations.

Biden has other priorities. He seems determined to give money to the middle class rather than the rich. He has already passed a pandemic relief bill that includes $1.9 trillion in payments and has proposed a $6 trillion spending budget. However, a close look at his personal finances suggests that Biden and Trump have something in common. Both of them are not afraid to borrow and love to spend money. So don’t be surprised if government debt continues to rise.

Where does the money come from?

Biden’s grandfather was an executive at American Oil. His father tried several businesses, but they all failed, and the family fell on hard times. Later, the politician’s father was able to get a job as a car salesman. Joe himself was not interested in a stable career. While attending the University of Delaware in the early 1960s, he asked his friends a question: “When you graduate, you guys are guaranteed a job at DuPont with a decent starting salary and lifetime guarantee, but you will never earn more than $40,000 a year (roughly $350,000) for today). Or you can accept a job with half the salary, no guarantees, but your possible income is not limited. What will you choose? For himself, the answer was obvious. He told friends he was willing to take the risk.

After graduating from law school, Biden took out a loan from the bank that financed his father’s business and opened his own law firm in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. He wasn’t particularly good at saving money. When the firm won its first major case, Biden received a check for $5,000. He and his wife Neilia spent all the money on a four-poster bed, dining room set and desk. “The bill was significant—maybe even more than the check—but the furniture was nice,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” “This was our adventure, and Neilia had so much faith in our future.”

Quite quickly, some real estate appeared in this future. In about six months, Biden purchased three houses. One of them was on a 32-hectare property in Maryland where he dreamed of one day building an estate for his parents and siblings. To start, he borrowed more money from his father-in-law and from banks while he and Neilia looked for tenants and rented out their property. Biden and his wife and sons lived in a small house for free in exchange for managing the pool at a nearby country club. Even with rental income, the family struggled to make ends meet. Biden himself admits this in his memoirs: “I was constantly on the verge of going into the red.”

This did not stop us from thinking big. After a tragic car accident in 1972 that killed Neilia and their infant daughter, Biden bought a new home for himself and his sons, the 930-square-foot DuPont mansion. m in Wilmington, costing $185,000 (equivalent to $930,000 today). At the time of the purchase, Biden was a senator and earned approximately $43,000 a year. Over the years, he often remortgaged the house and took out loans significantly in excess of its original value. In 1996, Biden sold the mansion for $1.2 million and bought a plot of land nearby for $350,000. There he built a new house, and then began regularly remortgaging it.

Biden’s three children attended private schools and colleges thanks to borrowed money. “Owning a home is how most middle-class families save, how most middle-class families build assets, and in many cases, it’s how you pay for your child’s college education—you take out loans against your home,” Biden explained on event of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in 2015. “That’s how I was able to send my kids to college.” In 2001, while his daughter Ashley was attending Tulane University, he was paying off at least a half-dozen loans worth more than $700,000.

If you look at all these decisions from a business point of view, they are illogical. Biden spent too much and saved or invested very little. But when measured in terms of quality of life, they seem more reasonable: “Middle Class Joe” wanted to live like the upper class, buy big houses and put his kids in expensive schools, so he borrowed a lot. “It’s common in the U.S. today that even high-income people don’t have enough money to spare,” says Megan Gorman, an attorney and managing partner of a firm that specializes in financial planning for high-net-worth individuals. “If you look at the Biden family’s tax returns, you’ll see a couple who have accumulated some assets throughout their lives, like retirement savings, life insurance, some other savings. And this is not some elaborate big plan to become ultra-rich.”

When Biden became vice president, he had extra income to pay on his house. In true Trump fashion, he rented out a cottage on his Wilmington property for $26,400 a year. Tenant, as reportedthere was the US Secret Service, which provides protection for Biden.

What did the Bidens spend on?

Just because you don’t have a lot of free money doesn’t mean you’re bankrupt. When Biden stepped down as vice president in 2017, he was worth an estimated $2.5 million. He had a life insurance policy and several retirement accounts, but the core of his wealth was his home in Delaware and a federal pension that guaranteed him a lifetime income of about $160,000 per year.

Soon there was more free money as Joe and Jill Biden began publishing books and speaking at events. The former vice president also received a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. But the more the Bidens earned, the more they spent. Tax returns show they paid $8,600 for household help in 2017, a figure that rose to $95,250 by 2020. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on what staff the Bidens hired. They gave $1.3 million to more than two dozen charities, such as the United Federation of Chicago Jews and the Beau Biden Children’s Defense Fund. They also paid off one mortgage and two lines of credit.

In June 2017, Biden fulfilled a long-time promise to his wife and shelled out $2.7 million for a 450-square-foot summer home. m in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It turned out to be a good investment: Thanks to skyrocketing home prices during the pandemic, the house is now valued at $3.4 million—25% more than what the Bidens paid four years ago.

But other than this incident, the Bidens appear to have done little to increase their wealth through investments. The politician took it upon himself not to invest in the shares of individual companies in order to avoid ethical conflicts in his work. But he didn’t even use diversified investment funds, which ethics experts often recommend as a way to avoid conflicts of interest. The 2019 filing showed the Bidens have less than $200,000 in variable annuity funds owned by an insurance company, with the rest of their money simply kept in bank deposits and government retirement accounts. , in the form of life insurance policies and in holding companies created to manage royalties from books and public appearances. By not actively investing in the stock market, the Bidens missed out on potential income that could have added millions to their net worth.

In the last financial statement, filed in May, Biden listed cash and retirement accounts as between $1.2 million and $2.9 million. If you simply take his $17.3 million in income and subtract $11.8 million in known expenses (taxes, philanthropy, expenses for the maintenance of the house, etc.), $5.5 million remains. This is significantly more than the amount “between $1.2 million and $2.9 million” indicated in the declaration. It can be assumed that Biden spent at least $2.6 million on something. One of the possible options is gifts to relatives. Tax law allows spouses to transfer up to $30,000 to anyone without declaring it. If Joe and Jill Biden gave the maximum amount possible to their children, Hunter And Ashley, as well as to his grandchildren, the total could exceed $200,000 per year. In addition, Biden may have made additional donations to charities outside the United States that are not reflected on his tax returns. For example, in 2018, the Bidens donated $25,000 to a British charity associated with Prince Harry.

Or maybe they just spent what they earned, enjoying their money and not thinking strategically. In 2017, the Bidens installed a new pool at their Rehoboth villa. Local pool experts estimate the project could have cost more than $75,000. The Washington Post reportedthat the Bidens rented a five-bedroom mansion in McLean, Virginia, for about $20,000 a month.

Even if the Biden family continues to live large, they are unlikely to become poor. They could spend $2,000 a day for the next eight years and still have more than $2 million saved after the end of a possible second term, as happened in 2017. Then they will again have more time to give speeches, write books and earn good money.

Translation by Natalia Balabantseva