WASHINGTON — Joe Biden's presidential campaign on Tuesday released the 2019 tax returns for the former vice president and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., hours ahead of the first general election debate.
Questions about President Donald Trump's tax returns, which he has refused to release, claiming he's under audit by the IRS, were bound to come up at the debate in Cleveland.
A bombshell New York Times report Sunday found that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017. The Times found that, based on two decades of Trump's tax information that it obtained, the president didn't pay any income taxes in 10 of the last 15 years.
Biden and his wife, Jill, reported about $945,000 in taxable income last year, and they paid nearly $300,000 in federal income taxes, according to the documents.
The 2019 tax return for Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, show that they reported about $3 million in taxable income and had a tax liability of about $1.2 million.
Biden became a multimillionaire after leaving the White House, according to tax filings and a financial disclosure form released last year. He and his wife reported income of more than $11 million in 2017 and more than $4.5 million in 2018, much of it from book deals.
In 2019, Joe Biden reported income from the University of Pennsylvania, and Jill Biden received income from Northern Virginia Community College. Joe Biden also made money from a book tour, and he receives a federal pension.
During a pre-debate briefing call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Biden's deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said his latest released return means there are now more than two decades of public tax records for the former vice president. The filing is the 10th year of tax records that Harris has made public.
Speaking about Trump, Bedingfield said: "He looked out for the stock market but looks down on the workers and middle-class families struggling to get by.
"Biden sees it a little differently," she said. "He sees the world from his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and those are the values that Biden will bring to the White House."
