KEEPS YOUR PAWS OFF MY MONEY! Socialist Bernie Sanders Donated Just 1% Of Million-Dollar Income To Charity

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Socialist from Vermont currently running for president, has a lot of plans for your money.

He of course advocates free health care for everyone — a wonderful idea we’d all support if we could figure out where we’d get the estimated $33 trillion needed to pay for the program for the first decade. And he wants free college tuition, too, (which comes in at a paltry-by-comparison $50 billion a year).

To Sanders, people with large salaries are greedy money-grubbers. In his last run for the presidency in 2016, he railed against the “1 Percent,” those in the top slot of annual incomes in America.

But Ol’ Bernie just happens to be a 1 Percenter, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, means earning more than $421,926 a year.

And now it turns out that Uncle Bernie doesn’t much like parting with his bucks.

In 2016, Sanders hauled in $1,062,626, much of that from a book about his socialist plans if elected president. That year, according to his newly released tax forms, he donated just $10,600 to charity. That makes him a different kind of 1 Percenter — he gave less than 1% of his cool million to charity.

In 2017, he made $1,131,925, and gave $36,300 to charity — just 3.2%.

His lowest, according to the forms he released, was 2012, when he donated just .68% of his income. His highest was 2014, when he gave slightly more than 4%.

https://twitter.com/AndrewKerrNC/status/1117922498413305856

Sanders, trying to pressure President Trump into releasing his tax returns, said he’s just been lucky in this land of opportunity. “These tax returns show that our family has been fortunate,” Sanders said in a statement. “I am very grateful for that, as I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck and I know the stress of economic insecurity.”

Sanders and his wife’s adjusted gross income in 2018 was $561,293, and they paid an effective tax rate of 26% after deductions. This chart shows that a taxpayer filing jointly would pay a 35% rate on that income, before deductions.

2014 was even better for Sanders. “Overall, Sanders claimed taxes of $27,653 on his family’s 2014 return. With $31,825 withheld from his Senate pay, that gave the senator a refund of $4,172 that year,” the Motley Fool website wrote. “Taxes of $27,653 on adjusted gross income of $205,271 amount to an effective tax rate of about 13.5%. That shows the importance of itemized deductions for helping higher-income taxpayers reduce their tax rate.”

Indeed it does. But Sanders wants top earners — like him — to pay more. “As Vermont’s senator and a member of the Budget Committee, I will not support a plan to reduce the deficit that does not call for shared sacrifice,” he wrote in the Burlington Free Press in 2011.

“At a time when the top one percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent, we must ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes,” he said. “Every segment of our society, including those who have money and power, must contribute and must sacrifice.”

Last week, Sanders revealed that he is a millionaire, in part because of his book, “Our Revolution: A Future To Believe In.” “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told the New York Times. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Senators make $174,000 a year, but Vermont magazine “Seven Days” reported in 2016 that Sanders and his wife bought a four-bedroom house on the shore of Lake Champlain in Vermont — with 500 feet of lake frontage — for about $600,000. The Sanders own at least three houses, with another in Burlington, Vermont, and one on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

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