Raining $$ on hypocrite Joe
Hur bared Biden’s dodgy tax move
‘LUNCH Bucket” Joe Biden, champion of the union worker and little guy, likes to bash millionaires and billionaires for “not paying their fair share” to the IRS.
But the president knows a little something himself about making millions and working the tax code to pay as little as possible on his wealth.
His good-for-me-but-not-forthee hypocrisy is exposed in the footnotes of Special Counsel Rob Hur’s recent report on Biden’s purloined classified documents.
When Hur investigated Biden for the government theft, he examined all the files FBI agents seized from his homes and offices, which also contained personal folders with the Bidens’ financial information.
The prosecutor dug through them searching for a motive for Biden hauling off hundreds of classified materials when he left the vice president’s office in January 2017, and he said he found one: good old-fashioned greed.
Profit motive
A month after leaving the White House, Biden shared some of the classified information with the ghostwriter of his lucrative memoir, according to Hur’s report.
“Mr. Biden had long contemplated writing a book about his vice presidency,” Hur wrote. And one of the reasons for writing one, according to an entry Biden jotted down in a notebook, was “profit.”
Within days of Biden’s staff packing up 15 boxes containing classified materials from his West Wing office, the departing veep finalized a deal with Creative Artists Agency, a talent agency that negotiated his book deal for “Promise Me, Dad,” with Macmillan Publishers’ American imprint Flatiron Books.
The book contract netted Biden an advance of $8 million.
On the same day, Biden also signed an agreement with the University of Pennsylvania to teach classes and run the Penn Biden Center in Washington. Though he never taught any classes, he pocketed close to $1 million.
The diary entry also referenced Biden’s plans to create a so-called S-corporation to shelter his income and trim his tax bill, according to Hur.
Biden signed a tax form listing himself as president of an S-corp, CelticCapri, on Jan. 30, 2017 — fewer than three weeks before Hur said Biden disclosed classified secrets to this ghostwriter,
Mark Zwonitzer, who was not cleared to receive such sensitive government information.
Later that year, UPenn and Flatiron sent their millions in checks not to Biden, but to his S-corp CelticCapri. In addition, hundreds of thousands of dollars in income from the Washington Speakers Bureau, a group that booked speeches for Biden, was routed through the S-corp.
Jill, too, gets a break
Around the same time, wife Jill Biden formed another S-corp — Giacoppa (named after her grandfather Gaetano Giacoppa) — as a pass-through for additional household income from her own literary earnings and speaking gigs.
In 2017, the Bidens declared a whopping $11.1 million in joint income, which was almost double what they had made in the prior 18 years combined.
More than $10 million of that windfall flowed through their two S-corps, CelticCapri and Giacoppa. In 2018, another $3.2 million flowed through these S-corps.
The income diversion helped the Bidens save hundreds of thousands in taxes.
That’s because the S-corps allowed them to pay their “employees” (that is, Joe and Jill) in two ways: wages and distributions. The Bidens avoided paying income tax on whatever portion they didn’t report as wages.
Take their 2017 S-corp tax filing, for example. Despite the $10 million windfall that year, their S-corps paid out modest salaries to the couple — a joint $245,833 — and treated the rest of the income as a non-wage “distribution,” which wasn’t subject to the 15.3% combined Social Security and Medicare tax.
S-corps are perfectly legal. Biden was certainly allowed to do what he did.
But his shielding of income makes his claims that the wealthy aren’t “paying their fair share” a bit rich.
In unveiling his new budget proposal last week, Biden scolded “high-income individuals who too often avoid paying their lawfully owed taxes” through tax breaks.
He complained they “make their money in ways that are often taxed at lower rates than ordinary wage income, or sometimes not taxed at all, thanks to giant loopholes and tax preferences that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest taxpayers.”
Biden proposed a billionaire minimum tax of 25%, while promising to protect and strengthen Social Security.
“Look, I’m a capitalist,” Biden said. “If you want to make millions of bucks, that’s great. Just pay your fair share in taxes.”
You first, Mr. President.