Speaker 1: Joe Biden and Jill Biden have released their 2022 taxes. And
even though the right wingers are trying to make a controversy out of them, I have to tell you,
there is nothing controversial about the Biden income nor the Biden taxes. But, David, they made
more than half a million dollars. Let's go through it. The the Bidens did indeed make $579,000 last
year as a household, and they paid a 23.8% federal tax rate, plus, of course, state tax as well. Now,
there are people seeing this and saying, oh, my goodness, this is just like Trump,
super wealthy multimillionaires. No, guys. No. Without passing any value judgment over
income. It's very important to understand that Trump made like $400 million a year during his
presidency. It was about 1.6 billion throughout the entire presidency, if I recall correctly,
and is a multibillionaire, at least as far as we know. Joe Biden is a multimillionaire. That's
true. So's Bernie Sanders, I've explained before. If you've been making six figures for 30 years,
you should be a multimillionaire by the time you're 80. Even if you save only a modest
amount of your income and put it in low cost index funds and wait for 30 years, if you're
not a multimillionaire, you've messed up. You're really bad with money. That's not controversial
now. $579,000 combined income. Presidents make 400 grand a year. Is it 400 or 440? It's around
$400,000 a year. That's the presidential salary. That's the vast majority of their
income. Jill Biden also made what was it here, about $80,000 teaching and they ended up yeah,
$82,000 teaching at Northern Virginia Community College. Totally standard uncontroversial salary.
So that gets us to $482,000. And then there was a little bit of income. I don't remember
what it was for. They made some donations to some charities and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So what is the right saying about this? The best they have is Joe Biden is using an SE corporation
for his book Profits. This is the best they have. And in fact, there's a Fox News article.
They've they've gone at this before. This is a couple of years old. Multimillionaire Biden's
use of s corporations draws scrutiny by republican who sees hypocrisy. I even got emails from some in
my audience who said that there are people on the left criticizing Biden for using an S corporation
for his book. Listen, guys, I'm calling this stuff like it is. There is nothing controversial about
Joe Biden running his book Profits through an S Corporation. I got emails about this being shady
and just like Donald Trump. Give me a break. Okay. Only if you know nothing about taxes could you
come to the conclusion that simply having an S corporation is in any way sketchy. First of all,
authors don't set up a C Corp for a book. You just don't do it. If they did,
then you have to pay yourself via salary and dividends. It just doesn't make any sense If
you're a small business like the author of a book and you want to separate those revenues from just
yourself as an individual sole proprietorship, the SE corporation or a partnership might make
perfect sense. There's nothing illegal, there's nothing shady. It's a standard
practice. It's passed through income. It goes on your personal tax return. It's not evasive,
it's not a loophole. It's a completely standard way that small businesses that don't want to just
be sole proprietorships would set up revenue. In this case, you get some liability protection. You
also I mean, listen, if you have a full time job in the case of Joe Biden, senator, vice president,
president, it's very logical that if you have a defined and distinct project like a book,
that you would separate that and not run it as a sole proprietorship through your Social Security
number, you would get anyone and set it up as an S corporation. It lets you pay yourself a reasonable
salary. Take the remainder as distributions. You can potentially reduce your tax liability slightly
because it can potentially reduce self-employment taxes. But Joe Biden's maxing out on that anyway
because he makes 400 grand a year and the cap is in the mid one fifties. This is like milquetoast,
milquetoast stuff. And whether you're on the left or the right and you're saying Biden's just like
Trump because his book Profits run through an S corporation, you're either arguing in bad faith
or you just don't understand even the basics about small business taxes. So I don't think we
need to entertain it any further. 579 K an income when you're the president and your wife works,
that makes a lot of sense paid. We can say, well, the tax at that level of income should
be higher. Fine, but an effective tax rate federally of 24% and then paying Delaware tax
totally reasonable. All totally expected. I think that's a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett pays,
by the way, even though the Bidens made a lot less. There's nothing controversial here. Biden
paid his taxes. He released his tax returns. If we could only say the same thing for Donald Trump.