Joe Biden: Providing another Great Moment in Left-Wing Hypocrisy

July 11, 2019 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I wrote last month about a group of leftist millionaires who said they should pay more in taxes.

My response was to ask why they aren’t taking advantage of the existing process that allows them to send extra money to the federal government?

There’s even a special website that facilitates payments from people who want to voluntarily pay more tax.

 

Yet, in a glaring example of hypocrisy, these rich statists won’t “put their money where their mouths are.”

Now we have a new example of a rich leftist who says one thing and does another.

And he happens to be a former Vice President of the United States. Tax Notes reports that Joe Biden, who says he wants higher taxes if he wins the 2020 presidential election, has been very aggressive about minimizing the amount of his money that is taken by the IRS.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s tax returns show he took advantage of a planning strategy that the Obama administration tried to shut down. The planning technique involves the use of an S corporation to allow only a small portion of an individual’s earnings to be subject to self-employment tax. On the portion that isn’t on the hook for self-employment taxes, in some cases it can also escape the 3.8 percent net investment income tax for high-income earners enacted into law during the Obama administration.  

“It’s truly astounding to me that Biden would take such an aggressive position while contemplating a run for president,” Steven Rosenthal of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center said. “I don’t get it,” he added. …Biden, who is now a Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, released federal and state tax information on June 9 showing he and his wife, Jill, earned millions from speaking and writing engagements since leaving office.

Interesting, there are some Democrats who have chosen not to take advantage of this strategy.

…before becoming president, Barack Obama earned income as an author but listed it on Schedule C, subjecting it to self-employment tax. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., similarly earned income as author and listed the amounts on Schedule C.

What makes Biden’s hypocrisy so remarkable is that the Obama-Biden Administration proposed to make this type of avoidance illegal.

In its proposed fiscal 2017 budget, the Obama administration would’ve expanded the 3.8 investment to passthrough income so it wouldn’t escape the 3.8 percent tax based on a technicality. The provision, included in a section entitled “loophole closers,” would have raised $271.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Treasury Department’s analysis of the proposal.

So Biden wanted to take away the right of other people to protect their money, yet he is perfectly happy to copy their tax-minimization tactics.

By the way, I should say, quite emphatically, that Biden made the right choice for his family.

Voluntarily giving more money to Washington would be wasteful and reckless. I’m not going to claim that politicians in D.C. are the worst people in the country. But I will assert that they’re the ones with the worst incentive to use money wisely.

 

In any event, there’s definitely something distasteful about a rich leftist politician behaving like a “greedy capitalist” in his private life. Especially since this politician in the past has asserted that it’s patriotic to pay more tax!

Does this make him a fiscal draft dodger? Is there smoke coming out of the Hypocrisy Meter?

And if so, does that mean John Kerry also is unpatriotic? And what about Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Though Governor Pritzker of Illinois may be the most aggressive example of taxes-for-thee-but-not-for-me.