Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released her 2015 personal tax return on Friday, adding pressure on her Republican counterpart Donald Trump to do the same.
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The returns, filed jointly with her husband former President Bill Clinton, showed income of $10.6 million.
“Here’s a pretty incredible fact: There is a non-zero chance that Donald Trump isn’t paying *any* taxes”, Clinton tweeted, just minutes after releasing her own returns.
Yet on Thursday, Mr. Trump was reduced to citing a poll that actually showed him a few points behind Clinton and arguing the race between them was close. The Clinton’s 2015 income was a little more than a third of what it was in 2014 ($28.3 million).
Trump has yet to release his returns, and claims they are still being audited by the IRS.
The Republican and Democratic candidates in the last nine presidential elections – since Ronald Reagan in 1980 – have released tax returns at least for the previous year, according to Politifact.
Clinton says Republican nominee Donald Trump’s speech in Detroit on Monday didn’t have any answers to help the economy.
The pair donated 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity over the course of the past 10 years. “There’s nothing to learn from them”, he said.
Clinton meant to try to make the case that Trump’s agenda would benefit him and his wealthy friends, and to characterise his plans as an update of “trickle-down economics”, according to her campaign.
The campaign reported the Clintons’ effective tax rate as 34%, which includes the more than $300,000 the couple paid in self-employment taxes, which are payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.
It is customary for US presidential candidates to make their tax returns public, although they are not required by law to do so. But given his frequent refusals and the possibility that the release of his tax return would reveal things Trump would rather we didn’t know, it seems unlikely he will release this document anytime soon.
Bill Clinton also earned more than $17 million over the same period for consulting work for Laureate Education, Inc., another worldwide for-profit education system based in Baltimore that makes most of its profits from overseas operations.
On his campaign trail, Trump has had a number of self-destructive stumbles that cast a long shadow over his White House run as they call into question if he is presidential.
That means their effective tax rate – a measure of their income tax burden – was 30.6% based on their adjusted gross income.
“I am not running against Crooked Hillary Clinton”, the Republican presidential candidate said in a speech late Saturday in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Their charitable contributions were $42,000 to the Desert Classic Charities and $1 million to the Clinton Family Foundation, a vehicle for charitable giving that is not related to the high-profile Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
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The billionaire property tyvoon told a rally in Altoona that he planned to watch certain parts of Pennsylvania closely on election day in November.
