From the Tuesday Morning Jolt:
What We Can Learn From Bernie Sanders’ Tax Return
Quite a few Bernie Sanders fans responded to this piece with the insistence, “he’s entitled to take all of those deductions!” And the piece never said otherwise, at least legally. But it’s quite ironic that the candidate who spends the most time arguing that the rich are under-taxed makes $205,000 per year and pays a lower tax rate than the average American. He is himself an example of precisely the phenomenon he decries every day on the campaign trail; he cuts himself slack he would never extend to any wealthy person he so vehemently demonizes.
When you offer a tax plan, you’re contending, ‘these are the parts of the current tax system that I think are bad; this is what needs to be changed.’ One part of Sanders’ plan is that the home mortgage deduction should be capped and limited to the first $300,000 in home-mortgage debt. (It’s currently capped much higher, $500,000 for a person filing singly, $1 million for a couple.)
We don’t know exactly how much mortgage debt the Sanders family has, but their Vermont home was bought in 2009 for $405,000, and their townhouse on Capitol Hill, purchased in 2007, has two mortgages on totaling $464,550. He probably has more – way more – than $300,000 left to pay off on the two properties.
So Sanders thinks wealthy people get to deduct too much from their taxes for their mortgage interest… but he himself will deduct nearly $23,000.
Another part of Sanders’s plan is that people making more than $250,000 per year would see the value of their deductions limited to 28 cents on every dollar of taxes they paid. (Notice Sanders’ threshold is about $45,000 more than he and his wife earn.) The heart of that argument is, rich people are paying too little in taxes because the law allows them to take too many deductions.