Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a major critic of billionaires and American corporations who do not “pay their fair share” in taxes.
This week, Bernie Sanders kept up the attack, criticizing the wealth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Bernie tweeted Monday, “You know what Amazon paid in federal income taxes last year? Zero” in response to a report about massive wealth gains by Bezos.
Sanders was criticized by an unlikely source: former Hillary Clinton senior adviser Philippe Reines. Reines tweeted, “You know what SenSanders paid in federal income taxes last year?”
Then Reines called the senator a “Hypocrite.”
After releasing his taxes, Sanders was criticized for being a hypocrite and taking advantage of over $60,000 worth of deductions. National Review wrote of Sanders’s tax release:
With all of his itemized deductions, Sanders’s taxable income was significantly lower than it would have been if he had taken the standard deduction. The deductions left Sanders and his wife paying $27,653 in federal income taxes in 2014, on a joint income of $205,271 — an effective federal tax rate of 13.5 percent. If that seems low to you, your instincts are right: According to the Tax Foundation, the average federal income-tax rate for a couple making $200,000 to $500,000 in 2014 was 15.2 percent. The “millionaires and billionaires” that Sanders is so fond of berating payed, on average, just more than twice as much of their income (27.4 percent) in federal taxes as he did.