Jeb Bush released 1,150 pages of tax returns on his website today — that’s 33 years’ worth. What do they show? Since leaving the Florida governor’s office in 2007, Bush has made at least $29 million. “Thank God for term limits,” he told a group of reporters on Tuesday. The 2016 candidate said his net worth is $19 or $22 million now. He made about $7.3 million in 2013, and has not yet released his tax returns for 2014. Speaking fees, contracts with Lehman Brothers and Barclays, additional consulting, and serving on several boards provided much of Bush’s recent income. He paid an effective federal tax rate of around 36 percent most years. After 2007, the Bushes spent about 1.5 percent of their income on charitable giving; a campaign spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that they gave more last year, however, than they gave in the previous three years combined — running for elections tends to do wonders for goodwill. Bush will surely use his disclosures to needle opponents who are more taciturn in the transparency department.
The Clintons released 30 years’ worth of tax returns that stop at 2006. The past few years are more of an unknown. When Clinton released her tax returns in 2007, her brags sounded very much like Bush’s current gloating. A spokesperson told reporters at the time, “The Clintons have now made public thirty years of tax returns, a record matched by few people in public service. None of Hillary Clinton’s presidential opponents have revealed anything close to this amount of personal financial information.”
