Friday, July 13, 2012

Presidential Candidate Gets More Than 30% of Income From "Foreign Sources"

No, not that rich guy that Obama's people keep attacking.  It's the other rich guy in the race.  James Lindgren at Volokh Conspiracy points out:

I find it strange that the Obama campaign would be making so much of Romney’s income from foreign sources when Obama’s foreign source income appears to be a much bigger percentage of his income over the last few years. Of course, one can’t tell for sure because Mitt Romney has not released his 2009 tax return.
 Yet in the three tax years in which Barack Obama has been President (2009, 2010, and 2011), fully 30.1% of the Obamas’ gross income has come from foreign sources: ($2,711,340 out of a 3-year total gross income of $8,993,449).  In 2009, 26.5% of the Obamas’ gross income came from foreign sources. In 2010 it was a whopping 41.4%, and in 2010 it was 30.2%.
The salary that we taxpayers pay him as President (just under $1.2 million over the 3 years) accounted for less than 13% of the Obamas’ income, a share dwarfed by their 30% from foreign sources over the same period.
More troubling is that there is nothing that identifies exactly from which foreign countries Obama's income is coming.  (It's probably book royalties, not something nefarious, but it still would be nice to know for sure, wouldn't it?)

3 comments:

  1. Potential reactions from the lickspittle lackey newsmedia:
    1 Nothing to see here, move along!
    2 Look! Biden said something controversial!
    3. Yes, but think how much more foreign income the other guy made!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Go back and read the update to the post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The passive foreign income (a few thousand a year) is explained by the update, but that isn't the vast majority of that foreign income.

    ReplyDelete