Re: taxes, taxes

John McCain finally released his tax returns for 2006 and 2007. John filed a separate return from his wife Cindy, so his total family income has not been fully disclosed. Arizona is a community property state where each spouse has a half-interest in salaries earned during marriage, so that part of Cindy’s income was disclosed.

John is drawing both social security ($23,157 in 2007) and a tax-free pension from the Navy ($58,358 in 2007). McCain certainly earned his Navy pension. But one can wonder why we let sitting Congressmen and Senators draw social security, particularly with the system headed towards deficits as the baby boomers retire. I guess it’s the old labor union principle of full pay to the last day. Paying social security and other public pensions to people who are still working and earning full salaries is one of the legal innovations of the late 1970s and early 1980s that we should perhaps revisit.

On the domestic front, John and Cindy paid out $183,554 for household help in 2006 and $273,144 in 2007.And John paid $17,700 annually in alimony to his first wife. John and Cindy donated $129,390 to charity in 2006 and $210,934 in 2007. Most of this went to the John and Cindy McCain Foundation. The three largest donations from the foundation in 2007:

$25,000 to The Halo Trust (clearing of mines)
$25,000 to Operation Smile (craniofacial abnormalities)
$10,000 to Craniofacial Foundation (craniofacial abnormalities)

So how do our candidates compare?

	AGI	AGI	AGI*
Year	Clinton	Obama	McCain
2000	357,026	240,505
2001	15,949,819	272,759
2002	9,466,632	259,394
2003	7,934,705	238,327
2004	19,995,915	207,647
2005	18,056,395	1,655,106
2006	15,858,422	983,826	698,028
2007	20,400,000	4,139,965	771,861
Total	$108,018,914	$7,997,529	$1,469,889

*AGI for McCain does not include dividend or other income from separate property owned by Cindy McCain. Cindy’s net worth, largely from a family-owned beer distributorship in Arizona, has been estimated at between $25 million and $45 million. If that generates no more than 5% income, the McCain’s would still likely have the least joint income of the three candidates. The McCains would likely be second in net worth to the Clintons, but ahead of the Obamas. The Obamas do have 25 years to catch up.

Total book royalties for 2006 and 2007:

$256,898 from Random House to John McCain: Faith of My Fathers, Worth the Fighting For, Why Courage Matters, Character is Destiny, and Hard Call.
$583,393 from Simon & Schuster to Hillary Clinton: Living History; It Takes a Village; Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets; and An Invitation To The White House: At Home With History.
$4,449,996 from Random House to Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father.
$7,274,132 from Random House to Bill Clinton: My Life and Giving.

Random House is a division of Bertelsmann AG, which is based in Germany and is controlled by German billionaire Reinhold Mohn and his family. Simon & Schuster is a division of CBS Corporation and is controlled by American billionaire Sumner Redstone.

There have been ethics questions about whether political figures get better book deals than other authors can get, even other celebrities can get, and whether marketing and advertising expenditures to promote a book also can be designed to help advance a politician’s career. But not every politician is capable of writing or having ghost-written a book that the public wants to buy.