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The returns show that Sanders’ earnings shot up after his first presidential bid, when he built up a vast national following. He and his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, reported income that topped $1 million in 2016 and 2017, lifted by proceeds from his books.
The couple had an adjusted gross income of $561,293 in 2018, according to their most recent tax return. Sanders had about $393,000 in book income last year, and he and his wife reported giving nearly $19,000 to charity.
Their federal taxes came to $145,840, for an effective federal tax rate of 26%.
Sanders’ higher income in recent years has created some political awkwardness for the senator, who in his 2016 presidential campaign frequently railed against “millionaires and billionaires” and their influence over the political process.
His income now puts him within the top 1% of taxpayers, according to data from the IRS.
“These tax returns show that our family has been fortunate,” Sanders said in a statement. “I am very grateful for that, as I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck and I know the stress of economic insecurity.”
The issue of tax returns has been in the spotlight because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to release his own, a position that defies decades of tradition. House Democrats are now demanding to see his returns.
Sanders handling of the issue received attention in the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton, his main rival for the Democratic nomination, pushed him to divulge years of tax returns, as she had done. At the time, Sanders said his wife did their taxes. “We’ve been a little bit busy lately,” he said during a debate. “You’ll excuse us.”
In that campaign, Sanders disclosed his tax return for only one year, 2014, which showed that he and his wife had an adjusted gross income of $205,271, largely from his Senate salary and Social Security benefits.
More recently, Sanders has come under criticism for his expanding personal wealth. A post on the website ThinkProgress last week called Sanders’ millionaire status “very off-brand and embarrassing,” and a video suggested he had stopped referring to “millionaires” after he became one himself. The website is run by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the sister organization of the Center for American Progress, a liberal organization.
On Saturday, Sanders fired back, accusing the CAP of “using its resources to smear” him and other progressive presidential candidates. The group was founded in 2003 by John Podesta, a close Clinton ally who served as Clinton’s campaign chairman in 2016. (The editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress said in a statement that the site was an “editorially independent journalistic entity.”)
Tax returns released by other Democratic presidential candidates have shown that they also earned more than a vast majority of U.S. households in recent years. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and her husband reported an adjusted gross income of about $1.9 million in 2018, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and her husband had $846,394 in adjusted gross income.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, also disclosed 10 years of tax returns Monday, though not his 2018 return. He and his wife reported $366,455 in adjusted gross income on their 2017 return.
A picture of Sanders’ finances was already available through his annual Senate financial disclosure filings, but the tax returns provide a precise accounting of the income earned by Sanders and his wife over the years. Their 2018 return indicated it was self-prepared.
In the past three years, their income has soared as a result of Sanders’ book writing. His book “Our Revolution” was published shortly after the 2016 election, and a young-adult book, “Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution,” followed the next year. Another book, “Where We Go From Here,” was published in 2018.
Sanders reported receiving about $840,000 in book income in 2016 and about $856,000 in 2017. His wife listed about $106,000 in income as a book author in 2017. The Sanders campaign said she had received an advance for a book she is writing “about Jane and Bernie’s experiences together in public service.”
In an interview with The New York Times last week, Sanders acknowledged that he had become a millionaire.
“I wrote a best-selling book,” he said. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.