Originally published on Forbes.com.
A copy of part of Jill Stein’s tax return for 2015 has gone up on her campaign website. To be fair it is the most interesting part, pages 1 and 2 of Form 1040. Still it would have been nice to include the schedules, which can flesh out the story a bit. The return is pretty unexciting. I think it likely that the $302,258 in salary was all earned by her spouse Dr. Richard Rohrer. In the signature portion of the return, he lists his occupation as physician. Dr. Stein lists hers as environmentalist.
Other Income
Besides the salary there is $140 in taxable interest income, $21,730 in tax-exempt interest income, $35,505 in dividends. $2,000 in business income and $9,185 in capital gains. That much interest and dividend income would make me very surprised if they didn’t have at least $2 million in investable assets. Could be quite a bit more. It is possible that some or all of that is a flow-through from a trust.
How Charitable?
Since Schedule A is not included we don’t know how much the Rohrer-Steins deducted in charitable contributions. We can infer that it is not a really large number. Their total itemized deductions were $32,229. They live in Massachusetts, so a back of the envelope on their state income tax deduction would be about $18,000. Throw in maybe $7,000 for real estate taxes and there is not a lot left over for charity. A sign that their itemized deduction lean heavily towards taxes is that they are hit with $7,074 in AMT.
What Rate?
Everybody seems to get excited about the tax rate with presidential candidate returns. I’ll be explicit in how I am computing this. The numerator (i.e. the tax) is $80,090, consisting of regular income tax of $70,625, AMT of $7,074 and net investment income tax of $2,391 (I’m not including the small amount of self-employment tax). The denominator is the total income on line 22 – $349,088 plus the tax-exempt interest of $21,730 for total income of $370,818. That works out to an average tax rate of 21.6%. Of course, their marginal rate is higher than that on ordinary income and you would get a different answer if you used taxable income as the denominator or excluded the tax-exempt interest income. I’ve always been skeptical of the rate really meaning anything, but I wanted to be thorough.
Who Prepared The Return?
When I interviewed Dr. Stein in 2012, she told me that she used Turbotax.
Maybe someone with a sharper eye than I can figure out the program from looking at the font, so I can’t say it is Turbotax, but there is no paid preparer listed. So I guess they are still in do-it-yourself mode.
No Idle Speculation
The release on the site is about the bare minimum that will allow Dr. Stein to claim that she has released her return.She can’t even use the plural. Fun as it would be I am not going to speculate on what exciting things there might be on the returns from 2011 through 2014. After waiting almost four years from when she said “soon”, I’ll be happy with what I got to see.