Obamas made $2.7m last year

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, millionaires from his best-selling books, made $2.7 million last year and paid just under one-third of their adjusted income in federal taxes.

While the income, mostly his, was far more than the US median household income of about $50,000, it was quite a decrease from the $4.2 million the Obamas made in 2007.

Both years, nearly all the earnings came from Obama's best-selling books. Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope brought in about $2.5 million in royalties last year, according to copies of the returns released by the White House on Wednesday, Americans' deadline for filing reports of income to the Internal Revenue Service, the government tax-collecting agency.

Obama earned $139,204 as a Democratic senator from Illinois last year before leaving his seat after winning the November election. Michelle Obama received a salary of $62,709 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she was an executive.

The couple's total federal tax came to $855,323. That was 32 percent of their adjusted gross income of $2,656,902.

The Obamas overpaid by $26,014, and elected to apply that amount to their 2009 taxes. That means their tax bill next year would be reduced by that amount.

The couple's federal tax deductions, or expenses that reduce a tax liability, included about $50,000 in home mortgage interest.

They reported contributing $172,050 to charity last year, including $25,000 each to the CARE international relief agency and the United Negro College Fund, a 65-year-old organization now better known as UNCF, dedicated to educating black Americans.

They gave a total of $1,400 to five churches. In contrast to 2007, they gave nothing to the Trinity United Church of Christ. Barack Obama was a longtime member of the church, and gave it $26,270 in 2007, but resigned from it and cut ties with its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, after Wright made incendiary comments that became a campaign issue.

The White House also released Vice-President Joe Biden's tax returns. Biden and his wife Jill earned $269,256 last year.

The Bidens' main sources of income were salaries from the Senate, Widener University, Delaware Technical & Community College and royalties from the audio rights to the vice-president's memoir, Promises to Keep.

AP

(China Daily 04/17/2009 page11)