Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren released their tax returns Friday, revealing that both senatorial candidates earn close to the top percentile of income in the nation.
The releases, which document the candidates’ tax records for a number of years until 2011, came after a request from The Boston Globe. Warren agreed to release her tax information to the Globe only if her opponent promised to do the same.
Warren released four years’ worth of returns, while Brown released six years’ worth.
The results show that Democrat Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, made about $955,000 in 2010.
But in 2011, Warren and Mann, both Harvard School of Law professors, reported an income of $616,181, tax payments of $191,052 and $17,209 worth of charitable donations.
While a professor at Harvard, Warren alone earned about $350,000 each year.
Warren “came up the hard way,” from a “hard-working middle class family in an America that created opportunities for kids like me,” according to her official campaign website.
But the median, working-class income of households in the Commonwealth is
$64,509, compared to $51,914 for the rest of the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Republican adversary Brown also said he struggled financially in his early years to relate to the middle-class.
“I didn’t have a lot of breaks growing up,” he wrote on his official campaign website. “I came from a broken home and moved around a lot as a kid. Times were not easy.”
Brown and his wife, reporter Gail Huff, earned a total of $510,856 for the tax year 2011, putting the Brown household in the top 1 percent of earners.
From this income, they paid $123,642 in taxes and gave $16,487 to charity – a record amount for the couple in six years.
As a U.S. senator, Brown earns $174,000 a year, but much of the additional income is a result of his book, “Against All Odds.” The Brown household racked in an extra $700,000 for the memoir.
They listed their daughter, Ariana, as a dependent in 2011, but they did not claim their daughter, Ayla, a former “American Idol” contestant.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
