Rick Santorum likes to
stress his working-class roots, of having grown up in public housing as the grandson of an immigrant coal miner. “It’s a story that resonates, and I have policies to fit the story,” he says.
He's been more resistant to telling the story of being a coal company "consultant," who in 2010 and 2011 took home $142,500 from Consol Energy, one of the biggest coal-mining companies in the United States. As shown by the tax returns Santorum finally released Wednesday after much delay, that haul was just a fraction of the income he reported in the past four years. He's a freshly minted millionaire.
If you'd like to check out Santorum's tax returns for yourself, you can see them here: 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. What you'll find, as reported by Maggie Haberman, is that his adjusted gross income was $659,000 in 2007, $952,000 in 2008, $1.1 million in 2009 and $923,000 in 2010. Not exactly in the same league as Mitt Romney, who reported income of $27 million in 2010.
But Santorum paid a higher tax rate than Romney, more than 28 percent compared with the 13.9 percent the former Massachusetts governor paid in 2010.
"I don't have wealth. I don't have investments. I don't have capital gains," said Santorum, who added that "most of the assets that I ended up building was paying down a mortgage on my house that went down in value."
"So that's where most of my money went. But as far as the tax rates were concerned, (Romney) had dividend income, he had capital gains income and was taxed at 15 percent," he said. "I had ...income, which was taxed at a higher rate."
That four-bedroom house in northern Virginia sits on five acres and was
assessed at $1.4 million in 2010.
Santorum contributed $16,289 to charity in 2010, 1.8 percent of his income.
Among other sources of income:
• Five rental properties in Pennsylvania worth $1.75 million
• $400,000 in compensation and stock options for serving on the board at Universal Health Services
• $230,000 for appearances on Fox News
• $65,000 from American Continental Group, a D.C. lobbying firm
• $125,000 from the Clapham Group, a Burke, Virginia firm "committed to promoting the good, true and beautiful in the public arenas of politics, policy and pop culture." The client list is made up mostly of religious rights organizations.
His ties to the 99 percent are purely ancestral.
Comments are closed on this story.