Elizabeth Warren gave $50,000 to charity last year, and other 2020 Democrats' tax return takeaways

Tax day.
(Image credit: Piotrekswat/ iStock)

While 2020 Democrats have made a big deal about getting President Trump to release his tax returns, there's also a lot to pull from the taxation information they've shared in the past few weeks. Here are four big takeaways from campaigners' taxes.

1. Beto O'Rourke underpaid his taxes. The former Texas congressmember released his returns Tuesday. They showed in 2013 and 2014, Beto and his wife Amy O'Rourke underpaid their taxes by more than $4,000 total because of an error in how they claimed medical cost deductions, The Wall Street Journal reports. An aide to O'Rourke promised to amend the past filings.

2. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is the most generous 2020 Democrat. Warren and her husband gave $50,000 to charity last year, making up 5.9 percent of their joint income, The New York Times notes. O'Rourke and his wife gave the least: $1,166, or .33 percent of their income.

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3. Not all book deals are equal. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is happy to acknowledge he earned more than $2 million from his books in the past three years, while Warren reported a $3 million income from books since 2013. But Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) took in just $320,000 in profits from her memoir last year, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) profited $134,000 from her 2014 memoir, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) netted $75,000 for her book in 2015.

4. There are a lot of 1 percenters. Harris, Warren, and Sanders' 2016 returns all put their incomes in the top percentile of American earners, the Times says. Harris' showed a $1,889,156 adjusted gross income in 2018, about $1 million higher than Warren's, and something that dramatically changed after she started filing jointly with her husband in 2014.

Trump, meanwhile, has yet to comply with Democrats' demands and release his tax returns — and his staffers have suggested he never will.

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Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.