Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Barack Obama's Adventures In Alternative Minimum Tax

In addition to getting a little AMT love on his $2.9 million in gross income last year mostly from Random House book publishers and Dystel and Goderich literary agents (p. 31), the more curious data is that president collected material dividends and interest from Northern Trust (from which he received $26.6k probably after Barney Frank went postal over the bank's little TARP funded romp at the House Of Blues) and JP Morgan, presumably from owning shares in these entities... Of course, The First Portfolio Manager is not capable of suffering from conflicts of interest, even when he is bailing out bank after bank compliments of AIG.



The president barely made any money on the $650,000 in T-bills he bought and sold ($150k of these had a 10 day holding period). Perhaps he should hire Bill Gross as an advisor on how to trade U.S. debt.

Also turns out the tuition at the "University of Chicago" for Malia (grade 5) and Natasha (grade 2) is roughly 24k each.

In summary: the president paid $881,337 on total income of $2,736,107, or 32.2% in federal taxes. Then again as per line 63 the president applied $841,000 in tax payments from his 2007 return (not publicly filed), effectively parting with $40k in cash for 2008.

And of course, there is nothing cooler than putting "US President" in the occupation box.

Obama 1040 Sphere: Related Content
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15 comments:

"DoctoRx" said...

Is this stock in NTRS or income from a brokerage account w Northern Trust Securities?

Anonymous said...

Yea I'm sure he's making these decisions entirely based on his 100 shares of JPM stock.

Aiden said...

I would imagine that those are his brokerage 1099s from Northern Trust and JPM.
Looks like his book was mostly made up of Treasuries. From the tax exempt portion, it looks like he also was holding some munis. The other interest could be either corporate bonds or interest from a money market account. He must also have some equity exposure, as he had dividend income. Interesting stuff.

Anonymous said...

noise

Anonymous said...

Exactly. This is noise.

I love this blog but...this is just 'looking up someone's skirt'.

How about more real stuff, as snarfy as it is.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, leave this stuff to bess, EP and Carney.

Although completely agree with on the occuption box.

Anonymous said...

$172K in contributions, of which $1,400 went to churches (spread among 5 churches, no less). That's my kind of guy. Maybe he does have some sense. After sticking with Geithner, I was beginning to wonder.

Anonymous said...

Oh, please.

Let Tyler have a little fun.

It's his damn blog. He can do what he wants.

If these people can do better, they can come out of the shadows of anonymity and post their own damn blog.

Anonymous said...

you didn't mention that he and michele earmarked $6 for the presidential election campaign fund. no way he is going to take that money, so he is funding the enemy!

Advant Guard said...

Isn't this the Tax return for last year's Income? He didn't become President until January this year so it reflects no presidential conflicts of interest. Those will be reported on tax returns next year.

Unknown said...

I doubt he's that cheap. You should worry more about the speaking fees and the hedge fund gigs for his daughters that will come after he leaves office.

I don't think the President is making decisions because of his relatively small stake in financials. It's much more likely that he simply doesn't understand the crisis all that deeply and he's put his faith in the wrong group of people. I've studied the markets and the economy nearly every day for the last decade, and even I have knowledge deficiencies. Were I making the big decisions, even I'd prefer to lean on others. Obama needs to come to the realization that his 'others' are complete fuck ups.

Anonymous said...

"University of Chicago" = University of Chicago Lab School, their K-12 school

Anonymous said...

The northern trust entry is just the broker dealer for his underlying investments and 25k is about what you make in a year on a couple million in treasuries these days.. the fact that he has no qualified dividends at all implies these are all fixed income holdings...

the past 3 presidents have all used northern trust as their trust company.

Anonymous said...

Why didn't President Obama pay any alternative minimum tax (AMT)? We make way less than him and paid a significant amount of AMT. Am I missing something? How is this "fair", since that's what President Obama is always spouting.

Anonymous said...

Look at Obama's schedule D - there is an error!

US Treasury Bills rarely trade above par (the one month bill auctioned at the end of December actually traded flat) - the schedule D shows all 3 instances of securities identified as "US TBILL" with values above par.

While the above tax errors are not errors as large as Timothy Geithner's or other nominees - they are errors nonetheless.