Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic socialist who’s built a career promoting policies to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, said he plans to make public his federal tax returns by April 15, the annual filing deadline.
Sanders of Vermont has said he’ll release 10 years of returns, and disclosed this week that his literary fame of recent years has catapulted him into the ranks of top earners he’s derided for decades.
“I wrote a best-selling book,” Sanders told the New York Times this week. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
The senator refused to release his full tax returns when he vied for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. He’s contending again in 2020 as one of the front-runners, and is attempting to manage the disconnect between decades of rhetoric about the “top 1 percent” and his own position within that group.