Edwards Made Almost $39M in 10 Years

[freedom_to_read]

Edwards Made Almost $39M in 10 Years

4 minutes ago

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards (news - web sites) made almost $39 million in income in a decade, his campaign disclosed Friday.

<snip>

Edwards was the plaintiffs' lawyer in 1997 when a North Carolina jury ordered an obstetrician and her employer to pay the parents of a retarded girl $23.2 million — the largest award ever for a medical malpractice case in the state.


The candidate's financial status fits right in with that of President Bush (news - web sites), Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) and Edwards' running mate John Kerry (news - web sites), who are all wealthy.



http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040903/ap_on_el_pr/edwards_taxes

Expect the typical "ambulance chaser" smears to follow...

[UpsideDownFlag]

1. ....so? n/t.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[physioex]

3. Shrub made altleast that much in blood money in one week...

What's the point of this article?

[readmylips]

4. cheney made 30Mil in one day from Halliburton....

that's the only job cheney ever had in the private sector. He was always attacked to the government's tit, the government he tells us to hate. Who's been on government welfare all this life cheney?

[AP]

11. And that came from ripping off average Americans.

[npincus]

5. you think he'd lend me some cash?

these Bush years have been rough.

[AP]

10. He's going to do even better. He's going to be your advocate, and he's

only going to take his salary as VP as compensation for doing for you exactly what he did for those clients for whom he won over 120 million dollars.

[Lex]

6. Don't worry--John's ready to counter.

He had to deal with this shit in NC from a Repuke incumbent, but he beat him anyway and took his Senate seat.

[AP]

7. That means he made his clients about $80 million. How many politicians

can say that they made less for themselves than they made for ordinary, injured victims of injustice?

(By the way, I think he won verdicts for his clients of something like 200 million over his entire career, so he must have taken less than 1/3rd in lots of those cases (because if the 39 mil only correlates to total awards of 120 million).)

[Yupster]

26. That 39 million would be

after taking out the costs of running his practice, paying his help, and whatever other business expenses he had.

If a client won $ 10 million, Edwards would get $ 3 million, but he would then be able to deduct his business costs before getting his taxable income which might only be $ 1 million, as there are often many things that a businessman can call a business expense which would be debatable at best. His main costs of doing business would be legit. Cost of his office and related salaries would be huge for instance.

[GOPAgainstGW]

8. WHERE DO WE SIGN UP FOR A CLASS!! - BEATS NO MONEY DOWN R/E SCAMS!

[TheRovingGourmet]

9. Yes, he took on a lot of big cases. You tend to make some

big dollars doing this. More power to him.

[lectrobyte]

12. Good for him. Now, maybe that reporter can look into Halliburton

and Cheney, or some of *'s more interesting deals...

[AP]

13. Like most Americans, and unlike Cheney, it was all earned income. Not...

...investment income or cap gains.

[Neecy]

15. exactly

He earned the money, he didn't rip off his daddy's investors or cheat the people of Arlington to get it.

[AP]

Exactly. Bush ripped off uninformed investors and paid something like 25%

on that 10 million he made. Then he fucked over the people of arlington, cashed out his share of the baseball team and probably paid 15% on that.

Edwards took money from large corporations which cheated and behaved poorly to get that wealth and shifted it back to the people from whom they took that value, and it encouraged those corporations to be better citizens and to take better care.

[Yupster]

27. Edwards reorted plenty of investments too

He listed his largest investment as a mutual fund, the Euro-Pacific Growth Fund run by American Funds. That's a mutual fund which invests in stocks from Europe and Asia.

Irony can be so ironic. The senator from North Carolina, hurt so much by outsourced jobs invests his own money overseas.

[AP]

46. The US paid a lot of money to get rid of Milosevic, which stabilizes

Europe and gives its economy a chance to thrive (and its equity markets create a lot of wealth by being competitive and not coddling monopolies, which forces American corporations to be more competitve). California reaps a lot of wealth from competitive Asian markets.

What would be ironic is if Edwards had investments in, say, the Gap and Levis who are making money from driving textile jobs to central America where labor isn't protected.

[MrMonk]

14. No wonder the Bush gang hates the Edwards

"The couple paid 34.8 percent of their income in federal taxes during the 10-year span, $13.2 million."

Bush's crowd would rather be caught with interns, than paying their share of taxes.

[AP]

16. A lawyer representing individuals cannot take income any other way than

earned.

If you represent corporations, you do have a chance to get appointed to a board and get some options, or take stock rather than cash in exchange for fees (alhtough that's rare).

But generally, lawyers pretty much end up paying the highest taxes possible. And in Edwards's case, it's hard to say that there isn't a huge social value in making sure negligent corporations pay for the damages they cause. So, we're taxing that valuable work more than twice as much as we tax sitting by the pool and cashing a dividend check.

That's bad for the economy.

[Yupster]

28. Lawyer can't take unearned income?

I must have missed that somewhere because I'm a stockbroker who buys stocks, bonds and mutual funds for lawyers all the time. I can assure you they are keeping their unearned income too.

[mbali]

41. I think the point was lawyers earn most of their income either through

salary or fees. No doubt lawyers invest their earned income and then make money on those investments, but that's different.

[AP]

43. I mean for their work. And if they invest income, it's income that came

first from earned income (unless they inheritied money).

What I'm saying is that doctors and lawyers generally work for people and when people pay you it's not very easy to arrange for a payement that can avoid being taxed as earned income.

Look at how much tax Edwards paid on that income -- 34%. That means that almost all of that money was earned income, even if he bought a lot stocks and real estate with it.

Now, if you work for a corporation, or if one corporation is trying to pass wealth to another corporation, you have lots and lots of options about how to realize the wealth, and many of them can be taxed at 15%, less than half of what people who work for people have to pay on their income.

Now, which of those activities tends to be more productive for soicety? So much corporate activity is designed just to pass wealth among insiders (and to take it from the public markets, or to create it through monopolization, which sucks wealth out fo the economy, rather than creating wealth).

It's ridiculous that we put so much of the tax burden on people who work, and it probably is a big reason why our economy isn't working for people who work.

[mbali]

25. And he paid more taxes than he was required to . . .

The campaign said Edwards had created the tax shelter, a so-called S Corporation, on the advice of his accountant. Accountants and tax law specialists say that S Corporations have grown increasingly popular with lawyers, contractors and entrepreneurs. The IRS received 3,191,108 such filings last year. If anything, these experts said, Edwards used it rather conservatively.

While most of his income, which included investments, was labeled as dividends on the S Corporation, for which he paid no Medicare tax, Edwards designated $360,000 a year as wages on which he was taxed for Medicare.

Even those whose business it is to collect taxes said they could find no fault with what Edwards did. "Let's face it," said Veranda Smith, a government affairs associate with the Federation of Tax Administrators. "I work for the state tax agencies, and I'm perfectly happy to say that anyone who puts in a structure that pays more taxes than necessary is nuts."

New York Times, July 10, 2004

[AP]

45. S Corporation is taxed like a partnership. All lawyers are either...

...partnerships, Limited Libablity Partnership/Corps, or S-Corps.

All three are taxed the same: only on distributions to the members (they don't pay corporate income tax).

Edwards would only ever have had used one of those three forms, and always would have only paid personal income tax on his income.

The Medicare Tax thing, however, is quite amazing. This man is a very decent person who has no problem paying taxes to the country which built an infrastruture which educated and giave him a chance to reach his full economic potential.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

17. Cheney made that in 6 years from Halliburton

So the fuck what?

[A_Possum]

18. Bush got a $25 million loan from Saddam's bankers

Bush did business with Bin Laden's bankers while Kerry...was fighting to shut it down to terrorist and drug connections.

Long before September 11, 2001, George W. Bush got a 25 million dollar loan from the same bankers that dealt with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while John Kerry was fighting to stop this bank's global laundering of money for drug lords and terrorists. John Kerry shut it down. He's been fighting terrorism at its roots since before George Bush ran for office.

[AP]

24. ...and you don't pay any tax on a loan. If you don't pay the loan back,

the lender can write it off as a business loss, but (unless I'm totally wrong) it still wouldn't be income for the borrower.

[spooky3]

32. A forgiven loan generally is income to the borrower, I believe.

So, it is subject to taxation. However, if it is not reported, the IRS may not be able to find it.

[Protected]

19. Good for him

I wish I had made $39 million over the last decade as well. ;)

[Beaverhausen]

20. Yes he earned it...his daddy wasn't rich

I think I heard somewhere his dad was a millworker...isn't that it?

anyway Cheney is the wealthiest of all of them. We need to get those facts and fight back.

[AgadorSparticus]

22. exactly!! atleast he didn't get it from his daddy. has dimwit done

anything on his own that is worth repeating? has he EVER been involved in any business venture that didn't end up a disaster? has he EVER won by NOT cheating, lying, or stealing?

[oasis]

21. Google is your friend too, Yahoo. Try Cheney/Halliburton for starters.

Edit to change media source.

[Triana]

23. and the point is??? (n/t)

[saracat]

29. Why do we need to know this?We know he is rich.

So What?And the point is?

[JI7]

30. good for him, he earned it

and did it through good work. not corrupt deals like cheney and bush.

[VOX]

31. The average 2004 salary for a major league ballplayer is $2,372,189.

http://bigleaguers.yahoo.com/mlbpa/faq

Why do the whores of the right-wing, big-money party think that Democrats aren't allowed to earn **honest** dough? Edwards came by this money honorably -- he earned it. Is that un-American if a Democrat does it?

The hypocrisy is stinking up the room.

[spooky3]

33. Isn't it horrible that we have a successful, intelligent, hardworking

VP candidate?

[mahina]

34. I really, really want to know what your point is.

Well?

[colonel odis]

35. edwards earned that money protecting people from big corporations,

instead of the opposite, as the bush bunch would do.

he's a good example of what a personal injury lawyer can and should do. corporations have no conscience themelves, so we need people who do what edwards does to keep them honest.

and if he got rich in the process, so what. there's not a damned thing wrong with being wealthy. it's how you earn your money and what you do with it that show what kind of person you are.

[girl gone mad]

36. I have a cousin who was born mentally disabled..

because the mother's doctor failed, for over a month, to diagnose sepsis. When her attorney's looked through the doctor's records, they found he had a long history of making the same error.

They won a large court settlement. Though I'm not sure of the exact figure, I do know my cousin will never be able to live independently, he will always need nursing and almost constant attention. The settlement will probably barely cover his cost of care after his parents can no longer take care of him.

I hate articles such as this one. I know some trial lawyers rise to the top of their field and are well compensated. I know my Aunt and Uncle never would have won against this doctor if it hadn't been for a very good law firm (the doctor's insurance company had been covering for him and had hidden or destroyed his records).

[molly]

37. Good for him! Proves the American dream

he earned it - didn't inherit it.

[prodigal_green]

38. and he paid his taxes.

He paid nearly 35% in federal taxes and gave nearly nine percent to charities.

The guy works for his money and has helped many people in the process.

Since when was that a crime in this country...oh yeah, since the chimp made money generated from wealth (capital gains) more important than money that comes from work.

The private legal system has to step in to do the work when the federal government refuses to regulate big business. Either the government tells you you can't sell faulty products, or the courts will.

[Meshuga]

39. It is easy to defend John Edwards

"Ambulance chaser? Just because he is a trial lawyer? He made lots of money? Well do we know of a specific examples of when he acted sleazy? no? Then shut up!!!"

[Carolinian]

40. Who has the least $$ - Bush, Kerry, Cheney, or Edwards?

[Gin]

42. he should have been a CEO with stock options....could have made

that in one stock transaction....or on a golden parachute even if the company was bankrupt. Compared to them...it is peanuts.

[mzmolly]

44. Democrats aren't allowed to make money right ?

Democrats are all poor folk who never shower, hate capitalism and don't want to work for a living. :eyes: And, if they earn money, there supposed to burn it.