It's widely known the Clintons have done well for themselves in recent years, but until now, it wasn't clear just how well. Today, the campaign filed a financial disclosure report revealing they earned $30 million in just the last seventeen months.
The report is not yet posted on the Federal Elections Commission website, but the campaign voluntarily released it to reporters. It covers the period from January 2014 to present.
In that time the former president and former secretary of state earned just over $25 million from about 100 paid speeches. That works out to about $250,000 per speech. Not bad work, if you can get it, which they can.
The report also reveals just who paid for all those speeches.
Another $5 million came from Simon and Schuster, the publisher of Hillary Clinton's book Hard Choices.
This income puts them in the upper echelons of the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States. An income of $430,000 puts you in the top 1 percent.
The Republican National Committee has already responded to the disclosure. Chairman Reince Priebus said "The Clintons' claim that staggering amounts of income from paid speaking fees that raise ethical questions and potential conflicts of interest is simply to 'pay our bills' shows how out-of-touch they've truly become."
While promoting the book, Clinton told ABC's Diane Sawyer when she and her husband moved out of the White House, they were "not only dead broke, but in debt." She later said she regretted those comments.
And in a recent Today show interview, Bill Clinton responded to a question about his highly-paid speeches saying, "I gotta pay our bills. And I also give a lot of it to the foundation every year."
According to a campaign official, because most of the Clintons income is held in cash, they didn't pay capital gains taxes. The campaign estimates their effective tax rate in 2014 was 30 percent, which is above the average for those in their income group.
Income and taxes became a campaign issue in 2012, when Mitt Romney released tax returns showing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010, lower than the tax burden of many middle class Americans.
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
