Sen. Bernie Sanders tries to make a lot of hay about his authenticity, that he’s just one of us, that he’s campaigning for the little guy.

I get his message as he battles Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

But this morning on CNN, the distinguished gentleman from Vermont fluffed a direct question from “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper: Why won’t you release your tax returns, as Secretary Clinton has done for the past eight years?

His answer? “My wife does our tax returns and I’ve been a little busy.”

OK, senator. Enough already.

Americans heard some kind of song-and-dance from Republican frontrunner Donald J. Trump, who said he couldn’t release his returns because he was being audited for the past 12 consecutive years. That, too, is a stretch.

However, these returns have become part of the effort to improve transparency among all the candidates running for president.

It seems to many of us that it’s especially critical to see the tax returns from candidates who keep purporting to be champions for “wage equality” and who keep blasting the “top 1 percent” of income-earners for getting rich while the rest of us are struggling to make ends meet.

Mrs. Sanders does his tax returns? They’ve been “busy”?

Get real, senator. If your returns are straightforward and uncomplicated as your campaign message would seem to imply, then releasing the records wouldn’t be that big a deal.

This, sir, simply goes with the territory. Candidates who ask voters to entrust them with governing the world’s richest and most powerful nation should expect demands to see if they, too, are living up to the high-minded rhetoric they espouse on the campaign trail.