The Clintons: estate taxes for thee but not for me

Bill and Hillary Clinton are using perfectly legal, but complex and expensive legal strategies available only to the rich in order to avoid the estate taxes they have assured us are essential to fairness and economic justice. So much for the crusade against the 1% who are supposedly responsible for all the ills of everyone else. Keeping Chelsea a wealthy member of the 1% is the apparent goal.

Richard Rubin of Bloomberg reports:

Bill and Hillary Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the U.S. from being dominated by inherited wealth. That doesn’t mean they want to pay it.

To reduce the tax pinch, the Clintons are using financial planning strategies befitting the top 1 percent of U.S. households in wealth. These moves, common among multimillionaires, will help shield some of their estate from the tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.

The Clintons created residence trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their New York house into them in 2011, according to federal financial disclosures and local property records. (snip)

“The estate tax has been historically part of our very fundamental belief that we should have a meritocracy,” Hillary Clinton said at a December 2007 appearance with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who supports estate taxes and is using charitable donations to reduce his eventual bill.

My relatives got involved in a trust scam to try to keep one older relative's from being taxed. He had somewhat over the $600k limit at the time, but lost more from screw ups by the idiot lawyers and accountants involved than he would have paid in taxes. If you do try to set up a trust, don't go to someone who got their skills from a "set up trusts in your spare time" ad in the back of a magazine.

I had one very liberal relative involved smugly saying that this is just the type of account the Kennedys use. Well, I went off on her about the hypocrisy of the Kennedys telling us to pay more taxes and hiding their money from the very laws they pass. I also pointed out that unlike the Kennedys she didn't have to power to call up the IRS and "correct" their error if they tried to poke holes in the trust. I then did a pretty good impression of Fat Ted telling and IRS agent "If you try to audit my family, you'll be doing all of your future audits in Fah-go". She didn't have much to say after that.

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