Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have actively tried to avoid estate taxes that they have long supported in public, according to a Bloomberg report.
Making financial moves common among multimillionaires, the Clintons could end up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in the same estate taxes on the wealthy that they have championed.
Bloomberg found that the Clintons created residence trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their New York house into them in 2011. That way, any appreciation in the house’s value would happen outside their taxable estate.
“The goal is really be thoughtful and try to build up the nontaxable estate, and that’s really what this is,” David Scott Sloan, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP in Boston, told Bloomberg. “You’re creating things that are going to be on the nontaxable side of the balance sheet when they die.”
In her last campaign, Mrs. Clinton supported making wealthier people pay more estate tax. At a December 2007 appearance with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, she said, “The estate tax has been historically part of our very fundamental belief that we should have a meritocracy.”
Without the estate tax, Hillary Clinton said, the country could become “dominated by inherited wealth,” Bloomberg reported.
In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton vetoed a proposal to repeal the estate tax, “though he backed less significant changes to cushion family-owned businesses and farms against the potential effects of the tax,” Bloomberg reported.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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