The Clintons donated used underwear to charity, wrote it off on taxes
Here is the report from The New York Times:
In previous returns, when Mr. Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas and his wife was a partner in a Little Rock law firm, the Clintons had gone so far as to deduct $2 for underwear donated to charities. The deduction was ridiculed by comedians and pundits, and the White House did not itemize the Clintons’ $17,000 in charitable contributions on the 1993 return.
It’s that time of year again, Mr. President.
Time to celebrate the lingering Yuletide spirit and the bright promise of the year to come. Time to savor the companionship of friends and family.
Time to donate your underpants to a charitable organization so you can later claim a deduction on your 1993 tax return.
If the recent past is any guide, Bill Clinton and his wife, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been spending the past few months gathering up unwanted belongings — from old shoes to shower curtains to jogging shorts to, yes, apparently used underwear — carefully enumerating each item alongside dollar amounts on handwritten lists, and giving the lot to such worthy causes as the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries.
The Clintons’ tax returns over the past decade — which “obviously were prepared with an eye toward being released,” according to White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers — are rife with detailed supporting documents that may someday prove a rich boon to historians and psychohistorians studying the forces that shaped the Clinton presidency.
As political figures are wont to do, particularly those with White House aspirations, the Clintons have over the past few years thoughtfully disclosed their tax returns, providing citizens with a fascinating window on a heretofore unexamined aspect of their lives.
Several experts were consulted about Clinton’s tax-deductible donations, especially of underwear. Paul Offenbacher, a longtime Washington-area tax accountant, said it is highly unusual to take an itemized deduction on donated underwear; indeed, he had never heard of such a thing. Adelphi University psychology professor George D. Goldman, a New York-based psychoanalyst who studies the unconscious symbolic meanings in human behavior, said the donations are, at the very least, fodder for intriguing speculation.
“Obviously I can’t tell you what Clinton’s individual symbols mean; all I can do is give you my own analysis — which is that he’s airing his dirty wash or maybe trying to take his dirty wash and make it cleaner,” Goldman said. “I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I voted for him, but there’s something, let’s say, grandiose, both too personal and a bit inappropriately intimate, to give your underwear away for someone else to wear, and then to think that your underwear is worth giving this sort of a valuation to.”
But another clinician, psychologist John Marr, pooh-poohed as fanciful such theorizing about a guy who donates underwear, itemizes the donation, and then discloses it to the public.
“Whether you’re a Freudian, a Jungian or a behaviorist, you always have to look for the simplest explanation first,” said Marr, who practices in Fayetteville, Ark., where, coincidentally, he has played poker with Clinton. “If you donate, you have to itemize what you donate.”
“We don’t get too much underwear here; I don’t think people want that too much,” said Joe Cheslow, a senior resident at the Union Rescue Mission, a haven for homeless people in Little Rock, Ark., that has been a frequent beneficiary of the Clintons’ tax-deductible largess. The mission thrift shop has been known to sell used underwear, displayed in bins, at 95 cents a pair.
http://www.zerohedge.com/print/573730
Well this is a little awkward. With the leaked 1995 Trump tax returns ‘scandal’ focused on the billionaire’s yuuge “net operating loss” and how it might have ‘legally’ enabled him to pay no taxes for years, we now discover none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton utilized a $700,000 “loss” to avoid paying some taxes in 2015.
The Clinton Campaign was quick to jump on the leaked Trump tax filing with Robby Mook tweeting…
And Hillary following up, adding Trump “apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades—while tens of millions of working families paid theirs.”
However, a look back at Hillary Clinton’s tax returns from 2015 (here), proudly displayed by the campaign proving she has nothing to hide – shows something awkward on page 17…
While not on the scale of Trump’s business “operating loss”, Hillary Clinton – like many ‘wealthy’ individuals is taking advantage of a legal scheme to use historical losses to avoid paying current taxes.
As Bloomberg notes, this federal tax break is among the wealthy’s most used avoidance schemes…
Those 1.1 million folks in the 1 percent, as measured by the TPC, have annual income that averages a little less than $700,000. The top one-tenth of that group, some 110,000 households, average about $3.6 million, according to Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the TPC.2
The middle of the pack, some 33 million people, have pretax income ranging from $45,000 to $80,000. The lowest one-fifth of taxpayers, a universe of about 47 million Americans, have income up to about $24,000.
Among the biggest of these givebacks, courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service (well, really Congress), are capital gains and dividends—these are the biggest way the wealthiest benefit.
In the words of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, “this bombshell report reveals [Hillary Clinton’s] past business failures… and may show just how long [Hillary Clinton] may have avoided paying taxes.”
Who would have believed it? Donald Trump has driven his political opponents to embrace the cause of tax reform so the wealthy have fewer loopholes to exploit. That seems to be the inescapable logic of the media and Clinton campaign’s reaction to the weekend story that Mr. Trump may have used large income losses to reduce his tax payments.
The New York Times reported Saturday that it had received an anonymous gift in the mail of three pages from three of Mr. Trump’s state tax returns from 1995. The real-estate and casino magnate, who was having well-known business problems at the time, reported a loss of $916 million on those New Jersey, New York and Connecticut returns.
The Times concludes from these losses and after consulting those it called “tax experts” that the resulting tax deduction “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” Cue the synthetic shock and outrage.
Note that word “legally.” No one, not even the Clinton campaign, is claiming Mr. Trump broke any tax laws 20 years ago. Had he done so you can bet the IRS would have noticed, since the tax agency doesn’t routinely ignore tax losses that large.
The details from three pages are scant and don’t reveal the specific tax deductions that Mr. Trump might have exploited in 1995 or other years. But even average taxpayers who declare self-employment income know that business losses are deductible, often across several years. This reflects that the cycle of business investment and sales isn’t confined to a calendar tax year.
The real-estate business is also notorious for complex accounting and depreciation practices that can reduce tax liability. Developers borrow heavily, and the interest on that debt is deductible. Mr. Trump didn’t write the tax laws he was exploiting, though President Bill Clinton did have a hand in writing them since he pushed a major tax bill through Congress in 1993 with a Democratic Congress. Maybe Hillary Clinton should blame her husband and party for tolerating such rules. CONTINUE AT SITE
Benjamin Gladstone is a junior at Brown University.
Providence, R.I. — Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.
That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist students would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation.
Of course, I still believe in the importance of accepting refugees, combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut out of these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to fight oppression.
My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus. They don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine have.
PARIS — It’s 1944, in occupied Paris. Four friends spend their days in a narrow room atop a Left Bank apartment building. The neighbors think they’re painters — a cover story to explain the chemical smell. In fact, the friends are members of a Jewish resistance cell. They’re operating a clandestine laboratory to make false passports for children and families about to be deported to concentration camps. The youngest member of the group, the lab’s technical director, is practically a child himself: Adolfo Kaminsky, age 18.
If you’re doubting whether you’ve done enough with your life, don’t compare yourself to Mr. Kaminsky. By his 19th birthday, he had helped save the lives of thousands of people by making false documents to get them into hiding or out of the country. He went on to forge papers for people in practically every major conflict of the mid-20th century.
Now 91, Mr. Kaminsky is a small man with a long white beard and tweed jacket, who shuffles around his neighborhood with a cane. He lives in a modest apartment for people with low incomes, not far from his former laboratory.
When I followed him around with a film crew one day, neighbors kept asking me who he was. I told them he was a hero of World War II, though his story goes on long after that. It remains painfully relevant today, when children are being bombed in Syria or boarding shabby boats to escape by sea.
Like most Westerners, I usually ignore their suffering, and assume that someone else will step in to help. But Mr. Kaminsky — a poor, hunted teenager — stepped in himself, during the war and then for many different causes afterward. Why did he do it?
It wasn’t for the glory. He worked in secret and only spoke about it years later. His daughter Sarah learned her father’s whole story only while writing a book about him, “Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life.” The English translation comes out this week.
It wasn’t for the money, either. Mr. Kaminsky says he never accepted payment for forgeries, so that he could keep his motives clear and work only for causes he believed in. He was perpetually broke, and scraped together a living as a commercial photographer, he said. The wartime work put such a strain on his vision that he eventually went blind in one eye.
Though he was a skilled forger — creating passports from scratch and improvising a device to make them look older — there was little joy in it. “The smallest error and you send someone to prison or death,” he told me. “It’s a great responsibility. It’s heavy. It’s not at all a pleasure.” Years later he’s still haunted by the work, explaining: “I think mostly of the people that I couldn’t save.”
There is so much parlous news in the world : Israel is threatened by genocide and Jihad and unrelenting enemies and the Jewish people, even those of us who dwell in the most benign democracies, now confront mounting anti-Semitism and libel and slander in the media and the academies.
We have survived and the words of King David have been and remain an inspiration.
Psalm 91- 5 and 6
5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
Amen!
Shana Tova and sincere wishes for a Happy New Year…and as we always abbreviated in the Bronx “A happy and a healthy!!!” rsk
U.S. President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry all flew off to Israel and attended the funeral of Shimon Peres, the last remaining political figure from modern Israel’s founding generation. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic Party nominee for president, had at one point been listed to attend, but did not make the trip.
The United States is fewer than six weeks away from the conclusion of what is now a tight presidential contest. The race conceivably could soon lean more toward Clinton after the widely watched first debate last Monday night (84 million viewers) between Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, which most pundits suggested she won, a conclusion supported by results from the first polls released after the debate.
However, it has been an unusual and surprising election contest, and there are no guarantees that the broader voting public saw things the same way their media superiors expected it to see them.
The high-level attendance at the funeral by Obama and Bill Clinton will certainly be a plus for Hillary Clinton’s prospects to win a large share of the Jewish vote in closely contested states such as Florida and Pennsylvania. Obama won about seven of every 10 Jewish votes in 2012, down from about eight in 10 in 2008. Bill Clinton scored even higher than this in his two runs for the White House, in 1992 and 1996, so Hillary Clinton can only benefit from association with presidents with far more popular support than she has demonstrated so far. Both Obama and Bill Clinton issued statements full of praise for Peres’ long career and also his commitment both to keep Israel strong but also to seek peace.
Obama’s tribute may be a harbinger of something more to come, presumably in the nine weeks he has left in the White House after the Nov. 8 vote has been cast. The president has just concluded an agreement with Israel for a 10-year military aid bill. The most contentious part of that agreement was Israel’s acceptance that if Congress votes for more assistance in the first two years of the agreement than the agreed $3.8 billion annual amount, it would have to return the excess to the United States. There are constitutional separation-of-powers issues that arise from the agreement, and already Trump has said he does not consider himself bound by the limits, a view also taken by a large number of members in Congress.
In any case, with this settled, Obama may feel free to try his hand at some legacy-building on the Israeli-Palestinian track, an area in which his record of failure follows a long pattern of presidents who thought they had the magic elixir to achieve the two-state solution.
The Republican contender is vulgar, brash, opinionated and unafraid of exposing those attributes to the public gaze, hence all the ‘gotcha’ questions he fielded during the first debate. His opponent, by contrast, was asked to explain nothing about Benghazi, deleted emails, a predatory husband….
Trump is a never-ending story. Who in their right mind would ever tune in to see and hear Hillary? Trump on the other hand is interesting. That is one reason why I think he will win. But being interesting has its drawbacks. You have to talk as do ordinary people. And sometimes ordinary people say things they shouldn’t. Those of you who have ever been drunk know too well what I mean. But even short of inebriation we all fall foul of high standards of civility at times.
Take this erstwhile fat Latino chick (oops! Sorry), Miss Universe 1996, Alicia Machado from Venezuela, who is attacking Trump allegedly because he made certain derogatory remarks about her weight twenty years’ ago. I have no idea whether, in fact, he referred to her as Miss Piggy as she claims and, if he did, to whom and how loudly. He may not have said this at all. The lady in question seems to have had a chequered past and might be making it up. But would you be irritated if you were running a beauty pageant and the winner with a calendar of subsequent appearances to fulfil proceeded to get fat?
OK, if you are a man, you might be struggling with the sheer sexism of considering a woman’s weight. And, moreover, you know what dangerous territory it is. So, switch topic and subject. Suppose you are a flamboyant boxing promoter who sets up a tournament to find the next new contender. A winner emerges and the schedule of fights towards the big pay-off is set in motion. Subsequently your prize-fighter spends most days not in the gym but on his couch eating chips and drinking beer. Oh dear, you might say, you are being a naughty boy.
Steve Kates wrote an excellent piece on the great debate and I don’t want to go over his ground. I don’t know who won. I don’t even know how to tell who won. We all see what we want to see.
There are some people apparently who are undecided and can be persuaded to shift one way or the other at the drop of a hat. A drop of a hat might be Trump sniffing or Hillary shimmying while grinning. I found both annoying. However, while Trump was clearly unconscious of the effect he was having on his microphone during the early part of the debate, Hillary’s display looked as though it had been choreographed beforehand. Let me admit to being hopelessly biased and finding Hillary’s grinning demeanour insufferable rather than merely annoying.
One thing stood out. Under the guidance of the moderator, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, the debate was largely a staged event to shield Hillary and get Trump. When Holt brought up the so-called birther issue and premised a question with his own debatable fact that Trump had changed his mind about the Iraq war, they were illustrative of two things. First, this was largely to be a policy free zone; and, second, omission of inconvenient subject matter being a well-practiced technique of the left, it was to be a Hillary-scandal free zone. There was to be no Holt-initiated talk of Benghazi, or of Libya, or of the Russian reset, or of emails, or of the Clinton Foundation, or of what she said to Wall Street bankers, or of dodging imaginary bullets in Bosnia.
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and PATRICK HEALYhttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/us/politics/donald-trump-debate.html?_r=0
The Commission on Presidential Debates said Friday that the first debate on Monday was marred by an unspecified technical malfunction that affected the volume of Donald J. Trump’s voice in the debate hall.
Mr. Trump complained after the debate that the event’s organizers had given him a “defective mike,” contributing to his widely panned performance against Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton lampooned Mr. Trump’s claim, telling reporters on her campaign plane, “Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night.”
Mr. Trump was clearly audible to the television audience. And there is no evidence of sabotage. But it turns out he was on to something.
“Regarding the first debate, there were issues regarding Donald Trump’s audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall,” the commission said in its statement.
The commission, a nonprofit organization that sponsors the presidential debates, released no other information about the malfunction, including how it was discovered, which equipment was to blame, or why the problem was admitted to only on Friday, four days after the debate.
Reached by phone, a member of the commission’s media staff said she was not authorized to speak about the matter.
Some members of the audience, held at Hofstra University in New York, recalled in interviews that the amplification of Mr. Trump’s voice was at times significantly lower than that for Mrs. Clinton. And at times Mr. Trump appeared to be hunching down to get his face closer to his microphone.
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