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.

I can understand Hillary’s concern. It will be expensive for Chelsea to maintain the ten million dollar apartment she and her husband and in utero child tissue mass live in. And those $600,000 a year part time jobs might be a little more difficult to come by when her parents have passed on to their ultimate reward.

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman