Several decades of tradition favor making them public, but the law doesn’t mandate it, and you wonder whether candidates for president wouldn’t be better off keeping their tax returns tucked away in a safe.
Oh, sure, secrecy gets the candidates badgered by the media and opponents who accuse them of hiding heaven knows what depravity. Yet if the yelpers are right that releasing the returns would make a candidate squirm in red-faced agony, why not endure the badgering instead?
Hillary Clinton recently chose to reveal eight years of tax data. It turns out that she and husband Bill have raked in $109 million since he left the White House. That reportedly puts their income in the top one-hundredth of 1 percent of household incomes — and also in the ranks of those CEO salaries that Hillary talks about as if they were bloody knives used to slice off the limbs of the middle class.
The money has mostly come from books they have written and speeches given by Bill, but there are other sources as well, such as a company receiving investments from the ruler of Dubai for which Bill Clinton is an adviser of some kind. The arrangement is murky and an appropriate subject for more media curiosity.
One of Bill’s books that gave the couple a handsome helping of dollars — more than $6 million — was “Giving,” which was about philanthropy. It recommends the rich give at least 5 percent of their income to charities, though a published account tells us how the Clintons have flubbed that goal sometimes. Much of their giving has been through a trust wholly controlled by the family. The Clintons received a tax write-off for the full amount of donations to their foundation for five years of tax-revealed information, but actually distributed under half of the money to charities, one news story says.
Whatever questions might be posed by this circumstance, they have to pale next to the questions about the Clintons taking deductions in the 1980s for carefully listed items of used clothing, including underwear. The practice put them in much the same giving bracket as Al Gore, whose charitable inclinations one year rose to a grand total of no more than $353. Then there’s John Kerry, who during a couple of years in the 1990s gave nothing at all. The columnist and radio talk-show host Howie Carr has noted how Kerry once gave under $200 to charity while finding the means to buy a fancy red Italian motorcycle.
All of which brings us to Barack Obama, who kept his contributions from taxable income to something like 10 percent of tithe level (one-tenth of one-tenth) until he began his run for the White House. Then, his charitable donations increased significantly. Moral of this story: From parsimony, magnanimity can grow … when watered by ambition.
While bad-mouthing a conservatism that is supposedly deprived of humane concern, Obama is forever preaching compassion of the governmental kind that coerces others to fund programs for the poor whose effectiveness is often iffy. But conservatives donate far more private money and time to charities than liberals do. They put their own money — not someone else’s — where their hearts are.
John McCain, the virtually certified Republican nominee for president, has so far not made his tax returns available, but says he will. Soon then, we will find out whether he too would have been better off letting people imagine he had something to hide instead of proving he did. For his sake, let’s hope he hasn’t thought it a sufficient reflection of family holdings to be a super-duper underwear contributor.
