Word: lindseyism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...counter-argument from Lindsey and other Clinton aides rests heavily on tax-law technicalities, flat contradictions of McDougal and hypotheses on what probably happened -- suggesting that the First Couple have not kept the aides who try to defend them well informed. Fundamentally, though, they insist all the deductions were legal and proper...
...Lindsey, for example, says he has hard evidence that the Clintons really did pay about $10,000 interest in 1978 and about $12,000 in 1979 and that the evidence consists of checks. Why so much more than their half-share? Well, say White House advisers, maybe the Clintons paid a greater share of the mortgage interest because the McDougals paid for all the roads and other improvements. McDougal says there was no such arrangement. And some tax experts suggest that if there had been, the Internal Revenue Service might look askance at a deal that gave one party most...
McDougal's insistence that the Clintons put only $13,350 into Whitewater? ^ He is "just wrong," says Lindsey. McDougal's memory is in fact questionable: he admits to undergoing treatment for severe manic-depression after he was ousted from Madison Guaranty...
Deducting interest already capitalized by Whitewater? That would have created a tax problem, says Lindsey, only if Whitewater had generated a capital gain, which it never did. (No argument there; the development was a dismal failure.) In that case, says Lindsey, the IRS would have insisted that the interest had been improperly capitalized and must be added to the taxable gain; no gain, no problem. Not so, replies tax expert Bruce Miller, chief managing partner in San Francisco for Kenneth Leventhal & Co., an accounting firm specializing in real estate: "You can't both deduct it and capitalize it, even...
What difference does it all make anyway? The amounts of money involved are small. The possibility of legal penalties is smaller still, since any underpayment may well have been inadvertent, resulting largely from what even Lindsey concedes was at times casual bookkeeping. The political embarrassment to the White House will be great if a President who has asked many Americans to pay higher taxes can be shown to have underpaid his own. But the penalty in loss of public trust if that revelation is forced out of an unwilling and obfuscating White House could be the greatest...