The Science of Deduction

This is not a time for reason, but I think no reasonable person ought to object to President Nixon’s taking his allowed tax deductions through the gift to the Library of Congress of his vice presidential papers. To call this a tax loophole is to imply that trickery was involved. A little fast footwork perhaps, but nothing more. Real trickery was involved in the special law that Truman steered through Congress allowing the royalties from his memoirs and incidentally from Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe to be considered capital gains, liable only to a fraction of the tax that would have been otherwise levied. Then, with Truman and Eisenhower securely rich by it, the law was repealed. Here was a real swindle, yet nobody got very worked up about it.

No one is morally obligated to pay any more taxes than he legally must, as J. P. Morgan tartly pointed out in the Thirties when it came out that in one Depression year he had paid no income tax at all.”Change the law,” he said, “if you don’t like it.” That is of course what Congress did in 1969 in regard to deductions for the gift of manuscripts, chiefly to prevent Lyndon Johnson from continuing to claim sweeping deductions through the piecemeal donation of his presidential papers. Just before the new law went into effect President Nixon managed to get rid of his vice presidential papers, in a hurry verging indeed on the unseemly, to obtain his vast and now well-publicized deductions. After that an author giving away his personal papers and manuscripts would find it did him no good with the Internal Revenue Service.

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Francis Russell

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This is not a time for reason, but I think no reasonable person ought to object to President Nixon’s taking his allowed tax deductions through the gift to the Library of Congress of his vice presidential papers. To call this a tax loophole is to imply that trickery was involved. A little fast footwork perhaps, but nothing more. Real trickery was involved in the special law that Truman steered through Congress allowing the royalties from his memoirs and incidentally from Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe to be considered capital gains, liable only to a fraction of the tax that would have been otherwise levied. Then, with Truman and Eisenhower securely rich by it, the law was repealed. Here was a real swindle, yet nobody got very worked up about it.

No one is morally obligated to pay any more taxes than he legally must, as J. P. Morgan tartly pointed out in the Thirties when it came out that in one Depression year he had paid no income tax at all.”Change the law,” he said, “if you don’t like it.” That is of course what Congress did in 1969 in regard to deductions for the gift of manuscripts, chiefly to prevent Lyndon Johnson from continuing to claim sweeping deductions through the piecemeal donation of his presidential papers. Just before the new law went into effect President Nixon managed to get rid of his vice presidential papers, in a hurry verging indeed on the unseemly, to obtain his vast and now well-publicized deductions. After that an author giving away his personal papers and manuscripts would find it did him no good with the Internal Revenue Service.