Ah, Tax Day.
If you’ve been staring at your tax bill and wondering how to keep more of your money, money, money to yourself next year, you might consider taking a page out of the billionaire’s playbook. You could be like Steve Ballmer and write off the costs of buying a sports team, or make like Mark Zuckerberg and dial down your salary to just $1 per year.
Or, if those things seem daunting, you might just donate to charity instead.
Every year, the US Treasury loses upward of $65 billion in revenue — enough money to pay for a national universal pre-K program by one count — to charitable deductions. But while Americans of all income levels give back, it’s the richest Americans who have reaped almost all of the benefits on their tax bill.
Over nine in 10 Americans won’t claim the charitable tax break this year because it only makes financial sense for people who have enough expenses to “itemize” their taxes, rather than take a standardized deduction — though that may be changing next tax cycle.
Meanwhile, over 80 percent of the country’s wealthiest earners — the millionaires and multimillionaires who almost always itemize — get money back for every dollar they give to charity.
Rewarding such giving means more money for charity — one model estimates that giving would fall by as much as $50 billion a year if the deduction were eliminated. But the policy also means less revenue for the government.
Michael Bloomberg, for example, gave about $4.3 billion to charity last year, mostly through his own foundation. That would in theory translate into a $1.6 billion tax break, assuming he’s taxed at the top income rate of 37 percent. So by this count, the donations really only cost him $2.7 billion. Even for those who aren’t quite as wealthy, tax-deductible donations are sort of like buying a $20 gift card that you only need to pay $13 for, earmarked for a charity of your choice.
That is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you ask. Many wealthy people use their philanthropy to underwrite causes that go underfunded by governments, such as malaria prevention, racial justice, and the clean energy transition.
“I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing US debt,” Warren Buffett told ProPublica, which found that the 95-year-old billionaire paid just 10 cents in taxes for every $100 he added to his wealth between 2014 and 2018.
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But critics point out that many wealthy people don’t donate like normal people do. Instead of writing checks directly to working charities, over 41 cents of every dollar donated in the US gets stashed in private foundations or donor-advised funds, which are charitable accounts. While donors get an immediate tax break for giving to these intermediaries, such charitable vehicles often take their sweet time doling out donations to actual charities, while the cash accumulates in their accounts, sometimes for years. Eventually, much of it may go to their own affiliated charitable projects or educational or cultural institutions that often cater to the wealthy, such as art galleries and Ivy League schools.
“I don’t think we should assume that what’s done with philanthropy is better than what’s done with tax dollars,” Ray D. Madoff, a tax lawyer and author of The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, wrote in The Conversation in January. “The money is often landing in what’s essentially a halfway house, with no obligation to get out.”
What this means for your tax bill
The fact that most Americans don’t see their charity reflected on their tax bill affects how they give.
While the charitable deduction has always been implicitly aimed at the elite, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made it even less accessible for low- and middle-income families. The law nearly doubled the standard deduction to $12,000, which meant far fewer Americans had enough expenses to justify itemizing their deductions. That caused the number of households claiming the benefit to plunge from 37 million in 2017 to just 16 million in 2018.
While the very wealthiest households continued to benefit, the share of middle-income families claiming the benefit fell by two-thirds, from 17 percent to just over 5 percent. Even among high-income households making between $216,800 and $307,900 per year, only 40 percent took the deduction in 2018, down from 78 percent the year prior.
In tandem, the number of everyday Americans giving to charity continued to drop precipitously. Researchers at Indiana University estimate that the 2017 bill led to a $20 billion decline in charitable giving, with families that no longer benefit from deduction reducing their donations by an average of $880 each year.
President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, however, did indeed do one big, beautiful thing for the charitable tax deduction. This time next year, Americans who don’t itemize their taxes — again, nine in 10 of us — will be able to lop off $1,000 in charitable contributions from their taxable income, or $2,000 for joint filers.
The Generosity Commission, which aims to encourage more Americans to give, has been advocating for such a change for years. And while it is not enough to radically reshape who primarily benefits from the tax break, researchers believe that it could lead 8 million more households to give to charity in the long run, leading to about $4.39 billion in new annual donations that they wouldn’t have made otherwise.
Someone who earns $65,000 and gives $350 to their church or local school each year will now pay $77 less in taxes if they remember to document their gifts. Their $350 donation will effectively only cost them $273.
Most Americans, including a full 70 percent of Zoomers and 57 percent of millennials, say they would give more to charity if they could write it off on their taxes. It will probably take time for them to catch wind of the fact that now, they finally can.
There’s a trade-off, though: The bill also made the tax break a little less lucrative for corporations and top earners. Researchers estimate that despite the multibillion-dollar increase in new donors, the changes will lead to a $5.67 billion reduction in charity overall each year — equivalent to a 1 percent drop in US giving — because wealthy donors may be less inclined to donate as much as they used to, which would mean the change would be a net negative for charity. And since the top 1 percent of households play an outsized role in philanthropy — accounting for one-third of all charitable giving — their retreat could have profound consequences for the causes and nonprofits they support.
But most Americans who give to charity aren’t in it for the tax break. They donate because they are trying to make a difference — sometimes for a cause they care about, sometimes simply in the life of a friend or neighbor. Almost three-quarters of them have given to an organization like a food bank or animal shelter in the past year, according to a poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, and even more have donated to crowdfunding campaigns or given goods like canned food.
Those ordinary donors typically aren’t rushing to pile up end-of-year donation receipts that they can write off on their tax forms. Most gave less than $500 each year, probably because while they’d like to give more, they often feel they can’t afford it. (Though as my colleague Sigal Samuel has written, nearly all of us can find ways to give if we try hard enough.)
Still, a boost from the charitable tax break could help. And if regular donors start giving more now, then by this time next year, they may finally get the break that they deserve, too.
