Three Tollbooths on Your Tithe
You give $20,000 to your church this year. You have $400,000 in income. The new tax law eats $2,000 of that gift before you write a single thing off.
That's the first tollbooth. There are two more.
The Floor
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act planted a 0.5% AGI floor under every charitable deduction starting in 2026. Your first half-percent of giving? Gone. Not deductible. Not carried forward. Just gone.
Half a percent sounds small. It is not small. The average American household gives 2% of income to charity each year. So this floor swallows a full quarter of a typical household's giving right off the top.
And it resets every January. Give the same amount next year. Pay the toll again.
The Cap
Whatever survived the floor now hits the second gate. The OBBBA's new “2/37ths rule” shaves 5.4% off your remaining itemized deductions. Your top bracket stays the same on paper. The deductions you'd use to offset it just got smaller.
Look. A married couple with $2 million in income gives $200,000 to charity. The floor takes $10,000. The 2/37ths rule takes another $10,270. That couple lost $20,270 in deductions on a $200,000 gift. Ten percent of the donation just vanished from the tax return.
Two tollbooths. Both new. Both permanent.
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The Gate Nobody Sees
Your CPA might not mention this one. Medicare IRMAA.
IRMAA is a surcharge on your Medicare premiums. It kicks in when your modified adjusted gross income crosses certain cutoffs. And it looks backward two years. Your 2026 income sets your 2028 Medicare bill.
A normal charitable deduction doesn't lower your modified adjusted gross income. It sits below the line. It cuts your taxable income, sure. Medicare looks at the number above that line.
So your $20,000 church gift? It did nothing to protect you from higher Medicare premiums.
IRMAA costs $9,240 a year for a couple in the $342,000 to $410,000 income range. Nine thousand two hundred forty dollars a year in extra premiums. And your charitable deduction, after surviving two tollbooths, failed to move the one number that triggers it.
Three gates. One donation. And every gate takes a cut.
One Wire Around All Three
If you're 70½ or older, you own the bypass.
A Qualified Charitable Distribution. QCD. Your IRA custodian sends a check straight to the charity. The money never touches your tax return. It never enters your adjusted gross income. It never existed as income at all.
No income means no floor to clear. No deduction means no cap to shave. No AGI bump means no IRMAA cliff to trigger.
One wire. Three tollbooths skipped.
The 2026 limit is $111,000 per person. For a married couple, that's $222,000 a year in charitable giving. Three gates. One wire. They just don't apply.
I mean. The government wrote the rules. We're just reading the fine print.
The emergency order nobody's talking about
Last week, wholesale electricity prices in Northern Virginia spiked from $40 to over $2,000 per megawatt-hour.
In one afternoon.
The largest power grid in America - serving 67 million people - declared an emergency.
The government ordered power plants to ignore pollution limits and run at maximum.
Factories were told to shut down.
All because of a heat wave and too many data centers pulling power from a grid that can't keep up.
Solar couldn't help. It was evening. Wind was dead.
Three miles underground, the temperature hasn't changed in 4.5 billion years.
It doesn't care about the weather. It runs at midnight, in a heat wave, in a blizzard.
Always.
One company has spent sixty years building the only system that can tap it.
Google just locked in 15 years. Gates wrote the check.
August 18th, a federal auction could hand them the territory where their crew already broke every drilling record.
The grid is breaking. This company has the fix.
P.S. The government just declared a power emergency for the largest grid in America. The one energy source that could have prevented it?
The Clock
Now it gets tight.
The IRS treats the first dollars leaving your IRA each year as your RMD. So if you want a QCD to satisfy the RMD, you have to wire it before you take anything else. You pull cash for living expenses in January. Then in November you send money to charity as a QCD. The QCD still works — it's excluded from income. But your January withdrawal already counted as your RMD, taxed and locked in. The QCD can't undo it.
So figure out your Required Minimum Distribution (the amount the IRS forces you to pull from your IRA each year after age 73) by January. Run the QCD before you pull anything else from the IRA.
January. Not April. Not December. January.
The road exists. It just has a calendar.
