The Two Tollbooths on Your Tithe
You gave $15,000 to your church last year. You saved $5,550 on your taxes. This year, same gift, same church, you save $3,500. The missing $2,050 doesn’t show up anywhere on your return.
Two tollbooths ate it. Congress built both of them inside the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), signed on the Fourth of July, 2025. Your tax software paid the tolls for you without a word.
The Entry Toll
Before your gift counts as a deduction, it has to clear a floor. The OBBBA created a new rule. IRC §170(b)(1)(I). The first 0.5% of your adjusted gross income in charitable gifts is not deductible. Gone. Dead on arrival.
Say your AGI is $1,000,000. Half a percent of that is $5,000. You gave $15,000 to your church. The first $5,000 falls through a hole in the floor. Only $10,000 walks out the other side as a deduction.
You paid $5,000 just to enter the building.
Washington Is Betting More Than the Company Is Worth
Here's a number that shouldn't be possible.
On May 21, 2026, a federal board voted unanimously to lend roughly $3 billion to one American mining company. That loan is bigger than the company's entire market cap.
Think about what that says. The people who spent months inside this deal, with access to every drill report and every projection, decided this company deserves more capital than the market thinks the whole business is worth.
One of those valuations is wrong. The papers get signed in the second half of this year. After that, the market does the correcting.
The Exit Toll
Now the $10,000 that survived has to leave. There’s a second tollbooth at the exit.
The OBBBA shaves all itemized deductions for the top bracket. Two dollars out of every thirty-seven. That’s 5.4% off the top. Your 37-cent dollar becomes a 35-cent dollar.
So your $10,000 deduction saves you 35 cents per dollar. Not 37.
That’s $3,500. Down from $5,550.
The two cuts run in sequence. The floor chews first. Then the cap shaves what’s left. A double hit on the same gift.
Where the $2,050 Went
Floor: $5,000 gone. Cap: 37 cents shaved to 35. Net savings on a $15,000 gift: $3,500. Last year, same gift: $5,550.
The gap is $2,050. Every year. Same church.
The Invisible Tax
Pull up Schedule A. Look at the lines:
Line 11: Gifts by cash or check. Line 14: Total charitable gifts.
Your $15,000 prints in full. Looks fine. Looks the same as last year.
Sure.
The floor? Computed in a worksheet your software runs in the background. The cap? Applied after all other limits, off the face of the form. Neither cut gets its own line. Neither one prints a receipt.
I mean, they didn’t just add a tax. They hid the math. Your CPA knows. Your software knows. The form looks normal. But $2,050 fell out the bottom, and nothing on the page told you where it went.
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The Bypass
There is a road that skips both tollbooths. It has been sitting in the tax code since 2006. Congress made it permanent in 2015. Now there are two fresh reasons to use it.
It’s called a Qualified Charitable Distribution. QCD. Here’s how the box works.
You’re 70½ or older. You tell your IRA custodian to send money straight to your church. The cash goes from IRA to charity. It never hits your bank account. It never touches your AGI.
No AGI means no floor. No itemized deduction means no cap. The money bypasses both tollbooths because it never enters the highway.
The limit is $111,000 per person. $222,000 for a married couple.
Look. A standard $15,000 donation in the 37% bracket now saves you $3,500. A $15,000 QCD from your IRA saves you the full $5,550. Same money. Same church. Different pipe.
The Shrug
The two tollbooths are real. They run in sequence. Your software pays them and says nothing. The $2,050 vanishes into a worksheet you will never open.
The bypass is also real. It’s been in the code for 20 years. It has an age gate, a dollar cap, and a specific code section. One of them requires you to know it exists.
Now you do.
