Donating your spring cleaning clutter to goodwill, or when you move and downsize, or when you clean out the attic, etc. should be deductible for lower income people. But instead, you have to donate so much that you’re essentially never going to hit it unless you’re explicitly going out of your way to get a tax break.

For better or worse, this is the result of how Trump structured the temporary tax breaks for us ordinary folks. Don’t worry though, under Trump corporations got their huge tax breaks locked in permanently. Us ordinary folks lose this next year in 2025 when the Standard Deduction gets effectively cut in half. At that point it will be worthy it again for us little folks to chase charitable deductions because we’ll have to itemize if we don’t want to take a bath on annual income taxes.