It’s a common misconception that people can get under the income tax line by donating a sufficient amount to charity.
I’ve run the numbers, and it’s not that simple.
The first problem is that the deduction for charitable donations is an itemized deduction, so you have to donate enough to get your itemized deductions as high as your standard deduction before you even begin to reduce your taxes.
The second problem is that your deduction is typically limited to some percentage of your adjusted gross income.
The third problem is that you take your itemized deductions after you calculate your adjusted gross income, so you can’t reduce your AGI that way and therefore can’t use this method to qualify for tax credits that require a low AGI (like the retirement savings tax credit I rely on).
Every once in a while the government loosens some of these restrictions.
For instance, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina they allowed people to make tax-deductible hurricane-related donations up to 100% of their AGI.
The ceiling on charitable deductions was also removed in the wake of the CoViD-19 epidemic in 2020.
These opportunities are difficult to predict, however, and only help with the second of the three problems.