No Stupid Questions

In most cases with rich people the two hacks are

1. Spending the money in the form of value indeterminate goods like artwork where you donate a painting you bought for 20k to a museum and the museum says "Gosh we probably would have paid 40 million for this painting" so for 20k you write off a 40 million loss. This is fraud if obvious but if the painting was last commercially sold in 1907 it's really difficult to definitively say what it would sell for today and everyone involved is motivated to inflate that number as high as possible.

2. Donating to the "Me Benevolent Trust Foundation" Trump is famous for this bullshit but most billionaires do this. You donate your money to a charity that spends your money how you want it spent - maybe it's somewhat altruistic and you're just using it to invest in causes you care about while being able to write all your funding off as a loss for taxes or maybe the foundation operates a private jet that is exclusively used by you and charges you one dollar per flight. Trump has heavily abused these sorts of charities in the past.

Also like... other ways. Rich people go to extreme lengths to avoid paying taxes and some of those methods are truly bizarre.

But hey, as long as they all donate 1 million to his inauguration fund, Trump doesn't give a shit.

Sort of; I object only to the way you presented it, not the facts.

You're donating to a cause, which I assume you believe in, which reduces the value used to calculate your taxes. If you make $10, and you donate $1 to a charity, you get taxed as if you made $9. This applies to all income taxes, since state taxes are based largely on your taxable federal income. So OP could try to do something like do their fed taxes and instead of copying "$9" put "$10” where their state forms say to use the federal value, but that's likely to raise a flag somewhere.

My main issue is the portrayal that donations are "spending money." You could probably successfully argue that "donating" satisfies the definition of "spending money", but that does a disservice to charity.

Also, just as an aside, OP would never save $0.45 on a dollar donation. No income tax bracket is that high except for the very rich, and they have many other ways to avoid paying taxes that in no way benefit charities.

what Ad Patrick is describing is not tax fraud. It's called fine art. And there are industries that support this scheme including duty-free storage at international airports so you don't have to pay duties on your tax shelter. Many works of art never leave these warehouses, never viewed by anyone, even the owner. They simply exist to hold value and get a new label when sold.

Yeah, 100%. But, AFAIK, that's how "art" works. Though you definitely want to make sure the appraiser is legitimate; can't just have another buddy say it's worth $12 million and write it off as such.