Please consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. But we already know this: The fundraising for our next deadline, $350,000 by the time September 30 rolls around, has to start now, and it has to be stronger than normal so that we don't fall behind and risk coming up short again. This Is the New Normal," and we'll have details about the year ahead for you soon. There's more about our finances in " News Never Pays," or " It's Not a Crisis. Because corporations, powerful people with deep pockets, and market forces will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. But it's not all doom and gloom!īecause over the challenging last year, and thanks to feedback from readers, we've started to see a better way to go about asking you to support our work: Level-headedly communicating the urgency of hitting our fundraising goals, being transparent about our finances, challenges, and opportunities, and explaining how being funded primarily by donations big and small, from ordinary (and extraordinary!) people like you, is the thing that lets us do the type of journalism you look to Mother Jones for-that is so very much needed right now.Īnd it's really been resonating with folks! Thankfully. We need people who care enough about Mother Jones’ journalism to be reading a blurb like this to decide to pitch in and support it if you can right now. Straight up: We need this pitch, what you're reading right now, to start earning significantly more donations than normal. And this next one simply has to be a year of growth-particularly for donations from online readers to help counter the brutal economics of journalism right now. We need to start being more upfront about how hard it is keeping a newsroom like Mother Jones afloat these days.īecause it is, and because we're fresh off finishing a fiscal year, on June 30, that came up a bit short of where we needed to be. AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON MOTHER JONES' FINANCES For now, though, figuring out the best way of getting substantial targeted assistance to the right places ought to be Job 1.īy signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners. If we decide we need to do it a few months from now, we can. Everyone will need help.įinally, we already know how to mail checks to people. Conservatives need to get over their dislike of helping the poor and liberals need to get over their dislike of helping businesses. We need to figure out who to target and how to do it, and we need to do it now while the number of affected people is still fairly small and they haven’t been out of work too long. Families that aren’t affected as much will most likely adapt and simply spend their income on different things instead of cutting back.Īs with everything related to the coronavirus, the key is to move quickly. If those people feel confident that there’s a strong bipartisan commitment to making their income whole for at least the next several months-or close to it-they’ll continue to spend normally. It would be better to use that $300 billion to target the people and businesses most affected by government mandated measures like restaurant closures, social distancing, and so forth. Even for most minimum wage folks, this is only a couple of weeks of pay-hardly enough to make a dent. I don’t imagine that mailing everyone a thousand dollars will do any harm, but it seems like a pretty inefficient way of doing things. These workers will need considerably more money if they are to get through a period of six or nine months before the economy starts to get back to normal. For someone earning $20 an hour (a bit more than the median wage), this is enough to replace 50 hours of pay. Giving them $1,000 will not change this fact.įor people who are losing their jobs because they are in the most affected industries, the $1,000 will lead to a boost in spending, but it is likely to provide them little help if they lose their jobs. They don’t want to go out to restaurants, movies, or travel. In this case, the main reason that spending is being cut back is because people are scared to spend. If you gave them more money, they would likely spend most of it, creating demand in the economy, shoring up employment, and in that way having a second round spending effect from the workers who get or stay employed. In past recessions, the reason most people did not spend is because they didn’t have money. I am happy to see that one of my favorite economists, Dean Baker, seems to agree: After all, the problem we face is not a lack of money, as we do in a normal recession. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Ī few days ago I asked if giving away money to everyone was really a good response to a recession caused by a pandemic.
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