March 13, 2021

People Like Money

Democrats learned their lesson from Obama’s hidden stimulus and gave people something to celebrate.

Joe Biden stops at the Cone Shoppe to meet Iowa voters in Monticello, Iowa, in April 2019.Melina Mara/Getty

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Do you remember when Barack Obama gave Americans $400 of stimulus money to help them get through the Great Recession? Neither do I. Sadly, that was by design. Democrats, high on a supply of Cass Sunstein nudge-ism, didn’t want you to know they were sending you money. 

A decade and a reality television president later, Democrats have realized that a little garishness goes a long way. On Thursday, President Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. Two days later, people are getting their $1,400 direct deposits from the IRS. One of the few good things on Twitter right now are the posts about the “stimmy” coming from a president who has been labeled MoneyBaggJoe. 

This is all a rather dramatic shift from when Democrats enthusiastically embraced what was termed “libertarian paternalism.” The idea back in 2009 was that, according to some behavioral economics research, people would spend more of their stimulus money if they thought it was extra income rather than a one-off lump sum. So, Obama officials helped devise a system whereby workers temporarily got an extra $45 or so per month tucked into their paychecks. Aside from the paltriness of the sum, it was hard for Democrats to take credit for money whose origin they’d hidden from their infantilized constituents.

The zeitgeist was captured by a 2009 New Yorker piece titled “A Smarter Stimulus.” After a then-obligatory name check of Nobel-winning economist Richard Thaler, James Surowiecki concluded, “If you want people to spend the money, you don’t want to give them one big check, because that makes it more likely that they’ll think of it as an increase in their wealth and save it.” Instead, he added, “you want to give them small amounts over time.” The people are them and the technocrats manipulating them are you. 

Democrats learned their lesson. “Not only did Dems get you another #stimmy, but we increased the child tax credit to $3000 per child & made it so that you could get a monthly cash advance of this credit starting in July,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) tweeted Friday. “Money is money & it will be in your pocket soon! This is incredible! Fighting for more!” Money is money. What an idea.

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The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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