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THE BAILOUT….Matt Yglesias looks at the past year of economic upheaval and says:

This is why the right response to a Bush/Paulson decision that we have to “do something” would probably be to take their specific proposal, light it on fire, and then call up some people who hadn’t spent the past 12 months ignoring festering problems and ask them to help you write a proposal.

This is unfair. Bernanke and Paulson have, in fact, taken tons of action over the past year. They’ve injected massive amounts of liquidity into the market through multiple term lending facilities, slashed the discount rate, opened up the discount window to all comers, passed a big stimulus package, and have become willing to accept everything from double-wides on up as collateral for loans. None of it worked. But even at that, they’re still having trouble getting everyone on board for a systemic bailout bill. Does anyone seriously think they could have proposed something like this a year ago and gotten anything but guffaws from Congress?

On the other hand, my left-wing populist instincts are just fine with this:

If anything should be done, the case seems clear for wildly higher tax rates on high-income individuals than prevailed during the Clinton years. Are we afraid of stifling the kind of fat cat activity that’s brought us to our current situation?

OK, I don’t know about “wildly.” But we could use a few more brackets with higher marginal rates for very high earners. The negative effect on the economy, contra modern supply side goofballism, would be about zero.

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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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