October 30, 2009

So How’s That GDP Growth Treating You?

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GDP was up 3.5% in the third quarter, and yesterday I wondered where all that growth was going.  Today we get part of the answer: not to workers.

The BEA reports that personal income and disposable personal income, adjusted for inflation, were down again in September and down for the entire quarter.  Spending was up in August thanks to Cash for Clunkers, but dropped 0.6% in September.

Separately, the BLS reports that the Employment Cost Index was up 0.4% in the third quarter.  However, since inflation rose about 0.6% in the same period, that’s a real decrease of about 0.2%.  “With incomes so soft,” analyst Ian Shepherdson said in a statement of the obvious, “increased spending will be a struggle.”

So: the economy is growing, but very little of that growth seems to be trickling down to us middle class types.  Happy holidays!

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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.

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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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