<a href="http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=1107888&t=r">Funking the Tax Gatherer, 1799, via NYPL Digital Gallery</a>.

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Here’s a quick rule of thumb: You can judge the Crank Factor™ of an op-ed about the financial crisis by how long it takes the author to say something like:

Yet in truth, it was government housing policy that was at the root of the crisis.

It takes AEI president Arthur Brooks about a thousand words to get there in the Washington Post today. That wouldn’t be too bad, actually, except that it’s a 2,500-word piece. That’s about 40% of the way in, so let’s give Brooks a CF of 60. Frankly, I think he could have done better.

I can’t figure out why conservatives insist on repeating this nonsense. The evidence against it is overwhelming, so they can hardly be unaware that they’re BSing. (Details here.) And usually you save BSing for arguments that actually have some traction. But this one doesn’t. As near as I can tell, even tea partiers don’t really buy it unless you throw in a bit of CRA/minority lending demagoguery — which, at least in this piece, even Brooks doesn’t quite have the brass to try to pitch. Maybe he saves that for the Wall Street Journal crowd.

Anyway, you can add “government housing policy caused the financial crisis” to this handy list of phrases that immediately let you know that you’ve been sucked into reading not a judicious exposition of conservative thought, but the most vapid, PowerPointy form of right-wing crankery:

  • Supply side economics: Arthur Laffer showed that tax cuts pay for themselves.
  • Healthcare: It can take as much as a year to get a hip replacement in Canada.
  • War on terror: Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda.
  • Tax policy: Half of all Americans don’t pay any taxes.
  • Climate change: McIntyre and McKitrick have shown that global warming is a fraud.

Roughly speaking, no one who’s actually serious about any of these topics would write any of this stuff. If you see it, it’s as much a flashing light as pining away for the gold standard or railing about the giveaway of the Panama Canal. Got other examples? Feel free to add to the list yourself. And conservatives are welcome to construct a similar list for liberals. Have at it, folks.

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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.

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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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