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Matt Yglesias argues that conservatives don’t really care about the federal deficit:

One piece of pushback I got from some right-of-center folks to yesterday’s post on how conservatives don’t care about the deficit was to say that well maybe some Republican Party elected officials are bad on this, but the conservative movement is different. I think that’s entirely false. President George H.W. Bush struck a bargain with congressional Democrats that reduced spending and decreased the deficit. Some Republican Party elected officials backed him. But conservatives were apoplectic. After all, the bill raised taxes. And conservatives care more about making taxes as low as possible than they do about reducing spending or reducing the deficit.

There’s a mountain of evidence to support this view, but it would be tedious to go through it. Instead, here are the results of a New York Times poll of self-identified tea partiers from April. Remember: these are the most militant deficit obsessives out there. Their entire movement revolves around small government and deficit reduction. 91% say they’ve followed news about the deficit closely.  In the middle of a massive recession with a sky-high unemployment rate, 76% say they’d rather cut the deficit than spend money to create jobs. They are the farthest right of the right wing.

But guess what? The deficit still takes a clear back seat to tax cutting: by a margin of 49% to 42% they say they prefer cutting taxes to reducing the deficit. These are the people the Republican leadership answers to these days, and they’ve made their choice.

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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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