Private Sector vs. Public Sector

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Here is Steve Benen’s chart showing private sector job gains and losses over the past few years:

Why look only at private sector jobs? Matt Yglesias suggests three tightly constrained reasons: it’s good spin for the White House, it controls for one-time census gains and losses, and then there’s a third thing about a conservative argument that I don’t understand.

But the fact is that both total jobs and private sector jobs are important to look at. If you simply want to know how the actual, lived economy is doing, then you want to look at all jobs. After all, a job’s a job, and if people are employed and getting a paycheck, that’s a good thing. But that’s not the only thing we should be interested in. In the medium term, government jobs can’t support the economy forever. Sustained growth depends on the private sector, so it’s critical to know how the private sector is doing. If it’s improving, that means we can look forward to the economy starting to recover by itself without a lot of further federal intervention. But if the private sector is stalling, we can’t.

That’s important to know. And based on these figures, it sure looks as if, after a year of recovery, the private sector has stalled for the past three quarters. Who knows? Maybe things will magically turn around shortly. But that sure doesn’t look like the right way to bet right now. More stimulus, please.

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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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