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The “Gang of Six” plan unveiled yesterday offers $1 trillion in new revenue as part of its deficit-reduction package. However, CBPP’s Robert Greenstein explains that this is not the same thing as the $1 trillion in new revenue from the previous grand bargain that House Speaker John Boehner walked away from. The grand bargain plan assumed that the Bush tax cuts for the rich would be made permanent (thus reducing revenue by $700 billion) and then added $1 trillion on top of that, for a net total of $300 billion in new revenue. The Gang of Six plan assumes the Bush tax cuts for the rich are allowed to expire and then adds $1 trillion more, for a net total that’s genuinely $1 trillion.

In other words, regardless of any legerdemain with CBO scoring, the Gang of Six plan raises taxes way more than the plan Boehner rejected because his conference was dead set against it. And that’s in addition to the fact that it’s obviously far too complex to be put into legislative language, scored, and moved through Congress in less than two weeks. So explain to me again why everyone was so excited about this?

I suppose one advantage of the G6 plan is that it makes only a few cuts immediately and basically punts everything else into the future, including the tax hikes. And since conservatives, in addition to being anti-tax, are also convinced that spending cuts promised for the future are just a sham, maybe they figure that tax hikes promised for the future are also a sham. So the G6 plan allows them to vote for kicking the can down the road without any intention of ever voting for the future tax hikes.

Or something. Frankly, I’m not really sure what’s going on anymore and I’m not sure anyone else is either. For now, I’m going to stick with my guess that we’ll blow by the August 2nd deadline, markets will go nuts, and we’ll end up with some kind of debt ceiling increase by August 7th. We’ll see.

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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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