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Paul Waldman:

Watching the Sunday blabbers, I was impressed with the facility with which the Republicans switched back and forth between two entirely different, and contradictory, rationales for their position on the budget and the debt ceiling. On one hand, they’d say, we simply have to cut the deficit, which is why we need to slash spending. OK, someone would say, why won’t you accept some increase in taxes? You know, to cut the deficit? Absolutely not, they’d say — you can’t raise taxes when the economy is bad! That’s the last thing you want to do!

Paul thinks that President Obama should point out how contradictory this is. Either we need to stimulate the economy (tax cuts, spending increases) or we need to cut the deficit (tax increases, spending cuts), but it makes no sense to do half of one and half of the other.

Well, sure, if you’re a garden variety Keynesian. But if you’re a conservative, then you consider tax cuts good for growth, which helps reduce the deficit. Ditto for spending cuts, which not only reduce the deficit in the obvious way, but also result in a smaller, more growth-friendly public sector. There’s no contradiction at all in supporting both.

So the question isn’t whether Republicans are contradicting themselves. They have a theory in which they aren’t. Instead, the question is this: Can Barack Obama persuade the American public that Keynesian economics is basically correct and that Republican economics is therefore crazy? Good luck with that. Everyone loves paying less in taxes, and there’s a very big chunk of the public that also loves spending cuts as long as they’re aimed at poor people. So they have every personal incentive to buy into the GOP’s high-minded justifications for stuff they want to do anyway. And they do.

After three decades, we still haven’t figured out how to effectively fight voodoo economics. It would be nice if Obama started talking sense instead of caving in to conservative nonsense, but the problem goes way beyond just him. Suggestions welcome.

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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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