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A reader points me to a critic who thinks that in yesterday’s post about the debt ceiling I played fast and loose with budget numbers:

To me, the most damning part of this article was what the Author determined that our Government would fund. Mainly, Social Security, Medicare, interest debt, and some defense spending. According to the article, these items would take up the entire revenue stream? Yet, by the design of the programs, Social Security and Medicare are supposed to be self sufficient….The truth of course, is that the left is simply being loose with the facts. Social Security and Medicare do not use up as much revenue as this article would like you to believe.

Actually, they use up more. In fact, this whole post is worth a response since most people don’t have a very good understanding of where federal revenue comes from and where it goes. But the basic figures are all easily accessible from the OMB and a few other sources, so here’s a quickie summary for 2011:

  • Social Security: Roughly speaking, Social Security is self sufficient. So yes, we can assume that even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, dedicated payroll taxes will be enough to keep the program going.
  • Medicare: Medicare gets about half its financing from dedicated payroll taxes and premiums. However, the non-hospital portion, which costs about $250 billion per year, comes out of the general fund.
  • Defense + Veterans Benefits: Using the narrowest definition of national defense, this costs about $900 billion per year.
  • Interest on the debt: About $200 billion per year.

So excluding the parts of Social Security and Medicare paid for out of dedicated payroll taxes, here’s what comes out of the general fund: $250 + $900 + $200 = $1,350 billion.

Now for taxes. Excluding dedicated payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, here’s roughly where our money comes from:

  • Individual income taxes: $950 billion.
  • Corporate income taxes: $200 billion
  • Other taxes: $200 billion

That comes to $1,350 billion. In other words, aside from payroll taxes, our entire tax base — income taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, customs duties, everything — is just barely enough to pay for our military, the non-hospital part of Medicare, and interest on the debt. Finis. If you want to fully fund those parts of government, as most tea partiers do, and if you also want to force an immediate balanced budget by not raising the debt ceiling, as most tea partiers do, you literally have to zero out the entire rest of the federal government. No Medicaid, no FAA, no border patrol, no FBI, no embassies, no highways, no disaster relief, no SEC, no court systems, no prisons, no national parks, no CIA, no school lunches, no medical care for children, no SNAP, no flood control, no student loans, no medical research, no nothing. You get Social Security, Medicare, the military, and interest on the debt. That’s it.

Capiche?

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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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