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Last week I defended Republican governors from charges of hypocrisy for accepting federal funding even though they may have opposed the law that enabled the funding in the first place. Whether you oppose a program or not, once it’s passed into law and your state’s taxpayers are helping pay for it, you have both a right and an obligation to take advantage of it. Steve Benen comments:

But my concern isn’t just the hypocrisy of Republicans decrying spending bills and then trying to direct that spending to their states and districts. My beef has more to do with their ideology: these same Republicans insist public investments can’t create jobs and are bad for the economy, and then also say public investments can create jobs and are good for the economy.

And that’s a problem, not of hypocrisy necessarily, but of an incoherent approach to governing.

This is quite a different kettle of fish, and it is indeed a problem of hypocrisy. If you oppose a program, that’s fine. Maybe you just think it’s a poor use of taxpayer dollars. But Steve is right: at any particular point in time, federal programs either create jobs or they don’t. If you insist that they don’t, you can’t turn around and brag about all the jobs you brought to your state via federal roadbuilding projects. You can argue that you’re just getting back the money your state sent to Washington in the first place, but you can’t pretend that you suddenly believe that federal spending creates jobs after all just because the money is being spent in your own backyard.

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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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