The US Economy Is Kind of Meh

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A couple of years ago, wonky bloggers started really digging into new releases of economic data. When GDP numbers were released, you could find a dozen posts diving deep into the weeds and explaining why the numbers did or didn’t really matter: defense spending was artificially up, inventory gains were wacky, the timber industry had an unusually good quarter, etc. etc.

Then that got tiresome, as everyone realized that there are details like that every quarter. Most of the time, the headline number is pretty much the best indication we have of how the economy is doing.

Now we’ve entered a third phase, in which the fashionable thing is to discount even the headline number because it’s just going to get revised next quarter anyway. So who knows?

I have a feeling that people who are new to economic analysis go through these phases routinely, while the wise old hands nod along and wait for them to pass. Now a new generation has done this, and a few years from now we’ll all be nodding along with a smile when a fresh batch of kids comes along and discovers that GDP reports and employment reports come with loads of detail to analyze and are always revised once or twice before they settle down.

In the meantime, GDP grew 2% last quarter. That’s not terrible, but not great. We need to do considerably better if we want to get unemployment down to acceptable levels. And like it or not, that’s about as much as we know: the economy isn’t terrible and isn’t great. It would be nice to know more, but we don’t.

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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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