Budget Crankery For Geeks: Real Nonresidential Fixed Investment Edition

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If you want to read about President Trump’s just-released budget, the rest of the news media has you covered. They have articles about cuts to food stamps, cuts to the border wall, cuts to the NIH, cuts to health research, cuts to Medicaid, cuts to the State Department, cuts to the EPA, trillions and trillions in cuts all over the place, and explainers about why 3 percent growth projections are ridiculous. Here’s the tl;dr version: Trump’s budget proposes huge cuts in spending on the poor along with preposterous assumptions about how much revenue they’ll raise. The details really don’t matter much since no one in Congress will read it. It’s just a statement of Trump’s callous guiding values.

So I’m mostly going to skip the whole thing unless someone points out something especially amusing. And someone has! Section 2 of the budget document is titled, “What went wrong: Inheriting $20 trillion in debt and a broken, stagnant economy.” Sure enough, it contains page upon page of woe. That Obummer dude sure did screw up the economy something fierce.

However, a reader emails to point out something he thinks I’d appreciate: “Note the cherry picking of dates going on around pages 6 and 7 of the just-released Trump budget. Just as do the climate ‘skeptics,’ the authors of the Trump budget document pick inconsistent starting dates when they calculate growth rates of various things in order to get the good or bad results they desire. The best, perhaps, is the growth rate for real private nonresidential fixed investment.”

Hmmm. Real private nonresidential fixed investment, you say? Here’s what the budget document says:

Due to high taxes, high regulations, and poor economic policies, real private nonresidential fixed investment has grown by only 1.3 percent each year (on a fourth quarter-over-fourth quarter basis) since 2007, compared to 4.9 percent annually before the recession.

Yikes! That sucks. Is it true? I admit that I can’t quite replicate their numbers, but let’s call it close enough for government work. It’s pretty nearly correct.

Of course, it only works if you start precisely at 2007 so that you include the big drop from the recession. Here’s what it looks like over the longer term:

It doesn’t really look all that different anymore, does it? In fact, since the Bush-era growth rate caused a massive property bubble and subsequent massive crash, we might well prefer a wee bit less growth than we had before 2007.

I suppose it says something disturbing about me that I find this kind of technocratic lying with statistics more interesting than a thousand words about how the cuts to food stamps will hurt the poor. Then again, if you made it this far, it probably says something disturbing about you, too. In any case, I figure this is my comparative advantage. Everyone is writing about food stamps, but who else will point out the obscure but telling lies like this?

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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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