Chart of the Day: 1 Million New Unemployment Claims This Week?

Unemployment claims last week were about a quarter higher than the week before. This week they’ve already doubled and may double again when every state is counted. Justin Wolfers has the chart:

This is just the start, and it’s the reason that a $1,000 check is so inadequate. We’re facing a crisis that will last for months at least, and if we want people to continue spending we need to provide them with the security of knowing that they’ll have an income for that entire time. Otherwise they’ll hoard their money just the same as they’re hoarding food and toilet paper now. Expanded unemployment insurance will help, but it’s not enough. We need to commit to replacing upwards of 70-80 percent of lost income. Or maybe even more.

And this needs to apply to just about everyone. You might think that someone with a six-figure income can get by, but if they lose their job they probably can’t. Even most upper middle-class folks don’t have a lot of savings, and their mortgages and car payments and credit card bills are all at upper-middle-class levels. They might be better off than the poor, but most of them will still run out of money pretty quickly if they get laid off.

If Donald Trump is dead set on mailing out checks with a MAGA hat on the back, I guess there are worse things than letting him do it. But make no mistake: this is just a reelection stunt. One way or another, we need to rescue both consumers and businesses with serious money that will last until the crisis is over. Let’s knock off the bullshit and get started.

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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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