April 7, 2020

Is It Time For More Lead Abatement? The Answer May Shock You.

Ringo Chiu/ZUMA

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This morning brings some Kevin bait:

I think that any time is a good time to spend a big chunk of money on lead abatement. Future generations will thank us. Unfortunately, if there’s a worst time to do it, now is it.

The COVID-19 pandemic is throwing us into a recession, but it’s a purely technical, man-made recession. It’s not due to an oil spike or a dotcom bust or a housing bubble or even just a cyclical reduction in savings that causes households to cut back on spending. It’s due to specific government mandates that can be lifted at any time.

What this means is that we don’t need any kind of general economic stimulus. Household savings are high, consumer demand is fine, and there should even be pent-up demand working in our favor by summer. Instead, we need to specifically help the people and businesses who have been affected by the government mandates so that they can stay afloat until the emergency is over. This means:

  • Workers who are laid off thanks to coronavirus restrictions.
  • Small businesses that are shuttered for the duration.
  • Large businesses facing revenue shortfalls.
  • State and local governments who are losing revenue and facing higher expenditures.
  • Hospitals and other health care providers.

Any follow-up rescue package—which we’ll probably need—needs to be directed toward these victims of the coronavirus lockdowns. A small amount of generalized stimulus—the $1,200 checks, for example—doesn’t hurt since any targeted program is bound to miss some people, but it shouldn’t be large and it shouldn’t be the focus of congressional action.

The exception to this might come later in the year. If the pandemic starts taking off in the global south just as the north is recovering, we might suffer a classic recession due to trade losses, supply chain disruptions, loan forfeitures, and so forth. If that happens, we might need a classic stimulus package to get us back on track. That would be the time for infrastructure projects and lead abatement. There’s no telling if we’ll need this, but it would certainly be wise to plan for the possibility by spending a few billion dollars now to identify and and do prep work for a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure.¹ When the time comes, it would be nice to have plenty of shovel-ready plans on the shelf ready to go if we need them.

¹Including lead abatement!

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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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