Forget About Stimulus. We Need Real Assistance.

The two biggest employers of the working poor are retail and leisure (including restaurants), which are good proxies for the overall economic health of low-income workers. Here’s how they’ve been doing:

In both cases, average weekly earnings have recovered to their pre-pandemic level. Among retail employees, average earnings are actually about $30 per week higher than before the pandemic. So if you still have a job in these industries, you’re doing OK.

Fine. But how many people still have jobs?

Both retail and leisure have suffered job losses. Leisure, in particular, has cratered, losing 8 million jobs at its worst point and still down by more than 4 million jobs today. Now let’s take a look at the big picture:

Overall national income is in good shape. The lesson here is simple: we don’t need $1,200 checks that go out to everyone. We don’t really need a lot of generic stimulus spending at all. Overall income is in good shape thanks to the CARES Act, and as long as you still have a job even the working poor are generally doing as well as they were before the pandemic.

What we need is not generic assistance, but assistance for those who actually need it. Primarily that means those who have lost their jobs, but it also means, for example, assistance specifically to the restaurant industry, which has been decimated by COVID-19. It also means states and cities, which are in dire shape thanks to plummeting tax revenue. That should be the top priority of any future coronavirus rescue package.

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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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