Chart of the Day: Stimulus Today vs. Stimulus in 2009

Today I’d like to show you a chart you probably haven’t seen before. Here it is:

The blue line shows personal expenditure plus personal saving: in other words, the total amount of money that households have available to them. The two red lines show the trends of this number starting two years before the Great Recession and then two years before the current pandemic recession. The difference is stark.

In 2008, a housing bust produced a huge loss of household wealth and a concurrent reduction in household demand. This hurled the economy into the Great Recession, which led to large-scale unemployment and a substantial loss in household funds. Stimulus spending from the federal government amounted to $1 trillion over two years, which was nowhere near enough. As you can see, we never—not to this day—recovered to the old trendline.

The pandemic recession has been completely different. There was no huge loss of wealth and the federal government almost immediately pumped $2.2 trillion into the economy over the course of nine months. Today, we have not only recovered to the trendline, we’re above it—and getting ready to spend another trillion dollars.

This is a dramatic illustration of two things. First, what if we had done the same thing back in 2009? The equivalent amount of stimulus would have been in the range of $4-5 trillion over two years and probably would have stopped the recession cold. Second, we’re in surprisingly good shape right now. If the economy is able to fully open up this summer, there’s every reason to think that economic recovery will be quick. The main thing is to keep people whole, housed, and fed in the meantime.

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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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