Update: Billions Have Gone to TX in Federal Disaster Aid During Perry’s Tenure

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Yesterday I mentioned that Texas Governor Rick Perry’s secessionist rhetoric flies in the face of Texas’ history of receiving gobs of federal money: the state has received federal disaster assistance more frequently than any other in the Union.

Today, I have some raw numbers, courtesy of FEMA’s public affairs office in Denton, Texas. During Perry’s tenure — 2001 to the present — FEMA alone has sent $3.45 billion to Texas. $3,449,142,397 to be exact. That figure does not include funding from any other federal agencies (of which there is plenty), nor does it include funding for Hurricane Ike recovery, which is still ongoing.

To get a sense of how much federal money goes to Texas every time a disaster strikes, consider the numbers in this FEMA press release from earlier this month: since Ike made landfall in September 2008, Texas has received over $2 billion in disaster relief funding from various federal agencies. That includes just $96 million from FEMA (to pay hotel bills for displaced citizens). The rest comes from the Small Business Administration and other agencies.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying Texas and its hurricane-weary citizens don’t deserve this money. They do. I’m glad the federal government is able to step in and help states recover from natural disasters when local authorities are overwhelmed. But it’s galling that Governor Perry, who reportedly has an eye on a presidential run, ginned up the GOP base by talking of splitting from the “oppressive” Obama administration (his words) when he knows full well that the federal government has bailed out his state repeatedly, and probably will do so again. Where does Perry think all this money would come from if Texas was its own state? He’s probably have to raise taxes to the point where Texas would want to secede from itself.

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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.

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