August 24, 2011

A Budget Plan That Treehuggers and Tea Partiers Can Love

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/32307961@N06/5072117180/sizes/m/in/photostream/">ciron810</a>/Flickr

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There’s not much that Friends of the Earth and The Heartland Institute agree on. Friends of the Earth is among the most liberal of the environmental groups in the US. Heartland thinks that climate change isn’t a crisis at all—actually, it might even be a good thing. But the two partnered this year to in the release of the Green Scissors Report, which looks at environmentally problematic government spending.

It’s heartening to know that while two groups might not be able to agree on the question of whether or not climate change is real, they can agree that subsidies for corn ethanol are dumb. That was among the $380 billion in “wasteful government subsidies” that the groups, along with Taxpayers for Common Sense and Public Citizen, unveiled on Wednesday. Friends of the Earth has released this report annually since 1994, and this was the first year that Heartland joined in. This year, they’re hoping it gets more attention, given the supercommittee’s charge to find spending cuts.

“We are a forthrightly conservative organization, and we disagree with many of the objectives of other partners,” said Heartland Institute Vice President Eli Lehrer in a call with reporters on Wednesday. But they did agree, that “big government spending” can have “negative consequences” for the environment.

Some the proposed cuts for the 2012 to 2016 period:

  • $4 billion in “royalty relief” for oil and gas drilling
  • $6.7 billion in a manufacturing tax break for domestic oil and gas companies
  • $22 billion for nuclear and uranium enrichment loan guarantees
  • $56 billion in tax credits and market support for ethanol
  • $1.3 billion in support for the FutureGen “clean coal” project
  • $18 billion in subsidies for commodity crops like corn, wheat and soybeans
  • $30 billion for crop insurance
  • $2.2 billion in tax breaks for timber companies
  • $20.8 billion in funds for road and bridge projects that they deem unnecessary
  • $5.6 billion in Army Corps of Engineers projects that “serve little to no national interest.”

“These are common-sense cuts, and should represent the lowest-hanging fruit,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

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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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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