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Each Friday, we bring you a piece from our archives to help propel you into the weekend.

Hi, you may have learned about the stock market this week. Why? Because hedge funds held short positions on GameStop, and retail traders noticed it, organized online, boosted the stock, then short-squeezed it. (Still confused? Go here.) In the aftermath—not that it’s really over!—a few discussions have bubbled up beyond this GameStop-infused moment. One idea floating around is to tax financial transactions as we used to do in the United States from 1914 to 1965.

That tax was also mentioned in the pages of Mother Jones—as our own CEO, Monika Bauerlein, pointed me to—back in 2013, in a piece on the post–Lehman Brothers economy and the growth of high-frequency trading. You can read the piece here. It chronicles the increase of trades made within seconds through algorithms.

There is an eerie post-recession feel to the fears of mass financialization in this one. Wall Street then, as now, was remote from real value unless it is crashing—then it could ruin your life. The potential of “quants” and math wizards making something so complex that it ends up being stupid is, it seems, high; greed reigns supreme. I’ll leave the analogies to you for our current moment. Take old data with a grain of salt. Here is the actual proposal for a tax on financial transactions from the piece so you know it really is possible to, at the very least, conceive of: 

In a more far-reaching proposal, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) have proposed levying a financial-transactions tax—they suggest 0.03 percent—on each trade, as a way of discouraging churn and raising revenue. (The United States had such a tax until 1966.) Economists, activists, and even some finance big shots—Warren Buffett among them—have endorsed the idea. “Even at the modest level we’ve proposed, [the tax] would raise $35 billion a year, which would either be used to defray the deficit or be used for job-creating investments by the government,” DeFazio told me. Eleven European Union countries (though not the United Kingdom) are pressing ahead with the idea—and they’ve talked about a tax as high as 0.1 percent. Wall Street lobbyists have pushed back against both speed limits and bringing back the transaction tax.

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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