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ADJUSTING FOR (DE)FLATION….The New York Times reports on consumer activity:

The price index for finished goods, a measure of the change in prices businesses pay, fell 0.9 percent in August after a 1.2 percent increase in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Consumers’ spending on retail and food decreased 0.3 percent in August after a 0.5 monthly drop in July, according to the Census Bureau. Economists had been expecting an increase of 0.2 percent.

Does this mean that actual sales of goods and services were down 0.3 percent? Or, if you adjust for inflation, does it mean that retail sales were actually up?

I have no idea, and nowhere in the NYT piece do they tell you. Nor do the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. The only way to find out is to go to the Census Bureau press release itself, which says:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for August, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $381.2 billion, a decrease of 0.3 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month, but 1.6 percent (±0.7%) above August 2007.

So the reported drop is from July to August, not from last year. And it’s not adjusted for inflation. Actual, inflation-adjusted sales were probably up a bit compared to last month, but down about 4% from last year.

This is all a bit murky since we don’t have final inflation/deflation numbers yet for August, and overall I don’t know if this is good or bad news anyway. But that’s the news. Why can’t the financial press report it?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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