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The Wall Street Journal asks a question today:

Can Rally Run Without Revenue?
Investors Wonder Whether Profits Based on Cost Cutting Can Long Endure

No, they can’t.  Beyond the very shortest of short terms, you need rising revenue to generate rising earnings, and for that you need higher consumer spending.

But there’s no sign of that.  This isn’t an ordinary inventory cycle recession, which goes away when inventories tighten back up, or a Fed-induced inflation-fighting recession, which goes away when the Fed eases up on interest rates.  It’s a massive deleveraging recession, and it won’t go away until consumers and businesses pay down their crushing debt loads and start spending money again.

But how?  There are only a few ways for consumers to spend more money, and none of them are anywhere on the horizon.  Wages aren’t going up, employment isn’t going up, the glory days of credit card debt and home equity loans are over, and no one is drawing down their savings to buy bedroom sets these days.  Just the opposite, in fact.

So with consumers actively reducing their consumption in order to pay off debt, what’s going to keep this recovery going?  A few hundred billion dollars in stimulus money?  Not likely.  Unfortunately, with no second stimulus likely to get serious consideration, we’re stuck in the doldrums until deleveraging has run its course.  That’s probably going to take another couple of years.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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