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Do you remember the great 1099 controversy? No matter. Details are here if you’re interested, but all that matters is that (a) it raised tax collections on small businesses a bit to fund the healthcare reform act, (b) everybody hates it, and (c) there’s a bipartisan consensus to get rid of it.

Fine. With Republicans in charge of the House, they can now write a bill to repeal it, which amounts to passing a tax cut. But guess what? For the first time in living memory, they’re insisting that a tax reduction has to be paid for with higher revenue from somewhere else. In particular, they’re taking aim at a provision of PPACA that says if you lose your job and get subsidized insurance via the exchange, but then you find a job six months later, you’ll get hit with a hefty year-end bill for the months you didn’t qualify for a subsidy. This is already bad enough, but at least the maximum payback is fairly modest. The Republican bill would make it much worse, upping the potential payback to multiple thousands of dollars. This is especially punitive for two reasons. First, because the incomes of the poor are highly volatile, which means they’re highly likely to get hit with year-end bills. And second, because the total amount of money this raises is minuscule.

Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein have more details, but it’s not the details that matter here, it’s the principle. Republicans obviously don’t believe that tax reductions require offsetting spending cuts, a stand they’ve made clear time and time again. Nor have they suddenly changed their minds about this. Rather, they’re trying to use the 1099 fix as an excuse to undermine the effectiveness of healthcare reform. As Austin Frakt puts it, “ACA’s subsidies are starting to function as a cash cow, paying for changes to the law.”

Tea party Republicans, now that they’re away from the campaign trail and have to face the real world, have discovered that they really don’t have any leverage to either repeal or seriously defund PPACA. So now they’re trying to find backdoor ways to chip away at it. This one is unusually shameless.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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