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In the end, I didn’t get to hear Obama’s SOTU speech at all. Things just didn’t work out, somehow. Still, I note this morning that he was unusually  non-fuzzy about a few things. First, he wants to raise the minimum wage to $9 and index it to inflation. Bravo! When it comes to anti-poverty measures, I’m in favor of doing lots of little things, rather than putting all my eggs in a few baskets. An economist might sniff that the minimum wage isn’t the most efficient way to help low-income workers, and it probably isn’t. So what? At modest levels (and $9 is a modest level), it helps a lot of people and almost certainly does little or no harm to the broader economy. It’s also very visible, very easy to understand, viewed as very fair, and politically popular. That stuff matters a lot.

Keying it to inflation is also interesting, but for a subtle reason: Obama is putting good policy ahead of good politics. Indexing the minimum wage to inflation will help the working poor, but it comes at the cost of allowing Democrats a cheap and easy issue to bang on every few years. Typical Obama.

Obama’s other proposal dear to my heart was his call for universal pre-K.The truth is that age four is too late. Age two would be better. Age one would probably be better still. But starting at age four makes the most political sense. But if Congress does act on this (unlikely, I know, but humor me), I hope they put in place extensive experimentation requirements. What we really want to know is what kind of pre-K programs work best, and we’ll only find out with a rigorous, fairly well-controlled program of experimentation. On this issue, I’m a Manzi-ite.

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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.

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