Our Handy Calculator Lets You Pretend You’re a 1-Percenter For a Day

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Do you ever wonder what your income would be like if it had grown as fast as the average investment banker’s since 1960? Well, wonder no more! Click here, enter your current salary, and our handy-dandy calculator will tell you how much you’d be making today if ordinary incomes had gone up as fast as the top 1 percent.

Now, before you ask, no, it’s not realistic to think that everyone’s income could rise as fast as the superwealthy’s has. Still, this calculator provides a concrete sense of what a 270 percent increase really means. When you hear that the head of Goldman Sachs used to make $20 million and now makes $75 million, it just seems like two ginormous numbers. When you find out that a similar growth rate means that you would be making, say, $150,000 instead of $50,000, it kind of brings it all home.

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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 find 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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