January 30, 2020

Chart of the Day: GDP Growth Ends 2019 on Ho-Hum Note

In the final quarter of 2019, real GDP grew 2.1 percent:

This is OK. It’s not great, but it’s OK, especially in the 128th month of an economic expansion. The fourth quarter results mean that we ended the year with annual growth of 2.3 percent:

Again, this is an OK number, but nothing to write home about. US economic growth has been remarkably steady since the end of the Great Recession, never breaking out of a range of 1.5-3.0 percent.

And for you political types who demand to know what this means for the election, it probably means nothing. Economic growth is good enough that it doesn’t provide Donald Trump with any big problems, but it’s low enough that he’s still vulnerable. Altogether, economic growth is probably a wash for the 2020 campaign.

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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.

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