This Week Brings Another 6 Million Unemployment Claims

Laid-off workers filed another 6 million unemployment applications this week. That brings us to 16 million coronavirus-related claims. I will once again say that this is good news: it means lots of people are applying for the expanded unemployment benefits in the rescue bill, and they’ll be kept whole until the COVID-19 countermeasures are lifted. When that happens, their savings will be intact and their consumption behavior will be unchanged.

Despite the best efforts of the news media to pretend otherwise, have you noticed that there’s surprisingly little economic panic right now? Obviously there’s some because the rescue bill doesn’t rescue literally everyone. But if we had unemployment like this caused by a normal recession, the panic would be palpable. Instead we have people delaying rent payments a bit, dipping into savings temporarily until the unemployment checks arrive, and making jokes about Netflix. Under the circumstances, people are taking this surprisingly well, and that’s because they know that help is on the way.

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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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