Kick the Can

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This… definitely falls into the category of arcane-yet-important budget stuff, but Health Affairs has a new study out on the ways in which various states dealt with their fiscal crises during Bush’s first term. The short answer: not very well. Most state legislatures, not surprisingly, were reluctant to treat the shortfalls as long-term crises, so they refrained from raising taxes or taking other difficult and politically unpopular measures to shore up their deficits. Rather, they just kicked the can down the road, either by borrowing money from other funds—New York’s legislature drew out money from its welfare fund; California from the transportation kitty—or by making “one-time” cuts in state health programs, such as Medicaid and S-CHiP, by, for instance, making it more difficult for residents to qualify, or by raising co-payments.

The problem with all this is that these moves weren’t just “one-time” cuts necessary to weather the fiscal crises: Since 2004, tax revenues have finally been increasing again, but most states still haven’t solved their long-term budget problems, and can’t use the additional funds to expand Medicaid again. As the study puts it: “the damage that the recent recession did to Medicaid may take years to repair.” That means less health care for everyone, despite the fact that we’re in the middle of an economic boom, supposedly. The lesson here, it seems, is that the Bush administration’s first-term reluctance to send federal relief down to the states during the recession—a measure many economists had advocated, and the federal government didn’t get around to doing until 2003—has created problems that persist to this day. Even more crucially, though, someone needs to point out that state legislatures can’t get away with pretending to take “one-time emergency actions” to deal with budget crunches.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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