October 23, 2018

Fake Tax Cut Now Embellished With Fake Details

How can you tell he's lying? Because his mouth is open.Song Qiong/Xinhua via ZUMA

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Well, we’ve now sailed far beyond the Isle of Lies and straight into the Maelstrom of Making Shit Up:


There is no tax cut planned. There’s never been a tax cut planned. Trump just tossed this out while he was in a lather about something else and noticed that it got a good reception. So he repeated it. And why not? Republicans love tax cuts. Now everyone is starting to get aboard, and we’re even getting some fake details about this fake plan. It’s going to be revenue neutral! It will be for the middle class—honest! It will be paid for by Mexico!

I dunno. Once again, the campaign press is in its usual bind. I’m sure every campaign reporter out there knows this is just another one of Trump’s fantasies, spun out solely to get attention from campaign reporters. And yet … he is the president of the United States. Whatcha gonna do?

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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.

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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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