Forget About Stimulus. We Need Real Assistance.

The two biggest employers of the working poor are retail and leisure (including restaurants), which are good proxies for the overall economic health of low-income workers. Here’s how they’ve been doing:

In both cases, average weekly earnings have recovered to their pre-pandemic level. Among retail employees, average earnings are actually about $30 per week higher than before the pandemic. So if you still have a job in these industries, you’re doing OK.

Fine. But how many people still have jobs?

Both retail and leisure have suffered job losses. Leisure, in particular, has cratered, losing 8 million jobs at its worst point and still down by more than 4 million jobs today. Now let’s take a look at the big picture:

Overall national income is in good shape. The lesson here is simple: we don’t need $1,200 checks that go out to everyone. We don’t really need a lot of generic stimulus spending at all. Overall income is in good shape thanks to the CARES Act, and as long as you still have a job even the working poor are generally doing as well as they were before the pandemic.

What we need is not generic assistance, but assistance for those who actually need it. Primarily that means those who have lost their jobs, but it also means, for example, assistance specifically to the restaurant industry, which has been decimated by COVID-19. It also means states and cities, which are in dire shape thanks to plummeting tax revenue. That should be the top priority of any future coronavirus rescue package.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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