Treasury Department Wins Award For Nation’s Ugliest Chart

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The actual news today, such as it is, concerns the federal deficit. A few weeks ago President Trump tweeted this:

The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.

ZOMG! Trump is a fiscal genius! But today the Treasury released its deficit report for February:

Sad news. January’s modest surplus has been wiped out. The deficit in February was $192 billion. Just like last year. I don’t suppose Trump will be tweeting about that, will he? But he still could: His February deficit is $0.74 billion less than Obama’s in his first February. Is that worth a tweet?

But who cares about all this? It’s just money. The real motivation for this post is to mock the Bureau of the Fiscal Service for the op-art inspired bit of visual ugliness they use to report the deficit over time. Seriously, guys? What possible piece of software could they be using to produce this? Every time I look at it the world starts spinning.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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