Fact Check: The Trump Era Has Been a Gold Mine for Drug Companies

Dean Baker is one of the few lonely folks who continues to hold out hope that the truth matters in our fallen age. I’m still with him, despite the abundant evidence that we’re both wrong, so here he is factchecking Donald Trump’s claim that he’s tough on drug companies and has cut prescription drug prices bigly. You will be unsurprised to know that the data shows otherwise. My added value in this is that I draw better charts than Dean, so here’s the growth in spending on prescription drugs over the past few years:

Even in an era of low inflation, we are being forced to pay more and more for prescription drugs. Donald Trump has done absolutely nothing to rein this in.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists 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 hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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