August 4, 2011

Raise the Gas Tax!

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No one in Congress wants to raise the gas tax even though our transportation infrastructure is crumbling and revenue from the tax has been falling. Brad Plumer rounds up some substitute ideas:

One idea is a vehicle-miles traveled tax, which would track driver habits via GPS and charge per mile driven….Another is to charge some sort of congestion fee on overclogged highways….Mica, for his part, has suggested extending the Build America Bonds program….A bipartisan team affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment has proposed an upstream tax on oil combined with a variable gas tax that shrinks when oil prices rise and expands when oil prices plummet.

Uh huh. Or we could, you know, just raise the gas tax. We are ruled by idiots.

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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.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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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