I have a few little things that have been bugging me, but none of them is really worth a whole post on its own. So I’m just going to mention them all briefly in a little potpourri post. Here they are.


I keep running into claims that the middle class is dead, killed off by income losses since the Great Recession. But it ain’t so. Here is median income since the peak year before the recession:

That’s an increase of 10 percent. Here is the CBO’s estimate of middle-class income vs. top income through 2017:

Since 2007, income of the middle 60 percent has gone up 4.3 percent, while income of the top 20 percent has gone up only 2.7 percent.

God knows that income inequality has increased generally since the Reagan era. I’ve written about this often and at length (here, for example). Still, that doesn’t mean that the middle class has died or that the affluent have outpaced the middle class during every single time span. In the case of the Great Recession, the well-off suffered more than the middle class and then made up more than the middle class. But when you net it out, the middle class did a little bit better than the rich.

(This doesn’t tell us anything about the top 1 percent or the top 0.1 percent. But it does tell us a lot about the middle class.)


Whenever progressives talk about Obamacare, the conversation usually turns immediately to a public option. In other words, progressives want people to be able to buy into Medicare at a set price.

But why? If you ask ordinary people what their biggest complaint is with Obamacare, it isn’t about the lack of a Medicare option. It’s about the fact that it costs too damn much. If you’re poor, you qualify for Medicaid. If you’re a little better off, the federal subsidy makes Obamacare free or close to it. But once you start moving into the middle class, the subsidies decrease pretty rapidly, and by the time you hit the middle-middle class they’re mostly gone. And since Obamacare raised the price of private insurance, this means that many middle-class families end up paying a lot of money for insurance with big deductibles.

So let’s forget about the public option for now. The real problem with Obamacare is the usual one with Democratic initiatives: it just isn’t funded well enough. In round numbers, we spend about $100 billion per year on Obamacare subsidies, and that should be doubled. If we did that, generous subsidies could be offered all the way into the high end of the middle class, and it could subsidize decent gold and platinum policies with modest deductibles and modest copays. “Double the subsidies!” should be the rallying cry of anyone who wants to improve Obamacare.


A few days ago, the new, more conservative Supreme Court ruled that New York’s COVID-19 regulations were an unconstitutional intrusion on the free exercise of religion. The most common reaction on the left was “Here we go. This is just the start.”

And it might be. But in this case, the conservative justices said only that religious gatherings should be considered “essential” and therefore regulated in the same way as other essential activities. In the face of a pandemic I doubt that I would second guess local officials like this, but the ruling isn’t really all that bad. I suspect that lots of liberals simply can’t grasp the notion of a religious assembly being considered “essential,” while plenty of conservatives can. Whichever side you come down on, just how sure are you that the other side is being ridiculous?

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate