Yesterday, Paul Krugman had media critic and former New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan on his weekly podcast. I was happy to see this since I think the media are enormously important and I have generally valued Sullivan’s comments.

In fact, Sullivan really made my day, week, and year with one of her columns over a decade ago at The New York Times. Responding to complaints from a number of organizations, including FAIR, Media Matters, and others, Sullivan took the Times to task for printing huge budget numbers without any context that would make them meaningful to readers.

Sullivan asked then Washington editor, David Leonhardt, about the Times’ treatment of big budget numbers. Leonhardt enthusiastically agreed that this was a problem. As Leonhardt put it, instead of writing a number in the billions or hundreds of billions, the paper might as well just write “really big number,” since no one had any idea what these numbers meant. He said that going forward they would try to put big numbers in a context that made them meaningful to readers.

When I saw this, I naturally went out and celebrated (I was on the road, so I had to drink alone).

I thought the NYT would start doing things like telling readers the $100 billion we spend on SNAP is 1.4 percent of the budget, the $6 billion we used to spend on the AIDS program for Africa was 0.09 percent of the budget, and the $500 million we used to spend on public broadcasting was 0.008 percent of the budget. And if the NYT adopted this practice, other news outlets would follow, and the world would be good.

But nothing changed at the NYT or anywhere else. Anyhow, that is a long digression, but it partially explains my appreciation for Margaret Sullivan.

Getting back to the issue at hand, Sullivan and Krugman talked about the importance of the media in general and especially in the era of Donald Trump, where democracy is under attack. People should read the piece. (To be clear, both noted its many failings, which I have also spent some time on.)

But what got me angry was when they got to the “what is to be done?” segment at the end. They encouraged people to support independent and especially local news outlets, advice I would enthusiastically endorse.

Then Krugman commented:

“Okay. I think that probably in the long run, we just need something like public support, but I guess that’s a non-starter right now.” A comment which Sullivan agreed with.

This one got me throwing things at my computer. No, we are not going to see a Republican Congress and Donald Trump put forward any useful proposals for supporting independent media. But we have 51 state governments (counting DC) and dozens of large cities. These governmental units absolutely could take steps to support media that serve their jurisdictions.

I have my own favorite scheme, an individual tax credit, modeled on the tax deduction for charitable contributions that we have had at the national level for many decades. This would give everyone some sum, say $100, to support the news outlet of their choice. In my version, the material supported could not be paywalled, so that everyone in the city, state, and indeed world, would have access to it.

Perhaps this is not the best route. There have been other proposals put forward, but the point is that we absolutely can and should look to have public support for the media at the state or local level at a time when it is precluded at the national level.

My plan also has the virtue, in my view, that there is no government bureaucrat deciding which news outlets are good and deserving of public support. People will make this call for themselves.

This should not be out of the realm of possibility in progressive cities or states. In fact, Katie Wilson, the newly elected mayor of Seattle, is a big proponent of this sort of system. (I know she has a big agenda, so I won’t assume that she will push this sort of journalism tax credit system forward just now. People should also see my podcast with Milo Vassallo, the executive director of the Media and Democracy Project.)

The key point is that we should not be defeatist. State and local governments can do many of the tasks where the federal government is failing under Trump, and supporting independent media is one of them. When we find one path is blocked, our responsibility is to look for other paths.