How To Cut The Deficit? Cut Into Corporate Welfare

Tax Dodging America

The Article: Ending Corporate Tax Dodging Would Cut Deficit By Twice As Much As Hiking Medicare Age by Zaid Jilani in The Contributor.

The Text: Some right-wing politicians want to raise the Medicare age to 67. This would reduce the deficit by $5.7 billion each year but pass on costs to seniors of $11.4 billion every year.

Rather than making health care more expensive for seniors, here’s a progressive deficit reduction idea. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office said we could raise $114 billion over ten years — twice as much as raising the Medicare age — by limiting corporate tax deferrals.

The way to do this would be to subject all income earned by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to U.S. tax laws by limiting or eliminating deferrals for overseas profits. Right now, large corporations like Microsoft will shift their profits to overseas locations — such as remote islands in the Caribbean or Switzerland — to avoid paying taxes on them.

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Why Even Radiologists Can Miss A Gorilla Hiding In Plain Sight

Gorilla Hiding

The Article: Why Even Radiologists Can Miss A Gorilla Hiding In Plain Sight by Alix Spiegel in NPR.

The Text: This story begins with a group of people who are expert at looking: the professional searchers known as radiologists.

“If you watch radiologists do what they do, [you’re] absolutely convinced that they are like superhuman,” says Trafton Drew, an attention researcher at Harvard Medical School.

About three years ago, Drew started visiting the dark, cavelike “reading rooms” where radiologists do their work. For hours he would stand watching them, in awe that they could so easily see in the images before them things that to Drew were simply invisible.

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Ricky Gervais’ Argument With God

Ricky Gervais My Argument With God Article

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Sequester 2013: The Worst Western Since, Well, Ever

Sequester

In a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar, Dwight Eisenhower wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt, a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

My, how things have changed.

The year is 2013. Our first black president has been re-elected and, following in Ike’s footsteps, is also the first presidential candidate in 56 years to receive over 51% of the popular vote not once but twice. Nine states (and now even some prominent conservatives) have committed themselves to ensuring that all individuals–regardless of their sexual orientation–can marry whom they choose; women outnumber men in college classrooms, and nationwide healthcare coverage is finally on its way to becoming reality. In spite of America’s many flaws, if there is one thing to admire about the tarnished beacon, it’s its commitment to progress. And yet, as of this Friday, that is precisely what is at stake.

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The Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth

White House Espionage

The Article: Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth by David Carr in The New York Times.

The Text: Last Wednesday in the White House briefing room, the administration’s press secretary, Jay Carney, opened on a somber note, citing the deaths of Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, two reporters who had died “in order to bring truth” while reporting in Syria.

Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”

He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”

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