Why Should Banks Get $83 Billion From Taxpayers Every Year?

The Article: Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year? in Bloomberg.

The Text: On television, in interviews and in meetings with investors, executives of the biggest U.S. banks — notably JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon — make the case that size is a competitive advantage. It helps them lower costs and vie for customers on an international scale. Limiting it, they warn, would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance.

So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?

Granted, it’s a hard concept to swallow. It’s also crucial to understanding why the big banks present such a threat to the global economy.

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How To Cut The Deficit? Cut Into Corporate Welfare

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

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

The Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth

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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