Vox Sentences: Obama gives it the old college try, fails

Welcome to Vox Sentences, our news bulletin breaking down the day's biggest stories.

1. The old college try fails

(Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

And you get a tax hike, and you get a tax hike, and … (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

• The Obama administration is abandoning its plan to limit college savings accounts for rich families.

  [NYT / Jonathan Weisman]

• The accounts in question — known as 529s — provide a way to save for college without paying tax on earnings, kind of like a Roth IRA.

  [SEC]

• Obama's plan would have made the earnings taxable, albeit at a reduced rate.

  [CNN Money / Jeanne Sahadi]

• The 529 program overwhelmingly helps the rich: 80 percent of the benefits go to families making more than $150,000, and 70 percent go to families making over $200,000.

  [CBPP / Robert Greenstein]

• Obama wanted to consolidate a number of different tax benefits for college — including 529s — into one tax credit that's overall much more progressive.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• The case for his proposal: "I generally don't think that our higher education policy should be geared toward helping families that earned $150,000 or more send their kid to the most expensive possible school."

  [Slate / Jordan Weissman]

• The case against: "States are developing innovative ways for all parents, including the very poor, to save for college in 529s."

  [Slate / Justin King]

2. Close Sesame

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 - Day 3 on May 7, 2014 in New York City. (Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

• Yahoo! is selling its stake in Alibaba, the massive Chinese e-commerce company.

  [NYT / Vindu Goel and Michael de la Merced]

• The company paid $1 billion for 40 percent of Alibaba in 2005 …

  [AP / Michael Liedtke]

• … but today its investment — now only 15 percent —  is worth an estimated $39.5 billion.

  [NYT / Vindu Goel and Michael de la Merced]

• By one estimate, without the Alibaba stake Yahoo! was worth negative $4 billion as of July. More than 100 percent of the company's value was bound in Alibaba.

  [NYT / Nicholas Carlson]

• Selling the Alibaba stake frees up a lot of capital that Yahoo! can direct elsewhere in order to (theoretically) make its core business actually valuable.

• Normally, a sale this big would lead to a nearly $14 billion tax bill, but Yahoo! will probably be able to evade that through various forms of financial chicanery.

  [NYT / Michael de la Merced]

• One way to avoid the big tax bill would have been for Yahoo! to just buy AOL but it seems like they're going to do something less fun than that.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• In case you have no idea what Alibaba is or why it's worth hundreds of billions of dollars, see Matt Yglesias's explainer here.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

3. Drilling in the sea, but not for thee

Jack up drilling rig. (Photo by: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)

• The Interior Department plans to allow drilling for oil off the coast of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, but ban it in parts of the Arctic.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• The Natural Resources Defense Council isn't pleased: "Opening up part of the Atlantic to drilling could expose the entire Eastern Seaboard to the risks of a catastrophic blowout."

  [NYT / Coral Davenport]

• Given that the eco-systems of the Gulf coast still haven't recovered from the BP oil spill in 2010, a degree of concern about more offshore drilling is understandable.

  [Mother Jones / Tim McDonnell]

• Naturally, the US petroleum industry and Alaska's Congressional representatives are pissed about the limits on Arctic drilling and are giving the standard warnings about how this will cost jobs.

  [Washington Post / Jody Warrick]

• This quote from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is illustrative: "We will do everything we can to push back against an administration that has taken a look at Alaska and decided it’s a ‘nice little snow globe up there and we’re going to keep it that way.’"

4. Misc.

• Welfare spending is supposed to hurt the economy. But what if it gives entrepreneurs the cushion they need to take big risks?

  [Bloomberg View / Noah Smith]

• One of the many struggles MTF trans people face: learning to talk like a woman. That's where voice coach Norma Garbo comes in.

  [The Atlantic / Shivam Saini]

• Getting rid of corporate personhood wouldn't limit corporate power. In fact, it'd make it much harder to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.

  [Washington Monthly / Kent Greenfield]

• The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle once put the entire World Wide Web on a shipping container. It weighed 26,000 pounds. That's only like five pickup trucks.

  [New Yorker / Jill Lepore]

• Autodesk is known for software for designing buildings and machines. Now it's writing software for designing living beings.

  [Synbiobeta / Spencer Scott]

• There's a new Louis CK special out, if you're into that kind of thing.

  [Louis CK]

5. Verbatim

• "The one-note guitar riff that the Strokes supposedly stole from Petty’s 'American Girl' in their breakthrough hit 'Last Nite' is the musical equivalent of carbon — an element of the universe, hardly something you can copyright."

  [Slate / Adam Ragusea]

• "The iOS App Store distributed $10 billion to developers in 2014, which, Deidu points out, is just about as much as Hollywood earned off US box office revenues the same year."

  [The Atlantic / Robinson Meyer]

• "Somebody tried to explain WhatsApp to me. Somebody else tried to explain Snapchat. I do not know about them, but it is absolutely clear that the terrorists and jihadists do."

  [Lord King of Bridgwater via Canada.com / Ishmael Daro]

• "One More Day felt like an erasure of what had been one of [Spider-Man's] more unintentionally bold endeavors—the attempt to allow a superhero to grow up, to be more than Peter Pan, to confront the tragic world as it was, to imagine life beyond what should have been."

  [The Atlantic / Ta-Nehisi Coates]

• "You are not going to get zombie-like numbers for a story about 200 units of low-income housing being built on the east side of the Saw Mill Expressway and the racial strife that ensues."

  [David Simon to Grantland / Amos Barshad]

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