NFHS Debate Topic Proposal: Income Inequality

Respectfully Submitted by:

Darin M. MaierVoting Delegate, State of Mississippi

Proposed Resolutions

1. Resolved: The United States Federal Government should increase progressive taxation, the federal minimum wage or regulation of predatory lending to substantially decrease income inequality in the United States.

2. Resolved: The United States Federal Government should establish a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens of the United States.

3. Resolved: The United States Federal Government should establish a negative income tax, increase the federal minimum wage or progressive taxation to substantially decrease income inequality in the United States.

4. Resolved: The United States Federal Government should amend the Internal Revenue Code to decrease income inequality in the United States.

5. Resolved: The United States Federal Government should increase social welfare benefits to substantially reduce income inequality in the United States.

6. Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially decrease economic inequality in the United States.

Addendum: while not included in specific resolutions, other specific plan areas that have been recommended for consideration include:

Wage caps Abolition of Right-to-Work laws Reduction or Elimination of Pre-screen criminal background checks for employment Amending trade policy to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the United States

Note – Resolution #1 was submitted to the states for consideration as the 2015-2016 National High School Debate Topic. It was the runner-up topic that year, losing to the domestic surveillance topic that students recently concluded debating..

Introduction

An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind.-Article 16, Pennsylvania Bill of Rights

In his State of the Union Address in January of 2016, President Obama remarked:

Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated. Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and they face tougher competition. As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.

All these trends have squeezed workers, even when they have jobs; even when the economy is growing. It’s made it harder for a hardworking family to pull itself out of poverty, harder for young people to start their careers, tougher for workers to retire when they want to. And although none of these trends are unique to America, they do offend our uniquely American belief that everybody who works hard should get a fair shot. (“State of the Union 2016”, www)

A central concern for any economic system, be it traditional, capitalist, democratically socialist or revolutionary socialist is the proper distribution of income among the members of its society. Similarly, the elimination or substantial reduction of poverty has been a problem that all governments have struggled with, as anthropologists have tracked social support structures and traditions where governments cancelled certain types of debt back to some of the earliest civilizations of Africa and Sumer. What has become disconcerting to many Americans today is the concentration of wealth at the top of the income pyramid and the apparent shrinking of the middle class over the last few decades. This topic was offered up for consideration for the 2015-2016 academic year and was the proverbial bridesmaid, and it ultimately became the bridesmaid, losing in the vote to the domestic surveillance topic by a count of 21 to 15. At the 2015 Topic Selection Meeting in New Orleans, this topic was identified again as a problem area to be considered with sufficient delegate support to make it and the delegates placed enough support behind it that the topic was deemed to be a viable candidate for reconsideration. Thus, this paper proposes that the National Federation of High Schools should select the problem area of income/economic inequality as the National High School Debate Topic for the 2017-2018 academic year.

For those looking for an entirely new treatment of the topic, I have but one word: sorry. I will confess that those who remember the 2014 paper co-written by Chris Bell and me will note that much of it remains in the 2016 version. Much of this is intentional, as the last two years have not fundamentally altered the issues/causes/proposed solutions to income and economic inequality; thus, it seemed counterproductive to force a rewrite of the original paper that would have said essentially the same thing, just with different verbiage. As such, it seemed a more appropriate approach would be to integrate some of the new research and data (and there is some intriguing and relevant research on this topic) and to offer in the resolution section some other ideas of areas for consideration should the Wording Committee deem appropriate. Additionally, some tweaking of discussions of particular issues where the new data might implicate how teams might think about these concepts has also taken place in the 2016 version of the paper.

Up front, I will confess that for those who read the 2014 paper that was written by Chris Bell and me, many parts of the 2016 version will sound like not much has changed. Some of this is very much intentional – the last two years have not fundamentally altered many of the issues of income/economic inequality so as to force an entire rewrite of the paper and as such, dedicating serious time and effort into rephrasing or restructuring text that doesn’t seem to need it would diminish what I see as a key goal of the redraft – providing updated research as it regards the data on inequality or new approaches to understanding the methodology by which inequality is understood (and there is some intriguing and relevant research in this regard), along with tweaking discussions of particular issues where new data and approaches will implicate how debate teams think about these concepts.

Before continuing further, it seems appropriate to discuss a couple of the key tools used to measure income inequality, specifically the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient. To explain the Lorenz Curve, imagine that we could gather every household in the United States together and rank them in order of how much income they earn. It would then be possible to take certain percentile groups (the top tenth, bottom fifth, middle fifth, for example) and see what percentage of the nation’s income that they earn collectively. The Lorenz Curve is a graphic representation of this, examining the population cumulatively, typically at various quintiles (thus, the bottom 20 percent, the bottom 40 percent, and so on), and comparing the percentage of income earned by those segments of the population (with population segments on the x-axis and percentage of income on the y-axis) to a “line of equality” that would exist in the theoretical world where every household earned the same level of income (such a line would come out at a 45 degree line from the origin). The larger the area between the curve and the line of equality, the greater the level of income inequality in the society. Because such an area can be hard to use efficiently, economists have also developed the Gini Coefficient, which uses an integration to measure the space between the Lorenz Curve and the line of equality, generating a number between 0The Lorenz Curve compares the percentage of income earned by various segments of the population compared to a line of equality representing an income distribution where every household earns the same amount of income (which would be a 45 degree line coming from the origin). The Gini Coefficient uses an integration to measure the space between the Lorenz Curve and the line of equality to come up with a number between 0 (representing perfect income equality – i.e. everyone makes the same income) and 1 (representing perfect income inequality, meaning one person earns all the income in a society). While no nation nears either of those extremes, the effective range seems to run between about .22 (typically indicating a nation with not many exceptionally wealthy people, but a solid middle class and usually a significant degree of social mobility) and .65 (often indicating a large poor class, a few very wealthy people relative to the rest of the society, and typically without great social mobility). Note that the World Bank, OECD, and other economic organizations all have slightly differing means by which to measure income, so their ranges will vary slightly. There is also a Gini Index, but the only real difference between it and the coefficient is the scale of numbers used (the Gini Index operates on a scale of 0 to 100).

Key Issues

Timeliness

Given the nature of this topic and the swirling debate about the nature of economic disparities , an , an income inequality topic would seem to be an appropriate one for discussion in almost any academic year. Back in 2014, Institution for Social and Policy Studies fellow Martin Gilens wrote that “over 70 percent of Americans say we are spending too little on 'fighting poverty,' while a similar number thinks spending for the homeless needs to be increased. Smaller numbers--though still

majorities'' think we are spending too little on 'poor people,' on 'assistance to the poor,' and on 'child care for poor children.' And as was true for education, health care, child care, and the elderly, very few Americans believe spending for the poor should be reduced from current levels." (Gilens, 29) Anecdotal evidence such as the sustained popularity of the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders would seem to indicate that this issue still remains on the minds of many Americans. Additionally, recent action by the states of California and New York to increase their minimum wages to fifteen dollars per hour over the course of the next several years further indicates that this issue will remain in the public consciousness for some time to come. Thus, this topic should remain quite fertile in terms of fresh research being generated through the end of the topic year.

On a broader academic level, this topic shot to the forefront with the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2014. It’s not often that a 700-plus page economic treatise captivates the attention of nonfiction readers, but Capital did just that, spending five months on the New York Times Best Seller list, including a three week stint at the top of the chart. Discussions of the central theories of this book took place over the course of several pieces in publications like The Economist. As Megan McArdle wrote in a review of the book for Bloomberg Businessweek, “The first thing to understand about Capital is that it is not really one book. There’s a data book, an analysis book, a book of projections about the future, and a book of policy recommendations based on those projections. All four are packaged within its 700 pages and frequently interleaved…and when you see commentators yelling at each other about the contents, it’s probably because they’re talking about different books.” (McArdle 45) To put it more simply, “Piketty has touched off the most vigorous public conversation about inequality since Occupy Wall Street – only this time it’s a conversation about data and economics, rather than the wealth of certain bankers and the propriety of camping in the streets. That’s a lot of progress to come from one man.” (McArdle 47) That being said, we can thank a couple of political developments in the last year for making this topic even more central in our political discourse. The first is the long-lived nature of Bernie Sanders’ quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, which featured income inequality as a central t heme of his campaign. Policy proposals such as the living wage, free college education, creating decent jobs, and creating affordable housing all speak to the issue and effects of income inequality. Additionally, a number of states (most notably California and New York) have taken steps within the last two years to increases their minimum wages instead of waiting for federal action. This means that a) there will be plenty of literature on this particular plan area and b) we should see some evolving empirical data on the effects of minimum wage increases on labor markets, consumer prices, and the like. Thus, it stands to reason that this topic should remain quite fertile in terms of fresh research being generated through the end of the year. Anecdotal evidence such as the sustained popularity of the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders would seem to indicate that this issue still remains on the minds of many Americans. Additionally, recent action by the states of California and New York to increase their minimum wages to fifteen dollars per hour over the course of the next several years further indicates that this issue will remain in the public consciousness for some time to come. Thus, this topic should remain quite fertile in terms of fresh research being generated through the end of the topic year.

Empirically, the case can be made that the United States is becoming more and more unequal in terms of income, and has been for nearly fifty years. In 1968, the Gini Coefficient for the United States was .386. By 2014, it had increased to a Gini Coefficient of .478. (“Gini Ratios”, www) In short, the United States is looking less and less like its OECD partners (using such data, the most equal nations in terms of income are South Korea and Iceland, with Ginis of .34 and .38, respectively) and more unequal than places such as Iran, Nigeria, Russia and Mongolia. (Sutter) However, what is perhaps even more

disconcerting is a growing disconnect between the super-wealthy and the rest of the population, along with a diminished link between hard work and reward, as Eric Liu wrote in 2014:

We live in an age of extreme concentration of wealth in America. The problem is not just that the 1% have managed to nearly triple their share of national income in the last three decades. Nor is it just that the 1% increasingly are fed, schooled and housed in a bubble apart from the rest of their fellow citizens.

The problem is that today's concentration of wealth is breaking the golden link that Ryan and others take pains to emphasize -- the link between work and reward.

Economist Thomas Piketty's landmark new book "Capital" unpacks this delinking in great statistical detail. It turns out that increasing numbers of Americans in the 1%, .1% and .01% have done little to "earn" their wealth or privilege.

Contrary to myth, most of today's plutocrats are not the kind of Steve Jobsian visionary risk-taking entrepreneurs or superstar celebrities. The .01%, for instance, tend overwhelmingly to be high-end corporate managers and executives, particularly on Wall Street, operating in interlocking networks that inflate the standard of what an executive is "worth." Or they are the heirs of the great entrepreneurs (4 of the 10 richest Americans are children of Sam Walton), inheritors of fortunes of which it can truly be said, "someone else built that."

An aristocracy is emerging in America, a class of insiders that corrodes the promise of equal citizenship. And with this compounding of unearned advantage, certain antisocial values and behaviors have taken root among the superrich -- norms that threaten to corrupt the rest of American society. (Liu)

Liu goes on further to argue that the super-wealthy are using the political power that their wealth grants them, effectively increased by the 2014 Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (which held that aggregate contribution limits to federal candidates were unconstitutional), to further skew the system in their favor, creating a fundamental threat to democracy. In fact, a paper published in the Fall 2014 issue of Perspectives on Politics by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University notes that, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” (Gilens and Page)

Further evidence of this can be found in accountings of spending by Super PAC organizations, where many wealthy individuals have used this type of organization to help bankroll the political efforts of their chosen candidates. As of April 26June 24, Super PACs had raised over $75507 million and spent over $405332 million, placing the spending not far off what was done by Super PACs for the entire 2014 campaign cycle and money raised slightly ahead of all 2014. (“Outside Spending”, www) Based on the current pace, it certainly seems entirely possible that this election cycle, after all Super PAC efforts are accounted for, may well break the $1 billion mark.

In today's American economy, the disparity between rich and poor is greater than at any other point in the nation's history, only challenged by the bread lines of the pre-Depression 1920's. Nobel economist Paul Krugman further illustrates the dire nature of the current income gap when he writes:

If gains in productivity had been evenly shared across the workforce, the typical worker's income would be about 35 percent higher now than it was in the early seventies. But the upward redistribution of income meant that the typical worker saw a far smaller gain. Indeed, everyone below roughly the 90th percentile of the wage distribution--the bottom of the top 10 percent--saw his or her income grow more slowly than average, while only those above the 90th percentile saw above-average gains. So the limited gain of the typical American worker were the flip side of above-average gains for the top 10 percent. (Krugman, 128-129)

While some argue that the current state of the income gap in America is simply part of a global readjustment to free trade and the rise of technological industry, a question remains as to why the United States has a much higher disparity than wealthy democracies, as historian Eric Alterman points out:

One cannot help but ask: Why is this not the case in Europe or Japan? In fact, among major world economies, the United States in recent years has had the third-greatest disparity in incomes between the very top and everyone else; only Mexico and Russia are worse. Only in the United States are the superwealthy so powerful, and their ideological interests so well tended and defended, that their interests have come to stand as 'principles' in our political discourse. As the historian Eric Foner notes, according to Franklin Roosevelt, 'individual freedom' could not be said to 'exist without economic security and independence....for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.' (Alterman, 300-301)

Recently, though, some new research and writing has emerged that may serve to reframe this discussion, or at least introduce some intriguing arguments. In December of 2015, the Pew Research Center noted that the percentage of Americans who were considered by economic metrics to be middle class had fallen below 50 percent for the first time in the nation’s history, or at least since measures of economic inequality have been recorded. (“Middle Class”, www). One item in the data worthy of note, and certainly hailednoted by conservatives and libertarians, was that some evidence indicated that the movement out of the middle class was bidirectional – both the lower class and upper class saw their percentage of the population increase, the latter phenomenon being something that the American Enterprise Institute, among others, has been arguing as an occurring trend since 2013. Admittedly, the AEI does use a measure of overall income as opposed to composition of the various economic classes, so the comparison between its data and that of Pew isn’t entirely an apples-to-apples one, but there areis enough different interpretations of the data that make this angle one that can be debated. More relevant to our purposes, though, the data is objective and easy enough to understand that novices will be able to access arguments here while more experienced debaters will be interested in getting into the intricacies of the methodologies being utilized to advance these ideas.

Another recent article, “Getting Serious About Inequality”, written by Economics Professor Kevin T. Leicht of the University of Illinois, challenges some of the previously accepted assumptions about income inequality. Specifically, Liecht seeks to dispel, among others, the myths that income variances exist primarily between groups based on demographic characteristics (race, gender, education levels)

than within those traits (Liecht 218-222). Certainly this will give debaters on both sides of the debates on feminism/anti-blackness/critical race theory sufficient ground to make arguments that will be strategically desirable, improving the quality and specificity of those discussions, as opposed to some of the more tortured link scenarios such debaters try to establish when they run these positions. Additionally, Leicht discusses some of the impacts of economic inequality, including the reduction ofdiminishing overall economic growth, which is also discussed in a later paper by researchers from the International Monetary Fund in their examination of neolibreralism. Some of this will be discussed in more detail in the section on harms.

Scope, Range, and Quality

Among the issues that exist within discussing economics and economic policy are the following: Language so obtuse that it can be perceived as meaningless Discussions so fraught with minutiae that were it to be distilled and bottled, could be

used to cure insomnia for the populations of entire nations Mathematical models that require advanced studies in calculus and/or differential

equations to utilize – for example, the Wikipedia page on the Gini Coefficient seems to have no fewer than six different methods of calculation, dependent on the particular statistical approach taken, all involving the use of integrations or summations.

As such, the key to producing a viable debate topic principally grounded in economics for a community where most coaches, debaters, and judges will not have engaged in the advanced mathematical studies needed to fully understand the calculations lies in careful resolution wording and developing commonly accepted understandings of what economic or income inequality entails. Discussing economic policy can be fraught with language either so obtuse as to have no meaning at all or so involved in minutiae as to cure insomnia for the masses. The key to developing a viable year-long debate topic lies in careful resolution wording and a further understanding of what precisely income inequality entails. The definition that Paul Krugman offered and that we was used for the 2014 paper remains a particularly clean description of the two types of economic inequality prevalent in America today:

In discussing ways to reduce inequality, it's helpful to make a distinction between two concepts of inequality, and two kinds of inequality-reducing policies.

The first concept of inequality is inequality in market income. The United States is, of course, a market economy. Most people get most of their income by selling their labor to employers; people also get income from the market return to assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate. So one measure of inequality is the inequality of the income people get from selling things. The distribution of market income is highly unequal and getting more so. In fact, market income is now as unequally distributed as it was in the 1920s.

But that’s not the end of the story. The government collects part of market income in the form of taxes, and transfers part of that revenue back to the public either in direct payments, like the Social Security checks that are the main source of income for many older Americans, or by paying for goods and services like health care. So another measure of inequality is the inequality of disposable income – income after you take taxes and government transfers into account. In modern America, as in all advanced countries, inequality in disposable income in less than inequality in market income,

because we have a welfare state – though a small one by international standards. Taxes and transfers, which somewhat crimp the living standards of the rich while helping out the less fortunate, are the reason America in 2007 doesn’t feel quite as unequal as America did in the twenties. (Krugman 251-252)

The benefit of this distinction will become clearer as Iwe move into an analysis of possible affirmative case ground, but the work that Krugman does here will, as the particulars of the resolution are fleshed out, help delineate some clear boundaries for those who wish to argue topicality against particular affirmative cases Krugman lays the groundwork here for a clean restriction for topicality standards.

With proper limitations on the topic, the variety of argument is still quite fertile. Even after one discounts those who deny that income inequality is a problem (which, as noted above, havethere is some fresh evidence related to that claim), the range of solutions is as varied as the political spectrum itself, and sometimes finds those with radically divergent viewpoints supporting similar plans. For example, the negative income tax that was advocated by Chicago School economist Milton Friedman also was proposed as an economic justice solution by the Green Party on page 59 of their 2014 platform. (“Green Party 2014 Platform”) Additionally, policies such as increasing the minimum wage or expanding the scope of the Earned Income Tax Credit would also certainly fall within the scope of this resolution, with the EITC having been a personal favorite of none other than Ronald Reagan. Another interesting policy option that would be that is at least arguably topical under at least some resolutions would be the creation of tech hubs. , as Ssuch areas tend to have lower income inequality, as Denver Nicks noted in Time on February 20, 2014, “As the Progressive Policy Institute notes, income inequality actually increased at a slower rate in tech hubs than in non-tech hubs in Brookings study, and two tech hubs (Denver and Seattle) actually saw a decrease in income inequality in recent years compared to just one non-tech hub (El Paso).” Affirmative teams could potentially advocate some variant of the old Ben and Jerry’s policy that limited executive salaries to no more than five times (later increased to seven times and abandoned after Unilever purchased Ben and Jerry’s) that of the lowest paid employee. This, coupled with the wealth of post-crash literature, provides ample ground for a strong variety of solvency mechanisms within the topic.

As with all topics, one question that needs to be addressed is the degree to which novices will be able to access the ideas being presented in the literature, along with whether the body of research also provides sufficient complexity to hold the attention of advanced debaters for a full academic year. Most, if not all, high school economics textbooks address the issue of income inequality through a discussion of the Lorenz Curve and/or the Gini Coefficient (both discussed in detail previously). Many texts go further and discuss various policy solutions to income inequality, though those discussions are usually couched in the theme of anti-poverty policy. For varsity debaters, there are more sophisticated models for such issues that will allow them to fully explore the nuances of this topic over the academic year. Additionally, as mentioned previously, while novice debaters are likely to focus on the data itself, advanced debaters may choose to engage the methodology. Finally, while novice or more policy-oriented teams will focus on the issue of income inequality in a vacuum, experienced or kritik-oriented teams will likely look at this within intersections of race and gender, and even sexual orientation, though admittedly there appears to be less literature on the last of these intersections than the others (a Google Scholar search for “heteronormativity” and “income inequality” yielded fewer than 200 results).

In discussing an appropriate agent of action for an income inequality resolution, the literature leaves little argument that the United States Federal Government is the single most influential player in

affecting income inequality. Thomas Hartmann discusses the history of government policies doing just that when he writes:

Although Herbert Hoover ran his 1932 presidential campaign on the slogan Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner, by that time few Americans were buying his idea of more tax cuts for millionaires. They also weren't happy with an extremist Supreme Court that had recently struck down minimum wage and other worker protection laws as unconstitutional. They voted in massive numbers for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who campaigned relentlessly on a platform of government involvement in the marketplace to restore both democracy and the middle class.

It took the leadership of President Roosevelt in the 1930s for the government to again take a hand in creating a middle class, this time via industrialized labor instead of land. FDR implemented the two necessary economic ingredients -- a classical economic model and a government-spending stimulus -- thereby almost single-handedly creating the modern middle class.

FDR made sure that We the People had money in our pockets through progressive taxation, Social Security, fair labor laws, the regulation of business, and the vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws. In 1935 he pushed through the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a minimum wage, and the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), which protected workers' right to create a democratic institution – a union that elected its own leadership – in the feudal kingdoms of America’s workplaces. (Hartmann, 45)

Hartmann goes on to explain that the federal government remains the only actor that can truly help close the income gap when he writes, "Government spending can be used to rebuild the middle class....It worked well between 1935 and 1981, and it could work again." (Hartmann, 21) Harvard's Christopher Jencks agrees with this argument, writing, "At least in rich democracies, differences in income distribution seem to be traceable to differences in constitutional arrangements, electoral systems, and economic institutions. Those differences in turn affect the political balance between left and right, the level of spending on the welfare state, and a wide range of economic policies." (Jencks, 134) Furthermore, as we will soon be discussed, there are a variety of economic policies that only the federal government can directly impact (like those regulations implemented by the Federal Reserve Bank or federal tax code reform).

For some case areas, such as the minimum wage, negative teams might attempt arguments like “states are acting now” or “states solve best”, and it is undeniable that some states are acting on this issue. However, other areas, like CEO wage caps or tax rates, are almost certainly going to have to be the province of the federal government if efficacy is desired. Additionally , a federal government setting a minimum wage does not preclude states from going even higher, as has been evidenced by the independent actions of states in recent years.

Harms Areas

But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect than what relates merely to elections. They are sources of endless contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the

common rights of national society....This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at the ruin of towns; and the effect is visible.-Thomas Paine

Biopower – For those debaters looking for a kritik-oriented angle to the topic of income inequality, biopower may represent some fertile ground. As Eric Liu wrote in an article on CNN:

What’s in this dysfunctional culture of concentrated wealth? Look around Wall Street. You’ll find tribal insularity, short-term thinking, personal irresponsibility, cynicism about playing by the rules, an aversion to socially productive labor, a habit of shameless materialism, an inability to defer gratification and a lack of concern for what “message” all this sends to youth raised in such an environment.

In short, you’ll find all the things typically imputed to a culture of poverty.

Now, to be sure, there are poor people who do exhibit these antisocial values and norms. And there is no question that plenty of poor people are poor because they made bad choices and behaved in self-destructive ways.

But rich people who exhibit such values have something the poor don’t: Money. Money buys exemption from bad choices. Money confers power – in particular, over the poor. It confers the power to frame public narrative and policymaking and to determine whose behavior -- whose culture – is (and isn’t) called pathological. (Liu)

This doesn’t seem to fall into the strictly Foucaldian notion of biopower, as his domination of the people seems to come from the government as opposed to an economic class. However, there are other authors and works (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, for instance) who infuse the notion of biopower with the class analysis typical of Marxist-leaning intellectuals, providing the base of literature needed for one to pursue those sorts of arguments. Perhaps (though this is admittedly a late addition and would require further research) some of the sorts of affluenza behaviors referenced in the Ethan Couch case might take place because of a sense of entitlement on the part of the wealthy (none of this should be taken to justify such behaviors, but that this belief that money can buy one’s way out of problems might have some basis in fact) that creates asymmetrical relationships.

Capitalism – Conventional American political wisdom has heldbecome that intervention in the economy disrupts the market's ability to self-stabilize and mutates the capitalist ideal. However, a majority of economists actually disagree with this point of view. Investment banker and management consultant Yves Smith explains this idea more clearly in her book Econned when she writes:

In fact, the main reason that the vast majority of economists endorse various forms of intervention in commerce is that many areas of activity do have a propensity toward concentration. Fewer powerful players lead to less competitive pricing, a sub-optimal outcome. Thus most economists endorse measures that partially reverse imbalances between influential producers and comparatively weak buyers....Yet remarkably, the backers of the extreme 'free market' views maintain that the only factor that leads the economy away from the neoclassical ideal of optimal efficiency is 'coercion' and even more remarkably, that it comes only from the government. The idea

that private actors will achieve commercial advantage that gives them economic power over others is airbrushed out. (Smith, 110-111)

This, in a myriad of forms, is likely to be a key, if not the key, battleground during the course of the debate season should this topic be adopted. Odd as it may sound, this part of the topic may very easily become bidirectional. Consider, for instance, that some Affirmatives may use cases to critique the capitalist model for not creating social justice, and thus advocating for the government to step in and restore the balance (i.e. capitalism bad). Alternatively, affirmatives could argue that addressing income inequalities restores faith in the capitalist model, solving for the class tensions that might lead to the overthrow of such systems (i.e. capitalism is good and must be preserved to avoid the most radical Marxist lines of thought from becoming realized). In the same way, it seems very reasonable that a Negative team could attack affirmative cases that sidestep the capitalism question from either side, requiring Affirmatives to be very well-researched on this point.

Civil Unrest – In Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone, he discusses the decline of social capital in America that created common experiences among our polity that was necessary for democracy to succeed. While that particular argument might still be viable, another avenue to consider is that income inequality diminishes the “common experience” of being an American and breeds resentment on the part of the underclass against the elites, perhaps to the point where the underclass might behave in anti-social ways. In fact, some political observers might argue that such frustration and alienation is part of what has driven the support for the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. While the most immediate impact might be crime, if the aspiration gap was large enough to create the perception among the poor that they can never get ahead, there would seem to be literature out there to advance the idea that the underclass becomes radicalized and resists the state, principally through terrorist actions. Krugman perhaps describes it best when he says, "More broadly still, high levels of inequality strain the bonds that hold us together as a society. There has been a long-term downward trend in the extent to which Americans trust either the government or one another." (Krugman, 251) Professor and practitioner of Social Work Phyllis Day goes even further when she writes:

The mechanisms are there, through Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service. What we lack is the moral foresight to accomplish it. We have taken another road, forcing the burdens of harsh values on the already overburdened poor while we pay homage to the rich. Our social aim today is not to end poverty but to make profits, and the targets of society's largesse are not the poor but the rich.

This has set new patterns into society, patterns that divide us and set us against one another. They include rivalries among the poor and near-poor, growing dissension between white and nonwhite people, the polarization of income, and a tacit approval of violence on both private and political levels. This new 'tribalism' is often based on race and demonstrates itself in local militia groups, the rise of hate groups such as the Aryan nation, the bombing in Oklahoma City, and increasingly violent federal retaliation against dissidents such as the Branch Davidians at Waco or the siege at Ruby Ridge. (Day, 460)

Another way that this may be fueled involves the divestment of the upper class from investing in public goods. Kevin Leicht writes about this is 2016:

Once inequality reaches certain heights (which we in the United States have long passed), the wealth can procure private alternatives to public services, hoard the benefits those private alternatives generate, and opt out of paying for public services everyone else relies on. At the extremes, the affluent can build entire alternative communities of escape where less worthy souls are prohibited from ever setting foot – gated communities, private schools, private highways, exclusive shopping areas, private police forces, and private health care services (this list is potentially endless).

There is plenty of literature that discusses why this is allowed to occur, but there is one answer nobody seems to want to give – it is permitted. One thing I have told my students for a number of years about why this goes on and how to stop it is that land in the United States is (comparatively) too cheap and too plentiful. The wealthy can physically segregate themselves from others in ways that are much harder to do if land is expensive and dear (just ask the residents of Hong Kong). Living among throngs of people has liabilities and everything is far from peace and harmony, but land scarcity does have one major advantage – people have to put up with each other. (Leicht 215-216)

Taking Leicht’s argument to the impact level, it would seem that such a situation, once institutionalized within American society, would fuel the sort of resistance that might manifest itself in any one of a number of ways: crime, insurrection, or even terrorism, or even the collapse of the American experiment, leaving in its place some sort of authoritarian or perhaps even a rogue state, one with access to thousands of nuclear weapons.

Democracy – Eric Liu takes a quote from early 20th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis when he remarked that “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.” (Liu) The concentration of money at the top of the income pyramid along with decreased limits of the ability of the wealthy to utilize their fiscal resources creates the potential for our democratic traditions to be torn asunder in the name of raw capitalism, as was also argued by John Rawls in his various works. From founding fathers to modern economic and social thinkers, the income gap seems to be viewed as a primary threat to the democratic process. As Paul Krugman writes:

Ever since America's founding, our idea of ourselves has been that of a nation without sharp class distinctions--not a leveled society of perfect equality, but one in which the gap between the economic elite and the typical citizen isn't an unbridgeable chasm. That's why Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.' Translated into modern terms as an assertion that a broad middle class is the most precious part of a state, Jefferson's statement remains as true as ever. High inequality, which has turned us into a nation with a much -weakened middle class, has a corrosive effect on social relations and politics, one that has become ever more apparent as America has moved deeper into a new Gilded Age. (Krugman, 245)

Affirmatives should have no trouble finding literature arguing that a litany of hard negative impacts result from here, including civil unrest, political corruption, and external conflict. It would also stand to reason that some modeling scenarios can be developed out here as well.

Economic Discrimination – This concept is fleshed out a couple different ways in the literature, but I wish to focus on this idea within the context of the effects of income inequality, specifically in terms of

access to services/infrastructure/education. Most recently, this is well-exemplified in the Flint Water Crisis, culminating in Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declaring the city to be in a state of emergency this past January. Because the city and state failed to install corrosion inhibitors, between 6 ,000 and 12,000 children were exposed to lead-tainted drinking water, creating future health effects which the scope may not be fully known for some time to come. (“United Way”, www) As one reviewer noted, it would be very difficult to imagine a Detroit suburb like Bloomfield Hills (median household income of over $170,000) having to deal with the same water issues that Flint (median household income under $30,000) has had to contend with, simply because Bloomfield Hills has the tax base to install measures to prevent lead from leaking into the water supply and/or the economic (and by extension, political) power to compel the state of Michigan do something about the issue. Similarly, probably every one of us can think of schools that are low-performing in our states. In many cases, those districts are in economically poorer areas, which creates a circular effect – poorer areas lead to less effective schools, which means that the students coming out of those schools have lower skills than their compatriots from wealthier districts, which we know then impacts economic outcomes. While affirmatives could isolate some of these impacts, there are some time-frame issues to many of the terminal impacts. However, the argument that racism is wrong and should be acted against will be in play in these scenarios.

Macroeconomics – There have been two points in American history when income inequality reached the level of emergency. We only see it now because those points were immediately preceding The Great Depression and the global economic meltdown of 2009. By nearly all scholarly accounts, the income gap has a very real effect on the American economy. On the macroeconomic level, harm scenarios will be able to discuss not only the way in which income disparity leads to American economic failure, but how that failure impacts the world at large. Since the dominance of free-trade took hold, the interconnected nature of global economics has gone beyond theory to reality. As a leader in the movement driving free trade and the world's largest economy, most economists agree that the United States holds a unique place in effecting the economies of other nations. However, experts also suggest that the income gap here has a uniqueuniquely has an impact on increasing ethnic conflict and terrorism across the globe. Take, for instance, Phyllis Day's position as she continues from earlier:

Like those citizens in the United States whose lives are Third World in nature, we have neglected to understand the impact of corporate power and arrogance on the Third World nations themselves. In retrospect, we should not have been so surprised at the heartbreaking attack on America, since America is the symbol, warranted or not, of inequality among people and their lives and work across the world. Nor can we predict the impact of the war against international terrorism on social welfare within the United States, except that it will be costly. This is not a war about nations or governments; rather, though we may refuse to recognize it, this war is about world economics, the decline of national cultures, and the ease of use of technologies to destroy instead of construct--factors that, in fact, war has always been about. (Day, 460)

For those who wish to look at this through a more neoliberal lens, there are also impacts to competitiveness, which accesses all sorts of other pieces of evidence (I will spare going through the terminal impacts here – coaches can raid their backfiles, Open Evidence Project, or send their students out to get some new cards for this). However, Leicht continues with his discussion of the impacts of income inequality as he writes that:

Finally, extreme inequality harms the international competitiveness of the country. There is scarcely a social indicator worthy of study that improves when inequality rises – life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, obesity, mental illness, and so on – all worsen as social inequality increases. This produces two serious, deadweight losses for our society and culture; (1) a massive loss in human potential that is wasted, not developed, or outright killed because people are not in the right place, with the right parents, with the right connections, and (2) a massive financial deadweight loss from the money we have to spend dealing with the consequences of inequality rather than fixing it in the first place. In short, every dollar we spend on prisons, home security systems, suburban neighborhoods away from “those people,” drug and alcohol treatment, and family counseling is a dollar we do not spend productively doing much of anything. (Leicht, 216)

That link to competitiveness should open up a whole range of terminal impacts for affirmatives taking this approach, from trade wars to economic collapse to a loss of hegemony.

Microeconomics – A discussion about the widening gap between rich and poor will undoubtedly involve a deep discussion of the various economic impacts it causes. For the purpose of brevity, we have split them into micro and macroeconomic impacts here. The microeconomic impact scenarios involve the greatest depth of literature. This is the discussion of harm scenarios that involve the effect of poverty on the Americans experiencing it. As Phyllis Day writes in A New History of Social Welfare:

We have created a 'Third-World citizenry' within the United States, a neo-colonization of our disadvantaged. With wage labor controlled, a segment of our population walled off in urban ghettos killing one another and being killed in 'drug wars,' and social programs limited, proscribed, and deteriorated, a small group of moneyed elite nevertheless continues to increase profits and reap rewards in the destruction of lives. (Day, 460)

From this jumping point, harms scenarios include discussions of health care, education, criminal justice, and ultimately the American standard of living, as Paul Krugman points out:

One reason to care about inequality is the straightforward matter of living standards....the lion's share of economic growth in America over the past thirty years has gone to a small, wealthy minority, to such an extent that it's unclear whether the typical family has benefited at all from technological progress and the rising productivity it brings. The lack of clear economic progress and the rising productivity it brings. The lack of clear economic progress for lower- and middle-income families is in itself an important reason to seek a more equal distribution of income. (Krugman, 244)

Social Inequality – Often under-represented in economic discussions is the indisputable link between economic inequality and social inequality. This, however, is one of the easiest links to make. Compounded by a lack of representation in government and access to resources, the income gap drives the impoverished into a separate level of citizenry; one beneath the ivory tower of American Dream. Paul Krugman takes a more in-depth look at this issue when he writes:

By claiming that income inequality doesn't matter because we have social equality, Kristol was in effect admitting that income inequality would be a problem if it led to social inequality. And here's the thing: It does. Kristol's fantasy of a world in which the rich live just like you and me, and nobody feels socially inferior, bears no resemblance to the real America we live in.

The fact is that vast income inequality inevitably brings vast social inequality in its train. And this social inequality isn't just a matter of envy and insults. It has real, negative consequences for the way people live in this country. It may not matter much that the great majority of Americans can't afford to stay in the eleven-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suites popping up in luxury hotels around the world. It matters a great deal that millions of middle-class families buy houses they can't really afford, taking on more mortgage debt than they can safely handle, because they're desperate to send their children to a good school--and intensifying inequality means that the desirable school districts are growing fewer in number, and more expensive to live in. (Krugman, 246-247))

Affirmative Case Ground

If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree.-Thomas Jefferson

In turning back to an earlier discussion about the difference between market and post-market income inequality, I we have split the discussion of possible affirmative case ground into these two areas. We believe that thisThis division provides an informative grouping of possible policies for affirmative teams to utilize as solvency mechanisms. Furthermore, this may also provide a helpful restricting factor in resolution wording.

Market Policies -- In review, market income inequality specifically relates to the amount of money one brings into the home. On face, this is the most basic and direct form of income inequality, and as such requires the most basic and direct solutions. Paul Krugman explains the concept further:

Aftermarket policies can do a great deal to reduce inequality. But that should not be our whole focus. The Great Compression also involved a sharp reduction in the inequality of market income. This was accomplished in part through wage controls during World War II, and experience we hope won't be repeated. Still, there are several steps we can take. (Krugman, 260)

Possibly the most elementary case area within this group involves labor law reform. The level of the national minimum wage is an issue of constant argument and one that Krugman takes head on:

There are two common but somewhat contradictory objections often heard to increasing the minimum wage. On one hand, it's argued that raising the minimum wage will reduce employment and increase unemployment. On the other it's argued that raising the minimum will have little or no effect in raising wages. The evidence,

however, suggest that a minimum wage increase will in fact have modest positive effects.

On the employment side, a classic study by David Card of Berkeley and Alan Krueger of Princeton, twoow of America's best labor economists, found no evidence that minimum wage increases in the range the United States has experienced led to job losses....For example, the state of Washington has a minimum wage almost three dollars an hour higher than its neighbor Idaho; business experiences near the state line seem to indicate that, if anything, Washington has gained jobs at Idaho's expense....Meanwhile minimum wage increases can have fairly significant effects on wages at the bottom end of the scale. (Krugman, 262)

Past the minimum wage discussion labor reform provides ample ground for affirmative cases. Possible solvency mechanisms include CEO wage caps, union labor support, mandatory arbitration restrictions, abolition of right-to-work, and restrictions on pre-screen criminal background checks for employment.

A second grouping of policy solutions to market inequality involves United States trade policy. Since the early nineties, many economists have written extensively about the way in which free trade has exported higher paying manufacturing jobs to the third world without replacing those jobs with the promised high tech positions. As a result, many point to free trade as the leading reason average wage incomes have fallen over the last thirty years. Paul Krugman explains this further:

Bangladesh mainly exports clothing--the classic labor-intensive good, produced by workers who need little formal education and no more capital equipment than a sewing machine. In return Bangladesh buys sophisticated goods--airplanes, chemicals, computers.

There's no question that U.S. trade with Bangladesh and other Third World countries, including China, widens inequality. Suppose that you buy a pair of pants made in Bangladesh that could have been made domestically. By buying the foreign pants you are in effect forcing the workers who would have been employed producing a made-in-America pair of pants to look for other jobs. Of course the converse is also true when the United States exports something: When Bangladesh buys a Boeing airplane, the American workers employed in producing that plane don't have to look for other jobs. But the labor embodied in U.S. exports is very different from the labor employed in U.S. industries that compete with imports. We tend to export 'skill-intensive' products like aircraft, supercomputers, and Hollywood movies; we tend to import 'labor-intensive' goods like pants and toys. So U.S. Trade with Third World countries reduces job opportunities for less-skilled American workers, while increasing demand for more-skilled workers. There's no question that this widens the wage gap between the less-skilled and the more-skilled, contributing to increased inequality. And the rapid growth of trade with low-wage countries, especially Mexico and China, suggests that this effect has been increasing over the past fifteen years. (Krugman, 135)

While not included in the wording of any of the specific resolutions, there is the possibility (either through this topic paper or as part of a future topic proposal on trade issues) to examine the connection between current trade policy and income inequality, specifically examining the neoliberal model.

International Monetary Fund researchers Jonathan Ostry, Praksah Loungani, and Davide Fuceri wrote at the end of May that:

Moreover, since both openness and austerity are associated with increasing income inequality, this distributional effect sets up an adverse feedback loop. The increase in Governments with ample fiscal space will do better by living with the debt. Finance & Development June 2016 41 inequality engendered by financial openness and austerity might itself undercut growth, the very thing that the neoliberal agenda is intent on boosting. There is now strong evidence that inequality can significantly lower both the level and the durability of growth. (Ostry, Loungani and Fuceri, 40-41)

At this point, there is probably not enough time to do a broad assessment of United States trade policy to do an evaluation of the viability of this literature, but the Wording Committee may want to have specific policies examined either prior to or at the Topic Selection Meeting.

Aftermarket Policies -- Aftermarket policies refer to those that effect affect a citizen's disposable income. These policies fall into one of three major categories; tax reform, bank reform, and welfare reform. Paul Krugman again offers a description of how government action may take place in this area:

If you're going through a rough patch in your life--or if your whole life has been rough--it's definitely better to be French than American. In France, if you lose your job and have to take an inferior one, you don't have to worry about losing your health insurance, because health insurance is provided by the government. If you're out of work for a long time, the government helps keep you fed and housed. If you're financially pinched by the cost of raising children, you get extra money from the state, as well as help with day care. You aren't guaranteed a comfortable life, but your family members, especially your children, are protected against experiencing really severe material deprivation.

On the other hand, if things are going very well for you, being French has its drawbacks. Income tax rates are somewhat higher than they are in the United States, and payroll taxes, especially the amount formally paid by employers but in effect taken out of wages, are much higher....In other words, France has extensive aftermarket policies that reduce inequality by comforting the afflicted but somewhat afflict the comfortable. In this France is typical of non-English-speaking Western nations. And even other English speakers do more to reduce aftermarket inequality than we do. (Krugman, 252-253)

The first option for affirmatives in this area is tax reform. Over the course of the last forty years, the American progressive tax system has been systematically dismantled, directly widening the gap between rich and poor. While multinational corporations utilize loopholes to avoid tax liability and the rate of capital gains taxation has steadily decreased, the tax burden has increasingly fallen on an ever shrinking middle-income America. Phyllis Day , author of A New History of Social Welfare and an educator and practitioner in the field of social work, makes a direct link between the Bush-era tax cuts and the widening gap between rich and poor when she writes:

The senior Bush's rhetoric of a 'thousand points of light' morphed into George W. Bush's 'compassionate conservatism.' Social programs seemed to receive the brunt

of conservatism; compassion was reserved for the nation's moneyed elite. Despite presidential protests that tax cuts would invigorate the economy by providing more jobs and increasing consumer confidence, a clear relationship emerged among tax cuts, rising unemployment, and a looming recession. The Bush administration gave tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, reducing the capital gains tax rates, lowering corporate interest rates and allowed high debt levels; promoted federal budget deficits as an alternative to raising taxes. Under estate tax laws of 1999, 6.6 percent of wealthy estates (those over $5.25 million) brought in federal revenues of $20 million. Under the George W. Bush administration, estate taxes are to be phased out....Therefore, the top one percent of the wealthiest Americans who would otherwise pay estate taxes will, in effect, receive a 36 percent tax reduction, enabling an even more top-heavy wealth-based American aristocracy. By 2004, more than $2 trillion in tax cuts were aimed primarily at the top 2 percent of earners, and budget deficits were projected to reach $5 trillion by 2010. Meanwhile, by August 2006 wages had fallen by more than 2 percent from 2003. Unemployment was 5 percent by the end of 2007, and from January 2001 to November 2007 inflation had risen by 26.4 percent, predicting an inevitable recession in 2008. (Day, 471-472)

There are a variety of possibly solvency mechanisms available here. Paul Krugman describes one such mechanism when discussing the existence of "super tax rates":

Top U.S. tax rates are also low compared with those in European countries. For example, in Britain, the top income tax rate is 40 percent, seemingly equivalent to the top rate of the Clinton years. However, in Britain employers also pay a social insurance tax--the equivalent of the employer share of FICA here--that applies to all earned income. (Most of the U.S. equivalent is levied only on income up to a maximum of $97,500.) As a result very highly paid British employees face an effective tax rate of almost 48 percent. In France effective top rates are even higher. Also, in Britain capital gains are taxed as ordinary income, so that the effective tax rate on capital gains for people with high income is 40 percent, compared with 15 percent in the United States. Taxing capital gains as ordinary income in the United States would yield significantly more revenue, and also limit the range of tax abuses like the hedge fund loophole.

Also, from the New Deal until the 1970s it was considered normal and appropriate to have 'super' tax rates on very-high-income individuals. Only a few people were subject to the 70 percent top bracket in the 70s, let alone the 90 percent-plus top rates of the Eisenhower years. (Krugman, 259)

Perhaps the most important topic within this area is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Phyllis Day describes the EITC as "probably America's best program for reducing poverty." (Day, 475) By 2003, the credit was used in 22.1 million households, receiving $39.2 billion, effectively lifting 4.4 million people above the poverty line (2.4 million of which were children). Expansion of the EITC provides an easy link for anti-poverty tax reform. Amongst the variety of other plan mechanisms available to affirmatives here include establishing a negative income tax, raising capital gains rates, and expanding/reinstating the estate ("death") tax.

The next grouping of case areas for aftermarket income inequality is perhaps the most rich with specific literature; : banking reform. Since the economic meltdown of 2009, there has been a windfall of

writing about the problems inherent to the American banking system. A central core of this writing involves how deregulation and/or lack of governmental oversight has led to a predatory system that extracts wealth from the poor under the guise of 'free market' values. Roger Lowenstein describes this process further in his book Origins of the Crash:

Properly organized, markets should be an engine of general prosperity. In theory, as share prices rise, the common man should reap a dividend through the stimulative effect on growth and jobs. But the shareholding culture of the '90s made a grander claim--that the ownership of stocks themselves was disseminating through society. Employee 401(k)s and other forms of employee participation were, it was said, democratizing capital. The relentless upward march of stocks was thus invigorating the middle class. Stocks were a leveling force, bringing ordinary Americans into the economic mainstream much as the automobile had done in the ear of the Model T.

That was the theory, and it is a prime reason why markets won such favor from politicians. But the leveling was a myth, as was the notion that the market was dispersing wealth throughout society. Many people owned a small portfolio but very few had a large one. As late as 1998, the eighth year of the boom, half of the households that owned stock of any kind (mutual funds, retirement accounts, direct shares, and so forth) had a total portfolio worth less than $25,000. Even among relatively affluent families--those with household income of more than $100,000 -- the median stock portfolio was only $150,000. So the million-dollar portfolios that were glorified in the popular culture were limited a very thin crust.

Despite the riches on Wall Street, those on the bottom, and also in the great middle of society, were essentially treading water. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew in the '80s and '90s by only a half a percent a year--and that only because many families were now sending two people to work. In other words, the Americans who constituted the lower half--not the lowest tenth, not just the jobless or the people on society's margins but the lower half--librarians, checkout clerks, forest rangers, and so on, did not participate in the boom at all.

Despite its pretensions, America was becoming a far less egalitarian society than it had been before the market boom. (Lowenstein, 46-47)

Yves Smith explains further how the wave of banking deregulation created an industry set on predation of the poor:

Financial firms were once contained within a regulated environment in which they were assured moderate but steady profits in exchange for services that contributed to the stability of the economy as a whole. Deregulation (and the failure of regulators to respond to the industry's attempts to escape restraints) changed everything, leading financial companies to become much more like the fiercely competitive firms idealized in neoclassical economics. With each company fighting for market share and profits, the aggressive impulses that had been check by oversight and by quaint notions like propriety were now unleashed.

It was easy for predatory firms to take advantage of their customers thanks to the rapid growth of a 'shadow banking system,' involving, in particular, over-the-counter markets derivatives. The financial services industry developed a range of products and services that were both very difficult for their clients to understand and also substantially outside of the reach of regulation.

In order to be ready to take advantage of fleeting profit opportunities, large financial firms also became more decentralized. Consequently, if misbehavior did come to light, it was often difficult to prove that top management had been responsible.

Finally, the people who were supposed to oversee financial markets had either absorbed enough of the ideas of neoclassical economics and the world view of the financial services industry that they had no interest in intervening (regulators, some judges in key decisions), or else they had a vested interest in keeping the party going (ratings agencies, along with accommodating accountants and attorneys). (Smith, 130-131)

Part and parcel to this wider conversation about banking is the effect regulatory agencies and financial institutions play in impacting income inequality. Yves Smith goes on to draw a direct link between the Federal Reserve Bank and American wages:

Recall that they saw the refusal of workers to accept low enough wages as a factor that made the Great Depression as severe as it was. One way to contain compensation is for the central bank to raise interest rates when inflation starts to build. The logic is that increasing unemployment will moderate pay pressures and also discourage businesses from giving employees pay increases in excess of productivity gains. Ironically, quite a few 'free markets' supporters endorse this type of intervention to correct a perceived market failure (labor having undue bargaining power) but reject a raft of others. (Smith, 224)

Beyond the Fed, there are a myriad of regulatory agencies that provide excellent grounds for affirmative policy making. For instance, The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) enforces investment rules regarding commodities purchased by Americans. The St. Louis Reserve Bank estimates that long-term investments in commodity futures currently accounts for 1/3 of the price Americans pay for a gallon of gasoline. Previous to the 1990's, this long-term investing was considered illegal, in violation of 1936 Commodity Exchange Act. However, a change in CFTC rules has allowed futures investments to artificially inflate the price of everyday products, unfairly burdening the people on the lowest end of the income spectrum (Taibbi, 132). These are but one regulatory example among a myriad of New Deal policies that were systematically dismantled over the last thirty years.

The final grouping of aftermarket policies reveals one of America's great political arguments of the last forty years; the health of the welfare state. Since the Clinton Administration, the American welfare system has experienced nothing short of a complete overhaul, or as Phyllis Day would put it, uprooting:

Faced with a recalcitrant Congress answerable both to a politically powerful Religious Right and economically forceful transnational corporations, Clinton chose politics over principles and backed away from other promises....his major retreat was in

welfare reform. Despite his protestations of care for children, this politically driven president, concerned with upcoming elections, after two vetoes signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Acts with its pernicious welfare reform bill titled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. To the dismay of those who trusted him, he fulfilled his promise to 'end welfare as we know it' by ending sixty years of the citizen entitlements established in the Social Security Acts of 1935. (Day, 421)

Indeed, the modern American welfare state seems paltry in comparison to other advanced nations. Martin Gilens discusses this further when he writes, "Compared with other affluent industrial nations, the Unites States does indeed devote less of its resources to government social spending. Among the world's developed nations, only Japan spends less of its gross national product on social programs, and the Scandinavian countries....devote twice as much of their GNP to government social programs as does the United States." (Gilens, 23)

Welfare reform provides a wide array of specific solvency mechanisms for affirmative teams. Amongst them being reforms or expansions of veteran's benefits, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), Unemployment Insurance, Workers Compensation, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Food and Nutrition Programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC). Additionally, there is much ground within the welfare realm for the implementation of new policies, like substance abuse and mental health services or rehabilitation assistance for ex-convicts. Add to this harm scenarios specifically tied to welfare reform, like the racial and sexual implications of welfare reform, and there is more than ample affirmative ground in this section alone.

For those associations who specify a limited set of novice plans and cases to be debated in their jurisdictions, such a list might look like this:

Increase the top marginal income tax rate Increase the minimum wage Increase or expand qualification status for the Earned Income Tax Credit Increase the phase-out point for the Social Security Tax Implement a negative income tax Increase the capital gains tax

Negative Core Arguments

Instead of trying to predict what every camp is likely to produce against this resolution, should it be adopted, we it seems proper should like to introduce a brief list of some of the intuitive core negative positions likely to be run on this resolution:

Business Confidence Disadvantage Capitalism Good Kritik Environmental Tradeoff Disadvantage Federalism Disadvantage Food Prices Disadvantage Inflation Disadvantage Politics Disadvantage Socialism Kritik States Counterplan Trade Deficit Disadvantage

Again, this is in no way intended to be an exhaustive list, but merely one to show that there is some strategic flexibility to negative teams on this topic. At first glance, it seems that one of the core negative arguments likely to be advanced against affirmatives is that steps to improve income equality will interfere with the operation of the market system. Impact stories may include some of the following:

A government picking winners and losers will naturally decrease economic growth. Creation of “tax exiles”, where wealthy citizens take up residence in other nations to reduce

their tax burdens. Minimum wage increases lead to reduced unemployment, bringing about a decrease in

unemployment, either based on a perception of businesses (like perhaps a Business Confidence scenario) or some actual decrease in the economy.

Conclusion

The topic of income/economic inequality is one that has become central to our politics, as evidenced by the suasion exhibited in the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Donald Trump. It’s not going anywhere and is not going to be solved before the end of the debate season. The central discussion of capitalism versus government intervention (and whether the two can be mutually compatible) is one on which there is copious amounts of evidence that both novices can understand and varsity debaters can advance nuanced arguments. Policy-oriented teams will be able to easily craft arguments such as Business Confidence, Politics, and a veritable plethora of economic scenarios (many based on labor costs collapsing a particular industry that is significant to the economy), while kritik-oriented teams will be able to challenge the Captialist/Neoliberalist model itself or examine class within the context of race/gender/sexual orientation, creating a topic that will not intrinsically favor a particular style of debate. Most importantly, though, is that this issue is one that will impact every debater in the years and decades after they finish arguing this topic. That is perhaps the best reason why we should be discussing it in the 2017-2018 academic year.

Definitions

Banking regulation

“Bank regulation includes issuing specific regulations and guidelines to govern the operations, activities and acquisitions of banking organizations.” www.federalreserveeducation.org

economic inequality

Economic inequality (also described as the gap between rich and poor, income inequality, wealth disparity, wealth and income differences or wealth gap[1]) is the difference between individuals or populations in the distribution of their assets, wealth, or income. Wikipedia.

“We measure economic inequality by looking at the distributions of income and wealth. A household’s income is the amount that it receives in a given period. A household’s wealth is the value of the things it owns at a point in time.” Bade and Parkin, Foundations of Economics (AP Edition 2007), p. 472

Federal minimum wage

“The federal minimum wage provisions are contained in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009.” U.S. Department of Labor, online.

“Minimum wage is the minimum amount of compensation an employee must receive for performing labor. Minimum wages are typically established by contract or legislation by the government.” Investopedia, online.

income inequality

“A measurement of the distribution of income that highlights the gap between individuals or households making most of the income in a given country and those making very little”. Business Dictionary.com

“The unequal distribution of household or individual income across the various participants in an economy. Income inequality is often presented as the percentage of income to a percentage of population. For example, a statistic may indicate that 70% of a country’s income is controlled by 20% of that country’s residents.” Investopedia.com

“Income inequality refers to how evenly or unevenly income is distributed in a society. The United States has a relatively high level of income inequality because the very richest people take home a large share of the economic pie -- and there is a relatively large gap between them and some of the poorest people in America.” John Sutter, CNN, October 29, 2013.

Internal Revenue Code

“The Internal Revenue Code is the body of law that codifies all federal tax laws, including income, estate, gift, excise, alcohol, tobacco, and employment taxes.” The Free Dictionary.com

“The comprehensive set of tax laws created by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This code was enacted as Title 26 of the Unites States Code by Congress, and is sometimes also referred to as the

Internal Revenue Title. The code is organized according to topic, and covers all relevant rules pertaining to income, gift, estate, sales, payroll and excise taxes.” Investopedia.com

poverty

“the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions” Merriam-Webster Online.

“America's official poverty measure is far simpler. Developed in the 1960s, the poverty threshold represents the basic cost of food for a household, multiplied by three.” The Economist, Jan. 20, 2011.

predatory lending

“Predatory lending is any lending practice that imposes unfair or abusive loan terms on a borrower. It is also any practice that convinces a borrower to accept unfair terms through deceptive, coercive, exploitative or unscrupulous actions for a loan that a borrower doesn’t need, doesn’t want or can’t afford.By definition, predatory lending benefits the lender and ignores or hinders the borrower’s ability to repay the debt. These lending tactics often try to take advantage of a borrower’s lack of understanding about loans, terms or finances.” Debt.org, online

progressive taxation

“A progressive tax is a tax that takes a larger percentage from the income of high-income earners than it does from low-income individuals.” Investopedia, online.

reduce

“make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size” Oxford Online Dictionary

“To bring down, as in extent, amount, or degree; diminish” American Heritage Online Dictionary.

should

“used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions”. Oxford Online Dictionary

“used to express obligation or duty”. American Heritage Online Dictionary

substantiallyAuthor’s note – as anyone who has coached or debated will know, several legal definitions exist that assign a precise percentage to this term. However, those definitions are often, by their context, limited to addressing the issue that was at bar in that particular case. Thus, while a list of cases could cite substantially as meaning anything from 10 percent up to 90 percent, I will refrain from listing them here. Debaters historically have proven themselves plenty capable of finding these interpretations.

“to a great or significant extent”. Oxford Online Dictionary

“considerable in importance, value, degree, amount, or extent”. American Heritage Online Dictionary

United States federal government“The United States Federal Government is established by the US Constitution. The Federal Government shares sovereignty over the United Sates with the individual governments of the States of US. The Federal government has three branches: i) the legislature, which is the US Congress, ii) Executive, comprised of the President and Vice president of the US and iii) Judiciary.” US Legal.com Definitions

“The government of the United States, established by the Constitution, is a federal republic of 50 states, a few territories and some protectorates. The national government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.” Word IQ.com

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