Welfare Surveillance Affirmative/Negative

Welfare Surveillance Affirmative

1AC

1AC

The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its surveillance conducted through means and moral testing of social services.

Government benefits are not distributed equally – they are racially coded and doled out at least according to preexisting notions of normalcy, race, class, and gender. While some services, like Social Security, are unconditional entitlements, programs intended to help persons living in poverty have harsh conditions attached to them, operating under the assumption that the poor are deviant and untrustworthy. This creates a hyper regulatory state that uses surveillance of social services to discipline and punish the most marginalized in society. This requires a re-imagination of the role of the state which requires institutional engagement.Bach, Associate Professor of Law @ University of Tennessee, 14 (Wendy, “The Hyperregulatory State: Women, Race, Poverty and Support,” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, Vol. 25, No. 2) In contrast, if you are a poor, and more likely than in a world without structural racism, African American, and if you are living as a parent in the inner city, any support you receive is likely to be structured quite differently . The meager support that may be available comes in the form of welfare, Food Stamps, public housing, underfunded, overpoliced schools and publically funded, overcrowded health care facilities. Moreover, and central to the arguments put forward here, this support is likely to come at an enormous punitive risk both within the initial social welfare system and beyond . The regulatory mechanisms of those systems of support are likely to function in at least two ways. They will, if you are lucky and resourceful enough to navigate the many barriers to receipt, dole out some much-needed but meager support. But the price of that support is exposure to a set of mechanisms , here termed regulatory intersectionality, by which regulatory systems intersect to share information and heighten the adverse consequences of what those systems quite easily deem to be unlawful or noncompliant conduct . Quite simply if you are poor, African American and living in the inner city, by seeking support you risk far more than simply being deprived of support . By seeking support you elevate your risk of exposure to ever more punitive consequences. You risk exposure, in the examples in this article, to a child welfare system that is far more likely to take and keep your children and in which your children are likely to fare horribly. You also risk exposure to a criminal “justice” system that is more likely to impose harsh criminal consequences for your allegedly deviant conduct . The state you encounter not only fails to respond to your need in any meaningful way. Instead the state is hyperregulatory , meaning here that its mechanisms are targeted, by race, class, gender and place, to exert punitive social control over poor, African American women , their families and their communities . Feminist political and legal theorists are currently engaged in a vital project. This work, led by scholars like Martha Fineman and Maxine Eichner, teaches that both dominant American political theory and, more importantly, the structures of current state institutions fail to enable families to meet dependency needs and are, in the name of an emaciated view of autonomy, obscenely content to leave gross inequality in place . This work provides a potent critique, a clearly better vision of the state we

need and a theory that holds great promise in getting us there . As we consider their vision, however, we must remember, as the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, Khiara Bridges, Kaaryn Gustafson and Dorothy Roberts, among many others, counsels, that if we are to build institutions that are responsive to some of the most vulnerable among us , we must seek to understand the particular institutional realities that constitute the relationship between poor and disproportionately African American women and the current state, and we must ask how these particular realities impact the path to a supportive or responsive state.

Federal laws empower infiltration into personal details of welfare recipients lives. Surveillance exists to enforce conditions on political subjects that are meant to normalize their behavior according to racist, heterosexist, and neoliberal values. This constitutes a policy of neo-eugenics.*NEG alts that don’t take action turn suffering into a spectacle to be observed instead of a problem to be stopped – this locks in a relationship to Others that transforms them into objects and their pain into our pleasure, which means the ALT is both unethical and can’t solve *NEG DA impacts that are based on attempts to manage future conflicts cause neo-eugenics because the entire idea underpinning the philosophy is that the state’s job is to manage Life and push it into the future, but that ignores the lives that have to be sacrificed in order to make that future livable – that means you can’t weigh the DA unless they beat the case, otherwise the judges impact calculus is complicit in mass slaughter Smith, Government Prof @ Cornell, 11(Anna Marie, “Neo-eugenics: A Feminist Critique of Agamben,” Occasions 1:2, http://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/neo-eugenics-feminist-critique-agamben) Agamben’s text, however, also lends itself to a more expansive reading. It can also be interpreted as an invitation to cultivate a more acute sensitivity to the ways in which even the most humanitarian forms of governance can have, as their hidden core principle, the brutal violation of fundamental human rights. As he defends

the decision to wage war on Iraq, former President George W. Bush proclaims the exemplary achievements of American democracy. But in this same country, the State has stripped the welfare mother of almost all the basic rights

that make a human life worth living, such as the right to refuse demeaning work . (This fact became all the more obvious, even to the corporate media, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.) The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996

(PRA) has eliminated her statutory entitlement to poverty assistance ;[9] she must look to her state constitution to give her

claim to emergency aid any binding force. American constitutional law not only refuses to recognize the very concept of social rights [10] but deliberately refuses to construct the poor as a suspect class where equal- protection doctrine is concerned.[11] The State is empowered by the law to intervene in the intimate and sexual dimensions of a poor single mother’s life in ways that would be considered legally and ethically unacceptable if these

same interventions were aimed at professional women. The state has what the courts regard as a legitimate interest in forcing the welfare mother to cooperate with child support enforcement —even if she is fleeing from a violent biological father ; it can order her to disclose her sexual history and to open her home, the personal conduct of her teenage children , and her very DNA structure [12] to intensive governmental scrutiny. Federal law allows the states to deprive needy families of benefits when the eligibility time limits are exceeded and to set benefit levels at below-subsistence levels. Workfare rules require custodial mothers with young children to perform duties out of the home on a rigid schedule even though they may not have access to adequate and affordable childcare. In the guise of a poverty program ostensibly aimed at families with dependent children, the state can put so much pressure on a poor single mother that it places her in an absolutely desperate condition, one in which it becomes all the more likely that she will “voluntarily” give up her children for adoption. Indeed, three states evidently do not want to leave the custodial relinquishment effect of poverty policy to chance. They actually require welfare applicants to endure pro-adoption counseling and educational materials designed to encourage them—solely on the basis of their application for means-tested aid alone, with not even the slightest allegation of child abuse or neglect—to relinquish

their custodial rights.[13] There is hardly any difference between the slurs that are commonly circulated in American society and government about the welfare mother—that is, the demonizing representations that construct her as a species of vermin or pestilence—and the absolutely obnoxious and horrific claim that her life is not worth living and does not deserve to be lived.[14] But mainstream American political rhetoric is also invested in portraying the state’s relationship with the poor in a humanitarian light: the state is “reluctantly” withdrawing redistributive supports only because they perversely fostered welfare dependency, and it is introducing therapeutic interventions designed to promote the work ethic and patriarchal and heterosexist family values. What we are really witnessing, however, is a massive reduction in social rights and the augmentation of a harsh punishment regime that advances racial-capitalist and patriarchal interests by keeping the poor disorganized, desperate, and eager to work for low wages .[15] Child support enforcement continues to fail as an antipoverty measure—given the fact that the biological fathers of the children of welfare mothers are typically too poor to meet their legal obligations—but the encapsulation of millions of adults within custodial mother/obliged biological father dyads greatly enhances the state’s ability to render the poor mass into a policeable totality. This tactic also interrupts the formation of solidaristic relations among the poor at an intimate level, and perpetuates neoliberal and traditional family values by displacing entitlement with private patriarchal dependency.[16] Agamben, like Foucault, encourages us to pay close attention not just to the eternal return of exclusion but to the structure of exclusion as well. For his part, Foucault is perhaps the better theorist of the two where the institutionally specific analysis of disciplinary technology is concerned. But they both read the text of State authority against the grain, as it were. In its ideological self-presentation, the State establishes its governmental interests by referring to its showcase policies, namely the ones that are widely accepted as “mainstream” measures for enhancing the “normal” citizen’s well-being. In the American case, we are seductively invited to position ourselves as citizens of a country that has built up the best form of government in human history, one that is deeply committed to securing the conditions necessary for the pursuit of the “good life.” Agamben and Foucault resist the lure of modern State legitimation discourse. Refusing to follow the ostensive gesture of the State itself—again, the state prefers to point out its “mainstream” policies that serve the “general population”—Agamben and Foucault seek to interpret power relations by investigating the “extreme” cases involving individuals who are rendered into nonpersons through the application of purportedly “extraordinary” law (Agamben) or problematized fields of insufficiently disciplined subjectivity (Foucault). But Agamben would argue that Foucault himself vacillates on this crucial point and at times endorses the view that unilateral forms of exclusionary governance—those that are embodied in State practices such as banishment, the quarantining of the sick within fenced-off spaces like the leper colony, or the execution of criminals, for example—were more or less eclipsed by modern disciplinary technologies.[17] In my view, Foucault’s juridico-discursive and biopower regimes should be understood as ideal types that can bring to light the operations of power that are constitutive of modern liberal democratic societies. The fact that Foucault did not address fascism in his development of these two governance types is indicative of his scrupulous attention to the institutional specificities of distinct political regimes.[18] Further, it is a virtue of Foucault’s work that the political status of the individuals targeted by biopower remains somewhat ambiguous; to a certain extent, they retain some types of liberal democratic rights even as they are excluded. Power in Foucault’s model is a sophisticated force that works best when it finds ways to bend freedom against itself, such that the subject misrecognizes his or her disciplined condition as a form of liberation. Agamben would vigorously resist these suggestions. He would charge Foucault with failing to push the investigation of the “exception” to its proper limit. Agamben’s eccentric reading of Foucault is consistent with his ambitious objective, namely to establish a theory that lays bare the timeless structure of any possible form of Western governance. From a political theory perspective, it is nevertheless important to note that Agamben proposes

a salutary challenge to the status quo. He is effectively insisting that we must reverse the analytical gaze of the social sciences: we must investigate the nature of sovereignty from the perspective of the “exception,” rather than the “mainstream,” policy of the State. It is “the politicization of bare life as such” that constitutes the “decisive event of modernity,” not the establishment of a liberal democracy dedicated to securing the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The opposition that is taken for granted between absolutism and democracy has always been a fragile one, and these two modes of governance are currently entering into a “real zone of indistinction.”

Absolutism only appears to lie at the other end of the regime-type continuum at a maximal distance from democracy.[19] Once we pierce the ideological obfuscations that are thrown up by the State , we can grasp the fact that the absolutist assertion of sovereign power over bare life is secretly tied to the most humanitarian moments of liberal democratic State authority. Standing confidently—some would say arrogantly—on our Enlightenment inheritance, we westerners are enthralled by our own legitimation discourse, namely humanitarianism. We find it almost inconceivable, for example, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw the line between imperialist military campaigns and humanitarian aid projects.[20] Similarly, we, the American wealthy, like to tell ourselves that we have always been very generous—if not overly generous—toward the poor. It is, in fact, power that lies at the heart of poverty program design: its structures owe everything to the struggles between racial-capitalist and patriarchal forces that are deeply invested in the production of a docile low-wage workforce and in the promotion of the traditional heterosexual family, on the one side, and progressive forces like the poor people’s protests and the civil rights movement, on the other.

Agamben’s ambitious deployment of transhistorical overview is quite suggestive; like Hortense Spillers’s concept of the American grammar book[21] (i.e., Spillers’s diagnosis of the underlying structure of gender and race hierarchies that remains constant in American culture from

the colonial period to the present), his theory interrupts our complacent assumption that liberal democratic formations are somehow magically endowed with such a distinct orientation to the law, and such resilient and

self-sustaining capacities, that we need not consider the possibility that they can harbor antidemocratic moments —such as slavery , imperialism , and eugenics —at their very core , or that they can descend quite quickly into

various forms of absolutism. Agamben and Spillers help us to resist the lure of progressivism : the myth that the West is always moving forwards in its bid to achieve a just form of social cooperation . They show us how to grasp the continuities between the various moments of constitutive exclusion in the history of American identity, whether they involve the strategic production of the indigenous “savage” or that of

the slave woman and the welfare mother. However, Agamben , unlike Spillers, moves at such a distance from historical

specificities that he loses sight of institutionalized gendered dynamics. His objective is not only to thematize Western discourse

on a metaphysical level, in the Derridean sense, but to establish a critical sociopolitical theory that can bring to light the fundamental character of Western governance that has purportedly endured, like a timeless essence, from Aristotle’s ancient Greece to post-9/11 American government. Like Spillers, Agamben underlines the fact that biopolitics

constructs the national population in a racially essentialist manner. But he cannot detect the specificity of racial formations ; he cannot help us to understand the ways in which the anti-Semitism of the Nazis resembles, but also deviates from, institutional racism in contemporary American society. Further, he completely fails to grasp the centrality of gender to the biopolitical project of producing bare life . For Agamben, the sovereign preserves for itself “the natural right to do anything to anyone.”[22] As the line between legitimate authority and the right of the sovereign in a state of exception to protect “the people” by producing bare life is increasingly blurred, we become unable to identify “any one clear figure of the sacred man.”[23] In effect, “we are all virtually

homines sacri.”[24] “Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.”[25] The historical record, however, makes it crystal clear that it is the structurally disempowered who are most vulnerable to the exercise of arbitrary state power in the state of emergency. Women are placed in especially constrained positions by the modern State when it devotes itself to population management. In the context of positive eugenics, the “fittest” women of the racial nation are asked to serve as the wombs of “the people” through natalist propaganda and policies. Negative eugenics in turn promotes the exclusion of the “unfit” through selective immigration controls, sterilization, and the discouragement of child-rearing. Poor women typically bear the brunt of these policies. In some eugenic contexts, the “unfit” woman is offered partial redemption, but only insofar as she is rendered into a sterile worker, a prostitute, or a military servant.[26] The practical implications of Agamben’s failure to address the historically specific and stratified character of the State’s targeting (i.e., the fact that in the midst of an emergency, the State escalates its already established class, race, ethnic, and gender profiling instead of

striking out in an unpredictable manner) are sobering. If we convinced ourselves that vulnerability is equally distributed, we would implicitly reinforce our already excessive tendency toward bourgeois self-regard .[27] We would also

foreclose all radical attempts to hold the agents who actively participate in the establishment of eugenics policy , and those who benefit handsomely from its operation, collectively responsible .[28] Out of our bourgeois narcissism, we would refuse to face the Other and to receive the Other’s inscrutable and yet insistent demand .[29] Instead of facing the Other, we would merely fixate on the image of the Other’s suffering. We would derive compensation for our perceived vulnerability through our consumption of this image ; it would become our fetish. We would congratulate ourselves for having the fortitude to commodify suffering, and we would act as if we could exhaust our moral obligation by doing so. Thus, we would forget that we had forgotten the Other and that we were keeping our backs

turned against the Other’s face. Fetishism, however, is not solidarity. If any person can be rendered into bare life, then we should assume that Agamben’s absolute sovereign will strike in a random fashion, anywhere and everywhere at once. If absolutism is omnipresent, then virtually every form of political organizing is doomed to fail. Once again, Agamben’s argument risks the incitement of bourgeois self-regard and quietistic resignation. Agamben’s sensitization is one-sided—it raises our awareness of the fact that it is the interests of powerful elites, not charity, that structure poverty programs, but it allows us to avoid the inconvenient truth: the State remains a terrain of struggle, and it is our moral duty to contribute to the advance of social justice. Today’s welfare mothers are not strategically positioned in exactly the same way as the Nazis’ concentration camp inmates; nor are they subjected to totalistic domination like the slave woman or Carrie Buck.[30] They can, and they do, engage in political organizing; they have a few—albeit far too few—allies in civil society, Congress, state legislatures, and local governments; and they are exercising their right to self-determination against very steep odds.[31] To return to Agamben, what precisely is the relationship between human reproduction and governance? Introducing Aristotle’s distinction between the life of the citizen and bare life, Agamben deploys a distinctly liberal democratic topographic metaphor: “In the classical world . . . simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined—as merely reproductive life—to the sphere of the oikos, home.”[32] The concept of confining a particular social practice to a distinct spatial region, like a “sphere,” seems to be at odds with the ancients’ organicism. To be sure, Agamben refers in particular to Aristotle’s rejection of the argument that governing the polis amounted to nothing more than the continuation of the sort of governing required in the household on a grander scale. But Agamben’s introductory passage on Aristotle continues to muddy the water even further. At one moment he is referring to distinct “spheres” of governance—the political versus the reproductive—in which different types of leadership take different fields of human activity as their proper object. At the next, he discusses Aristotle’s hierarchy of moral ends: man is “born with regard to life, but exist[s] essentially with regard to the good life.”[33] In fact, the organicism that was proper to the ancients had a very specific character. The Greek citizen’s household was not a distinct “sphere” of human intersubjectivity in the modern sense; household relations had a great deal of bearing upon the good of the community and the ability of the polis to facilitate the pursuit of the good life. Ideally, the male citizen conducts himself ethically when he acts as the head of the household, for he enters into relations with other citizens from the most felicitous position when he does so, and the good of the polis depends upon the ethical performance of social roles in every nook and cranny of the citizens’ world. It is also best for the citizen to manage his economic affairs properly—that is, to achieve a subsistence standard of living and to generate the small surplus necessary for honoring virtuous friends with appropriate gifts. Ultimately, however, these domestic matters ought to be determined by a set of ethical principles that are unique; the guiding principles for household management cannot be derived from the ones that are proper to political deliberation. This is not because the household was located in a separate domestic sphere, however. In the ideal polis, the citizen rules and is ruled by other citizens in turn. In the household, the patriarch is directing subjects who allegedly do not meet the male citizen’s standard of rationality, namely women, children, and slaves. Even if the “good man” is the same as the “good citizen” in the ideal polis, the art of governing one’s peers remains distinct from that pertaining to the management of one’s dependents.[34] Let us assume, then, that the polis remains properly constituted, and that the household in question is headed by a male citizen. In that case, we certainly cannot construct the household as if it existed in a distinct sphere—it is not wholly apart from the polis, and it is not a special place within the polis that cannot be considered a proper object of public deliberation. The citizen has to adopt a different leadership posture when he applies himself to the task of heading the household, but that is not because the polis has no interest in regulating reproduction. He does so only because he must deal with his inferiors when he acts as the head of the household and manages his domestic affairs.[35] Agamben’s use of Aristotle to set up his broader argument could distract us from the fact that Aristotle actually wanted the legislator to take a deep interest in the management of human

reproduction. In The Politics, for example, the discussion of constitutional types is juxtaposed with a substantial section in which a plan for the ideal city-state is sketched out, complete with advice on demographics, territorial considerations, the best division of labor, public planning, military preparation, and education.[36] At its foundation, the polis must seek to enhance the moral development of the citizen,[37] but educational institutions work best when they receive the best pupils. Reflecting the biological and medical thinking of his day, Aristotle lays out a model family law. Indeed, the topic is treated as if the text does not sense any particular need for extraordinary explanation; for Aristotle’s students,[38] this expansive view of the polis—which includes population management within the

scope of legitimate governmental interests—was entirely unremarkable. The legislator in the ideal city-state naturally concerns

[themselves] himself with the task of establishing the legal conditions that foster the best types of human reproduction . The polis’s interest in ensuring the reproduction of the best offspring is so extensive that it may quite properly establish rigid and narrow age requirements for marriage (around eighteen for women and thirty-seven for men).[39] The legislator is invited to consider a law that would require pregnant mothers to perform daily pilgrimages in order to enhance their physical fitness.[40] As for the treatment of the unfit child, The Politics states plainly that “there should certainly be a law to prevent the rearing of deformed children.”[41] The legislator is also counseled to establish the upper limit of children in the ideal family

and to ensure that miscarriages are induced when a family has reached that limit. Of course, the liberal democratic idea of a right to privacy has no place in Aristotle's scheme. Men and women form intimate partnerships, not as an expression of their individual and autonomous wills, but to “render service to the state by bringing children into the world.”[ 42] Fascist organicism similarly seeks to extend the grip of the sovereign into every corner of the Reich such that the will of the Führer defines virtually every field of social activity, from the courts to the market, the church, and the family. Agamben quite rightly draws our attention to the integration of eugenics into fascist social policy. The National Socialists sought to secure the life of the people by preserving the Aryan racial stock from miscegenation and degeneration.[43] They adopted laws permitting the sterilization of those deemed to be carrying “hereditary disorders of the body or the mind.” They prohibited marriage for anyone who was institutionalized or who suffered from contagious disease, mental illness, or hereditary disease. Only those with Aryan blood were considered full citizens with the right to a passport, and Jews were not allowed to marry full citizens.[44] Agamben could have also pointed to the fact that these prohibitions were combined with positive eugenics strategies. The Aryan woman was charged with the duty of marrying an Aryan man, bearing children, and faithfully rearing the Reich’s future generation. Aryan women who bore more than four children received the Cross of Honor of the German mother. In Hermann Göring’s “Nine Commandments for the Workers’ Struggle,” German Aryan women were called to “take hold of the frying pan, dust pan and broom and marry a man.”[45] Taking

inspiration from Agamben, and yet rejecting his metaphysical approach to governance, I would argue that contemporary social policy is an expression of neo-eugenics . Neo-eugenics is a special kind of biopolitics that resembles fascist organicism but is

unique in several key respects. Eugenics is certainly alive and well in the United States today. Not only are publications like

The Bell Curve that espouse a theory of biologically determined and racially differentiated intelligence received as mainstream texts, but we are also witnessing the training of a myriad of forces upon the poor that effectively discourage them from forming kinship groups and bearing and rearing children on their own terms .[46] The harsh character of poverty assistance policy, the gap between the living wage and the minimum wage, gender- and race-based discrimination, and the stratified nature of the labor market operate in tandem. Together, they guarantee that millions of American adults will never earn enough to support a family even when they do manage to find full-time and year-round jobs . The racial bias of the criminal justice system places a disproportionate number of black and Latino men and women in prison at precisely the moment in their life cycles in which nonincarcerated adults typically start building their families. American infant mortality rates are the worst for any developed country,[47] while HIV infection and AIDS continue to hit poor women of color particularly hard. Even if a poor black woman beats the odds and manages to bear and rear a healthy child and to provide him or her with an adequate diet, decent housing, a safe neighborhood, adequate childcare, and early education, she is still exposed to the inequitable child welfare system that threatens to cancel out her parental rights in an arbitrary manner.[48]

Welfare Surveillance transforms entitlements to government assistance into a privilege conferred onto the “deserving poor.” The conditions enforced by surveillance construct welfare recipients into subjects to be manipulated according to the cultural values that are calculated by governmental elites. The act of means and moral testing defines single-black mothers as outside of the body politic, justifying continued marginalization Roberts, Law Prof @ Northwestern, 96 (Dorothy, “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,” http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1256:welfare01-2&catid=56&Itemid=179&showall=1&limitstart=) The stratification of our welfare system that distributes benefits according to race and gender also

differentiates between two classes of inhabitants -- citizens and subjects . Citizens receive welfare as an entitlement : Government has an obligation to support citizens as compensation for their social contribution or as a prerequisite to their full participation in political and economic life. For example, the

government pays citizens Social Security benefits that are unencumbered by behavioral conditions, caseworker investigations, or social stigma. Subjects , on

the other hand, receive inferior, inadequate, and stigmatizing relief at the government's discretion . Poor mothers who receive AFDC, for example, are considered unworthy of government assistance; their benefits, set below the poverty level, are conditioned on conformance to

behavioral rules and submission to government inspection. This surveillance of welfare recipients' everyday lives is so contrary to the government's respect for citizens that it unmistakably marks these families as government subjects. Black organizers who agitated for relief entitlements during the Depression suggested that the investigation of applicants' morals was a violation of citizenship rights. One complained: "Your Administrators here in Baltimore take it upon themselves to inquire into the morals of the applicant. . . . The writer does not believe that the letter of the Relief law, or even its spirit gives the Administrators that authority. May I mention that in France, to hold a moral inquest upon the applicant for aid is forbidden by law." Given this connection between citizenship and entitlement to welfare, it is not surprising that current

welfare reform proposals include the elimination of public assistance for undocumented immigrants. The critical difference between these two forms of welfare lies in their relation to individuals' autonomy. While welfare for citizens enables them to be self-ruling persons , welfare for subjects enables the government to rule them. Gordon makes this distinction in her defense of welfare entitlements: "Citizens have rights to which they are entitled by law, and losing this understanding endangers the republic. . . . Moreover, the feeling of entitlement is also vital to the republic. It is the attitude of citizenship, the essence of independence; without it we would have subjects,

not citizens." The very relegation of subjects to inferior programs that supervise and humiliate them reinforces their lack of citizenship qualities while bolstering the virtues of the citizens who receive dignified entitlements . Citizens' compensation by social insurance makes them appear independent and self- sufficient; subjects' receipt of charity makes them appear dependent and irresponsible . Current welfare

reform rhetoric condemns mothers who receive AFDC for transmitting a pathology of "welfare dependency" to their children. According to this view, reliance on this form of welfare reflects a lack of work ethic and leads to a myriad of social problems, including crime, unwed motherhood, and long-term poverty. Yet Americans do not view reliance on Social Security as "dependency" at all, despite the program's strong redistributive effects and the millions of nonworking wives and children who in fact depend on its benefits for subsistence. Gordon gives the following

example of the downward-spiraling process that results from stigmatizing welfare recipients: The stigmas of "welfare" and of single motherhood intersect; hostility to the poor and hostility to deviant family forms reinforce each other.

The resentment undercuts political support for the program , and benefits fall farther and farther behind inflation. The resulting immiseration makes poor single mothers even more needy and less politically attractive. The economic downturn of the last decade has deepened both the poverty and the resentment, and created the impression that

we are experiencing a new, unprecedented, and primarily minority social problem. Thus, Black single mothers' inferior status in the welfare state has intensified their political and economic marginalization, making them even less worthy of citizenship rights . By casting their need for public assistance as "dependency," welfare reform rhetoric suggests that these women lack the independence required to be citizens, entitled to dignified government support. B. Welfare as a Waiver of Privacy One of the key differences between welfare extended to citizens and welfare extended to subjects is the degree to which each conditions its benefits on government intrusion into recipients' privacy. Public relief for single mothers is structured to permit bureaucratic supervision of clients in order to determine their eligibility based on both means and morals testing . Citizens avoid these impositions because they receive their benefits in the form of entitlements that are not subject to the discretion of caseworkers, supervisors, or administrators. Since welfare's inception, states have conditioned payments on mothers' compliance with standards of sexual and reproductive morality, such as "suitable home" or "man in the house" rules. More recently, welfare mothers have been required to undergo mandatory paternity proceedings involving state scrutiny of their intimate lives. Over the last three

years, at least thirty states have applied for federal waivers allowing them to change their welfare programs to incorporate a form of behavior modification. Means testing and morals testing allow welfare bureaucrats to place recipients under surveillance to check for cheating or lapses in eligibility. Such testing also forces recipients to assume a submissive stance lest offended caseworkers cut them from the rolls. A Black domestic's experience with poor relief in the 1930s remains typical of welfare recipients today: "The investigators, they were like detectives, like I had committed a crime. . . . I had to tell them about my life, more than if I was on trial . . . the investigator searched my icebox . . . I was ashamed of my life . . . that's how you're made to feel when you're down and out

like you're nothing better than a criminal." Privacy doctrine does not shield from state intrusion people who receive

welfare as subjects; rather, their acceptance of government benefits constitutes a waiver of privacy .

Because families are not entitled to government support, the Supreme Court has reasoned, the government may force them to open up for inspection, shrink, rearrange, or break up in order to qualify for benefits . Courts sometimes find egregious invasions of poor families' privacy to be unconstitutional, but most of the day-to-day decisions of family life remain vulnerable to legitimate state supervision . While poor single mothers (subjects) must endure government surveillance for their paltry benefits, "self-sufficient" traditional families (citizens) receive huge public subsidies -- Social Security, tax breaks, and government-backed mortgages -- without any loss of privacy. The Supreme Court invalidated early welfare eligibility requirements, such as AFDC's "man in the house" rule, designed to "legislate morality" of recipients. Other precedents, however,

affirm the state's power to condition eligibility for benefits on conformity with majoritarian family norms. In Dandridge v. Williams, for example, the Court upheld Maryland's regulation that placed an absolute cap of $250 monthly per family, regardless of the family's size or financial need. The Court found that the state's interest in encouraging employment was a sufficiently rational reason to defeat recipients' equal protection challenge. The Court rejected the objection that some families had no employable member on the ground that "the Equal Protection Clause does not require that a State must choose between attacking every aspect of a problem or not attacking the problem at all." Nor do welfare recipients fare well under the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which provides that the government may not condition the conferral of a benefit on the beneficiary's surrender of a constitutional right , although the government may choose not to provide the benefit altogether. The Court has avoided the unconstitutional conditions problem in cases involving public assistance to the poor by distinguishing between direct state interference with a protected activity and the state's mere refusal to subsidize a protected activity. The former, the Court concedes, raises a constitutional issue because it involves state action, whereas the latter is a constitutionally insignificant failure to act. For example, the Court refused to require the state or federal governments to pay the cost of abortion services for poor women, even though they pay for the expenses incident to childbirth, reasoning that "[a]lthough

government may not place obstacles in the path of a woman's exercise of her freedom of choice, it need not remove those not of its own creation." By regarding welfare benefits as an undeserved subsidy, the Court allows the state to treat recipients as subjects whose behavior may be modified to fit current social policy.

Curtailing surveillance on social services is critical to providing essential services for empowerment while simultaneously protecting against intrusive and punitive conditions. The plan strengthens the social safety net while weakening the carceral state. Bach, Associate Professor of Law @ University of Tennessee, 14 (Wendy, “The Hyperregulatory State: Women, Race, Poverty and Support,” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, Vol. 25, No. 2) Though calls for universal benefits and/or significantly increased low-income benefits administered by agencies like the IRS might well address some of the concerns raised in this article, the heart of the critique falls on what remains of programs designed explicitly to serve those in poverty . It also falls by implication on those programs, essential to a robust supportive or responsive state , that might provide significantly more support to poor families . Addressing the twofold harm described above (privacy deprivation and punishment) involves four steps: erecting more privacy protections and higher bars on surveillance and monitoring in the first place; enforcing and creating new privacy protections within systems once information is collected; building higher walls between support systems and punishment systems, and, finally, exercising significant caution in the face of calls for coordination and collaboration. In the support programs discussed in this article, women are forced, as a condition of either applying for the benefit (in the case of welfare) or seeking the service (in the case of health care) to part with vital information that , in other settings and for other people , would be considered private. Although the

demand for and collection of this information is clearly a harm in and of itself, what’s important here is that the information (and negative interpretation of the information) leads to the punishment . The decision, imbedded within formal and informal legal and regulatory structures described above, to seek a drug test leads to additional intervention, questioning, and information acquisition. Doctors, nurses, and social workers intervene and question, collecting information that ultimately results in punitive actions against the family by the child protection and criminal justice agencies . 253 One need only recall the sources for facts underlying the child abuse prosecutions and the findings of Flavin and Paltrow to recall that health care providers, social workers and child protection staff provide much of the information to justify punishing these families. What if, instead, programs were restructured to protect the informational privacy of the women involved? What if it were the woman herself who chose whether she would submit to drug tests and additional interviews . What if the contents of her medical records were in fact confidential and there were a very high and enforceable bar against disclosure? What if we significantly shifted program eligibility rules and administrative structures to require the gathering of only minimal information and respected the rights of families to keep their homes , their bodies , and, in the vast majority of circumstances, the choices they make about how to parent private? These proposals almost inevitably lead to calls of caution concerning the welfare of children, and it is certainly true that we continue to need mechanisms to intervene in cases of abuse and neglect. But before concluding that we cannot take the legal and regulatory finger towards intervention off the scale and rebalance it to lean much more strongly toward informational privacy, it is important to remember that, for families who are not poor, this is already the case. For communities that are not in poverty we apparently assume as a society that having laws against child abuse and neglect and the ability to prosecute child abuse is enough to protect children. It is only in those programs that actually (welfare) or as a matter of practice (health care in poor communities) serve and target poor , disproportionately African American communities that we have put our legal and regulatory mechanism on the scale toward monitoring , information gathering , information-sharing and escalating punishment. To rebalance the state toward autonomy is to address this class and race disparity.

The plan solves the criminalization of welfare – legal change transforms the social construction of welfare recipients as being cheaters or criminals Kaaryn Gustafson Associate Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law. 2009 “The Criminalization of Poverty” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology @ Northwestern School of LawMany of the current welfare policies and practices are far removed from promoting the actual welfare of low-income parents and their children. ... Notwithstanding a 1961 rule issued by the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare barring the arbitrary application of suitable home requirements, many welfare offices continued to engage in midnight raids on the homes of ADC recipients in order to police "man in the house" rules. ... And Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign was spearheaded by an attack on waste, fraud and abuse in welfare programs. ... In the 1990s, states began to attack welfare recipients through aggressive welfare fraud investigations and criminal prosecutions. ... If they were found cheating - for example, underreporting their income or failing to report a change of household composition - but were still income-eligible for aid, then the penalties were civil: their welfare benefits would typically be reduced by a certain percentage each month until any overpayments were recouped by the state. ... Given the limited knowledge of the elements of welfare reform among welfare recipients, most recipients are likely unaware of the felony drug exclusion. ... The

counties pursue cash repayments from individuals who are no longer receiving aid. ... It is important to note that since the federal welfare reforms of 1996, many welfare advocates have actually encouraged more home visits (though not home searches) of welfare recipients. ... Legislators could move closer to guaranteeing basic privacy rights by repealing the federal welfare provisions that allow law enforcement officials to access welfare records and states to drug test welfare applicants . ... Numerous studies have questioned the community and fiscal benefits of fingerprint imaging, welfare sanctions,

lifelong welfare exclusions, and criminal welfare prosecutions. ... Moreover, many fiscal studies fail to measure costs such as the effect of punitive policies on families and communities, costs associated with increasing the number of parents in the criminal justice system, the cost to state and local governments of policing the poor, and the long-term costs of stigmatizing government assistance and allowing poverty to go unalleviated.¶ HIGHLIGHT: The welfare system and the criminal justice system in the United States are becoming ever more tightly interwoven. Scholars, however, have not yet examined the processes involved in these developments and what these developments mean for both the welfare system and for criminal

jurisprudence. Many people, including welfare recipients, treat the welfare and criminal justice systems as analytically distinct. As a practical matter, however, the systems now work in tandem.¶ This Article maps the criminalization of welfare . First, this Article describes the social construction of welfare fraud, tracing how "welfare queens" and welfare cheating came to be the targets of much governmental attention and resources. The

Article then describes the various ways that criminal justice goals and strategies have become embedded in the welfare system, as well as the ways that the welfare system has become a tool of law enforcement. Next, the Article examines the treatment of welfare recipients in the courts, where the poor have been relegated to an inferior status of rights-bearing citizenship, a status on par with parolees and probationers. In the end, the Article encourages more careful policy analysis of these criminalizing practices, proposes a de-coupling of the economic security and crime control functions of the

state, and offers recommendations for ensuring the constitutional rights of welfare recipients. Specifically, administrative and criminal procedures must adapt to the transformations in welfare law to ensure that welfare recipients enjoy basic constitutional protections. More research is suggested to measure the unmeasured and the externalized costs associated with the criminalization of welfare.

AT: T

AT: T-Its We Meet – it’s all authorized by the federal government - Federal law allows the states to conduct welfare surveillance – that’s Smith.

AND – this means it is the federal government’s surveillance Ready Mag 14(“Politics and Welfare Surveillance” https://readymag.com/u18428914/44359/4/) Welfare has been fiercely contested, both politically and socially, in the U.S. since the program was expanded under FDR. With the Democratic

and Republican parties staunchly divided on the issue, welfare programs have increasingly fell under surveillance by the federal government and the media. Any mishaps, specifically those regarding the illegitimacy of recipients , are greatly magnified in order to be used as a political weapon for conservative groups.

We Meet – the plan text says “its” – at best this is a half-baked solvency argument

Its means related to the USFG – surveillance is done because of federal requirements Merriam Webster NO DATE (Merriam Webster Dictionary, online dictionary, “its,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/its)//ghs-VAof or relating to it or itself especially as possessor, agent, or object of an action <going to its kennel> <a child proud of its first drawings> <its final enactment into law>

Prefer –

Limits – we don’t justify corporate surveillance or other countries because the surveillance we curtail is authorized by the federal government, not third parties.

AFF Ground – the FG never conducts the surveillance itself – its delegated out based on statutory authority

Reasonability - competing interps cause a race to the bottom and crowd out substance –

A2: Its – “Surveillance is states”

Legislators have the power to repeal the legal justifications that allow the states to surveilKaaryn Gustafson Associate Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law. 2009 “The Criminalization of Poverty” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology @ Northwestern School of LawIt is important to note that since the federal welfare reforms of 1996, many welfare advocates have actually encouraged more home visits (though not home searches) of welfare recipients. ... Legislators could move closer to guaranteeing basic privacy rights by repealing the federal welfare provisions that allow law enforcement officials to access welfare records and states to drug test welfare applicants

AT: T – Surveillance = Consent

We Meet- There is no consent – the impoverished do not choose to live on welfare, they are forced to because of the structural position they were put into by racist implementations of neoliberalism.

Counter-interpretation – surveillance is observation with preventative intent – we meet because the government surveys the poor to make sure they do not violate welfare conditions Lemos 11 (Andre, University of Baha, “Locative Media and Surveillance at the Boundaries of Informational Territories,” 2011, https://books.google.com/books?id=quEd4w61EYoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)//ghs-VAAlthough they often appear to be synonymous, it is important to distinguish between informational control, monitoring and surveillance so that the problem can be better understood. We consider control to be the supervision of activities, or actions normally

associated with government and authority over people, actions and processes. Monitoring can be considered a form of observation to gather information with a view to making projections or constructing scenarios and historical records, i.e., the

action of following up and evaluating data. Surveillance, however, can be defined as an act intended to avoid something , as an observation whose purposes are preventive or as behavior that is attentive, cautious or careful. It is interesting to note that in English and French the two words “vigilant” and “surveillance”, each of which is spelt the same way and has the same meaning in both languages, are applied to someone who is particularly watchful and to acts associated with legal action

or action by the police intended to provide protection against crime, respectively. We shall define surveillance as actions that imply control and monitoring in accordance with Gow, for whom surveillance "implies something quite specific as the intentional observation of someone's actions or the intentional gathering of personal information in order

to observe actions taken in the past or future" (Gow. 2005. p. 8). According to this definition, surveillance actions presuppose

monitoring and control, but not all forms of control and/or monitoring can be called surveillance. It could be said that all forms of

surveillance require two elements: intent with a view to avoiding /causing something and identification of individuals or groups by name. It seems to me to be difficult to say that there is surveillance if there is no identification of the person under observation (anonymous) and no preventive intent (avoiding something). To my mind it is an exaggeration to say, for example, that the system run by my cell phone operator that controls and monitors my calls is keeping me under surveillance. Here there is identification but no intent. However, it can certainly be used for that purpose. The Federal Police can request wiretaps and disclosure of telephone records to monitor my telephone calls. The same can be said about the control and monitoring of users by public transport operators. This is part of the administrative routine of the companies involved. Once again, however, the system can be used for surveillance activities (a suspect can be kept under surveillance by the companies' and/or police safety systems). Note the example further below of the recently implemented "Navigo "card in France. It seems to me that the social networks, collaborative maps, mobile devices, wireless networks and countless different databases that make up the information society do indeed control and monitor and offer a real possibility of surveillance.

Prefer---

No case meets – by virtue of the social contract we all are forced to consent to the rule of law, which means we can be legally surveyed when we are suspects of crimes.

AFF Ground – our interp prevents AFFs about regulation, but preserves our ability to innovate with government infiltration into privacy rights which is the core of the topic. They only allow AFFs about national security and terrorism which makes the topic stale and creates insular education

Reasonability – competing interps cause a race to the bottom and crowd out substance

A2: Reasonable Expectation

Welfare recipients enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacyKaaryn Gustafson Associate Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law. 2009 “The Criminalization of Poverty” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology @ Northwestern School of LawWhile some judges have argued that home searches by welfare fraud investigators should not be viewed as searches under the Fourth Amendment, these searches are properly viewed as searches under established Fourth Amendment case law. Since the 1970s, welfare [*707] recipients have typically had very little interaction with government officials in their homes. While information gathering about the recipient increased in the form of written and electronic information, welfare recipients began to expect freedom from government intrusion into their homes. Under the two-pronged Katz standard, welfare recipients certainly had a subjective expectation of privacy from government intrusion in their own homes. Supreme Court cases handed down over the last decade would suggest that welfare recipients, like everyone other than parolees and probationers, n297 enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy within the home.

Risk

Predictions Fail

Forecasting fails- 3 reasonsTetlock and Gardner 11’Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, 3-17-2011, "Why Most Predictions Are So Bad," Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/2011/03/17/why-predictions-bad-leadership-managing-forecast.html

The intelligence community is feeling the heat.∂ The response to these charges is also emphatic. “We are not clairvoyant,” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. The intelligence community was well aware that the ingredients for unrest were present in Egypt. It said so often. But “specific triggers for how and when instability would lead to the collapse of various regimes cannot always be known or predicted.”∂ This is an old debate that resumes whenever a major event catches the intelligence community by surprise. It’s also fruitless. It simply cannot be resolved with charges and denials.∂ But there is a constructive way to settle it. First, however, we must recognize some fundamental realities.∂ First, as natural science has revealed, our ability to predict is limited by the nature of complex systems. Weather forecasts, for example, are quite accurate a day or two out. Three or four days out, they are less accurate. Beyond a week, we might as well flip a coin. As scientists learn more about weather, and computing power and sophistication grow, this forecasting horizon may be pushed out somewhat. But there will always be a point beyond which meteorologists cannot see, even in theory.∂ Prediction horizons vary, but the general idea is the same whether experts are trying to forecast the weather, economies, elections or social unrest: No matter how brilliant the analysts may be, no matter how abundant the resources at their disposal, their vision can only go so far.∂ A second point is even more humbling: People are really bad at predicting the future. This very much includes experts. In the largest and best-known test of the accuracy of expert predictions, a study reported in Philip Tetlock’s book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, the average expert was found to be only slight more accurate than a dart-throwing chimpanzee . Many experts would have done better if they had made random guesses. And even the best forecasters were beaten by arbitrary rules such as “always predict no change” (a rule that worked very well for the first 30 years of Hosni Mubarak’s regime).∂ It’s easy to conclude that all hope is lost. But that would be wrong. In the Tetlock study, what separated those with modest but significant predictive ability from the utterly hopeless was their style of thinking. Experts who had one big idea they were certain would reveal what was to come were handily beaten by those who used diverse information and analytical models, were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and kept their confidence in check.∂ What this and much other research suggests is that the right training, tools and organization can make people better forecasters. Their vision will be not be perfect, so they won’t see to the prediction horizon. But they will see closer to the horizon. And their vision will be as good as anyone’s can reasonably be expected to be.∂ With all their advantages, intelligence agencies should reach that optimal level of accuracy. Do they? We don’t know, because we don’t know what that optimal level is.∂ That may change. One of the goals of new IARPA-funded research is to find the optimal level of prediction.∂

Researchers will assemble five forecasting teams that will compete to design the best possible methods of training forecasters, shaping judgments and aggregating the predictions of individual forecasters. These methods will be put to the test when the volunteers are asked to predict political and economic developments.∂ It’s a huge undertaking. Tetlock has a team that alone will consist of 2,400 volunteers. But at the end of the experiment, which will take four years, we should know much more about how to improve forecasts–and what level of accuracy we can reasonably expect from intelligence agencies.∂ This is critical work. Better forecasting and better accountability could make a world of difference. But for

that to happen, the intelligence community and its critics first must acknowledge how much there is that we do not know

Forecasting Fails- useless and we technology can’t measure accuratelyHarford 14’Tim Harford, 5-30-2014, "An astonishing record – of complete failure," Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/14e323ee-e602-11e3-aeef-00144feabdc0.htmlFor one of Britain’s most respected economists, Hendry gives the strong impression of a man ploughing a lonely furrow. His choice of field – the theory of economic forecasting – is to blame. It is viewed with scepticism not only by laymen but by most academic economists, too. But his research – a heady mix of bewildering computer-assisted mathematics and straightforward common sense – has convinced me that economic forecasting shouldn’t be consigned to the realm of quackery quite yet. There is a simple reason why most economic forecasts are useless, which is that forecasting is hard. We don’t fully understand the underlying economic processes that produce the results we wish to forecast (growth, inflation, house prices), nor can we measure all the variables accurately, nor anticipate the sudden shifts caused by politics or technological change. Some forecasts – notably of the price of shares and other assets – are intrinsically self-defeating, because if it was obvious that share prices would rise, then they would have risen already. But one of Hendry’s insights – developed with his co-author Michael Clements – is that not all of these difficulties produce bad forecasts. What really screws up a forecast is a “structural break”, which means that some underlying parameter has changed in a way that wasn’t anticipated in the forecaster’s model. These breaks happen with alarming frequency, but the real problem is that conventional forecasting approaches do not recognise them even after they have happened. Oil-price forecasters have been predicting since 2000 that the oil price will fall; all the while it has been climbing. The reverse problem applied during the 1980s: oil prices collapsed, but the expert consensus was that the price would recover soon. That consensus persisted for years. The pound appreciated sharply in 1997; for the next eight years, forecasters predicted this appreciation would soon be reversed. In all these cases, the forecasts were wrong because they had an inbuilt view of the “equilibrium” oil price or sterling exchange rate. In each case, the equilibrium changed to something new, and in each case, the forecasters wrongly predicted a return to business as usual, again and again. The lesson is that a forecasting technique that cannot deal with structural breaks is a forecasting technique that can misfire almost indefinitely. Hendry’s ultimate goal is to forecast structural breaks.

Forecasting fails- highly inaccurateStevens 12’Jacqueline Stevens, 6-23-2012, "Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/political-scientists-are-lousy-forecasters.html

DESPERATE “Action Alerts” land in my in-box. They’re from the American Political Science Association and colleagues, many of whom fear grave “threats” to our discipline. As a defense, they’ve supplied “talking points” we can use to tell Congressional representatives that political science is a “critical part of our national science agenda.”∂ Political scientists are defensive these days because in May the House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating National Science Foundation grants for political scientists. Soon the Senate may vote on similar legislation. Colleagues, especially those who have received N.S.F. grants, will loathe me for saying this, but just this once I’m sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a subject that has troubled me for decades: the government — disproportionately — supports research that is amenable to statistical analyses and models even though everyone knows the clean equations mask

messy realities that contrived data sets and assumptions don’t, and can’t, capture.∂ It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists’ insistence, during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was “of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming.” And yet, he noted, “None actually did so.” Careers were made, prizes awarded and millions of research dollars distributed to international relations experts, even though Nancy Reagan’s astrologer may have had superior forecasting skills. ∂ Political prognosticators fare just as poorly on domestic politics. In a peer-reviewed journal, the political scientist Morris P. Fiorina wrote that “we seem to have settled into a persistent pattern of divided government” — of Republican presidents and Democratic Congresses. Professor Fiorina’s ideas, which synced nicely with the conventional wisdom at the time, appeared in an article in 1992 — just before the Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidential victory and the Republican 1994 takeover of the House.∂ Alas, little has changed. Did any prominent N.S.F.-financed researchers predict that an organization like Al Qaeda would change global and domestic politics for at least a generation? Nope. Or that the Arab Spring would overthrow leaders in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia? No, again. What about proposals for research into questions that might favor Democratic politics and that political scientists seeking N.S.F. financing do not ask — perhaps, one colleague suggests, because N.S.F. program officers discourage them? Why are my colleagues kowtowing to Congress for research money that comes with ideological strings attached?∂

The political scientist Ted Hopf wrote in a 1993 article that experts failed to anticipate the Soviet Union’s collapse largely because the military establishment played such a big role in setting the government’s financing priorities. “Directed by this logic of the cold war, research dollars flowed from private foundations, government agencies and military individual bureaucracies.” Now, nearly 20 years later, the A.P.S.A. Web site trumpets my colleagues’ collaboration with the government, “most notably in the area of defense,” as a reason to retain political science N.S.F. financing.∂ Many of today’s peer-reviewed studies offer trivial confirmations of the obvious and policy documents filled with egregious, dangerous errors. My colleagues now point to research by the political scientists and N.S.F. grant recipients James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin that claims that civil wars result from weak states, and are not caused by ethnic grievances. Numerous scholars have, however, convincingly criticized Professors Fearon and Laitin’s work. In 2011 Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch wrote in the American Political Science Review that “rejecting ‘messy’ factors, like grievances and inequalities,” which are hard to quantify, “may lead to more elegant models that can be more easily tested, but the fact remains that some of the most intractable and damaging conflict processes in the contemporary world, including Sudan and the former Yugoslavia, are largely about political and economic injustice,” an observation that policy makers could glean from a subscription to this newspaper and that nonetheless is more astute than the insights offered by Professors Fearon and Laitin.∂ How do we know that these examples aren’t atypical cherries picked by a political theorist munching sour grapes? Because in the 1980s, the political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock began systematically quizzing 284 political experts — most of whom were political science Ph.D.’s — on dozens of basic questions, like whether a country would go to war, leave NATO or change its boundaries or a political leader would remain in office. His book “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” won the A.P.S.A.’s prize for the best book published on government, politics or international affairs.

Forecasts fail- only marginally better than a coin tossMcClintock 14’

Alex McClintock a journalist for the guardian and a newspaper editor Ba in communications and media 12-31-14"Why most 'expert' predictions for 2015 will be wrong," http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/why-most-expert-2015-predictions-will-be-wrong/5993266It’s not just the end of the world we’ve been bad at predicting, though. Just days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, prominent economist Irving Fisher said shares had reached a new, ‘permanently high plateau’. ∂ In 1943 the president of IBM predicted that there might one day be a market for as many as five computers.∂ On the opposite end of the technology spectrum, 1950s promises of flying cars and meals in pill form are yet to be realised.∂ Despite that, there are still entire industries devoted to predicting the future. Newspapers, magazines and television chat shows are filled with economists, analysts, futurists and prognosticators of all kinds.∂ Yet according to a 20-year study undertaken by psychology professor and author Phillip Tetlock, experts of all stripes are only marginally better than a coin toss at predicting future events. In fact, they’re worse at it than basic computer algorithms.∂ Economist Tim Harford has looked at why the so-called experts are so consistently wrong and come up with some interesting conclusions.∂ ‘All of these people who produce economic and political forecasts ... they're not really trying to see into the future,’ he says. ‘That's not what these forecasts are. These forecasts are marketing exercises, or they're cheering for their own side, or they're just trying to catch the eye and get themselves on television.’∂ ∂ ‘A lot of it is actually marketing and whether the forecast turns out to be right or wrong is not really the aim of the exercise.’∂ Another study is showing that some people are able to accurately predict the near future with startling consistency, however. Like the earlier study, it’s run by Professor Tetlock, but rather than focusing on experts, The Good Judgement Project is testing the prediction skills of thousands of everyday people.∂ Volunteers are asked to forecast, for example, the outcome of an election or what will happen next in Ukraine. Because the forecasts are short term, the researchers are able to see who has been right and who has been wrong. And a small group of ‘super-forecasters’ has been right more often than not over the three year course of the study.∂

‘It's not that they always get them right,’ says Harford, ‘but they get them right a lot more often than you would expect by chance. They were also very good at knowing their own limits, so they will say when it's a tossup, and that they have no idea when they're uninformed.’∂ It all starts to sound a bit science fiction, but according to Harford, there’s a very simple explanation, one which can help you improve your prediction skills as well.∂ ‘They keep getting feedback,' he says. 'They keep seeing whether their forecasts were right or wrong and which of their forecasts were right or wrong, and they're getting more feedback every day because they're forecasting dozens of things at any one time.’∂ ‘Most of us, if we think about the forecasts we've made, we might remember one or two spectacular successes or failures, but generally we're not keeping score.'∂ ‘One of the researchers I spoke to ... said, "Keep score." That's it, all you need to know. You'll become a better forecaster.’

AT IR predictions

IR predictions fail experiment of experts proves-forecasts are slightly more accurate than random guessingGardner and tetlock 11’Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock, professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley and columnist and senior writer, 7-11-2011, "Overcoming Our Aversion to Acknowledging Our Ignorance," Cato Unbound, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-philip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-acknowledging-our-ignorance The editors may regret that short shelf-life some years, but surely not this one. Even now, only halfway through the year, The World in 2011 bears little resemblance to the world in 2011. Of the political turmoil in the Middle East—the revolutionary movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria—we find no hint in The Economist’s forecast. Nor do we find a word about the earthquake/tsunami and consequent disasters in Japan or the spillover effects on the viability of nuclear power around the world. Or the killing of Osama bin Laden and the spillover effects for al Qaeda and Pakistani and Afghan politics. So each of the top three global events of the first half of 2011 were as unforeseen by The Economist as the next great asteroid strike. This is not to mock The Economist, which has an unusually deep bench of well-connected observers and analytical talent. A vast array of other individuals and organizations issued forecasts for 2011 and none, to the best of our knowledge, correctly predicted the top three global events of the first half of the year. None predicted two of the events. Or even one. No doubt, there are sporadic exceptions of which we’re unaware. So many pundits make so many predictions that a few are bound to be bull’s eyes. But it is a fact that almost all the best and brightest—in governments, universities, corporations, and intelligence agencies—were taken by surprise. Repeatedly. That is all too typical. Despite massive investments of money, effort, and ingenuity, our ability to predict human affairs is impressive only in its mediocrity. With metronomic regularity, what is expected does not come to pass, while what isn’t, does. In the most comprehensive analysis of expert prediction ever conducted, Philip Tetlock assembled a group of some 280 anonymous volunteers—economists, political scientists, intelligence analysts, journalists—whose work involved forecasting to some degree or other. These experts were then asked about a wide array of subjects. Will inflation rise, fall, or stay the same? Will the presidential election be won by a Republican or Democrat? Will there be open war on the Korean peninsula? Time frames varied. So did the relative turbulence of the moment when the questions were asked, as the experiment went on for years. In all, the experts made some 28,000 predictions. Time passed, the veracity of the predictions was determined, the data analyzed, and the average expert’s forecasts were revealed to be only slightly more accurate than random guessing—or, to put more harshly, only a bit better than the proverbial dart-throwing chimpanzee. And the average expert performed slightly worse than a still more mindless competition: simple extrapolation algorithms that automatically predicted more of the same.

No predictions are absolute- low risk events happen and high risk events don’t happenPhilip Tetlock 6’Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,Challenges of scoring subjective probability forecasts. We cannot assess the accuracy of experts’ predictions if we cannot figure out what they predicted. And experts were reluctant to call outcomes

either impossible or inevitable. They hedged with expressions such as “remote chance,” “maybe,” and “odds-on favorite.” Checking the correctness of vague verbiage is problematic. Words can take on many meanings: “likely” could imply anything from barely bet- ter than 50/50 to 99 percent.19 Moreover, checking the correctness of numerical probability estimates is problematic. Only judgments of zero (impossible) and 1.0 (inevitable) are technically falsifiable. For all other values, wayward forecasters can argue that we stum- bled into improbable worlds: low-probability events sometimes happen and high-probability events sometimes do not. To break this impasse, we turned to behavioral decision theorists who have had success in persuading other reluctant professionals to translate verbal waffling into numerical probabilities as well as in scoring these judgments.20 The key insight is that, although we can never know whether there was a .1 chance in 1988 that the Soviet Union would disintegrate by 1993 or a .9 chance of Canada disinte- grating by 1998, we can measure the accuracy of such judgments across many events (saved again by the law of large numbers). These aggregate measures tell us how discriminating forecasters were: do they assign larger probabilities to things that subsequently happen than to things that do not? These measures also tell us how well calibrated forecasters were: do events they assign .10 or .50 or .90 probabilities materialize roughly 10 percent or 50 percent or 90 percent of the time? And the Technical Appendix shows us how to tweak these measures to tap into a variety of other finer-grained conceptions of accuracy. 5. Challenging reality. We risk making false attributions of good judg- ment if we fail to recognize the existence of legitimate ambiguity about either what happened or the implications of what happened for the truth or falsity of particular points of view.

Decision makers won’t be one hundred percent accurate- predictions can be in the low risk Philip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,This defense overlaps a lot with other defenses, such as exogenous-shock and close-call counterfactual arguments that portray the observed outcome as fluky. But there is a distinction. One could argue that we wound up inhabiting a low-likelihood world without offering any extenuation (such as the higher-likelihood world almost occurred) or excuse (unpredictable forces blew history off course). Decision makers are constantly spinning the roulette wheel of history, so we should not be astonished when the silver ball stops occasionally not in the black or red slots that make up more than 90 percent of the wheel, but in one of the few green slots.

IR predictions fail- study proves scenarios can be inevitable and impossiblePhilip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,In the “intensive unpacking” experimental condition, experts responded to the same questions with one key difference: the impossibility curve ques- tion now asked experts to judge the likelihood of alternative, more vio- lent endings that had been decomposed into exhaustive and exclusive subsets. As Figure 7.7 shows, this set of counterfactual scenarios was ini- tially decomposed into subsets with fewer

than one hundred casualties or with one hundred or more casualties, that, in turn, were broken into sub-subsets in which violence was limited to the Caribbean or violence extended outside the Caribbean. Finally, all subsets with more than one hundred casualties were broken down still further into those scenarios in which only conventional weaponry was used and those in which nuclear weaponry was used. After presenting these possibilities, we asked ex- perts to perform the same inevitability—and impossibility—curve exer- cises as in the control condition but to do so for each of the six subsets that appear at the bottom of figure 7.7. We did not expect experts to be blatantly inconsistent. Our working hypothesis was that, when experts completed the two measures back to back, their judgments of the retrospective likelihood of some form of peaceful outcome would mirror their judgments of the retrospective likeli- hood of alternative, more violent, outcomes.

AT history

Predications suffer by using history- intuitive reasoning trumps extensional probabilistic reasoningPhilip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,Political observers run the same risk when they look for patterns in random concatenations of events.

They would do better by thinking less. When we know the base rates of possible outcomes—say, the incum- bent wins 80 percent of the time—and not much else, we should simply predict the more common outcome. But work on base rate neglect sug- gests that people often insist on attaching high probabilities to low- frequency events.40 These probabilities are rooted not in observations of relative frequency in relevant reference populations of cases, but rather in case-specific hunches about

causality that make some scenarios more “imaginable” than others. A plausible story of how a government might suddenly collapse counts for far more than how often similar outcomes have occurred in the past. Forecasting accuracy suffers when intuitive causal reasoning trumps extensional probabilistic reasoning.41

AT Analysts

Decisions of different analyst are vastly different- there are 2 spectrumsPhilip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,The search for correlates of good judgment across time and topics became more successful when the spotlight shifted from what experts thought to how they thought. Table 3.3 presents the thirteen items used to measure cognitive style, as well as the results of a maximum likelihood factor analysis. The low and high variable loadings on the first factor bear a striking resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes in the history of ideas.5 Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express consider- able confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see ex- planation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting

Analysts aren’t better at prediction’s than anyone else- study provesPhilip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,In this age of academic hyper specialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in “reading” emerging situations. The data reported in chapters 2, 3, and 4 under- score this point. The analytical skills undergirding academic acclaim conferred no advantage in forecasting and belief-updating exercises. If these null-hypothesis results capture the true state of nature, it is not surprising there is so much disdain among high-ranking academics for forecasting exercises (the opposite of the attitude I would expect if they thought they held some advantage). One social science colleague told me with ill-concealed contempt: “We leave that for the media mavens.” Caveats to the side, my own public-intellectual-goods proposal builds on the principle of rigorous review that prevails in top-ranked academic journals. These journals, like this project in miniature, are offspring of the Enlightenment quest to identify correspondence and coherence bench- marks for judging claims that transcend clashing schools of thought and establish criteria by which civilized people can agree to resolve disagreements—or at least agree on terms for disagreeing. To achieve legitimacy within a political or scholarly community, it is necessary for aspiring, public-intellectual-goods providers not only to maintain high evidentiary standards but also to honor basic norms of procedural fairness, including (a) equality of treatment so that representatives of opposing views perceive that the same epistemic ground rules apply to everyone; and (b) responsiveness to

protests about the application of standardized rules in cases in which special circumstances allegedly arise.16

AT Neoconservative think tanks

Impact of neoconservative think tanks on American foreign policyArin 14’KUBILAY YADO ARIN 5-26-2014, "The Impact of Neoconservative Think Tanks on American Foreign Policy," E-International Relations, http://www.e-ir.info/2014/05/26/the-impact-of-neoconservative-think-tanks-on-american-foreign-policy/ Scholar at the Middle East Technical University at AnkaraAfter recruiting their staff from the most renowned think tanks, the Clinton and Bush administrations succeeded in influencing the public opinion in the US. In this regard, policy advisers from think tanks are not merely viewed as objective scholars who give neutral recommendations to the government, but as policy entrepreneurs who are associated with power blocs, foundations, corporations, and partisan politics. Did the neoconservative Project for a New American Century form an alliance with the Bush Administration? In the article, the success of the

neoconservative think tanks as an advocacy coalition is discussed. For the conservative turn, the alliance of the Christian Right and the neoconservative intellectuals in think tanks (Heritage Foundation and AEI) with the financial elite did not only move the Republican Party to the right, but also tried to manipulate public opinion under the influence of sympathizing media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch (Müller 43-44). Neoconservative papers like the National Journal, the Public Interest, and the American Spectator influence the op-eds of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. Liberal think tanks and their contacts in Congress should be expelled from the government apparatus by losing their donors with the result that the neocons could gain access to the state institutions and leave an imprint on the Clinton administration before the next election (Krugman 182-184). The Bush Administration Vice-President Cheney was the key player in the appointment of leading neoconservatives like Abrams, Armitage, Bolton, Wolfowitz, and Perle. Dorrien characterizes Cheney as policy entrepreneur who was highly amenable for neoconservative proposals. Neither Dick Cheney nor Donald Rumsfeld had a neoconservative tenure. Rather, both represented traditional Republican hawks who were receptive to neoconservative views. So both of them had signed the founding charter of the Project for a New American Century. Cheney and Rumsfeld shared its unipolarism and thus were aligned with the neoconservative movement (Dorrien, Imperial Designs 3). Hardline conservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld would never agree with the balance of power or follow Buchanan in an old-fashioned isolationism. President George W. Bush may be close to the Christian Right and Vice-President Dick Cheney may be considered a fiscal

conservative. These two factions rival with the neoconservatives for ideological predominance in the GOP, but both factions are in concord with them in the unilateral foreign policy for the adherence of national interests, increased defense spending, and going it alone. Though Donald Rumsfeld was no neoconservative, he was closely connected to Paul Wolfowitz, Jeane

Kirkpatrick, and Richard Perle. Indeed, he was a go-between among the neoconservatives, the corporations, and politicians; he partly orchestrated the support of multinationals and arms producers to the neoconservative movement. Big business became the profiteer of neoconservative ideas that legitimized their interests (Velasco 73). Rumsfeld nominated neocons such as Wolfowitz and Feith to senior positions in the DoD (Ibid. 207). The office of the Vice-President, the Pentagon, and the Defense Policy Board were neoconservative strongholds (Dorrien, Imperial Designs 2). According to Peleg, the assertive hawks Cheney and Rumsfeld influenced George W. Bush’s decisions on foreign policy. In the case of Bush, one can assess that he had the same opinion on neoconservative thinking. In all probability, the President made a decision after consulting his Vice President, while both were increasingly affected by neoconservatives who were incorporated in the Defense and State Departments (Peleg 165). While Bush’s speeches often included religious terms, he

always stressed his resolve to unilaterally enhance American power. The resolute stance of Bush Jr. was the broadening of his Christian faith based on neoconservatism. The neocons gave him assurance that his failing policies were right, despite the loss of public opinion. In conveying his policies to the electorate, Bush used the neoconservative argumentation that his promotion of liberty and democracy were identical with American interests (Skidmore 209). The Bush Doctrine, the Neoconservative Concept for Primacy? In the enforcement of the Pax Americana, neocons were willing to approve tensions in diplomacy and international law: not the entire UN, but its perception as fundament of the ‘new world order’ would fall. From their perspective, this was a liberal illusion that the UN Security

Council could exclusively legitimize the use of force or guarantee peace through international law in cooperation with other organizations (Halper and Clarke 40-47). Moreover, neocons feared that the international institutions might be misused in an absolutely legal and administrative framework to constrain American power by a sovereign world government that strictly followed international law. By implication, neocons are regarded as architects of an interventionist unilateralism because of their endorsement of military conflict settlement. Neoconservative think tanks like the AEI and the PNAC, whose members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and, Wolfowitz, not only demanded a significant rise in defense spending,

but also the challenging of regimes that were hostile to American values and interests (Homolar-Riechmann 34-35). “Wolfowitz began drafting the doctrine of pre-emptive attack and unilateralism in 1992″(Coffmann 5). As former member of the Bush Sr. administration, Wolfowitz formulated, in his time at the AEI and

later at the PNAC, which he co-founded, the Bush Doctrine formerly known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. The unilateral war strategy of the AEI and the PNAC was set against the multilateral US foreign policy that had built the United Nations and NATO. The Bush administration proceeded unilaterally against other states for the preservation of the US national interest in security. While multilateral cooperation under US hegemony was widely desirable, unilateralism provoked counterweight among France, Germany, Russia, and

China, or the group of states, the G-77 (Jäger 838). The neoconservatives saw the occupation of Iraq as first phase in the reordering of the Near East. “By 1997 the neoconservative think-tank the New American Century Project advocated a remaking of the Middle East”(Coffman 5). In its

analysis, the Iraq war should secure democracy in the world. Iraq should become the first democratic state in the Arab world and induce its neighbours to emulate its progress. Islamism would lose ground, since economic prosperity and democratic freedom were contagious. America’s military presence would have, according to neocons, a sobering effect on the authoritarian regimes in the region. The neocons, however, primarily made the same observations, like all proponents of earlier foreign policy doctrines, about the frailness of their abstract theories to real events. The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya proved the veracity of their assumptions after years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and months-long air attacks to oust Gaddafi from power, according to the neoconservative Hoover Institution (Lagon and Shultz). Conclusion Following Sabatier’s and Jenkins-Smith’s explanatory approach, the advocacy coalition neoconservatives have used their network of scholars, journalists, managers, bureaucrats, and politicians to convince the foreign policy novice George W. Bush of their plans for the reordering of the Near East (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 3). Since the foundation of the PNAC in 1997, the scholars exchanged views with the Republican members of Congress in testimonies. Even before the election of Bush Jr., they could convey their

unilateral stance not only to Republicans, but also to the Clinton administration, though they did not ultimately succeed under Clinton. Not until Buh Jr. came into office were the neoconservatives able, under the leadership of their proponents Rumsfeld and Cheney, to implement their unilateral pursuit of US primacy, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the

proclamation of the Bush Doctrine. Once in government, they isolated dissenters like Colin Powell in the decision-making. As former think-tank scholars, they provided Bush Jr. with analyses, ideology, and knowledge for his plans to topple Saddam Hussein. There existed a coalition of interest and knowledge between the former scholars and their employer in the White House, causing a learning effect and the socialization of neoconservative ideas over group boundaries into the entire state apparatus and to the GOP, resulting in a policy change. As a consequence a symbiosis of knowledge and power, neoconservatives were linked to the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. The changes in international politics led to a recalibration of the US role as hegemon in a multipolar system to primacy in a unipolar system, which resulted in an alignment of the decision-making process in foreign policy. So the USA succumbed to the temptation to maintain and enhance, by military means, its position as hegemonic power in the world economy. By conducting the war on terror, the political elites pursued their goal of universal dominion under Bush Jr. After the dismissal of key neoconservatives from the Bush administration, the unilateral foreign policy was altered. The alliance between the neoconservative PNAC and the administration ended after the loss of majority in Congress in 2006, whereupon

leading neoconservatives like Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz resigned and their think tank PNAC was closed (Reynolds). The new foreign policy should secure the military and economic strength after the loss of the ‘unipolar moment’ (Charles Krauthammer) for shaping a global consensus and mutual agreement with the allies to face global challenges under US leadership (Nye, Future of Soft Power 10). Even liberal internationalists contended: multilateralism when possible, going it alone when necessary (Maull 11).[1] In this sense, Nye points to ‘smart power’ that combines strategies of hard and soft power for providing US foreign policy the diplomatic legitimacy of military interventions through the promotion of democracy, human rights, and the development

of civic society. The war on terror had lessened the ‘smart power’ of the US and, after 9/11, brought an ‘overmilitarised’ foreign policy with deep cuts in foreign aid and the budget of the State Department (Nye, Future of Soft Power 9-11). This is related to the impact of neoconservative think tanks AEI and PNAC, which, as sectional interest groups, defined expansive foreign policy goals at cost of broadly conceived national interests. As a result, the assertive multilateralism of the Clinton administration shifted to unilateral

primacy under Bush Jr. The neocons still represent the strongest foreign policy faction in the GOP. They are allied with the Christian

Right, which is lacking its own foreign policy strategy. The neocons are rooted in the Pentagon and the arms industry. Their network in think tanks, government agencies, economy, and media such as Fox News will not diminish in the coming years. In 2009, some of the same people started the Foreign Policy Initiative. Many of Romney’s key advisers have been drawn from this network and are credited by him with influencing his outlook (Judis). Out of Romney’s 24 foreign policy advisers, 17 had worked for the Bush administration. As his advisers, the neocons formulated Romney’s uncompromising stance towards Russia, China, Iran, and the stalled Mideast peace process. Once again, the right-wing intellectuals made the headlines with their impact on American foreign policy (Berman; Horowitz; Heilbrunn).

AT Perception

We should change how we focus- only permissible deviations assure participants diverse viewsPhilip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,

Unlike the precedent of academic journals, however, the proposal advanced here is not centered around evaluating the explanatory strengths and weaknesses of abstract theoretical accounts; the focus is on the capacity of flesh-and-blood observers, drawing on whatever mix of street smarts and academic knowledge they deem optimal, to decode real events unfolding in real time. To this end, observers would be subject to the same bottom-line correspondence and coherence tests of their judgments in this book. The only permissible deviations from standardization would be those necessary to assure participants from diverse viewpoints that the norms of procedural fairness are being respected. For example, at the beginning of the forecasting exercise, all participating observers would be given the option of specifying whether they wish to avail them- selves of difficulty and value adjustments to their forecasting accuracy scores; at the end of the exercise, observers would be given the option of revising those adjustments as well as given the opportunity to accept additional modifications such as controversy adjustments (for residual un- certainty over what really happened) and fuzzy-set adjustments (for residual uncertainty over what nearly happened (close-call counterfactuals) or what might yet happen (off-on-timing). Observers could also opt either to keep their results private (and use the resulting feedback purely for cognitive self-improvement) or to go public (demonstrating their willingness to put their reputations on the line).

AT nuclear war

Nuclear war very likely wont end humanity- physically impossible given missiles in existenceMatthews 15’Dylan Matthews, 2-19-2015, "These are the 12 things most likely to destroy the world," Vox, http://www.vox.com/2015/2/19/8069533/end-of-the-world

The "good" news here is that nuclear war could only end humanity under very special circumstances. Limited exchanges, like the US's bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, would be humanitarian catastrophes but couldn't render humans extinct. Even significantly larger exchanges fall short of the level of impact Pamlin and Armstrong require. "Even if the entire populations of Europe, Russia and the USA were directly wiped out in a nuclear war — an outcome that some studies have shown to be physically impossible, given population dispersal and the number of missiles in existence

AT Nuclear Prolif

2 Reasons why nuclear proliferation wont happen- not as dangerous and leadershipPhilip Tetlock 6’

Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?,Foxes clustered around more middle-of-the-road analyses. They con- ceded that peace requires deftly managing balance-of-power relation- ships and implementing credible deterrence commitments. But they also saw real risks of provoking desperate states and setting off conflict spi- rals that could be avoided by adopting a more empathic posture. These foxes made mental room for two contradictory propositions: (a) nuclear proliferation is not as dangerous as supposed because such weapons (coupled with secure second-strike capabilities) induce caution; (b) nu- clear proliferation is every bit as dangerous as widely supposed because, absent 100 percent confidence in the leadership and command and con- trol of each new nuclear power, each instance of proliferation has the net effect—after subtracting out the benefits of mutual deterrence—of in- creasing the likelihood of nuclear war.28 One fox gets the last word: “I’m not smart enough to know who is right. I’m not sure anyone is. We don’t have a lot of experience with nuclear war.”

AT: Case Arguments

Stigma – 2AC

Stigmatization of welfare recipients deters applicants Barr 2k (Barbara Matacera Barr – Highly respected professional with 15 years of experience in legal including 8 ½ years in the government sector, 5 years banking experience and 3 years of compliance/transparency. Performance driven with ability to build relationships with business and technology personnel by identifying opportunities for improvement. Leverage skill-set as a Certified Paralegal to understand and disseminate state and federal laws that govern interactions between HCPs and medical device companies. – “Stigma: A Paper for Discussion” – Covering Kids National Program Office Southern Institute on Children and Families – 2000 – http://www.coveringkidsandfamilies.org/resources/docs/Stigma.pdf)

Literature on stigma and its effects on participation in public programs has defined the problem of stigma. Work that continues today with regard to eligibility simplification and enrollment has begun to address the stigma affect ing

program participation , and this work continues to define and re-define the problem. The public in general still perceives Medicaid and welfare as synonymously linked. As you will see below, the way people are treated is a big contributor to the enduring negative perceptions of public-run programs, including health coverage. Yet, what the existing literature and possibly the current work lacks are explicit solutions to the defined problem. Theories exist and evidence is beginning to arise to support the theories. However, more work needs to focus on the stigma associated with government-sponsored health coverage before we can confirm the theories and test the solutions. The following section lists what the literature has stated about why

individuals feel stigmatized when using public programs, such as AFDC and Food Stamps. Dynamics of stigma most vividly operate through face-to-face interaction (Jarrett, 1996); 3 Stigma is associated with the degree to which recipients accept the

traditional ideology of individual self-reliance (Kerbo, 1976); Stigma can be self-afflicting, emanating from the participants’ own recognition that they are engaging in actions they view as self-demeaning, while recognizing it is more than this because it involves other people’s evaluation of one’s actions (Moffitt, 1983); Feelings of stigma are dependent

on the audience, the specific situation and the individual’s life history (Rogers-Dillons, 1995); Applicants are often treated disrespectfully and judged by case workers in welfare offices as lazy and reluctant workers (Rosier and

Corsaro, 1993); Welfare and public programs are viewed as enabling people to get something for nothing and not being self-reliant and willing to work hard (Besley and Coate, 1992); The culture of the welfare system needs to build on people’s strengths, not reinforce negative stereotypes of welfare mothers (Mills, 1996). III. What the Literature Says About How Welfare Recipients Internalize and Manage Stigma Welfare recipients tend to view themselves as different from the typical welfare recipient, referring to welfare recipients as "they" not "we," dissociating themselves from the negative stereotype of people on welfare (Briar, 1966); Recipients view themselves as supplicants, seeking assistance to help tide them over until things get better (Briar,

1966); Those most likely to internalize the stigma of being a recipient of welfare were also more likely to believe that people were poor because they are lazy and irresponsible about work (Kerbo, 1976); Recipients who

do not internalize stigma were less likely to hold poor people responsible for their circumstances (Kerbo, 1976); 4 Welfare recipients feeling the most negative impact of stigma are those who identify themselves with the lower class and believe that this country is a land of equal opportunity (Goodban, 1985);

Welfare recipients are MUCH less likely to vote and have strong influence on young adults, risking long term consequences – studies proveSwartz 9 (Teresa Toguchi Swartz, Amy Blackstone, Christopher Uggen, and Heather McLaughlin – Swartz: Associate Professor Ph.D. 2001. Blackstone:  Associate Professor Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2003. Uggen: Christopher Uggen is the McKnight Professor of sociology and criminology who works at University of Minnesota. McLaughlin: Ph.D from University of Minnesota. – “WELFARE AND CITIZENSHIP: THE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE ON YOUNG ADULTS’ CIVIC PARTICIPATION” – November 2, 2009 – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771575/#__articleid630472aff-info)

The welfare system has recently undergone dramatic changes aimed at altering financial dependency upon the state, marital status, and fertility of recipients (Haney and March 2003; Hays 2003; Rogers-Dillon and Skrentny 1999). But how are these programs affecting the citizenship of recipients? Contrary to assertions that any assistance from the welfare state uniformly diminishes civic participation, our research indicates that the effects of government assistance

depend on the type of government program. Specifically, those involved with stigmatizing and discretionary

welfare programs were significantly less likely to vote than non-recipients . On the other hand, there were no

differences in voting for those who received other forms of government assistance compared with non-recipients. Moreover, this research shows that these effects on political participation extend beyond those that could be accounted for by poverty and lower levels of education. The statistically significant differences in the voting rates between those involved in different welfare state tiers imply differential consequences on voting of these two channels and provide evidence for the

bifurcated welfare state thesis. We found the effect of welfare on voting to persist over time. In particular, welfare receipt in 1996 continued to have a negative effect on voting in the 2000 elections . This is particularly disconcerting given that our respondents were young adults who are establishing their civic engagement trajectories and identities as citizens, especially given what we have seen here about the strong influence of prior voting on later voting. If experiences with welfare diminish their voting behaviors and feelings of efficacy during these early years of adulthood, this may have long term consequences for later well-being and political involvement . This study goes beyond previous research and contributes to theories of a

bifurcated welfare state in several different respects. First we use a unique data set of official voting records rather than the self-reported measures of previous studies. What is more, this study controls for prior voting behavior—

that is, voting habits that preceded the receipt of government assistance—which provides much stronger evidence that the welfare experience itself is what is driving dampened political participation in the more stigmatized government assistance programs. Further, this study examines civic engagement in the form of volunteering, as well as voting.

AT: Drug Testing Good

Rhetoric of federal attempts to prevent drug abuse are fundamentally flawed: they don’t work, aren’t based on statistics, and are attempts to increase social controlKatherine Beckett is an associate professor at the University of Washington and Theodore Sasson is an associate professor at Middlebury College.

2004 “The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America” Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAAahUKEwjAwaWz_erGAhUUNYgKHYy-B4A&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.publiceye.org%2Fdefendingjustice%2Fpdfs%2Fchapters%2Ftoughcrime.pdf&ei=7JOtVcCbNpTqoASM_Z6ACA&usg=AFQjCNFXkSWKFeptURUvPQkxD5_gTXYiZQ&sig2=udt1maHxSyWdepxdUQkojQ

Conclusion¶ Beginning in the 1960s, conservative politicians at the national level began to focus an unusual degree of attention on the problem of street crime. That they did so is somewhat surprising: Not only is the capacity of federal government officials to respond to this type of crime fairly limited, but there was no indication that public concern about crime had increased or that the public believed that getting tough was the best way to address this problem . Similarly, in the 1980s, conservatives called for the wars on crime and drugs before the public demonstrated any increased desire for such measures. These politicians made law and order a centerpiece of their political platforms, promoted the view that these social ills stem from permissiveness in the forms of criminal justice leniency and welfare dependency, and argued for tough criminal justice and welfare policies in order to address the problem. ¶

If not a response to clear public demands to “get tough” on crime, how can the rise of the crime issue to the center of the political stage be explained? The conservative initiative on these issues was part of a larger effort to forge a new Republican electoral majority following the collapse of the New Deal coalition. Doing so involved reaching out to formerly Democratic, white voters who had been alienated by the (belated and reluctant) Democratic embrace of the civil rights cause. Rhetoric about the collapse of law and order, crime in the streets, and the need for strength in the face of chaos proved to be a successful means of doing so . Conservative initiative on the crime issue has also been aimed at shifting the government’s role and responsibilities from the provision of social welfare toward the protection of personal security. The get-tough policies that have resulted from this campaign are not supported by the findings of most sociological research, which suggest that severity of punishment does not have a significant deterrent effect and that welfare spending reduces rather than increases crime . Nevertheless, these policies have been largely supported by both Republican and Democratic politicians for complex political reasons, and, to a significant extent, by members of the public.

AT: Crime DA

Structural poverty causes crime- StatisticsLichter and Crowley 02 (Daniel T. Lichter is professor of sociology and the Robert F. Lazarus Chair in Population Studies at Ohio State University. Martha L. Crowley is a doctoral candidate in the sociology department at Ohio State University. June 2002 "Poverty in America: Beyond Welfare Reform" www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2002/PovertyinAmericaBeyondWelfareReformPDF106MB.aspx)The association between poverty and crime arouses passionate debate among social scientists and public opinion leaders. The empirical evidence is unequivocal : A higher percentage of the poor than the nonpoor are arrested, convicted for violent crimes, and incarcerated. Violent and property crime rates tend to be higher in poor neighborhoods and economically depressed urban areas than in other areas.80 Poor people are also more likely than other Americans to be the victims of crime (see Table 3).81 But the interpretation of this evidence is not straightforward. Table 3 Victims of Violent Crime by Income Level, 2000Victims per 1,000 people age 12 or older

Rape/sexual Annual income Rape/Sexual Assault Robbery AssaultLess than $7,500 4.3 8.1 45.1$7,500-$14,999 1.6 6.9 35.9$15,000-$24,999 3.2 4.8 27.2$25,000-$34,999 1.2 3.1 33.7$35,000-$49,999 1.6 3.5 25.3$50,000-$74,999 1.5 2.2 29.7$75,000 or more 0.8 1.8 20.3Source: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Criminal Victimization 2000: Changes 19992000 With Trends 1993-2000” (2001): Table 14. One common view is that poverty and inequality sow the seeds of crime and deviant social behavior. Poor children are more likely than other children to be raised by single mothers, have minimal supervision, become involved with delinquent peers, and be socialized into deviant subcultures, such as gangs and organized crime. According to another view, disadvantaged persons, even if they aspire to middle-class values and goals, may turn to illegal activities when they find that legitimate routes to a better material life are blocked by their low educational attainment or by discrimination.82 A related view holds that the poor are disproportionately targeted for arrest , and that they are more likely to be convicted and jailed than nonpoor people because they have weaker legal representation , among other disadvantages. Critics claim that white-collar crime by wealthier Americans is rarely targeted in the same way. Some analysts suggest that delinquent or criminal behaviors lead directly to poverty. Underage drinking and drug use, for example, may lead indirectly to other criminal behaviors, including gang activity and violent and property crimes, that lead ultimately to dropping out of school, unemployment, or unmarried childbearing. According to this view, poverty is a consequence of bad decisionmaking early in life. Spending time in jail, especially in early adulthood, may cut short education and job preparation, elevating the likelihood of chronic poverty.

Being “tough on crime” is an excuse which has historically justified racism and classism – it’s true goal is in achieving a politics of social controlKatherine Beckett is an associate professor at the University of Washington and Theodore Sasson is an associate professor at Middlebury College.

2004 “The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America” Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAAahUKEwjAwaWz_erGAhUUNYgKHYy-B4A&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.publiceye.org%2Fdefendingjustice%2Fpdfs%2Fchapters%2Ftoughcrime.pdf&ei=7JOtVcCbNpTqoASM_Z6ACA&usg=AFQjCNFXkSWKFeptURUvPQkxD5_gTXYiZQ&sig2=udt1maHxSyWdepxdUQkojQ

“Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for [Hubert] Humphrey’s war on poverty. ” –Richard Nixon, 38th President of the United States of America“ [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. ” –H.R. Haldeman , Nixon’s Chief of Staff The “tough on crime” movement refers to a set of policies that emphasize punishment as a primary, and often sole , response to crime . Mandatory sentencing, Three strikes, truth-in-sentencing, quality of life policing, zero tolerance, and various other proposals that result in longer and harsher penalties and the elimination of rehabilitation and other programs are all contemporary examples of “tough on crime” policies. The effects of these policies are alarming . Local, state and federal governments have all adopted and implemented these policies resulting in enormous increases in drug arrests, more punitive sentencing proposals, resurgence of the death penalty, departure from juvenile justice systems, and increased racial profiling and community surveillance. While proponents claim these policies are race-neutral, poor people and people of color are overwhelmingly affected and ensnared by the criminal justice system.In the following article, scholars Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson argue “that conservative politicians have worked for decades to alter popular perceptions of crime, delinquency, addiction, and poverty, and to promote policies that involve ‘getting tough’ and ‘cracking down.’”1 They also challenge the claim that political elites were simply responding to popular opinion about crime and punishment, and instead argue that conservatives played a large role in shaping the public’s perceptions about crime. The authors document how the modern “tough on crime” movement was part of a larger effort to increase votes for the Republican Party, and more significantly, to redirect State policy away from social welfare toward social control. It is important to note that while the modern “tough on crime” movement— and the resulting incarceration boom—can be traced to late 19 60s and early 1970s, many activists justifiably argue that the U.S. government has always had a “get tough” policy beginning with Native colonization . However, for the purposes of understanding the modern Right, this section will focus primarily on the electoral and political development of the “get tough” movement since the 1960s. Over the past several decades, the U.S. government has enthusiastically declared and waged wars against crime and drugs. In this article, we focus squarely on this issue: Why have national-level politicians so vigorously waged a war on crime and drugs that has created the largest prison population in the world ? We argue that in response to the social challenges of the 1960s, conservative political leaders—and, increasingly, those at the national level—began to highlight the problem of street crime in an attempt to steer state policy toward social control and away from social welfare.In what follows, we show that conservative politicians have worked for decades to alter popular perceptions of crime, delinquency, addiction, and poverty, and to promote policies that involve “getting tough” and “cracking down.” We also show that when advocating such policies, these political elites were not simply responding to popular beliefs and sentiments about crime and punishment, although they did help to shape the public’s perceptions of the crime problem and preferences regarding what to

do about it. Rather, their activities were part of a larger effort to realign the electorate in ways that favor the GOP and, even more significantly, to reorient state policy around social control rather than social welfare.

AT: Disads

Impact Calculus – 2AC

Attempts to manage future conflicts cause neo-eugenics because the entire idea underpinning the philosophy is that the state’s job is to manage Life and push it into the future, but that ignores the lives that have to be sacrificed in order to make that future livable – that means you can’t weigh the DA unless they beat the case, otherwise their impact calculus is complicit in mass slaughter – that’s Smith

Focus on solving apocalyptic extinction scenarios is a governance of fear that cements inequality by prioritizing the social advancement of the elite at the expense of the most poor – a vote for the status quo is an alliance with a neoliberal politics that tells the poor they don’t deserve the chance to survive Samantha Lynn Kolpin, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2014 “Fight the Dead, Fear the Living: Post-Apocalyptic Narratives of Fear, Governance and Social Control” http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2769&context=etdSpecifically, neoliberal governments pursue policies aimed at deregulating government control of economic interests and increasing the privatization of traditionally public social services . According to Giroux (2004), under neoliberal policies “ the rich get tax handouts and corporate relief while the most basic health care services for children, elderly are cut or dramatically reduced” (p. 4). While neoliberal states emphasize deregulation in economic spheres, it is argued that they conversely increase regulations in public spheres to maximize individual opportunities to participate unrestrained in a consumer-based culture . Power is created among a chain of actors, rather than relying on any sort of power imposed by one overarching figure (Garland, 1997). Deukmedjian (2013) argues that neoliberalism reflects free market politics, which allows for the security and freedoms afforded to individuals to relate more to market demands than to the success or failure of any business. According to Giroux

(2004), there is a decreased interest in providing social security for the larger population and an increased interest in providing economic security to facilitate those individuals who are rational, freethinking and willing and able to participate in a market society (Bell, 2011; Giroux, 2004). ¶ Based on these features, many critics have argued that neoliberalism is marked by a commitment to social inequality , which results in a permanent underclass . The focus is on ensuring a low cost of public services and a market model, leaving little room to provide social security for those in the lower classes

of society. People who are unable or unwilling to participate in capital accumulation are seen as deviant. As such,

neoliberal policy focuses on policing or regulating these individuals (Brown, 2006; Maki, 2011). Maki (2011) considers the rule of neoliberalism and surveillance techniques for welfare recipients under Ontario Works. In order to justify the use of widespread welfare surveillance during the 1990s, neoliberal policy emphasized that the widespread stereotypes of assumed criminality and fraud amongst welfare recipients demanded a more punitive and regulatory system to monitor potential recipients. Other key arguments included the desire to reduce and control welfare caseloads (and costs) to ensure accountability to taxpayers, and the privatization of social services to create an efficient centralized system that had the potential to offload some of the state's responsibility for the poor onto the private market. Maki (2011) claims that welfare surveillance acts as a direct assault

on the poor in the service of a neoliberal state. Surveillance becomes a “calculated practice for managing and manipulating human behaviour” (Henman, 2004, p. 176). The goal with these surveillance techniques is to minimize the number of people on welfare, thereby forcing individuals to participate in the market culture and acquire paid labour employment as a means of survival. ¶ Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Governing through Fear ¶ It can be suggested that a neoliberal style of government leads to a particular focus on governmentality, biopolitics/biopower, and governing through fear . Foucault (1998) defines biopower as “the subjugation of bodies and ...control of populations” (pg.

93). According to Foucault, biopower allows the power of the state to enter multiple institutions and social fields as a means of managing and controlling the population (De Larrinage & Doucey, 2008). For example, Amoore (2006) discusses how the use of biometrics through the US VISIT program (a management program that collects and analyzes biometric data as a means

of tracking individuals) demonstrates the extent of government regulatory powers as a means of protecting and ensuring life. Essentially , the concept of biopower refers to the ability to manage the health of the population by determining which individuals are able to access the health resources that greatly contribute to their chances of survival . This is linked to the concept of

governmentality, the notion that governmental power is decentralized and spread throughout government institutions. Giroux (2006) describes how biopower works in the United States to render some groups disposable and privilege others within a permanent state of emergency. Similar trends can be seen in Canadian government. Canavan (2011) discusses how census data collected by Statistics Canada can be used to help determine funding models for health agencies, postsecondary academic programs or immigration policies, thereby influencing who could legally enter Canada or gain access to health care and education for Canadian residents. Biopower retains its sovereign power to harm and to kill through the identification, monitoring, and regulations of certain individuals based on bio-information (Canavan, 2011).

AT: Politics

AT political capital real

Political capital not real- history provesMoraes 13’Frank Moraes is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, and throughout the computer industry. And he has taught physics and is a writer at frankly curious., 1-7-2013, Political Capital is a Myth," http://www.franklycurious.com/LMNucleus/index.php?itemid=3575What was this thing that Bush intended to spend? It is usually said that political capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor and kill the gays. But he used his political capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this proves the point, but does anyone really think if Bush had decided to use his political capital destroying food stamps and Medicaid that he would have succeeded any better? The truth was that Bush's political capital didn't exist. Let's look at more recent events: the Fiscal Cliff. Obama didn't win that fight because the people who voted for him demanded it. He won it because everyone knew that in the new year he would still be president. Tax rates were going up. Boehner took the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was the best deal that he felt he could get. He didn't fold because of some magic political capital that Obama could wave over him. There is no doubt that public opinion does affect how politicians act. Even politicians in small safe districts have to worry that larger political trends may end up making them look stupid, out of touch, or just cruel. But beyond that, they really don't care. If they did, then everyone in the House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate and the associated political capital. But they don't, because presidential elections have consequences—for who's in the White House. They don't have much consequence for the Representative from the Third District of California.

Political capital didn’t work before wont work now- Clinton provesKlein 12’Ezra Klein, 3-19-2012, currently the editor and chief of vox graduated from UCLA and is an editor and columnist for the Washington Post "The Unpersuaded," New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/the-unpersuaded-2A study by the Gallup organization, from 2004, found that, compared with all the Presidential job-approval ratings it had on record, Reagan’s was slightly below average, at fifty-three per cent. It was only after he left office that Americans came to see him as an unusually likable and effective leader. According to Edwards, Reagan’s real achievement was to take advantage of a transformation that predated him. Edwards quotes various political scientists who found that conservative attitudes peaked, and liberal attitudes plateaued, in the late nineteen-seventies, and that Reagan was the beneficiary of these trends, rather than their instigator. Some of Reagan’s closest allies support this view. Martin Anderson, who served as Reagan’s chief domestic-policy adviser, wrote, “What has been called the Reagan revolution is not completely, or even mostly, due to Ronald Reagan. . . . It was the other way around.” Edwards later wrote, “As one can imagine, I was a big hit with the auditorium full of dedicated scholars of rhetoric.” Edwards’s views are no longer considered radical in political-science circles, in part because he has marshalled so much evidence in support of them. In his book “On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit” (2003), he expanded the poll-based rigor that he applied to Reagan’s rhetorical influence to that of nearly every other President since the nineteen-thirties. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats are perhaps the most frequently cited example of Presidential persuasion. Cue Edwards: “He gave only two or three fireside chats a year, and rarely did he focus them on legislation under consideration in Congress. It appears that FDR only used a fireside chat to discuss such matters on four occasions, the clearest example being the broadcast on March 9, 1937, on the ill-fated ‘Court-packing’ bill.” Edwards also quotes the political scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell, who, in a more systematic examination of Roosevelt’s radio addresses, found that they fostered “less than a 1 percentage point increase” in his approval

rating. His more traditional speeches didn’t do any better. He was unable to persuade Americans to enter the Second World War, for example, until Pearl Harbor. No President worked harder to persuade the public, Edwards says, than Bill Clinton. Between his first inauguration, in January, 1993, and his first midterm

election, in November, 1994, he travelled to nearly two hundred cities and towns, and made more than two hundred appearances, to sell his Presidency, his legislative initiatives (notably his health-care bill), and his party. But his poll numbers fell, the health-care bill failed, and, in the next election, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than forty years. Yet Clinton never gave up on the idea that all he needed was a few more speeches, or a slightly better message. “I’ve got to . . . spend more time communicating with the American people,” the President said in a 1994 interview. Edwards notes, “It seems

never to have occurred to him or his staff that his basic strategy may have been inherently flawed.” George W. Bush was similarly invested in his persuasive ability. After the 2004 election, the Bush Administration turned to the longtime conservative dream of privatizing Social Security. Bush led the effort, with an

unprecedented nationwide push that took him to sixty cities in sixty days. “Let me put it to you this way,” he said at a press conference, two days after the election. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” But the poll numbers for privatization—and for the President—kept dropping, and the Administration turned to other issues.

Obama, too, believes in the power of Presidential rhetoric. After watching the poll numbers for his health-care plan, his stimulus bill, his Presidency, and his party decline throughout 2010, he told Peter Baker, of the Times, that he hadn’t done a good enough job communicating with the American people: “I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.” The annual State of the Union address offers the clearest example of the misconception. The best speechwriters are put on the task. The biggest policy announcements are saved for it. The speech is carried on all the major networks, and Americans have traditionally considered watching it to be something of a civic duty. And yet Gallup, after reviewing polls dating back to 1978, concluded that “these speeches rarely affect a president’s public standing in a meaningful way, despite the amount of attention they receive.” Obama’s 2012 address fit the pattern. His approval rating was forty-six per cent on the day of the speech, and forty-seven per cent a week later. Presidents have plenty of pollsters on staff, and they give many speeches in the course of a year. So how do they so systematically overestimate the importance of those speeches? Edwards believes that by the time Presidents reach the White House their careers have taught them that they can persuade anyone of anything. “Think about how these guys become President,” he says. “The normal way is talking for two years. That’s all you do, and somehow you win. You must be a really persuasive fellow.” But being President isn’t the same as running for President. When you’re running for President, giving a good speech helps you achieve your goals. When you are President, giving a good speech can prevent you from achieving them. In January, 2004, George W. Bush announced his intention to “take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond.” It was an occasion that might have presented a moment of bipartisan unity: a Republican President was proposing to spend billions of dollars on a public project to further John F. Kennedy’s dream of venturing deep into the cosmos. As Frances Lee, now a professor at the University of Maryland, recalls, “That wasn’t a partisan issue at all. Democrats had no position on sending a mission to Mars.” But, she says, “they suddenly began to develop one. They began to believe it was a waste of money.” Congressional Democrats pushed the argument in press releases, public statements, and television appearances. In response, the White House, which had hinted that the Mars mission would feature prominently in the State of the Union address, dropped it from the speech. The experience helped to crystallize something that

AT political capital key

Political capital doesn’t do anything- if a party wants something to pass they have to be convinced againstKlein 12’Ezra Klein, 3-19-2012, currently the editor and chief of vox graduated from UCLA and is an editor and columnist for the Washington Post "The Unpersuaded," New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/the-unpersuaded-2

Lee had been thinking about. “Most of the work on the relationship between the President and Congress was about the President as the agenda setter,” she says. “I was coming at it from the perspective of the increase in partisanship, and so I looked at Presidents not as legislative leaders but as party leaders.” That changes things dramatically. As Lee writes in her book “Beyond Ideology” (2009), there are “inherent zero-sum conflicts between the two parties’ political interests as they seek to win elections.” Put more simply, the President’s party can’t win unless the other party loses. And both parties know it. This, Lee decided, is the true nature of our political system. To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. She found that a President’s powers of persuasion were strong, but only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars variety—they should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper. One way of interpreting this is that party members let their opinion of the President influence their evaluation of the issues. That’s not entirely unreasonable. A Democrat might have supported an intervention in Iraq but questioned George W. Bush’s ability to manage it effectively. Another interpretation is that party members let their political incentives influence how they evaluate policy. “Whatever people think about raw policy issues, they’re aware that Presidential successes will help the President’s party and hurt the opposing party,” Lee says. “It’s not to say they’re entirely cynical, but the fact that success is useful to the President’s party is going to have an effect on how members respond.” Or, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to get a man to support something if his reëlection depends on his not supporting it. Both parties are guilty of this practice. Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, recalls discussing the Social Security privatization plan with a sympathetic Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. He says that the representative told him, “You wouldn’t get everything you want and I wouldn’t get everything I want, but we could solve the problem. But I can’t do it because my leadership won’t let me.” Rove says, “It was less about Social Security than it was about George W. Bush.” At various times during the nineteen-nineties, Clinton and other Democrats had been open to adding some form of private accounts to Social Security, and in 1997 there were, reportedly, quiet discussions between Democrats and Republicans about doing exactly that. In theory, this background might have led to a compromise in 2005, but Bush’s aggressive sales pitch had polarized the issue. The Obama Administration was taken by surprise when congressional Republicans turned against the individual mandate in health-care reform; it was the Republicans, after all, who had championed the idea, in 1993, as an alternative to the Clinton initiative. During the next decade, dozens of Senate Republicans co-sponsored health-care plans that included a mandate. Mitt Romney, of course, passed one when he was governor of Massachusetts. In 2007, when Senator Jim DeMint, of South Carolina—now a favorite of the Tea Party—endorsed Romney for President, he cited his health-care plan as a reason for doing so. Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, who supported the mandate before he opposed it, shrugs off his party’s change of heart. “We were fighting Hillarycare,” he has said, of the Republicans’ original position. In other words, Clinton polarized Republicans against one health-care proposal, and then Obama turned them against another. Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, takes Lee’s thesis even further. “The more high-profile the communication effort, the less likely it is to succeed,” he says. “In education reform, I think Obama has done brilliantly, largely because it’s out of the press. But on higher-profile things, like

deficit reduction, he’s had a much tougher time.”

Legislation would have passed anyway- without the shift Hirsh 13’Michael Hirsh, 2-7-2013, Michael Hirsh is the national editor for Politico Magazine. He is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek. He was a member of JournoList Author. "There’s No Such Thing as Political Capital," national journal, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207

As a result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit of compromise on immigration reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence—his political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do with just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a

surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of the

Republican Party’s recent introspection, and the realization by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side.”

Obamas pc doesn’t work- democrats ignored himBrandner and walsh 15’Eric Bradner and Deirdre Walsh, Cnn, 6-13-2015, "Dems reject Obama's key trade proposal in House vote," CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/12/politics/white-house-tpp-trade-deal-congress/Sensing his free trade agenda was hours from a stunning defeat, President Barack Obama went to Capitol Hill on Friday morning to make a personal plea for his own party's support.∂ Democrats ignored him.∂ And now, the prospects for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the biggest free trade deal in history, to be finalized and adopted are grim -- unless Democrats can be convinced to change their minds or Republicans can find another way to revive the bills and rescue Obama's biggest second-term legislative priority.∂ The House overwhelmingly rejected the first in a series of trade bills Friday, with Democrats voting against a program that aids displaced workers -- in large part because, under the chamber's procedures, its defeat meant the vote on the so-called "fast track" bill that followed was only symbolic, so the measure couldn't be sent to Obama's desk.∂ In a statement released Friday afternoon, Obama praised the approval of the fast-track bill and continued to press for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.∂ "These kinds of agreements make sure that the global economy's rules aren't written by countries like China; they're written by the United States of America," Obama said. "And to stand in their way is to do nothing but preserve the long-term status quo for American workers, and make it even harder for them to succeed."∂ But Friday's votes provided the clearest evidence yet that, with 19 months left in his presidency, Obama's pulpit is less bully than it's ever been before.∂ It also showcased the strength of populist elements of both parties, who beat back an intense lobbying push from traditional Washington forces like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers

Congress is not convinced by ObamaKlein 12’Ezra Klein, 3-19-2012, currently the editor and chief of vox graduated from UCLA and is an editor and columnist for the Washington Post "The Unpersuaded," New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/the-unpersuaded-2Richard Neustadt, who died in 2003, was the most influential scholar of the American Presidency. He was a founder of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an adviser to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton, and, in his book “Presidential Power” (1960), he wrote the most frequently quoted line in Presidential studies: “The power of the

presidency is the power to persuade.” On August 31st of last year, President Barack Obama prepared to exercise that power. Frustrated with the slow recovery of the economy, he wanted to throw the weight of his office behind a major new stimulus package, the American Jobs Act. To this end, the White House announced that the President would deliver a televised speech to a joint session of Congress, and, as is customary, the President sent a letter to the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, asking him to schedule the address for September 7th. Boehner, the man Obama needed to persuade above all others, said no. In a written reply to the President, the Speaker said that the House had votes scheduled for six-thirty that evening. He added, “It is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no

parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.” Few believed that this was all there was to it. Boehner’s real objection, most thought, was that the

Republican Presidential candidates were scheduled to hold a televised debate at the Reagan Library on the seventh, and Obama’s speech would upstage it. The White House, meanwhile, had its own concerns: Boehner’s suggested date would pit the

President against the opening game of the N.F.L. season. No Speaker of the House had ever refused a President’s request to address a joint

session of Congress, but the House Republicans refused to budge, and the back-and-forth, which was dominating and delighting the political news media, threatened to overwhelm the President’s message on jobs. In the end, Obama agreed to speak on the eighth. He was in a combative mood, and, after a summer in which the Republicans had driven the economic debate, with their brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, the Democrats were thrilled to see him take back the legislative initiative. When the TV ratings came in, the White House was relieved: with thirty-one million viewers, the President had beaten the N.F.L. But, in the days following the speech, Obama’s approval rating was essentially unchanged—according to a Gallup poll, it actually dropped a percentage point. The

audience, apparently, had not been won over. Neither had Congress: the American Jobs Act was filibustered in the Senate and ignored in the House. The White House attempted to break the act into component parts, but none of the major provisions—expanded payroll-tax cuts, infrastructure investment, and a tax credit for businesses that hired unemployed workers—have passed. The President’s effort at persuasion failed. The question is, could it have succeeded? In 1993, George Edwards, the director of the Center for Presidential Studies, at Texas A. & M. University, sponsored a program in Presidential rhetoric. The program led to a conference, and the organizers asked their patron to present a paper. Edwards didn’t know anything about Presidential rhetoric himself, however, so he asked the organizers for a list of the best works in the field to help him prepare. Like many political scientists, Edwards is an empiricist. He deals in numbers and tables and charts, and even curates something called the Presidential Data Archive. The studies he read did not impress him. One, for example, concluded that “public speech no longer attends the processes of governance—it is governance,” but offered no rigorous evidence. Instead, the author justified his findings with vague statements like “One anecdote should suffice to make this latter point.” Nearly twenty years later, Edwards still sounds offended. “They were talking about Presidential speeches as if they were doing literary criticism,” he says. “I just started underlining the claims that were faulty.” As a result, his conference presentation, “Presidential Rhetoric: What Difference Does It Make?,” was less a contribution to the research than a frontal assault on it. The paper consists largely of quotations from the other political scientists’ work, followed by comments such as “He is able to offer no systematic evidence,” and “We have no reason to accept such a conclusion,” and “Sometimes the authors’ assertions, implicit or explicit, are clearly wrong.” Edwards ended his presentation with a study of his own, on Ronald Reagan, who is generally regarded as one of the Presidency’s great communicators. Edwards wrote, “If we cannot find evidence of the impact of the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, then we have reason to reconsider the broad assumptions regarding the consequences of rhetoric.” As it turns out, there was reason to reconsider. Reagan succeeded in passing major provisions of his agenda, such as the 1981 tax cuts, but, Edwards wrote, “surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities”—all programs that the President opposed—“increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure.” Meanwhile, “support for increased defense expenditures was decidedly lower at the end of his administration than at the beginning.” In other words, people were less persuaded by Reagan when he left office than they were when he took office. Nor was Reagan’s Presidency distinguished by an unusually strong personal connection with the electorate.

Political capital isn’t effective and is antipersuasive- presidential persuasion isn’t effective with the publicKlein 12’Ezra Klein, 3-19-2012, currently the editor and chief of vox graduated from UCLA and is an editor and columnist for the Washington Post "The Unpersuaded," New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/the-unpersuaded-2

Edwards’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion isn’t effective with the public. Lee’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion might actually have an anti-persuasive effect on the opposing party in Congress. And, because our system of government usually requires at least some members of the opposition to work with the President if anything is to get done, that suggests that the President’s attempts at persuasion might have the perverse effect of making it harder for him to govern. If speeches don’t make a difference, what does? Another look at the Presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan offers an answer. Roosevelt was one of only two Presidents in the twentieth century whose parties won seats in a midterm election. That was in 1934—a year in which the economy grew by ten per cent. But in the midterms of 1938, the year after the economy plunged into a double-dip recession, the Democrats lost seventy-two seats in the House. If Roosevelt had been running for reëlection, he, too, would almost certainly have lost. During Reagan’s first two years in office, the economy fell into recession. By the time of the 1982 midterm election, unemployment had risen to 10.8 per cent and the economy had shrunk by two per cent. Already the minority party in the House, the Republicans lost twenty-six seats. Reagan’s approval rating went below forty per cent. But then the economy recovered. By November, 1984, unemployment had fallen to 7.2 per cent, and the economy, remarkably, was growing at an annual rate of seven per cent. Reagan was elected to a second term in a forty-nine-state landslide. There is no reason to believe that F.D.R.’s storytelling faltered for a single midterm election, or that Reagan lost his persuasive ability in 1982, then managed to regain it two years later. Rather, the causality appears to work the other way around: Presidents win victories because ordinary Americans feel that their lives are going well, and we call those Presidents great communicators, because their public persona is the part of them we know. After three years in Washington, David Axelrod, who served as the chief strategist for President Obama’s 2008 campaign, agrees. “Some folks in politics believe this is all just a rhetorical game, but when you’re governing it’s not,” he says. “People are viewing their lives through the lens of their own experience, not waiting for you to describe to them what they’re seeing or feeling.” Paul Begala, who helped set the message in the Clinton White House, puts it more piquantly: “The Titanic had an iceberg problem. It did not have a communications problem. Right now, the President has a jobs problem. If Obama had four-per-cent unemployment, he would be on Mt. Rushmore already and people would look at Nancy Pelosi like Lady Gaga.” The question, Begala says, is: What is the alternative to Presidential persuasion? “If you don’t try it at all, it guarantees you won’t persuade anybody,” he says. “And, to put it simply, your people in Congress and in the country will hate you if you don’t.” That’s the real dilemma for the modern White House. Aggressive, public leadership is typically ineffective and, during periods of divided government, can actually make matters worse. But passivity is even more dangerous. In that case, you’re not getting anything done and you look like you’re not even trying. One option is to exert private leadership. The Obama Administration has had some success with this approach. Late in 2010, some observers wondered why the White House, which clearly believed that there was a need for further stimulus, wasn’t pushing Republicans on a payroll-tax cut, one of the few stimulus measures they had seemed somewhat open to. Then, suddenly, after the midterm election, it appeared in the tax deal. Axelrod says, “We didn’t put the payroll-tax cut into our speeches in the fall because we didn’t think we could pass it, and we worried that if we included it in our rhetoric it might pollute the issue and impair our chances of getting it done after the election.” Back-room bargains and quiet negotiations do not, however, present an inspiring vision of the Presidency. And they fail, too. Boehner and Obama spent much of last summer sitting in a room together, but, ultimately, the Speaker didn’t make a private deal with the President for the same reason that Republican legislators don’t swoon over a public speech by him: he is the leader of the Democratic Party, and if he wins they lose. This suggests that, as the two parties become more sharply divided, it may become increasingly difficult for a President to govern—and there’s little that he can do about it. Theorists have long worried over this possibility. They note that our form of government is not common. As Juan Linz, a professor of political science at Yale, pointed out in a 1989 paper, “The only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States.” A broad tendency toward instability and partisan conflict, he writes, is woven into the fabric of a political system in which a democratically elected executive can come from one party and a democratically elected legislature from another. Both sides end up having control over some levers of power, a claim to be carrying out the will of the public, and incentives that point in opposite directions. The American system has traditionally had certain features that reduced the stakes—notably, political parties that encompassed a diverse range of opinions and often acted at cross purposes with themselves. But today the parties operate as disciplined, consistent units. According to Congressional Quarterly, in 2009 and 2010 Democrats and Republicans voted with their parties ninety per cent of the time. That rigidity has made American democracy much more difficult to manage—and it has made the President, as party leader, a much more divisive figure. Edwards, ever the data cruncher, has the numbers to back up this perception. “When President Obama took office, he enjoyed a 68 percent approval level, the highest of any newly elected president since John F. Kennedy,” he wrote in a recent paper. “For all of his

hopes about bipartisanship, however, his early approval ratings were the most polarized of any president in the past four decades. By February 15, less than a month after taking office, only 30 percent of Republicans approved of his performance in office while 89 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Independents approved. The gap between Democratic and Republican approval had already reached 59 percentage points—and Obama never again reached even 30 percent approval among Republicans.” This, Edwards says, is the reality facing modern Presidents, and one they would do well to accommodate. “In a rational world, strategies for governing should match the opportunities to be exploited,” he writes. “Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation through Congress on a party-line vote.” That’s easier said than done. We don’t have a system of government set up for Presidents to drive legislation through Congress. Rather, we have a system that was designed to encourage division between the branches but to resist the formation of political parties. The parties formed anyway, and they now use the branches to compete with one another. Add in minority protections like the filibuster, and you have a system in which the job of the President is to persuade an opposition party that has both the incentive and the power to resist him. Jim Cooper says, “We’ve effectively lost our Congress and gained a parliament.” He adds, “At least a Prime Minister is empowered to get things done,” but “we have the extreme polarization of a parliament, with party-line voting, without the empowered Prime Minister.” And you can’t solve that with a speech. ♦

AT: Counterplans

Replace Welfare CP – Aff

2AC – Solvency

Counterplan doesn’t solve inequality – in the long run it just creates similar welfare systems under GI, perpetuating stigmatizationTanner 14 (Michael D. Tanner – Cato Institute senior fellow, Michael Tanner heads research into a variety of domestic policies with a particular emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care reform, and Social Security. – “The Basic Income Guarantee: Simplicity, but at What Cost?” – CATO Unbound – August 26, 2014 – http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/26/basic-income-guarantee-simplicity-what-cost)

But the benefit would not be truly univers al. It therefore raises the question of what to do about those who are disabled or who cannot work for other reasons. For that matter, what about those who cannot find jobs? Would there be a parallel welfare system to care for those people ? If so, it would appear that all we have done is add a new benefit on top of the current system. Moreover, the EITC is already one of the most fraud-ridden of all federal programs.

2AC – AT: Poverty NB

Basic income system doesn’t give out enough money, is 3 times more expensive than welfare and doesn’t solve povertyTanner 14 (Michael D. Tanner – Cato Institute senior fellow, Michael Tanner heads research into a variety of domestic policies with a particular emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care reform, and Social Security. – “The Basic Income Guarantee: Simplicity, but at What Cost?” – CATO Unbound – August 26, 2014 – http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/26/basic-income-guarantee-simplicity-what-cost)

Zwolinski does not propose any specific income, but cites Charles Murray’s suggestion of $ 10,000 per person spread over a U.S. citizen population of roughly 296 million , the cost of such a program would be $2.96 trillion, or almost 3 times our current welfare expenditure . And there is considerable question as to whether $10,000 would be a sufficient grant . Last year, the poverty threshold for a single individual under 65, after all, was $12,119. Of course, some suggest using the basic income to replace middle-class social welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as

those targeted to the poor. The idea of abolishing Social Security and Medicare is far more problematic, both politically and practically, than using UBI to replace more conventional welfare programs. Besides, it still wouldn’t raise enough money to fund a truly universal basic income. Using CBO data for 2013, eliminating welfare state programs including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income security and so forth (but

excluding tax expenditures) would yield only $2.13 trillion. If we also included, as some have suggested, so-called tax expenditures, such as the mortgage interest deduction and the exclusion of employer contributions, as well as Social Security, EITC and CTC related tax

expenditures, we could add an additional $393 billion for a total of $2.5 trillion. That still wouldn’t be enough . Others would limit grants to adults only. This would clearly be more affordable, dropping the cost to roughly $2.25 trillion.

However, limiting participation to adults would leave families with several children well below the poverty level. Consider that the poverty threshold for a family of four was $23,624 in 2013, while grants for the two adults in the family would total $20,000 . One possibility would be to adjust the benefit downward

for each additional person in a household, recognizing that there are some economies of scale as household size increases. This would reduce costs and the incentive to increase household size (potentially by having more children) while also allowing the initial benefit to be set higher (benefiting smaller households], but would introduce another layer of complexity.

CP isn’t net beneficial – different costs of living make it harder for them to solve povertyTanner 14 (Michael D. Tanner – Cato Institute senior fellow, Michael Tanner heads research into a variety of domestic policies with a particular emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care reform, and Social Security. – “The Basic Income Guarantee: Simplicity, but at What Cost?” – CATO Unbound – August 26, 2014 – http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/26/basic-income-guarantee-simplicity-what-cost)

Another issue that would arise in any national level implementation of a UBI is how to address the regional variation in the cost of living . The benefit might be more than sufficient in low cost states like South Dakota, but it might not be enough in high cost states like California and New York . A recent study by the Tax Foundation looked at the purchasing power of $100 in each state, with the relative value ranging from $84.60 in Washington D.C. to

$115.74 in Mississippi. Our current system addresses this disparity to some extent, although some of the variation may be due to states increasing benefit generosity for reasons other than cost of living differences. In The Work versus Welfare Trade-off 2013, I found that the benefits package from the same seven programs ranged from

$25,491 in Arkansas to $49,175 in Hawaii. The impact of the UBI would vary by location, and low-income people in high cost areas could be worse off . It is not hard to imagine a scenario where people advocate for some kind of benefit adjustment based on the cost of living in the area. While this could potentially be a

better design, it would again add a layer of complexity to what initially seemed like a very simple program .

2AC – Perm do both

Perm do both – curtail surveillance of welfare recipients and give guaranteed income

2AC – Perm do the Counterplan

Perm the reduce welfare surveillance by replacing the welfare system with guaranteed income

AT: Overpopulation NB

No impact to overpopulation – misunderstands human ecologyEllis 13 (ERLE C. ELLIS – Ph.D., Cornell University, 1990 Professor, Geography & Environmental Systems University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. He says: My research investigates the ecology of anthropogenic landscapes and their changes at local to global scales. Current work in my lab has three main foci: the global ecology and history of human landscapes (anthropogenic biomes), tools for global synthesis of local knowledge of landscape change (GLOBE), and inexpensive tools for measuring and managing ecological change across anthropogenic landscapes (Ecosynth, Anthropogenic Ecotope Mapping). All of these come together in my main goal: informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. My earlier work investigated ecological changes in ancient village landscapes across China in the transition from traditional to industrially-based agricultural systems. My teaching includes Environmental Science & Conservation (120), Landscape Ecology (305), Applied Landscape Ecology (405/605), and Biogeochemical Cycles in the Global Environment (412/612) and Field Methods in Geography: Environmental Mapping (485/685). At Harvard Graduate School of Design, I co-teach Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies III: Introduction to Ecology (GSD 6241) – “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem” – The New York Times – September 13, 2013 – http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html)

BALTIMORE — MANY scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are

reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences. Disaster looms as humans exceed the earth’s natural carrying capacity. Clearly, this could not be sustainable. This is nonsense . Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues

repeat these and similar claims — often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems . The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems. Dot Earth Blog: An Ecologist Explains His Contested View of Planetary LimitsSEPT. 16, 2013 The evidence from archaeology is clear. Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies and tools of stone and fire to extract more sustenance from

landscapes than would otherwise be possible. And, of course, Homo sapiens went much further, learning over generations, once their preferred big game became rare or extinct, to make use of a far broader spectrum of species. They did this by extracting more nutrients from these species by cooking and grinding them, by propagating the most useful species and by burning woodlands to enhance hunting and foraging success. Photo Credit Katherine Streeter Even before the last ice age had ended, thousands of years before agriculture, hunter-gatherer societies were well established across the earth and depended increasingly on sophisticated technological strategies to sustain growing populations in landscapes long ago transformed by their ancestors.

The planet’s carrying capacity for prehistoric human hunter-gatherers was probably no more than 100 million . But without their Paleolithic technologies and ways of life, the number would be far less — perhaps a few tens of millions. The rise of agriculture enabled even greater population growth requiring ever more intensive land-use practices to gain more sustenance from the same old land. At their

peak, those agricultural systems might have sustained as many as three billion people in poverty on near-vegetarian diets. The world population is now estimated at 7.2 billion. But with current industrial technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that the more than nine billion people expected by 2050 as the population nears its peak could be supported as long as necessary investments in infrastructure and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies are in place. Who knows what will be possible with the

technologies of the future? The important message from these rough numbers should be clear. There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity . We are nothing at all like bacteria in a petri dish. Why is it that highly trained natural scientists don’t understand this ? My experience is likely to be illustrative. Trained as a biologist, I learned the classic mathematics of

population growth — that populations must have their limits and must ultimately reach a balance with their environments. Not to think so would be to misunderstand physics: there is only one earth, of course! It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships — archaeologists,

geographers, environmental historians and agricultural economists. The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire

history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves . This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits. Two

hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement. There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future . There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever.

3 reasons why overpopulation is goodAque 14 (Prime Aque – a freelance WordPress Developer, I also offer SEO services to my existing clients on Fiverr. Also a freelance writer at Academia-Research.com – “Positive and Negative Effects of over Population” – Self-Help – November 20, 2015 – http://selfhelparchive.com/positive-and-negative-effects-of-over-population/#sthash.lM1leQVa.dpuf)

Defense: Large Population makes it possible to mobilize enough people to defend the integrity of the country in times of war and any other emergencies. Increase in Labor Market: Increasing population ensures increase in the labor force. Lack of growth in the labor force will make a country static , retarded and gets to equilibrium at less than full employment level of the economy. Large Market: Investors would like to invest in a country with a large population. As the population continues to grow so will be the growth in demand for food, shelter, clothing etc

AT: Virtual Rights CP

AT: Virtual Rights CP

The counterplan views it from a flawed understanding: these rights are utopian and unable to be implemented. Prefer our author, he indicts theirsPaul Dornan and John Hudson, 2003 Dr John Hudson, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York "Welfare Governance in the Surveillance Society: A Positive-Realistic Cybercriticalist View" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9515.00352/referencesWe believe that Fitzpatrick’s position is useful, that he has started a vital debate, but we disagree in substance and instead suggest a recasting of his “cybercriticalism” to promote the opportunities as well as the threats. Reading Fitzpatrick’s analysis, one is left with the impression that, given the fact that radical socio-economic change of the sort he desires seems unlikely, ICTs are largely a threat to welfare and well-being: something to be guarded against unless—somewhat unrealistically—they can be disconnected from the powerful multinational corporations (MNCs) that develop and, often, manage them.2 The result is a closed-down debate and a focus on the negativity of change. On the other hand, as Fitzpatrick (: ) rightly points out, the Blair government tends to have an overly positive view of ICTs that often assumes benefits will automatically flow from the deployment of the technology (see also Hudson ). It is so eager to embrace new ICTs—and the MNCs that are part and parcel of the “information age”—that its agenda shows little thinking about potentially negative aspects. As Kearns (: ) puts it: “the government implicitly sees technology, including internet technology, as value neutral”. In a sense, this leaves us caught between an almost utopian belief in the power of ICTs to improve both our economy and polity on the one hand, and what is effectively a dystopian perspective on the other, urging resistance and heavy regulation until far-reaching socioeconomic change can be instigated . As Kearns (: ) suggests, we should reject “both the utopian and dystopian visions of the internet . . . both are too technologically deterministic and too simplistic”. Indeed, as Norris and Armstrong (: ) argue, not only is there room for a middle ground, there is “an urgent need to consider how the new technologies of mass surveillance can be harnessed to encourage participation rather than exclusion, strengthen personhood rather than diminish it, and be used for benevolent rather than malign purposes”.

AT: Critiques

Framework - Welfare reform debates good

Critical education on welfare surveillance is good – helps identify implicit biases in our policies which spills over to better debatesPhilosophy @ University of Hong Kong 2015 University of Hong Kong, Philosophy Department, Open Courseware on Critical Thinking, Logic and Creativity Feburary 15 2015 "Moving Beyond Biases and Stereotypes" www.cptc.edu/stereotype/bias/lessonbuilder_files/Stereotypes_and_Bias_print.htmlWithout thinking critically, you're only looking at the surface of things. When you come across a politician's statement in the media, do you accept

it at face value? Do you accept some people's statements and not others'? The chances are you exercise at least some judgment, based on what you know

about the particular person, and whether you generally agree with her or not.¶ Knowing whether or not you agree with someone is not necessarily the same as critical thinking, however. Your reaction may be based on emotion ("I hate that guy!"), or on the fact that this elected official supports programs that are in your interest, even though they may not be in the best interests of everyone else. What's important about critical thinking is that it helps you to sort out what's accurate and what's not, and to give you a solid, factual base for solving problems or addressing

issues. Critical thinking helps you to move beyond the stereotypes and your own biases to judge individuals more accurately.¶ Some specific reasons for the importance of critical thinking:¶

• It identifies bias . Critical thinking identifies both the bias in what it looks at (its object), and the biases you yourself bring to it . If you can address these honestly, and adjust your thinking accordingly, you'll be able to see the object in light of the way it's slanted, and to understand your own biases in your reaction to it.¶ A bias is not necessarily bad: it is simply a preferred way of looking at things. You can be racially biased, but you can also be biased toward looking at all humans as one family. You can be biased toward a liberal or

conservative political point of view, or toward or against tolerance. Regardless of whether most of us would consider a particular bias good or bad, not seeing it can limit how we resolve a problem or issue.¶ •It's oriented toward the problem, issue, or situation that you're addressing . Critical thinking focuses on analyzing and understanding its object. It eliminates, to the extent possible, emotional reactions, except where they become part of an approach or solution.¶ It's just about impossible to eliminate emotions, or to divorce them from your own deeply-held assumptions and beliefs. You can, however, try to understand that they're present,

and to analyze your own emotional reactions and those of others in the situation.¶ There are different kinds of emotional reactions. If all the evidence points to something being true, your emotional reaction that it's not true isn't helpful, no matter how badly you want to believe it. On the other hand, if a proposed solution involves harming a particular group of people "for the good of the majority", an emotional reaction that says "we can't let this happen" may be necessary to change the situation so that its benefits can be realized without harm to anyone. Emotions that allow you to deny reality generally produce undesirable results; emotions that encourage you to explore

alternatives based on principles of fairness and justice can produce very desirable results.¶ •It gives you the whole picture. Critical thinking never considers anything in a vacuum. Its object has a

history, a source, a context. Thinking critically allows you to bring these into play, thus getting more than just the outline of what you're examining, and making a realistic and effective solution to a problem more likely. ¶ •It brings in other necessary factors. Some of the things that affect the object of critical thought -- previous situations, personal histories, general assumptions about an issue -- may need to be examined themselves. Critical thinking identifies

them and questions them as well.¶ During the mid-90's debate in the United States over welfare reform , much fuss was made over the amount of federal money spent on welfare. Few people realized, however, that the whole entitlement program accounted for less than 2% of the annual federal budget . During the height of the debate, Americans surveyed estimated the amount of their taxes going to welfare at as much as 60%. Had they examined the general assumptions they were using, they might have thought differently about the issue. ¶ •It considers both the simplicity and complexity of its object. A situation or issue may have a

seemingly simple explanation or resolution, but it may rest on a complex combination of factors. Thinking critically unravels the relationships among these, and determines what level of complexity needs to be dealt with in order to

reach a desired conclusion.¶ •It gives you the most nearly accurate view of reality. The whole point of critical thinking is to construct the most objective view available.

100% objectivity may not be possible, but the closer you can get, the better.¶ •Most important, for all the above reasons, it is most likely to help you get the results you want. The closer you are to dealing with things as they really are, the more likely you are to be able to address a problem or issue with some hope of success.¶ In more general terms, the real value of critical thinking is that it's been at the root of all human progress. The first ancestor of humans who said to himself, "We've always made bone tools, but they break awfully easily. I bet we could make tools out of something else. What if I tried this rock?" was using critical thinking. So were most of the social, artistic, and technological ground breakers who followed. You'd be hard pressed to find an advance in almost any area of humanity's development that didn't start with someone looking at the way things were and saying "It doesn't have to be that way. What if we looked at it from another angle?"

Welfare Surveillance Negative

Note For risk calc answers, go to the TSA NEG from the FLA lab.

Virtual Rights CP

1NC

The United States Federal Judiciary should establish an explicit set of virtual rights using information communication technologies

The counterplan solves the welfare surveillance stateFitzpatrick 2000 (Tony Fitzpatrick University of Nottingham, Tony Fitzpatrick - degree in Literature and Philosophy and a Masters degree in Politics and Political Philosophy -PhD in 1996 from Edinburgh University on the subject of Basic Income "Critical cyberpolicy: network technologies, massless citizens, virtual rights" csp.sagepub.com/content/20/3/375.refs?patientinform-links=yes&legid=spcsp;20/3/375)How can we formulate alternatives to this kind of approach? The essential point made so far is that cybercriticalism is that which focuses upon (a) the reciprocal interactions of online and offline environments, and (b) the socially

damaging results of those interactions due to the virtual reproduction of real inequalities. The job of social policy is to emphasize the influence which deregulatory capitalism is having upon social welfare and collective institutions and values : for if left unchallenged it is the worrying consequences of ICTs [ Information and Communication Technologies] that are likely to emerge given the effects of the offline free market environment. The task, then, is to ask the following question: how do we deploy ICTs and how do we reform welfare systems in such a way that cyberpolicies work towards the objective of social justice ? This section will provide a preliminary response to this question. We begin with someone

whose ideas provide the standard terms of reference: T. H. Marshall.¶ Earlier, I observed that as much attention should be paid to the social rights of cyberusers as to their civil and political rights. The problem is that Marshall provides little guidance in this respect. Many have criticized him for overestimating the extent to which the welfare state had replaced a class society and for ignoring the possibility that the former was itself the latest, though not

necessarily the final, stage of class struggle (Turner, 1993). Marshall’s conception of a hyphenated citizenship, where market value, democratic value and welfare value are held together in a creative tension, underestimated the endurance of free market capitalism and the commodifying tendencies of the welfare state itself . If, by contrast, we interpret the classic welfare state as the bureaucratization and only partly decommodification of market capitalism, then our allegiance to it (as opposed to our allegiance to the principle of social justice) can be profitably weakened. Marshall was on stronger ground when trying to identify entitlements which were ‘beyond’ social rights, i.e. industrial rights, whereby welfare citizenship could be extended more firmly into the economic sphere. Within the context of market capitalism, however, such industrial rights can never be anything other than an appendage to the other categories of rights (Giddens, 1981) and socialist commentators were correct to point out that the institutional embodiment of industrial

rights required another socio-economic context altogether.¶ Yet because of the socio-economic changes that Marshall never lived to fully see I propose an alternative category to that of industrial rights: virtual rights , these being rights possessed by massless citizens which overlap with, but are nevertheless distinct from, their civil, political and social rights (see Tambin, 1998: 103–7). In short, we still need a category that is ‘beyond’ those of the classic triumvirate and which posits a post-capitalistic socio-economic context. (I should add that I regard virtual rights to be a subset of global citizenship alongside ‘ecological rights’ and ‘cultural rights’.) That context, however, has to allow for changes to the nature of production and consumption and so cannot simply refer back to the economistic industrialism of productivist socialism (Fitzpatrick, 1998b). So, the concept of ‘virtual rights’ has a heuristic intent: to tease out and lead us toward the possible dimensions of that post-productivist context. ¶

The ‘massless citizen’ is the ghostly inhabitant of the information society and the term is meant to conceptualize the fact that with the integration and comparison of computer files we each have an electronic shadow or doppelganger, a ‘data-self’ (Lacy, 1996: 162–3; Fisher, 1997: 120). Sometimes this virtual self is nothing more than a cyberreflection of the real person; increasingly, though, the flesh and blood person is being treated as an inferior version of their data-shadow, as in the case of a credit check or a CCTV scan. It all depends upon whether we possess our data-selves or whether we are

possessed by them. The aim of cybercriticalism is to work out how social policies can be used to ensure that it is individuals who possess their data-selves and not the other way around. So, somebody does not have to be logged into the Internet (a netizen) to become massless: in an

information society, even the most computer illiterate person is a massless citizen in that they have an online virtuality which is sometimes a simulation of, and sometimes simulates, their offline realities. ¶ We are all massless citizens, then, because we are all caught and implicated within the informational webnet of the state–market nexus. However, and as already argued, some (the wealthy) are more able to control and benefit from this web, evading the predatory dangers within. So, whereas the term ‘digital citizen’ focuses simply upon online–offline interactions (Morrison, 1999), ‘massless citizen’ is meant to encompass both digitality and social hierarchy: the ‘digital hierarchy’ (see Schiller, 1996: 96–107). For masslessness implies both virtuality—streams of data that are without mass

(photons)—and post-collectivism—a society where the masses are no longer said to exist; and it is precisely the shift to an informatic, post-collectivist society that has exacerbated social and class divisions.¶ Virtual rights can be thought of as the fundamental entitlements of massless citizens: their purpose being to suppress the disempowering tendencies of network technologies by conjoining online and offline environments as a goal of social policy-making and permitting collective forms of identity and

association to be reconstructed . They place the emphasis upon the informatic empowerment of the individual for its own sake (Steele, 1998) rather than upon the competitive needs of the

economy (Bangemann, 1994; Moore, 1998). First, they are offline-to-online rights, i.e. possessed by citizens with regard to the accuracy of the information which is held on them by both public and private agencies. Second, they are online-to-offline rights in that they relate to the uses to which that information is put and so to whether it is our virtual selves that do or do not predominate in our social and economic interactions.¶ In many respects, virtual rights have already been placed on the agenda by civil liberties groups campaigning for updated Freedom of Information Acts suited to the cyberage and against proposals such as those for the surrender of encryption keys

and those contained in the Communications Decency Act of 1996.13 Equally, we have seen that virtual activity can be unlawful even when no offline effects have been detected. The designers of an anti-abortion website were successfully prosecuted in 1999 for implicitly encouraging violence against doctors and clinics performing abortions; and a male university student was expelled several years earlier for a graphic online description of the rape, mutilation and murder of a female student, even though she never encountered her assailant at all. We can therefore define virtual rights as rights that are concerned (a) with the complex offline–online interfaces which affect all citizens in an information society, and (b) with addressing online and offline inequalities. Virtual rights may be conceived as a fourth right of global citizenship, but perhaps also as a prosthetic addition to the classic triumvirate.14

Legalism K

1NC

The discourse of progressivism and reform conceal legacies of oppression – causes war, administrative violence, and turns the case Dillon 13 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0740770X.2013.786277, “It's here, it's that time:” Race, Queer Futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames, May 23, 2013, Stephen Dillon, writer and philosopher)The revolutionary state replicates the past through discourses of reform, progress, and patience. By tracing the debates, tactics, and theories of aboveground and underground feminist revolutionaries organizing for a revolution against the revolution, Born in Flames challenges the imagination and fantasies of the state and labor, and the future such visions instantiate. It also critically intervenes in futures imagined by the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: futures often normalized and restrained by the heterosexist and patriarchal regulation of gender and sexuality. To the extent that it builds off of the insights and theories of women-of-color feminism, Born in Flames produces a politics of futurity that exceeds the imagination of the state, labor, and the revolutionary Left. Critically, the film produces a theory of the future and time where the continuation of the present as it is means that the future will not come. A critique of the state is central to this politics. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the future in the same manner . The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass” (Martin 2007, 63). For the Women’s Army, in the future that is no future – when “things are better now” but state and non-state violence continue to target racialized and gendered populations in the same way but under a new name – the only way to usher in a future that is not an end is to make the present expire. Hope means that tomorrow (as it is, as it has been, and as it will be) cannot come. As I understand it, the film’s critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound implications for how we think about the future. Unlike traditional dystopic science-fiction films that are often set decades (if not centuries) in the future and that attempt to paint a picture of what will be if an aspect of the present is not undone, the dystopia of Born in Flames – one marked by surveillance, assassination, incarceration, state racism and heterosexism, and sexual violence – is the truth of our past and present. In other words, the future within the film is not the future that awaits us, but the present and past we are and have been living. Born in Flames does not show us what is coming, but what is here – what has always been here. This is evident in the ways that the film undoes the fabricated division between fact and fiction. In an interview, director Lizzie Borden describes the film as inhabiting a “border line between what is present and therefore documentary and what would be fiction, and therefore science fiction” (Borden and Sussler 1983, 27). The film is an ostensible documentary of the near future, but also uses fiction to produce forms of knowledge that exceed the epistemological boundaries of the state, the non-profit, the university, and the social order. Indeed, the film was conceived, filmed, and released at the moment when new modes of governance based on the prison, the market, and the non-profit emerged.2 In particular, the urgency and impatience of the Women’s Army produces a politics and epistemology that undermines the temporalities of progress and reform central to the state and the heterosexist and patriarchal regulations of revolutionary nationalisms (Ferguson 2004). The film’s critique of the forms of knowledge central to the state, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy is evident in its engagement with the relationship between time and violence – what I call the temporality of violence. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 39 Downloaded by [Northwestern University] at 17:19 20 July 2015 In this essay, I consider the different

temporalities in the film and their relation to state, non-state, and revolutionary forms of violence in order to think through the debate in queer studies concerning hope and the future. This debate has centered on psychoanalysis, popular culture, and the aesthetics of art and literature, yet what is often missing are the theories and histories of radical and revolutionary activists who contested the unbearable weight of the present in the hope of creating something else. While much of this debate has centered on the ideological and libidinal labor of the concept of the future, here I am concerned with theories of time and violence and their relation to the future.3 Even after 30 years, Born in Flames raises pressing questions about the relationship between time, violence, race, sexuality, and gender. I situate the film’s engagement with the politics of temporality within the writings of 1970s activists who theorized the relationship between race, time, and violence. In particular, I argue that by showing the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism. Additionally, the film gestures toward an anti-social politics that arise out of, not despite, the constitutive violence that produces and regulates race, gender, and sexuality. In other words, the Women’s Army does not deny the future and hope for its end because they miscalculated the power of racialized and gendered subjection. Rather, they hope for the end of the future precisely because they understand the power of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.

Reject the system instead of trying to reform it – the plan just perfects the systems of oppression – vote NEG to burn them down Farley ’05 (Anthony Paul, Professor of Law @ Boston College, “Perfecting Slavery”, 1/27/2005, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)VII. BURN What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up , they , of necessity, burned everything : They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. 48 The slaves burned everything because everything was against them . Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything. 49 “ Leave nothing white

behind you ,” said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.” 51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. 52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful

revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The colorline belts the world.” 54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline. 55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling.

The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death , not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end . There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave , or so it seems. We are trained to think through a progress narrative , a grand narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery . The progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresent-future timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline , only under conditions of total juridical freedom . It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights . The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system

of law is a plantatio n. These plantations , all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white- overblack , white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal rights . The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country

only by burning down every plantation . When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only calling— it alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may

later blossom into the fullness of our lives . We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die?

Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot be . The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.

Replace Welfare CP – Neg

1NC

Text: The fifty states should guaranteed a basic income for persons living each respective state without conditions.

The states can guarantee income Mitchell, 13 (Dan, “Decentralization and Federalism Is the Libertarian Way to Determine Whether a Basic Income Is Practical or Desirable,” http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/decentralization-federalism-is-libertarian-way-determine-whether-basic-income-is-practical)They’re right, but there’s actually a better way of approaching the issue. Why not take all income-redistribution programs,

put them into a single block grant , and then transfer the money – and responsibility – to state governments? In an ideal world, the block grant would gradually diminish so that states would be responsible for both the collection and disbursement of all monies related to welfare. But that’s a secondary issue. The main benefit of this

federalist approach is that you stop the Washington-driven expansion of the welfare state and you trigger the creation of 50 separate experiments on how best to provide a safety net . Some states might choose a basic income. Others might retain something very similar to the current system. Others might try a workfare-based approach, while some could dream up new ideas that wouldn’t stand a chance in a one-size-fits-all system run out of Washington, DC. And as states adopted different systems, they could learn from each other about what works and what doesn’t work. And since it’s easier to influence decisions that are closer to home, taxpayers at the state level almost

certainly would have more ability to impact what happens with their money. Moreover, there’s actually some evidence that this approach is practical . The 1996 welfare reform legislation isn’t a perfect analogy, but the core feature of that law was the elimination of a national entitlement and the provision of a block grant so that states could decide (with some strings attached) how to deal with poverty. By most measures, the 1996 reform was a success, with Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution explaining that it resulted in lower levels of welfare dependency and reductions in child poverty. This isn’t to say the 1996 law was ideal. The advantage of a comprehensive federalist approach is that policy experts can push states to experiment with different policies. And given the vast differences between various American states, it’s almost guaranteed that there will be lots of

diversity. This diversity not only will inform policy makers about what works and what doesn’t work. It also will satisfy the libertarian desire to get Washington out of the business of income distribution, while presumably producing a system that actually does a better job of helping the less fortunate escape government dependency. In

other words, all the advantages of the basic income plan without the potential system-wide downsides.

A guaranteed income would reduce the humiliations of the current welfare system while promoting individual responsibilityFeeney 13 (Matthew Feeney – Before coming back to the U.S. Matthew worked in London for the Institute of Economic Affairs and at the Headquarters of the Liberal Democrats. He moved to Washington, D.C. to take part in the Institute for Humane Studies' journalism program at The American Conservative and was assistant editor of Reason.com – “Scrap the Welfare State and Give People Free Money” – Reason.com – November 26, 2013 – http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/26/scrap-the-welfare-state-give-people-free)

In 2008, Charles Murray wrote that a guaranteed income for all American adults over the age of 21 who are not in prison of $10,000 a year that would replace all current welfare programs as well as agricultural

subsidies and corporate welfare would be cheaper than maintaining the current welfare system in the coming decades. It is important to point out that under Murray’s proposal, which is outlined fully in his book In Our Hands: A Plan to

Replace the Welfare State, after someone’s total annual income reached $25,000 a 20 percent surtax tax would be imposed on “incremental earned income,” capped at $5,000 once someone earns $50,000 a year.

Murray’s plans also requires that $3,000 of the $10,000 grant be spent on health insurance. Of course giving every non-incarcerated American over the age of 21 $10,000 (or the current poverty line of $11,490) a year with Murray’s

surtax plan in place of all corporate welfare and the entirety of the welfare state (including Social Security,

Medicaid, and Medicare) would not be cheap, but it would be more efficien t , because it is a simple cash transfer, and would be easier to fund were other libertarian budget proposals considered, such as cuts to defense spending. Those who are not fans of Murray’s guaranteed income may be more open to Milton Friedman’s negative income tax, which would not guarantee a set income for every adult, but would provide payments to Americans based on how much below a certain threshold they earned. Like Murray’s guaranteed income, Friedman’s negative income tax would be financed through wealth redistribution. Some libertarians may not be fans of a guaranteed or basic income because

such a system would, they argue, disincentivize work. Murray believes that his surtax scheme would incentivize work after someone began earning over $25,000. Friedman wrote that the negative income tax “reduces the

incentives of those helped to help themselves, but it does not eliminate that incentive entirely, as a system of supplementing

incomes up to some fixed minimum would. An extra dollar earned always means more money available for expenditure.”

GI solves poverty – even under worst circumstancesMurray 8 (Charles Murray – Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray’s other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real Education (2008), and Coming Apart (2012). His most recent book, “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission” (Crown Forum, 2015) urges Americans to stem governmental overreach and use America’s unique civil society to put government back in its place. – “Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State” – The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society – October 30, 2008 – http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf)

The immediate effect of the GI is to end involuntary poverty among the working-aged as well as the elderly. In a world where every adult starts with US$10,000 a year, no one needs to go without decent food, shelter, clothing, and the amenities of life. This statement holds even after taking the expenses of retirement and medical care into account. To summarize the detailed calculations presented in the book, assuming that US$3000 of the grant is devoted to health care (by requirement) and US$2000 is devoted to a retirement fund (voluntarily), leaving US$5000 per person per year, surpassing the official poverty line under the GI is easy for people in a wide range of living circumstances, even in a bad economy with substantial periods of unemployment, and even assuming jobs at the minimum wage.

Poverty kills billions of peopleDS 5/23/15 (Do Something .Org – One of the largest global orgs for young people and social change, our 3.9 million members tackle campaigns that impact every cause, from poverty to violence to the environment to literally everything else. – “11 Facts about Global Poverty” – DoSomething.org – May 23 2015 – https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-global-poverty)

Nearly 1/2 of the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3

billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day. 1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According

to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty . 805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat. Food banks are especially important in providing food for people that can’t afford it themselves. Run a food drive outside your

local grocery store so people in your community have enough to eat. Sign up for Supermarket Stakeout. More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Diarrhea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally , or approximately 2,300 people per day . In 2011, 165 million children under the age 5 were stunted (reduced rate of growth and

development) due to chronic malnutrition. Preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia take the lives of 2 million children a year who are too poor to afford proper treatment . As of 2013, 21.8 million children

under 1 year of age worldwide had not received the three recommended doses of vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. 1/4 of all humans live without electricity — approximately 1.6 billion people. 80% of the world population lives on less than $10 a day. Oxfam estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global

poverty--that's less than 1/4 the income of the top 100 richest billionaires. The World Food Programme says, “The poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty.” Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined .

2NC – Solvency

States are the ones who implement the surveillance – the CP solves the case Rachel Levinson-Waldman, 15 Senior Counsel to the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, Why the Surveillance State Is Everybody's Problem, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/why-surveillance-state-everybodys-problemThere’s been much controversy around the New York City Police Department’s stop and frisk program, which unfairly ensnared tens of thousands of young minority men. But new reports show the NYPD’s tactics are evolving. Now, the Department is monitoring Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts — particularly those of young African-American men— and residents have pointed to surveillance cameras liberally sprinkled throughout African-American neighborhoods. 8, and now affecting nearly every American in one way or another. We ignore this history at our peril; if we fail to act when one group finds itself targeted by the government, we will soon find we are all under the microscope. The developing welfare state provided the first opportunity to keep tabs on a disfavored community: the poor. Some states require drug tests for aid recipients. Others strictly limit the items that can be purchased with aid dollars. Most recently, Kansas banned welfare recipients from spending aid money at swimming pools, and if the Missouri legislature has its way, those on food stamps will no longer be able to buy canned tuna. Such restrictions are likely to be accompanied by bureaucratic tracking mechanisms as well as limits on using cash to facilitate monitoring of recipients’ spending. The information in some welfare databases is shared extensively within the government, and recipients report that caseworkers are using their electronic welfare benefit cards to monitor their activities. These accumulations of data are also inevitably vulnerable to misuse. Cutting-edge technologies are prone to be targeted at communities of color as well. An advocacy group’s deep dive into license plate records from Oakland, Calif., revealed that lower-income minority neighborhoods – regardless of their crime rates – were lined with the devices, while white wealthier neighborhoods could count on having their cars snapped with far less frequency. Another study conducted after a Michigan city installed surveillance cameras in residential neighborhoods found that African-American residents were twice as likely to be surveilled as their white neighbors.

Replacing welfare with guaranteed income solves poverty and inequality of welfare recipientsFeinauer 4/7/15 (JJ Feinauer – a writer and web producer for the National Edition of the Deseret News – “Will a guaranteed basic income replace welfare?” – Desert News National Beta – May 7, 2015 – http://national.deseretnews.com/article/4381/Will-a-guaranteed-basic-income-replace-welfare.html#UIt4WFIlcxdAQ7Bp.99)

The efficiency of the American welfare state is no minor issue of debate. Each year, the president and Congress negotiate the best ways to distribute funds in the federal budget, and each year there are those who call for major reforms to the social safety net, from both the left and the right. Some, typically from the conservatives in Congress, call for reduced spending on welfare initiatives, while

others, typically the liberals, call for increases and expansions. But are there any policies that meet in the middle? Replacing current welfare programs with a guaranteed basic income for all citizens is one idea that pops up now and again, precisely because it has supporters on both sides. According to Vox's Dylan Matthews, who highlighted basic income

proposals on May 1 as part of International Worker's Day, the idea of providing a minimum sum of money to all citizens could work to not only minimize poverty, but close or weaken the widening gap of income inequality . So what, exactly, is a minimum income? According to the Basic Income Earth Network, "A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement." BIEN

explains that basic income differs from more common welfare programs because it pays the individual, not

the household, and it is unconditional. According to Matthews, fears that providing a basic income would

eliminate incentives to work and throw the budget out of whack may be reasonable, but there is evidence

(through some small-scale experiments) that it would have little noticeable impact on these factors . "The scale is likely

to be modest," he wrote, "and the form that reduction in work effort takes could very well be good for the economy in the long run." One of the strangest aspects of basic income proposals, which Matthews handles at length, is that there is substantial support for it from both ideological extremes. On the conservative side, for example, libertarian political philosopher Matt Zwolinski joined the likes of economists Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith when he argued last year that

such a policy could potentially simplify the current federal bureaucracy, lower costs and provide greater protections to individual privacy .

2NC – Poverty NB

GI is the best and only way to win the war on poverty – eliminating welfare programs keyVINIK 13 (DANNY VINIK – Before joining Business Insider, Danny Vinik wrote for his own blog, Political Algebra, on economics, politics, and occasionally sports. He graduated from Duke in 2013 with degrees in economics and public policy. He is a political reporter at Business Insider. – “Everyone's Talking about This Simple Solution to Ending Poverty by Just Giving People Free Money” – Business Insider – November 12, 2013 – http://www.businessinsider.com/giving-all-americans-a-basic-income-would-end-poverty-2013-11#ixzz3gY2kfYknIn 2012, there were 179 million Americans between the ages of 21 and 65 (when Social Security would kick in). The poverty line was $11,945.

Thus, giving each working-age American a basic income equal to the poverty line would cost $2.14 trillion . For some comparison, U.S. GDP was almost $16 trillion in 2012 and the defense budget was $700 billion. But a minimum income would also allow us to eliminate every government benefit as well . Get rid of SNAP, TANF, housing vouchers , the Earned Income tax credit and many others . Get rid of them all. A 2012

Congressional Research Service report found that the federal government spends approximately $750 billion each year on benefits for low-income Americans and that rises to a clean trillion when you factor in state programs . Eliminate all of those and the net figure comes out to $1.2 trillion needed to pay for a universal basic income, still a hefty sum. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to pay for it. The CBO found that a

carbon tax would bring in nearly $100 billion a year for instance. Revenue would also increase automatically since everyone would have a basic income on which to pay taxes. The government could also offer a basic income of $6,000 a year instead of up to the poverty line. Funding a basic income for all working-age adults would not be easy and would

require a substantial increase in the size of government, but it's not impossible either. What are the benefits of a basic income? The

clear one is that no American would live below the poverty line. The U.S. has been waging the War on Poverty for a generation now and still nearly 50 million Americans are below the line. This would end that war with a decisive victory . There are knock on effects as well. Americans would have greater leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions from their employer thanks to the increased income security.

Families could allow one parent to take time off to raise their kids. Eliminating the numerous different government welfare programs would also lead to efficiency gains as adults would simply receive their check in the mail and not have to waste time filling out paperwork at numerous different offices.

Poverty kills billions of innocent people – worse and more probable than their impactEPC 11 (End Poverty Campaign – Hearts & Minds is a clearinghouse of helpful information, motivating people to get involved and showing how to make self-help, volunteering, and donations more effective. We work to reach people nationwide and globally through our website and public education and activism campaigns. – “Facts on World Hunger and Poverty” – Hearts and Minds – July 21, 2011 – http://www.heartsandminds.org/poverty/hungerfacts.htm)

Global Poverty Facts Every day, poverty kills more than 50,000 innocent people - 18 million every year . Source: World Health Organization (2004 report, most recent available, current deaths may be far higher due to global economic setbacks and the rising

cost of food) These statistics account for one third of all human deaths. More people die as a result of extreme poverty than of any other cause. Source: WHO 2008 1.37 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, and 2.56 billion live on less than $2 a day. Moreover, 5.05 billion people (more than 80 percent of the world's population ) live on less than $10 a day . Source: World Bank 2005 Because of the global economic slowdown and rising food

prices, FAO projects 100 million more people will suffer from poverty and chronic hunger by the end of 2009 - an 11% increase from 2008. Source: World Food Program 2009 Extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in fragile states

and territories, defined as those with very weak institutions and poor policies. These areas are home to 9 percent of the population living in developing countries, but nearly 27 percent of the extreme poor.

These places are often sources of war, terrorism and refugee crises. Source: World Bank, Global Monitoring Report

2007 Top of Page Hunger & Poverty 8 million people die from lack of food and nutrition every year - about 24,000 deaths each day. Source: FAO Hunger Report 2008 Every year, 5.8 million children die from hunger related-causes.

Every day, that’s 16,000 young lives lost. Source: FAO Hunger Report 2008 For the first time in history, over 1 .02 billion people do not have enough to eat. That’s one sixth of humanity - more than the population of the United States, Canada and the European Union combined. Source: FAO Hunger Report 2008 There are around one billion hungry people in the world: 642 million live in Asia and the Pacific,

265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 in the Near East and North Africa. Fifteen million people in developed countries go hungry, around 1.5 percent of the total. Source: FAO 2010 The number of undernourished people in the world increased by 75 million in 2007 and 40 million in 2008, largely due to higher food prices. Source: FAO 2008 Top of Page Inequality & Poverty The GDP (Gross Domestic Product, total of everyone's income) in the poorest 48 nations is less than the

combined wealth of the world's three richest people. Source: Global Issues Website 20% of the population in developed nations consumes 86% of the world's goods. Source: Global Issues Website Recent studies find that prices paid by the poor in developing countries are much higher than previous thought. They cannot buy as much food with $1 as they can in a country like United States. This shows

that they're even poorer than reported in earlier studies. Source: World Bank 2009 The poorest 40% of the world’s population accounts for 5% of the global income. The richest 20% of world’s population accounts for three-quarters of world income. Source: Global Issues Website The average yearly income of the richest 20% of people in the world is about 50 times greater than the yearly income of the poorest 20% of people. Source: Human Development Report 2005 Top of Page Children & Poverty Photo of Chinese girl with smile is sitting at her deskAll children should have good food, good education, and an active, happy life Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 600 million are victims of extreme poverty. Source: UNICEF 2008 Each year, over 10

million children in developing countries die before the age of five. More than half of these deaths are attributed to malnutrition, which claims a child's life every 5 seconds. Sources: World Development Indicators 2007, The United Nations' World Food

Program Under nutrition contributes to 53 percent of the 9.7 million* deaths of children under five each year in developing countries. This means that one child dies every six seconds from malnutrition and related causes. *Note that this statistic is different from the bullet point just above, due to different year of study: UNICEF 2005 Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger

and preventable diseases - that’s over 30,000 per day, or one every 3 seconds. Source: Global Poverty Facts Approximately 146 million children in developing countries, about 1 out of 4, are underweight. Source: The United Nations' World Food Program An estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children

become blind every year. Half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight. This is easily corrected with an inexpensive vitamin supplement. Source: World Health Organization New: It is estimated that 684,000 child deaths worldwide could be

prevented by increasing access to vitamin A and zinc Source: World Food Program 2007 Top of Page Clean Water & Sanitation Photo of the water dropWe all need water to live 1 .1 billion people don't have safe water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation . Source: Human Development Report 2006 Dirty water and poor sanitation account for the vast majority of 1.8 million child deaths each year from diarrhea - almost 5,000 every day - making it the second largest cause of child mortality. . Source: Human Development Report 2006 Deaths from diarrhea can usually be prevented with very inexpensive oral rehydration salts. Source:

Child Health Research Project Poor sanitation and drainage contribute to malaria, which claims the lives of 1.3 million people a year, 90% of which are children under the age of five .

Poverty is worse than deathOlson 14 (Samantha Olson – She earned her BA in Professional Writing with a Business Administration minor at King’s College, and her MS in Journalism at Stony Brook University. Her graduate work focused on nutrition and exercise science, and continues to cover public health and wellness for women and children. – “Life of Poverty More Common for Children than Becoming Pregnant or Dying, And Possibly A Worse Fate” – Medical Daily – July 22, 2014 – http://www.medicaldaily.com/life-poverty-more-common-children-becoming-pregnant-or-dying-and-possibly-worse-fate-294274)

There are now more children living in poverty than becoming pregnant or dying prematurely , but it may not necessarily be good news considering the trials and tribulations that accompany a life of straits could be a fate worse than death . A new report published in the 25th edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Book has revealed some startling news for the future of America’s children and which states are best and worst to raise them in. The

report assesses a child state-by-state on four factors: economic well-being, education, health, and their family and community. It found nearly 23 percent of children were living below the poverty line in 2012, and it’s hypothesized the reason is behind low-income families’ struggles to recover from the recession. Patrick McCarthy, the foundation’s president and CEO, pointed out the pros and cons of what their data indicates and said in a press release that the public should be “encouraged” by improvements on several fronts, but “we

must do much more.” Teen birth rates dropped from 40 per every 1,000 teens in 2005 to 29 per births in 2012, along with the decrease of babies born at low birth weights. Child and teen deaths also dropped from 32 per every 100,000 in 2005 to only 26 in 2010, which shows a clear

improvement. But the nagging numbers of poverty rate increases show less promise for the teens and adults these children will grow into one day. In 2012, there were three million more children living in poor families than in 2005. It’s not just a life of wanting that could cripple a child’s mental and emotional health, but also their physical well-being as well. One of the improvements for children living in low-income families in the past 20 years has been the increased access to health insurance through Medicaid expansions through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program implemented in 1997. From 1990 to 2012, there was a four percent increase in the amount of children who were insured. However,

McCarthy says the decrease of resource availability from government programs like Medicaid or Medicare will only make things worse for kids in the future and as higher housing and transportation costs increase, poor families stay poor. “We should strengthen our commitment and redouble our efforts until every child in America develops to full

potential," McCarthy said. "We simply cannot afford to endanger the futures of the millions of low-income children who don’t have the chance to experience high-quality early childhood programs and the thriving neighborhoods that higher-income families take for granted." Children who live in single-parent families are more likely to live below the poverty line, which generally concludes they’ll have access to fewer resources. It’s no surprise why it would be

alarming to find there were 35 percent more children living in single-parent families in 2012 than in 2005. What Is Life Like For Children Who Live In Poverty? Being poor is a reality too many children face in America today . It is a frequent misconception many well-off Americans have, that the poor are lazy or even take advantage of the government

systems we have in place. Children do not choose to be raised in poverty and to scoff at a child who may go wanting day-to-day is an arguably shameful opinion to hold.

2NC – Overpopulation NB

GI decreases teenage pregnanciesMurray 8 (Charles Murray – Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray’s other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real Education (2008), and Coming Apart (2012). His most recent book, “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission” (Crown Forum, 2015) urges Americans to stem governmental overreach and use America’s unique civil society to put government back in its place. – “Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State” – The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society – October 30, 2008 – http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf)

The GI obviously increases the economic penalty of having a baby for a single woman under twenty-one,

who no longer has access to any of the existing welfare programmes for single mothers. The GI also increases the economic penalty on the parents of a teenaged mother who is still living at home, thereby also increasing their incentives to pressure the daughter to avoid pregnancy or to have an abortion. Under the GI, having a baby no longer triggers a benefits stream to defray their costs. The GI radically increases the economic penalties for

fathers who are unemployed or working off the books. Under the current system, a child support law is meaningless because they have no visible income . Under the GI, every man aged twenty-one or older has a known income stream deposited to a known bank account every month that can be tapped by a court order. For teenaged fathers who are not yet old enough to be eligible for the grant, their obligation would accumulate until they turn twentyone, whereupon the child support law would force them to start paying it back.

Teenage pregnancies contribute to overpopulationFN 8 (Fox News – The Fox News Insider is the official Blog of Fox News Channel. Established in June 2010, Fox News Insider delivers breaking news and show highlights just moments after they air on FNC.  – “Expert: Teen Pregnancies Contribute to Overpopulation” – Fox News – March 14, 2008 – http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/03/14/expert-teen-pregnancies-contribute-to-overpopulation.html)

Unwanted teen pregnancies and bouts of binge drinking are contributing to the world’s unsustainable population growth, a World Health Organization academic said. John Gillebaud, a leading academic on birth control, reproductive health

and population issues, told a conference in Canberra, Australia, that unprotected sex leading to unwanted pregnancies is the greatest threat to mankind . "Every single week a new city of 1.7 million could be created, and the current global population growth is unsustainable," he said, speaking via satellite from London. "Each year, there are around 80 million unwanted pregnancies and 30 million of these are aborted," he said. "The inconvenient truth is, the world is already overpopulated and soon we may experience shortages of food and water."

Overpopulation causes extinctionHumes no date (Edward Humes – I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author living in Southern California. My latest books are Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, and A Man and His Mountain: The Everyman Who Created Kendall-Jackson and Became America's Greatest Wine Entrepreneur. – “HUMAN POPULATION GROWTH AND EXTINCTION” – Center for Biological Diversity – no date – http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/)

We're in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis . Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background

rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history. The current mass extinction differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or galactic physical process. When the human race — Homo sapiens sapiens — migrated out of Africa to the Middle East 90,000 years ago, to Europe and Australia 40,000 years ago, to North America 12,500 years ago, and to the Caribbean 8,000 years ago, waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos,

and large lemurs extinct [1]. Lange's metalmark butterfly from Amy Harwood. The first wave of extinctions targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave began 10,000 years ago as the discovery of agriculture caused a population boom and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of domestic cattle . The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7 billion today. If the current course is not altered,

we’ll reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former) by 2050. No population of a large vertebrate animal in

the history of the planet has grown that much, that fast, or with such devastating consequences to its fellow earthlings. Humans’ impact has been so profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the "global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development" dominate planetary physical, chemical, and

biological conditions [2]. Humans annually absorb 42 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity,30 percent of its marine net primary productivity, and 50 percent of its fresh water [3]. Forty

percent of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7 percent in 1700 [3]. Fifty percent of the planet’s land mass has been transformed for human use [3]. More atmospheric nitrogen is now fixed by humans that all other natural processes combined [3]. The authors of Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems, including the current director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, concluded: "[A]ll of these seemingly disparate phenomena trace to a single cause: the growing scale of the human enterprise. The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from

those at any other time in history. . . . We live on a human-dominated planet and the momentum of human population growth, together with the imperative for further economic development in most of the world, ensures that our dominance will increase." Predicting local extinction rates is complex due to differences in biological diversity, species distribution, climate, vegetation, habitat threats, invasive species, consumption patterns, and enacted conservation measures. One constant, however, is human population pressure. A study of 114 nations found that human population density predicted with 88-percent

accuracy the number of endangered birds and mammals as identified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature [4]. Current population growth trends indicate that the number of threatened species will increase by 7 percent over the next 20 years and 14 percent by 2050. And that’s without the addition of global warming impacts. Edward Humes When the population of a species grows beyond the capacity of its environment to sustain it, it reduces that capacity below the original level, ensuring an eventual population crash. "The density of people is a key factor in species threats," said Jeffrey McKee, one of the study’s authors. "If other species follow the same pattern as the mammals and birds... we are facing a serious threat to global biodiversity associated with our growing human population." [5]. So where does wildlife

stand today in relation to 7 billion people? Worldwide, 12 percent of mammals, 12 percent of birds, 31 percent of reptiles, 30 percent of amphibians, and 37 percent of fish are threatened with extinction [6]. Not enough plants and invertebrates have been assessed to determine their global threat level, but it is severe.E xtinction is the most serious, utterly irreversible effect of unsustainable human population . But unfortunately, many analyses of what a sustainable human population level would look like presume that the goal is simply to keep the human race at a level where it has enough food and clean water to survive. Our notion of sustainability and ecological footprint — indeed, our notion of world worth living in — presumes that humans will allow for, and themselves enjoy, enough room and resources for all species to live.

AT: Perm Do Both

You can’t do welfare and GI – it’s too expensive and GI is betterMurray 8 (Charles Murray – Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray’s other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real Education (2008), and Coming Apart (2012). His most recent book, “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission” (Crown Forum, 2015) urges Americans to stem governmental overreach and use America’s unique civil society to put government back in its place. – “Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State” – The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society – October 30, 2008 – http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf)

From a practical standpoint, Professor Etzioni’s arguments for a GI in addition to the existing benefit system are moot. No matter how theoretically persuasive those arguments might be, no Western nation can afford to add a significant GI to its existing commitments . On the contrary, all Western nations need to restructure their existing benefit systems to avoid bankruptcy. If a GI is to be financially feasible, it must replace existing programmes rather than augment them . I regard this practical necessity as serendipitous. The real reason to scrap the advanced welfare state is that its apparatus is outmoded, ineffectual, and often counterproductive.

Because this view is so central to the Right’s potential support for a GI, some explanation of it is in order. The European and American welfare states evolved under the twin assumptions that resources were scarce and that government could allocate them effectively. The first assumption was true during the first half of the twentieth century, in the sense that no country had ever been so rich that its wealth, divided evenly among everyone, would provide everyone with a comfortable living.

After World War II, in a few countries, wealth increased so much that, for the first time, there was enough money to go around. It was technically possible for no one to be poor. Much of the energy behind the social turmoil of the 1960s was fuelled by this revolutionary chang

AT: CP Disincentivizes Work

Studies prove GI doesn’t decrease incentive to workMallett 2/4/15 (WHITNEY MALLETT – Whitney is a writer and video producer, especially interested in how technology intersects with art, privacy, and criminal justice. – Whitney is a writer and video producer, especially interested in how technology intersects with art, privacy, and criminal justice. – “The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money” – Motherboard – February 2, 2015 – http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin)

Critics of basic income guarantees have insisted that giving the poor money would disincentivize them to work, and point to studies that show a drop in peoples' willingness to work under pilot programs. But in Dauphin—thought to be the largest such experiment conducted in North America—the experimenters found that the primary breadwinner in the families who received stipends were in fact not less motivated to work than before . Though there was some reduction in work effort from mothers of young children and teenagers still in high school—mothers wanted

to stay at home longer with their newborns and teenagers weren’t under as much pressure to support their families—the reduction was not anywhere close to disastrous, as skeptics had predicted.

AT: Aff Solves Poverty

The current welfare system has failed to life people out of povertyTanner 14 (Michael D. Tanner – Cato Institute senior fellow, Michael Tanner heads research into a variety of domestic policies with a particular emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care reform, and Social Security. – “The Basic Income Guarantee: Simplicity, but at What Cost?” – CATO Unbound – August 26, 2014 – http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/26/basic-income-guarantee-simplicity-what-cost)

And obviously we should be concerned that the existing welfare system has utterly failed at its primary mission: lifting people out of poverty and enabling them and their children to become independent and self-supporting members of society. Last year alone, the federal government spent nearly $700 billion to fund anti-poverty programs. State and local governments kicked in an additional $300 billion, bringing the total to roughly $1 trillion.

Since the Start of the War on Poverty in 1965, we have spent nearly $19 trillion. Recent studies suggest that

welfare programs did help to reduce the worst deprivations of material poverty, especially in their early years. But they have long since reached a point of diminishing returns. We may have reduced the discomfort of poverty, but we have failed to truly lift people out of poverty . Therefore I am sympathetic to the argument that some form of guaranteed basic income would be an improvement over what we have today . For example, while I am skeptical of some of the

predicted administrative savings, there would be clear advantages to a simplified system. Second, it would treat poor people like adults, expected to save and budget, rather than doling out small allowances for those specific goods and services that the government believes they should have. Third, as Zwolinski notes, it helps break up the entrenched constituencies that support the welfare state.