2023
Michigan
Counterplan
Aff › Perm – Do The CP
Rehme 7, Professor of Economics @ Technische Universität Darmstadt (Gunther, “Economic Growth and (Re-)Distributive Policies in a Non-cooperative World,” Journal of Economics, 91.1)
Following Alesina and Rodrik’s paper redistribution is defined here as any policy that reduces the incentive to accumulate. Taking growth maximizing policies as a benchmark has its virtues since people appear to have difficulties disentangling the relationship between utility enhancing income growth and the distribution of income at each point in time. See, e.g. Amiel and Cowell (1999). Thus, any policy s5^s redistributes and lowers growth in the model.19
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
Aff › Perm – Do The CP
Dimick 16, Professor of Law at SUNY Buffalo (Matt, “SHOULD THE LAW DO ANYTHING ABOUT ECONOMIC INEQUALITY?,” 26 Cornell J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 1)//BB
This Article challenges the double-distortion argument from a law-and-economics perspective. In particular, the Article contends that legal rules should be used to redistribute income, in addition to taxes and transfers. Two main reasons justify this conclusion. 7 First, there is no a priori reason why a legal rule that redistributes income should always be distortionary - a necessary condition for the double-distortion argument to be true. Indeed, it is easy to devise examples where a change in legal rules will both redistribute income and increase efficiency. More generally, there is nothing inherent in the concept of redistribution that requires such a change to be accompanied by an efficiency loss. Within economics, redistribution is defined simply as a reduction in inequality. Consistent with this definition, it is possible for a redistributive legal change to be either inefficient or efficient - even in the Pareto sense, where no one is worse off and at least someone is better off. 8 Since a legal change that meets such conditions both reduces inequality and not only is nondistortionary but increases wealth, it is unambiguously superior to redistribution through the tax and transfer system, which is always distortionary. 9
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
Aff › Perm – Do The CP
Alonzi 18, Professor of Law at U British Columbia (Erez, “The Marital Wealth Gap,” Washington Law Review, Lexis)//BB
Redistribution is defined as "the act or process of distributing something again or anew." Redistribution, Black's Law Dictionary (10th ed. 2014). This Article: adopts a broader meaning, expanding on Nancy Fraser's definition, which follows: The remedy for economic injustice is political-economic restructuring of some sort. This might involve redistributing income, reorganizing the division of labour, subjecting investment to democratic decision-making, or transforming other basic economic structures. Although these various remedies differ importantly from one another, I shall henceforth refer to the whole group of them by the generic term redistribution. Fraser, supra note 20, at 73.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › -xt – UQ Dollar decline now
Duguid '1/27 [Kate; 1/27/2023; "US dollar hits reverse gear as Fed cedes rate-rise ‘driver’s seat’”; https://www.ft.com/content/84e98e21-0c89-486b-8ec9-b4c56c8af129]
The US dollar has wilted against its peers in the opening month of 2023 as the Federal Reserve fades as the key driver in currency markets and investors focus on the policies of other major central banks.
The Fed’s campaign of big rate rises captivated investors in the first nine months of 2022, igniting a rush into the dollar. But as the US central bank has slowed its increases in borrowing costs, the currency has slid against its peers.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › -xt – No Impact
Richter ’20 [Wolf, "US Dollar as “Global Reserve Currency” amid Fed’s QE and US Government Deficits: Dollar Hegemony in Decline," https://wolfstreet.com/2020/12/31/us-dollar-as-global-reserve-currency-amid-feds-qe-and-us-government-deficits-dollar-hegemony-in-slow-decline/]
The Eurozone and Japan – with the #2 and #3 reserve currencies – normally have large trade surpluses with the rest of the world. This shows that the economy of a major reserve currency doesn’t need to have a trade deficit. The US didn’t have persistent trade deficits until the early 1990s. There were years before then when it even had a trade surplus. The persistent trade deficits didn’t take off until the mid-1990s and exploded from there on amid the rampant “globalization” of Corporate America. The dollar being by far the largest reserve currency has enabled the US to easily finance its big trade deficits, which enables the US to even have those big trade deficits.
If the dollar’s status as top-dog global reserve currency deteriorates a whole lot, it would shake up that equation. At the pace of decline of the past six years, it would take a decade for the dollar’s share to drop to 50%, with other currencies picking up the slack. But for the equation to be shaken up, the dollar’s share would likely have to drop well below 50%.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › -xt – No Impact
Ashworth '1/29 [Marcus; 1/29/2023; "The Dollar Will Vanquish Pretenders to Its Throne;" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-dollar-will-vanquish-pretenders-to-its-throne/2023/01/26/3a58355e-9d39-11ed-93e0-38551e88239c_story.html]
A couple of recent geopolitical events have prompted the hoary old question of whether the dollar’s hegemony as the world’s reserve currency is at risk. It isn’t. Not in the slightest. If anything, the developments just serve to underline why King Dollar sits atop the throne.
The most recent challenger is a putative South American common currency, with the working title of the sur (south). It’s an idea that’s been kicking about since the 1980s, but my colleague Eduardo Porter believes it is either dangerous or irrelevant. If it ever comes to pass, it would be used to facilitate trade between Brazil and Argentina (though they’d retain their respective currencies). Other South American countries could be tempted to join if it succeeded in smoothing the bumps of illiquid, volatile local currencies. But there is something that does that already — it’s called the US dollar.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: Dollar Heg
Poast ‘22 - associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs [Paul; 11/04/22; "U.S. Dollar Hegemony Isn’t Going Anywhere," World Politics Review]
The global economy is being battered these days by the fallout from war, disease and great-power competition. This is bad news for global trade, and some even wonder if it will also dramatically shake up a pillar of the global financial system: the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s “reserve currency,” meaning its position as the currency most widely held by foreign governments and used in international financial and trade transactions.
Early in Russia’s war against Ukraine, some believed the comprehensive nature of the economic sanctions that were quickly slapped on Russia held the potential to accelerate the dollar’s decline. Because the sanctions are primarily and nearly exclusively being imposed by Western economies, the fear is that they could cause the global economy to bifurcate. Indeed, cut off from the Western financial and economic system, Russia has sought alternative economic outlets, primarily China, with China’s currency—the yuan—having supplanted the dollar as the most widely traded currency on the Moscow currency exchange. Similarly, by observing the West’s ability to essentially weaponize Russia’s dependence on their economies, countries like China could seek to decouple from those economies, while also seeking to establish alternatives to the dollar as the dominant global reserve and trade currency.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: Dollar Heg
Smith '23– PhD of Economics @ UM, former columnist @ Bloomberg [Noah; 2/2/23"'Threats to the dollar' are just scare stories;" https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/threats-to-the-dollar-are-just-scare]
One of the most common questions people ask me is some variant of: “Is the U.S. dollar going to lose its dominance?” Variations on this include:
Will overthrow the dollar?
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: MMT Bad
Vague 16 [Richard Vague, managing partner of Gabriel Investments and the chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation, The Private Debt Crisis, Fall 2016,
Start with public debt deleveraging, since it is the type of debt that garners the most attention. Economists and politicians often cite the post-World War II period as a triumph of government debt deleveraging. In the 30 years from 1951, a point just beyond the wind-down of World War II, to 1980, the beginning of the Reagan era, federal debt to GDP declined from 73 percent to 32 percent (it is now back to 105 percent). What these experts generally either don’t notice or neglect to mention is that private debt increased dramatically during this period, from 54 percent to 101 percent, entirely offsetting the decline in government debt. It was that offsetting leveraging that allowed the public debt ratio to come down. Otherwise we would have had massive GDP contraction just like in the Great Depression. From 1951 to 1980, a huge $2.7 trillion increase in private debt powered a $2.5 trillion increase in GDP, such that even though public debt grew by $653 billion, it declined in ratio to GDP. But total debt increased in ratio to GDP. The GDP growth resulting from that private debt growth is what allowed the federal debt ratio to decline without causing a contraction in GDP. In fact, offsetting private leveraging is usually the mechanism that enables the ratio of public debt to come down. So, for example, we may find that a given country’s GDP grew by $30 billion, but public debt grew by only $10 billion, thereby improving that country’s public debt ratio. When we examine countries comprehensively, what we will generally find in a situation like this is that private debt will have increased by $20 billion or more in the same period, filling the “gap” left by slower public debt growth. In this example, it took a full $30 billion in total debt growth—$10 billion public and $20 billion private—to obtain this $30 billion in GDP growth. The exceptions to this are when there is very high inflation or a large net export position. To understand this more fully, I examined a database that includes available data from 1945 onward for 47 of the largest 71 countries, including the 20 largest. (Historical private debt data is missing for certain countries, underscoring the lack of attention to this subject.) These countries together constitute 91 percent of world GDP. For these countries, since World War II, there have been a total of 42 cases where public debt to GDP (and not also private debt) has declined by at least 10 percentage points in a five-year period. By my reckoning, in 33 of these cases, this deleveraging was due largely or wholly to increasing private debt leverage—not the most desirable way to achieve that end. Stated differently, on a ratio basis, private debt increased as much or more than public debt decreased, and therefore overall debt stayed high. In the next eight cases, the deleveraging was due to high inflation. Inflation does work, but it is a painful path to deleveraging. In the one remaining case, Saudi Arabia from 1999 to 2014, the deleveraging was due to massive positive net oil exports. In no case was the deleveraging accomplished without one of these three factors—rapid private debt leveraging (which in many cases led to a financial crisis), high inflation, or a very large net export position. None. Both private debt leveraging and high inflation are steep prices to pay for public deleveraging. A high net export level is a better path, but it is the very thing that contributes to the global imbalances that economists have so heavily criticized. It generally only occurs in smaller countries, and is very difficult for larger countries to sustain without political repercussions, as with China in the 2000s or Germany in the current, contentious EU. In any event, in its entire history, the United States has never had a sustained export surplus of the size required for meaningful public debt deleveraging. The story is similar for private debt. Private debt deleveraging has usually only been possible because of offsetting public debt increases. Japan’s private debt ratio reached a whopping 221 percent in the lead up to its 1990s crisis. But luckily for Japan, its public debt ratio at that time was only 86 percent. In the two decades following Japan’s crisis, private debt has deleveraged from 221 percent to 170 percent (which is still too high), but that deleveraging was enabled by a massive increase in the public debt ratio from 86 percent to 246 percent. Private debt declined by ¥260 trillion, but public debt grew by ¥810 trillion, and the combined impact of this debt increase was growth of zero in nominal GDP. Again, just one example, but I have surveyed all the available data for these same 47 countries, and since World War II, there have been a total of 40 cases in which private debt to GDP (and not also public debt) has declined by at least 10 percentage points in a five-year period. By my reckoning, in 24 of these cases, the deleveraging was due largely or wholly to increased public debt leverage. In eight more cases, the deleveraging was due to high inflation. In the eight remaining cases, the deleveraging was due to a large, positive net export position. In no case was the deleveraging accomplished without one of these three factors—rapid public debt leveraging, high inflation, or a very large net export advantage. There are only ten cases since World War II in which both public and private debt deleveraged by 10 percentage points or more in a five-year period. Six of these were due to high inflation. Four of these were in large measure due to a high export surplus position, or more broadly speaking, a high current account surplus. One of these, Israel in 2003, comes the closest of any case I examined to deleveraging through growth, but even there, total debt outgrew GDP. Deleveraging is difficult. Absent the methods described above, if the total debt ratio were to be meaningfully reduced, either through an absolute decline in debt outstanding, or through a decline in the ratio, it would force significant, damaging downward pressure on GDP. The Great Depression saw such a deleveraging, and that’s why those years were so tremendously painful. By contrast, in the years after 2008, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve acted to prevent deleveraging. We were saved from another Great Depression, but we were left with a massive pile of debt.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: MMT Bad
Eggertsson et al. 16 [Gauti B. Eggertsson, Professor of Economics, Brown University, Neil R. Mehrotra, Assistant Professor of Economics at Brown University, Sanjay R. Singh Lawrence H. Summers, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s , former Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the , former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and former Director of the for , “A CONTAGIOUS MALADY? OPEN ECONOMY DIMENSIONS OF SECULAR STAGNATION,” IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 64(4), pages 581-634, November 2016, doi: 10.3386/w22299]
7.2 Debt Policy As we have shown in Section 3, our model can be generalized to incorporate government debt. Foreign reserve accumulation in the absence of an increase in public debt issuance puts downward pressure on the natural rate of interest, as can be seen in equation (22). Equation (22) has other important implications. In particular, an increase in government debt will directly increase the natural rate of interest. Thus, a straightforward solution to secular stagnation is to issue government debt. That foreign reserve accumulation puts downward pressure on the natural rate of interest is essentially the inverse of this - an increase in reserve accumulation reduces the total amount of government bonds held by the private sector.25 One concern about debt-financed fiscal expansions may be the risk that materializes from a higher debt to GDP ratio that may become a burden in the future. In a secular stagnation, our model shows that increases in government spending financed by an increase in public debt actually lower the debt to GDP ratio. As emphasized in DeLong and Summers (2012) in a setting with hysteresis effects, debt-financed fiscal expansions in our model are fiscally sustainable. Conversely, reductions in the public debt actually worsen the fiscal position of countries in secular stagnation. In Proposition 9, we show that, in autarky, a permanent increase in government spending financed by debt issuance will lower the debt to GDP ratio. The proposition carries over directly to the open economy (modulo notation) under the case of perfect integration.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: MMT Bad
Romanchuk 17 [Brian Romanchuk, senior quantitative analyst in Fixed Income Trading, former analyst at BCA Research, an economic research firm, doctorate in control systems engineering at the University of Cambridge, “Misunderstanding MMT”, January 2017, ]
The Disappearing Fiscal Constraint Gerard took aim at some of Warren Mosler's comments about the fiscal constraint. Since I view MMT as part of a broader tradition, we need to look at what that tradition suggests, and not quotes from a particular popular book. In this case, the MMT tradition relies heavily on Functional Finance, going back to Abba Lerner. I will now restate my interpretation of what MMT says about the "financial constraint" for governments, using a fairly simple example. Imagine that I walk into a new shopping mall, with only a $20 bill in my pockets. I can buy whatever I want -- so long as it costs less than $20 (sales taxes included). (I assume that I do not know any of the people running the shops, so they will not extend me credit.) I have a hard $20 constraint on my ability to finance purchases; hence it makes sense that I have a hard financial constraint. A key point to note that this constraint is directly related to a dollar amount, a fact that I will return to. From a practical perspective, central governments face no such constraint -- the circular nature of governmental finance flows means that they can "finance" practically anything. (OK, under the current institutional framework, there are limitations; the U.S. Treasury could not just write a $100 quadrillion cheque to buy a fancy hotel on a Friday afternoon. I discuss such institutional details in ; What matters is that these limitations represent largely uninteresting "corner cases.") What stops the government from buying "everything"? Inflation. If the government issues an insane amount of liabilities ("money" and debt) relative to its tax base, the value of those liabilities goes down versus real goods and services. As a result, the constraint on government finances is best described: excessive government purchases and transfers can raise capacity utilisation in the economy beyond "normal" levels, (eventually) giving rise to inflationary pressures. Since the government is buying stuff with money, is this not financial? If you want "financial" to mean "anything to do with money," I guess you could say that. However, this is a fairly meaningless definition. The constraint has nothing to do with the government's ability to finance purchases, nor does it have anything to do with fixed dollar amounts. The second point (no relation to dollar amount) is critical, and why I think we need to drop the tag "financial." I am currently developing my stock-flow consistent (SFC) modelling framework, and I have discovered that it is fairly easy to generate endlessly growing governmental debt levels. All you need to do is to add a sector to the economy, give it a source of cash flow, and forget to add an outflow. It will hoard financial assets, and drive the economy to a state of capacity underutilisation. The automatic stabilisers associated with fiscal policy kick in, and the government runs deficits to counteract the demand drag. Eventually, the economy returns to a "normal" capacity utilisation level, but with higher governmental debt and deficit levels. In other words, we can have wildly different governmental debt levels corresponding to the exact same level of capacity utilisation. If we return to the real world, we do see sectors that emulate such hoarding behaviour. Pension funds are relentlessly accumulating financial assets to meet future outflows. Those pension funds will never purchase real goods and services (beyond their technology infrastructure), no matter the level of their financial asset holdings. Foreign central banks have been accumulating reserve assets, with no intention of ever buying real goods and services with those reserves -- they are to be used to purchase a particular financial asset (their domestic currency if it is under attack). Many corporations are mindlessly piling up cash hoards, reflecting the empire-building objectives of the C-suite. Increasing inequality is redistributing income flows to the parts of the household sector with a low propensity to consume, leading to the growth of the stock of financial assets held. If we include various intra-governmental debt holdings within the total, government debt outstanding could become arbitrarily large without any observable effect on economic behaviour. As a result, we cannot relate the dollar amounts of governmental debt or deficits to real world capacity utilisation. Anything that causes such hoarding behaviour to increase will increase government debt level while keeping "capacity utilisation" essentially the same. In summary, governments (that control their currency) can always "finance" spending (under plausible limits); and government spending is limited by an inflation constraint, and when that constraint is hit has no relationship to the dollar amounts involved. Under such circumstances, my view is that anyone who applies the term "financial" to this constraint is using the word "financial" in a manner that bears no resemblance how that word is normally used by speakers of the English language.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: MMT Bad
Yglesias 11 [Matthew Yglesias, Center for American Progress; former writer for The Atlantic Monthly magazine and the American Prospect, “How eliminating paper money could end recessions,” Dec 12, 2011]
Why would a cashless society be a depression-less society? Starting about 40 years ago, it became clear that central banks had the power to end most recessions pretty easily, independent of fiscal stimulus. If your economy is saddled with idle resources—unemployed workers, vacant office spaces, factories that aren’t running all their shifts, trucks cruising down highways half-empty—what you need to do is increase the flow of spending through the economy. You do that by cutting interest rates. When rates fall, business investment, homebuilding, and durable goods purchases all rise and next thing you know everybody’s back to work. That’s how the American economy worked from the mid-1970s until 2008, and there wasn’t much more to say about it. When recession comes, cut interest rates, and growth restarts. Economists could happily move on to more interesting topics, such as: How do countries get rich rather than simply escape recession? But there is a problem with this simple recession-fighting formula. The number zero. As Paul Krugman wrote in a 1999 Slate column about Japan’s decadelong depression, “whereas U.S. interest rates in early 1982 were in double digits—and could therefore be sharply reduced—Japanese short-term interest rates have been below 1 percent for years, apparently leaving little room for further cuts.” Japan couldn’t reduce interest rates to spur economic activity, because interest rates couldn’t fall below zero. Today, the United States is in the same boat. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing a central bank can do to fight a recession, but it does mean the standard formula of simple rate cuts won’t work.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Impact Turns › AT: Links to Interest Rates DA
Labonte '05 [Marc, "Do Budget Deficits Push Up Interest Rates and Is This the Relevant Question;" CRS Order Code RL31775]
Comparing changes in budget deficits to changes in interest rates is not a valid way to determine whether budget deficits affect interest rates. That is because there are many other factors that also affect interest rates, such as the state of the economy. To determine the effect of budget deficits on interest rates, these other factors must be held constant using statistical methods. Otherwise, the effect of budget deficits on interest rates could be misestimated or even reversed.
Empirical evidence on a link between budget deficits and interest rates is mixed. There is not a consensus among economists on how to model the economy and what relevant variables should be included. Therefore, conclusions drawn from empirical evidence vary widely. More recent evidence tends to find a stronger, positive relationship between the two. In addition, 10 major forecasting models all predict that a budget deficit would increase interest rates. According to Gale and Orszag (2002), the models predict that a budget deficit equal to 1% of GDP would increase interest rates, with a range of 0.1-1 (mean=0.52) percentage points after one year and 0.05-2 (mean=0.99) percentage points after 10 years. This report will be updated.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › AT “And” Means “Or”
Supreme Court of Missouri, Division No. 2 1958 (“Samuel Kraus Company v. Kansas City,” Lexis)//BB
To substantiate this construction of the contract Kraus seizes upon the word "and" in the parenthetical clause and invokes the conjunctive-disjunctive rules employed in the submission of tort cases and says, by reason of these rules, "the exception requires conjunctively that both conditions exist to authorize a variation from the lump sum contract price." The word "and" is defined and cases are cited to demonstrate that the word may not be changed or construed to mean "or," and therefore it is urged, before there could be any adjustment in the lump sum price or before the unit prices for estimated quantities became effective or into operation, they must have come about only as the result of additional, omitted or changed work as elsewhere defined and set forth in the contract. It is said that the contract is ambiguous and in support of the plaintiff's interpretation the auxiliary rules of construction are invoked (Paisley v. Lucas, 346 Mo. 827, 143 S.W.2d 262) and extrinsic evidence is resorted to and, finally, it is urged that the proof, particularly certain documentary evidence, is so plain as to admit of no doubt and established the plaintiff's right to recover on count one as a matter of law.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › Even-If
Rappeport 21, analyst at New York Times (Alan, “For Republicans, Deep Wounds Fuel Resistance to Bolstering the I.R.S.,” New York Times,
Republicans, in theory, support measures to curb tax evasion but not if it means showering cash on the I.R.S. and doubling the size of its staff, as the Biden administration has proposed. The tax collection agency was never particularly popular with Republicans, who tend to embrace small government and low taxes. But their animus toward the I.R.S. became more impassioned in 2010, after Democrats and the Obama administration used it as a tool for enforcing the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that everyone buy health insurance. Republicans eventually repealed the tax penalty that enforced the mandate in 2017, but the health law remains in place. “As a general matter, Republicans have this theory that the best government is either no government or very small government,” said John Koskinen, who served as the commissioner of the I.R.S. from 2013 to 2017. “To the extent that you deny the government the ability to collect taxes that are owed, you limit the ability of the government to expand its operations.”
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › Even-If
Faler 6-2-2023, Politico columnist (Brian, “Congress could tax IRS again after debt limit deal,” Politico,
The debt-limit agreement highlights an overlooked threat to the $80 billion Democrats pushed through last summer for the IRS: That it will become a congressional piggybank. Nine-and-a-half months after the money was handed over to the agency, lawmakers are taking a quarter of it back, in order to stave off budget cuts to unrelated domestic programs. Though that’s helped ease the debt hike through Congress, some call it a precedent that could endanger the administration’s ambitious plans for the IRS. After all, lawmakers will continue to face demands for money, even after the debt fight passes, and the agency will still have nearly $60 billion in its coffers — most of which won’t be spent for years to come. The administration itself is downplaying the impact of the impending $21.4 billion cut, saying the money Democrats gave the IRS last year was always intended to be slowly spooled out over the next decade. Now, instead of running dry in ten years, the administration says, the money will be exhausted in eight. But, by that logic, lawmakers will surely ask why they can’t lop off another year or two or three off the back end, and use the savings for something else. “Once you start down this path…” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a senior tax writer. “It’s extremely disappointing.” That is an altogether different threat than had been the focus in Washington before the debt fight. Attention had been focused on Republicans’ promise to repeal the entire $80 billion, something they campaigned on in the run-up to the midterm elections but was never particularly likely, not with President Joe Biden in office and Democrats in charge of the Senate. A less stark but more potent risk is that the IRS money gets pulled into unrelated budget disputes, and Democrats are forced by Republicans to choose between cutting funding for the agency and other initiatives they also support. That’s essentially what’s happening with the debt deal between Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who have agreed to use $20 billion of the money to prevent cuts over the next two years to domestic programs whose budgets are set each year by Congress. The plan would actually increase the deficit by $19 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate provided to Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). Cutting IRS enforcement costs the government money because auditors bring in far more revenue than it costs to employ them. While the plan would save $21.4 billion in spending, CBO predicts it would reduce future tax collections by $40.4 billion. Nearly six times the agency’s annual budget, the $80 billion was intended to be used for a once-in-a-generation overhaul of the agency that would improve tax services, beef up enforcement and modernize its technology. The problem for the agency is that will be a very slow process. Though the money was approved last August, the IRS has barely begun to spend the cash. It only released its blueprint for the cash in April and has told lawmakers it anticipates spending only $2.8 billion by the end of 2023. By 2025, just $5.8 billion will have been obligated, the IRS says. Most of the cash won’t go out the door until sometime after 2027. That’s partly because it takes a long time to hire and train sophisticated auditors, something that will be particularly tough in a tight labor market. “You can readily see the risk, which is that the next time anyone needs money, they’ll say, ‘Well, there’s $60 billion there,’” said former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › Distribute vs Redistribute
Holcomb 20, MA in Political and Justice Studies (Carolyn, “Welfare Reform: The Politics of Redistributive Policy,” Proquest Theses)//BB
My research will analyze whether the goals were of PRWORA to eliminate redistributive tax dollars from the middle class to the “undeserving” single mother households. The definition of redistributive public policy is the transfer of taxes from the rich to the poor; but in some instances the redistributive benefits comes from the middle class to the upper class in the form of regressive taxes. However, redistributive public policies that involves social welfare policy that taxes the upper and middle classes to fund programs for the lower class. Distributive public policy is when the government deems it is necessary to benefit a certain segment of society such as farmers or a community after a disaster without raises taxes on the public. Distributive public policies are not controversial because the taxpayers are not being asked to fund another segment of society’s lifestyle. Redistributive public policy has been an ongoing debate since the 1960s with the increase in single mother household that were chronically dependent on government for their income. Redistributive tax policies have a racial undertone that intimates that single mothers, specifically African-American single mothers are not productive and are dependent on the governmental support for themselves and their children. The perception by many in the public is that the single mother households are not deserving of ongoing support of the taxpayers. The conservative ideology is defined as valuing tradition, religion, and institutions. The people holding conservatives values and ideology are usually the wealthy and the fundamentalist Christians and other conservative religious groups.
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › F = Tax
Beezer 88, Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit (Robert R. Beezer, 1988, “United States v. Cuevas,” United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 87-5007, University of Kansas Libraries, Lexis)
The term "fiscal aspects" is not defined anywhere in the Swiss order. Other passages, however, shed light [**30] on the Swiss court's intent. On page one of the (29-page) order, the Swiss court observed that Zurich authorities had opened two cases against Cuevas, one "because of financing illegal activities in narcotics trading," a second "for collection of wrongfully obtained capital gains."
The second prosecution, relating to taxes, provides the most obvious referent for the term "fiscal aspects." Such a construction of "fiscal aspects" (relating to taxes or financial penalties) is supported by the following central, but ambiguous passage of the extradition order:
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › R = Tax
Paul 91, Professor of Law (Jeremy, “THE HIDDEN STRUCTURE OF TAKINGS LAW,” Southern California Law Review)//BB
But it is nonsense to find talismanic significance in the idea of taking money from the public as a whole. See Michelman, supra note 11, at 146-49 (arguing that within the liberal tradition Scalia's concession that general redistribution is permissible commits him to principles that justify affirmative welfare rights). Progressive taxes take money from some, high income earners, and transfer it through public assistance to others, low or no income earners. Indeed, the very definition of redistribution is to take from some to give to others. Taxes may be a good mechanism for redistribution because legislators may encounter difficulty in singling out one group for adverse, perhaps unfair, treatment. Justice Scalia is unconvincing, however, in his effort to demonstrate that the entire class of landlords is less likely to be unfairly singled out than, for example, the class of high income earners. See Note, Taking a Step Back: A Reconsideration of the Takings Test of Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, 102 HARV. L. REV. 448, 464 (1988) (challenging the claim that tax policy is more democratic than regulatory policy). In short, once redistribution becomes a permissible goal of government, the standard for unfair redistribution cannot be derived from mere allegations that the purpose of a statute is redistributional. See generally Rose, Mahon Reconstructed: Why the Takings Issue is Still a Muddle, 57 S. CAL. L. REV. 561 (1984) (characterizing the ambivalence of takings clause jurisprudence toward redistribution as the inevitable result of the tension within the American tradition between property as wealth and property as virtue).
2023
Michigan
Counterplan
AT: Perms › R = Tax
Dyreng and Hoopes 22, both professors of accounting (Scott Dyreng, Professor of Accounting at Duke, and Jeff Hoopes, Professor of Accounting at UNC, “Progressive Taxation: What is it? Why would we want it? Do we have it?,” transcribed by Youtube, edits by Brett Bricker, )
I like that explanation and I use that in my class as a justification for what sometimes we call income redistribution. And basically the idea is this, can take something away from, I’m going to keep picking on tim cook today, i can take 100 away from tim cook and he doesn't hardly even notice and i can give it to somebody who's a starving student and they are just thrilled to have that extra hundred dollars and so Tim cook's not any sadder and the other person is much happier and collectively in society then we are happier overall. So and i think it's a good i think it's a good i think it's reasonable it certainly has limits but it's a reasonable way to think about the world. So you said you use that to explain income redistribution what's the difference what's the connection between income redistribution and progressivity? Well one connection is this so what you were talking about was just one side of the equation which is the government taking the income. The other side of the equation is…you have to you have to make the evil voice taking the income yeah okay so the government's gonna take your income and by the way um it took my income uh well i filed my taxes jeff was saying he filed his on saturday night i'm doing them saturday filed them today like half an hour ago okay so i i'm almost worse than you i started on saturday night i could not bear to finish i finished on sunday night fearing that something would come up that i would have to resolve on monday it turned out it was fine so i did file on late sunday night electronically. So the the government took all my money but they're not going to just take that money and burn it they're going to take that money and do something with it including possibly directly giving it to someone who doesn't have very much money and so that's where the redistribution part of it comes in. The government doesn't literally take only take from rich people they give, sometimes, to poor people. I would say they're pretty i mean as long as when you said it literally you said as long as they don't burn it as long as they don't burn it and as long as they're not taking rich people to just like shuffle things around and give back to rich people then they're the same thing, progressive, yeah.