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Lydia Nicholson, 2-17-2021, Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually, LPE Project, Lydia Nicholson is a 3L at UCLA where they are a board member of their school’s NLG and a co-founder of its Tenants Law Association, Ippoliti is an assistant professor at Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Department of Philosophy, https://lpeproject.org/blog/leftist-benefits-are-in-kind-actually/, Accessed: 7-19-2023, //ONHS IF

Modern welfare reforms from both red and blue politicians tend to skew towards the restrictive–adding limitations and replacing cash benefits with vouchers, subsidies, and specific goods that limit recipients’ choices. For instance, in 2018 Trump proposed replacing food stamps with “harvest boxes” in order to promote healthier eating and prevent unauthorized uses. Many moves towards in-kind benefits are motivated by patronizing notions of health, coded fears of fraud or abuse, and ideals of self-sufficiency. In this way, in-kind benefits are often intentional in their ability to control and surveil, especially targeting lower-status means-tested programs such as food stamps, while higher-status benefits like social security are rigorously cash based. This divide demonstrates how in-kind orthodoxy often reflects notions that poor recipients are incapable or irresponsible when it comes to managing their money. In response, liberal welfare reform advocates have long pushed for cash benefits as liberty enhancing mechanisms. The argument goes that cash benefits, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. In fact, in his 2020 presidential bid, Andrew Yang literally called his UBI proposal a “Freedom Dividend.” Cash benefits sound good in this sense. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that basic needs will be met. The context of housing provides one example of this. The reality of cash benefits is that even where choice is not restricted by the state, it remains restricted by the failures of the market. No Choice In Scarcity Both liberals and conservatives have theorized that the best way to provide housing to low-income to those who can’t afford it is to give them cash, which they could use to obtain housing if they so desire. Cash benefits provide the ability to prioritize where one’s money is spent. Therefore, if families prefer to spend their money on other necessities than housing they are free to do so under this system. From this perspective, the unrestrictedness of cash benefits liberates people in ways that no in-kind benefit could. But this vision falls short; it is impossible to imagine what other needs a family might choose while happily eschewing housing. Thus, this freedom is formal at best. Yang’s “Freedom Dividends” of $1,000 per month are not enough to afford the average rent in the U.S. Coupled with the weakening of other parts of the welfare state, this vision of UBI would leave recipients with an appearance of expanded choices, but really no better off than they started. Current cash benefit programs for low income folks, such as TANF, are also woefully inadequate. In this way, the focus on the freedom promoted by cash benefits obscures the larger issue that public benefits are just not sufficient to provide for all the needs of their recipients. Cash benefits also do not address other common problems of public benefits such as the bureaucratic disentitlement that prevents many from accessing any form of aid, whatever the form (a truly universal UBI could alleviate this to some extent). All in all, cash benefits are not the solution to the failures of in-kind benefits if all they provide is the choice of what basic needs recipients go without. Market Failures Even if cash benefit amounts were increased beyond their current paltry amounts, cash benefits are not the solution they are held out to be. For one, without real forms of rent control or community control of land, an increase in cash benefits may simply incentivize private housing providers to raise rents, effectively cancelling out any positive effects of an increased income. Cash benefits as currently imagined may also serve as nothing more than a safety valve, allowing the tiniest bit of economic pressure to be removed from tenants such that they can continue to participate in and legitimate the commercial housing market, but never truly become free from its ills. More than this, the preference for cash benefits relies on notions of market-participation through consumption as a key marker of citizenship. And it assumes that more than having good housing, we want to pick our housing, even if the options are terrible. Liberal and conservative theorists have argued that in-kind benefits harm the poor by removing their ability to bargain on the market. This vision puts far too much faith in the ability of the market to produce the goods needed for the flourishing of all humankind. The fact that cash benefits create demand does not mean that the suppliers will be inclined to provide good housing. The truth is that the speculative real estate market is actually pretty bad at guaranteeing all but the absolute wealthiest renters good housing. Housing voucher programs, in which the government subsidizes portions of tenants’ rent through direct payments to landlords, provide another example of how poorly suited the market is to actually provide necessities for all. Perverse combinations of in-kind and cash, housing vouchers often leave recipients unable to find housing and contribute to housing discrimination. Public housing is often lambasted as an example of the government’s inability to provide goods as well as private entities, thus justifying programs like housing vouchers, if not outright cash. While some criticisms are more honest than others, when it comes to public housing, we need not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solution isn’t to abandon public housing. Instead, we should double down on the direct provision of well maintained, beautiful housing that promotes flourishing for all, instead of fighting for such outcomes to come from the private sector. In this way, there is a plain leftist argument in favor of in-kind housing benefits. And there seems to be a consensus at least among broad swaths of the left that this is the right choice. Even where the public benefits system is not implicated, leftists housing projects such as Community Land Trusts demonstrate a drive away from market solutions to in-kind solutions. Directly providing people housing prioritizes communitarian values of ensuring that everyone is cared for over the strawman of market freedom. It recognizes that the ideal of choice upon which justifications of cash benefits rely is a fallacy when the cash is not sufficient to obtain necessities and when the market fails to even produce those necessities. It also imagines that by taking housing off the market, other priorities can come to the forefront. For instance, in the COVID-19 pandemic, HUD has encouraged public housing agencies to retroactively adjust rents such that tenants do not owe more than they can pay. Tenants of private housing cannot expect any such option. More than just ensuring housing for all, a return to public housing also signifies the collapse of the increasingly powerful and parasitic real estate industry, disincentivizing displacement through gentrification and the hoarding of land for profit. Complexities of Need This logic extends beyond housing, as other forms of direct provision of needs also seem preferable. Medicare For All is another easy example of a recent leftist drive for in-kind provisions of benefits. The same reasons come to the forefront, the disempowerment of predatory insurance companies and the assurance that needs will be met for all. As this vision continues to expand, it gets more complicated. While it may be attractive to say “just give people what they need,” there are real questions that arise from such a promising statement. The question about what comprises a human “need” is not an easy one. There are many things that may seem like necessities for some but not for others. While some argue that internet access is a necessity, others contend that computers are luxuries. And generally, those who decide what is a necessity are influenced by norms informed by class, race, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, there is a real risk that in attempting to ensure that everyone gets enough through direct provision, some may get too little, or the wrong things. A way out might be to provide so many in-kind benefits that nobody would be left lacking, but not only does this seem impossible, it seems unethical in the midst of a climate crisis fueled in part by vast overproduction. There is no perfect solution to this problem. Cash benefits generally leave recipients with impossible choices, and vulnerable to the whims and pitfalls of the market. A resurgence of in-kind benefits would provide new opportunities for collectivized resources and the guarantees of basic needs, but those needs are not so easily defined. The answer probably lies somewhere between a flexible and adaptive administrative state that is actually accountable to the needs of all people (won through persistent and powerful social movements) and outside the state completely in the form of community care.

Sculos ’18 -- Dr. Bryant William Sculos holds a PhD in political theory and international relations(“Socialism & Universal Basic Income” , Class, Race and Corporate Power, Volume 6 Issue 1 Article 9, Florida International University, https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1120&context=classracecorporatepower///jrc)

3 However, simply because not all UBI programs are worth supporting, does not mean that there are not thick or expansive conceptions of UBI that absolutely are. An example of a conception of UBI that socialists should support would be one that is—as the acronym requires—universal and also set at or above subsistence. This means that all people, regardless of their ability or willingness to work, would at least be much more likely to live a life without lacking any fundamental necessities. A subsistence (or higher) UBI would likely only be able to achieve the goal of eradicating extreme poverty if it was also combined with a universal health care and tuition-free public higher education system. If the poor still had to pay or go into massive debt to afford basic health care and education, a subsistence UBI would be nearly functionally irrelevant—or worse.

Melissa S. Kearney and Magne Mogstad, 8-23-2019, Melissa Schettini Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Magne Mogstad is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Chicago. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo in 2008. (Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a Policy Response to Current Challenges, Aspen Insitute, 8-23-2019, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/UBI-ESG-Memo-082319.pdf, 7-20-2023)//AAlmand

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) provision. In its most basic form, a UBI is a guaranteed cash benefit that the government provides to all citizens. This is not a new idea, but one that has historically resurfaced from time to time. In the 1960s the economist Milton Friedman suggested and the Nixon administration considered a Negative Income Tax (NIT), which is a related policy idea that would give everyone some guaranteed level of income that would gradually be taxed away as own income increases. The longevity of such proposals can be attributed to the fact that various elements of UBI proposals appeal to both conservative and liberal political thinkers. Three trends appear to be driving a renewed interest in UBI. First, some view a UBI as a reasonable response to growing inequality, to stem both economic and political unease. The American entrepreneur Andrew Yang claims the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay has risen from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016 (Yang, 2018). He notes that current levels of wealth and income inequality can be economically and politically destabilizing, and a UBI would provide a boost to the lowest-earners that could mitigate the effects of this inequality. Second, some worry about the widespread elimination of well-paying jobs for many workers in the U.S. due to robots and other technological advancements. For this reason, the idea seems to have caught on among a number of tech futurist personalities. This also seems to be a main motivation behind the call for a UBI in the book Give People Money by American journalist Annie Lowrey. She writes that it was not a question of “whether self-driving cars and other automated technology would start putting people out of work. It was when – and what would come next” (Lowrey, 2018). A universal basic income, Lowrey concludes, will provide a minimum standard of living for those shut out by automation and other forces, such as international trade. A third, very distinct motivation for a UBI scheme is to streamline the current complicated and sometimes counterproductive system of U.S. transfer programs. American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray is a prominent proponent of a UBI system for this reason. Murray proposes to convert all federal dollars currently spent on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, social services, and other programs into payments of $13,000 per year to every American age 21 or older, which would be scaled back for higher earning individuals such that someone making $50,000 or more would receive a capped amount of $6500 per year. In his 2016 book, Murray stipulates that under his proposal individuals would be required to use $3,000 of their UBI to purchase health insurance. He views the current system of programs as ineffective, and argues that instead, the government should simply give the money directly to people. Murray claims that savings from existing transfer program benefits and their administrative costs can be used to fund a UBI that provides for the poorest and in his view, is less likely to discourage work compared to some existing programs (Murray, 2016). We view a UBI to be a sub-optimal, and possibly harmful, policy response to all three of these challenges. A UBI in its most basic form would be massively expensive yet do little to reduce inequality or advance opportunity. Devoting that level of spending to targeted benefits, focusing on the poorest and those hardest hit by ongoing economic forces, and polices dedicated to human capital development instead of mere redistribution would produce a much greater social return than a UBI. First, on inequality and redistribution, a UBI is by design not ideal for redistributive purposes. For example, a UBI that paid $10,000 to every U.S. adult would cost about $2.5 trillion per year, well more than half the current federal annual budget. Furthermore, by giving money to everyone, there would be far fewer resources available to redistribute money and/or invest in the human capital of those with the most need. In calculations presented below, we show the practical trade-off between giving more money to a more targeted group of low-income individuals and less money to a more diffuse group including less needy individuals. We cite work by Hoynes and Rothstein (2019) documenting the loss of progressivity that would come from replacing our current system of transfer programs with a UBI. We further argue that programs that are universal do not accomplish as much in terms of generating social benefits as those that are targeted, citing evidence from examples such as child care and early childhood education programs. Second, on labor market trends and limited skills, the best long-term policy response is for the government to pursue a pro-work, pro-skills agenda, and devote resources to investing in the human capital development of children and economically disadvantaged groups of individuals. Such a policy emphasis would advance both individual economic security and aggregate productivity. However, it is critical that this long-term investment strategy be coupled with income support programs that provide wage subsidies for low-wage workers and limited cash and near-cash benefits for individuals who can’t work or who are temporarily out of work. This implies a pro-work agenda and targeted redistribution. UBI is neither. Third, the safety net should not just be about redistribution, but also about investment in human capital and in the next generation. Programs should advance opportunity and economic mobility. Targeted in-kind programs and benefits have been shown to do that, especially when targeted to children. We are sympathetic to the argument that the existing safety net consists of a complicated array of different programs. To some extent, however, this complexity is a consequence of having different programs deliberately designed to serve different purposes and/or different needs. Even so, we are in favor of taking a holistic view of the panoply of safety net programs and reforming the entire system to work better in terms of both efficiency (namely, incentives) and equity (specifically, redistribution). Simplifying and improving the system does not, however, imply a UBI. It would be wholly counterproductive to address the complexity of the current system by replacing targeted programs that function as investments in human capital – thereby advancing the productivity of future workers – with an income guarantee that would fail to advance opportunity and upward mobility. Instead, we should reform current programs to better serve their desired goals. In summary, for fiscal, efficiency, and equity reasons, the U.S. government should provide targeted benefits instead of universal benefits. And, it should not just provide cash, but rather invest in human capital and pursue redistribution through targeted spending on education, child care, health insurance, food vouchers, and housing assistance programs.

David James Hobb, 4-25-2022, ‘The Left will find that it has bought a Trojan Horse’: The dialectics of universal basic income, Sage Journals, Liverpool Hope University, Hope Park, Liverpool, L16 9JD, England, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02610183221092151, Accessed: 7-19-2023, //ONHS IF

A ‘shape-shifting social policy’ What makes the implications of basic income so challenging to assess is the difficulty in pinning down what it actually entails. Calnitsky describes it as a ‘shape-shifting social policy’ which seems to represent all things to all people (2018: 293). This has led to wildly different interpretations of UBI right across the political spectrum, allowing it to ‘be sold to different political constituencies as a solution to a variety of different problems’ (Sloman, 2018: 638). It can also lead to those involved in the debate talking past each other, moving the goal-posts of what can truly be considered “universal” or “basic”. The language used to describe the variety of proposals reflects this. At various times in Britain, campaigners have referred to UBI as ‘a “vagabond’s wage”, a “state bonus”, a “social dividend”, a “new social contract”, a “basic income”, and a “citizen’s income”’, not to mention Friedman’s “negative income tax” in the US (Sloman, 2018: 626). Clearly each of these terms ‘evokes a rather different set of connotations’, and as a result basic income has often paradoxically been seen as ‘unconditional’, ‘selective’, ‘unitary’ or ‘two-tiered’ depending on the ideology of its proponents and the intended audience of the proposals (Sloman, 2018: 626; Calnitsky, 2018: 293). Guy Standing credits the myriad of opposing views within the BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network) group of which he is a part for its influence on the debate. Though he admits to ‘tensions between those who take a libertarian approach and those who have been more egalitarian’, Standing holds that ‘this “broad church” approach has been key to the success of BIEN’ due to the ‘knowledge base’ it has built and the fruitful contradictions that have influenced its research (2017: x). But while such an approach may be suitable for an organisation like BIEN, the irreconcilable attitudes and approaches to UBI from across the political spectrum pose real difficulties in determining how the policy is likely to be implemented in practice. Indeed, as Sloman argues, ‘[i]t is difficult to see how tech entrepreneurs and the TUC could ever be brought together in support of a particular scheme’ (2018: 639). While the Left sees basic income as emancipatory, reducing the exploitative nature of wage labour and constituting a radical reimagination of work, the Right view it as a continuation of their long-standing efforts to undermine the welfare state and cut the “red tape” of workers’ protections.

The AFF’s reliance on the early ideas of Marx doom the transition --- the 1AC overlooks years of Marx’s post-Hegelian philosophy which generates a massive solvency deficit.

David James Hobb, 4-25-2022, ‘The Left will find that it has bought a Trojan Horse’: The dialectics of universal basic income, Sage Journals, Liverpool Hope University, Hope Park, Liverpool, L16 9JD, England, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02610183221092151, Accessed: 7-19-2023, //ONHS IF [Hegel = “hay-gul”]

David James Hobb, 4-25-2022, ‘The Left will find that it has bought a Trojan Horse’: The dialectics of universal basic income, Sage Journals, Liverpool Hope University, Hope Park, Liverpool, L16 9JD, England, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02610183221092151, Accessed: 7-19-2023, //ONHS IF

A ‘Trojan Horse’? Throughout British political history, UBI has primarily been an interest of the ‘free-market right’ and the ‘pragmatic centre’ rather than the Left (Sloman, 2015: 9). Despite the idealism of the Enlightenment thinkers who first introduced the concept, the most influential of basic income proposals have been regressive, seeking to resist or weaken the welfare state. For example, Rhys-Williams’ scheme, emerging as it did amidst the post-war consensus, ‘might plausibly be read as an attempt to resist the growth of progressive taxation and the rising bargaining power of the organised working class’ (Sloman, 2018: 629). Such an impression is reinforced by her ‘ambivalence’ regarding the sum that would constitute a basic income and her concerns about ‘conditionality’ (Sloman, 2018: 629). There is a moralising of work within the Right’s support of UBI, one of the key components that make it antithetical to any Leftist variation. Following the publication of the Beveridge Report - which made the key recommendations on which the British welfare state was based - Beveridge’s ideas, and the Labour government’s willingness to implement them, inspired an anxiety in Rhys-Williams and her fellow conservatives that ‘[n]ot only will the idle get as much from the State as will the industrious workers, they will get a great deal more’, which would result in an ‘undermining [of] the will to work’ (Rhys-Williams, 2004: 164). In order to combat this, Rhys-Williams argued for a “new social contract”, ‘expressed by the actual signature of a contract between the individual […] and the State’, in which the recipient of a basic income would be obliged to ‘devote his best efforts’ to societal wealth creation in exchange for a basic safety net (2004: 167). A UBI on these terms would essentially be a form of workfare, and a comparatively timid solution when contrasted with what actually emerged as the post-war consensus. This concern for protecting “the will to work” is implicit within the UBI pilot scheme carried out in Finland in 2017–2018. The pilot consisted of 2000 unemployed people being given a mere 560 euros a month to live on throughout the trial period, indicative of the moderate sum likely to be introduced (Kela, 2020). In simulating UBI models before the actual trial began, the academics involved found that such a low sum, despite offering more disposable income for social groups such as students and lower paid workers, would mean that ‘individuals with unemployment benefits would be the largest group of losers’, as ‘the basic income would only partially replace their existing benefits’ (Kangas et al., 2017: 90). These benefits would of course be abolished to make way for a UBI, as ‘[d]istributing a basic income to all beneficiaries on top of their current benefits would not be economically sustainable’ (Simanainen and Kangas, 2018: n.p.). Such a narrow conception of UBI should not be surprising, given Finland’s Centre-Right coalition government at the time - which included the Right-wing populist Finns Party - hoped the trial would help ‘diminish disincentives to working, […] reduce bureaucracy and […] simplify the overly complex tax-benefit system’, rather than provide more security for its poorest citizens (Kangas et al., 2017: 87). Such concerns with efficiency and bureaucracy are central to many conservative interpretations of UBI. Many of its supporters on the Right are ‘attracted to the idea as a pragmatic solution to the failings of the existing safety-net or as a free-market alternative to wage regulation and state welfare provision’ (Sloman, 2018: 627). In other words, this version of UBI represents little more than a continuation of the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and its attack on workers’ security. American economists Milton and Rose Friedman were key architects of this neoliberal revolution of course, and in Capitalism and Freedom advocated a basic income in order to ‘reduce the need for the social safety net and […] its expensive, inefficient bureaucracy’ (Friedman and Friedman, 2002; Stern and Kravitz, 2016: 174). The Friedmans saw their “negative income tax” as the most efficient way of ‘dismantling […] government interferences with the market’, typically positing this anti-welfare stance as one concerned with ‘individual liberty’ (Friedman, 2013: n.p.). Under this system, all state benefits would be abolished and replaced by a mechanism whereby above a certain threshold ‘you pay tax to the Inland Revenue; below it, they pay you’ (Gorz, 1985: 41). This would enable governments to cut off all support for those earning above an arbitrary figure which would ‘bring substantial savings’ and streamline welfare provision in the way the Friedmans and their fellow ideologues wished (Gorz, 1985: 41). The system would also tax those above the threshold at a flat rate rather than through progressive taxation, meaning the plans would also allow inequality to increase. Although Rhys-Williams’ proposals are probably the most well-known in Britain, Sloman sees those put forward by Arthur Cockfield in the 1970s as ‘the closest any British government has come to introducing UBI' (2018: 632). Cockfield’s proposals drew heavily on the work of the Friedmans, and like his predecessors he ‘explicitly rejected the notion of welfare rights’, wishing to be selective and exclude from the allowances those he labeled ‘the vagrants, the drifters, the drop-outs, [and] the petty criminals' (Sloman, 2018: 632; Cockfield, 1971: cited in Sloman). Such plans to streamline welfare and the tax system were popular within the Conservative Party, which would allow them to reduce administrative costs by abolishing the PAYE method of taxation in favour of the flat rate. However, Cockfield’s plans were unable to command the bipartisan support needed to be introduced, and were later abandoned by the subsequent Labour government (Sloman, 2016). Such emphases on reducing bureaucracy, ‘streamlining' the welfare state and instilling a “will to work” in lower earners betray the major difference between Left- and Right-wing interpretations of basic income. However, by arguing for a version of the same reform, Leftist advocates risk masking the huge differences between these interpretations, serving as enablers for the introduction of a more regressive variation. This is a particular possibility given how policy-making processes function, and how certain stakeholders within this process are able to shape policy outcomes, which will be explored later in more detail. Milton Friedman himself was aware of this, taking great delight in warning that ‘[t]he Left, if it accepts the programme, will find that it has bought a Trojan Horse’ (2013: n.p.). Bourgeois support for UBI is not just historic however. In the modern age, support is strong among those Zizek terms the ‘socially conscious billionaire' (2015: 39). In his estimation, such figures ‘stand for global capital at its most seductive and “progressive” – in short, at its most dangerous’ (Zizek, 2015: 39). This most advanced faction of capital ‘ha[s] embraced UBI as a way of defusing political resistance to automation and technological change’ (Benanav, 2019a: 7). Techno-capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk view such changes as both desirable and inevitable, and indeed both have publicly shared their support for UBI at one time or another. Marxist political economy shows the importance of technological advances to the accumulation of capital. Marx demonstrates that capitalist growth relies fundamentally on the ‘surplus labour' of its workers, which is the value produced beyond that which is covered by the worker’s wages. The rate at which this occurs is ‘therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour power by capital’ (Marx, 2013: 151). But capital’s endless search for further growth makes the invention of labour-saving technology vital to the increase in the rate of surplus value relative to the value the worker is paid for. This increase in ‘the productiveness of labour’ therefore means a decrease in the ‘labour-time required for the production of an article’, meaning capital is able to shorten the “necessary labour time” for which the worker is remunerated, and in turn ‘lengthen the other part of the day, during which he [sic] is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist’ (Marx, 2013: 21; 222). Just as working hours are not limited to those of necessary labour time, the fact that the labourer is able to produce their “means of subsistence” – the value equivalent to their wages - in a shorter space of time as a result of a particular advancement in production does not then lead to a reduction in hours, but rather the opposite. Capital is able to use this new technology to squeeze the wages of those who remain in post following its introduction, as the threat of unemployment now looms large for those ‘rendered superfluous’ by this innovation (Marx, 2013: 297). The work in which this technology is employed is therefore de-valued as “unskilled” - for much of it is completed by machinery with human supervision – which again spells wage cuts. In this way, even the very threat of technology – regardless of whether it is actually deployed in production - ensures the employer is able to reduce wage costs, while any workplace radicalism is quelled by the insecurity such innovation inspires. For those whose jobs are lost to automation, they either ‘flood[…] all the more easily accessible branches of industry’ or join the ranks of the jobless; what Marx terms the ‘reserve army of labour'. Either way, the result ‘sinks the price of labour below its value’ (Marx, 2013: 297). A UBI in conjunction with technological advancement is therefore entirely consistent with the demands of capital, which often repurposes reforms for its own development. In assessing the impact of the post-war welfare state, John Saville writes that it emerged not only through ‘the struggle of the working class against their exploitation’, but also as a result of ‘the requirements of industrial capitalism […] for a more efficient environment’, in other words a healthier and more educated workforce (1957: n.p.). Similarly, UBI serves to create this “more efficient environment” through a liberating of employers from the constraints of paying full wages. Not only does the policy force the state - or rather the tax payer - to top-up these wages, but it continues to maintain the labour force for a comparatively lower rate. This combination of UBI and automation could well allow capital to continue increasing its profit margins while throwing at least some of its workers - now guaranteed a basic income - on the scrapheap.

Esteban Mercatante, 8-7-2018, Universal Basic Income: A Capitalist Fix to the Evils of Capitalism?, Left Voice, Esteban is an economist from Buenos Aires and a member of the PTS, https://www.leftvoice.org/universal-basic-income-a-capitalist-solution-to-the-evils-of-capitalism/, Accessed: 7-18-2023, //ONHS IF

Universal basic income, a guaranteed, no-strings-attached income for the entire population, is presented as a progressive solution to the “end of work.” But those who promote a UBI are doing one of two things. They either entertain illusions in a top-down palliative measure for the miseries of the capitalist system, or they are searching for an impossible shortcut to the challenges of organizing the working class, the only social force that can overcome capitalism. In either case, they lack any sense of realism. The “end of work” narrative A widely held belief suggests that most jobs today are threatened by the so-called “fourth industrial revolution” which promises to extend robotics throughout production. Unlike previous waves of innovation, according to this line of thought, the fourth revolution will result in fewer replacement jobs. Yet in reality the number of workers exploited by capital around the world has grown as never before. According to the International Labour Organization, over 3.2 billion individuals are employed today. While this supposed “end of work” has escaped serious analysis, the idea that a UBI could secure an income for those who can no longer expect to find gainful employment has become more popular. It is not a new idea. But what gives it a new sense of urgency and more adherents is that, as Paul Mason suggests, it could solve the problem of “the disappearance of work itself.” 1 Talk of the “end of work” is permeated with a fetishism of robotics. But in the conditions of the “secular stagnation“ of modern capitalism, the use of robotics does not produce sufficiently high rates of capital accumulation to present a real threat to most people’s jobs. More generally, the idea that capitalism can impose generalized robotization clashes with capital’s need for ever increasing exploitation of the only source of its profits – labor power. Advocates of UBI also assume that growing job insecurity and precarity, faced by a large proportion of the world’s labor force, are irreversible. It is true that accessing formal employment, participating in the social security system, and so on, are unattainable for a growing sector of the working class. The ILO estimates that 42 per cent of workers suffer from “vulnerable employment”, including self-employment, temporary jobs etc., which has increased among young people and especially women. 2 People are working more and earning less than they did decades ago. The length of today’s workday is as long, or even longer, than it was 80 years ago, and in the United States, Germany and France it is being lengthened further. Contrary to what John Maynard Keynes imagined when he considered the economic possibilities of his grandchildren’s generation, we are not even a fraction closer to 15-hour workweek than we were in the 1930s – even though labor productivity has multiplied threefold. But as Leo Panitch points out 3, such generalized job insecurity, seen as inescapable by those who propose UBI, has much more to do with capital’s advance against the historic gains of the working class than it does with supposedly irreversible changes in capitalism’s material processes. Thirty years ago, the most left-wing proponents of UBI, Robert J. van der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs, considered it “A Capitalist Road to Communism.” 4 But what these proponents see as UBI’s “progressive” side is in fact its fatal flaw: accepting the premise of the “end of work” and sidestepping this problem by fighting not for socialism but rather for a UBI. To accept this idea is to accept that the working class has already lost half the battle. Money for Nothing Money here and now, because there is no time to wait for great social transformations – that is the slogan of UBI proponents. They want to give every person a sufficient income to acquire the essentials, whether or not they have a job, whether or not they want to work, with no strings attached. Such a decoupling of the income of citizens from the obligation to work seems to some to be the only viable alternative in a world where the system of production throws growing numbers of workers to the side of the road. A basic level of economic and social rights would be universally guaranteed – without the need to expropriate the means of production or storm the Winter Palace. Since the capitalist state already outlays considerable sums, which in some cases are universal, such as the cash transfers offered to families with children by many states in Latin America, what major roadblocks could stand in the way of taking one more step, however great, down the same path? UBI proponents are certain that it is within reach, and this feeling is reinforced by the growing number of experiments by public agencies and NGOs to test the effects of implementing a basic income. This has occurred even though there is a great abyss separating “progressive” proposals, meant to ensure a “dignified” income, and state practices that aim only to manage poverty without eliminating it. It is no surprise, then, that Rutger Bregman gave his book about UBI the title Utopia for Realists. 5 This book summarizes the experiences from different times and places and also examines the arguments for and against UBI. One of the main objectives of Bregman’s book is to disprove the claim that handing out money for nothing leads to laziness. The author presents the conclusions of a pilot scheme implemented in 2009 in London by the Broadway Cares organization, which delivered 3,000 pounds to 13 homeless people. According to this study, in each case the aid “empowered” the beneficiaries. Utopia also presents the results of a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the performance of the NGO Give Directly, which collects money from donations and delivers it to beneficiaries in poor countries with no strings attached. This study shows a lasting increase in income (on average 38% higher than before the transfer) and an increase in assets and property, including homes (up 58%), as well as a 42% reduction in the number of days that children go hungry. Other examples abound. According to Bregman, there are different programs based on cash transfers that reach 110 million families in 45 countries (“from Brazil to India, from Mexico to South Africa”), the overwhelming majority of which have been implemented in the last 20 years. Focusing on the poorest sectors of society is of course not the same as implementing a UBI sufficient to lift everyone above the poverty line, regardless of their employment status, income and wealth. Bregman does refer to one experiment that took place from 1974 to 1978 in the Canadian town of Dauphin with 13,000 inhabitants. This program secured a basic income for the entire population and ensured that no one fell below the poverty line. Thirty percent of the population (one family in four) received monthly payments that in today’s currency amounted to $19,000 a year. With the arrival of a fiscally zealous new government, the program was canceled without any investigation of the results. Thirty years later, a study analyzed the program’s impacts on health statistics compared with similar populations that did not receive this benefit, and it showed that it was a success. There are currently trials that have been advertised as first steps toward a UBI in Canada, Holland, Scotland, Kenya and India. A “citizen’s wage” is even included in the program of the government coalition formed by the Italian Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S – Five Star Movement) and the xenophobic Lega Nord (LN – Northern League), part of a program that also calls for large company tax reductions. In their current stage, these proposals focus on the poor and the unemployed, just like many of the experiments that Bregman refers to. They also continue to run into similar difficulties over time. Finland announced a few months ago that its two-year program, in which 2,000 unemployed people between 25 and 28 years old received 560 euros a month tax-free, was ending on December 31, 2018. This decision was motivated by fiscal austerity as a result of a slowing economic growth, and has nothing to do with the program’s results, which, according to its organizers, can be assessed only after six years. Still, the amount of money provided was less than half of the 1,200 euros needed to avoid poverty in Finland. This fact shows that the proposals discussed by different nation-states are a long way from the paradise of free time without poverty that some leftists like to imagine. This basic income thus aims to be nothing more than a palliative measure. In the United States, for example, there is the SNAP program (“food stamps”) to provide food to people who cannot afford it. Payments such as this ameliorate the situation of the poorest sectors, but they do nothing to reduce income inequality between capitalists and workers, which has particularly exploded in the US since the 1980s. This type of program just allows this unequal income distribution to continue but with a bit less tension. Such a basic income that comes “from above” as a public social security policy will hardly be universal. Capitalist production is dependent on not only an active labor force, but also a pool of unemployed and underemployed that are ready to take up any vacancy. This “reserve army of labor” exerts a constant downward pressure on wages and has a disciplining effect on the employed sector of the working class. A government-provided allowance that enables workers to fully withdraw themselves from the labor market would dismantle this key mechanism of any capitalist system. For this reason, it will be focused only on very low-income sectors and will not even amount to a basic income, but be set at levels below the poverty line. This is the only way that a basic income can be compatible with the continued exploitation of labor in the conditions that modern capitalism in decline requires, especially in backward and dependent countries, but also in the richest imperialist economies. Basic income is a long way from being a progressive reform that ensures a decent income for all citizens. Public policies are caught between the demand for fiscal austerity and the need to contain discontent and make capitalism’s continued social degradation somehow bearable. As Michel Husson states, “Progressive partisans of an income of 1,000 euros per month may well serve as ‘useful idiots’ for the establishment of a universal income of 400 euros, for a final settlement that also advantageously reduces the operating costs of the welfare state.” 6 UBI or the Redistribution of Working Hours? Tens years after the Great Recession, some have proclaimed that the world has turned a corner, even if the turbulence of more the last couple years discredits such claims. The capitalist class is preparing new attacks on the living standards of the working class, which it must do in order to increase accumulation. A key part of this are the labor and pension (counter)-reforms being imposed around the world (from France to Brazil and Argentina). But UBI also has its part to play. The proposal for a UBI shifts debate from the terrain of class conflict to that of public policy and citizenry. This could be of great service to the capitalist class as it continues its attacks on the working class. After all, a dispute about the primary distribution of income always entails the danger that the exploited will question who controls social production and begin to organize. But if the debate is shifted to UBI, it becomes a question of secondary distribution, of income management and social security expenses. Some on the left defend UBI because it will supposedly “empower” the working class in its confrontation with capital. The logic is that an income that can cover the basic cost of living would give the working class greater bargaining power, since all workers would have a credible “exit” strategy. This position is defended by, for example, David Calnitsky in Catalyst. 7 However, this argument has some major weaknesses. All efforts by capital in recent decades have aimed at creating job insecurity, flexibility and fragmentation of the workforce. Calnitsky is right that working class power is today at a historic low. So, can we really expect the government to come up with a proposal for UBI that gets any closer to a livable income? Doing so would be naïve. Then, what we need to focus on is not a policy proposal that shifts the attention away from class struggle, but the task of organizing at workplaces, in the unions, for the working class to become again a force that needs to be reckoned with. Of course, the argument of those who propose a “dignified” basic income is not that it will come from state generosity, but that it must be achieved through struggle. However, as Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk argue in Catalyst, There is consequently no prospect of the hoped for policy coming to pass until there is a working-class constituency that is organized and powerful enough to be able to extract it, in spite of the predictable resistance of superbly organized capital.8 Accepting the “end of work” and fighting for remuneration outside of employment does not bode well for a working class that aspires to become such a powerful social force. If anything, it can facilitate the new attacks of the ruling class. The “progressive” proponents of UBI are thus caught in a vicious circle. UBI is not a shortcut to the independent organization of the working class that its progressive proponents imagine. In contrast to these illusions, there is only one response to either neoliberal austerity or miserable handouts: the struggle to reduce the workweek to six hours a day, five days a week, and the redistribution of working hours among all those available to work. Around the world, the workload for those who have a job is increasing, while unemployment and underemployment grow alongside it. Data from the US show that, even though labor productivity has tripled from 1957 to today, the eight-hour day remains unchanged and businesses have found multiple ways to impose even longer hours. In the last decades, the time dedicated to work has increased. The same goes for Europe, and even more so for many dependent countries that have joined the networks of transnational production. Far from being “natural,” this is determined by capital’s need to increase its appropriation of surplus value at the expense of labor. Therefore we must raise the demand for the reduction of the working day by distributing the available work among all those who can work, without any loss in salary, thus guaranteeing all employed people an income based on the cost of living. This proposal seeks to question the seemingly “natural” character of the industrial reserve army. The conditions have been created for everyone to work fewer hours. But while capital is in power, some must continue working as many hours as workers did many decades ago while a growing part of the population is transformed into a “relative surplus population.” Thus, we have to question the private monopoly of the means of production. The IG Metall strike in Germany last year, in which hundreds of thousands of workers fought for the reduction of the working day,9 showed that this is an idea that can resonate deeply in important sectors of the working class (even if in this case the strike was called off by the union bureaucracy after it imposed a salary cut in exchange for a shorter working day). What stands in the way of distributing all available work among all those who want to work, decreasing everyone’s working day? Why should some of us have exhausting working days while others are condemned to unemployment and underemployment (with or without a UBI)? Why can’t we use technological advances to reduce the working day to everyone? Why do the workers who produce all the social wealth have to settle for crumbs from the capitalist state, while eight billionaires own the same wealth as 3.5 billion people? Capitalism has created the conditions for reducing the time required to produce all socially necessary goods. But for the vast majority of the world population to benefit from this enhanced productive capacity, we need to question the mechanisms of exploitation that sustain the current mode of production. Then the only “realistic” thing to do is to fight to abolish the capitalist system. We must clear the path for a mode of production that is no longer based on private profit but rather on meeting the social needs of everyone.

MMT key to solve class consciousness and avoid reliance on taxation

Charles Stevenson and Ellen Helker-Nygren 23, Activist striving for social-ecological transformation who is currently studying for a master’s degree in Degrowth: Ecology, Economics and Policy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Aside from political strategy, his interests include critical macroeconomics, unequal exchange, and Modern Monetary Theory; Activist and recent graduate from the Master's of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Ottawa. She runs a degrowth group in Ottawa called the "Snails Collective" which focuses on building community and organizing for socio-ecological transformation in the City, “A Coherent Monetary Theory is a Threat to the Capitalist State”, degrowth, January 31 2023, , NSH-NT

Only reparations are sufficient to resolve racialized economic disparities --- it encourages democratic planning within communities which solves the case.

Ed Whitfield, 12-10-2018, Why Universal Basic Income Is Not the Solution We Think It Is, YES! Magazine, Whitfield is the co-founder and co-managing director of the Fund for Democratic Communities. He serves on the boards of the New Economy Coalition, the Working World, and the Southern Reparations Loan Fund, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/good-money/2018/12/10/why-universal-basic-income-is-not-the-solution-we-think-it-is, Accessed: 7-18-2023, //ONHS IF

Across all but 2 social policies, support was higher among those favoring a stronger governmental role in society relative to those favoring a weaker governmental role (Figure 1). For 2 unemployment policies—tax credits to businesses and public spending on construction projects—support was equally high for both. Other than these 2 policies, differences in support based on beliefs about the appropriate role of government persisted even in analyses including measures of political party affiliation (results not shown). We did not identify significant differences in support when comparing those living in states with the highest and the lowest case-fatality rates in early April 2020 (results not shown).

I focus on the US for two reasons. First, due to racialized politics, the negative stereotypes of welfare recipients are especially strong among American conservatives. As many conservatives believe that welfare programs disproportionately benefit Black Americans, they regard welfare with fundamental disdain (Gilens, 1999). Yet, the universality and unconditionality of UBI allow working classes of all races to benefit from the policy, thereby blurring racial lines. As such, UBI could potentially neutralize racial animus among conservative opponents, forming a basis for conservatives to be persuadable in reducing their opposition to UBI.

Among the income support policies, a majority supported an increased federal minimum wage (58%), but fewer supported universal basic income (39%). All of the unemployment policies had majority support, including expanding unemployment insurance benefits (52%), tax credits for businesses to retain and hire workers (66%), employment education and training programs (68%), and public spending on construction projects (71%).

When asked to gauge the role of government in society, 34% of the respondents favored the government taking “active steps in every area it can” relative to only 24% of the respondents in the 2019 pre-COVID-19 Gallup survey4 that used identical question wording.

The concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is turning up more often these days in debates over income inequality, poverty and the impact of automation on the labor force. It’s an old idea that traces back to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and appears later in the writings of social philosophers such as Condorcet, Thomas Paine, Charles Fourier, and John Stuart Mills. In the 1960s, economist Milton Friedman proposed a “negative income tax” that would replace America’s patchwork system of social welfare programs with unconditional cash payments that would be enough to cover the basic costs of food and shelter for low income households. Friedman’s idea was the basis for the Family Assistance Program that was proposed (and then defeated) during the Nixon Administration. Recently the idea has drawn renewed interest because of skepticism about the effectiveness of aid programs in developing nations and concerns about workers who will be displaced in the near future by robots and artificial intelligence. Several countries around the world and several cities in the US have announced their interest in UBI, and some have launched experiments designed to test its feasibility.

For the most part, public opinion on the subject of UBI has been divided. A 2017 poll by Gallup found a near even split among American adults between those who support UBI (48%) and those who do not (52%). A Zogby Strategies poll done around the same time found 40% in favor of UBI, 35% opposed, and 25% undecided. A 2017 international survey by IPSOS found a more even split among Americans, with 38% in favor, 38% opposed and 24% undecided. Among other nations in the poll, support for UBI was found to be lowest in countries such as France (29%) and Spain (31%) and highest in Poland (60%) and Germany (52%). Switzerland is the only country that has had a national referendum on this issue. In 2016, voters there rejected a proposal to give each person a monthly cash allowance of 2,500 Swiss francs (about $2,000 US dollars when you factor in the cost of living) by a margin of nearly 3 to 1.

[*293] B. Broad Delegations to Independent Experts Congressional delegations to administrative agencies are commonplace in the modern Federal government. But the tax system has only infrequently relied on broad delegations: while there are instances in which Congress has delegated broadly in the tax code, 77tax legislation has generally consisted of Congress enacting extremely detailed tax statutes that leave little room for discretion to be exercised by Treasury or any other agency. 78Congress has been able to legislate with specificity and in high volumes without relying on delegation because of the institutional capacity it has developed in-house. 79 [*294] The first democracy avoidance technique is to introduce broad delegations into tax laws. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act featured a moderate version of this sort of delegation. As usual, the Department of Treasury was responsible for implementing the new tax law. But unlike most prior legislation, the law featured several exceptionally broad delegations that left Treasury with significant policymaking discretion. 80Although this move to broader delegations may have been incidental, it is consistent with other proposals that would move tax lawmaking even further towards significant delegations. Hines and Logue make an extended case for broader delegations of tax policymaking authority, arguing that tax policymaking should be entrusted to professional staff who have "political independence." 81Their most drastic proposal is for Congress to delegate authority to set tax rates to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or to a similar sort of "independent" regulatory body. 82Their goal is to allow the Federal Reserve to coordinate fiscal policy, which has typically been the purview of Congress, with monetary policy, which has long been reserved for the independent Federal Reserve Board. 83 [*295] Hines and Logue describe their proposal to give the Federal Reserve tax rate-setting authority as empowering it to fight economic contractions by "precommit[ting] to an optimal policy plan over time, which Congress notoriously struggles to do." 84Delegation would serve as a bulwark against what they see as inappropriate meddling and tinkering by Congress. 85For example, a high-profile example of the problem they seek to avoid might be Congress' notorious inability to sustain base-broadening, rate-reducing "tax reform" of the sort enacted in 1986. In that case, and in others, a base broadened by eliminating "loopholes" was quite promptly re-holed, and the broadly reduced rates crept back up. 86 They also argue that broad delegations to experts allow for policy changes that are more responsive to "changed circumstances." 87The concern here is that the legislative process is too cumbersome; for example, Congress may find itself unable to enact fiscal policy to meet the moment of turning economic cycles--in broad strokes, lower taxes in recessions, higher taxes in boom times. This second critique is the diametric opposite of the first one: their concerns seem to be that Congress is too quick to change policies when it shouldn't, but also not quick enough to change policies when it should. The unifying concern here, implicit in Hines and Logue's description of Congress's deficiencies, is about the influences to which Congress is responsive. In short, [*296] this is a public choice story: special interests push Congress in wrong directions, regardless of the circumstances. 88Delegation, they argue, could screen out some of these influences by transferring authority to better insulated bodies. Hines and Logue believe that the case for policymaking via delegation of this sort "is as strong with tax as elsewhere." 89The tax system, they argue, is missing out on specific benefits facilitated by delegation to agencies in the modern administrative state, namely reliance on expertise in policymaking settings that are shielded from political winds. 90They argue that the benefits of expertise accrue in other areas of law in which Congress makes broad delegations to administrative agencies--transportation, food and drug, environmental and health care, to name a few--should also be bestowed on tax policymaking. 91Although broad delegations that give agencies wide-ranging policy discretion raise some basic and well-recognized democratic concerns, [*297] non-tax scholars have confronted these issues extensively. 92But the goal of political independence runs contrary to a primary justification offered by administrative law and constitutional law scholars as to why broad delegations are permissible in the U.S.'s constitutional structure, namely that agency personnel are faithful to the politically accountable President. 93 Indeed, while there is an extensive literature on the importance of central bank independence and expertise, 94there is no similar body of literature or academic support for political independence in tax [*298] policy; Hines and Logue acknowledge that some elements of their proposals would be "unprecedented." 95 Further, the Federal Reserve is an outlier even among independent government agencies. 96Its features make it perhaps the most politically insulated piece of the Executive Branch, and have raised persistent questions about the constitutionality of its structure and the potential lack of democratic accountability for the decisions the Federal Reserve Board makes. 97Its members are protected from removal by the President by statute so that they do not feel obliged to follow administration policy; it has independent litigation authority, so does not need to rely on the Department of Justice to support its legal positions; 98it has its own source of funds so that it does not rely on Congress for annual appropriations; 99its regulatory actions are exempt from centralized review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and its [*299] interactions with Congress are exempt from the sort of White House review to which departments and agencies are generally subject; 100and its multimember structure is thought to facilitate independent "deliberative decision making" and foster greater reliance on expertise. 101 Using the Federal Reserve to set tax rates would, by design, severely limit opportunities for public participation in tax policymaking. 102The authors acknowledge that "delegation arguably reduces the democratic nature of the system, undermining the legitimacy" of whatever policies are ultimately adopted--which they explain to mean that policies that are the product of this sort of broad delegation may lack public accountability, and thus may be judged to be illegitimate. 103They also recognize that the distributional effects of tax policy are "quintessentially political decision[s] entailing tradeoffs among different groups of taxpayers." 104 Nonetheless, the authors dismiss concerns related to democratic values as having been "overstated" by critics. 105They acknowledge that [*300] there are mechanisms included in the constitutional and institutional design of Congress that allow "voters to understand their representatives' contributions to legislation outcomes, and to a certain degree, why legislators voted the way they did," and they recognize that this facilitates accountability. 106That is, they acknowledge that Congress has some potential strengths in providing transparency and accountability. Additionally, they do defend delegation in part on grounds that there are some mechanisms for delegated decisions to reflect public preferences, via direct engagement with the rulemaking process and through the election of the President. 107 To be sure, there are various ways that broad delegations can be designed to cabin the authority of agency officials, and that decisions made by unelected bureaucrats can be made to be responsive to the public. Indeed, Hines and Logue offered that their proposal could be cabined if Congress specified the final distribution of the federal tax burden (thus limiting the Federal Reserve's discretion to change rates too differentially). 108Nonetheless, in federal tax law, more and broader delegations-whether it is rates to the Federal Reserve, or the contours of special tax provisions as seen in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act--means shifting decision making from elected officials to unelected officials, moving the decision making process and inputs farther from public view, and moving away from the possibility of electoral accountability for decisions.

[*281] I. WHY DEMOCRACY? A. Debate Among Democratic Theorists Among democratic theorists, there is a long-running debate about how to justify democracy--in short, what is democracy good for? The justification matters in practical terms, as the discussion in Part III of this Article will show. If democracy is a moral imperative--that is, there are rules and norms of decision making that must be followed without regard for results because, for example, shared decision making is required to respect equality-then sufficiently democratic procedures might be required regardless of the outcomes these procedures produce. 31On the other hand, if democracy is instrumental, then it is best measured by reference to the objectives it is oriented towards achieving, and by this view if democratic procedures fall short in terms of results then other less democratic procedures might be preferable. 32 The deontological justifications for democracy see its shared decision making and self-governance as required in order to, for example, protect individuals' liberty, allow for public reasoning among the governed, and to ensure equality among citizens. 33The democracy avoidance techniques addressed in Part III offend this justification for democratic decision making--they propose to compromise (or, from the current workings of Congress, further compromise) democratic norms in the name of specific tax policy goals. This approach discounts values like liberty and equality, rather than treating them as fundamental to humanity and uniquely intrinsic to democratic selfgovernance. As an alternative, other democratic theorists subscribe to consequentialist justifications for democracy. From the consequentialist perspective, democracy is good to the extent it delivers the best available [*282] outcomes. 34The broadest consequentialist approach accommodates some of the deontological justifications by attributing some value to things that flow from democratic decision making itself. This might include, for example, that democracy "enhance[s] the moral qualities of its citizens" by making them participate in decision making and causing them to be attentive to their fellow citizens' perspectives. 35There are also a host of consequentialist justifications that attribute value to the ways that democracy might enhance substantive outcomes. For example, some argue that the democratic process can organize diverse inputs from a broad range of people, or that in a representative system, democracy prompts the decision makers to "respond to the expressions of needs" of the population. 36These deontological justifications for democracy can be integrated into the consequentialist framework, so that if democracy has or produces independent value, that value can be considered along with other objectives. 37 But there is a more strict consequentialist approach as well, and this is the one with which the proposals critiqued in Part II are aligned. In this narrower version of consequentialism, the instrumental focus of democratic decisions is entirely turned toward external objectives. For example, Amartya Sen famously observed that there has never been a famine in a democracy. 38From a narrow consequentialist perspective focused on nourishment, this fact alone might justify democracy, but if an aristocracy could also avoid famines, or perhaps could produce consistently better nutrition outcomes, then perhaps aristocracy would be preferable to this imaginary and highly particular narrow consequentialist. Similarly, if a democratic structure yields the most efficient tax policies (a standard concern among tax experts), it might be judged [*283] through a narrow consequentialist lens to be the best decision making structure for tax policy. But if a different structure--say, a small group of experts-could develop more efficient tax policies, then that alternative decision making process would be justified. This approach focusing on efficiency without regard to the process does not attribute any intrinsic value to democratic structure. The predominant view among democracy scholars and legal scholars focused on democracy is that democratic decision making has intrinsic value and good consequences. 39Thus, among democratic theorists, a narrow consequentialist approach may be defensible but it is normatively freighted--the exclusion of democratic values and disregard of any intrinsic value in democratic decision making in this sort of evaluation is salient. As discussed in Part II, tax scholars focused on efficiency and equity have perhaps inadvertently removed democracy from their latent consequentialist equation, and mostly disregarded deontological justifications that would require democratic engagement.

[*273] INTRODUCTION When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law in December 2017, it was the most significant amendment to U.S. federal tax law in more than three decades. 1The obvious question for taxpayers across the [*274] country was: How will it affect me? Surprisingly, the answer for most taxpayers was that they had no idea-to find out if they were better or worse off, individuals and businesses generally had to wait for more than a year until they actually prepared and filed their first returns under the new law. 2That meant that they did not really see how they were affected until months after election day for many of the members of Congress who advocated for and against the legislation. 3Transparency and accountability, both fundamental to democratic governance, 4were sorely lacking. 5 [*275] Many of the process-based objections to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act carried the taint of partisanship-- Democrats who opposed the bill complained, while Republicans celebrated. 6But just eight years earlier the partisan sides were flipped as Republicans lodged process complaints about the enactment of another hugely significant piece of tax legislation, the Affordable Care Act. 7There were some similarities between the two- each was the product of significant out-of-public-view wrangling, each included special provisions that benefitted powerful special interests, and each was enacted using the same distinctive procedural mechanisms that help to avoid extended public debate. 8Hence, the processes in each case gave their critics fodder for complaints on democratic process grounds. 9 American expectations of democratic control are arguably at their zenith when Congress exercises its constitutional power to tax (think: "no taxation without representation"). 10But, as experienced [*276] recently, modern tax lawmaking in the United States can feel divorced from the conduct of democratic governance. 11This perceived democratic deficit is not incidental. Rather, among tax policymakers and scholars, America's most democratic institutions and procedures are commonly approached as obstacles to implementing desired tax policies. 12At the federal level, democratic barriers are perceived to be erected in the halls [*277] of Congress, with its byzantine committee process, burdensome procedural hurdles, constant myopic focus on elections and reelections of members, and attentiveness to interest group lobbyists. 13To be sure, some of these features are anti-democratic by constitutional design or by political evolution, including bicameralism, the skewed representation of small states in the U.S. Senate, and legislative practices particularly in the Senate that allow a minority to shape the legislative agenda. 14 8 But some commentators have responded to the current state of fiscal policymaking by advocating for mechanisms that would further avoid or constrain democratic forces. This Article identifies a persistent undemocratic impulse in tax policymaking--an interest in bypassing democratic decision making to get to preferred policy outcomes--that has given rise to a host of democracy avoidance proposals. These proposals would work to enact desired tax policies by limiting who participates in tax policymaking, or by favoring certain participants in the process or certain normative perspectives. 15One proposal would insulate tax policymaking from political pressures by delegating tax rate setting authority to an independent body like the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Another would outsource new tax reform legislation to a panel of experts, in a posture so that their proposal would presumptively become law unless blocked by Congress. 16These sorts of approaches to tax lawmaking find support in public choice scholarship, which uses [*278] economic analysis to evaluate collective decision making 17and which has become a preferred lens among some tax scholars for analyzing the political economy of tax and other types of legislation. 18 This Article responds to the tendency of democracy avoidance in federal tax lawmaking in two respects. First, I place the phenomenon of democracy avoidance in a broader, ongoing debate among democratic theorists. 19Some democratic theorists argue that democratic decision making has its own moral force, regardless of how one might evaluate substantive decisions. From this perspective, democracy as a mode of decision making should be preferred and privileged even if the democratically chosen policies are undesirable in some respects. In short, as Amy Gutmann succinctly explained in an argument supporting a deliberative model of democratic decision making, "democracy is valuable for far more than its capacity to achieve correct outcomes." 20 In contrast, the democracy avoidance proposals identified in this Article are aligned with another strain of democratic theory, which posits that outcomes are the most important aspect of governance. 21From this perspective, democracy is preferable if it allows a society to make the best decisions for its community members; but, equally, if democracy does not deliver good results, other forms of decision making might be deemed preferable. By privileging specific tax policy outcomes that can be arrived at by insulating decision making from democratic forces, some of the advocates of the strategies described in this Article have placed tax policy as an issue that supersedes commitments to democratic governance. 22This Article seeks to introduce tax scholars and policymakers to this debate, 23and make clear that democracy avoidance [*279] proposals implicitly embrace the tradeoff of less democratic input in exchange for "better" tax policy outcomes. 24 Second, I offer several proposals to refocus tax lawmaking to value and benefit from democratic engagement (and to produce democratically legitimate tax policies) rather than avoiding democratic decision making and circumvent democratic institutions. While these proposals are a response to the democracy avoidance proposals critiqued earlier in the Article, they also could be implemented in ways that are consistent with some of the ideas that I critique--some of those specific proposals are not mutually exclusive with democratically legitimate decisionmaking. 25This approach places democracy as a central concern in tax lawmaking, not because of the resultant policies-- although there is interesting empirical and theoretical work supporting the idea that more democratically responsive policies may be better policies 26--but rather because it is important that community members perceive tax policies to be democratically legitimate. 27This Article seeks to shift tax policy debates to appreciate the value of democratic decision making to [*280] the tax system. The first volley, presented here, is to recommend reforms to the U.S. Federal tax lawmaking process to reorient it towards (rather than away from) democratic responsiveness. 28 The proposals, laid out in Part III, include the following: to counteract the uncertainty most taxpayers experienced with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that is a threat with any complex tax legislation, Congress should formally require, as part of the legislative process, detailed and publicly accessible analysis of how specific provisions affect typical taxpayers. 29This reform would rely on Congress's professional tax staff (housed in the Joint Committee on Taxation) to analyze the expected changes in tax liability for various typical taxpayers in each congressional districtperhaps the median individual filing as a single taxpayer, the median family of four, a small service-providing business, typical taxpayers from different racial groups or of different genders, and so on. Thus, before a congressperson voted on final legislation, he or she would receive a district-specific report (which would also be made public) showing the effects on variations of common taxpayers who are his or her constituents, based on demographics of the district and models of taxpayer responses. 30 The Article proceeds as follows: Part I introduces the debate among democratic theorists about how to value and justify democratic decision making, and whether and how to account for policy outcomes. This part also briefly introduces some features of democratic decision making that public choice theory generally sidelines, but that I argue should come to bear on tax policymaking institutions. Part II uncovers and examines the strain of democracy avoidance in tax lawmaking and tax scholarship, which I argue is rooted in public choice theory. In Part III, I propose four specific reforms that can bolster democratic legitimacy in federal tax policymaking in accordance with the framework. Part III also begins to consider what the vision of democratic tax policymaking presented here might mean in terms of substantive tax policy.

Reconceptualizing Performance Budgeting as Performance Budget Management

It should be noted that many of the foregoing recommended practices focus on activities controlled and managed by the executive branch. Although the legislative use of performance information in the budgetary process and the proactive engagement of the legislature in the development of performance goals and performance-budgeting strategies are important (OECD 2014; Park and Jang 2015; Podger 2018; Shaw 2016; White 2012), there is a long-held view that performance budgeting is primarily an executive budgeting tool for managerial and planning purposes (Jones and McCaffery 2010; Joyce 2003; Kelly and Rivenbark 2011; Lu 2007; Moynihan 2008). In the 1940s in the United States, performance-budgeting reform was not intended to change congressional budgeting, and throughout its history, the reform has seldom succeeded in doing so. Hence, the conceptualization of performance budgeting as an executive budgeting tool will probably remain more salient than a conceptual focus on its legislative use. The idea that performance budgeting may provide an alternative model of legislative decision making that trumps politics, gaming, and incremental logics is likely to continue to draw skepticism (Radin 2008; Raudla 2012; Wildavsky 1961). From this perspective, it is perhaps helpful for practitioners and the academic community to reconceptualize the practice of performance budgeting as “performance budget management” and focus more on the financial management aspects of the practice rather than on the legislative process and outcomes. PBM is about using the full budget cycle, from preparation, appropriation, and execution to evaluation, as a platform to achieve various managerial, budgetary, and policy-making purposes (see figure 2). Based on the From Performance Budgeting to Performance Budget Management: Theory and Practice 753 recommended practices, PBM activities should integrate multiyear budgetary planning and the assessment of long-term liabilities with policy planning so that policy makers and the budget office can be more informed about the short-term, near-term, and long-term financial risks faced by key policies and outcomes that the political leadership and the public hope to achieve. PBM also should link macro budgetary and policy planning with micro budget planning at the departmental and program levels so that departmental and program priorities and their budget requests are based on consideration of the macro budgetary constraints and the policy priorities of the executive and legislative leadership. In addition to integrating budgetary planning with policy planning, PBM needs to focus on “value for money” considerations, such as the efficiency, effectiveness, and public satisfaction of spending. This focus is more likely to occur at the subdepartmental program level, however, where decisions are less politicized, the outcomes and beneficiaries of spending can be more clearly defined, and the performance logics and the focal points of accountability of spending can be specified more easily (Blöndal et al. 2008; Castro 2009; Ho 2011; Park and Jang 2015). Further, even though there has been a growing emphasis on outcome-orientated budgeting, some legislators and citizens are still interested in monitoring how much tax money is spent on what activities. As a result, they may feel hesitant to delegate the detailed control function to another bureaucratic organization, such as the executive budget office or the auditor’s office. Based on this concern, performance-oriented program budget documentation is likely to coexist with traditional, input-oriented, line-item budgets in some governments (Schick 2014). Finally, under a system of PBM, departmental and program managers need to monitor spending progress and results regularly during the budget execution process. There also should be spending reviews conducted by departments and programs, probably on a rotating basis over a specified period of time so that the budget office and departmental leadership can evaluate the legality, allocative efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and necessity of spending. Occasional in-depth performance audits of selected spending programs by an independent, external entity, such as the auditor’s office, are also needed so that deficiencies, vulnerabilities, risk, and long-term sustainability concerns of spending programs can be identified and proactive remedial actions can be recommended to policy makers and budgeters. Figure 3 provides an example from the City of Olathe, Kansas, which has institutionalized a “threedimensional review” to “look back” at the effectiveness of spending, “look around” to benchmark performance results and learn from peer experiences, and to “look forward” to the future and integrate budget planning with the long-term vision and strategic planning of the community.

Delegators can also be explicit in the other direction: that is, to make clear that they do not divest themselves of authority. Most commonly, agency heads explicitly “reserve” authority to exercise the delegated power themselves. Sometimes they issue blanket reservations of authority. The Secretary of Transportation, for example, declares that “except as otherwise provided,” she “may exercise powers and duties delegated or assigned to officials other than the Secretary.” 95 Alternatively, subdelegations can also specify reservations for individual grants of power. The Secretary of Agriculture specifically reserves authority from a delegation to the Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs on issues “related to foreign agriculture” and for “[a]pproving export controls.” 96 Under these circumstances, courts generally decline to apply Accardi since the rule itself retains authority in the initial delegator.97 Between these two poles are a host of delegations that are ambiguous: they lack both clear reservations of authority and explicit intent to divest authority completely. Unfortunately, our dataset does not capture which delegations fall into each of these categories given the challenges of collecting and coding data on reservations of authority. Reservations, whether blanket or individual, are often placed in different parts of the Code of Federal Regulations and have idiosyncratic appearances in the Federal Register. They must be matched, often manually, with each delegated power through cross-references. Nevertheless, to try to get some sense of magnitude, we drew a random sample of 200 of the delegations in our dataset and found only two for which explicit reservations were present in the same Federal Register entries. Further, none of the 200 delegations in this sample included an express statement of divestment within the same entry. For these more ambiguous rules, judges will defer to the agency after deploying the ordinary tools of regulatory interpretation. 98

A current – and recurring – topic of conversation in the SFF writer/ blogger/ reader community is the lack of people of color (POC) writing and publishing in the field.  (This is also an issue in the literary community in general; here’s a recent  that appeared on the Book Riot website.)

People of color are underrepresented in SFF for a lot of reasons, but one which I see frequently mentioned is that books without diversity make POC feel excluded.  This creates a vicious circle – POC don’t read SFF, so they don’t write SFF, so there aren’t POC in SFF books, so POC don’t read SFF.  One way to break the cycle is for white writers to include more diversity in their own work.

The world of speculative fiction publishing is plagued by “structural, institutional, personal, universal” racism, according to a new report that found less than 2% of more than 2,000 SF stories published last year were by black writers.

The report, published by the magazine Fireside Fiction, states that just 38 of the 2,039 stories published in 63 magazines in 2015 were by black writers. With the bulk of the industry based in the US, more than half of all speculative fiction publications the report considered did not publish a single original story by a black author. “The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96% of published writers are black in a country where 13.2% of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%,” says the report.

(Dr. Ebony Elizabeth - professor in Literacy, Culture, and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania, “Toward a Theory of the Dark Fantastic: The Role of Racial Difference in Young Adult Speculative Fiction and Media,” Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 14 Issue 1—Spring 2018, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1175839.pdf)

In the West, the mysterious unknowability of darkness in nature was extended to a corresponding fear of unknown and unknowable dark things, including imaginary monsters beyond the boundaries of the known world during medieval times, and, in the modern period, conquered and enslaved people from beyond Europe’s borders. This fear of dark people was written into the United States constitution, denoting for the ages a “threefifths compromise” that at the time of the Founding and well beyond, enslaved African Americans were not fully human. The colloquial term by which people of African descent were often known during pronouns to refer to individuals that correspond with the pronouns that they use to refer to themselves. H Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 14 Issue 1—Spring 2018 3 this late 18th century period—darky—signals that in modern English, darkness has never been just a metaphor. Even in language, darkness is personified, embodied, and most assuredly racialized. My quest to seek the origins of fantastic darkness within history, culture, and society is part of a long intellectual tradition. Critical medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) frequently cited edited volume Monster Theory is but one of many influential texts that views fantastic beasts, witches, zombies, vampires, dragons, manticores, shades, and the rest of a monstrous menagerie as an analogy for those who are positioned as different in the real world. Cohen’s seven theses of monster culture echoed some of the observations that I began making as I read text after text. Furthermore, Toni Morrison’s (2010) Playing in the Dark provides an even better starting point for locating the Dark Other in the fantastic, especially when many traditional fantasy novels, fairy tales, comics, television shows, and movies seem not to have any discernible characters of color: The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. (pp. 9-10; emphasis in original) In other words, the reason why our culture does not often notice the ways that race, difference, and darkness are hailed in the fantastic is that we have been carefully taught not to notice it. The supposedly raceless terrain of the fantastic thus becomes a means of escape from our raced, embodied existences, even for White readers and viewers. However, enforced invisibility through colormuteness (Pollock, 2004)in the fantastic does not render dark bodies shadowless. Quite the contrary. The shadow cast becomes darker and more ominous still for its very unspeakability. Beyond the magical landscapes of fantasy, stories set in the future and on alien worlds seem to uncannily imagine alien Others subjugating the West in the same way that Europe did to the “rest.” John Rieder (2008) observed in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction that “scholars largely (though not universally) agree that the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century is also the most crucial period for the emergence of the [science fiction]” (pp. 2-3). Science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales for children and young adults are not exempt from colonial themes. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (2012), quoting José Monleón, find that fantasy emerges from dialectics of reason and unreason that arose with modernity, dividing the world into “us” and “them” (p. 103). In the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, witches and wizards, and seers and shifters often function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities, and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between and among identity groups. Dark Others cross all of these boundaries—generic, categorical, and rhetorical — as embodied material sites of accumulation and fungibility. In my book manuscript in progress, I focus on textual narratives for young adults that have been turned into television shows and movies. It is one thing to read and imagine a character who is the site of difference; it is quite another to see that character on the small or large screen. Participatory culture also plays a role in this phenomenon. When Morrison asked rhetorically about what happens as we imagine “an Africanist Other,” she might not have foreseen that twenty years later, not only would fans run to social media to share their reactions after finishing a narrative, they would also use the Internet to discuss books and shows during readings and viewings. Thus reader, viewer, and fan responses are being shaped much more collectively than at any time in the recent past. And so is imagination. When people read fantastic texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, they find themselves in completely different terrain. Thus, rooted in both critical race theory and Afropessimism, the central claim that I am making about the dark fantastic is this: In the AngloAmerican fantastic tradition, the Dark Other is the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, spectacle, and violence. The Dark Other is the present-absence that lingers at the edges of every fairy tale. She stalks the shadows of the futurist visions of science fiction, lurks along the margins of the imagined magical pasts of high fantasy, and renders the uchronia of alternate history into a nonsensical cipher. Perhaps what is most chilling is that even when those who are endarkened and Othered dream in the fantastic, the Dark Other is still the obstacle to be overcome. Even in stories where all of the characters are “White and blue-eyed” —recalling Adichie’s (2009) influential talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”—the Dark Other is always already there. When readers who are White, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied enter the fantastic dream, they can be empowered and afforded a sense of transcendence that may be elusive within the real world. However, this perspective often means that the implicit message that readers, hearers, and viewers of color receive as we read these texts is that we are the villains. We are the horde. We are the enemies. We are the monster. For many readers, viewers, and fans of color, I suspect that at the level of consciousness, to participate in the fantastic is to watch yourself be slain (and justifiably so, as the story recounts). In fairy tales, you terrorized the hapless villagers, kidnapped the fair princess, dared wage war against the dashing hero. You are the jealous darker sister who wishes to steal the fair maiden’s pedestal for yourself. If you are present in the story at all, you are relegated to the margins. To watch a science fiction film is to learn that you have no future; there are only two or three people of color on most fictional spaceships. Very often, when you appear on the page or on the screen, you are a slave, a servant, or a prostitute— even your very body is not your own. If you have words, your speech serves only to support the narrative, never to subvert it. Rarely is the narrative focalized through your eyes. You are rendered abject. Fungible. Socially dead. You are the alien Other. You are the Orc. You are the fell beast. The very presence of the Dark Other in a text of speculative fiction (across genre and mode) creates a profound ontological dilemma. This dilemma is inescapable, for readers and for writers, and must be reconciled. This dilemma is most often resolved by enacting narrative violence against the Dark Other. This dilemma is what the readers and hearers of the fantastic expect, for it mirrors the unending spectacle of violence against the endarkened and the Othered in our own world. The fantastic has need of darkness, for these innocent “stories about stories” require both heroes and villains, fair princesses and evil crones, valiant steeds and nightmarish beasts. The fantastic requires Medusas and Grendels, chimaeras and manticores, cunning tricksters and cowardly fools. It needs the Dark Other as its source of hesitation, the very spectacle that causes the heart to skip in fear. It desires the Dark Other’s violent end in a form of ritual sacrifice, purging the very source of the darkness and righting the wrongs of the world before returning to haunt the happy ending.