Reparations Neg - DDI 2023 TT

UBI+ Case Neg
Adv
Coates – 1NC
Coates’ oversimplification reinforces the idea that race is binary and creates a slippery slope of due reparations which cause conflict and turns solvency.
Frum, 14 [David, journalist at the Atlantic, 6-3-2014, ‘The Impossibility of Reparations’, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-impossibility-of-reparations/372041/ //alundy]
The United States government launched its reparations program to African Americans in autumn of 1969. Originally known as “the Philadelphia plan,” the program set quotas for black employment in construction trades. Over the next decades, such quotas would spread from industry to industry, and would expand into higher education and public contracting.
The plan is usually credited to the Nixon administration. Sometimes it’s even described as a secret scheme to split the Democratic base. The history is more prosaic. The plan originated under the Johnson administration, following President Lyndon Johnson’s pledge in his 1965 Howard University speech to seek racial equality as a result, not merely as a theory.
In this month’s Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an eloquent case for restitution to black Americans, not only for wrongs done before 1865, but as much or more for wrongs done in the century of segregation that followed. Yet this powerful essay explicitly disavows any consideration of the single most important question about the restitution he has in mind: How would it work?
The affirmative action experience since 1969 offers some insights into what is likely to happen next:
1) The program will expand to additional groups.
Within only a very few months of the implementation of the Philadelphia plan, preferences of various kinds were extended to women, Hispanics, and other groups. With any program of reparations, likewise, other claimants will come forward. If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what about Native Americans, who lost a whole continent? What about Mexican-Americans, who were deprived by the Mexican-American war of the right to migrate into half their former country? Japanese Americans, interned during World War II? Chinese Americans, the victims of coolie labor and the Oriental Exclusion Acts? Members of these groups may concede that they were not maltreated in the same way as African Americans—and may not be entitled to exactly the same consideration. But if black Americans are entitled to almost a trillion dollars in compensation (Coates suggests a figure of $34 billion a year “for a decade or two”) surely these other maltreated groups must be entitled at least to something?
Coates’s essay is built on an unstated assumption that America’s racial composition is essentially binary, a white majority that inflicts inequality; a black minority that suffers inequality. Others enter into his imagination only at the hazy edges: “One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration … A nation outlives its generations.”
But the “others” are now 25 percent of the nation and rising fast. Does the Fujianese delivery man pedaling through the brownstones of Fort Greene owe a debt to the people whose food he carries? How much? The reparations idea—so long politically outlandish—has become thinkable today because of the gathering power of the Obama political coalition. But nothing would blow that coalition apart faster than the internal redistribution Coates contemplates from some constituencies to others. And if the idea is that the newest arrivals to America will be persuaded to accept paying reparations as a cost of immigration—or that new Americans can be cajoled to pay a symbolic something because the bulk of the burden will be carried by the dwindling white majority (a majority that already feels ever more culturally insecure and economically beset)—well, that’s a prescript for an even more dangerous political explosion.
Coates – 2NC
Coates’ framework contains massive inequities that circumvent the aff’s racial cap an work impacts.
Frum, 14 [David, journalist at the Atlantic, 6-3-2014, ‘The Impossibility of Reparations’, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-impossibility-of-reparations/372041/ //alundy]
4) The program will work severe inequities.
Affirmative action’s quirks and injustices are notorious. But they will be nothing compared to the strange consequences of a reparations program. Not all black people are poor. Not all non-black people are rich. Does Oprah have a housecleaner? Who changes the diapers of Beyonce’s baby? Who files Herman J. Russell’s taxes? Will their wages be taxed and the proceeds redirected to their employers?
Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured? Will convicted criminals be eligible? If not, the program will exclude perhaps 1 million African Americans. If yes, the program would potentially tax victims of rape and families of the murdered for the benefit of their assailants.
And if reparations were somehow delivered communally and collectively, disparities of wealth and power and political influence within black America will become even more urgent. Simply put, when government spends money on complex programs, the people who provide the service usually end up with much more sway over the spending than the spending’s intended beneficiaries. The poorer the beneficiaries, the more powerfully this rule holds—and it has held strongest of all in programs intended to aid the black poor. The District of Columbia public schools have excelled at delivering stable jobs to their unionized employees. They have failed their students.
5) The legitimacy of the project will rapidly fade.
Affirmative action ranks among the least popular thing that U.S. governments do. When surveyed, white Americans crushingly reject race preferences, Hispanic Americans object by a margin of two to one, and black Americans are almost evenly divided, with only the slightest plurality in favor.
Now imagine how Americans will feel when what is redistributed by racial calculus is not university admissions or workplace promotions but actual, foldable cash.
Committing yourself to a solution before you have any idea whether such a solution is workable is not a responsible reaction to America’s racial dilemmas.
Ta-Nehisi Coates anticipates this trouble by suggesting that reparations might be paid not to individuals but collectively to African Americans as a group. He favorably cites the example of German reparations to the state of Israel after World War II.
But the state of Israel was a sovereign, elected by a democratic process. Few in the Jewish world doubted that Israel could and did act for the Jewish people as a whole. Black Americans, however, do not have a state of their own. If reparations are deemed some kind of collective debt to black Americans as a group, rather than to black Americans as individuals, then the question will arise: Who decides how this money will be distributed? Some kind of National Endowment for Black America? Chosen how? Accountable to whom?
The Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree suggests widening the concept of reparations even further, into a national “program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” In that case, reparations would cease to be a new program but would become instead a new argument in favor of the preexisting policy preferences of the left wing of the Democratic party. Earlier in his article, Coates quotes with seeming disdain the radio host Rush Limbaugh’s disparagement of the Affordable Care Act as a form of “reparations." But aren’t Limbaugh and Ogletree more or less in agreement here?
Coates dismisses all these questions and so many others. He suggests the country first enact Rep. John Conyers’ Reparations Bill and then open a discussion about how reparations would work. But committing yourself to a solution before you have any idea whether such a solution is workable—or, rather, in defiance of pretty strong reasons that your solution is utterly unworkable—is not a responsible reaction to America’s racial dilemmas.
Instead, we’ll be all too likely to repeat once more the sad pattern of so many civil-rights initiatives: the bold announcement, the raised hopes, the unexpected difficulties, the suppression of open discussion of those difficulties, the ossifying of the project into bureaucracy, the realization of failure, the discovery of the political impossibility of reforming or repairing the failure.
Stigma – 1NC
Can’t solve for stigma or collective bargaining
Rogers 17’ [Brishen Rogers: B.A., University of Virginia; J.D., Harvard, Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, 5-3-17, Boston Review, “Basic Income in a Just Society,” https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/brishen-rogers-basic-income-just-society/]
How would a basic income impact workers and firms in this context? It would surely protect workers against the economic harms of unemployment and underemployment by giving them unconditional resources, and it would enable them to bargain for higher wages and to refuse terrible jobs. But a basic income would do little to reduce corporate power, which is a function not just of wealth but of the ability of firms to structure work relationships however they wish when countervailing institutions—such as a powerful regulatory state—are absent or ineffective. Yes, a basic income would make it easier for workers to organize and demand reforms—Andy Stern dubbed it “the ultimate permanent strike fund”—but the threat of termination or retaliation would still prevent many workers from protesting or striking in the first place. And of course many have argued that a basic income would make minimum wage and collective bargaining laws less necessary, since workers’ material needs would be met by the state. But cash benefits and reasonable wages are not morally equivalent. In Robert Solow’s memorable phrase, the labor market is a “social institution” governed in part by norms of reciprocity and mutual respect. Workers often demand higher wages from larger and more profitable employers. And they work less diligently when they feel disrespected. So there is a major difference between a generous wage on the one hand and a meager wage supplemented with cash from the state on the other. Generous wages help make firms’ economic responsibility roughly commensurate with their economic power. Meager wages signal disrespect, and state transfers are impersonal. In fact, without labor market regulations in place, the impact of a basic income on very low-wage work could be disastrous. If a basic income were not extended to green card holders, guest workers, or “irregular” immigrants (those who enter or stay without authorization), such workers would be far cheaper to employ in menial jobs, at which point they would be permanently enshrined as a laboring underclass. (Currently minimum wage laws apply regardless of work authorization, on the grounds that differential treatment would undermine standards for all.) A basic income could even be designed to serve white nationalist ends. In fact, far-right European parties have often embraced the welfare state as a means of defending citizens against a purported tide of immigrants. A standalone basic income also will not ensure equal access to quality education, health care, mental health care, housing, and transportation. Liberal markets systematically fail to provide such goods to the poor and working class, for the simple reason that they often are not profitable when provided on equitable terms. Giving cash to individuals to purchase them will not suddenly change matters. Popular debates have largely ignored these limits of a standalone basic income, an oversight that is not entirely accidental. As a tax-and-transfer program, basic income would be consistent with a wide variety of political-economic systems, including neoliberal capitalism, social democracy, and various forms of socialism, but much of the basic income literature has a libertarian streak. On the right, Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax in large part because he hoped it would reduce government bureaucracy. On the left, Philippe van Parijs’s now-classic argument for the policy held it would maximize what he called “real freedom” better than standard welfare-state policies. And Silicon Valley’s take exemplifies an “everyday libertarianism,” which views market results, including pre-tax incomes, as presumptively fair. Unlike many libertarians, basic income proponents accept the necessity and fairness of income and wealth taxation. But a basic income is still no cure for the moral ills of liberal markets. Since labor cannot be separated from workers, it will never be a classic commodity, and labor markets will never be stock exchanges for faceless buyers and sellers. Low wages carry a stigma that low bids for soybeans never will. In the long run, companies cannot treat workers or even consumers as line items on a balance sheet without risking a revolt. Uber is now paying a high price for ignoring this lesson. The company’s flagrant disregard for our moral economy and its open embrace of a cutthroat, winner-take-all libertarianism made it a pariah in many quarters well before it faced allegations of a workplace culture of sexual harassment.
//Alt causes – 1NC
A UBI+ is insufficient to solve for broader structural causes of racial inequality – anti-Blackness, sexism, and xenophobia are unaccounted for and currently deny black people a true revolution of “American Consciousness”.
Battacharya 19, (Jhumpa is the Co-President and Co-Founder of The Maven Collaborative. She directly leads work identifying policy and narrative solutions to racial and gender income and wealth inequities and mitigating the harms of mass incarceration.), ““Exploring Guaranteed Income Through a Racial and Gender Justice Lens.”, Roosevelt Institute, 06/2019, https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf // EE
By tackling wealth inequality, we can ultimately put America on the road to greater racial and gender economic justice. Income is crucial for building wealth, but efforts to improve incomes alone will not close gaps in wealth along racial and gender lines. As such, we also need to consider how anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and sexism have rigged the rules of our economy to deny certain populations equal access to prosperity and liberation. This will enable us to have a more comprehensive discussion about intersectionality and the numerous issues that need to be addressed—in addition to boosting incomes—in order to create the conditions where everyone in the US truly has the ability to build wealth and thrive. This paper proposes a multi-pronged approach to designing a guaranteed income policy that includes: • Dismantling narratives that dehumanize Black and brown people and question their deservedness to receive public assistance; • Eliminating state-sponsored wealth extraction through our criminal justice system; and • Establishing a truth and reconciliation process in the US. Incorporating these elements into a no-strings-attached cash benefit for all residents can create the conditions that are necessary for true gender and racial economic justice to be achieved.
Solvency
Turns Case – 1NC
A Basic Income sets back radical progress and retrenches all the impacts it claims to solve.
Diamond 17’ [Patrick Diamond: B.A. in Social and Political Sciences from Clare College, Cambridge, MPhil from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Queen Mary University of London, 5-3-17, Boston Review, “Will Basic Income Hurt the Cause?,” https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/patrick-diamond-will-basic-income-hurt-cause/]
Nonetheless, the basic income schemes that are currently exciting political actors are scarcely a panacea. We need to be clear about a basic income’s merits and its drawbacks. Brishen Rogers argues that economic security guarantees have to be combined with an expansion of the public sector and with rules that promote collective bargaining, increasing the relative power of labor in the wage-setting process. But while a basic income might be a big idea whose time has come, there are alternative strategies that stand a greater chance of winning over the public. And in the political struggle to create more egalitarian structures of work and welfare, it is reasonable to go further than Rogers, arguing that a basic income might actually hurt the cause. First, basic income could set back the public debate about how to create more egalitarian societies, giving succor to the forces of state retrenchment. Indeed a basic income could amplify tax resistance and increase hostility to the welfare state. As Donald Hirsch has inferred, basic income involves “a very different tax settlement to the present one.” In a climate of austerity marked by declining real wages, a basic income could well entail higher taxes on average incomes. Raising taxes is never politically popular, but to add insult to injury, these taxes would be used to fund a proposal that contradicted many citizens’ notion of what is fair, flipping the concepts of contribution and reciprocity on their head. This is even more likely in countries such as the United States and the UK where there is a higher level of diversity and less sympathy for a universal social safety net. In most western European countries, after all, voters agree that benefits and services should be directed toward those who need them most, especially children and pensioners. Moreover, work is valued as a social institution; it is widely accepted that a key function of the welfare state is to promote employment, a goal that is met very effectively in the Scandinavian countries. In other words, politically and culturally, Western societies are a long way from arriving at a “post-work” future. As long as paid work continues to be ascribed social value, those outside formal employment will be more vulnerable to isolation, poor health, and lower levels of well-being. A basic income or any measure that was perceived to promote worklessness would struggle to achieve public legitimacy. More importantly, it would risk souring the political discourse about radical measures to advance a more equal society—at a time when voters may be more amenable to it than at any point since the 1970s. Second, a basic income could increase unemployment among vulnerable constituencies, exposing them to even greater precariousness. Research by Evelyn Forget in Canada and the United States in the 1970s showed that guaranteed income schemes reduced the working hours of “secondary earners,” usually women, who were then more dependent on the principle breadwinner in the household. Feminist critics fear that basic income would lead to greater numbers of women dropping out of the labor market, or significantly reducing their working hours. Women would end up doing more unpaid domestic labor relative to men, making the household division of labor even more unequal. Third, while a basic income has seemingly radical potential, it could be insufficiently transformative. Indeed basic income would simply trap the most disadvantaged in a cycle of inequality and precariousness from which there would be little prospect of escape. For an individual with an insecure job, trapped in low-paid work, and living in poor quality urban housing, it is hard to envisage how a basic income would substantively improve life circumstances. A basic income would compensate individuals for the effects of inequality, but it would absolve governments of responsibility for taking active measures to help those most exposed t

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