Structural UBI Aff - Georgetown 2023

Structural UBI---Aff
1AC---Tiered Basic Income
Adv---Wealth Disparities
Wealth is stripped from families of color – no safety net makes achieving economic security impossible
Bhattacharya, vice president of programs and strategy at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 2019
[Jhumpa, “EXPLORING GUARANTEED INCOME THROUGH A RACIAL AND GENDER JUSTICE LENS,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]
WEALTH: THE TRUE INDICATOR OF ECONOMIC STABILITY
Wealth—i.e., what one owns minus what they owe—is the most important indicator of an individual’s or family’s economic position. Wealth is comprised of income, savings, and assets, such as property and non-liquid assets, as well as debt owed. Wealth is the money you draw upon in a case of an emergency, such as an immediate car repair, unforeseen medical cost, or a natural disaster.
Wealth is used as a both a safety net and a generator of more wealth. When wealth is passed on from one generation to the next, it crystalizes economic security from one generation to the next. Wealth makes it possible for people to purchase a home, avoid student loans by paying for education outright, or start a business. Without wealth or access to significant social capital, individuals have no safety net to fall back on. Wealth is often stripped or extracted from families—particularly families of color—through practices like unpaid labor, depressed property values in certain neighborhoods, criminal justice fines and fees, and student or medical debt.
When wealth is passed on from one generation to the next, it crystalizes economic security from one generation to the next.
In addition to the massive concentration of wealth held by a select few mentioned at the start of this brief, the differences in wealth between white Americans and people of color is at its highest level in 25 years (Kochnar and Fry 2014). In 2016, the typical white household held $171,000 in wealth—10 times that of the typical Black household, and about 8 times that of Latinx households (Kochnar and Cilluffo 2017).
Wealth inequities also exist along the intersections of race and gender; disparities in wealth accumulation are a result of historic and present-day barriers that people of color and women face when trying to build wealth and achieve economic security and prosperity. The median wealth for single men in the US is $10,150, compared to $3,210 for single women (Chang 2015). Breaking this down further by race/ethnicity, we find that single Black and Latinx women have a median wealth of $200 and $100 respectively, compared to $28,900 for single white men (Chang 2015).
Wealth Extraction Scenario:
Specifically, guaranteed income key to address historic systemic wealth extraction in the form of mass incarceration – disproportionately impacts people of color and women –– multiple warrants
Bhattacharya, vice president of programs and strategy at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 2019
[Jhumpa, “Exploring Guaranteed Income Through A Racial And Gender Justice Lens,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]
The continued push towards mass incarceration is closely tied to the movement to criminalize poverty through local and state fines and fees. Since 2010, over 48 states have either increased their criminal fees or adopted new fees (Shapiro 2014). In North Carolina, fees have risen by 400 percent, leading to the startling fact that 20 percent of people incarcerated in a county jail in North Carolina are there for failure to pay their fines and fees debt (Hunt and Nichol 2017). The Ferguson Report, written by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the aftermath of the police shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, brought national attention to the unconstitutional and discriminatory impact of the practices and priorities held by local government. Local law enforcement agencies and the courts engaged in patterns that systematically targeted communities of color, essentially using community residents as cash registers to fund the municipal budgets through fines and fees related to non-violent offenses, such as traffic violations, loitering, sleeping on the sidewalk, and other causes for ticketing (US Department of Justice 2015). The DOJ deemed these acts to be unconstitutional.
Ferguson was representative of the systemic racism prevalent in many other municipalities: Over-policing of communities of color has led to disproportionate rates of stops and arrests of people of color, forcing these communities to pay exorbitant fines and fees and extracting their wealth—and in many cases driving them into debt (Bingham et al. 2016).
Additionally, even if women are not the ones being arrested and/or fined, they are the ones primarily paying the fine, fee, or bail money for their sons, grandsons, brothers, partners, uncles, and other family members (deVuono-powell et al. 2015). 63 percent of court-related costs were paid for by family members outside of the system, and 80 percent of these family members were women. Further, close to 90 percent of costs for phone calls and visits to an incarcerated person are incurred by women (deVuono-powell et al. 2015). This creates an additional financial burden to the layers of economic insecurity women of color already experience from race and gender discrimination in the labor market.
Putting money into people’s pockets through government interventions won’t mean anything if that money is taken by the government with the other hand.
These practices and the crusade towards mass incarceration and criminalization of non- violent crimes effectively strip wealth from Black and brown women and communities. In many cases, these realities prevent people of color from building wealth at all. It is clear that any policy discussion about a guaranteed income must both address the historic barriers placed on women and people of color to build wealth and eliminate current wealth-extraction policies that are reinforced by current governmental policies. Putting money into people’s pockets through government interventions won’t mean anything if that money is taken by the government with the other hand.
And, Slow violence outweighs - manifests through systemic and invisible attrition causing silent death
Fisher, senior journalist for BBC Future, 2021
[Richard, “The unseen 'slow violence' that affects millions,” BBC Future, January 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210127-the-invisible-impact-of-slow-violence, accessed July 1, 2023, GDS-LL]
The idea of slow violence can be traced back to the 1960s, though it wasn't called that back then. In 1969, the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung – known as the "father of peace studies" – argued that violence could be enacted by more than fists or weapons. Violence, he argued, could also be "structural".
For Galtung, this kind of violence happens when a society causes harm to its citizens and their property, often invisibly, through social or health inequalities, racism, sexism or another systemic means. The victims have foreshortened lives, and have suffered both bodily and psychologically. But while the impact is tangible, the blame is harder to pin down.
"Personal violence shows," Galtung wrote. "[It] represents change and dynamism – not only ripples on waves, but waves on otherwise tranquil waters. Structural violence is silent, it does not show – it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us."
How does this violence remain unnoticed? One of the primary reasons is its pace.
This year marks a decade since the environmentalist and literary scholar Rob Nixon of Princeton University coined the term "slow violence". Like Galtung, he described a kind of violence that was structural, but he was the first to point out that it could also be experienced over many years, possibly even generations. It occurs "gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all," he wrote.
According to Nixon, slow violence can be found embedded within the "slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes" of long-term pollution, climate change or nuclear fallout. But it can also describe many kinds of harm that affect individuals and communities at a pace too slow to assign blame.
Like fast violence, people still suffer or even die, but the protagonists of the act are diffuse and often outside the reach of prosecution. Some of the blame might lie with an entire industry subtly polluting an ecosystem legally and collectively, while some blame may lie with a government policy written in a distant capital years before. The point is that slow violence does not always have a clear perpetrator.
"Slow violence provokes us to expand our imaginations of what constitutes harm. It insists we take seriously forms of violence that have, over time, become unmoored from their original causes," says geographer Thom Davies of the University of Nottingham, UK.
Wealth Inequality Scenario:
US history of slavery and oppressive policies locked people of color into exploitation and occupational segregation
Solomon et al., vice president for Race and Ethnicity Policy at the Center for American Progress, 2019
[Danyelle, Connor Maxwell, Abril Castro, “Systematic Inequality and Economic Opportunity,” CAP – Center for American Progress, August 7, 2019, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/systematic-inequality-economic-opportunity/, accessed July 7, 2023, GDS-LL]
The U.S. economy was built on the exploitation and occupational segregation of people of color. While many government policies and institutional practices helped create this system, the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and the New Deal—as well as the limited funding and scope of anti-discrimination agencies—are some of the biggest contributors to inequality in America. Together, these policy decisions concentrated workers of color in chronically undervalued occupations, institutionalized racial disparities in wages and benefits, and perpetuated employment discrimination. As a result, stark and persistent racial disparities exist in jobs, wages, benefits, and almost every other measure of economic well-being.
This report examines how government-sanctioned occupational segregation, exploitation, and neglect exacerbated racial inequality in the United States. Eliminating current disparities among Americans will require intentional public policy efforts to dismantle systematic inequality, combat discrimination in the workplace, and expand access to opportunity for all Americans.
Slavery and Jim Crow concentrated workers of color in chronically undervalued occupations
For centuries, Black people were enslaved and forced to work in brutal conditions as agricultural, domestic, and service workers. By some estimates, slaveholders extracted more than $14 trillion worth of labor, in today’s dollars, from their captives.1 Enslaved people plowed and sowed fields; harvested and packaged crops; and raised, milked, and butchered livestock.2 They cooked and served food, cleaned houses, weaved and mended clothing, and provided child care services.3 They cut hair, carried luggage, and drove wagons, carts, and carriages.4 When enslaved Black people attempted to flee, federal laws such as the 1793 and 1850 Fugitive Slave Acts helped ensure their recapture by fining officials who did not arrest alleged runaways and imprisoning anyone who aided in their escape.5 If captured, enslaved people could be tortured, mutilated, and even killed without legal repercussions.6
The United States abolished slavery in 1863, but this action did not coincide with the opening of all occupations to liberated Black workers. On the contrary, federal officials within the Freedmen’s Bureau—established by the federal government in part to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom—encouraged Black people to stay in the South and enter into contracts doing the same work for the families that previously enslaved them.7 After Reconstruction, state and local governments doubled down on these efforts by enacting Jim Crow laws, which codified the role of Black people in the Southern economy and society.8 States such as South Carolina enacted strict “Black Codes” that fined Black people if they worked in any occupation other than farming or domestic servitude.9 If they broke these laws or abandoned their jobs after signing a labor contract, they could be arrested and, thanks to a loophole in the 13th Amendment, forced back into unpaid labor on white plantations.10 Lawmakers also sought to prevent Black people from migrating in search of safety and economic opportunity. They enacted emigrant-agent laws restricting interstate labor recruiters from encouraging or financing the relocation of Black workers or from posting advertisements in predominantly Black communities for distant job openings.11
During the mid-20th century, technological advancements reduced the demand for farm labor and domestic work in the South.12 These changes, combined with discriminatory U.S. Department of Agriculture policies, rampant lynchings, and Ku Klux Klan terror, led thousands of Black households in the South to flee north.13 As a result, the United States experienced a rapid decline in the number of Black farm operators and farm and domestic workers.14 However, Black workers remained overrepresented in low-wage service jobs.15 Meanwhile, the continued devaluation of domestic and agricultural vocations and the accompanying search for lower-wage laborers of color soon led to a high concentration of Asian American and Latinx workers in domestic and agricultural occupations; this remains the case today.16
Occupational segregation and the persistent devaluation of workers of color are a direct result of intentional government policy. To this day, people of color remain overrepresented in the lowest-paid agricultural, domestic, and service vocations. (see Figure 1) While Black or African American, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino people comprise 36 percent of the overall U.S. workforce, they constitute 58 percent of miscellaneous agricultural workers; 70 percent of maids and housekeeping cleaners; and 74 percent of baggage porters, bellhops, and concierges. Slavery and Jim Crow devalued these types of work, and the legacy of these institutions continues to inform the American economic system and its outcomes.
And, People of color trapped in the racial wealth gap – multiple warrants
Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer, 2021
[Liz, “Racial wealth gap may be a key to other inequities,” Harvard Gazette, June 3, 2021, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/06/racial-wealth-gap-may-be-a-key-to-other-inequities/, accessed July 1, 2023, GDS-LL]
The wealth gap between Black and white Americans has been persistent and extreme. It represents, scholars say, the accumulated effects of four centuries of institutional and systemic racism and bears major responsibility for disparities in income, health, education, and opportunity that continue to this day.
Consider that right now the net wealth of a typical Black family in America is around one-tenth that of a white family. A 2018 analysis of U.S. incomes and wealth written by economists Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike I. Steins and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis concluded, “The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years.”
It’s no surprise. After the end of slavery and the failed Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, which existed till the late 1960s, virtually ensured that Black Americans in the South would not be able to accumulate or to pass on wealth. And through the Great Migration and after, African Americans faced employment, housing, and educational discrimination across the country. After World War II many white veterans were able to take advantage of programs like the GI Bill to buy homes — the largest asset held by most American families — with low-interest loans, but lenders often unfairly turned down Black applicants, shutting those vets out of the benefit. (As of the end of 2020 the homeownership rate for Black families stood at about 44 percent, compared with 75 percent for white families, according to the Census Bureau.) Redlining — typically the systemic denial of loans or insurance in predominantly minority areas — held down property values and hampered African American families’ ability to live where they chose.
The 2020 pandemic and its economic fallout had a disproportionate toll on people of color, and many expect that it will widen the gap in various areas, including wealth. At Harvard, experts from different disciplines are studying the problem to find its roots and possible ways to level the playing field to ensure all have an equal chance to achieve the American dream. Here we will take a look at a few, several of which focus on education as a long-term path out.
Slow violence is an impact filter and rooted in inequality
Fisher, senior journalist for BBC Future, 2021
[Richard, “The unseen 'slow violence' that affects millions,” BBC Future, January 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210127-the-invisible-impact-of-slow-violence, accessed July 1, 2023, GDS-LL]
A key point about this category of harm is that it is rooted in inequality. When Galtung was writing in the 1960s, he pointed out that such violence represented a curtailing of potential, where somebody is prevented from living a better life. The point is that it affects some, but not all, communities. Those with more privilege can escape it.
The nature of slow violence also means it tends to compound, with one type begetting another. One example might be the "John Henryism" effect, which BBC Future has written about earlier in this series. This is a theory proposing that the stresses that some communities go through to thrive in the face of inequality and racism can lead to worse-than-average cardiovascular health problems. Many low-income residents of the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana have also been disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, says Davies.
Slow violence might be too incremental to make headlines or provoke outrage, but Davies cautions that it is not hidden to everyone. Nixon described it as "spectacle deficient" and "uncinematic", which is true. But totally unseen? It depends on who is looking.
"If you look at the lived experience of people who are exposed to slow violence, they can notice the incremental changes that are happening to their ecosystems and environment," he says. While it happens over the spans of decades or generations, those who have lived it can describe it well enough. So, while slow violence may not have an obvious perpetrator, and its pace may make it difficult to record, punish or litigate – what matters is that it is always felt.
But, Guaranteed Income solves - key to resolving racial chasm in economic and wealth security
Bhattacharya, vice president of programs and strategy at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 2019
[Jhumpa, “EXPLORING GUARANTEED INCOME THROUGH A RACIAL AND GENDER JUSTICE LENS,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]
Race- and gender-based wealth inequities are two of the greatest failures of the American economy. Economic policy choices and practices put forth by those in power, such as the GI

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