CP - Privatization CPs - Georgetown 2023 Starter

Jobs Guarantee
Wage Subsidies - 1NC
Wage subsidies are a better alternative than job guarantees.
Dolan 20 --- PhD in economics from Yale University. He has taught in the United States at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, George Mason University and Gettysburg College
Ed, 1-14-2020, "Can We Put Everyone to Work? — The Alternatives to a "Job Guarantee."," Niskanen Center, https://www.niskanencenter.org/can-we-put-everyone-to-work-the-alternatives-to-a-job-guarantee/
First, even though guaranteed jobs would be designed not to compete directly with the private sector, a JG would still be disruptive. Private employers would lose workers if they did not match a job-and-benefit package worth some $20 per hour. JG advocates are confident that private employers have enough slack to raise wages without cutting employment, but I am not so sure. JG jobs would not only offer good wages and benefits, but also, as advocates promise, they would be more accommodating than many private sector jobs to workers’ personal schedules, family needs, and disabilities. A large outflow from private employment to guaranteed jobs could raise the cost of the program sharply.
Second, I think advocates overstate the ease of creating 10 to 15 million meaningful new public service jobs. To avoid competing with the private sector, they could not be jobs in hotels or factories. They could not require advanced skills or investments in heavy equipment, which would mean JG workers could play a limited role in projects like replacing aging bridges or building green energy infrastructure. When we read advocates’ descriptions of JG jobs, they talk about things like teachers’ aides, recycling, and planting trees on vacant lots. How many workers could be absorbed in such jobs before they became mere make-work?
Third, many of those who remain out of work in today’s booming economy are, almost by definition, among the “hard to employ.” Those include people with criminal records, unstable housing, substance abuse issues, family situations that interfere with regular work schedules, and borderline mental and physical conditions that fall short of full disability but still create problems on the job. Programs that try to find work for the hard-to-employ are not a new idea. Many existing programs are well run. Still, their experience shows that lasting success requires intensive, one-on-one casework to help with things like soft job skills and support with personal issues. Even then, success rates are far from 100 percent. The leading JG proposals do not, in my view, come close to budgeting enough for administration, counseling, and support services.
Work Requirements
Although the issues just discussed make me skeptical of guaranteed jobs, I am no less skeptical of the leading conservative alternative – work requirements on welfare recipients. Welfare reforms of the 1990s already imposed work requirements on most recipients of cash welfare. The current administration now wants to extend work requirements to noncash programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and housing assistance.
A recent report from the Council of Economic Advisers claims that the welfare reforms of the 1990s prove that work requirements can increase employment and reduce dependence. I see two reasons to doubt such confidence.
For one thing, backers of work requirements assume there are many nondisabled welfare recipients who are able to work, but who choose not to. The data show otherwise. They show that a majority of nondisabled welfare recipients already work or face serious barriers to work. The following chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows data for Medicaid recipients. The figures for SNAP, housing assistance, and other programs are similar.
As the chart shows, well over half of Medicaid recipients are already working, and nearly half work full time. Some 12 percent are not working because of caregiving responsibilities and another 7 percent because they are in school. Although the chart excludes people who have qualified for Social Security disability programs, 11 percent even among the officially nondisabled cite illness or disability as their reason for not working. That leaves just a sliver who fall into the category of “not working but able to work.”
A second problem is that the kind of work requirements that conservatives favor are not, in practice, very work-friendly. They often place unrealistic burdens on beneficiaries, such as detailed record keeping, frequent verifications, and unrealistic allowances for family needs or irregular work schedules. Administrative lapses are often punished with extended lockouts from benefits. Furthermore, these programs – like some JG proposals – offer inadequate personal assistance to the hard-to-employ, leaving it up to them to find work or training and to deal with personal barriers to work.
In the end, then, many people who ought to qualify for assistance fail to do so. Many who are pushed off welfare rolls do not find work. On balance, work requirements trim welfare rolls but increase poverty. Cynics say that is the intended outcome.
Wage Subsidies
Progressives promise jobs in the public sector. Conservatives propose using the stick of work requirements to push people into private-sector jobs. Wage subsidies fall somewhere between these alternatives. They focus on private- rather than public-sector jobs, but they use a carrot rather than a stick to encourage employment.
By far the largest wage subsidy program is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In existence since 1975, it has earned wide bipartisan support. Liberals like it because it raises 6 million families out of poverty each year. Conservatives like it because it encourages work and self-sufficiency. Ronald Reagan called it “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”
The amount of wage subsidy offered under the EITC varies both with income and the number of dependent children. For the lowest-paid workers, it provides a bonus of 35 to 45 cents for each dollar earned. Once earnings approach the official poverty level, the subsidy is gradually phased out. Benefits are paid in a lump sum, once a year, as a refundable tax credit.
Solvency - 2NC
Wage subsidies would encourage more people to work.
Cas 15 --- Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Oren, 8-19-2015, "A Better Wage Hike," US News & World Report, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/08/19/wage-subsidies-are-better-than-raising-the-minimum-wage
For these reasons, economists tend to dislike minimum wage increases and argue instead for expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, known as the EITC. Low-income households receive this credit when they file their taxes at the end of the year, getting additional money from the government for each dollar earned up to a limit. For instance, a single mother with two children who earns $18,000 (equivalent to 30 hours per week for 50 weeks at $12 per hour) receives an EITC of more than $5,000 that lifts her family above the poverty line. The EITC solves the minimum wage's critical problems: It encourages more people to work instead of shutting some out of jobs and it uses tax dollars so the cost is distributed in the same way as for other government programs. But while the EITC looks great on the blackboard, it cannot deliver that well in practice. Recipients tend to be only vaguely aware of how the program works and what they could receive, which means it cannot provide much of an incentive to start working. They receive one huge payment long after their work year is over, which makes covering day-to-day necessities difficult. And because different workers receive different credits depending on the size of their family and how much they work, the labor market skews in favor of some at the expense of others.
An ideal policy would look to workers like an increased minimum wage (more pay for every hour worked) but to the labor market and broader society like an expanded EITC (a government subsidy to support the low-income worker). A wage subsidy would do just that. A wage subsidy adds dollars-per-hour to the worker's wage, on a sliding scale that pays the highest subsidy for the lowest wage and phases out to no subsidy as the wage increases. A worker earning $8 per hour might, for instance, receive an additional $2 per hour in his paycheck. And he would receive that for every hour worked, no matter how many hours he worked or how much he eventually earned. For him, the policy appears like the minimum wage has been raised to $10 per hour. But for his employer and co-workers and customers the cost is still $8 per hour. Other workers unwilling to take a job at $8 per hour but willing to at $10 per hour would join the labor force as well. A wage subsidy sounds expensive, but in reality it is money that America already spends on the EITC and on a host of other anti-poverty programs that cost a combined $1 trillion per year. Using more of that money to put wages into the pockets of low-income workers would be a far better way to promote work, support low-income households and combat poverty.
Stats show they also cushion against consumption declines.
Komatsu 20 --- Ph.D. student at UW-Madison.
Katsuhiro, 2020, “Wage Subsidies for Reemployment and Unemployment Insurance,” The Conference Exchange, https://nta.confex.com/nta/2020/mediafile/ExtendedAbstract/Paper4013/Komatsu_UI_reemployment.pdf
This paper studies the welfare implications of providing temporary wage subsidies to people finding a job after unemployment. Following earlier studies on UI, I construct a dynamic model of consumption, saving, and job search, and derive a formula for the welfare impact of wage subsidies that can be evaluated with several reduced form parameters. Using parameter values common in the literature, I find that providing wage subsidies for reemployment brings about a large welfare impact by reducing the cost of UI. Specifically, the policy outperforms many historical policy changes targeting adults considered in Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) in terms of cost effectiveness. I also calibrate parameters in the model and show that (i) given the current UI generosity, the optimal level of wage subsidies is the same as the level of UI benefits, and (ii) providing wage subsidies makes the optimal UI more generous, which means that wage subsidies enable the government to provide more generous protection against consumption declines during unemployment as an optimal policy than currently provided.
Minorities - 2NC
They target key segments of the population and create new job opportunities.
Armand et al. 20 --- Associate Professor Nova SBE.
Alex, 2020, “Can Subsidized Employment Tackle Long-Term Unemployment? Experimental Evidence from North Macedonia*” https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/ACTX_SEP_JLE.pdf
Overall, this analysis suggests that the main beneficiaries of the SEP are individuals with lower attachment to the labor market, such as women, the inexperienced and those with low education levels. In the absence of the intervention, the employment rates of these workers would be at or below 10%. With the intervention, they are between 15 and 30 percentage points higher. One possible interpretation for this finding is that SEP created job opportunities that these workers would not have otherwise sought, and that these individuals were able to secure the job by accumulating work experience and skills.
To shed more light on this mechanism, we investigate if the program effect on the measures of individual skills varies across different job seekers in a way which is consistent with the heterogeneous employment effects. Figure 5 shows the estimated effect on the non-cognitive skill index (Panel A) and on the job-related skill index (Panel B) for the same groups in Figure 4. We pool together the short-term and medium-term assessments, and estimate such effects jointly on both waves.24 The program has similar positive effects on skills for both males and females, and a larger effect for young as compared to old individuals. We find a large, positive and statistically significant effect on both the non-cognitive skill index and the job-related skill index among individuals with primary education or less, whereas the effects for individuals with secondary education are small and not statistically different from zero. When we condition on the individual previous work experience, we see large and significant effects only for individuals without previous experience, and null effects for the experienced individuals. Consistently with the results shown in Figure 4, the largest program effects are found exactly on less educated and inexperienced individuals. The most likely explanation behind the persistent employment effect is a combination of acquired work experience and skills among individuals who would not have easily found employment, and that the improvement of such skills allows them to secure a job even after the subsidy expired.
This paper studies the impact of a subsidized employment program in North Macedonia targeted to marginalized individuals in long term unemployment. Participating employers are given a wage subsidy that roughly reduced by half the yearly cost of a newly hired worker’s wage and compensated the firm for the training costs. We evaluate the effectiveness of the program in increasing employment of participating job seekers by randomly varying the access to a job interview with the potential employer. In the short run, the SEP program increases the employment rates of individuals who were offered the job interview by more than 20 percentage points. The effect persists even after the end of the subsidized period and of the employer’s contractual obligations, at about 15 percentage points three years after the start of the program. Using the random assignment to the interview as an instrument for being offered a SEP job, we estimate even larger employment impacts, of about 50 percentage points over the counterfactual employment rates of the control group, for those job seekers who were offered the subsidized employment. Such large impacts are mainly concentrated on job seekers with lower counterfactual participation rates in the labor market, such as women, inexperienced and unskilled individuals
Empirics - 2NC
Empirics prove - Europe’s wage subsidy programs prevented unprecedented unemployment during COVID.
Garver 20, 5-8-2020, "As US Unemployment Soars, Wage Subsidies Enable European Workers to Keep their Jobs," VOA, https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_us-unemployment-soars-wage-subsidies-enable-european-workers-keep-their-jobs/6188950.html
Nearly two months into an unprecedented global economic downturn, the U.S. unemployment rate has rocketed to 14.7%, far outpacing Europe and other developed economies like Japan, the United Kingdom. The effects of the coronavirus have marked a sharp reversal for the US, which in the years prior to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic was enjoying one of the strongest job markets in the developed world. Just a few months ago, the national unemployment rate was 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years and far below the average rate of 6.2% in the European Union. The jobs report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday morning showed that the U.S. lost 20.5 million jobs in the one-month period ending in mid-April, a stunning figure without precedent in the country’s economic history. The job losses were spread across industries, with the leisure and hospitality industries showing the largest declines. The release from the BLS comes just one day after the Department of Labor reported that an additional 3.2 million American had filed unemployment insurance claims in the previous week, bringing the total in the seven weeks since virus-related lockdowns began to 33.5 million people. The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits fluctuates, as not everyone who applied for them in previous weeks has their claims accepted, and others find new employment. The Labor Department also tracks continuing claims, the number of people currently receiving benefits. That number, which is reported a week later than the data on initial claims, rose to 22.6 million in the week ending April 25, the highest on record.
In Europe, by contrast, the average unemployment rate has jumped far less dramatically, and is expected to rise to about 9.5% in 2020, according to projections released Wednesday by the European Commission. To be sure, Europe will face a severe economic downturn as a result of the pandemic. This week, the European Commission’s Spring 2020 Economic Forecast predicted a “deep and uneven recession” and “an uncertain recovery.” Some countries, like Italy, Greece, and Spain, which already were facing double-digit unemployment before the pandemic, will see rates spike into the high teens, according to the report. The stark contrast between the unemployment figures in the U.S. and those in most European countries reflects the very different policy choices made by lawmakers in Washington by those across Europe. By and large, governments across Europe have been subsidizing the wages of employees of private companies, in some cases effectively paying them to stay home. “European governments are choosing to use their unemployment funds to keep workers attached to the firms that they're working for through what are known as work-sharing, or short-term compensation programs,” said Robert E. Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “That means that workers keep the benefits that they have associated with those jobs,” he said. “But it also, more importantly, keeps the workers attached to the firm and not unemployed.” These programs serve two main purposes. The most immediate is that they guarantee that millions of people who could face financial disaster if they lost their stream of income are able to remain solvent. In the long term, the programs are designed to maintain the connection between workers and employers, making it easier and more likely for businesses to start back up once the crisis is past. In France, for example, a chômage partiel program, which translates as “partial unemployment,” has more than half of private sector workers receiving government-subsidized paychecks despite the fact that they are either not working at all or are working a dramatically reduced schedule.
In Germany, the government has activated an existing program called Kurzarbeit, which translates as “short-term work,” to cover up to two-thirds of workers’ salaries. The German program is a longstanding one that has helped the country weather economic downfalls in the past. Similar ad hoc measures have been put in place across the continent, with governments covering, in some cases, more than 80% of wages. In the United States, lawmakers attempted to create a similar program through the Paycheck Protection Program, which was created by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The $669 billion effort was intended to provide forgivable loans to businesses that used the funds to keep their employees on the payroll. The rollout of the PPP, however, was rocky. Many businesses were unable to access funding in a timely manner, some still haven’t received the funds they were promised, and hundreds of millions of dollars went to large public companies that were not intended to benefit from the program. Lawmakers have indicated that additional coronavirus relief packages will be considered in the U.S., but even if that forestalls future unemployment claims, the large surge in Americans out of work will likely have undesirable consequences for the economy when a recovery begins. “The macroeconomic benefits of having a short-term compensation program, such as the one they have in Germany, or even in the United Kingdom or Can

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.