Topicality - Georgetown 2023 Starter

Topicality
Resolution
The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income.
Basic Income
Must Be Universal
Covers everyone unconditionally
Stanford Basic Income Lab ND, “What is Basic Income?,” Stanford, https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/#:~:text=Basic%20income%20is%20a%20regular,work%20requirement%20of%20other%20conditions.
Basic income is a regular cash payment to all members of a community, without a work requirement of other conditions.
It’s synonymous with UBI
Center for Hunger Free Communities 21, Drexel University, “Universal Basic Income: Key to Reducing Food Insecurity and Improving Health,” https://drexel.edu/hunger-free-center/research/briefs-and-reports/universal-basic-income/
If every person received the same basic income “floor” regardless of income, class, race, location of residence, or other status, the stigma of receiving support could be eliminated.
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
Universal basic income (UBI), or basic income guarantee, is a government program that aims to address economic inequality and provide economic security through monthly direct cash transfers to every member of a community with no means testing. It creates a basic income floor for everyone, regardless of income and employment status. UBI allows recipients to spend funds however they choose, unlike other benefit programs.
UBI differs from other guaranteed income proposals in that every adult in the community receives a monthly payment, regardless of their income. Guaranteed income programs that target only specific populations are problematic as they require citizens to prove they are deserving of basic income support.
Job Guarantee
Must be MMT---1NC
The term job guarantee requires an MMT funding mechanism.
Bill Mitchell 19, Director, CofFEE, Professor, “Modest (insipid) Green New Deal proposals miss the point – Part 1,” William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory, 7/25/19, https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=42788
All over the globe now there are cries for a Green New Deal. What constitutes the GND is another matter. Like the concept of the Job Guarantee, there are now countless versions springing out of various groups, some that only seem to offer a short-term, short-week job or other arrangements that fall short of the way Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) constructs the concept. There is only one Job Guarantee in the modern parlance and that is the MMT concept. Other job creation programs are fine but they should stop using the term Job Guarantee, which is a comprehensive macroeconomic stability framework rather than a job creation program per se. In the same vein, all manner of proposals seem to have become part of the GND. The problem is that many of these proposals sell the idea short and will fail to achieve what is really required – a massive transformation of society and the role the government plays within it. The imprecision is exacerbated by progressives who are afraid to go too far outside the neoliberal mould for fear of being shut out of the debate. So we get ‘modest’ proposals, hunkered down in neoliberal framing as if to step up to the plate confidently is a step too far. This is Part 1 of a two-part blog post series on my thoughts on the failure of the environmental Left and climate action activists to frame their ambitions adequately.
Must be MMT---2AC
There are MMT and non-MMT versions.
Bill Mitchell 18, Director, CofFEE, Professor, comment on “Neil Wilson-en eta Bill Mitchell-en iruzkinak, lan bermea dela eta,” 3/11/18, https://www.unibertsitatea.net/blogak/heterodoxia/2018/03/11/neil-wilson-en-eta-bill-mitchell-en-iruzkinak-lan-bermea-dela-eta/
The term Job Guarantee to describe public employment creation initiatives goes back a long way and was not ‘invented’ by me nor a blog commentator on Warren’s WWW site.
The resurrection and inclusion of the term in the MMT literature does indeed relate to my work.
When we started to develop what has become known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) around 1994 and 1995, my US MMT colleagues (Warren, Randy, Stephanie etc) used the term Employer of Last Resort (ELR) whereas I originally called the concept – which I developed in my Honours year at University (1978) – the Buffer Stock Employment (BSE) framework. The BSE terminology followed directly from the concept of buffer stocks of employment being used to stabilise the price and exhaust the quantity supplied (that is, create full employment).
Early on in MMT history, the two terms were interchangeable. I used BSE, the US colleagues used ELR.
Two things happened. First, I objected to the use of the term ELR because it was derived from the central bank’s capacity as Lender of Last Resort and I considered applying a term that was about the provision of inanimate reserves to human labour was not appropriate.
Second, Britain experienced the outbreak of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) in 1996, which rendered my BSE acronym somewhat dubious.
There was some usage (by Randy for example) of the term Public Employment policy, but I decided to use replace the BSE terminology with the Job Guarantee terminology and I started using that language in public presentations and academic papers from then on.
After a while, we (the original MMT team) all agreed either formally or implicitly to unify the terminology as so it became Job Guarantee – late 1990s. The Americans still occasionally lapse back into ELR but rarely these days.
Must be Universal---1NC
Job guarantees must be universal---cannot be discretionary
Hugh Sturgess 16, University of Sydney, “Would a Job Guarantee Guarantee Jobs? An Analysis of the Employer of Last Resort Proposal,” 10/12/16, https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/16650/Hugh%20Sturgess%20Honours%20Thesis.pdf;jsessionid=D699E22B1A683CFCB48554C3BD41CFA1?sequence=2
Historical Employment Guarantee Programs and Proposals
Kaboub (2007) argues that the idea of the state acting as an employer of last resort can be traced back to the writings of William Petty in 1662, who recommended that the unemployed be hired to build public infrastructure. More recently, several programs to hire unemployed workers were created during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Youth Administration (NYA). While these programs did not meet all the requirements of a JG (there were limits on enrolment, workers were not paid at the minimum wage, etc.), they represent the closest equivalent attempted in a developed country, employing millions of workers to engage in soil conservation, reforestation and the creation of public works (Gordon, 1997). Tymoigne (2014: 520) makes the point that these programs were distinct from past make-work or relief programs in that they treated applicants as workers in search of decent employment rather than indigent loafers.
The programs that most resemble the idealised model of the JG today are found in the developing world. Argentina’s Jefes y Jefas (Heads of Households) program, introduced in response to a major recession, offered employment for one individual per jobless household with children, to engage in community services or small-scale construction activity (Iturizza, Bedi and Sparrow, 2011). At its peak in 2002, Jefas cost approximately 1% of GDP, with nearly 2 million participants (Tcherneva and Wray, 2005: 13). South Africa’s Expanded Public Work Program (EPWP) hires unemployed South Africans for a maximum of 24 months over five years for construction of public works and provision of public services (Phillips, 2004). The EPWP has a set “budget” of jobs offered (200,000 per year) and costs approximately 0.5% of GDP (Antonopoulos, 2009). The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREG) in India offers unemployed rural workers a hundred days of employment at the minimum wage as a legal right (Vij, 2013). The MGNREG displays many of the feature of the JG, in that it is a right rather than an obligation, it is a demand-driven system and those employed by the scheme conduct socially useful labour such as labour-intensive construction of public infrastructure (ibid.; Maiorano, 2014).
These JG-like programs along will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 2.
Harry Hopkins, the administrator of the New Deal work programs, proposed making permanent job assurance part of the American welfare-state, as a counterpart to unemployment insurance, though this did not eventuate due to political opposition (Hopkins, 1999). Public debate during the Lyndon Johnson administration included discussion of the government as “employer of last resort” as an anti-poverty program (Time, 1967) and Martin Luther King, Jr. endorsed an “Economic Bill of Rights” that would “guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work” (King, 2003: 103). This led to legislation like the Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Bill (1974), which, if enacted, would have created a legally enforceable right to a job, and used the term “Job Guarantee” to describe the program on offer (Hawkins, 1975: 15). Another program described as a “job guarantee” was extended to teenage high school dropouts in a demonstration project in the late 1970s, which Gueron (1984: 5) described as working by “eliminat[ing] any shortage of minimum wage jobs” through direct public jobs and subsidised private employment. By this time, political opinion was turning against the prioritisation of full employment over price stability, but as late as 1978, the US Congress debated and passed the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, which directs the US Government to achieve full employment (defined as below 3%) via “reservoirs” of public employment (Ginsburg, 2012). However, one of the bill’s authors, Hawkins (1979), lamented that its directions were being violated within a year of enactment.
Two clear theoretical antecedents of the JG are Pierson (1979) and Minsky (1986). Pierson’s Economic Performance Insurance (EPI) proposed “guaranteeing” specific levels of employment and consumer spending by creating jobs through a permanent “reserve shelf” of public services and works and more traditional pump-priming policies (Pierson, 1979: 86; 89). The “reserve shelf” would comprise public works and services of “intrinsic value”, which could be started and suspended quickly. As with later JG proposals, Pierson (ibid.: 93-94) argued that the EPI would allow full employment (minus “necessary frictional” unemployment of workers moving between jobs) with price stability, as the target levels for jobs and spending would have upper bands as well as lower, encouraging swift government action to curb excess demand and creating expectations of the foregoing. Minsky (1986: 308) proposed “an infinitely elastic demand for labour […] that does not depend upon long- and short-run profit expectations”, and was included in an economic plan to stabilise the fluctuations of the labour market. Minsky (ibid.: 310-312) recommended the resurrection of large government employment programs from the New Deal to employ a total of 9 million workers, but Minsky explicitly did not envisage employing all jobless workers. Nevertheless, so great is the obvious debt the JG owes these proposals, Pierson (1979) and Minsky (1986) should be recognised as the creators of the JG.
The Job Guarantee
The development of the JG can be dated to the late 1990s with the publication of Gordon (1997), Mitchell (1998), Mosler (1997-1998), Forstater (1998) and Wray (1998), regarded by JG advocates as seminal contributions (Juniper, Sharpe and Watts, 2014-2015: 298). All envisaged a state-guaranteed “employer of last resort” as the only effective solution to unemployment, and describe it in similar ways. The government should “offer[…] a public-service job to anyone who wants one” (Mosler, 1997-1998: 167), to “continuously absorb[…] workers displaced from the private sector” (Mitchell, 1998: 549). Such a program would not be discretionary, but would be “bound to hire the […] workers that no other employer is willing to hire” (Gordon, 1997: 828). As with Pierson (1979) and Minsky (1986), these authors see the JG as a force for both full employment and price stability. Mitchell (1998: 548) calls it “the only rational strategy for a government that [issues] a fiat currency and wishes to maximise macroeconomic benefits and price stability”.
Must be Universal---AT: C/I
Job guarantee means the government unconditionally guarantees someone a job---it’s agnostic as to the mechanism.
L. Randall Wray 20, professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, “Job Guarantee,” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2020, pp. 1–9 Springer Link, doi:10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_3080-1
‘Job Guarantee’ (JG) has become the favoured term applied to a variety of approaches that seek to ensure what can be described as true full employment. While often used as a synonym for ‘Employer of Last Resort’ (ELR), these terms evoke quite different framing. Employer of Last Resort implies that there is an entity that stands by to provide jobs to those who otherwise have failed to secure them. The term Job Guarantee implies a right to a job, although it does not indicate how that right will be secured. However, if we are to include the right to a job as similar to other recognized rights (right to life, right to free speech, right to vote, right to marriage), this would seem to imply that it is government that is to provide the guarantee. Many proponents of the JG do emphasize the human rights angle, interpreting the UN Charter on Human Rights as explicitly guaranteeing the right to access to a job (See Harvey 1989, 1993, 1999; Burgess and Mitchell 1998).
Unfortunately, each term carries a negative connotation: ‘last resort’ can be seen as derogatory—the potential workers cannot find anything better; ‘guarantee’ implies that potential workers must be employed no matter what. Together, these associations fuel suspicion that work done is of low quality and otherwise without merit. There have been some efforts to rebrand the proposal as Public Service Employment (PSE) to emphasize the positive potential of such jobs (Wray 1999).
Must be universal and below minimum wage
Dave Timoney 15, British economist, comment on “The Left's Ideas,” Stumbling and Mumbling, 1/30/15, https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/01/the-lefts-ideas.html?cid=6a00d83451cbef69e201b8d0cb802e970c#comment-6a00d83451cbef69e201b8d0cb802e970c
A jobs guarantee wouldn't be paid at the national minimum wage, but slightly below it. This is to encourage labour to move from the public sector to the private sector once the economy picks up and (low-paying) vacancies are created in the latter.
The job guarantee is meant to be a self-regulating mechanism to deal with temporary unemployment. If paid at the NMW (let alone the living wage), this would encourage some workers to prefer the security of a public sector role. For the same reason, the jobs are likely to be unattractive, to avoid workers discounting their wage expectations for pro-social roles.
In practice, job guarantee schemes either tend towards the antiquated model of the 20th century (a labour battalion with the prospect of parole), or they are pro-capital schemes that provide subsidies to business for certain types of worker (e.g. the young or long-term unemployed) for fixed periods. The use of the term "job guarantee" for the latter is questionable - "subsidy guarantee" would be more accurate.
The Federal Jobs Guarantee Act defines the term to require universality.
Cory Booker et al. 18, Mr. Booker, for himself, Mrs. Gillibrand, Mr. Merkley, Ms. Harris, and Ms. Warren, US Senators, “S. 2746,” https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2746/text
(2) JOB GUARANTEE PROGRAM.—The term “job guarantee program” means a program that meets the requirements of subsection (c).
(3) RURAL AREA.—The term “rural area” means an area that is located outside of a metropolitan statistical area.
(4) TRIBAL ENTITY.—The term “Tribal entity” means an Indian tribe or tribal organization as such terms are defined in section 4 of the Indian Self-Determination Act (25 U.S.C. 5304).
(5) SECRETARY.—The term “Secretary ” means the Secretary of Labor.
(b) Establishment.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary shall establish a pilot program to provide competitive grants to eligible entities to establish programs to ensure that any individual within the area served by the entity who applies for a job through the program will be provided with employment as provided for in this section.
(2) TERMINATION.—A job guarantee program established under a grant under this section shall terminate on the earlier of—
(A) the end of the 3-year period beginning on the date of the grant; or
(B) the date of any revocation of the grantee as an eligible entity.
(c) Job Guarantee Programs.—A job guarantee program meets the requirements of this subsection if the jobs provided under such program—
(1) are available to all individuals who—
(A) are 18 years of age or older; and
(B) reside in the area served under the program;
except that participants in the program may be disciplined, released, or suspended from further participation in jobs under this program if they are found to be negligent, or generally disruptive to the workplace involved under procedures established by the Secretary that provide for an opportunity for a review of such determinations;
(2) are, with respect to individual participants, included as part of an established bargaining unit and covered by any applicable collective bargaining agreement in effect if similarly situated employees part of such unit and represented by an exclusive bargaining representative;
(3) are available for the duration of the pilot program;
(4) provide a wage of not less than the greater of—
(A) the hourly wage provided for under the provisions of S. 1242 (115th Congress, as introduced);
(B) the prevailing wage in the area involved for a similar job as required by chapter 67 of title 41, United States Code, and other related laws; or
(C) the applicable wage under an applicable collective bargaining agreement as provided for under paragraph (2);
(5) provide for coverage of the worker under a health insurance program that is comparable to that offered to Federal employees under the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program; and
(6) provide, at a minimum—
(A) paid family leave consistent with the provisions of S. 337 (115th Congress, as introduced) and applicable State law; and
(B) paid sick leave consistent with the provision of S. 636 (115th Congress, as introduced) and applicable State law.
Must be Universal---2AC
A Job Guarantee is a federally sponsored work program that increases the elasticity of the labor supply. It can be universal or targeted, conditional or unconditional, as long as its design is focused on using state sponsored jobs to overcome involuntary unemployment.
Marie Hasdenteufel 21, Master in Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business, “Modelling a Job Guarantee for Germany using a Job Search Model,” November 2021, https://www.momentum-institut.at/system/files/2022-02/2022-Hasdenteufel-Marie-Masterarbeit-Modelling%20a%20Job%20Guarantee%20for%20Germany%20using%20a%20Job%20Search%20Model.pdf
4 The concept of a Job Guarantee
4.1 The general idea
To overcome the problem of involuntary unemployment, which can cause societal and personal issues as shown in the forgone chapters, the idea of a Job Guarantee is prominent in the economic literature. A variety of papers approached this topic using a multitude of labels, including “buffer stock employment” (Mitchell, 1998), “public service employment” (Forstat

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