T - Supplement - Michigan 7 2023 BFHGR

Topicality Supplement---BFGHR
FR---Taxes---Neg
FR---Requires Transfer from Rich to Poor---1NC
‘Fiscal redistribution’ refers to transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor.
Alan Altshuler 13, Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Harvard University, Spring 2013, “Equity as a Factor in Surface Transportation Politics,” https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/10/Equity-as-a-Factor-in-Surface-Transportation-Politics.pdf
Fiscal Redistribution
Defined here as transfers from more to less affluent groups, and at times special benefits for those with disabilities.
FR---Requires Taxes---2NC
Redistribution requires distribution of taxes.
Serhan Cevik 15, Senior Economist at the IMF; and Carolina Correa-Caro, Research Analyst at the IMF, 9/21/2015, “Growing (Un)equal: Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality in China and BRIC+,” Inequality and Fiscal Policy, Chapter 19, https://doi.org/10.5089/9781513567754.071
Income distribution depends on a complex array of factors, including the design of fiscal policy instruments. According to the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), the market-income Gini coefficient (before taxes and transfers) in China increased by 82 percent between 1980 and 2013, whereas the net Gini coefficient (after taxes and transfers) increased by 90 percent (Figure 19.1). This difference indicates that the redistributive impact of fiscal policy is eroding. Fiscal redistribution—defined as the difference between market-income and net Gini coefficients—amounted to an average of 1.7 Gini-index points in the 1990s, but it turned negative during the period 2000-13, averaging -1.1 Gini-index points. Fiscal policy, however, can matter not just for redistribution, but also for market-income inequality. Redistribution is, of course, a function of the level and composition of taxation and spending as well as their distribution across income groups. The distribution of taxes in China, for example, remains regressive, with taxes accounting for 10.8 percent of annual income among the bottom decile of households (and 13.3 percent among the bottom 5 percent) compared with 8.7 percent among the top decile of households.
FR requires taxes and spending.
Melissa Rogers 16, Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Inequality and Policy Research Center at Claremont Graduate University, Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, 2016, “The Politics of Place and the Limits to Redistribution,” Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics, ISBN: 978-0-203-54529-4
A bounty of research also addresses the relationship between income inequality and political outcomes, especially fiscal redistribution. As I have explained, these works almost always conceptualize and measure inequality at the individual level, aggregated to one national indicator. I focus additionally on the relationship between interregional inequality and fiscal redistribution. I define fiscal redistribution as the efforts made by the government through taxes and spending to equalize income. In Figure 1.2, I show a snapshot of the relationship between interregional inequality and fiscal redistribution in 2010. Fiscal redistribution is measured by the percentage reduction in the national Gini coefficient of individual income inequality that results from government policies (Solt 2014). The relationship is quite clearly negative; that is, countries with higher interregional inequality also tend to have lower fiscal redistribution. This statistical relationship is very strong, as I will discuss in detail in the next chapter. This book is an effort to link the empirical observations in Figures 1.1 and 1.2 to a theory of political representation.
‘Fiscal redistribution’ must occur through transferring revenues generated by taxes.
JCT 91 – the Joint Committee on Taxation, 12/12/1991, “Tax Policy and the Macroeconomy: Stabilization, Growth, and Income Distribution,” https://www.jct.gov/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=1660ca49-d1d1-4b33-aa22-531489416ce3
VI. EFFECTS OF FISCAL POLICY ON INCOME DISTRIBUTION
In general
Federal fiscal policy affects income distribution in the United States in several different ways. Redistribution occurs directly by transferring revenues raised through a Federal tax (e.g., the Federal individual income tax) to others via direct spending programs (e.g., to lower-income households through the Food Stamp program). This type of transfer directly affects the ultimate distribution of income in the economy. The Federal tax and transfer system also redistributes income indirectly by taxing or subsidizing various activities (e.g., by taxing wage income or by providing tax credits to investors in certain rental housing properties for lower-income households). By taxing income, the Federal tax system tends to discourage some income-producing activities. To the extent individuals have discretion in choosing the amount of labor provided or the amounts and type of saving undertaken, levying taxes on these activities may reduce the amount undertaken. Changes in the amounts of these activities will affect the observed distribution of income in the economy.
FR---Requires Taxes---AT: IMF 14---2NC
IMF ev concedes it must be taxes and transfers.
2AC IMF ’14 [International Monetary Fund; Jan 23; the IMF Is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries; IMF Policy Paper, “Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality,” http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2014/012314.pdf]
Evaluating the redistributive impact of fiscal policies requires a comparison of incomes after taxes and transfers with those that would exist without them. In principle, assessments of the incidence of fiscal policies should incorporate information on consumers’ and producers’ behavioral responses to taxes and transfers and their impact on market incomes.12 In practice, most studies do not incorporate this aspect, since sufficient data on behavioral responses are often unavailable. In these studies, the incidence of commodity taxes is typically assumed to fall on consumers, factor taxes are assumed to fall on factor suppliers (labor and capital), and transfers to beneficiaries do not lead to changes in factor supplies.13 The evidence below is drawn from such studies. In econometric studies, on the other hand, behavioral responses are captured—Box 3 provides a summary of recent empirical literature evaluating the distributive impact of fiscal policy based on econometric analysis of cross-country panel data.
‘By its very nature,’ FR requires taxes and transfers.
2AC IMF ’14 [International Monetary Fund; Jan 23; the IMF Is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries; IMF Policy Paper, “Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality,” http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2014/012314.pdf]
Fiscal redistribution can usually most efficiently be achieved through direct instruments that tax or provide benefits based on income. Fiscal redistribution, by its very nature, involves transferring resources from higher-income to lower-income households through taxes and transfers. On the tax side, personal income taxes, for example, are often preferable for achieving redistribution than taxes on consumption because they directly take account of the ability of households or individuals to pay. On the spending side, cash transfers to poor households are usually superior to indirect methods such as price subsidies. Better targeting of transfers reduces their fiscal cost and the tax levels required to finance them, thus achieving distributional objectives in a more efficient manner. Targeting, however, is not without efficiency costs and must be designed carefully (see below)
‘Taxes’ and ‘transfers’ must be understood jointly.
2AC IMF ’14 [International Monetary Fund; Jan 23; the IMF Is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries; IMF Policy Paper, “Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality,” http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2014/012314.pdf]
33. The impact of tax and expenditure policies on redistribution should be evaluated jointly. Although both taxes and spending can have redistributive implications, the trade-off between efficiency and redistribution will usually differ. Therefore, where the efficiency cost of redistribution through taxes is relatively large, this suggests that these taxes should focus on raising revenue to finance other redistributive instruments. For instance, an increase in regressive taxes can still be the best approach to supporting redistribution if the public expenditures they finance are highly progressive.
FR---Requires Taxes---AT: ‘And’---2NC
‘And’ must be understood in the joint sense---established constitutional interpretations agree---if the authors meant “taxes OR transfers,” they would have used “or”
Antonin Scalia 12, Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States; and Bryan Garner, American lawyer, lexicographer, and teacher who has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style, 6/19/2012, “Conjunctive/Disjunctive Canon,” Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, Chapter 12, ISBN: 978-0-314-27555-4
12. Conjunctive/Disjunctive Canon
And joins a conjunctive list, or a disjunctive list—but with negatives, plurals, and various specific wordings there are nuances.
The conjunctions and and or are two of the elemental words in the English language. Under the conjunctive/disjunctive canon, and combines items while or creates alternatives. Competent users of the language rarely hesitate over their meaning. But a close look at the authoritative language of legal instruments—as well as the litigation that has arisen over them—shows that these little words can cause subtle interpretive problems. Although these conjunctions can appear in countless constructions, we have identified six types of sentences in which they most frequently appear in legal instruments.
#1: The Basic Requirement
With the conjunctive list, all three things are required—while with the disjunctive list, at least one of the three is required, but any one (or more) of the three satisfies the requirement. Hence in the well-known constitutional phrase cruel and unusual punishments, 1 the and signals that cruelty or unusualness alone does not run afoul of the clause: The punishment must meet both standards to fall within the constitutional prohibition. 2 The same point holds true for the phrase necessary and proper 3 in Article I of the Constitution.
A common interpretive issue involves the conjunction and, which (if there are two elements in the construction) entails an express or implied both before the first element. Here it is implied: “Service shall be made upon the District of Columbia by delivering . . . or mailing . . . a copy of the summons, complaint and initial order to [both] the Mayor of the District of Columbia (or designee) and the Corporation Counsel of the District of Columbia (or designee).” 4 A plaintiff sued the District for injuries suffered when a fire truck struck her car, but her complaint was dismissed for failure to comply with the rule just quoted because she had not served the mayor. 5 She contended that the purpose of the statute was substantially satisfied by service on the corporation counsel; since that officer was a statutory agent of the mayor, service on him or her was, in legal effect, service on the mayor. The D.C. Superior Court correctly held that what the rule says, it says (see § 2 [supremacy-of-text principle]), and the and means that service must be effected on both corporation counsel and the mayor. 6
‘And’ means ‘and’ NOT ‘or’
Don Willett 22, Federal Judge on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, dissenting, 11/2/2022, “United States v. Palomares,” 52 F.4th 640
With deepest respect, I dissent.
The majority opinion holds that "and" can have either a "distributive" or a "joint" sense and that only context can resolve the inherent ambiguity. Piercing the legalese, the idea is that "and" can mean either "and" or "or." To be fair, the majority isn't alone. Courts facing clumsy drafting have sporadically reached that conclusion.1
The English language is never in stasis. Witness the off-definition misuse of "literally," which has literally come to mean "figuratively." But interchanging "and" and "or" is a mistake. "We give our language, and our language-dependent legal system, a body blow when we hold that it is reasonable to read 'or' for 'and'"—or "and" for "or."2 Manufactured ambiguity poses a special threat to our language's elemental particles. How can Congress express its will [**29] if everyday words slip into linguistic black holes so dense that settled language rules break down? When judges say that certain words are inherently ambiguous, we beget a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when we use complicated semantic bracework to augment ordinary meaning, we risk creating a negative feedback loop if Congress sees the favor as an invitation rather than a one-off.
Congress said that Palomares is ineligible for safety valve relief if her criminal history runs afoul of § 3553(f)(1)(A), (B), and (C). While the First Step Act "is far from a chef d'oeuvre of legislative draftsmanship,"3 we must assume that Congress meant what it said. Congress said "and." If it wished to withhold safety valve relief from defendants who failed any one of the three sub-sections, it would have (maybe should have) joined them together with [*653] "or." I would vacate Palomares's sentence and remand for resentencing.
I
As the majority concedes, the plain meaning of "and" is conjunctive. Dictionaries and treatises aren't needed to prove the point, but they uniformly define "and" this way.4 The definition even lends its name to the "conjunctive/disjunctive canon" of construction.5 That interpretive rule says what ordinary English [**30] speakers already know: When the word "and" joins a list, all the things listed are required.6 A parent who tells you to pick up milk, eggs, and cheese will rightly be upset if you return with just milk.
“We give our language … a body blow when we hold that it is reasonable to read ‘or’ for ‘and.’"
Alex Kozinski 88, Federal Judge on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, dissenting, 8/14/1988, “MacDonald v. Pan American World Airways, Inc.,” 859 F.2d 742
I cannot agree that the plan's clear and simple language is reasonably susceptible of the interpretation offered by the defendants. Plain as day, the plan provides that the valuation date shall be on "the last day of each calendar quarter and, as the Administrative Committee elects, any other day of the Plan Year." Pan American World Airways, Inc. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (Pan Am ESOP), at I-4, Excerpts of Record (ER) at 3 (emphasis added). This language is not in the least ambiguous: It can only be interpreted to mean that the Administrative Committee has the authority to select valuation dates in addition to the four already provided by the plan. The Administrative Committee has nevertheless taken the position that it may do away with the quarterly valuation dates altogether, and substitute a single valuation date in their stead. I can think of only one way to derive that interpretation from the quoted provision: by substituting the disjunctive "or" for the conjunctive "and." Unlike the majority, I am unable to approve as reasonable an interpretation that requires us to perform such radical surgery on a document's plain language.
I see two obstacles [**10] barring the majority's conclusion, one linguistic, the other structural. As a linguistic matter, "and" and "or" are not synonyms; indeed, they are more nearly antonyms. One need only start the day with a breakfast of ham or eggs to be duly impressed by the difference. While "and" and "or" are both small words, and are occasionally seen joined with a slash, when they stand alone, they have substantially different meanings with dramatically different effects. We give our language, and our language-dependent legal system, a body blow when we hold that it is reasonable to read "or" for "and." While I don't foreclose the possibility of substituting the two words for each other where it is necessary to avoid a patent absurdity or correct a drafting error, see, e.g. Leff, The Leff Dictionary of Law: A Fragment, 94 Yale L.J. 1855, 2021 (1985); People v. Skinner, 39 Cal. 3d 765, 775-77, 217 Cal. Rptr. 685, 704 P.2d 752 (1985), I can't agree that the substitution is permissible in ordinary circumstances.
‘And’ requires both words to be satisfied.
Matthew Byrne 23, Judge on the Twelfth District Court of Appeals, 2023, “State of Ohio v. Brandon William Hensley,” https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/12/2023/2023-Ohio-119.pdf
{¶ 25} As stated above, Marsy's Law requires that a victim be both "directly and proximately" harmed by the criminal act. The word "and" is conjunctive, while the word "or" is disjunctive. Scalia & Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 116–25 (2012) ("Under the conjunctive/disjunctive canon, and combines items while or creates alternatives."); Conjunctive/Disjunctive Canon, Black's Law Dictionary (11th Ed.2019) ("[I]n a legal instrument, and joins a conjunctive list to combine items, while or joins a disjunctive list to create alternatives."). In other words, when "or" is used, the words joined by "or" are alternatives. In re Estate of Centorbi, 129 Ohio St.3d 78, 2011-Ohio-2267, ¶ 18; Scalia & Garner at 116. But when "and" is used, both of the words joined by "and" must be satisfied. Judy v. Ohio Bur. of Motor Vehicles, 100 Ohio St.3d 122, 2003-Ohio-5277, ¶ 14; Scalia & Garner at 116. Because Marsy's Law defines a "victim" as a person who is both "directly and proximately" harmed by the criminal act, it is not enough that there be merely a causal connection between the criminal act and the harm ultimately sustained by a third-party such as an insurer. The resulting harm must not only be the "proximate" result of the criminal act but must also be the "direct" result of the criminal act.
FR---Requires Taxes---AT: ‘And’---AT: Jolly
Jolly concedes plain meaning goes neg.
Grady Jolly 22, senior Federal Judge Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 11/2/2022, “United States v. Palomares,” 52 F.4th 640
The ordinary meaning of "and," which § 3553(f)(1) uses to join the three subsections, is conjunctive. See, e.g., Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. [**5] Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 116-25 (2012). "Or" is disjunctive. Conjunctive/disjunctive canon, Black's Law Dictionary (10th ed. 2014) ("[I]n a legal instrument, and joins a conjunctive list to combine items, while or joins a disjunctive list to create alternatives."). Palomares points to this straightforward linguistic rule and insists that because Congress used the word "and," the government would need to prove that her criminal history included all the sub-sections, (A), (B), and (C). Or stated differently, because her criminal history only included (B), she is eligible for this sentencing relief. We cannot agree.
FR---Requires Taxes----AT: ‘Both’
Both means combined, not each.
Reverso No Date – ReversoDictionary, https://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/both+together#:~:text=a%20the%20two%3B%20two%20considered%20together
2 coordinating used preceding words, phrases, or clauses joined by and, used to emphasize that not just one, but also the other of the joined elements is included both Ellen and Keith enjoyed the play, both new and exciting
‘Both’ means both. Not ‘either.’
Black’s Law 68 – Black’s Law Dictionary, the leading legal lexicographer, 1968, “Black's Law Dictionary: Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of Ameri

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.