Aff - FJG - GND - Michigan 7 2023 STARTER

GND FJG
1AC Components
GND 1AC 1.0
The United States federal government should implement a Green New Deal jobs guarantee financed by a wealth tax
Contention 1: Separate and Unequal
1. Best data shows covid has dramatically accelerated inequality. Big government action like a federal jobs guarantee is the only way to reverse it
Adamczyk 20
(Alicia, money reporter at CNBC Make It. She formerly covered personal finance at Money Magazine and Lifehacker. Adamczyk has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/coronavirus-is-exacerbating-economic-inequality-in-the-us.html)
Experts, who have been trying to sound the alarm on the growing economic inequality in the United States for the past few decades, are seeing their worst fears realized during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since mid-March, tens of millions of Americans across the country have lost their jobs as a result of the economic fallout from the pandemic. No group has been spared: men and women, young and old, Black and White. But as the economy starts to recover, some groups are faring significantly worse than others, including Blacks, Hispanics, millennials, mothers and low-wage workers in the service industry. They are not returning to work at the same rate as White professional workers. The same groups, ironically, are also overrepresented in frontline industries that were deemed essential during the peak of the crisis, including health care, child care, cleaning services and grocery stores. In North Carolina, these frontline workers are 65% women and around 30% Black, according to the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, disproportionate to the percentage of the total workforce those two groups account for. Economic recessions never impact every group the same. But the degree to which Black and White workers are seeing their fortunes diverge post-Covid is one of the reasons many economists have deemed the ongoing recovery “K-shaped.” While White Americans have recovered more than half of the jobs they lost between February and April, Black Americans have recovered only around one-third. As recovery drags on, the coronavirus recession has turned into the most unequal in modern U.S. history. “The recession is almost over for white collar jobs with good benefits,” says Patrick McHugh, research manager at the nonpartisan North Carolina Budget and Tax Center. “But we’re still a long way away from recovering for people in the middle, and particularly low wage jobs.” Even before the Covid-19 crisis, many North Carolinians, like many Americans generally, still hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession. While the number of white collar jobs in the financial and tech sectors have grown in the state over the past decade, job growth in mid-income industries like manufacturing has been stagnant. “A lot of the other job growth was in extremely low paying positions that don’t have real opportunities for career advancement and would come with entirely meager benefits, if any,” says McHugh. With those middle-income jobs disappearing, many individuals, especially Black workers, settled for lower paying work and have not been able to build up the assets they would need to cushion another financial blow: Before coronavirus, 42% of North Carolina households would have been unable to cover all of their expenses for three months without assistance, including 33% of White households and 63% of Black households. Covid-19 has decimated those low-wage industries. Temporary furloughs in these fields are turning into permanent job loss. Long-term unemployment is on the rise. “We have to get a handle on income disparity,” says Ken Schorr, executive director of the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, based in Charlotte, NC. “This will not be a society that anybody wants to live in if we don’t get a handle on providing a better deal for working people in the bottom half of the income spectrum.” Systemic racism means people of color face the worst outcomes Centuries of systemic racism have made the financial outcomes disproportionately worse for Black and Hispanic Americans, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported earlier this month. Black Americans, especially, have been kept from higher-paying white collar jobs, and are over-represented in the service and hospitality sectors, which have borne the brunt of the coronavirus layoffs. That is further bifurcating the U.S. economy. Across the country, just 20% of Black workers are able to work from home, compared to 30% of White workers and 37% of Asian workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While white collar professionals work remotely, service industry workers must go to work and risk being exposed to Covid-19 or go without income at all. “Racism forms the foundation of inequality in our society, and it threatens our economy and limits economic opportunity for people of color,” the Fed wrote. And not only are Black workers more likely to lose their jobs, they are also more likely to have their unemployment insurance claims denied by their employers and more likely to receive less aid when they do get approved, according to research from Nyanya Browne and William Spriggs of Howard University. That’s no accident. It’s “the legacy of white supremacy” in North Carolina, says McHugh. States with higher populations of Black residents, especially in the South, have slashed unemployment insurance budgets and intentionally designed the systems so that they are more difficult to access, he says. Even more stark are the health disparities. Black Americans are disproportionately dying of Covid-19. In fact, APM Research Lab estimates that the virus is responsible for the death of 1 in 920 Black Americans, compared to 1 in 1,840 White Americans. The age-adjusted Covid-19 mortality rate is 3.2 times as high for Black Americans as it is for Whites. “Inequality has been building for decades, and the pandemic ripped it open,” says Schorr. How to move forward Another Covid-19 recovery package from the federal government is necessary to help the 23 million Americans still without work and keep inequality from growing even worse. The CARES Act, passed in March, included $2 trillion in enhanced unemployment, stimulus checks for individuals, food assistance and much more. Aid was disbursed quickly and was well-targeted to those who needed it, say the experts interviewed for this article. Fewer people fell into poverty than would have been expected, according to recent research from Columbia University. But now many of the most helpful provisions have expired. Yet the crisis is ongoing, and though some jobs have come back, the recovery has flat lined. Meanwhile, Congress has been negotiating another deal for months but has so far been unable to agree on what to include in the next aid package. Without more relief, everyone loses, says Eliza Forsythe, a labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Some economists believe if we had been more proactive, we could have gotten back to recovery faster,” says Forsythe. “The CARES Act was really successful in terms of mitigating the effects. But we’re not giving [workers] more support. That prolongs the recovery.” Enhanced unemployment benefits, a sticking point of the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, are important. They helped prop up the economy in the early months of the crisis, says Forsythe, ensuring families could pay all of their bills. Without them, households are falling behind. Now is the time to think big Just as important as the benefits themselves is the continuity of providing them, says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Households need the short- and long-term assurance that they will have income. “We know that when families are experiencing huge fluctuations in income, it can have a [domino] effect. It can lead to them losing their homes, or to debt that can end up costing them way more than the original bill,” says Curran. “Without action even more folks are going to be losing out.” Federal assistance for state and local governments is also crucial, says North Carolina Budget and Tax Center’s McHugh. With tax revenues down across the country, this would allow local governments to offer more aid to their citizens. Now is the time to think big, says William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University. The virus has demonstrated the need for an expanded national health-care program and a federal jobs guarantee. The latter would essentially be a national payroll to ensure people could have income whenever there was a need, not on the “sporadic basis” Congress is providing now, says Darity. Nationalized health care would mean that if people lost their jobs, they wouldn’t automatically lose their health insurance. Without more relief, inequality in the U.S. will continue to grow. That hurts individuals and families, and the economy as a whole. “The data is clear that the need is high,” says Curran. “As a poverty researcher, we’re trying to sound the alarm here. We know action that was taken earlier this year worked, but we know that it wasn’t enough and we know that families need more. Congress can do something, but they need to take action.”
2. Inequality has reached an all time high -neg defense is a snapshot that ignores the trend
Baum, PhD, 6-9-23
(Rick, PoliSci@CCSF https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/the-u-s-has-made-great-progress-at-increasing-economic-inequality/
One of the more impressive accomplishments of the United States in recent decades is how it has achieved greater economic inequality in line with what Marx expected from a capitalist economy. There are periods of setbacks—in which economic inequality is reduced–followed by improvements resulting in even higher levels of inequality. Advancing economic inequality has been a bipartisan undertaking. The actions of both the Democrats and Republicans in power have increased economic inequality as their leaders, together, champion the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle and working classes. Additionally, despite the growth in the diversity of the ruling class, economic inequality has continued to widen. Examples of progress towards greater economic inequality that results in unmet needs and misery for many is made apparent in media stories such as a recent one in the Guardian with the title “I can’t afford groceries’: why one-third of US college students don’t have enough to eat.” Wealth Inequality Wealth is the value of what one owns minus one’s debts. Many people owe more than all of what they own is worth. They have negative wealth. Then there are those at the top who have played a major role in our country’s success at achieving such high levels of economic inequality. They include our “generous” good friends, the “job creators,” Musk, Bezos and Gates, the wealth of each is more than $100 billion. The Federal Reserve Board, the banker’s bank, has been providing data on the distribution of wealth in the U.S. going back to 1989. The share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest has grown tremendously. In 1989, the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent held 8.7% of the nation’s wealth rising to 12.6% as of the end of 2022. The Fed’s data show that in 1989, the wealth of the .1% was 2.26 times greater than the poorest 50%. At the end of 2022, the value of their holdings, $17.6 trillion, was more than four times greater than the wealth, $4.16 trillion, of the poorest 50% of the U.S. population.
3. Inequality outweighs war and is the root cause of negative disads
Lee, MD/MDV Yale, 16
(Bandy X, Medicine&Law@Yale, Causes and cures VII: Structural violence Aggression and Violent Behavior Volume 28, May–June 2016, Pages 109-114)
Behavioral violence, in measurements by the tolls of street violence or war, is more noticeable, even though the “tranquil” waters of structural violence may contain much more violence. American violence scholar James Gilligan (1999) compared structural violence to the most deadly military conflicts: estimating 49 million military and civilian deaths from World War II, or about 8 million per year from 1939 to 1945, or even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the United States and the former Soviet Union at 232 million, could not even begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year, during times of peace as well as of war. In other words, every fifteen years, on average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating thermonuclear war or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. He also described structural violence as increased rates of disabilities and deaths among the people who occupy the bottom class. He noted that the suffering of people from lower classes are the product of people above who have collective bargaining power making choices that determine the allocation of resources. Unlike behavioral violence, its lethal effects operate continuously rather than sporadically; it can occur independently of any intention to kill anyone (for example, it can be a byproduct of wishing to maximize one's wealth and power); and it is usually invisible, in the sense that deaths from structural violence may appear to have other causes, natural or violent. More recent figures bear out these conclusions even more startlingly, as we will see in the next section. Gilligan (2001) also articulated how, through the mechanisms of shame, humiliation, and inferiority, the disparities in classes are the most potent cause of behavioral violence, such as suicide, homicide, warfare, or capital punishment (Bloom, 2001). American anthropologist Paul Farmer (2003) also developed the concept of structural violence by first defining structure as a pattern of collective social actions within institutional practices, law, economic policies, and other habitual elements. These structures can materially manifest through facilities such as roads, server systems, hospitals, and schools. He described violence as suffering resulting from social arrangements that put individuals in harm's way. Since the exertion of structural violence is systematic—that is, indirect—by everyone who belongs to a certain social order, no one is at fault, at the same time as everyone of that order is at fault. Cumulative historical forces and processes work together to constrain individual agency inversely, if not always neatly, with the ability to resist marginalization and oppression, and deny them the benefits of social progress.
4. Inequality is the most important internal link to the economy- swamps disads
Edwards, Phd, 6-16-23
(Kathryn, labor economist and independent policy consultant https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-16/america-s-inequality-of-income-and-wealth-will-only-get-worse?leadSource=uverify%20wall)
When people worry about the US economy these days, their focus is invariably too myopic. Forget about the battle with inflation: It will be won, perhaps at the cost of a painful recession, and the country will settle back into its previous trajectory. The real problem is that trajectory. America is turning into an oligopolistic economy that marginalizes the vast majority of its inhabitants. To get a sense of what I mean, consider a fairly conservative exercise: Take historical trends and extrapolate them for the next 25 years. The results are alarming. Let’s start with income. By 2048, the top 1% of Americans will account for 22.5% of the nation’s total, the largest share since the peak of the stock bubble in 1928. Meanwhile, the middle will stagnate. The median annual income will rise a mere 0.3% a year in inflation-adjusted terms, from about $67,000 in 2021 to about $72,000 in 2048. The income of the poorest 10% will actually decline. Malaise in the Middle The outlook for wealth is even worse. By 2048, more than 62% will belong to the top 1%, crushing the 1928 record of 51%. And nearly a quarter will belong to the top 0.01%, far exceeding the extreme inequality of the robber-baron era. Too Much at the Top How is this happening? It’s far from inevitable. In terms of development, the US is on par with the industrialized nations of Western Europe. Yet in terms of inequality, it’s closer to Turkey, Mexico, Haiti and Iran. Rather, America chooses inequality. Protections for the poor are extremely weak: On historical trends, the minimum wage will reach just $10.62 in 2048 in nominal terms, from $7.25 today. Preferences for the rich keep expanding: Our exercise projects that the amount exempted from estate tax should reach a nominal $24.3 million in 2048, up from $12.9 million today. The more concentrated the wealth, the less it is taxed. No politician would campaign on a platform of giving more to the wealthiest, allowing the middle class to barely get by and stiffing the poor. Yet unless the US changes tack, that’s precisely the future it’s headed toward.
5. We control uniqueness- current risk of recession near 100%
Hetzner 6-15-23
(Christian, https://fortune.com/2023/06/15/economy-recession-federal-reserve-powell-deutsche-bank-hard-landing/)
It appears as if U.S. economists may have popped the Champagne corks on a soft landing too early—at least according to Deutsche Bank. The German multinational bank’s top research team believes Washington has sparked a boom-bust cycle that now is nearing its end stage. In its house view, the recession slated to arrive as soon as October is the inevitable consequence of a series of aggressive rate hikes designed to extinguish the very flames of inflation that policymakers ignited through their own actions during the COVID pandemic. “Avoiding a hard landing would be historically unprecedented,” warned group chief economist David Folkerts-Landau in a research report titled The Clock Is Ticking, published on Wednesday. This bleak view contrasts with recent investor bullishness as well as the belief that the Federal Reserve has seemingly pulled off the impossible by cooling an overheated economy without sparking a recession, leaving only deflated asset prices as collateral damage—a “non-recession recession” as private equity firm Apollo Global Management called it last month. Germany’s only bulge bracket bank uses an indicator that attempts to measure the probability of a recession in the next 12 months. Currently it is handicapping the chances of a contraction in U.S. economic activity “near 100%”—in other words, a virtual certainty. But in order for this to occur, one thing has to happen first: Consumers must exhaust the last of their savings stored up from COVID lockdowns. “These will not be depleted until nearer year-end,” Folkerts-Landau wrote, so “things are going to script for our Q4 recession timeline.” Additional headwinds in the latter half of the year will come from the government mandate for college graduates to resume repaying their federal student debt. For more than the past three years, there has been a moratorium on payments and interest accrual in place owing to the pandemic. Fed reversal expected for March with ‘aggressive’ easing to come Worse, Deutsche estimates the United States will stay there in the year to come—just as the November presidential election campaign kicks off with the Iowa caucus. In fact, it believes the U.S. will be the only leading industrial nation to see its economy shrink in 2024, when activity will contract by four-tenths of a percent after adjusting for inflation. By comparison, it should still grow by 1.4% this year, according to Folkerts-Landau’s team. Other G7 countries have little reason to cheer either, though. The rosiest 2024 performance could top out at a tepid 0.8% in Japan, while both Germany

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