Aff - FJG GND Wave 2 - Michigan 7 2023 CPSW

GND Wave 2
A/O – Agriculture
Wealth tax would protect agriculture
Buffie 21, Nick, Nick Buffie is a Senior Policy Analyst at PPI's Center for Funding America's Future, where he focuses on tax reform, income security programs, pro-growth public investments, and fiscal sustainability. He previously worked as a tax and budget policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, as an economic policy advisor to Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign, as a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and as an intern at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, The American Families Plan Taxes Billionaires and Protects Family Farms and Businesses, August 30th, 2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/american-families-plan-taxes-billionaires-protecting-family-farms-businesses/[AMoss]
In recent months, reporting by ProPublica confirmed that some of the wealthiest billionaires in the United States are paying virtually no income tax on the incredible gains in their fortunes.1 Worse, a massive loophole in the tax code allows these billionaires and other wealthy Americans to escape income tax on their gains for their entire lifetimes—even as regular Americans pay income tax on every paycheck.
To pay for the transformative investments in his Build Back Better agenda, President Joe Biden has proposed tax reforms to close a capital gains loophole favoring the wealthiest Americans. This change is the most important way that Biden’s plan combats the tax code’s preferential treatment of income from wealth over income from work.
Under the American Families Plan (AFP), only a small fraction of Americans—those with very large untaxed gains—would be affected, mainly because the plan exempts the first $1 million of untaxed gains per person.2 And while critics of the president’s plan have argued that it would harm family farms and businesses, these claims are unfounded. As this issue brief explains, many of these claims are based on flawed studies, including some that do not even analyze the actual Biden proposal.
The fact is that under the AFP, the vast majority of Americans—including family farmers and small-business owners—would be exempt from new taxes, since the proposal is targeted at those with large untaxed gains. Moreover, the proposal includes special protections for owners of family farms and businesses who plan to keep their enterprises in the family. Because of these protections, critics’ harshest claim—that the Biden plan would force families to sell their farms and businesses, thereby preventing transfers from one generation to the next—is simply not true.
A wealth tax is necessary and sufficient to redirect funds away from corporate agribusinesses that take agriculture – other countries prove.
Greene 22, Greene, Liza. "Wealth Inequalities Worsen Food Insecurity, Brief Shows." Food Tank, 7 July 2022, https://foodtank.com/news/2022/07/the-inequality-pandemic-agribusiness-billionaires-profit-from-pain/. //CPSW PA
A recent research brief from Oxfam International, Profiting from Pain, uncovers the massive wealth inequalities that contribute to global food insecurity. While prices of food, energy, and other basic items rose from 2019 to 2022, the brief finds companies including Cargill and Walmart earned more than they have over the last 23 years. Oxfam reports that there are now 2,668 billionaires in the world–that is 573 more billionaires compared to 2019. At the same time, between 2019 and 2022, a quarter of a million people around the world experienced poverty and food insecurity. Irit Tamir, Director of Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department, tells Food Tank, “if governments were able to tax the wealthiest, there would be more money available to invest in poverty-busting public services like education, health, and social care.” Tamir says that taxing industries on excess profits can help redistribute wealth to vulnerable communities. She explains that industries charging more for basic items, including food, throughout the pandemic, should be taxed accordingly. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, food price inflation, compounded by supply chain and labor shortages, has added to an already unstable food system. The brief finds that corporate tax breaks have increased profits for the wealthiest companies in the food, energy, pharmaceutical, and technology sectors. In the food and agriculture sector for instance, billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by US$382 billion between 2020 and 2022. According to the brief, together with just three other companies, the Cargill family dominates 70 percent of the global agriculture market. In 2021, Cargill made US$5 billion in net income, its largest profit ever. The company’s profits are expected to increase further in 2022. Archer-Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and (Louis)-Dreyfus have consolidated power over years through their roles in biofuels investment, large-scale land acquisitions, and financialization of agriculture commodity markets, Tamir explains. This consolidated power makes supply chains more vulnerable to price shocks, climate change, and conflict, and concentrates “greater power in fewer people.” Additionally, the food and technology industries avoid taxes which perpetuate this corporate consolidation of power. Tamir mentions that companies including Amazon “park their intellectual property in tax havens.” This tax loophole is bad for everyone because, “it deprives governments of much needed revenue for public services or food aid when a crisis hits, like the one we’re seeing now in the horn [of Africa],” Tamir tells Food Tank, referring to the worsening drought, causing a hunger crisis that will impact 20 million people by United Nations estimates. Tamir hopes to see the United States Congress introduce tax reform outlined in the Build Back Better proposal that can help close corporate tax avoidance loopholes and prevent tax haven abuse. Oxfam also urges governments to create immediate and permanent billionaire tax policies to support the most vulnerable members of society. Argentina, for example, has introduced a one-time wealth tax on its wealthiest citizens as part of the country’s COVID-19 recovery plan. In the past, other countries, such as Thailand, have introduced progressive taxes to promote social welfare for their most vulnerable communities. Since 2001, Thailand’s Universal Coverage Scheme provides free healthcare to a population of 65 million people by taxing its wealthiest members, and, Tamir mentions, “the system was implemented when Thailand had the same per capita income as the U.S. did in 1930.” “Costa Rica is another example that has universal public services,” Tamir tells Food Tank, referring to the country’s free education and public healthcare programs. “Nepal, Sri Lanka, these are countries that are not wealthy countries and yet have been able to provide universal public services through taxation.”
Ag k2 food security
USDA 10, United States department of agriculture, The United States Department of Agriculture is the federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, rural economic development, and food, Agriculture Key to Food Security, August 5th 2010, https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2010/08/05/agriculture-key-food-security[AMoss]
During this year’s International Food Aid and Development Conference (IFADC), food security featured prominently as both a major concern and a primary program focus for current and future USDA projects. Each year the IFADC brings together USDA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, private sector companies and voluntary organizations who collaborate throughout the year to provide America’s food aid and assistance to the world’s neediest people. This week I joined USDA and USAID leaders in Kansas City to address this important subject.
You may not be aware, but the United States is the largest provider of food assistance in the world. Over the past 10 years, we have supplied about one-half of total international food assistance, and in 2009 alone United States programs reached over 70 million people worldwide.
Even with America’s food aid experience and resources, the number of poor, hungry people continues to grow. In 2008, a supply and demand imbalance in global food systems raised international food prices and resulted in increased instability in food insecure countries. This served as a wake-up call to rich and poor countries alike that we need to begin reinvesting in our agricultural sectors.
Last year, the G8 leaders committed to combating food insecurity, a priority echoed by the Obama Administration’s pledge to invest $3.5 billion in the next three years and the whole-of-government Feed the Future (FTF) initiative. Agriculture plays an important role in this new approach. The majority of people in developing countries depend on it not only for food, but also as a main source of income and employment.
Public-private partnerships provide farmers technical assistance to form cooperatives, improve production, or storage and handling, and these practices and information can be passed on to future generations and larger groups. Through sustainable food programs that continue years after U.S. funding has ended, such as USDA’s McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program, the U.S. will increasingly seek new ways of using private money, businesses and trade to help struggling countries become self-sufficient in feeding their people.
With the number of chronically hungry people now surpassing one billion, we need a sustainable approach to answer the call of those in need, sharing America’s bounty and knowledge with those less fortunate. USDA sees its engagement in Feed the Future as central to achieving that goal. Our unique capacities in research, extension, and institutional capacity building can make an important contribution to long term food security.
Food insecurity causes war
Sova 23, Chase, Chase Sova is senior director of Public Policy and Research at World Food Program USA (WFP USA). Previously, Chase worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). He has consulted with the World Bank, Johns Hopkins, and Tufts University, Dangerously Hungry: The Link between Food Insecurity and Conflict, April 21st, 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/dangerously-hungry-link-between-food-insecurity-and-conflict[AMoss]
Economist Paul Collier once wrote that “war is development in reverse.” That conflict inevitably produces poverty and hunger is a theory that has been tested—and proven true—in every major clash across human history. It is believed, for example, that more people died of starvation and starvation-related disease than from combat during the Second World War.
But it is also true that hunger and food insecurity can lead to instability. There is a vicious feedback loop between conflict and hunger currently at play in dozens of countries around the world. War drives hunger and hunger drives war.
In 2017, the World Food Program USA (WFP USA) produced a report titled Winning the Peace: Hunger and Instability. It was a comprehensive review of the literature on “food-related instability”—or the ways that hunger drives conflict. At the time, U.S. lawmakers knew anecdotally that this relationship existed. Former Senate Agriculture Committee chair Pat Roberts (D-KS) said in a 2015 speech, “Show me a nation that cannot feed itself, and I’ll show you a nation in chaos.” Others, like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), frequently warned that providing humanitarian assistance in some of the world’s most complex emergencies was necessary to avoid more costly—in both blood and treasure—engagements.
Winning the Peace provided a snapshot of what the academic community knew about the relationship between food insecurity and conflict. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, the lingering economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a rise in extreme climate events around the world, 2022 was a year of unprecedented global hunger. Predictably, global instability rose in tandem. At least 12,500 protests occurred last year in countries facing rapid food and fuel price increases.
Academic literature on food-related instability has grown significantly in the last half decade. In fact, almost 50 percent of all the research to be published on food-related instability over the past 20 years has been produced in the last five years alone. A new report by WFP USA, launched in April of 2023, aims to capture this latest thinking in a review of 60 peer-reviewed academic studies produced between 2017 and 2022. Dangerously Hungry is a study of studies. This commentary is a literature review of such studies and discusses specific drivers and motivators of food-related instability, and how to create an improved framework for understanding of the complex relationship between food insecurity and conflict.
A/O – Biodefense
Bioweapon prolif now – Innovation is the only deterrent
Haines 23, Avril, Avril Danica Haines is an American lawyer and senior government official who serves as the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration. She is the first woman to serve in this role. Haines previously served as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Obama administration. Prior to her appointment to the CIA, she served as Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs in the Office of White House Counsel, IARPA Pursuing Breakthrough Biointelligence and Biosecurity Innovations, May 17th, 2023, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2023/item/2380-iarpa-pursuing-breakthrough-biointelligence-and-biosecurity-innovations[AMoss]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the advanced research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — recently launched a program to develop new innovations for tackling threats and advances inherent within the rapidly changing biointelligence and biosecurity landscapes.
The Biointelligence and Biosecurity for the Intelligence Community (B24IC) program represents the Intelligence Community’s (IC) latest investment in research that pushes the boundaries of our biointelligence and biosecurity understanding and technologies. The resulting innovations could have far-reaching impacts, with the potential to develop new ways to collect, detect, analyze, and prevent traditional biothreats, while addressing possibilities and dangers associated with biotechnology. To address these challenges, the IC seeks to advance research across multiple biology sub-disciplines.
“The rapid proliferation of biotechnology stands to pose new national security risks that the IC will need to counter and mitigate,” said B24IC Program Manager Dr. Michael Patterson. “B24IC could boost our approach to biointelligence and biosecurity far beyond our current understanding and years or decades into the future.”
Wealth tax key to economic growth
Malleson, PhD, 5-14-23 ( Tom, SocialJustice&PeaceStudies@Western,https://theconversation.com/taxing-the-wealthy-to-the-hilt-would-make-us-all-much-better-off-203814 )
Though most people naturally dislike inequality, it’s often argued that raising taxes on the rich will do more harm than good by damaging incentives and investment, thereby slowing economic growth and ultimately hurting us all. “Given five fat sheep and ninety-five thin, how [to] induce the ninety-five to resign to the five the richest pasture and shadiest corners?” the famous British philosopher R.H. Tawney once asked. He continued: “By convincing them, obviously, that, if they do not, they will die of rot, be eaten by wolves, and be deprived in the meantime of such pasture as they have. Nor, indeed, hitherto has it been difficult to convince them, for there is nothing which frightens thin sheep like the fear of being thinner.” But is it really true that high taxes — even very high ones — are detrimental to societal well-being? The last few years have witnessed an explosion of new evidence from economists, sociologists, political scientists and ecologists that suggests they’re not. Exaggerated concerns It’s accurate that high taxes on the wealthy bring real risks. But in general, the downsides are highly overblown. For instance, a common worry is that rich people will respond to high taxes by working less. But there’s essentially zero empirical support for this claim. In fact, there is now close to consensus among researchers that while the rich do frequently try to avoid taxes, they don’t do so by working less. The most serious potential cost of high taxes is the reduction of private investment. This is definitely possible. But the key point to keep in mind is that such a reduction is only half the picture. It’s wrong to think of taxes as simply reducing investment, because states do not simply collect taxes — they also spend them. Therefore it’s more accurate to regard taxes not as reducing investment but as rearranging it — from the private sector to the public. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends entirely on the details. In many cases, levying high taxes on the rich will mean money is no longer invested in foreign stock markets or spent on unproductive things like private jets and multiple mansions, but is rather spent on productivity-enhancing entities like schools, hospitals, roads, public research grants and so on. Indeed, critical research shows that, all things considered, high inequality actually tends to reduce an economy’s overall growth rate. The most sensible and cautious conclusion is that high taxes — very high taxes, in particular — could somewhat reduce economic growth, but these costs are likely to be only mild or moderate. What about the other side of the ledger? What are the social and economic benefits from high taxes and reduced inequality?
A/O – Biodiversity
A wealth tax solves for biodiversity loss. Simon Whalley 22 [an educator in Japan, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Japan, contributing author to "The Carbon Almanac" and the author of "Dear Indy: A Father's Plea for Climate Action.", “It's Time for a Global Billionaire and Millionaire Wealth Tax to Save Our Living Planet”, 1/26/22, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/01/26/its-time-global-billionaire-and-millionaire-wealth-tax-save-our-living-planet, Common Dreams]//rurallion
Our politicians, flush from millionaire/billionaire campaign "contributions," like to pretend that the cost of dealing with the climate and biodiversity crises is prohibitively expensive and pretend that we should wait until the cost of solutions come down before we act, but is this really true?
In their 2019 Emissions Gap Report, the U.N. states that transitioning to a zero-carbon economy by 2050 will cost between $1.6-$3.8 trillion annually. While this is an enormous amount of money, to put it into context, $16.7 trillion was spent globally by May 2021 on COVID-19 measures. It is also worth noting that should global temperatures warm by 2degC, then the cost to the global economy is estimated at between $10-$20 trillion a year, a fivefold increase. The cost of action will rise each year governments drag their feet. It will never be cheaper than $1.6-$3.8 trillion.
Now we have seen what it will cost, the big question should be where this funding comes from? One source of funding could come from military budgets which total approximately $2 trillion a year and contribute around 6% of global CO2 emissions. As military budgets are sold to citizens as a defense strategy, their use to defend us from runaway climate chaos is clearly warranted. A further source of funding, and one that is equally justified, is a global wealth tax 

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.