Neg - SSI Reparations - Michigan 7 2023 CFMP

Neg---Reparations---CFMLP
Reparations Advantage
1NC---Baby Bonds Fail
Baby bonds fail – determining eligibility is impossible
Madeline Brown and Catherine Harvey 22 {Brown is a Senior Policy Associate and Interim Project Director at the Housing Crisis Research Collaborative. Harvey is a Senior Policy Program Manager} - ("As Baby Bonds Gain Momentum, States Must Grapple with These Four Implementation Questions," Urban Institute, published 7-11-2022, accessed 7-21-2023, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/baby-bonds-gain-momentum-states-must-grapple-these-four-implementation-questions)//marlborough-wr/
1. Who is eligible for a baby trust, and how do you identify those people?
Because baby bonds are meant to address wealth inequality, it could be logical to base eligibility on a measure of wealth, with larger deposits for people from households with little wealth. Unfortunately, publicly available data on household wealth are limited at the local and state levels, making it difficult to identify eligible people. Urban and others are working to improve local measures of wealth, which could help states better target their programs.
Current legislative proposals use household income or eligibility for public benefits as a proxy for wealth and program eligibility. For instance, New Jersey’s legislation applies to children from households earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In Connecticut (PDF) and Washington, DC (PDF) enrollment is automatic for births covered by state Medicaid.
Relying on Medicaid eligibility to determine baby bonds eligibility, though smart and implementable as a policy, may have drawbacks. In California, Medicaid-based eligibility would include nearly 4 in 10 children, which would make a Medicaid-based baby bond program costly and thus politically difficult to achieve. Furthermore, linking eligibility to other public benefits programs could unduly exclude children of immigrants (PDF), who are less likely to participate in public benefits programs for many reasons.
States are also contending with how to identify and enroll people into baby trust accounts. Birth certificates and Social Security numbers identify new births but aren’t easily linked to family income or wealth. If income proxies are used for enrollment, like Medicaid enrollment, states still need ways to notify families of their child’s baby trust account and contact families early and often over the years to leverage and link other services and supports that maximize health and economic well-being. At Urban’s convening, several states reported they are exploring solutions to share datasets to help identify and contact eligible families.
1NC---AT: Racial Wealth Gap
Aff evidence is based on flawed models – the plan doesn’t actually rectify racial inequality
Matt Bruenig 19 {Founder of the People's Policy Project} - ("Baby Bonds Only Modestly Reduce the Racial Wealth Gap," People's Policy Project, published 1-22-2019, accessed 7-22-2023, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/01/22/baby-bonds-only-modestly-reduce-the-racial-wealth-gap/)//marlborough-wr/ [bracketed for problematic language]
Dylan Matthews has a piece at Vox saying that Booker’s Baby Bonds program would nearly close the racial wealth gap for young adults. Matthews’ piece is based on a working paper by Naomi Zewde that uses the PSID to model the effect of providing means-tested demogrants to 18-year-olds. Under the flawed racial wealth gap metric commonly used, it is possible that Booker’s program would significantly reduce it. But under a comprehensive measure, it is hard to imagine how such a program would make much of a dent.
Booker’s Plan
Booker’s plan, in brief, is to spend 18 years gradually capitalizing an approximately $700 billion social wealth fund. In the 19th year, the annual return on that fund plus some current revenue will be bundled together to provide an annual lump sum grant to 18-year-olds. The race-neutral grants will be heavily means-tested based on the earnings records of each 18-year-old’s parents and the spending of the grants will be restricted to approved purposes such as education, retirement accounts, or a down payment on a house.
The plan Zewde writes about in her paper is largely the same as Booker’s plan except the means-testing is done by parental wealth rather than parental earnings records.
How Big Is The Racial Wealth Gap?
Before discussing what effect such a program would have, it is necessary to first discuss how big the racial wealth gap is. And this is frankly where much of the discussion about the racial wealth gap goes off the rails.
The norm in the racial wealth gap world is to compare median white families to median black families. I do this myself sometimes depending on the situation. Under that metric, the racial wealth gap was $146,200 in 2016 according to the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).
The problem with this conventional measure is that, by comparing median to median, it misses the people who actually own virtually all of the wealth in this country. It is not the middle that owns the wealth, but rather the very top. In 2016, the median white quintile owned just 3.7 percent of white wealth. For black families, the same figure was 2.8 percent. Across all people it was 2.9 percent.
By comparison, the top quintile owned over 85 percent of each group’s wealth.
When it comes to wealth, comparing 50th percentiles against one another does not really give you a good picture of the disparity since it compares people who own almost none of the wealth. Instead, as I’ve argued before, the best single statistic for the racial wealth gap is mean wealth. On that measure, the gap is not $146,200 but rather $760,700. Instead of being 10.2 cents on the dollar, the racial gap is 15.5 cents on the dollar, but it is nonetheless much bigger in absolute terms.
As we’ll see in the exercise below, getting the black median and white median to become equal is relatively easy. So if you define the racial wealth gap that way, fairly modest programs can get the job done (especially if you define it as getting the 18-25 black and white median wealth to line up). But getting mean black and white wealth to line up would require a program vastly more ambitious than baby bonds.
Closing the Two Gaps
The median black family has a net worth of $16.6k while the median white family has a net worth of $162.8k. Thus, if your sole goal was to get the medians to align, the cheapest way to do so would be to take all black families with net worths between $16.6k and $162.7k and transfer each of them the amount of wealth they need to get up to $162.8k. After this process, the black and white median would both be $162.8k and the racial wealth gap, so defined, would be over.
Some simple math shows that this sort of policy would require transfers of $456 billion, or 0.5 percent of total wealth in 2016.
By contrast, if the goal is to make it so that the black community and the white community have the same total amount of wealth relative to their population sizes (i.e. mean wealth), then the required transfers are $15.2 trillion, or 17.5 percent of US wealth in 2016. If you imagine this program as a direct transfer from white to black (such that each dollar transferred actually closes the gap by $2 dollars), then it goes to $7.6 trillion, or 8.6 percent of US wealth.
What these figures show is that you can eliminate or nearly eliminate the “racial wealth gap” as it is normally understood with fairly modest programs that basically operate by gaming the statistic. Since [Black people] and whites near the middle of their respective wealth distributions own almost none of the wealth anyways, it simply is not that hard to get them to own the same or similar amounts of approximately nothing. This is basically how the baby bonds policy works.
Baby Bond Figures
In her paper, Zewde finds that in the 2015 PSID data, the median white adult between the ages of 18 and 25 has a net worth of $46,000 while the median black adult of that age has a net worth of $2,900. These figures are considerably different from the 2016 SCF, which reports that the median white 18-25 adult has a net worth of $5,720 versus the median black adult of that age having a net worth of $940. I am not sure why the SCF figures are so much lower, but I suspect it is because the SCF counts youth-headed households while the Zewde’s calculations of the PSID may also be including young people who live at home and who thereby get some of their parent’s wealth assigned to them.
From that reported starting point, Zewde constructs a counterfactual scenario in which baby bonds were paid out in a means-tested way according to parental wealth. She finds in that scenario that young black median wealth goes to $57,845 while young white median wealth goes to $79,159. This then prompts the conclusion (emphasized by Matthews) that the program reduces the racial wealth gap from young whites owning 16x young black wealth ($46,000/$2,900) to young whites owning 1.4x young black wealth ($79,159/$57,845).
This sort of thing lends itself to a great headline statistic, but it’s not really doing that much to close the overall gap. The age group being focused on here — 18 to 25 — owns just 0.7 percent of the overall wealth (in the SCF data). And then the middle quintile of that age group, which is where the action is really at, owns just 2.4 percent of that wealth (according to Zewde’s PSID analysis). In the baby bond counterfactual, they end up owning 5.2 percent of their age group’s wealth, which is able, along with disproportionate benefit to black families, to get you the eye-popping statistic of nearly eliminating the racial wealth gap.
But if the goal is to converge overall mean black and white wealth over time, this sort of policy just is not going to get you anywhere close to there. Indeed, even these median young adults who have a brief convergence around the time they turn adults will themselves end up diverging again with differential incomes, differential savings, differential rates of return (especially on real estate), and differential inheritances — none of which have significantly kicked in yet at that age but which are the drivers of the continuation of the racial wealth gap.
1NC---AT: Baby Bonds
Baby Bonds would be expensive, decrease motivation, and do little to resolve inequality
Taylor - 22[Kiaray Taylor; University of Cincinnati, The Ohio State University 10+ years in finance spanning fixed income to emerging markets Contributor for The Balance and Crunchbase Strong advocate of a more diverse finance industry Doretha Clemon; Februrary 2022; Can Baby Bonds Fix Intergenerational Wealth Inequality? https://www.investopedia.com/can-baby-bonds-fix-intergenerational-wealth-inequality-5096825|DOA: 7-24-23]-rrm
Critics of baby bonds say it would be extremely expensive—costing up to $60 billion, according to Booker’s own figures. 2 Some have also argued that receiving funding from the federal government might actually decrease the motivation of poor young people. “If you are a child receiving a baby bond, you might have less incentive to save, less incentive to get an education, knowing that this account is sitting there,” Rachel Greszler, a research fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, told The Washington Post. 8 Others argue that there is little evidence that this is true. In fact, many argue that the baby bond program doesn’t go far enough. Research from Columbia University showed that even in the most “extreme” versions of the program, it would do little to address structural wealth inequality in the U.S. The top 10% of citizens would still own much more than the bottom 90%.
2NC---AT: Baby Bonds
Brooker’s proposal doesn’t solve racism and amounts to backdoor redistribution while doing little to address poverty
Bourne -18 [Ryan Bourne; Cory Booker’s ‘Baby Bonds’ Wouldn’t Support a Savings Culture — It’s Just More Government Subsidies R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics, Cato Institute https://www.cato.org/commentary/cory-bookers-baby-bonds-wouldnt-support-savings-culture-its-just-more-government| DOA: 7-14-23]
Booker’s proposal is entirely different. Being solely a public scheme, it amounts to pure redistribution — transfers from taxpayers to those on low incomes. As such, it has little to offer conservatives. The argument it will encourage saving or show children the power of investment is bogus. Saving is about deferring consumption — sacrificing today to fulfill other goals tomorrow. But this is pure taxpayer support: taxing or borrowing to take from Peter to pay Paul, with no sacrifice on the part of those enjoying the rewards. It’s actually worse than that. Precisely because it amounts to pure redistribution, Booker would naturally impose conditions on what the funds could be used for. He recognizes, correctly, that taxpayers would be loath to grant young adults a huge lump sum at age 18 to blow on a fast car or an around‐​the‐​world travel excursion. Yet by restricting what the “savings” from the accounts can be used for, the program really amounts to just a backdoor subsidy for home‐​buying, college tuition, or retirement. It would be one thing if such a one‐​time coming of age transfer replaced existing means‐​testing federal support elsewhere. But that is not what this is about. It is really just a whole new entitlement — an elaborate scheme, with a raft of new bureaucracy, which masks its effect: pumping $100 billion per year toward the same old usual liberal ambitions. As my colleague Chris Edwards and I documented in a report last year, low‐​income people really do often have little to no savings. Conservatives should care about their financial security. But rather than support Booker’s phony savings scheme, which will do nothing to change behaviors, conservatives should instead push for Universal Savings Accounts — innovations that have been extraordinarily successful in encouraging modest savings for those on low incomes in Britain and Canada. These accounts allow people to deposit after‐​tax income, which then grows tax‐​free, much like supercharged Roth IRAs. Crucially, they can be used for any purpose and funds withdrawn at any time. That flexibility overcomes one of the main reasons that poorer families do not save in tax‐​advantaged schemes: the fear they will not be able to access funds for unforeseen contingencies. The best way to give people experience of savings and investment is to remove risk barriers that currently prevent them from saving formally. Booker’s scheme operates under the veneer of encouraging frugality. But it really just amounts to expanding federal government subsidies through the back‐​door.
1NC---Reparations Bad
At best reparations try to remedy current inequality though the past which taints current oppression --- at worst reparations are tainted by contemporary racist culture
Wilson - 09[Wilson, Carter A. Carter A. Wilson is professor and department head of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Northern Michigan University “A Radical Critique of the Reparations Movement.” National Political Science Review, vol. 12, USA: Transaction Publishers, pp. 205–26. | DOA: 7-24-23]-rrm
Reparations for the outrages of the past-the holocaust of the Atlantic slave trade, the atrocities of plantation slavery, the exploitation of the sharecropping system, the indignities of segregation and the horrors of over a century of lynchings-are long overdue. Over the past decade the movement for reparations has gained in visibility and popularity. Although the movement is stronger today than it has been in the past, as a movement for social justice it is most problematic. It is problematic because even the most symbolic reparations proposals are stalled and unlikely at this point to succeed. It is problematic because racial oppression persists and because the current, dominant racist culture and prevailing socioeconomic and political arrangements stand like a brick wall between the movement and the attainment of reparations. Moreover, there are problems endemic to the movement. It has failed to address the dominant racist culture, to construct an effective counterideology and to develop the type of coalition strong enough to challenge the dominant power arrangement. At its best, this movement explains current patterns of racial inequality in terms of the past history of slavery. This explanation shifts public attention away from current problems of racial oppression. At its worse, this movement not only fails to confront present forms of racial oppression, it is tainted by the contemporary racist culture. This movement has been gaining in popularity among African Americans and growing at the same time that civil and human rights violations against them have been increasing. The call for reparations today is like the odd cry of a slave who is being brutally whipped. Instead of crying out for the immediate cessation of the whipping, the slave demands compensated for the beatings that took place years ago. The beatings must stop first. That is, the current patterns of racial oppression and repression must stop before compensation can be paid. Current patterns of racial inequality are not simple artifacts of the past. The facts that there are more African Americans on death row, more African American in prison and jail, and more African American teenagers serving life sentences without any chance of parole than ever before in U.S. history are not artifacts of past slavery. These facts are functions of current forms of state racial repression. The growth of concentrated poverty in the inner cities of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and other older industrial areas is not a function of past slavery, but the results of current processes of racial oppression. Just as racist culture in the past legitimized the institution of slavery, racist culture today legitimizes and normalizes current patterns of racial oppression and repression. Before there can be any compensation for slavery in the past, racial oppression must end in the present. The beating of the slave must stop first, before the slave can realistically expect any compensation. The cry for reparations muffles the call for an immediate end to racial oppression. This essay reexamines the reparations movement in the larger context of contemporary patterns of racial oppression and current forms of racist culture. It does this first by reporting on the status of the reparations movement. Second, it briefly outlines current patterns of racial oppression. That is, it associates these patterns with the emergence of advanced capitalism or post-Fordism, which explains the growth of concentrated poverty and the persistence of racial inequality. It outlines forms of state repression and briefly describes contemporary racist culture. Racist culture today, as it has been in the past, legitimizes racial oppression. Finally, this essay concludes with a reassessment of the reparations movement and makes recommendations for a redirection of this movement.
2NC---Reparations Bad
The plan can’t overcome racial oppression in the status quo which dooms it to fail --- racism coopts and overdetermines their attempt at reparations
Wilson - 09[Wilson, Carter A. Carter A. Wilson is professor and department head of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Northern Michigan University “A Radical Critique of the Reparations Movement.” National Political Science Review, vol. 12, USA: Transaction Publishers, pp. 205–26. | DOA: 7-24-23]-rrm
Now that I have provided a brief analysis of metaracism, current patterns of racial oppression and repression, and contemporary racist culture, I can return to an analysis of the reparations movement. This movement is occurring at the same time that racial oppression and repression are intensifying and racist culture is expanding. The success of a

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