Aff Means Tested Basic Income

The United States federal government should

substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the
United States by adopting a means-tested basic
income(MTBI).
 1AC Poverty Advantage
Advantage – Poverty
1. The income gap is widening. Economic inequality in the US is growing, worsened by the pandemic
and soaring inflation.
Orchard, 2022 - PhD Candidate in Economics, University of California, San Diego [Jacob, Jan 13, The Conversation
“Inflation inequality: Poorest Americans are hit hardest by soaring prices on necessities”
https://theconversation.com/inflation-inequality-poorest-americans-are-hit-hardest-by-soaring-prices-on-necessities-174853 TA]

The fastest rate of inflation in 40 years is hurting families across the U.S. who are seeing ever-higher prices for everything
from meat and potatoes to housing and gasoline. But behind the headline number that’s been widely reported is something that often gets overlooked: Inflation affects

different households in different ways – and sometimes hurts those with the least, the most. Inflation, as calculated by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, is designed to track the price increases in a typical U.S. household’s basket of goods. The problem is spending bundles differ across households. For example, a family in the
lowest 20% of income typically spends around 15% of their budget on groceries – this is nearly 60% more than households in the top 20% of the income distribution, according to my
calculations. The widening inflation gap On Jan. 12, 2022, the BLS released figures showing that inflation jumped by 7% in
December from a year earlier – the fastest pace since 1982. To see how this varied across households, I used the bureau’s own price data and factored in the typical spending
habits of different income groups. I calculate that inflation is running at 7.2% for the lowest income households – higher than for any

other group. For the highest income families, the rate of change was 6.6%. The difference between the two income
groups steadily increased throughout 2021, starting the year at just 0.16 percentage point but ending at 0.6 percentage point – near the highest it has been since
2010. The reason for this widening rich-poor inflation gap, known by economists as inflation inequality, comes down to the

typical spending habits of people in each income group. In times of economic uncertainty and recession, most households tend to hold back on buying luxury
goods. But by and large, people can’t cut down on necessities such as groceries and heating – although wealthier consumers are better placed to stock

up on these necessities when prices are cheap. This shift of spending away from luxury items like vacations and new cars, and toward necessities, pushes inflation up

for poorer families more than richer ones. This is because lower-income households dedicate a higher percentage of
their income on necessities. My data shows that this inflation gap tends to be widest in times of recession or in the early stages of economic recovery. In the aftermath of the
Great Recession of 2008-2009, the gap in inflation rates between the lowest and highest income groups was close to 1 percentage point – higher than it is now.

2. Soaring income inequality in the US is a matter of life and death for millions of workers and their
families – this perpetuates structural violence in the form of poverty, inequality and powerlessness.
Sanders, 2021 - US senator [March 29th, 2021, Bernie Sanders, “The rich-poor gap in America is obscene. So let's fix it – here's how”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/29/rich-poor-gap-wealth-inequality-bernie-sanders TA]

The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so
little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral,
economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with. The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society, where
a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way we have
not seen since the Great Depression. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Today, half of our people are
living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions,
92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to
feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their
standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15

years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence. Meanwhile, the people on top have
never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own
more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during
the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn. The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new. Over the past 40 years
there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America. In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s
wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%. Unbelievably,
the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,
now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the
past four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in America would be earning $42,000 more in income
each year. Instead, as corporate chief executives now make over 300 times more than their average employees, the
average American worker now earns $32 a week less than he or she did 48 years ago – after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite huge
increases in technology and productivity, ordinary workers are actually losing ground. Addressing income and wealth and inequality will not be easy, because we will be taking on some of the
most powerful and well-financed entities in the country, including Wall Street, the health insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial-complex.
But it must be done. Here is some of what Congress and the president can do in the very near future. We must raise the minimum wage from the current starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to
A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it. We need to make it easier, not
a living wage of at least $15 an hour.

harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the
decline in union membership in America.

3. Economic inequality is the highest priority we face – the effects of poverty are the largest
magnitude impact, and structural violence is the root cause of warfare.
Lee, 2016 – consultant on public health approaches to violence prevention for the World Health Organization [Bandy X,
May-June, Aggression and Violent Behavior “Causes and cures VII: Structural Violence” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178916300441 SP]

He therefore believed that we could easily avoid structural violence if people became conscious of the limitations social structures imposed on them (Beyer, 2008). Liberation theologists have
made their own contribution to shaping the concept, starting in the 1950's and 1960's with the Catholic Church in Latin America, principally as a moral reaction to the poverty and the social
injustice in the region (Gutiérrez, 1973). Canadian peace researchers Gernot Kohler and Norman Alcock (1976) devised ways to quantify the excess deaths
that social, political, and economic inequalities cause, through two measures. In the first, they used Sweden as a model, for it had come closest to eliminating
structural violence, with the greatest equities in living standard and the highest life expectancy among nations. They asked: how many deaths would we avoid, if all countries enjoyed the
same living conditions as Sweden? The second measure they used was “the egalitarian model,” one that postulates complete and equal redistribution of the available global wealth. They
asked: how many deaths would we avoid, if we equally distributed the available global wealth around the world? When the authors compared life expectancies everywhere else in the world
with Sweden, they found that 18
million deaths a year could be attributed to “structural violence,” or the socioeconomic
inequalities that exist globally. Considering life expectancy to be a function of relative socioeconomic position (Galtung and Høivik, 1971), when they plotted gross national
product (GNP) per capita for each nation on earth, they were able to show that the life expectancy for nations with a GNP per capita at world average was 68.3 years for the year 1965. One
remarkable aspect of the egalitarian life expectancy is its magnitude, the authors note, which is about forty years higher than the lowest life expectancy in 1965 (27 years for Guinea) and only
six years less than the highest life expectancy (74.7 years for Sweden). In other words, under conditions of complete global equality, rich countries would lose only minor amounts of life
expectancy, whereas poor ones would gain tremendously. British social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) make similar observations, concluding that egalitarian
societies do better overall, with only minor compromises from “the wealthy.” 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.
5. Means testing is essential to have the most impact on poverty – Cook County empirically proves
Ban, 2023 – Digital Editor for the National Association of Counties [Charles Feb 13, County News “Changing lives: ARPA
funds Cook County guaranteed income pilot program” https://www.naco.org/articles/changing-lives-arpa-funds-cook-county-guaranteed-income-pilot-program Acc
3/21/23 TA]

Applicants had to be 18 years or older, have a household income at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level and not be participating in another
guaranteed income program. Nearly 36 percent of Cook County residents were eligible. It’s not Cook County’s first foray into direct payments, though. Using Coronavirus Relief Fund money, the

county allocated $2 million, which soon expanded to $9 million, in one-time allocations of $600 to $1,400. “I think that showed a lot of people inside Cook County government just

how valuable this kind of a program could be,” Subkoviak said, noting that program served every person who applied. With
the Cook County Promise, the 3,250 families were a compromise between offering families a significant amount and casting a wide net — and a large sample size. “We wanted to help as many people as we

could, but at the same time we wanted to have really impacted each of those households’ lives,” Subkoviak said about
the amounts. “This kind of assistance can make a difference in people’s lives beyond just being able to purchase things. This could give someone
the cushion to be able to take time off work, or not have to take an extra shift and be able to see their kid’s soccer game. So many people are
just working and sleeping and this can give them a chance to take a breath.”
 1AC – Economy Advantage

1. Automation and Artificial Intelligence will collapse the labor market, causing Mass
Unemployment
Kelly, 2023 - Executive Recruiter at The Compliance Search Group [Jack, May 2, Forbes “Artificial Intelligence Is Already
Causing Disruption And Job Losses At IBM And Chegg”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/05/02/artificial-intelligence-is-already-causing-disruption-and-job-losses-at-ibm-and-chegg/?sh=7247b63a75a4 TA]

Twenty-five percent of jobs will be negatively impacted over the next five years, according to a new report by the World
Economic Forum. In a study, New York City-based investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that the fast-growing mass adoption of AI
will impact 300 million jobs. We are now seeing the effects of helpful but disruptive technology. CheggCHGG +3.8%, an educational
company, and IBM have both announced that AI will cause a change within their respective organizations. Chegg saw its shares fall in value. IBM will enact hiring
freezes and allow attrition without recruiting new personnel, as AI will take over their jobs. AI Schools Chegg Stock Shares in online learning company Chegg plunged
after it was one of the first organizations to admit that AI affected its business model. Chegg recognized that students were turning to OpenAI’s ChatGPT for help. The
AI alternative hurts Chegg’s financial situation as its shares fell nearly 50% on Tuesday morning. The education company highlights how quickly AI can inexpensively
replicate services and products. The Financial Times reported that California-based Chegg saw a decline in revenue and a loss of subscribers. In response to the new
reality, The company started CheggMate, a service created with ChatGPT-4 to offer tailored content via AI. Millions Of Jobs Predicted To Be Impacted According to a
new report by the World Economic Forum released on Monday, a quarter of jobs will be impacted over the next five years. The
fast-growing trends of
artificial intelligence, digitization, renewable energy and supply chain reshoring will bring about a critical shift in the
global labor market. The WEF predicts a "new era of turbulence," as many workers won’t have the requisite skills to keep
up with the changes. Those with a technology, data analytics or cybersecurity background will benefit in the new environment. The WEF study surveyed more
than 800 companies that collectively employ 11.3 million workers across 45 countries worldwide. Global employers anticipate creating 69 million new positions by
2027 and eradicating 83 million jobs—a net loss of 14 million roles. Clerical workers will bear the brunt of the fast-moving changes. Around 26 million jobs in
administrative positions will be cut due to AI. Suppose
generative AI lives up to its hype. In that case, the workforce in the United
States and Europe will be upended, Goldman Sachs reported this week in a sobering and alarming report about AI's ascendance.
The investment bank estimates 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by this fast-growing technology.

2. Mass Unemployment will wreck the economy and drag us into military conflict – historically
proven
Benek, 2018 - global emerging tech & theology expert and CEO of The CoCreators Network [Christopher
"The Technology That Can Destroy the Church and the World As We Know It,"
https://www.christopherbenek.com/2018/03/the-coming-churchtastrophe-the-technology-that-can-destroy-the-church-and-the-world-as-we-know-it/ UM CMFP]

The Problem In 2013 an Oxford Study indicated that up to one half of all jobs in the United States are at risk of being fully
automated in the next 20 years. More recently, the McKinsey Global Institute posited a lesser number; that up to one-fifth of the global workforce will be
affected by 2030. That study suggests that up to one-third of the workforce in richer nations like the United States and Germany will be

replaced. Even if the percentage only ends up being 12% to 22% in the US, as the McKinsey report suggests, such
unemployment rates would be the greatest percentage of job loss in the United States since the Great Depression. In those
years literally a quarter of all Americans were out of work. Remember, these most recent predictions are estimates for just 12 years away. So, in a very real way, the clock is ticking… Of
course, it should be noted that the societal and cultural situations that we face today are quite a bit different than those of the 1930’s. But it is also worth noting that it
was mass
unemployment in Germany during the Great Depression that undergirded the events that led to the Second World War.
Those who remember history will also remember that – once the Great Depression hit the United States – it lasted a
decade and the unemployment rate in America didn’t drop below 10% until after the U.S. entered the Second World War
and began mass military production which reinvigorated the economy. Obviously, given the modern advances in warfare, a potential Third World War
would devastate humanity. But assuming that global war can be avoided, a loss of jobs of this magnitude would likely still shake the
foundations of society creating new levels of unimagined poverty, increased income inequality between the rich and the poor and heightened
racial & ethnic divisions. What makes things worse is that global governments are wildly unprepared even if this type of
scenario transpires in the mildest of ways.
3. A broad U.S. economic recovery is essential to avoid global conflict – it is key to our military and
diplomatic credibility and secures alliances and peace.
Baird 2020 – Member of the Aspen Strategy Group [Zoë, October. “Equitable Economic Recovery Is a National Security Imperative”, in
Domestic and International (Dis)Order: A Strategic Response, Ed. Bitounis and King, October 2020, p. 89-90 UM BFHRG]

Broadly shared economic prosperity is a bedrock of America’s economic and political strength—both domestically and in the
international arena. A strong and equitable recovery from the economic crisis created by COVID-19 would be a powerful testament to the resilience of the American system and its ability to
create prosperity at a time of seismic change and persistent global crisis. Such a recovery could attack the profound economic inequities that have developed over the past several decades.
Without bold action to help all workers access good jobs as the ecoomy returns, the United States risks undermining the
legitimacy of its institutions and its international standing. The outcome will be a key determinant of America’s national
security for years to come. An equitable recovery requires a national commitment to help all workers obtain good jobs—particularly the two-thirds of adults without a
bachelor’s degree and people of color who have been most affected by the crisis and were denied opportunity before it. As the nation engages in a historic debate about how to accelerate
economic recovery, ambitious public investment is necessary to put Americans back to work with dignity and opportunity. We need an intentional effort to make sure that the jobs that come
back are good jobs with decent wages, benefits, and mobility and to empower workers to access these opportunities in a profoundly changed labor market. To achieve these goals, American
policy makers need to establish job growth strategies that address urgent public needs through major programs in green energy, infrastructure, and health. Alongside these job growth
strategies, we need to recognize and develop the talents of workers by creating an adult learning system that meets workers’ needs and develops skills for the digital economy. The national
security community must lend its support to this cause. And as it does so, it can bring home the lessons from the advances made in these areas in other countries, particularly our European
allies, and consider this a realm of international cooperation and international engagement. Shared Economic Prosperity Is a National Security Asset A
strong economy is
essential to America’s security and diplomatic strategy. Economic strength increases our influence on the global stage,
expands markets, and funds a strong and agile military and national defense. Yet it is not enough for America’s economy to be strong for
some—prosperity must be broadly shared. Widespread belief in the ability of the American economic system to create economic

security and mobility for all—the American Dream— creates credibility and legitimacy for America’s values, governance, and alliances
around the world. After World War II, the United States grew the middle class to historic size and strength. This achievement made America the model of the free world—setting
the stage for decades of American political and economic leadership. Domestically, broad participation in the economy is core to the legitimacy of our democracy and the strength of our
political institutions. A belief that the economic system works for millions is an important part of creating trust in a democratic government’s ability to meet the needs of the people. The
COVID-19 Crisis Puts Millions of American Workers at Risk For the last several decades, the American Dream has been on the wane. Opportunity has been increasingly concentrated in the
hands of a small share of workers able to access the knowledge economy. Too many Americans, particularly those without four-year degrees, experienced stagnant wages, less stability, and
fewer opportunities for advancement. Since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs or income and are struggling to meet their basic needs—including food, housing, and medical care.1
The crisis has impacted sectors like hospitality, leisure, and retail, which employ a large share of America’s most economically vulnerable workers, resulting in alarming disparities in
unemployment rates along education and racial lines. In August, the unemployment rate for those with a high school degree or less was more than double the rate for those with a bachelor’s
degree.2 Black and Hispanic Americans are experiencing disproportionately high unemployment, with the gulf widening as the crisis continues.3 The experience of the Great Recession shows
that without intentional effort to drive an inclusive recovery, inequality may get worse: while workers with a high school education or less experienced the majority of job losses, nearly all
new jobs went to workers with postsecondary education. Inequalities across racial lines also increased as workers of color worked in the hardest-hit sectors and were slower to recover
earnings and income than White workers.4 The Case for an Inclusive Recovery A
recovery that promotes broad economic participation, renewed opportunity,
and equity will strengthen American moral and political authority around the world. It will send a strong message about the
strength and resilience of democratic government and the American people’s ability to adapt to a changing global
economic landscape. An inclusive recovery will reaffirm American leadership as core to the success of our most critical international alliances, which are rooted in the notion of
shared destiny and interdependence. For example, NATO, which has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and a force of global stability for decades, has suffered from American
disengagement in recent years. A
strong American recovery—coupled with a renewed openness to international collaboration—is core to NATO’s ability to
solve shared geopolitical and security challenges. A renewed partnership with our European allies from a position of economic
strength will enable us to address global crises such as climate change, global pandemics, and refugees. Together, the United States
and Europe can pursue a commitment to investing in workers for shared economic competitiveness, innovation, and long-term prosperity. The U.S. has unique advantages that give it the
tools to emerge from the crisis with tremendous economic strength— including an entrepreneurial spirit and the technological and scientific infrastructure to lead global efforts in developing
industries like green energy and biosciences that will shape the international economy for decades to come.

4. A means tested basic income stimulates the economy by increasing employment as workers can find
more productive work and keep them in their jobs.
Harris, 2022 - LISC Institute for Community Power [Susan Fitter, Oct 4, “Demonstrating Economic Liberation: How Guaranteed Income
Pilot Programs Point to New Solutions to Poverty”
https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/demonstrating-economic-liberation-how-guaranteed-income-pilot-programs-point-new-solutions-poverty/ TA]

Advocates on the national stage often call for Universal Basic Income (UBI), a structure in which all Americans, regardless of income status, receive regular payments. By contrast the

guaranteed income pilots seen so far are typically tailored to specific groups. Most often, these are people earning below
a certain percentage of area median income, or living in neighborhoods where average incomes fall below a certain threshold. Within that broad category, there is a
wide variety of program designs. Many local pilots, including Stockton’s, distribute funds to randomly selected individuals. Others are tailored to families, such as Oakland, San Diego, and
Chelsea, Mass. Some cater to mothers in particular, like in Magnolia Mother’s Trust in Jackson, Miss., designed with and for low income Black mothers; a program in Saint Paul, Minn.
specifically focuses on residents with babies. A privately funded experiment in San Francisco, Miracle Money, focused on unhoused individuals. Other programs supported artists in San
Francisco, justice-impacted people in Gainesville, Fla. and Durham, N.C., and Black fathers in Columbia, S.C.Richmond, Va. is centering working families in the gap, with incomes too high to
qualify for benefits but still too low to comprise a living wage. Minneapolis recipients live in specific zip codes. Louisville and New Orleans are serving “opportunity youth” ranging in age from
late teens to early twenties. The Chicago Resilient Communities pilot, the result of years of community organizing and grassroots leadership, will select recipients through an open application
and lottery. The most ambitious attempt so far, it is designed to become a permanent program serving thousands of Chicagoans. These local programs look different, but they share several
basic elements in common. They are limited in time. Pilots last anywhere from several months to a few years, but 12-month pilots are typical. They are not universal. Most programs benefit
100-200 recipients. Chicago’s trial will be the largest by far, selecting 5,000 individuals to receive monthly payments. They set a standard payment amount. Amounts range from a few
hundred dollars to$1,000 per month, with $500 per month being the most common. Some cities are taking the opportunity to investigate different disbursement schemes. Newark, for
example, will give $12,000 per person over two years to two groups; one group will receive $250 twice per month and the other will receive $3,000 twice per year. Again, these amounts are
limited by the private funding sources that pay for them at the pilot stage. They measure impacts. Many of the local programs include a control group of non-recipients from similar
socioeconomic contexts to truly capture the difference the payments make. Proposals for a national guaranteed income The
guaranteed income concept is gaining
momentum on the national level, even as pandemic stimulus checks have spurred conversation about the feasibility and value of such payments. The success of
local pilots like Stockton’s is helping spur conversations about a national guaranteed income program. Researchers at The New
School’s Institute on Race, Power and the Political Economy offered a proposal in 2021 for what a national guaranteed income program could look like. They propose an expansion of the
Earned Income Tax Credit to include people whose incomes are too low to qualify for the current benefit – or who have no income at all. This would essentially function as a negative income
tax that would provide refunds on a sliding scale to every adult making less than the national median income. Coupled with other benefits like an expanded child tax credit, this scheme could
dramatically narrow the U.S.’s persistent racial income gap between white families and families of color. Lawmakers are listening. Congresswomen Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Bonnie Watson
Coleman (D-NJ) introduced bills in 2021. In the Senate, Mitt Romney (R-UT) floated a plan to give per-child cash benefit to families and followed up with a proposed child tax credit distributed
in quarterly payments. Such federal proposals often face an uphill climb against entrenched stigma around welfare as well as the problem of how to pay for the program without taking away
from other benefits that help families, thus leaving them worse off. The research: guaranteed income works Despite critics’ fears that a no-strings-attached “handout” would encourage
people to spend irresponsibly and avoid employment, research on the Stockton pilot shows that extra funds are typically spent on food,
health care, paying down debt and household needs. Full-time employment among recipients actually increased,
perhaps because people with a little extra cushion could spend more money looking for work, and when they got a job,
were better able to successfully encounter challenges like a car breakdown. Advocates of guaranteed income point to positive
effects not only on individual financial stability, but on health, economic stimulus, education, and crime and safety. As with Housing First policies
that reduced overall homelessness dramatically over more restrictive – and expensive – program efforts, researchers are finding that unconditional assistance

can be more effective for the individuals involved and a more efficient use of public sector dollars.

5. A basic income encourages job retraining and increases productivity which stimulates the economy
Painter, 2015 – Leader of the RSA’s Policy Development [Anthony, Creative citizen, creative state: the principled and pragmatic
case for a Universal Basic Income, RSA, December 2015, https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/reports/rsa_basic_income_20151216.pdf, TA]

Finally, there
is the economic case for a Basic Income. On the macro-economic front, it becomes a very efficient means of stimulating
the economy at times of heightened demand stress, ie deep recession. A simple way to increase demand is to top up the Basic Income for a period of time.
Rather than quantitative easing supporting financial institutions, central banks can increase the money supply by funding
government bonds to finance an increased Basic Income. So-called ‘overt monetary finance’ (OMF), which this would be a form of, has been advocated by
Adair Turner and others, albeit with some provisos on management of banking credit to avoid unsustainable credit multipliers.59 This policy could have been very useful in 2008-09 (and
something akin to it was attempted in the Australian ‘cash splash’).60 On the micro-economic front, there are grounds to believe that Basic Income could increase
productivity. This mechanism would work in a number of ways. Firstly, rather than workers being forced into the first job that comes along as some conditional systems do, Basic
Income enables a little more time to search for the right job. As an evaluation of a highly conditional Department for
Work and Pensions scheme showed, hard conditionality does little to increase medium term employment rates and only increases number of days in work marginally in a
two year period.61 So the benefits are minimal yet the UK suffers from endemic skills mismatch and this impacts productivity. For
example, 58 percent of graduates are in non-graduate level jobs.62 The Basic Income would not resolve this issue, as there are strong structural factors, but 58 Erik Christensen, “Feminist
Arguments in Favour of Welfare and Basic Income in Denmark,” in Basic Income European Network (BIEN) (Geneva, 2002),
www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/ses/download/docs/chris.pdf. 59 Turner, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance. 60 Stephen Grenville, “Helicopter
Money,” VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal, 2013, www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf. 61 Jonathan Portes, “The ‘Help to Work’ Pilots: Success, Failure or Somewhere in between?,
National Institute of Economic and Social Research, accessed December 4, 2015, www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/help-work-pilots-success-failureor-somewhere-between. 62 CIPD, “Over-Qualification
and Skills Mismatch in the Graduate Labour Market,” August (2015), www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/over-qualification-andskills-mismatch-graduate-labour-market.pdf. Creative citizen, creative
state 38 POWER TO CREATE could mitigate it somewhat by giving more secure breathing space to individuals. Secondly, if workers have the ability to withdraw
their labour, it provides more of an incentive for employers of low pay, low quality jobs to improve those jobs either by increasing pay,
providing better conditions or additional support such as for training. Thirdly, there is a possible motivation effect. Workers would be in a particular workplace

because they want to be, not simply because they feel coerced to be. This is a healthier basis on which to develop intra-firm productivity.
Finally, the Basic Income facilitates short-term withdrawal from the labour market to improve formal skills and qualifications. This
could increase potential productivity. Basic Income is not an economic magic bullet but it is possible to see significant potential macro and micro economic benefits.
 Solvency
1. A means tested basic income solves inequality best, because it focuses on aid with the highest
social utility, saves money, and is the most efficient – recent empirical examples prove.
Strawczynski and Tirosh, 2021 - profs of Economics and Public Policy at Hebrew University,
Jerusalem [Michel and Oren, November “Means-Tested Basic Income versus Traditional Welfare”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3620139 Acc 3/23/23 TA]

1. Introduction In
recent years there is a heated debate on the desirability of Basic Income as a future device for substituting
traditional welfare, which continues to be implemented by governments in all countries. In fact, experiments for Basic Income were
performed in Canada, Finland, India and Namibia (and proposed also in Switzerland). Recently, Spain has accelerated the implementation of such a
system (called "minimum vital income3") in order to cope with the consequences of the Covid 19 crisis, which created in the short run a situation of poverty for many
families during the months of economic inactivity, that was imposed in order to avoid contagion. According to the Spanish government's decision, the basic income is
transferred to eligible families starting in June 2020. In the background of this proposal, we are witnessing a process of substitution of workers by the use of machines
– following the growth process that characterizes modern economies. In a situation where growth enhances the substitution of unskilled workers by machines, it
would be desirable to adjust ex-ante the welfare system, in order to gradually cope with increasing unemployment of older workers, as observed in many countries.4
The means tested Basic Income proposal claims for a transfer that will be guaranteed to low-income workers; in such
situation this income would allow individuals that confront difficulties for becoming skilled to have decent living, and
thus improving social welfare under the new technological environment. Paradoxically, the "machines instead of workers" phenomenon
occurs in a period in which more governments are implementing the Earned Income Tax Credit as a policy tool, which actually curtails disincentives for
non-participation of the Working Poor and consequently it depresses unskilled wages. Such an expansion in the use of this tool, in a world where machines substitute
workers, represents substantial trade-offs in terms of policy, and calls for an analysis that allows assessing the comparative advantage of Basic Income programs
against traditional welfare. Since
the General Basic Income program has been rejected by most economists (as explained below), it is
important to check whether its relevant substitute – a means-tested Basic Income – is the right remedy under the new
situation. In particular, policy-makers are interested to know whether under increasing inequality a means-tested Basic
Income system produces a policy option with higher social utility compared to traditional welfare. In this paper we deal with this
basic question. In order to do so we use a standard framework widely accepted in Public Economics, and we run a substantial number of simulations by mapping
results as a function of the most relevant parameters that are traditionally accepted to perform a valuation. In order to evaluate the desirability of a means-tested
Basic Income program we distinguish between a Conservative Social Planner, who evaluates the desirability of the proposals by looking only at consumption; and a
Liberal Social Planner, who uses a standard framework of utility based on both consumption and leisure. In all scenarios we will concentrate on the short-run
implications. 5 2. Literature Survey 2.1 Replacement of workers by machines Acemoglu and Autor (2011) explain the impact of technologically driven growth on labor
market developments. The use of machines acts a substitute for routine and non-skilled work, creating the need of re-thinking jobs and doing the needed adjustments
for labor supporting government policy. Autor (2014) shows that wages and earnings of lower-skilled workers, particularly men, have stagnated over several decades.
While so far technology advance did not cause an apocalyptic increase in unemployment,6 there are other remarkable effects that merit further analysis and adoption
of policy measures. One of the effects of "machines replace workers" type of growth is the difficulty for old workers to re-insert themselves into the labor market.
Aubert, Caroli and Roger (2006) investigate the relationships between new technologies, innovative workplace practices and the age structure of the workforce in a
sample of French firms. They find evidence that the wage bill share of older workers is lower in innovative firms and that the opposite holds for younger workers. This
age bias affects both men and women and it is also evidenced within occupational groups. More detailed analysis of employment inflows and outflows shows that
new technologies essentially affect older workers through reduced hiring opportunities. This difficulty maybe reflected even in discrimination practices, as studied by
Adams (2004). This author shows that this practice is quite common among employers, and it brought about a number of legislation efforts among many US states.
The vast literature on the acceleration of the ageing process brought about renewed calls for adopting old proposals for welfare reform, based on the basic income
approach. According to this approach individuals should rely on a basic income, which will allow them to cope with this kind of phenomenon from a perspective that
assures dealing respectfully with the cost of living. Philosophically inclined advocates of this approach (e.g., Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017), emphasize the related
value of a Universal Basic Income in increasing human freedom, a difficult concept to express in terms of budget constraints, but nevertheless an important goal.
Hoynes and Rothstein (2019) carefully describe the new attempts for renewing the Basic Income initiative, that was
accompanied by new pilots implemented at different countries – including Canada, Finland, India and Namibia (and proposed also in
Switzerland). Nevertheless, these authors clearly show that the General Basic Income initiative by itself must be rejected, since it is too
expensive and implies many inefficiencies. These authors show that there are many issues related to specific groups that
may be targeted by welfare and to the incentives associated with the payment schedule, including the phasing out. A clear result that is implied
by their analysis is that a relevant alternative shall be based on a restricted version of Basic Income. In this paper we will
propose a mean-tested Basic Income approach.
2. A Basic Income is key to the post automation economy – it is necessary to maintain consumer
demand which is the key internal link to the economy
Streithorst, 2015 – Evonomics Journalist [Tom, “How Basic Income Solves Capitalism’s Fundamental Problem”, Evonomics, December 20,
2015, http://evonomics.com/how-universal-basic-income-solves/ TA]

Over the past 80 years, we have solved the problem of demand in very different ways. The first is war. In 1938, US unemployment was
almost 20%. In 1944 it was barely 1%. Everybody knows World War II ended the Great Depression: but it is worth remembering that it wasn’t the slaughter of civilians or the destructions of cities that reinvigorated the
global economy, but rather the massive fiscal stimulus of government borrowing. Had we borrowed and spent as much on building schools, homes and roads as we did on defeating the Axis powers, the economic effect

would have been even greater. The advantage of military Keynesianism is political: conservatives who loathe government spending are able to overcome their distaste when it comes to war. The second, during the
post war Golden Age, was rising salaries. Between 1950 and 1970, the average American worker saw his real wages double: since then, they have barely gone up at all. Back then, productivity improvements translated
almost immediately into wage gains. As workers’ wages went up, so did consumer spending. Productivity increases meant each worker was able to make more stuff. Wage increases meant he was able to afford to buy it.

Advertising transformed luxuries into necessities. Productivity gains combined with wage hikes gave the Golden Age the greatest GDP growth the world has ever seen. In our most recent era, from 1982
until the financial crisis, the engine of economic expansion was ever increasing levels of private debt. After Reagan and Thatcher, median wages stopped going
up, even as productivity maintained its inexorable rise. With wages stagnant, only by taking on more debt were consumers able to keep spending enough to buy all they produced. As long as banks were happy to lend, the
economy managed to grow (albeit much more slowly than during the Golden Age) and the party could go on. But after the financial crisis, both household willingness to incur more debt and bank willingness to lend

contracted, leaving us with the stagnant economy we are trapped in today. These old methods of stimulating demand have passed their sell by dates. Global
war would reinvigorate the economy, but at an unbearable cost. Rising wages, unfortunately, are unlikely, with more and more of us replaceable by robots, software or much cheaper foreign workers. And higher levels of

Every year, technological progress allows us to make more goods and

debt not only increase inequality, they also engender financial instability. What is to be done?

services with fewer inputs of labour and capital. As consumers, this is wonderful. We can buy better and cheaper goods than ever before. As workers, however, productivity
increases threaten our jobs. As we need fewer workers to make the same amount of stuff, more of us become redundant. And it is likely to get worse. The rise of the robots may eliminate 47% of
existing jobs within the next two decades. Unfortunately, even though a robot can make an iPhone, it cannot buy one. If we are hurtling

towards a post scarcity future, only a Basic Income Guarantee can ensure sufficient demand to keep the global economy
ticking over. It is not just the poor that profit. The rich get exactly the same payment, in the form of a tax cut. Corporations also win. With more money in
consumers’ pockets, sales increase, raising profits. And since firms no longer need to provide a living wage, labour costs
could go down, which would give employers reason to hire. Meanwhile, workers, with a guaranteed income, no matter what, will have the freedom to tell an unreasonable
boss to “take this job and shove it.” These benefits suggest that a Basic Incoe Guarantee could command considerable support from

diverse sectors. But these are all merely side benefits of the BIG. If technological progress continues to eliminate jobs, the Basic Income
Guarantee may well be only way we will be able to maintain demand in a post-work future. By giving every citizen a
monthly cheque, a Basic Income Guarantee will be as fiscally stimulative as World War II without requiring the murder of
millions. The Basic Income Guarantee is economically sensible and politically practical. What then stands in its way?