Welfare Aff and Neg - Northwestern 2015

Welfare Surveillance
Affirmative/Negative
Welfare Surveillance
Affirmative
1AC
1AC
The United States Federal Government should substantially
curtail its surveillance conducted through means and moral
testing of social services.
Government benefits are not distributed equally they are
racially coded and doled out at least according to preexisting
notions of normalcy, race, class, and gender. While some
services, like Social Security, are unconditional entitlements,
programs intended to help persons living in poverty have
harsh conditions attached to them, operating under the
assumption that the poor are deviant and untrustworthy. This
creates a hyper regulatory state that uses surveillance of
social services to discipline and punish the most marginalized
in society. This requires a re-imagination of the role of the
state which requires institutional engagement.
Bach, Associate Professor of Law @ University of Tennessee, 14
(Wendy, The Hyperregulatory State: Women, Race, Poverty and Support, Yale
Journal of Law & Feminism, Vol. 25, No. 2)
In contrast, if you are a poor, and more likely than in a world without structural
racism, African American, and if you are living as a parent in the inner city, any
support you receive is likely to be structured quite differently . The meager
support that may be available comes in the form of welfare, Food Stamps, public
housing, underfunded, overpoliced schools and publically funded, overcrowded
health care facilities. Moreover, and central to the arguments put forward here, this
support is likely to come at an enormous punitive risk both within the
initial social welfare system and beyond . The regulatory mechanisms of those
systems of support are likely to function in at least two ways. They will, if you are
lucky and resourceful enough to navigate the many barriers to receipt, dole out
some much-needed but meager support. But the price of that support is
exposure to a set of mechanisms , here termed regulatory intersectionality, by
which regulatory systems intersect to share information and heighten the
adverse consequences of what those systems quite easily deem to be
unlawful or noncompliant conduct . Quite simply if you are poor, African
American and living in the inner city, by seeking support you risk far more than
simply being deprived of support . By seeking support you elevate your risk of
exposure to ever more punitive consequences. You risk exposure, in the examples in
this article, to a child welfare system that is far more likely to take and keep your
children and in which your children are likely to fare horribly. You also risk
exposure to a criminal justice system that is more likely to impose harsh
criminal consequences for your allegedly deviant conduct . The state you
encounter not only fails to respond to your need in any meaningful way. Instead
the state is hyperregulatory , meaning here that its mechanisms are targeted,
by race, class, gender and place, to exert punitive social control over poor,
African American women, their families and their communities . Feminist
political and legal theorists are currently engaged in a vital project. This work, led by
scholars like Martha Fineman and Maxine Eichner, teaches that both dominant
American political theory and, more importantly, the structures of current state
institutions fail to enable families to meet dependency needs and are, in the name
of an emaciated view of autonomy, obscenely content to leave gross inequality
in place . This work provides a potent critique, a clearly better vision of the
state we need and a theory that holds great promise in getting us there. As we
consider their vision, however, we must remember, as the work of Kimberle
Crenshaw, Khiara Bridges, Kaaryn Gustafson and Dorothy Roberts, among many
others, counsels, that if we are to build institutions that are responsive to
some of the most vulnerable among us , we must seek to understand the
particular institutional realities that constitute the relationship between poor and
disproportionately African American women and the current state, and we must ask
how these particular realities impact the path to a supportive or
responsive state.
Federal laws empower infiltration into personal details of

welfare recipients lives. Surveillance exists to enforce
conditions on political subjects that are meant to normalize
their behavior according to racist, heterosexist, and neoliberal
values. This constitutes a policy of neo-eugenics.
*NEG alts that dont take action turn suffering into a spectacle to be observed
instead of a problem to be stopped this locks in a relationship to Others that
transforms them into objects and their pain into our pleasure, which means the ALT
is both unethical and cant solve
*NEG DA impacts that are based on attempts to manage future conflicts cause neoeugenics because the entire idea underpinning the philosophy is that the states job
is to manage Life and push it into the future, but that ignores the lives that have to
be sacrificed in order to make that future livable that means you cant weigh the
DA unless they beat the case, otherwise the judges impact calculus is complicit in
mass slaughter
Smith, Government Prof @ Cornell, 11
(Anna Marie, Neo-eugenics: A Feminist Critique of Agamben, Occasions 1:2,

http://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/neo-eugenics-feminist-critique-agamben)
Agambens text, however, also lends itself to a more expansive reading. It can also be interpreted as an invitation to cultivate a
more acute sensitivity to the ways in which even the most humanitarian forms of governance can have, as their hidden core
principle, the brutal violation of fundamental human rights. As he defends the decision to wage war on Iraq, former President George
Bush proclaims the exemplary achievements of American democracy . But in this same
country, the State has stripped the welfare mother of almost all the basic
rights that make a human life worth living, such as the right to refuse
demeaning work . (This fact became all the more obvious, even to the corporate media, in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina in 2005.) The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 ( PRA) has eliminated her
statutory entitlement to poverty assistance ;[9] she must look to her state constitution to give her claim
to emergency aid any binding force. American constitutional law not only refuses to recognize
W.
the very concept of social rights [10] but deliberately refuses to construct the
poor as a suspect class where equal-protection doctrine is concerned .[11] The State is
empowered by the law to intervene in the intimate and sexual dimensions
of a poor single mothers life in ways that would be considered legally and ethically unacceptable if these
same interventions were aimed at professional women. The state has what the courts regard as a
legitimate interest in forcing the welfare mother to cooperate with child
support enforcement even if she is fleeing from a violent biological father ; it
can order her to disclose her sexual history and to open her home, the
personal conduct of her teenage children , and her very DNA structure [12] to
intensive governmental scrutiny. Federal law allows the states to deprive needy
families of benefits when the eligibility time limits are exceeded and to set benefit
levels at below-subsistence levels . Workfare rules require custodial mothers with
young children to perform duties out of the home on a rigid schedule even though
they may not have access to adequate and affordable childcare. In the guise of a poverty
program ostensibly aimed at families with dependent children, the state can put so much pressure on a poor single mother that it
places her in an absolutely desperate condition, one in which it becomes all the more likely that she will voluntarily give up her
children for adoption. Indeed, three states evidently do not want to leave the custodial relinquishment effect of poverty policy to
chance. They actually require welfare applicants to endure pro-adoption counseling and educational materials designed to
encourage themsolely on the basis of their application for means-tested aid alone, with not even the slightest allegation of child
There is hardly any difference between the

slurs that are commonly circulated in American society and government about the
welfare motherthat is, the demonizing representations that construct her as a
species of vermin or pestilenceand the absolutely obnoxious and horrific claim that
her life is not worth living and does not deserve to be lived .[14] But mainstream
American political rhetoric is also invested in portraying the states relationship with
the poor in a humanitarian light: the state is reluctantly withdrawing
redistributive supports only because they perversely fostered welfare
dependency, and it is introducing therapeutic interventions designed to
promote the work ethic and patriarchal and heterosexist family values.
What we are really witnessing, however, is a massive reduction in social rights and the
augmentation of a harsh punishment regime that advances racial-capitalist and
patriarchal interests by keeping the poor disorganized, desperate, and eager to
work for low wages.[15] Child support enforcement continues to fail as an antipoverty measuregiven the fact that the
abuse or neglectto relinquish their custodial rights.[13]
biological fathers of the children of welfare mothers are typically too poor to meet their legal obligationsbut the encapsulation of
millions of adults within custodial mother/obliged biological father dyads greatly enhances the states ability to render the poor mass
into a policeable totality. This tactic also interrupts the formation of solidaristic relations among the poor at an intimate level, and
perpetuates neoliberal and traditional family values by displacing entitlement with private patriarchal dependency.[16] Agamben,
like Foucault, encourages us to pay close attention not just to the eternal return of exclusion but to the structure of exclusion as well.
For his part, Foucault is perhaps the better theorist of the two where the institutionally specific analysis of disciplinary technology is
concerned. But they both read the text of State authority against the grain, as it were. In its ideological self-presentation, the State
establishes its governmental interests by referring to its showcase policies, namely the ones that are widely accepted as
mainstream measures for enhancing the normal citizens well-being. In the American case, we are seductively invited to position
ourselves as citizens of a country that has built up the best form of government in human history, one that is deeply committed to
securing the conditions necessary for the pursuit of the good life. Agamben and Foucault resist the lure of modern State
legitimation discourse. Refusing to follow the ostensive gesture of the State itselfagain, the state prefers to point out its
mainstream policies that serve the general populationAgamben and Foucault seek to interpret power relations by investigating
the extreme cases involving individuals who are rendered into nonpersons through the application of purportedly extraordinary
law (Agamben) or problematized fields of insufficiently disciplined subjectivity (Foucault). But Agamben would argue that Foucault
himself vacillates on this crucial point and at times endorses the view that unilateral forms of exclusionary governancethose that
are embodied in State practices such as banishment, the quarantining of the sick within fenced-off spaces like the leper colony, or
the execution of criminals, for examplewere more or less eclipsed by modern disciplinary technologies.[17] In my view, Foucaults
juridico-discursive and biopower regimes should be understood as ideal types that can bring to light the operations of power that are
constitutive of modern liberal democratic societies. The fact that Foucault did not address fascism in his development of these two
governance types is indicative of his scrupulous attention to the institutional specificities of distinct political regimes.[18] Further, it
is a virtue of Foucaults work that the political status of the individuals targeted by biopower remains somewhat ambiguous; to a
certain extent, they retain some types of liberal democratic rights even as they are excluded. Power in Foucaults model is a
sophisticated force that works best when it finds ways to bend freedom against itself, such that the subject misrecognizes his or her
disciplined condition as a form of liberation. Agamben would vigorously resist these suggestions. He would charge Foucault with
failing to push the investigation of the exception to its proper limit. Agambens eccentric reading of Foucault is consistent with his
ambitious objective, namely to establish a theory that lays bare the timeless structure of any possible form of Western governance.
From a political theory perspective, it is nevertheless important to note that Agamben proposes a salutary challenge to the status
we must investigate the

nature of sovereignty from the perspective of the exception, rather than the
mainstream, policy of the State. It is the politicization of bare life as such that
constitutes the decisive event of modernity, not the establishment of a liberal democracy dedicated to
quo. He is effectively insisting that we must reverse the analytical gaze of the social sciences:
securing the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The opposition that is taken for granted between absolutism and
democracy has always been a fragile one, and these two modes of governance are currently entering into a real zone of
indistinction. Absolutism only appears to lie at the other end of the regime-type continuum at a maximal distance from democracy.
Once we pierce the ideological obfuscations that are thrown up by the State,
we can grasp the fact that the absolutist assertion of sovereign power over
bare life is secretly tied to the most humanitarian moments of liberal
democratic State authority. Standing confidentlysome would say arrogantlyon our Enlightenment
[19]
inheritance, we westerners are enthralled by our own legitimation discourse, namely humanitarianism. We find it almost
inconceivable, for example, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw the line between imperialist military campaigns and
humanitarian aid projects.[20] Similarly, we, the American wealthy, like to tell ourselves that we have always been very generousif
not overly generoustoward the poor. It is, in fact, power that lies at the heart of poverty program design: its structures owe
everything to the struggles between racial-capitalist and patriarchal forces that are deeply invested in the production of a docile lowwage workforce and in the promotion of the traditional heterosexual family, on the one side, and progressive forces like the poor
Agambens ambitious deployment of

transhistorical overview is quite suggestive; like Hortense Spillerss concept of the American grammar
peoples protests and the civil rights movement, on the other.
book[21] (i.e., Spillerss diagnosis of the underlying structure of gender and race hierarchies that remains constant in American
his theory interrupts our complacent assumption that

liberal democratic formations are somehow magically endowed with such a distinct
orientation to the law, and such resilient and self-sustaining capacities, that we need not consider the
possibility that they can harbor antidemocratic moments such as slavery ,
imperialism , and eugenics at their very core , or that they can descend quite quickly into various
forms of absolutism. Agamben and Spillers help us to resist the lure of progressivism : the
myth that the West is always moving forwards in its bid to achieve a just form of
social cooperation . They show us how to grasp the continuities between the
various moments of constitutive exclusion in the history of American identity,
whether they involve the strategic production of the indigenous savage or that of
the slave woman and the welfare mother. However, Agamben, unlike Spillers, moves at
such a distance from historical specificities that he loses sight of institutionalized gendered dynamics.
His objective is not only to thematize Western discourse on a metaphysical level, in the Derridean sense, but to
establish a critical sociopolitical theory that can bring to light the fundamental
character of Western governance that has purportedly endured, like a timeless essence, from
Aristotles ancient Greece to post-9/11 American government . Like Spillers, Agamben
underlines the fact that biopolitics constructs the national population in a racially essentialist manner. But he cannot
detect the specificity of racial formations ; he cannot help us to understand the
ways in which the anti-Semitism of the Nazis resembles , but also deviates from,
institutional racism in contemporary American society . Further, he completely fails
to grasp the centrality of gender to the biopolitical project of producing
bare life . For Agamben, the sovereign preserves for itself the natural right to do anything to anyone.[22] As the line
culture from the colonial period to the present),
between legitimate authority and the right of the sovereign in a state of exception to protect the people by producing bare life is
increasingly blurred, we become unable to identify any one clear figure of the sacred man.[23] In effect, we are all virtually
homines sacri.[24] Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of
The historical record, however, makes it crystal clear that it is the

structurally disempowered who are most vulnerable to the exercise of arbitrary
state power in the state of emergency. Women are placed in especially
constrained positions by the modern State when it devotes itself to population
management. In the context of positive eugenics, the fittest women of the racial nation are asked to serve as the wombs
every living being.[25]
of the people through natalist propaganda and policies. Negative eugenics in turn promotes the exclusion of the unfit through
selective immigration controls, sterilization, and the discouragement of child-rearing. Poor women typically bear the brunt of these
policies. In some eugenic contexts, the unfit woman is offered partial redemption, but only insofar as she is rendered into a sterile
worker, a prostitute, or a military servant.[26] The practical implications of Agambens failure to address the historically specific and
stratified character of the States targeting (i.e., the fact that in the midst of an emergency, the State escalates its already
If we
convinced ourselves that vulnerability is equally distributed, we would implicitly
reinforce our already excessive tendency toward bourgeois self-regard.[27] We
would also foreclose all radical attempts to hold the agents who actively participate in
the establishment of eugenics policy , and those who benefit handsomely from its
operation, collectively responsible .[28] Out of our bourgeois narcissism, we would
refuse to face the Other and to receive the Others inscrutable and yet insistent
demand .[29] Instead of facing the Other, we would merely fixate on the image
of the Others suffering. We would derive compensation for our perceived
vulnerability through our consumption of this image ; it would become our fetish. We would
established class, race, ethnic, and gender profiling instead of striking out in an unpredictable manner) are sobering.
congratulate ourselves for having the fortitude to commodify suffering, and we would act as if we could exhaust our moral obligation
by doing so. Thus, we would forget that we had forgotten the Other and that we were keeping our backs turned against the Others
face. Fetishism, however, is not solidarity. If any person can be rendered into bare life, then we should
assume that Agambens absolute sovereign will strike in a random fashion, anywhere and everywhere at once. If absolutism is
omnipresent, then virtually every form of political organizing is doomed to fail. Once again, Agambens argument risks the
incitement of bourgeois self-regard and quietistic resignation. Agambens sensitization is one-sidedit raises our awareness of the
fact that it is the interests of powerful elites, not charity, that structure poverty programs, but it allows us to avoid the inconvenient
truth: the State remains a terrain of struggle, and it is our moral duty to contribute to the advance of social justice. Todays welfare
mothers are not strategically positioned in exactly the same way as the Nazis concentration camp inmates; nor are they subjected
to totalistic domination like the slave woman or Carrie Buck.[30] They can, and they do, engage in political organizing; they have a
fewalbeit far too fewallies in civil society, Congress, state legislatures, and local governments; and they are exercising their right
to self-determination against very steep odds.[31] To return to Agamben, what precisely is the relationship between human
reproduction and governance? Introducing Aristotles distinction between the life of the citizen and bare life, Agamben deploys a
distinctly liberal democratic topographic metaphor: In the classical world . . . simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the
strict sense, and remains confinedas merely reproductive lifeto the sphere of the oikos, home.[32] The concept of confining a
particular social practice to a distinct spatial region, like a sphere, seems to be at odds with the ancients organicism. To be sure,
Agamben refers in particular to Aristotles rejection of the argument that governing the polis amounted to nothing more than the
continuation of the sort of governing required in the household on a grander scale. But Agambens introductory passage on Aristotle
continues to muddy the water even further. At one moment he is referring to distinct spheres of governancethe political versus
the reproductivein which different types of leadership take different fields of human activity as their proper object. At the next, he
discusses Aristotles hierarchy of moral ends: man is born with regard to life, but exist[s] essentially with regard to the good
life.[33] In fact, the organicism that was proper to the ancients had a very specific character. The Greek citizens household was not
a distinct sphere of human intersubjectivity in the modern sense; household relations had a great deal of bearing upon the good of
the community and the ability of the polis to facilitate the pursuit of the good life. Ideally, the male citizen conducts himself ethically
when he acts as the head of the household, for he enters into relations with other citizens from the most felicitous position when he
does so, and the good of the polis depends upon the ethical performance of social roles in every nook and cranny of the citizens
world. It is also best for the citizen to manage his economic affairs properlythat is, to achieve a subsistence standard of living and
to generate the small surplus necessary for honoring virtuous friends with appropriate gifts. Ultimately, however, these domestic
matters ought to be determined by a set of ethical principles that are unique; the guiding principles for household management
cannot be derived from the ones that are proper to political deliberation. This is not because the household was located in a
separate domestic sphere, however. In the ideal polis, the citizen rules and is ruled by other citizens in turn. In the household, the
patriarch is directing subjects who allegedly do not meet the male citizens standard of rationality, namely women, children, and
slaves. Even if the good man is the same as the good citizen in the ideal polis, the art of governing ones peers remains distinct
from that pertaining to the management of ones dependents.[34] Let us assume, then, that the polis remains properly constituted,
and that the household in question is headed by a male citizen. In that case, we certainly cannot construct the household as if it
existed in a distinct sphereit is not wholly apart from the polis, and it is not a special place within the polis that cannot be
considered a proper object of public deliberation. The citizen has to adopt a different leadership posture when he applies himself to
the task of heading the household, but that is not because the polis has no interest in regulating reproduction. He does so only
because he must deal with his inferiors when he acts as the head of the household and manages his domestic affairs.[35]
Agambens use of Aristotle to set up his broader argument could distract us from the fact that Aristotle actually wanted the
legislator to take a deep interest in the management of human reproduction. In The Politics, for example, the discussion of
constitutional types is juxtaposed with a substantial section in which a plan for the ideal city-state is sketched out, complete with
advice on demographics, territorial considerations, the best division of labor, public planning, military preparation, and education.
[36] At its foundation, the polis must seek to enhance the moral development of the citizen,[37] but educational institutions work
best when they receive the best pupils. Reflecting the biological and medical thinking of his day, Aristotle lays out a model family
law. Indeed, the topic is treated as if the text does not sense any particular need for extraordinary explanation; for Aristotles
students,[38] this expansive view of the poliswhich includes population management within the scope of legitimate governmental
The legislator in the ideal city-state naturally concerns

[themselves] himself with the task of establishing the legal conditions that foster the
best types of human reproduction . The poliss interest in ensuring the reproduction of the best offspring is
interestswas entirely unremarkable.
so extensive that it may quite properly establish rigid and narrow age requirements for marriage (around eighteen for women and
thirty-seven for men).[39] The legislator is invited to consider a law that would require pregnant mothers to perform daily
pilgrimages in order to enhance their physical fitness.[40] As for the treatment of the unfit child, The Politics states plainly that
there should certainly be a law to prevent the rearing of deformed children.[41] The legislator is also counseled to establish the
upper limit of children in the ideal family and to ensure that miscarriages are induced when a family has reached that limit. Of
the liberal democratic idea of a right to privacy has no place in Aristotle's scheme.
Men and women form intimate partnerships, not as an expression of their individual
and autonomous wills, but to render service to the state by bringing children
into the world.[ 42] Fascist organicism similarly seeks to extend the grip of the sovereign into every corner of the
course,
Reich such that the will of the Fhrer defines virtually every field of social activity, from the courts to the market, the church, and the
family. Agamben quite rightly draws our attention to the integration of eugenics into fascist social policy. The National Socialists
sought to secure the life of the people by preserving the Aryan racial stock from miscegenation and degeneration.[43] They adopted
laws permitting the sterilization of those deemed to be carrying hereditary disorders of the body or the mind. They prohibited
marriage for anyone who was institutionalized or who suffered from contagious disease, mental illness, or hereditary disease. Only
those with Aryan blood were considered full citizens with the right to a passport, and Jews were not allowed to marry full citizens.
[44] Agamben could have also pointed to the fact that these prohibitions were combined with positive eugenics strategies. The
Aryan woman was charged with the duty of marrying an Aryan man, bearing children, and faithfully rearing the Reichs future
generation. Aryan women who bore more than four children received the Cross of Honor of the German mother. In Hermann Grings
Nine Commandments for the Workers Struggle, German Aryan women were called to take hold of the frying pan, dust pan and
broom and marry a man.[45] Taking inspiration from Agamben, and yet rejecting his metaphysical approach to governance, I would
contemporary social policy is an expression of neo-eugenics . Neo-eugenics is a

special kind of biopolitics that resembles fascist organicism but is unique in several key respects.
Eugenics is certainly alive and well in the United States today. Not only are
argue that
publications like The Bell Curve that espouse a theory of biologically determined and racially differentiated intelligence received as
we are also witnessing the training of a myriad of forces upon the

poor that effectively discourage them from forming kinship groups and bearing and
rearing children on their own terms .[46] The harsh character of poverty
assistance policy, the gap between the living wage and the minimum wage, genderand race-based discrimination, and the stratified nature of the labor market operate
in tandem. Together, they guarantee that millions of American adults will never earn
enough to support a family even when they do manage to find full-time
and year-round jobs . The racial bias of the criminal justice system places a disproportionate number of black and
mainstream texts, but
Latino men and women in prison at precisely the moment in their life cycles in which nonincarcerated adults typically start building
their families. American infant mortality rates are the worst for any developed country,[47] while HIV infection and AIDS continue to
hit poor women of color particularly hard. Even if a poor black woman beats the odds and manages to bear and rear a healthy child
and to provide him or her with an adequate diet, decent housing, a safe neighborhood, adequate childcare, and early education, she
is still exposed to the inequitable child welfare system that threatens to cancel out her parental rights in an arbitrary manner.[48]
Welfare Surveillance transforms entitlements to government

assistance into a privilege conferred onto the deserving
poor. The conditions enforced by surveillance construct
welfare recipients into subjects to be manipulated according to
the cultural values that are calculated by governmental elites.
The act of means and moral testing defines single-black
mothers as outside of the body politic, justifying continued
marginalization
Roberts, Law Prof @ Northwestern, 96
(Dorothy, Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,
http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1256:welfare012&catid=56&Itemid=179&showall=1&limitstart=)
The stratification of our welfare system that distributes benefits according to race
and gender also differentiates between two classes of inhabitants -- citizens and
subjects . Citizens receive welfare as an entitlement : Government has an
obligation to support citizens as compensation for their social contribution or as a
prerequisite to their full participation in political and economic life . For example, the
government pays citizens Social Security benefits that are unencumbered by behavioral conditions, caseworker investigations, or
Subjects , on the other hand, receive inferior, inadequate, and stigmatizing

relief at the government's discretion. Poor mothers who receive AFDC, for example, are considered unworthy
social stigma.
of government assistance; their benefits, set below the poverty level, are conditioned on conformance to behavioral rules and
This surveillance of welfare recipients' everyday

lives is so contrary to the government's respect for citizens that it unmistakably
marks these families as government subjects. Black organizers who agitated for relief entitlements during
submission to government inspection.
the Depression suggested that the investigation of applicants' morals was a violation of citizenship rights. One complained: "Your
Administrators here in Baltimore take it upon themselves to inquire into the morals of the applicant. . . . The writer does not believe
that the letter of the Relief law, or even its spirit gives the Administrators that authority. May I mention that in France, to hold a
moral inquest upon the applicant for aid is forbidden by law." Given this connection between citizenship and entitlement to welfare,
it is not surprising that current welfare reform proposals include the elimination of public assistance for undocumented immigrants.
The critical difference between these two forms of welfare lies in their relation to
individuals' autonomy. While welfare for citizens enables them to be self-ruling
persons , welfare for subjects enables the government to rule them. Gordon makes this
distinction in her defense of welfare entitlements: "Citizens have rights to which they are entitled by law, and losing this
understanding endangers the republic. . . . Moreover, the feeling of entitlement is also vital to the republic. It is the attitude of
The very relegation of

subjects to inferior programs that supervise and humiliate them reinforces their
lack of citizenship qualities while bolstering the virtues of the citizens who
receive dignified entitlements . Citizens' compensation by social insurance
makes them appear independent and self- sufficient; subjects' receipt of charity
makes them appear dependent and irresponsible . Current welfare reform rhetoric condemns
citizenship, the essence of independence; without it we would have subjects, not citizens."
mothers who receive AFDC for transmitting a pathology of "welfare dependency" to their children. According to this view,
reliance on this form of welfare reflects a lack of work ethic and leads to a myriad of
social problems, including crime, unwed motherhood, and long-term poverty . Yet
Americans do not view reliance on Social Security as "dependency" at all, despite
the program's strong redistributive effects and the millions of nonworking wives and
children who in fact depend on its benefits for subsistence. Gordon gives the following example of
the downward-spiraling process that results from stigmatizing welfare recipients: The stigmas of "welfare" and of
single motherhood intersect; hostility to the poor and hostility to deviant family
forms reinforce each other. The resentment undercuts political support for
the program , and benefits fall farther and farther behind inflation . The resulting
immiseration makes poor single mothers even more needy and less
politically attractive. The economic downturn of the last decade has deepened both the poverty and the
resentment, and created the impression that we are experiencing a new, unprecedented, and primarily minority social problem.
Black single mothers' inferior status in the welfare state has

intensified their political and economic marginalization, making them
even less worthy of citizenship rights . By casting their need for public assistance as "dependency,"
welfare reform rhetoric suggests that these women lack the independence required
to be citizens, entitled to dignified government support. B. Welfare as a Waiver of Privacy
One of the key differences between welfare extended to citizens and welfare
extended to subjects is the degree to which each conditions its benefits on
government intrusion into recipients' privacy. Public relief for single mothers is
structured to permit bureaucratic supervision of clients in order to determine
their eligibility based on both means and morals testing . Citizens avoid these
impositions because they receive their benefits in the form of entitlements that are
not subject to the discretion of caseworkers, supervisors, or administrators . Since
welfare's inception, states have conditioned payments on mothers' compliance with
standards of sexual and reproductive morality, such as "suitable home" or "man in
the house" rules. More recently, welfare mothers have been required to undergo
mandatory paternity proceedings involving state scrutiny of their intimate lives . Over
the last three years, at least thirty states have applied for federal waivers allowing them to
change their welfare programs to incorporate a form of behavior modification.
Thus,
Means testing and morals testing allow welfare bureaucrats to place recipients
under surveillance to check for cheating or lapses in eligibility. Such testing also forces
recipients to assume a submissive stance lest offended caseworkers cut them from the rolls. A Black domestic's experience with
poor relief in the 1930s remains typical of welfare recipients today: "The investigators, they were like detectives, like I had
committed a crime. . . . I had to tell them about my life, more than if I was on trial . . . the investigator searched my icebox . . . I was
ashamed of my life . . . that's how you're made to feel when you're down and out like you're nothing better than a criminal."
Privacy doctrine does not shield from state intrusion people who receive welfare
as subjects; rather, their acceptance of government benefits constitutes a waiver of
privacy . Because families are not entitled to government support, the Supreme
Court has reasoned, the government may force them to open up for inspection,
shrink, rearrange, or break up in order to qualify for benefits . Courts
sometimes find egregious invasions of poor families' privacy to be unconstitutional ,
but most of the day-to-day decisions of family life remain vulnerable to legitimate
state supervision . While poor single mothers (subjects) must endure government
surveillance for their paltry benefits, "self-sufficient" traditional families (citizens)
receive huge public subsidies -- Social Security, tax breaks, and
government-backed mortgages -- without any loss of privacy. The Supreme Court
invalidated early welfare eligibility requirements, such as AFDC's "man in the house" rule, designed to "legislate morality" of
recipients. Other precedents, however, affirm the state's power to condition eligibility for benefits on conformity with majoritarian
the Court upheld Maryland's regulation that placed

an absolute cap of $250 monthly per family, regardless of the family's size or
financial need. The Court found that the state's interest in encouraging employment
was a sufficiently rational reason to defeat recipients' equal protection challenge .
The Court rejected the objection that some families had no employable member on
the ground that "the Equal Protection Clause does not require that a State must
choose between attacking every aspect of a problem or not attacking the problem
at all." Nor do welfare recipients fare well under the unconstitutional conditions
doctrine, which provides that the government may not condition the conferral of
a benefit on the beneficiary's surrender of a constitutional right , although
the government may choose not to provide the benefit altogether. The Court has
avoided the unconstitutional conditions problem in cases involving public assistance
to the poor by distinguishing between direct state interference with a protected
activity and the state's mere refusal to subsidize a protected activity. The former, the Court
family norms. In Dandridge v. Williams, for example,
concedes, raises a constitutional issue because it involves state action, whereas the latter is a constitutionally insignificant failure to
act. For example, the Court refused to require the state or federal governments to pay the cost of abortion services for poor women,
even though they pay for the expenses incident to childbirth, reasoning that "[a]lthough government may not place obstacles in the
By regarding
welfare benefits as an undeserved subsidy, the Court allows the state to treat
recipients as subjects whose behavior may be modified to fit current
social policy.
path of a woman's exercise of her freedom of choice, it need not remove those not of its own creation."
Curtailing surveillance on social services is critical to providing

essential services for empowerment while simultaneously
protecting against intrusive and punitive conditions. The plan
strengthens the social safety net while weakening the carceral
state.
Bach, Associate Professor of Law @ University of Tennessee, 14
(Wendy, The Hyperregulatory State: Women, Race, Poverty and Support, Yale
Journal of Law & Feminism, Vol. 25, No. 2)
Though calls for universal benefits and/or significantly increased low-income

benefits administered by agencies like the IRS might well address some of the
concerns raised in this article, the heart of the critique falls on what remains of
programs designed explicitly to serve those in poverty . It also falls by
implication on those programs, essential to a robust supportive or responsive
state, that might provide significantly more support to poor families .
Addressing the twofold harm described above (privacy deprivation and punishment)
involves four steps: erecting more privacy protections and higher bars on
surveillance and monitoring in the first place; enforcing and creating new
privacy protections within systems once information is collected; building higher
walls between support systems and punishment systems, and, finally, exercising
significant caution in the face of calls for coordination and collaboration. In the
support programs discussed in this article, women are forced, as a condition of
either applying for the benefit (in the case of welfare) or seeking the service (in the
case of health care) to part with vital information that , in other settings and for
other people , would be considered private. Although the demand for and collection
of this information is clearly a harm in and of itself, whats important here is that the
information (and negative interpretation of the information) leads to the
punishment. The decision, imbedded within formal and informal legal and
regulatory structures described above, to seek a drug test leads to additional
intervention, questioning, and information acquisition. Doctors, nurses, and social
workers intervene and question, collecting information that ultimately results in
punitive actions against the family by the child protection and criminal justice
agencies. 253 One need only recall the sources for facts underlying the child
abuse prosecutions and the findings of Flavin and Paltrow to recall that health care
providers, social workers and child protection staff provide much of the information
to justify punishing these families. What if, instead, programs were restructured to
protect the informational privacy of the women involved? What if it were the
woman herself who chose whether she would submit to drug tests and
additional interviews . What if the contents of her medical records were in
fact confidential and there were a very high and enforceable bar against
disclosure? What if we significantly shifted program eligibility rules and
administrative structures to require the gathering of only minimal information
and respected the rights of families to keep their homes , their bodies , and, in
the vast majority of circumstances, the choices they make about how to
parent private? These proposals almost inevitably lead to calls of caution
concerning the welfare of children, and it is certainly true that we continue to need
mechanisms to intervene in cases of abuse and neglect. But before concluding that
we cannot take the legal and regulatory finger towards intervention off the scale
and rebalance it to lean much more strongly toward informational privacy, it is
important to remember that, for families who are not poor, this is already the case.
For communities that are not in poverty we apparently assume as a society that
having laws against child abuse and neglect and the ability to prosecute child abuse
is enough to protect children. It is only in those programs that actually (welfare) or
as a matter of practice (health care in poor communities) serve and target poor,
disproportionately African American communities that we have put our legal
and regulatory mechanism on the scale toward monitoring, information

gathering, information-sharing and escalating punishment. To rebalance the
state toward autonomy is to address this class and race disparity.
The plan solves the criminalization of welfare legal change

transforms the social construction of welfare recipients as
being cheaters or criminals
Kaaryn Gustafson Associate Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law.
2009 The Criminalization of Poverty Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology @
Northwestern School of Law
Many of the current welfare policies and practices are far removed from promoting
the actual welfare of low-income parents and their children . ... Notwithstanding a 1961 rule issued by the
Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare barring the arbitrary application of suitable home requirements, many welfare offices continued to engage in
midnight raids on the homes of ADC recipients in order to police "man in the house" rules. ... And Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign was spearheaded
by an attack on waste, fraud and abuse in welfare programs. ... In the 1990s, states began to attack welfare recipients through aggressive welfare fraud
investigations and criminal prosecutions. ... If they were found cheating - for example, underreporting their income or failing to report a change of
household composition - but were still income-eligible for aid, then the penalties were civil: their welfare benefits would typically be reduced by a certain
percentage each month until any overpayments were recouped by the state. ... Given the limited knowledge of the elements of welfare reform among
welfare recipients, most recipients are likely unaware of the felony drug exclusion. ... The counties pursue cash repayments from individuals who are no
It is important to note that since the federal welfare reforms of 1996,

many welfare advocates have actually encouraged more home visits (though not home searches)
of welfare recipients. ... Legislators could move closer to guaranteeing basic
privacy rights by repealing the federal welfare provisions that allow law
enforcement officials to access welfare records and states to drug test
welfare applicants . ... Numerous studies have questioned the community and fiscal benefits of fingerprint imaging, welfare sanctions,
longer receiving aid. ...
lifelong welfare exclusions, and criminal welfare prosecutions. ... Moreover, many fiscal studies fail to measure costs such as the effect of punitive policies
on families and communities, costs associated with increasing the number of parents in the criminal justice system, the cost to state and local
governments of policing the poor, and the long-term costs of stigmatizing government assistance and allowing poverty to go unalleviated. HIGHLIGHT:
The welfare system and the criminal justice system in the United States are becoming ever more tightly interwoven. Scholars, however, have not yet
examined the processes involved in these developments and what these developments mean for both the welfare system and for criminal jurisprudence.
Many people, including welfare recipients, treat the welfare and criminal justice
systems as analytically distinct. As a practical matter, however, the systems now
work in tandem. This Article maps the criminalization of welfare . First, this Article describes the
social construction of welfare fraud, tracing how "welfare queens" and welfare
cheating came to be the targets of much governmental attention and resources. The
Article then describes the various ways that criminal justice goals and strategies have become
embedded in the welfare system, as well as the ways that the welfare system has
become a tool of law enforcement. Next, the Article examines the treatment of welfare recipients in the courts, where the
poor have been relegated to an inferior status of rights-bearing citizenship, a status on par with parolees and probationers. In the end, the Article
encourages more careful policy analysis of these criminalizing practices, proposes a de-coupling of the economic security and crime control functions of
administrative and
criminal procedures must adapt to the transformations in welfare law to ensure that
welfare recipients enjoy basic constitutional protections. More research is suggested to measure the
the state, and offers recommendations for ensuring the constitutional rights of welfare recipients. Specifically,
unmeasured and the externalized costs associated with the criminalization of welfare.
AT: T
AT: T-Its
We Meet its all authorized by the federal government Federal law allows the states to conduct welfare surveillance
thats Smith.
AND this means it is the federal governments surveillance
Ready Mag 14
(Politics and Welfare Surveillance https://readymag.com/u18428914/44359/4/)
Welfare has been fiercely contested, both politically and socially, in the U.S. since the program was expanded under
welfare programs have

increasingly fell under surveillance by the federal government and the media. Any
mishaps, specifically those regarding the illegitimacy of recipients , are
greatly magnified in order to be used as a political weapon for conservative
groups.
FDR. With the Democratic and Republican parties staunchly divided on the issue,
We Meet the plan text says its at best this is a half-baked

solvency argument
Its means related to the USFG surveillance is done because of
federal requirements
Merriam Webster NO DATE (Merriam Webster Dictionary, online dictionary,
its, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/its)//ghs-VA
of or relating to it or itself especially as possessor, agent, or object of an action
<going to its kennel> <a child proud of its first drawings> <its final enactment into law>
Prefer
Limits we dont justify corporate surveillance or other
countries because the surveillance we curtail is authorized by
the federal government, not third parties.
AFF Ground the FG never conducts the surveillance itself its
delegated out based on statutory authority
Reasonability - competing interps cause a race to the bottom
and crowd out substance
A2: Its Surveillance is states

Legislators have the power to repeal the legal justifications
that allow the states to surveil
It is important to note that since the federal welfare reforms of 1996, many welfare
advocates have actually encouraged more home visits (though not home searches)
of welfare recipients. ... Legislators could move closer to guaranteeing basic
privacy rights by repealing the federal welfare provisions that allow law
enforcement officials to access welfare records and states to drug test
welfare applicants
AT: T Surveillance = Consent

We Meet- There is no consent the impoverished do not
choose to live on welfare, they are forced to because of the
structural position they were put into by racist
implementations of neoliberalism.
Counter-interpretation surveillance is observation with
preventative intent we meet because the government
surveys the poor to make sure they do not violate welfare
conditions
Lemos 11 (Andre, University of Baha, Locative Media and Surveillance at the
Boundaries of Informational Territories, 2011, https://books.google.com/books?

id=quEd4w61EYoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)//ghs-VA
Although they often appear to be synonymous, it is important to distinguish between informational
control, monitoring and surveillance so that the problem can be better understood. We consider control to
be the supervision of activities, or actions normally associated with government and authority over people, actions
Monitoring can be considered a form of observation to gather

information with a view to making projections or constructing scenarios and historical records, i.e., the action of
following up and evaluating data. Surveillance, however, can be defined as an act intended
to avoid something , as an observation whose purposes are preventive or as
behavior that is attentive, cautious or careful. It is interesting to note that in English and French
and processes.
the two words vigilant and surveillance, each of which is spelt the same way and has the same meaning in both
languages, are applied to someone who is particularly watchful and to acts associated with legal action or action by
We shall define surveillance as

actions that imply control and monitoring in accordance with Gow, for whom surveillance "implies
something quite specific as the intentional observation of someone's actions or the
intentional gathering of personal information in order to observe actions taken in the past or
future" (Gow. 2005. p. 8). According to this definition, surveillance actions presuppose monitoring and
control, but not all forms of control and/or monitoring can be called surveillance. It could be said that all forms of
surveillance require two elements: intent with a view to avoiding/causing something
the police intended to provide protection against crime, respectively.
and identification of individuals or groups by name. It seems to me to be difficult to say that there is surveillance if
there is no identification of the person under observation (anonymous) and no preventive intent (avoiding
something). To my mind it is an exaggeration to say, for example, that the system run by my cell phone operator
that controls and monitors my calls is keeping me under surveillance. Here there is identification but no intent.
However, it can certainly be used for that purpose. The Federal Police can request wiretaps and disclosure of
telephone records to monitor my telephone calls. The same can be said about the control and monitoring of users
by public transport operators. This is part of the administrative routine of the companies involved. Once again,
however, the system can be used for surveillance activities (a suspect can be kept under surveillance by the
companies' and/or police safety systems). Note the example further below of the recently implemented "Navigo
"card in France. It seems to me that the social networks, collaborative maps, mobile devices, wireless networks and
countless different databases that make up the information society do indeed control and monitor and offer a real
possibility of surveillance.
Prefer--No case meets by virtue of the social contract we all are

forced to consent to the rule of law, which means we can be
legally surveyed when we are suspects of crimes.
AFF Ground our interp prevents AFFs about regulation, but
preserves our ability to innovate with government infiltration
into privacy rights which is the core of the topic. They only
allow AFFs about national security and terrorism which makes
the topic stale and creates insular education
Reasonability competing interps cause a race to the bottom
and crowd out substance
A2: Reasonable Expectation

Welfare recipients enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy

While some judges have argued that home searches by welfare fraud investigators
should not be viewed as searches under the Fourth Amendment, these searches are
properly viewed as searches under established Fourth Amendment case law. Since
the 1970s, welfare [*707] recipients have typically had very little interaction with
government officials in their homes. While information gathering about the recipient
increased in the form of written and electronic information, welfare recipients began
to expect freedom from government intrusion into their homes. Under the twopronged Katz standard, welfare recipients certainly had a subjective expectation of
privacy from government intrusion in their own homes. Supreme Court cases
handed down over the last decade would suggest that welfare recipients, like
everyone other than parolees and probationers, n297 enjoy a reasonable
expectation of privacy within the home.
Risk
Predictions Fail
Forecasting fails- 3 reasons
Tetlock and Gardner 11
Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, 3-17-2011, "Why Most Predictions Are So Bad,"
Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/2011/03/17/why-predictions-bad-leadershipmanaging-forecast.html
The intelligence community is feeling the heat. The response to these charges is
also emphatic. We are not clairvoyant, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of
national intelligence, told a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. The
intelligence community was well aware that the ingredients for unrest were present
in Egypt. It said so often. But specific triggers for how and when instability would
lead to the collapse of various regimes cannot always be known or predicted. This
is an old debate that resumes whenever a major event catches the intelligence
community by surprise. Its also fruitless. It simply cannot be resolved with charges
and denials. But there is a constructive way to settle it. First, however, we must
recognize some fundamental realities. First, as natural science has revealed, our
ability to predict is limited by the nature of complex systems. Weather forecasts, for
example, are quite accurate a day or two out. Three or four days out, they are less
accurate. Beyond a week, we might as well flip a coin. As scientists learn more
about weather, and computing power and sophistication grow, this forecasting
horizon may be pushed out somewhat. But there will always be a point beyond
which meteorologists cannot see, even in theory. Prediction horizons vary, but the
general idea is the same whether experts are trying to forecast the weather,
economies, elections or social unrest: No matter how brilliant the analysts may be,
no matter how abundant the resources at their disposal, their vision can only go so
far. A second point is even more humbling: People are really bad at predicting the
future. This very much includes experts. In the largest and best-known test of the
accuracy of expert predictions, a study reported in Philip Tetlocks book Expert
Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, the average expert was
found to be only slight more accurate than a dart-throwing chimpanzee .
Many experts would have done better if they had made random guesses. And even
the best forecasters were beaten by arbitrary rules such as always predict no
change (a rule that worked very well for the first 30 years of Hosni Mubaraks
regime). Its easy to conclude that all hope is lost. But that would be wrong. In the
Tetlock study, what separated those with modest but significant predictive ability
from the utterly hopeless was their style of thinking. Experts who had one big idea
they were certain would reveal what was to come were handily beaten by those who
used diverse information and analytical models, were comfortable with complexity
and uncertainty and kept their confidence in check. What this and much other
research suggests is that the right training, tools and organization can make people
better forecasters. Their vision will be not be perfect, so they wont see to the
prediction horizon. But they will see closer to the horizon. And their vision will be as
good as anyones can reasonably be expected to be. With all their advantages,
intelligence agencies should reach that optimal level of accuracy. Do they? We dont
know, because we dont know what that optimal level is. That may change. One of
the goals of new IARPA-funded research is to find the optimal level of prediction.
Researchers will assemble five forecasting teams that will compete to design the
best possible methods of training forecasters, shaping judgments and aggregating
the predictions of individual forecasters. These methods will be put to the test when
the volunteers are asked to predict political and economic developments. Its a
huge undertaking. Tetlock has a team that alone will consist of 2,400 volunteers.
But at the end of the experiment, which will take four years, we should know much
more about how to improve forecastsand what level of accuracy we can reasonably
expect from intelligence agencies. This is critical work. Better forecasting and better
accountability could make a world of difference. But for that to happen, the
intelligence community and its critics first must acknowledge how much there is
that we do not know
Forecasting Fails- useless and we technology cant measure

accurately
Harford 14
Tim Harford, 5-30-2014, "An astonishing record of complete failure," Financial
Times, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/14e323ee-e602-11e3-aeef-00144feabdc0.html
For one of Britains most respected economists, Hendry gives the strong impression
of a man ploughing a lonely furrow. His choice of field the theory of economic
forecasting is to blame. It is viewed with scepticism not only by laymen but by
most academic economists, too. But his research a heady mix of bewildering
computer-assisted mathematics and straightforward common sense has
convinced me that economic forecasting shouldnt be consigned to the realm of
quackery quite yet. There is a simple reason why most economic forecasts are
useless, which is that forecasting is hard. We dont fully understand the underlying
economic processes that produce the results we wish to forecast (growth, inflation,
house prices), nor can we measure all the variables accurately, nor anticipate the
sudden shifts caused by politics or technological change. Some forecasts notably
of the price of shares and other assets are intrinsically self-defeating, because if it
was obvious that share prices would rise, then they would have risen already. But
one of Hendrys insights developed with his co-author Michael Clements is that
not all of these difficulties produce bad forecasts. What really screws up a forecast is
a structural break, which means that some underlying parameter has changed in
a way that wasnt anticipated in the forecasters model. These breaks happen with
alarming frequency, but the real problem is that conventional forecasting
approaches do not recognise them even after they have happened. Oil-price
forecasters have been predicting since 2000 that the oil price will fall; all the while it
has been climbing. The reverse problem applied during the 1980s: oil prices
collapsed, but the expert consensus was that the price would recover soon. That
consensus persisted for years. The pound appreciated sharply in 1997; for the next
eight years, forecasters predicted this appreciation would soon be reversed. In all
these cases, the forecasts were wrong because they had an inbuilt view of the
equilibrium oil price or sterling exchange rate. In each case, the equilibrium
changed to something new, and in each case, the forecasters wrongly predicted a
return to business as usual, again and again. The lesson is that a forecasting
technique that cannot deal with structural breaks is a forecasting technique that
can misfire almost indefinitely. Hendrys ultimate goal is to forecast structural
breaks.
Forecasting fails- highly inaccurate

Stevens 12
Jacqueline Stevens, 6-23-2012, "Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters," New York
Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/political-scientists-arelousy-forecasters.html
DESPERATE Action Alerts land in my in-box. Theyre from the American Political
Science Association and colleagues, many of whom fear grave threats to our
discipline. As a defense, theyve supplied talking points we can use to tell
Congressional representatives that political science is a critical part of our national
science agenda. Political scientists are defensive these days because in May the
House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating National Science Foundation
grants for political scientists. Soon the Senate may vote on similar legislation.
Colleagues, especially those who have received N.S.F. grants, will loathe me for
saying this, but just this once Im sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans
behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a
subject that has troubled me for decades: the government disproportionately
supports research that is amenable to statistical analyses and models even though
everyone knows the clean equations mask messy realities that contrived data sets
and assumptions dont, and cant, capture. Its an open secret in my discipline: in
terms of accurate political predictions (the fields benchmark for what counts as
science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of
time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists insistence,
during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the
United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold
war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was of
such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming
both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming. And yet, he
noted, None actually did so. Careers were made, prizes awarded and millions of
research dollars distributed to international relations experts, even though Nancy
Reagans astrologer may have had superior forecasting skills. Political
prognosticators fare just as poorly on domestic politics. In a peer-reviewed journal,
the political scientist Morris P. Fiorina wrote that we seem to have settled into a
persistent pattern of divided government of Republican presidents and
Democratic Congresses. Professor Fiorinas ideas, which synced nicely with the
conventional wisdom at the time, appeared in an article in 1992 just before the
Democrat Bill Clintons presidential victory and the Republican 1994 takeover of the
House. Alas, little has changed. Did any prominent N.S.F.-financed researchers
predict that an organization like Al Qaeda would change global and domestic politics
for at least a generation? Nope. Or that the Arab Spring would overthrow leaders in
Egypt, Libya and Tunisia? No, again. What about proposals for research into
questions that might favor Democratic politics and that political scientists seeking
N.S.F. financing do not ask perhaps, one colleague suggests, because N.S.F.
program officers discourage them? Why are my colleagues kowtowing to Congress
for research money that comes with ideological strings attached? The political
scientist Ted Hopf wrote in a 1993 article that experts failed to anticipate the Soviet
Unions collapse largely because the military establishment played such a big role in
setting the governments financing priorities. Directed by this logic of the cold war,
research dollars flowed from private foundations, government agencies and military
individual bureaucracies. Now, nearly 20 years later, the A.P.S.A. Web site trumpets
my colleagues collaboration with the government, most notably in the area of

defense, as a reason to retain political science N.S.F. financing. Many of todays
peer-reviewed studies offer trivial confirmations of the obvious and policy
documents filled with egregious, dangerous errors. My colleagues now point to
research by the political scientists and N.S.F. grant recipients James D. Fearon and
David D. Laitin that claims that civil wars result from weak states, and are not
caused by ethnic grievances. Numerous scholars have, however, convincingly
criticized Professors Fearon and Laitins work. In 2011 Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B.
Weidmann and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch wrote in the American Political Science
Review that rejecting messy factors, like grievances and inequalities, which are
hard to quantify, may lead to more elegant models that can be more easily tested,
but the fact remains that some of the most intractable and damaging conflict
processes in the contemporary world, including Sudan and the former Yugoslavia,
are largely about political and economic injustice, an observation that policy
makers could glean from a subscription to this newspaper and that nonetheless is
more astute than the insights offered by Professors Fearon and Laitin. How do we
know that these examples arent atypical cherries picked by a political theorist
munching sour grapes? Because in the 1980s, the political psychologist Philip E.
Tetlock began systematically quizzing 284 political experts most of whom were
political science Ph.D.s on dozens of basic questions, like whether a country
would go to war, leave NATO or change its boundaries or a political leader would
remain in office. His book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We
Know? won the A.P.S.A.s prize for the best book published on government, politics
or international affairs.
Forecasts fail- only marginally better than a coin toss

McClintock 14
Alex McClintock a journalist for the guardian and a newspaper editor Ba in communications and
media 12-31-14"Why most 'expert' predictions for 2015 will be wrong,"
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/why-most-expert-2015-predictions-will-bewrong/5993266
Its not just the end of the world weve been bad at predicting, though. Just days
before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, prominent economist Irving Fisher said shares
had reached a new, permanently high plateau. In 1943 the president of IBM
predicted that there might one day be a market for as many as five computers. On
the opposite end of the technology spectrum, 1950s promises of flying cars and
meals in pill form are yet to be realised. Despite that, there are still entire industries
devoted to predicting the future. Newspapers, magazines and television chat shows
are filled with economists, analysts, futurists and prognosticators of all kinds. Yet
according to a 20-year study undertaken by psychology professor and author Phillip
Tetlock, experts of all stripes are only marginally better than a coin toss at
predicting future events. In fact, theyre worse at it than basic computer
algorithms. Economist Tim Harford has looked at why the so-called experts are so
consistently wrong and come up with some interesting conclusions. All of these
people who produce economic and political forecasts ... they're not really trying to
see into the future, he says. That's not what these forecasts are. These forecasts
are marketing exercises, or they're cheering for their own side, or they're just trying
to catch the eye and get themselves on television. A lot of it is actually marketing
and whether the forecast turns out to be right or wrong is not really the aim of the
exercise. Another study is showing that some people are able to accurately predict
the near future with startling consistency, however. Like the earlier study, its run by
Professor Tetlock, but rather than focusing on experts, The Good Judgement Project
is testing the prediction skills of thousands of everyday people. Volunteers are
asked to forecast, for example, the outcome of an election or what will happen next
in Ukraine. Because the forecasts are short term, the researchers are able to see
who has been right and who has been wrong. And a small group of superforecasters has been right more often than not over the three year course of the
study. It's not that they always get them right, says Harford, but they get them
right a lot more often than you would expect by chance. They were also very good
at knowing their own limits, so they will say when it's a tossup, and that they have
no idea when they're uninformed. It all starts to sound a bit science fiction, but
according to Harford, theres a very simple explanation, one which can help you
improve your prediction skills as well. They keep getting feedback,' he says. 'They
keep seeing whether their forecasts were right or wrong and which of their forecasts
were right or wrong, and they're getting more feedback every day because they're
forecasting dozens of things at any one time. Most of us, if we think about the
forecasts we've made, we might remember one or two spectacular successes or
failures, but generally we're not keeping score.' One of the researchers I spoke to ...
said, "Keep score." That's it, all you need to know. You'll become a better forecaster.
AT IR predictions
IR predictions fail experiment of experts proves-forecasts are
slightly more accurate than random guessing
Gardner and tetlock 11
Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock, professor of organizational behavior at the Haas
Business School at the University of California-Berkeley and columnist and senior
writer, 7-11-2011, "Overcoming Our Aversion to Acknowledging Our Ignorance,"
Cato Unbound, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-philiptetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-acknowledging-our-ignorance
The editors may regret that short shelf-life some years, but surely not this one. Even
now, only halfway through the year, The World in 2011 bears little resemblance to
the world in 2011. Of the political turmoil in the Middle Eastthe revolutionary
movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syriawe find no hint in
The Economists forecast. Nor do we find a word about the earthquake/tsunami and
consequent disasters in Japan or the spillover effects on the viability of nuclear
power around the world. Or the killing of Osama bin Laden and the spillover effects
for al Qaeda and Pakistani and Afghan politics. So each of the top three global
events of the first half of 2011 were as unforeseen by The Economist as the next
great asteroid strike. This is not to mock The Economist, which has an unusually
deep bench of well-connected observers and analytical talent. A vast array of other
individuals and organizations issued forecasts for 2011 and none, to the best of our
knowledge, correctly predicted the top three global events of the first half of the
year. None predicted two of the events. Or even one. No doubt, there are sporadic
exceptions of which were unaware. So many pundits make so many predictions
that a few are bound to be bulls eyes. But it is a fact that almost all the best and
brightestin governments, universities, corporations, and intelligence agencies
were taken by surprise. Repeatedly. That is all too typical. Despite massive
investments of money, effort, and ingenuity, our ability to predict human affairs is
impressive only in its mediocrity. With metronomic regularity, what is expected does
not come to pass, while what isnt, does. In the most comprehensive analysis of
expert prediction ever conducted, Philip Tetlock assembled a group of some 280
anonymous volunteerseconomists, political scientists, intelligence analysts,
journalistswhose work involved forecasting to some degree or other. These
experts were then asked about a wide array of subjects. Will inflation rise, fall, or
stay the same? Will the presidential election be won by a Republican or Democrat?
Will there be open war on the Korean peninsula? Time frames varied. So did the
relative turbulence of the moment when the questions were asked, as the
experiment went on for years. In all, the experts made some 28,000 predictions.
Time passed, the veracity of the predictions was determined, the data analyzed,
and the average experts forecasts were revealed to be only slightly more accurate
than random guessingor, to put more harshly, only a bit better than the proverbial
dart-throwing chimpanzee. And the average expert performed slightly worse than a
still more mindless competition: simple extrapolation algorithms that automatically
predicted more of the same.
No predictions are absolute- low risk events happen and high

risk events dont happen
PhilipTetlock6
Philip Tetlock is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of
Arts and Sciences Ph.D. From Yale Professor of management and Professor of
psychology Princeton University Press (2006) Expert political judgment: How good is
it? How can we know?,
Challenges of scoring subjective probability forecasts. We cannot assess the
accuracy of experts predictions if we cannot figure out what they predicted. And
experts were reluctant to call outcomes either impossible or inevitable. They
hedged with expressions such as remote chance, maybe, and odds-on
favorite. Checking the correctness of vague verbiage is problematic. Words can
take on many meanings: likely could imply anything from barely better than
50/50 to 99 percent.19 Moreover, checking the correctness of numerical probability
estimates is problematic. Only judgments of zero (impossible) and 1.0 (inevitable)
are technically falsifiable. For all other values, wayward forecasters can argue that
we stum- bled into improbable worlds: low-probability events sometimes happen
and high-probability events sometimes do not. To break this impasse, we turned to
behavioral decision theorists who have had success in persuading other reluctant
professionals to translate verbal waffling into numerical probabilities as well as in
scoring these judgments.20 The key insight is that, although we can never know
whether there was a .1 chance in 1988 that the Soviet Union would disintegrate by
1993 or a .9 chance of Canada disinte- grating by 1998, we can measure the
accuracy of such judgments across many events (saved again by the law of large
numbers). These aggregate measures tell us how discriminating forecasters were:
do they assign larger probabilities to things that subsequently happen than to
things that do not? These measures also tell us how well calibrated forecasters
were: do events they assign .10 or .50 or .90 probabilities materialize roughly 10
percent or 50 percent or 90 percent of the time? And the Technical Appendix shows
us how to tweak these measures to tap into a variety of other finer-grained
conceptions of accuracy. 5. Challenging reality. We risk making false attributions of
good judgment if we fail to recognize the existence of legitimate ambiguity about
either what happened or the implications of what happened for the truth or falsity of
particular points of view.
Decision makers wont be one hundred percent accuratepredictions can be in the low risk
Philip Tetlock 6
This defense overlaps a lot with other defenses, such as exogenous-shock and
close-call counterfactual arguments that portray the observed outcome as fluky. But
there is a distinction. One could argue that we wound up inhabiting a low-likelihood
world without offering any extenuation (such as the higher-likelihood world almost
occurred) or excuse (unpredictable forces blew history off course). Decision makers
are constantly spinning the roulette wheel of history, so we should not be
astonished when the silver ball stops occasionally not in the black or red slots that
make up more than 90 percent of the wheel, but in one of the few green slots.
IR predictions fail- study proves scenarios can be inevitable

and impossible
Philip Tetlock 6
In the intensive unpacking experimental condition, experts responded to the same
questions with one key difference: the impossibility curve question now asked
experts to judge the likelihood of alternative, more violent endings that had been
decomposed into exhaustive and exclusive subsets. As Figure 7.7 shows, this set of
counterfactual scenarios was initially decomposed into subsets with fewer than
one hundred casualties or with one hundred or more casualties, that, in turn, were
broken into sub-subsets in which violence was limited to the Caribbean or violence
extended outside the Caribbean. Finally, all subsets with more than one hundred
casualties were broken down still further into those scenarios in which only
conventional weaponry was used and those in which nuclear weaponry was used.
After presenting these possibilities, we asked experts to perform the same
inevitabilityand impossibilitycurve exercises as in the control condition but to
do so for each of the six subsets that appear at the bottom of figure 7.7. We did not
expect experts to be blatantly inconsistent. Our working hypothesis was that, when
experts completed the two measures back to back, their judgments of the
retrospective likelihood of some form of peaceful outcome would mirror their
judgments of the retrospective likelihood of alternative, more violent, outcomes.
AT history
Predications suffer by using history- intuitive reasoning trumps
extensional probabilistic reasoning
Philip Tetlock 6
Political observers run the same risk when they look for patterns in random
concatenations of events. They would do better by thinking less. When we know the
base rates of possible outcomessay, the incum- bent wins 80 percent of the timeand
not much else, we should simply predict the more common outcome . But work on base
rate neglect suggests that people often insist on attaching high probabilities to low- frequency events.40 These
probabilities are rooted not in observations of relative frequency in relevant reference populations of cases, but
rather in case-specific hunches about causality that make some scenarios more imaginable than others .
A
plausible story of how a government might suddenly collapse counts for far more
than how often similar outcomes have occurred in the past. Forecasting accuracy
suffers when intuitive causal reasoning trumps extensional probabilistic reasoning. 41
AT Analysts
Decisions of different analyst are vastly different- there are 2
spectrums
Philip Tetlock 6
The search for correlates of good judgment across time and topics became more
successful when the spotlight shifted from what experts thought to how they
thought. Table 3.3 presents the thirteen items used to measure cognitive style, as
well as the results of a maximum likelihood factor analysis. The low and high
variable loadings on the first factor bear a striking resemblance to Isaiah Berlins
famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes in the history of ideas.5 Low
scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who know one big thing, aggressively
extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly
impatience with those who do not get it, and express considerable confidence
that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High
scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade),
are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive
exercises but rather as exercises in flexible ad hocery that require stitching
together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own
forecasting
Analysts arent better at predictions than anyone else- study

proves
Philip Tetlock 6
In this age of academic hyper specialization, there is no reason for supposing that
contributors to top journalsdistinguished political scientists, area study specialists,
economists, and so onare any better than journalists or attentive readers of the
New York Times in reading emerging situations. The data reported in chapters 2,
3, and 4 under- score this point. The analytical skills undergirding academic acclaim
conferred no advantage in forecasting and belief-updating exercises. If these nullhypothesis results capture the true state of nature, it is not surprising there is so
much disdain among high-ranking academics for forecasting exercises (the opposite
of the attitude I would expect if they thought they held some advantage). One social
science colleague told me with ill-concealed contempt: We leave that for the media
mavens. Caveats to the side, my own public-intellectual-goods proposal builds on
the principle of rigorous review that prevails in top-ranked academic journals. These
journals, like this project in miniature, are offspring of the Enlightenment quest to
identify correspondence and coherence bench- marks for judging claims that
transcend clashing schools of thought and establish criteria by which civilized
people can agree to resolve disagreementsor at least agree on terms for
disagreeing. To achieve legitimacy within a political or scholarly community, it is
necessary for aspiring, public-intellectual-goods providers not only to maintain high
evidentiary standards but also to honor basic norms of procedural fairness,
including (a) equality of treatment so that representatives of opposing views
perceive that the same epistemic ground rules apply to everyone; and (b)
responsiveness to protests about the application of standardized rules in cases in
which special circumstances allegedly arise.16
AT Neoconservative think tanks

Impact of neoconservative think tanks on American foreign policy
Arin 14
KUBILAY YADO ARIN 5-26-2014, "The Impact of Neoconservative Think Tanks on

American Foreign Policy," E-International Relations, http://www.eir.info/2014/05/26/the-impact-of-neoconservative-think-tanks-on-american-foreignpolicy/ Scholar at the Middle East Technical University at Ankara
After recruiting their staff from the most renowned think tanks, the Clinton and Bush administrations succeeded in influencing the public opinion in the US.
In this regard, policy advisers from think tanks are not merely viewed as objective scholars who give neutral recommendations to the government, but as
policy entrepreneurs who are associated with power blocs, foundations, corporations, and partisan politics. Did the neoconservative Project for a New
American Century form an alliance with the Bush Administration? In the article, the success of the neoconservative think tanks as an advocacy coalition is
, the alliance of the Christian Right and the neoconservative

intellectuals in think tanks (Heritage Foundation and AEI) with the financial elite did not only move the
Republican Party to the right, but also tried to manipulate public opinion under the
influence of sympathizing media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch (Mller 43-44). Neoconservative papers like the National
discussed. For the conservative turn
Journal, the Public Interest, and the American Spectator influence the op-eds of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. Liberal think tanks and
their contacts in Congress should be expelled from the government apparatus by losing their donors with the result that the neocons could gain access to
the state institutions and leave an imprint on the Clinton administration before the next election (Krugman 182-184). The Bush Administration VicePresident Cheney was the key player in the appointment of leading neoconservatives like Abrams, Armitage, Bolton, Wolfowitz, and Perle. Dorrien
characterizes Cheney as policy entrepreneur who was highly amenable for neoconservative proposals. Neither Dick Cheney nor Donald Rumsfeld had a
neoconservative tenure. Rather, both represented traditional Republican hawks who were receptive to neoconservative views. So both of them had signed
the founding charter of the Project for a New American Century. Cheney and Rumsfeld shared its unipolarism and thus were aligned with the
neoconservative movement (Dorrien, Imperial Designs 3). Hardline conservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld would never agree with the balance of power
or follow Buchanan in an old-fashioned isolationism. President George W. Bush may be close to the Christian Right and Vice-President Dick Cheney may be
the neoconservatives for ideological

predominance in the GOP, but both factions are in concord with them in the
unilateral foreign policy for the adherence of national interests, increased defense
spending, and going it alone. Though Donald Rumsfeld was no neoconservative, he was closely connected to Paul Wolfowitz,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Richard Perle. Indeed, he was a go-between among the neoconservatives, the
corporations, and politicians; he partly orchestrated the support of multinationals and arms producers to the neoconservative
considered a fiscal conservative. These two factions rival with
movement. Big business became the profiteer of neoconservative ideas that legitimized their interests (Velasco 73). Rumsfeld nominated neocons such as
Wolfowitz and Feith to senior positions in the DoD (Ibid. 207). The office of the Vice-President, the Pentagon, and the Defense Policy Board were
neoconservative strongholds (Dorrien, Imperial Designs 2). According to Peleg, the assertive hawks Cheney and Rumsfeld influenced George W. Bushs
decisions on foreign policy. In the case of Bush, one can assess that he had the same opinion on neoconservative thinking. In all probability, the President
made a decision after consulting his Vice President, while both were increasingly affected by neoconservatives who were incorporated in the Defense and
State Departments (Peleg 165). While Bushs speeches often included religious terms, he always stressed his resolve to unilaterally enhance American
neocons gave him

assurance that his failing policies were right, despite the loss of public opinion. In conveying his policies to the electorate, Bush used
the neoconservative argumentation that his promotion of liberty and democracy were
identical with American interests (Skidmore 209). The Bush Doctrine, the Neoconservative Concept for Primacy? In the
power. The resolute stance of Bush Jr. was the broadening of his Christian faith based on neoconservatism. The
enforcement of the Pax Americana, neocons were willing to approve tensions in diplomacy and international law: not the entire UN, but its perception as
fundament of the new world order would fall. From their perspective, this was a liberal illusion that the UN Security Council could exclusively legitimize
neocons
feared that the international institutions might be misused in an absolutely legal
and administrative framework to constrain American power by a sovereign world
government that strictly followed international law. By implication, neocons are
regarded as architects of an interventionist unilateralism because of their
endorsement of military conflict settlement. Neoconservative think tanks like the
AEI and the PNAC, whose members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and, Wolfowitz, not only demanded a significant
rise in defense spending, but also the challenging of regimes that were hostile to
American values and interests (Homolar-Riechmann 34-35). Wolfowitz began drafting the doctrine of pre-emptive attack and
the use of force or guarantee peace through international law in cooperation with other organizations (Halper and Clarke 40-47). Moreover,
unilateralism in 1992(Coffmann 5). As former member of the Bush Sr. administration, Wolfowitz formulated, in his time at the AEI and later at the PNAC,
The unilateral war strategy of the AEI

and the PNAC was set against the multilateral US foreign policy that had built the
United Nations and NATO. The Bush administration proceeded unilaterally against
other states for the preservation of the US national interest in security. While multilateral
which he co-founded, the Bush Doctrine formerly known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
cooperation under US hegemony was widely desirable, unilateralism provoked counterweight among France, Germany, Russia, and China, or the group of
states, the G-77 (Jger 838). The
neoconservatives saw the occupation of Iraq as first phase in the
reordering of the Near East. By 1997 the neoconservative think-tank the New American Century Project advocated a remaking of
the Middle East(Coffman 5). In its analysis, the Iraq war should secure democracy in the world. Iraq
should become the first democratic state in the Arab world and induce its
neighbours to emulate its progress. Islamism would lose ground, since economic prosperity and democratic freedom were
contagious. Americas military presence would have, according to neocons, a sobering effect on the authoritarian regimes in the region. The neocons,
however, primarily made the same observations, like all proponents of earlier foreign policy doctrines, about the frailness of their abstract theories to real
events. The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya proved the veracity of their assumptions after years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and monthslong air attacks to oust Gaddafi from power, according to the neoconservative Hoover Institution (Lagon and Shultz). Conclusion Following Sabatiers and
Jenkins-Smiths explanatory approach, the advocacy coalition neoconservatives have used their network of scholars, journalists, managers, bureaucrats,
and politicians to convince the foreign policy novice George W. Bush of their plans for the reordering of the Near East (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 3). Since
the foundation of the PNAC in 1997, the scholars exchanged views with the Republican members of Congress in testimonies. Even before the election of
Bush Jr., they could convey their unilateral stance not only to Republicans, but also to the Clinton administration, though they did not ultimately succeed
under Clinton. Not until Buh Jr. came into office were the neoconservatives able, under the leadership of their proponents Rumsfeld and Cheney, to
. Once in
government, they isolated dissenters like Colin Powell in the decision-making . As former
think-tank scholars, they provided Bush Jr. with analyses, ideology, and knowledge for his plans to topple Saddam Hussein. There existed a
coalition of interest and knowledge between the former scholars and their employer
in the White House, causing a learning effect and the socialization of
neoconservative ideas over group boundaries into the entire state apparatus and to
the GOP, resulting in a policy change. As a consequence a symbiosis of knowledge and
power, neoconservatives were linked to the Bush administration and the Republican
Congress. The changes in international politics led to a recalibration of the US role as
hegemon in a multipolar system to primacy in a unipolar system , which resulted in an alignment of
the decision-making process in foreign policy. So the USA succumbed to the temptation to maintain and
enhance, by military means, its position as hegemonic power in the world economy.
By conducting the war on terror, the political elites pursued their goal of universal
dominion under Bush Jr. After the dismissal of key neoconservatives from the Bush administration, the
unilateral foreign policy was altered. The alliance between the neoconservative PNAC and the administration ended after
implement their unilateral pursuit of US primacy, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the proclamation of the Bush Doctrine
the loss of majority in Congress in 2006, whereupon leading neoconservatives like Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz resigned and their think tank PNAC was
foreign policy should secure the military and economic strength after
the loss of the unipolar moment (Charles Krauthammer) for shaping a global consensus and
mutual agreement with the allies to face global challenges under US leadership (Nye,
closed (Reynolds). The new
Future of Soft Power 10). Even liberal internationalists contended: multilateralism when possible, going it alone when necessary (Maull 11).[1] In this
sense, Nye points to smart power that combines strategies of hard and soft power for providing US foreign policy the diplomatic legitimacy of military
interventions through the promotion of democracy, human rights, and the development of civic society.
The war on terror had
lessened the smart power of the US and, after 9/11, brought an overmilitarised foreign policy with deep cuts in foreign aid and
the budget of the State Department (Nye, Future of Soft Power 9-11). This is related to the impact of neoconservative think tanks AEI and PNAC, which, as
sectional interest groups, defined expansive foreign policy goals at cost of broadly conceived national interests. As a result, the assertive multilateralism of
neocons still represent the strongest

foreign policy faction in the GOP. They are allied with the Christian Right, which is lacking its own
foreign policy strategy. The neocons are rooted in the Pentagon and the arms industry. Their network in think tanks, government
the Clinton administration shifted to unilateral primacy under Bush Jr. The
agencies, economy, and media such as Fox News will not diminish in the coming years. In 2009, some of the same people started the Foreign Policy
Initiative. Many of Romneys key advisers have been drawn from this network and are credited by him with influencing his outlook (Judis). Out of Romneys
24 foreign policy advisers, 17 had worked for the Bush administration. As his advisers, the neocons formulated Romneys uncompromising stance towards
Russia, China, Iran, and the stalled Mideast peace process. Once again, the right-wing intellectuals made the headlines with their impact on American
foreign policy (Berman; Horowitz; Heilbrunn).
AT Perception
We should change how we focus- only permissible deviations
assure participants diverse views
Philip Tetlock 6
Unlike the precedent of academic journals, however, the proposal advanced here is
not centered around evaluating the explanatory strengths and weaknesses of
abstract theoretical accounts; the focus is on the capacity of flesh-and-blood
observers, drawing on whatever mix of street smarts and academic knowledge they
deem optimal, to decode real events unfolding in real time. To this end, observers
would be subject to the same bottom-line correspondence and coherence tests of
their judgments in this book. The only permissible deviations from standardization
would be those necessary to assure participants from diverse viewpoints that the
norms of procedural fairness are being respected. For example, at the beginning of
the forecasting exercise, all participating observers would be given the option of
specifying whether they wish to avail themselves of difficulty and value
adjustments to their forecasting accuracy scores; at the end of the exercise,
observers would be given the option of revising those adjustments as well as given
the opportunity to accept additional modifications such as controversy adjustments
(for residual uncertainty over what really happened) and fuzzy-set adjustments
(for residual uncertainty over what nearly happened (close-call counterfactuals) or
what might yet happen (off-on-timing). Observers could also opt either to keep their
results private (and use the resulting feedback purely for cognitive selfimprovement) or to go public (demonstrating their willingness to put their
reputations on the line).
AT nuclear war
Nuclear war very likely wont end humanity- physically

impossible given missiles in existence
Matthews 15
Dylan Matthews, 2-19-2015, "These are the 12 things most likely to destroy the
world," Vox, http://www.vox.com/2015/2/19/8069533/end-of-the-world
The "good" news here is that nuclear war could only end humanity under very
special circumstances. Limited exchanges, like the US's bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in World War II, would be humanitarian catastrophes but couldn't render
humans extinct. Even significantly larger exchanges fall short of the level of impact
Pamlin and Armstrong require. "Even if the entire populations of Europe, Russia and
the USA were directly wiped out in a nuclear war an outcome that some studies
have shown to be physically impossible, given population dispersal and the number
of missiles in existence
AT Nuclear Prolif
2 Reasons why nuclear proliferation wont happen- not as
dangerous and leadership
Philip Tetlock 6
Foxes clustered around more middle-of-the-road analyses. They con- ceded that
peace requires deftly managing balance-of-power relationships and implementing
credible deterrence commitments. But they also saw real risks of provoking
desperate states and setting off conflict spi- rals that could be avoided by adopting
a more empathic posture. These foxes made mental room for two contradictory
propositions: (a) nuclear proliferation is not as dangerous as supposed because such
weapons (coupled with secure second-strike capabilities) induce caution; (b) nuclear proliferation is every bit as dangerous as widely supposed because, absent
100 percent confidence in the leadership and command and control of each new
nuclear power, each instance of proliferation has the net effectafter subtracting
out the benefits of mutual deterrenceof increasing the likelihood of nuclear
war.28 One fox gets the last word: Im not smart enough to know who is right. Im
not sure anyone is. We dont have a lot of experience with nuclear war.
AT: Case Arguments
Stigma 2AC
Stigmatization of welfare recipients deters applicants
Barr 2k (Barbara Matacera Barr Highly respected professional with 15 years of experience in legal including 8 years
in the government sector, 5 years banking experience and 3 years of compliance/transparency. Performance driven with ability to
build relationships with business and technology personnel by identifying opportunities for improvement. Leverage skill-set as a
Certified Paralegal to understand and disseminate state and federal laws that govern interactions between HCPs and medical
device companies. Stigma: A Paper for Discussion Covering Kids National Program Office Southern Institute on Children
and Families 2000 http://www.coveringkidsandfamilies.org/resources/docs/Stigma.pdf)
Literature on stigma and its effects on participation in public programs has defined
the problem of stigma. Work that continues today with regard to eligibility simplification and enrollment has
begun to address the stigma affect ing program participation , and this work continues to define
and re-define the problem. The public in general still perceives Medicaid and welfare as
synonymously linked. As you will see below, the way people are treated is a big
contributor to the enduring negative perceptions of public-run programs, including
health coverage. Yet, what the existing literature and possibly the current work lacks are explicit solutions to
the defined problem. Theories exist and evidence is beginning to arise to support the theories. However, more work
needs to focus on the stigma associated with government-sponsored health coverage before we can confirm the
theories and test the solutions. The following section lists what the literature has stated about why individuals feel
Dynamics of stigma most

vividly operate through face-to-face interaction (Jarrett, 1996); 3 Stigma is associated with the
degree to which recipients accept the traditional ideology of individual self-reliance (Kerbo, 1976); Stigma can
be self-afflicting, emanating from the participants own recognition that they are
engaging in actions they view as self-demeaning , while recognizing it is more than this because it
stigmatized when using public programs, such as AFDC and Food Stamps.
involves other peoples evaluation of ones actions (Moffitt, 1983); Feelings of stigma are dependent on the
Applicants are
often treated disrespectfully and judged by case workers in welfare offices as
lazy and reluctant workers (Rosier and Corsaro, 1993); Welfare and public programs are
viewed as enabling people to get something for nothing and not being self-reliant
and willing to work hard (Besley and Coate, 1992); The culture of the welfare system
needs to build on peoples strengths, not reinforce negative stereotypes of welfare
mothers (Mills, 1996). III. What the Literature Says About How Welfare Recipients Internalize and Manage
audience, the specific situation and the individuals life history (Rogers-Dillons, 1995);
Stigma Welfare recipients tend to view themselves as different from the typical welfare recipient, referring to
welfare recipients as "they" not "we," dissociating themselves from the negative stereotype of people on welfare
(Briar, 1966); Recipients view themselves as supplicants, seeking assistance to help tide them over until things get
Those most likely to internalize the stigma of being a recipient of

welfare were also more likely to believe that people were poor because they are
lazy and irresponsible about work (Kerbo, 1976); Recipients who do not internalize stigma were less
likely to hold poor people responsible for their circumstances (Kerbo, 1976); 4 Welfare recipients feeling
the most negative impact of stigma are those who identify themselves with the
lower class and believe that this country is a land of equal opportunity (Goodban, 1985);
better (Briar, 1966);
Welfare recipients are MUCH less likely to vote and have

strong influence on young adults, risking long term
consequences studies prove
Swartz 9 (Teresa Toguchi Swartz, Amy Blackstone, Christopher Uggen, and Heather McLaughlin Swartz: Associate
Professor Ph.D. 2001. Blackstone: Associate Professor Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2003. Uggen: Christopher Uggen is the
McKnight Professor of sociology and criminology who works at University of Minnesota. McLaughlin: Ph.D from University of
Minnesota. WELFARE AND CITIZENSHIP: THE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE ON YOUNG ADULTS
CIVIC PARTICIPATION November 2, 2009
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771575/#__articleid630472aff-info)
The welfare system has recently undergone dramatic changes aimed at altering
financial dependency upon the state, marital status, and fertility of recipients (Haney and March 2003;
Hays 2003; Rogers-Dillon and Skrentny 1999). But how are these programs affecting the
citizenship of recipients? Contrary to assertions that any assistance from the welfare state
uniformly diminishes civic participation, our research indicates that the effects of government
assistance depend on the type of government program. Specifically, those involved with
stigmatizing and discretionary welfare programs were significantly less
likely to vote than non-recipients. On the other hand, there were no differences in voting for those
who received other forms of government assistance compared with non-recipients. Moreover, this research
shows that these effects on political participation extend beyond those that could
be accounted for by poverty and lower levels of education . The statistically significant
differences in the voting rates between those involved in different welfare state tiers imply differential
We
found the effect of welfare on voting to persist over time . In particular, welfare receipt
in 1996 continued to have a negative effect on voting in the 2000
elections . This is particularly disconcerting given that our respondents
were young adults who are establishing their civic engagement
trajectories and identities as citizens, especially given what we have seen here about the
strong influence of prior voting on later voting. If experiences with welfare
diminish their voting behaviors and feelings of efficacy during these early
years of adulthood, this may have long term consequences for later wellbeing and political involvement . This study goes beyond previous research and contributes to
theories of a bifurcated welfare state in several different respects. First we use a unique data set of
official voting records rather than the self-reported measures of previous studies .
What is more, this study controls for prior voting behavior that is, voting habits that preceded the
receipt of government assistance which provides much stronger evidence that the welfare
experience itself is what is driving dampened political participation in the more
stigmatized government assistance programs. Further, this study examines civic engagement in
consequences on voting of these two channels and provide evidence for the bifurcated welfare state thesis.
the form of volunteering, as well as voting.
AT: Drug Testing Good

Rhetoric of federal attempts to prevent drug abuse are
fundamentally flawed: they dont work, arent based on
statistics, and are attempts to increase social control
Katherine Beckett is an associate professor at the University of Washington and Theodore Sasson is an
associate professor at Middlebury College. 2004 The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America Retrieved from
https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAAahUKEwjAwaWz_erGAhUUNYgKHYy-B4A&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.publiceye.org%2Fdefendingjustice%2Fpdfs%2Fchapters
%2Ftoughcrime.pdf&ei=7JOtVcCbNpTqoASM_Z6ACA&usg=AFQjCNFXkSWKFeptURUvPQkxD5_gTXYiZQ&sig2=udt1maHxSyWdepxdU
QkojQ
Conclusion Beginning in the 1960s, conservative politicians at the national level

began to focus an unusual degree of attention on the problem of street crime. That
they did so is somewhat surprising: Not only is the capacity of federal
government officials to respond to this type of crime fairly limited, but
there was no indication that public concern about crime had increased or
that the public believed that getting tough was the best way to address
this problem . Similarly, in the 1980s, conservatives called for the wars on crime
and drugs before the public demonstrated any increased desire for such measures.
These politicians made law and order a centerpiece of their political platforms,
promoted the view that these social ills stem from permissiveness in the forms of
criminal justice leniency and welfare dependency, and argued for tough criminal
justice and welfare policies in order to address the problem. If not a response to
clear public demands to get tough on crime, how can the rise of the crime issue to
the center of the political stage be explained? The conservative initiative on these
issues was part of a larger effort to forge a new Republican electoral majority
following the collapse of the New Deal coalition. Doing so involved reaching out to
formerly Democratic, white voters who had been alienated by the (belated and
reluctant) Democratic embrace of the civil rights cause. Rhetoric about the collapse
of law and order, crime in the streets, and the need for strength in the face of chaos
proved to be a successful means of doing so. Conservative initiative on the crime
issue has also been aimed at shifting the governments role and responsibilities
from the provision of social welfare toward the protection of personal security. The
get-tough policies that have resulted from this campaign are not supported by the
findings of most sociological research, which suggest that severity of
punishment does not have a significant deterrent effect and that welfare
spending reduces rather than increases crime . Nevertheless, these policies
have been largely supported by both Republican and Democratic politicians for
complex political reasons, and, to a significant extent, by members of the public.
AT: Crime DA
Structural poverty causes crime- Statistics
Lichter and Crowley 02 (Daniel T. Lichter is professor of sociology and the
Robert F. Lazarus Chair in Population Studies at Ohio State University. Martha L.
Crowley is a doctoral candidate in the sociology department at Ohio State
University. June 2002 "Poverty in America: Beyond Welfare Reform"
www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2002/PovertyinAmericaBeyondWelfareReformPDF
106MB.aspx)
The association between poverty and crime arouses passionate debate among
social scientists and public opinion leaders. The empirical evidence is unequivocal:
A higher percentage of the poor than the nonpoor are arrested, convicted for violent
crimes, and incarcerated. Violent and property crime rates tend to be higher in poor
neighborhoods and economically depressed urban areas than in other areas.80 Poor
people are also more likely than other Americans to be the victims of crime (see
Table 3).81 But the interpretation of this evidence is not straightforward.
Table 3 Victims of Violent Crime by Income Level, 2000
Victims per 1,000 people age 12 or older
Rape/sexual
Annual income
Rape/Sexual Assault
Robbery Assault
Less than $7,500 4.3
8.1
45.1
$7,500-$14,999
1.6
6.9
35.9
$15,000-$24,999 3.2
4.8
27.2
$25,000-$34,999 1.2
3.1
33.7
$35,000-$49,999 1.6
3.5
25.3
$50,000-$74,999 1.5
2.2
29.7
$75,000 or more 0.8
1.8
20.3
Source: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization 2000: Changes
19992000 With Trends 1993-2000 (2001): Table 14.
One common view is that poverty and inequality sow the seeds of crime and
deviant social behavior. Poor children are more likely than other children to be
raised by single mothers, have minimal supervision, become involved with
delinquent peers, and be socialized into deviant subcultures, such as gangs and
organized crime. According to another view, disadvantaged persons, even if they
aspire to middle-class values and goals, may turn to illegal activities when they find
that legitimate routes to a better material life are blocked by their low educational
attainment or by discrimination.82 A related view holds that the poor are
disproportionately targeted for arrest, and that they are more likely to be convicted
and jailed than nonpoor people because they have weaker legal representation,
among other disadvantages. Critics claim that white-collar crime by wealthier
Americans is rarely targeted in the same way. Some analysts suggest that
delinquent or criminal behaviors lead directly to poverty. Underage drinking and
drug use, for example, may lead indirectly to other criminal behaviors, including
gang activity and violent and property crimes, that lead ultimately to dropping out
of school, unemployment, or unmarried childbearing. According to this view,
poverty is a consequence of bad decisionmaking early in life. Spending time in jail,
especially in early adulthood, may cut short education and job preparation,
elevating the likelihood of chronic poverty.
Being tough on crime is an excuse which has historically

justified racism and classism its true goal is in achieving a
politics of social control
Katherine Beckett is an associate professor at the University of Washington and Theodore Sasson is an
associate professor at Middlebury College. 2004 The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America Retrieved from
https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAAahUKEwjAwaWz_erGAhUUNYgKHYy-B4A&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.publiceye.org%2Fdefendingjustice%2Fpdfs%2Fchapters
%2Ftoughcrime.pdf&ei=7JOtVcCbNpTqoASM_Z6ACA&usg=AFQjCNFXkSWKFeptURUvPQkxD5_gTXYiZQ&sig2=udt1maHxSyWdepxdU
QkojQ
Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do more to cure crime in
America than quadrupling the funds for [Hubert] Humphreys war on poverty.
Richard Nixon, 38th President of the United States of America
[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole
problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while
not appearing to.
H.R. Haldeman, Nixons Chief of Staff
The tough on crime movement refers to a set of policies that emphasize
punishment as a primary, and often sole, response to crime. Mandatory sentencing,
Three strikes, truth-in-sentencing, quality of life policing, zero tolerance, and various
other proposals that result in longer and harsher penalties and the elimination of
rehabilitation and other programs are all contemporary examples of tough on
crime policies.
The effects of these policies are alarming . Local, state and federal governments
have all adopted and implemented these policies resulting in enormous increases in
drug arrests, more punitive sentencing proposals, resurgence of the death penalty,
departure from juvenile justice systems, and increased racial profiling and
community surveillance. While proponents claim these policies are raceneutral, poor people and people of color are overwhelmingly affected and
ensnared by the criminal justice system.
In the following article, scholars Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson argue that
conservative politicians have worked for decades to alter popular perceptions of
crime, delinquency, addiction, and poverty, and to promote policies that involve
getting tough and cracking down.1 They also challenge the claim that political
elites were simply responding to popular opinion about crime and punishment, and
instead argue that conservatives played a large role in shaping the publics
perceptions about crime. The authors document how the modern tough on crime
movement was part of a larger effort to increase votes for the Republican Party, and
more significantly, to redirect State policy away from social welfare toward social
control.
It is important to note that while the modern tough on crime movement and the
resulting incarceration boomcan be traced to late 1960s and early 1970s, many
activists justifiably argue that the U.S. government has always had a get tough
policy beginning with Native colonization. However, for the purposes of
understanding the modern Right, this section will focus primarily on the electoral
and political development of the get tough movement since the 1960s.
Over the past several decades, the U.S. government has enthusiastically declared
and waged wars against crime and drugs. In this article, we focus squarely on this
issue: Why have national-level politicians so vigorously waged a war on crime and
drugs that has created the largest prison population in the world ? We argue that in
response to the social challenges of the 1960s, conservative political

leadersand, increasingly, those at the national levelbegan to highlight
the problem of street crime in an attempt to steer state policy toward
social control and away from social welfare.
In what follows, we show that conservative politicians have worked for decades to
alter popular perceptions of crime, delinquency, addiction, and poverty, and to
promote policies that involve getting tough and cracking down. We also show
that when advocating such policies, these political elites were not simply
responding to popular beliefs and sentiments about crime and punishment,
although they did help to shape the publics perceptions of the crime problem and
preferences regarding what to do about it. Rather, their activities were part of a
larger effort to realign the electorate in ways that favor the GOP and, even more
significantly, to reorient state policy around social control rather than social welfare.
AT: Disads
Impact Calculus 2AC

Attempts to manage future conflicts cause neo-eugenics
because the entire idea underpinning the philosophy is that
the states job is to manage Life and push it into the future,
but that ignores the lives that have to be sacrificed in order to
make that future livable that means you cant weigh the DA
unless they beat the case, otherwise their impact calculus is
complicit in mass slaughter thats Smith
Focus on solving apocalyptic extinction scenarios is a
governance of fear that cements inequality by prioritizing the
social advancement of the elite at the expense of the most
poor a vote for the status quo is an alliance with a neoliberal
politics that tells the poor they dont deserve the chance to
survive
Samantha Lynn Kolpin, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2014 Fight the Dead, Fear the
Living: Post-Apocalyptic Narratives of Fear, Governance and Social Control
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2769&context=etd
Specifically, neoliberal governments pursue policies aimed at deregulating government control
of economic interests and increasing the privatization of traditionally public social
services. According to Giroux (2004), under neoliberal policies the rich get tax handouts and
corporate relief while the most basic health care services for children, elderly are
cut or dramatically reduced (p. 4). While neoliberal states emphasize deregulation in
economic spheres, it is argued that they conversely increase regulations in public
spheres to maximize individual opportunities to participate unrestrained in a
consumer-based culture. Power is created among a chain of actors, rather than relying on any sort of power imposed by one
overarching figure (Garland, 1997). Deukmedjian (2013) argues that neoliberalism reflects free market politics, which allows for the security and freedoms
there is a
decreased interest in providing social security for the larger population and an
increased interest in providing economic security to facilitate those individuals who
are rational, freethinking and willing and able to participate in a market society (Bell,
2011; Giroux, 2004). Based on these features, many critics have argued that neoliberalism is
marked by a commitment to social inequality, which results in a permanent
underclass . The focus is on ensuring a low cost of public services and a market model, leaving little room to provide social security for those in
the lower classes of society. People who are unable or unwilling to participate in capital
accumulation are seen as deviant. As such, neoliberal policy focuses on policing or regulating
these individuals (Brown, 2006; Maki, 2011). Maki (2011) considers the rule of neoliberalism and surveillance techniques for welfare
afforded to individuals to relate more to market demands than to the success or failure of any business. According to Giroux (2004),
recipients under Ontario Works. In order to justify the use of widespread welfare surveillance during the 1990s, neoliberal policy emphasized that the
widespread stereotypes of assumed criminality and fraud amongst welfare recipients demanded a more punitive and regulatory system to monitor
potential recipients. Other key arguments included the desire to reduce and control welfare caseloads (and costs) to ensure accountability to taxpayers,
and the privatization of social services to create an efficient centralized system that had the potential to offload some of the state's responsibility for the
poor onto the private market. Maki (2011) claims that welfare surveillance acts as a direct assault on the poor in the service of a neoliberal state.
Surveillance becomes a calculated practice for managing and manipulating human

behaviour (Henman, 2004, p. 176). The goal with these surveillance techniques is to
minimize the number of people on welfare, thereby forcing individuals to
participate in the market culture and acquire paid labour employment as a
means of survival. Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Governing through Fear It can be suggested that a
neoliberal style of government leads to a particular focus on governmentality,
biopolitics/biopower, and governing through fear . Foucault (1998) defines biopower as the subjugation of
bodies and ...control of populations (pg. 93). According to Foucault, biopower allows the power of the state to enter multiple institutions and social fields
as a means of managing and controlling the population (De Larrinage & Doucey, 2008). For example, Amoore (2006) discusses how the use of biometrics
through the US VISIT program (a management program that collects and analyzes biometric data as a means of tracking individuals) demonstrates the
, the concept of biopower

refers to the ability to manage the health of the population by
determining which individuals are able to access the health resources that
greatly contribute to their chances of survival . This is linked to the concept of governmentality, the
extent of government regulatory powers as a means of protecting and ensuring life. Essentially
notion that governmental power is decentralized and spread throughout government institutions. Giroux (2006) describes how biopower works in the
United States to render some groups disposable and privilege others within a permanent state of emergency. Similar trends can be seen in Canadian
government. Canavan (2011) discusses how census data collected by Statistics Canada can be used to help determine funding models for health
agencies, postsecondary academic programs or immigration policies, thereby influencing who could legally enter Canada or gain access to health care and
education for Canadian residents. Biopower retains its sovereign power to harm and to kill through the identification, monitoring, and regulations of certain
individuals based on bio-information (Canavan, 2011).
AT: Politics
AT political capital real

Political capital not real- history proves
Moraes 13
Frank Moraes is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has
worked in climate science, remote sensing, and throughout the computer industry.
And he has taught physics and is a writer at frankly curious., 1-7-2013, Political
Capital is a Myth," http://www.franklycurious.com/LMNucleus/index.php?
itemid=3575
What was this thing that Bush intended to spend? It is usually said that political
capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush
meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor and kill the gays. But he used his political
capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this proves the point, but
does anyone really think if Bush had decided to use his political capital destroying
food stamps and Medicaid that he would have succeeded any better? The truth was
that Bush's political capital didn't exist. Let's look at more recent events: the Fiscal
Cliff. Obama didn't win that fight because the people who voted for him demanded
it. He won it because everyone knew that in the new year he would still be
president. Tax rates were going up. Boehner took the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was
the best deal that he felt he could get. He didn't fold because of some magic
political capital that Obama could wave over him. There is no doubt that public
opinion does affect how politicians act. Even politicians in small safe districts have
to worry that larger political trends may end up making them look stupid, out of
touch, or just cruel. But beyond that, they really don't care. If they did, then
everyone in the House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate
and the associated political capital. But they don't, because presidential elections
have consequencesfor who's in the White House. They don't have much
consequence for the Representative from the Third District of California.
Political capital didnt work before wont work now- Clinton proves
Klein 12
Ezra Klein, 3-19-2012, currently the editor and chief of vox graduated from UCLA
and is an editor and columnist for the Washington Post "The Unpersuaded," New
Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/the-unpersuaded-2
A study by the Gallup organization, from 2004, found that, compared with all the Presidential job-approval ratings it had on record, Reagans was slightly
below average, at fifty-three per cent. It was only after he left office that Americans came to see him as an unusually likable and effective leader.
According to Edwards, Reagans real achievement was to take advantage of a transformation that predated him. Edwards quotes various political
scientists who found that conservative attitudes peaked, and liberal attitudes plateaued, in the late nineteen-seventies, and that Reagan was the
beneficiary of these trends, rather than their instigator. Some of Reagans closest allies support this view. Martin Anderson, who served as Reagans chief
domestic-policy adviser, wrote, What has been called the Reagan revolution is not completely, or even mostly, due to Ronald Reagan. . . . It was the other
way around. Edwards later wrote, As one can imagine, I was a big hit with the auditorium full of dedicated scholars of rhetoric. Edwardss views are no
longer considered radical in political-science circles, in part because he has marshalled so much evidence in support of them. In his book On Deaf Ears:
The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (2003), he expanded the poll-based rigor that he applied to Reagans rhetorical influence to that of nearly every other
President since the nineteen-thirties. Franklin Delano Roosevelts fireside chats are perhaps the most frequently cited example of Presidential persuasion.
Cue Edwards: He gave only two or three fireside chats a year, and rarely did he focus them on legislation under consideration in Congress. It appears that
FDR only used a fireside chat to discuss such matters on four occasions, the clearest example being the broadcast on March 9, 1937, on the ill-fated
Court-packing bill. Edwards also quotes the political scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell, who, in a more systematic examination of Roosevelts
radio addresses, found that they fostered less than a 1 percentage point increase in his approval rating. His more traditional speeches didnt do any
. No President worked
harder to persuade the public, Edwards says, than Bill Clinton. Between his first inauguration, in January, 1993, and
his first midterm election, in November, 1994, he travelled to nearly two hundred cities and
towns, and made more than two hundred appearances, to sell his Presidency, his
legislative initiatives (notably his health-care bill), and his party. But his poll numbers fell, the healthcare bill failed, and, in the next election, the Republicans took control of the House
of Representatives for the first time in more than forty years. Yet Clinton never gave up on the idea that
better. He was unable to persuade Americans to enter the Second World War, for example, until Pearl Harbor
all he needed was a few more speeches, or a slightly better message. Ive got to . . . spend more time communicating with the American people, the
President said in a 1994 interview. Edwards notes, It seems never to have occurred to him or his staff that his basic strategy may have been inherently
George W. Bush was similarly invested in his persuasive ability
flawed.
. After the 2004 election, the
Bush Administration turned to the longtime conservative dream of privatizing Social Security. Bush led the effort, with an unprecedented nationwide push
I earned
capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. But the poll
numbers for privatizationand for the Presidentkept dropping, and the
Administration turned to other issues. Obama, too, believes in the power of
Presidential rhetoric. After watching the poll numbers for his health-care plan, his
stimulus bill, his Presidency, and his party decline throughout 2010, he told Peter
Baker, of the Times, that he hadnt done a good enough job communicating with the
American people: I think anybody whos occupied this office has to remember that
success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you cant be
neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion. The annual State of the Union address offers the clearest
that took him to sixty cities in sixty days. Let me put it to you this way, he said at a press conference, two days after the election.
example of the misconception. The best speechwriters are put on the task. The biggest policy announcements are saved for it. The speech is carried on all
the major networks, and Americans have traditionally considered watching it to be something of a civic duty. And yet Gallup, after reviewing polls dating
back to 1978, concluded that these speeches rarely affect a presidents public standing in a meaningful way, despite the amount of attention they
receive. Obamas 2012 address fit the pattern. His approval rating was forty-six per cent on the day of the speech, and forty-seven per cent a week later.
Presidents have plenty of pollsters on staff, and they give many speeches in the course of a year. So how do they so systematically overestimate the
importance of those speeches? Edwards believes that by the time Presidents reach the White House their careers have taught them that they can
persuade anyone of anything. Think about how these guys become President, he says. The normal way is talking for two years. Thats all you do, and
somehow you win. You must be a really persuasive fellow. But being President isnt the same as running for President. When youre running for President,
giving a good speech helps you achieve your goals. When you are President, giving a good speech can prevent you from achieving them. In January, 2004,
George W. Bush announced his intention to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond. It was an occasion
that might have presented a moment of bipartisan unity: a Republican President was proposing to spend billions of dollars on a public project to further
John F. Kennedys dream of venturing deep into the cosmos. As Frances Lee, now a professor at the University of Maryland, recalls, That wasnt a partisan
issue at all. Democrats had no position on sending a mission to Mars. But, she says, they suddenly began to develop one. They began to believe it was a
waste of money. Congressional Democrats pushed the argument in press releases, public statements, and television appearances. In response, the White
House, which had hinted that the Mars mission would feature prominently in the State of the Union address, dropped it from the speech. The experience
helped to crystallize something that
AT political capital key

Political capital doesnt do anything- if a party wants something to pass
they have to be convinced against
Klein 12
Lee had been thinking about. Most of the work on the relationship between the
President and Congress was about the President as the agenda setter, she says. I
was coming at it from the perspective of the increase in partisanship, and so I
looked at Presidents not as legislative leaders but as party leaders. That changes
things dramatically. As Lee writes in her book Beyond Ideology (2009), there are inherent zero-sum
conflicts between the two parties political interests as they seek to win elections.
Put more simply, the Presidents party cant win unless the other party loses. And
both parties know it. This, Lee decided, is the true nature of our political system. To
test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between
1981 and 2004. She found that a Presidents powers of persuasion were strong, but
only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars
varietythey should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans.
Absent a Presidents involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of
the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The
same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised
taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the
divide was even sharper. One way of interpreting this is that party members let their opinion of the President influence their
evaluation of the issues. Thats not entirely unreasonable. A Democrat might have supported an intervention in Iraq but questioned George W. Bushs
ability to manage it effectively. Another interpretation is that party members let their political incentives influence how they evaluate policy. Whatever
people think about raw policy issues, theyre aware that Presidential successes will help the Presidents party and hurt the opposing party, Lee says. Its
not to say theyre entirely cynical, but the fact that success is useful to the Presidents party is going to have an effect on how members respond. Or, to
paraphrase Upton Sinclair, its difficult to get a man to support something if his relection depends on his not supporting it. Both parties are guilty of this
practice. Karl Rove, President Bushs deputy chief of staff, recalls discussing the Social Security privatization plan with a sympathetic Democrat on the
House Ways and Means Committee. He says that the representative told him, You wouldnt get everything you want and I wouldnt get everything I want,
but we could solve the problem. But I cant do it because my leadership wont let me. Rove says, It was less about Social Security than it was about
George W. Bush. At various times during the nineteen-nineties, Clinton and other Democrats had been open to adding some form of private accounts to
Social Security, and in 1997 there were, reportedly, quiet discussions between Democrats and Republicans about doing exactly that. In theory, this
background might have led to a compromise in 2005, but Bushs aggressive sales pitch had polarized the issue. The Obama Administration was taken by
surprise when congressional Republicans turned against the individual mandate in health-care reform; it was the Republicans, after all, who had
championed the idea, in 1993, as an alternative to the Clinton initiative. During the next decade, dozens of Senate Republicans co-sponsored health-care
plans that included a mandate. Mitt Romney, of course, passed one when he was governor of Massachusetts. In 2007, when Senator Jim DeMint, of South
Carolinanow a favorite of the Tea Partyendorsed Romney for President, he cited his health-care plan as a reason for doing so. Senator Orrin Hatch, of
Utah, who supported the mandate before he opposed it, shrugs off his partys change of heart. We were fighting Hillarycare, he has said, of the
Republicans original position. In other words, Clinton polarized Republicans against one health-care proposal, and then Obama turned them against
another. Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, takes Lees thesis even further. The more high-profile the communication effort, the less
likely it is to succeed, he says. In education reform, I think Obama has done brilliantly, largely because its out of the press. But on higher-profile things,
like deficit reduction, hes had a much tougher time
Legislation would have passed anyway- without the shift

Hirsh 13
Michael Hirsh, 2-7-2013, Michael Hirsh is the national editor for Politico Magazine. He is the former
foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek. He was a member of JournoList Author.
"Theres No Such Thing as Political Capital," national journal,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207
As a result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the
way people are permitted to buy them. Its impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more
than cosmetic changes to gun laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new
possibilities exist now that didnt a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the Senates so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard
for a new spirit of compromise on immigration reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would
make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would self-deport. But this turnaround has very little to do
with Obamas personal influencehis political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do with just two numbers: 71 and 27. Thats 71
percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his
advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a
surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of
the Republican Partys recent introspection, and the realization by its more
thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of
Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic death in a
country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have
fallen into the minority. Its got nothing to do with Obamas political capital or,
indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that political capital is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for mandate or
momentum in the aftermath of a decisive electionand just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he
actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasnt, he has a better claim on the countrys mood and
direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. Its an unquantifiable but meaningful concept, says Norman
Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. You cant really look at a president and say hes got 37 ounces of political capital. But the fact is,
its a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side.
Obamas pc doesnt work- democrats ignored him

Brandner and walsh 15
Eric Bradner and Deirdre Walsh, Cnn, 6-13-2015, "Dems reject Obama's key trade
proposal in House vote," CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/12/politics/white-housetpp-trade-deal-congress/
Sensing his free trade agenda was hours from a stunning defeat, President Barack
Obama went to Capitol Hill on Friday morning to make a personal plea for his own
party's support. Democrats ignored him. And now, the prospects for the TransPacific Partnership, the biggest free trade deal in history, to be finalized and
adopted are grim -- unless Democrats can be convinced to change their minds or
Republicans can find another way to revive the bills and rescue Obama's biggest
second-term legislative priority. The House overwhelmingly rejected the first in a
series of trade bills Friday, with Democrats voting against a program that aids
displaced workers -- in large part because, under the chamber's procedures, its
defeat meant the vote on the so-called "fast track" bill that followed was only
symbolic, so the measure couldn't be sent to Obama's desk. In a statement
released Friday afternoon, Obama praised the approval of the fast-track bill and
continued to press for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. "These kinds of
agreements make sure that the global economy's rules aren't written by countries
like China; they're written by the United States of America," Obama said. "And to
stand in their way is to do nothing but preserve the long-term status quo for
American workers, and make it even harder for them to succeed." But Friday's
votes provided the clearest evidence yet that, with 19 months left in his presidency,
Obama's pulpit is less bully than it's ever been before. It also showcased the
strength of populist elements of both parties, who beat back an intense lobbying
push from traditional Washington forces like the Chamber of Commerce and the
National Association of Manufacturers
Congress is not convinced by Obama

Klein 12
Richard Neustadt, who died in 2003, was the most influential scholar of the American Presidency. He was a founder of Harvards Kennedy School of
Government and an adviser to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton, and, in his book Presidential Power (1960), he wrote the
President
Barack Obama prepared to exercise that power. Frustrated with the slow recovery of
the economy, he wanted to throw the weight of his office behind a major new
stimulus package, the American Jobs Act. To this end, the White House announced
that the President would deliver a televised speech to a joint session of Congress,
and, as is customary, the President sent a letter to the Speaker of the House, John
Boehner, asking him to schedule the address for September 7th. Boehner, the man
Obama needed to persuade above all others, said no. In a written reply to the President, the Speaker said
most frequently quoted line in Presidential studies: The power of the presidency is the power to persuade. On August 31st of last year,
that the House had votes scheduled for six-thirty that evening. He added, It is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening,
when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks. Few believed that this was all there
that the Republican Presidential candidates were

scheduled to hold a televised debate at the Reagan Library on the seventh, and
Obamas speech would upstage it. The White House, meanwhile, had its own concerns: Boehners suggested date would pit
the President against the opening game of the N.F.L. season. No Speaker of the House had ever refused a
Presidents request to address a joint session of Congress, but the House Republicans refused to
budge, and the back-and-forth, which was dominating and delighting the political
news media, threatened to overwhelm the Presidents message on jobs. In the end, Obama
was to it. Boehners real objection, most thought, was
agreed to speak on the eighth. He was in a combative mood, and, after a summer in which the Republicans had driven the economic debate, with their
brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, the Democrats were thrilled to see him take back the legislative initiative. When the TV ratings came in, the White
House was relieved: with thirty-one million viewers, the President had beaten the N.F.L. But, in the days following the speech, Obamas approval rating was
essentially unchangedaccording to a Gallup poll, it actually dropped a percentage point. The audience, apparently, had not been won over. Neither had
The White House attempted to

break the act into component parts, but none of the major provisionsexpanded
payroll-tax cuts, infrastructure investment, and a tax credit for businesses that hired
unemployed workershave passed. The Presidents effort at persuasion failed. The
Congress: the American Jobs Act was filibustered in the Senate and ignored in the House.
question is, could it have succeeded? In 1993, George Edwards, the director of the Center for Presidential Studies, at Texas A. & M. University, sponsored a
program in Presidential rhetoric. The program led to a conference, and the organizers asked their patron to present a paper. Edwards didnt know anything
about Presidential rhetoric himself, however, so he asked the organizers for a list of the best works in the field to help him prepare. Like many political
scientists, Edwards is an empiricist. He deals in numbers and tables and charts, and even curates something called the Presidential Data Archive. The
studies he read did not impress him. One, for example, concluded that public speech no longer attends the processes of governanceit is governance,
but offered no rigorous evidence. Instead, the author justified his findings with vague statements like One anecdote should suffice to make this latter
point. Nearly twenty years later, Edwards still sounds offended. They were talking about Presidential speeches as if they were doing literary criticism,
he says. I just started underlining the claims that were faulty. As a result, his conference presentation, Presidential Rhetoric: What Difference Does It
Make?, was less a contribution to the research than a frontal assault on it. The paper consists largely of quotations from the other political scientists
work, followed by comments such as He is able to offer no systematic evidence, and We have no reason to accept such a conclusion, and Sometimes
the authors assertions, implicit or explicit, are clearly wrong. Edwards ended his presentation with a study of his own, on Ronald Reagan, who is
generally regarded as one of the Presidencys great communicators. Edwards wrote, If we cannot find evidence of the impact of the rhetoric of Ronald
Reagan, then we have reason to reconsider the broad assumptions regarding the consequences of rhetoric. As it turns out, there was reason to
reconsider. Reagan succeeded in passing major provisions of his agenda, such as the 1981 tax cuts, but, Edwards wrote, surveys of public opinion have
found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to
minoritiesall programs that the President opposedincreased rather than decreased during Reagans tenure. Meanwhile, support for increased
defense expenditures was decidedly lower at the end of his administration than at the beginning. In other words, people were less persuaded by Reagan
when he left office than they were when he took office. Nor was Reagans Presidency distinguished by an unusually strong personal connection with the
electorate.
Political capital isnt effective and is antipersuasive- presidential

persuasion isnt effective with the public
Klein 12
Edwardss work suggests that Presidential persuasion isnt effective with the public.
Lees work suggests that Presidential persuasion might actually have an antipersuasive effect on the opposing party in Congress. And, because our system of
government usually requires at least some members of the opposition to work with
the President if anything is to get done, that suggests that the Presidents attempts
at persuasion might have the perverse effect of making it harder for him to govern.
If speeches dont make a difference, what does? Another look at the Presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan offers an answer. Roosevelt was
one of only two Presidents in the twentieth century whose parties won seats in a midterm election. That was in 1934a year in which the economy grew
by ten per cent. But in the midterms of 1938, the year after the economy plunged into a double-dip recession, the Democrats lost seventy-two seats in the
House. If Roosevelt had been running for relection, he, too, would almost certainly have lost. During Reagans first two years in office, the economy fell
into recession. By the time of the 1982 midterm election, unemployment had risen to 10.8 per cent and the economy had shrunk by two per cent. Already
the minority party in the House, the Republicans lost twenty-six seats. Reagans approval rating went below forty per cent. But then the economy
recovered. By November, 1984, unemployment had fallen to 7.2 per cent, and the economy, remarkably, was growing at an annual rate of seven per cent.
Reagan was elected to a second term in a forty-nine-state landslide. There is no reason to believe that F.D.R.s storytelling faltered for a single midterm
election, or that Reagan lost his persuasive ability in 1982, then managed to regain it two years later. Rather, the causality appears to work the other way
around: Presidents win victories because ordinary Americans feel that their lives are going well, and we call those Presidents great communicators,
because their public persona is the part of them we know. After three years in Washington, David Axelrod, who served as the chief strategist for President
Obamas 2008 campaign, agrees. Some folks in politics believe this is all just a rhetorical game, but when youre governing its not, he says. People are
viewing their lives through the lens of their own experience, not waiting for you to describe to them what theyre seeing or feeling. Paul Begala, who
helped set the message in the Clinton White House, puts it more piquantly: The Titanic had an iceberg problem. It did not have a communications
problem. Right now, the President has a jobs problem. If Obama had four-per-cent unemployment, he would be on Mt. Rushmore already and people would
look at Nancy Pelosi like Lady Gaga. The question, Begala says, is: What is the alternative to Presidential persuasion? If you dont try it at all, it
guarantees you wont persuade anybody, he says. And, to put it simply, your people in Congress and in the country will hate you if you dont. Thats the
real dilemma for the modern White House. Aggressive, public leadership is typically ineffective and, during periods of divided government, can actually
make matters worse. But passivity is even more dangerous. In that case, youre not getting anything done and you look like youre not even trying. One
option is to exert private leadership. The Obama Administration has had some success with this approach. Late in 2010, some observers wondered why
the White House, which clearly believed that there was a need for further stimulus, wasnt pushing Republicans on a payroll-tax cut, one of the few
stimulus measures they had seemed somewhat open to. Then, suddenly, after the midterm election, it appeared in the tax deal. Axelrod says, We didnt
put the payroll-tax cut into our speeches in the fall because we didnt think we could pass it, and we worried that if we included it in our rhetoric it might
pollute the issue and impair our chances of getting it done after the election. Back-room bargains and quiet negotiations do not, however, present an
inspiring vision of the Presidency. And they fail, too. Boehner and Obama spent much of last summer sitting in a room together, but, ultimately, the
Speaker didnt make a private deal with the President for the same reason that Republican legislators dont swoon over a public speech by him: he is the
leader of the Democratic Party, and if he wins they lose. This suggests that, as the two parties become more sharply divided, it may become increasingly
difficult for a President to governand theres little that he can do about it. Theorists have long worried over this possibility. They note that our form of
government is not common. As Juan Linz, a professor of political science at Yale, pointed out in a 1989 paper, The only presidential democracy with a long
history of constitutional continuity is the United States. A broad tendency toward instability and partisan conflict, he writes, is woven into the fabric of a
political system in which a democratically elected executive can come from one party and a democratically elected legislature from another. Both sides
end up having control over some levers of power, a claim to be carrying out the will of the public, and incentives that point in opposite directions. The
American system has traditionally had certain features that reduced the stakesnotably, political parties that encompassed a diverse range of opinions
and often acted at cross purposes with themselves. But today the parties operate as disciplined, consistent units. According to Congressional Quarterly, in
2009 and 2010 Democrats and Republicans voted with their parties ninety per cent of the time. That rigidity has made American democracy much more
difficult to manageand it has made the President, as party leader, a much more divisive figure. Edwards, ever the data cruncher, has the numbers to
back up this perception. When President Obama took office, he enjoyed a 68 percent approval level, the highest of any newly elected president since John
F. Kennedy, he wrote in a recent paper. For all of his hopes about bipartisanship, however, his early approval ratings were the most polarized of any
president in the past four decades. By February 15, less than a month after taking office, only 30 percent of Republicans approved of his performance in
office while 89 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Independents approved. The gap between Democratic and Republican approval had already
reached 59 percentage pointsand Obama never again reached even 30 percent approval among Republicans. This, Edwards says, is the reality facing
modern Presidents, and one they would do well to accommodate. In a rational world, strategies for governing should match the opportunities to be
exploited, he writes. Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through
their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation
through Congress on a party-line vote. Thats easier said than done. We dont have a system of government set up for Presidents to drive legislation
through Congress. Rather, we have a system that was designed to encourage division between the branches but to resist the formation of political parties.
The parties formed anyway, and they now use the branches to compete with one another. Add in minority protections like the filibuster, and you have a
system in which the job of the President is to persuade an opposition party that has both the incentive and the power to resist him. Jim Cooper says,
Weve effectively lost our Congress and gained a parliament. He adds, At least a Prime Minister is empowered to get things done, but we have the
extreme polarization of a parliament, with party-line voting, without the empowered Prime Minister. And you cant solve that with a speech.
AT: Counterplans
Replace Welfare CP Aff
2AC Solvency
Counterplan doesnt solve inequality in the long run it just
creates similar welfare systems under GI, perpetuating
stigmatization
Tanner 14 (Michael D. Tanner Cato Institute senior fellow, Michael Tanner heads research into a variety of domestic
policies with a particular emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care reform, and Social Security. The Basic
Income Guarantee: Simplicity, but at What Cost? CATO Unbound August 26, 2014 http://www.catounbound.org/2014/08/26/basic-income-guarantee-simplicity-what-cost)
the benefit would not be truly universal. It therefore raises the question of what to
do about those who are disabled or who cannot work for other reasons . For that matter,
what about those who cannot find jobs? Would there be a parallel welfare
system to care for those people ? If so, it would appear that all we have
done is add a new benefit on top of the current system. Moreover, the EITC is
But
already one of the most fraud-ridden of all federal programs.
2AC AT: Poverty NB

Basic income system doesnt give out enough money, is 3
times more expensive than welfare and doesnt solve poverty
Charles Murrays suggestion of $ 10,000

per person spread over a U.S. citizen population of roughly 296 million , the
cost of such a program would be $2.96 trillion, or almost 3 times our current
welfare expenditure . And there is considerable question as to whether
$10,000 would be a sufficient grant . Last year, the poverty threshold for a single individual
Zwolinski does not propose any specific income, but cites
under 65, after all, was $12,119. Of course, some suggest using the basic income to replace middle-class social
The idea of
abolishing Social Security and Medicare is far more problematic, both politically and
practically, than using UBI to replace more conventional welfare programs . Besides, it
still wouldnt raise enough money to fund a truly universal basic income . Using CBO data
for 2013, eliminating welfare state programs including Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, income security and so forth (but excluding tax expenditures) would yield only
$2.13 trillion. If we also included, as some have suggested, so-called tax expenditures, such as the mortgage
welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as those targeted to the poor.
interest deduction and the exclusion of employer contributions, as well as Social Security, EITC and CTC related tax
we could add an additional $393 billion for a total of $2.5 trillion. That still
wouldnt be enough. Others would limit grants to adults only. This would clearly be more affordable,
dropping the cost to roughly $2.25 trillion. However, limiting participation to adults would
leave families with several children well below the poverty level. Consider
that the poverty threshold for a family of four was $23,624 in 2013, while
grants for the two adults in the family would total $20,000 . One possibility would
expenditures,
be to adjust the benefit downward for each additional person in a household, recognizing that there are some
This would reduce costs and the incentive to

increase household size (potentially by having more children) while also allowing
the initial benefit to be set higher (benefiting smaller households], but would introduce
another layer of complexity.
economies of scale as household size increases.
CP isnt net beneficial different costs of living make it harder

for them to solve poverty
Another issue that would arise in any national level implementation of a UBI is
how to address the regional variation in the cost of living . The benefit
might be more than sufficient in low cost states like South Dakota, but it
might not be enough in high cost states like California and New York . A recent
study by the Tax Foundation looked at the purchasing power of $100 in each state, with the relative value ranging
Our current system addresses this

disparity to some extent, although some of the variation may be due to states
increasing benefit generosity for reasons other than cost of living differences . In The
from $84.60 in Washington D.C. to $115.74 in Mississippi.
Work versus Welfare Trade-off 2013, I found that the benefits package from the same seven programs ranged from
The impact of the UBI would vary by location , and

low-income people in high cost areas could be worse off . It is not hard to
imagine a scenario where people advocate for some kind of benefit adjustment
based on the cost of living in the area. While this could potentially be a better
design, it would again add a layer of complexity to what initially seemed
like a very simple program .
$25,491 in Arkansas to $49,175 in Hawaii.
2AC Perm do both

Perm do both curtail surveillance of welfare recipients and
give guaranteed income
2AC Perm do the Counterplan

Perm the reduce welfare surveillance by replacing the welfare
system with guaranteed income
AT: Overpopulation NB
No impact to overpopulation misunderstands human ecology
Ellis 13 (ERLE C. ELLIS Ph.D., Cornell University, 1990 Professor, Geography & Environmental Systems University
of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture Graduate School of Design, Harvard
University. He says: My research investigates the ecology of anthropogenic landscapes and their changes at local to global scales.
Current work in my lab has three main foci: the global ecology and history of human landscapes (anthropogenic biomes), tools
for global synthesis of local knowledge of landscape change (GLOBE), and inexpensive tools for measuring and managing
ecological change across anthropogenic landscapes (Ecosynth, Anthropogenic Ecotope Mapping). All of these come together in
my main goal: informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. My earlier work investigated ecological
changes in ancient village landscapes across China in the transition from traditional to industrially-based agricultural systems.
My teaching includes Environmental Science & Conservation (120), Landscape Ecology (305), Applied Landscape Ecology
(405/605), and Biogeochemical Cycles in the Global Environment (412/612) and Field Methods in Geography: Environmental
Mapping (485/685). At Harvard Graduate School of Design, I co-teach Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies III: Introduction to
Ecology (GSD 6241) Overpopulation Is Not the Problem The New York Times September 13, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html)
MANY scientists believe that by transforming the earths natural

landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us . Like
BALTIMORE
bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences.
Disaster looms as humans exceed the earths natural carrying capacity . Clearly, this
could not be sustainable. This is nonsense . Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues repeat
these and similar claims often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims
demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human
systems . The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have
been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered
ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered
natural ecosystems. Dot Earth Blog: An Ecologist Explains His Contested View of Planetary LimitsSEPT. 16,
2013 The evidence from archaeology is clear. Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies
and tools of stone and fire to extract more sustenance from landscapes than would otherwise be possible. And, of
Homo sapiens went much further, learning over generations, once their
preferred big game became rare or extinct, to make use of a far broader spectrum
of species. They did this by extracting more nutrients from these species by cooking and grinding them, by
course,
propagating the most useful species and by burning woodlands to enhance hunting and foraging success. Photo
Credit Katherine Streeter Even before the last ice age had ended, thousands of years before agriculture, huntergatherer societies were well established across the earth and depended increasingly on sophisticated technological
The planets
carrying capacity for prehistoric human hunter-gatherers was probably no more
than 100 million. But without their Paleolithic technologies and ways of life, the
number would be far less perhaps a few tens of millions . The rise of
agriculture enabled even greater population growth requiring ever more
intensive land-use practices to gain more sustenance from the same old land. At their
strategies to sustain growing populations in landscapes long ago transformed by their ancestors.
peak, those agricultural systems might have sustained as many as three billion people in poverty on near-
The world population is now estimated at 7.2 billion. But with current industrial
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has
estimated that the more than nine billion people expected by 2050 as the population
nears its peak could be supported as long as necessary investments in infrastructure
and conducive trade, anti-poverty and food security policies are in place . Who knows
vegetarian diets.
technologies,
what will be possible with the technologies of the future? The important message from these rough numbers should
There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity . We are nothing

at all like bacteria in a petri dish. Why is it that highly trained natural scientists dont
understand this? My experience is likely to be illustrative. Trained as a biologist, I learned the classic
be clear.
mathematics of population growth that populations must have their limits and must ultimately reach a balance
with their environments. Not to think so would be to misunderstand physics : there is only one
earth, of course! It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point
where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologistss blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew
for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester
Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth
tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the
data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler
with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships archaeologists, geographers,
environmental historians and agricultural economists. The science of human sustenance is inherently a social
Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand

how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the
destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene . The idea that humans
science.
must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most
Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to

sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planets
human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and
our technologies more than from any environmental limits . Two hundred thousand years ago
we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the
limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement. There is
no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future .
There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity increasing land
productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave
more land for nature a goal that is both more popular and more possible than
ever.
likely the future.
3 reasons why overpopulation is good

Aque 14 (Prime Aque a freelance WordPress Developer, I also offer SEO services to my existing clients on Fiverr. Also
a freelance writer at Academia-Research.com Positive and Negative Effects of over Population Self-Help November 20,
2015 http://selfhelparchive.com/positive-and-negative-effects-of-over-population/#sthash.lM1leQVa.dpuf)
Large Population makes it possible to mobilize enough people to defend the

integrity of the country in times of war and any other emergencies . Increase in Labor
Market: Increasing population ensures increase in the labor force. Lack of growth in
the labor force will make a country static, retarded and gets to equilibrium at less
than full employment level of the economy . Large Market: Investors would like to invest
in a country with a large population. As the population continues to grow so will be the growth in
Defense:
demand for food, shelter, clothing etc
AT: Virtual Rights CP
AT: Virtual Rights CP

The counterplan views it from a flawed understanding: these
rights are utopian and unable to be implemented. Prefer our
author, he indicts theirs
Paul Dornan and John Hudson, 2003 Dr John Hudson, Department of Social Policy
and Social Work, University of York "Welfare Governance in the Surveillance Society:
A Positive-Realistic Cybercriticalist View" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/14679515.00352/references
We believe that Fitzpatricks position is useful, that he has started a vital debate,
but we disagree in substance and instead suggest a recasting of his
cybercriticalism to promote the opportunities as well as the threats. Reading
Fitzpatricks analysis, one is left with the impression that, given the fact that radical
socio-economic change of the sort he desires seems unlikely, ICTs are largely a
threat to welfare and well-being: something to be guarded against unless
somewhat unrealisticallythey can be disconnected from the powerful
multinational corporations (MNCs) that develop and, often, manage them.2 The
result is a closed-down debate and a focus on the negativity of change. On
the other hand, as Fitzpatrick (: ) rightly points out, the Blair
government tends to have an overly positive view of ICTs that often assumes
benefits will automatically flow from the deployment of the technology (see also
Hudson ). It is so eager to embrace new ICTsand the MNCs that are part
and parcel of the information agethat its agenda shows little thinking about
potentially negative aspects. As Kearns (: ) puts it: the government
implicitly sees technology, including internet technology, as value neutral. In a
sense, this leaves us caught between an almost utopian belief in the power
of ICTs to improve both our economy and polity on the one hand, and what
is effectively a dystopian perspective on the other, urging resistance and
heavy regulation until far-reaching socioeconomic change can be
instigated. As Kearns (: ) suggests, we should reject both the utopian
and dystopian visions of the internet . . . both are too technologically deterministic
and too simplistic. Indeed, as Norris and Armstrong ( : ) argue, not
only is there room for a middle ground, there is an urgent need to consider how the
new technologies of mass surveillance can be harnessed to encourage participation
rather than exclusion, strengthen personhood rather than diminish it, and be used
for benevolent rather than malign purposes.
AT: Critiques
Framework - Welfare reform debates good

Critical education on welfare surveillance is good helps
identify implicit biases in our policies which spills over to
better debates
Philosophy @ University of Hong Kong 2015 University of Hong Kong,
Philosophy Department, Open Courseware on Critical Thinking, Logic and Creativity
Feburary 15 2015 "Moving Beyond Biases and Stereotypes"
www.cptc.edu/stereotype/bias/lessonbuilder_files/Stereotypes_and_Bias_print.html
Without thinking critically, you're only looking at the surface of things . When you come across a
politician's statement in the media, do you accept it at face value? Do you accept some people's statements and not
others'? The chances are you exercise at least some judgment, based on what you know about the particular person, and whether you generally agree with her or not.
Knowing whether or not you agree with someone is not necessarily the same as
critical thinking, however. Your reaction may be based on emotion ("I hate that guy!"), or on the fact that this elected official supports programs that are in your
interest, even though they may not be in the best interests of everyone else. What's important about critical thinking is that it helps you to sort out what's accurate and what's not, and
to give you a solid, factual base for solving problems or addressing issues. Critical thinking helps you to move beyond the stereotypes and your own biases to judge individuals more
the importance of critical thinking: It identifies bias . Critical

thinking identifies both the bias in what it looks at (its object), and the biases you
yourself bring to it. If you can address these honestly, and adjust your thinking
accordingly, you'll be able to see the object in light of the way it's slanted, and to
understand your own biases in your reaction to it. A bias is not necessarily bad: it is simply a preferred way of looking at
accurately. Some specific reasons for
things. You can be racially biased, but you can also be biased toward looking at all humans as one family. You can be biased toward a liberal or conservative political point of view, or
Regardless of whether most of us would consider a particular bias good

or bad, not seeing it can limit how we resolve a problem or issue. It's oriented
toward the problem, issue, or situation that you're addressing . Critical thinking
focuses on analyzing and understanding its object. It eliminates, to the extent
possible, emotional reactions, except where they become part of an approach or
solution. It's just about impossible to eliminate emotions, or to divorce them from your own deeply-held assumptions and beliefs. You can, however, try to understand that
toward or against tolerance.
they're present, and to analyze your own emotional reactions and those of others in the situation. There are different kinds of emotional reactions. If all the evidence points to
something being true, your emotional reaction that it's not true isn't helpful, no matter how badly you want to believe it. On the other hand, if a proposed solution involves harming a
particular group of people "for the good of the majority", an emotional reaction that says "we can't let this happen" may be necessary to change the situation so that its benefits can be
realized without harm to anyone. Emotions that allow you to deny reality generally produce undesirable results; emotions that encourage you to explore alternatives based on principles
It gives you the whole picture
of fairness and justice can produce very desirable results.

. Critical thinking never considers anything in a vacuum. Its
object has a history, a source, a context. Thinking critically allows you to bring these into play, thus getting more than just the outline of what you're examining, and making a realistic
and effective solution to a problem more likely. It brings in other necessary factors. Some of the things that affect the object of critical thought -- previous situations, personal histories,
During the mid-90's

debate in the United States over welfare reform, much fuss was made over the
amount of federal money spent on welfare. Few people realized, however, that the
whole entitlement program accounted for less than 2% of the annual federal
budget. During the height of the debate, Americans surveyed estimated the amount
of their taxes going to welfare at as much as 60%. Had they examined the
general assumptions they were using, they might have thought differently
about the issue. It considers both the simplicity and complexity of its object . A situation
general assumptions about an issue -- may need to be examined themselves. Critical thinking identifies them and questions them as well.
or issue may have a seemingly simple explanation or resolution, but it may rest on a complex combination of factors. Thinking critically unravels the relationships among these, and
It gives you the most nearly accurate

view of reality. The whole point of critical thinking is to construct the most objective view available. 100% objectivity may not be possible, but the closer you can get,
determines what level of complexity needs to be dealt with in order to reach a desired conclusion.
the better. Most important, for all the above reasons, it is most likely to help you get the results you want. The closer you are to dealing with things as they really are, the more likely
you are to be able to address a problem or issue with some hope of success. In more general terms, the real value of critical thinking is that it's been at the root of all human progress.
The first ancestor of humans who said to himself, "We've always made bone tools, but they break awfully easily. I bet we could make tools out of something else. What if I tried this
rock?" was using critical thinking. So were most of the social, artistic, and technological ground breakers who followed. You'd be hard pressed to find an advance in almost any area of
humanity's development that didn't start with someone looking at the way things were and saying "It doesn't have to be that way. What if we looked at it from another angle?"
Welfare Surveillance Negative
Note
For risk calc answers, go to the TSA NEG from the FLA lab.
Virtual Rights CP
1NC
The United States Federal Judiciary should establish an explicit
set of virtual rights using information communication
technologies
The counterplan solves the welfare surveillance state
Fitzpatrick 2000 (Tony Fitzpatrick University of Nottingham, Tony Fitzpatrick -
degree in Literature and Philosophy and a Masters degree in Politics and Political
Philosophy -PhD in 1996 from Edinburgh University on the subject of Basic Income
"Critical cyberpolicy: network technologies, massless citizens, virtual rights"
csp.sagepub.com/content/20/3/375.refs?patientinformlinks=yes&legid=spcsp;20/3/375)
How can we formulate alternatives to this kind of approach? The essential point made so far is that cybercriticalism is that which focuses upon (a) the reciprocal interactions of online
The job of social policy

is to emphasize the influence which deregulatory capitalism is having upon social
welfare and collective institutions and values: for if left unchallenged it is the
worrying consequences of ICTs [Information and Communication Technologies] that
are likely to emerge given the effects of the offline free market environment . The
task, then, is to ask the following question: how do we deploy ICTs and how do we
reform welfare systems in such a way that cyberpolicies work towards the objective
of social justice? This section will provide a preliminary response to this question. We begin with someone whose ideas provide the standard terms of reference: T. H.
and offline environments, and (b) the socially damaging results of those interactions due to the virtual reproduction of real inequalities.
Marshall. Earlier, I observed that as much attention should be paid to the social rights of cyberusers as to their civil and political rights. The problem is that Marshall provides little
guidance in this respect. Many have criticized him for overestimating the extent to which the welfare state had replaced a class society and for ignoring the possibility that the former
a hyphenated citizenship,
where market value, democratic value and welfare value are held together in a
creative tension, underestimated the endurance of free market capitalism
and the commodifying tendencies of the welfare state itself . If, by contrast,
we interpret the classic welfare state as the bureaucratization and only partly
decommodification of market capitalism, then our allegiance to it (as opposed to our allegiance to the
principle of social justice) can be profitably weakened . Marshall was on stronger ground when trying to identify entitlements which were beyond social
was itself the latest, though not necessarily the final, stage of class struggle (Turner, 1993). Marshalls conception of
rights, i.e. industrial rights, whereby welfare citizenship could be extended more firmly into the economic sphere. Within the context of market capitalism, however, such industrial rights
can never be anything other than an appendage to the other categories of rights (Giddens, 1981) and socialist commentators were correct to point out that the institutional embodiment
Yet because of the socio-economic changes that

Marshall never lived to fully see I propose an alternative category to that of
industrial rights: virtual rights , these being rights possessed by massless citizens
which overlap with, but are nevertheless distinct from, their civil, political and social
rights (see Tambin, 1998: 1037). In short, we still need a category that is beyond those of the classic triumvirate and which posits a post-capitalistic socio-economic context. (I
of industrial rights required another socio-economic context altogether.
should add that I regard virtual rights to be a subset of global citizenship alongside ecological rights and cultural rights.) That context, however, has to allow for changes to the nature
of production and consumption and so cannot simply refer back to the economistic industrialism of productivist socialism (Fitzpatrick, 1998b). So, the concept of virtual rights has a
The massless citizen is the

ghostly inhabitant of the information society and the term is meant to conceptualize
the fact that with the integration and comparison of computer files we each have an
electronic shadow or doppelganger, a data-self (Lacy, 1996: 1623; Fisher, 1997: 120). Sometimes this virtual self is nothing
heuristic intent: to tease out and lead us toward the possible dimensions of that post-productivist context.
more than a cyberreflection of the real person; increasingly, though, the flesh and blood person is being treated as an inferior version of their data-shadow, as in the case of a credit
The aim of cybercriticalism is to work out

how social policies can be used to ensure that it is individuals who possess their
data-selves and not the other way around. So, somebody does not have to be logged into the Internet (a netizen) to become massless: in
check or a CCTV scan. It all depends upon whether we possess our data-selves or whether we are possessed by them.
an information society, even the most computer illiterate person is a massless citizen in that they have an online virtuality which is sometimes a simulation of, and sometimes simulates,
We are all massless citizens, then, because we are all caught and
implicated within the informational webnet of the statemarket nexus. However,
and as already argued, some (the wealthy) are more able to control and benefit
their offline realities.
from this web, evading the predatory dangers within. So, whereas the term digital
citizen focuses simply upon onlineoffline interactions (Morrison, 1999), massless citizen is
meant to encompass both digitality and social hierarchy: the digital hierarchy (see
Schiller, 1996: 96107). For masslessness implies both virtualitystreams of data that are without mass (photons)and post-collectivisma society where the masses are no longer said
Virtual rights can be

thought of as the fundamental entitlements of massless citizens: their
purpose being to suppress the disempowering tendencies of network
technologies by conjoining online and offline environments as a goal of
social policy-making and permitting collective forms of identity and
association to be reconstructed. They place the emphasis upon the informatic empowerment of the individual for its own sake (Steele,
1998) rather than upon the competitive needs of the economy (Bangemann, 1994; Moore, 1998). First, they are offline-to-online rights,
i.e. possessed by citizens with regard to the accuracy of the information which is
held on them by both public and private agencies. Second, they are online-to-offline
rights in that they relate to the uses to which that information is put and so to
whether it is our virtual selves that do or do not predominate in our social and
economic interactions. In many respects, virtual rights have already been placed on the agenda by civil liberties groups campaigning for updated Freedom of
to exist; and it is precisely the shift to an informatic, post-collectivist society that has exacerbated social and class divisions.
Information Acts suited to the cyberage and against proposals such as those for the surrender of encryption keys and those contained in the Communications Decency Act of 1996.13
we have seen that virtual activity can be unlawful even when no offline effects
have been detected. The designers of an anti-abortion website were successfully
prosecuted in 1999 for implicitly encouraging violence against doctors and clinics
performing abortions; and a male university student was expelled several years
earlier for a graphic online description of the rape, mutilation and murder of a
female student, even though she never encountered her assailant at all. We can
therefore define virtual rights as rights that are concerned (a) with the complex
offlineonline interfaces which affect all citizens in an information society, and (b)
with addressing online and offline inequalities . Virtual rights may be conceived as a fourth right of global citizenship, but perhaps
Equally,
also as a prosthetic addition to the classic triumvirate.14
Legalism K
1NC
The discourse of progressivism and reform conceal legacies of
oppression causes war, administrative violence, and turns the
case
Dillon 13 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0740770X.2013.786277,
It's here, it's that time: Race, Queer Futurity, and the temporality of violence in
Born in Flames, May 23, 2013, Stephen Dillon, writer and philosopher)
The revolutionary state replicates the past through discourses of reform, progress,
and patience. By tracing the debates, tactics, and theories of aboveground and
underground feminist revolutionaries organizing for a revolution against the
revolution, Born in Flames challenges the imagination and fantasies of the state and
labor, and the future such visions instantiate. It also critically intervenes in futures
imagined by the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: futures
often normalized and restrained by the heterosexist and patriarchal regulation of
gender and sexuality. To the extent that it builds off of the insights and theories of
women-of-color feminism, Born in Flames produces a politics of futurity that
exceeds the imagination of the state, labor, and the revolutionary Left. Critically, the
film produces a theory of the future and time where the continuation of the present
as it is means that the future will not come. A critique of the state is central to this
politics. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge
through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the
future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated
from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it
arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing,
administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its imagined future come to
pass (Martin 2007, 63). For the Womens Army, in the future that is no future
when things are better now but state and non-state violence continue to target
racialized and gendered populations in the same way but under a new name the
only way to usher in a future that is not an end is to make the present expire. Hope
means that tomorrow (as it is, as it has been, and as it will be) cannot come. As I
understand it, the films critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound
implications for how we think about the future. Unlike traditional dystopic sciencefiction films that are often set decades (if not centuries) in the future and that
attempt to paint a picture of what will be if an aspect of the present is not undone,
the dystopia of Born in Flames one marked by surveillance, assassination,
incarceration, state racism and heterosexism, and sexual violence is the truth of
our past and present. In other words, the future within the film is not the future that
awaits us, but the present and past we are and have been living. Born in Flames
does not show us what is coming, but what is here what has always been here.
This is evident in the ways that the film undoes the fabricated division between fact
and fiction. In an interview, director Lizzie Borden describes the film as inhabiting a
border line between what is present and therefore documentary and what would
be fiction, and therefore science fiction (Borden and Sussler 1983, 27). The film is
an ostensible documentary of the near future, but also uses fiction to produce forms
of knowledge that exceed the epistemological boundaries of the state, the nonprofit, the university, and the social order. Indeed, the film was conceived, filmed,
and released at the moment when new modes of governance based on the prison,
the market, and the non-profit emerged.2 In particular, the urgency and impatience
of the Womens Army produces a politics and epistemology that undermines the
temporalities of progress and reform central to the state and the heterosexist and
patriarchal regulations of revolutionary nationalisms (Ferguson 2004). The films
critique of the forms of knowledge central to the state, white supremacy, and
heteropatriarchy is evident in its engagement with the relationship between time
and violence what I call the temporality of violence. Women & Performance: a
journal of feminist theory 39 Downloaded by [Northwestern University] at 17:19 20
July 2015 In this essay, I consider the different temporalities in the film and their
relation to state, non-state, and revolutionary forms of violence in order to think
through the debate in queer studies concerning hope and the future. This debate
has centered on psychoanalysis, popular culture, and the aesthetics of art and
literature, yet what is often missing are the theories and histories of radical and
revolutionary activists who contested the unbearable weight of the present in the
hope of creating something else. While much of this debate has centered on the
ideological and libidinal labor of the concept of the future, here I am concerned with
theories of time and violence and their relation to the future.3 Even after 30 years,
Born in Flames raises pressing questions about the relationship between time,
violence, race, sexuality, and gender. I situate the films engagement with the
politics of temporality within the writings of 1970s activists who theorized the
relationship between race, time, and violence. In particular, I argue that by showing
the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present,
and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and
presentism. Additionally, the film gestures toward an anti-social politics that arise
out of, not despite, the constitutive violence that produces and regulates race,
gender, and sexuality. In other words, the Womens Army does not deny the future
and hope for its end because they miscalculated the power of racialized and
gendered subjection. Rather, they hope for the end of the future precisely because
they understand the power of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and
heteropatriarchy.
Reject the system instead of trying to reform it the plan just

perfects the systems of oppression vote NEG to burn them
down
Farley 05 (Anthony Paul, Professor of Law @ Boston College, Perfecting
Slavery, 1/27/2005, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1028&context=lsfp)
VII. BURN What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti
rose up, they, of necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so
that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything?
asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate
because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this
unknown anarchist. 48 The slaves burned everything because everything was
against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their
lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless
things, every plantation, everything. 49 Leave nothing white behind you , said
Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 God gave Noah the
rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time. 51 The slaves burned everything,
yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. 52 Theirs was the
greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the
failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth
century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The
colorline belts the world. 54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century
was the problem of the colorline. 55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twentyfirst century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the
world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire
world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and
tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if
they would escape slavery, win the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as
children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not
called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves
are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they
are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but
objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided
from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are
called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so
the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and
death is not a beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the
undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think through a
progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from
slavery. There is no up from slavery . The progress from slavery to the end of
history is the progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack.
The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresent-future
timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline , only
under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of
bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to
bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer
for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a
plantation. The system of law is a plantatio n. These plantations, all part of the
same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack , white-over-black only, and that
continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal rights .
The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated above, has
knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the
undiscovered country only by burning down every plantation . When the
slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the
free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become
something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we
pursue a calling. Freedom is the only calling it alone contains all possible
directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of
our lives . We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not
born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living
cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must
be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue
the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave
must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. Whiteover-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is
not a calling.
Replace Welfare CP Neg
1NC
Text: The fifty states should guaranteed a basic income for
persons living each respective state without conditions.
The states can guarantee income
Mitchell, 13
(Dan, Decentralization and Federalism Is the Libertarian Way to Determine
Whether a Basic Income Is Practical or Desirable,
http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/decentralization-federalism-is-libertarianway-determine-whether-basic-income-is-practical)
Theyre right, but theres actually a better way of approaching the issue. Why not take all incomeredistribution programs, put them into a single block grant , and then transfer
the money and responsibility to state governments? In an ideal world, the block grant would
gradually diminish so that states would be responsible for both the collection and
disbursement of all monies related to welfare. But thats a secondary issue. The main benefit of
this federalist approach is that you stop the Washington-driven expansion of the welfare state and you trigger the
creation of 50 separate experiments on how best to provide a safety net . Some

states might choose a basic income. Others might retain something very similar to the current system. Others
might try a workfare-based approach, while some could dream up new ideas that wouldnt stand a chance in a onesize-fits-all system run out of Washington, DC. And as states adopted different systems, they could learn from each
other about what works and what doesnt work. And since its easier to influence decisions that are closer to home,
taxpayers at the state level almost certainly would have more ability to impact what happens with their money.
theres actually some evidence that this approach is practical . The 1996
welfare reform legislation isnt a perfect analogy, but the core feature of that law
was the elimination of a national entitlement and the provision of a block grant so
that states could decide (with some strings attached) how to deal with poverty. By most
Moreover,
measures, the 1996 reform was a success, with Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution explaining that it resulted
in lower levels of welfare dependency and reductions in child poverty. This isnt to say the 1996 law was ideal. The
advantage of a comprehensive federalist approach is that policy experts can push states to experiment with
different policies. And given the vast differences between various American states, its almost guaranteed that
there will be lots of diversity. This diversity not only will inform policy makers about what works and what doesnt
It also will satisfy the libertarian desire to get Washington out of the business of
income distribution, while presumably producing a system that actually does a
better job of helping the less fortunate escape government dependency. In other words,
all the advantages of the basic income plan without the potential systemwide downsides.
work.
A guaranteed income would reduce the humiliations of the

current welfare system while promoting individual
responsibility
Feeney 13 (Matthew Feeney Before coming back to the U.S. Matthew worked in London for the Institute of
Economic Affairs and at the Headquarters of the Liberal Democrats. He moved to Washington, D.C. to take part in the Institute
for Humane Studies' journalism program at The American Conservative and was assistant editor of Reason.com Scrap the
Welfare State and Give People Free Money Reason.com November 26, 2013 http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/26/scrapthe-welfare-state-give-people-free)
Charles Murray wrote that a guaranteed income for all American adults over
the age of 21 who are not in prison of $10,000 a year that would replace all
current welfare programs as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare would
In 2008,
be cheaper than maintaining the current welfare system in the coming

decades. It is important to point out that under Murrays proposal, which is outlined fully in his book In Our
Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, after someones total annual income reached
$25,000 a 20 percent surtax tax would be imposed on incremental earned
income, capped at $5,000 once someone earns $50,000 a year . Murrays plans also
requires that $3,000 of the $10,000 grant be spent on health insurance . Of course giving
every non-incarcerated American over the age of 21 $10,000 (or the current poverty line of
$11,490) a year with Murrays surtax plan in place of all corporate welfare and
the entirety of the welfare state (including Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare) would not be
cheap, but it would be more efficient , because it is a simple cash transfer, and would
be easier to fund were other libertarian budget proposals considered, such as cuts
to defense spending. Those who are not fans of Murrays guaranteed income may be more open to Milton
Friedmans negative income tax, which would not guarantee a set income for every adult, but would
provide payments to Americans based on how much below a certain threshold they
earned. Like Murrays guaranteed income, Friedmans negative income tax would be financed
through wealth redistribution. Some libertarians may not be fans of a guaranteed or basic income
because such a system would, they argue, disincentivize work. Murray believes that his surtax
scheme would incentivize work after someone began earning over $25,000.
Friedman wrote that the negative income tax reduces the incentives of those helped to help
themselves, but it does not eliminate that incentive entirely, as a system of supplementing
incomes up to some fixed minimum would. An extra dollar earned always means more money
available for expenditure.
GI solves poverty even under worst circumstances

Murray 8 (Charles Murray Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national
attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare
Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard
J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping Americas class structure. Murrays other
books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real
Education (2008), and Coming Apart (2012). His most recent book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission
(Crown Forum, 2015) urges Americans to stem governmental overreach and use Americas unique civil society to put
government back in its place. Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State The Foundation for Law, Justice
and Society October 30, 2008 http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf)
The immediate effect of the GI is to end involuntary poverty among the workingIn a world where every adult starts with US$10,000 a year, no
one needs to go without decent food, shelter, clothing, and the amenities of life .
This statement holds even after taking the expenses of retirement and medical care
into account. To summarize the detailed calculations presented in the book, assuming that US $3000 of the
grant is devoted to health care (by requirement) and US$2000 is devoted to a retirement
fund (voluntarily), leaving US$5000 per person per year, surpassing the official
poverty line under the GI is easy for people in a wide range of living
circumstances, even in a bad economy with substantial periods of
unemployment, and even assuming jobs at the minimum wage.
aged as well as the elderly.
Poverty kills billions of people

DS 5/23/15 (Do Something .Org One of the largest global orgs for young people and social change, our 3.9 million
members tackle campaigns that impact every cause, from poverty to violence to the environment to literally everything else.
11 Facts about Global Poverty DoSomething.org May 23 2015 https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-globalpoverty)
Nearly 1/2 of the worlds population more than 3 billion people live on less than
$2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty less than $1.25 a day. 1 billion
children worldwide are living in poverty . According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each
day due to poverty . 805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat .
Food banks are especially important in providing food for people that cant afford it themselves. Run a food drive
outside your local grocery store so people in your community have enough to eat. Sign up for Supermarket
More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean drinking water .
by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene
kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally , or approximately
2,300 people per day . In 2011, 165 million children under the age 5 were stunted
(reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic malnutrition. Preventable diseases like
diarrhea and pneumonia take the lives of 2 million children a year who are
too poor to afford proper treatment . As of 2013, 21.8 million children under 1 year
of age worldwide had not received the three recommended doses of vaccine against
diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis . 1/4 of all humans live without electricity approximately 1.6 billion
people. 80% of the world population lives on less than $10 a day . Oxfam estimates that it
Stakeout.
Diarrhea caused
would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty--that's less than 1/4 the income of the top 100
The poor are hungry and their hunger traps

them in poverty. Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world,
killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined .
richest billionaires. The World Food Programme says,
2NC Solvency
States are the ones who implement the surveillance the CP
solves the case
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, 15 Senior Counsel to the Brennan Centers
Liberty and National Security Program, Why the Surveillance State Is Everybody's
Problem, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/why-surveillance-state-everybodysproblem
Theres been much controversy around the New York City Police Departments stop
and frisk program, which unfairly ensnared tens of thousands of young minority
men. But new reports show the NYPDs tactics are evolving. Now, the Department is
monitoring Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts particularly those
of young African-American men and residents have pointed to surveillance
cameras liberally sprinkled throughout African-American neighborhoods. 8, and now
affecting nearly every American in one way or another. We ignore this history at our
peril; if we fail to act when one group finds itself targeted by the government, we
will soon find we are all under the microscope. The developing welfare state
provided the first opportunity to keep tabs on a disfavored community: the poor.
Some states require drug tests for aid recipients. Others strictly limit the items that
can be purchased with aid dollars. Most recently, Kansas banned welfare recipients
from spending aid money at swimming pools, and if the Missouri legislature has its
way, those on food stamps will no longer be able to buy canned tuna. Such
restrictions are likely to be accompanied by bureaucratic tracking mechanisms as
well as limits on using cash to facilitate monitoring of recipients spending. The
information in some welfare databases is shared extensively within the government,
and recipients report that caseworkers are using their electronic welfare benefit
cards to monitor their activities. These accumulations of data are also inevitably
vulnerable to misuse. Cutting-edge technologies are prone to be targeted at
communities of color as well. An advocacy groups deep dive into license plate
records from Oakland, Calif., revealed that lower-income minority neighborhoods
regardless of their crime rates were lined with the devices, while white wealthier
neighborhoods could count on having their cars snapped with far less frequency.
Another study conducted after a Michigan city installed surveillance cameras in
residential neighborhoods found that African-American residents were twice as likely
to be surveilled as their white neighbors.
Replacing welfare with guaranteed income solves poverty and

inequality of welfare recipients
Feinauer 4/7/15 (JJ Feinauer a writer and web producer for the National Edition of the Deseret News Will a
guaranteed basic income replace welfare? Desert News National Beta May 7, 2015
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/4381/Will-a-guaranteed-basic-income-replace-welfare.html#UIt4WFIlcxdAQ7Bp.99)
The efficiency of the American welfare state is no minor issue of debate . Each year, the
president and Congress negotiate the best ways to distribute funds in the federal budget, and each year there are
those who call for major reforms to the social safety net, from both the left and the right. Some, typically from the
conservatives in Congress, call for reduced spending on welfare initiatives, while others, typically the liberals, call
Replacing current
welfare programs with a guaranteed basic income for all citizens is one idea that
pops up now and again, precisely because it has supporters on both sides . According to
Vox's Dylan Matthews, who highlighted basic income proposals on May 1 as part of International Worker's Day,
for increases and expansions. But are there any policies that meet in the middle?
the idea of providing a minimum sum of money to all citizens could work
to not only minimize poverty, but close or weaken the widening gap of
income inequality . So what, exactly, is a minimum income? According to the Basic Income Earth Network,
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis,
without means test or work requirement." BIEN explains that basic income differs from
more common welfare programs because it pays the individual , not the household, and it
is unconditional. According to Matthews, fears that providing a basic income would
eliminate incentives to work and throw the budget out of whack may be reasonable,
but there is evidence (through some small-scale experiments) that it would have little
noticeable impact on these factors . "The scale is likely to be modest," he wrote, "and the
form that reduction in work effort takes could very well be good for the economy in
the long run." One of the strangest aspects of basic income proposals, which Matthews handles at length, is
that there is substantial support for it from both ideological extremes. On the
conservative side, for example, libertarian political philosopher Matt Zwolinski joined the likes of economists Milton
such a policy could potentially

simplify the current federal bureaucracy, lower costs and provide greater
protections to individual privacy .
Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith when he argued last year that
2NC Poverty NB
GI is the best and only way to win the war on poverty
eliminating welfare programs key
VINIK 13 (DANNY VINIK Before joining Business Insider, Danny Vinik wrote for his own blog, Political Algebra, on
economics, politics, and occasionally sports. He graduated from Duke in 2013 with degrees in economics and public policy. He is
a political reporter at Business Insider. Everyone's Talking about This Simple Solution to Ending Poverty by Just Giving
People Free Money Business Insider November 12, 2013 http://www.businessinsider.com/giving-all-americans-a-basicincome-would-end-poverty-2013-11#ixzz3gY2kfYkn
In 2012, there were 179 million Americans between the ages of 21 and 65 (when Social Security would kick in). The
giving each working-age American a basic income equal to

the poverty line would cost $2.14 trillion . For some comparison, U.S. GDP was
almost $16 trillion in 2012 and the defense budget was $700 billion. But a minimum income
would also allow us to eliminate every government benefit as well . Get rid of SNAP,
TANF, housing vouchers, the Earned Income tax credit and many others. Get rid of
them all. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report found that the federal government
spends approximately $750 billion each year on benefits for low-income
Americans and that rises to a clean trillion when you factor in state
programs . Eliminate all of those and the net figure comes out to $1 .2 trillion
needed to pay for a universal basic income , still a hefty sum. That doesnt mean there
arent ways to pay for it. The CBO found that a carbon tax would bring in nearly $100 billion a year for
instance. Revenue would also increase automatically since everyone would have a
basic income on which to pay taxes. The government could also offer a basic income
of $6,000 a year instead of up to the poverty line. Funding a basic income for all working-age adults would not
be easy and would require a substantial increase in the size of government, but it's not impossible either.
What are the benefits of a basic income? The clear one is that no American would live below the poverty line .
The U.S. has been waging the War on Poverty for a generation now and
still nearly 50 million Americans are below the line. This would end that
war with a decisive victory . There are knock on effects as well. Americans would have
greater leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions from their
employer thanks to the increased income security . Families could allow one parent
to take time off to raise their kids. Eliminating the numerous different
government welfare programs would also lead to efficiency gains as adults
would simply receive their check in the mail and not have to waste time filling out
paperwork at numerous different offices.
poverty line was $11,945. Thus,
Poverty kills billions of innocent people worse and more

probable than their impact
EPC 11 (End Poverty Campaign Hearts & Minds is a clearinghouse of helpful information, motivating people to get
involved and showing how to make self-help, volunteering, and donations more effective. We work to reach people nationwide
and globally through our website and public education and activism campaigns. Facts on World Hunger and Poverty Hearts
and Minds July 21, 2011 http://www.heartsandminds.org/poverty/hungerfacts.htm)
Global Poverty Facts Every day,
poverty kills more than 50,000 innocent people - 18
million every year . Source: World Health Organization (2004 report, most recent available, current deaths
These statistics account
for one third of all human deaths . More people die as a result of extreme poverty
than of any other cause. Source: WHO 2008 1.37 billion people live on less than $1.25 a
day, and 2.56 billion live on less than $2 a day . Moreover, 5.05 billion people ( more than
may be far higher due to global economic setbacks and the rising cost of food)
80 percent of the world's population ) live on less than $10 a day . Source: World
Bank 2005 Because of the global economic slowdown and rising food prices, FAO projects 100 million
more people will suffer from poverty and chronic hunger by the end of 2009 - an
11% increase from 2008. Source: World Food Program 2009 Extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated
in fragile states and territories, defined as those with very weak institutions and poor
policies. These areas are home to 9 percent of the population living in developing
countries, but nearly 27 percent of the extreme poor. These places are often sources
of war, terrorism and refugee crises. Source: World Bank, Global Monitoring Report 2007 Top of
Page Hunger & Poverty 8 million people die from lack of food and nutrition
every year - about 24,000 deaths each day. Source: FAO Hunger Report 2008 Every year,
5.8 million children die from hunger related-causes. Every day, thats 16,000 young lives lost. Source: FAO Hunger
Report 2008 For the first time in history, over 1.02 billion people do not have enough to eat . Thats
one sixth of humanity - more than the population of the United States, Canada and the European Union combined.
Source: FAO Hunger Report 2008 There are around one billion hungry people in the world: 642 million live in Asia
and the Pacific, 265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 in the Near
Fifteen million people in developed countries go hungry , around 1.5

percent of the total. Source: FAO 2010 The number of undernourished people in the world increased by 75
East and North Africa.
million in 2007 and 40 million in 2008, largely due to higher food prices. Source: FAO 2008 Top of Page Inequality &
Poverty The GDP (Gross Domestic Product, total of everyone's income) in the poorest 48 nations is less than the
combined wealth of the world's three richest people. Source: Global Issues Website 20% of the population in
developed nations consumes 86% of the world's goods . Source: Global Issues Website Recent
studies find that prices paid by the poor in developing countries are much higher than previous thought. They
cannot buy as much food with $1 as they can in a country like United States. This shows that they're even poorer
World Bank 2009 The poorest 40% of the worlds

population accounts for 5% of the global income . The richest 20% of worlds
population accounts for three-quarters of world income . Source: Global Issues Website
The average yearly income of the richest 20% of people in the world is about 50
times greater than the yearly income of the poorest 20% of people . Source: Human
Development Report 2005 Top of Page Children & Poverty Photo of Chinese girl with
smile is sitting at her deskAll children should have good food , good education, and an active,
happy life Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 600 million are victims of extreme poverty.
Source: UNICEF 2008 Each year, over 10 million children in developing countries die before the age of five. More
than half of these deaths are attributed to malnutrition , which claims a child's life every 5
than reported in earlier studies. Source:
seconds. Sources: World Development Indicators 2007, The United Nations' World Food Program Under nutrition
This
means that one child dies every six seconds from malnutrition and related causes .
contributes to 53 percent of the 9.7 million* deaths of children under five each year in developing countries.
*Note that this statistic is different from the bullet point just above, due to different year of study: UNICEF 2005
Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases - thats over 30,000 per day, or
Global Poverty Facts Approximately 146 million children in

developing countries, about 1 out of 4, are underweight. Source: The United Nations' World Food
one every 3 seconds. Source:
Program An estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000
Half of them die within 12 months of losing

their sight. This is easily corrected with an inexpensive vitamin supplement. Source: World Health Organization
vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year.
New: It is estimated that 684,000 child deaths worldwide could be prevented by increasing access to vitamin A and
World Food Program 2007 Top of Page Clean Water & Sanitation Photo of
the water dropWe all need water to live 1.1 billion people don't have safe
water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation . Source: Human Development Report 2006 Dirty
zinc Source:
water and poor sanitation account for the vast majority of 1.8 million child deaths each year from diarrhea - almost
5,000 every day - making it the second largest cause of child mortality. . Source: Human Development Report 2006
Deaths from diarrhea can usually be prevented with very inexpensive oral rehydration salts. Source: Child Health
which claims the lives of 1.3

million people a year, 90% of which are children under the age of five .
Research Project Poor sanitation and drainage contribute to malaria,
Poverty is worse than death

Olson 14 (Samantha Olson She earned her BA in Professional Writing with a Business Administration minor at Kings
College, and her MS in Journalism at Stony Brook University. Her graduate work focused on nutrition and exercise science, and
continues to cover public health and wellness for women and children. Life of Poverty More Common for Children than
Becoming Pregnant or Dying, And Possibly A Worse Fate Medical Daily July 22, 2014 http://www.medicaldaily.com/lifepoverty-more-common-children-becoming-pregnant-or-dying-and-possibly-worse-fate-294274)
There are now more children living in poverty than becoming pregnant or dying
prematurely, but it may not necessarily be good news considering the trials and
tribulations that accompany a life of straits could be a fate worse than death . A
new report published in the 25th edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundations KIDS COUNT Data Book has revealed
some startling news for the future of Americas children and which states are best and worst to raise them in. The
report assesses a child state-by-state on four factors: economic well-being, education, health, and their family and
nearly 23 percent of children were living below the poverty line in

2012, and its hypothesized the reason is behind low-income families struggles to recover from the recession.
community. It found
Patrick McCarthy, the foundations president and CEO, pointed out the pros and cons of what their data indicates
and said in a press release that the public should be encouraged by improvements on several fronts, but we
must do much more. Teen birth rates dropped from 40 per every 1,000 teens in 2005 to 29 per births in 2012,
along with the decrease of babies born at low birth weights. Child and teen deaths also dropped from 32 per every
But the nagging numbers of

poverty rate increases show less promise for the teens and adults these children will
grow into one day. In 2012, there were three million more children living in poor
families than in 2005. Its not just a life of wanting that could cripple a childs
mental and emotional health, but also their physical well-being as wel l. One of the
100,000 in 2005 to only 26 in 2010, which shows a clear improvement.
improvements for children living in low-income families in the past 20 years has been the increased access to
health insurance through Medicaid expansions through the State Childrens Health Insurance Program implemented
in 1997. From 1990 to 2012, there was a four percent increase in the amount of children who were insured.
government programs like

Medicaid or Medicare will only make things worse for kids in the future and as
higher housing and transportation costs increase, poor families stay poor . We should
However, McCarthy says the decrease of resource availability from
strengthen our commitment and redouble our efforts until every child in America develops to full potential,"
"We simply cannot afford to endanger the futures of the millions of lowincome children who dont have the chance to experience high-quality early
childhood programs and the thriving neighborhoods that higher-income families
take for granted." Children who live in single-parent families are more likely to live below the poverty line,
McCarthy said.
which generally concludes theyll have access to fewer resources. Its no surprise why it would be alarming to find
What Is Life Like

For Children Who Live In Poverty? Being poor is a reality too many children
face in America today . It is a frequent misconception many well-off Americans
have, that the poor are lazy or even take advantage of the government systems we have in place . Children
do not choose to be raised in poverty and to scoff at a child who may go wanting
day-to-day is an arguably shameful opinion to hold .
there were 35 percent more children living in single-parent families in 2012 than in 2005.
2NC Overpopulation NB
GI decreases teenage pregnancies
The GI obviously increases the economic penalty of having a baby for a single
woman under twenty-one, who no longer has access to any of the existing welfare programmes for single
mothers. The GI also increases the economic penalty on the parents of a teenaged
mother who is still living at home, thereby also increasing their incentives to
pressure the daughter to avoid pregnancy or to have an abortion. Under the GI,
having a baby no longer triggers a benefits stream to defray their costs . The GI radically
increases the economic penalties for fathers who are unemployed or working off the books . Under the
current system, a child support law is meaningless because they have no visible
income. Under the GI, every man aged twenty-one or older has a known income
stream deposited to a known bank account every month that can be tapped by a
court order. For teenaged fathers who are not yet old enough to be eligible for the grant, their
obligation would accumulate until they turn twentyone, whereupon the child
support law would force them to start paying it back .
Teenage pregnancies contribute to overpopulation

FN 8 (Fox News The Fox News Insider is the official Blog of Fox News Channel. Established in June 2010, Fox News
Insider delivers breaking news and show highlights just moments after they air on FNC. Expert: Teen Pregnancies Contribute
to Overpopulation Fox News March 14, 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/03/14/expert-teen-pregnanciescontribute-to-overpopulation.html)
Unwanted teen pregnancies and bouts of binge drinking are contributing to the worlds
unsustainable population growth, a World Health Organization academic said. John Gillebaud, a leading
academic on birth control, reproductive health and population issues, told a conference in Canberra, Australia,
that unprotected sex leading to unwanted pregnancies is the greatest threat to

mankind. "Every single week a new city of 1.7 million could be created, and the
current global population growth is unsustainable," he said, speaking via satellite from London.
"Each year, there are around 80 million unwanted pregnancies and 30 million of these are
aborted," he said. "The inconvenient truth is, the world is already overpopulated and soon we
may experience shortages of food and water."
Overpopulation causes extinction

Humes no date (Edward Humes I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author living in Southern
California. My latest books are Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, and A Man and His Mountain: The Everyman Who
Created Kendall-Jackson and Became America's Greatest Wine Entrepreneur. HUMAN POPULATION GROWTH AND
EXTINCTION Center for Biological Diversity no date
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/)
We're in the midst of the Earths sixth mass extinction crisis . Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson
estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to
extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you
can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history. The current mass extinction
differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or
galactic physical process. When the human race Homo sapiens sapiens migrated out
of Africa to the Middle East 90,000 years ago, to Europe and Australia 40,000 years
ago, to North America 12,500 years ago, and to the Caribbean 8,000 years ago,
waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as
recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos, and
The first wave of extinctions

targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave
began 10,000 years ago as the discovery of agriculture caused a population boom
and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of
domestic cattle. The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of
fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly
from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7 billion today . If
the current course is not altered, well reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former)
by 2050. No population of a large vertebrate animal in the history of the planet has grown that much, that fast,
or with such devastating consequences to its fellow earthlings. Humans impact has been so
profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and
the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the
"global environmental effects of increased human population and economic
development" dominate planetary physical, chemical, and biological conditions [2]. Humans annually
absorb 42 percent of the Earths terrestrial net primary productivity,30 percent of its
marine net primary productivity, and 50 percent of its fresh water [3]. Forty percent of the
planets land is devoted to human food production, up from 7 percent in 1700 [3]. Fifty percent of the
planets land mass has been transformed for human use [3]. More atmospheric
nitrogen is now fixed by humans that all other natural processes combined [3]. The
large lemurs extinct [1]. Lange's metalmark butterfly from Amy Harwood.
authors of Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems, including the current director of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, concluded: "[A]ll of these seemingly disparate phenomena trace to a single cause: the
growing scale of the human enterprise. The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are
We live on a human-dominated
planet and the momentum of human population growth, together with the
imperative for further economic development in most of the world, ensures that our
dominance will increase." Predicting local extinction rates is complex due to differences in biological
fundamentally different from those at any other time in history. . . .
diversity, species distribution, climate, vegetation, habitat threats, invasive species, consumption patterns, and
enacted conservation measures. One constant, however, is human population pressure. A study of 114 nations
found that human population density predicted with 88-percent accuracy the number of endangered birds and
Current population
growth trends indicate that the number of threatened species will increase by 7
percent over the next 20 years and 14 percent by 2050. And thats without the addition of
global warming impacts. Edward Humes When the population of a species grows beyond the
capacity of its environment to sustain it, it reduces that capacity below the original
level, ensuring an eventual population crash . "The density of people is a key factor
in species threats," said Jeffrey McKee, one of the studys authors. "If other species follow the same pattern
mammals as identified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature [4].
as the mammals and birds... we are facing a serious threat to global biodiversity associated with our growing
human population." [5]. So where does wildlife stand today in relation to 7 billion people? Worldwide ,
12
percent of mammals, 12 percent of birds, 31 percent of reptiles, 30 percent of
amphibians, and 37 percent of fish are threatened with extinction [6]. Not enough
plants and invertebrates have been assessed to determine their global threat level,
but it is severe.Extinction is the most serious, utterly irreversible effect of
unsustainable human population. But unfortunately, many analyses of what a sustainable human
population level would look like presume that the goal is simply to keep the human race at a level where it has
enough food and clean water to survive. Our notion of sustainability and ecological footprint indeed, our notion of
world worth living in presumes that humans will allow for, and themselves enjoy, enough room and resources for
all species to live.
AT: Perm Do Both

You cant do welfare and GI its too expensive and GI is better
Professor Etzionis arguments for a GI in addition to the existing

benefit system are moot. No matter how theoretically persuasive those arguments might be, no
Western nation can afford to add a significant GI to its existing
commitments . On the contrary, all Western nations need to restructure their existing
benefit systems to avoid bankruptcy. If a GI is to be financially feasible, it
must replace existing programmes rather than augment them . I regard this
practical necessity as serendipitous. The real reason to scrap the advanced welfare state is
that its apparatus is outmoded, ineffectual, and often counterproductive. Because this
view is so central to the Rights potential support for a GI, some explanation of it is in order. The European
and American welfare states evolved under the twin assumptions that resources
were scarce and that government could allocate them effectively . The first assumption was
From a practical standpoint,
true during the first half of the twentieth century, in the sense that no country had ever been so rich that its wealth,
After World War II, in a

few countries, wealth increased so much that, for the first time, there was enough
money to go around. It was technically possible for no one to be poor . Much of the energy
divided evenly among everyone, would provide everyone with a comfortable living.
behind the social turmoil of the 1960s was fuelled by this revolutionary chang
AT: CP Disincentivizes Work

Studies prove GI doesnt decrease incentive to work
Mallett 2/4/15 (WHITNEY MALLETT Whitney is a writer and video producer, especially interested in how
technology intersects with art, privacy, and criminal justice. Whitney is a writer and video producer, especially interested in
how technology intersects with art, privacy, and criminal justice. The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money Motherboard
February 2, 2015 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin)
Critics of basic income guarantees have insisted that giving the poor money would
disincentivize them to work, and point to studies that show a drop in peoples' willingness to work under
pilot programs. But in Dauphinthought to be the largest such experiment conducted in North
America the experimenters found that the primary breadwinner in the
families who received stipends were in fact not less motivated to work
than before . Though there was some reduction in work effort from mothers of young children and teenagers
still in high schoolmothers wanted to stay at home longer with their newborns and teenagers werent under as
much pressure to support their familiesthe
as skeptics had predicted.
reduction was not anywhere close to disastrous,
AT: Aff Solves Poverty

The current welfare system has failed to life people out of
poverty
obviously we should be concerned that the existing welfare system has

utterly failed at its primary mission: lifting people out of poverty and
enabling them and their children to become independent and self-supporting
members of society. Last year alone, the federal government spent nearly $700 billion to
fund anti-poverty programs. State and local governments kicked in an additional $300 billion, bringing
the total to roughly $1 trillion. Since the Start of the War on Poverty in 1965, we have spent
nearly $19 trillion. Recent studies suggest that welfare programs did help to reduce the worst deprivations of
material poverty, especially in their early years. But they have long since reached a point of
diminishing returns. We may have reduced the discomfort of poverty, but we
have failed to truly lift people out of poverty . Therefore I am sympathetic to the argument
that some form of guaranteed basic income would be an improvement over
what we have today . For example, while I am skeptical of some of the predicted administrative savings,
there would be clear advantages to a simplified system. Second, it would treat poor people like
adults, expected to save and budget, rather than doling out small allowances for
those specific goods and services that the government believes they should have.
Third, as Zwolinski notes, it helps break up the entrenched constituencies that support the
welfare state.
And

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Welfare Surveillance

Federal laws empower infiltration into personal details of

Smith, Government Prof @ Cornell, 11

(Anna Marie, Neo-eugenics: A Feminist Critique of Agamben, Occasions 1:2,

There is hardly any difference between the

we must investigate the

Agambens ambitious deployment of

his theory interrupts our complacent assumption that

The historical record, however, makes it crystal clear that it is the

The legislator in the ideal city-state naturally concerns

contemporary social policy is an expression of neo-eugenics . Neo-eugenics is a

we are also witnessing the training of a myriad of forces upon the

Welfare Surveillance transforms entitlements to government

Subjects , on the other hand, receive inferior, inadequate, and stigmatizing

This surveillance of welfare recipients' everyday

The very relegation of

Black single mothers' inferior status in the welfare state has

the Court upheld Maryland's regulation that placed

Curtailing surveillance on social services is critical to providing

Though calls for universal benefits and/or significantly increased low-income

and regulatory mechanism on the scale toward monitoring, information

The plan solves the criminalization of welfare legal change

It is important to note that since the federal welfare reforms of 1996,

welfare programs have

We Meet the plan text says its at best this is a half-baked

A2: Its Surveillance is states

AT: T Surveillance = Consent

Boundaries of Informational Territories, 2011, https://books.google.com/books?

Monitoring can be considered a form of observation to gather

We shall define surveillance as

Prefer--No case meets by virtue of the social contract we all are

A2: Reasonable Expectation

Northwestern School of Law

Forecasting Fails- useless and we technology cant measure

Forecasting fails- highly inaccurate

my colleagues collaboration with the government, most notably in the area of

Forecasts fail- only marginally better than a coin toss

No predictions are absolute- low risk events happen and high

IR predictions fail- study proves scenarios can be inevitable

Analysts arent better at predictions than anyone else- study

AT Neoconservative think tanks

KUBILAY YADO ARIN 5-26-2014, "The Impact of Neoconservative Think Tanks on

, the alliance of the Christian Right and the neoconservative

the neoconservatives for ideological

neocons gave him

The unilateral war strategy of the AEI

neoconservatives saw the occupation of Iraq as first phase in the

The war on terror had

neocons still represent the strongest

Nuclear war very likely wont end humanity- physically

AT: Case Arguments

Dynamics of stigma most

Those most likely to internalize the stigma of being a recipient of

Welfare recipients are MUCH less likely to vote and have

the form of volunteering, as well as voting.

AT: Drug Testing Good

Conclusion Beginning in the 1960s, conservative politicians at the national level

Being tough on crime is an excuse which has historically

response to the social challenges of the 1960s, conservative political

Impact Calculus 2AC

Surveillance becomes a calculated practice for managing and manipulating human

, the concept of biopower

AT political capital real