***ECON ADVANTAGE

1NC

No transition wars.
Christopher Clary, 2015. PhD in Political Science from MIT and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public
Affairs at Brown. “Economic Stress and International Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,” MIT Political Science Department,
Research Paper No. 2015-8, p. 16-17

Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1) Economic crises lead to austerity
pressures, which in turn incent leaders to search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2) Economic crises also
encourage strategic reassessment, so that leaders can argue to their peers and their publics that defense spending
can be arrested without endangering the state. This can lead to threat deflation, where elites attempt to downplay the
seriousness of the threat posed by a former rival. (3) If a state faces multiple threats, economic crises provoke elites to
consider threat prioritization, a process that is postponed during periods of economic normalcy. (4) Economic
crises increase the political and economic benefit from international economic cooperation. Leaders seek
foreign aid, enhanced trade, and increased investment from abroad during periods of economic trouble. This
search is made easier if tensions are reduced with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select leaders
who are perceived as capable of resolving economic difficulties, permitting the emergence of leaders who hold
heterodox foreign policy views. Collectively, these mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will prefer
conciliatory policies compared to during periods of economic normalcy. This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also
providing historical examples that these mechanisms recur in practice.

Growth causes conflict.

Charles Boehmer, 2010. Ph.D. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University. “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict:
1875-1999,” Defence and Peace Economics, Vol. 21, Issue 3, Emory Libraries

The theory set forth earlier theorizes that economic growth increases perceptions of state strength, increasing the
likelihood of violent interstate conflicts. Economic growth appears to increase the resolve of leaders to stand
against challenges and the willingness to escalate disputes. A non-random pattern exists where higher rates of
GDP growth over multiple years are positively and significantly related to the most severe international
conflicts, whereas this is not true for overall conflict initiations. Moreover, growth of mililary expenditures, as a measure of the war chest
proposition, does not offer any explanation for violent interstate conflicts. This is not to say lhat growth of military expenditures never has any effect
on the occurrence of war, although such a link is not generally true in the aggregate using a large sample of states. In comparison, higher rates of
economic growth are significantly related to violent interstate conflicts in the aggregate. States with growing economies are more apt
to reciprocate military challenges by other states and become involved in violent interstate conflicts. The results
also show that theories from the Crisis-Scarcity perspective lack explanatory power linking GDP growth rates to
war at the state level of analysis. This is not to say thai such theories completely lack explanatory power in general, but more particularly
that they cannot directly link economic growth rates to state behavior in violent interstate conflicts. In contrast,
theories of diversionary conflict may well hold some explanatory power, although not regarding GDP growth in a
general test of states from all regions of the world across time. Perhaps diversionary theory better explains state
behaviors short of war, where the costs of externalizing domestic tensions do not become too costly, or in
relation to the foreign policies of particular countries. In many circumstances, engaging in a war to divert attention away from
domestic conditions would seemingly exacerbate domestic crisis conditions unless the chances of victory
were practically assured. Nonetheless, this study does show that domestic conflict is associated with interstate conflict. If diversionary
conflict theory has any traction as an economic explanation of violent interstate conflicts, it may require the study of other
explanatory variables besides overall GDP growth rates, such as unemployment or inflation rales. The contribution of this article
has been to examine propositions about economic growth in a global study. Most existing studies on this topic focus on only the
United States, samples of countries that are more developed on average (due to data availability in the past), or are
based on historical information and not economic GDP data. While I have shown that there is no strong evidence linking
military expenditures to violent interstate conflicts at the state level of analysis, much of the remaining Growth-as-Catalyst perspective is grounded in
propositions that are not directly germane to questions about state conflict behavior, such as those linking state behavior to long-cycles, or those that
remain at the systemic level. What answer remains linking economic growth to war once we eliminate military expenditures as an explanation?
Considering that the concept of foreign policy mood is difficult to identify and measure, and that the bulk of the literature relies solely on the
American historical experience, I do not rely on that concept. It is still possible that such moods affect some decision-makers. Instead, similar to
Blainey, I find that economic growth, when sustained over a stretch of years, has its strongest effect on states once
they find themselves in an international crisis. The results of this study suggest that states such as China, which have a
higher level of opportunity to become involved in violent interstate conflicts due to their capabilities,
geographic location, history of conflict, and so on, should also have a higher willingness to fight after enjoying
multiple years of recent economic growth. One does not have to assume that an aggressive China will emerge from growth. If
conflicts do present themselves, then China may be more likely to escalate a war given its recent national performance

Collapse inevitable --- complexity, inequality, and social stratification --- clinging to growth kills the
environment.
Rachel Nuwer, 4/18/2017. Writes about science, travel, food and adventure for outlets such as the New York Times, Scientific American,
National Geographic and more. “How Western Civilisation could Collapse,” BBC. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-
civilisation-could-collapse

Such collapses have occurred many times in human history, and no civilisation, no matter how seemingly great, is
immune to the vulnerabilities that may lead a society to its end. Regardless of how well things are going in the
present moment, the situation can always change. Putting aside species-ending events like an asteroid strike, nuclear winter or
deadly pandemic, history tells us that it’s usually a plethora of factors that contribute to collapse. What are they, and which, if
any, have already begun to surface? It should come as no surprise that humanity is currently on an unsustainable and uncertain path –
but just how close are we to reaching the point of no return?
While it’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, mathematics, science and history can provide hints about the
prospects of Western societies for long-term continuation.
Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper
understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and
his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The
ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural
resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.
That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his
colleagues. Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and
resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with
labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not
enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within
and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are
responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s
population lives on less than $3 per day.
For both scenarios, the models define a carrying capacity – a total population level that a given environment’s resources can sustain over the long term.
If the carrying capacity is overshot by too much, collapse becomes inevitable. That fate is avoidable, however. “If we make rational choices to reduce
factors such as inequality, explosive population growth, the rate at which we deplete natural resources and the rate of pollution – all perfectly doable
things – then we can avoid collapse and stabilise onto a sustainable trajectory,” Motesharrei said. “But we cannot wait forever to make those
decisions.”
Unfortunately, some experts believe such tough decisions exceed our political and psychological capabilities. “The world
will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more
expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of
climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and author of 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. “The climate problem will get
worse and worse and worse because we won’t be able to live up to what we’ve promised to do in the Paris Agreement and elsewhere.”
While we are all in this together, the world’s poorest will feel the effects of collapse first. Indeed, some nations are already serving
as canaries in the coal mine for the issues that may eventually pull apart more affluent ones. Syria, for example, enjoyed exceptionally high
fertility rates for a time, which fueled rapid population growth. A severe drought in the late 2000s, likely made worse by
human-induced climate change, combined with groundwater shortages to cripple agricultural production. That crisis left large
numbers of people – especially young men – unemployed, discontent and desperate. Many flooded into urban
centres, overwhelming limited resources and services there. Pre-existing ethnic tensions increased, creating
fertile grounds for violence and conflict. On top of that, poor governance – including neoliberal policies that eliminated water subsidies
in the middle of the drought – tipped the country into civil war in 2011 and sent it careening toward collapse.
In Syria’s case – as with so many other societal collapses throughout history – it was not one but a plethora of factors
that contributed, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, and
author of The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon calls these combined forces tectonic stresses for the way in which they
quietly build up and
then abruptly erupt, overloading any stabilising mechanisms that otherwise keep a society in check.
The Syrian case aside, another sign that we’re entering into a danger zone, Homer-Dixon says, is the increasing
occurrence of what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the
2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.
The past can also provide hints for how the future might play out. Take, for example, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. By the end of the 100BC
the Romans had spread across the Mediterranean, to the places most easily accessed by sea. They should have stopped there, but things were going
well and they felt empowered to expand to new frontiers by land. While transportation by sea was economical, however, transportation across land was
slow and expensive. All the while, they were overextending themselves and running up costs. The Empire managed to remain stable in the ensuing
centuries, but repercussions for spreading themselves too thin caught up with them in the 3rd Century, which was plagued by civil war and invasions.
The Empire tried to maintain its core lands, even as the army ate up its budget and inflation climbed ever higher as the government debased its silver
currency to try to cover its mounting expenses. While some scholars cite the beginning of collapse as the year 410, when the invading Visigoths sacked
the capital, that dramatic event was made possible by a downward spiral spanning more than a century.
According to Joseph Tainter, a professor of environment and society at Utah State University and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, one
of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of
thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception.
By the 3rd Century, Rome was increasingly adding new things – an army double the size, a cavalry, subdivided provinces that each
needed their own bureaucracies, courts and defences – just to maintain its status quo and keep from sliding backwards. Eventually, it
could no longer afford to prop up those heightened complexities. It was fiscal weakness, not war, that did the
Empire in.
So far, modern Western societies have largely been able to postpone similar precipitators of collapse through fossil fuels and industrial technologies –
think hydraulic fracturing coming along in 2008, just in time to offset soaring oil prices. Tainter suspects this will not always be the case, however.
“Imagine the costs if we have to build a seawall around Manhattan, just to protect against storms and rising tides,” he says. Eventually, investment
in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness
and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity, as our ancestors did when they increasingly ran
societies on fossil fuels.”
Meanwhile, a widening gap between rich and poor within those already vulnerable Western nations will push society
toward further instability from the inside. “By 2050, the US and UK will have evolved into two-class societies
where a small elite lives a good life and there is declining well-being for the majority,” Randers says. “What will collapse
is equity.”

Short-term collapse of the global economy is the only way to avoid catastrophic warming --- delay
locks in emissions.
David Holmgren, 2013. Founder of Holmgren Design Services, an environmental design and consulting firm, inventor of the Permaculture
system for regenerative agriculture, “Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future,” Simplicity Institute report,
http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/CrashOnDemandSimplicityInstitute.pdf

Many climate policy professionals and climate activists are now reassessing whether there is anything more they can do
to help prevent the global catastrophe that climate change appears to be. The passing of the symbolic 400ppm CO2 level certainly has seen
some prominent activists getting close to a change of strategy. As the Transition Town movement founder and permaculture activist Rob Hopkins
says, the shift in the mainstream policy circles from mitigation to adaptation and defence is underway (i.e. giving up).13
While political deadlock remains the most obvious obstacle, I believe at least some of that deadlock stems from widespread doubt about
whether greenhouse gas emissions can be radically reduced without economic contraction and/or substantial wealth
redistribution. Substantial redistribution of wealth is not generally taken seriously perhaps because it could only come about through some sort of
global revolution that would itself lead to global economic collapse. On the other hand, massive economic contraction seems like it might happen all
by itself, without necessarily leading to greater equity.
The predominant focus in the "climate professional and activist community" on policies, plans and projects for transition to
renewable energy and efficiency has yet to show evidence of absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that
do not depend on rising greenhouse gas emissions in other parts of the global economy. For example, the contribution of
renewable technology installation to reduced GGE in some European countries appears to be balanced by increased GGE in China and India (where
much of the renewable technologies are manufactured).
The Jevons'paradox14 suggests than any gains in efficiency or tapping of new sources of energy will simply expand
total consumption rather than reduce consumption of resources (and therefore GGE).
Richard Eckersley in his article 'Deficit Deeper Than Economy' identifies the improbability of ever decoupling economic growth from resource
depletion and green house gas emissions. He states "Australia's material footprint, the total amount of primary resources required to service domestic
consumption (excludes exports and includes imports) was 35 tonnes per person in 2008, the highest among the 186 countries studied. Every 10 per
cent increase in gross domestic product increases the average national material footprint by 6 per cent. By 2050, a global population of 9 billion people
would require an estimated 270 billion tonnes of natural resources to fuel the level of consumption of OECD countries, compared with the 70 billion
tonnes consumed in 2010."15
Time seems to be running out for any serious planned reductions in GGE[Greenhouse Gas Emissions] adequate to
prevent dangerous climate change without considering a powerdown of the growth economy . The ideas of degrowth16
are starting to get an airing, mostly in Europe, but the chances of these ideas being adopted and successfully implemented would require a long slow
political evolution if not revolution. We don't have time for the first, and the second almost certainly crashes the financial system, which in turn
crashes the global economy.
IS TIME RUNNING OUT FOR BOTTOM UP ALTERNATIVES?
Like many others, I have argued that the bottom up creation of household and community economies, already proliferating in the shadow of the global
economy, can create and sustain different ways of well-being that can compensate, at least partly, for the inevitable contraction in centralised fossil
fuelled economies (now well and truly failing to sustain the social contract in countries such as Greece and Egypt). When the official Soviet Union
economy collapsed in the early '90s it was the informal economy that cushioned the social impact. Permaculture strategies focus on the provision of
basic needs at the household and community level to increase resilience, reduce ecological footprint and allow much of the discretionary economy to
shrink. In principle, a
major contraction in energy consumption is possible because a large proportion of that
consumption is for non-essential uses by more than a billion middle class people. That contraction has the potential to
switch off greenhouse gas emissions but this has not been seriously discussed or debated by those currently working very hard to get
global action for rapid transition by planned and co-ordinated processes. Of course it is more complicated because the provision of fundamental
needs, such as water, food etc., are part of the same highly integrated system that meets discretionary wants.
However, the time available to create, refine and rapidly spread successful models of these bottom-up solutions is running out, in the same way that
the time for government policy and corporate capitalism to work their magic in converting the energy base of growth from fossil to renewable
sources.17 If the climate clock is really so close to midnight what else could be done?
Economic crash as hell or salvation
For many decades I have felt that a collapse of the global economic systems might save humanity and many of our
fellow species great suffering by happening sooner rather than later because the stakes keep rising and scale of the
impacts are always worse by being postponed . An important influence in my thinking on the chances of such a collapse was the
public speech given by President Ronald Reagan following the 1987 stock market crash. He said "there won't be an economic collapse, so long as
people don't believe there will be an economic collapse" or words to that effect. I remember at the time thinking; fancy the most powerful person on
the planet admitting that faith (of the populous) is the only thing that holds the financial system together.
Two decades on I remember thinking that a second great depression might be the best outcome we could hope for. The
pain and suffering that has happened since 2007 (from the more limited "great recession") is more a result of the ability
of the existing power structures to maintain control and enforce harsh circumstances by handing the empty bag to the public, than
any fundamental lack of resources to provide all with basic needs. Is the commitment to perpetual growth in wealth for the richest the
only way that everyone else can hope to get their needs met? The economy is simply not structured to provide all with their basic needs. That
growth economy is certainly coming to an end ; but will it slowly grind to a halt or collapse more rapidly?
The fact that the market price for carbon emissions has fallen so low in Europe is a direct result of stagnating growth. Past economic recessions
and more serious economic collapses, such as faced by the Soviet Union after its oil production peaked in the late 1980's,18 show
how greenhouse gas emissions can and have been reduced, then stabilizing at lower levels once the economy
stabilized without any planned intention to do so. The large number of oil exporters that have more recently peaked has provided many
case studies to show the correlation with political upheaval, economic contraction and reductions in GGE. Similarly many of the countries that have
suffered the greatest economic contraction are also those with the greatest dependence on imported energy, such as Ireland, Greece and Portugal. The
so-called Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, followed high food and energy prices driven by collapsed oil revenues and inability to maintain subsidies.
The radical changes of government in Egypt have not been able to arrest the further contraction of the economy.
The effects of peak oil and climate change have combined with geopolitical struggles over pipeline routes to all but destroy the Syrian economy and
society.19
Slow Contraction or Fast Collapse
The fragility of the global economy has many unprecedented aspects that make some sort of rapid collapse of the global
economy more likely . The capacity of central banks to repeat the massive stimulus mechanism in response to the
2008 global financial crisis, has been greatly reduced, while the faith that underpins the global financial system
has weakened , to say the least. Systems thinkers such as David Korowicz20 have argued that the inter-connected nature of the
global economy, instantaneous communications and financial flows, "just in time" logistics, and extreme degrees of economic and technological
specialisation, have increased the chances of a large scale systemic failure, at the same time that they have mitigated (or at least
reduced) the impact of more limited localised crises.
Whether novel factors such as information technology, global peak oil and climate change have increased the likelihood of more extreme economic
collapse, Foss and Keen have convinced me that the
most powerful and fast-acting factor that could radically reduce
greenhouse gas emissions is the scale of financial debt and the long-sustained growth of bubble economics
stretching back at least to the beginnings of the "Thatcherite/Reaganite revolution" in the early 1980s. From an energetics perspective, the peak of US
oil production in 1970, and the resulting global oil crises of 73 and 79, laid the foundations for the gigantic growth in debt that super accelerated the
level of consumption, and therefore GGE.
Whatever the causes, all economic bubbles follow a trajectory that includes a rapid contraction, as credit evaporates, followed by a long-sustained
contraction, where asset values decline to lower levels than those at the beginning of the bubble. After almost 25 years of asset price deflation in Japan,
a house and land parcel of 1.5ha in a not too isolated rural location can be bought for $25,000. A contraction in the systems that supply wants are likely
to see simultaneous problems in the provision of basic needs. As Foss explains, in a deflationary contraction, prices of luxuries generally collapse but
essentials of food and fuel do not fall much. Most importantly, essentials become unaffordable for many, once credit freezes and job security declines.
It goes without saying that deflation rather inflation is the economic devil that governments and central banks most fear and are prepared to do almost
anything to avoid.
Giving credence to the evidence for fast global economic collapse may suggest I am moving away from my belief in the more gradual Energy Descent
future that I helped articulate. John Michael Greer has been very critical of apocalyptic views of the future in which a collapse sweeps away the current
world leaving the chosen few who survive to build the new world. In large measure I agree with his critique but recognise that some might interpret
my work as suggesting a permaculture paradise growing from the ashes of this civilisation. To some extent this is a reasonable interpretation, but I see
that collapse, as a long drawn-out process rather than resulting from a single event.21
I still believe that energy descent will go on for many decades or even centuries. In Future Scenarios I suggested energy descent driven by
climate change and peak oil could occur through a series of crises separating relatively stable states that could
persist for decades if not centuries. The collapse of the global financial system might simply be the first of those
crises that reorganise the world. The pathways that energy descent could take are enormously varied, but still little discussed, so it is not
surprising that discussions about descent scenarios tend to default into ones of total collapse. As the language around energy descent and collapse has
become more nuanced, we start to see the distinction between financial, economic, social and civilisational collapse
as potential stages in an energy descent process where the first is fast changing and relatively superficial and the last is slow moving
and more fundamental.
In Future Scenarios I suggested the more extreme scenarios of Earth Steward and Lifeboat could follow Green Tech and Brown Tech along the
stepwise energy descent pathway. If we are heading into the Brown Tech world of more severe climate change, then as
the energy sources that sustain the Brown Tech scenario deplete , and climate chaos increases, future crises and
collapse could lead to the Lifeboat Scenario. In this scenario, no matter how fast or extreme the reductions in GGE due
to economic collapse, we still end up in the climate cooker , but with only the capacity for very local, household and
communitarian organisation.
If the climate crisis is already happening, and as suggested in Future Scenarios, the primary responses to the crisis increase rather than reduce GGE,
then it is probably too late for any concerted effort to shift course to the more benign Green Tech energy descent
future. Given that most of the world is yet to accept the inevitability of Energy Descent and are still pinning their faith in "Techno Stability" if not
"Techno Explosion", the globally cooperative powerdown processes needed to shift the world to Green Tech look unlikely. More fundamental than
any political action, the resurgent rural and regional economies, based on a boom for agricultural and forestry commodities, that structurally underpins
the Green Tech scenario, will not eventuate if climate change is fast and severe. Climate change will stimulate large investments in agriculture but they
are more likely to be energy and resource intensive, controlled climate agriculture (greenhouses), centralised at transport hubs. This type of
development simply reinforces the Brown Tech model including the acceleration of GGE.
While it may be too late for the Green Tech Scenario, it still may be possible to avoid more extreme climate
change of a long drawn out Brown Tech Scenario before natural forcing factors lock humanity into the climate cooker of
4-6 degrees and resource depletion leads to a collapse of the centralised Brown Tech governance and a rise of local war lords (Lifeboat Scenario).
The novel structural vulnerabilities highlighted by David Korowicz, and the unprecedented extremity of the bubble economics highlighted by Nicole
severe global economic and societal
Foss suggest the strong tendencies towards a Brown Tech world could be short lived. Instead,
collapse could switch off GGE enough to begin reversing climate change ; in essence the Earth Steward scenario
of recreated bioregional economies based on frugal agrarian resources and abundant salvage from the
collapsed global economy and defunct national governance structures.

Transition is inevitable by 2030 --- attempting to cling to growth just deepens and intensifies the
impact.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, 2017. Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development.
DPhil in international relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University. Member of the Executive Committee of the British Muslim
Human Rights Centre at London Metropolitan University’s Human Rights and Social Justice Institute. Taught at the Department of International
Relations, University of Sussex, and has lectured at Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Formerly a senior researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission. Award-winning 15-year investigative journalist, noted international security
scholar, bestselling author, film-maker, and creator of INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project. “Failing
States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence,” SpringerBriefs in Energy Energy Analysis. Conclusions: From Systemic State-Failure
to Civilizational Transition. Book. pp. 90-91

Concepts of the ‘circular economy’—involving a fundamental reorganization of the way societies produce,
manage and consume resources through wide-scale practices of recycling across production and consumption
chains—bear considerable importance to this sort of vision. The circular economy brings to the fore the necessity of reusing and
recycling raw materials to the most efficient extent possible to support the sustainability of production and consumption chains relative to increasingly
depleted mineral ores and higher energy costs for their extraction, refining and input into manufacturing. Numerous companies are taking
the concept seriously in the recognition of current and looming environmental risks to their supply chains, but
human civilization must begin to do so in the wider context of a recognition that the animating ideology of the current phase-shift of civilization is
deeply misguided.
A major report to the Club of Rome tracking the depletion of the planet’s mineral ores finds that by the end of this century, higher
quality ores critical to the growth of industrial civilization as we know it will be largely depleted. But the report
shows that a ‘circular economy’ approach has strong potential to allow existing minerals to be recycled with
minimum losses and a high degree of efficiency sufficient to maintain a high technology society in, however, a
new post-capitalist economic context (Bardi 2014 ).
The ESD–HSD amplifying feedbacks discussed in this study demonstrate that the twenty-first century is rapidly transitioning to a
crisis convergence threshold heralding the inevitable demise of the endless growth model of neoliberal
finance capitalism that currently animates industrial civilization as we know it. This points to the urgency of adaptation to
prepare for the emergence of a new evolutionary phase-shift in the form of post-capitalism—a concept whose unspecified nature is important precisely
because it opens up new possibilities for economic organization which are not limited by the failures of
prevailing economic orthodoxy. The rejection of that orthodoxy as limited springs from the recognition that the doctrine of unlimited
economic growth is nothing less than a fundamental violation of the laws of physics. In short, it is the stuff of cranks—yet it is nevertheless the
ideology that informs policymakers and pundits alike. Post-capitalism, on the other hand, seeks to ground itself in harmony with
the biophysical environment, not by rejecting the ideals of human prosperity and well-being, but by
decoupling them from the fetish for endless material growth.
That in turn paves the way, potentially, for a renewed sense of human value and purpose beyond the confines of
material production and consumption, rejuvenated by a consciousness of humanity’s embeddedness in its
environment. The magical thinking of endless growth must make way for a post-materialist ethic of human interconnectedness with itself and its
biophysical context.
Groundbreaking economic work on this theme of ‘prosperity without growth’ has been forthcoming from several quarters, and provides mounting
evidence that the endless growth model of economics has not just failed to deliver meaningful prosperity to the world’s poorest, but is incapable of
doing so as it continues to generate inequality, environmental destruction, and to eventually undermine its very own basis (Jackson 2009). This body of
work also demonstrates that meaningful prosperity in the sense of providing for human needs and well-being in high technology societies remains
possible in a fundamentally re-organized post-capitalist economy. In this framework, human progress can continue but within a new
paradigm in which limited material development is mobilized to meet fundamental human needs through
extension of human relations instead of market relations, a deepening of democracy, enhancing ecosystems, and
more equal distribution of wealth. Inevitably, therefore, post-capitalism will be incommensurate with the features of
endless growth associated with industrial forms of capitalism: namely, continuously growing material throughput driven by ever
growing consumption by unrestrained population growth (Victor 2010 ; Fournier 2008 ; Schneider et al. 2010 ; Fritz and Koch
2014 ).
Instead, theunsustainable nature of contemporary capitalism opens up the urgency of working toward a new
post-capitalist era built on the following components: regulation of market mechanisms and corporate activities;
support for social enterprises organized as community cooperatives; democratic money creation processes,
including community currencies, in place of debt-based fractional reserve banking; communities reclaiming the
commons, especially in the sense of communal land stewardship systems; redistribution of income and capital assets;
a diversity of production scales and modes, including small-scale, subsistence and self- employment to widen
economic democracy (Johanisova and Wolf 2012 ).
Such a vision may, in the current context, appear impossibly utopian. By 2030, and even more so by 2050—as the
manifestations of global capitalism’s self-catabolic trajectory become more obvious—it will appear
increasingly realistic.
 2NC – AT: Nuclear War

Counter-forcing solves escalation.

John Mueller, 2009. Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. “Atomic
Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda” p. 8, Google Books

To begin to approach a condition that can credibly justify applying such extreme characterizations as societal annihilation, a full-out attack with
hundreds, probably thousands, of thermonuclear bombs would be required. Even in such extreme cases, the area actually
devastated by the bombs' blast and thermal pulse effective would be limited: 2,000 1-MT explosions with a destructive radius of 5
miles each would directly demolish less than 5 percent of the territory of the United States, for example. Obviously, if major
population centers were targeted, this sort of attack could inflict massive casualties. Back in cold war days, when such devastating events sometimes
seemed uncomfortably likely, a number of studies were conducted to estimate the consequences of massive
thermonuclear attacks. The most likely scenario--one that could
One of the most prominent of these considered several probabilities.
be perhaps considered at least to begin to approach the rational--was
a "counterforce" strike in which well over 1,000 thermonuclear
weapons would be targeted at America's ballistic missile silos, strategic airfields, and nuclear submarine bases in an effort to
destroy the country’s strategic ability to retaliate. Since the attack would not directly target population centers,
most of the ensuing deaths would be from radioactive fallout, and the study estimates that from 2 to 20 million, depending mostly
on wind, weather, and sheltering, would perish during the first month.15

No nuclear winter.
Russell Seitz, 7/1/2011, a former associate of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University’s Center for International
Affairs, “Nuclear winter was and is debatable”, Nature. Vol. 475 Issue 7354, p37-37. 1

Alan Robock's contention that there has been no real scientific debate about the 'nuclear winter' concept is
itself debatable (Nature 473, 275–276; 2011). This potential climate disaster, popularized in Science in 1983, rested on the
output of a one-dimensional model that was later shown to overestimate the smoke a nuclear holocaust might
engender. More refined estimates, combined with advanced three-dimensional models (see
http://go.nature.com/kss8te), have dramatically reduced the extent and severity of the projected cooling. Despite
this, Carl Sagan, who co-authored the 1983 Science paper, went so far as to posit “the extinction of Homo sapiens” (C. Sagan
Foreign Affairs 63, 75–77; 1984). Some regarded this apocalyptic prediction as an exercise in mythology . George
Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology protested: “Nuclear winter is the worst example of
the misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory,” (see http://go.nature.com/yujz84) and climatologist
Kerry Emanuel observed that the subject had “become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity” (Nature 319,
259; 1986). Robock's single-digit fall in temperature is at odds with the subzero (about −25 °C) continental
cooling originally projected for a wide spectrum of nuclear wars. Whereas Sagan predicted darkness at noon
from a US–Soviet nuclear conflict, Robock projects global sunlight that is several orders of magnitude
brighter for a Pakistan–India conflict — literally the difference between night and day. Since 1983, the
projected worst-case cooling has fallen from a Siberian deep freeze spanning 11,000 degree-days Celsius (a
measure of the severity of winters) to numbers so unseasonably small as to call the very term 'nuclear winter' into
question.
 AT: Shock Doctrine

Shocks are inevitable without the transition—rising inequality, debt, and unemployment guarantee
financial crises are inevitable.
Wolfgang STREECK 16, Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany [“On the
dismal future of capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2016, p. 163-183, Accessed Online through
Emory Libraries]

The writing is on the wall, and has been for some time; we must only learn to read it. The message is: capitalism is a historical social formation; it
has not just a beginning but also an end.1 Three trends have run in parallel since the 1970s, throughout the family of
rich capitalist democracies: declining growth, rising inequality of income and wealth and rising debt—public, private and total.
Today the three seem to have become mutually reinforcing: low growth contributes to inequality by intensifying
distributional conflict; inequality dampens growth by curbing effective demand; high levels of existing debt
clog credit markets and increase the risk of financial crises; an overgrown financial sector both results from
and adds to economic inequality etc. Already the last growth cycle before 2008 was more fake than real 2 and post-
2008 recovery remains anaemic at best, also because Keynesian stimulus, monetary or fiscal, fails to work in the face of
unprecedented amounts of accumulated debt. Note that we are talking about long-term trends, not just a momentary unfortunate
coincidence, and indeed about global trends, affecting the capitalist system as a whole and as such. Nothing is in sight that seems only
nearly powerful enough to break the three trends , deeply engrained and densely intertwined as they have become.
Moreover, looking back we see a sequence of political-economic crises that began with inflation in the 1970s, followed by an explosion of public debt
in the 1980s and by rapidly rising private debt in the subsequent decade, resulting in the collapse of financial markets in 2008. This sequence, again,
was by and large the same for all major capitalist countries, whose economies have never really been in equilibrium since the end of postwar growth.
All three crises began and ended in the same way: inflation, public debt and private debt initially served as expedient political solutions to distributional
conflicts between capital and labour (and sometimes third parties such as raw material producers), until they became problems themselves: inflation in
the early 1980s, public debt in a first consolidation phase in the 1990s, and private debt after 2008.3 Today’s political fix is called
‘quantitative easing’: essentially the printing of money by treasuries and central banks to keep interest rates down
and accumulated debt sustainable, as well as prevent a stagnant economy from sliding into deflation, at the price of more
inequality and of new bubbles in asset markets building and, eventually, collapsing .
The fundamental nature of the crisis is reflected in the extent to which the captains of capitalism have lost orientation and find themselves reduced to
devising ever new provisional stopgaps until the next unpleasant surprise catches up with them. The wizards have become clueless. How long can
quantitative easing go on? Is deflation the problem or inflation? How does one know a bubble before it blows up? Is
growth restored through spending or through cutting back on spending? Is stricter financial regulation conducive or harmful to growth?4 Until the
mid-1970s, growth was to result from redistribution from the top to the bottom; then, when Keynesianism was succeeded by Hayekianism, the
opposite was true and markets were to be set free to redistribute from the bottom to the top. Now, seven years after the disaster of 2008,
there is still no new growth formula and confusion rules the day. State-administered capitalism has failed —that is, was
rejected by the owners of capital as too costly for them, to be replaced with free-market capitalism, which has also
failed. For the time being, central banks act as regents waiting for a new ruler. But who would this be, and what would be his recipe for holding the
capitalist enterprise together?
I suggest thatafter more than 200 years, capitalism has become unsustainable as a result of having become
ungovernable. Behind this is what has come to be summarily called ‘globalization’: the expansion of capitalist market relations beyond the
reach of government, uniting capitalism while leaving collective political action fragmented. Although this may look like the final victory of
capitalism, which to an extent it is, it also and at the same time foreshadows its demise. Unlike what Mandeville promised in his ‘Fable
of the Bees’ (1988 [1714]), and what Adam Smith suggested with his less provocative metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ (1993 [1776]), the capitalist
conversion of private vices into public virtues underwriting a stable society worked only in the presence of strong formal and informal institutions
restraining the market’s ‘order of egoism’ (Dunn, 2005) and subjecting it to social discipline. By outgrowing the collective capacities to govern it, that is
to say, capitalism has won a Pyrrhic victory. That there is today no alternative to it, no globally united anti-capitalist force,
is as much a predicament for capitalism as it is a blessing. Note that in crucial moments in capitalism’s history, it
was its opposition that stabilized it as a society: regional, national or religious movements preserving social
cohesion and thereby enabling cooperation and exchange in good faith, or trade unions and social-democratic
welfare states securing sufficient demand and social reproduction through political intervention.
The simultaneous disappearance of government and opposition in contemporary capitalism makes for a cumulative
breakdown of system integration which, in turn, is driving an accelerating transformation of social integration
(Lockwood, 1964). Global ungovernability has caused a deep erosion of social regimes on the frontlines between capitalist markets and what Karl
Polanyi has called the three ‘fictitious commodities’, labour, land and money. While capitalist development, according to Polanyi, must ultimately aim
to commodify everything, it can proceed only as long as it is prevented by society from forcing under its logic what it can fully commodify only at its
own detriment. Protecting labour, land and money from the dynamics of capitalist development requires government; ‘governance’ is not enough
(Offe, 2008) to keep capitalism from going too far and thereby undermining itself.
Today regime erosion is blatant with respect to nature, where the fragmented politics of global capitalism has proved
unable to contain the consumption and destruction of the natural environment. Similarly, the competitive production
of money by governments, central banks and financial firms has become a potent source of uncertainty and a
permanent threat to systemic stability. As to labour, traditional postwar employment regimes designed to protect workers and their
families from excessive market pressures are disappearing in leading capitalist countries, giving way to precarious employment, zero hours jobs,
freelancing and standby work in global firms like Uber that function almost entirely without regular employees.5 Employment risks are being
privatized and individualized, while life and work become indistinguishably fused. Unions are becoming irrelevant, or never come into existence in new
industries and countries. Thus there is nothing to soften the impact of technological change proceeding faster than
ever to reorganize work, or disorganize it, like artificial intelligence rendering a broad band of middle-class
occupations redundant and thereby destroying the middle-class way of life (see Randall Collins, ‘The End of Middle-Class Work: No More
Escapes’, pp. 37–69 in Wallerstein et al., 2013).
In a previous article (Streeck, 2014), I have identified
five disorders of contemporary capitalism that I consider beyond repair, each of
secular stagnation, which is the culmination of the long decline
them standing for a different aspect of system disintegration:
in growth rates 6 ; oligarchic neo-feudalism, merging political and economic power not just in Russia, Ukraine
and China but also in the West, particularly in the USA,7 and de-coupling the fate of the rich from that of the
poor; the plundering of the public economy, which had once been both an indispensable counterweight and a
supportive infrastructure to capitalism, through fiscal consolidation and the privatization of public services
(Bowman et al., 2014); systemic de-moralization; and international anarchy . For reasons of space, I will briefly elaborate on the
latter two points only.8
First, de-moralization. Unlike in the Mandevillian Fable, under financialized capitalism private vices have become public vices as well, depriving
capitalism of its last—consequentialist— moral justification. Stylizing owners and managers of capital as trustees of society is not even tried any more,
their much publicized exercises in philanthropy notwithstanding. A pervasive cynicism is now deeply engrained in the collective common sense, which
as a matter of course regards capitalism as an opportunity structure for the well-connected superrich to become even richer. Cheating in pursuit of
profit is assumed to be normal and fails to excite moral outrage. This holds true especially in finance where the highest profits are made by
circumventing or outright violating legal rules, on insider trading, mortgage lending, rate fixing or whatever.9 In the USA alone, banks had, by June
2015, agreed to pay about 100 billion dollars in out-of-court settlement fees for legal infractions in connection with the 2008 financial crisis
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 29, 2015). None of these cases ever went to trial and nobody had to go to prison, testifying to the deep empathy
of the legal system with the need for financial institutions to break the law in order to make a profit.10 Add the lawyers’ fees to the settlement fees to
get a sense of the fines that would have been due after conviction in a regular trial—and take into account that very likely, a goodly share of both will
for tax purposes legally be declared as business expenses.11
Second, historically capitalism has required a stable international order maintained by a hegemonic power, that role having moved from Florence via
the Netherlands to Britain and, in the postwar era, the USA. When the position of hegemon was contested or vacant, like in the first half the twentieth
century, conflict was rampant, accompanied by severe economic disruption. Since the 1970s, the USA have been increasingly less able and willing to
provide for the collective goods a capitalist hegemon is expected to deliver; instead, they have become parasitic on the global economy. A cooperative
solution of the problem of international order, for example through power-sharing between the USA and China, is not in sight. On the periphery of
the capitalist world system, the USA have lost several wars in succession, and democratic-capitalist development, or ‘nation-building’, has failed in large
parts of the world. Instead of the postwar project of a comprehensive system of sovereign states covering the entire globe, large and growing territories
have become stateless. In many of them, fundamentalist religious movements have taken control, rejecting modernism and international law, and
seeking an alternative to the consumerism of contemporary capitalism that they can no longer hope to bestow its blessings on their countries.
Increasingly, they find allies in the global North, in particular immigrants from the South, who respond to their social and economic exclusion by
carrying the wars of the periphery into the centre.
How can capitalism end without a new society waiting to take its place? To understand this, we must abandon the
idea of an orderly succession of social formations: the historical-materialist expectation that a society dies by giving
birth to a new, more advanced one, including the Bolshevist fallacy of a social order ending only by a different social order being put in
place by the central committee of a victorious revolutionary party. At the same time, we must also beware of falling victim to a
contemporary equivalent of what might be called the Ravenna illusion: the deep conviction of the ruling classes of
the fifth century Western Roman Empire in the preordained immortality of their civilization, unshakeable
even after their territory had been reduced to the tiny city of Ravenna on the Adriatic coast whose surrounding swamps
granted them a final reprieve while the Germanic hordes were busy sacking Rome and the empire’s Western provinces. Convinced that life
could not but eventually return to what it had always been, Rome’s ruling families in their Ravenna refuge
occupied themselves with elaborate intrigues over the imperial succession.12 Learning from their example that
optimism may sometimes result from no more than a lack of imagination , we may consider the possibility that a social
order may issue, not in another order, but in lasting disorder—in a historical epoch of uncertain duration when, in the words of
Antonio Gramsci, ‘the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born’.13
What may life be like in a time like this? According to Gramsci, the breakdown of a social order in the absence of a successor
may give rise to ‘an interregnum in which pathological phenomena of the most diverse sort come into
existence’ 14—in other words, to a society devoid of coherent institutions capable of normalizing the lives of its members and protecting them
from accidents and monstrosities of all sorts. Life in an interregnum is characterized by a lack of structural determinacy,15 making it unpredictable. Its
society fails to provide its members with reliable templates around which they may organize themselves: instead
it demands constant improvisation, making individuals substitute strategy for structure—offering rich opportunities to oligarchs and
warlords of all sorts while forcing the majority to live in insecurity, uncertainty and anomy, much like the long
interregnum that began in the fifth century and is now called the dark age.
System integration in contemporary capitalism has given way to unstable change that has yet to crystallize in a new, stable order. Turbulence and
immobility, dynamics and stagnation have become close correlates. The social character bred by this sort of social structure (Gerth and Mills, 1953) is
that of a de-socialized, intendedly self-sufficient, individualistic individual, relying on self-policed neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 2008) to
compensate for the absence of government and the weakness of governance. Social structure in an indeterminate social world emerges from, or better:
is replaced with, the improvisations of self-interested individuals surrounding themselves with self-made networks of opportunistic relationships—an
Ersatz society of users rather than members, constructed from below, that appears to have grown out of a libertarian wealth of alternatives and is sold
ideologically as a large adventure playground while in fact reflecting a destructive absence of social order.
The broken society of the post-capitalist interregnum is one devoid of normative legitimacy— one that has turned
responsibility for itself over to the individually rational choices of its members, leaving them uninstructed in making such choices. While
this may
be and is presented as liberation, in the reality of post-capitalism the place of social norms and institutions is
taken by greed and fear as the ultimate mechanisms of social control. Together they power the self-economization and self-
marketization of individuals adapting to unpredictably changing circumstances, among other things by relentless competitive investment in their
‘flexibility’ and ‘human capital’, so as to maximize their fitness for the imagined meritocracy of a ‘free’ market in a world of exploding inequality. Self-
reliance becomes the order of the day, even though and precisely because some have much more self to rely on than others.
Under post-capitalism, private profit-making continues, even though in the shadow of uncertainty in an
anomic society with decaying institutions, declining coherence, successive crises, and ongoing local and more-
than-local conflicts and contestations. Mass cooperation with capital accumulation is driven by a culture of competitive consumption that, apart
perhaps from large parts of Asia where it seems to be based in collective conformism, must be vigilantly protected against being subverted by post-
materialist value change, if not by shrinking spending power. The life of individuals in the post-capitalist sauve qui peut
interregnum follows the behavioural prescriptions of neoliberal doctrine (Dardot and Laval, 2013), which means that it is bound to burn to
the ground the foundations of a successful society and economy. Social life cannot be reduced to economic life, and economic
life is not possible outside of a society. Proposition 12 of Etzioni’s Moral Dimension (1988, 257) applies: ‘The more people accept the
neoclassical paradigm as a guide for their behaviour, the more their ability to sustain a market economy is
undermined’. The future of capitalism is bleak.
 2NC – Unsustainable

Peak oil.
Nafeez Ahmed, 1/20/2017. Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development. DPhil in
international relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University. Member of the Executive Committee of the British Muslim Human
Rights Centre at London Metropolitan University’s Human Rights and Social Justice Institute. Taught at the Department of International Relations,
University of Sussex, and has lectured at Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Formerly a senior
researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission. Award-winning 15-year investigative journalist, noted international security scholar, bestselling
author, film-maker, and creator of INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project. “Brace for the Oil, Food and
Financial Crash of 2018,” The Observer. http://observer.com/2017/01/brace-for-the-oil-food-and-financial-crash-of-2018/

Seen in this broader scientific context, the

HSBC global oil supply report provides quite stunning confirmation that for the
most part, global oil production is already in post-peak. That much is incontrovertible, and derived from
industry-validated data.
HSBC believes that after 2018, this is going to manifest in not simply a global supply shock, but a world in which cheap, high
quality fossil fuels is increasingly hard to find.
We don’t need to accept this forecast dogmatically — the post-peak oil market, which HSBC confirms now exists, may function differently than what
anyone can easily forecast.
But if HSBC’s forecast is accurate, here’s what it might mean. One possible scenario is that by 2018 or shortly thereafter, the world will face
a similar convergence of global crises that occurred a decade earlier.
In this scenario, oil price hikes would have a recessionary affect that destabilizes the global debt bubble, which for
some years has been higher than pre-2008 crash levels, now at a record $152 trillion.
In 2008, oil price shocks played a key role in creating pre-crisis economic conditions for consumers in which
rising living costs helped trigger debt-defaults in housing markets, which rapidly spiraled out of control.
In or shortly after 2018, economic and energy crisis convergence would drive global food prices up, re-
generating the contours of the triple crunch we saw ravage the world from 2008 to 2011, the debilitating impacts of which
we have yet to recover from.
2018 is likely to be crunch year for another reason. 1 January 2018 is the date when a host of new regulations are set to come in force, which will
“constrain lending ability and prompt banks to only advance money to the best borrowers, which could accelerate bankruptcies worldwide,” according
to Bloomberg. Other rules to come in play will require banks to stop using their own international risk assessment
measures for derivatives trading.
Ironically, the introduction of similar well-intentioned regulation in January 2008 (through Basel II) laid the groundwork
to rupture the global financial architecture, making it vulnerable to that year’s banking collapse.
In fact, two years earlier in July 2006, Dr David Martin, an expert on global finance, presciently forecast that Basel II would interact with the debt
bubble to convert a collapse of the housing bubble into a global financial conflagration.
Just a month after that prescient warning, I was told by a former senior Pentagon official with wide-ranging high-level access to the US military,
intelligence and financial establishment that a global banking collapse was imminent, and would likely occur in 2008.
My source insisted that the event was bound up with the peak of global conventional oil production about two years earlier (which according to the
UK’s former chief government scientist Sir David King did indeed occur around 2005, even though unconventional oil and gas production has offset
the conventional decline so far).
Having first outlined my warning of a 2008 global banking collapse in August 2006, I re-articulated the warning in November 2007, citing Dr. Martin’s
forecast and my own wider systems analysis at a lecture at Imperial College, London. In that lecture, I specifically predicted that a housing-triggered
banking crisis would be sparked in the context of the new era of expensive fossil fuels.
I called it then, and I’m calling it now.
Some time after January 2018, we are seeing the probability of a new crisis convergence in global energy, economic
and food systems, similar to what occurred in 2008.
In the end, I might be wrong. The crash might not happen in exactly 2018. It might happen later. Or it might be triggered by something else,
something unexpected, that the model outlined here doesn’t capture.
The point of a forecast is not to be right — but to imagine a potential scenario based on the data available that one can reasonably prepare for; and to
adjust the model accordingly in light of new data.
Whether or not a crash takes place in precisely the way suggested here, what’s clear from the new research is that the economy is
hugely vulnerable to a financial crisis for reasons that conventional economists don’t talk about — reasons relating
to the energy system on which the economy is fundamentally dependent.
Today, we are all supposed to quietly believe that the economy is in ‘recovery’, when in fact it is merely
transitioning through a fundamental global systemic phase-shift in which the unsustainability of prevailing
industrial structures are being increasingly laid bare.
The truth is that the cycles of protracted economic crisis are symptomatic of a deeper global systemic process.
One way we can brace ourselves for the next crash is to recognise it broadly for what it is: a symptom of global
system failure, and therefore of the inevitable transition to a post-carbon, post-capitalist future.
The future we are stepping into simply doesn’t work the way we are accustomed to.
The old, industrial era rules for the dying age of energy and technological super-abundancemust be re-written for a
new era beyond fossil fuels, beyond endless growth at any environmental cost, beyond debt-driven finance.
 2NC – AT: Tech/Decoupling

Framing issue --- if you’re skeptical of our transition scenario, you should be especially skeptical of
some fictional techno-fix coming in the future that boosts global environmental efficiency 80-fold.
Samuel Alexander, 2015. Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, co-director of the Simplicity Institute and research fellow at the
Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Prosperous Descent. The Simplicity Institute. book

Perhaps the
limits of technology can be most easily understood when clarifying exactly what is expected of
technology in terms of achieving sustainability. The global development agenda, as expressed in the Rio+20 declaration, is that all
nations should seek ‘sustained growth’ (UN, 2012) in GDP as a path to sustainable development. But what degree of efficiency improvements would
be required to make sustained global growth ‘sustainable’? When one does the math on this question, it becomes perfectly
clear that technology can never make the growth model ‘green’. Consider the following basic arithmetic:
Throughout much of the 20th century, developed economies achieved around 3% growth in GDP per annum, meaning that
they doubled in size roughly every 23 years (Purdey, 2010). This has become something of a reference point for signifying politicoeconomic ‘success’
(Hamilton, 2003), so let us assume that when the United Nations talks of ‘growth’ it means continuing levels of growth that have been experienced in
recent decades. Furthermore, for social justice reasons, let us assume that the aim of ‘development’ is ultimately to bring the poorest parts of the world
up to the living standards enjoyed by the developed world. After all, from a moral perspective, it is difficult to argue that one section of the global
population is entitled to a certain income per capita while denying a similar level to others. If, however, this global development agenda were to be
achieved over the next 70 years, how big would the global economy be relative to the existing economy?
The figures are confronting, to say the least. Over 70 years, at 3% growth, the economies of the developed world (populated
by roughly 1 billion people) would have doubled in size three times, meaning they would be eight times larger, in
terms of GDP, than they are now. If we also assume that by 2080 the world population is going to be around 10 billion
(UNDSEA, 2012), and that this population has caught up to the living standards of the developed world by this stage, then the global
economy would be around 80 times larger, in terms of GDP, than the size of the developed world’s aggregate economy today.
Needless to say, ecosystems are trembling under the pressure of one ‘developed world’ at the existing size. Who,
then, could seriously think our planet could withstand the equivalent of an 80-fold increase? The very
suggestion is absurd, and yet this very absurdity defines the vision of the global development agenda. It is the
elephant in the room. If we make the rough estimation that the developed world, on its own, currently consumes the earth’s entire sustainable
biocapacity (Vale and Vale, 2013), then an 80-fold increase would imply that in 70 years we would need 80 planets in
order to sustain the global economy. We only have one planet, of course, and its biocapacity is already in decline.
At this stage the techno-optimist may wish to interject and insist that in this scenario, which forecasts GDP growth
into the future, we can expect that there would be efficiency improvements, such that the impact of global growth would be less
than projected above. There would be efficiency improvements, indeed, meaning that the impact could be significantly less than projected above. For
example, a recent study (Wiedmann et al., 2013) shows that with every 10% increase in GDP, the material footprint of economies ‘only’ increase by
6%. But based on that estimate of decoupling, we would still need 48 planets’ worth of biocapacity. Accordingly,
even if these figures are overstated by an order of magnitude, the point would remain that efficiency
gains could not possibly be
expected to make the projected amount of GDP growth sustainable. The levels of decoupling required would
simply be too much (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011; Trainer, 2012). To think otherwise is not being optimistic but delusional.
Even based on more conservative numbers, the decoupling required would be unattainable. For example, Tim Jackson (2009) has
done the arithmetic with respect to carbon emissions, envisioning a scenario in which current Western European incomes grow at
2% and by 2050 nine billion people share that same income level. In this more moderate scenario, the global economy still grows 15 times. Jackson
shows that in order to meet the IPCC’s carbon goal of 450ppm, the carbon intensity of each dollar of GDP must be 130 times lower than the average
carbon intensity today. This means carbon intensities must fall 11% every year between now and 2050. By way of context, carbon intensities have
declined merely 0.7% per year since 1990 (Jackson, 2009: 79). When these numbers are understood, one can only conclude
that technooptimism is not a scientifically credible position but is instead a ‘faith’ without foundation.
According to the latest IPCC report (2013), if the world is to have a 50% chance of keeping warming to less than two degrees (the so-called ‘safe’
level), no more than 820-1445 billion tones of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can be emitted during the rest of this century. Based on
existing yearly emissions, and aiming for a 66% chance of success, this carbon budget is going to be used up by 2045. If existing trends of
growth in emissions continue or accelerate, or if we demand a higher chance of success than 66%, that
budget will be used up even sooner (see also, Moriarty and Honnery, 2011).
The question, therefore, must not be: ‘How can we make the growth model sustainable?’ The question should
be: ‘What economic model is sustainable?’ And the answer, it seems, must be: ‘Something other than the growth
model.’
Rebound effect makes decoupling growth and the environment impossible and potentially
dangerous.
Samuel Alexander, 2015. Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, co-director of the Simplicity Institute and research fellow at the
Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Prosperous Descent. The Simplicity Institute. book

The Jevons paradox is generally discussed in the scholarly literature with reference to the notion of ‘rebound effects’ (Herring and Sorrell, 2009; Alcott
and Madlener, 2009). A rebound effect is said to have occurred when the benefits of efficiency improvements are partially or wholly negated by
consumption growth that was made possible by the efficiency improvements. For example, a 5% increase in energy efficiency may only reduce energy
consumption by 2% if the efficiency improvements incentivise people to act in more energy-intensive ways (meaning 60% of anticipated savings are
lost or ‘taken back’). In other words, efficiency improvements can provoke behavioural or economic responses (‘rebounds’) that end up reducing some
of the anticipated benefits of the efficiency improvements. When those rebounds are significant enough they can even lead to
increased resource or energy consumption, which is sometimes called ‘back-fire’ – or the Jevons paradox. As will now be explained,
there are three main categories of rebound effects – direct rebounds, indirect rebounds, and a macroeconomic or economy-wide rebound.
A direct rebound occurs when an efficiency gain in production results in increased consumption of the same resource
(Khazzoom, 1980; Frondel et al., 2012). For example, a
more fuel-efficient car can lead people to drive more often, or further,
since the costs of fuel per kilometre have gone down; a more efficient heater can lead people to warm their houses for longer periods or
to hotter temperatures, since the relative costs of heating have gone down; energy efficient lighting can lead people to leave the lights on for longer,
etc. (Sorrell, 2009). Because efficiency generally reduces the price of a commodity (since it makes production less resourceintensive
or time-intensive), this
incentivises increased consumption, meaning that some or all of the ecological benefits that
flow from efficiency gains are often lost to increased consumption.
An indirect rebound occurs when efficiency gains lead to increased consumption of some other resource. For example,
insulating one’s home might reduce the annual consumption of energy for electricity, but the money saved from reduced energy costs
is often spent on other commodities that require energy (e.g., a plane flight or a new television). This can mean that some or all of
the energy saved from insulating one’s house is actually consumed elsewhere, meaning overall energy dependence can stay the same or even increase.
A macroeconomic or economy-wide rebound is the aggregate of direct and indirect rebounds. New technologies can create new production
possibilities, or make existing production possibilities accessible to more people, thus stimulating economic growth. The result is that
efficiency-promoting technologies often facilitate the consumption of more energy and resources even as
energy and resource intensities reduce, as Jevons observed long ago.
While the basic mechanism of rebound effects is widely acknowledged, and, indeed, beyond dispute, there is an ongoing debate over the magnitude of
the various rebound phenomena. Some argue that the macroeconomic rebound actually exceeds the energy or resource
savings (Polimeni et al., 2009; Hanley et al., 2009; Owen, 2012), suggesting that efficiency improvements, designed to reduce
overall consumption, sometimes actually backfire and lead to increased consumption. This would cast into
grave doubt the presumed value of efficiency improvements, at least in some circumstances. Other theorists are more circumspect
(Herring and Sorrell, 2009), suggesting at the very least that the case for back-fire is unclear. It is also the case that rebounds generally differ according
to context and type of rebound, and assessing the degree of rebound also depends on the methodological assumptions used when studying them.
Direct rebounds are estimated to range generally in the vicinity of 10-30% (Sorrell, 2009: 33), meaning that typically 10-30% of the expected
environmental benefits of efficiency gains are lost to increased consumption of the same resource. In some circumstances, direct rebounds can
be 75% or higher (Chakravarty et al., 2013). Indirect rebounds are somewhat harder to measure, but are generally thought to be higher than
direct rebounds, and estimates of macroeconomic rebound range from 15%-350% (Dimitropoulos, 2007). The huge range here again points to
differences in methodological assumptions. Without entering into the intricacies of the complex empirical and theoretical debates, it is fair to say that
despite the uncertainties, there is broad agreement that rebound effects exist and that they are significant. The
benefits of technology are almost always less than presumed, and, in fact, at times efficiency improvements can
lead to more, not fewer, resources being consumed overall.
What seems to be far less widely appreciated, however, is that when efficiency gains occur within a paradigm of growth economics, there is little
to no chance of absolute decoupling occurring (Herring, 2009; Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011; Trainer, 2012). This is partly
due to rebound effects, and partly due to the inherent structure of growth economics. It will now be shown that in
order to achieve the absolute decoupling required for sustainability, efficiency gains must be governed, not by an imperative to grow, but by an
economics of sufficiency.
 2NC – Warming O/V

Winning one environment internal-link accesses everything.

James Gustave Speth, 2008. Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, founder of the World Resources
Institute, Professor at Vermont Law School, Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, Co-
founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, p. 39

These eight global-scale environmental problems, as well as acid deposition and ozone layer depletion, do not exist in
isolation —they are constantly interacting with one another , typically worsening the situation . The loss
of forests, for example, contributes to biodiversity loss, climate change, and desertification. Climate
change, acid rain, ozone depletion, and water reductions can in turn adversely affect world forests.
Changing climate will affect everything . Among other things, it is likely to worsen desertification, lead to both additional
flooding and increased droughts, reduce freshwater supplies, adversely affect biodiversity and forests, and further degrade aquatic
ecosystems. What is one to make of all this? A number of prominent scientists have taken a hand at describing what all these trends mean.
In 1998, ecologist Jane Lubchenco, in her address as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, drew the
following conclusions: “The conclusions . . . are inescapable: during the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature.
We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates, and over larger
spatial scales than ever recorded on earth. Humans have unwittingly embarked upon a grand experiment with our planet.
The outcome of this experiment is unknown, but has profound implications for all of life on Earth .”72
In 1994, fifteen hundred of the world’s top scientists , including a majority of living Nobel Prize–winners, issued a plea
for more attention to environmental problems: “The earth is finite,” they stated. “Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive
effluents is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. Moreover,
we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits .
Current economic practices that damage the environment , in both developed and underdeveloped nations,
cannot be continued with the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair .”73

Turns geopolitical impacts and independently makes growth unsustainable.

James Gustave Speth, 2008. Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, founder of the World Resources
Institute, Professor at Vermont Law School, Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, Co-
founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, p. 41

In 2007, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, citing
environmental threats .75 The Doomsday Clock reminds us that today’s alarming environmental trends have
consequences far beyond the environment . They can also contribute to conflicts over human access to
water, food, land, and energy; ecological refugees and humanitarian emergencies; failed states; and armed
movements spurred by declining circumstances. They are profound affronts to fundamental fairness and justice in the world and
discriminate against both those too poor and powerless to hold their own against these tides and voiceless future generations. And
they bring large economic costs. The Stern Review estimated that the total cost of a business-as-usual approach to climate
change could be “around a 20% reduction in current per capita consumption, now and forever.” And that’s just from climate
change .76
 2NC – Transition O/V

Framing issue --- try or die means the transition’s worth it --- our evidence does the impact calculus.
Samuel Alexander, 2015. Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, co-director of the Simplicity Institute and research fellow at the
Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Prosperous Descent. The Simplicity Institute. Book. pp. 201-202.

While Tainter’s theory of social complexity has much to commend it, in this chapter I wish to examine and ultimately challenge Tainter’s conclusion
that voluntary simplification is not a viable path to sustainability. In fact, I will argue that it is by far our best bet, even if the
odds do not provide grounds for much optimism. Part of the disagreement here turns on differing notions of ‘sustainability’.
Whereas Tainter seems to use sustainability to mean sustaining the existing civilisation, I use sustainability to mean changing the form of
civilisation through voluntary simplification, insofar as that is required for humanity to operate within the carrying capacity of the planet
(Vale and Vale, 2013). Given that Tainter (1988) seems to accept, as we will see, that his own conception of sustainability will eventually lead to
collapse, I feel he is wrong to be so dismissive of voluntary simplification as a strategy for potentially avoiding
collapse. It is, I argue, our only alternative to collapse, and if that is so, voluntary simplification ought to be
given our most rigorous attention and commitment, even if the chances of success do not seem high. I feel
Tainter is flippant about our best hope, and given what is at stake, his dismissal of voluntary simplification should be given close critical attention.
Furthermore, even if attempting to sustain the existing civilisation through ever-increasing complexity continues to be humanity’s dominant approach
to solving societal problems, I maintain the alternative path of voluntary simplification remains the most effective means
of building ‘resilience’ (i.e., the ability of an individual or community to withstand societal or ecological shocks). This is significant
because it justifies the practice and promotion of voluntary simplification, irrespective of the likelihood of it ever
being broadly accepted. Directed toward the highly developed regions of the world, I argue that environmental sustainability requires voluntary
simplification; but if that strategy is not widely embraced , I maintain we should still embrace the strategy as far as
possible, in order to build resilience in preparation for forthcoming civilisational deterioration or collapse. The aim is
not to achieve some passive socio-ecological stasis, but to move toward a way of life that achieves some form of dynamic equilibrium within
ecologically sustainable limits.
[Italics in the original]

Social-psychological research proves.

Samuel Alexander, 2015. Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, co-director of the Simplicity Institute and research fellow at the
Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Prosperous Descent. The Simplicity Institute. book

A third way Tainter

might respond to my analysis is by stating that, even if simplification were an available strategy, it
will not be voluntarily embraced on the grounds that people will perceive that it is against their own interests. In fact, when considering
whether voluntary simplification is possible, he states: ‘I am confident that usually it is not, that humans will not ordinarily forgo affordable
consumption of things they desire on the basis of abstract projections about the future’ (Tainter, 2011a: 31). Although Tainter’s position
here has some intuitive force, it is far from being selfevident. Tainter seems to assume (without being explicit about it)
that reducing consumption is against one’s self interest, but that assumption, despite being culturally entrenched, is
empirically debatable, and in consumer societies it is most probably false. Indeed, there is now a vast body of
social and psychological research (see Alexander, 2012a) indicating that many if not most Westernstyle consumers
are actually mis-consuming to some extent, in the sense that they could increase their wellbeing while reducing their consumption. The
intricacies of that research cannot be explored here, but if it can indeed be shown, as I believe it can, that large portions of high-consumption societies
would benefit from exchanging superfluous material consumption for more time to pursue non-materialist forms of wellbeing, this would
provide further support for the argument that voluntary simplification is not only possible, but desirable. If
more people came to see this, one would expect simplification to be voluntarily embraced.
Nevertheless, while that might be so at the individual or community level, the question of whether governments will ever voluntarily initiate overall
reductions in societal production and consumption is more challenging. After all, governments depend for their existence on taxes, and a larger
economy means more taxable income, so a process of voluntary simplification is almost certainly not going to be initiated from the ‘top down’. The
overriding objective of governments around the world is to grow their economies without apparent limit (Hamilton, 2003; Purdey, 2010), and
continued growth requires (among other things) a citizenry that seeks ever-higher material standards of living. This growth model of progress is
arguably a reflection of an underlying belief that social progress requires more energy and resources in order to increase existing standards of living and
solve ongoing problems. But if the global economy has now reached a stage where the growth model is causing the very problems it was supposed to
solve, as many argue it has (Meadows et al., 2004; Jackson, 2009; Trainer, 2010a; Heinberg, 2011), then voluntary simplification provides the most
coherent path forward, especially for the most highly developed regions of the world (Alexander, 2012b). Although the prospects of governments
embracing some ‘top down’ policy of voluntary simplification seem very slim, it is also clear that governments create many of the structures within
which social movements operate, and those structures can function either to facilitate or inhibit a process of voluntary simplification. While an
examination of ways governments could facilitate such a process lies beyond the scope of this chapter, the ‘growth imperative’ structurally built into
modern economies suggests that if voluntary simplification is to emerge, it may well have to be driven ‘from below’.
6. Escaping Tainter’s Tragedy ‘From Below’
While still marginal, there are several overlapping social movements that suggest that the seeds of voluntary
simplification have already been sown at the grassroots level. The most long-standing of these social movements or subcultures
is based on the idea of ‘voluntary simplicity’, which can be understood as a way of life in which people choose to reduce or restrain their material
standard of living while seeking a higher quality of life (Alexander, 2009; Alexander and Ussher, 2012).17 This counter-cultural attitude
toward material wealth seems to be as old as civilisation itself (Vanenbroeck, 1991), with philosophers, prophets, and poets
throughout history highlighting that ‘the good life’ lies not in the accumulation of material possessions but in various non-materialistic sources of
wellbeing, such as social relations, connection with nature, and peaceful, creative activity. In the 1960s and 70s, as modern
environmentalism took hold, the eco-village movement emerged (Walker, 2005), which involved creating
intentional communities, often on the fringe or beyond urban centres, in the hope of showing that sustainable, post-industrial forms of life
were possible. Toward the end of the 1970s the term ‘permaculture’ was coined (Holmgren and Mollison, 1978), which is a complex notion
that essentially refers to the ideal of designing social and economic systems that work with nature, rather than against it.
In more recent years the Transition Towns movement has burst onto the global scene as a positive,
community-based response to the dual crises of peak oil and climate change, through which people come together in an
attempt to build resilient communities and local economies in the face of government inaction (Hopkins, 2008).
Space does not presently permit a detailed examination of these movements. The purpose of mentioning them is merely to suggest that they
exemplify, in various ways and to various degrees of influence, the process of voluntary simplification ‘from below’. The
reduced-consumption lifestyles of voluntary simplicity can be understood to be freeing up energy and resources to solve more important problems, or
to solve problems by reducing wasteful consumption; eco-villages can be understood to be attempting (with various degrees of
success) to
build communities that can be sustained over the long term within the carrying capacity of the local
environment; permaculture can be understood to be a design system that seeks to achieve sustainability by
working with nature’s limits and minimising waste of energy and resources; transition towns in many ways can be
understood to be a mixture of all three previous movements, with the added virtue of emphasising the importance of building a post-
carbon world within the existing society through committed grassroots, community-based activity. These are all gross oversimplifications of rich and
diverse social movements, but if we were to take the best insights from each of them and begin shaping our societies on that basis (see Odum and
Odum, 2001; Trainer, 2010a), that might just be enough to realise the concept of voluntary simplification defended in
this chapter and thereby escape Tainter’s tragedy – the tragedy of a civilisation increasing in complexity until
it collapses. As I argued above, the energy intensity of industrial civilisation is primarily a function of the values that produce or shape the
perception of its problems and solutions. But the social movements just outlined embody values that contrast with the pro-growth, materialistic values
upon which industrial civilisation is built, and this means that if those alternative values were ever mainstreamed they would
tend to produce a different perception of what problems needed to be solved and in what ways. This shift in
values would open up space for voluntary simplification. It would require a much longer work to provide details on what the
process of voluntary simplification would look like in practice, and how or whether it could ever come about, but in closing this chapter one brief
example will be offered to help clarify the essential strategy.

Yes mindset shift --- systems failure shifts collective consciousness.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, 2017. Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development.
DPhil in international relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University. Member of the Executive Committee of the British Muslim
Human Rights Centre at London Metropolitan University’s Human Rights and Social Justice Institute. Taught at the Department of International
Relations, University of Sussex, and has lectured at Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Formerly a senior researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission. Award-winning 15-year investigative journalist, noted international security
scholar, bestselling author, film-maker, and creator of INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project. “Failing
States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence,” SpringerBriefs in Energy Energy Analysis. Conclusions: From Systemic State-Failure
to Civilizational Transition. Book. pp. 87-89

The cases of crisis

convergence already occurring and examined here provide concrete empirical evidence on the
impacts of Earth System Disruption (ESD) in terms of the breakdown of human societies, or Human System
Destabilization (HSD). While much of the West has so far avoided the most important aspects of such disruptions the writing is on the wall that no
country can feel completely safe from its potential impacts. Rather than ESD eventually unfolding in some far-flung, catastrophic
imaginary future to be pondered purely through abstract models, it is destabilizing the local state-level sub-systems of key
regions here and now.
Each case study explored here represents the reality of emerging ESD–HSD along with local amplifying feedback processes, where the
convergence of energy and environmental crises feeds into, and in turn is fueled by, political and economic
crises. Poorer, less developed countries on the periphery of the world system find themselves more politically and economically weaker, and thus
more vulnerable to ESD processes which happen to be more pronounced in these regions. As such, biophysical ESD processes have triggered
interlinked social, political and economic crises leading to the breakdown of traditional order (HSD). In turn, HSD rapidly breaks down
the
capacity of local states to respond effectively to the ESD processes triggering HSD in the first place, allowing
ESD to continue accelerating. The acceleration of ESD, in turn, establishes a biophysical groundwork for the continued triggering of HSD.
This overarching process, in effect, amounts to a local ESD– HSD amplifying feedback loop, in which the intertwined nature of ESD and HSD
processes becomes self-reinforcing. Within the last decade, local ESD–HSD amplifying feedback loops have broken out in
major countries in every key continent.
Taking a holistic, planetary perspective suggests that local ESD–HSD amplifying feedbacks have already reached a global pandemic scale, even though
this pandemic still remains in a nascent state. As crisis convergence accelerates, these ESD–HSD processes, which are already interconnected across
the global system in complex ways, will intensify and interlock further. They are, ultimately, symptoms of a wider systemic process:
an accelerating phase-shift toward a new systemic configuration that is being driven by the global system’s
increasing collision with its own biophysical basis.
The intensification of political violence can be seen as a symptom and direct result of this overarching global
systemic crisis. The rise in Western militarism as well as Islamist militancy are ‘securitized’ HSD responses to
ESD processes that are unravelling the very basis of order as we know it. To be more precise, the intensification of HSD appears, in effect, to be
a direct result of the thermodynamics of accelerating energy consumption, depletion and dissipation—which is trending rapidly toward a threshold
effect.
The time-scale to reach this global system threshold effect cannot be pinned down, but an important finding of this study is that given the
hindsight provided by the cases in the Middle East, it takes about 15 years before a government experiences
systemic state-failure from the point at which its energy and economic base begins to decline, relative to
climate-induced water and food crises. This in turn suggests that after 2030, both the Euro-Atlantic core, as well
as the fast-rising Indo Chinese periphery, will begin to experience their own symptoms of systemic state-failure.
The cases examined here thus point to a global process of civilizational transition. As a complex adaptive system,
human civilization in the twenty-first century finds itself at the early stages of a systemic phase-shift which is already
manifesting in local sub-system failures in every major region of the periphery of the global system . As these
sub-system failures driven by local ESD–HSD amplifying feedbacks accelerate and converge in turn, they will
coalesce and transmit ever more powerfully to the core of the global system. As this occurs and re-occurs, it will reach
a system-wide threshold effect resulting in eventual maladaptive global system failure; or it will compel an
adaptive response in the form of fundamental systemic transformation.
In this context, it is precisely the acceleration of global system failure that paves the way for the possibility of
fundamental systemic transformation, and the emergence of a new phase-shift in the global system. Far from
representing the end of the human species, these processes represent the inevitable demise of a historically specific global
systemic configuration in the form of neoliberal finance capitalism as it transitions into a new era dominated
by information technologies. Well before 2050, this study suggests, systemic state-failure will have given way to the
irreversible demise of neoliberal finance capitalism as we know it.
Human civilization is in the midst of a global transition to a completely new system which is being forged from
the ashes of the old. Yet the contours of this new system remain very much subject to our choices today. If the forces of systemic failure
overwhelm us, then the new systemic configuration is likely to represent a maladaptive collapse in civilizational complexity. Yet even within such
a maladaptive response—which arguably is well-underway as these cases show—there remains a capacity for agents within
the global system to generate adaptive responses that, through the power of transnational information flows, hold the
potential to enhance collective consciousness. The very breakdown of the prevailing system heralds the
potential for long-term post-breakdown systemic transformation.
***ADVANTAGE CP
 1NC – CP

The fifty states should fully fund and invest in grid adapatation and substantially increase incentives
for scivic participation in their rulemaking-process.
 1NR – Theory
Lit supports 50 state uniformity.
Dean Clancy, 5/16/2014. Vice President for Public Policy at FreedomWorks. “Health Care Compact: Let states take the reins of health care away
from the federal government,” United Liberty. http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/17644-health-care-compact-a-flawed-idea-whose-time-has-come

Individual states
would voluntarily enter an agreement (an interstate compact) to take over health care spending
from the federal government. In those states, most existing federal health programs would be cashed out and
folded into a single, gigantic grant to be administered by the state. (Defense and veterans health would be excluded. So would
the big tax breaks for employer-sponsored health benefits, which come through the tax code.)
In non-compact states, the status quo would continue unchanged.
Remarkably, the grant would come with no strings: the state would just have
to use the money to improve health
care. Member-states could even suspend federal health care regulations within their borders!
Each state would receive the amount of money the feds spent in that state, on the relevant health care programs, in 2010, plus an add-on payment to
reflect any inflation and population growth. If the HCC were in effect today in all fifty states, the total spent on it in 2015 would
be around $937 billion, or about 24 percent of that year’s projected total federal spending of $3.9 trillion.
Think about that: one quarter of the federal budget, handed over to the states.
The Pros
Compact supporters predict this would save a bundle: at least $3 trillion over ten years, assuming all fifty states opt in .
That’s because because the grants would grow less rapidly than health care inflation, and thus less rapidly than the
current-law programs they’d replace.
Opponents, of course, think that’s a downside. How dare we cut health care spending! But I think most normal people would see the prospect of less
federal spending, more local control, no more Obamacare, and the possibility of universal coverage (in participating states), as a plus.
The Left should love this idea. States would suddenly have more than enough money to provide all of their residents
with a basic level of health coverage (thanks to all that Medicare money, which they currently have no access to), with
maximum freedom to try new ways to deliver care.
So, for example, some states could institute single-player , while others could emulate Singapore and give everyone a Health Savings
Account. It would be “laboratories of democracy” on steroids.
***FEDERALISM ADVANTAGE
 1NC
Uniformity --- scale, race to the bottom, and redistribution.
Abigail R. MONCRIEEF AND Eric LEE 12. *Professor of Law at Boston University. ** JD candidate at
Boston University. “The Positive Case for Centralization in Healthcare Regulation: The Federalism Failures
of the ACA.” Kansas J. of Law & Public Policy 20: 266,
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1983398.
Perhaps the best-known and most frequently invoked advantage of national regulation is uniformity : the ability of the national
government to set consistent standards nationwide. Uniformity is particularly important when regulated interests,
such as manufacturers or employers, operate in several states or nationwide. In that case, state control would force
multistate entities to learn and to comply with up to fifty different sets of rules. Uniformity significantly
decreases the costs of compliance.¶ b. Scale¶ A second advantage of national governance is that it benefits from
economies of scale . The term “economies of scale” refers to the cost advantages of expansion or increased production.28 For a standard
corporation, the cost per unit of production might go down as the corporation produces more units, especially if the corporation experiences high
fixed costs. For government, the same phenomenon might occur if the cost per instance of regulation decreases
as the number of regulated individuals increases. Furthermore, government frequently acts like a private corporation or private
business, providing goods and services directly, either at taxpayer expense or on a fee-for-service basis. In that case, public programs might
benefit from economies of scale for exactly the same reasons that private corporations would: the cost of
producing public goods might decrease as the number of units produced increases. For public regulations and public
goods that benefit from scale, putting the national government in charge has the obvious advantage of increasing the
regime’s or program’s size relative to any given state’s population¶ c. Spillover Prevention¶ The third advantage of national
control is really a justification for federal intervention—a correction of diseased state governance rather than a true virtue of national governance.
The states are sometimes able to externalize the negative effects of their regulatory regimes, distorting their
regulatory incentives, and the national government can correct that distortion. The best example of this spillover problem
is environmental regulation; the negative effects of under-regulating environmental harms often flow downstream to neighboring states. This
problem is the one that gives rise to “races to the bottom” in state regulation.29 Although the national government might also be able to
externalize costs onto neighbors—in this case neighboring countries—the national government certainly internalizes more of its
own costs than any given state. In a regulatory regime that experiences spillover effects, therefore, the
national government might be better motivated to regulate well.¶ d. Redistribution¶ The final advantage of national
regulation is its ability to redistribute resources from richer to poorer states. In policy regimes in which voters
believe that all Americans should receive a minimum floor of public goods or services, the national
government can play a role in helping the poorer states to reach that floor.¶ B. The Functional Federalism of Healthcare¶
What, then, are the factors that matter most for healthcare regulation? Although American “healthcare regulation” is far from
monolithic, we propose that economies of scale, redistribution, and perhaps spillover problems are important
throughout the healthcare regulatory complex. Scale, we argue, is the single most important functional factor for
every regulatory question that falls under the broad umbrella of “healthcare,” and redistribution seems
universally relevant because most Americans seem to believe that all citizens should receive a minimum floor
of healthcare coverage.30 Spillovers might also be universally important, depending on the empirical reality of the “snowball effect,” 31 and
spillovers are probably at least sometimes relevant, regardless of whether or not the snowball effect is real. Finally, uniformity is sometimes but not
always important in healthcare.¶ It is also true, of course, that policy diversity, voice, and experimentation are often, if not always,
important to healthcare. Those functional values could be protected through cooperative federalist programs that would capture benefits of
scale, redistribution, and spillover prevention while relying on state implementation to accomplish diversity, voice, and experimentation. We propose,
however, that healthcare
regulation will work better if, instead of relying on state implementation to get diversity,
voice, and experimentation, the national government simply diversifies its own policy implementation to
suit local needs, invests in accurate information about local preferences, and runs its own experiments to test
new policy proposals, all of which are things that the central government does in the Medicare program.32

Democracy doesn’t solve war --- increases hostility.

Ghatak et al. 17—Sam Ghatak is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Tennessee Knoxville;
Aaron Gold is a PhD Student in Political Science at UT Knoxville; Brandon C. Prins is a Professor and
Director of Graduate Studies of Political Science at UT Knoxville [“External threat and the limits of
democratic pacifism,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 34, No. 2, p. 141-159, Emory Libraries]
Conclusion
It has become a stylized fact that dyadic democracy lowers the hazard of armed conflict. While the Democratic
Peace has faced many challenges, we believe the most significant challenge has come from the argument that the
pacifying effect of democracy is epiphenomenal to territorial issues, specifically the external threats that they
pose. This argument sees the lower hazards of armed conflict among democracies not as a product of shared
norms or institutional structures, but as a result of settled borders . Territory, though, remains only one geo-political context
generating threat, insecurity, and a higher likelihood of armed conflict. Strategic rivalry also serves as an environment associated with fear, a lack of
trust, and an expectation of future conflict. Efforts to assess democratic pacifism have largely ignored rivalry as a context
conditioning the behavior of democratic leaders. To be sure, research demonstrates rivals to have higher probabilities of armed
conflict and democracies rarely to be rivals. But fundamental to the Democratic Peace is the notion that even in the face of
difficult security challenges and salient issues, dyadic democracy will associate with a lower likelihood of
militarized aggression. But the presence of an external threat, be that threat disputed territory or strategic
rivalry, may be the key mechanism by which democratic leaders, owing to audience costs, resolve and
electoral pressures, fail to resolve problems nonviolently .
This study has sought a ‘‘hard test’’ of the Democratic Peace by testing the conditional effects of joint
democracy on armed conflict when external threat is present. We test three measures of threat: territorial contention, strategic
rivalry, and a threat index that sums the first two measures. For robustness checks, we use two additional measures of our
dependent variable: fatal MID onset, and event data from the Armed Conflict Database, which can be found in our
Online Appendix. As most studies report, democratic dyads are associated with less armed conflict than mixed-regime and autocratic dyads. In every
one of our models, when we control for each measure of external threat, joint democracy is strongly negative and significant and each measure of
threat is strongly positive and significant. Here, liberal institutions maintain their pacific ability and external threats clearly increase
conflict propensities. However, when we test the interactive relationship between democracy and our measures
of external threat, the pacifying effect of democracy is less visible . Park and James (2015) find some evidence that when faced
with an external threat in the form of territorial contention, the pacifying effect of joint democracy holds up. This study does not fully support the
claims of Park and James (2015). Using a longer timeframe, we find more consistent evidence that when faced with an
external threat, be it territorial contention, strategic rivalry, or a combination, democratic pacifism does not
survive . What are the implications of our study? First, while it is clear that we do not observe a large amount of armed conflict among democratic
states, if we organize interstate relationships along a continuum from highly hostile to highly friendly, we are probably observing what Goertz et al.
(2016) and Owsiak et al. (2016) refer to as ‘‘lesser rivalries’’ in which ‘‘both the frequency and severity of violent interaction decline. Yet, the sentiments
of threat, enmity, and competition that remain—along with the persistence of unresolved issues—mean that lesser rivalries still experience isolated
violent episodes (e.g., militarized interstate disputes), diplomatic hostility, and non-violent crises’’ (Owsiak et al., 2016). Second, our findings show that
the pacific benefits of liberal institutions or externalized norms are not always able to lower the likelihood of
armed conflict when faced with external threats, whether those hazards are disputed territory, strategic rivalry,
or a combination of the two. The structural environment clearly influences democratic leaders in their foreign policy actions more than has
heretofore been appreciated. Audience costs, resolve, and electoral pressures, produced from external threats, are
powerful forces that are present even in jointly democratic relationships. These forces make it difficult for
leaders to trust one another, which inhibits conflict resolution and facilitates persistent hostility . It does
appear, then, that there is a limit to the Democratic Peace.

Multilat fails and is unsustainable.

Young et al 13 Kevin Young is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, David
Held is Master of University College, and Professor of Politics and International Relations, at the University of Durham. He is also Director of Polity
Press and General Editor of Global Policy, Thomas Hale is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford
University, Open Democracy, May 24, 2013, "Gridlock: the growing breakdown of global cooperation", http://www.opendemocracy.net/thomas-
hale-david-held-kevin-young/gridlock-growing-breakdown-of-global-cooperation
[Modified for ableist language]
The Doha round of trade negotiations is deadlocked, despite eight successful multilateral trade rounds before it.
Climate negotiators have met for two decades without finding a way to stem global emissions. The UN is
[destroyed] paralyzed in the face of growing insecurities across the world, the latest dramatic example being Syria. Each of these
phenomena could be treated as if it was independent, and an explanation sought for the peculiarities of its causes. Yet, such a perspective would fail to
Global cooperation is
show what they, along with numerous other instances of breakdown in international negotiations, have in common.
gridlocked across a range of issue areas. The reasons for this are not the result of any single underlying causal
structure , but rather of several underlying dynamics that work together. Global cooperation today is failing not
simply because it is very difficult to solve many global problems – indeed it is – but because previous phases of
global cooperation have been incredibly successful, producing unintended consequences that have overwhelmed the problem-
solving capacities of the very institutions that created them. It is hard to see how this situation can be unravelled, given failures
of contemporary global leadership, the weaknesses of NGOs in converting popular campaigns into institutional change and reform, and the domestic
political landscapes of the most powerful countries. A golden era of governed globalization In order to understand why gridlock has come about it is
important to understand how it was that the post-Second World War era facilitated, in many respects, a successful form of ‘governed globalization’
that contributed to relative peace and prosperity across the world over several decades. This period was marked by peace between the great powers,
although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created the conditions for what now can be regarded as an
unprecedented period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onward. Although it is by no means the sole cause, the UN is central to this story,
helping to create conditions under which decolonization and successive waves of democratization could take root, profoundly altering world politics.
While the economic record of the postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth and living standards rose rapidly
across significant parts of the world. By the late 1980s a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the
late 1990s countries such as China, India and Brazil had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this day. Meanwhile, the
institutionalization of international cooperation proceeded at an equally impressive pace. In 1909, 37 intergovernmental organizations existed; in 2011,
the number of institutions and their various off-shoots had grown to 7608 (Union of International Associations 2011). There was substantial growth in
the number of international treaties in force, as well as the number of international regimes, formal and informal. At the same time, new kinds of
institutional arrangements have emerged alongside formal intergovernmental bodies, including a variety of types of transnational governance
arrangements such as networks of government officials, public-private partnerships, as well as exclusively private/corporate bodies. Postwar
institutions created the conditions under which a multitude of actors could benefit from forming multinational companies, investing abroad,
developing global production chains, and engaging with a plethora of other social and economic processes associated with globalization. These
conditions, combined with the expansionary logic of capitalism and basic technological innovation, changed the nature of the world economy, radically
increasing dependence on people and countries from every corner of the world. This interdependence, in turn, created demand for further
institutionalization, which states seeking the benefits of cooperation provided, beginning the cycle anew. This is not to say that international
institutions were the only cause of the dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last few decades. Changes in the nature of global capitalism,
including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, are obviously critical drivers of interdependence. However, all of these changes
were allowed to thrive and develop because they took place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. By preventing World
War Three and another Great Depression, the multilateral order arguably did just as much for interdependence as microprocessors or email (see
Mueller 1990; O’Neal and Russett 1997). Beyond the special privileges of the great powers Self-reinforcing interdependence has now
progressed to the point where it has altered our ability to engage in further global cooperation. That is,
economic and political shifts in large part attributable to the successes of the post-war multilateral order are
now amongst the factors grinding that system into gridlock. Because of the remarkable success of global cooperation in the
postwar order, human interconnectedness weighs much more heavily on politics than it did in 1945. The need for international
cooperation has never been higher. Yet the “supply” side of the equation, institutionalized multilateral
cooperation, has stalled. In areas such as nuclear proliferation, the explosion of small arms sales, terrorism, failed
states, global economic imbalances, financial market instability, global poverty and inequality, biodiversity losses, water
deficits and climate change, multilateral and transnational coop eration is now increasingly ineffective or
threadbare. Gridlock is not unique to one issue domain, but appears to be becoming a general feature of global governance: cooperation
seems to be increasingly difficult and deficient at precisely the time when it is needed most. It is possible to identify
four reasons for this blockage, four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity, institutional inertia, harder problems,
and institutional fragmentation . Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of
causal mechanisms. Each of these are explained briefly below.
Growing multipolarity.
The absolute number of states has increased by 300 percent in the last 70 years, meaning that the most basic
transaction costs of global governance have grown. More importantly, the number of states that “matter” on a
given issue—that is, the states without whose cooperation a global problem cannot be adequately addressed—has expanded by similar
proportions. At Bretton Woods in 1945, the rules of the world economy could essentially be written by the United States with some consultation
with the UK and other European allies. In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 crisis, the G-20 has become the principal forum for global economic
management, not because the established powers desired to be more inclusive, but because they could not solve the problem on their own. However, a
consequence of this progress is now that many more countries, representing a diverse range of interests, must agree in
order for global cooperation to occur.
Institutional inertia.
The postwar order succeeded, in part, because it incentivized great power involvement in key institutions. From the UN Security Council, to the
Bretton Woods institutions, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, key pillars of the global order explicitly grant special privileges to the countries that were
wealthy and powerful at the time of their creation. This hierarchy was necessary to secure the participation of the most important countries in global
governance. Today, the gain from this trade-off has shrunk while the costs have grown. As
power shifts from West to East, North to
South, a broader range of participation is needed on nearly all global issues if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the same time,
following decolonization, the end of the Cold War and economic development, the idea that some countries should hold more
rights and privileges than others is increasingly (and rightly) regarded as morally bankrupt. And yet, the architects
of the postwar order did not , in most cases, design institutions that would organically adjust to fluctuations in
national power .
Harder problems.
As independence has deepened, the types and scope of problems around which countries must cooperate has evolved.
Problems are both now more extensive , implicating a broader range of countries and individuals within countries, and intensive ,
penetrating deep into the domestic policy space and daily life. Consider the example of trade. For much of the postwar era, trade negotiations focused
on reducing tariff levels on manufactured products traded between industrialized countries. Now, however, negotiating a trade agreement requires also
discussing a host of social, environmental, and cultural subjects - GMOs, intellectual property, health and environmental standards, biodiversity, labour
standards—about which countries often disagree sharply. In the area of environmental change a similar set of considerations applies. To clean up
industrial smog or address ozone depletion required fairly discrete actions from a small number of top polluters. By contrast, the threat of
climate change and the efforts to mitigate it involve nearly all countries of the globe. Yet, the divergence of
voice and interest within both the developed and developing worlds, along with the sheer complexity of the
incentives needed to achieve a low carbon economy, have made a global deal, thus far, impossible (Falkner et al. 2011; Victor
2011).
Fragmentation.
The institution-builders of the 1940s began with, essentially, a blank slate. But efforts
to cooperate internationally today occur in a
dense institutional ecosystem shaped by path dependency. The exponential rise in both multilateral and transnational
organizations has created a more complex multilevel and multi-actor system of global governance. Within this
dense web of institutions mandates can conflict, interventions are frequently uncoordinated, and all too typically scarce resources
are subject to intense competition. In this context, the proliferation of institutions tends to lead to dysfunctional fragmentation, reducing
the ability of multilateral institutions to provide public goods. When funding and political will are scarce, countries need focal points to guide policy
(Keohane and Martin 1995), which can help define the nature and form of cooperation. Yet, when international regimes overlap, these positive effects
are weakened. Fragmented institutions , in turn, disaggregate resources and political will, while increasing
transaction costs. In stressing four pathways to gridlock we emphasize the manner in which contemporary global governance problems build up
on each other, although different pathways can carry more significance in some domains than in others. The challenges now faced by the
multilateral order are substantially different from those faced by the 1945 victors in the postwar settlement . They are
second-order cooperation problems arising from previous phases of success in global coordination. Together, they now block and inhibit problem
solving and reform at the global level.

No impact to blackouts --- empirics.

Lawson 11—Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Associate National Security Analyst
with DynCorp Systems & Solutions, PhD in Science and Technology Studies [WORKING PAPER
BEYOND CYBER-DOOM: Cyberattack Scenarios and the Evidence of History January, No. 11-01,
Mercatus Center George Mason University]
In August 2003, many initially worried that the two-day blackout that affected 50 million people in the United
States and Canada was the result of a terrorist attack. Even after it was determined that it was not, some wondered what might
happen if such a blackout were to be the result of intentional attack. One commentator hypothesized that an intentional “outage would surely thwart
emergency responders and health-care providers. It’s a scenario with disastrous implications” (McCafferty, 2004). But the actual evidence
from the actual blackout does not indicate that there was panic, chaos, or “disastrous implications.” While the
economic costs of the blackout were estimated between four and ten billion dollars (Minkel, 2008; Council, 2004), the
human and social consequences were quite minor. Few if any deaths are attributed to the blackout.3 A sociologist who conducted
impromptu field research of New York City residents’ responses to the incident reported that there was no panic or paralysis, no spike in crime or
antisocial behavior, but instead, a sense of solidarity, a concern to help others and keep things running as normally as possible, and even a sense of
excitement and playfulness at times (Yuill, 2004). For example, though the sudden loss of traffic lights did lead to congestion, he notes that the
situation was mitigated by “people spontaneously taking on traffic control responsibilities. Within minutes, most crossing points and junctions were
staffed by local citizens directing and controlling traffic . . . All of this happened without the assistance of the normal control culture; the police were
notably absent for long periods of the blackout” (Yuill, 2004). James Lewis (2006) of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies has observed that “The widespread blackout did not degrade U.S. military capabilities,
did not damage the economy, and caused neither casualties nor terror.”

Trump waters down the plan --- reconciliation.

David Dayen, 11/29/2016. Author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, winner
of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. He contributes to The Nation, The Intercept, The American Prospect, Vice, and more. “Donald Trump Is Coming
for Your Medicare,” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-is-coming-for-your-medicare/

For those who thought Donald Trump, someone who spent two years on the campaign trail promising to protect programs like Medicare, might
consider keeping that promise, let today’s news disabuse you of that notion. The selection of Georgia Congressman Tom Price as Health
and Human Services Secretary offers the clearest signal yet that Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are
perfectly aligned, and ready to make Medicare phase-out the signature proposal of his presidency.
There’s not much daylight between Ryan’s and Price’s plans for the nation’s health system. Both want to
repeal Obamacare; in fact, Price has issued a detailed replacement plan every year since 2009, before the ACA even passed.
Price’s Empowering Patients First Act contains the usual features of conservative health-care plans—poorly funded high-risk pools for anyone
rejected for a preexisting condition, letting insurers sell across state lines, health savings accounts, tort reform, and capping the tax exclusion for
employer health coverage. Practically all of these ideas have been implemented either at the state level or during George W. Bush’s administration, and
none succeeded in closing the uninsured gap or making health care cheaper. But Price’s major provision replaces the ACA with a
meager tax credit to purchase private insurance on the individual market. It also allows people to opt out of Medicare or
Medicaid and take the tax credit.
If that sounds familiar, it’s substantially the framework of Ryan’s premium-support plan to convert Medicare into a coupon for people to put toward
insurance. Price has endorsed the Ryan plan: Earlier this month he said Congress would phase out Medicare in the first
six to eight months of 2017. He even laid out how to get it done while avoiding the filibuster. Using budget
reconciliation, fiscal items that don’t increase the deficit outside the 10-year budget window can get an up-or-down vote with limited debate.
Price succeeded Ryan as House Budget Committee chair, so he understands the mechanics of the process. And he would have to do something fast,
because a full Obamacare repeal, including the Medicare provisions, would immediately reverse the ACA’s extension of the Medicare trust fund,
triggering an inability to pay all benefits within the first year or two. So Price and Ryan would create an unnecessary crisis in Medicare to get to their
favored solution of voucherizing it.
For good measure, Price’s last budget not only repealed Obamacare but turned Medicaid into a block-grant program for the states.
This is about much more than the Rube Goldberg–system of the ACA. Price’s ambitious blueprint would roll back two of
America’s biggest social-insurance programs. Prior to Congress, he was an orthopedic surgeon, the kind of high-priced service
provider that stands to lose from a universal system that wrings costs out of specialist fees. He has no interest in social insurance, and
his top priority at HHS will be to cripple [gut] anything resembling it. And to sell Trump on the whole
shebang.
The president-elect mostly stayed out of this debate during the campaign. “Abolishing Medicare, I don’t think you’ll get away with that one,” he told
MSNBC last October. “It’s actually a program that’s worked. It’s a program that some people love, actually.”
But the Price pick should leave no doubt: Donald Trump is coming for your Medicare. This is not a drill. His
allies in the cabinet and on Capitol Hill mean to roll back the Great Society. They have been meticulously
laying out the plan for close to a decade. None of Trump’s statements over the past year mean as much as
installing Tom Price at HHS.
Liberals need to dispense with the idea that there’s one Trump, that he’ll either be singularly captured by the conservative policy establishment or
singularly committed to an idiosyncratic nationalist populism. There’s ample room for him to pick and choose. Trump may adhere to his promises
destroy universal health-care programs.
on immigration and trade—though calling for the repeal of fast track would prove it—and also
Consistency is not really his strong suit. Besides, he can simply convince himself that he’s giving people something classier
and better than what they already have. Trump contains multitudes.
Anyway, Trump may actually need to gut Medicare and Medicaid if he wants conservatives to move forward on his
other priorities. Trump’s advocacy for budget-busting tax cuts and Keynesian spending (though his infrastructure plan isn’t
as pricey as advertised) has angered fiscal conservatives. There simply aren’t many ways to make up the difference,
especially since Trump wants to increase defense spending. The federal government has been described as an insurance company with an army. The
Trump will have to toss out the insurance company.
army’s staying, so to satisfy the bean-counters,
So what can liberals do in response? Using reconciliation means that Republicans can accomplish this entirely on their
own. The only question is whether Democrats will make the idea so toxic that they threaten the job security of anyone in Washington who goes
along with it. Republicans have a 24-seat cushion in the House, but could only afford to lose two senators to phase out Medicare (I’ve questioned in
the past whether Senate Republicans actually want to make these kinds of big changes). Every senior in every district in America
should be aware of the GOP plan to destroy a health-care guarantee that has lasted for generations. And if
Republicans pull the cowardly move of protecting those already on Medicare or close to eligibility, that should be ridiculed for the bait and switch that
it is.
Democrats can take up the fight immediately, in the special elections that will arise as Trump fills out his cabinet. CIA director nominee Mike
Pompeo’s seat in Kansas and Price’s in Georgia are pretty red, but seniors typically represent the largest voting bloc in these low-turnout races. In
2011, the last time Ryan made a serious push to privatize Medicare, Kathy Hochul won a right-leaning seat in upstate New York by making the race
entirely about social insurance. This can be replicated, proving the concept that trying to dismantle programs Americans have paid in to their entire
working lives is political suicide.
So far Democrats have mostly said the right things. Chuck Schumer defiantly asked Republicans to “make my day” by trying to take away Medicare
from seniors. Even red-state Democratic senators up for re-election in 2018 aren’t budging. But being united is one thing; making this issue
synonymous with Republicans and Trump for the next several years is quite another. Distractions must be pushed to the side. This is a very real
assault on one of the signature pillars of the 20th-century liberal project. It’s time to organize.
 1NR – Grid D

Nuclear is safe---you’re more likely to be attacked by a shark than have a meltdown.

Stockton 16—Science Journalist for Wired, MA in Journalist from NYU, and former Cryptologist for the US
Navy [Nick, “Nuclear Power Is Too Safe to Save the World From Climate Change,” Wired Magazine, 3 Apr
2016, http://www.wired.com/2016/04/nuclear-power-safe-save-world-climate-change/, accessed 25 Aug
2016]

Those fears may be moot. Safety concerns didn’t delay construction on Watts Bar Unit 2 for so many years. Economics did. For all that fear,
nuclear power still has the safest track record of any power source .
The Danger
Nuclear energy sources are dangerous because they emit radiation—particles and energy shed from unstable molecules trying to calm down. “Those
radioactive missiles can hit the human body and damage cells or DNA,” says David Lochbaum, director of the Union of Concerned Scientist’s nuclear
safety project. Enough radiation will give you cancer, or possibly even pass genetic mutations on to your kids. Too much can kill you outright.
But plants like Watts Bar don’t release much radiation into the environment. Inside, radioactive material heats water,
which turns into steam, which spins the enormous turbines that generate electricity. Plants regularly release some of that
water and steam at rates prescribed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and if you live downriver or downwind of one, the radiation within
will raise your chances of developing a tumor by just one tenth of one percent. You’re far more likely to grow a tumor because you
sneak a cigarette now and again.
But you aren’t afraid of routine releases. You’re terrified of another Three Mile Island, Fukushima, or Chernobyl.
These disasters were the result of a meltdown, which occurs when something impedes a reactor’s ability to cool the fuel.
The US, where nearly 20 percent of electricity comes from 99 nuclear plants, uses uranium. Older reactors—which is every reactor in the US, including
Watts Bar Unit 2—use electric pumps to move water through the system. The Fukushima disaster showed what happens it you have pumps but no
power to use them. Newer generations rely on gravity instead, draining cooling water from elevated storage tanks
to send it through the reactor core.
Those updates mean serious nuclear accidents are becoming ever more rare. Since Three Mile Island in 1979,
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the rate of shut-down-the-reactor-level problems has
dropped from 2.5 per plant per year to around 0.1 (One such happened on March 29 in Washington). Even Three Mile
Island wasn’t the disaster it could have been, because of that plant’s layers of redundant protection .
In terms of full blown nuclear disaster, there is really only one data point: Chernobyl. Which was horrifying. But in
terms of real risk? The World Health Organization estimates the disaster will claim 4,000 lives, a figure that includes
everything from direct victims to people born with genetic mutations well after the meltdown in 1986. By comparison, particulate matter
from coal power plants kills about 7,500 people in the US every year. Radiation is the shark attack of
environmental danger : An awful way to go, but far less likely than, say, a car wreck.

New FLEX strategy checks the impact to any meltdown.

NEI 15—The Nuclear Energy Institute researches nuclear energy policy and safety [“Fukushima Response,”
2015, http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Safety-Security/Fukushima-Response, accessed 25 Aug 2016]

The FLEX strategy is the foundation of the U.S. industry Fukushima response. It addresses the major problems encountered
in Japan—the loss of power to maintain effective cooling—by stationing additional layers of backup
equipment at each nuclear power plant and at the SAFER response centers. It is called FLEX because much of the
additional backup safety equipment is flexible for multiple uses, while other equipment is tailored to specific safety applications.
This flexible approach builds on existing, multilayered safety systems to protect against unforeseen events and is
being replicated by the industry in other nations.
The equipment ranges from diesel-driven pumps and electric generators to ventilation fans, hoses, fittings, cables and satellite communications gear.
The new equipment is stored in protected locations at each site to ensure that it can be used if other systems
that comprise a facility’s multilayered safety strategy are compromised.
Almost all U.S. nuclear power plants are scheduled to have FLEX implemented by the end of 2016, including
installing on-site equipment and conducting training in the use and integration of that equipment into
emergency response protocols. The industry plans to revise FLEX guidance as needed to guide the evaluation of emerging information on
severe flooding and seismic hazards.
The NRC has validated that the industry’s national SAFER response centers—which store multiple redundant
sets of equipment off-site as part of the FLEX strategy—are fully operational. Centers in Phoenix and Memphis can
begin delivering—within 24 hours of notification of an event—additional complete sets of emergency equipment to a staging area
near any U.S. nuclear power plant. Equipment stored at the centers includes portable backup generators, pumps, standardized couplings and hoses.
Each center houses five full sets of safety equipment, with four sets ready to be shipped to support U.S.
nuclear power plants at all times. The equipment undergoes regular testing to assure its functionality.
***1NC OTHER
 1NC – T-FG Financing

Interpretation --- topical affs are funded by the federal government.

Wallace 80 – M.D. Columbia, M.P.H. Harvard, Professor of Public Health [Helen M. Wallace, National
Health Insurance and Child Health Care, Journal of Public Health Policy, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 150-
165]

It is possible that the United States may have some type of national health insurance enacted in the near future and that
it may be enacted in a series of phases. One possibility is that special coverage for mothers and children may be included in the first phase. The
terms national health insurance and national health service are often used synonymously, but in fact they have
different meanings. National health insurance means the collection and distribution of funds to providers to
defray the expenditures for health care. National health service means the system of delivery of care to recipients:
the planning, provision, and evaluation of health services (e.g., medical, dental, hospital, ambulatory, drugs, appliances); and
responsibility for recruitment, education, training, and deployment of health personnel. National health
insurance is essentially a bill-paying activity , but it can potentially influence the content and the emphasis of services and patient care.
THE INGREDIENTS OF CHILD HEALTH CARE
Essential child health care services consist of: (i) preventive health services; (2) primary health care; (3) medical specialist care; (4) hospital and
rehabilitation care. Not only are these four types of service required, but they must be linked and interrelated. Furthermore, the maternal health
antecedents are also required: basic maternal health care, screening for high risk, special care of high-risk mothers and infants, intrapartum,
interconceptional, and postpartum care, family planning, abortion, and gynecological care. Maternal health services need to be linked and interrelated
to child health services. National health insurance must include coverage for each of the above listed child health and maternal
health services. Not only do the specific services mentioned above have to be covered. Funds need to be channeled in such a way that the best-
quality services are supported by national health insurance funds.

Violation --- the Aff is financed by the states.

Vote neg:

1. Limits --- there are hundreds of different actors who can contribute to insurance schemes
including the individual companies themselves --- kills any stable basis for Neg preparation.

2. Neg Ground --- core generics on this topic only come from the federal government expanding
their financial obligations --- they eliminate spending, tradeoff, politics, etc. --- all other mechanisms
are counterplans.
 1NC – T-Universal
Interpretation --- National Health Insurance must extend to all citizens.
Sang-Yi Lee et al., January 2008. Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Medicine, Cheju National University, Jeju, South
Korea. “The National Health Insurance system as one type of new typology: The case of South Korea and Taiwan,” Health Policy. Volume 85. p. 105-
113. Science Direct. Accessed Online Through Emory Libraries.

Brief description of each health care system classified by new typology is as follows. The NHS model characterizes a government provision of health
care services and public finance for all citizens. In the SHI model, service provision limits only to the insured, whereas the government indirectly
administers health care financing through dispersed multiple health insurance societies. In the NHI model, private sectors dominantly
provide health care services whereas the state centrally administers health care financing and covers all
citizens. In the Liberal model, the private providers mainly provide health care services and the role of state
in health care provision is limited to the marginal segment of population.
Those four types of health care system clearly explain each country’s health care system in terms of social value, main body of health care provision,
and state intervention into health care financing and provision (Table 3).
The social value for constitution of the health care system can be classified into universalism, corporatism, and liberalism. From the view of
the health care provision to all citizens, the NHS and NHI are rooted in universalism. In contrast, health care
are provided to the specific population in SHI and liberal model, which are rooted in corporatism and
liberalism, respectively. Specifically, health care services are offered only to the insured in the SHI model, whereas those are offered only to the
vulnerable people in the Liberal model. The social solidarity in NHS and NHI is ranged across the nation regardless of
the sex, age, income, and health status. For this reason, the range of risk dispersion is to be the entire nation.
Under the SHI model where health care services are provided to the insured, however, the range of social solidarity is limited only to the insured of a
certain group based on the region, occupation, and economic activity.
Another way of classification of health care system is based on the main body of health care provision. Depending on the proportion of the public to
private provision, the descending order of health care system is to be NHS–SHI–Liberal system. The ratio of public bed to all hospitals’ bed is good
example of this. The ratio of public bed to all hospitals’ bed is 96.0% in UK (NHS); 53.1% in Germany (SHI) [24,25]; 33.7% in US (PHI) [24]. In case
of Korea and Taiwan (NHI), however, this ratio is relatively low as 17.5 and 33.0% [26,27]. This is close proportion with that of US.
The NHI model keeps a higher degree of government intervention in management, whereas private sector overwhelms public sector in health care
resources such as hospitals. Although the size of private health care resources in NHS and NHI system is different,
these two models share much in common. Both systems adopt broad, intensive and detailed state
intervention over the private sector to offer equitable health care to all citizens. In contrast, state intervention in private
health care provision in the Liberal system is considerably restrictive. No matter Japanese and German health care system are classified into same in
SHI model, these two systems take on different aspects. While Germany maintains a general level of state intervention, Japan implemented broad and
strong state intervention over the private sector like NHI system.
To explain the degree of state intervention into health care financing, two indicators are available—ratio of public expenditure to total health care
expenditure and mode of state’s roles in health care financing administration. Looking at the ratio of public expenditure to total health care
expenditure in 2001, the UK is 83.0%. Korea and Taiwan are 54.4, 64.4%, respectively. Germany and Japan are 78.6, 81.7%, while the US in the
Liberal model is 44.9% [24,28]. The most important aspect in financing is whether a state collects and administers revenues centrally and directly, or
whether a state administers financing system downwardly and indirectly to different organizations. In a typical case, the state administers health care
financing directly in the NHS system and a specialized public corporate is assumed to be responsible for administering and controlling health care
financing in the NHI system. In the SHI system, multiple public insurers administer financing, while in the Liberal system the state and many private
health insurers control the health care financing.
Comparing characteristics of state intervention among different systems of new typology, several important matters should be considered: state’s
directorship for providing health care services, the degree of the state’s role as regulator, and the extent of state’s direct control. While state in the NHS
system is a practical provider, it is both conductor and regulator in the NHI system. Further, although the states act as a regulator in both the SHI and
Liberal systems, the degree of the state’s role in the SHI type is higher than that in the Liberal system.
To summarize, the new typology of a country’s health care system can be classified by the following criteria. First, what group of people does the
national health care system aim to protect—all citizens, the specific insured, or the vulnerable? Second, which sector is the main provider in health care
provision—is it public or private? Third, is state intervention in health care financing administration concentrated or dispersed? Based on these criteria,
a new typology divides the existing health care systems into four types—NHS, SHI, NHI and Liberal system. With this typology, the SHI system
has multiple insurers that provide health care services for the insured and their dependants by contracts, while
the state is indirectly involved in administrating the dispersed health care financing organizations. In contrast, in the NHI system, the
private sector plays a dominant role in providing health resources, whereas the state is responsible for administrating centrally
health care financing, covering the total population directly.
Violation --- the Aff only covers [a specific segment of the population].

Voting issue:

1. Predictable limits --- the alternative is a proliferation of tiny sector-specific Affs designed to link
turn the spending or politics DAs, which are the only reliable generics on the topic --- makes the
Negative research burden impossible to manage.

2. Neg ground --- artificially limiting the breadth of healthcare coverage eliminates stable, negative
generics based off of universal implementation of different payment types.

3. Precision --- our interpretation comes from a taxonomic cross-country study designed to
accurately characterize and compare cross-country health systems --- best focus for debate.
Richard Freeman and Lorraine Frisina, 2010. *University of Edinburgh and HWK, Bremen. **University of Bremen. “Health Care
Systems and the Problem of Classification,” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. Volume 12. Number 1-2. p. 163-178. Accessed Online Through
Emory Libraries.

The study of health care is no exception to these processes. Indeed, to speak of health care systems or health care policy is
already to engage in classification. The health care system is a set of social, economic and political processes
concerned with the finance, provision and regulation of health care, that is, that set of things we categorize as constitutive of
'the health care system' rather than, for example, the transport system or the political system.1 Moreover, beyond this initial qualification, the
category of 'health care system' is further classifiable in terms of distinct system types that vary according to
their combination of different values of specified variables (such as finance, provision and regulation). As such,
we may arrive at any number of sub-categorizations that continually refine our understanding and explanation of health care systems.
In trying to reach any single understanding, however fluid, it is important to recall that explanation of every
kind risks two sorts of (equal and opposite) problems. One is that it becomes too broad, too general to give much
purchase on any particular case; the other is that it is too narrow, too specific to be applicable beyond a very
small number of cases. These are the problems of underdetermination and overdetermination respectively.
Addressing them is the aim of comparative analysis, which seeks to develop what Merton described as 'theories of the middle range'
(Merton 1968).2 Why is country A like this and B like that, and why is country B like C but very different from D?
Meanwhile, few research projects have the resources to investigate the universe of cases in which they are interested: instead, they concentrate on a
sample drawn from the available population. Where a population is (relatively) small and (relatively) diverse, random sampling risks significant error.
Comparativists tend, therefore, to work with purposive samples which they take to be representative of the population as a whole. The difficulty they
face is in choosing a representative sample even while they have limited knowledge of the population from which it is to be drawn.
The solution to these problems lies in the very foundations of science and cognition, which is to say, once again, in
classification. Classification is the way comparativists mediate between sample and population: a population is deemed to be divisible into a
certain number of classes or types, and comparative analysis proceeds on the basis of one or more cases taken to represent or exemplify each type.
Comparative research design, therefore, is always a process of iteration between the theory which informs a
given classificatory scheme and the data available to substantiate the sense of a case as an example of a given
type.
 1NC – T-SP
The only topical financing method is single-payer.
Kooijman 99 — Associate Professor in Media Studies and American Studies @ University of Amsterdam
[Jaap, “…and the Pursuit of National Health: The Incremental Strategy Toward National Health Insurance in
the United States of America” Volume 8 of Amsterdam monographs in American studies | ISSN 0926-5600 |
Rodopi, 1999 | accessed online through Goggle Books]

Using broad definitions, national health care systems can be divided in three categories: 1) traditional sickness
insurance , meaning the state finances the health care services for certain lower-income segments of the population,
predominately through sickness funds consisting of contributions by employers and employees, 2) national health insurance ,
meaning the state functions as single-player intermediary between health care provider and health care
consumer, and 3) national health service , meaning the state both finances and provides for health care services. A
fourth category includes national health care systems consisting of a mixture of the three.20 In practice, most health care systems overlap. Private
health insurance co-exists with government health insurance programs. Systems based on social insurance (contributions by employers and employees)
are combined with government health insurance programs for the non-working population financed by general revenue. Recent health care reforms
have blurred the differences even further. Government programs have been partially privatized. Systems of managed care have strengthened the ties
between private and government health insurance. Interestingly enough, these reforms are often defined as the “Americanization” of health care.21

Vote neg – they explode the limits on the topic by making multiple payment methods topical –
multiplied by the number of services and groups makes the topic unwieldy.
 1NC – States CP
Text: The fifty state governments and all relevant sub-federal territories should

- establish regional governance organizations to coordinate inter-state and inter-regional

approaches to establish national health insurance to achieve universal coverage

- ignore the federal government’s preemption of their actions.

Solves case, avoids backlash, and causes follow-on.

Gregg Bloche, April 2010. Professor of Law, Georgetown University; Visiting Professor of Law, University of Chicago. “The Emergent Logic of
Health Law,” Southern California Law Review. Volume 82. pp. 389-480.
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1362&context=facpub

States have seized the initiative on the health reform front, and creative, bipartisan ideas about how they
might expand coverage have spread virally.167 From a conventional health reform perspective, the prospect of fifty different insurance
schemes is anathema: a single, national system (whether market oriented or government administered) is essential to avoid Byzantine bureaucratic and
legal complexity.168 But from an emergent systems vantage point—a perspective that focuses on evolutionary possibilities—the
state-by-state route is worth encouraging. Ongoing ideological and interest group gridlock at the federal level
has stymied reform at the national level. State-by-state progress could build momentum toward nationwide
insistence on universal coverage, so long as high-visibility state initiatives are seen as successes worth propagating.169 Similarities in
design are likely to result from the propagation of successful state models along informal networks of
influence;170 this would ease administrative burdens. But if large employers or health plans become concerned
about the balkanization of legal and regulatory requirements, they could press Congress and the White House
for federalization of the emerging universal coverage scheme. They might well succeed, demonstrating the
power of feedback mechanisms to transform health policy and law in circuitous fashion171—and locking in a national
commitment to medical coverage for all.
Support for state initiatives thus constitutes a wise gamble from an emergent systems perspective. It carries no
guarantee that the country will embrace any particular model for expanding coverage;172 states will decide, case by case, and more likely than not, one
or a few prevailing models will emerge. Nor must it lead, in the end, to state governance of health insurance coverage. Congress and the
White House could respond to state initiatives by imposing an overarching federal scheme. Were this to happen,
state reforms would still have served a vital purpose as steps in the evolution of universal coverage.
 1NC – Federal CP
The United States federal government should establish national health insurance to achieve
universal coverage.
 1NC – Courts CP
Text: The United States Supreme Court should hold that the Due Process Clause requires the federal
government to waives federal barriers to, and provides shared-financing for, state-based means to
achieve universal coverage under a national health insurance scheme.

A topical aff must implement a law.

Merriam-Webster's 16—[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/establish]
Full Definition of establish
transitive verb
1: to institute (as a law) permanently by enactment or agreement
2: obsolete : settle 7

Courts cannot establish a policy.

Charney 85 [Jonathan I. Charney, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University; Board of Editors, Judicial Deference In Foreign Relations, 83 Am. J.
Int'l L. 805, 1985, Westlaw]
Disputes with foreign policy implications have often been brought to the federal courts. These cases call attention to the tension between the authority
of the political branches to conduct the foreign relations of the United States and the authority of the courts to render judgments
according to the law. How this tension is resolved, in turn, bears directly on the commitment of the United States to the rule of law.
The courts have responded in various ways when U.S. foreign policy has been implicated in cases before them. In some circumstances, courts have
accorded complete deference to the position expressed by the executive branch. In others, that position has been given great weight, has been treated
as particularly persuasive evidence or has been considered as merely relevant evidence. In still other cases, courts have disregarded the Executive's
position completely. Sometimes courts have abstained from deciding such issues. Cases have been dismissed outright without prejudice to the merits,
and judgments have been rendered without addressing the foreign policy questions. Finally, through the application of conflicts-of-law rules, courts
have relied upon foreign determinations. This variety may reflect a purely political approach by the courts or the application of a normative rule
derived from the constitutional relationship between the courts and the political branches—but it most likely reflects a combination of the two. This
essay summarizes and critiques the principal arguments with respect to the propriety of judicial deference and abstention in such cases.
While lengthy and highly reasoned judicial opinions have addressed this question, no consensus has been reached on the appropriate role for the
judiciary in cases relating to U.S. foreign relations. Neutral constitutional *806 principles that support judicial deference or abstention have not been
established. Pragmatic concerns about the effective execution of U.S. foreign policy appear to demand that the executive branch of the Government
be accorded a salient role when such matters are involved in litigation. These concerns have led courts to accord great respect to the executive branch's
positions. This deference, however, may be unjustified in many cases.
Constitutional theories differ on the allocation of federal authority and the appropriate role of the courts in foreign affairs. Notwithstanding United
States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp.,1 the U.S. Constitution does not allocate the entire foreign affairs power to the President or to the Congress.
With few exceptions, the Constitution is devoid of any specific assignment of responsibilities for establishing U.S. law and policy in the area of foreign
relations. Furthermore, it contains no textual basis for excluding, limiting or altering the role of the courts when the cases or controversies they are
called upon to decide relate to U.S. foreign relations.
The lack of a textual disposition of foreign relations responsibilities may not have been an oversight. The Framers of the Constitution focused upon
the relationship of the federal Government to state governments and to private citizens. The checks and balances built into the system were designed
principally to protect the direct interests of the states and their citizens, not foreign states or aliens. Because the federal Government had the authority
of an independent state, the Framers did not devote much attention to the allocation of foreign relations authority. That authority may have been
presumed and may be extraconstitutional. Traditional separation of powers analysis cannot therefore be easily invoked to decide the distribution of
foreign affairs authority.
One of the Framers' objectives arguably was to design a system that would limit the authority of the executive branch so
that the policymaking power of the people could be expressed through legislation enacted by their elected
representatives in Congress. The Founding Fathers sought to establish the United States as a trustworthy member of the international
community. As a consequence, they gave Congress, not the Executive, authority to define and punish offenses against the law of nations through
legislation. The Constitution describes the President's authority as the “executive Power,” requiring that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully
Congress
executed.”2 Thus, the President may conduct U.S. foreign relations directly or through ambassadors received or appointed by him. Yet
may be the only branch that establishes U.S. law and policy . The President alone may not have the authority
to make policy, domestic or foreign, that would dictate the results of litigation in courts of law.

Court action using Due Process justifications can create rights to healthcare access
Swendiman 12 (Kathleen S. Swendiman, Legislative Attorney, “Health Care: Constitutional Rights and Legislative Powers”,
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40846.pdf)
The Right to Health Care at the Government’s Expense
Even though the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly set forth a right to health care, the Supreme Court’s
decisions in the areas of the right to privacy and bodily integrity suggest the Constitution implicitly provides an
individual the right to access health care services at one’s own expense from willing medical providers.8
However, issues regarding access to health care do not usually concern access where a person has the means and ability to pay for health care, but
rather involve situations where a person cannot afford to pay for health care. The question becomes, not whether one has a right
to health care that one can pay for, but whether the government or some other entity has the obligation to
provide such care to those who cannot afford it. If the Supreme Court were to find an implicit right to health
care for persons unable to pay for such care, it might do so either by finding that the Constitution implicitly
guarantees such a right , or that a law which treats persons differently based on financial need creates a
“suspect classification.” In either case, the Court would evaluate the constitutionality of legislative enactments
that unduly burden such rights or classifications under its “strict scrutiny” standard of review, thus according the
highest level of constitutional protection offered by the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution. Absent a finding of an implicit fundamental
right to health care for poor persons under the Constitution, or that wealth distinctions create a “suspect class,” the Court would likely evaluate
governmental actions involving health care using the less rigorous “rational basis” standard of review. Most health care legislation would likely be
upheld, as it has been, so long as the government can show that the legislation bears a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental interest.
Substantive Due Process: Impact on Fundamental Rights
the denial by the federal
Despite the lack of discussion of health care rights in the Constitution, arguments have been made that
government of a minimal level of health care to poor persons transgresses the equal protection guarantees
under the Constitution . While the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies only to the
states , similar equal protection principles are applicable to the federal government through the Due Process
Clause of the Fifth Amendment.9
A litigant challenging a federal action has the burden of proving that the governmental action places an undue burden on the exercise of an individual’s
fundamental right. The standard of review used in cases involving fundamental rights is called “strict scrutiny.”
Using this heightened standard of review, if the Court determines that a fundamental right has been unduly
burdened, the governmental action will only be upheld if the government can demonstrate that the action is
necessary to achieve a compelling governmental interest.10 The Supreme Court has held that the Due Process Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment provides constitutional protection for certain rights or “liberty interests” related to privacy.11 Legislative enactments that
implicate the right to privacy have been reviewed under the heightened strict scrutiny standard of review. Thus, the right to privacy has been held to
include the right to procreate,12 use contraception,13 have an abortion,14 and maintain bodily integrity.15
 1NC – Midterms
GOP healthcare failure is key to dems wave --- the plan saves then and swings the house and the
senate.
Debenedetti 17 (Gabriel, political reporter for POLITICO, graduated from Princeton University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Daily
Princetonian; “Republicans risk midterm meltdown: Officials in D.C. and the states admit they’re growing increasingly concerned about falling into
familiar political traps”)
The party in power has twice attempted to overhaul health care in the past quarter-century. And both times it
ended up with politically catastrophic results . Now, the GOP attempt to replace Obamacare is shaping up to be
the defining issue of the 2018 midterm elections — one big enough to rattle the foundations of Donald
Trump-era Washington and beyond.¶ The Republican-controlled House and Senate aren’t all that’s at stake if
the president and congressional leaders can’t deliver , nor sell the American public on the new plan. If the
1994 and 2010 midterm elections are any guide, the blast radius of failure could also reach deep into the
statehouses.¶ Bill Clinton’s lead strategist James Carville — who saw the 1993-94 health care battle up close — framed the impending peril for the
GOP as inevitable at a private Florida Democratic donor conference in January. “The mover on health care loses,” he said. “To do something is to
lose.Ӧ That conclusion was drawn from bitter experience. The ultimately unsuccessful fight Clinton undertook early in his first term
contributed to a 1994 scorching that cost Democrats both chambers of Congress, handing the House to Republicans
for the first time in nearly a half-century. And the shockwaves rippled well beyond the Beltway: In 1994, Democrats went
from control of 29 governors mansions to 19 and lost more than 15 state legislative chambers.¶ Sixteen years
later, passage of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act led to similarly disastrous results for Democrats — losses from
which the party has yet to recover . In addition to losing the House in 2010, Democrats were forced to watch their 26-24 edge in governorships turn into
a 29-20 Republican majority. And Republicans gained nearly 700 seats in state legislatures across the nation. ¶ “It did result in my defeat, and a whole lot of other Democrats
in 2010. I don’t think it was the [only] thing, but it was the impetus that got people angry enough that they wanted to throw the bums out,” said former Indiana Rep. Baron
Hill, a Democrat who lost his seat in Republicans’ 2010 romp and still defends Obama’s law. “The town hall meetings that these Republicans are having? There’s more
energy in our side than in a long, long time, [and] the same ingredients are involved this time around that were around in 2010, and that’s anger. Anger that gets people
motivated.”¶ “We’ve got to remind everybody that Republicans are in total control right now,” he added. “They cannot run away from what they’re
doing.Ӧ Republican leaders, naturally, dispute any similarities to previous go-rounds, insisting that the proposal led
by House Speaker Paul Ryan is nothing like the efforts from Obama or Clinton — the latter spearheaded by then-first lady
Hillary Clinton. Their central message is that, after eight years of trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, GOP
lawmakers are keeping a promise they had been making for four election cycles.¶ “The difference is the
Obamacare legacy has been debated and decided by the voters in 2010, 2014 and 2016,” said Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers,
chairman of House Republicans’ campaign arm, who joined Congress in the same election that ousted Hill. “We’ve run on getting rid of Obamacare in
2010, 2014 and 2016, and done pretty well in all those cycles on that. No one with a credible, straight face can say Obama ran on Obamacare in 2008,
[so] this has been litigated by the voters, decided by the voters. I’m in the interesting position of having been elected in 2010 due to their overreach on
Republicans concede they’re
health care and other issues, and that’s why I’ve said we shouldn’t overreach. And I don’t think we have.”¶ But
growing increasingly concerned about falling into familiar political traps . Vulnerable members are beginning
to seek distance from the GOP leadership-backed American Health Care Act. Messy intratribal rifts have been exposed.
Even Ryan is taking flak: On Monday, hours after the release of a Congressional Budget Office report showing the speaker’s plan would increase the
number of uninsured Americans to 24 million by 2026, the alt-right Breitbart News picked a scab by publishing an October recording of Ryan
excoriating Trump to Hill Republicans.

Democratic house is necessary to impeach Trump.

Jonah Goldberg, 6/14/2017. National Review senior editor and bestselling author and columnist and fellow of the National Review Institute.
His nationally syndicated column appears regularly in scores of newspapers across the United States. Named one of the top 50 political commentators
in America by The Atlantic magazine “Trump Will Probably Be Impeached if Republicans Lose the House”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448590/democrats-take-back-house-2018-trump-probably-impeached

Unless it steps up soon, Democrats will probably take back the majority in 2018 — and take down the
president.
The 1998 midterm election was a debacle for Republicans, particularly then-speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Since
Reconstruction, no president had seen his party gain seats in the House in a midterm election six years into
his presidency. Gingrich, who made the election a referendum on impeaching President Bill Clinton, resigned after the loss. Clearly, voters had
sent the signal, “Don’t do it.”
The White House thought it had dodged a bullet. But one morning, over Thanksgiving break, then–White House chief of staff John Podesta was
running in Washington’s Rock Creek park when it hit him: GOP leaders are “not going to let their members off the hook. They’re going to beat and
beat and beat on them until they vote for impeachment.”
It fell to Podesta to tell the still-celebrating White House staff that the midterms meant nothing, that the push to impeach the president in the House
was a runaway train that could not be derailed. “This thing is rigged,” Podesta announced at a Monday-morning staff meeting. “We are going to lose.”
President Trump’s White House could use a John Podesta about now. Because no one seems to have told Trump’s team that the
Democrats are every bit as committed to impeaching Trump as the GOP was to impeaching Clinton. The
difference, of course, is that the Democrats don’t control the House — yet .
If they did, as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York rightly noted recently, impeachment proceedings would already be
underway . And if the Democrats take back the House in 2018, it won’t matter to most members whether the
country as a whole supports impeachment, because the voters who elected them — and the donors who
supported them — will be in favor of it. (A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that 47 percent of Americans support
impeachment while 43 percent oppose it.)
Personally, I think it would be folly to impeach the president given what we know now. But that’s meaningless. The phrase “high crimes and
misdemeanors” notwithstanding, the criteria for impeachment have little to do with criminal law and everything to do
with politics . If 218 members of the House think it is right — or simply in their political interest — to impeach
the president, he can be impeached. Whether two-thirds of the Senate decides to remove the president from office is
also an entirely political decision. Given the likely composition of the Senate after the next election, however, that remains unlikely.
Then again, who knows? Given how Trump responds to criticism and political pressure, would you want to bet that
the tweeter-in-chief would be a model of statesmanlike restraint during an impeachment ordeal? So many of his
current problems are the direct result of letting his ego or frustration get the better of him. What fresh troubles would he mint when
faced with removal from office? What might he say under oath to the special counsel? Clinton, recall, was impeached and
disbarred because he perjured himself in a deposition.

Impeachment’s key to prevent North Korea, SCS, and Middle East nuclear war.
Andy Schmookler, 3/26/2017. Award-winning American author, public speaker, social commentator, and radio talk show host. “Impeachment
Delayed is America Imperiled,” Blue Virginia. http://bluevirginia.us/2017/03/impeachment-delayed-america-imperiled

It looks to me increasingly likely that the Trump presidency will end with his removal from office through
impeachment (despite the effort of the Republicans to protect him.) The question is, when?
The other day, on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, the discussion of the Trump-Russia connection arrived at the point that the FBI
investigation must of course take precedence over the investigations by Congress. That’s because congressional hearings and investigations could
interfere with the ability of the FBI to build its cases and then to prosecute those who have committed criminal acts. Then it was said that the
completion of the FBI investigation would likely take another year or two.
But this is no time to let the mills of justice grind slowly. The passage of time compounds the danger that the Trump presidency
is posing to the nation.
The paramount danger here is the threat of war. Threatening clouds hang over the world at present, and the
United States can ill afford to have Donald Trump’s hand on the helm.
It is hardly Trump’s fault that the problem with North Korea is gradually coming to a head: American presidents since the 1990s have been attempting
to prevent North Korean weapons from posing a nuclear threat to our Asian allies and to the United States. The agreements reached have not worked.
The hope that the regime would collapse have not been fulfilled. And over the years, the North Korean stock of nuclear bombs has
increased, and it has made great progress toward acquiring the means of delivering atomic weapons to ever more distant targets.
Soon, the American mainland itself may be vulnerable to nuclear attack from a rogue regime and its
psychologically unstable leader.
The question of how to deal with North Korea, and with the Chinese government that props up Kim’s evil regime, poses a
challenge as difficult as anything American diplomacy – and the American military — have faced in a very
long time. Literally millions of lives are at stake . And if there were easy answers, Clinton or Bush or Obama would have come up with
them.
In such a delicate situation, we
cannot afford to have a man with such an attenuated connection with reality,
animated by such primitive passions of dominance and vengeance, as our commander in chief.
Another potential flashpoint concerns the South China Sea. Here, too, Trump is not responsible for the problem: China, with its
rising power, has been asserting sovereignty over waters to which other nations have legitimate claims, and the
Chinese have brushed away the finding by an international tribunal in the Hague rejecting China’s claims.
History has shown that the most dangerous threats to world peace emerge out of the confrontation between an
established hegemon (like the United States) and an ascendant power (like China). How to navigate toward a
rebalancing of the international order that accommodates new realities in relative power is another major
challenge for diplomacy—one that the world disastrously failed in 1914 and again in 1939.
Donald Trump is hardly the man on whom we can safely rely to find our way through this potential flashpoint
for major-power confrontation.
And who knows what other areas of potential conflict may arise while the FBI takes another year or two to
complete its investigation?
(There are a few clouds developing in the Middle East, where the Russians have reportedly told Israel that its
“freedom to act” regarding Syria is over. Once before, at the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, a conflict between Israel
and its Arab neighbors led the U.S. and the Soviet Union to escalate their level of nuclear alert to a level hardly
reached hardly at all otherwise during the forty years of the Cold War.)
Every day that Donald Trump is president, America is spinning the chamber in a dangerous game of Russian
roulette.
The question needs to be asked: How important is the successful prosecution of a few individuals in comparison with the successful navigation of
potential international confrontations between nuclear powers?
This is not like the slow-moving process by which a 1972 break-in led to the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon. Nixon, for all his faults, was an
intelligent person with a sophisticated knowledge of international affairs. (And at his elbow was another adept diplomat – Henry Kissenger –and not a
let’s-destroy-the-world nut-job like Stephen Bannon.) With Nixon, unlike with Trump – at least until his drunken ravings at the very end – we had a
commander-in-chief who, for all his faults, knew what was real and what was fantasy, and knew what he was doing.
But if it is decided that the FBI’s investigation really should take precedence, even if that would delay Congress’s learning what Congress and the
people should know about the possibly treasonous collusion of the Trump campaign in the attack on our elections by an adversary of the United
States, then another route to a speedy conclusion of the Trump crisis should be taken.
Fortunately, there is such another route: although the most spectacular reason why this President should be removed likely lies in the collusion
between the Russians and the Trump campaign, that it is not the only impeachable offense we have every reason to believe that Trump has committed.
There is also the issue of the “emoluments clause.”
Just from what is publicly known, it would appear clear enough that Trump has violated that clause of the Constitution. The
Government Ethics Office gave Trump clear warning that his total divestiture was required, lest his conflicts of interest bring him into violation of the
emoluments clause. But Trump disregarded that warning. And bit by bit, the news has added to a pile of evidence that
these conflicts of interest are real, are many, and are corrupting the presidency.
So, if the Russia-Trump scandal does not provide the means to remove this unstable and incompetent commander-in-chief quickly – because of the
FBI investigation, or for whatever other reason – the security of the nation requires us to proceed with all deliberate speed
to avail ourselves of any other means available for getting that job.
And it would seem that the violation of the emoluments clause provides that means.