NFHS Debate Topic Proposal: Income Inequality
Respectfully Submitted by:
Chris Bell
Voting Delegate, State of Kansas
Darin M. Maier
Voting Delegate, State of Mississippi
Proposed Resolutions
1.
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially decrease income
inequality in the United States.
2.
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should enact a policy to substantially reduce
poverty in the United States.
3.
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce market income
inequality in the United States.
4.
Resolved: The United States Federal Government implement one or more banking regulations to
substantially reduce income inequality in the United States:
5.
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should amend the Internal Revenue Code to
decrease income inequality in the United States.
6.
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially decrease economic
inequality in the United States.
Introduction
An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and
destructive of the common happiness of mankind.
-Article 16, Pennsylvania Bill of Rights
In his State of the Union Address in January of this year, President Obama remarked:
Tonight, I ask more of America’s business leaders to follow John’s lead and do
what you can to raise your employees’ wages. To every mayor, governor, and state
legislator in America, I say, you don’t have to wait for Congress to act; Americans will
support you if you take this on. And as a chief executive, I intend to lead by example.
Profitable corporations like Costco see higher wages as the smart way to boost
productivity and reduce turnover. We should too. In the coming weeks, I will issue an
Executive Order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally-funded employees a
fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour – because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash
their dishes, you shouldn’t have to live in poverty.
Of course, to reach millions more, Congress needs to get on board. Today, the
federal minimum wage is worth about twenty percent less than it was when Ronald
Reagan first stood here. Tom Harkin and George Miller have a bill to fix that by lifting
the minimum wage to $10.10. This will help families. It will give businesses customers
with more money to spend. It doesn’t involve any new bureaucratic program. So join
the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise.
There are other steps we can take to help families make ends meet, and few are
more effective at reducing inequality and helping families pull themselves up through
hard work than the Earned Income Tax Credit. Right now, it helps about half of all
parents at some point. But I agree with Republicans like Senator Rubio that it doesn’t
do enough for single workers who don’t have kids. So let’s work together to strengthen
the credit, reward work, and help more Americans get ahead. (“State of the Union”,
www)
A market system, and for that matter any economic system, is always going to have some
measure of income or economic inequality. The elimination of poverty is a concept that not only
predates the birth of the United States, but the birth of the very concept of citizenship. Anthropologists
have tracked social support structures back to some of the earliest African civilizations. What has
become disconcerting to many Americans today is the concentration of wealth at the top of the income
pyramid and the apparent shrinking of the middle class over the last few decades. This paper proposes
that the debate community should address these issues through designating income or economic
inequality as the National Federation of High Schools Debate Topic for the 2015-2016 academic year.
Before continuing further, it seems appropriate to discuss a couple of the key tools used to
measure income inequality, specifically the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient. The Lorenz Curve
compares the percentage of income earned by various segments of the population compared to a line of
equality representing an income distribution where every household earned the same amount of
income (which would be a 45 degree line coming from the origin). The Gini Coefficient uses an
integration to measure the space between the Lorenz Curve and the line of equality to come up with a
number between 0 (representing perfect income equality – i.e. everyone makes the same income) and 1
(representing perfect income inequality, meaning one person earns all the income in a society). While
no nation nears either of those extremes, the effective range seems to run between about .22 (typically
indicating a nation with not many exceptionally wealthy people, but a solid middle class and usually
having a significant degree of social mobility) and .65 (often indicating a large poor class, a few very
wealthy people relative to the rest of the society, and typically without great social mobility). Note that
the World Bank, OECD, and other economic organizations all have slightly differing means by which to
measure income, so their ranges will vary slightly. There is also a Gini Index, but the only real difference
between it and the coefficient is the scale of numbers used (the Gini Index operates on a scale of 0 to
100).
Key Issues
Timeliness
Given the nature of this topic and the increasing nature of economic disparities, an income
inequality topic would seem to be an appropriate one for discussion in almost any academic year. One
thing that makes such a topic more appealing for the 2015-2016 debate season is that it will be the last
one in which President Obama will be in office at the end of the season. For this president, improving
economic equality has been a key theme of his public career, dating back to his days as a community
organizer, and that interest has not waned with time or his career progression, as evidenced by his
remarks during the State of the Union address noted above. Additionally, it would appear that an
overwhelming number of Americans agree that something more must be done to address this issue.
Institution for Social and Policy Studies fellow Martin Gilens expands on this when he writes, "Over 70
percent of Americans say we are spending too little on 'fighting poverty,' while a similar number thinks
spending for the homeless needs to be increased. Smaller numbers--though still majorities'' think we are
spending too little on 'poor people,' on 'assistance to the poor,' and on 'child care for poor children.' And
as was true for education, health care, child care, and the elderly, very few Americans believe spending
for the poor should be reduced from current levels." (Gilens, 29) Furthermore, in the aftermath of the
global economic crisis of 2009, there is now an extremely wide breadth and depth of scholarly
publications specifically focusing on the issue of income inequality in the United States. All this means
that there is quite fertile ground for a year long discussion of the matter.
On an broader academic level, this topic has come to the forefront with the publication and rise
of French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. As of July 2, this book
was still ranked among Amazon’s top 20 selling books across all categories. Discussions of the central
theories of this book have taken place over the course of several pieces in publications like The
Economist. As Megan McArdle wrote last month in a review of the book for Bloomberg Businessweek,
“The first thing to understand about Capital is that it is not really one book. There’s a data book, an
analysis book, a book of projections about the future, and a book of policy recommendations based on
those projections. All four are packaged within its 700 pages and frequently interleaved…and when you
see commentators yelling at each other about the contents, it’s probably because they’re talking about
different books.” (McArdle 45) To put it more simply, “Piketty has touched off the most vigorous public
conversation about inequality since Occupy Wall Street – only this time it’s a conversation about data
and economics, rather than the wealth of certain bankers and the propriety of camping in the streets.
That’s a lot of progress to come from one man.” (McArdle 47)
Empirically, the United States is becoming more and more unequal in terms of income, and has
been for nearly fifty years. In 1968, the Gini Coefficient for the United States was .386. In 2011, it had
increased to .477. In short, the United States is looking less and less like its OECD partners (using such
data, the most equal nations in terms of income are South Korea and Iceland, with Ginis of .34 and .38,
respectively) and more unequal than places such as Iran, Nigeria, Russia and Mongolia. (Sutter)
However, what is perhaps even more disconcerting is a growing disconnect between the super-wealthy
and the rest of the population, along with a diminished link between hard work and reward, as Eric Liu
wrote on April 9:
We live in an age of extreme concentration of wealth in America. The problem is
not just that the 1% have managed to nearly triple their share of national income in the
last three decades. Nor is it just that the 1% increasingly are fed, schooled and housed
in a bubble apart from the rest of their fellow citizens.
The problem is that today's concentration of wealth is breaking the golden link
that Ryan and others take pains to emphasize -- the link between work and reward.
Economist Thomas Piketty's landmark new book "Capital" unpacks this delinking
in great statistical detail. It turns out that increasing numbers of Americans in the 1%,
.1% and .01% have done little to "earn" their wealth or privilege.
Contrary to myth, most of today's plutocrats are not the kind of Steve Jobsian
visionary risk-taking entrepreneurs or superstar celebrities. The .01%, for instance, tend
overwhelmingly to be high-end corporate managers and executives, particularly on Wall
Street, operating in interlocking networks that inflate the standard of what an executive
is "worth." Or they are the heirs of the great entrepreneurs (4 of the 10 richest
Americans are children of Sam Walton), inheritors of fortunes of which it can truly be
said, "someone else built that."
An aristocracy is emerging in America, a class of insiders that corrodes the
promise of equal citizenship. And with this compounding of unearned advantage,
certain antisocial values and behaviors have taken root among the superrich -- norms
that threaten to corrupt the rest of American society. (Liu)
Liu goes on further to argue that the super-wealthy are using the political power that their
wealth grants them, effectively increased by the recent Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v.
Federal Election Commission, to further skew the system in their favor, creating a fundamental threat to
democracy. In fact, a paper to be published in the Fall 2014 issue of Perspectives on Politics by Martin
Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University notes that, “economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on
U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no
independent influence.” (Gilens and Page)
In today's American economy, the disparity between rich and poor is greater than at any other
point in the nation's history, only challenged by the bread lines of the pre-Depression 1920's. Nobel
economist Paul Krugman further illustrates the dire nature of the current income gap when he writes:
If gains in productivity had been evenly shared across the workforce, the typical
worker's income would be about 35 percent higher now than it was in the early
seventies. But the upward redistribution of income meant that the typical worker saw a
far smaller gain. Indeed, everyone below roughly the 90th percentile of the wage
distribution--the bottom of the top 10 percent--saw his or her income grow more
slowly than average, while only those above the 90th percentile saw above-average
gains. So the limited gain of the typical American worker were the flip side of aboveaverage gains for the top 10 percent. (Krugman, 128-129)
While some argue that the current state of the income gap in America is simply part of a global
readjustment to free trade and the rise of technological industry, a question remains as to why the
United States has a much higher disparity than wealthy democracies, as historian Eric Alterman points
out:
One cannot help but ask: Why is this not the case in Europe or Japan? In fact,
among major world economies, the United States in recent years has had the thirdgreatest disparity in incomes between the very top and everyone else; only Mexico and
Russia are worse. Only in the United States are the superwealthy so powerful, and their
ideological interests so well tended and defended, that their interests have come to
stand as 'principles' in our political discourse. As the historian Eric Foner notes,
according to Franklin Roosevelt, 'individual freedom' could not be said to 'exist without
economic security and independence....for the average man which will give his political
freedom reality.' (Alterman, 300-301)
Scope, Range, and Quality
Discussing economic policy can be fraught with language either so obtuse as to have no meaning
at all or so involved in minutiae as to cure insomnia for the masses. The key to developing a viable yearlong debate topic lies in careful resolution wording and a further understanding of what, exactly, income
inequality entails. Paul Krugman offers a particularly clean description of the two types of economic
inequality prevalent in America today:
In discussing ways to reduce inequality, it's helpful to make a distinction
between two concepts of inequality, and two kinds of inequality-reducing policies.
The first concept of inequality is inequality in market income. The United States
is, of course, a market economy. Most people get most of their income by selling their
labor to employers; people also get income from the market return to assets such as
stocks, bonds, and real estate. So one measure of inequality is the inequality of the
income people get from selling things. The distribution of market income is highly
unequal and getting more so. In fact, market income is now as unequally distributed as
it was in the 1920s.
But that’s not the end of the story. The government collects part of market
income in the form of taxes, and transfers part of that revenue back to the public either
in direct payments, like the Social Security checks that are the main source of income for
many older Americans, or by paying for goods and services like health care. So another
measure of inequality is the inequality of disposable income – income after you take
taxes and government transfers into account. In modern America, as in all advanced
countries, inequality in disposable income in less than inequality in market income,
because we have a welfare state – though a small one by international standards. Taxes
and transfers, which somewhat crimp the living standards of the rich while helping out
the less fortunate, are the reason America in 2007 doesn’t feel quite as unequal as
America did in the twenties. (Krugman 251-252)
The benefit of this distinction will become clearer as we move into an analysis of possible
affirmative case ground, but Krugman lays the groundwork here for a clean restriction for topicality
standards.
With proper limitations on the topic, the variety of argument is still quite fertile. Even after one
discounts those who deny that income inequality is a problem, the range of solutions is as varied as the
political spectrum itself, and sometimes finds those with radically divergent viewpoints supporting
similar plans. For example, the negative income tax that was advocated by Milton Friedman also was
proposed as an economic justice solution by the Green Party in their platform in 2010. (“Green Party
2010 Platform”) Additionally, policies such as increasing the minimum wage or expanding the scope of
the Earned Income Tax Credit would also certainly fall within the scope of this resolution. Another
interesting policy option that would also be a topical policy option under at least some of the topic
wordings would be the creation of tech hubs, as such areas tend to have lower income inequality, as
Denver Nicks noted in Time on February 20 of this year, “As the Progressive Policy Institute notes,
income inequality actually increased at a slower rate in tech hubs than in non-tech hubs in Brookings
study, and two tech hubs (Denver and Seattle) actually saw a decrease in income inequality in recent
years compared to just one non-tech hub (El Paso).” Affirmative teams could potentially advocate some
variant of the old Ben and Jerry’s policy that limited executive salaries to no more than five times that of
the lowest paid employee. This, coupled with the wealth of post-crash literature, provides ample
ground for a strong variety of solvency mechanisms within the topic.
As with all topics, one question that needs to be addressed is the degree to which novices will
be able to access the ideas being presented in the literature, along with whether the body of research
also provides sufficient complexity to hold the attention of advanced debaters for a full academic year.
Most, if not all, high school economics textbooks address the issue of income inequality through a
discussion of the Lorenz Curve and/or the Gini Coefficient (both discussed in detail earlier in the paper).
Many texts go further and discuss various policy solutions to income inequality, though those
discussions are usually couched in the theme of anti-poverty policy. For varsity debaters, there are
more sophisticated models for such issues that will allow them to fully explore the nuances of this topic
over the academic year.
In discussing an appropriate agent of action for an income inequality resolution, the literature
leaves little argument that the United States Federal Government is the single most influential player in
affecting income inequality. Thomas Hartmann discusses the history of government policies doing just
that when he writes:
Although Herbert Hoover ran his 1932 presidential campaign on the slogan
Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner, by that time few Americans were buying his idea of
more tax cuts for millionaires. They also weren't happy with an extremist Supreme
Court that had recently struck down minimum wage and other worker protection laws
as unconstitutional. They voted in massive numbers for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who
campaigned relentlessly on a platform of government involvement in the marketplace
to restore both democracy and the middle class.
It took the leadership of President Roosevelt in the 1930s for the government to
again take a hand in creating a middle class, this time via industrialized labor instead of
land. FDR implemented the two necessary economic ingredients -- a classical economic
model and a government-spending stimulus -- thereby almost single-handedly creating
the modern middle class.
FDR made sure that We the People had money in our pockets through
progressive taxation, Social Security, fair labor laws, the regulation of business, and the
vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws. In 1935 he pushed through the Fair Labor
Standards Act, which set a minimum wage, and the National Labor Relations Act
(Wagner Act), which protected workers' right to create a democratic institution – a
union that elected its own leadership – in the feudal kingdoms of America’s workplaces.
(Hartmann, 45)
Hartmann goes on to explain that the federal government remains the only actor that can truly
help close the income gap when he writes, "Government spending can be used to rebuild the middle
class....It worked well between 1935 and 1981, and it could work again." (Hartmann, 21) Harvard's
Christopher Jencks agrees with this argument, writing, "At least in rich democracies, differences in
income distribution seem to be traceable to differences in constitutional arrangements, electoral
systems, and economic institutions. Those differences in turn affect the political balance between left
and right, the level of spending on the welfare state, and a wide range of economic policies." (Jencks,
134) Furthermore, as we will soon discuss, there are a variety of economic policies that only the federal
government can directly impact (like those regulations implemented by the Federal Reserve Bank or
federal tax code reform).
Harms Areas
But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect than what relates merely to
elections. They are sources of endless contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the
common rights of national society....This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at
the ruin of towns; and the effect is visible.
-Thomas Paine
Biopower – For those debaters looking for a kritik-oriented angle to the topic of income inequality,
biopower may represent some fertile ground. As Eric Liu wrote in an article on CNN:
What’s in this dysfunctional culture of concentrated wealth? Look around Wall
Street. You’ll find tribal insularity, short-term thinking, personal irresponsibility,
cynicism about playing by the rules, an aversion to socially productive labor, a habit of
shameless materialism, an inability to defer gratification and a lack of concern for what
“message” all this sends to youth raised in such an environment.
In short, you’ll find all the things typically imputed to a culture of poverty.
Now, to be sure, there are poor people who do exhibit these antisocial values
and norms. And there is no question that plenty of poor people are poor because they
made bad choices and behaved in self-destructive ways.
But rich people who exhibit such values have something the poor don’t: Money.
Money buys exemption from bad choices. Money confers power – in particular, over
the poor. It confers the power to frame public narrative and policymaking and to
determine whose behavior -- whose culture – is (and isn’t) called pathological. (Liu)
This doesn’t seem to fall into the strictly Foucaldian notion of biopower, as his domination of the
people seems to come from the government as opposed to an economic class. However, there are
other authors and works (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, for instance) who infuse the notion
of biopower with the class analysis typical of Marxist-leaning intellectuals, providing the base of
literature needed for one to pursue those sorts of arguments.
Capitalism – Conventional American political wisdom has become that intervention in the economy
disrupts the market's ability to self-stabilize and mutates the capitalist ideal. However, a majority of
economists actually disagree with this point of view. Yves Smith explains this idea more clearly in her
book Econned when she writes:
In fact, the main reason that the vast majority of economists endorse various
forms of intervention in commerce is that many areas of activity do have a propensity
toward concentration. Fewer powerful players lead to less competitive pricing, a suboptimal outcome. Thus most economists endorse measures that partially reverse
imbalances between influential producers and comparatively weak buyers....Yet
remarkably, the backers of the extreme 'free market' views maintain that the only factor
that leads the economy away from the neoclassical ideal of optimal efficiency is
'coercion' and even more remarkably, that it comes only from the government. The idea
that private actors will achieve commercial advantage that gives them economic
power over others is airbrushed out. (Smith, 110-111)
This, in a myriad of forms, is likely to be a key battleground during the course of the debate
season should this topic be adopted. Odd as it may sound, this part of the topic may very easily become
bidirectional. Consider, for instance, that some Affirmatives may use cases to critique the capitalist
model for not creating social justice, and thus advocating for the government to step in and restore the
balance (i.e. capitalism bad). Alternatively, affirmatives could argue that addressing income inequalities
restores faith in the capitalist model, solving for the class tensions that might lead to the overthrow of
such systems (i.e. capitalism is good and must be preserved to avoid Marxist lines of thought from
becoming realized). In the same way, it seems very reasonable that a Negative team could attack
affirmative cases that sidestep the capitalism question from either side, requiring Affirmatives to be very
well-researched on this point.
Civil Unrest – In Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone, he discusses the decline of social capital in
America that created common experiences among our polity that was necessary for democracy to
succeed. While that particular argument might still be viable, another avenue to consider is that income
inequality diminishes the “common experience” of being an American and breeds resentment on the
part of the underclass against the elites, perhaps to the point where the underclass might behave in
anti-social ways. While the most immediate impact might be crime, if the aspiration gap was large
enough to create the perception among the poor that they can never get ahead, there would seem to
be literature out there to advance the idea that the underclass becomes radicalized and resists the state,
principally through terrorist actions. Krugman perhaps describes it best when he says, "More broadly
still, high levels of inequality strain the bonds that hold us together as a society. There has been a longterm downward trend in the extent to which Americans trust either the government or one another."
(Krugman, 251) Phyllis Day goes even further when she writes:
The mechanisms are there, through Social Security and the Internal Revenue
Service. What we lack is the moral foresight to accomplish it. We have taken another
road, forcing the burdens of harsh values on the already overburdened poor while we
pay homage to the rich. Our social aim today is not to end poverty but to make profits,
and the targets of society's largesse are not the poor but the rich.
This has set new patterns into society, patterns that divide us and set us against
one another. They include rivalries among the poor and near-poor, growing
dissension between white and nonwhite people, the polarization of income, and a tacit
approval of violence on both private and political levels. This new 'tribalism' is often
based on race and demonstrates itself in local militia groups, the rise of hate groups
such as the Aryan nation, the bombing in Oklahoma City, and increasingly violent federal
retaliation against dissidents such as the Branch Davidians at Waco or the siege at Ruby
Ridge. (Day, 460)
Democracy – Eric Liu takes a quote from early 20th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis when
he remarked that “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a
few, but we can't have both.” (Liu) The concentration of money at the top of the income pyramid along
with decreased limits of the ability of the wealthy to utilize their fiscal resources creates the potential
for our democratic traditions to be torn asunder in the name of raw capitalism, as was also argued by
John Rawls in his various works. From founding fathers to modern economic and social thinkers, the
income gap seems to be viewed as a primary threat to the democratic process. As Paul Krugman writes:
Ever since America's founding, our idea of ourselves has been that of a nation
without sharp class distinctions--not a leveled society of perfect equality, but one in
which the gap between the economic elite and the typical citizen isn't an unbridgeable
chasm. That's why Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'The small landholders are the most
precious part of a state.' Translated into modern terms as an assertion that a broad
middle class is the most precious part of a state, Jefferson's statement remains as true
as ever. High inequality, which has turned us into a nation with a much -weakened
middle class, has a corrosive effect on social relations and politics, one that has become
ever more apparent as America has moved deeper into a new Gilded Age. (Krugman,
245)
Affirmatives should have no trouble finding literature arguing that a litany of hard negative
impacts result from here, including civil unrest, political corruption, and external conflict.
Macroeconomics – There have been two points in American history when income inequality reached
the level of emergency. We only see it now because those points were immediately preceding The Great
Depression and the global economic meltdown of 2009. By nearly all scholarly accounts, the income gap
has a very real effect on the American economy. On the macroeconomic level, harm scenarios will be
able to discuss not only the way in which income disparity leads to American economic failure, but how
that failure impacts the world at large. Since the dominance of free-trade took hold, the interconnected
nature of global economics has gone beyond theory to reality. As a leader in the movement driving free
trade and the world's largest economy, most economists agree that the United States holds a unique
place in effecting the economies of other nations. However, experts also suggest that the income gap
here uniquely has an impact on increasing ethnic conflict and terrorism across the globe. Take, for
instance, Phyllis Day's position as she continues from earlier:
Like those citizens in the United States whose lives are Third World in nature,
we have neglected to understand the impact of corporate power and arrogance on the
Third World nations themselves. In retrospect, we should not have been so surprised at
the heartbreaking attack on America, since America is the symbol, warranted or not, of
inequality among people and their lives and work across the world. Nor can we predict
the impact of the war against international terrorism on social welfare within the United
States, except that it will be costly. This is not a war about nations or governments;
rather, though we may refuse to recognize it, this war is about world economics, the
decline of national cultures, and the ease of use of technologies to destroy instead of
construct--factors that, in fact, war has always been about. (Day, 460)
Microeconomics – A discussion about the widening gap between rich and poor will undoubtedly involve
a deep discussion of the various economic impacts it causes. For the purpose of brevity, we have split
them into micro and macroeconomic impacts here. The microeconomic impact scenarios involve the
greatest depth of literature. This is the discussion of harm scenarios that involve the effect of poverty on
the Americans experiencing it. As Phyllis Day writes in A New History of Social Welfare:
We have created a 'Third-World citizenry' within the United States, a neocolonization of our disadvantaged. With wage labor controlled, a segment of our
population walled off in urban ghettos killing one another and being killed in 'drug wars,'
and social programs limited, proscribed, and deteriorated, a small group of moneyed
elite nevertheless continues to increase profits and reap rewards in the destruction of
lives. (Day, 460)
From this jumping point, harms scenarios include discussions of health care, education, criminal
justice, and ultimately the American standard of living, as Paul Krugman points out:
One reason to care about inequality is the straightforward matter of living
standards....the lion's share of economic growth in America over the past thirty years
has gone to a small, wealthy minority, to such an extent that it's unclear whether the
typical family has benefited at all from technological progress and the rising productivity
it brings. The lack of clear economic progress and the rising productivity it brings. The
lack of clear economic progress for lower- and middle-income families is in itself an
important reason to seek a more equal distribution of income. (Krugman, 244)
Social Inequality – Often under-represented in economic discussions is the indisputable link between
economic inequality and social inequality. This, however, is one of the easiest links to make.
Compounded by a lack of representation in government and access to resources, the income gap drives
the impoverished into a separate level of citizenry; one beneath the ivory tower of American Dream.
Paul Krugman takes a more in-depth look at this issue when he writes:
By claiming that income inequality doesn't matter because we have social
equality, Kristol was in effect admitting that income inequality would be a problem if it
led to social inequality. And here's the thing: It does. Kristol's fantasy of a world in
which the rich live just like you and me, and nobody feels socially inferior, bears no
resemblance to the real America we live in.
The fact is that vast income inequality inevitably brings vast social inequality in
its train. And this social inequality isn't just a matter of envy and insults. It has real,
negative consequences for the way people live in this country. It may not matter much
that the great majority of Americans can't afford to stay in the eleven-thousand-dollara-night hotel suites popping up in luxury hotels around the world. It matters a great deal
that millions of middle-class families buy houses they can't really afford, taking on more
mortgage debt than they can safely handle, because they're desperate to send their
children to a good school--and intensifying inequality means that the desirable school
districts are growing fewer in number, and more expensive to live in. (Krugman, 246247)
Affirmative Case Ground
If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is
the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree.
-Thomas Jefferson
In turning back to an earlier discussion about the difference between market and post-market
income inequality, we have split the discussion of possible affirmative case ground into these two areas.
We believe that this division provides an informative grouping of possible policies for affirmative teams
to utilize as solvency mechanisms. Furthermore, this may also provide a helpful restricting factor in
resolution wording.
Market Policies -- In review, market income inequality specifically relates to the amount of money one
brings into the home. On face, this is the most basic and direct form of income inequality, and as such
requires the most basic and direct solutions. Paul Krugman explains the concept further:
Aftermarket policies can do a great deal to reduce inequality. But that should
not be our whole focus. The Great Compression also involved a sharp reduction in the
inequality of market income. This was accomplished in part through wage controls
during World War II, and experience we hope won't be repeated. Still, there are several
steps we can take. (Krugman, 260)
Possibly the most elementary case area within this group involves labor law reform. The level of
the national minimum wage is an issue of constant argument and one that Krugman takes head on:
There are two common but somewhat contradictory objections often heard to
increasing the minimum wage. On one hand, it's argued that raising the minimum
wage will reduce employment and increase unemployment. On the other it's argued
that raising the minimum will have little or no effect in raising wages. The evidence,
however, suggest that a minimum wage increase will in fact have modest positive
effects.
On the employment side, a classic study by David Card of Berkeley and Alan
Krueger of Princeton, tow of America's best labor economists, found no evidence that
minimum wage increases in the range the United States has experienced led to job
losses....For example, the state of Washington has a minimum wage almost three dollars
an hour higher than its neighbor Idaho; business experiences near the state line seem to
indicate that, if anything, Washington has gained jobs at Idaho's expense....Meanwhile
minimum wage increases can have fairly significant effects on wages at the bottom end
of the scale. (Krugman, 262)
Past the minimum wage discussion labor reform provides ample ground for affirmative cases.
Possible solvency mechanisms include CEO wage caps, union labor support, mandatory arbitration
restrictions, abolition of right-to-work, and restrictions on pre-screen criminal background checks for
employment.
A second grouping of policy solutions to market inequality involves United States trade policy.
Since the early nineties, many economists have written extensively about the way in which free trade
has exported higher paying manufacturing jobs to the third world without replacing those jobs with the
promised high tech positions. As a result, many point to free trade as the leading reason average wage
incomes have fallen over the last thirty years. Paul Krugman explains this further:
Bangladesh mainly exports clothing--the classic labor-intensive good, produced
by workers who need little formal education and no more capital equipment than a
sewing machine. In return Bangladesh buys sophisticated goods--airplanes, chemicals,
computers.
There's no question that U.S. trade with Bangladesh and other Third World
countries, including China, widens inequality. Suppose that you buy a pair of pants made
in Bangladesh that could have been made domestically. By buying the foreign pants you
are in effect forcing the workers who would have been employed producing a made-inAmerica pair of pants to look for other jobs. Of course the converse is also true when
the United States exports something: When Bangladesh buys a Boeing airplane, the
American workers employed in producing that plane don't have to look for other jobs.
But the labor embodied in U.S. exports is very different from the labor employed in U.S.
industries that compete with imports. We tend to export 'skill-intensive' products like
aircraft, supercomputers, and Hollywood movies; we ten to import 'labor-intensive'
goods like pants and toys. So U.S. Trade with Third World countries reduces job
opportunities for less-skilled American workers, while increasing demand for moreskilled workers. There's no question that this widens the wage gap between the lessskilled and the more-skilled, contributing to increased inequality. And the rapid growth
of trade with low-wage countries, especially Mexico and China, suggests that this effect
has been increasing over the past fifteen years. (Krugman, 135)
Aftermarket Policies -- Aftermarket policies refer to those that effect a citizen's disposable income.
These policies fall into one of three major categories; tax reform, bank reform, and welfare reform. Paul
Krugman again offers a description of how government action may take place in this area:
If you're going through a rough patch in your life--or if your whole life has been
rough--it's definitely better to be French than American. In France, if you lose your job
and have to take an inferior one, you don't have to worry about losing your health
insurance, because health insurance is provided by the government. If you're out of
work for a long time, the government helps keep you fed and housed. If you're
financially pinched by the cost of raising children, you get extra money from the state,
as well as help with day care. You aren't guaranteed a comfortable life, but your family
members, especially your children, are protected against experiencing really severe
material deprivation.
On the other hand, if things are going very well for you, being French has its
drawbacks. Income tax rates are somewhat higher than they are in the United States,
and payroll taxes, especially the amount formally paid by employers but in effect taken
out of wages, are much higher....In other words, France has extensive aftermarket
policies that reduce inequality by comforting the afflicted but somewhat afflict the
comfortable. In this France is typical of non-English-speaking Western nations. And even
other English speakers do more to reduce aftermarket inequality than we do. (Krugman,
252-253)
The first option for affirmatives in this area is tax reform. Over the course of the last forty years,
the American progressive tax system has been systematically dismantled, directly widening the gap
between rich and poor. While multinational corporations utilize loopholes to avoid tax liability and the
rate of capital gains taxation has steadily decreased, the tax burden has increasingly fallen on an ever
shrinking middle-income America. Phyllis Day makes a direct link between the Bush-era tax cuts and the
widening gap between rich and poor when she writes:
The senior Bush's rhetoric of a 'thousand points of light' morphed into George
W. Bush's 'compassionate conservatism.' Social programs seemed to receive the brunt
of conservatism; compassion was reserved for the nation's moneyed elite. Despite
presidential protests that tax cuts would invigorate the economy by providing more jobs
and increasing consumer confidence, a clear relationship emerged among tax cuts,
rising unemployment, and a looming recession. The Bush administration gave tax cuts
to corporations and the wealthy, reducing the capital gains tax rates, lowering corporate
interest rates and allowed high debt levels; promoted federal budget deficits as an
alternative to raising taxes. Under estate tax laws of 1999, 6.6 percent of wealthy
estates (those over $5.25 million) brought in federal revenues of $20 million. Under the
George W. Bush administration, estate taxes are to be phased out....Therefore, the top
one percent of the wealthiest Americans who would otherwise pay estate taxes will, in
effect, receive a 36 percent tax reduction, enabling an even more top-heavy wealthbased American aristocracy. By 2004, more than $2 trillion in tax cuts were aimed
primarily at the top 2 percent of earners, and budget deficits were projected to reach $5
trillion by 2010. Meanwhile, by August 2006 wages had fallen by more than 2 percent
from 2003. Unemployment was 5 percent by the end of 2007, and from January 2001 to
November 2007 inflation had risen by 26.4 percent, predicting an inevitable recession in
2008. (Day, 471-472)
There are a variety of possibly solvency mechanisms available here. Paul Krugman describes one
such mechanism when discussing the existence of "super tax rates":
Top U.S. tax rates are also low compared with those in European countries. For
example, in Britain, the top income tax rate is 40 percent, seemingly equivalent to the
top rate of the Clinton years. However, in Britain employers also pay a social insurance
tax--the equivalent of the employer share of FICA here--that applies to all earned
income. (Most of the U.S. equivalent is levied only on income up to a maximum of
$97,500.) As a result very highly paid British employees face an effective tax rate of
almost 48 percent. In France effective top rates are even higher. Also, in Britain capital
gains are taxed as ordinary income, so that the effective tax rate on capital gains for
people with high income is 40 percent, compared with 15 percent in the United States.
Taxing capital gains as ordinary income in the United States would yield significantly
more revenue, and also limit the range of tax abuses like the hedge fund loophole.
Also, from the New Deal until the 1970s it was considered normal and
appropriate to have 'super' tax rates on very-high-income individuals. Only a few people
were subject to the 70 percent top bracket in the 70s, let alone the 90 percent-plus top
rates of the Eisenhower years. (Krugman, 259)
Perhaps the most important topic within this area is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Phyllis Day
describes the EITC as "probably America's best program for reducing poverty." (Day, 475) By 2003, the
credit was used in 22.1 million households, receiving $39.2 billion, effectively lifting 4.4 million people
above the poverty line (2.4 million of which were children). Expansion of the EITC provides an easy link
for anti-poverty tax reform. Amongst the variety of other plan mechanisms available to affirmatives here
include establishing a negative income tax, raising capital gains rates, and expanding/reinstating the
estate ("death") tax.
The next grouping of case areas for aftermarket income inequality is perhaps the most rich with
specific literature; banking reform. Since the economic meltdown of 2009, there has been a windfall of
writing about the problems inherent to the American banking system. A central core of this writing
involves how deregulation and/or lack of governmental oversight has led to a predatory system that
extracts wealth from the poor under the guise of 'free market' values. Roger Lowenstein describes this
process further in his book Origins of the Crash:
Properly organized, markets should be an engine of general prosperity. In
theory, as share prices rise, the common man should reap a dividend through the
stimulative effect on growth and jobs. But the shareholding culture of the '90s made a
grander claim--that the ownership of stocks themselves was disseminating through
society. Employee 401(k)s and other forms of employee participation were, it was said,
democratizing capital. The relentless upward march of stocks was thus invigorating
the middle class. Stocks were a leveling force, bringing ordinary Americans into the
economic mainstream much as the automobile had done in the ear of the Model T.
That was the theory, and it is a prime reason why markets won such favor from
politicians. But the leveling was a myth, as was the notion that the market was
dispersing wealth throughout society. Many people owned a small portfolio but very
few had a large one. As late as 1998, the eighth year of the boom, half of the
households that owned stock of any kind (mutual funds, retirement accounts, direct
shares, and so forth) had a total portfolio worth less than $25,000. Even among
relatively affluent families--those with household income of more than $100,000 -- the
median stock portfolio was only $150,000. So the million-dollar portfolios that were
glorified in the popular culture were limited a very thin crust.
Despite the riches on Wall Street, those on the bottom, and also in the great
middle of society, were essentially treading water. Median family income, adjusted for
inflation, grew in the '80s and '90s by only a half a percent a year--and that only because
many families were now sending two people to work. In other words, the Americans
who constituted the lower half--not the lowest tenth, not just the jobless or the people
on society's margins but the lower half--librarians, checkout clerks, forest rangers, and
so on, did not participate in the boom at all.
Despite its pretensions, America was becoming a far less egalitarian society than
it had been before the market boom. (Lowenstein, 46-47)
Yves Smith explains further how the wave of banking deregulation created an industry set on
predation of the poor:
Financial firms were once contained within a regulated environment in which
they were assured moderate but steady profits in exchange for services that contributed
to the stability of the economy as a whole. Deregulation (and the failure of regulators to
respond to the industry's attempts to escape restraints) changed everything, leading
financial companies to become much more like the fiercely competitive firms idealized
in neoclassical economics. With each company fighting for market share and profits, the
aggressive impulses that had been check by oversight and by quaint notions like
propriety were now unleashed.
It was easy for predatory firms to take advantage of their customers thanks to
the rapid growth of a 'shadow banking system,' involving, in particular, over-the-counter
markets derivatives. The financial services industry developed a range of products and
services that were both very difficult for their clients to understand and also
substantially outside of the reach of regulation.
In order to be ready to take advantage of fleeting profit opportunities, large
financial firms also became more decentralized. Consequently, if misbehavior did come
to light, it was often difficult to prove that top management had been responsible.
Finally, the people who were supposed to oversee financial markets had either
absorbed enough of the ideas of neoclassical economics and the world view of the
financial services industry that they had no interest in intervening (regulators, some
judges in key decisions), or else they had a vested interest in keeping the party going
(ratings agencies, along with accommodating accountants and attorneys). (Smith, 130131)
Part and parcel to this wider conversation about banking is the effect regulatory agencies and
financial institutions play in impacting income inequality. Yves Smith goes on to draw a direct link
between the Federal Reserve Bank and American wages:
Recall that they saw the refusal of workers to accept low enough wages as a
factor that made the Great Depression as severe as it was. One way to contain
compensation is for the central bank to raise interest rates when inflation starts to
build. The logic is that increasing unemployment will moderate pay pressures and also
discourage businesses from giving employees pay increases in excess of productivity
gains. Ironically, quite a few 'free markets' supporters endorse this type of intervention
to correct a perceived market failure (labor having undue bargaining power) but reject a
raft of others. (Smith, 224)
Beyond the Fed, there are a myriad of regulatory agencies that provide excellent grounds for
affirmative policy making. For instance, The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) enforces
investment rules regarding commodities purchased by Americans. The St. Louis Reserve Bank estimates
that long-term investments in commodity futures currently accounts for 1/3 of the price Americans pay
for a gallon of gasoline. Previous to the 1990's, this long-term investing was considered illegal, in
violation of 1936 Commodity Exchange Act. However, a change in CFTC rules has allowed futures
investments to artificially inflate the price of everyday products, unfairly burdening the people on the
lowest end of the income spectrum (Taibbi, 132). These are but one regulatory example among a myriad
of New Deal policies that were systematically dismantled over the last thirty years.
The final grouping of aftermarket policies reveals one of America's great political arguments of
the last forty years; the health of the welfare state. Since the Clinton Administration, the American
welfare system has experienced nothing short of a complete overhaul, or as Phyllis Day would put it,
uprooting:
Faced with a recalcitrant Congress answerable both to a politically powerful
Religious Right and economically forceful transnational corporations, Clinton chose
politics over principles and backed away from other promises....his major retreat was in
welfare reform. Despite his protestations of care for children, this politically driven
president, concerned with upcoming elections, after two vetoes signed the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Acts with its pernicious welfare
reform bill titled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. To the dismay of those who
trusted him, he fulfilled his promise to 'end welfare as we know it' by ending sixty years
of the citizen entitlements established in the Social Security Acts of 1935. (Day, 421)
Indeed, the modern American welfare state seems paltry in comparison to other advanced
nations. Martin Gilens discusses this further when he writes, "Compared with other affluent industrial
nations, the Unites States does indeed devote less of its resources to government social spending.
Among the world's developed nations, only Japan spends less of its gross national product on social
programs, and the Scandinavian countries....devote twice as much of their GNP to government social
programs as does the United States." (Gilens, 23)
Welfare reform provides a wide array of specific solvency mechanisms for affirmative teams.
Amongst them being reforms or expansions of veteran's benefits, the Americans with Disabilities Act,
Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), Unemployment Insurance, Workers Compensation,
Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Food and Nutrition
Programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC).
Additionally, there is much ground within the welfare realm for the implementation of new policies, like
substance abuse and mental health services or rehabilitation assistance for ex-convicts. Add to this harm
scenarios specifically tied to welfare reform, like the racial and sexual implications of welfare reform,
and there is more than ample affirmative ground in this section alone.
For those associations who specify a limited set of novice plans and cases to be debated in their
jurisdictions, such a list might look like this:
 Increase the top marginal income tax rate
 Increase the minimum wage
 Increase or expand qualification status for the Earned Income Tax Credit
 Increase the phase-out point for the Social Security Tax
 Implement a negative income tax
Negative Core Arguments
Instead of trying to predict what every camp is likely to produce against this resolution, should it
be adopted, we should like to introduce a brief list of some of the intuitive core negative positions likely
to be run on this resolution:
 Business Confidence Disadvantage
 Capitalism Good Kritik
 Environmental Tradeoff Disadvantage
 Federalism Disadvantage
 Food Prices Disadvantage
 Inflation Disadvantage
 Politics Disadvantage
 Socialism Kritik
 States Counterplan
 Trade Deficit Disadvantage
Again, this is in no way intended to be an exhaustive list, but merely one to show that there is
some strategic flexibility to negative teams on this topic.
Definitions
Banking regulation
“Bank regulation includes issuing specific regulations and guidelines to govern the operations, activities
and acquisitions of banking organizations.” www.federalreserveeducation.org
economic inequality
Economic inequality (also described as the gap between rich and poor, income inequality, wealth
disparity, wealth and income differences or wealth gap[1]) is the difference between individuals or
populations in the distribution of their assets, wealth, or income. Wikipedia.
“We measure economic inequality by looking at the distributions of income and wealth. A household’s
income is the amount that it receives in a given period. A household’s wealth is the value of the things it
owns at a point in time.” Bade and Parkin, Foundations of Economics (AP Edition 2007), p. 472
income inequality
“A measurement of the distribution of income that highlights the gap between individuals or households
making most of the income in a given country and those making very little”. Business Dictionary.com
“The unequal distribution of household or individual income across the various participants in an
economy. Income inequality is often presented as the percentage of income to a percentage of
population. For example, a statistic may indicate that 70% of a country’s income is controlled by 20% of
that country’s residents.” Investopedia.com
“Income inequality refers to how evenly or unevenly income is distributed in a society. The United States
has a relatively high level of income inequality because the very richest people take home a large share
of the economic pie -- and there is a relatively large gap between them and some of the poorest people
in America.” John Sutter, CNN, October 29, 2013.
Internal Revenue Code
“The Internal Revenue Code is the body of law that codifies all federal tax laws, including income, estate,
gift, excise, alcohol, tobacco, and employment taxes.” The Free Dictionary.com
“The comprehensive set of tax laws created by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This code was
enacted as Title 26 of the Unites States Code by Congress, and is sometimes also referred to as the
Internal Revenue Title. The code is organized according to topic, and covers all relevant rules pertaining
to income, gift, estate, sales, payroll and excise taxes.” Investopedia.com
poverty
“the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions”
Merriam-Webster Online.
“America's official poverty measure is far simpler. Developed in the 1960s, the poverty threshold
represents the basic cost of food for a household, multiplied by three.” The Economist, Jan. 20, 2011.
reduce
“make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size” Oxford Online Dictionary
“To bring down, as in extent, amount, or degree; diminish” American Heritage Online Dictionary.
should
“used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions”. Oxford
Online Dictionary
“used to express obligation or duty”. American Heritage Online Dictionary
substantially
Author’s note – as anyone who has coached or debated will know, several legal definitions exist that
assign a precise percentage to this term. However, those definitions are often, by their context, limited
to addressing the issue that was at bar in that particular case. Thus, while a list of cases could cite
substantially as meaning anything from 10 percent up to 90 percent, I will refrain from listing them here.
Debaters historically have proven themselves plenty capable of finding these interpretations.
“to a great or significant extent”. Oxford Online Dictionary
“considerable in importance, value, degree, amount, or extent”. American Heritage Online Dictionary
United States federal government
“The United States Federal Government is established by the US Constitution. The Federal Government
shares sovereignty over the United Sates with the individual governments of the States of US. The
Federal government has three branches: i) the legislature, which is the US Congress, ii) Executive,
comprised of the President and Vice president of the US and iii) Judiciary.” US Legal.com Definitions
“The government of the United States, established by the Constitution, is a federal republic of 50 states,
a few territories and some protectorates. The national government consists of the executive, legislative,
and judicial branches.” Word IQ.com
Bibliography
Alterman, Eric. Why We're Liberals. New York City: Penguin, 2008. Print.
Boston Consulting Group. Majority of Large Manufacturers are Now Planning or Considering ‘Reshoring’
from China to the United States. Press Release, September 23, 2013. Last accessed April 8,
2014. <http://www.bcg.com/media/PressReleaseDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-144944>
Day, Phyllis J. A New History Of Social Welfare. Boston: Pearson Education, 2009. Print.
Gilens, Martin. Why Americans Hate Welfare. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999. Print.
Gilens, Martin and Page, Benjamin. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and
Average Citizens.”
Published April 9, 2014.
Last accessed April 29, 2014.
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Pag
e/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf>
Hartmann, Thom. Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class. San Francisco: Berrett
Koehler, 2007. Print.
Jencks, Christopher, et al. Inequality Matters. New York City: The New Press, 2005. Print.
Liu, Eric. “How America is Rigged for the Rich.” CNN, April 9, 2014. Last accessed April 1, 2014.
Lowenstein, Roger. Origins Of The Crash: The Great Bubble And Its Undoing. New York City: Penguin,
2004. Print.
McArdle, Megan. “The Rich Man’s Nightmare”. Bloomberg Businessweek, June 2, 2014.
Milanovic, Branko. The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.
New York City: Basic Books, 2012. Print.
Krugman, Paul. The Conscience Of A Liberal. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
Nicks, Denver. “America’s Big Cities are Inequality Hot Spots.” Time Magazine. Published February 20,
2014. Last accessed April 11, 2014. <http://nation.time.com/2014/02/20/income-inequalitycities-brooking-study/>
Obama, Barack. State of the Union Speech. The White House, 2014. Last accessed April 7, 2014.
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/28/president-barack-obamas-stateunion-address>
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (English Edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Belknap Press, 2014. Print.
Salverda, Wiemer, et. al. The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford
University Press, 2011. Print.
Smith, Yves. Econned. New York City: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Print.
Sutter, John D. “What is Income Inequality, Anyway?” CNN, October 29, 2013. Last accessed April 12,
2014. <http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/29/opinion/sutter-explainer-income-inequality/>
Taibbi, Matt. Griftopia. New York City: Spiegal & Grau, 2011. Print.
The Economist. “A Defining Issue, for Poor People.” Published December 16, 2013. Last accessed April
29, 2014. < http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/12/inequality>
The Green Party of the United States. 2010 Platform: Economic Justice & Sustainability. Last accessed
April 11, 2014. <http://www.gp.org/committees/platform/2010/Platform2010.pdf>