1

Welfare programs are effective – aff empirics are flawed and won’t account for their
sizable impact on poverty.
Worstall 16. (Time Worstall, June 8 2016, “America's Surprisingly Efficient And Effective Welfare Benefits System” Forbes, I'm a Fellow
th

at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium,
one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The
Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit,
Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers,
including the Daily Sport. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/08/americas-surprisingly-efficient-and-effective-welfare-
benefits-system/#117ea8154cb5)/RL

The Republicans look like turning to that perennial interest, reforming the welfare benefits system. And there's no doubt that it could be reformed to all our benefit. In particular, we could
make the poor better off without spending any more money: or we could make them as well off as they are now and spend less. That's not quite what is being suggested as yet of course but

However, when considering such reform we do need to think rather more than just a little bit
we can all hope.

about how good the current system is at alleviating poverty: that being the goal of a welfare benefits
system of course, the alleviation of poverty. The truth here is that the American system is really rather
good at that job. And more than that, it's almost excellent at the aim of reducing child poverty. So, therefore,
we've got both left and the progressives coming out in support of the current system. Which is great, why not? But their arguments then run smack into the face of their own more normal
rhetoric, which we'll get to in a moment: “For years, decades now, Washington has spent billions of dollars on dozens of programs to fight poverty, but we have barely moved the needle,”
Ryan says. “The War on Poverty is a stalemate, at best.” This is a favorite claim of Paul Ryan’s, and it’s completely wrong. Ryan and others who makes this claim that War on Poverty, launched

, the
in the mid-60s, has been ineffective usually point to the official poverty rate, which stands roughly equal to where it was in 1965. But as Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote in 2015

official poverty rate is a “travesty of a statistic” that doesn’t take into account “in-kind transfers like
Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers, as well as tax-based programs like the [Earned Income
Tax Credit].” So when Ryan complains that billions of dollars have been uselessly spent on anti-poverty programs, he’s citing a statistic that doesn’t account for much of that spending.
Quite so, quite so, it's a point I have made many a time around here. In fact, in my native UK, I've made the point so many times that some now call it Worstall's Fallacy. We can't measure
anything before whatever it is that we do to alleviate that problem. We must measure afterwards, to see how much we've alleviated. This is taken further by the CBPP: Workers in poverty
typically have a greater incentive to work more hours or at higher wages than other workers do. A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis found workers with earnings below the
poverty line face “marginal tax rates” — i.e., the reduction in benefits or increase in taxes for each additional dollar earned — that are typically well below those that other workers face. The
median or typical worker with earnings below half of the poverty line has a marginal tax rate of 14 percent, according to CBO’s analysis, meaning that he or she loses 14 cents in higher taxes
and/or lower benefits for each additional dollar earned. Workers with earnings between 50 and 100 percent of the poverty line typically face marginal tax rates of 24 percent. In contrast, the
groups of earners with somewhat higher incomes that CBO examined typically have marginal tax rates of about 33 or 34 percent. What we want in a welfare system is that it alleviates poverty,
of course. But also that it doesn't destroy the incentives to kill off poverty through work rather than redistribution. This is something the American system does rather well. Rather better than

By the American measure

most of the European systems in fact which almost all suffer from very high (millions above 60% in Britain alone) marginal tax rates as above.

of child poverty for example that welfare system reduces it from the 20% or so that we see before
welfare down to about 2 or 3% after welfare. That's a pretty good performance for a government system
and it manages it without those fearsome marginal tax rates. It's a good performance. But of course this defence of the
system runs smack into the problem of the more usual political rhetoric. We are continually told that the poverty rate is still 15% or whatever: we must do more! Child poverty is 20%, we must

! But when we defend the current system we point out that actually, after welfare those rates are
do more

nothing like that. All of which means that we really ought to move to the correct defence of the
American system. The low tax and low redistribution system in general means that Americans are, in
general, better off than Europeans. Then in kicks the various welfare systems, more generous in Europe than in the US. This leads to the average for the bottom
10% in say the US, Sweden and Finland as being about the same. Yes, including food prices, health care, education and so on. The richer economy in general in the US makes up for the lesser
redistribution. For the bottom 5% on average it's a bit gloomier in the US. That's because the place deals rather badly with significant mental health and addiction problems rather than

any debate about the welfare system really does have to include two things
anything specifically to do with poverty itself. Thus

which either side very rarely mention. Firstly, that the US system as a whole does its job pretty well.
Secondly, that there's nowhere near as much poverty floating around as we generally get told there is.
Because the claims are usually of the numbers before that rather good performance is taken into
account.

UBI would be extremely expensive and force massive welfare cuts.

Porter 16 (Eduardo Porter writes the Economic Scene column for The New York Times. Formerly he was a member of The Times’
editorial board. He graduated with a degree in physics from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and has an M.Sc. in quantum fields
and fundamental forces from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, "A Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Tool to Fight
Poverty", 5-31-2016, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/business/economy/universal-basic-income-poverty.html) // dl

In the United States, the idea has the support of thinkers on the left like Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International
Union. Some thinkers on the right, too, have managed to overcome their general distaste for government welfare to support the idea. This
month, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute will publish an updated version of his plan
to replace welfare as we
know it with a dollop of $10,000 in after-tax income for every American above the age of 21. Readers of my
conversation with a fellow Times columnist, Farhad Manjoo, a few weeks ago know that I think the idea is, let’s say, poorly thought out. Given
its resilience, however, it is worth taking apart more methodically. Its
first hurdle is arithmetic. As Robert Greenstein of the left-
leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, a
check of $10,000 to each of 300 million Americans would cost
more than $3 trillion a year. Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue
collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of
burden to their current taxes. Cut it by half to $5,000? That wouldn’t even clear the poverty line. And it would
still cost as much as the entire federal budget except for Social Security, Medicare, defense and interest
payments. Thinkers on the right solve the how-to-pay-for-it problem simply by defunding everything
else the government provides, programs as varied as food stamps and Social Security. That, Mr. Greenstein
observes, would actually increase poverty. It would redistribute wealth upward, taking money targeted to
the poor and sharing it with everybody, including you and me. As Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and
onetime top economic adviser to President Obama, told me, paying a $5,000 universal basic income to the 250 million
nonpoor Americans would cost about $1.25 trillion a year. “It would be hard to finance that in a way
that wouldn’t burden the programs that help the poor,” he said. The popularity of the universal basic income stems from a
fanciful diagnosis born in Silicon Valley of the challenges faced by the working class across industrialized nations: one that sees declining
employment rates and stagnant wages and concludes that robots are about to take over all the jobs in the world.

The DA turns and outweighs case – welfare programs are comparatively more
effective at combatting inequalities than a UBI.
Matthews 17. (Dylan Matthews is one of the staff members at Vox, an online media venture, "What Happens If You Replace Every
Social Program With A Universal Basic Income", 5-30-2017, Vox, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15712160/basic-income-
oecd-aei-replace-welfare-state) // dl

Basic income — the idea of just giving everyone in a given country a regular, guaranteed cash payment, no strings attached — is still
pretty far from being adopted in the US . But it’s been gaining steam as an idea for a while now, most recently garnering praise
from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his widely viewed Harvard commencement speech last week. But no one quite agrees on what the
term “basic income” means. And in particular, no one agrees on how such a plan would be funded. Conservative
and libertarian
proponents tend to want to pay for it by eliminating the entire welfare state, including health programs
like Medicare and Medicaid and social insurance programs such as Social Security. More cautious
center-left or moderate libertarian proponents — who are loath to cut those aspects of the safety net, endanger people’s
retirements, and let uninsured sick people die in the streets — tend to only propose funding through eliminating means-
tested programs like food stamps and the earned income tax credit, as well as tax benefits such as the
health care exclusion and mortgage interest deduction . The most ambitious lefty proponents want to
finance the program entirely through new tax revenue. As two big new reports on the impact of basic income show, “how
would we fund it” is a massively important question. The first, by the OECD (an international organization of developed countries), models a
basic income that would "replace most cash benefits for working age households." That includes unemployment benefits, cash welfare, early
retirement pensions, child and family allowances, and personal exemptions and standard deductions in income and payroll taxes. They assume
no additional tax increases and no changes to programs for retired people, and that "the provision of public services, such as health, education,
care, or other in-kind supports … continue[s] unchanged." The report then calculates how the introduction of a budget-neutral basic income,
available to every person below retirement age, would affect rich, middle-class, and poor people in four illustrative countries: Finland, Italy,
France, and the UK. The charts in question are slightly confusing, but the important line is the one with blue circles, showing the percentage
change in income for each slice of the income distribution. What you see, consistently, is that the poorest people in each country would gain
the most as a result of the change. In the UK, existing spending on the cash programs that would be replaced by a UBI is quite low, resulting in
small basic income payments; that means poor but not extremely poor people would lose out a bit. But in Finland, Italy, and France, the greater
benefits for the poor would be subsidized by benefits and tax breaks lost by higher-income people. The biggest losers in each country tend to
be the near-elderly; early retirement benefits offered to those below 65 tend to be a great deal more generous than a basic income, so the
policy would effectively redistribute that money to people across the age spectrum. And despite
high average increases in
income for poor people, a UBI financed through existing benefits would do little to cut poverty, the
report finds. So would one set at countries’ pre-established welfare benefit level, and funded where
necessary by increased taxes (or decreased taxes in Italy, where welfare benefits are below the budget-neutral UBI level). The
average effect on income obscures some specific losers from the policy who would fall back below the
poverty line in greater numbers than beneficiaries from the policy would climb above it.
 2
The economy is high now – wage growth is set to expand and inflation will reach the
target range
Fox 2/27 (Fox Business, 2-27-2018, "Fed chair Jerome Powell says US economic outlook strong, sees gradual rate hikes,"
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/fed-chair-jerome-powell-says-us-economic-outlook-strong-sees-gradual-rate-hikes) //SM

Jerome Powell, the new head of the Federal Reserve, said Tuesday in prepared remarks for Capitol Hill
testimony that the economic outlook remains strong despite weak er than expected inflation and
moderate wage growth. Powell was set to testify before the House Financial Services Committee at 10 a.m. ET in his first public
appearance since he succeeded Janet Yellen as chairman of the U.S. central bank. He said he expects both inflation and wage
growth to accelerate this year as the economy grows and U.S. fiscal policy becomes more stimulative. He
also said he believes that gradually raising interest rates will boost inflation to the Fed's target range and
sustain a strengthening labor market. Previous communications from the Fed have indicated three rate increases in 2018 with
investors expecting the first in March. Commenting on recent volatility in the markets the Fed chair points out that financial conditions remain
accommodative. He says financial conditions, which had eased substantially in 2017 have reversed that trend but the Fed does not see that
weighing heavily on its outlook for the economy, labor market and inflation.

UBI disincentives work and subsidizes non-productive activities

Keeble 17 (Nathan Keeble, Nathan Keeble is a Mises University Graduate and helped found the Campaign to End Civil Asset Forfeiture in
Tennessee. 01/16/2017, "The Dangers of a "Universal Basic Income"," Mises Institute, https://mises.org/blog/dangers-universal-basic-income)
//WW-AK 2/9/17

A universal basic income is not the god-sent welfare policy that it initially seems to be. It does not create incentive to
work. It won’t help solve unemployment, and it will not alleviate poverty. The truth is that a UBI will
exaggerate all of these factors in comparison to what would exist in a more unhampered market. There is
even reason to think that it would be worse in the long run than traditional, means-tested welfare systems. First, UBI does not eliminate the
disincentives to work that are inherent in welfare programs; it simply moves them around. This
program must be financed after
all, and any welfare system, including the UBI, is necessarily a wealth redistribution scheme. Wealth
must be forced from those who have it to those who do not. This means that at some point on the
income ladder, people must go from being net receivers of benefits to being net payers of benefits. The
progressive taxation that is necessary to finance a UBI means that the more a person earns, the higher
percentage of their wealth will be taken from them. The work disincentives are therefore still very much
present in the tax system. They’ve simply been transferred onto different, higher income groups of
people. UBI Diminishes the Power of Consumers in Directing the Marketplace The universal basic income shares
another problem with traditional welfare systems. Far from promoting the unemployed from searching for work the market rewards, it
actually subsidizes non-productive activities. The struggling entrepreneurs and artists mentioned earlier are struggling for a
reason. For whatever reason, the market has deemed the goods they are providing to be insufficiently valuable.
Their work simply isn’t productive according to those who would potentially consume the goods or
services in question. In a functioning marketplace, producers of goods the consumers don't want would quickly have
to abandon such endeavors and focus their efforts into productive areas of the economy. The universal
basic income, however, allows them to continue their less-valued endeavors with the money of those who
have actually produced value, which gets to the ultimate problem of all government welfare programs.
In the marketplace, wealth is earned by generating value. When someone buys a good, they’ve earned the money they
are spending by having produced something else. This is not so with welfare programs like a universal basic income.
Money is forcibly taken from those who have produced enough to earn it, and given to those who
haven’t. This allows for people who aren’t producing wealth to continue to consume scarce goods.
Eventually, all government welfare leads to the consumption of wealth, or, at the very least, a reduction in the amount of wealth that would
have been accumulated otherwise. When
entrepreneurs have less need to respond to the needs and desires of
their customers, consumers will find themselves with fewer choices and with lower-quality choices. This
means that overall welfare makes everyone poorer than they would have been in a free market.

Unemployment tanks the economy

Fuhrmann 17 (Ryan C. Fuhrmann, Ryan C. Fuhrmann, CFA, has a background in portfolio management, overseeing assets for high-net-
worth individuals and covering a broad array of industries from a generalist perspective. An active student of investing, he focuses on
communicating his ideas as an investment writer and learning from the financial community. Ryan is also actively involved with the CFA
Institute. 5-12-2017, "Unemployment and Economic Growth: Okun's Law," Investopedia,
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/12/okuns-law.asp) //WW-AK 2/9/17 *Brackets in original text

In its most basic form, Okun's law investigates the statistical relationship between a country's unemployment
rate and the growth rate of its economy. The economics research arm of the Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Louis explains that Okun's law "is intended to tell us how much of a country's gross domestic product
(GDP) may be lost when the unemployment rate is above its natural rate. " It goes on to explain that "the logic
behind Okun's law is simple. Output depends on the amount of labor used in the production process, so there is
a positive relationship between output and employment. Total employment equals the labor force
minus the unemployed, so there is a negative relationship between output and unemployment (conditional
on the labor force)." Yale professor and economist, Arthur Okun, was born in November 1928 and passed away in March 1980 at the age of 51.
He first published his findings on the subject in the early 1960s, which have since come to be known as his "law." Okun's Law is, in essence, a
rule of thumb to explain and analyze the relationship between jobs and growth. A talk from former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke,
perhaps most succinctly summarizes Okun's law basic concepts: "That rule of thumb describes the observed relationship between changes in
the unemployment rate and the growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP). Okun noted that, because
of ongoing increases
in the size of the labor force and in the level of productivity, real GDP growth close to the rate of growth
of its potential is normally required, just to hold the unemployment rate steady . To reduce the
unemployment rate, therefore, the economy must grow at a pace above its potential. More specifically,
according to [the] currently accepted versions of Okun's law, to achieve a 1 percentage point decline in the
unemployment rate in the course of a year, real GDP must grow approximately 2 percentage points
faster than the rate of growth of potential GDP over that period. So, for illustration, if the potential rate of
GDP growth is 2%, Okun's law says that GDP must grow at about a 4% rate for one year to achieve a 1
percentage point reduction in the rate of unemployment." It is most important to note that Okun's law
is a statistical relationship that relies on a regression of unemployment and economic growth. As such,
running the regression can result in differing coefficients that are used to solve for the change in unemployment, based on how the economy
grew. It all depends on the time periods used and inputs, which are historical GDP and employment data. Below is an example of an Okun's law
regression: The law has indeed "evolved," or changed over time to fit the current economic climate and employment trends at the time. One
version of Okun's law has stated very simply that when
unemployment falls by 1%, GNP rises by 3% . Another version
of Okun's Law focuses on a relationship between unemployment and GDP, whereby a percentage
increase in unemployment causes a 2% fall in GDP. A Bloomberg article integrating data from the highly volatile Great
Recession period noted that "the rule of thumb holds that for every percentage point that year-over-year growth exceeds the trend rate -
which Federal Reserve policy makers peg at between 2.3 and 2.6% - unemployment drops by half a percentage
point." Notice the varying uses of economic growth, such as GNP and GDP, as well as what qualifies as potential economic growth measures.
As with any law in economics, science or any discipline, it is important to determine if it holds under varying conditions and over time. In regard
to Okun's law, there appear to be conditions where it holds quite well and others where it doesn't. For instance, a review of Okun's law by the
Federal Reserve of Kansas City detailed that one of Okun's
first relationships looked at quarterly changes in
unemployment compared to quarterly growth in real output and it seemed to hold up well. There are also
different ways to track unemployment, and of course, the primary testing ground for Okun's law has been the United States. Okun also
analyzed the gap between potential economic output and the actual output rate in the economy. The Kansas City study detailed differing
versions of Okun's law, starting with his original quarterly relationship, a "gap version" that looked at differences in actual and potential output,
including if the law would hold under a condition of full employment or even high unemployment. It settled on a more dynamic version, leaving
options for variables to be left out or added, depending on the levels of current and historical economic growth.

Economic growth is the best metric to fight poverty.

Notaras 12. Mark Notaras; Mark Notaras was a writer/editor of Our World for the United Nations University (UNU) from 2009-2012. He
is a former researcher in Peace and Security for the UNU Institute for Sustainability and Peace. He holds a Masters in International Affairs
(Peace and Conflict Studies) from the Australian National University and the Peace Research Institute, Oslo and in 2013 completed a Rotary
Peace Fellowship at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Currently Mark works in Timor-Leste advising local NGOs on community agriculture
and conflict prevention projects. “Does Economic Growth Make Us Happy?” 2012; http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/does-economic-growth-make-
us-happy

“happier countries tend to be richer countries” says the report, “more important for happiness than income are social factors
like the strength of social support, the absence of corruption and the degree of personal freedom”. Those who have been arguing, in light of the
focus on rescuing the financial system, that “we live in a society and not an economy”, would surely agree. ¶ For the record, the world has
become a happier place overall over the last 30 years, mirroring the rise in global incomes and the emergence of a truly global middle class in
the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries and beyond. Using
the methodology of a 1–10 scale of happiness, the
world’s happiest countries are the democratic-socialist Northern European states of Denmark, Norway, Finland and the
Netherlands which rate a healthy 7.6 on the happiness meter. Supporters of this state-driven, socially conscious model will gloat that citizens of
these countries are happier than those in the more economic growth-obsessed Anglophone nations like the US and the UK. At the other
end of the spectrum are the poverty, coup and conflict prone sub-Saharan Africa nations of Togo, Benin,
Central African Republic and Sierra Leone registering scores of just 3.4. In fact, the global table of happiness stronger
replicates the global table of income with poorer nations at the bottom and richer nations overwhelmingly at
the top. A few notable exceptions include middle income Costa Rica ranked as 12th happiest and middle income Georgia and Bulgaria
ranked surprisingly close to the bottom.
Case
 T/L
Trump would never pass a UBI – welfare budgets are more likely to be cut.
Battistoni 17 (Alyssa Battistoni is a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University and an editor at Jacobin magazine., "The False
Promise of Universal Basic Income", 2017, Dissent Magazine, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/false-promise-universal-basic-income-
andy-stern-ruger-bregman) // dl

In the United States, meanwhile, the

combination of nativism and libertarianism that makes up the Trump
coalition is particularly dangerous: it’s hard to imagine any way a basic income program implemented in
the Trump era would be anything but a vehicle for dismantling the remains of the welfare state while
simultaneously reinforcing nationalism by excluding non-citizens from shared prosperity . That said, basic
income doesn’t seem likely to be on the agenda of the Trump administration anytime soon. Instead of
inventing the future, Trump’s move is to borrow from the past via boondoggles like the Carrier deal, which give public money to private
companies in an attempt to revive a mid-century imaginary where men had real factory jobs. Welfare programs, meanwhile, are
likely to come under renewed attack from a Republican administration ready to slash government
spending. The apparent success of Trump’s appeal to mid-century nostalgia, though, has thrown cold water on utopian visions. After a few
years of UBI flirtation, the American left seems to be returning to full employment—rather than full unemployment—as a demand, particularly
via the idea of a federal job guarantee. There’s plenty of useful work to be done, of course, and like income, jobs should be distributed as
evenly as possible. Remaking the ideology of work may be too heavy a lift for the next few years.
 LBL
Off Santens 18
1. Not comparative – prefer our evidence.
2. Even if targeting system imperfect, it’s net better than no targeting

Off Calder 17
Says welfare is bad because it increases tax – the plan causes greater tax hikes and undermines bottom-
up worker demands.

Cotte 2-14. Anna Coote Is Head Of Social Policy For The New Economics Foundation (Nef)., 2-14-2018, "Don’T Buy The Hype, Universal
Basic Income Won’T Tackle Poverty Or Inequality," HuffPost, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-coote-universal-basic-
income_us_5a830188e4b01467fcf1df2f //RS

When an idea stirs the popular imagination, pundits and politicians find it hard to resist. Never mind if there is no evidence to support it. Never
mind if closer scrutiny suggests putting it into practice will be counterproductive or plain impossible. What matters is the platform it provides
for its champions, the energy it generates and the votes it wins. Brexit is one example. President Donald Trump’s Mexican wall is another. And I
would add a third: universal basic income (UBI) – the idea that every citizen receives a weekly or monthly lump sum from the government,
whether they’re employed or not. The case against UBI is building rapidly. But so is the clamor to try it out in states and cities around the world.
That the latter seems immune to the former is alarming. And the fact that it’s promoted by radicals at both ends of the political spectrum
should ring alarm bells. As Daniel Zamora argues in Jacobin, this is an idea “whose time has come,” not because it is good or practicable, but
because it is a creature of the moment. “As politics move to the right and social movements go on the defensive, UBI gains ground ... not as an
alternative to neoliberalism, but a capitulation to it,” he wrote. Wehave to assume, as do almost all of its protagonists, that a basic
income could only be implemented in very small amounts. The most generous UBI scheme envisaged in
a 2017 study by the Roosevelt Institute falls below the poverty line . This means a range of additional
benefits would need to be paid to people unable to work – wiping out the much-vaunted promise that
UBI simplifies the social security system and removes the stigma of claiming benefits. In fact, all it offers is
a small rise in the floor above which conditional benefits are required. And even at that level, we would
need massive tax hikes to pay for it. In a nutshell, “an affordable UBI would be inadequate and an adequate
UBI would be unaffordable.” Why bother to construct what British economist Ian Gough called a “powerful new tax engine to pull
along a tiny cart?” Whose interests are really at stake here? UBI is an individualistic, monetary intervention that
undermines social solidarity and fails to tackle the underlying causes of poverty, unemployment and
inequality. These are systemic problems that need to be addressed by people getting together and
building shared control over local economic development, wage bargaining and decisions about national
investment in industry and infrastructure, not by governments giving individuals small amounts of
money. Leftist advocates of UBI, like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, claim that it “overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists
between labour and capital” by partially de-commodifying labor and loosening the coercive aspects of paid employment. But here’s the catch:
It will only happen, they say, if UBI “provides a sufficient amount of income to live on.” As
we have seen, this is not remotely
possible. If UBI isn’t generous enough to let you refuse work, it can only suppress wages and support a
multiplication of lousy jobs (that you still can’t refuse). The idea of giving money to individuals sits comfortably with the
neoliberal claim that services are better when markets provide and customers choose. Indeed, where UBI has been piloted in countries without
free public services, it is often used to buy such essentials as education and healthcare. Bottom of Form One
of the most dangerous
aspects of this “radical” idea is that it can help to dismantle welfare states – both by supporting the
ideology of privatization and monetization, and by draining huge amounts of money from the public
purse. But collectively provided public services, available to all according to need, give far better value for
money than commercialized services. They are more likely to be inclusive and egalitarian, and to
encourage solidarity. They represent a very substantial virtual income that is also highly redistributive. It
is estimated that this “social wage” reduces income inequality by 20 percent. Far more compelling than UBI is UBS,
or the idea of universal basic services currently being developed by economists at London University’s Global Prosperity Institute. Their goal is
“public services that enable every citizen to live a larger life” by ensuring access to security, opportunity and participation. This means reaching
beyond education services, to provide health, transport, access to information, shelter and food, free according to need at the point of access.
Their technical analysis found that access to services can be financed through fairly modest adjustments to the tax system. UBS will meet needs
more directly for those with the lowest incomes and will “always deliver greater value for the same expenditure as a cash distribution.” Many
left-wing supporters of UBI claim they also want to defend public services. However, they pay no attention to how these services can be
strengthened or improved, and ignore the very obvious danger of robbing Peter to pay Paul. As the UBI fan base grows, it is capturing political
energy that is urgently needed for more serious causes. There are viable alternatives that have far stronger claims – in philosophical, economic
and political terms – to address the challenges of poverty and inequality. For example, it is worth building a campaign for a minimum income
guarantee, combined with more generous child benefits and a system of credits for carers based on the principles of time banking, so that time
spent on caring for others earns a reciprocal contribution to one’s pension or care costs later in life. But the snake oil of a deceptively simple
idea is charming the public gaze in another direction. Implemented in any remotely viable form, UBI
will do nothing to help
workers gain more control through collective bargaining – the ability to negotiate their salary and
working conditions. It will do nothing to encourage employers to pay a decent living wage or narrow the
gap between the top and bottom of the workplace hierarchy. And it will do nothing to alter power
relations between labor and capital . A no-strings-attached payout will not eliminate poverty or insecurity. It will only harm
the hard-won social democratic tradition of public services available to all according to need. It will not,
in fact, disturb a hair on the head of modern capitalism. No wonder UBI is popular with the moguls of Silicon Valley. In
their world, where automation is the name of the game, they think their interests are best served by a docile population who cannot hold their
bosses’ feet to the fire but may have just enough money to keep on shopping. What could be more attractive than a government prepared to
spend more public money to subsidize low wages and a dwindling supply of precarious jobs?

Outweighs case – the plan prevents workers from engaging in broader movements
that can create effective solutions to the root cause of poverty.

Off Pugh 16
1. Non-unique – basic income doesn’t account for disproportionately racial people being forced
into poverty.
2. Reforms are improving welfare programs now.

CEBC writes. (Research Evidence, xx-xx-xxxx, "CEBC » Topic › Reducing Racial Disparity And Disproportionality In Child Welfare", No
Publication, http://www.cebc4cw.org/topic/reducing-racial-disparity-and-disproportionality-in-child-welfare/, 3-2-2018) //RS

Reducing Racial Disparity and Disproportionality in Child Welfare: Programs are defined by the CEBC as interventions to
address disparities in the child welfare services received by minorities and/or the disproportionate
representation of ethnic minorities in the child welfare system. This topic area highlights programs that propose
replicable strategies for reducing disparities and disproportionality. Qualifying programs work to reduce disparity and/or
disproportionality at various stages in the child welfare system: screening for child abuse and neglect;
investigation of allegations; service provision to families, children, and adolescents (Note: Many states offer an
alternative response process where lower risk cases receive a more supportive, service-oriented, and strengths-focused approach, please
click here for more information about these types of programs.); out-of-family
placement in foster care; adoption; and
reunification. It should be noted that there is some discussion in the child welfare field regarding whether the
disproportionate entrance of ethnic minorities into the child welfare system is appropriate and reflects
higher maltreatment rates in some minority communities, or whether the differences reflect biases
within the child welfare system, or other societal factors such as poverty and income inequality. For more
information on this topic, please see the Child Welfare Information Gateway's section on
Disproportionality: https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/cultural/disproportionality/
Off c2
UBI lowers wages and worsens worker conditions – turns case.
Zamora 12-28. Daniel Zamora is a postdoctoral sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Cambridge University., 12-28-2017,
"The Case Against a Basic Income," No Publication, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work //RS

The Crisis of Work? When asked about work, Philippe Van Parijs likes to quote the physician Jan Pieter Kuiper, who launched the debate on
basic income in the Netherlands in the 1970s: “Among my patients there are guys who are sick because they work too much, and guys who are
sick because they are unable to find work.” This contradiction runs through the history of capitalism, and it motivates Van Parijs and many of his
followers. UBI would create a society in which “those who work too much … work less, in order to avoid burnout, breathe a little, retrain for
new work, or care for their loved ones, and the jobs thus freed up could then be taken by others.” That is, it doesn’t aim at “working less, so all
can work,” as the workers’ movement traditionally did, but letting everyone choose how much to work at any given moment. Proponents
present it as a way to achieve a more harmonious distribution of work. That objective may seem sensible, but it raises several questions. Most
important, it risks amplifying employers’ current race to the bottom. Today’s labor market is highly stratified: some people
enjoy access to good jobs while others, subject to harsh competition, can only find precarious and unstable work. A low or moderate UBI —
too low to let people refuse job offers — could relegate the least qualified people to more intensely
precarious situations. As Luke Martinelli puts it: The lack of an exit option for such workers, and their weak
bargaining position with respect to employers, means that basic income could end up exacerbating poor
pay and conditions if other workers were willing to reduce their wage demands as a result of the
unconditional payment. Martinelli highlights “the danger that basic income ‘would aggravate the problem of
low pay and subsidize inefficient employers,’ leading to a proliferation of ‘lousy’ jobs.” In this scenario, those
with good jobs will continue to lead fulfilling lives, now supplemented by universal income, while others
will have to combine their UBI with one or more “lousy” jobs, with little gain in income. The proposal
makes no attempt to help those without a job today get one tomorrow or improve the job they have.
Indeed, everything suggests that the opposite will happen: the UBI will function like a war machine for lowering wages
and spreading precarious work. This aspect of basic income isn’t new: it explains why the neoliberal economist George Stigler
originally proposed a UBI, in the form of a negative income tax. In contrast to Keynes, who downplayed the role of wage levels in his
explanation of unemployment, Stigler’s famous 1946 paper “The Economics of Minimum Wage Legislation” argued that the minimum wage
reduced employment. He called on the government to abolish such regulations so that workers could accept wages that don’t exceed the
market price. Stigler’s negative income tax, which would supplement incomes up to a certain point, would allow workers to accept low-wage
jobs while still living above the poverty line. In effect, the system guarantees a minimum income without affecting the wage price. As Friedman
wrotein 1956, the program, “while operating through the market, [does] not distort the market or impede its functioning,” as Keynesian
programs do. Today, one still commonly sees UBI advocates resort to neoclassical platitudes about employment. We can only be astonished, for
example, at the dubious claims made by Van Parijs and Vanderborgh in their recent book Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society
and a Sane Economy, such as: “where the level of remuneration is and remains firmly protected by minimum wage legislation, collective
bargaining, and generous employment insurance, the result tends to be massive losses of jobs.” We
shouldn’t be starting from the
premise that too-high wages generate unemployment by disrupting the economy’s optimal equilibrium :
that’s precisely the idea we should fiercely challenge. Indeed, recent studies seriously undermine these claims. Contrary
to neoclassical predictions, countries that tax work the most have the highest employment rates
because income taxes fund social services, which promote labor market participation , especially for women.

Costs of living vary –

a. UBI doesn’t solve
b. Also disproportionate – links to the same discriminatory arguments they make.