Disclosure---Glenbrooks Rd 5---MBA GH vs.

Bell KL
1AC---JG---GBX
1AC---Glenbrooks
 Stagnation Advantage---1AC
Advantage one is Economic Stagnation.

Inevitable recessions produce rampant unemployment by excluding prime-age

workers from the labor force---that guarantees prolonged slow growth, or secular
stagnation.
Flavia Dantas 22, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York; and
Larry Wray, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at the Bard College, 2022, “Secular Stagnation: as good as it
gets?” Handbook on Economic Stagnation, Chapter 15, ISBN: 978-0-12-815898-2
Evidence from the experience of prime age workers

Since 1990, the pace of recovery of the prime-age employment ratio (those 25e54 years—who always have the highest labor
force participation) has been painfully slow after each recession. Fig. 15.6 shows that after the GFC, it took 141 months for the
employment rate to return to its pre-recessionary level. More troubling, the pattern from recent recessions has been that
even after unemployment rates begin to fall , labor force participation , and the employment-population
ratio remain depressed for an extended period .
[Figure 15.6 omitted]

The pattern of recent decades is that with

each recession, more people become excluded —more or less permanently
—from labor markets. This trend is particularly worrisome for prime-age men, who have been leaving the
labor force since 1970, presumably as job prospects dimmed. For almost 40 years, rising labor force participation
rates of women made up for that. However, as Fig. 15.7 shows, the prime-age labor force participation rate
fell off in the GFC and only very slowly recovered over the next 2 decades.

Most workers have not seen significant wage increases —which might explain some of the decline of
participation by prime age males. And while structural shifts have partially contributed to the falling participation ratio,
they cannot easily explain why participation among prime-age workers remains significantly below pre-
recessionary levels. The typical explanation for declining labor force participation is age demographics , combined with
changing characteristics of the American labor force and other structural forces (see, e.g., Aaronson et al., 2006; Eberstadt, 2016). However,
labor force participation for those 55 and over actually has been rising (although the rate might have leveled off in the
past few years), partly counteracting the negative impact of an aging population on the overall participation rate.
[Figure 15.7 omitted]

The erosion of labor force participation for prime-age men has been steady in the U.S. economy since the mid-1960s.
Eberstadt (2016), for example, calculates that “a monthly average of nearly one in six prime-age men had no paying job of any kind” (2016, p.
213). If
current trends continue, in 40 years, one out of four men of prime working age will be out of the
labor force (Summers, 2016).
The U.S. does not fare well in international comparisons—in 2018 it had one of the lowest prime-age labor force participation rates among
OECD countries. It is hard to make the argument that excessive labor market regulation , or generous social
safety nets , are the reason for the lower participation rates in the U.S. since OECD countries with higher labor force
participation tend to have more closely regulated labor markets , and more extensive and comprehensive
social safety net . Further, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, which
curtailed or imposed time limits on government assistance to those in need to promote private sector work over “government-dependency” of
the able-bodied. Still, performance compared to other OECD countries declined ; the US was among only a handful of
countries with a falling participation ratio between 1990 and 2018.

Some have attributed the decline of labor force participation to “ social shifts ” (Williams, 2016) such as
changes in personal preferences as more people “traded a second paycheck for spending more time at
home, whether it’s for childcare, leisure, or simply that it’s a better lifestyle fit” (Williams, 2016) or to seek higher education al
achievements. While the decline of labor force participation for those between the ages of 16 and 24 reflects the fact that Americans are
spending more years in school, it cannot explain why Americans of prime-working age have simply withdrawn

from the labor market .

While the social shifts explanation sounds plausible, it

is unlikely that a large number of Americans are voluntarily
leaving the labor force for personal preferences. In fact, the number of those not in the labor force, who
report not wanting a job now has declined for age groups 16-24 and 25-54.8 Further, the historical trend for married
couples with children under 18 shows a significant increase in the percentage of families in which both
parents are employed —from 25% in 1960s to almost 61 in May 2016. Neither of these trends is obviously consistent
with the “ lifestyle changes ” argument.

The number of prime-age men who are neither employed nor looking for a job has more than doubled over the
past 50 years (Eberstadt, 2016). According to a White House Report, adverse labor supply conditions explain very little of
this decline—fewer than 25% of prime-age people not in the labor force have a working spouse , and nearly 36%
of them were living in poverty (White House, 2014, 2016). The report also shows that “m-age males without children
saw a larger decline of 9.4 percentage points since 1968 compared to 4.9 percentage points among prime-
age males with children.” (White House, 2014, 2016) That runs counter to the belief that the “ supply side ”
choice to leave the labor force to take care of children can explain much of the movement of prime-age males
out of the labor force. Only a quarter of prime-age men who are not in the labor force are parents (falling
from 40% in 1968) (White House, 2014, 2016). Finally, if we compare time-use of prime-age men who are out of the labor force with those who
are working, we do not find much ev idence that prime-age workers leave the labor force to pursue more
education , to care for family members, or to do housework . Rather, the most significant difference in time
use between those who are working and those who are out of the labor force is that a larger portion of the
day is spent in socializing , leisure, and relaxing.9 Also, unemployed men spend almost twice as much time in
educational activities as do men who are out of the labor force 10.

While all these data are only suggestive, we believe they support the argument that chronically insufficient
aggregate demand produces an insufficiency of jobs and loose labor markets. Measured unemployment is only
part of the story, as many work part-time, take contingent work, or leave the labor force. Labor force participation rates rose until the 1990s
only because women entered; prime age male participation rates were falling over the entire period under analysis. Redundancy
of
human labor keeps wage growth low —which further encourages workers to voluntarily leave the labor
market . Hence, we face what looks like labor market slack, but one that is tighter than it appears. Stagnant wages and stagnant
working hours keep aggregate demand low . This hinders growth and reduces the incentive to invest . Given
constrained supply of jobs and wages plus slow growth of productivity, secular stagnation is inevitable .
While it is too early to tell, evidence from the pandemic is that participation rates of women (especially) have fallen
greatly . Many speculate that this could be a long-lasting trend as families have weighed the costs (monetary and familial) of
working outside the home in a nation that provides little support for working parents. If true, this might paradoxically contribute to even bigger
problems with effective demand even as it tightens labor markets at least marginally through exit of some parents—unless wages and
monetary support for families rise substantially.

Insufficient demand makes economic stagnation inevitable---the plan’s targeted job

creation is the only way to solve structural and proximate causes of decline by
stimulating consumer spending while avoiding inflationary pressures.
Flavia Dantas 22, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York; and
Larry Wray, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at the Bard College, 2022, “Secular Stagnation: as good as it
gets?” Handbook on Economic Stagnation, Chapter 15, ISBN: 978-0-12-815898-2

In contrast to the above, we argue that the secular stagnation experienced in the US economy since the 1970s is, and has been,
a problem of chronic insufficient demand . We do not reject the notion that productivity is important or that supply side
constraints might arise (as they recently have with the COVID-19 pandemic), but insufficient aggregate demand has been the
primary reason for historically low growth rates observed over the period of analysis in rich, developed capitalist countries such
as the United States. However, we also reject Summers’ secular stagnation hypothesis—that is, that secular stagnation in the US is
caused by an imbalance between saving and investment that has reduced the equilibrium real rate of interest to very low, or even negative
territory. Our argument is that slow growth of demand is the cause of slow growth of investment ; in addition (as
Vatter and Walker argued—see the chapter by Wray), the supply boost to capacity increasingly exceeds the demand
side multiplier effect of investment. This compounds the problem of insufficient aggregate demand to
operate at full capacity—which reduces the incentive to invest .

There are several causes of chronic insufficient demand in the US and the rest of the industrialized world, including chronic
labor underutilization , wage stagnation , rising inequality, current account deficits, improper policy
response , and insufficient government spending . Many of these factors have been analyzed in previous contributions to
this volume, so we will instead focus on the evidence of chronic insufficient of demand in the U.S. through the lens of labor markets;
stagnant worker’s incomes , falling participation rates of prime-age men, and relatively slow growth of
productivity are all indicative of a problem of insufficient aggregate demand . The fundamental problem is
not demographic trends, lack of technological innovations, negative equilibrium real rates of interest, or
displacement by robots . We will argue that the slow “recovery” of labor markets following recessions, and
especially of the employment rate and labor force participation, is due to a combination of insufficient job creation as well as
stagnant wages .
We focus on two slow growth episodes experienced by the US economy (early-mid 1970s to mid-1990s, and then post-GFC, but prior to COVID-
19). We argue that the US had been suffering from insufficient aggregate demand for several decades before economists
like Summers and Krugman took notice. To be sure, stagnation is periodically relieved by short economic bursts —
usually brought on by unsustainable asset price bubbles (dot com stocks, commodities, housing prices—a
point also made by Summers, and by Fazzari in this volume). But once the bubbles burst , we return to secular
stagnation . We also believe that, in absence of fundamental changes, the postpandemic US economy could return to the same pattern.
In this chapter, we first provide an overview of the relationship between growth and labor productivity over the two periods in question. The
slowdown in productivity growth since the 1970s has puzzled economists and has been an important part of the
secular stagnation argument made economists like Gordon, who believe that low rates of real GDP growth are due to supply side forces. Next,
we discuss labor market trends. We focus on labor market participation, especially by prime-age workers. While female participation rates had
been rising—which had long boosted overall participation—prime-age male participation has experienced a falling long-term trend.
Recessions cause the participation rate of all groups to fall ; in recent expansions ; however, the recovery
of participation rates have been attenuated over expansions —and in the expansion following the Global Financial Crisis
(GFC), even rates of prime-age females took a long time to fully recover. So far, they remain depressed in the recovery from
the depths of the pandemic .

Some have proposed a b asic i ncome guarantee as a solution to current labor market dynamics: just provide income to workers who have
been displaced by robots, or who do not have the skills and training required in today’s knowledge economy. However, that might raise
aggregate demand beyond our limited ability to grow supply constrained output . The result could be

stagnation and inflation —with the specter of a late 1970s style stagflation. While we do need more aggregate demand , we
will argue that this should take the form of targeted job creation as well as growth of wages at the bottom of the
wage ladder. Our recommendation will follow Hyman Minsky’s “ e mployer of l ast r esort” proposal developed in the 1960s (see
Minsky, 2013) and revived in recent decades as a “job guarantee” program. This would bring workers back into the labor
force without fueling the inflation that would be generated by either the b asic i ncome guarantee or the old
“Keynesian” reliance on “ pump-priming .”

The most robust studies agree---demand is the deciding factor in stagnation---inflation

concerns miss the mark.
Servaas Storm 19, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 12/12/2019, “The Secular Stagnation of Productivity Growth,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Working Paper No. 108, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp108
5. Wage growth as a determinant of productivity growth

In the supply-side explanation of secular stagnation (of Figure 1), productivity growth is treated as an exogenous variable, and if and when it
declines, real wage growth is forced down — because profit-maximizing firms will not allow unit labor costs to increase. What is neglected in
this narrative, however, is that causality may run in the opposite direction as well: indeed, real wage growth is found to be a
major determinant of productivity growth (Gordon 1987, 2015; Foley and Michl 1999; Marquetti 2004; Basu 2010; Storm and
Naastepad 2012). Theoretically, the influence of real wage growth on labor productivity growth has been variously explained in terms of
‘induced technical change’ (Hicks 1932; Funk 2002; Brugger and Gehrke 2017), ‘Marx-biased technical change’ (Foley and Michl 1999; Basu
2009), or ‘directed technical change’ (Acemoglu 2002) — but the key mechanism is this: rising real wages, as in the U.S.
economy during the period 19 48 -19 72 (Table 2), provide an incentive for firms to invest in labor-saving
machinery and productivity growth surges as a result; but when wage growth is low , as in the U.S.
during 1972-2015 (Table 2), businesses have little incentive to invest in the modernization of their capital
stock and productivity growth falters .

Seen this way, labor productivity growth is endogenous and (at least partly) determined by real wage growth . If so, then
the secular stagnation of productivity growth in the U.S. economy must be attributed at least partly to the long-term
decline in the growth rate of U.S. hourly real wages. This is illustrated in the mnemonic of Figure 2 by the arrow from
‘permanently low real wage growth’ to ‘decline in labor productivity growth’. The decline in real wage growth in turn is strongly
associated with the post-1980 reorientation in macroeconomic policy, away from full employment and
towards low and stable inflation, which paved the way for labor market deregulation , a scaling down of social
protection, a lowering of the reservation wage of workers, and a general weakening of the wage bargaining power of
unions (Storm and Naastepad 2012). The recent rise in persons ‘working in alternative work arrangements’ in the U.S. (Katz and Krueger
2016) is merely the culmination of this earlier trend. To empirically illustrate this point, Figure 3 shows that there is a statistically significant (at
1%) positive long-run relation between the degree of unionization and real wage growth in the U.S. (1948-2015). The association is remarkably
strong: all by itself, the secular decline in unionization ‘explains’ about two-thirds of the long-term fall in real wage growth — which minimally
suggests that domestic regulatory changes leading to greater job and income insecurity have contributed to real wage restraint.

However, real wage stagnation generates additional damage to potential output growth, as is illustrated in Figure 2. Stagnant real wage
growth adds to the aggregate demand shortage , which lowers capacity utilization and capital stock growth in
eq. (15), or alternatively, it reduces utilization and TFP growth in eq. (14). Either way, potential growth gets hurt — and
economic growth slows down . The recognition that real wage growth is a major driver of productivity
growth holds an important insight for macroeconomic policy, as Robert Gordon (1987, pp. 154-155) explains:
“… a stimulus to aggregate demand provides not only the direct benefit of raising output and employment, but also the indirect
benefit of raising the real wage and creating substitution away from labor that boosts productivity [….] With this dual benefit
obtainable from demand expansion, the case against demand stimulation must rest on convincing evidence that such policies would
create an unacceptable acceleration of inflation.”

Higher wage growth may raise inflation considerably less than expected, in other words, because the rate
of potential growth goes up in response to the increases in productivity , demand and actual output
induced by the extra wage growth (see Figure 2; Storm and Naastepad 2012; Storm 2018; Girardi et al. 2018; Fontanari et al. 2019). If
so, the reverse holds true as well: sluggish business investment in the U.S. has been a key factor behind the stagnation of TFP growth and has
also been responsible for propagating hysteresis-like adverse consequences for TFP and potential output after 2008 (see Hall 2014; Ollivaud et
al. 2016; Fazzari et al. 2017; Cynamon and Fazzari 2017; Girardi et al. 2018). This conclusion only becomes stronger once we acknowledge the
‘cumulative causation’ at work: sluggish investment weakens aggregate demand and this, in turn, weakens accumulation through the
‘accelerator effect’ — which was Nicholas Kaldor’s argument — as well as real wage growth, which reduces the rate of labor-saving
technological progress (as argued here). Both ways, cyclical and/or structural demand shortfalls must carry over into lower growth of potential
output.

[Figure 3 omitted]

6. Conclusion: weak demand growth pulls down potential output growth

The theoretical arguments and empirical ev idence presented in this paper make the case for demand-led secular
stagnation in the U.S. economy since the early 1980s. Obviously, no single chart or empirical test “proves” the case. Rather the
case rests on a historical analysis of multiple pieces of evidence, which all point in the same direction.
The present theoretical analysis and the evidence, when taken together, do lead to an unmistakable conclusion:
demand is leading supply , in the short as well as in the long run — which is an insight that runs counter to today’s ‘decided opinion’.
The important dynamic macro channels through which demand growth influences potential output growth, listed in Figure 2, deserve more
attention in research.6 After all, it is through these channels that stagnant business investment leads to a slower adoption of new technologies,
a more limited space for learning by doing and exploiting economies of scale, and — as Hansen rightly argued — a discouragement to (demand-
pull) initiatives to uncover further possibilities for innovation.

Recognizing the importance of demand growth to long-run growth has profound and radically upsetting consequences for macro policy-making.
Indeed, the all-too-neat separation between a ‘Keynesian’ short run and ‘supply-determined’ potential growth in the long run breaks down —
and so do standard notions and measurements of ‘potential’ output growth and ‘output gaps’ (Fontanari et al. 2019). What must be recognized
is that structurally weak demand growth forces down potential growth, whereas faster demand growth ,
supported by more expansionary, full-employment oriented fiscal and monetary policies, raises productivity growth
and potential output. Conventional ( supply-side ) measures of potential output which ignore the dynamic demand-side
channels, systematically
overemphasize the ‘ inflation barrier ’ and methodically underestimate the margins
for expansion of actual output (Fontanari et al. 2019) and thereby legitimate a structural deflationary bias in macro policy (Storm
and Naastepad 2012; Girardi et al. 2018; Storm 2017). What is not recognized is that higher demand may gradually remove the scarcities and
bottlenecks which in the short run might create inflation pressures. To illustrate this important point: as shown by a model analysis of Fazzari et
al. (2017), it is entirely plausible for changes in demand growth from something like 1% to 3% to be
accommodated by endogenous adjustments of supply, without generating additional inflation. Hence, we
need new , more realistic and less biased measures of potential output growth, which take the dynamic impacts of
demand on potential growth into account and remove all the unwarranted deflationary policy biases of existing
approaches.

The unwarranted deflationary bias shows up in constant needless fiscal austerity , the abandonment of demand management in order to
maintain full employment, overly restrictive monetary policy, and real wage stagnation (and rising income inequality), which jointly explain
most, if not all , of the secular stagnation (as has been argued here). Real wage restraint directly reduces labor-
saving technological progress and productivity growth. Moreover, when the top income-earners (‘the 1%’) are allowed to
capture most of the growth, the economy’s central function to recycle income back into demand is deeply compromised. As real incomes
stagnate for the large majority of households, weak aggregate demand in turn feeds into sluggish business
investment and a decline in capital deepening and ultimately into a slowing down of productivity growth
and potential growth (Figure 2). Stagnation is a sad instance of iatrogenesis, as it is a pathology caused by the exact economists whose task it is
to improve the economy’s health. To do better, we must look more deeply at shifting social norms that affect wage setting and allow higher
inequality, and think creatively about how income growth can be restored across the distribution. Understanding these issues is difficult;
designing effective macro policies to keep up demand growth in line with full employment and with potential growth may be even harder. But
one thing is clear: unless we discard ‘decided opinion’ that secular stagnation is an exclusively supply-side
phenomenon and recognize that demand drives growth ‘ all the way ’ (see Taylor et al. 2019), macro policy will
retain its deflationary biases and secular stagnation remains the ‘ normal ’. Hansen had it right after all.

Secular stagnation is a crisis accelerant---it collapses U.S. primacy, making nuclear war,
prolif, and every great power conflict far more likely.
Michael Oppenheimer 21, Professor at the Center for Global Affairs of New York University, member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, 2021, “The Turbulent Future of International Relations,” The Future
of Global Affairs: Managing Discontinuity, Disruption and Destruction, Chapter 2,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56470-4
Secular Stagnation

This unbrave new world has been emerging for some time, as
US power has declined relative to other states, especially
China, global liberalism has failed to deliver on its promises, and totalitarian capitalism has proven effective in leveraging
globalization for economic growth and political legitimacy while exploiting technology and the state’s coercive powers to maintain internal
political control. But this
new era was jumpstarted by the world financial crisis of 2007, which revealed the
bankruptcy of unregulated market capitalism, weakened faith in US leadership , exacerbated economic
deprivation and inequality around the world, ignited growing populism , and undermined international liberal
institutions . The skewed distribution of wealth experienced in most developed countries, politically tolerated in periods of growth,
became intolerable as growth rates declined. A combination of aging populations, accelerating technology, and global populism/nationalism
promises to make this growth decline very difficult to reverse. What Larry Summers and other international political economists have come to
call “ secular stagnation ” increases the likelihood that illiberal globalization , multipolarity , and rising
nationalism will define our future . Summers11 has argued that the world is entering a long period of
diminishing economic growth . He suggests that secular stagnation “may be the defining macroeconomic
challenge of our times.” Julius Probst, in his recent assessment of Summers’ ideas, explains:
…rich countries are ageing as birth rates decline and people live longer. This has pushed down real interest rates because investors
think these trends will mean they will make lower returns from investing in future, making them more willing to accept a lower
return on government debt as a result.

Other factors that make investors similarly pessimistic include rising global inequality and the slowdown in
productivity growth…
This decline in real interest rates matters because economists believe that to overcome an economic downturn, a central bank must
drive down the real interest rate to a certain level to encourage more spending and investment… Because real interest rates are so
low, Summers and his supporters believe that the rate required to reach full employment is so far into negative territory that it is
effectively impossible.

…in the long run, more immigration might be a vital part of curing secular stagnation. Summers also heavily prescribes increased
government spending , arguing that it might actually be more prudent than cutting back – especially if the money
is spent on infrastructure, education and research and development.

Of course, governments in Europe and the US are instead trying to shut their doors to migrants. And austerity policies have
taken their toll on infrastructure and public research. This looks set to ensure that the next recession will
be particularly nasty when it comes… Unless governments change course radically , we could be in for a
sobering period ahead.12

The rise of nationalism / populism is both cause and effect of this economic outlook. Lower growth will
make every aspect of the liberal order more difficult to resuscitate post-Trump. Domestic politics will
become more polarized and dysfunctional , as competition for diminishing resources intensifies.
International collaboration , ad hoc or through institutions, will become politically toxic . Protectionism, in its multiple
forms, will make economic recovery from “secular stagnation” a heavy lift, and the liberal hegemonic leadership and strong
institutions that limited the damage of previous downturns , will be unavailable . A clear demonstration of this
negative feedback loop is the economic damage being inflicted on the world by Trump’s trade war with China, which— despite the so-called
phase one agreement—has predictably escalated from negotiating tactic to imbedded reality, with no end in sight. In a world already suffering
from inadequate investment, the uncertainties generated by this confrontation will further curb the investments essential for future growth.
Another demonstration of the intersection of structural forces is how populist-motivated controls on immigration (always a weakness in the
hyper-globalization narrative) deprives developed countries of Summers’ recommended policy response to secular stagnation, which in a more
open world would be a win-win for rich and poor countries alike, increasing wage rates and remittance revenues for the developing countries,
replenishing the labor supply for rich countries experiencing low birth rates.

Illiberal Globalization

Economic weakness and rising nationalism (along with multipolarity) will not end globalization, but will profoundly alter its character
and greatly reduce its economic and political benefits . Liberal global institutions, under American
heg emony, have served multiple purposes, enabling states to improve the quality of international relations and
more fully satisfy the needs of their citizens, and provide companies with the legal and institutional stability necessary to manage the inherent
risks of global investment. But under present and future conditions these institutions will become the battlegrounds —
and the victims—of geopolitical competition . The Trump Administration’s frontal attack on multilateralism is but the final nail in the
coffin of the Bretton Woods system in trade and finance, which has been in slow but accelerating decline since the end of the Cold War.
Future American leadership may embrace renewed collaboration in global trade and finance, macroeconomic
management, environmental sustainability and the like, but repairing the damage requires the heroic
assumption that America’s own identity has not been fundamentally altered by the Trump era (four years
or eight matters here), and by the internal and global forces that enabled his rise. The fact will remain that a sizeable portion of the American
electorate, and a monolithically pro-Trump Republican Party, is committed to an illiberal future. And even if the effects are transitory, the
causes of weakening global collaboration are structural, not subject to the efforts of some hypothetical future US liberal leadership. It is clear
that the US has lost respect among its rivals, and trust among its allies. While its economic and military capacity is still
greatly superior to all others, its political dysfunction has diminished its ability to convert this wealth into effective power.13 It will
furthermore operate in a future system of diffusing material power , diverging economic and political governance
approaches, and rising nationalism. Trump has promoted these forces, but did not invent them, and future US Administrations will struggle to
cope with them.

What will illiberal globalization look like? Consider recent events. The instruments of globalization have been weaponized by strong states in
pursuit of their geopolitical objectives. This has turned the liberal argument on behalf of globalization on its head. Instead of interdependence
as an unstoppable force pushing states toward collaboration and convergence around market-friendly domestic policies, states are exploiting
interdependence to inflict harm on their adversaries, and even on their allies. The increasing interaction across national boundaries that
globalization entails, now produces not harmonization and cooperation, but friction and escalating trade and investment disputes.14 The
Trump Administration is in the lead here, but it is not alone. Trade and investment friction with China is the most obvious and damaging
example, precipitated by China’s long failure to conform to the World Trade Organization (WTO) principles, now escalated by President Trump
into a trade and currency war disturbingly reminiscent of the 1930s that Bretton Woods was designed to prevent. Financial sanctions against
Iran, in violation of US obligations in the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), is another example of the rule of law succumbing to
geopolitical competition. Though more mercantilist in intent than geopolitical, US tariffs on steel and aluminum, and their threatened use in
automotives, aimed at the EU, Canada, and Japan,15 are equally destructive of the liberal system and of future economic growth, imposed as
they are by the author of that system, and will spread to others. And indeed, Japan has used export controls in its escalating conflict with South
Korea16 (as did China in imposing controls on rare earth,17 and as the US has done as part of its trade war with China). Inward foreign direct
investment restrictions are spreading. The vitality of the WTO is being sapped by its inability to complete the Doha Round, by the proliferation
of bilateral and regional agreements, and now by the Trump Administration’s hold on appointments to WTO judicial panels. It should not
surprise anyone if, during a second term, Trump formally withdrew the US from the WTO. At a minimum it will become a “dead letter
regime.”18

As such measures gain traction, it will become clear to states—and to companies—that a global trading system more responsive to raw power
than to law entails escalating risk and diminishing benefits. This will be the end of economic globalization, and its many benefits, as we know it.
It represents nothing less than the subordination of economic globalization, a system which many thought obeyed its own logic, to an
international politics of zero-sum power competition among multiple actors with divergent interests and values. The costs will be significant:
Bloomberg Economics estimates that the cost in lost US GDP in 2019- dollar terms from the trade war with China has reached $134 billion to
date and will rise to a total of $316 billion by the end of 2020.19

Economically, the just-in-time, maximally efficient world of global supply chains, driving down costs, incentivizing innovation, spreading
investment, integrating new countries and populations into the global system, is being Balkanized. Bilateral and regional deals are proliferating,
while global, nondiscriminatory trade agreements are at an end. Economies of scale will shrink , incentivizing less
investment , increasing costs and prices , compromising growth , marginalizing countries whose growth and poverty
reduction depended on participation in global supply chains. A
world already suffering from excess savings (in the corporate
sector, among mostly Asian countries) will respond to heightened risk and uncertainty with further retrenchment .
The problem is perfectly captured by Tim Boyle, CEO of Columbia Sportswear, whose supply chain runs through China, reacting to yet another
ratcheting up of US tariffs on Chinese imports, most recently on consumer goods:

We move stuff around to take advantage of inexpensive labor. That’s why we’re in Bangladesh. That’s why we’re looking at Africa.
We’re putting investment capital to work, to get a return for our shareholders. So, when we make a wager on investment, this is not
Vegas. We have to have a reasonable expectation we can get a return. That’s predicated on the rule of law: where can we expect the
laws to be enforced, and for the foreseeable future, the rules will be in place? That’s what America used to be.20

The international political effects will be equally damaging . The four structural forces act on each other to produce
the more dangerous , less prosperous world projected here. Illiberal globalization represents geopolitical conflict
by (at first) physically non-kinetic means. It arises from intensifying competition among powerful states with divergent interests
and identities, but in its effects drives down growth and fuels increased nationalism/populism, which further contributes to conflict. Twenty-
first-century protectionism represents bottom-up forces arising from economic disruption. But it is also a top-down phenomenon, representing
a strategic effort by political leadership to reduce the constraints of interdependence on freedom of geopolitical
action , in effect a precursor and enabler of war . This is the disturbing hypothesis of Daniel Drezner, argued in an important
May 2019 piece in Reason, titled “Will Today’s Global Trade Wars Lead to World War Three ,”21 which examines the pre-World War I
period of heightened trade conflict, its contribution to the disaster that followed, and its parallels to the present:

Before the First World War started, powers great and small took a variety of steps to thwart the globalization
of the 19th century. Each of these steps made it easier for the key combatants to conceive of a general war.

We are beginning to see a similar approach to the globalization of the 21st century. One by one, the economic
constraints on military aggression are eroding . And too many have forgotten—or never knew—how this played
out a century ago.

…In many ways, 19th century globalization was a victim of its own success. Reduced tariffs and transport costs flooded Europe with
inexpensive grains from Russia and the United States. The incomes of landowners in these countries suffered a serious hit, and the
Long Depression that ran from 1873 until 1896 generated pressure on European governments to protect against cheap imports.

…The primary lesson to draw from the years before 1914 is not that economic interdependence was a weak constraint on military
conflict. It is that, even in a globalized economy, governments can take protectionist actions to reduce their interdependence in
anticipation of future wars.

In retrospect, the 30 years of tariff hikes, trade wars, and currency conflicts that preceded 1914 were harbingers of the devastation
to come. European governments did not necessarily want to ignite a war among the great powers. By reducing their
interdependence , however, they made that option conceivable .
…the backlash to globalization that preceded the Great War seems to be reprised in the current moment. Indeed, there are ways in
which the current moment is scarier than the pre-1914 era . Back then, the world’s hegemon, the United
Kingdom, acted as a brake on economic closure. In 2019, the United States is the protectionist with its foot on the accelerator. The
constraints of Sino-American interdependence—what economist Larry Summers once called “the financial balance of terror”—no
longer look so binding. And there are far too many hot spots —the Korean peninsula , the S outh C hina
S ea, Taiwan —where the kindling seems awfully dry.
Multipolarity

We can define multipolarity as a wide distribution of power among multiple independent states. Exact equivalence of material power is not
implied. What is required is the possession by several states of the capacity to coerce others to act in ways they would otherwise not, through
kinetic or other means (economic sanctions, political manipulation, denial of access to essential resources, etc.). Such a distribution of power
presents inherently graver challenges to peace and stability than do unipolar or bipolar power configurations,22 though of course none are safe
or permanent. In brief, the greater the number of consequential actors, the greater the challenge of coordinating actions to avoid, manage, or
de-escalate conflicts. Multipolarity also entails a greater potential for sudden changes in the balance of power, as
one state may defect to another coalition or opt out, and as a result, the greater the degree of uncertainty
experienced by all states, and the greater the plausibility of downside assumptions about the intentions and
capabilities of one’s adversaries. This psychology , always present in international politics but particularly powerful in
multipolarity , heightens the potential for escalation of minor conflicts, and of states launching preventive or
preemptive wars . In multipolarity , states are always on edge , entertaining worst-case scenarios about actual
and potential enemies, and acting on these fears —expanding their armies, introducing new weapon systems, altering doctrine to relax
constraints on the use of force—in ways that reinforce the worst fears of others.

The risks inherent in multipolarity are heightened by the attendant weakening of global institutions . Even in a
state-centric system, such institutions can facilitate communication and transparency, helping states to manage conflicts by reducing the
potential for misperception and escalation toward war. But, as Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu argues in his chapter on the United Nations, the
influence of multilateral institutions as agent and actor is clearly in decline , a result of bottom-up populist/nationalist
pressures experienced in many countries, as well as the coordination problems that increase in a system of multiple great powers. As conflict
resolution institutions atrophy, great powers will find themselves in “ security dilemmas ”23 in which verification of a
conflicts will expand
rival’s intentions is unavailable, and worst-case assumptions fill the gap created by uncertainty. And the supply of
as a result of growing nationalism and populism, which are premised on hostility, paranoia, and isolation, with governments seeking
political legitimacy through external conflict , producing a siege mentality that deliberately cuts off communication with
other states.

Finally, the transition from unipolarity (roughly 1989–2007) to multipolarity is unregulated and hazardous , as
the existing superpower fears and resists challenges to its primacy from a rising power or powers, while the rising
power entertains new ambitions as entitlements now within its reach. Such a “power transition” and its dangers were identified by Thucydides
in explaining the Peloponnesian Wars,24 by Organski (the “rear-end collision”)25 during the Cold War, and recently repopularized and brought
up to date by Graham Allison in predicting conflict between the US and China .26
A useful, and consequential illustration of the inherent challenge of conflict management during a power transition toward multipolarity, is the
weakening of the arms control regime negotiated by the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Despite the existential, global conflict
between two nuclear armed superpowers embracing diametrically opposed world views and operating in economic isolation from each other,
the two managed to avoid worst-case outcomes. They accomplished this in part by institutionalizing verifiable limits on testing and deployment
of both strategic and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Yet as diplomatically and technically challenging as these achievements were, the
introduction of a third great power, China, into this two-country calculus has proven to be a deal breaker. Unconstrained by these bilateral
agreements, China has been free to build up its capability, and has taken full advantage in ramping up production and deployment of
intermediate-range ground-launched cruise missiles, thus challenging the US ability to credibly guarantee the security of its allies in Asia, and
greatly increasing the costs of maintaining its Asian regional hegemony. As a result, the Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty is effectively dead,
and the New Start Treaty, covering strategic missiles, is due to expire next year, with no indication of any US–Russian consensus to extend it.
The US has with logic indicated its interest in making these agreements trilateral; but China, with its growing power and ambition, has also
logically rejected these overtures. Thus, all three great powers are entering a period of nuclear weapons
competition unconstrained by the major Cold War arms control regimes. In a period of rapid advances in technology
and worsening great power relations , the nuclear competition will be a defining characteristic of the next decade
and beyond. This dynamic will also complicate nuclear nonproliferation efforts , as both the demand for nuclear weapons
(a consequence of rising regional and global insecurity), and supply of nuclear materials and technology (a result of the weakening of the
nonproliferation regime and deteriorating great power relations) will increase.

Will deterrence prevent war in a world of several nuclear weapons states, (the current nuclear powers plus South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Japan, Turkey), as it helped to do during the bipolar Cold War? Some neorealist observers view nuclear weapons proliferation as stabilizing,
extending the balance of terror, and the imperative of restraint, to new nuclear weapons states with much to fight over (Saudi Arabia and Iran,
for example).27 Others,28 examining issues of c ommand a n d c ontrol of nuclear weapons deployment and use by
newly acquiring states, asymmetries in doctrines, force structures, and capabilities between rivals, the perils of variable rates in
transition to weapons deployment, problems of communication between states with deep mutual grievances, the

heightened risk of transfer of such weapons to non-state actors , have grave doubts about the safety of a
multipolar , nuclear-armed world .29 We can at least conclude that prudence dictates heightened efforts to slow the pace of
proliferation, while realism requires that we face a proliferated future with eyes wide open.

The current distribution of power is not perfectly multipolar. The US still commands the world’s largest economy, and its military power is
unrivaled by any state or combination of states. Its population is still growing, despite a recent decline in birth rates. It enjoys extraordinary
geographic advantages over its rivals, who are distant and live in far worse neighborhoods. Its economy is less dependent on foreign markets or
resources. Its political system has proven—up to now—to be resilient and adaptable. Its global alliance system greatly extends its capacity to
defend itself and shape the world to its liking and is still intact, despite growing doubts about America’s reliability as a security guarantor. Based
on these mostly material and historical criteria, continued American primacy would seem to be a good bet, if it chooses to use its power in this
way.30

So why multipolarity? The clearest and most frequently cited evidence for a widening distribution of global
power away from American unipolarity is the narrowing gap in GDP between the US and China. The IMF’s
World Economic Outlook forecasts a $0.9 trillion increase in US GDP for 2019–2020, and a $1.3 trillion increase for China in the same period.31
Many who support the American primacy case argue that GDP is an imperfect measure of power, that Chinese GDP data is inflated, that its
growth rates are in decline while Chinese debt is rapidly increasing, and that China does poorly on other factors that contribute to
power—its low per capita GDP, its political succession challenges, its environmental crisis, its absence of any external alliance system. Yet GDP
is a good place to start, as the single most useful measure and long-term predictor of power . It is from the
overall economy that states extract and apply material power to leverage desired behavior from other
states. It is true that robust future Chinese growth is not guaranteed, nor is its capacity to convert its wealth to power, which is a
function of how well its political system works over time. But this is equally the case for the US, and considering recent political developments
is not a given for either country.
As an alternative to measuring inputs—economic size, political legitimacy, technological innovation, population growth—in assessing relative
power and the nature of global power distribution, we should consider outputs: what are states doing with their power? The input measures
are useful, possibly predictive, but are usually deployed in the course of making a foreign policy argument, sometimes on behalf of a reassertion
of American primacy, sometimes on behalf of retrenchment. As such, their objectivity (despite their generous deployment of “data”) is open to
question. What is undeniable , to any clear-eyed observer, is a real decline in American influence in the world ,
and a rise in the influence of other powers , which predates the Trump administration but has accelerated into
America’s free fall over the last four years. This has produced a de facto multipolarity , whether explainable in the various
measures of power—actual and latent—or not. This decline results in part from policy mistakes: a reckless squandering of material power and
legitimacy in Iraq, an overabundance of caution in Syria, and now pure impulsivity. But more fundamentally, it is a product of relative
decline in American capacity —political and economic—to which American leadership is adjusting
haphazardly , but in the direction of retrenchment/restraint. It is highly revealing that the last two American presidents, polar opposites in
intellect, temperament and values, agreed on one fundamental point: the US is overextended, and needs to retrench. The fact that neither
Obama nor Trump (up to this point in his presidency) believed they had the power at their disposal to do anything else, tells us far more about
the future of American power and policy—and about the emerging shape of international relations—than the power measures and
comparisons made by foreign policy advocates.

Observation of recent trends in US versus Russian relative influence prompts another question: do we understand the emerging characteristics
of power? Rigorously measuring and comparing the wrong parameters will get us nowhere at best and mislead us into misguided policies at
worst. How often have we heard, with puzzlement, that Putin punches far above his weight? Could it be that we misunderstand what
constitutes “weight” in the contemporary and emerging world? Putin may be on a high wire, and bound to come crashing down; but the fact is
that Russian influence, leveraging sophisticated communications/social media/influence operations, a strong military, an agile (Putin-
dominated) decision process, and taking advantage of the egregious mistakes by the West, has been advancing for over a decade, shows no
sign of slowing down, and has created additional opportunities for itself in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Arctic. It has done
this with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s. There are few signs of a domestic political challenge to Putin. His external opponents are in
disarray, and Russia’s main adversary is politically disabled from confronting the problem. He has established Russia as the Middle East power
broker. He has reached into the internal politics of his Western adversaries and influenced their leadership choices. He has invaded and
absorbed the territory of neighboring states. His actions have produced deep divisions within NATO. Again, simple observation suggests
multipolarity in fact, and a full explanation for this power shift awaiting future historians able to look with more objectivity at twenty-first-
century elements of power.

When that history is written, surely it will emphasize the extraordinary polarization in American politics. Was multipolarity a case of others
finding leverage in new sources of power, or the US underutilizing its own? The material measures suggest sufficient capacity for sustained
American primacy, but with this latent capacity unavailable (as perceived, I believe correctly, by political leadership) by virtue of weakening
institutions: two major parties in separate universes; a winnertake-all political mentality; deep polarization between the parties’ popular bases
of support; divided government, with the Presidency and the Congress often in separate and antagonistic hands; diminishing trust in the
permanent government, and in the knowledge it brings to important decisions, and deepening distrust between the intelligence community
and policymakers; and, in Trump’s case, a chaotic policy process that lacks any strategic reference points, mis-communicates the
Administration’s intentions, and has proven incapable of sustained, coherent diplomacy on behalf of any explicit and consistent set of policy
goals.

Rising Nationalism/Populism/Authoritarianism

The evidence for these trends is clear. Freedom House, the go-to authority on the state of global democracy, just published its annual
assessment for 2020, and recorded the fourteenth consecutive year of global democratic decline and advancing authoritarianism. This dramatic
deterioration includes both a weakening in democratic practice within states still deemed on balance democratic, and a shift from weak
democracies to authoritarianism in others. Commitment to democratic norms and practices—freedom of speech and of the press, independent
judiciaries, protection of minority rights—is in decline. The decline is evident across the global system and encompasses all major powers, from
India and China, to Europe, to the US. Right-wing populist parties have assumed power, or constitute a politically significant minority, in a
lengthening list of democratic states, including both new (Hungary, Poland) and established (India, the US, the UK) democracies. Nationalism,
frequently dismissed by liberal globalization advocates as a weak force when confronted by market democracies’ presumed inherent
superiority, has experienced a resurgence in Russia, China, the Middle East, and at home. Given the breadth and depth of right-wing populism,
the raw power that promotes it—mainly Russian and American—and the disarray of its liberal opponents, this factor will weigh heavily on the
future.

The major factors contributing to right-wing populism and its global spread is the subject of much discussion.32 The most straightforward
explanation is rising inequality and diminished intergenerational mobility, particularly in developed countries whose labor-intensive
manufacturing has been hit hardest by the globalization of capital combined with the immobility of labor. Jobs, wages, economic security, a
reasonable hope that one’s offspring has a shot at a better life than one’s own, the erosion of social capital within economically marginalized
communities, government failure to provide a decent safety net and job retraining for those battered by globalization: all have contributed to a
sense of desperation and raw anger in the hollowed-out communities of formerly prosperous industrial areas. The declining life expectancy
numbers33 tell a story of immiseration: drug addition, suicide, poor health care, and gun violence. The political expression of such conditions of
life should not be surprising. Simple, extremist “solutions” become irresistible. Sectarian, racial, regional divides are strengthened, and exclusive
identities are sharpened. Political entrepreneurs offering to blow up the system blamed for such conditions become credible. Those who are
perceived as having benefited from the corrupt system—long-standing institutions of government, foreign countries and populations,
immigrants, minorities getting a “free ride,” elites—become targets of recrimination and violence. The simple solutions of course, don’t work,
deepening the underlying crisis, but in the process politics is poisoned. If this sounds like the US, it should, but it also describes major European
countries (the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic), and could be an indication of things to come for non-Western
democracies like India.

We have emphasized throughout this chapter the interaction of four structural forces in shaping the future, and this interaction is evident here
as well. Is it merely coincidence that the period of democratic decline documented by Freedom House, coincides precisely with the global
financial and economic crisis? Lower growth , increasing joblessness , wage stagnation , superimposed on longer-term
widening of inequality and declining mobility, constitute a forbidding stress test for democratic systems , and
many continue to fail. And if we are correct about secular stagnation , the stress will continue , and authoritarianism’s fourteen-
year run will not be over for some time. The antidemocratic trend will gain additional impetus from the illiberal direction of globalization, with
its growth suppressing protectionism, weaponization of global economic exchange, and weakening global economic institutions. Multipolarity
also contributes, in several ways. The former hegemon and author of globalization’s liberal structure has lost its
appetite , and arguably its capacity , for leadership , and indeed has become part of the problem, succumbing to and promoting
the global right-wing populist surge. It is suffering an unprecedented decline in life expectancy, and recently a decline in the birth rate, signaling
a degree of rot commonly associated with a collapsing Soviet Union. While American politics may once again cohere around its liberal values
and interests, the time when American leadership had the self-confidence to shape the global system in its liberal image is gone. It may build
coalitions of the like-minded to launch liberal projects, but there will be too much power outside these coalitions to permit liberal globalization
of the sort imagined at the end of the Cold War. In multipolarity, the values around which global politics revolve will reflect the diversity of
major powers, their interests, and the norms they embrace. Convergence of norms, practices, policies is out of the question. Global collective
action, even in the face of global crises, will be a long shot. To expect anything else is fantasy.

Revitalizing the U.S.-led order solves a litany of risks.

Richard Haass 22, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as Director of Policy
Planning for the US State Department, September/October 2022, “The Dangerous Decade: A Foreign
Policy for a World in Crisis,” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/dangerous-decade-foreign-
policy-world-crisis-richard-haass
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” Those words are apocryphally attributed to the
Bolshevik revolutionary (and Foreign Affairs reader) Vladimir Lenin, referring to the rapid collapse of tsarist Russia just over 100 years ago. If he
had actually said those words, Lenin might have added that there are also decades when centuries happen.

The world is in the midst of one such decade. As with other historical hinges, the danger today stems from a sharp
decline in world order. But more than at any other recent moment, that decline threatens to become especially steep ,
owing to a confluence of old and new threats that have begun to intersect at a moment the United States is ill
positioned to contend with them.

On the one hand, the world is witnessing the revival of some of the worst aspects of traditional geopolitics: great-power
competition , imperial ambitions , fights over resources. Today, Russia is headed by a tyrant , President Vladimir
Putin, who longs to re-create a Russian sphere of influence and perhaps even a Russian empire . Putin is
willing to do almost anything to achieve that goal, and he is able to act as he pleases because internal constraints on his regime have
mostly disappeared. Meanwhile, under President Xi Jinping, China has embarked on a quest for regional and potentially

global primacy , putting itself on a trajectory that will lead to increased competition or even confrontation with
the U nited S tates.

But that is not all—not by a long shot. These geopolitical risks

are colliding with complex new challenges central to the
contemporary era, such as climate change , pandemics , and nuclear prolif eration. And not surprisingly, the

diplomatic fallout from growing rivalries has made it nearly impossible for great powers to work
together on regional and international challenges, even when it is in their interest to do so.

Further complicating the picture is the reality that American

democracy and political cohesion are at risk to a degree not
seen since the middle of the nineteenth century. This matters because the United States is not just one country
among many: U.S. leadership has underpinned what order there has been in the world for the past 75
years and remains no less central today . A United States riven internally, however, will become ever less
willing and able to lead on the international stage .
Call it a perfect—or, more accurately, an imperfect—storm.

These conditions have set off a vicious circle: heightened geopolitical competition makes it even more difficult to
produce the cooperation demanded by new global problems, and the deteriorating international environment further fuels geopolitical
tensions—all at a time that the United States is weakened and distracted. The frightening gap between global challenges and
the world’s responses, the increased prospects for major-power wars in Europe and the Indo-Pacific , and

the growing potential for Iran to cause instability in the Middle East have come together to produce the
most dangerous moment since World War II. Call it a perfect—or, more accurately, an imperfect—storm.
To warn of danger is not to predict the future. Ideally, things will turn out for the better. But good things rarely happen on their own; to the
contrary, left to their own devices, systems deteriorate. The
task for U.S. policymakers, then, is to rediscover the principles and
practice of statecraft : to marshal national power and collective action against the tendency toward disorder .

The goal must be to manage the collision of old geopolitics and new challenges, to act with discipline in what is
sought, and to build arrangements or, better yet, institutions where there is sufficient consensus. To do all that, Washington will have to
prioritize establishing order over fostering democracy abroad—at the same time as it works to shore up democracy at home.

Only the plan stabilizes the business cycle and avoids the negative effects of pump
priming.
Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04, NAIRU = Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment
3. MACROECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS

Having outlined the general framework of the JG, this section elaborates on the macroeconomic impacts of the JG focusing on aggregated
demand management, price stability and trade. The JG works as an automatic countercyclical stabilizer . During the
business cycle, the JG increases public employment and government spending as jobs are lost in the
private sector and decreases public employment and government spending as the private sector activity
expands . In this regard, the effect of the JG is comparable to regular unemployment compensation, which prevents aggregated demand
from plummeting during a recession, except for the fact that the JG prevents involuntary unemployment and large
output gaps from occurring. As consumers’ spending patterns are much more stable when someone
gets a job as compared to unemployment compensation , especially in countries where unemployment compensations
are only temporary, the JG and its increase in government expenditure is the real stimulus that the economy needs in
order to recover from recessions . Moreover, the JG perfectly builds on the insight that aggregated demand management is the
responsibility of the government and cannot be left to the private sector. While the private sector-led stimulus , e.g. triggered via
monetary policy, is related to an increase in private debt , a JG-based fiscal policy creates net financial assets for
the private sector, i.e. it puts purchasing power directly into the pockets of actors in the private sector.
Clearly, since the currency issuer and the currency user operate under a different logic – the users of a currency being constrained by revenue
and subject to default risks while the issuer of the currency is not – a government-led economic stimulus is financially
more sustainable than a private sector-led one (Mitchell, Wray and Watts 2016, Murray and Forstater 2013a, Tcherneva 2018,
Wray 2015, Wray et al. 2018).

While the current NAIRU approach uses a buffer stock of involuntary unemployed as a means to achieve
price stability, the JG aims for price stability by using an employed buffer stock , also referred to as NAIBER (non-
inflation accelerating buffer employment ratio) (Mitchell and Muysken 2008). While the JG is not designed to address all sources of inflation
(deflation), the employed buffer stock addresses inflationary and deflationary pressure alike in a countercyclical
way as the buffer stock fluctuates with the business cycle . The fixed JG wage effectively works as a wage and
price anchor . The government being the sole issuer of the currency, has the same pricing power as
other monopolists have. Under the JG approach, the government makes use of this power by setting the base wage for labour offered
in exchange for the currency issued. All other prices float at the market level but will reflect nominal value

relative to the price set for one hour of labour offered in the JG. This anchoring mechanism is missing in the
NAIRU approach and makes the JG a superior tool to stabilize prices (Mosler 1997, Wray 1997).
Depending on the actual size of the JG wage, its implementation might result in a one-time price adjustment, and a related compositional shift
in the workforce, i.e. the ratio of employment numbers in the JG relative to those in the private sector are affected. If the JG wage were
set too high , it would draw workers from the private sector into the JG, leading to a one-time price (and
wage) increase due to an increase in worker’s income and firms’ costs for hiring new workers or retaining current
employees. However , in today’s demand-constrained , underutilized economies, it is reasonable to
expect that firms are more likely to increase utilization of their production facilities than to increase
prices . On top, the initial income push could enable debt repayments and satisfy saving desires . On the
contrary, if the JG wage were set too low, it would result in one-time price decrease as private sector’s income would be insufficient to realize
the desire to accumulate the net financial assets in the currency and purchase firm’s output resulting in increasing inventories, layoffs and
downward pressure on prices and wages. As the JG wage is not indexed to any other prices, it has no internal
mechanism that feeds a wage-price spiral in any direction . Adjustment is supposed to be one-time events that do not
result in inflation (deflation) defined as continuous rise (fall) in the price level.

Moreover, the JG facilitates workers’ transition from the JG into the private sector . As business theory
details, firms prefer to hire those who have previously been employed over those who have been
unemployed as the previously employed have been exposed to on-the-job training and demonstrated working commitment. Accordingly,
the JG , which provides on-the-job training and requires continuous working commitment , lowers the
hiring costs of firms. Lower hiring costs mean that the private sector is able to expand its production
capacities more quickly if demand should exceed current production capacities, thereby reducing the risk
of demand-pull inflationary pressures . On top, as the JG provides the private sector with a pool of
committed workers from which they can draw, the JG provides a brake for wage increases not related to
productivity increases, which prevents feeding a wage-price spiral . Lastly, and in distinction from traditional
pump-priming , the JG does not compete for market prices as it hires off the bottom , where there is no
private-sector employer who wants to employ at the minimum wage (Mitchell and Muysken 2008, Mosler 1997,
Tcherneva 2018). Compared to the typical, non-JG based aggregated demand management, the JG offers superior characteristics.
Traditional pump-priming does not immediately help the most disadvantaged members of society, does not
incorporate a counter inflation mechanism , does not address any public purpose concerns given that
market allocations are the basis for employment expansion, does not address regional disparity related to the
local concentration of economic activity and employment. On top, pump-priming might encounter real resources caps

that trigger demand-pull inflation before everyone is hired (Mitchell and Muysken 2008).

Subnational actors lack the fiscal capacity to ensure full employment.

Daniel Carpenter 20, professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of
social sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; and Darrick Hamilton,
associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs,
Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research,
2020, “A Federal Job Guarantee: Anti-Poverty and Infrastructure Policy for a Better Future,”
scholars.org/contribution/federal-job-guarantee

What would a f ederal j ob g uarantee program look like? The program would be administered by the D epartment o f
L abor and overseen by the Secretary of Labor. The Secretary and Department of Labor will be charged with working in conjunction with
other agencies, and states and localities to identify an inventory of public infrastructure tasks and associated jobs.

1. Jobs to support state and local governments. State and local governments account for most of the government employment in the United
States, and they comprise an important part of our federalist system. In a range of policy domains – public health, education and job training,
infrastructure, health provision and conservation – it is state and local governments that have the legal authorities and historical capacities to
act. Yet state governments also have the weakest capacity to respond to an economic crisis . First, state
governments have nothing like the Fed eral Reserve to back their debt (this is one among several reasons that the
Federal Reserve has recently been looking into mass purchases of municipal bonds). They cannot print money . Second, state
governments lack the expansive revenue-generating capacity of the federal government. Beyond this, state
governments have in recent decades constrained their powers with b alanced b udget a mendment s , while a
number of states (Illinois and Connecticut are two examples) have badly underfunded pension systems, and still others have tethered their
income to commodity (especially petroleum) sales, which are at historically low prices and whose price declines have damaged state revenues.
Workers and some capital costs for projects at the local, county, or state levels can be funded in a way to provide
regional full employment and infrastructure needs. The projects and areas with the greatest needs could be cued to receive the federal
intervention sooner. The Department of Labor would work closely with local governments . Local and state
governments would, in conjunction with community organizations, develop project proposals to address local infrastructure needs, similar to
the local, state, and federal collaborations in the design of direct government employment programs of the New Deal. Localities are likely most
aware of the infrastructure needs to offer the greatest benefit to their communities.

In order to minimize inequality across states and reduce the burden of discrimination, the workers under this program
would be federally employed but would be tasked or apportioned (perhaps by formula, to reduce near-term political discretion) to
states according to their economic, public health, and infrastructure needs. Even if the work occurs at the state and local level,
the federal government needs to step in to provide the jobs, and there are a range of tools it has to do so. The
traditional tool consists of program-specific block grants that have been an important feature of American government since the New Deal and
especially the Nixon era. The problem with these grants is that they often permit state and local officials to withhold important resources from
populations in need, as occurred with so many states’ refusal to take Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act. Our proposal would
build upon the strengths of grants by making the jobs available to states and local governments, but would address the inequality-related
weakness of these programs by making the employees federal workers who, as such, are made available to state and local governments.

In order to avoid potentially unconstitutional imposition of requirements upon state governments (which were declared
unconstitutional in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012)), the
federal government could offer these jobs as an option , as it did with
Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. Another alternative is to allow state and localities to develop a bank of
proposals for physical and human infrastructure from which a federal authority (operating under formulaic or
discretionary procedures) can prioritize with regards to urgent and useful needs. The state and localities can even administer
the program with federal oversight , however, the workers would be ultimately employed by the
federal government , as opposed to state or local employees by way of a federal grant.
 Plan---1AC
Therefore:
The United States federal government should adopt a federal jobs guarantee.
 Workers Advantage---1AC
Advantage two is Workers.
Two scenarios:
First, unions.
They’re latent, but the plan revitalizes them by providing leverage to workers.
Dustin Guastella 22, coordinator on DSA’s National Design Committee and union staffer in
Philadelphia, B.A. from Temple University, 2022, “Jobs for All: A Job Guarantee Puts Workers in the
Driver’s Seat,” The Green New Deal and the Future of Work, Chapter 7,
https://doi.org/10.7312/calh20556
THE RIGHT TO EMPLOYMENT OR THE WORKHOUSE

Still, for other critics the problem of a job guarantee is less a question of strategy and more a question of outcomes. Skeptics
worry that
the realization of a j ob g uarantee could result in a program that resembles the eighteenth-century English

workhouse. Of course, this exaggerated concern is hardly defensible , not least because the Dickensian workhouse was a
policy intended to deal with a labor shortage; it was never meant as a solution to unemployment . Other critics conflate a
job guarantee— the social right to a job, should you want one— with a work requirement. Jonathan Chait even equates the idea with Clintonite
workfare.19

Skeptics’ concerns are valid if the job guarantee is narrowly defined solely as a countercyclical employment policy. That is, if policymakers
designed a program built exclusively to hire workers in periods of recession (and some have done just this) the program would likely be a flop.
But if a job guarantee means a traditional public works program combined with the countercyclical
solution, then the workfare and workhouse comparisons make little sense analytically (unless critics consider most
public sector workers part of a dismal forced-labor regime). In fact, the most successful predecessors to a program like this
— the T ennessee V alley A uthority, the W orks P rogress A dministration, and the C ivilian C onservation C orps— were hardly
the gray work camps of critics’ dystopian imagination.

The guiding principle behind a job guarantee, the affirmation of the social right to employment, does not and would not
impose work on anyone, just as the guarantee of any particular right almost never means the compulsion to exercise it. The goal of
employment assurance is, as ever, to end involuntary unemployment. People unable to perform paid work should still be
eligible for unemployment benefits, and they would not be expected to work against their will or ability. And of course, no left-wing
advocate for employment assurance (and there really are no other advocates for it) would argue for a program that would force people into
soul-crushing jobs.

But there is a stronger point to be made here. Not only is the vision of the workhouse rejected by job guarantee advocates, even capitalists
don’t find this vision particularly desirable in the long term. Consider that even if a job guarantee resulted in nightmarish
working conditions , such conditions have a low likelihood of persisting because a tight labor market
with a state guarantee of employment would necessarily lead to greater structural leverage for workers .
Workers under a system where employment is guaranteed would have the same “ exit option ” praised by basic income
advocates: they could walk off the job knowing that another job is secure . But they would also have the
option to strike . Of course, such options are only political potentials; still, under the tight labor markets wrought by an aggressive
employment policy, workers would likely be more emboldened to strike.
Further, the workforce itself would grow . Under conditions of state-led employment assurance, a twin phenomenon
occurs: the wage floor rises and the overall l abor f orce p articipation r ate increases . The simple explanation for
why Nordic countries are able to raise wages while expanding their workforce is that active labor market policies and
public employment— especially in the care of children and the elderly— allow women and other traditionally disadvantaged workers to enter
the job market while sectoral bargaining puts upward pressure on wages across the workforce. (This in turn explains how the labor force
participation rate, the rate of wage growth, and the levels of social equality for women in these countries far outpace the outcomes of the
“free” labor market in the United States.)

The knock-on effects of a job guarantee also bolster the mobilization capacity of the working class by
providing new avenues for organizing drives. An invigorated public sector would make mass
unionization a possibility again. And given that public sector unionization and public sector worker
militancy have been less vulnerable to deterioration than their private sector counterparts, it’s reasonable to
assume that a union drive among millions of new federally employed workers would have legs .

If we understand neoliberalism to mean, as Adolph Reed Jr. and Mark Dudzic usefully define it, “capitalism that has effectively eliminated
working- class opposition,” then our political aims should be to increase the social leverage and class self-assurance and
consciousness needed to rebuild that opposition .20 Without the assurance of a perennially tight labor market
and with the looming threat of automation , many workers rightfully fear they are disposable . A late- career pink slip
could mean you will never work again. A j ob g uarantee could alleviate that crushing fear. It could help facilitate the
growth of wages, labor force participation, and workplace militancy — the policy could literally grow the
working class in size and strength .

Compare this to the potential institutionalization of unwaged earners through a stand-alone b asic i ncome scheme. Basic income
proponents praise the potential freedom afforded by a no- strings- attached income guarantee. But with a growing low-wage
service sector , high rates of secular unemployment , underemployment, and, in the United States, a uniquely
weak union movement , it’s unclear how low- waged and unwaged basic income earners would have anything
close to the social leverage that workers have through the power of the strike. This is one reason some of the super-
elite tech and finance gurus are enamored of the basic income solution. While the precarization of wage work and the growth of the gig
economy is often overstated, it seems obvious that a nonwaged cash benefit would only help fortify that sector and
weaken the potential for collective action among those trapped in low- wage gig jobs or long- term unemployment. How would
the unwaged basic income earner flex their muscles? How could a stand- alone basic income provide the kind of economic environment
conducive to workplace organizing? Socialist skeptics of a job guarantee tend to minimize the central position that wage labor plays in
capitalism and the potential social power that workers have by virtue of their structural position— indeed, some tend to downplay the meaning
and significance of work altogether.

Only an exit option solves---regulatory tweaks are insufficient.

Hiba Hafiz 23, associate professor of law at Boston College, fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, fellow at
the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, 11/9/2023, “A Federal Job Guarantee to Combat
Geographic Inequality,” https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/a-federal-job-guarantee-to-combat-
geographic-inequality/

A federal j ob g uarantee is the most straightforward place-based intervention to combat geographic inequality.
The unique structural features of rural and distressed labor markets make alternative regulatory
solutions intractable and insufficient to address or fix the impacts on worker voice and outside options —
workers’ bargaining power —that result from natural monopsony , market thinness, and the deeper market failures
they produce. Granting workers an outside option to monopsonistic employers presents a simplified and effective
solution relative to dismantling or even tweaking the collective legal infrastructure and regulatory sources of worker
disempowerment , particularly because certain elements of that infrastructure produce a wider range of social welfare
benefits and would be nearly impossible to reform .

Regulatory solutions that fall short of a federal j ob g uarantee have been and continue to be structurally
deficient for countering employers’ natural monopsony and market thinness in rural and distressed labor markets. Even
if policymakers were to expand the money supply, federal monetary policy is a blunt instrument incapable of targeting
and incentivizing place-based job growth in rural and distressed communities. Likewise, while trade policy can discourage
foreign competition, alone it cannot target local business growth that reduces natural monopsony —if anything, local
employers competing in national or international markets for goods or services can still have significant market power among local populations
and have every incentive to drive labor costs down in order to remain competitive. Fiscal policy that stops short of a federal
j ob g uarantee—whether funded and administered through pre-labor market educational and training programs or economic
development spending directed through private-sector employers— does nothing to fundamentally challenge the natural
monopsony employers in these communities have and, if anything, would help to strengthen their buyer power
over local populations. Without some kind of federal fallback to lift wage rates, in addition to countervailing labor
market institutions like unions, such programs leave in place a captive pool of workers with limited outside
options .

Biden will inevitably push democratic norms globally, but weak domestic unions
ensure authoritarianism prevails.
Ishaan Tharoor 23, foreign affairs columnist at the Washington Post, former senior editor and
correspondent at Time, quoting Thea Lee, deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs at the
U.S. Department of Labor, 3/31/2023, "Under Biden, U.S. sees unions as key ally in democracy agenda,"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/31/biden-unions-democracy-summit/
It’s common, uncontroversial practice for U.S. ambassadors to put themselves forward as emissaries of American business. The diplomats of
the world’s leading superpower have long worked to grease the wheels of international trade and boost the access and competitive muscle of
their country’s major companies on the world stage. Implicit in the practice of American fo reign po licy, for decades, has
been a kind of globalizing zeal . But what about the workers on which that world system depends ?

Thursday marked the last day of the Biden administration’s second Summit for Democracy , a sprawling series of in-person
and virtual meetings and addresses staged across five continents. Its packed itinerary offered a snapshot of some of the Biden
administration’s earnest priorities, from strengthening global anti-corruption efforts to boosting the inclusion
of women in democracies.

A day-long session in Zambia featuring a host of representatives from African trade unions illustrated another
shift in U.S. policy thinking: A new focus on the importance of organized labor in the life of
democracies , and its role in bolstering them . “ Unions are essential to democracy ,” said Thea Lee, deputy
undersecretary for international labor affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, during her virtual address to those attending the gathering in
Zambia. “If we believe in democracy , we need strong labor movements .”
That’s a message that has been delivered by President Biden as well, who has cast himself as the most pro-union leader in U.S.
history bent on pursuing a “ fo reign po licy for the middle class ,” an agenda involving industrial policy and subsidies that
has led some critics to accuse the administration of engaging in a regressive form of protectionism. “In a
simple word, a union means there is democracy ,” Biden said in 2021. “Organizing, joining a union — that’s democracy in action.”

How that rhetoric translates into meaningful action is a bit more complicated . Domestically, bitter political fights
continue over legislative efforts to strengthen American workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain. Internationally, the Biden
administration has embarked on a modest slate of efforts to “center” organized labor and boost workers’ voices.
The signature piece of that is the Multilateral Partnership for Organizing, Worker Empowerment and Rights (M-POWER), an initiative launched
last year by the Labor Department in conjunction with a number of civil society and philanthropic organizations, which also has the partnership
of some major foreign international trade unions and the governments of Argentina, Canada, Germany, South Africa and Spain.

It represents what is effectively the largest commitment by the U.S. government to support trade unions and the right to organize around the
world. Projects in motion include technical assistance programs to help organized labor in poorer countries and diplomatic lobbying to draw
attention to abuse of workers and bolster trade unions under political pressure. Lee’s bureau earlier this week spotlighted the testimony of
labor leaders in countries like Myanmar and Belarus, where broad crackdowns by autocratic regimes have targeted trade unions.

“ Unions are the largest civil society organizations in any country, they are membership-based, sustainable ,
and are themselves examples of democratic practice,” said Shawna Bader-Blau, the executive director of the Solidarity Center, a nonprofit
aligned with the AFL-CIO, the biggest grouping of American unions. “Weak or strong, they have elections.” Their capacity to mobilize ,
act collectively , strike and force political change far outweighs whatever smaller nongovernmental
org anization s can muster, she said.

The focus on organized labor comes at a moment of political and economic crisis . Studies point to years of
democratic decline , including in the West , while the coronavirus pandemic reversed decades in global progress
in fighting poverty. Economic inequality has further ballooned. In this context, “it’s important for the United States to use
the clout of our economic power to support workers ,” Lee, the deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs, told
me. “In the past, we have used it to defend intellectual property rights and [strengthen U.S.] financial services, but we are now saying we can’t
be part of a global economy where workers rights are trampled.”

The impact of this shift in policy thinking may not be widely felt on the ground, but it’s still significant and reflects a wider realignment in many
liberal democracies. The European Union, as well as other Group of Seven nation industrialized economies, are all working on their own tracks
to buttress worker rights and build connections between labor movements in different countries . “Our
economy does not live in nation-states . Capital moves around the globe ,” José García, director of the Future of
Work(ers) program at the Ford Foundation, one of the civil society backers of the M-POWER initiative, told me. “It’s only natural that
workers practice a level of solidarity and understand that their reality and material needs are connected .”
No matter the early stages of the initiative, “the fact that an administration is creating this center of gravity around democracy is a huge leap
forward,” he said.

“We had to fight pretty hard to even be at the table in previous administrations, and that’s because organized labor’s message in countries has
historically been at odds with the U.S.’s economic message and those of its companies,” Bader-Blau said. “But that’s changing with the Biden
administration.”

“When workers are able to be part of that debate, there is a countervailing power in the world,” Lee said, gesturing to the thicket of corporate
and elite political interests that tend to dominate policymaking. She added that there need not be great distance between the two camps,
pointing to an “evolving” view in the world, shared by many governments and companies, of what “a robust, equitable, transparent supply
chain looks like.”

The emphasis on cleaning up practices in global supply chains has a direct bearing on support for advancing
democratic rights . It also feeds into the ideological project often touted by Biden: Strengthening democracy in its global
clash with authoritarian regimes . A worker-centric agenda , Lee suggested, would have clear soft power
dividends for the United States.

“The contrast between working conditions in a Chinese-funded B elt and R oad I nitiative,” Beijing’s keystone
global infrastructure project, “compared to what you might see in a U.S. , or World Bank-funded infrastructure project is one
that I hope will resonate with a lot of countries ,” she said.

Democracy plugs existential risks from a laundry list of impacts---nuke war,

pandemics, climate change, and future tech risks.
Haydn Belfield 23, Research Associate and Academic Project Manager at the University of Cambridge's
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 2023, “Collapse, Recovery, and Existential Risk,” How Worlds
Collapse: What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile
Future, pp. 74-76, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384

A world dominated by totalitarian states would be more incompetent, more war-prone, less cooperative, and more
inhibitive of progress than one dominated by democratic states. Our current world is not particularly competent, peaceful, cooperative, or
progressive—a totalitarian-dominated world would be worse. It would increase the risk of another collapse and extinction and could
shape the future toward less desirable trajectories (Beckstead, 2013).

Totalitarian states are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This
can be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker, 1996;
Dikotter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen, 2010). “Established
autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology
of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the “inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly
chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided
(Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday, 2006). If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and technological
problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at responding to risks of collapse and
extinction .

A world dominated by totalitarian states is more likely to have major wars . States with near-universal adult suffrage rarely (if ever)
go to war with one another (Barnhart et al., 2020), so a world dominated by democracies has fewer wars. Miscalc ulation might be a
particular problem for totalitarian states due to personalization and disincentives for accurate information ,
leading to well-known strategic disasters such as Hitler and Stalin’s blunders in World War II (Bialer, 1970; Noakes & Pridham, 2001), or at a
smaller level, Saddam Hussein’s rejection of diplomacy (Atkinson, 1993). War makes collapse and extinction more likely, by
raising the chance of w eapons of m ass d e s truction being used.

Linked to this, totalitarian states are less cooperative than democratic states. While cooperation is possible (Ginsburg, 2020),
their internal norms are characterized by paranoia and treachery, and their lack of transparency limits their ability to
credibly commit to agreements . This is bad for all risks that require cooperation such as pandemics or climate
change (Tomasik, 2015).

Finally, continued social and scientific progress is likely to reduce risks of collapse and extinction . Social progress
could reduce global inequality and other risk factors. Scientific progress could help address natural risks and climate change
(Sandberg, 2018), differentially increase defensive rather than offensive power (Garfinkel & Dafoe, 2019), and solve safety
challenges in AI or biotech nology (Russell, 2019). However, as we will now discuss totalitarian states would likely inhibit social
progress.

A central question from a longtermist perspective is: Which values should shape the future? I would argue that we should prefer it to be shaped
by liberal democratic values. This is not to say that the current democracy-dominated world is perfect—far from it. The fate of billions of
factory-farmed animals or hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty makes that abundantly clear. However, democracies have two
advantages. First, democracies have space for cosmopolitan values such as human rights, plurality, freedom, and equality. These are better
than those that characterize life under totalitarianism: Fear, terror, subjection, and secrecy. Second, they have within themselves the
mechanism to allow progress. In the last 100 (or even 50) years, the lives of women, LGBT people, religious minorities, and non-white people
have dramatically improved. Our “moral circle” has expanded, and could continue to expand (Singer, 1981). The arc of the moral universe is
long, but given the right conditions, it might just bend toward justice (King, 1968). A global society dominated by these values, and with the
possibility of improving more, has a better longterm potential. A totalitarian-dominated world, on the other hand, would reduce the space for
resistance and progress—distorting the human trajectory.

We should be particularly concerned about “bottlenecks” at which values are particularly important—where there is a
risk of “ locking-in ” some particular set of (possibly far from optimal) values. While they are currently far-off, future technologies such
as a rtificial g eneral i ntelligence, space settlement , life extension (of autocrats), or much better surveillance could
enable lock-in (Caplan, 2008).17

Conditional on them avoiding new catastrophes, world orders dominated by totalitarians could be quite long-lasting (Caplan, 2008).
Democracies can undermine authoritarian and totalitarian regimes through the following ways: Control, including conquest; contagion through
proximity; and consent, promoting receptivity toward democratization (Whitehead, 2001). Democracies can actively undermine these regimes
through war, sanctions, hosting rebellious exiles, or sponsoring internal movements. Passively, through contagion, they offer a demonstration
that a better, more prosperous life is possible. For example, in the final years of the USSR, ordinary Soviet citizens were able to see that the
West had a higher standard of living—more innovation, more choice, and more consumer goods. The elites were able to read books from the
outside, and travel—Gorbachev’s contacts and friendships with European politicians may have made him more favorable to social democracy
(Brown, 1996). Democracies can undermine the will and capacity of the coercive apparatus (Bellin, 2004). However, in a world not dominated
by democracies, all these pressures would be far less.

A world in which, say, totalitarian regimes emerged as dominant after World War II (for example if the USA was defeated) could be self-
reinforcing and long-lasting, like the self-reinforcing relationship of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (Orwell, 1949). Orwell’s fictional world is
characterized by constant low-grade warfare to justify emergency powers and secure elites, and with shifting alliances of convenience
as states bandwagon and balance, thereby preventing any resolution. A totalitarian-dominated world order could be rather robust, perhaps for
decades or even centuries.

A long-lasting totalitarian-dominated
world would extend the period of time humanity would spend with a heightened risk of
collapse or extinction , as well as increased potential for distortion of the human trajectory and the possibility
that a “ lock-in ” event may occur. This example illustrates the possibility of a “negative recovery,” resulting in a trajectory with less or no

scientific and social progress and a less favorable geopolitical situation, which would threaten the destruction of
humanity’s longterm potential .

The second scenario is the federal bureaucracy.

Withering state capacity imperils critical federal functions---readiness, pandemic
response, and environmental regulations---a reserve army of the unemployed solves.
Noah Smith 23, professor at Stony Brook University, Ph.D. from the University of Michigan,
10/22/2023, "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy," https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-
needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy
This is a picture of Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a character from the comedy sci-fi movie Everything Everywhere All At Once — an IRS auditor who
hounds the immigrant protagonists mercilessly. I loved that movie, but I also thought Deirdre’s character was emblematic of a common and
unhelpful way that Americans tend to think about the civil service. Ronald Reagan famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the
English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” I think that antipathy toward government workers has filtered through
to much of American society — not just to libertarians or conservatives, but to many progressives as well.

I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity . We’ve outsourced many of our core
government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer
money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in
paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like
pandemics and — most importantly — war .
It’s time for us to bring back the bureaucrats.

Aggregate numbers give a decent general impression of how the United States’ civil service has withered over the
decades. This process began in the 1970s, before Reagan ever took power, and has continued to this day. The percent of American workers
employed by the government rose through 1975 and fell thereafter, interrupted only by recessions (in which government employees were less
likely to be laid off):

It’s worth noting that much

of this decline was at the federal level . State and local governments employ a lot of
people in public education and policing, which are both harder to cut:

An even better way to see the decline might be to look at government spending on wages and salaries as a percent
of total government spending. This represents the percent of government dollars that actually goes to pay government workers. It held
steady until the mid-70s at around 34%, and then collapsed in the late 70s and early 80s to around 25%. It has since fallen to around
18% — about half of what it used to be.
If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits,
for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced . But this graph doesn’t actually
capture the full scope of the decline, because it doesn’t include outsourcing via unfunded mandates — things that the government could do,
but instead simply orders the private sector to do, without providing the funding.

I’m far from the first person to sound the alarm about this. John DiIulio wrote a book in 2014 called Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More
Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government, which is the basis for many of the ideas in this post and others. More recently,
Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center put out a great report in 2021 called “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back”.
A few excerpts from the executive summary:

A series of calamities during the 21st century —the Iraq War , Hurricane Katrina , the financial
crisis , and most recently the COVID -19 pandemic—have made it painfully clear that American state capacity is
not what it once was …On the right, healthy suspicion of rapid government expansion has given way to a toxic contempt for
government and public service per se. On the left, efforts to expand “citizen voice” in government as a check on abusive power have
produced a sclerotic “vetocracy” that makes effective governance all but impossible…

[The Niskanen Center is] taking on five new issues that we see as critical arenas for the struggle to rebuild state
capacity : (1) expanding and upgrading the federal workforce , (2) improving tax collection and closing the tax gap,
streamlining environmental
(3) overhauling how the federal government acquires and uses information technology, (4)
review to reduce delays and cost overruns in infrastructure projects, and (5) revitalizing the country’s
sclerotic public health institutions to better prepare for the next pandemic .
This is in concert with Tyler Cowen’s concept of “state capacity libertarianism”, which he outlined in January 2020 as an alternative to
traditional libertarianism or classical liberalism.

Meanwhile, on the progressive side of the aisle, writers like Ezra Klein have begun to focus on low state capacity as a reason why it’s hard for
progressives to accomplish their objectives. Don Moynihan has also written a bunch of good stuff on the topic, including this post:

[Post omitted]
A bunch of people across the ideological spectrum are thus homing in the same conclusion: America needs a better bureaucracy .
Here are just a few of the reasons why.

Bureaucrats vs. NEPA

Maybe this is just my personal experience, but I find that when Americans say the word “bureaucracy”, they tend to mean “a bunch of
regulations and red tape”, rather than “the civil service”. This sets up an implicit dichotomy between private-sector individuals and companies
that just want to do their thing, and civil servants who work tirelessly to enforce rules that prevent them from doing their thing.

For example, this is the depiction of environmental regulation in the movie Ghostbusters (another of my favorites). Our heroes have set up a
private business trapping and imprisoning dangerous ghosts. Then Walter Peck, a bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency, shows
up and tells them that the rules forbid them from doing this, eventually managing to shut them down (which causes a citywide catastrophe).

This is also the depiction of environmental regulation in The Simpsons Movie, in which the EPA tries to stop pollution by sending an army to
take over Springfield and encasing it in a giant dome.

But in fact, this is not actually how the most cumbersome environmental regulation works in America! Instead, we have laws
like NEPA
and its stronger state-level equivalents like CEQA, which farm out the job of environmental regulation to citizens and
the courts. The way it works is this: A developer starts work on a project, like a solar plant or an apartment complex. Then
private citizens who don’t want that project in their backyards — because of concern over scenic views, or property values, or
“neighborhood character”, or whatever — sue the developer in court. Even if the project satisfies all relevant

environmental laws from day 1, citizens can sue the developer under NEPA or CEQA to force it to stop the project and
complete a cumbersome environmental review — basically, a ton of paperwork. This often delays the project for years , and
drives up costs immensely — which of course discourages many developers from even trying to build anything in
the first place.

Enforcing environmental regulation via judicialized procedural review has had devastating consequences on America’s ability to build the thing
we need. Housing projects are routinely held up by NIMBYs using environmental review laws to sue developers, often under the
most ridiculous of pretexts (such as labeling human noise from apartment complexes a form of pollution). The solar plants and battery
factories and transmission lines that we need to decarbonize our economy aren’t getting built nearly as fast as they
should, because they’re getting held up by these review laws. And remember that most of these projects aren’t violating any environmental
review laws in the first place — the NIMBYs have the right to sue and hold up development regardless of whether any regulation is actually
being violated!

Which raises an obvious question: How can we know if no environmental regulation is being violated , other than
waiting for a lawsuit and a multi-year environmental review ? The answer is: bureaucrats . The answer is that
you have a bunch of government workers examine the project and make sure it checks all the relevant
regulatory boxes, and then if it does, you simply allow the project to go ahead, without lawsuits or multi-year studies. This is called
“ministerial approval” or “ministerial review”. This is how Japan does things, which is why they’ve been able to build enough housing to keep
rent affordable.

NIMBYs are absolutely terrified of ministerial review. I strongly encourage you to read this thread by Jordan Grimes, detailing the dismay of a
NIMBY pressure group at a raft of new pro-housing laws in California. The most terrifying prospect, for the opponents of new housing, turns out
to be “as-of-right” development, which means a bureaucrat gets to decide whether to allow a housing project rather than a lawsuit and a judge.

In other words, environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious
bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we
implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats . If we scrapped this legalistic permitting
regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats , we would still be able to protect the environment just
fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon .
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Nine far more terrifying words
are: “Please spend four years completing your Environmental Impact Statement.”
Bureaucrats vs. nonprofits and consultants

Even as environmental regulation has been outsourced to the courts, a huge variety of other government functions have
been outsourced to nonprofits . In a post back in May, I argued that this represented a toxic compromise between anti-government
conservatives who wanted to shrink the state and progressives who wanted to increase community input into policymaking:

[Post omitted]

Some excerpts from that post:

We do know that about a third of nonprofit funding comes from government purchases and grants, and that nonprofit revenue rose
by about 70% in inflation-adjusted terms from 1998 to 2016. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation — $2.62 trillion in nonprofit
revenue in 2016, 32.3% from government — says that this would equate to around $850 billion in government spending on
nonprofits in the U.S.

That’s about 13% of all government spending, including state and local, spent via nonprofits. Compare that to about 18.4% of
government spending spent on actual government workers as of 2022. We’ve outsourced a significant amount of our government to
nonprofits. Here’s a brief overview of some of the ways this work is outsourced. Of course the number includes things like public
university funding (universities are also nonprofits). But a lot of it is just paying organizations to administer government spending.

Outsourcing government functions to nonprofits — which is definitely a form of privatization, even if no one is officially
making a profit — has a number of problems . First there’s the obvious danger of corruption , in which nonprofits line
their pockets by using taxpayer money to help elect leaders who give them more taxpayer money. Of course this money is paid
out in executive salaries rather than “profit”, but it amounts to the same thing.

But even more important is what economists call an “ agency problem ”. Nonprofits would rather get the government to
give them as much money as possible; they would love to rip the government off . And if all the expertise involved in
building housing or providing social services resides in the nonprofits instead of the government itself, the government doesn’t have
the ability to judge whether it’s getting ripped off. Here’s how I put it in my earlier post:
When the government controls the purse strings but only the contractors know how much things should really cost, you get the
worst of both worlds — a government that doesn’t know how to save taxpayer money, paying contractors who don’t want to save
taxpayer money.

This problem is especially acute in San Francisco, which makes it extremely difficult to hire workers for the civil service, and has taken nonprofit-
outsourcing to an extreme. (In fact, if you want to read a fun satire about nonprofit-outsourcing in SF in the late 60s and 70s, check out Tom
Wolfe’s essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”.) Investigations have shown that oversight of SF nonprofits has been extremely poor — in part
because the city got rid of the bureaucrats who could have done that monitoring effectively. Massive inefficiencies are allowed to fester for
years, only coming to light after elected officials discover the problems and raise the alarm. The most recent blowup I’ve seen is over an
addiction treatment nonprofit:

A San Francisco supervisor is calling for an audit of the city’s largest addiction treatment nonprofit after word leaked that a staffing
shortage forced the organization’s detox program to pause intakes last week…

HealthRight 360 is the largest drug treatment provider in San Francisco and is slated to receive more than $200 million from the city
this fiscal year, according to a city database.

“This is not to cast aspersions on anyone, but I am truly concerned that we are paying for a service that they’re not able to provide,”
Stefani said at Tuesday’s hearing.

Of course this doesn’t mean that bureaucrats always have the right incentives. With the wrong funding incentives, civil service agencies can fall
into a trap in which they try to maximize the amount they spend each year in order to increase their budgets for future years. An efficient
bureaucracy requires avoiding perverse incentives like that. But when the funds
are being spent via nonprofits instead of
government workers , the incentives are much harder to get right , because the government lacks most of the
levers of control that it has over its own workforce .

Of course, the agency problems doesn’t just apply to nonprofits, but to any government contractors. And when
it comes to
transportation planning, a huge problem is the amount that governments have come to rely on consultants . The
Transit Cost Project has been looking into the question of why it costs so much more to build each mile of train in the U.S. than in other rich
countries (most of which have stronger unions). Their big report, released earlier this year, found that state and local governments’ excessive
reliance on outside consultants rather than in-house bureaucratic expertise was a huge driver of excess cost. Here are some excerpts from a
great writeup by Henry Grabar:

[M]any of the [transit cost] problems can be traced to a larger philosophy: outsourcing government
expertise to a retainer of consultants …
For example, when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority got to work on the Green Line Extension, the agency only had a
half-dozen full-time employees managing the largest capital project the MBTA had ever undertaken. On New York’s Second Avenue
subway, the most expensive mile of subway ever built, consultant contracts were more than 20 percent of construction costs—more
than double what’s standard in France or Italy. By 2011, the MTA had trimmed its in-house capital projects management group of
1,600 full-time employees (circa 1990) to just 124, tasked with steering $20 billion in investment. Perhaps the most notorious case in
this business is the debacle of the California High-Speed Rail project, which in its early years had a tiny full-time staff managing
hundreds of millions of dollars in consulting contracts…

It’s that lack of institutional know-how, of which consultants are both a symptom and a cause, that really hampers projects…It
means staff are overwhelmed by change orders as projects evolve. In the case of New York’s Second Avenue subway, the lack of a
powerful, effective team of civil servants may also explain some inexplicable conflicts and mistakes: misunderstandings and feuds
with local agencies, hugely overbuilt stations, and so little standardization that the escalators in the three new stops were built by
three different companies.

Would replacing some of these consultants with government bureaucrats really lower costs? A recent paper by
Zachary Liscow, William Nober, and Cailin Slattery suggests that it would:

[W]e find ev idence that state capacity correlates inversely with costs in a several ways . States
with (perceived) higher quality DOT employees have lower costs. A state with a neutral rating has almost 30% higher costs per mile
than one that rates the DOT employees as “moderately high quality”, all else equal. Consistent with the capacity hypothesis, states
that flag concerns about consultant costs have higher costs. States where contractors and procurement officials expect more change
orders have significantly higher costs. Frequent change orders could directly lead to higher costs through delays and costly
renegotiation; they could also be a downstream symptom of poor administrative capacity at a state DOT—many contractors
reference poor-quality project plans made by third-party consultants. Moreover, when we measure capacity using external data we
show that states with higher DOT capacity have lower infrastructure costs. A one standard deviation increase in capacity is
correlated with 16% lower costs.

And a recent paper by Maggie Shi finds that when the government monitors Medicare spending more closely , it
reduces waste by a huge amount :

Every dollar Medicare spent on monitoring generated $24–29 in government savings . The
majority of savings stem from the deterrence of future care, rather than reclaimed payments from prior care. I do not find
evidence that the health of the marginal patient is harmed , indicating that monitoring primarily deters low-
value care. Monitoring does increase provider administrative costs, but these costs are mostly incurred upfront and include
investments in technology to assess the medical necessity of care.

And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending ? Bureaucrats . So that’s at least a 2300%
r eturn o n i nvestment in bureaucracy !
In sum, the years since the 1970s have been a massive experiment in whether a government, by outsourcing core functions to private actors
like nonprofits and consultants, can increase the efficiency with which public funds are spent. That experiment has failed, and it needs to be
reversed.

Preparing for the next threat

I became painfully aware of the problems of a weak bureaucracy during the early days of the Covid
pandemic. I started a group to help encourage state public health agencies to improve contact tracing — an approach that ultimately
proved futile due to hyper-infectious mutations. But back when the virus was less contagious and we still thought contact tracing might work,
my partners and I had some meetings with government workers at the CDC . It was clear that they had absolutely no resources
to commit to our project, and that they were overwhelmed with other demands .

Perhaps that’s to be expected in the middle of a massive pandemic. But it was also clear that the
CDC workers we talked to didn’t
know a lot of basic facts about how their organization worked ; there was lots of data that they had no idea how to find,
or even who was responsible for collecting it, and they had little concept of who was responsible for contact tracing at the state level. Those are
things they should have known long before the pandemic even started.

In fact, the pathetic crisis performance of the CDC — which before the pandemic was often believed to be
one of our most competent government agencies — is now the stuff of legend. Most damningly, the agency was
unable to collect even the most basic data on the spread of the virus — data that private individuals were forced to collect in its stead. In
addition, it made numerous bad recommendations that were later reversed, issued confusing guidance, and failed to develop Covid tests in the
early days of the pandemic. The agency is now being reformed, but it’s not yet clear how deep the reforms go.

But what I’m most afraid of is not another pandemic; it’s a major war . In a widely-read post last week, I warned that a war
with China over Taiwan is a lot more likely than most Americans seem to realize, and that we need to be
preparing for that grim possibility right now. China’s state apparatus is famously effective in building large
amounts of stuff very quickly — in the space of just a few years, while the U.S. was failing to build even a
small amount of h igh- s peed r ail, China built a high-speed rail network that dwarfed American transit
advocates’ wildest dreams . In a war situation, China’s massive production advantage means that the
U.S. will be at a dramatic disadvantage in a protracted conflict . We do not have the equivalent of the
effective bureaucracies that we created in the runup to World War 2 .

But even beyond military production, the U.S. needs to do lots of preparation for the possibility of a China
conflict . Private companies need to audit their supply chains to make sure they can sustain production in the event of a war. The U.S.
government needs to ensure that critical minerals can be accessed without reliance on Chinese processing facilities. And the government needs
to revive the defense-industrial base, so we don’t see bottlenecks of the kind we encountered when we tried to produce Covid masks, tests,
and ventilators in the early days of the pandemic.

All of this requires a large , competent, well-funded bureaucracy . Yet I worry that neither progressives nor conservatives
understand this need. Progressives still seem wedded to the idea of defending NEPA, while conservatives still seem wedded to the idea of
slashing and burning any government agency they can. It’s a toxic equilibrium in which one side wants to drown the government in a bathtub
and the other wants to outsource it to every NIMBY and nonprofit in the country.

To reestablish U.S. state capacity , we have to sail between the rocks of both of these disastrous approaches. We have to
rebuild the civil service , with sufficient long-term funding guarantees , talent, and size. For all our sake, we need
to bring back the bureaucrats.

A formidable state staves off existential risks.

Stephen Collier 21, Professor of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD
in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, November 2021, “The Government of
Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security,” p. xi-19, ISBN: 9780691199283

The evidence is clear: we live in an increasingly vulnerable world. Maps with isometric lines indicating flood zones tell
us about the ever-growing likelihood that the places we live will be inundated in future hurricanes, torrential rains, or even high tides.
Emergency exercises reveal that governmental response systems are not prepared to deal with future disease outbreaks. Stress tests
isolate weak links in national and global financial systems that would be exposed in the event of a panic or an economic
downturn. Network analyses point to alarming vulnerabilities to accidents or attacks (whether cyber or
physical) on critical nodes of power systems . Models of climate change demonstrate the vulnerability of
cities and critical infrastructures to heat waves, drought, floods, and landslides. This mountain of evidence points to a
troubling contemporary reality: the vulnerability of the vital systems on which modern life depends to
a startling range of potentially catastrophic events .1
Discussions of vulnerability and preparedness are often, understandably, caught up in the urgency of recent disasters and future threats: a
looming hurricane; a critical system that is prone to failure; a virus that is a single mutation away from causing a deadly
pandemic . And experts, policymakers, and scholars often search out the sources of vulnerability in relatively recent changes in the
structure of our collective existence. Intensifying global flows of people, goods, and capital, they argue, make our world
increasingly interdependent and therefore subject to sudden disruptions that spread through financial systems,
electricity grids, information networks, or human bodies in rapid circulation and close proximity.2 But there is another way to think about our
vulnerable world. Rather than taking vulnerability for granted as a category of understanding—and investigating how our vulnerability became
so acute and pervasive—we can ask how it became possible to think about our world in this way in the first place. More specifically, we can ask
how we came to think of our world in terms of a particular kind of vulnerability. When did government first become concerned with the
disruption or breakdown of life-sustaining vital systems? For what purposes were the techniques that, today, generate such an
extraordinary profusion of evidence about our vulnerability originally invented? How did norms such as resilience and preparedness become
political obligations, to which policymakers and officials are held accountable?

The Government of Emergency addresses these questions by turning to a period of American history in which this distinctive and now mostly
taken-for- granted way of thinking about vulnerability was just taking shape. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, amid the Great
Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of technical experts and government officials developed a new understanding of
the United States as a complex of vulnerable, vital systems. They also invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate

the nation’s vulnerability , as well as organizing a distinctive form of emergency government designed to
prepare for uncertain future events that might catastrophically disrupt these systems. In doing so, these
experts and officials did not, of course, solve the problem of vulnerability. Quite the contrary, they defined vulnerability as a particular kind of
problem with which today’s experts, officials, policymakers, and emergency managers are still grappling.

——

Our interest in these topics was initially sparked by the aftermath—at once troubling and disorienting—of the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. The most visible and controversial response by the federal government to these attacks was a series of aggressive security policies
identified with the “war on terror.” External security measures taken in the wake of the September 11 attacks included preemptive wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, drone strikes on suspected terrorist cells, and extrajudicial detentions, most notoriously in the prison complex at
Guantanamo Bay. Domestically, new security measures included heightened border controls, domestic surveillance, and steps to protect large
cities and transportation networks against attack. Many of these domestic measures were associated with a new federal agency, established
soon after the attacks of 9/11, with an unfamiliar and Orwellian name: the Department of Homeland Security.

At one level, these new security measures challenged familiar conceptions of security. Externally, the focus of military and intelligence
organizations on terrorist groups and other nonstate actors seemed distinct from the traditional framework of national security, related to
struggles among sovereign states. Meanwhile, new domestic policies pointed to an ominous “securitization” of civilian life, with totalitarian
overtones. In another sense, however, these widely discussed elements of the “war on terror” fit relatively comfortably with familiar
understandings of security. These measures sought to identify and interdict enemies of the United States, employing traditional means of
intelligence, surveillance, military force, border control, and policing.

But beneath the surface of these highly visible and contested measures, a different formation of contemporary security was consolidating. Its
contours could be glimpsed by perusing the plans and strategic statements on problems such as “national preparedness” and “critical
infrastructure protection” issued by the president, the D epartment of H omeland S ecurity, the Department of H ealth and H uman

S ervices, and other parts of the US government in the years after 2001. The key norm articulated in these statements was not
the deterrence, interdiction, capture, or defeat of an enemy. Rather, these statements laid out a strategy of preparedness for a
range of uncertain future events —from natural disasters to disease outbreaks, blackouts , and
terrorist attacks —that threatened to disrupt the vital systems that make contemporary life possible .
They drew on forms of specialized knowledge and expert assessment that were quite different from those of domestic surveillance, foreign
intelligence, and other approaches to understanding the plans and motivations of enemies. The evidence these documents adduced to assess
vulnerability was produced by tools such as simulations of catastrophic events; scenario-based exercises to pinpoint gaps in preparedness
plans; and evaluations of the “criticality” of particular facilities, such as ports, power plants, communication nodes, and transportation hubs.
Finally, these statements of strategy proposed a distinctive set of preparedness measures : stockpiling critical
supplies; securing vital facilities or creating redundant facilities; improving coordination among different parts of the
federal government, and among federal, state, and local governments; and, perhaps above all, conducting more exercises to test
readiness. The sudden consolidation of these norms, knowledge practices, and security measures was puzzling. Where had they developed
and been cultivated before coming together so rapidly in new plans and practices?

In 2005, two years after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, these questions were cast into starker relief, and inflected in
new ways, by another domestic catastrophe: Hurricane Katrina, which inundated the city of New Orleans. Like the attacks of September 11,
Katrina was followed by rancorous debate and finger pointing. Much of the blame fell on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
FEMA had borne responsibility for disaster preparedness and response in the federal government for almost thirty years. But by 2005, it was
incorporated into the new Department of Homeland Security, whose emphasis on counterterrorism, some observers charged, had left the
agency unprepared for a massive natural disaster.3 FEMA’s failure to organize a competent response to Katrina raised
doubts about the federal government’s ability to prepare for a range of other disasters , such as the
outbreak of a novel and dangerous infectious disease , a particularly acute concern for public health officials in 2005 given
the reemergence of avian flu in Asia, one year earlier. 4 The failed response to Katrina also focused attention on the “distributed” structure of
preparedness in the United States, which required complex coordination among local, state, and federal governments. This structure, too, had
failed in spectacular fashion. Local governments proved poorly organized and ill equipped. State governments were unable to provide timely
assistance.

But amid the arguments about where the failure lay, and who was to blame, a basic diagnosis was universally accepted : the
government had been unprepared to deal with an event like Katrina and was obliged , in the future, to
bolster preparedness , not only for natural disasters but also for a range of other future catastrophes . Thus, more
questions: Where did this peculiar American structure of distributed preparedness come from? Why would an agency charged with anticipating
terrorism also be responsible for natural disaster preparedness? And how had this unquestioned political responsibility—to prepare for events
like Katrina—initially been established and entrusted to such a peculiar and apparently precarious governmental arrangement?

In a first stage of our research, we sought to address these questions by looking back to civil defense planning of the early Cold War.5 Cold War
civil defense was in one sense quite different from contemporary emergency management. Its primary concern was not preparedness for
natural disasters, pandemic disease, or terrorist attacks. Rather, civil defense focused on strengthening the preparedness of local governments,
communities, and households for a nuclear attack on the United States.6 In another sense, however, the way civil defense planners identified
problems and sought to address them was familiar: preparing to respond in the wake of a catastrophic event. Moreover, Cold War civil defense,
particularly the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1950–1958), was a recognized part of the landscape of postwar history for scholars of
American emergency management, who have identified it as the source of our current way of thinking about and organizing for emergencies.7

But as our research proceeded, our attention was increasingly drawn to another history—adjacent to but distinct from the history of civil
defense—that turned out to be more germane to our concerns. Initially, we encountered a forgotten federal government office, the Office of
Emergency Preparedness, that in the 1960s was charged with addressing many of the problems that have become so urgent and visible at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. 8 The central concern of this office was the vulnerability of vital systems, such as oil pipeline networks,
electricity and communication grids, and systems of economic circulation. And it sought to develop methods for anticipating the effects of
various kinds of events—terrorist attacks, economic shocks, industrial strikes—that might disrupt these systems, as well as techniques for
planning and testing a governmental structure capable of rapid, coordinated response. Digging into the history of this office and its
predecessors, we found ourselves on a track that ran parallel to the story of civil defense (see figure 0.1). It led us to the National Security
Resources Board and the Office of Defense Mobilization, which were established not to carry out the now-familiar functions of emergency
management but to prepare for military-industrial mobilization. In contrast to the well-studied history of civil defense, the activities of these
organizations have been largely neglected in the scholarship on the history of emergency management and, indeed, in the broader scholarship
on American political development in the middle of the twentieth century. And yet, from 1947 (when the National Security Resources Board
was created by the National Security Act) to 1958 (when the Office of Defense Mobilization was combined with the Federal Civil Defense
Administration), these were the organizations working on the central problem of emergency government: preparedness for a nuclear attack on
the United States. As we show in the chapters that follow, experts and officials working in these now obscure offices shaped current
understandings and practices related to the vulnerability of vital systems, preparedness for future catastrophes, and the organization of
emergency government.

Our research into the work of these mobilization planning offices opened up, in turn, a deeper history, which connected the history of
emergency management in the United States to very different kinds of emergencies: the Great Depression and World War II. During these
earlier episodes, we found, experts and officials working in domains such as mobilization planning, target selection for air war, and national
economic planning developed new kinds of knowledge about flows of resources through the nation’s vital systems and their vulnerability to
catastrophic disruption. These were also the circumstances in which government reformers assembled the distinctive administrative and
political mechanisms of American emergency government, with its small, centralized planning offices (the ancestors of FEMA), its complex
arrangements for distributed preparedness across agencies and governmental units, and its often-fraught accommodations between
democratic norms, expert control, and strong executive authority to address crisis situations. Thus, in the unexpected settings of depression
and world war, we encountered the now-familiar norms and forms of US emergency government taking shape.

When we set out to write this book, we imagined that it would begin in the 1950s and move into the present, tracing how Cold War civil
defense evolved into contemporary emergency management in its various guises of homeland security, pandemic preparedness, and natural
disaster policy. But as this parallel history unfolded, the scope of our book shifted. What we had previously imagined would be the beginning of
the story—nuclear pathways of American emergency government. Many of the practices and institutions of contemporary American
emergency government emerged from little-studied offices such as the National Security Resources Board and the Office of Defense
Mobilization. The history of these organizations points to largely unexplored genealogical connections between emergency government as we
know it today and major midcentury episodes in the development of American political institutions. Credit: Janice Yamanaka-Lew.
preparedness in the 1950s—became its endpoint. Our question changed as well. The book’s central concern was no longer the process through
which nuclear preparedness expanded into preparedness for a range of other emergencies in the decades after the 1950s—a history that
largely remains to be written. Instead, we traced how the knowledge practices, administrative devices, and governmental mechanisms
originally invented to manage the emergencies of economic depression and world war were redirected to preparedness for uncertain future
events that threaten vital systems.

This shift in empirical focus went hand in hand with a shift in, and significant expansion of, the conceptual and historical problems with which
we were grappling. In the United States and elsewhere, the problem of the vulnerability of vital systems to catastrophic disruption is coeval
with—and is indeed a crucial element in—the history of industrial and urban modernity itself. Thus, the process through which system
vulnerability became such a prevalent governmental concern, and such a dominant feature of our politics, can only be described as one
dimension of the broader emergence of a mass industrial and metropolitan society in the United States during the first half of the twentieth
century. It is also linked to a significant mutation in political institutions. In contending with the “emergencies” of the Great Depression, World
War II, and the early Cold War—all of which were understood as existential crises that demanded exceptional government measures—political
reformers created new mechanisms of expert rule and expanded executive power. Thus, in investigating the genealogy of system vulnerability,
we also address the process through which, as political scientist Clinton Rossiter put it in 1949, US government was “adjusted in all its
ramifications to the mounting stresses of a protean, outward-looking, industrial society.”9

As we completed this book, governments around the world were struggling to respond to a global crisis. In early 2020 , the
coronavirus outbreak that began in China was spreading rapidly. As the first wave of the pandemic arrived in the United
States, officials faced a daunting prospect: the onset of a deadly disease with no effective biomedical countermeasures at hand, and an
immunologically naïve population. Experts rushed to identify bottlenecks in health systems , such as shortages of
masks, testing reagents, and medical personnel , that would limit the number of patients that could be treated.
Policymakers argued about how to procure scarce materials and establish priorities for the allocation of limited resources. Local officials sought
to identify essential functions—medical services, critical infrastructure, and the production and distribution of food, for example—whose
operation would need to be secured as stay-at- home orders were imposed across the country. Epidemiologists updated pandemic models to
anticipate surges in cases in particular areas and to estimate the demand that such surges would make on health resources. Debates flared up
about the distribution of responsibility between federal agencies and the president, and between the federal government and the states.

As authorities sought to address multiplying breakdowns and bottlenecks in health systems, a distant episode of American history came to
public attention. In spring 2020, Democratic lawmakers and a range of experts and interest groups urged then-president Donald Trump to draw
on the emergency powers of the Defense Production Act to organize a forceful federal response to the pandemic. This Act, passed in 1950, gave
the president authority to manage national economic resources in order to mobilize the industrial economy, initially for the Korean War.10 By
the late 1950s, mobilization planners had laid plans to use Defense Production Act powers to manage an array of other problems— including
massive nationwide medical response—that would arise in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear attack on the United States. These plans
addressed many of the issues that health officials and policymakers would face, over half a century later, in spring 2020: ensuring adequate
production capacity of essential medical supplies through government loans and production agreements; securing vital inputs to such
production through priorities ratings and allocation controls; and managing the distribution of scarce medical resources, including personnel, to
meet a medical emergency unfolding across the country.
The Trump administration made limited use of the Defense Production Act to procure items such as test kits and protective gear but was widely
criticized for its unwillingness to employ it more expansively. “We’re at war,” proclaimed the former director of the Defense Production Act
program division at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “and the enemy is called Covid. The question is do we have the guts that our
grandfathers had to mobilize the economy of the United States against the enemy.” 11 Upon taking office in January 2021, President Joseph
Biden issued an executive order that outlined a broad use of the Defense Production Act’s emergency authorities. Priorities ratings would
bolster vaccine manufacturers’ access to equipment such as filling pumps and filtration units required to ramp up production. Loans and
purchase agreements would spur investment in domestic plants to manufacture surgical gloves, whose production in other countries had been
constrained by shortages of a vital input: nitrile butadiene rubber. Officials contemplated similar actions, such as issuing loans and purchase
agreements, to expand the production of at-home coronavirus tests, N95 masks, and other critical supplies.12

As we show in this book, the powers of priorities ratings, allocation control, emergency loans, and purchase agreements are not the only
elements of the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic that have roots in the emergencies of the mid-twentieth century. Indeed,
many dimensions of the response can be traced back to attempts to manage national resources and to ensure the operation of vital systems
during these prior emergencies. Perhaps like no other event in the last seventy years, the Covid-19 pandemic has
thrust these
problems to the center of attention . But a range of current issues —most notably the intensifying
disasters that will result from climate change —ensure that this largely neglected dimension of
emergency government will be increasingly central to contemporary politics .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the intellectual engagement and support of innumerable friends, colleagues, collaborators, and family members. We are particularly grateful
to Ben Anderson, Carlo Caduff, Craig Calhoun, David Collier, Ruth Berins Collier, Deborah Cowen, Savannah Cox, Tyler Curley, Myriam Dunn, Lyle Fearnley, Andreas Folkers, Nils Gilman, Kevin
Grove, Anke Gruendel, Frédéric Keck, Chris Kelty, Clay Kerchoff, Eric Klinenberg, George Lakoff, Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Sandy Lakoff, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Brian Lindseth, Sven Opitz, Onur
Özgöde, Paul Rabinow, Peter Redfield, Janet Roitman, Antina von Schnitzler, and Antti Silvast.

We are also grateful for support from the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 1058882, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Julien J. Studley Research Fund
at The New School, and the Dean’s Office of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

INTRODUCTION

The New Normalcy

During the past twenty years we have substituted for the normalcy of the halcyon 1920s an almost unbroken series of emergencies: depression, defense, war, inflation, cold
war. Indeed, emergency appears to have become the new kind of normalcy. National emergencies tend to favor improvisation by government. Yet with all our improvising, our
“putting out of fires,” our apparent activation by events instead of deliberate activation of events, we have emerged with a discernible pattern of domestic and foreign policy
and, most important, with an acceptance of the idea that government should consciously plan a strategy for anticipating and meeting domestic and foreign emergencies at the
operational level.

— JAMES FESLER, SPEECH TO THE INDUSTRIAL COLL EGE OF THE ARMED FORCES, SEPTEMBER 4, 1952

In 1954, the United States’ Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) published a massive multivolume tome, Emergency Management of the National Economy.1 The ICAF volumes
collected a series of lectures that had been delivered to military officers at the college, as well as a range of government documents that addressed ICAF’s main concern: managing industrial
mobilization for war. The fourth volume, dedicated to Principles of Administration, reproduced a lecture by political scientist James Fesler, a veteran of government reform during the New
Deal and of mobilization planning during World War II.2 Looking back on the previous two tumultuous decades, Fesler observed that the United States had emerged from an “unbroken series
of emergencies”—“ depression, defense, war, inflation, cold war”—with a “discernible pattern” of emergency government. Its hallmark was a new norm: “government should consciously plan
a strategy for anticipating and meeting domestic and foreign emergencies at the operational level.” In the “new kind of normalcy” Fesler described, emergency government was no longer
confined to exceptional situations. Rather, ongoing emergency preparedness had become a part of governmental routine.

More than six decades later, it is taken for granted that government bears responsibility for continuously anticipating and preparing for emergencies. This assumption has been evident in
efforts to assign blame and bolster readiness following disasters such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is noteworthy, then, that in 1952, when Fesler gave his lecture, this governmental norm was neither established nor taken for granted. Rather, it was new and required explicit statement
and elaboration.

It is also noteworthy that Fesler’s discussion addressed a set of problems and institutional contexts that seem distant from our contemporary understandings of emergency management.
Today, government offices tasked with managing emergencies are concerned with preparedness for events such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and terrorist attacks, as well as with
response and recovery in the aftermath of such events. But in 1952, the object of emergency management was the national economy, and its central aim was military-industrial mobilization—
marshaling raw materials, industrial facilities, and manpower to build the tanks, planes, munitions, and other supplies necessary for total war. In this sense, Fesler’s speech points us to the
specificity of the historical conjuncture during which new norms for managing emergencies were first articulated in the United States and were connected to forms of expert knowledge,
administrative practices, and legal mechanisms. The topics addressed in Emergency Management of the National Economy suggest some of the issues that, in this now unfamiliar landscape,
were initially clustered around emergency government: resource planning, economic controls, internal security, economic intelligence, air targeting, government reorganization, domestic
vulnerability, and nonmilitary defense. And the government offices, commissions, and agencies whose work was either collected or discussed in the ICAF volumes—most long-since dissolved,
and many virtually forgotten—provide a map of the institutional settings in which emergency government was addressed at this time. Among these were committees working on government
reform and resource management during the New Deal; wartime and postwar mobilization planning offices; air-targeting and strategic intelligence units in the military; and offices of civil
defense and domestic preparedness of the early Cold War.3

If Emergency Management of the National Economy situates the history of American emergency government in relation to economic management and military-industrial mobilization during
the Great Depression and World War II, it also marks a point of inflection. In the early 1950s, emergency government was already in the process of becoming something different and, from our
contemporary perspective, more familiar. In the foreword to the ICAF tome, another veteran of wartime mobilization planning, Arthur Flemming, described this new horizon of emergency
government. At the time, Flemming was serving as director of the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM). Created in 1950 to lead civilian mobilization planning for the Korean War, ODM had by
1953 become the most important domestic preparedness agency in the federal government. Surveying the landscape of the early Cold War, Flemming offered a grim assessment of the current
world situation. The United States, he wrote, was in an “age of peril.” The advent of long-range bombers and atomic weapons confronted national security strategists with the specter of a
sudden “devastating attack on the continental United States.” In the event of such a sudden attack, the United States would not have time to mobilize its “material and human resources” over
the course of months or years, as it had in the prior two world wars. Rather, Flemming argued, the country would have to shift immediately to war footing and would be faced with managing
the consequences of a crippling initial blow. Adequately preparing the nation for this eventuality could “save an untold number of human lives” and ensure that the United States could
“continue a substantial portion of our war production and production essential for the holding together of our civilian economy.” 4

In light of these concerns about a devastating enemy attack, during the 1950s the civilian mobilization planning agencies turned their attention to a novel task. If earlier these agencies were
concerned primarily with military-industrial production during a long war fought overseas, then increasingly their focus shifted to preparedness planning to ensure the survival of the national
population and recovery of the economy in the aftermath of a domestic catastrophe. It is indicative of this shift that, by the early 1960s, the Office of Defense Mobilization had evolved into the
Office of Emergency Planning, which was in turn renamed the Office of Emergency Preparedness. In 1962, the director of this office, Edward McDermott, outlined the aims and means of
emergency government as they had come to be understood by this time. Citing a draft executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy, McDermott reported that he had been charged
with coordinating the “national preparedness program,” whose goal was to maintain a “state of readiness with respect to all conditions of national emergency.” This meant, first and foremost,
maintaining an “emergency management organization” that would be prepared to “handle the myriad of resource and economic problems necessary to save lives and sustain survival and
expedite recovery.” Reviewing these “resource and economic problems”— related to electric power, transportation, communications, food, and medical care—McDermott pointed to the vast
scope of his office’s concern. “We are really talking about the fundamentals of life on this earth,” he intoned, “the elemental problems of safeguarding the food we eat, the fuel we consume,
the transportation to maintain a steady flow of commerce, an intricate telecommunications system which will continue to function under all conditions, and perhaps most important, the
foundation of constitutional government which underpins our way of life.”5 In sum, the Office of Emergency Planning was charged with sustaining the very biological and associational life of
the American population during a future emergency.

In the decades since McDermott’s speech, practices for anticipating and managing emergencies have continued to evolve, and the organization of emergency government has been frequently
reshuffled. But McDermott’s 1962 description of the task of governmental preparedness for emergency is strikingly similar to contemporary understandings. Emergency preparedness
continues to focus on reducing the vulnerability of vital systems in anticipation of a range of potentially catastrophic future events, and on preparing for life-saving response and recovery in
their aftermath. Thus, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 2015 National Preparedness Goal—which currently guides governmental preparedness for events ranging from terrorist
attacks to hurricanes and pandemics—refers to a “secure and resilient Nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and
recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.” 6 The emphasis now, as in 1962, is on what the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 guidance on critical infrastructure
protection refers to as “the essential services that underpin American society and serve as the backbone of our nation’s economy, security, and health”; “the power we use in our homes, the
water we drink, the transportation that moves us . . . and the communication systems we rely on.”7 Today, as in the early 1960s, emergency preparedness aims to ensure governmental
functions relating to “health and safety,” “infrastructure systems,” “hydration, feeding, and sheltering,” that, in the wake of a future disaster, will be essential to “rapidly meeting basic human
needs,” “restoring basic services,” “establishing a safe and secure environment,” and “supporting the transition to recovery.”8 And as has been true since the beginning of the postwar period,
emergency government today is not an exception to the normal operation of the state. Rather, it encompasses the management of unfolding emergencies and ongoing preparedness for future
emergency situations as permanent functions of normal government.

A Genealogy of Emergency Government

This book examines the formation of American emergency government in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It follows the process
through which a governmental apparatus initially assembled to manage economic depression and industrial mobilization for war mutated into
an apparatus of emergency preparedness for domestic catastrophe. The account presented in this book is a genealogy of emergency
government that traces how now-familiar forms of knowledge, practices, and norms first came into being.9 It is only relatively recently, we
suggest, that we have come to understand and organize emergency government as a matter of reducing the vulnerability of vital systems, and it
is only recently that preparedness for events that might disrupt these systems has become a basic obligation of government.

This genealogical approach to the study of emergency government can be usefully distinguished from histories of the field of disaster
preparedness and emergency management, which follow the changing forms of knowledge and governance that have been applied to a certain
class of phenomena—disasters. For example, in Acts of God, historian Ted Steinberg traces how the US government has understood and
managed (or failed to manage) natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and storms, from the early days of the American republic to the
present. 10 Scott Knowles, in The Disaster Experts, constructs what he calls a “disaster chronology” over roughly the same period, tracking how
experts have made “the knowledge and control of disasters their special concern.”11 In contrast to such historical studies of disaster and
disaster management, a genealogical approach asks how a range of seemingly disparate phenomena, from nuclear attacks and economic
shocks to hurricanes and disease outbreaks, have been constituted as common types of events that present similar kinds of problems. Thus, the
title of this book—The Government of Emergency—does not refer to the way that a pregiven class of events or situations has been governed.
Rather, it refers to a form of political rationality, which we understand, following sociologist Nikolas Rose, as an “intellectual machinery or
apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming.”12

As Rose suggests, political rationalities have both normative and epistemological dimensions. On the one hand, a given political rationality
entails specific assumptions about the “proper distribution of tasks between different authorities” and the “ideals or principles to which
government should be addressed.” Thus, it implies certain presumptions (however contested and unstable) about what government is, what it
should do, and what its limits should be. On the other hand, a political rationality involves a distinct “style of reasoning,” that is, a body of
“intellectual techniques for rendering reality thinkable and practicable, and constituting domains that are amenable—or not amenable—to
reformatory intervention.” Importantly, a style of reasoning entails specific “conceptions of the objects to be governed,” whether the national
economy, the population, or the vulnerable, vital systems on which the economy and the population depend.13

One strategy of genealogical research is to paint a “before and after” picture that aims, as Ian Hacking has put it, “to permanently fix in the
mind of the reader the fact that some upheaval has occurred”—a momentous shift in ways of thinking and governing.14 Our account is framed
by such a conceptual and political “upheaval,” in which new objects, aims, and practices of government came into being over a relatively brief
period. But we also present a detailed account of how this momentous shift unfolded. We focus on specific organizations and on historically
situated actors as they took up existing ways of knowing and intervening, or invented new ones, to address novel problems. 15 Through these
often-mundane practices, a new political rationality—and indeed, we suggest, a new dimension of political modernity—took shape over the
period spanning roughly from the Great Depression through the early Cold War.

The first part of the book examines the period from the 1930s to the early 1940s, in which the federal government faced two conditions of
“national emergency”: the Great Depression and World War II. During this period, emergency government largely involved economic
interventions to ameliorate the Depression and to manage industrial production for total war. Chapter 1 follows the work of experts in a
succession of domains—from city and regional planning to economic management, wartime mobilization, and air targeting—as they
constituted vital systems as objects of systematic knowledge and as targets of intervention. Chapter 2 describes a parallel process through
which government reformers invented administrative devices and organizational forms to address the economic emergencies of depression
and war. It focuses in particular on how these reformers addressed the tensions between liberal constitutionalism and crisis government by
assembling what they called an “administrative machinery” to organize and prepare for emergency situations.

The book’s second part is situated in the years immediately after World War II, a period of heightening concern about the prospect of an enemy
attack on the continental United States that would cripple military-industrial production systems. Chapter 3 shows how civilian experts and
military officers developed systematic knowledge about American economic and infrastructural vulnerability and devised practices and
understandings that would constitute a new kind of expertise—and a new kind of expert, the “vulnerability specialist.”16 Chapter 4 turns to the
first efforts to develop techniques for reducing this vulnerability and preparing to manage the consequences of a massive attack. It examines
postwar mobilization planning agencies, where experts and officials reoriented the existing institutions and practices of emergency
government. If previously these institutions had focused on economic management of the unfolding emergencies of depression and war, their
objective now shifted to preparing for a future war. Emergency government was thus becoming a matter of ongoing peacetime preparedness.

Part III traces a further shift in American emergency government that took place during the 1950s. As nuclear weapons and delivery systems
grew increasingly powerful, mobilization planners deemphasized readiness to ramp up industrial production for a long war. Instead, they
turned to the task of ensuring the continuous functioning of vital systems that would be required to sustain human
life , economic activity, and governmental operations in the unprecedented conditions that would result from a thermo nuclear attack.
Chapter 5 examines the practices of “administrative readiness” developed by mobilization planners to prepare for
government operations in a future emergency, culminating with a description of Mobilization Plan D-Minus (1957)—the first
plan for national emergency preparedness in the United States. Chapter 6 focuses on one dimension of such national preparedness planning:
the management of resources such as food, medical supplies, and services that would be essential to the population’s postattack survival. The
chapter traces how mobilization planners used the new tool of computer simulation to envision and prepare for an unprecedented future event
—a catastrophic nuclear attack.

By the late 1950s, emergency government, which had previously focused on alleviating economic depression and mobilizing for war, had
mutated into emergency preparedness for a future domestic catastrophe. A coherent set of understandings, practices, and organizational forms
had consolidated into an apparatus that continues to structure emergency government—in the United States and beyond—to the present day.
In the next two sections, we outline the broader conceptual and theoretical significance of this mutation in governmental rationality. First, we
introduce the concept of vital systems security as a form of “reflexive biopolitics,” oriented to the management of uncertain and potentially
catastrophic future events. We argue that, beginning with the midcentury episodes we examine, securing the nation’s vital systems has become
a central norm of modern government. Second, we describe how American emergency government took shape as a response to the challenge
that increasingly common use of emergency powers during war and economic crisis posed to democratic government. In these contexts,
reformers assembled a political technology for governing emergencies that, they thought, would make it possible to avoid recourse to
exceptional measures that would undermine constitutional democracy.

Vital Systems Security

In 1984, applied mathematician and security expert Robert Kupperman published Technological Advances and Consequent Dangers, a working paper for the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.17 Kupperman’s essay was a far-reaching reflection on the vulnerability of vital systems as a central problem of national security.
For our purposes, Kupperman’s paper indicates how system vulnerability was linked to a broader problematization of risk and security in modern societies.

For millennia, Kupperman argued, human beings had faced relatively localized and “self-extinguishing” threats that were “dissipated by the distribution of cultural assets, by the existence of
physical and psychological ‘hinterlands,’ and by the cushioning function of institutional diversity and independence.” Even the cataclysm of World War I was a contained event. “Diversities,
distances, and differences, systematic inefficiencies of civilization in themselves,” he argued, “provided the recuperative forces necessary to maintain continuity.” But in the intervening years,
the “extension of technology in the service of civilization” had enabled human beings to move “into every suitable niche, and even into some not so suitable.” The increasingly “efficient,
economical infrastructure” required to sustain this process carried with it an unacknowledged price. “Modern technological efficiency in the provision of food, water, energy, medicine,
transport and communication,” he wrote, has been “oriented toward economic affordability without much attention to complex network fragility.” Pointing to the “interlocking technologies”
that underpin the “fragile dynamic cycle of production, transportation, and consumption” in contemporary societies, Kupperman argued that the “greater a society’s dependence for survival
on its technological infrastructure, the greater its vulnerability to a collapse triggered naturally or artificially at a key point.” Like biological organisms, contemporary human societies could not
manage “fundamental system failures multiplying at a biological rate.” “A critical point is reached,” Kupperman warned. “A cascade of organ-system failures ensues, and death comes quickly.”
Modern civilization, in developing technologies oriented to furthering the “ends of human life,” had created a system whose “success and importance to social survival make it, ironically, one
of society’s greatest weaknesses.”18

In the 1970s and 1980s, the kinds of hazards that Kupperman identified—what sociologist Ulrich Beck describes as “modernization risks”19—were taking on a new kind of public and political
life. Economic and energy shocks, environmental crisis, and terrorism garnered increasing attention alongside the paradigmatic specter of catastrophic risk, thermonuclear war, which raised
the prospect, for the first time, of self-inflicted human extinction. 20 Kupperman’s reflections are especially significant for our story given his career trajectory, which passed through some of
the mostly forgotten technical domains in which, we show in this book, the vulnerability of vital systems was identified and addressed as a matter of governmental concern. In 1980,
Kupperman served the incoming Ronald Reagan administration as the head of the transition for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which President Jimmy Carter had
created by executive order in 1979. Prior to that, during the 1960s and early 1970s, Kupperman had worked in one of FEMA’s predecessors, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). As
director of the Systems Evaluation Division within OEP, Kupperman oversaw studies on “the impact on the Nation’s security and economy created by emergency contingencies of both military
and nonmilitary nature,” examining issues such as natural disaster assistance, the continuity of government, damage assessment, resource management, and the “survivability of networks
related to national preparedness.”21

The arc of Kupperman’s career points us to a broader question: How did it become possible to understand collective existence in the United States as dependent on a complex of vital and
vulnerable systems, and how did the protection of such systems come to be a taken-for- granted obligation of contemporary government? In the chapters that follow we show that, for nearly
a century, a persistent discourse has examined collective life from a particular point of view: the vulnerability of modern society and economy to disruption of the vital systems on which they
depend. And since at least the early Cold War, the federal government has been concerned with ensuring the continuous functioning of such systems in the face of catastrophic threats. Today,
this problem of “vital systems security” is a central object and aim of government, defined in legislation, executive orders, and broad statements of security strategy.

REFLEXIVE BIOPOLITICS

We analyze the emergence of vital systems security as the product of a mutation in the government of modern life. Specifically, it marks a reflexive moment in the history of “biopolitics”—that
is, the government of human beings in relation to their biological and social existence. Michel Foucault famously coined the term “biopolitics” to mark a shift, dating roughly to the late
eighteenth century, in the aims and objects of government in European countries: from the “classical sovereignty” of the European territorial monarchies to a new governmental concern with
ensuring the health and well-being of national populations.22 Classical sovereignty, Foucault argued, ruled “from the standpoint of the juridical-political notion” of the legal subject.
Diplomatic, military, and police apparatuses—elements of what might be called “sovereign state security”—aimed to ensure the security of the state itself in the face of foreign and domestic
threats. By contrast, biopolitical government is exercised over the population—a collection of living beings understood as a “technical-political object of management.” Foucault traced the
“birth of biopolitics” to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Europe, when government authorities sought to manage the health and welfare of populations in growing urban centers.
The rapid growth of towns, the expansion of industry, the intensification of trade, and increasingly crowded living conditions posed “new and specific economic and political problems of
governmental technique.” In response, officials, planners, and experts in the nascent human sciences invented new forms of knowledge about—and devices for governing—the “fine
materiality of human existence and coexistence, of exchange and circulation.”23 As Foucault emphasized, the point is not that the birth of biopolitics displaced prior mechanisms of
sovereignty; indeed, particularly with the advent of total war, threats to sovereignty were a key catalyst for the development of biopolitics. Rather, the theme of biopolitics designates the
interplay between the exercise of juridical power over legal subjects and the technical management of living beings.

Building on Foucault’s analysis, scholars have traced the development of biopolitical government in a range of domains from the early nineteenth century. In efforts to reduce the toll of
epidemics, organize conscription for war, or manage economic fluctuations, government bureaucracies generated vast amounts of data about phenomena such as birth, illness, and death;
suicide and crime; and levels of production and employment.24 This “avalanche of numbers,” as Hacking puts it, made possible a new, statistical understanding of collective life.25 The
technical and political category of risk played a central role in this development, enabling experts and government officials to quantitatively analyze how phenomena such as crime, illness,
accident, and poverty were distributed over a given population, and to assess the costs and benefits of measures to minimize these risks.26 New governmental apparatuses in areas such as
economic regulation, urban planning, and public health specified and managed these problems. As Foucault describes this complex process, a “constant interplay between techniques of power
and their object” served to “carve out” the population and its specific phenomena (birth and death rates, disease processes, etc.) as a “field of reality.” 27

We take up this story of biopolitical modernity at a later conjuncture and in a different locale. Beginning in the early twentieth century, American planners and policymakers in various domains
argued that with the development of mass industrial and metropolitan societies, the interdependencies that made modern collective life possible also rendered it vulnerable to catastrophic
disruption from events such as economic shocks, industrial accidents, or wars. Over the following decades, experts and officials addressed this vulnerability by devising new ways to anticipate
and mitigate the effects of such events, to reduce the vulnerability of vital systems, and to make society resilient to shocks.28

The first governmental apparatus for securing vital systems was assembled in the 1950s. In the early Cold War, planners and officials working on nuclear preparedness brought together a set
of elements— knowledge forms, techniques of intervention, and organizational arrangements—that constituted system vulnerability as a target of governmental intervention. Like the
demographers, public health experts, and urbanists of the nineteenth century, mobilization planners produced an “avalanche of numbers” about collective existence, not through statistical
analysis of populations but by using scenarios, catastrophe models, and vulnerability assessments. Through this process, society became vulnerable in a novel way. Like the figure of population
a century earlier, a new figure of collective life—the vulnerable, vital system—was “carved out” as an object of expert knowledge, technical intervention, and political concern.

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this apparatus of vital systems security had been extended into new domains, including natural disaster response, pandemic
preparedness, the management of economic crises, and homeland security.29 This is not to say that vital systems security displaced prior forms of security or became the dominant form of
collective security. As we will show, vital systems security emerged and consolidated in complex relation to sovereign state security and population security. Thus, the officials and planners in
the 1950s-era Office of Defense Mobilization viewed the task of ensuring the functioning of vital systems in the wake of a nuclear attack as a matter of sovereign state security—prevailing in a
future war.30 Meanwhile, vital systems security has become central to many domains of biopolitical government, including the provision of population security in areas such as public health,
urban planning, and economic governance. Indeed, we suggest that vital systems security should be understood as a form of “reflexive biopolitics.” It shares the aim of population security:
ensuring the health and welfare of populations. But these two forms of biopolitical security differ in their objects of concern, knowledge practices, and norms (see table 1). Whereas population
security addresses regularly occurring events that can be managed through the distribution of risk, vital systems security deals with events whose probability cannot be precisely calculated,
but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic. Vital systems security does not rely on statistical analysis of past events, but rather employs techniques of enactment such as
catastrophe models and scenario-based exercises to simulate potential future events and thereby generate knowledge about present vulnerabilities.31 Its interventions seek to increase the
resilience of critical systems and to bolster preparedness for future emergencies.

A NEW POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Our claim is not that governmental concern with vital systems is itself novel. Governments have long been concerned with vital systems like roads, communication networks, and large systems
of water management. The construction and control of transportation, energy, and communication systems—what has only recently come to be called “infrastructure”—is found in all large-
scale complex societies. 32 Territorial empires have for centuries recognized what were referred to as “communications” as essential to prosperity and security. And military strategists have
long been concerned with the importance of transportation and communication for military lines of supply; the military tactic of blockade goes back millennia.33 But from the late nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century, we observe a significant intensification and modulation of these concerns. In particular, three features distinguish vital systems security as a political
rationality and delimit the conceptual and empirical scope of this book: first, its relationship to biopolitics; second, the emergence of specialized expertise about vital systems; and third, the
consolidation of a new political norm—that governments must ensure the ongoing functioning of vital systems in the face of catastrophic threats.

Vital systems and modern biopolitics. First, we can refer to vital systems security in the sense we use the term here only with the emergence of modern biopolitics. Electricity networks,
railroads, and complex chains of production became “vital systems” when they were linked to newly constituted problem domains such as the national economy or social welfare.34 Although
this development can be traced to the late nineteenth century, particularly in European contexts,35 our narrative begins in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. We
focus on two apparently disparate fields: regional planning and strategic bombing theory.36 Experts in these fields initially used biological metaphors to illustrate the dependence of collective
existence on what Muir Fairchild, an instructor at the US Army’s Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s, called “life-sustaining vital systems.”37 Fairchild’s term suggested that, like the failure of
vital organs or the breakdown of circulatory systems in a biological organism, the disruption of such systems would be catastrophic to the social body. As another Air Corps instructor put it in
1938, as the United States had “grown and prospered in proportion to the excellence of its industrial system,” it had become “more vulnerable . . . to wartime collapse caused by the cutting of
one or more of its essential arteries.”38 The use of such biological metaphors would fade over time (though never disappear, as Kupperman’s 1984 report demonstrates). But from the case
studies of the Air Corps Tactical School and the quantitative analyses of “criticality” and “essentiality” in wartime and postwar facilities ratings to contemporary assessments of critical
infrastructure vulnerability or resilience, experts have defined the “vitality” of vital systems, and the threat posed by their disruption, in terms of these systems’ role in the health and well-
being of populations—the central concerns of biopolitical government.

System vulnerability expertise. Second, vital systems security is distinguished by the development of specialized knowledge that constitutes vital systems and their vulnerability as objects of
expert analysis and rational-technical intervention. By the mid-twentieth century, technical specialists and officials working in mobilization and air-targeting agencies had devised new practices
for assessing vulnerability and preparing for future events that might disrupt the nation’s vital systems. This new form of expertise rested on the accumulation of a vast amount of information
about American natural resources, productive facilities, and public works—what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to in 1935 as an “inventory of our national assets.”39 Such
expertise also drew on techniques for analyzing the interrelationships among the elements that this “inventory” comprised. Although specialists from many fields were involved in constituting
vital systems—and the vulnerability of these systems—as objects of systematic knowledge, economists played a particularly prominent role. Economists first appear in our account during the
New Deal, inventing a “science of flows” to analyze how shocks would propagate through the economic system, whether these shocks resulted from a plunge in demand during economic
downturns or from a surge in demand caused by government stimulus policies or wartime mobilization. A number of these New Deal economists then migrated to air intelligence offices during
World War II, where they developed an “economics of strategic target selection” to assess the vulnerability of enemy production systems and to recommend bombing targets.40 A decade
prior to the development of “systems analysis” at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, these mobilization planners and air intelligence specialists established methods for the quantitative
analysis of military-industrial complexes as ensembles of interlocking vital systems.41

In the closing years of World War II and the early Cold War, technical experts coupled the analysis of vital systems with new methods for modeling how a catastrophic event—such as an
incendiary bombing attack on a city (during World War II) or an atomic detonation (after the war)—would unfold in space. As we show in chapter 3, these experts produced a new kind of
knowledge about vital and vulnerable systems. Initially, military analysts in air intelligence units used graphical techniques such as maps and transparent overlays to generate assessments of
urban and industrial vulnerability. By the mid-1950s, vulnerability experts had replaced maps and physical overlays with digital computers and geographically tagged data sets—a precursor of
geographic information systems (GIS). The advent of computer simulation added another dimension to vulnerability analysis. By incorporating randomization procedures and multiple
simulated runs in their models, vulnerability specialists could account for uncertainties about how a future attack would unfold. These simulation techniques—initially used as speculative
“experiments” or “war games” 42 as part of nuclear preparedness planning (see chapter 6)—have come to be accepted in various domains as authoritative tools for generating knowledge
about uncertain future events.43

Vital systems security as political obligation and norm. Third, and finally, vital systems security refers to an increasingly taken-for- granted norm of politics. After World War II, the task of
ensuring the continuous operation of vital systems and managing the risk of catastrophic disruption came to be accepted as a basic obligation of sovereign government. This was not the first
time that the US government was expected to deal with the consequences of domestic catastrophes. As Michele Landis Dauber has documented, there is a long American tradition of federal
relief following disasters.44 But prior to the middle of the twentieth century, these governmental responses were ad hoc, organized in the wake of what were understood to be unforeseeable
“acts of god.” 45 Only in the last several decades has government been held responsible for preparing in advance of future catastrophes that can be anticipated if not precisely predicted. And
only in the last several decades has this obligation been addressed, at least in part, by technical measures that aim to ensure the functioning of vital systems.

The first statutory mention of this new governmental obligation (discussed in chapter 4) was in the 1947 National Security Act. The Act created a new peacetime mobilization agency—the
National Security Resources Board (NSRB)—and charged it with undertaking measures to protect “industries, services, Government and economic activities” whose “continuous operation”
Congress deemed “essential to the Nation’s security.” 46 The NSRB was a defense mobilization agency, in which the norm of “preparedness” still referred to military-industrial readiness for
war. But planners working in government agencies charged with preparedness gradually adapted these techniques to address other kinds of potentially catastrophic events, such as hurricanes,
floods, and infectious disease outbreaks. By the 1960s, the norm of preparedness could refer to any event that might catastrophically disrupt the nation’s vital systems. The organization of
responsibility for emergency preparedness has shifted almost constantly over the subsequent decades, and attention to this problem has ebbed and flowed. But the task of ensuring the
continuous operation of vital systems is now a virtually unquestioned—if not always successfully met—obligation of contemporary government.

An “Administrative Machinery” for Governing Emergencies

The prior section described how experts and officials constituted system vulnerability as an object of specialized knowledge and a target of governmental intervention during the Depression,
World War II, and the early Cold War. But on its own, this description of expert knowledge and technical interventions is too serene. It is too serene, in part, because these “interventions” into
vital systems were closely linked to projects— whether war mobilization, strategic air targeting, or nuclear preparedness—that involved the mass slaughter of civilians, the annihilation of
cities, and, after World War II, the prospect of nuclear holocaust.47 It is also too serene because the developments we have described corresponded to an upheaval in American government.
Technical experts and government officials often instituted the mechanisms of vital systems security through “emergency” measures that challenged American political traditions, such as
deference to legislative prerogative and judicial precedent, as well as a diffuse and decentralized pattern of sovereignty. An account of the emergence and consolidation of vital systems
security must, therefore, address the fraught relationship between emergency powers and constitutional democracy.

As a point of entry into these questions, we turn to the writings of a prominent midcentury American commentator on crisis government, political scientist Clinton Rossiter. Rossiter began his
seminal study Constitutional Dictatorship, published in 1948, with a question that President Abraham Lincoln had posed at the outset of the American Civil War. “Is there in all republics,”
Lincoln asked, “this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Had Lincoln been alive on the eve
of World War II, Rossiter observed, he could have “framed his question in more modern terms.” Was it possible for a democracy to “fight a successful total war and still be a democracy when
the war is over?” For Rossiter, writing just after the end of World War II, the “incontestable facts of history” had provided an answer. “We have fought a successful total war,” Rossiter
declared, “and we are still a democracy.” In this “severe national emergency,” the US government had employed “devices and techniques” that made it “strong enough to maintain its own
existence without at the same time being so strong as to subvert the liberties of the people it has been instituted to defend.” 48

In what follows, we show that the “devices and techniques” Rossiter referred to were the product of efforts by governmental reformers who, during the New Deal and World War II, sought to
meet the challenge that, they thought, emergency situations posed to constitutional democracy. These reformers assembled what Rossiter called an “administrative machinery” that would
enable the US federal government, especially its executive branch, to manage emergency situations through expert rule without recourse to an extra-constitutional state of exception. They
believed, like Rossiter, that in an era of pervasive doubt about the prospects for democracy, they had successfully responded to the “taunt of the dictators” that “democracies cannot meet the
demands of the modern world and still remain democratic,” as the reformer Luther Gulick put it in 1941.49 Our aim in describing these reformers’ efforts is not to assess the validity of such
claims. Rather, it is to reconstruct how they formulated and sought to address the problem that emergencies posed to democratic constitutionalism. Their responses shaped a distinctive
political technology for governing emergency situations.

DEMOCRACY, EMERGENCY, AND THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE

Our account begins in the early twentieth century. At this time, Progressive reformers argued that, as Charles Merriam put it in 1933,
governments had “to undertake new activities” to address intensifying processes of urbanization and industrialization.
Among these new activities were the management of “public welfare, including education, recreation, health, social relief, and
welfare planning”; the construction of public works , such as “highways and aid to communications”; and the “central
control over social and economic forces .”50 The challenge, Merriam and other reformers held, was that American
governmental institutions, which were set up when the United States was a largely rural and sparsely populated country, were ill suited to the
functions required of what they referred to as a “positive state” that was involved in managing the health, well-being, and conditions of
existence of a rapidly growing and an increasingly urban population. Merriam described this mismatch as “social lag” and argued for
governmental “adjustment.”51 On the one hand, technical experts would have to play an expanded role in political administration. On the
other hand, such an “adjustment” would require a significant shift in the locus of political authority: centralization to address issues that
crossed local jurisdictional boundaries and decisive executive leadership to manage urgent social and economic problems.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, administrative reformers succeeded in instituting significant changes
along the lines Merriam and other Progressives prescribed. Initially, their efforts focused on state and local governments, as they sought to deal
with the growing pressures of urban growth and industrial expansion. By the 1930s, in the context of the New Deal, these reformers turned
their attention to the national level and the federal government, where they confronted the “emergency” situations of the Great Depression
and World War II. Between 1933 and 1945, federal agencies took on a vast range of new functions relating to the
provision of social welfare , economic management , and industrial mobilization .52 To better equip the
federal government —particularly the executive branch—to meet these new demands, Progressive reformers working in and
around the Roosevelt administration pushed through a series of laws and administrative changes. Partly as a result of their efforts, the
American presidency, which began the 1930s as a solitary office with a small staff, emerged from the war as a powerful office that oversaw an
array of agencies , wield ing formidable discretionary powers.53 [FOOTNOTE] 53. Waldo (Administrative State)
referred to the federal government that emerged from World War II as the “administrative state.” On the expansion of the
Executive Office of the President (EOP) in particular, see Relyea, Executive Office. As one indicator of the growth of this apparatus of executive
rule, President Hoover’s staff consisted of thirty-three people; today, more than two thousand people are on the EOP’s staff. [END FOOTNOTE]
New expert bodies were scattered throughout the executive branch, and new mechanisms of rational-technical administration were woven into
laws and regulations.

Perceived US weakness causes global nuclear war.

Grady Means 21, Former Policy Assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Retired American
Business Executive, MA in Economics and Engineering from Stanford University, 8/30/2021, “Biden
Brings The World Closer To Nuclear War,” https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/569732-biden-
brings-the-world-closer-to-nuclear-war

Over the past six months, the world has edged closer to nuclear war than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The
Doomsday Clock is ticking toward midnight. The global power balance has been dramatically reshuffled , and the potential for
disastrous miscalc ulation hasn't been so high in 80 years . The match and fuse for this is instability — an exaggerated sense
of U.S. weakness and lack of capability and resolve — that could lead to huge , aggressive military
miscalc ulations and mistakes by our enemies . The Biden administration has set the table for such a catastrophe.

The timing could not be more dangerous. China has changed strategic direction and has been building its nuclear stockpile
and delivery systems. China also has continued to develop hypersonic weapons, including stand-off “carrier killers,” space
weapons and cyber capabilities to blind opponents’ strategic and conventional systems. Russia has been advertising (mostly for
domestic consumption, but nonetheless worrying) its “unstoppable” delivery systems, and has a very capable nuclear stockpile
and military. Iran will continue to move forward with building nuclear weapons . Pakistan and India both have
significant nuclear capability in an increasingly unstable part of the world. Nuclear-armed North Korea is again assuming a more belligerent
posture. Israel has a full nuclear triad (land, air, subs) to respond to existential aggression. The U.K. and France have significant nuclear
deterrents. The world is a powder keg.

In Hollywood terms, today’s capacity for nuclear [catasrophe] holocaust is thousands of times greater than the
era portrayed in the Armageddon films “On the Beach,” “Fail Safe,” or “Dr. Strangelove.” There would not be anything left for “Mad
Max.” Climate disasters may be unfolding over the next hundred years. Nuclear disaster is unfolding now. COVID-19 has killed more Americans
than the flu typically does. Nuclear war could kill us all . Our leaders must get their priorities straight.

The plan solves---it supplies necessary labor to critical federal functions.

Daniel Carpenter 20, professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of
social sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; and Darrick Hamilton,
associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs,
Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research,
2020, “A Federal Job Guarantee: Anti-Poverty and Infrastructure Policy for a Better Future,”
scholars.org/contribution/federal-job-guarantee

2. Jobs to support federal agencies. Direct government hiring by federal agencies would be essential for many
reasons. First, in a polarized political environment, it is quite possible that some states may obstruct cooperation with federal government
employment. Having a robust program of federal hiring , including directly in uncooperative states, would broaden the
distribution of benefits and mechanize the mandate for guaranteed employment . The federal
government has a well-established personnel system that has expanded before: witness the
mobilization of government employment after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, including the creation of a new Cabinet-
level department and the launching of new agencies such as the Transportation Security Agency (TSA).

Congress should both create new federal programs and fund federal agencies to expand existing
programs . The kinds of programs can and should be shaped by the imperative social, political, and economic needs of the American
republic.

What kinds of programs and what kinds of jobs make the most sense?

Public health infrastructure . The news that we get on a daily basis on COVID-19 comes largely from the numbers collected by state
health departments, agencies that are usually invisible but ever a bulwark against the most daunting health threats. Yet state and local health
agencies have shed capacity since the 1980s. Then came the Great Recession. From an already weakened state, the American public health
system has lost 55,000 jobs since 2008. Reliable estimates suggest that the deficit in American public health infrastructure amounts to at least
250,000 additional jobs. An
assertive program of public hiring would include nurses, physicians,
epidemiologists, health care aides, mental health professionals, social workers, health clinic
administrators, workers to perform contact tracing for this and future pandemics, and building services
workers like janitors.
Rebuild our crumbling cities. Urban infrastructure would be an important part of any American rebuilding effort, but key to rebuilding America’s cities would be to invest in the public hospitals,
health clinics, schools, and libraries (including informatics and digital training centers) that would promote both civic engagement and human capital formation. Construction jobs alone to
build the new buildings and renew the older ones required for first rate public health, education, and library systems in cities and towns could provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, with
many more in buildings operations and maintenance. Funding these positions would also allow governments to target black and brown communities and lower resourced communities in
general who have traditionally been passed by in government employment programs.

Expansion of rural programs through augmented postal services. The post office is the branch of government that Americans probably know best, with offices in essentially every zip code in
the country. Until 1970, the Post Office Department provided banking services in its branches, providing an important tool of savings that dated from the Progressive Era. Over one hundred
countries around the world offer a postal banking option. In addition to banking services, post offices could be augmented to provide rural broadband (not merely network extension but
installation and repair consultations), health and wellness clinics, and claims processing for federal programs. Building upon our postal system would leverage existing infrastructure and
provide rural benefits.

There are approximately 35,000 post offices in the United States, with just under 500,000 employees. Each office that adds banking services would add an employee or more. Transforming the
post office into a local service provision agency would offer the opportunity for the creation of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of jobs.

Preschool, Pre-kindergarten and childcare for all. Americans have been confronting the reality that many jobs in our rapidly evolving society require an education beyond that provided by the
K-12 system. Proposals for a vocationally-focused 13th and 14th grade have emerged, whether through reformed public school systems or through community college and vocational school
expansion. In the other direction, pre-kindergarten and pre-school programs have important precedents in Head Start and have been shown to bring a wide range of social, economic, and
cultural benefits. As the economist Randy Albelda has argued, programs like these, as well as expanded child-care and after-school options, can augment parents’ ability to participate in the
labor force while also delivering educational benefits to their children as students. Important educational and non-economic by-products would include better student-to-teacher ratios,
augmented tutoring, and increased student services.

Infrastructure and the Green New Deal. Important proposals for a Green New Deal – a series of programs that invest heavily in the renovation and transformation of our energy infrastructure
and prepare the country for the energy revolution in wind and solar power – have been written about elsewhere. Yet direct government employment on the model of the Civil Works
Administration, Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps would efficiently and robustly serve the ends of environmental economic transformation in the United
States. Jobs could include solar panel installation for existing buildings as well as new panel grid installation, windmill installation, white roof installation, and concomitant investments in
energy storage. A system that complemented the repair of the federal highway system could install new networks of electric charging stations across the country, including in urban and rural
areas.

As the example of Vermont shows, “clean energy” and “green energy” investment has the potential to create thousands upon thousands of living-wage jobs that span a range of skills. Solar
energy has begun to provide more jobs than fossil fuel companies in the United States. With the impending downturn in oil and gas hiring, and with the continuing downturn in coal-related
employment, important investments in these areas would provide jobs in the energy industry just as they are drying up elsewhere.

Construction and conservation work, including the Great Lakes, rivers and oceans. Massive job losses are occurring in states and communities that depend heavily upon water, whether the
Atlantic or Pacific Coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, or America’s many river systems that are crucial for transport. Jobs available include rivers and harbors construction and
conservation, toxic waste mitigation, invasive species mitigation, and coastline construction to prepare for rising ocean levels.
Job training and education. Every kind of job imagined here will require labor supply adjustments . The federal
government used to have expansive job training programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and
Training Act created in 1973 and the Job Training Partnership Act that followed it. Studies of these programs were mixed on
their efficacy, but Congress could create new programs or directly fund state universities and community colleges to do so.

The key here is that completion of a job training program should come with the assurance of a productive job
with at least a living wage at the end.
State elections administration and voter registration. Election administration in the United States rests at the level of state government, and
this capacity, too, has withered. Direct government employment programs would be used to strengthen the administration of motor-voter
laws, provide non-volunteer poll workers, supply workers to increase the registration of minority populations, make voting more accessible for
the elderly as well as the young, and provide nonpartisan information to empower urban and rural citizens alike to vote.

Investing in Indian Country. An expansion of hiring by the Bureau of Indian Affairs could directly employ tribal members to work on Indian
reservations throughout the United States, in positions ranging from health and education to conservation and infrastructure. Such an
expansion would help the United States government meet the needs of a non-white population that is now fast-growing but which remains
highly impoverished and often left aside from both economic innovation patterns and social welfare programs that target urban concentrations.

Legislative and regulatory capacity . Although it won’t be the source of millions of jobs, America’s Article One branch has
seen its capacity wither in recent years, losing important analytic capacity with the downsizing of the Government
Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office and the elimination of the Office of Technology
Assessment. Committee staffs have also declined. As a result, a bipartisan, cross-spectrum network of observers has called for a
reinvestment in congressional capacity. Such a reinvestment will be all the more important if any kind of direct government employment
program comes to pass, as the dispensation of funds and working conditions must be overseen by the people’s representatives.

These congressional jobs need not be centered in Washington, D.C. Congressional staffers who oversee the work of
the Veterans Administration hospital system, or who monitor the progress and employment conditions of
infrastructure projects , or who facilitate and monitor state and local government use of federal workers, could be employed
across the geography of the U nited S tates.

Important federal agencies in the regulatory , scientific and health space have also shrunk . The C enters
for D isease C ontrol has been shedding jobs since the Bush Administration. The F ood and D rug A dministration
has expanded, but much more heavily in staffing to approve drugs and much less to monitor imports and
pharmaceutical and medical device safety. And as two public health leaders have recently proposed, the federal
government could fund and structure a public service program to boost the supply of vital physicians by 20,000
medical students in the near-term of the pandemic.

The capacity of state legislatures , state agencies , and local governments is also worryingly weak . Indeed,
critics such as Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey have pointed to the lack of personnel in decision-making agencies –
and their increasing reliance on lobbyists – for decisions that frequently benefit special interests at the expense
of the common good. Federal block grants to hire staff and increase the research capacity of state legislatures and agencies to analyze complex
issues could have broad benefits for citizens through reducing regulatory capture and better decisions.

Conclusion

America seems stuck on “stimulus” as metaphor and model. Indeed, a federal j ob g uarantee not only stimulates , it
eliminates involuntary unemployment, the concept of working poverty, provides an automatic business-cycle
stabilizer, and ensures a more resilient and secure public infrastructure .
As millions file for unemployment amid the economic disruption cause by COVID-19, the primary response in Washington has
been to rely ever more on the
Fed eral Reserve as an instrument of social policy, to provide u nemployment i nsurance
for those out of work, and to provide further inducements to small businesses. While valuable, these
policy moves do everything
but directly provide jobs to those who need them . The limits of the American policy discourse will become
apparent in the weeks and months to come, when corporate profits and asset values begin to rebound but millions
of our fellow citizens remain without work and the meaning, structure, and benefits it provides. Americans can claim the mantle of
the New Deal past while consciously avoiding the racism that limited its providence. And Americans can claim the mantle of the
future by transform ing our country into one ready for the energy revolution and the next pandemic ,
while investing in urban and rural communities that have been too often left behind during the past three decades, as
economic gains have flowed overwhelmingly to a small percentage of Americans and corporate titans at the very top.

Unprecedented crises demand unprecedented action. The pandemic calls for restructuring, not just re-stimulation. Far from
a temporary state of affairs, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis instead exposes the rot in our republic , the severe weakness

of our society, and the frailty of a purportedly robust economy where, even with record-low official unemployment
rates, four in ten Americans reported before the pandemic that they would be unable to meet a $400 emergency with their savings.
2AC---Glenbrooks---Rd 5
Stagnation Advantage
 AT: Crowdout Link---Turn---2AC
Turn---the plan increases private sector jobs via worker transition---that’s Ehnts
<For reference>

Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04

Moreover, the JG facilitates workers’ transition from the JG into the private sector . As business theory
details, firms prefer to hire those who have previously been employed over those who have been
unemployed as the previously employed have been exposed to on-the-job training and demonstrated working commitment. Accordingly,
the JG , which provides on-the-job training and requires continuous working commitment , lowers the
hiring costs of firms. Lower hiring costs mean that the private sector is able to expand its production
capacities more quickly if demand should exceed current production capacities, thereby reducing the risk
of demand-pull inflationary pressures . On top, as the JG provides the private sector with a pool of
committed workers from which they can draw, the JG provides a brake for wage increases not related to
productivity increases, which prevents feeding a wage-price spiral . Lastly, and in distinction from traditional
pump-priming , the JG does not compete for market prices as it hires off the bottom , where there is no
private-sector employer who wants to employ at the minimum wage (Mitchell and Muysken 2008, Mosler 1997,
Tcherneva 2018). Compared to the typical, non-JG based aggregated demand management, the JG offers superior characteristics.
Traditional pump-priming does not immediately help the most disadvantaged members of society, does not
incorporate a counter inflation mechanism , does not address any public purpose concerns given that
market allocations are the basis for employment expansion, does not address regional disparity related to the
local concentration of economic activity and employment. On top, pump-priming might encounter real resources caps

that trigger demand-pull inflation before everyone is hired (Mitchell and Muysken 2008).
 AT: Crowdout Link---Internal---2AC
a) Macroeconomics---crowding out the private sector is irrelevant---demand is the
controlling factor for growth---slips in supply won’t affect stagnation---that’s Dantas
and Storm.
<For reference>

Flavia Dantas 22, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York; and
Larry Wray, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at the Bard College, 2022, “Secular Stagnation: as good as it
gets?” Handbook on Economic Stagnation, Chapter 15, ISBN: 978-0-12-815898-2

In contrast to the above, we argue that the secular stagnation experienced in the US economy since the 1970s is, and has been,
a problem of chronic insufficient demand . We do not reject the notion that productivity is important or that supply side
constraints might arise (as they recently have with the COVID-19 pandemic), but insufficient aggregate demand has been the
primary reason for historically low growth rates observed over the period of analysis in rich, developed capitalist countries such
as the United States. However, we also reject Summers’ secular stagnation hypothesis—that is, that secular stagnation in the US is
caused by an imbalance between saving and investment that has reduced the equilibrium real rate of interest to very low, or even negative
territory. Our argument is that slow growth of demand is the cause of slow growth of investment ; in addition (as
Vatter and Walker argued—see the chapter by Wray), the supply boost to capacity increasingly exceeds the demand
side multiplier effect of investment. This compounds the problem of insufficient aggregate demand to
operate at full capacity—which reduces the incentive to invest .

<For reference>

Servaas Storm 19, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 12/12/2019, “The Secular Stagnation of Productivity Growth,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Working Paper No. 108, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp108
5. Wage growth as a determinant of productivity growth

In the supply-side explanation of secular stagnation (of Figure 1), productivity growth is treated as an exogenous variable, and if and when it
declines, real wage growth is forced down — because profit-maximizing firms will not allow unit labor costs to increase. What is neglected in
this narrative, however, is that causality may run in the opposite direction as well: indeed, real wage growth is found to be a
major determinant of productivity growth (Gordon 1987, 2015; Foley and Michl 1999; Marquetti 2004; Basu 2010; Storm and
Naastepad 2012). Theoretically, the influence of real wage growth on labor productivity growth has been variously explained in terms of
‘induced technical change’ (Hicks 1932; Funk 2002; Brugger and Gehrke 2017), ‘Marx-biased technical change’ (Foley and Michl 1999; Basu
2009), or ‘directed technical change’ (Acemoglu 2002) — but the key mechanism is this: rising real wages, as in the U.S.
economy during the period 19 48 -19 72 (Table 2), provide an incentive for firms to invest in labor-saving
machinery and productivity growth surges as a result; but when wage growth is low , as in the U.S.
during 1972-2015 (Table 2), businesses have little incentive to invest in the modernization of their capital
stock and productivity growth falters .

Seen this way, labor productivity growth is endogenous and (at least partly) determined by real wage growth . If so, then
the secular stagnation of productivity growth in the U.S. economy must be attributed at least partly to the long-term
decline in the growth rate of U.S. hourly real wages. This is illustrated in the mnemonic of Figure 2 by the arrow from
‘permanently low real wage growth’ to ‘decline in labor productivity growth’. The decline in real wage growth in turn is strongly
associated with the post-1980 reorientation in macroeconomic policy, away from full employment and
towards low and stable inflation, which paved the way for labor market deregulation , a scaling down of social
protection, a lowering of the reservation wage of workers, and a general weakening of the wage bargaining power of
unions (Storm and Naastepad 2012). The recent rise in persons ‘working in alternative work arrangements’ in the U.S. (Katz and Krueger
2016) is merely the culmination of this earlier trend. To empirically illustrate this point, Figure 3 shows that there is a statistically significant (at
1%) positive long-run relation between the degree of unionization and real wage growth in the U.S. (1948-2015). The association is remarkably
strong: all by itself, the secular decline in unionization ‘explains’ about two-thirds of the long-term fall in real wage growth — which minimally
suggests that domestic regulatory changes leading to greater job and income insecurity have contributed to real wage restraint.

However, real wage stagnation generates additional damage to potential output growth, as is illustrated in Figure 2. Stagnant real wage
growth adds to the aggregate demand shortage , which lowers capacity utilization and capital stock growth in
eq. (15), or alternatively, it reduces utilization and TFP growth in eq. (14). Either way, potential growth gets hurt — and
economic growth slows down . The recognition that real wage growth is a major driver of productivity
growth holds an important insight for macroeconomic policy, as Robert Gordon (1987, pp. 154-155) explains:

b) Private productivity---wage increases elicit waves of productivity, avoiding the

impact to crowdout---that’s Storm.
<For reference>

Servaas Storm 19, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 12/12/2019, “The Secular Stagnation of Productivity Growth,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Working Paper No. 108, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp108
5. Wage growth as a determinant of productivity growth

In the supply-side explanation of secular stagnation (of Figure 1), productivity growth is treated as an exogenous variable, and if and when it
declines, real wage growth is forced down — because profit-maximizing firms will not allow unit labor costs to increase. What is neglected in
this narrative, however, is that causality may run in the opposite direction as well: indeed, real wage growth is found to be a
major determinant of productivity growth (Gordon 1987, 2015; Foley and Michl 1999; Marquetti 2004; Basu 2010; Storm and
Naastepad 2012). Theoretically, the influence of real wage growth on labor productivity growth has been variously explained in terms of
‘induced technical change’ (Hicks 1932; Funk 2002; Brugger and Gehrke 2017), ‘Marx-biased technical change’ (Foley and Michl 1999; Basu
2009), or ‘directed technical change’ (Acemoglu 2002) — but the key mechanism is this: rising real wages, as in the U.S.
economy during the period 19 48 -19 72 (Table 2), provide an incentive for firms to invest in labor-saving
machinery and productivity growth surges as a result; but when wage growth is low , as in the U.S.
during 1972-2015 (Table 2), businesses have little incentive to invest in the modernization of their capital
stock and productivity growth falters .
 AT: China GDP Low---2AC
China’s growth is far outpacing the US.
Manoj Joshi 22, Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, "Is the United States in a
state of irretrievable decline?," 7/25/2022, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/is-the-united-
states-in-a-state-of-irretrievable-decline/

When compared to China, the US has seen a decline . In purchasing power parity terms, the US’ share of the
global GDP has declined from 50 percent in 1950 to 14 percent in 2018, whereas China’s has
surpassed it at 18 per cent. The Chinese population is four times larger than that of the US and its economy has
been growing three times faster . Other areas such as R&D and STEM education are also growing fast in China.
If the present trends are projected 20 years ahead, one can get an idea of the coming Chinese dominance .
Where once, in the 1950s and 1960s, American assistance built up Europe and transformed the educational and agricultural sector in India and other countries,
China has come up with Belt and Road Initiative to provide hard infrastructure across the world. While there
is a lot of talk about how countries have gotten into a debt trap through Chinese projects, the reality is that the Chinese are the only game in

town . Between 2001 and 2018, China provided loans worth US$ 126 billion to African countries and invested US$ 41
billion. While the US has been trying to match the Chinese, it has little to show for it as of now. The latest
proposals of the G7 to unleash US$ 600 billion remain only on paper.
T-FR
 T---‘FR’ (Taxes)---2AC
Their interp misunderstands the budget. Taxes are not collected before spending.
Pavlina Tcherneva 18, Associate Professor at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 4/2018,
“The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper
Collection, Working Paper No. 902, https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_902.pdf

It is also important to point out that government programs cannot be “prefunded” via tax collections . Program
budgets are appropriated ahead of time , allowing the necessary spending to take place. Tax collections
are a reflux , after the spending has occurred, and the amount of taxes collected varies with the health
of the economy and in precisely the opposite direction to the needs of the program.

In recessions the JG requires increased funding, exactly at a time when tax revenues decline . So raising
taxes to prefund the program is not only impossible , but trying to do so will be counterproductive , the
income that the government provides to the unemployed needs to be a net injection in the economy , not
offset by taking away income somewhere else in the economy.

Fiscal redistribution is done through taxes, transfers, or both

Lane Kenworthy 8, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona,
1/15/2008, “Government Benefits, Inequality, and Employment,”
https://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/472.pdf /jpb

Redistribution is one of the principal mechanism s through which countries secure low income
inequality. Maintaining moderately high wage levels at the low end of the distribution may be
increasingly difficult and perhaps even counterproductive from an egalitarian perspective (Kenworthy
2008, ch. 5). If so, redistribution is likely to become even more critical. Redistribution can be achieved
through the tax system , via government transfers , or both . In practice , however, very little
redistribution is accomplished via taxation, and a shift toward greater use of taxes to achieve
redistributive ends is unlikely . Benefits, therefore, may be the key to successful pursuit of low
inequality for affluent countries.
Econ DA
 U---Inflation---2AC
Inflation’s out of control.
Bryan Mena 11/12, reporter for CNN, 11/12/2023, "Americans are losing faith that inflation will
return to normal. The Fed is terrified," https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/12/economy/stocks-week-
ahead-could-americans-get-used-to-inflation/index.html

A worrisome sign for the Fed eral Reserve is starting to emerge.

The Fed keeps a close eye on several risks that could make its job of taming inflation even more difficult, such as
red-hot consumer demand keeping some upward pressure on prices and the possible effects of geopolitical tensions in the
Middle East on oil prices .

But the US central bank also pays close attention to whether Americans still have faith inflation will eventually
return to normal. That faith seems to be eroding .

The University of Michigan’s latest consumer survey released Friday showed that Americans’ long-run inflation
expectations rose to 3.2% this month, the highest level since 2011 .

And those perceptions could continue to get worse the longer it takes the Fed get inflation back to its 2% target. Fed
officials don’t
expect inflation to reach 2% until 2026 , according to their latest economic projections released in September.

If the re’s one thing that would make the Fed quake in its boots , it would be worsening inflation
expectations .

“If we find that consumers or businesses are really starting to feel like that long-term level of inflation … is
creeping up, if that’s their expectation, we’ve got to act and we’ve got to get that under control ,” Atlanta Fed
President Raphael Bostic told Bloomberg earlier this month.

If Americans lose faith that inflation can ever return to normal that would prompt the Fed to tighten
monetary policy even more — either by raising interest rates or keeping them elevated for much longer than
expected.

The Fed’s benchmark lending rate is currently at a 22-year high and investors already expect the central bank to keep rates higher for longer.

“I worked at the Fed for six years and if inflation expectations are drifting higher and they’re not under control,
the Fed absolutely will act ,” Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust Investment Advisors, told CNN.

“That is the one thing that gives them trouble sleeping at night. They don’t lose sleep over recessions because they come and go,
but they do lose sleep over long-term inflation expectations drifting higher,” he said.

It’s unclear if inflation expectations will continue to worsen, and the Fed looks at a broad range of surveys, not just the
University of
Michigan’s. But the university’s survey is one of the most closely watched by investors and economists.

The Fed specifically focuses on long-run inflation expectations and Fed Chair Jerome Powell makes it a point to mention the
state of Americans’ inflation perceptions at every news conference after officials set monetary policy (which
happens eight times a year.)
During his most recent post-meeting presser earlier this month after officials voted to hold rates steady, Powell said “longer-term inflation
expectations appear to remain well anchored.”

But the clock is ticking, inflation remains well above 2% and some economists believe the last mile of the Fed’s inflation fight
might be the most difficult .

“I remain willing to support raising the federal funds rate at a future meeting should the incoming data indicate that progress on
inflation has stalled or is insufficient to bring inflation down to 2% in a timely way,” Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, one
the Fed’s most hawkish officials, said last week at a New York Bankers Association forum in Palm Beach, Florida.

The keyword there is “timely.”

Sticky inflation could possibly “un-anchor” inflation expectations or elicit a consistent deterioration in
Americans’ perception on inflation. But it’s unclear how long it would take for persistently high inflation to cause that.

That’s a result of factors unrelated to wages---there is zero uniqueness.

Servaas Storm 23, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 5/4/2023, "Profit Inflation Is Real," https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/profit-
inflation-is-real
However, Lavoie is wrong when suggesting, as a more or less universal stylized fact, that “the rise in profits and the profit share can be
explained without resorting to an explanation based on firms taking advantage of the situation and raising markup rates.” In principle, profit
inflation could also be due to increases in the profit markup —and the empirical evidence for the U.S.
share
shows that the increase in the American profit share is overwhelmingly caused by a steady increase in the
markup . For the U.S., the Netherlands, and also other Eurozone economies, the rise in profit mark-ups has been the main
driver of (gross output price) inflation . Higher prices of intermediate ( energy ) inputs have certainly added to
the inflationary pressure (while at the same time, raising the profit share). Of course, these outcomes reflect conflict inflation—but
today (unlike during the 1970s), the outcome is not a wage-price spiral but a profit mark-up-price spiral. Lane is
completely right when concluding that “ wages had had only a limited influence on inflation over the past two
years .”

The evidence on profit inflation was first ignored and then denied— ‘serious’ economists were laughing at and then attacking those
proposing that higher mark-ups were a major driver of inflation. However, their attitude has changed now that the evidence has become
so solid that denial of profit inflation is no longer plausible . Illustrating this new attempt to neutralize the debate on
corporate profiteering, Jon Sindreu, writing in the Wall Street Journal of May 25, 2023, argues that “’Greedflation’ is real—and probably good
for the economy.” His point appears to be that corporations have been able to hike their profit mark-ups only because customers have kept
spending money; seen this way, the higher profit markup and higher inflation are to be blamed on an excess of aggregate demand.

Blaming excess demand is grist to the mill of conservative and libertarian economists who, following Milton Friedman,
have the particular habit of blaming every problem on the state and fiscal profligacy, especially when the incumbent
administration is a Democratic one. To illustrate the point: economists of the Cato Institute (Lincicome 2023) reject the diagnosis
of profit inflation , arguing that American consumers, rich in cash because of Biden’s supposedly ‘all-too-generous’
pandemic income relief checks, have created a surge in (nominal) demand growth, and during this ‘consumption boom’,
it was completely ‘natural’ for corporations to increase their profit margins (mind you, they’re not talking about mark-ups). Corporations
are not charities and because of their obligation to maximize value for their shareholders, they have to reap whatever windfall profits
they can get.
This particular argument focused on an excess demand does not hold water , however, because it ignores the
negative effect of higher prices on real incomes for the large majority of U.S. households. To make the
point, we can use data from the Congressional Budget Office (2022) which shows how different U.S. households are affected differently by the
rise in inflation. CBO held quantities of consumption constant by considering an average bundle of goods and services purchased in that year by
households in each quintile of the income distribution.[2] The results are shown in Figure 10.

[Figure 10 omitted]

inflation forced U.S. households to spend much larger shares of their incomes on consumption
It is evident that
in 2022 than in 2019 if they wished to buy the same consumption bundle as they had bought in 2019. The share of consumption in the
income of households in the lowest income quintile would have had to rise by 21% to make up for the elevated prices of
the unchanged consumption bundle, while households in the second and third quintiles would have needed to increase 16% and 13.6%,
respectively, of their incomes just to maintain their consumption levels at the level of 2019.

In other words, consumption demand of the poorest 80% of U.S. households did not and could not increase a
lot —and clearly did not cause an excess of aggregate demand and cannot , therefore, be blamed for
causing ‘ profit inflation ’. What happened instead, as has been documented by Ferguson and Storm (2023), is that aggregate demand
in the U.S. economy did increase, thanks to unprecedented gains in household wealth during 2020-22, particularly for the richest 10% of US
households. Wall Street Journal’s Jon Sindreu may well be right in arguing that moderately elevated demand allowed price-setting corporations
to raise their mark-ups—but, as explained by Ferguson and Storm (2023), this price gauging is, without doubt, bad for the U.S. economy. I
conclude by concurring with ECB President Lagarde that “it’s important that competition authorities could actually look at those [price gauging]
behaviors, and I would certainly regard that as perfectly called for.”
 Link Turn---2AC
Turn---the plan prevents all recessions by operating countercyclically with the private
sector---that’s Ehnts.
<For reference>

Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04
Having outlined the general framework of the JG, this section elaborates on the macroeconomic impacts of the JG focusing on aggregated
demand management, price stability and trade. The JG works as an automatic countercyclical stabilizer . During the
business cycle, the JG increases public employment and government spending as jobs are lost in the
private sector and decreases public employment and government spending as the private sector activity
expands . In this regard, the effect of the JG is comparable to regular unemployment compensation, which prevents aggregated demand
from plummeting during a recession, except for the fact that the JG prevents involuntary unemployment and large
output gaps from occurring. As consumers’ spending patterns are much more stable when someone
gets a job as compared to unemployment compensation , especially in countries where unemployment compensations
are only temporary, the JG and its increase in government expenditure is the real stimulus that the economy needs in
order to recover from recessions . Moreover, the JG perfectly builds on the insight that aggregated demand management is the
responsibility of the government and cannot be left to the private sector. While the private sector-led stimulus , e.g. triggered via
monetary policy, is related to an increase in private debt , a JG-based fiscal policy creates net financial assets for
the private sector, i.e. it puts purchasing power directly into the pockets of actors in the private sector.
Clearly, since the currency issuer and the currency user operate under a different logic – the users of a currency being constrained by revenue
and subject to default risks while the issuer of the currency is not – a government-led economic stimulus is financially
more sustainable than a private sector-led one (Mitchell, Wray and Watts 2016, Murray and Forstater 2013a, Tcherneva 2018,
Wray 2015, Wray et al. 2018).
 AT: Inflation Link---Turn---2AC
Turn---the plan prevents all inflationary and deflationary cycles by creating a price
anchor---their ev doesn’t assume the current, volatile NAIRU approach---that’s Ehnts.
<For reference>

Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04

While the current NAIRU approach uses a buffer stock of involuntary unemployed as a means to
achieve price stability, the JG aims for price stability by using an employed buffer stock , also referred
to as NAIBER (non-inflation accelerating buffer employment ratio) (Mitchell and Muysken 2008). While
the JG is not designed to address all sources of inflation (deflation), the employed buffer stock
addresses inflationary and deflationary pressure alike in a countercyclical way as the buffer stock
fluctuates with the business cycle . The fixed JG wage effectively works as a wage and price anchor .
The government being the sole issuer of the currency, has the same pricing power as other monopolists
have. Under the JG approach, the government makes use of this power by setting the base wage for
labour offered in exchange for the currency issued. All other prices float at the market level but will
reflect nominal value relative to the price set for one hour of labour offered in the JG. This anchoring
mechanism is missing in the NAIRU approach and makes the JG a superior tool to stabilize prices
(Mosler 1997, Wray 1997).
 AT: Inflation Link---Defense---2AC
a) Macroeconomics---the economy’s operating at a demand deficit, meaning there’s
only a risk of demand catching-up to supply---their ev relies on biased, antiquated
models---that’s Storm.
<For reference>

Servaas Storm 19, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 12/12/2019, “The Secular Stagnation of Productivity Growth,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Working Paper No. 108, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp108

6. Conclusion: weak demand growth pulls down potential output growth

The theoretical arguments and empirical ev idence presented in this paper make the case for demand-led secular
stagnation in the U.S. economy since the early 1980s. Obviously, no single chart or empirical test “proves” the case. Rather the
case rests on a historical analysis of multiple pieces of evidence, which all point in the same direction.
The present theoretical analysis and the evidence, when taken together, do lead to an unmistakable conclusion:
demand is leading supply , in the short as well as in the long run — which is an insight that runs counter to today’s ‘decided opinion’.
The important dynamic macro channels through which demand growth influences potential output growth, listed in Figure 2, deserve more
attention in research.6 After all, it is through these channels that stagnant business investment leads to a slower adoption of new technologies,
a more limited space for learning by doing and exploiting economies of scale, and — as Hansen rightly argued — a discouragement to (demand-
pull) initiatives to uncover further possibilities for innovation.

Recognizing the importance of demand growth to long-run growth has profound and radically upsetting consequences for macro policy-making.
Indeed, the all-too-neat separation between a ‘Keynesian’ short run and ‘supply-determined’ potential growth in the long run breaks down —
and so do standard notions and measurements of ‘potential’ output growth and ‘output gaps’ (Fontanari et al. 2019). What must be recognized
is that structurally weak demand growth forces down potential growth, whereas faster demand growth ,
supported by more expansionary, full-employment oriented fiscal and monetary policies, raises productivity growth
and potential output. Conventional ( supply-side ) measures of potential output which ignore the dynamic demand-side
channels, systematically
overemphasize the ‘ inflation barrier ’ and methodically underestimate the margins
for expansion of actual output (Fontanari et al. 2019) and thereby legitimate a structural deflationary bias in macro policy (Storm
and Naastepad 2012; Girardi et al. 2018; Storm 2017). What is not recognized is that higher demand may gradually remove the scarcities and
bottlenecks which in the short run might create inflation pressures. To illustrate this important point: as shown by a model analysis of Fazzari et
al. (2017), it is entirely plausible for changes in demand growth from something like 1% to 3% to be
accommodated by endogenous adjustments of supply, without generating additional inflation. Hence, we
need new , more realistic and less biased measures of potential output growth, which take the dynamic impacts of
demand on potential growth into account and remove all the unwarranted deflationary policy biases of existing
approaches.

The unwarranted deflationary bias shows up in constant needless fiscal austerity , the abandonment of demand management in order to
maintain full employment, overly restrictive monetary policy, and real wage stagnation (and rising income inequality), which jointly explain
most, if not all , of the secular stagnation (as has been argued here). Real wage restraint directly reduces labor-
saving technological progress and productivity growth. Moreover, when the top income-earners (‘the 1%’) are allowed to
capture most of the growth, the economy’s central function to recycle income back into demand is deeply compromised. As real incomes
stagnate for the large majority of households, weak aggregate demand in turn feeds into sluggish business
investment and a decline in capital deepening and ultimately into a slowing down of productivity growth
and potential growth (Figure 2). Stagnation is a sad instance of iatrogenesis, as it is a pathology caused by the exact economists whose task it is
to improve the economy’s health. To do better, we must look more deeply at shifting social norms that affect wage setting and allow higher
inequality, and think creatively about how income growth can be restored across the distribution. Understanding these issues is difficult;
designing effective macro policies to keep up demand growth in line with full employment and with potential growth may be even harder. But
one thing is clear: unless we discard ‘decided opinion’ that secular stagnation is an exclusively supply-side
phenomenon and recognize that demand drives growth ‘ all the way ’ (see Taylor et al. 2019), macro policy will
retain its deflationary biases and secular stagnation remains the ‘ normal ’. Hansen had it right after all.

That disproves raising prices---firms will increase utilization of existing production

facilities, NOT jack up prices---that’s Ehnts.
<For reference>

Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04
Depending on the actual size of the JG wage, its implementation might result in a one-time price adjustment, and a related compositional shift
in the workforce, i.e. the ratio of employment numbers in the JG relative to those in the private sector are affected. If the JG wage were
set too high , it would draw workers from the private sector into the JG, leading to a one-time price (and
wage) increase due to an increase in worker’s income and firms’ costs for hiring new workers or retaining current
employees. However , in today’s demand-constrained , underutilized economies, it is reasonable to
expect that firms are more likely to increase utilization of their production facilities than to increase
prices . On top, the initial income push could enable debt repayments and satisfy saving desires . On the
contrary, if the JG wage were set too low, it would result in one-time price decrease as private sector’s income would be insufficient to realize
the desire to accumulate the net financial assets in the currency and purchase firm’s output resulting in increasing inventories, layoffs and
downward pressure on prices and wages. As the JG wage is not indexed to any other prices, it has no internal
mechanism that feeds a wage-price spiral in any direction . Adjustment is supposed to be one-time events that do not
result in inflation (deflation) defined as continuous rise (fall) in the price level.

i. Wage increases…
<For reference>

Servaas Storm 19, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 12/12/2019, “The Secular Stagnation of Productivity Growth,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Working Paper No. 108, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp108
5. Wage growth as a determinant of productivity growth

In the supply-side explanation of secular stagnation (of Figure 1), productivity growth is treated as an exogenous variable, and if and when it
declines, real wage growth is forced down — because profit-maximizing firms will not allow unit labor costs to increase. What is neglected in
this narrative, however, is that causality may run in the opposite direction as well: indeed, real wage growth is found to be a
major determinant of productivity growth (Gordon 1987, 2015; Foley and Michl 1999; Marquetti 2004; Basu 2010; Storm and
Naastepad 2012). Theoretically, the influence of real wage growth on labor productivity growth has been variously explained in terms of
‘induced technical change’ (Hicks 1932; Funk 2002; Brugger and Gehrke 2017), ‘Marx-biased technical change’ (Foley and Michl 1999; Basu
2009), or ‘directed technical change’ (Acemoglu 2002) — but the key mechanism is this: rising real wages, as in the U.S.
economy during the period 19 48 -19 72 (Table 2), provide an incentive for firms to invest in labor-saving
machinery and productivity growth surges as a result; but when wage growth is low , as in the U.S.
during 1972-2015 (Table 2), businesses have little incentive to invest in the modernization of their capital
stock and productivity growth falters .

They prevent inflation while increasing overall growth---that’s Storm.

<For reference>

Servaas Storm 19, Ph.D. in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Senior Lecturer at Delft
University, 12/12/2019, “The Secular Stagnation of Productivity Growth,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Working Paper No. 108, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp108

Higher wage growth may raise inflation considerably less than expected, in other words, because the rate
of potential growth goes up in response to the increases in productivity , demand and actual output
induced by the extra wage growth (see Figure 2; Storm and Naastepad 2012; Storm 2018; Girardi et al. 2018; Fontanari et al. 2019). If
so, the reverse holds true as well: sluggish business investment in the U.S. has been a key factor behind the stagnation of TFP growth and has
also been responsible for propagating hysteresis-like adverse consequences for TFP and potential output after 2008 (see Hall 2014; Ollivaud et
al. 2016; Fazzari et al. 2017; Cynamon and Fazzari 2017; Girardi et al. 2018). This conclusion only becomes stronger once we acknowledge the
‘cumulative causation’ at work: sluggish investment weakens aggregate demand and this, in turn, weakens accumulation through the
‘accelerator effect’ — which was Nicholas Kaldor’s argument — as well as real wage growth, which reduces the rate of labor-saving
technological progress (as argued here). Both ways, cyclical and/or structural demand shortfalls must carry over into lower growth of potential
output.

ii. Training---the JG lowers hiring costs for the private sector, allowing companies to
increase production to match demand---that’s Ehnts.
<For reference>

Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04

Moreover, the JG facilitates workers’ transition from the JG into the private sector . As business theory
details, firms prefer to hire those who have previously been employed over those who have been
unemployed as the previously employed have been exposed to on-the-job training and demonstrated working commitment. Accordingly,
the JG , which provides on-the-job training and requires continuous working commitment , lowers the
hiring costs of firms. Lower hiring costs mean that the private sector is able to expand its production
capacities more quickly if demand should exceed current production capacities, thereby reducing the risk
of demand-pull inflationary pressures . On top, as the JG provides the private sector with a pool of
committed workers from which they can draw, the JG provides a brake for wage increases not related to
productivity increases, which prevents feeding a wage-price spiral . Lastly, and in distinction from traditional
pump-priming , the JG does not compete for market prices as it hires off the bottom , where there is no
private-sector employer who wants to employ at the minimum wage (Mitchell and Muysken 2008, Mosler 1997,
Tcherneva 2018). Compared to the typical, non-JG based aggregated demand management, the JG offers superior characteristics.
Traditional pump-priming does not immediately help the most disadvantaged members of society, does not
incorporate a counter inflation mechanism , does not address any public purpose concerns given that
market allocations are the basis for employment expansion, does not address regional disparity related to the
local concentration of economic activity and employment. On top, pump-priming might encounter real resources caps

that trigger demand-pull inflation before everyone is hired (Mitchell and Muysken 2008).

c) Fixed wage---avoids the price spiral---that’s Ehnts.

<For reference>

Dirk Ehnts 19, Ph.D. in economics from University of Oldenburg, research assistant at the Chair for
European economics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany; Maurice Höfgen, M.A. in
economics, member of the Samuel Pufendorf Society for Political Economy, 2019, “The Job Guarantee:
Full Employment, Price Stability, and Social Progress,” Society Register, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 49-65,
https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2019.3.2.04
Depending on the actual size of the JG wage, its implementation might result in a one-time price adjustment, and a related compositional shift
in the workforce, i.e. the ratio of employment numbers in the JG relative to those in the private sector are affected. If the JG wage were
set too high , it would draw workers from the private sector into the JG, leading to a one-time price (and
wage) increase due to an increase in worker’s income and firms’ costs for hiring new workers or retaining current
employees. However , in today’s demand-constrained , underutilized economies, it is reasonable to
expect that firms are more likely to increase utilization of their production facilities than to increase
prices . On top, the initial income push could enable debt repayments and satisfy saving desires . On the
contrary, if the JG wage were set too low, it would result in one-time price decrease as private sector’s income would be insufficient to realize
the desire to accumulate the net financial assets in the currency and purchase firm’s output resulting in increasing inventories, layoffs and
downward pressure on prices and wages. As the JG wage is not indexed to any other prices, it has no internal
mechanism that feeds a wage-price spiral in any direction . Adjustment is supposed to be one-time events that do not
result in inflation (deflation) defined as continuous rise (fall) in the price level.

A one-time jump isn’t inflation.

Pavlina Tcherneva 18, Associate Professor at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 5/25/2018,
"The Job Guarantee and the Economics of Fear: A Response to Robert Samuelson," https://multiplier-
effect.org/the-job-guarantee-and-the-economics-of-fear-a-response-to-robert-samuelson/

And if none of the above scares you, critics want you to fear the program’s inflationary effects that are supposed to result from
raising the program’s wage to $15 per hour by 2022. That would establish an effective national minimum wage—
raising it from the current abysmal $7.50 an hour to $15 per hour. As wages rise, it is true that that the price level will probably increase as
employers adjust to higher labor costs.

But Samuelson, like others, confuses a key issue : a one-time increase in the price level is not inflation
(i.e., a continuous rise in the price level ). Our model finds negligible inflationary impact from the
program and we stress its key anti-cyclical feature : the program shrinks in expansions—i.e., it is
a dampening force on inflation.
Ukraine DA
 Won’t Pass---2AC
It won’t pass & PC is already depleted.
Abigail Hauslohner et al. 11/14 – Jeff Stein, Dan Lamothe and Jacob Bogage, WaPo, “Amid
competing U.S. security priorities, Ukraine could get left behind”, 2023,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/14/ukraine-aid-congress/

Ukraine is running out of money and time, its proponents say. But congressional interest in financing its fight
against invading Russian forces has dipped lower than ever, and rising competition from other national
security priorities — including Israel and the U.S. southern border — could sound the death knell for
continued American aid for its embattled European ally.

Both Democrats and Republicans have alluded to this possibility in recent days, as Congress hurtles toward a
government shutdown and stands virtually no chance of attaching Ukraine aid to any measure aimed at preventing that. The
Pentagon, meanwhile, has warned that its provisions for Kyiv are getting “smaller and smaller.”
“We are at risk of failing, of handing Putin a victory right when he is on the verge of defeat,” Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) told his Senate
Foreign Relations Committee colleagues, invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin during a deliberative hearing last week that appeared
engineered to shore up support for President Biden’s request for another $61 billion for the war. But Republicans are increasingly
hesitant — and distracted.
Congress has less than a week to hash out a short-term bill to avert a government shutdown, before federal funding expires Saturday. Even
then, lawmakers probably will have to spend the next two months trying to reconcile deep differences to pass larger funding plans for the year
ahead.

The growing prospect that Congress, amid this chaotic landscape, will simply not approve additional aid for Ukraine
could have major geopolitical ramifications, undermining one of Biden’s central foreign policy objectives and affirming Russian optimism that
Western resolve would crack first in its bid to reclaim part of the old Soviet empire.

To date, Congress has appropriated some $113 billion to assist Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, providing armored
vehicles, air defense systems, artillery, drones, munitions and more, which Ukrainian forces have used to destroy a significant amount of
Russian weaponry and vehicles and oust the Russians from some key towns, the Biden administration says.

The president’s request for Ukraine is part of a $106 billion national security package that would also provide emergency funding for Israel as it
prosecutes a retaliatory war in the Gaza Strip after Hamas militants pulled off a brazen cross-border attack last month; for initiatives to deter
China throughout the Asia-Pacific region; and to address the surge in illegal immigration through the U.S.-Mexico border.

Republican lawmakers’ appetite for further helping Ukraine has been declining for many months,
however, even before the nation’s much-anticipated summer offensive failed to produce any dramatic
breakthroughs, as polling has showed a steady descent in the American public’s once robust support. In
recent months, a small but powerful faction of House conservatives has thrown the legislature into disarray,
further hindering the passage of liberal or bipartisan priorities. And now, Ukraine finds itself competing
for lawmakers’ attention.

Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) said in an interview that her Republican constituents are “of the opinion that, right at
the moment, Israel is a higher priority and that, if later we needed to revisit some of these other earlier priorities, it would be
appropriate to do so.”

Proponents in both chambers insist that a

bipartisan majority of Congress still favors sending aid to Kyiv, but even that
might not be enough to muscle through Biden’s request anytime soon.
The Republican-led House earlier this month approved a bill to pay for the administration’s requested $14 billion for Israel through cuts to the
Internal Revenue Service. The bill was a nonstarter in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the White House has said Biden would veto it. But
many Republicans say they remain unwilling to pass Israel aid — the most popular aspect of Biden’s request — as the package deal that the
White House and Ukraine’s backers had hoped to see.

“Ukrainefunding, I believe, if it’s worth doing, needs to stand on its own,” Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) said in an interview. “It
should not be in any way tied to Israel. These should be separate votes to show our districts exactly where we stand.”

One potential path forward that is under discussion in the Senate would see Ukraine aid lumped together with money to
combat illegal immigration — a top GOP priority. But it is unclear whether Democrats will be able to
compromise on certain Republican wish-list items that they see as unpalatable to their constituents.
“I want to be frank with you about our problem,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told three administration officials who appeared at last week’s
hearing. “People come up to me and say the following: ‘We have five, six thousand people a day crossing our border; we’ve got all these other
needs . . . Why is Ukraine important in that context?’”

“I hear that constantly,” Rubio added.

The uncertainty in Congress has prompted the Defense Department to “meter out” the appropriated funds that remain available for Ukraine
security assistance, which as of Thursday stood at about $1 billion, said Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Recent aid packages have
totaled less than $200 million, compared with earlier weapons deliveries that totaled $1 billion or more.

“We’re going to continue to roll out packages,” Singh said. “But they are getting smaller.”

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Monday that the United States’ ability to “fully fund” Ukraine’s needs “gets harder and
harder” with each passing week. “The window is closing,” he told reporters. “If we got the full funding,” the United States could arm the
Ukrainians “on a much more certain and consistent basis” to help them win the war, he said.

Ukraine also faces a massive budget deficit of $35 billion for next year, only a third of which is expected to be covered by its other principal
backer, the European Union. The former Soviet state has relied on U.S. funding to keep its government operational as Russia attempts to
bludgeon its economy. Failure to pass additional U.S. economic aid for Ukraine probably would force the country to cut huge numbers of
government workers and services, U.S. officials warned lawmakers last week.

“At this time there is no funding left for direct budget support,” Erin McKee, the assistant administrator for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S.
Agency for International Development, told senators on the Foreign Relations Committee. “Without further appropriations, the government of
Ukraine would need to use emergency measures such as printing money or not paying critical salaries, which could lead to hyperinflation, and
severely damage the war effort,” she said.

“Ukraine’s economic stability . . . is as vital as winning the war. If the economy collapses, Putin will have won,” McKee added later.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) is among those advocating

a path forward that keeps Ukraine aid
flowing by packaging it with major new immigration reforms. “For any of this supplemental security funding to pass the
Senate, we will also need to implement serious policy changes at the southern border,” he said in remarks last week.

But Senate Democrats have so far resisted some of the Republicans’ key immigration proposals, such as
redefining asylum qualifications, completing President Donald Trump’s border wall and requiring the detention of unauthorized migrants until
their court hearings. And it
is unclear if even a bipartisan Senate deal on immigration and Ukraine could pass
the far more conservative House.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has been assailed by some liberals for his proposal to restrict asylum and enlarge the border wall. They’ve
characterized such suggestions as a cynical effort to defeat additional Ukraine funding by linking it to an issue so contentious it could never pass
a bitterly divided Congress.

Lankford rejected that notion, telling The Post last week: “This is not an immigration bill. This is a border security bill.”

In the end, though, the competition for finite resources might prove too much for Ukraine aid to survive.
“One of the dangers we face in these three challenges,” Rubio said during last week’s hearing, referring to Israel, Ukraine and the southern
border, “is the trade-offs
that are going to have to happen. We’re gonna have to make policy decisions, because one of the
risks we run is being overextended.”
 No Internal---2AC
Other measures solve.
Hans Nichols 10-15, Political Reporter, Axios, "Team Biden Looks for Creative Ways to Help Ukraine,"
Axios, 10/15/2023, https://www.axios.com/2023/10/15/ukraine-military-aid-biden-creative.

With Congress paralyzed, the Biden administration is exploring — and implementing — creative ways to achieve its goals
in Ukraine without signoff from Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: U.S. allies are depending on military aid to fight wars in both Europe and the Middle East. The U.S. government itself faces a
shutdown in a month.

 But without a speaker of the House, it's hard to see how either war — or the U.S. government — will be funded.
 That's putting pressure on Biden officials to minimize the potential collateral damage from a problem — GOP infighting — that they
didn't create.

Driving the news: In Luxembourg this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to encourage European officials to take
concrete steps to capture the interest generated on some $200 billion in Russian assets held in European
accounts, according to a U.S. official.

 In Marrakech last week, Yellen helped convince G-7 finance ministers and central bankers to publicly
announce they are exploring the idea.
 This month, the
Pentagon announced it sent Ukraine more than 1 million rounds of Iranian
ammunition that it seized en route to Yemen.
 The Biden administration is also considering using an existing State Department grant program to help
Ukraine purchase weapons, Politico reports.
 No Impact---2AC

Teaching aggressors via Russia defeat is a myth---decision calculus and empirics.

Stephen Walt 22, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University,
6/2/2022, "Will Teaching Aggressors a Lesson Deter Future Wars?"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/02/will-teaching-aggressors-a-lesson-deter-future-wars/

Not every aggressive war ends in defeat, of course, but there seems to be no shortage of cases where aggressors were
badly beaten and more than a few where the people who started the war paid a large personal price for
their folly. Yet the lesson that “aggression does not pay” is typically ignored or forgotten . Why?

One reason is that the lessons of any given war aren’t always clear-cut , and reasonable people can draw different
conclusions from a defeat. Was going to war a bad idea from the start, or was defeat due to poor
implementation or just bad luck? The lessons from a failed war will also be discarded if policymakers believe
that this time is different , and that new knowledge , new tech nology, a clever new strategy , or a uniquely
favorable set of political circumstances will bring success this time around. One should never underestimate what
elites can talk themselves into if they really want to go to war.

A second problem—one highlighted in the work of the late scholar Robert Jervis—is that humans tend to place more weight on their own
experiences than on the experiences of others . Leaders in one country may be intimately familiar with their own
national history (though they have probably absorbed a self-serving version of it), but they will know and care less about what
happened to other nations in similar circumstances.

And it’s easy to dismiss another country’s failure by claiming their cause was not as just , their resolve not
as great , and their military not as competent as one’s own. Moreover, because decisions for war typically reflect a complex weighing of
threats, opportunities, expected costs, and alternatives, what happened to an other country in a wholly different conflict
may not loom large in their calculations.

Furthermore, leaders who start wars are often aware that there are risks involved , and they sometimes
recognize that the odds of victory are slim . Even so, they will “ roll the iron dice ” if they believe the alternative is
even worse . To take an obvious example, Japan’s leaders in 1941 understood that the United States was vastly stronger and that attacking Pearl Harbor was a
huge gamble that would probably fail. Nonetheless, they believed the alternative was bowing to U.S. pressure and giving up their quest for great-power status and
Asian dominance—an outcome they regarded as infinitely worse.
 PC Not Key---2AC
Biden is distracted and won’t push aid.
Amna Nawaz 10-9, Co-Anchor of PBS newshour, 10/9/2023, “Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on
pressure to elect House speaker after attack in Israel,” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/tamara-
keith-and-amy-walter-on-pressure-to-elect-house-speaker-after-attack-in-israel [Person speaking left for
added clarification]

Tam, you heard John Kirby tell Geoff earlier that he's very optimistic, feels very good that the White
House and the administration is
prepared to handle all of these multiple fronts , right, the war in Ukraine , countering China , and now

supporting Israel .

But what does your reporting show? Do they have both the p olitical c apital and the consensus to do all that ?
Tamara Keith:

What's fascinating is, President Biden last week announced that he was going to give a major address on Ukraine to try to make the case to the
American people that this is something that they should still care about and should still be invested in.

Now he may have to give a major address on Israel and Ukraine. And as I was looking into sort of the approach to that
speech, I talked to a number of allies of the White House who said that President Biden hadn't really made the

case to the American people .

Like, he had sort of been quiet on Ukraine for a domestic audience and that that was a mistake. Well, now you have
yet another front here. One thing that is important to point out, a big difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is, there
are not U.S. boots on the ground.
Amna Nawaz:

Yes.

Amy Walter:

Right.

Tamara Keith:

And that is a very big difference and something that the White House hasn't exactly driven home as part
of their pitch .
States CP
 CP---States---Fed Staffing Deficit---2AC
1. States solve none of the bureaucracy scenario---its descriptive of federal programs
being understaffed---explicitly says the federal-level is the problem---that’s Smith.
<For reference>

Noah Smith 23, professor at Stony Brook University, Ph.D. from the University of Michigan,
10/22/2023, "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy," https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-
needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy
This is a picture of Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a character from the comedy sci-fi movie Everything Everywhere All At Once — an IRS auditor who
hounds the immigrant protagonists mercilessly. I loved that movie, but I also thought Deirdre’s character was emblematic of a common and
unhelpful way that Americans tend to think about the civil service. Ronald Reagan famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the
English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” I think that antipathy toward government workers has filtered through
to much of American society — not just to libertarians or conservatives, but to many progressives as well.

I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity . We’ve outsourced many of our core
government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer
money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in
paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like
pandemics and — most importantly — war .
It’s time for us to bring back the bureaucrats.

Aggregate numbers give a decent general impression of how the United States’ civil service has withered over the
decades. This process began in the 1970s, before Reagan ever took power, and has continued to this day. The percent of American workers
employed by the government rose through 1975 and fell thereafter, interrupted only by recessions (in which government employees were less
likely to be laid off):

It’s worth noting that much

of this decline was at the federal level . State and local governments employ a lot of
people in public education and policing, which are both harder to cut:
 CP---States---2AC
a) Fiscally---they can’t print money---revenue constraints mean only the fed can back
the plan during recessions, when the plan requires the most funding---that’s
Carpenter.
<For Reference>

Daniel Carpenter 20, professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of
social sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; and Darrick Hamilton,
associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs,
Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research,
2020, “A Federal Job Guarantee: Anti-Poverty and Infrastructure Policy for a Better Future,”
scholars.org/contribution/federal-job-guarantee
1. Jobs to support state and local governments. State and local governments account for most of the government employment in the United
States, and they comprise an important part of our federalist system. In a range of policy domains – public health, education and job training,
infrastructure, health provision and conservation – it is state and local governments that have the legal authorities and historical capacities to
act. Yet state governments also have the weakest capacity to respond to an economic crisis . First, state
governments have nothing like the Fed eral Reserve to back their debt (this is one among several reasons that the
Federal Reserve has recently been looking into mass purchases of municipal bonds). They cannot print money . Second, state
governments lack the expansive revenue-generating capacity of the federal government. Beyond this, state
governments have in recent decades constrained their powers with b alanced b udget a mendment s , while a
number of states (Illinois and Connecticut are two examples) have badly underfunded pension systems, and still others have tethered their
income to commodity (especially petroleum) sales, which are at historically low prices and whose price declines have damaged state revenues.

b) Capture---states are prone to it---that tanks JG implementation---that’s Carpenter.

<For Reference>

Daniel Carpenter 20, professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of
social sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; and Darrick Hamilton,
associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs,
Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research,
2020, “A Federal Job Guarantee: Anti-Poverty and Infrastructure Policy for a Better Future,”
scholars.org/contribution/federal-job-guarantee

The capacity of state legislatures , state agencies , and local governments is also worryingly weak . Indeed,
critics such as Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey have pointed to the lack of personnel in decision-making agencies –
and their increasing reliance on lobbyists – for decisions that frequently benefit special interests at the expense
of the common good. Federal block grants to hire staff and increase the research capacity of state legislatures and agencies to analyze complex
issues could have broad benefits for citizens through reducing regulatory capture and better decisions.
Localities CP
 AT: Pietrovito---2AC
Concludes aff---decentralization is negatively correlated with redistribution. You cut
the literature review part, not the conclusion!
Filomena Pietrovito 23. Associate Professor, University of Molise - Department of Economics. Alberto
Franco Pozzolo b, Giuliano Resce c, Antonio Scialà. “Fiscal decentralization and income (re)distribution in
OECD countries’ regions.” Structural Change and Economic Dynamics.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X23000929#b66

From a theoretical perspective , the literature on the effects of fiscal decentralization on inequality can be
broadly classified into the two main strands of first- and second-generation theories of fiscal federalism (Oates, 2005, Weingast, 2014).
devolution to sub-central levels of
According to the first-generation theories (Musgrave, 1959, Oates et al., 1972, Stigler, 1998),
government of tax and expenditure reduces intra-regional income inequality, increasing inter-region inequality.
From an intra-regional perspective, if the central government acts as a benevolent agent who faces heterogeneous
preferences and has the objective of increasing residents’ welfare, a decentralized structure can exploit its information
advantage and its flexibility to provide public goods and services which are better targeted to citizens’
needs and preferences. However, from an inter-regional perspective, sub-national governments are less efficient than central
governments in implementing redistribution policies because their preferences may give raise to regional polarization. If low-income taxpayers
prefer to move to jurisdictions with generous local redistribution policies (e.g., universal provision of public services financed with progressive
taxation) and high-income taxpayers prefer instead to move away from such jurisdictions, absent national redistribution policies,
an equilibrium with low intra-regional income inequality and high inter-regional income inequality is
likely to emerge. In other words, individuals can “vote with their feet” and sort themselves into homogeneous communities where their
preferences are maximized and their differentiation is minimized (Tiebout, 1956). However, this view has been challenged for
at least two reasons. First, with imperfect inter-regional mobility and majority voting, decentralization of
redistribution policies may lead to Pareto improvements (Pauly, 1973). Second, if fiscal decentralization leads to
a sufficiently high per-capita income to overcome the inverse U turn described by Kyriacou et al. (2017), this may favor a
reduction in income inequality via a “Kuznets effect ” (Ezcurra and Rodríguez-Pose, 2013a).

[Their card ends]

Given the opposed predictions of theoretical models , the answer on the impact of decentralization on
income distribution needs to be assessed empirically . To this purpose, we conduct an analysis of the relationship
between fiscal decentralization and intra-regional income redistribution, based on regional level data on inequality and government revenues
and expenditures for 183 regions of 14 OECD countries.1

Our work builds on Tselios et al. (2012), but with three relevant differences. First, while they analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on
income inequality, we focus instead on income redistribution. That is, we are interested in assessing if the degree of fiscal decentralization plays
a role in the policy objective of reducing intra-regional differences in before-tax income distribution (i.e., differences within each region). In this
regard, it is worth recalling that fiscal decentralization, and related government policies, may affect income inequality through two main
channels: (i) changing market incentives; and (ii) favoring redistribution (Doerrenberg and Peichl, 2014). While the first channel mainly impacts
market inequality, i.e., pre-government intervention inequality (before tax and subsidies), the second channel affects disposable income
inequality, i.e., post-government intervention inequality (D’Agostino et al., 2020).

Second, we distinguish the redistributive effect of taxation on market income from that related to the provision of non-market income, for
example through public pensions.2 To address this issue, we adopt two alternative measures of income redistribution: (i) the difference
between the Gini index calculated on market income and the Gini index calculated on disposable income (after tax and cash benefits); and (ii)
the difference between the Gini index calculated on gross income (before tax but after cash benefits), as suggested by Galbraith et al. (2014),
and the Gini index calculated on disposable income.

Third, different from Tselios et al. (2012), we focus on two different measures of fiscal decentralization. One is a comprehensive qualitative
measure of fiscal authority at the regional level, developed by Marks et al. (2008) and used in several studies on the effect of decentralization
on macroeconomic variables, such as economic growth (Filippetti and Sacchi, 2016) and fiscal stability (Lago-Peñas et al., 2020). The other is a
quantitative measure of fiscal decentralization, based on the share of local revenues over total government revenues.

Our results show that income redistribution within regions is negatively associated with both the institutional
measure of fiscal autonomy and the quantitative measure of revenue decentralization . This finding is confirmed also
controlling for spending decentralization, that instead appears to have a positive association with income redistribution. Interestingly, and quite
reassuringly, our results are confirmed using both measures of income redistribution described above.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 sets the framework of our analysis, reviewing the literature that helps contextualizing
our contribution, and discussing our research questions. Section 3 presents the data, the empirical model, and some preliminary evidence
based on summary statistics. Section 4 discusses the results. Section 5 concludes.
Courts CP
 CP---Courts---AT: PQD---Turn---2AC
a) NAVAL POWER. Intruding on foreign affairs questions spills over and undermines
maritime warfighting
Maj. Charles Gartland 12, B.A. from the University of Alaska - Anchorage; J.D., cum laude, from
Gonzaga University School of Law, LL.M. from George Washington University Law School, United States
Air Force Judge Advocate Currently Serving As The Environmental Liaison Officer for the Air Force
Materiel Command, “At War And Peace With The National Environmental Policy Act: When Political
Questions And The Environment Collide”, Air Force Law Review, 68 A.F. L. Rev. 27, Lexis

Entertaining political questions in the courtroom has consequences , both legal and practical. The
argument for a national defense exemption to NEPA can be reduced to three bases: (1) the impracticality
of hearing national defense political questions in the courtroom; (2) the real-world impact that results;
and (3) that the very nature of injunction law causes the first two bases to blend in a manner that is
particularly virulent to national defense .
1. Policy and Politics in the Courtroom

Trident, Weinberger v. Wisconsin, and Callaway amply illustrate the issues that trial courts are unequipped to resolve, as
tactical, strategic, and fo reign po licy elements figure into national defense undertakings. n378 One
District Court judge hearing a NEPA case with foreign policy implications remarked on the oddity of the
testimony given in his courtroom, more akin to a "legislative hearing" than a trial. n379 As noted in McQueary v.
Laird, national security does not blend well with evidentiary hearings . n380

2. Real-World Adverse Impact to the National Defense

The consequences of judicial intervention in national defense can be more than academic : Army units
n381 and naval fleets not training adequately or at all , n382 [*68] nuclear tests jeopardized , n383 and
diplomatic missions put at risk . n384 Winter is but the most recent and highest profile example of unwieldy
judicial process outcomes: uniformed personnel devoted to being lookouts with binoculars and adjusting
sonar decibel levels as whales approach and disperse-- in the middle of a warfighting exercise . n385
3. The Nature of Injunction Law Forces Judicial Policy-Making

The law surrounding injunctions guarantees unsatisfactory results because the third and fourth prongs of the
injunction test in essence require the courts to make a policy choice that, in the national defense context
at least, involves the constitutional separation of powers. Some courts have simply avoided the
dilemma by ignoring the portion of the injunction test corresponding to the agency's equity and the
public interest in national defense, n386 while others have plainly considered the former to be more
important. n387 Either way, the NEPA injunction often decides a question that the Constitution and statute
intended to be handled differently.

Nuclear war
Seth Cropsey 18, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for American Seapower at Hudson Institute,
MA from Boston College, and Bryan McGrath, Founding Director of Delex Consulting, Studies and
Analysis, Former Deputy Director of the Center for American Seapower, “Maritime Strategy in a New Era
of Great Power Competition”, Hudson Institute Report, January 2018,
https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.hudson.org/files/publications/HudsonMaritimeStrategy.pdf

As a maritime nation, naval power is the U.S.’s most useful means of responding to distant crises , preventing
them from harming our security or that of our allies and partners, and keeping geographically remote
threats from metastasizing into conflicts that could approach our borders . A maritime defense demands a
maritime strategy. As national resources are increasingly strained the need exists for a strategy that makes deliberate choices to connect ends
(security) with means (money and the fleet it builds). This paper examines the need for a maritime strategy, discusses options, and offers
recommendations for policy makers.

After several decades of unchallenged world leadership, the U nited S tates once again faces great
power competition , this time featuring two other world powers. China and Russia increasingly bristle under the constraints of the post-
World War II systems of global trade, finance, and governance largely created by the United States and its allies, systems that the United States
has protected and sustained to the economic and security benefit of its citizens and the citizens of other nations. Both China and
Russia are demonstrably improving the quality of their armed forces while simultaneously acting
aggressive ly toward neighboring countries, some of which are US treaty allies. Additionally, both nations are turning
their attention to naval operations far from their own coasts, operations designed to advance national interests that
are often in tension with those of the United States.1

For the past several decades, US national security strategy has not had to contend with great powers. Instead, it has concerned itself primarily with building alliances designed to manage
regional security more efficiently by proxy, while devoting increasingly more resources to homeland defense and intelligence aimed at stemming acts of terror by Islamic radical organizations
and their followers. To the extent that the US position of leadership in the world was not threatened, this strategy was reasonable, if imperfectly pursued. Such a strategy will no longer suffice
in a world of great power competition, especially one in which powers of considerable—but unequal—strength are opposed. Unbalanced multi-polarity is an especially unstable condition, and
the United States is not effectively postured to manage that instability. Henry Kissinger divides the concept of world order into two parts: a normative system that defines acceptable action,
and a ‘balance of power’ arrangement that punishes the breach of such conventions2. As the underlying balance of forces shifts, states with different ideas of international order gain the
power to reshape the system. Thucydides’ ancient insight holds true – the rise in power of one actor threatens all others. Where such threat exists and if the balance of power between states
or coalitions approaches equilibrium, a “Cold War” between competing ideological camps occurs. In an unbalanced system, the stronger side is tempted to strike its weaker opponent while the
balance of forces is favorable. Unbridled competition for supremacy defined Europe during its bloodiest periods. Europe’s 16th and 17th century religious wars between Catholics and
Protestants and the global 20th century struggles between totalitarian ideologies and democracy both represent the natural end-state of unbalanced multipolar systems. Without norms to
restrain states and force to uphold these norms, violence is very likely.

Today’s international system is moving toward unbalanced multi-polarity. Unfortunately, the United States is not currently prepared to manage
such an international environment. If Americans want to preserve their nation’s secure and prosperous position as the world’s great power, the
United States must begin now to prepare strategically for what it will inevitably face. Otherwise, it will ultimately be forced into an increasingly
limited number of unattractive options to sustain its position of leadership.

There is little evidence that the people of the United States wish to see our position in the world
diminished . The 2016 Presidential Election raised important questions about the degree to which globalization has served the interests of
everyday Americans (and their perceptions thereof), while the two dominant US political parties have moved toward more protectionist
policies, at least as articulated by their nominees. Opinion polling indicates the divided nature of the American public on issues like free trade
and sustained foreign commitments.3 However, Americans remain cognizant of threats to the United States, and
favor maintaining America’s position as a great power by sustaining a strong military.4 Moreover, it would be
difficult to identify meaningful numbers of Americans who would sacrifice national security in favor of increased social spending, despite the
continuing rise in non-discretionary spending in the federal budget. Americansunderstand that the US position of world
leadership benefits the nation’s economy, its security, its allies, and the international order that has been the object of US
foreign and defense policy for over a century. They know that their lives would be diminished if this position of global leadership were
surrendered to an adversary or group of them. The paradox of the American experience is that the US is not simply a great power – it is an
exceptional power, for which ideals count as much as strength. The American public, despite its aversion to foreign
commitments, can rise to the occasion and respond to clear threats , as it has in both World Wars, the Cold War,
and after September 11th. The job of the policymaker , therefore, is to ensure America remains a great power , so
that when the occasion arises, it can act as an exceptional power.

It is critical then, for US political leaders to begin thinking more strategically about protecting and advancing America's position in the face of growing great power competition. This
monograph asserts that a strategy to support such a goal would necessarily be maritime in nature, leveraging this nation’s great geographical advantages in the service of its national power.
Sharing land borders with only two nations—both of whom are friendly to the United States—and separated from other great powers by vast oceans, the United States enjoys a security
position quite unlike that of any other nation. For over a century, it has been the unspoken (but doggedly pursued) national security aim of the United States to ensure that no power rise to
prominence in Asia or Europe so as to occupy a position there as dominant as the United States’ position in the Western Hemisphere. Were this to occur, not only could that nation then lock
the United States out of the resources and activity of that region, but it could also then eventually turn its attention to challenging our position in the Western Hemisphere.5

Underlying this approach is the reality that most the world’s activity does not occur in our own hemisphere , but in
Asia and Europe . American interests in these regions— political, diplomatic, economic, and military—are
considerable and growing . Protecting and sustaining those interests must remain a priority of American
policy, and maritime strategy is an effective tool in doing so.
Maritime strategy is a subset of grand strategy, and the relationship between the two is ably defined by Professor John B. Hattendorf of the Naval War College: “In its broadest sense, grand strategy is the comprehensive direction
of power to achieve particular national goals. Within those terms, maritime strategy is the direction of all aspects of national power that relate to a nation’s interests at sea. The navy serves this purpose, but maritime strategy is not
purely a naval preserve. Maritime strategy involves the other functions of state power that include diplomacy; the safety and defence of merchant trade at sea; fishing; the exploitation, conservation, regulation and defence of the
exclusive economic zone at sea; coastal defence; security of national borders; the protection of offshore islands; as well as participation in regional and world-wide concerns relating to the use of oceans, the skies over the oceans
and the land under the seas.6 dominant naval power—separated from its widely-flung interests by thousands of miles of open ocean—to develop and execute coherent maritime strategy. In a time of re-emerging
It is wholly appropriate for the world’s

great power competition, it is essential. The nation’s current maritime strategy7 is, unfortunately, not up to the task. It focuses insufficiently on great power competition; it does not recognize the rise in importance of conventional
forces in deterring great power war; it does not provide a theory of conventional deterrence appropriate to great powers and their likely objectives; it does not suggest a posture for naval forces that acts as an effective deterrent;
its derived force structure is too small and short on effective logistic support; it does not place sufficient value on naval partnerships with geographically important nations which may not be traditional partners; and it is silent on
the need for the nation to invest in a maritime industrial base that can enable an appropriate strategy. This monograph urges new thinking about maritime strategy, a strategy compatible with the United States’ responsibilities as
the leader of the free world, as well as the world’s premier political, military, economic, and diplomatic power. Such a strategy would seek to protect and sustain those leadership positions in the face of renewed great power
competition, competition that largely subsumes other, lesser security concerns. There will be those who view this approach as a return to “Cold War” strategic thinking, and we do not shy from this comparison. The United States
acted for decades as a coherent strategic actor when faced with expansionist Soviet totalitarianism, and it must act with equal coherence and resolve to contest China and Russia’s brands of aggressive mercantilism, regional
expansion, and contempt for established global order. There will be those who evaluate our suggestions in this paper and conclude that the nation cannot afford it, that the expense associated with moving to a maritime grand
strategy would imbalance the traditional “ends, ways, means” approach to the making of strategy. And while the ends, ways, means approach is generally relevant to military and operational strategy, it is unsuited to the making of
grand strategy for one very important reason. Unlike subordinate levels of strategy, grand strategy re-allocates, realigns, and re-orients a nation’s “means” to serve strategic “ends”. Military strategy starts with the proposition that
there is a certain resource level available to pursue its ends. Grand strategy starts with the sum of the nation’s output capacity, and then determines how it can most effectively be allocated to the achievement of strategic goals.

Short of war itself, there is nothing in American history that causes strategic realignment more reliably than a change in Administration, and we
wish to be part of that dialogue. We argue here for a new theory of deterrence , one that revises the Cold War approach in
which the Soviet Union was deterred from large-scale conventional attack by the threat of nuclear escalation. Under that rubric, one could
justifiably say that America’s conventional deterrent was dependent on its strategic deterrent. Today, the decapitating “ bolt from
the blue ” strike is even more remote than it was in the Cold War, and to the extent that nuclear
exchange between great powers is conceivable, it is far more likely to flow from conventional conflict
that has gone awry . Therefore, to deter nuclear war , we must deter conventional war . No aspect of
American military power will be more critical to deterring either nuclear or conventional super-power
war than seapower .
Set Col K
 2AC---AT: Set Col
Rejecting the state and emphasizing structure is a pessimism trap that stifles
indigenous agency and activism.
Sheryl Lightfoot 20, associate professor in Indigenous Studies at University of British Columbia, “The
Pessimism Traps of Indigenous Resurgence,” Chapter 10 in Pessimism in International Relations, pp 162-
170, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21780-8_10, pacc

Pessimism Trap 2: The State is Unified, Deliberate and Unchanging in Its Desire to Dispossess Indigenous Peoples and
Gain Unfettered Access to Indigenous Lands and Resources
In other words, colonialism by settler states is a constant, not a variable, in both outcome and intent. Further, the state is not only intentionally colonial, but it is also unified in its desire to co-opt Indigenous peoples as a method and means of control.

In 2005's Wasase, Alfred presents the state as unitary, intentional and unchanging in its desire to colonise and oppress Indigenous peoples noting, 'I think that the only thing that has changed since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that some of us have lost heart'.22
Referring to current state policies as a 'self-termination movement', Alfred states, 'It is senseless to advocate for an accord with imperialism while there is a steady and intense ongoing attack by the Settler society on everything meaningful to us: our cultures, our communities, and our
deep attachments to land'.23

Alfred's Peace, Power, Righteousness (2009) also argues that the state is deliberate and unchanging, stating quite plainly that 'it is still the objective of the Canadian and US governments to remove Indians, or, failing that, to prevent them from benefitting, from their ancestral
territories'.24 Contemporary states do this, he argues, not through outright violent control but 'by insidiously promoting a form of neo-colonial self-government in our communities and forcing our integration into the legal mainstream'.25 According to Alfred, the state 'relegates
indigenous peoples' rights to the past, and constrains the development of their societies by allowing only those activities that support its own necessary illusion: that indigenous peoples today do not present a serious challenge to its legitimacy'.26

Linking back to the aim of co-option, Alfred argues that while the state's desire to control Indigenous peoples and lands has never changed, the techniques for doing so have become subtler over time. 'Recognizing the power of the indigenous challenge and unable to deny it a voice', due
to successful Indigenous resistance over the years, 'the state has (now) attempted to pull indigenous people closer to it'.27 According to Alfred, the state has outwitted Indigenous leaders and 'encouraged them to reframe and moderate their nationhood demands to accept the fait
accompli of colonization, (and) to collaborate in the development of a "solution" that does not challenge the fundamental imperial lie'.28

In a similar vein, Coulthard's central argument is centred on his understanding of the dual structure of colonialism. Drawing directly from Fanon, Coulthard finds that colonialism relies on both objective and subjective elements. The objective components involve domination through the
political, economic and legal structures of the colonial state. The subjective elements of colonialism involve the creation of 'colonized subjects', including a process of internalisation by which colonised subjects come to not only accept the limited forms of 'misrecog-nition' granted through
the state but can even come to identify with it.29 Through this dual structure, colonial power now works through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, actively shaping their perspectives in line with state discourses, rather than merely excluding them, as in years past. Therefore, any
attempt to seek 'the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority'.30

Concerning the state in relation to Indigenous peoples on the international level, Corntassel argues that states and global organisations, for years, have been
consistently framing Indigenous peoples' self-determination claims in ways that 'jeopardize the futures of indigenous communities'.31 He claims that states first
compartmentalise Indigenous self-determination by separating lands and resources from political and legal recognition of a limited autonomy. Second, he notes,
states sometimes deny the existence of Indigenous peoples living within their borders. Thirdly, a political and legal entitlement framing by states deem-phasises
other responsibilities. Finally, he claims that states, through the rights discourse, limit the frameworks through which Indigenous peoples can seek self-
determination. Like Alfred and Coulthard, Corntassel has concluded that states are deliberate and never changing in their behaviour. With this
move,
Corntassel limits and actually demeans Indigenous agency , overlooking the reality that Indigenous

organisations themselves chose the human rights framework and rights discourse as a target sphere of action precisely
because, as was evident in earlier struggles like slavery , civil rights or women's rights , these were tools
available to them that had a proven track record of opening up new possibilities and shifting previous state
positions and behaviour. Indigenous advocates also cleverly realised, by the 1970s, that the anti-discrimination and decolonisation frames could be used
together against states. States did, in no way, nefariously impose a rights framework on Indigenous peoples. Rather, Indigenous organisations and savvy Indigenous
political actors deliberately chose to frame their self-determination struggles within the human rights framework in order to bring states into a double bind where
they could not credibly claim to adhere to human rights and claim that they uphold equality while simultaneously denying Indigenous peoples' human rights and

leaving them with a diminished and unequal right of self-determination. But, because he is caught in the pessimism trap of seeing the state
only as unified, deliberate and unchanging , Corntassel overlooks and diminishes the clear story of Indigenous agency and the potential
for positive change in advancing self-determination in a multitude of ways.

Pessimism Trap 3: Engagement with the Settler State is Futile , if Not Counter-Productive
Since the state always intends to maintain, if not expand, colonial control, and is seeking to co-opt as many Indigenous peoples as possible in order to maintain or expand its dispossession and control, it is therefore futile, at best, and actually dangerous to Indigenous existence to engage
with the state. Furthermore, all patterns of engagement will lead to co-optation as the state is cunning and unrelenting in its desire to co-opt Indigenous leaders, academics and professionals in order to gain or maintain control of Indigenous peoples.

Alfred argues, in both his 2005 and 2009 books, that any Indigenous engagement with the state, including agreements and negotiations, is not only futile but fundamentally dangerous, as such pathways do not directly challenge the existing colonial structure and 'to argue on behalf of
indigenous nationhood within the dominant Western paradigm is self-defeating'.32 Alfred states that a 'notion of nationhood or self-government rooted in state institutions and framed within the context of state sovereignty can never satisfy the imperatives of Native American political
traditions'33 because the possibility for a true expression of Indigenous self-determination is 'precluded by the state's insistence on dominion and its exclusionary notion of sovereignty'.34 Worst of all, according to Alfred, when Indigenous communities frame their struggles in terms of
asserting Aboriginal rights and title, but do so within a state framework, rather than resisting the state itself, it 'represents the culmination of white society's efforts to assimilate indigenous peoples'.35

Because it is impossible to advance Indigenous self-determination through any sort of engagement with the state, Coulthard also advocates for an Indigenous resurgence paradigm that follows both his mentor Taiaiake Alfred but also Anishinaabe feminist theorist Leanne Simpson.36 As
Coulthard writes, 'both Alfred and Simpson start from a position that calls on Indigenous peoples and communities to "turn away" from the assimilative reformism of the liberal recognition approach and to instead build our national liberation efforts on the revitalization of "traditional"
political values and practices'.37 Drawing upon the prescriptive approach of these theorists, Coulthard proposes, in his concluding chapter, five theses from his analysis that are intended to build and solidify Indigenous resurgence into the future:

1. On the necessity of direct action, meaning that physical forms of Indigenous resistance, like protest and blockades, are very important not only as a reaction to the state but also as a means of protecting the lands that are central to Indigenous peoples' existence;

2. Capitalism, No More!, meaning the rejection of capitalist forms of economic development in Indigenous communities in favour of land-based Indigenous political-economic alternative approaches;

3. Dispossession and Indigenous Sovereignty in the City, meaning the need for Indigenous resurgence movements 'to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples' experiences in both urban and land-based settings'38;

4. Gender Justice and Decolonisation, meaning that decolonisation must also include a shift away from patriarchy and an embrace of gender relations that are non-violent and reflective of the centrality of women in traditional forms of Indigenous governance and society; and
5. Beyond the Nation-State. While Coulthard denies that he advocates complete rejection of engagement with the state's political and legal system, he does assert that 'our efforts to engage these discursive and institutional spaces to secure recognition of our rights have not only failed,
but have instead served to subtly reproduce the forms of racist, sexist, economic, and political configurations of power that we initially sought.to challenge'.39 He therefore advocates expressly for 'critical self-reflection, skepticism, and caution' in a 'resurgent politics of recognition that
seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non-exploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions'.40

Corntassel also demonstrates the third pessimism trap, that all engagement with the state is ultimately futile. For the most part, however, Corntassel's observation is that the UN system operates like a reverse Keck and Sikkink 'boomerang model' and 'channels the energies of
transnational Indigenous networks into the institutional fiefdoms of member countries', by which an 'illusion of inclusion' is created.41 He argues that, in order to be included or their views listened to, Indigenous delegates at the UN must mimic the strategies, language, norms and modes
of behaviour of member states and international institutions. Corntassel finds that 'what results is a cadre of professionalized Indigenous delegates who demonstrate more allegiance to the UN system than to their own communities'.42 In his final analysis, he charges that the co-optation
of international Indigenous political actors is highly 'effective in challenging the unity of the global Indigenous rights movement and hindering genuine dialogue regarding Indigenous self-determination and justice'.43

Finding that states deliberately co-opt and provide 'illusions of inclusion' to Indigenous political actors in UN settings, Corntassel comes to the same conclusion as Alfred concerning the futility of engagement, arguing that because transnational Indigenous networks are 'channeled' and
'blunted' by colonial state actors, 'it is a critical time for Indigenous peoples to rethink their approaches to bringing Indigenous rights concerns to global forums'.44

Imagining a Post-Colonial Future: Pessimistic 'Resurgence' Versus the Optimism and Tenacity of Indigenous Movements on the Ground

All of these writers advocate Indigenous resurgence, through a combination of rejecting the current reconciliation politics of settler colonial states, coupled with a return to land-based Indigenous expressions of governance as the only viable, 'authentic' and legitimate path to a better
future for Indigenous peoples, which they refer to as decolonisation. While inherently critical in their orientation, these three approaches do make some positive and productive contributions to Indigenous movements. They help shed light on the various and subtle ways that Indigenous
leaders and communities can become co-opted into a colonial system. They help us to hold leadership accountable. They also help us keep a strong focus on our traditional, cultural and spiritual values as well as our traditional forms of governance which then also helps us imagine future
possibilities.

As I have pointed out here, however, all three theorists are also caught in the same three pessimism traps: authenticity versus co-option; a vision of the state as
unified, deliberate and never changing in its desire to colonise and control; and a view of engagement with the state as futile, if not dangerous, to Indigenous

sovereignty and existence. When combined, these three pessimism traps aim to inhibit Indigenous peoples' engagement
with the state in any process that could potentially re-imagine and re-formulate their current relations hip into
one that could be transformative and post-colonial, as envisioned by the UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples . The pessimism traps together work to foreclose any possibility that there could be credible openings of
opportunity to negotiate a fairer and just relationship of co-existence with even the most progressive state government.

This pessimistic approach is not innocuous. By overemphasising structure and granting the state an enormous degree of
agency as a unitary actor , this pessimistic approach does a remarkable disservice to Indigenous resistance
movements by proscribing, from academia, an extremely narrow view of what Indigenous self-
determination can and should mean in practice. By overlooking and/or discounting Indigenous agency and not even considering the
possibility that Indigenous peoples could themselves be calculating, strategic political actors in their own right, and vis-a-vis states,
the pessimistic lens of the resurgence school unnecessarily, unproductively and unjustly limits the field of possibility for Indigenous peoples'
decision-making , thus actually countering and inhibiting expressions of Indigenous self-determination . By
condemning—writ large— all Indigenous people s and organisations that wish to seek peaceful co-existence
with the state, negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with the state, and/or who have advocated on the international level for a set of standards that
can provide a positive guiding framework for Indigenous-state relations, the pessimistic lens of resurgence forecloses much potential for new and improved

relations, in any form, and is very likely to lead to deeper conflicts between states and Indigenous people s, and
potentially, even violent action , which Fanon indicated was the necessary outcome. The pessimism traps of the resurgence school are
therefore, likely self-defeating for all but the most remote and isolated Indigenous communities. Further, this approach is quite out of step
with the actions and vision of many Indigenous resistance movements on the ground who have been
working for decades to advance Indigenous self-determination , both domestically and globally, in ways that transform the
colonial state into something more just and may eventually present creative alternatives to the Westphalian state form in ways that could respect and

accommodate Indigenous nations. Rather, it aims to shame and blame those who wish to explore creative and innovative post-colonial
resolutions to the colonial condition.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Declaration or UN Declaration) was adopted by the General
Assembly in 2007 after 25 years of development. The Declaration is ground-breaking , given the key leadership roles Indigenous
peoples played in negotiating and achieving this agreement.45 Additionally, for the first time in UN history, the rights holders,
Indigenous peoples, worked with states to develop an instrument that would serve to promote, protect and affirm
Indigenous rights, both globally and in individual domestic contexts.46
Many Indigenous organisations and movements, from dozens of countries around the world, were involved in drafting and negotiating the UN Declaration and are
now advocating for its full implementation, both internationally and in domestic and regional contexts. In Canada, some of the key organisational players—the
Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee), the Assembly of First Nations, and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, or their predecessor organisations—were
involved in the drafting and lengthy negotiations of the UN Declaration during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. In the United States, organisations like the American
Indian Law Alliance and the Native American Rights Fund have been involved as well as the Navajo Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who represent
themselves as Indigenous peoples' governing institutions. From Scandinavia, the Saami Council and the Sami Parliaments all play a key role in advancing Indigenous
rights. In Latin America, organisations like the Confederation de Nationalidades Indfgenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) and the Consejo Indio de Sud America (CISA)
advocate for implementation of the UN Declaration. The three, major transnational Indigenous organisations— the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, the
International Indian Treaty Council and the Inuit Circumpolar Council—were all key members of the drafting and negotiating team for the UN Declaration, and the
latter two, which are still in existence, continue their strong advocacy for its full implementation.

Implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires fundamental and significant change, on both the international and domestic
levels. Because implementation of Indigenous rights essentially calls for a complete and fundamental restructuring of Indigenous-state relationships, it expects
states to enact and implement a significant body of legal, constitutional, legislative and policy changes that can accommodate such things as Indigenous land rights,

free, prior and informed consent, redress and a variety of self-government, autonomy and other such arrangements. States are not going to
implement this multifaceted and complex set of changes on their own, however. They will require significant political and
moral pressure to hold them accountable to the rhetorical commitments they have made to support this level of change.
They will also require ongoing conversation and negotiation with Indigenous peoples along the way, lest the process becomes problematically one-sided. Such

processes ultimately require sustained political will , commitment and engagement over the long term, to
reach the end result of radical systemic change and Indigenous state relationships grounded in mutual respect, co-existence and reciprocity. This type of

fundamental change requires creative thinking, careful diplomacy, tenacity, and above all, optimistic vision , on the part of
Indigenous peoples. The pessimistic approaches of the resurgence school are ultimately of little use in these efforts, other than as a
cautionary tale against state power, of which the organisational players are already keenly aware . Further,
by dismissing and discouraging all efforts at engagement with states, and especially with the blanket accusations that all
who engage in such efforts are ' co-opted ' and not 'authentically' Indigenous , the resurgence school actually creates

unnecessary negative feelings and divisions amongst Indigenous movements who should be pooling limited
resources and working together towards better futures .
1AR---Glenbrooks---Rd 5
DA---Inflation
 U---Inflation---1AR
It’s self-fulfilling---expectation of inflation drives inflation.
Neil Irwin 11/13, reporter for Axios, 11/13/2023, "Americans believe high inflation is the new
normal," https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/inflation-cpi-economic-data-2023-prices

Despite a pullback in inflation over the last year, Americans do not appear to be snapping back into their
pre-pandemic comfort that low, stable inflation is the normal state of things .

Why it matters: Inflation expectations can be self-fulfilling . To the extent Americans view elevated inflation
as a long-term condition , it could make it more likely to come true — or require the Fed eral Reserve
to undertake more painful action to overcome inflationary momentum.

Driving the news: On Friday, the University of Michigan released its preliminary consumer sentiment survey for
November. It showed Americans expect 3.2% annual inflation from five to 10 years from now, the highest since
2011.

 Data out from the New York Fed on Monday morning does not show the same dramatic uptick in recent weeks as the
Michigan survey, but continues to point to more inflationary consumer psychology than prevailed pre-
pandemic.

Expectation of inflation makes the Fed’s goal impossible.

Neil Irwin 11/13, reporter for Axios, 11/13/2023, "Americans believe high inflation is the new
normal," https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/inflation-cpi-economic-data-2023-prices

Between the lines: The relationship between inflation expectations and actual inflation results is murky. But in theory, at least, people
expecting high inflation will push harder for wage increases and be more willing to pay high prices on the
expectation they will be even higher in the future .
 They may also push harder in various contractual situations to ensure there are protections against rising prices — union deals with
a cost-of-living adjustment being the most obvious example.
 If those forces are deeply entrenched , it could prevent inflation from continuing to march
downward to the Fed's 2% target .

CPI is aff.
Matthew Boesler 11/14, reporter for Bloomberg, 11-14-2023, "US Inflation Report to Keep Fed
Leaning Toward More Rate Hikes," https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/us-cpi-
report-inflation-data-to-show-fed-may-not-be-done-with-rate-hikes

A monthly US government report on consumer prices due Tuesday is set to show slower progress toward
the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target , keeping the central bank biased toward more tightening , according
to Bloomberg Economics.
The figures
are set to show the c onsumer p rice i ndex excluding food and energy rose 0.3% for a second
straight month in October, leaving the year-over-year rate unchanged at 4.1%, Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and
Stuart Paul said Monday in a preview of the report.

“After showing encouraging progress this summer, disinflation in year-over-year core CPI likely stalled , while the
monthly pace has been creeping up toward something more consistent with an annualized inflation
pace of 3%- 4% than 2%,” Wong and Paul said.

“ Officials most likely will leave open the possibility of future rate hikes as long as core CPI is running at the
current monthly pace.”
Inflation has been receding this year after peaking in 2022 at the highest levels since the early 1980s. Better-than-expected data on consumer
prices over the last several months helped build consensus for a pause in the Fed’s tightening campaign at each of the central bank’s last two
policy meetings.

Slower progress toward the 2% inflation target will raise concerns that more interest- rate increases
may be needed, even with the central bank’s benchmark rate at a 22-year high.
Investors currently put the chances of another rate hike at either of the next two policy meetings at roughly one-in-four, according to futures
markets.

“While disinflation in core CPI has pretty much stalled, the Fed is unlikely to change its wait-and-see attitude toward
rate hikes — especially with the next few months likely to provide additional evidence that the labor market is cooling more rapidly,” Wong
and Paul said.

The Bloomberg Economics projections are in line with the median responses in a Bloomberg survey of outside forecasters.
 U---Inflation---Indicts---1AR
Newman concedes 2022 thumps.
1NR Newman 11/17 [Rick; Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance; 11-17-2023; This week in
Bidenomics: Inflation fever breaks; Yahoo Finance; https://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-week-in-
bidenomics-inflation-fever-breaks-192532199.html?guccounter=1]

<gray for reference>

The biggest implication of the latest inflation news is that the Federal Reserve is done hiking interest
rates after rapidly jacking up short-term rates by 5.25 percentage points since March of 2022. That was one
of the fastest hiking cycles ever, and it came with a major risk the Fed would move too far , too fast and tip the
economy into
recession . It now appears the Fed will get the job done without a big spike in unemployment or a
major economic downturn.
 AT: Inflation Link---Turn---1AR
Scaling up the program only takes a few months.
Pavlina Tcherneva 18, Associate Professor at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 4/2018,
“The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper
Collection, Working Paper No. 902, https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_902.pdf

Furthermore, the creation of jobs relatively quickly need not be a tall task either. Experience has shown that
large-scale employment programs can be up and running in a matter of a few months (e.g., the New Deal
programs in the United States and Argentina’s Plan Jefes). Such programs, however, have often been implemented as emergency measures. If the JG is designed as
a preparedness response, a lengthier period of assessment, design, and planning is needed for its long-run success. Once such a program is in place, finding work for
any additional entrants is a much easier task by comparison. A fair amount of experimentation may be needed initially, as well as continual evaluation to improve
program performance over the long run.
 AT: Inflation Link---Defense---AT: Spiral---1AR
A set wage resolves the wage-price spiral.
Jeff Spross 17, writer for Democracy, former economics and business correspondent for The Week,
2017, “You’re Hired!” https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/44/youre-hired/

An even more intriguing possibility is that the job guarantee would eliminate the need for the Fed to adjust
interest rates .

Here’s how that would work: Currently, Fed officials operate on the assumption that some amount of
unemployment is necessary to control inflation. As workers’ bargaining power rises, an arms race sets
in across businesses. Workers claim more revenue as compensation, capitalists try to preserve their cut
by raising prices, then workers demand higher wages for the increased cost of living . Wash, rinse, repeat. The
result is the wage-price spiral , delivering higher inflation .

The Fed intervenes by raising interest rates, which squeezes the supply of credit and forces companies to
stop expanding or to downscale. This stops the arms race by destroying jobs. But, once again, it’s left up
to the capitalists to decide just whose jobs are to be destroyed first.

There’s a burn-the-village-to-save-it quality to this practice, since allowing inflation to continue also
destroys jobs as price signals go haywire. But again, with a job guarantee, the downturn would simply
move workers onto the set wage and compensation rate, which doesn’t engage in a bidding war . This
would end the arms race as well, but without casting people into joblessness and all its attendant
human destruction. So the job guarantee could stabilize the ups and downs of inflation as well. (This
would be complicated if the job guarantee’s wage was indexed to rise with inflation, though not indexing the wage would force regular
legislative fights to raise it instead.)