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Observation 1: Climate ChangeEconomic inequality is one of the most pressing concerns in the United States. Real wages have been diminishing since 1979 and the income and wealth gaps between the top 20% of the population and the middle and bottom quintiles are drastically growing. This inequality is only projected to worsen in the coming decades, particularly for people of color. Current trends show minority populations’ real wages will comprise a majority of the working class by 2043.Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color, “People of color will be a majority of the American working class in 2032,” 9 June 2016, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/, KD

The working class, defined here as people with less than a bachelor’s degree, accounts for about two-thirds of the 18- to 64-year-old labor force in the United States. Assuming that rates of college completion by race/ethnicity, gender, and age cohort continue to increase at the same pace they did between 1993 and 2013, the 18- to 64-year-old working class is projected to become majority-minority in 2032 (Figure A). For the prime-age working class (25- to 54-year-olds), the transition takes place in 2029 (Figure B) with the 25- to 34-year-old cohort reaching this tipping point first in 2021 (Figure C). Differences in educational attainment by race and ethnicity first emerge within this last cohort because traditionally, most adults have completed a college degree by age 25. Figure D shows the changes in each of the main racial/ethnic group’s share of the working class between 2013 and 2032 and illustrates the changing gender demographics of the working class within each racial or ethnic group. Among working-class people of color, most of the projected growth is coming from men, while women are driving more of the decline among working-class non-Hispanic whites. Although women as a whole are projected to constitute a smaller share of the working class, Latinas will become a larger share of working-class women. These projections are based on assumptions about patterns of college completion as applied to Census Bureau estimates of population growth and estimates of labor force participation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The extent to which reality differs from any of these assumptions will affect the projected date and the racial, ethnic, or gender composition of the working class at any point in time. However, even if we were to assume that the more rapid increase in college completion rates occurring after 2003 continues, it would have little effect on the projected dates. As Table 1 shows, this alternative assumption had no effect on the transition year for the entire working class, the prime-age working class, and the 25- to 34-year-old working class, but did affect the dates for young (age 18 to 24) and mid-career (age 35 to 44) workers. A more detailed discussion of post-2003 trends in educational attainment and how they affect the projected majority-minority working-class transition dates for each of these cohorts is available in the appendix. America’s future workforce and the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class As the working class transitions to being majority people of color, class inequality and racial inequality will likely become more indistinguishable. Improving the living standards of all working-class Americans while closing racial disparities in employment and wages will depend on how well we seize opportunities to

build multiracial, multigendered, and multigenerational coalitions to advance policies that achieve both of these goals. Policies and practices that promote good jobs with living wages and benefits, ensure a strong social safety net, and make high-quality education available to all children regardless of their race, ethnicity, or zip code must be leveraged with those that end employment and pay discrimination, as well as residential segregation. Unlike the projections that motivated this report, the economic, political, and social implications associated with the demographic transition of the working class don’t fit neatly into a math equation that predicts the world will suddenly be different on a given day. The U.S. population has been undergoing demographic change since this country was founded. Further, the concepts of working class and racial and ethnic identity, upon which this analysis is based, are themselves very fluid. The remainder of this report summarizes some of the challenges ahead for the working class, and why failure to confront them would have real costs for working-class families and the broader economy. Wage stagnation is the most pressing issue of the working class As 66.1 percent of the labor force in 2013, people with less than a bachelor’s degree supplied most of the labor and generated much of the demand needed to drive economic growth. Even as educational attainment continues to rise, the working class will remain a majority of the labor force, comprising 57.8 percent by 2032 when people of color are projected to become the majority. Building a strong working class is only possible when workers are able, through broad-based wage growth, to share in the economic prosperity that they help generate. Unfortunately, this has been the exception more than the rule for the last three and a half decades. Figure E shows that since 1979, median hourly real wage growth has fallen far short of productivity growth—a measure of the potential for pay increases—for all groups of workers (not just those without a bachelor’s degree), regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. Over this same period, there have been clear differences in wage growth trends of men and women, and of people of color relative to whites. Median wages for white, black, and Hispanic men all fell, with Hispanic men suffering the greatest losses (-9.8 percent). On the other hand, median wages of all women increased, with white women’s wages growing the most (30.2 percent) and Hispanic women’s wages growing the least (8.6 percent). Most of the decline in men’s wages occurred between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s. While men’s and women’s wages grew during the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, for men, these gains were either inadequate to make up for the losses during the previous decade or have since been eroded in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Among men and women, wages for workers of color have grown more slowly than those of whites. As a result, existing pay disparities by race and ethnicity have remained unchanged or widened. Figure F returns to looking at members of the working class, plotting the median hourly wages by gender, race, and ethnicity since 1979, all as a share of white men’s wages. In 2014, median pay ratios for black and Hispanic men were almost exactly the same as they were in 1979. While there’s been improved gender equality in pay over this same period, 40 percent of the narrowing in the gender wage gap occurred because of falling men’s wages (Davis and Gould 2015). At the same time, racial and ethnic pay gaps among women have grown. These data show that wage stagnation has been a problem for the entire working class, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. As such, it is easily the most pressing common issue for an increasingly diverse working class, and solutions for reversing the trend are clearly defined. Wage stagnation can be directly traced to a number of intentional policy decisions on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and power—decisions that have eroded the leverage

of the vast majority of workers while directing most of the gains to the top. Two of the ways this has played out are through declining unionization and an economy for which genuinely full employment has been a rare occurrence (Mishel and Eisenbrey 2015). It is also the case that these factors have affected a larger share of working-class blacks than other groups.

Poverty is one of the most important indicators of vulnerability to climate change. It directly relates to marginalization and lack of access to resources necessary to cope with climate change. As economic inequality increases in a population, community vulnerability increases as resources, financial assistance and outside assistance become restricted. W. Neil Adger, Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and P. Mick Kelly, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia,“Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4: 253–266, 1999, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009601904210, KD

Poverty is an important aspect of vulnerability and the architecture of entitlements because of its direct association with access to resources. The incidence of poverty, as observed through quantifiable changes in income (though recognising the multi-faceted nature of poverty - see Baulch, 1996), is a relevant proxy for access in its multi-faceted forms. Income is related in a direct manner to the architecture of entitlements: resources and wealth in themselves do not constitute security, the corollary of vulnerability, since resources are mediated through property rights and access to them. Access in this context can be taken to mean ‘involving the ability of an individual, family, group or community to use resources which are directly required to secure a livelihood. Access to those resources is always based on social and economic relations’ (Blaikie et al., 1994, p.48). Both resource availability and entitlements are difficult to observe and quantify because of their temporal dimensions and because they involve transactions and exchanges between different members of households. These potential rights and reciprocal social coping mechanisms and informal social security are fluid and often only exactly determined in times of crisis (Platteau, 1991; Moser, 1998). Poverty is, therefore, an important indicator of individual vulnerability to climate extremes and to climate change because it can be directly related to marginalisation and lack of access to resources which are critical when faced with the risk of hazards and the resultant stress on livelihoods. Poverty affects vulnerability through individuals’ expectations of the impacts of hazards and their ability to invest to alleviate risks. It also affects the coping and recovery from extreme events through directly constraining opportunities for coping and reducing the resilience to impacts. Increasing inequality over time within a population, or between different parts of the population, increases collective vulnerability to climate change. Such changes in inequality are linked to the reduction of communal allocation of resources and the pooling of risk, and other social phenomena associated with the ‘moral economy’ in which entitlements to resources can be realised in times of crisis (Adger, 1999b). In addition, inequality and vulnerability linkages are associated with relationships between inequality, diversification of income sources and poverty.

In other words, inequality affects vulnerability directly through constraining the options of households and individuals when faced with external shock; and indirectly through its links to poverty and other factors. The direct links between inequality and vulnerability concern the concentration of resources in fewer hands, constraining coping strategies based on private resources for households faced with external stresses. Research on the impacts of drought in agricultural societies indicates that both income (immediately accessible resources) and wealth (disposable capital assets) are important in coping strategies (Corbett, 1988). Hence, distribution directly affects the ability of households as part of the community, to cope with the impacts of extreme events. The indirect link between inequality and vulnerability is through skewed accumulation being associated with increased levels of poverty, and hence insecurity. Once again this is a complex issue whereby rising inequality does not necessarily cause poverty, but both poverty and inequality are jointly associated with constraints on coping strategies (e.g., Reardon and Taylor, 1996). An example of such constraints is where wealth concentration confines access to credit to certain sectors of the population, thereby reinforcing income poverty and enhancing vulnerability.

We are already seeing the devastating effects of global warming. Typhoons, rising sea levels, desertification, and other changes will disproportionately impact the world’s poor due to the geography of climate change and disparate access to tools able to combat the changes and deal with the aftermath Annie Lowrey, reports on politics and economic policy for New York magazine, previously covered economic policy for The New York Times, “The Inequality of Climate Change,” 12 November 2013, New York Times, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/the-inequality-of-climate-change/?_r=0, KD

Typhoon Haiyan has left an estimated 10,000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless in the Philippines. And it has once again underscored for many development experts a cruel truth about climate change: It will hit the world’s poorest the hardest. “No nation will be immune to the impacts of climate change,” said a major World Bank report on the issue last year. “However, the distribution of impacts is likely to be inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions, which have the least economic, institutional, scientific and technical capacity to cope and adapt.” That is the firmly established view of numerous national governments, development and aid groups and the United Nations as well. “It is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit , ” said Rajenda Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, speaking to reporters in Brussels back in 2007. The reason is twofold. First is the geography of climate change itself. The higher the latitude, the bigger the temperature increase. And generally, the farther from the equator, the wealthier the country — meaning rich countries like Norway and Canada might see a disproportionate impact from global warming. But poorer, lower-latitude regions are expected to face desertification and more-intense storms. The increase in the sea level might be 15 to 20 percent higher in the tropics than the global average, meaning flooding for coastal cities in regions like southern Asia. Droughts are also expected to increase significantly in lower-latitude areas, including in Africa and the Middle East. (The United States and Australia might also be hard hit, as the map below shows.) Moreover, in

many countries, the vulnerable poor might cluster in areas where climate change might have a disproportionate impact, like flood zones and dry rural areas. Here’s the World Bank on the topic earlier this year: As the coastal cities of Africa and Asia expand, many of their poorest residents are being pushed to the edges of livable land and into the most dangerous zones for climate change. Their informal settlements cling to riverbanks and cluster in low-lying areas with poor drainage, few public services, and no protection from storm surges, sea-level rise, and flooding. These communities – the poor in coastal cities and on low-lying islands – are among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change and the least able to marshal the resources to adapt, a new report finds. They face a world where climate change will increasingly threaten the food supplies of Sub-Saharan Africa and the farm fields and water resources of South Asia and South East Asia within the next three decades, while extreme weather puts their homes and lives at risk. The second, more significant reason is that the poorer the country, the harder it might be for it to respond to a changing climate. Let’s take the example of a typhoon. Before a storm hits, building sturdy, secure houses and ensuring that a population has a plan for evacuation are critical to preserving life and property. Right after a storm, highways, search-and-rescue teams, helicopters, tractors, firefighters, hospitals and surgeons become critical for doing the same. Afterward, insurance, savings and a well-financed government response become necessary for rebuilding lives and cities. When it comes to such disasters, money matters. The same goes for many other phenomena related to climate change caused by human activity. If a given area is getting drier and hotter, a subsistence farmer is going to face greater struggles than a diversified agricultural conglomerate. A shrinking water supply might be harder for Pakistan to manage than California. The same might be true for rising oceans.

It is imperative to find a solution to climate change—governments must take action now to avoid catastrophic results and the best way to accomplish that is to penalize polluters. This is literally a matter of life and death.Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and the Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, from 2009-10 he served as the chief economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, research is focused on estimating the costs and benefits of environmental quality and the consequences of government regulation, “Paying the Cost of Climate Change,” 19 September 2014, Brookings, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2014/09/19-paying-cost-of-climate-change-greenstone, KD

The economic cost of climate change is high: an annual $12 billion increase in electricity bills due to added air conditioning; $66 billion to $106 billion worth of coastal property damage due to rising seas; and billions in lost wages for farmers and construction workers forced to take the day off or risk suffering from heat stroke or worse. By the end of the century, these costs and others put a combined price tag of hundreds of billions of dollars on climate change in the United States, according to a recent report. Fortunately, most Americans are wealthy enough to protect themselves from the worst that climate change has to offer. This is not the case in the world’s poorest countries where climate change is projected to dramatically reduce incomes for the most affected. As just one measure, my research has shown that the effect of very hot days on mortality in India is nearly 20 times as great as in the United States where people turn up the

air conditioning on hot days. Other developing countries, like Bangladesh, are expected to lose substantial fractions of their land mass due to rising water levels. For these people, confronting climate change is quite literally a matter of life or death. We know the looming costs of climate change will weigh heavily on every country around the world in the coming decades, including the United States. The question is, what do we do about it? How do we rationalize making investments to prevent future threats to society when so many investments need to be made to prevent current threats? While complex politically, the economic case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has always been simple: put a higher price on things that cause harm. In economic-speak, we call these “things that cause harm” negative externalities, and climate change is the ultimate negative externality. That is, when someone anywhere in the world drives their car or turns on their lights they are causing damages for everyone else in the world. The very simple solution to this problem, which economists of all political stripes recognize and teach, is to penalize activities that cause damages to others. To date, lawmakers around the world have largely chosen to ignore this basic economic insight—the result is that we are subsidizing the activities that cause climate change by failing to put a price on carbon emissions. As a consequence, polluters all over the world are causing the climate to change in ways that pose risks to the well-being of our children, their children, and on and on.

The impacts of global warming are exacerbated in areas of low income, food insecurity, and relative lack of wealth. Economic and social entitlements are codified by government law and policies and sustained by societal norms. Analyzing the architecture of entitlements is critical and a prerequisite to any regulatory measuresW. Neil Adger, Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and P. Mick Kelly, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, “Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4: 253–266, 1999, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009601904210, KD

The basis for any examination of social vulnerability is an understanding of the human use of resources. The extent to which individuals, groups or communities are ‘entitled’ to make use of resources determines the ability of that particular population to cope with and adapt to stress. The concept of entitlements, which extends beyond income or other material measures of well-being, has been developed in analyses of vulnerability to food insecurity and famine (Sen, 1990; Bohle et al., 1994). Climate impacts can be related to the security of populations in a wider sense (cf. Hewitt, 1997, and Cutter, 1996, on natural hazards and vulnerability) and the same conceptual framework and terminology applies. Watts and Bohle (1993, p.45) argue that the space of vulnerability to food insecurity can be defined in terms of exposure, capacity and potentiality where these three terms are shorthand, respectively, for the risks associated with: exposure to stress and crises; inadequate capacity to cope with stress; and the severe consequences of stress and the related risk of slow recovery. We would argue that capacity - put positively, the ability to respond, to cope and to adapt - should move centre stage in any

policy-relevant analysis of vulnerability to climate change. Definitions of vulnerability vary. Blaikie et al. (1994), for example, use terminology which emphasises the social construction of vulnerability. They define risk as consisting of two components: the first, equivalent to Watts and Bohle’s exposure, is a measure of the physical hazard. The second, vulnerability itself, is equivalent to capacity and is largely determined by socio-economic structure and property relations. When considering the process of responding to climate change in general, of course, a longer term, and arguably more positive, perspective has to be adopted which encompasses the process of adaptation along side coping and recovery. Just as vulnerability provides an entry point for study of the implications of climate change, so study of the ability of a population to respond - to cope recover and adapt - must take centre stage in any policy-relevant analysis of vulnerability to climate change. Extending the analysis of Watts and Bohle, examining social vulnerability to climate change through an entitlements approach means consideration of the availability and distribution of entitlements, the means by which entitlements are defined, contested and, therefore, change over time, and the wider political economy of the distribution and formation of entitlements. It is important to understand both the level of vulnerability of a particular population and the factors that determine that level of vulnerability if analysis is to fully inform policy on sustainable adaptation. The factors which determine levels of social vulnerability define how the pattern of access to resources is constructed; this construction can be termed the ‘architecture of entitlements’. Within this framework, assessment of social vulnerability is based on: • Direct analysis of the material sources of entitlements, which is manifest at the individual level; • The distribution of those entitlements at the community or population level; and • The institutional context within which the entitlements are formed, contested and distributed over time and among groups. The use of the term entitlements to define the material and social aspects of resource use is itself based on a premise that the institutions of the state are dominant in determining access to resources. Under this emphasis, ‘the status quo structure of entitlements determines which parties to environmental disputes bear unwanted costs, which parties bear the transactions costs of institutional change ... and which parties are able to call upon the power of the state to protect their interests’ (Bromley, 1992, p.1). In other words, most, but not all, entitlements to material assets are legitimised by government and formal laws. The institutional determinants of entitlement distribution and formation are treated under the approach developed here, however, in a broader sense, such that the cultural context and the social differentiation of entitlements are not constrained in their analysis to those institutions of the state but extend more widely to include both formal political structures and the more diffuse ‘rules of the game’ and social and cultural norms. Adaptation is socially mediated and differentiated and takes place through mechanisms which can be characterised as social learning and policy learning. The extended analysis of the architecture of entitlements allows consideration of both positive and normative aspects of social vulnerability, which as argued in the introductory section, are both implicit in all climate impact assessment.

Social vulnerability to climate change changes frequently and is concentrated in certain regions. It must be included in an analysis of how to effectively respond to global warmingSusan L. Cutter, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina where she directs the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, and Christina Finch, masters degree from University of South Carolina, currently employed by FEMA, “Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards,” 2007, PNAS, vol. 105, no. 7, 2301-2306, http://www.pnas.org/content/105/7/2301.long, KD

As the composition of American society changed during the past five decades, so too has our social vulnerability to natural hazards, as measured by the SoVI. Those most socially vulnerable populations were initially concentrated in the Deep South (race, gender, and socioeconomic status), the Southwest (Native American lands), and in Florida (elderly), but over time the pattern of social vulnerability to natural hazards in the United States changed. By 2000, the social vulnerability was greatest in the lower Mississippi Valley region, in South Texas border lands, in California's Central Valley, and in the upper Great Plains. Pockets of high social vulnerability remained in the Deep South and Southwest. The driving forces behind increased social vulnerability vary between regions and across counties. For example, contributing components in the lower Mississippi Valley counties were race and socioeconomic status; along the Texas–Mexico border counties, it was ethnicity and poverty, whereas in the Great Plains counties, it was a combination of economic dependence and an aging population brought on by depopulation. The overall result was a distinct geography of social vulnerability to natural hazards based on the SoVI metric. Many counties in the United States are experiencing a significant increase or decrease in social vulnerability, suggesting that the county's susceptibility to hazards and their potential ability to recover from them has changed. On the basis of this analysis, 46 counties had significant increases in social vulnerability and 40 counties had significant decreases in social vulnerability from 1960 to 2000. As these counties experience changes over time attributable to components such as increasing development and diversity, the driving forces contributing to the social vulnerability need to be identified in current hazard assessment and mitigation plans to make them more responsive. The projected social vulnerability in 2010 identified priority areas that should be addressed now, to improve the resilience of communities. The SoVI of 2010 projects that high-social-vulnerability concentrations will continue along the lower Mississippi River, the Texas–Mexico border, southern California, the northern Great Plains, and in the nation's largest metropolitan areas. Social vulnerability is born from inequality and its social and political consequences (37). In many ways, it mirrors the geography of inequality (38) and poverty (39). Within the context of natural hazards, the SoVI helps determine which places may need specialized attention during immediate response and long-term recovery after a natural hazard event, given the sensitivity of the populations and the lowered capacity to respond. Although not as readily apparent in the visualization of SoVI, metropolitan counties continue to be among the most socially vulnerable over time driven by components such as development density and large diverse populations. In a broader context of social policy, the SoVI has applicability in the identification of counties that are most in need for socially based services—health, welfare, housing, education—that would

not improve the quality of life of residents but would improve their ability to respond to and recover from disaster events.

Observation 2: US Tax CodeChanges in the US tax code over the last 60 years have dramatically increased economic inequality by shifting from corporate taxes to individual payroll taxes which require proportionately higher tax rates for the middle and lower classes—unless changes in the tax code occur, the effect will worsenJohn Irons, PhD, the Research Director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., previously he Director of Tax and Budget Policy at The Center for American Progress, and a Senior Economic Analyst and Staff Economist at OMB Watch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting government accountability and citizen participation, “Corporate tax declines and U.S. inequality,” Economic Policy Institute, 9 April 2008, http://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_snapshots_20080409/, KD

Over the last 60 years, the U.S. tax code has dramatically shifted away from corporate taxes and toward taxes on individuals, especially through the payroll tax, the financing backbone of Social Security and Medicare. In the 1950s, the corporate income tax brought in, on average, one of every four dollars in federal tax revenues. By the 2000s, however, it raised just one of every 10 tax dollars. The shrinking share of corporate taxes was made up by an increase in payroll taxes to fund social insurance and retirement programs. Excise and other taxes—such as fuel taxes, phone taxes, etc.—shrank as well over the last 60 years, while the individual federal income tax rose slightly, from an average of 43% of total federal revenue in the 1950s to 46% in the 2000s (see chart). This shift is important because of who pays these different taxes. The corporate income tax is significantly more progressive than other taxes. Those with incomes in the top 20% of the income distribution (those making more than about $86,000 a year in 2007) pay four times the average tax rate on corporate income than the middle 20% (those making between $27,000 and $48,000); while, for the payroll tax, those in the top 20% actually pay less than those in the middle as a share of their income.1 This shift has been one of the factors leading to the drop in average federal tax rates for the very highest earners. Between 1960 and 2004, the average tax rate has fallen by about 14 percentage points (from 44.4% to 30.4%) for the top 1% of earners (those making more than $435,000 in 2007), while it has increased slightly (from 15.9% to 16.1%) for those in the middle 20%. 2 Without offsets, further erosion of corporate tax revenues—either through lower statutory tax rates or through special preferences—would expand the already wide and growing income inequality in the United States.

The US tax code has been getting more regressive in recent years drastically increasing inequality—reworking the code is necessary Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and the Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, from 2009-10 he served as the chief economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, research is focused on estimating the costs and benefits of environmental quality and the consequences of government regulation, and Adam Looney, Policy Director, The Hamilton Project, and Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, “Just How Progressive Is the U.S. Tax Code?,” 13 April 2012,

Brookings, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2012/04/13-tax-greenstone-looney, KD

As tax time approaches, many are debating whether high-income taxpayers should pay more or whether their tax rates are already too high. This debate is particularly relevant today because of the economic struggles many Americans are experiencing, and because of the longer-term trend of rising inequality. A host of economic forces, like changes in technology, increases in international competition, and other changes in the labor market, such as the decline of unions and a falling real minimum wage, have reduced job opportunities and wages for some American workers, but expanded opportunities and incomes for others. In fact, the earnings and market incomes of many middle-class and lower-income households have stagnated and even declined over time, while incomes at the top of the income distribution have risen dramatically. The United States has traditionally boasted a progressive tax code—one in which the tax rate increases as income increases. A key question for policymakers, then, is how the tax system should respond to the current challenges—how progressive should the tax code be? The purpose of any tax system is to raise revenues to fund government programs. But the challenge to designing a good tax system is raising revenues in a way that minimizes economic harm. That means being concerned not just with economic incentives in the tax code, but also the ability to pay of hard-hit middle- and lower-income households, whose incomes and employment prospects have been hurt by economic forces beyond their control. By basing tax rates on income and one’s ability to pay, a progressive tax system prevents these households from suffering the double burden of hard economic times and higher taxes. In this post we examine the progressivity of the U.S. tax code and highlight two facts: the current U.S. tax system is less progressive than the tax systems of other industrialized countries, and considerably less progressive today than it was just a few decades ago. The figure below shows how much influence taxes and transfers have in reducing inequality (measured using a common metric called the “Gini coefficient”) in various countries around the world. As indicated in the chart, the U.S. tax and transfer system does less to counteract pre-tax income inequality than the tax systems of most of our peer countries, meaning that our system is actually less progressive. In addition to being less progressive relative to other countries, the U.S. tax system has also become less progressive over time. Over the last fifty years, tax rates for the wealthiest Americans have declined by 40 percent, while tax rates for average Americans have remained roughly constant. This is illustrated in the figure below. This decline in tax rates for the wealthy has coincided with an increase in income inequality, where most of the wage gains have been concentrated among a relatively small portion of the American people. For example, since 1979, earnings for households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution have risen by over 250 percent. At the same time, many households at the middle and bottom of the income distribution have experienced stagnating incomes or even declines in earnings (figure below, blue bars). This means that the very people who have received the biggest income gains in the past three decades have also seen the largest tax cuts (figure below, red bars). These estimates may come as a surprise to observers focused on the share of federal taxes paid by high-income individuals, rather than the tax rates that those individuals face. Without a doubt, the share of taxes paid by high-income individuals has increased. But the reason why the share of taxes paid by the top 10 percent has increased is because their share of income has increased. In 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans earned 9.3 percent of all income in the United States and paid 15.4

percent of all federal taxes. While the share of income earned by the top 1 percent had more than doubled by 2007—to 19.4 percent—the share of federal tax liability paid by that group only increased by about 80 percent, to 28.1 percent. The share of taxes increased less for this group because high-income tax rates fell by more than the tax rates for everyone else—reductions that made the system less progressive. A final factor, discussed in The Hamilton Project’s April Jobs Blog, is that federal taxes account for only part of the tax burden: the tax system is even less progressive when state and local taxes are factored in, because those systems tend to be regressive. For instance, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution face state and local tax rates of 12 percent, compared to tax rates of only 8 percent for the top 1 percent of families (Citizens for Tax Justice 2011).

Economic inequality directly contributes to rampant racism in the United States due to disparate employment rates, pay and wealth. It is time to consider persistent, unequal trends that reinforce racial injustice.Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “ What racial injustice looks like in America’s economy,” 11 July 2016, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/11/racial-economic-injustice-jobs-incomes-and-wealth/, KD

Another option, one I pursue below, is to briefly document some of the systemic racial injustice embedded in the economy. It would be ridiculously reductionist to argue that these data are the same problem that we’ve seen highlighted so vividly in recent years. But these persistent, unequal trends are very much in the mix and, at a time when we need to think deeply about institutional prejudices in all corners of society, they are worth a look. — Black unemployment; white unemployment: For as far back as we have the data, the black unemployment rate has been twice that of the white rate (see first figure). Moreover, as the second figure shows, you can’t dismiss that fact by citing lower levels of education among blacks. Not only does the 2-to-1 ratio roughly hold for each education level, the education explanation for racial differences in unemployment rates ignores the reality of racial educational barriers erected by systemic racism. Also, note that the black/white unemployment ratio is biased down by the disproportionate imprisonment of blacks, as the prison population is left out of the numbers. There is, however, something potentially positive embedded in this arithmetic. For the ratio to stay roughly constant, black jobless rates must rise and fall about twice as much as white rates. That’s the algebra behind, “when the economy sniffles, too many black workers catch pneumonia.” But the converse is also true: The black unemployment rate is highly responsive (“elastic” in econ jargon) to labor demand of the lack thereof. This is visible in the first figure, as you see the black unemployment rate climb more than that of whites during recessions (shaded areas) and fall more during recoveries. That means that full employment is particularly useful to minorities. — Black pay, white pay: These racial disparities show up in pay, of course, as the work of economist Valerie Wilson has shown (Wilson’s work is a national treasure trove of information on racial economic disparities). In this paper, Wilson shows that in periods where labor markets really tightened up, this pumped-up reaction function I just noted is highly operative: “in all periods when median household income for African Americans increased more

than that for whites (1982-1990, 1991-2001, and 1995-2000), African American households also experienced a greater increase in hours worked than did white households, especially if the households had lower incomes.” To be clear, neither racial wage nor income gaps closed, but the longer we stay at full employment, the more pressure there is on those gaps. It’s not that discrimination disappears in very tight labor markets. It’s that doing business gets more expensive for racist employers who either have to hire someone they’d rather not or leave profits on the table. Where do we go with this information? As I argued in a recent piece on this page, suppose the Federal Reserve were to accommodate another percentage point decline in the unemployment rate. Based on the historical record, that would lower black unemployment by close to two points, and when you map that tightening onto to low-wage, black workers, you get the picture below. — Racial wealth disparities are far larger than income ones. According to Federal Reserve data, as the figure below reveals, the median income ratio between non-whites and whites was 60 percent in 2013. For net worth (wealth minus liabilities), that ratio was 13 percent. There are many excellent analyses of racial wealth disparity — this one by Jordan Weissmann, for example — but one of deepest and most incisive dives into the origins of the black-white wealth gap is Richard Rothstein’s historical analysis of the public policy roots of historical segregation, the impact of which is very much with us today. In fact, Rothstein’s story begins with Ferguson and proceeds through a meticulous anatomy of segregation policies felt today in unequal schooling, policing, housing, wealth and access to opportunities. These are but a few examples of racial inequities embedded in our economy. I’ve barely touched on inequalities in criminal justice, education, beginning with preschool, voting rights and political representation. But these persistent economic disparities in jobs, incomes and wealth provide some aged bricks in the edifice of institutionalized, systemic racism in the United States. Like many friends and family members I’ve spoken to in recent days, I don’t know what to do about this ongoing crisis. There is, however, much we could and should do to reduce the gaps shown above. It involves a policy agenda that reconnects economic growth, which we have, to broadly shared prosperity, which has been missing for a long time, particularly from communities of color. I’ll break down the details in a later column, but for now, I can state only that the urgency of this reconnection agenda just keeps growing. If we continue to allow money-driven politics to block that agenda while demagogic candidates stir up more hatred, then there really is no way out of this horror.

Contention 3: SolvencyWe advocate the implementation of a national carbon tax in the United States.Carbon taxes are effective when implemented in the largest emitting countries and at particular points of the consumption industryJoseph E. Aldy, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Visiting Fellow at Resources for the Future, and Robert N. Stavins, Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Programs in Public Policy, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, “Designing the PostKyoto Climate Regime: Lessons from the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements An Interim Progress Report for the 14th Conference of the Parties, Framework Convention on Climate Change,” December 2008, The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, an initiative of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, which develops innovative answers to today’s complex environmental issues, through research, teaching, and policy outreach, Access Date: 13 July 2016, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/Interim%20Report%20081203%20Akiko%20v6.pdf, KD

This architecture consists of harmonized domestic taxes on emissions of greenhouse gases from all sources. The tax (or charge) would be internationally adjusted from time to time, and each country would collect and keep the revenues it generates. This approach begins from the premise that seriously addressing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions requires a worldwide approach. Changing the prices of goods and services made with fossil fuels is the most effective way to influence the daily consumption decisions made by more than a billion households and firms around the world. If CO2-emitting activities are to be reduced, then the prices of those activities must be increased. Levying a charge on CO2 emissions does that directly. In terms of design, the geographic coverage of a carbon tax should be as broad as possible. The initial scheme need not cover all countries, but it should cover the countries that account for the vast majority of world emissions. Additionally, the tax should cover all the significant greenhouse gases, insofar as practical. The level of the tax would be set by international agreement and could be subject to periodic review every five or ten years. To minimize administrative costs, the charge should be assessed at upstream locations— that is, on the carbon content of fossil fuels. For example, the carbon content of oil should be taxed at refineries, natural gas should be taxed at major pipeline collection points, and coal at mine heads. All but the poorest nations should have sufficient administrative capacity to administer such a plan. Fortunately, the countries that lack this capacity are likely to be low emitters.

The aff is key—carbon taxes generate revenue that can fuel social programs that help at risk populations and lower income tax bracketsAparna Mathur, a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Adele C. Morris, a senior fellow and the policy director for the Climate and Energy Economics Project, focused on the economics of climate change, "Distributional effects of a carbon tax in broader US fiscal reform," Energy Policy 66 (2014): 326-334,

http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/-mathur-distributional-effects-of-a-carbon-tax-in-broader-us-fiscal-reform_17161031273.pdf, KD

Our results suggest that a carbon tax is regressive when using annual incomes as the base for the incidence measure, but less regressive when using consumption. Our analysis suggests that if policymakers direct about 11 percent of the tax towards the poorest two deciles, for example through greater spending on social safety net programs than would otherwise occur, then those households would on average be no worse off after the carbon tax than they were before. Of course, individual households within those groups might be better or worse off depending on their individual energy consumption patterns and participation in federal spending programs.

Carbon taxes are necessary to switch to a carbon-free economy, subsidies failFrederick van der Ploeg and Cees Withagen, “Growth, renewables, and the optimal carbon tax,” International Economic Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, February 2014, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/iere.12049/epdf, KD

A substantial and possibly rising carbon tax is needed not only to curb demand for fossil fuel, but also to accelerate the switch from a carbon-based to a carbon-free economy. It does this by encouraging more oil to be left in the crust of the earth and renewables to be phased in more quickly. Subsidies for carbon-free renewables are a poor substitute for a credible path of present and future carbon taxes.2The optimal carbon tax should be set to the social cost of carbon, which is the present value of all future marginal damages from global warming. But the social cost of carbon is highly endogenous as it depends on the level of consumption and capital in the economy as well as on whether oil,3renewables, or both are used.

Solvency

General carbon tax goodTraditional understandings of carbon taxes fail but the affirmative provides a unique understanding that forces positive changes to create an effective policyChelsea Harvey, a freelance journalist covering science. She specializes in environmental health and policy, “ Climate change is going to make inequality even worse than it already is,” 8 December 2015, The Washington Post: Energy and Environment, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/07/climate-change-is-going-to-make-inequality-even-worse-than-it-already-is/, KD

This is a tricky concept even for expert economists, and given that the whole idea of a discount rate revolves around murky ethical and social considerations, there’s no universally agreed upon answer. Therefore, different models apply different discount rates — for example, a rate of 3 percent versus a rate of 5 percent. Higher rates suggest that we value the future effects of climate change less, so they result in a lower estimated cost of carbon, which translates into weaker carbon pricing policies. Economists who favor higher discount rates (and, thus, a lower social cost of carbon) often justify their position by the idea that the global economy as a whole is growing and future generations will be better off than current ones — thus, climate damages will have less of an impact on them, economically speaking. But the modified model suggests that this won’t necessarily be the case for lower-income segments of society, whose welfare may decline as a result of the impacts of climate change. In their modified model, the researchers kept a discount value that some economists have argued is high. But notably, when they assumed a disproportionate effect of climate change on the poor, the model produced an optimal carbon price similar to what would be generated in an existing model that adopted a lower discount rate — in other words, the carbon price skyrockets. The finding packs a punch, suggesting that climate inequalities could be just as important in informing policy as the discount rate.

Partial equilibrium frameworks incorrectly analyze the effects of carbon taxes—prefer the nuance of the affirmativeEmmanuel Combet, economist at the Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement in Paris (CIRED), master’s degrees in engineering and economics, PhD in economics, Frederic Ghersi, research fellow, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Jean Charles Hourcade, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Daniel Théry, Carbon Tax and Equity : The Importance of Policy Design. Dias Soares, C., Milne, J., Ashiabor, H., Deketelaere, K., Kreiser, L. (ed.). Critical Issues In Environmental Taxation, Oxford University Press, pp 277-295, 2010, Oxford University Press, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00692516, KD

This basic reasoning already appears in early works by Poterba (1991) or Pearson and Smith (1991)—who also stress that the ‘partial equilibrium’ framework implicit behind it has substantial shortcomings: it assumes that energy producers or distributors pass the entire tax burden through to the consumers; it considers a fixed level and structure of energy supply and demand, thereby precluding adaptive behaviour; at last, it ignores the propagation of the

carbon tax to other goods and services prices through their intermediate energy consumptions, and thus the ultimate effects on the economy and household income. This chain of effects resorts to fiscal incidence, which deals with possible discrepancies between the directly perceived distributive impacts and those ultimately resulting from ‘general equilibrium’ effects. Partial equilibrium analyses were admittedly extended by allowing for consumption trade-offs through the introduction of price-elasticities differentiated by class. It turned out that such adaptive behaviour attenuates the immediate direct impact of a tax, but hardly ever reverses its sign (Cornwell and Creedy, 1996; West and Williams, 2004). On the contrary, the use of input-output tables for evaluating the propagation of the tax effect to all prices tends to reinforce the regressive effect (Hamilton and Cameron, 1994; Hassett et al., 2007; Wier et al., 2005). But such computation, however close to the immediate perception of consumers and facilitated by quite simple arithmetic or linear algebra, ultimately reasons in a fictitious world: it assumes constant nominal income, and ignores the use made of the tax revenue, which disappears in some unexplainable potlatch.

Carbon taxes good—progressiveThe structure of the tax code will resolve any issue with the distributive impact of the carbon tax via direct redistribution of proceedsEmmanuel Combet, economist at the Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement in Paris (CIRED), master’s degrees in engineering and economics, PhD in economics, Frederic Ghersi, research fellow, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Jean Charles Hourcade, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Daniel Théry, Carbon Tax and Equity : The Importance of Policy Design. Dias Soares, C., Milne, J., Ashiabor, H., Deketelaere, K., Kreiser, L. (ed.). Critical Issues In Environmental Taxation, Oxford University Press, pp 277-295, 2010, Oxford University Press, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00692516, KD

The contrasted impacts of a carbon tax on different household classes ultimately result from the interaction of three effects: (i) the sheer weight of the tax payments, strongly determined by the budget share of energy expenses and hence rather regressive; (ii) the distribution of the macroeconomic consequences of the tax (themselves strongly sensitive to the recycling of its proceeds), which hangs both on the specific position of each class on the labour market (rate of unemployment, wedge between wage and unemployment benefits) and on its income structure (share of revenue only remotely connected to variations in general activity—transfer payments); (iii) potential direct redistribution schemes of part or of all the tax proceeds to households, which offer a powerful leverage to overturn the first two effects. Contrary to a misconception inherited from partial equilibrium analyses, there is thus no mechanical link between a carbon tax and its ultimate distributive effects. The implementation of a carbon tax invites indeed to a political trade-off through the choice of a recycling rule. A direct redistribution of the tax proceeds to households can be used to favour the poorest household classes, but at a macroeconomic cost in terms of both GDP and either aggregate consumption or employment. Conversely, a recycling of all tax proceeds in lower payroll taxes results in higher GDP, consumption and employment, but at the cost of a widening of the gap between the lower and the higher revenue classes—although it manages to increase the consumption of all classes. A mix recycling scheme, which devotes the tax levied on firms to payroll tax rebates, and that levied on household to the financing of redistributive transfers, is proven to provide a compromise between the two polar options: it allows to achieve both an improvement of all macroeconomic indicators, and a control of the distributive impacts of the reform.

Studies prove that carbon taxes are progressive by increasing tax benefits, labor tax cuts, and capital tax cuts—you can’t just evaluate the cost of the tax but must include an income analysisMarisa Beck, a Global Governance PhD candidate (ABD) at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, specializing in Global Environmental Governance, Nicholas Rivers, Associate Professor Public and International Affairs Social Sciences University of Ottawa, Randall Wigle, professor in the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, focused on CGE modeling, Canadian Climate Policy, and innovation policy and the environment,

and Hidemichi Yonezawa, “Carbon tax and revenue recycling: Impacts on households in British Columbia,” Resource and Energy Economics 41 (2015) 40–69, http://www.tehranthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/beck2015.pdf, KD

There has been much attention on the equity implications of the revenue-neutral carbon tax in BC and some analysts have criticized the program for not fully compensating low-income households for the additional burden due to higher energy prices. Our analysis suggests that this criticism is unfounded. Our analysis focuses on the equity and efficiency effects of the provincial carbon tax with its accompanying revenue recycling program, making every effort to represent the provisions of the policy program as closely as possible. Our key findings relate to the progressivity of the scheme (both with or without recycling). Even without a revenue recycling system in place, our model suggests that the carbon tax is progressive. The policy’s revenue recycling measures, including labour tax cuts, tax benefits, and capital tax cuts, enhance the progressive incidence. This finding is clearly different from other studies that estimate the incidence of carbon taxes considering only the spending-side effect, because the missing income-side effect is the driver of the progressive incidence. On the other hand, our finding is in line with other studies considering both spending-side and income-side effects (Rausch et al. (2010), Metcalf et al. (2010), and Dissou and Siddiqui (2014)), showing that the progressive incidence of the income-side effect can dominate the regressive incidence of spending-side effect. However, which effect dominates the other effect depends on the characteristics of the regulated region or country. In the case of the BC carbon tax, the regressive incidence of spending-side effect is very weak or neutral because the electricity in BC is mostly generated from hydropower and the fossil fuel spending share is not significantly different between households. Whether our finding holds or not in other provinces in Canada or other countries depends on the characteristics of income source and spending pattern of households. For example, in the countries where the transfer income share is high for low income households, which is the case for other provinces in Canada and most (if not all) OECD countries, the income-side effect is expected to be progressive because carbon tax affects other types of income. In contrast, if the electricity is generated mostly from coal, the spending-side effect is expected to be regressive, since the electricity spending share tends to be high for low income households.

Carbon taxes are progressive—most likely to affect the wealthier tax bracket and provide incentives to the lower. The question is public perception—discussions like the aff are key Marisa Beck, a Global Governance PhD candidate (ABD) at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, specializing in Global Environmental Governance, Nicholas Rivers, Associate Professor Public and International Affairs Social Sciences University of Ottawa, Randall Wigle,professor in the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, focused on CGE modeling, Canadian Climate Policy, and innovation policy and the environment, and Hidemichi Yonezawa, “Carbon tax and revenue recycling: Impacts on households in British Columbia,” Resource and Energy Economics 41 (2015) 40–69, http://www.tehranthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/beck2015.pdf, KD

We find the following. First, the BC carbon tax as a stand-alone policy without accompanying programs for revenue recycling is highly progressive (i.e., the absolute incidence of the tax falls more heavily on wealthy households than poor households).1 This result is primarily caused by general equilibrium changes in factor prices that accompany introduction of the carbon tax, rather than by changes in energy prices. Real wages drop, which affects higher-income households more as these are more dependent on labour as an income source. Second, a revenue recycling scheme as implemented in BC can impact the incidence of the tax. In the case of the revenue-recycling measures adopted to accompany the carbon tax in BC the revenue recycling scheme enhances the carbon tax’s progressive incidence (i.e., the differential incidence of the tax also falls more heavily on wealthy households).2 By estimating the distribution of costs and benefits among different income groups this analysis provides important input to the political debate around the carbon tax in BC and potentially other jurisdictions. Insights on distributional effects are of great policy relevance considering that perceived equity and fairness of a carbon tax policy are key to achieving political acceptance. In fact, Harrison and Peet (2012) explain the large variety in local responses to the introduction of the BC carbon tax in 2008 was dictated by the public perception of winners and losers from the regulation rather than evidence of the actual distribution of costs. For example, the regions with the lowest anticipated costs were the ones where opposition was strongest: rural communities in Northern BC perceived the tax as unfair and considered their interests ignored by politicians, while suburban communities in Southern BC remained largely quiet. Similarly, Rabe and Borick (2012) look at de facto carbon tax policies in multiple US states and Canadian provinces and show that the labeling and framing of carbon pricing instruments in the public debate and the use of tax revenues crucially shape public perception of tax proposals.

Progressive tax goodThe progressive nature of the carbon tax creates an optimal tax system that prioritizes both equity and efficiencyPeter Diamond, professor Emeritus of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology, Cambridge Massachusetts, and Emmanuel Saez, professor of Economics , University of California, Berkeley , California, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations,” Journal of Economic Perspectives - Volume 25, Number 4 - Fall 2011 - Pages 1 65-1 90, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41337235.pdf?_=1469233747869, KD

Models in optimal tax theory typically posit that the tax system should maximize a social welfare function subject to a government budget constraint, taking into account that individuals respond to taxes and transfers. Social welfare is larger when resources are more equally distributed, but redistributive taxes and transfers can negatively affect incentives to work, save, and earn income in the first place. This creates the clas- sical trade-off between equity and efficiency which is at the core of the optimal income tax problem. In general, optimal tax analyses maximize social welfare as a function of individual utilities - the sum of utilities in the utilitarian case. The marginal weight for a given person in the social welfare function measures the value of an additional dollar of consumption expressed in terms of public funds. Such welfare weights depend on the level of redistribution and are decreasing with income whenever society values more equality of income. Therefore, optimal income tax theory is first a normative theory that shows how a social welfare objective combines with constraints arising from limits on resources and behavioral responses to taxation in order to derive specific tax policy recommendations. In addition, optimal income tax theory can be used to evaluate current policies and suggest avenues for reform. Understanding what would be good policy, if implemented, is a key step in making policy recommendations. When done well, moving from mathematical results, theorems, or calculated examples to policy recommendations is a subtle process. The nature of a model is to be a limited picture of reality. This has two implications. First, a model may be good for one question and bad for another, depending on the robustness of the answers to the inaccuracies of the model, which will naturally vary with the question. Second, tractability concerns imply that simultaneous consideration of multiple models is appropriate since different aspects of reality can be usefully highlighted in different models; hence our reliance on trying to draw inferences simultaneously from multiple models. In our view, a theoretical result can be fruitfully used as part of forming a policy recommendation only if three conditions are met. First, the result should be based on an economic mechanism that is empirically relevant and first order to the problem at hand. Second, the result should be reasonably robust to changes in the modeling assumptions. In particular, people have very heterogeneous tastes, and there are many departures from the rational model, especially in the realm of intertemporal choice. Therefore, we should view with suspicion results that depend critically on very strong homogeneity or rationality assumptions. Deriving optimal tax formulas as a function of a few empirically estimable "sufficient statistics" is a natural way to approach those first two conditions. Third, the tax policy prescription needs to be implementable - that is, the tax policy needs to be socially acceptable and not too complex relative to the modeling of tax administration and individual responses to tax law. By socially acceptable, we do not mean

to limit the choice to currently politically plausible policy options. Rather, we mean there should not be very widely held normative views that make such policies seem implausible and inappropriate at pretty much all times. For example, a policy prescription such as taxing height (Mankiw and Weinzierl, 2010) is obviously not socially acceptable because it violates certain horizontal equity concerns that do not appear in basic models. The complexity constraint can also be an issue when optimal taxes depend in a complex way on the full history of earnings and consumption, as in some recent path-breaking papers on optimal dynamic taxation. We obtain three policy recommendations from basic research that we believe can satisfy these three criteria reasonably well. First, very high earners should be subject to high and rising marginal tax rates on earnings. In particular, we discuss why the famous zero marginal tax rate at the top of the earnings distribution is not policy relevant. Second, the earnings of low-income families should be subsidized, and those subsidies should then be phased out with high implicit marginal tax rates. This result follows because labor supply responses of low earners are concentrated along the margin of whether to participate in labor markets at all (the extensive as opposed to the intensive margin). These two results combined imply that the optimal profile of transfers and taxes is highly nonlinear and cannot be well approx- imated by a flat tax along with lump sum "demogrants." Third, we argue that capital income should be taxed. We will review certain theoretical results - in particular, those of Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976), Chamley (1986), andjudd (1985) - implying no capital income taxes and argue that these findings are not robust enough to be policy relevant. In the end, persuasive arguments for taxing capital income are that there are difficulties in practice in distinguishing between capital and labor incomes, that borrowing constraints make full reliance on labor taxes less efficient, and that savings rates are heterogeneous.

The US tax system has become increasingly regressive in the last 40 years due to low rates for high earners, halved corporate taxes and increased individual income taxes, trends which are all reversed by the affirmativeThomas Piketty, Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics (PSE), Paris, France, and a Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, United Kingdom, and Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, “How Progressive is the U.S. Federal Tax System? A Historical and International Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives-Volume 21, Number 1-Winter 2007-Pages 3-24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30033699.pdf?_=1469233742515, KD

Over the last 40 years, the U.S. federal tax system has undergone three striking changes, each of which seems to move the federal tax system in the direction of less progressivity. First, there has been a dramatic decline in top marginal individual income tax rates. In the early 1960s, the statutory individual income tax rate applied to the marginal dollar of the highest incomes was 91 percent. This marginal tax rate on the highest incomes declined to 28 percent by 1988, increased significantly to 39.6 percent in 1993, and fell to 35 percent as of 2003. Second, corporate income taxes as a fraction of gross domestic product have fallen by half , from around 3.5-4.0 percent of GDP in the early 1960s to less than 2 percent of GDP in the early 2000s (for example, Auerbach, 2006). Meanwhile, corporate profits as a share of GDP have not

declined over the period, suggesting that capital owners-who are disproportionately of above-average incomes-earn relatively more net of taxes today than in the 1960s. Third, there has been a substantial increase in payroll tax rates financing Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare. The combined employee-employer payroll tax rate on labor income has increased from 6 percent in the early 1960s to over 15 percent in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, the Social Security payroll tax applies only up to a cap-equal to $90,000 of annual earnings in 2005-and is therefore a relatively smaller tax burden as incomes rise above the cap.

The US tax code attempts to control for wealth concentration but since 1960, the power has been eroding as the composition of the top quintile has shifted—because the top is no longer composed of those effected most by capital taxes, the tax system controls on inequality have weakened causing the drastic income inequality we see today. The aff is key to reversal.Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics (PSE), Paris, France, and a Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, United Kingdom, and Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, “How Progressive is the U.S. Federal Tax System? A Historical and International Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives-Volume 21, Number 1-Winter 2007-Pages 3-24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30033699.pdf?_=1469233742515, KD

The changes in progressivity of the income distribution since 1960 have been most marked at the very top of the income distribution, which as Table 1 illustrated, accounts for a substantial share of total income. In an earlier paper (Piketty and Saez, 2003), we document the evolution of the incomes of those at the very top of the income distribution. Figure 2 displays the total share of income received by the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution and its composition. Two important facts stand out. First, the share of income going to the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution has grown tremendously since the late 1970s: the share of total income received by the top 0.1 percent was around 2.5 of total income in the 1970s and reached a peak above 9 percent of total income in 2000. In fact, most of the overall increase in the inequality of income has been driven by the very top of the income distribution. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports, using a somewhat different definition of income than ours, that the top quintile of the income distribution received 43-44 percent of all income in the 1970s, but this share had increased to about 50 percent by 2001. Piketty and Saez (2003) show that most of the relative income gains for the top quintile have been concentrated within the top 1 percent--and especially the top 0.1 percent--with relatively modest gains in the top decile excluding the top percentile (P90-95 and P95-99). Second, the composition of top incomes has changed substantially. Figure 2 shows the breakdown into wage income, business income, capital income (including imputed corporate taxes), and realized capital gains. In the 1960s, top incomes were primarily composed of capital income: mostly dividends and capital gains. The surge in top incomes since the 1970s has been driven in large part by a steep increase in the labor income component, due in large part to the explosion of executive compensation. As a result, labor income now represents a substantial fraction of income at the top. This change in composition is important to keep in mind, because the corporate and estate taxes that had such a strong effect

on creating progressivity in the 1960s would have relatively little effect on labor income. Figure 3 shows how the progressivity of the federal income tax system has mitigated income concentration since 1960. Panel A displays the share of total income received by the top 0.1 percent of the distribution before and after all federal taxes. Panel A shows that the federal tax system reduced income concen- tration the most in the 1960s and 1970s when income concentration was relatively low, and that the federal tax system has a relatively modest effect on the top 0.1 percent income share in recent years when income inequality has become higher. To put it another way, the pre-tax share of income for the top 0.1 percent rose from 2.6 percent in 1970 to 9.3 percent in 2000. The rise in after-tax income shares was from 1.2 percent in 1970 to over 7.3 percent in 2000. In percentage point terms, the increase in pre-tax incomes is slightly greater than the increase in post-tax incomes. But in terms of observing what those with very high incomes can afford to consume, the after-tax share of income for those in this income group multiplied by a factor of 6.1, while the pre-tax share of income multiplied by a factor of 3.5. The tax reductions enacted in 2001 and 2003 have further weakened the redistributive power of the federal income tax today.9 When the pattern of redistribution is broken down into different taxes, an expected pattern emerges. The overall extent of redistribution from the very top of the income distribution was higher in the 1960s, mainly because of the impact of the corporate income tax and the estate tax. In more recent years, as the relative magni- tude of the corporate and estate taxes has diminished and as average income tax rates have dropped a great deal at the bottom of the income distribution, the income tax has become the primary element of progressivity in the overall federal tax code, creating a gap between pre-tax and post-tax income for those at the highest income levels.

Regional DistributionThe effect of a carbon tax would be dispersed equally regardless of region due to differences in energy costs and transportation needsAparna Mathur, a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Adele C. Morris, a senior fellow and the policy director for the Climate and Energy Economics Project, focused on the economics of climate change, "Distributional effects of a carbon tax in broader US fiscal reform," Energy Policy 66 (2014): 326-334, http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/-mathur-distributional-effects-of-a-carbon-tax-in-broader-us-fiscal-reform_17161031273.pdf, KD

Some also fear that areas of the U.S. heavily dependent on coal for electricity, for example, will be hit much worse than other regions. However, prior analysis of the distribution of burdens across the country shows that households in different regions will likely bear similar burdens as a share of income. That is because people in different regions use different mixes of fuels to heat and cool homes, and they also vary in their gasoline consumption. Hassett et al (2009) show that these differences tend to even out the impact of the price on carbon. In other words, areas where electricity prices may go up most may be areas where expenditures on transport fuels are relatively low. In addition, households in most regions consume similar baskets of non-energy goods, resulting in similar patterns of indirect energy consumption. However, the study estimates that a carbon pollution tax could fall a little harder than average on households in Eastern central states because of their higher overall fuel consumption as a share of income.

Discussion KeyAnalyzing both environmental and social systems is critical in understanding how vulnerable groups are impacted by climate changeSusan L. Cutter, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina where she directs the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, and Christina Finch, masters degree from University of South Carolina, currently employed by FEMA, “Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards,” 2007, PNAS, vol. 105, no. 7, 2301-2306, http://www.pnas.org/content/105/7/2301.long, KD

Although significant advancements have been made in sustainability and vulnerability science, especially the conceptualization and representation of vulnerability within the human-environment system (1–6), nuanced differences in the definition of vulnerability between the risk-hazards and human-environmental research communities remain. The primary application arena also distinguishes these two communities. Human-environmental vulnerability research relates to large-scale global environmental processes, especially climate change and its local to global impacts (7, 8). Findings from natural-hazards and disasters research on vulnerability and resilience are incorporated into emergency management and hazards mitigation (9–12). Despite differences between the two research communities, both acknowledge that the composition of vulnerability is driven by exposure, sensitivity, and response (carrying capacity or resilience), and it requires measurements of both environmental and social systems, the latter being less prevalent in the literature. This paper adds to the paucity of empirical literature on the vulnerability of social systems through an examination of the historical variability in natural-hazard vulnerability, or social vulnerability. Social vulnerability is a measure of both the sensitivity of a population to natural hazards and its ability to respond to and recover from the impacts of hazards. It is a multidimensional construct, one not easily captured with a single variable. There is ample field-based evidence for understanding the characteristics of people and social groups that make them more sensitive to the effects of natural hazards and reduce their ability to adequately respond and recover (13, 14). Race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and gender are among the most common characteristics that define vulnerable populations, along with age (elderly and children), migration, and housing tenure (renter or owner). For example, the literature has cited many reasons why the elderly are more vulnerable in the event of a disaster: physical limitations that influence their inability or unwillingness to comply with mandatory evacuation orders; postdisaster psychological stress that impairs recovery and increases the need for additional social services; declining cognitive abilities to process hazard information necessitating specially targeted risk communication or warning messages; and fewer economic resources to repair damaged homes, especially by elderly residents on fixed incomes (15–18). Thus, the greater the proportion of elderly in a community, the more vulnerable it is and the longer it will take for the community to fully recover from the disaster's aftermath.

Identifying the human consequences of climate change is critical to creating solutions—the aff is a prerequisiteW. Neil Adger, Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and P. Mick Kelly, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia,“Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4: 253–266, 1999, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009601904210, KD

Determining the potential consequences of climate change and sea level rise is a complex and uncertain endeavour. To date, most attention has been paid to assessing the direct physical, chemical or biological impact of the global warming problem in terms of effects on, for example, levels of coastal erosion, water quality, agriculture and ecosystem viability. No one would deny, though, that a full assessment of consequences for human well-being also requires evaluation of the manner in which society is likely to respond to the initial signs of impacts or to the perception of coming impacts. Social and biophysical systems react to climate change through adaptation. In the case of social systems, these reactions may be involuntary, spontaneous responses or may be deliberate, adaptive strategies (e.g., see Smit et al., 1998). We would argue (in line for example with Smithers and Smit, 1997 and Burton, 1997) that it is meaningless to study the consequences of climate change without considering the range of adaptive responses that will substantially alter any initial impacts. There are clear parallels with the concept of climate sensitivity whereby a complex series of feedbacks modifies the initial, purely radiative effect of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, changing not only the overall scale of the effect but also local detail. The objective of this paper is to outline a conceptual model of social vulnerability to climate change as the first step in appraising and understanding the social and economic processes that shape the adaptive response. Vulnerability as defined here pertains explicitly to individuals and social groups. It is the state of individuals, groups, or communities defined in terms of their ability to cope with and adapt to any external stress placed on their livelihoods and well-being. We emphasise vulnerability to short-term climate hazards and extremes (flood and drought, cyclone and heatwave) as it is these events that populations first and foremost experience and react to (see, for example, Palutikof et al., 1997). Moreover, it is through the varying character of these events that any long-term change in climate will first be manifest. Why study social vulnerability? There are two main reasons why the scientific community is presently addressing the issue of the consequences of climate change. First, information regarding the scale of the problem is required in order to assess the magnitude of the threat and thus motivate the broader community to take an appropriate level of action. This is, perhaps, the primary driving force behind the work of the IPCC. Second, information regarding potential consequences is needed to identify effective means of promoting remedial action to limit impacts. Given that action on global warming is at the precautionary stage, this latter requirement amounts to the identification of win-win situations in which action taken now to curb the long-term impact of climate change also meets present-day needs.

Our focus on economic inequality allows for an intersectional analysis on the basis of how climate change and inequality affect different races, ethnicities and gendersValerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color, “People of color will be a majority of the American working class in 2032,” 9 June 2016, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/, KD

Advancing policies that address persistent racial disparities while also tackling class inequality will require abandoning the zero-sum mindset that says one group’s set of issues is totally distinct from and in direct competition with another’s. Overcoming this trap begins with defining a broader view of how all the issues are related. For example, there is a connection between the political, economic, and social disempowerment of black and brown communities embodied in the remarkably similar rise in mass incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s and deportations during the 1990s and 2000s (Figure J). To begin with, both trends can be traced to policy decisions, the burdens of which have been disproportionately born by black and Latino men and their families. Raphael and Stoll (2013) find that most of the growth in the prison population can be accounted for by society’s choice for tough-on-crime policies (e.g., determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, limiting discretionary parole boards, etc.) resulting in more individuals—committing less serious offenses—being sentenced to serve time, and longer prison sentences. These policies have most affected black and Hispanic men, particularly those without a college degree. For example, in 1979, a black man faced a 13.4 percent chance of being admitted to a state or federal prison during his lifetime, compared with a 6 percent chance for a Hispanic man and a 2.5 percent chance for a white man. By 2001, these probabilities had grown to a 32.2 percent for black men, 17.2 percent chance for Hispanic men, and 5.9 percent for white men (Cox 2015). Similarly, the rapid rise in deportations was preceded by the passage of two 1996 laws: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). These laws made individuals eligible for deportation, based on nearly any criminal offense, regardless of severity; eliminated judicial review of aggravated felony cases, and instituted mandatory detention of immigrants awaiting deportation proceedings. Ninety-eight percent of deportees are from Latin America and the Caribbean, 88 percent are men, and half of all deportations are on the grounds of criminal violations (Golash-Boza 2015). Golash-Boza (2015) further argues that immigration law enforcement serves the aims of global capitalism, making labor a disposable commodity and laborers powerless. This also has contributed to the suppression of working-class wages. Opportunities to find common ground don’t stop with issues of social justice and civil rights that most directly impact African Americans and Latinos. As has already been stated, there is great commonality across race, ethnicity, and gender on economic issues such as wage stagnation. Unfortunately, as working-class families have come under increased economic pressure over the last 15 years, the result has not been greater racial and ethnic cohesion behind policies that can improve their lot. Divisions persist in spite of the data, which suggests that in order to deal with the common economic challenges, we have to deal with racial disparities and vice versa. The fact is working-class whites can’t blame people of color as the cause of their economic hardships

any more than people of color can dismiss the economic frustrations of working-class whites as insignificant. As Figure E showed, the lack of median wage growth among white men did not translate into higher wages for black or Hispanic men, and declining median wages among black and Hispanic men were not offset by excessive wage growth among white men at the median. As a larger share of working-class jobs have shifted from making things to serving and caring for people, working-class whites are occupying more of the low-wage jobs that have traditionally been undervalued and disproportionately filled by women and people of color. So, not only do these workers share the experience of inadequate wages, but increasingly they’re working side by side in the same low-paying jobs.

Environmental sustainability paired with ensuring the most vulnerable populations are prepared is necessaryHans A. Baer, a scholar activist who adheres to the notion of praxis – the merger of theory and social action – anthropologist, “Global Capitalism and Climate Change,” in Handbook on International Political Economy, edited by Ralph Pettman, World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2012, pg. 395-414, http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43030594/Ralph_Pettman-Handbook_On_International_Political_Economy-Wo1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1469152351&Signature=2QfxTk1NR8qzXt2JG1EBkkXVV18%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRalph_Pettman_Handbook_On_International.pdf#page=408, KD

Anthropologists have long recognised that social systems, whether local, regional, or global, do not last forever. Global capitalism has been extant for some five hundred years but it has many inherent contradictions. These suggest that it will ultimately be transcended and, indeed, that it must be if humanity and the planet are to survive. It seems that there is a need to start thinking about alternative world systems, one committed to meeting people’s basic needs, to social parity and justice, to democracy, and last but not least, to environmental sustainability. One scenario, that presents an alternative to an eco-fascist or at least an eco-authoritarian vision, juxtaposes environmental sustainability and climate change mitigation with ongoing social inequality, authoritarian statism, and a smaller global population. Achieving such a world would not be easy, especially given the fate of earlier efforts to create ostensibly more equitable and just social systems. Despite all of the baggage associated with the term ‘socialism’ and the desire of various progressivist thinkers to substitute terms such as ‘radical democracy,’ ‘economic democracy’, ‘Earth democracy’, and ‘global democracy’, such a term does make it possible to grapple with scenarios variously given this label, both reformist and revolutionist. And though scenarios like these remain very much visions still, they are ones that various individuals and groups continue to promote. They represent, in Amin’s words, “a future to be invented, a project of civilisation, open to the creativity of the imagination” (Amin, 2009, p. 22).

Impacts

Economic InequalityClimate change disproportionately effects the poor and will exacerbate existing inequality both between and within different countries—discussions like the aff are key to create effective solutionsChelsea Harvey, a freelance journalist covering science. She specializes in environmental health and policy, “ Climate change is going to make inequality even worse than it already is,” 8 December 2015, The Washington Post: Energy and Environment, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/07/climate-change-is-going-to-make-inequality-even-worse-than-it-already-is/, KD

In a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists demonstrate the full ramifications of a widely accepted theory about climate change: that it will almost certainly have a disproportionate impact on the poor. Acknowledging this fact in models, they find, can drastically change estimates of how climate change will affect the economy, and leads to a deeply troubling conclusion — climate change won’t just hit the poor hardest, but it will exacerbate existing inequality within societies. The disproportionate effect of climate change on the poor isn’t a new idea. But in general, while the economic models used to inform climate policies have accounted for income inequalities between different countries or regions of the world, they’ve failed to acknowledge that these inequalities exist within countries as well. “The lacking description of subregional/national inequality is one of the most glaring lacunae in these models,” said lead author Francis Dennig, an assistant professor of economics at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, in an email to The Post. Dennig and his colleagues decided to see what would happen if they tweaked a leading climate-economy model, known as RICE (the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy), to account for inequalities within different regions of the world — essentially acknowledging that different countries contain people of both higher and lower incomes. They found that when they assumed a scenario in which lower-income sectors of society were hit hardest by the effects of climate change, a key factor in our understanding of the economic effects of climate change changed drastically in comparison to models that didn’t take these inequalities into account.

Now is the time to create solutions to institutionalized means by which oppression operates and interrogate how race and economic inequality are tied.Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color, “People of color will be a majority of the American working class in 2032,” 9 June 2016, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/, KD

As we anticipate the demographic transition of the working class, one phrase seems especially appropriate—“demography is not destiny.” On one hand it is true that simply having more people in the working class who identify as something other than white doesn’t guarantee greater racial equity. On the other, demography will have an impact on the future of the

American economy, politics, and social infrastructure. The shape of that destiny is what’s at stake. There are those who seek to stoke fears about this transition or frame it as a threat to white America for political gain. However, it is important to remember that the same special interest groups that fund the opposition to policies such as the minimum wage and paid sick leave, and that support efforts to undermine collective bargaining power, are often the same ones aligned with support of voter suppression tactics that limit voting among people of color, low-income individuals, students, seniors, and people with disabilities (Lafer 2013, Keyes et al. 2012, Weiser and Opsal 2014). The best way to advance the needed economic policies is for diverse groups to recognize that they share more in common than not and work together to achieve their overlapping and intersecting agendas. As simple as it may sound, that task is much easier said than done because it requires challenging and dismantling generations-old structures that were created to segregate people and establish a predetermined system of winners and losers on the basis of race. Historically, racism has created the sharpest social and economic divisions between whites and blacks, but it is also naïve to assume a collective identity that unifies the numerous and widely diverse constituencies conveniently referred to as minorities or people of color. In other words, there is work to do in tearing down stereotypes and building trust among all groups of people, not just between whites and people of color. It will take a considerable amount of ongoing effort to shift the dominant narrative from one that divides the masses to one that creates a new world of possibilities that benefits all of us. The only certain thing is that issues of race and ethnicity will become more central and will need to be confronted head on.

HealthClimate change significantly reduces food sources for varying groups and poses great health risks as disease and infection spread easier and quicker due to the increased desertificationHans A. Baer, a scholar activist who adheres to the notion of praxis – the merger of theory and social action – anthropologist, “Global Capitalism and Climate Change,” in Handbook on International Political Economy, edited by Ralph Pettman, World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2012, pg. 395-414, http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43030594/Ralph_Pettman-Handbook_On_International_Political_Economy-Wo1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1469152351&Signature=2QfxTk1NR8qzXt2JG1EBkkXVV18%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRalph_Pettman_Handbook_On_International.pdf#page=408, KD

Climate change may also contribute to the intensification of droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, precipitation, and flooding. It may cause stronger and more frequent El Nino events. Due to climate change, plants and animals are already moving into regions closer to the poles. Climate change is already having an impact upon human societies. South Pacific Islanders in particular face threats to their traditional horticultural lifestyle due to rising sea levels and storm surges. These inundate their fields and freshwater supplies and threaten to submerge their islands. The Inuit of Arctic Canada and Alaska are experiencing a significant reduction in the number of polar bears that they have traditionally hunted. They are unable to access seals either, because pack ice is freezing later in the autumn than it once did. Andean peoples face the possibility of the eradication of their way of life as glaciers from which they have drawn water for themselves, their fields, and their animals continue to retreat. Peoples living in coastal areas around the world face the possibility of increasing flooding and hurricanes due to the rise of the oceans. Meanwhile many climate scientists contend that the droughts that people in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the American Southwest and Australia have been facing are related to climate change. Climate change appears also to be the primary impetus behind the spread of infectious diseases to environments north and south of the equator and the heat waves that threaten the lives and health of vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and the sick. Given the health consequences of climate change, it is possible to speak of the diseases of climate change or global warming (Baer and Singer, 2009). These are not necessarily new diseases, although they might include ‘tropical diseases’ (e.g. malaria and dengue fever) that have spread to new places and peoples because of climate change as well as the detrimental health effects of failing food security due to the desertification of pastoral areas and the flooding of agricultural lands.

RacismSegregation from housing to schools to economic success has operated in the United States unabated leading to inequality, profiling, disproportionate policing, and violence—we must not allow our reaction to climate change to reinforce segregationist policies that maintain and increase racial oppressionRichard Rothstein, research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley), recent work has documented the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, “From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation,” 29 April 2015, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/blog/from-ferguson-to-baltimore-the-fruits-of-government-sponsored-segregation/, KD

In Baltimore in 1910, a black Yale law school graduate purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting African Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore’s mayor proclaimed, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.” Thus began a century of federal, state, and local policies to quarantine Baltimore’s black population in isolated slums—policies that continue to the present day, as federal housing subsidy policies still disproportionately direct low-income black families to segregated neighborhoods and away from middle class suburbs. Whenever young black men riot in response to police brutality or murder, as they have done in Baltimore this week, we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality—training officers not to use excessive force, implementing community policing, encouraging police to be more sensitive, prohibiting racial profiling, and so on. These are all good, necessary, and important things to do. But such proposals ignore the obvious reality that the protests are not really (or primarily) about policing. In 1968, following hundreds of similar riots nationwide, a commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson concluded that “[o]ur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” and that “[s]egregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.” The Kerner Commission (headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner) added that “[w]hat white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” In the last 50 years, the two societies have become even more unequal . Although a relatively small black middle class has been permitted to integrate itself into mainstream America, those left behind are more segregated now than they were in 1968. When the Kerner Commission blamed “white society” and “white institutions,” it employed euphemisms to avoid naming the culprits everyone knew at the time. It was not a vague white society that created ghettos but government—federal, state, and local—that employed explicitly racial laws, policies, and regulations to ensure that black Americans would live impoverished, and separately from whites. Baltimore’s ghetto was not created by private discrimination, income differences, personal preferences, or demographic

trends, but by purposeful action of government in violation of the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. These constitutional violations have never been remedied, and we are paying the price in the violence we saw this week.

Housing segregation in many communities has been directly caused by government actions including taxation benefits for businesses and communities practicing segregation as well as labor market segregation restricting locations for establishing homes—the affirmative is a way to rectify the actions of previous administrationsRichard Rothstein, research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley), recent work has documented the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, “The Making of Ferguson,” 15 October 2014, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/, KD

In August 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. Michael Brown’s death and the resulting protests and racial tension brought considerable attention to that town. Observers who had not been looking closely at our evolving demographic patterns were surprised to see ghetto conditions we had come to associate with inner cities now duplicated in a formerly white suburban community: racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment, poor student achievement in overwhelmingly black schools, oppressive policing, abandoned homes, and community powerlessness. Media accounts of how Ferguson became Ferguson have typically explained that when African Americans moved to this suburb (and others like it), “white flight” followed, abandoning the town to African Americans who were trying to escape poor schools in the city. The conventional explanation adds that African Americans moved to a few places like Ferguson, not the suburbs generally, because prejudiced real estate agents steered black homebuyers away from other white suburbs. And in any event, those other suburbs were able to preserve their almost entirely white, upper-middle-class environments by enacting zoning rules that required only expensive single family homes, the thinking goes. No doubt, private prejudice and suburbanites’ desire for homogenous affluent environments contributed to segregation in St. Louis and other metropolitan areas. But these explanations are too partial, and too conveniently excuse public policy from responsibility. A more powerful cause of metropolitan segregation in St. Louis and nationwide has been the explicit intents of federal, state, and local governments to create racially segregated metropolises. Many of these explicitly segregationist governmental actions ended in the late 20th century but continue to determine today’s racial segregation patterns. In St. Louis these governmental policies included zoning rules that classified white neighborhoods as residential and black neighborhoods as commercial or industrial; segregated public housing projects that replaced integrated low-income areas; federal subsidies for suburban development conditioned on African American exclusion; federal and local requirements for, and enforcement of, property deeds and neighborhood agreements that prohibited resale of white-owned property to, or occupancy by, African Americans; tax favoritism for private institutions that practiced segregation ; municipal boundary lines designed to separate black neighborhoods from white ones and to deny necessary services to

the former; real estate, insurance, and banking regulators who tolerated and sometimes required racial segregation; and urban renewal plans whose purpose was to shift black populations from central cities like St. Louis to inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson. Governmental actions in support of a segregated labor market supplemented these racial housing policies and prevented most African Americans from acquiring the economic strength to move to middle-class communities, even if they had been permitted to do so.

WelfareCarbon taxes generate revenue that can be refunded to struggling families and used to cut back taxes from other areasMarisa Beck, a Global Governance PhD candidate (ABD) at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, specializing in Global Environmental Governance, Nicholas Rivers, Associate Professor Public and International Affairs Social Sciences University of Ottawa, Randall Wigle,professor in the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, focused on CGE modeling, Canadian Climate Policy, and innovation policy and the environment, and Hidemichi Yonezawa, “Carbon tax and revenue recycling: Impacts on households in British Columbia,” Resource and Energy Economics 41 (2015) 40–69, http://www.tehranthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/beck2015.pdf, KD

Carbon tax revenue in BC has been disposed through two channels: (a) personal tax reductions and transfers to households and (b) business tax rate reductions and corporate tax credits. In fiscal year 2011/2012, nearly 60% of revenue measures targeted businesses and 40% went to households. Revenue recycling to households combines personal income tax rate reductions and lump-sum transfers, both primarily targeted at protecting low income households. In 2008/09 the government cut the income tax rates for the two bottom brackets by 5% (i.e. for annual taxable income up to $70,000) using carbon tax revenues. In fiscal year 2011/12, $220 M or 23% of total carbon tax revenues were used to fund this personal income tax cut. In terms of direct transfers, the central program implemented to date is the BC Low Income Climate Action Tax Credit program, which received $184 M in support in 2011/12. The maximum Climate Action Tax Credit amounts to $115.50 per adult and $34.50 per child. Eligibility is tied to net household income. In 2011, the full credit could be claimed if net household income was below $31,711 for singles and $36,997 for married couples or single parents.6 The third recycling measure to support households is the Northern and Rural Area Homeowner Benefit program, which has only received a small share of carbon revenue in 2011/12 ($66 M or 7%). Support of up to $200 is granted to homeowners outside the Capital, Greater Vancouver, and Fraser Valley districts. Eligibility for the homeowner benefit depends on property value and additional criteria related to age and income. In terms of business measures, the government has cut the provincial corporate income tax rate for both small and general businesses. The general rate was lowered from 12% in 2008 to 10% in 2011. The small business corporate income tax rate declined from 4.5% to 2.5% in 2008. In addition, the small business tax rate threshold was increased from $400,000 in 2009 to $500,000 from January 2010. An Industrial Property Tax Credit of 50% of school property taxes for light and major industrial properties was introduced in 2009 and increased to 60% in 2011. Finally, carbon tax revenues funded a cut in school property taxes for land classified as ‘farm’ starting in 2011.

AT: FrameworkThe affirmative is key—studies of climate change do not acknowledge disproportionate impacts on at-risk populations. Any determination on domestic policies must include the affirmativeChelsea Harvey, a freelance journalist covering science. She specializes in environmental health and policy, “ Climate change is going to make inequality even worse than it already is,” 8 December 2015, The Washington Post: Energy and Environment, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/07/climate-change-is-going-to-make-inequality-even-worse-than-it-already-is/, KD

It turns out that the estimation of these values is heavily dependent on the way climate change impacts people of differing income levels. If people with lower incomes are disproportionately affected by climate change, as many scientists and economists believe they will be, then these damages could cause them to become less well-off than previous generations — essentially slowing, halting or — in extreme cases — even reversing their economic growth. If this becomes true, and whole segments of the population are forced to endure more than their proportional share of climate change damages, then greater climate mitigation efforts — in the form of higher estimates of the social cost of carbon, which translate into higher carbon prices — will be considered optimal. The danger with models that don’t take these inequalities into consideration is that they tend to average the economic conditions of people within regions or countries, and doing so can have the effect of masking the worst economic climate-caused damages in those countries. Thus, the models will assume that less intensive mitigation strategies are warranted. So in the modified model used in the new study, when the income inequalities were factored in, suddenly the worst climate damages became apparent, and the model compensated for them by producing higher values for the carbon prices necessary to mitigate or prevent these future effects. What this means, in effect, is that climate change was suddenly viewed as even costlier because it was revealed to be keeping poor people poor to a greater extent than estimated in existing models. “Most of the efforts on quantifying damage [from climate change] are still just trying to improve on estimates of damage to the economy as a whole, without looking at its incidence across the income distribution,” Dennig said in his email. “We need to start directing our efforts at quantifying the distribution.” Furthermore, he added, the results suggest that existing models have been underestimating the need for aggressive climate policies by not taking into account the idea that income inequalities exist within regions, and that the poor will be disproportionately affected by climate change.

Their author concludes affirmative—analyzing vulnerabilities and restrictions on adaptation stemming from social inequalities are a prerequisite to determining policy actionW. Neil Adger, Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and P. Mick Kelly, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and Climatic Research Unit, School of

Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia,“Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4: 253–266, 1999, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009601904210, KD

What are the benefits of adopting the framework of social vulnerability advanced in this paper? • First and foremost, since adaptation will control the ultimate impact of global warming and hence its significance for society, study of the social construction of adaptation is critical in any assessment of the consequences of climate change. • Second, the perspective afforded by analysis of the architecture of entitlements and the nature of adaptation produces robust, policy-relevant conclusions regarding feasible means of reducing vulnerability and facilitating adaptation. • Third, the framework of social vulnerability provides a realistic and detailed picture of a continually evolving process which affects a particular population in diverse ways. By not masking the value judgments implicit in any analysis that hinge on measures of human well-being, it renders consideration of these issues more straight forward. Extending such a framework to non-human systems and identifying the physical integrity of systems in terms of climate change impacts on resilience and diversity is an important further step. • Finally, by locating the analysis in the present-day, rather than a hypothetical future, the approach reconciles the demands of immediate aspirations and long-term environmental security. The social vulnerability framework outlined in this paper cannot provide answers to all the questions asked by the climate impact community, nor can it operate in isolation without input from more traditional approaches based on analysis of biophysical impacts. Rather, it should be considered as one essential perspective on a multi-dimensional problem.

One-size-fits all policies fail—only the affirmative provides the necessary assessments that allow for effective regulationSusan L. Cutter, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina where she directs the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, and Christina Finch, masters degree from University of South Carolina, currently employed by FEMA, “Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards,” 2007, PNAS, vol. 105, no. 7, 2301-2306, http://www.pnas.org/content/105/7/2301.long, KD

The identification of socially vulnerable counties and regions and the components contributing to social vulnerability is a critical element for emergency preparedness, immediate response, mitigation planning, and long-term recovery from disasters. As we have shown, social vulnerability to natural hazards is dynamic. The temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability based on our historic assessments suggest that for future preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation planning, a one-size-fits-all approach may be ineffective in reducing social vulnerability or improving local resilience to the impacts of hazards. Instead, a more flexible approach that nests place-specific local variability within the broader federal policy guidelines and frameworks is suggested.

The affirmative is a prerequisite—this discussion is key to exposing how arbitrary the boundaries are between those negatively affected by climate change and those who are not. This recognition is key to any real policy change regarding climate changeJonathan Baron, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making regarding moral questions, especially questions about public policy, “Thinking about global warming,” Climatic Change (2006) 77: 137–150, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-006-9049-y, KD

Another source of resistance to Schelling’s proposal is that it explicitly involves helping people in other countries. By contrast, the usual account of what to do about global warming does not state exactly who the victims are, hence who would benefit from reductions in global warming. People may resist the idea of helping outsiders, i.e., foreigners, even if they are poor foreigners. Perhaps the resistance is especially strong when the help is compulsory, e.g., higher taxes. The tendency of people to favor a group that includes them, at the expense of outsiders and even at the expense of their own self-interest, has been called parochialism (Schwartz-Shea and Simmons, 1991). A prime example is nationalism, a value that goes almost unquestioned in many circles, just as racism and sexism went unquestioned in the past. Nationalists are concerned with their fellow citizens, regardless of the effect on outsiders. Nationalists are willing to harm outsiders, e.g., in war, for the benefit of co-nationals. Several experiments demonstrate this sort of in-group bias, using artificial small groups rather than nations. Bornstein and Ben-Yossef (1994), for example, gave each subject an endowment of money, which could be “contributed” or not. In a condition with two competing groups, the contribution would increase the payoff for the subject’s group and decrease the payoff for members of the other group, leading to a result in which the contribution is lost an no net good is done. Subjects were more willing to contribute in this condition than in a control condition, in which the other group was unaffected, so that net good resulted from the contribution because the subject’s group benefited on the whole. Similar results have been found by others (Schwartz-Shea and Simmons, 1990, 1991). Baron (2001) has argued that this parochialism effect is partly the result of an illusion, in which people think something like, “I am a member of my group. So anything that helps my group helps me. Thus, if I sacrifice for my group, I help myself.” What this argument ignores is that the personal benefit from one’s own sacrifice is small, especially when the sacrifice involves something like paying more for gasoline in order to reduce pollution. Baron asked subjects to calculate the effects of their contribution on themselves and others. This manipulation reduced the parochialism effect. Thus, parochialism is somewhat labile. As suggested by Singer (1982), it may be possible, through reason, to understand the arbitrariness of group boundaries. The more that people think of boundaries as arbitrary, the more they can direct their non-self-interested concern at the greater good rather than the parochial interests of their group. Yet, in the absence of such understanding, parochialism will cause people to resist any proposal that taxes them in order to help outsiders.

The negative’s call for hypothetical government implementation leaves no room to discuss the implications of systems of subordination. Their framework always assumes a white man with equal access to freedomSherene H. Razack, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at OISE/UT, “Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, race, and culture in the courtrooms and classrooms,” 1998, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, Canada, Pg. 17, KD

Beginning with rights thinking in chapter 1, I take up where I left off at the end of my first book Canadian Feminism and the Law42

and ask, How do women speak about their realities in a court of law when the naming of those realities would force a confrontation over naming men, and white people, as oppressors? Underlying chapter 1 is the paradox of liberalism as articulated by David Goldberg:43 race is irrelevant but all is race. That is to say,

as Linda Alcoff has written in commenting on Goldberg’s work, ‘the universal sameness that was so important for the liberal self required a careful containment and taxonomy for difference. Where rights require sameness, difference must either be trivialized or contained in the Other across a firm and visible border.’44 The problem that I explore is thus twofold: first, how can we talk about power and privilege using a concept – rights – that leaves no room for a discussion of histories of subordination? Rights thinking is based on the liberal notion that we are all individuals who contract with one another to live in a society where each of us would have the maximum in personal freedom. Starting from this premise, there then are no marginalized communities of people and no historical relations of power. Each man, and the prototype is male, makes himself anew . Second, when histories do enter the discussion, for instance when we examine how slavery and racism affected the freedom to engage in this contract, or when we consider how violence against women secured the freedom and autonomy of men, they implicate dominant groups and are thus strenuously resisted through the narrative that we are all just human beings.

AT: Technology SolvesThe US is one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide and the one of the most technologically advanced countries. Technological development to make energy production more efficient fails and leads to more emissionsHans A. Baer, a scholar activist who adheres to the notion of praxis – the merger of theory and social action – anthropologist, “Global Capitalism and Climate Change,” in Handbook on International Political Economy, edited by Ralph Pettman, World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2012, pg. 395-414, http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43030594/Ralph_Pettman-Handbook_On_International_Political_Economy-Wo1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1469152351&Signature=2QfxTk1NR8qzXt2JG1EBkkXVV18%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRalph_Pettman_Handbook_On_International.pdf#page=408, KD

In 2005 the top ten emitters of greenhouse gasses were either specific developed countries (such as the US, Japan, and Canada) along with the EU or the “large emerging market economies” (such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia) (Barbier, 2010, p. 35). Altogether they accounted for over seventy percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Jevons once identified an important paradox, namely, that increasing efficiency of coal use was correlated with increasing coal consumption (York et al., 2009, p. 137). It seems that the most ‘eco-efficient’ businesses, industries, or political economies may be the ones consuming the largest quantities of resources and producing the most pollution. While China, for example, has undergone a significant improvement in energy efficiency, it has undergone a marked increase in its total ecological footprint (York et al., 2009, p. 140). This trend challenges the basic assumption underpinning ecological modernisation theory, which says that technological transformations will be paramount in solving environmental problems. Efficiency may increase but consumption (and pollution) may increase overall. It is worth noting in this regard that four countries declined in ecological footprint intensity between 1961 and 2003 but increased in terms of their total ecological footprint (York et al., 2009, p. 142). In terms of historical responsibility with regard to global carbon emissions between 1750 and 2006, the US accounted for twenty-eight percent, the UK six percent, Japan four percent, Russia eight percent, Germany seven percent, the remainder of Europe eighteen percent, and China eight percent (Schor, 2010, p. 175). Table 2 indicates that carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion overall have continued to rise around the world, although there are specific regions, particularly former Soviet-bloc ‘economies in transition’, where it has dropped.

AT: UtilitarianismThe negative has it wrong—the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized individuals affects not only those individual people but communities, regions and nations as a wholeW. Neil Adger, Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and P. Mick Kelly, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia,“Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4: 253–266, 1999, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009601904210, KD\

The state of social vulnerability to climate change does not equate directly to the level of poverty or any other single economic or institutional phenomenon as there are many factors involved, not least the climatic and topographical factors which define the dimension of exposure to environmental risk. As argued in the previous section, the adaptive response, which is at the heart of any analysis of vulnerability, is manifest through the actions and status of individuals and institutions. It is, therefore, helpful to disaggregate social vulnerability into the two distinct aspects of individual and collective vulnerability in order to clarify the scale issue and the unit of analysis. Individual vulnerability is determined by access to resources and the diversity of income sources , as well as by the social status of individuals or households within a community. The collective vulnerability of a nation, region or community is determined by institutional and market structures, such as the prevalence of informal and formal social security and insurance, and by infrastructure and income. Collective vulnerability is exacerbated by the ‘exogenous’ environmental changes which will occur through climate change.

AT: Regulation BadThe negative’s arguments are founded on biased logic which prevents critical, necessary regulationJonathan Baron, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making regarding moral questions, especially questions about public policy, “Thinking about global warming,” Climatic Change (2006) 77: 137–150, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-006-9049-y, KD

I have focused on biases that cause people to worry too much about global warming and too little about other problems. Surely other biases have the opposite effect. One is wishful thinking. People who oppose government regulation tend to distort facts so as to convince themselves that no regulation is needed. They also convince themselves that uncertainty will be resolved in their favor (Baron et al., 1990). They may even endorse or accept unsupported scientific positions, such as the belief that climate change is not occurring. Parochialism can also favor underspending when people focus on the fact that prevention of climate change will benefit mostly other nations than their own. Parochialism can also distort judgments of fairness. For example, those from nations that have contributed very little to climate change will think it is fair for the big “polluters” to pay more, while the latter group will favor equal reductions for all. As argued by Baron (1998, chapter 2), these arguments can be made quite sincerely. Interestingly, opponents of spending on climate change have some of the other biases. They spend a lot of time trying to argue that people did not cause global warming. As should be apparent from what I have said, many other arguments against regulation are available. When President Bush withdrew from the Kyoto negotiations, he based his position on highly questionable claims about the inadequacy of our current scientific understanding and the possibility that people were not really causing problems after all. Perhaps the greater uncertainty is in the economics, not the atmospheric science. A more defensible argument might have been that the Kyoto treaty would cost a fair bit and do very little to stop global warming. By contrast, cost-effective solutions might focus instead on helping less-developed countries in ways that are more cost-effective. It may be possible to present cost-effective ways to help the world’s poor as viable alternatives to spending the same amount of money on a futile war against global warming. People may be more willing to support help for the world’s poor when it is presented in this way. Or, it may turn out that new technology will make the war against climate change winnable after all.

Government policies reinforce segregation in housing which can contribute to inceases in police violence, food insecurity, and further economic inequality, resulting in increased vulnerability to climate change. Identifying problematic policies and fixing them is necessaryRichard Rothstein, research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley), recent work has documented the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, “Housing segregation undergirds the nation’s racial inequities,” 9 May

2016, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/blog/housing-segregation-undergirds-the-nations-racial-inequities/, KD

Yuma offered to find a site elsewhere in the city where the developer could construct comparable housing. But the appeals court dismissed such an offer, saying that “[t]ruly comparable housing… is not simply a question of price and model, but also of the factors that determine the desirability of particular locations—factors such as similarly or better performing schools, comparable infrastructure, convenience of public transportation, availability of amenities such as public parks and community athletic facilities, access to grocery or drug stores, as well as equal or lower crime levels.” Citing the Housing Scholars brief, the appeals court noted that “[g]overnment policy, which promised not to change a neighborhood’s composition when constructing affordable housing, exacerbated the stark segregation in America’s cities.” The court also observed that “housing segregation both perpetuates and reflects this country’s basic problems regarding race relations: educational disparities, police-community relations, crime levels, wealth inequality, and even access to basic needs such as clean water and clean air. In this country, the neighborhood in which a person is born or lives will still far too often determine his or her opportunity for success. As the Supreme Court recognized [last June], the Fair Housing Act must play a ‘continuing role in moving the Nation toward a more integrated society’ and a more just one.” Evidence for the wisdom of these insights is omnipresent, and continues to accumulate. Were African Americans in Flint, Michigan not residentially segregated, denying them “clean water” would have been inconceivable. If the segregation of West Baltimore’s citizens did not deny them “convenience of public transportation,” they would have access to metropolitan area jobs and their economic circumstances would improve.4 Many scholars have recently documented that “the neighborhood in which a person is born or lives will still far too often determine his or her opportunity for success.”5 Poor “police-community relations” (in the court’s euphemism), resulting in deaths of African Americans in Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, and elsewhere, could only have taken place in segregated neighborhoods. When low-income minority children can attend truly integrated schools, their achievement rises, not because black children need to sit next to white children to succeed, but because integrated schools are not overwhelmed with children’s social and economic problems and can instead focus on instruction. The absence of supermarkets in segregated neighborhoods contributes to poor diets, reduced cognitive ability in children, higher health care costs, and shorter lifespans. Housing segregation undergirds many of the nation’s seemingly intractable racial inequities. Federal courts may be starting to notice.

AT: Treaties CPInternational treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol fall short of solving the issues related to emissionsJoseph E. Aldy, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Visiting Fellow at Resources for the Future, and Robert N. Stavins, Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Programs in Public Policy, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, “Designing the PostKyoto Climate Regime: Lessons from the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements An Interim Progress Report for the 14th Conference of the Parties, Framework Convention on Climate Change,” December 2008, The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, an initiative of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, which develops innovative answers to today’s complex environmental issues, through research, teaching, and policy outreach, Access Date: 13 July 2016, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/Interim%20Report%20081203%20Akiko%20v6.pdf, KD

Among the strengths of the Kyoto Protocol is its inclusion of provisions for market-based approaches— the three so-called flexibility mechanisms. A second feature of the Protocol is that it provides freedom for nations to meet their national targets and commitments in any way they want. Third, the agreement has the appearance of fairness in that it focuses on the wealthiest countries and those most responsible for the current stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, consistent with the principle—first enunciated in the Framework Convention on Climate Change—of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Fourth, the fact that the Protocol was signed by more than 180 countries and subsequently ratified by a sufficient number of Annex I countries to come into force may be taken as an indicator of its political viability. The weaknesses of the Kyoto Protocol also provide valuable lessons. First, some of the largest emitters are not constrained by Kyoto. The Protocol has not been ratified by the United States, and it does not include emissions targets for some of the largest and most rapidly growing economies in the developing world. Second, a relatively small number of countries are asked to take action, which has resulted in concerns about emissions leakage and competitiveness. Third, the nature of the Protocol’s emissions trading elements has caused concern. The provision in Article 17 for international emissions trading among nation-states is unlikely to be effective, if it is utilized at all. And the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is plagued by criticisms that it is crediting projects that would have happened anyway (commonly known as the problem of “additionality”). Fourth, the Kyoto Protocol—with its five year time horizon (2008 to 2012)—represents a relatively short-term approach for what is fundamentally a long-term problem. Finally, the agreement may not provide sufficient incentives for compliance.

AT: ElectionsProgressive tax systems are popular—the only reason people are upset is because of massive tax evasion and avoidance, and the regressive nature of local taxesJared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 26 October, 2015 “ The elusive goal of tax fairness,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/26/the-elusive-goal-of-tax-fairness/, KD

So I looked at some polls and took a convenience sample (asked a bunch of people, from my 16-year-old to fellow D.C. wonks) and came up with this: to most people, tax fairness means a progressive tax system (where rates rise with income) without tax avoidance or evasion (avoidance is legal; evasion is not). There’s even a coalition — Americans for Tax Fairness — organized around those principles, with an emphasis on raising ample revenue. My colleague Ben Spielberg put it similarly: “Tax fairness means that the tax code should reduce inequality and boost opportunity. It must raise enough revenues, predominantly from those with the greatest ability to pay, to pay for public goods.” Don’t worry, I spoke to some conservatives, too. Some preferred a flat tax, but most were comfortable with progressive taxation. On the other hand, they don’t think you can keep raising taxes only on those at the top of the scale. Some share a concern about what Jeb Bush calls “free stuff,” i.e., when politicians make promises to lower income people paid for by taxes on higher income people (I’ll have more to say about this label in a forthcoming post). The polls show that most people think the amount of income tax they pay is fair, but that share has fallen considerably from around 90 percent in the 1940s to around 60 percent in recent years. One of the most interesting polls is the one you see here, where they showed people various tax schedules and asked them which one they thought was the fairest. About 75 percent thought a progressive (vs. a flat) schedule was fair, and the top choice had everyone paying something, with the wealthy facing much higher rates than the poor. So how does the U.S. system stack up vis-à-vis tax fairness? Well, like the system itself, the answer is complicated. First, our federal income tax rate system is progressive, though less than it used to be. Second, there’s so much tax avoidance and evasion that the progressivity gets significantly dulled when it comes to the actual liabilities faced by certain taxpayers. Third, state and local taxes tend to be pretty regressive.

Negative

AT: Economic inequality

Alt Cause: AgricultureThe affirmative’s claims that the rich are responsible for climate change are exaggerated—agriculture causes many problems especially in low income countriesEd Dolan, an economist and educator with a Ph.D. from Yale University, has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Chicago, George Mason University among others, “How Is Inequality Linked to Climate Change, and What to Do About It?,” 4 January 2016, EconoMonitor, http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2016/01/04/how-is-inequality-linked-to-climate-change-and-what-to-do-about-it/, KD

The principal message of the Oxfam study is that that the rich are disproportionately responsible for climate change. As evidence, it supplies the following chart showing “lifestyle carbon emissions” by income class of global population. The report defines lifestyle emissions as those that arise from consumption of goods and services, with emissions from producing those goods attributed to the country in which consumption takes place, even if they are produced elsewhere. The chart indicates that the poorest half of the global population is responsible for only 10 percent of total global emissions while nearly 50 percent can be attributed to the wealthiest 10 percent. The rich have average carbon footprints 11 times as high as the poorest half of the population, and 60 times as high as the poorest 10 percent. I have no trouble with the proposition that wealthy consumers contribute more than proportionately to climate change, but to be fair, the Oxfam chart exaggerates that tendency, and in more than one way. One problem is that “lifestyle emissions,” as defined by Oxfam, understate the role of agriculture in climate change. The Oxfam chart presumably captures emissions from food produced in the developing world and exported to wealthy countries, but most food produced in low-income countries is consumed locally, or exported from one developing country to another (for example, Latin American exports of soy products to China). As detailed in a report from the respected environmental organization Worldwatch Institute, agriculture is responsible for a substantial share of climate change—two-thirds as much as transportation, and more than a third as much as the burning of fossil fuels for heat and energy production. According to Worldwatch, agricultural emissions are heavily concentrated in lower- and middle-income countries: Emissions from manure on pasture in Asia, Africa, and South America together account for as much as 81 percent of global emissions from this source. These emissions from those three regions increased 42 percent on average between 1990 and 2010, reflecting an increase in range-based livestock populations; elsewhere, these emissions either decreased or stagnated. Carbon dioxide emissions from cultivated organic soils account for some 14 percent of total agricultural emissions, with Asia contributing 54 percent of these emissions. Deforestation and clearing for agricultural land in many tropical South and Southeast Asian countries are a leading cause of these emissions. Asia is home to four out of the top five countries with the highest CO2 emissions from cultivated organic soils, with Indonesia contributing 279 million tons, Papua New Guinea 41 million tons, Malaysia 35 million tons, and Bangladesh 31 million tons.

Alt Cause: TradeCarbon taxes only affect US businesses, the aff doesn’t stop trade with developing countries or the emissions caused by the manufacturing of goods we import Ed Dolan, an economist and educator with a Ph.D. from Yale University, has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Chicago, George Mason University among others, “How Is Inequality Linked to Climate Change, and What to Do About It?,” 4 January 2016, EconoMonitor, http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2016/01/04/how-is-inequality-linked-to-climate-change-and-what-to-do-about-it/, KD

Government policies vary among wealthy countries. Some make an effort to shape market forces in a way that restrains carbon emissions, as the EU does with its carbon trading mechanism and many countries do with heavy taxation of motor fuels. Other governments, including the United States, prefer a command-and-control approach to carbon emissions while maintaining low energy prices that undermine those efforts at least in part. Even in the US, however, carbon emissions per dollar of GDP have fallen steadily. The role of government policy is more complicated for the substantial share of lifestyle emissions that arise from consumption of manufactured goods exported to the developed world by China and other developing countries. Although the policies of developed countries are responsible to the extent that they encourage global trade, the technologies and market forces that shape the carbon footprint of production processes are largely the responsibility of the governments in the countries of origin. Unfortunately, the governments of China, India, and many other third-world countries have consistently placed GDP growth above the environment. They have not been content with the natural comparative advantage that abundant labor and low wages give them. Instead, they have further reduced manufacturing costs by condoning low-tech, inefficient, and dirty production methods. Even if, say, steel produced by a Chinese or Indian mill is exported to Europe or North America, the government of the country of origin cannot escape responsibility for the resulting pollution, or at least for the amount by which Chinese or Indian emissions per ton of steel exceed those from the cleaner mills of industrially advanced countries.

AT: Tax Code Bad

Reduces inequalityWhile inequality definitely exists, it is not the fault of the tax code. Rather, current US tax system reduces inequality—statistics proveDavid Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, the mission of which is to improve the quality of fiscal and monetary policies and public understanding of them, contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, “How much does the tax code reduce inequality?,” 9 April 2015, Brookings, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2015/04/09-how-does-tax-code-reduce-inequality-wessel, KD

Since it’s (almost) Tax Day, that April 15 deadline for filing tax returns, it’s a good time to ponder a very simple question: How much does the U.S. tax system shrink the gap between rich and poor? Now you can tell this story long or you can tell it short. And you can tell it with tables of numbers, charts and graphs—or you can tell with Legos. To explain how much the U.S. tax code evens out the distribution of income, we’ve made a 3-minute video—with Lego bricks—that illustrates just how unequal the U.S. is before taxes and how much (or how little, depending on your perspective) the tax code changes that. Watch for yourself, but here are a few of the basic facts: The average before-tax income of the top 20% of the population in 2014 was $306,320, according to estimates by our friends at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. That’s more than 21 times the average income ($13,809) of those in the bottom 20%, or quintile (as economists put it.) And after federal taxes—income taxes, payroll taxes, etc.? Because the government takes more from best-off than from those at the bottom, the average after-tax income of the top quintile ($229,360) is about 17 times that of the bottom ($13,809.) In other words, the U.S. tax system does reduce inequality, but there’s still a lot of it left after taxes. And what about the famous 1%, the really well off? Their income averaged slightly more than $2 million before taxes in 2014—and $1.34 million after taxes. Put differently, the before-tax income of the richest 1% was 32 times the income of the folks smack in the middle of the middle; after taxes, it was 25 times larger.

Progressive tax systems fail to reduce inequality—only regressive taxes solveTim Worstall, Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, Forbes contributor,“Alan Krueger's Mistake: The US Tax Code is More Progressive Than Most Other OECD Countries,” 18 Jan 2012, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/01/18/alan-kruegers-mistake-the-us-tax-code-is-more-progressive-than-most-other-oecd-countries/#7e254e5842dc, KD

For, and this will surprise many, I agree absolutely that most/many other OECD countries do more than the US to reduce post tax and post benefits inequality. I might even, at times, agree that they are right to do so. However, they do not do this by having a more progressive tax system than the US. Quite the opposite, they do it by having a more regressive tax system than the US. So, this is where it gets important. If you want to reduce inequality and you want to reduce inequality the same way that other countries have successfully reduced inequality then you need to do what other countries have successfully done to reduce inequality. Which is, in short, to have a more regressive tax system than the United States and a more progressive

benefits and transfers system than the United States. Quite whether the Federal income tax system is more or less progressive than other countries I’m not sure. Certainly the top rates are lower than in many other places. However, the tax free allowance is also much higher than in many other places (I think I’m right in saying that only 50% of the working population pay any federal income tax at all? Or is it 50% of the adult population?) These might well balance each other out. The addition of FICA certainly makes total taxation of incomes more regressive than just the income tax is. But other countries have things very similar to FICA and normally at much higher rates too (for example, total FICA, employer and employee, is 12 and a bit percent in the US. In my native UK it’s just passing 25% for our equivalent, national insurance.) so the total Federal taxation of income becomes more progressive. However, the really big thing about the Federal taxation system is that it doesn’t include any (apologies, very little, the Federal gas tax for example) consumption taxation. There is no nationwide VAT or sales tax for example. This makes the US Federal taxation system considerably more progressive than those of most other OECD countries. Almost all of whom have a high and national VAT or consumption tax. 25% in Sweden for example (it’s even 22.5% on food I am told) and yes that does make the tax system considerably more regressive. Then in the US system we move down to the local taxation systems, where the sales taxes are, and this then makes the total US system a little less progressive and a little more regressive. Now totting all of this up and finding out the true effects of this mixture of taxes would be, as the technical term has it, a right pain. Fortunately, Lane Kenworthy has done all of this for us: As Lane explains: I calculate inequality in each country using household incomes before and after taxes are subtracted; the difference between the two is the amount of inequality reduction achieved by taxes. I do the same for government transfers. Being farther to the right in the chart indicates greater reduction of inequality. Note what is being said here: that the US tax system is more progressive than the tax systems of most other OECD countries. This is the opposite of what Alan Krueger has stated. Please also note the very important indeed point about reducing inequality. Those that have indeed successfully done so are not doing so through their use of the tax system. What they are doing is raising much more money in a more regressive manner, through those consumption taxes, and then using the money thus gained as transfers to reduce inequality. At which point you’ll obviously want to know why they are doing this? Well, basically, because this is the straight and standard economics of taxation. As the OECD points out, taxes really do have costs. The most obvious one, the one they explore in that chart, is that different taxes have different effects on future growth. The taxes with the lowest effect on future growth are those on land and fixed property. There are greater negative effects from consumption taxes, greater yet from income taxes and then finally, the worst effects are from taxes on capital and corporations. So, if we decide to try and reduce inequality through the taxation of incomes we’re going to find ourselves reducing future growth more than if we try to do it through, say, a land value tax and a VAT, then spread the money around as a transfer. We may well want to reduce inequality but we almost certainly want to do it at least cost to our children’s lifestyles, eh? The reason I explain this at length is because, as Krueger seems to be pointing out, there’s a general thought around at present that you deal with inequality by making the tax system more progressive. But this isn’t in fact what you do. You raise more money via the tax system, certainly, but you do this in a regressive manner because it causes less damage to the future economy. You then actually

reduce the inequality through the transfer, the benefits, system. You know, give poor people money.

The affirmative has the wrong focus—we need to close tax gaps and end avoidance and evasion to produce an effective tax systemJared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 26 October, 2015 “ The elusive goal of tax fairness,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/26/the-elusive-goal-of-tax-fairness/, KD

But where reasonable people should be solidly on the same page is around the other dimension of fairness: reducing avoidance and evasion. Here is where we have a large, growing problem for at least four reasons. Business income is increasingly being claimed as personal income (see figure below), and as I explain here, business income “passed through” to the individual level is the single largest source of the “tax gap” (the difference between what people owe and what they pay; it amounts to over $300 billion/year). Sole proprietors, e.g., have been found to report less than half of their income to the IRS. As Gabriel Zucman documents in his essential new book, “The Hidden Wealth of Nations,” the share of U.S. foreign profits booked in tax havens has grown from about 20 percent to 50 percent (see figure above). As Austin, Burman, and Rosenthal show in a forthcoming paper, the share of corporate stock held in taxable household accounts has fallen from around 80 percent in the mid-1960s to about 25 percent now, meaning most such stock is now untaxed by U.S. authorities or held in tax-favored vehicles, like individual retirement accounts. Congressional conservatives are bolstering the cause of tax evasion by cutting the budget of the IRS. Since 2010, their budget is down 18 percent in real dollars; enforcement staffing is down by 20 percent. Such budgeting supports the tax gap: Treasury estimates that each additional $1 spent on IRS enforcement yields $6 of additional revenue. It’s more than a little odd to have these heated debates about tax reform when we’re neither adequately enforcing the current code nor blocking avoidance tactics that gut the tax base and diminish progressivity. And there are many other aspects of the U.S. tax code that are patently unfair. There’s the fact that much asset-based income is taxed at lower rates than regular income. The code is littered with upside-down subsidies providing tax breaks for those who least need them. The effective tax rate on business investment returns that were debt financed is negative, since interest payments are deductible (private equity firms make a killing off of that one).

AT: RacismWorking through the law to deal with systematic racism will always fail—the legal system is not adequately equipped to dealYoung 2010 (Donna E., Professor of Law at Albany Law School, “Defining Race Through Law: Enforcing the Social Norms of Power and Privilege,” Albany Law Review, Vol. 72 (4), 2010, http://www.albanylawreview.org/Articles/Vol72_4/72.4.0012%20Young.pdf, pg. 1045-1046, KD)

Although it is true that the courts today do not engage in the crude and explicit exercise of categorizing groups of people in order to

protect white privilege, it is clear that race privilege continues to exist, is largely invisible to critical examination, and is likely to go unchallenged in the courts of the United States .19 Though popular culture has made great strides in drawing attention to what it means to be white and the privileges associated with whiteness,20 the legal system has not incorporated this enhanced understanding of race privilege in any measurable way. Consequently, the legal system sees race discrimination and inequality through a stale legal prism that requires courts to determine the race of the parties in order to determine the appropriate role that race has played or ought to play in a given case. But, at the same time, working within a particular antidiscrimination framework, courts are doctrinally ill-equipped to consider historical and contextual influences that assign social meaning to racial classifications . The ways in which race privilege and disadvantage are reflected in our ordinary system of government does not fit nicely into our current legal models.21 Consequently, structural or systemic racial subordination fall well outside the structure of legal redress that was designed to address individual cases involving an identifiable wrongdoer and an identifiable person who has been wronged. This tension within antidiscrimination law constitutes a significant weakness, but also explains why too strong a reliance on American antidiscrimination law to resolve systemic racism is ill advised.

Carbon tax bad

FailsThe Green Capitalism of the affirmative inevitably fails. It does nothing to challenge the power of those who emit the most carbon dioxide and will result in an authoritarian state where wages constantly decline in an effort to pay for the new measures—turning the affHans A. Baer, a scholar activist who adheres to the notion of praxis – the merger of theory and social action – anthropologist, “Global Capitalism and Climate Change,” in Handbook on International Political Economy, edited by Ralph Pettman, World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2012, pg. 395-414, http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43030594/Ralph_Pettman-Handbook_On_International_Political_Economy-Wo1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1469152351&Signature=2QfxTk1NR8qzXt2JG1EBkkXVV18%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRalph_Pettman_Handbook_On_International.pdf#page=408, KD

Many of the specific proposals, albeit not all of them, would be steps toward mitigation. While numerous strategies, including emissions trading schemes, emissions taxes, and carbon capture sequestration, have been proposed as ways of coping with climate change, the vast majority of them are framed within the existing parameters of global capitalism, either under the dictates of climate regimes, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), or under the rubric of ‘green capitalism’. As such they will be insufficient to contain climate change in the long run. Mueller and Passadakis (2010, pp. 562–564) delineate eight arguments against green capitalism. In the interests of space, only the first four will be considered here: • Green capitalism will not challenge the power of those who actually produce most greenhouse gases. • All types of green capitalism fail to acknowledge that the expansive nature of capitalism — its need to grow — will undermine any attempt to reduce its constant imperial demand for more resources. • [I]n a green capitalist setup, wages will probably stagnate or even decline, to offset the rising costs of ‘ecological modernisation’. • The ‘green capitalist state’ will be an authoritarian one. Ultimately, Mueller and Passadakis (2010, p. 563) insist that governments and corporations will not provide adequate solutions to the climate crisis but rather that solutions will have to emerge from “globally networked social movements for climate justice” around the world.

Owners of non-renewable carbon resources will simply wait until the carbon tax lowers—undermining any expected decrease in emissionsMichael Hoel, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Oslo, “Climate Change and Carbon Tax Expectations,” CESIFO Working Paper No. 2966, Category 10: Energy and Climate Economics, Presented at CESFIO Area Conference on Energy & Climate Economics, October 2009, November 2010, https://core.ac.uk/download/files/153/6634302.pdf, KD

Much of the discussion on the importance of expected future carbon taxes on investments and hence on emissions ignores the fact that most CO2 emissions are due to combustion of fossil fuels, which are scarce exhaustible resources. For such resources, Sinclair (1992) pointed out

that "the key decision of those lucky enough to own oil-wells is not so much how much to produce as when to extract it." More recently, this issue has received considerable attention, often with reference to the so-called "green paradox"2 . This term stems from Sinn (2008a,b), who argues that some designs of climate policy, intended to mitigate carbon emissions, might actually increase carbon emissions, at least in the short run. The reason for this possibility is closely related to the insights given by Sinclair. Sinn’s point is that if e.g. a carbon tax rises sufficiently rapidly, profit maximizing resource owners will bring forward the extraction of their resources. Hence, in the absence of carbon capture and storage (CCS), near-term carbon emissions increase. If lack of commitment has similar consequences as the future expected carbon tax being lower than under commitment, owners of the non-renewable carbon resources will postpone extraction compared with the extraction path they would have chosen had the policy makers been able to commit to the optimal price path. This argument suggests that it is not obvious whether near term emissions will increase or decline as a consequence of lack of commitment: If lack of commitment has similar consequences as the future carbon tax being lower than a government would like to set if it could commit, there are two effects working in opposite direction: Low investments in emission reducing capital tends to increase emissions, while postponed extraction works in the opposite direction. Notice also that these two effects interact: Owners of carbon resources are not only concerned about future carbon taxes, but also about how large is the future demand for energy and the supply of competing energy3 . Similarly, firms investing in energy saving technologies or renewable energy care about what the future carbon tax will be, but also about what the supply of fossil energy will be.

Policymakers cannot commit to a high carbon tax that would effectively solve the impactsMichael Hoel, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Oslo, “Climate Change and Carbon Tax Expectations,” CESIFO Working Paper No. 2966, Category 10: Energy and Climate Economics, Presented at CESFIO Area Conference on Energy & Climate Economics, October 2009, November 2010, https://core.ac.uk/download/files/153/6634302.pdf, KD

An obvious problem with implementing an optimal climate policy is that policy makers cannot commit to a high future carbon tax. In the policy debate on climate policies it is often argued that long-run investments in greenhouse gas mitigation may be smaller than desirable since investors fear that future carbon prices will be lower than currently announced by policy makers. The present paper shows that it is not obvious how expectations about future carbon taxes affect important variable such as investments in non-carbon energy and near-term emissions. .3

RegressiveCarbon taxes hurt welfare and increase government deficitsMarisa Beck, a Global Governance PhD candidate (ABD) at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, specializing in Global Environmental Governance, Nicholas Rivers, Associate Professor Public and International Affairs Social Sciences University of Ottawa, Randall Wigle, professor in the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, focused on CGE modeling, Canadian Climate Policy, and innovation policy and the environment, and Hidemichi Yonezawa, “Carbon tax and revenue recycling: Impacts on households in British Columbia,” Resource and Energy Economics 41 (2015) 40–69, http://www.tehranthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/beck2015.pdf, KD

We begin by reporting aggregate impacts of the carbon tax. Table 8 shows the effects of the carbon tax on aggregate welfare and GHG emissions in scenarios with and without revenue recycling. In our model, welfare change is measured as the Hicksian equivalent variation and is shown as a percent of benchmark income (like other papers, we ignore the welfare gains from reduced greenhouse gases in this calculation; it should as a result be treated as a cost-effectiveness result rather than as a cost-benefit result). As explained earlier, actual implementation of the carbon tax in BC was associated with a net decrease in government revenue, since revenue recycling measures were larger than the carbon tax revenue. While assuming a flexible government deficit in the model has some merits (simulating “pure” distributional impact of carbon tax and implementing the existing revenue recycling scheme), the level of welfare change could be misleading (as a change in welfare is financed by an change in borrowing). Thus, we report both the welfare change and the change in government deficit that accompanied the policy. When we consider aggregate welfare as opposed to welfare for each household decile, a back-of-envelope calculation for “adjusted” welfare is straightforward (we simply subtract the increase in deficit from the aggregate income of BC).19 The carbon tax without revenue recycling worsens household welfare by 0.53%, whereas the carbon tax as actually implemented with revenue recycling worsens welfare by 0.01%. The change in welfare however, does not reflect the change in the government deficit, which increased in conjunction with the tax. If we adjust the welfare change to reflect the change in government deficit, aggregate BC welfare decreases by 0.13% without revenue recycling whereas it decreases by 0.08% with revenue recycling.20 Our model exhibits a weak double dividend (revenue recycling improves welfare relative to no revenue recycling) but not a strong double dividend (welfare is still negatively affected). Table 8 also shows that the interim 2012 emission reduction target of 6% is met. The magnitude of GHG emissions reduction (9.1%) in our model is comparable to the one reported in Elgie and McClay (2013).

Carbon taxes favor the wealthiest tax bracketsAparna Mathur, a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Adele C. Morris, a senior fellow and the policy director for the Climate and Energy Economics Project, focused on the economics of climate change, "Distributional effects of a carbon tax in broader US fiscal reform," Energy Policy 66 (2014): 326-334,

http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/-mathur-distributional-effects-of-a-carbon-tax-in-broader-us-fiscal-reform_17161031273.pdf, KD

Consistent with earlier findings, we find that a carbon tax is regressive. Taking into account both direct and indirect energy costs, the carbon tax burden would comprise 3.5 percent of the income of the poorest decile of households and only 0.6 percent of the income of the highest decile. In the consumption approach, the carbon tax is substantially less regressive, with the ratio of average taxes paid by the bottom and top deciles equal to about 1.7. In the tax swap simulations, we subtract the burden of other taxes that the carbon tax revenue could displace, such as the corporate and personal income taxes, and compute the net effect on households. We analyze revenue-neutral tax shifts under three assumptions about how those other taxes lower households’ capital and labor income: all borne by labor, all borne by capital, and a 50/50 split. Although all of the tax swaps lower the overall burden of the carbon tax (as a share of household income) on the poorest two deciles, tax swaps also exacerbate the regressivity of the carbon tax on the high end. This means that the benefit to the highest income households of the reduction in other taxes is greater than their share of the burden of the carbon tax.

The strategy of the affirmative doesn’t solve both climate change or inequality—it just slows the process and increases wealth disparity Ed Dolan, an economist and educator with a Ph.D. from Yale University, has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Chicago, George Mason University among others, “How Is Inequality Linked to Climate Change, and What to Do About It?,” 4 January 2016, EconoMonitor, http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2016/01/04/how-is-inequality-linked-to-climate-change-and-what-to-do-about-it/, KD

All three of these propositions belong to the realm of positive economics. To reach any policy conclusions, we need to combine them with the normative proposition that people who cause harm to others should mitigate the harm when possible, and when not possible, make restitution to victims. Combined with Proposition 1, this implies that wealthy countries, and wealthy individuals wherever they live, should take a leading role in combatting climate change and its adverse consequences. But, what can they do? Neither of the two most obvious policies would address both climate change and inequality. Efforts by rich countries to reduce their own emissions could slow climate change, but they would not stop it. Even if wealthy countries achieved net zero emissions, doing so would only slow the increase of global inequality, not reverse it. Policies that attack inequality directly through income transfers or conventional forms of foreign aid would not work, either. Other things being equal, any decrease in inequality would increase global net emissions and accelerate climate change. Fortunately, there does seem to be one kind of policy that would simultaneously combat climate change and inequality, namely, policies that would speed the adoption in poor countries of emission reducing technologies, such as solar energy, improved agricultural practices, or cleaner cookstoves. If they include enough subsidies or financing to reduce the cost of clean energy to users below that of conventional alternatives like coal, such policies can simultaneously raise real incomes in beneficiary countries and reduce the carbon intensity of their GDP. They also satisfy the ethical obligation of the world’s wealthy, who disproportionately contribute to climate change, to compensate victims living low-income countries.

Production focus badWe need to focus on the consumption of materials that contribute to global warming. The affirmative’s focus on production does nothing if consumption doesn’t declineHans A. Baer, a scholar activist who adheres to the notion of praxis – the merger of theory and social action – anthropologist, “Global Capitalism and Climate Change,” in Handbook on International Political Economy, edited by Ralph Pettman, World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2012, pg. 395-414, http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43030594/Ralph_Pettman-Handbook_On_International_Political_Economy-Wo1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1469152351&Signature=2QfxTk1NR8qzXt2JG1EBkkXVV18%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRalph_Pettman_Handbook_On_International.pdf#page=408, KD

Much of the economic growth in developing countries, including China and India but also the oil-producing countries, results from the production of luxury goods for the wealthy and the new middle classes in these places. In China many of these people can be found in the eastern provinces where individual purchasing power exceeds seven thousand US dollars annually (Harris, 2010, p. 126). The Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency says that in 2006 China surpassed the United States in total carbon dioxide emissions (Camilleri and Falk, 2010, p. 279). China builds a new coal power plant approximately every four days and appears to have surpassed the US to become single largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world due to the rapid growth in its fossil-fuel consumption and cement manufacturing. Hence the argument that affluent nations need to reduce the demands they place on the environment and to transform their politico-economic systems to meet people’s needs without unsustainably devouring the planet’s natural resources (York et al., 2009, p. 143). Hence the parallel argument that says less affluent nations need to shift their development strategies away from relentless politicoeconomic expansion in order to focus not only on escalating material consumption but also on strategies that improve people’s quality of life.

Alt Methods

Polluter-pays Models in which the person or organization responsible for the environmental issue is also responsible for the resolution is the most popular and justified method which deters future harmJonathan Baron, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making regarding moral questions, especially questions about public policy, “Thinking about global warming,” Climatic Change (2006) 77: 137–150, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-006-9049-y, KD

A powerful intuition is that people should clean up their own waste. If you cause a problem, you own it. When I play tennis, I will carefully deposit the lid of my tennis ball can in the trash, even when I could more easily pick up 5 lids that others have left on the court. Baron et al. (1993) found that subjects preferred to have companies clean up their own hazardous waste, even if the waste threatened no one, rather than spend the same amount of money cleaning up the much more dangerous waste of a defunct company. Ordinarily, it is easiest for people to undo their own harm, but this principle may be applied even when no such justification is available. Another justification of the polluter-pays principle is that, when enforced, it deters people from causing harm. But the deterrent effect of this principle is absent when people do not know what they are causing, or when alternatives are too costly. It might be argued that we should have known about global warming since 1896, when Svante Arrhenius first proposed the idea and then provided estimates that agree fairly well with modern computer models. Although Arrhenius was an important scientist, who won the Nobel Prize for other work, it could still be argued that too many scary findings and theories sit around in old journals for anyone to dig through them all and take them seriously, even when their authors are famous. A brief warming scare in the 1930s may have been the cry of “wolf” that led to neglect of later cries (Mahlman, 1997). Yet, in the 1980s, some observations suggested that warming had begin, and the world started to take it seriously. In hindsight, it may turn out that the scientific uncertainties were exaggerated, but at the time they seemed great enough to discourage precipitous action, especially in view of the excessive pessimism of earlier predictions of environmental disaster (Simon, 1980). It therefore is not clear what lesson people would learn from a decision to hold the “polluters” responsible for the cost of reducing global warming. Heed every warning? No, there are too many. The desire to make the polluters pay seems like a good intuition because it usually creates good incentives for the future, but, in the case of global warming, that justification seems weak. The intuition remains strong.

State Action KeyInstitutions are responsible for solutions to poverty, economic inequality and distribution of resources necessary to combat and cope with climate change—engaging with the state is keyW. Neil Adger, Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and P. Mick Kelly, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, and Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia,“Social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4: 253–266, 1999, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009601904210, KD

All the indicators of vulnerability to climate extremes discussed thus far are predicated by the influence of institutions on their operation. Poverty, the use of resources, and the distribution of wealth and income within a population are all institutionally determined, and hence central to the analysis of vulnerability. Since it is formal political institutions that devise and implement the legal enforcement of property rights, all economic structures can be conceptualised as dependent on the institutional structure. Institutions can be classified as either formal (referring to bureaucracies and agencies of the state) or informal (associated with, for example, how individual decision-making is constrained by custom). As outlined in Table 1, adaptation can be observed through changing formal institutional structures and through examination of the perceived legitimacy, or lack of legitimacy, of institutions and institutional changes. These aspects, therefore, rely on examination of structures of institutions and constraints on their evolution, and on the constraints they exert on individuals (Sanderson, 1994). The most difficult aspect of the observation of institutional change is the assessment of whether the change is ‘appropriate’ for the external threat or environmental change. Appropriateness can be examined by whether institutional changes are legitimised within the internal or external constituencies and stakeholders of the institutions, and whether they are timely or even anticipatory. In the case of climate variability and change this may only be judged when the institutions are put to the test through the real events. The appropriateness of formal institutional arrangements for collective action in circumstances where hazards are a threat may themselves be undermined by reduced ‘keenness of perception’ (Burton et al., 1993, p.150) of hazards depending on the period since previous impact. Thus, even if formal institutional change is appropriate for an external threat to livelihood security, this may be undermined by subjective perceptions downplaying such risks. In a similar fashion, heightened perception of the threat of future impacts may also influence the appropriateness of the institutional response.