Interest Rates

A. The Federal reserve is keeping interest rate hikes small and gradual to
prevent inflation, but theyll respond quickly to unplanned stimulus
causes a panicked market reaction

AP, 4-5-2017, ("Fed minutes reveal debate over inflation and Trump," LA Times,
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fed-minutes-inflation-trump-20170405-
story.html//)MBA HBJ

Federal Reserve officials struggled last month to come to grips with two big uncertainties facing
the U.S. economy: whether it would be safe to let inflation rise faster for a while and how to
assess the impact of President Trump's ambitious economic stimulus plans. Minutes of the Fed's discussion at their March meeting,
released Wednesday, showed near-unanimous support for the quarter-point increase in its key policy rate, the second rate hike in three months. But there was less agreement

future rate increases would be

over the issues of inflation and Trump's economic plans. ADVERTISING The group decided to keep signaling that

gradual but be prepared to respond quickly to changes in the economic outlook. Many
analysts believe the Fed will hold rates steady at its May meeting. The minutes also showed that Fed officials had a briefing from staff
over the central bank's $4.5-trillion balance sheet, which quadrupled during the financial crisis and its aftermath as the central bank engaged in successive rounds of bond
purchases as a way to lower long-term interest rates and give the weak economy a boost. The minutes said Fed officials agreed that if the economy continued to perform as

Currently, the Fed has been keeping

expected, a change in the committee's reinvestment policy would likely be appropriate later this year.

the level of the balance sheet steady at $4.5 trillion. But financial markets have been closely
watching for any Fed signal on the timing of when the Fed would begin reducing the level of its
bond holdings by halting its current practice of replacing any maturing bonds. The minutes indicated that this change could be announced later this year. The
minutes showed that several Fed officials believed that Trump's stimulus plans would probably not begin

until next year. The minutes said that because of the substantial uncertainties about the outlines of the
program that will eventually emerge from Congress, about half of the Fed officials had not
included any assumptions about Trump's efforts in their economic forecasts. While most believed Trump's
plans had the potential to boost growth, some said there were also downside risks from a possible adverse economic reaction from Trump's measures to limit immigration and

On inflation, the minutes showed that some Fed officials worried

to increase trade barriers to protect U.S. workers.

that if unemployment, currently at a low of 4.7%, fell even further, it could pose a significant
upside risk of higher inflation. The Fed's two goals are to achieve maximum employment and moderate inflation. Unemployment is below the Fed's
4.8% goal, while inflation has remained below the Fed's 2% inflation goal for several years. Although some Fed officials argued that the inflation target might be achieved by the
end of this year, other Fed officials argued that because inflation had run below 2% for so long, it would do no harm to allow prices to rise above 2% for a time. A few members
expressed the view that the committee should avoid policy actions or communications that might be interpreted as suggesting the committee's 2% inflation objective was

The Fed continued to

actually a ceiling, the minutes said. The Fed's decision to boost its key policy rate by a quarter of a point left it in a range of 0.75% to 1%.

signal that it expected to boost rates three times this year, and many private economists believe that the upcoming rate hikes
might occur at the June and September meetings. The next meeting is May 2 and 3.

B. Plans federal education spending results in rate hikes by the Fed

timing matters more than the magnitude of the link
Olson and Sheiner 17
(Louise M. Sheiner Policy Director - The Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, Senior Fellow - Economic Studies at
Brookings Peter Olson Research Analyst, , The Hutchins Center Explains: Fiscal stimulus and the Fed, pg online @
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/01/26/the-hutchins-center-explains-fiscal-stimulus-and-the-fed/ //um-ef)
WHAT IS FISCAL STIMULUS? Fiscal stimulus is a term for tax cuts or new government spending that increase
aggregate demand. Almost any deficit-increasing policyreduced corporate taxes, more generous food
stamps, added infrastructure spendingcan stimulate demand, but the precise impacts depend
on the structure of the package and the timing. For example, tax cuts aimed at the poor can boost the economy more in the near-term than tax cuts for the rich
because the poor tend to spend a higher percentage of what they receive than the wealthy. In contrast, a decision today to build a new nuclear submarine five years in the

Fiscal stimulus can be helpful when

future wont have much effect on demand in the short-term at all. WHEN IS FISCAL STIMULUS WARRANTED?

unemployment is high and economic output is less than its potential. When the economy is at full employment, or close to
it, fiscal stimulus is more likely to lead to higher prices than to higher output. In that case, the

Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates to keep higher government spending or lower taxes from
producing an unwelcome increase in inflation. DOES IT MAKE SENSE RIGHT NOW? The current
unemployment rate in the U.S. (4.7%) is near what economists think of as full employment, and
GDP growth in 2016 likely was close to what many economists think of as its potential rate (1.8 to 2.0%), roughly defined as the rate at which the labor force grows plus the rate

As a result, the U.S. does not appear to require additional stimulus

at which productivity (output per hour of work) grows.

right now. At least, that was Chair Yellens take at the Federal Reserves December 2016 press conference. When asked about fiscal
stimulus, she said that it was not obviously needed, given the solid labor market. Other Fed officials have made similar comments since Donald Trumps election brought more talk of stimulus. For instance, Loretta

Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said earlier this month that I think were basically at full employment and I think that inflation is going to be moving back up to 2 percent over the next couple of years. So I dont see a need of the kind of fiscal policy just to stimulate aggregate demand. HOW ABOUT SPENDING ON PUBLIC
INVESTMENT? The Fed clearly would prefer that any fiscal expansion be aimed at increasing the long-run potential growth rate. John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, recently stated: Today I dont think we need short-term fiscal stimulus. What we need is really better policies and investments in the long-term health of
the economy. Increased government spending on investmentbridge projects, scientific research, educationraises the level of future GDP, whereas spending on consumption does not. So as Williams suggests, even when fiscal stimulus doesnt make sense for near-term support for the economy, increased spending on public investment might. (For a
Hutchins Center explainer on public investment, see here.) As Governor Lael Brainard said at the Hutchins Center recently: Changes in fiscal policy that raise the level or growth rate of productivity or that induce greater labor force participation and higher levels of skill and education in the workforce raise the nations productive capacity and result in
more sustainable increases in output and living standards. The higher productivity and workforce levels engendered by these policies would likely increase investment opportunities and raise expectations of future income growth, sustainably boosting the levels of investment and consumption and, as a result, the longer-run neutral rate. Such policies are
more likely to be sustainable because the boost to GDP that they provide continues to accumulate over time, limiting increases in the debt-to-GDP ratio and preserving fiscal space. [Fiscal space is how much more debt a government can take on before it runs into trouble.] Some economists, such as Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Harvard Kennedy
School of Government, and Louise Sheinerone of the authors of this posthave argued that now is a particularly good time for the government to undertake more investment because interest rates are so low, which makes borrowing to finance that investment much cheaper. IS FEDERAL RESERVE INTEREST RATE POLICY LIKELY TO RESPOND

It is entirely possible that the Fed could respond the

DIFFERENTLY TO TAX CUTS AND SPENDING INCREASES IF THEY ARE LARGELY AIMED AT INCREASING INVESTMENT AS OPPOSED TO CONSUMPTION?

same way to two packages that look quite differentone aimed at stimulating aggregate
demand in the short term, and one aimed at improving the economys growth potential in the
long runbecause government spending intended to boost the economys productive capacity in
the long run will generally also increase short-run aggregate demand. Government spending acts as fiscal stimulus whether the
government is buying food or a supercomputer that may lead to scientific breakthroughs and greater growth potential. More generally, whether the Federal

Reserve will increase interest rates in response to a fiscal stimulus package depends on both the timing of

the effects and the magnitude of those effects. Inflationary pressures come from increases in aggregate demand not

met by increases in aggregate supply. So if President Trump and Congress fashion a tax-and-spending package that increases both demand and
supply by the same amount at the same time, that wouldnt be inflationary. The Fed would not respond by raising interest rates. But such a policy would be unusual. Most

investments take time to build and time to bear fruit. Consider the time it takes to develop a new air traffic control
system and the time it takes for airlines to adapt to it, or the lag between improved education funding and a more skilled

workforce. IF FISCAL STIMULUS MEANS TIGHTER MONETARY POLICY IN THE SHORT TERM, IS
THERE ANY REASON TO DO IT? Spending increases and tax cuts would lead to greater deficits, and thus to an increase in the national debt. A
larger debt, among other impacts, could make it harder for the federal government to borrow
still more to provide fiscal stimulus during the next downturn. But a deficit-widening package of
spending increases and tax cuts probably would lead the Federal Reserve to raise rates more than it
otherwise would, and that would give it more room to cut rates in a downturn. In effect, fiscal space would be traded for monetary policy space.

C. Status Quo Interest Rate levels are CRITICAL to the stability of the
economy quick, unexpected hikes to combat inflation collapse the
economy

Stratfor 12/14/16
(2016, Stratfor Geopolitical Diary, A Globally Fraught Fed Rate Hike,
https://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical-diary/globally-fraught-fed-rate-hike)
Today, the Federal Reserve raised the U.S. benchmark interest rate for the first time in a year and only the second time in a decade. That the move had been widely expected and the increase was held to a quarter

The U.S. dollar's central role in the global economy means that ripples
of a percentage point does not detract from its significance.

from Fed policy shifts reach all countries. The central bank's most recent interest rate hike in December 2015
sparked a dramatic reaction in international capital markets as investors sold off risky assets over the
next two months. Signals by the Fed that another rate hike was not imminent stopped the capital flight to

safer havens. The chance of a repeat of that drama as 2017 dawns appears to be somewhat lessened by an overall improvement in the global economic

outlook and less volatile markets. That said, all of last year's fragilities such as teetering Italian banks, Chinese capital

outflows, and notable dollar-denominated debt exposure in the emerging markets are still in place, so
there remains a high risk that today's move will trigger economic turbulence in the coming months. Because the dollar reigns supreme in
global markets, both as a currency in which to hold savings and as a medium used to conduct international transactions, other currencies are measured against it. (A stronger dollar weakens
other currencies in comparison.) So higher interest rates in the United States increase the dollar's allure as a means to hold money

because of the higher return it offers for international investors. Of course, the markets anticipate these moves
in advance, so the dollar-strengthening from this rate hike had already occurred, largely over the past few months. The

key question going forward is when and how often more rate hikes will occur. An accelerated
cycle of rate increases will result in continued market adjustments and thus an even stronger
dollar. Donald Trump's election has increased the expectation of a higher pace of Fed rate hikes. His campaign platform was based on policies that would both increase economic activity such as greater
infrastructure spending and corporate tax cuts and raise barriers to imports that could boost prices domestically. Such plans are recipes for higher inflation. The central bank's key

job is to keep prices stable, which it does by adjusting interest rates. Higher rates raise the costs of borrowing and
dampen economic activity. Thus, increasing inflation generally will lead to more rate increases.
There is good reason to believe that this linkage will hold, at least for the remainder of Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet
Yellen's term. In 2018, her position will be up for renewal, raising the possibility that she might be replaced by a leader more resistant to interest rate hikes, particularly if the new administration
proves to be less concerned about inflation than it is about about sustaining growth. But for the time being, at least, the path to higher spending, higher inflation and higher rates resulting in a stronger dollar

appears to be set. One notable aspect of today's move by the Fed is that it increases the gap between the
United States and other major currency areas like Japan and the eurozone, both of which have negative interest rates and are still
following aggressive bond-buying policies. Such divergence among the world's major central banks is historically rare,

and as the disparity grows, it will boost the gains to be made by borrowing in the lower-rate
countries and lending in the higher-rate ones. Such flows of capital among the world's major
centers can be destabilizing and indeed might have contributed to the instability on display after the last Fed rate hike. With this in mind, recent moves by the Bank of Japan
(which has stepped back from its quantitative focus on bond-buying and begun stabilizing bond prices) and the European Central Bank (which has reduced its rate of bond purchases) could be seen as attempts to
reduce the divergence effect ahead of the U.S. hike to keep the gap under control. That said, each central bank also had other reasons for its strategy shift, from the dwindling supply of bonds available for

the improving
purchase by the Japanese bank to the overall improvement in global economic circumstances and increasing signs of general inflation as commodity prices have stabilized. In fact,

global economic climate has allowed the market to largely ride out developments that at the
beginning of 2016 seemed to be filling it with panic. Last December's U.S. rate hike made China's yuan look overvalued, especially following the move
in 2015 by the People's Bank of China to break its currency's dollar peg. The resulting rapid increase in capital outflows prompted the Chinese central bank to spend $100 billion a month in foreign exchange

China's reserves have shrunk by around

reserves to staunch the bleeding. The trend has resumed over the past few months, but to a lesser degree. The yuan's decline has been consistent, and

$40 billion per month, but this has not caused much disturbance in the markets. More recently, instability in the Italian

banking system, corresponding to political uncertainty in the wake of Italy's failed constitutional referendum, has created a
much more muted reaction than it did in January, when the banks were, at least on paper, considerably less vulnerable. In sum, global
markets this year generally have been taking events in stride even the Brexit referendum in
June, when Britain became the first country to choose to leave the European Union, surely a highly unsettling event. This market calmness can
be traced to the announcement in February that the Fed would be tightening the monetary supply
more slowly than had been expected. There is a danger that an accelerated rate-hike cycle,
which by all appearances began today, could re-create the conditions that led to the upsets
that began the year. With Italy's banks now at an extremely fragile point, and with China's $3
trillion in reserves now 25 percent lower than they were in 2014, countries around the world are
hoping that another financial storm will not descend.
 D. Extinction

Auslin 9 Michael Auslin, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Desmond
Lachman, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, The Global Economy Unravels,
Forbes, 3-6, http://www.aei.org/article/100187

global chaos followed hard on

What do these trends mean in the short and medium term? The Great Depression showed how social and

economic collapse. The mere fact that parliaments across the globe, from America to Japan, are unable to make responsible, economically sound recovery plans
suggests that they do not know what to do and are simply hoping for the least disruption. Equally worrisome is the adoption of more statist economic programs around the

globe, and the concurrent decline of trust in free-market systems.The threat of instability is a pressing concern. China, until last year the
world's fastest growing economy, just reported that 20 million migrant laborers lost their jobs. Even in the flush times of recent years, China faced upward of

70,000 labor uprisings a year. A sustained downturn poses grave and possibly immediate
threats to Chinese internal stability. The regime in Beijing may be faced with a choice of repressing its own people or diverting their energies
outward, leading to conflict with China's neighbors. Russia, an oil state completely dependent on energy sales, has had to put down riots in its

Far East as well as in downtown Moscow. Vladimir Putin's rule has been predicated on squeezing civil liberties while providing economic
largesse. If that devil's bargain falls apart, then wide-scale repression inside Russia, along with a continuing

threatening posture toward Russia's neighbors, is likely. Even apparently stable societies face increasing risk and the threat of
internal or possibly external conflict. As Japan's exports have plummeted by nearly 50%, one-third of the country's prefectures have passed emergency economic stabilization
plans. Hundreds of thousands of temporary employees hired during the first part of this decade are being laid off. Spain's unemployment rate is expected to climb to nearly 20%
by the end of 2010; Spanish unions are already protesting the lack of jobs, and the specter of violence, as occurred in the 1980s, is haunting the country. Meanwhile, in Greece,

workers have already taken to the streets. Europe as a whole will face dangerously increasing tensions between native
citizens and immigrants, largely from poorer Muslim nations, who have increased the labor pool in the past several decades. Spain has absorbed five million immigrants since
1999, while nearly 9% of Germany's residents have foreign citizenship, including almost 2 million Turks. The xenophobic labor strikes in the U.K. do not bode well for the rest of

A prolonged global downturn, let alone a collapse, would dramatically raise tensions
Europe.

inside these countries. Couple that with possible protectionist legislation in the United States, unresolved ethnic and
territorial disputes in all regions of the globe and a loss of confidence that world leaders actually know what they are doing. The
result may be a series of small explosions that coalesce into a big bang .
 Gerrymandering
Wisconsins districting map is going to get struck down maintaining Kennedy
is key
Greenblat, Staff Writer, 9/13/2017
Alan, Will the U.S. Supreme Court Take a Stand Against Partisan Gerrymandering?
http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-supreme-court-wisconsin-gerrymandering.html

The
One of the most time-honored and criticized traditions in American politics is for the party in power to draw legislative districts in ways that help keep them in power.

U.S. Supreme Court, though, may soon outlaw at least the most blatant partisan gerrymandering. On Oct. 3, the
nation's highest court will hear oral arguments in a case challenging Wisconsin's state legislative
districts. Plaintiffs complain that the map unfairly protects Republican lawmakers from partisan competition. A lower court agreed with that argument last November.
"This could be a huge case if the justices strike down Wisconsin's partisan gerrymander," says Joshua

Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky. "That will show that there are some limits to partisan gerrymandering." The last time

the Supreme Court heard a partisan gerrymandering case, in 2004's Vieth v. Jubelirer, the justices were divided. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that

there could be such a thing as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander -- but only if the courts
had a "workable standard" for determining when partisans had crossed that line. The Wisconsin
case, known as Whitford v. Gill, represents an attempt to come up with such a standard. To prove their argument that
partisan gerrymandering in the state exceeded what's constitutional, the plaintiffs used a new political science measurement

known as the efficiency gap, which looks at how votes translate into victories. According to this argument, all
votes cast for a losing candidate and any votes for the winner beyond what was needed to win are considered wasted. If too many districts have lopsided outcomes (where

that shows that the party that drew the map

the party that drew the map wasted significantly fewer votes), the argument goes,

sought to game the system, creating districts that are totally safe for one party or the other and diluting its strength in neighboring districts. Plaintiffs in
the Wisconsin case used the efficiency gap to show that Wisconsin's Assembly map -- as measured by results in the 2012 elections -- was roughly three times more inefficient
than the average legislature's. Democrats actually won a majority of the overall vote in Wisconsin's legislative contests in 2012 but came away with only 39 of the Assembly's 99
seats. "Basically, it didn't matter what we did in an election," says Sachin Chheda, a Democratic consultant in Milwaukee who directs the Fair Elections Project, which organized
and launched the Whitford lawsuit. "We could get more votes, but there was no path to a majority in the legislature." That's because regardless of how the total vote breaks out,
what matters is winning by district, says Matt Walter, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which helps elect GOP state officials nationwide. "The
redistricting process in and of itself is inherently political and was designed as such at the founding," Walter says. "It was designed to have accountable elected officials take the
actions of adjusting districts based on population growth." For their part, Wisconsin Republicans have maintained that they didn't draw the maps to punish Democrats. Rather,
they note that most Democrats are clustered in Milwaukee or Madison, while Republican voters are spread out more evenly around the state. Although the issue is almost

there's growing bipartisan support for putting a stop to

always divided along partisan lines (depending on which party is in power),

partisan gerrymandering. A handful of prominent Republicans -- including Ohio Gov. John Kasich, U.S. Sen. John McCain and
former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- urged the Supreme Court to use the Wisconsin case to establish a

standard for measuring partisan gerrymanders. "The Supreme Court has said before that partisan gerrymandering can be
unconstitutional, but basically it doesn't know how to tell when a plan goes too far," says Annabelle Harless, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which is working with
plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case. "They could adopt the test plaintiffs propose, they could in theory come up with their own standard, or they could say it's not justiciable [not an

plaintiffs in Wisconsin didn't rely exclusively on the efficiency gap. They demonstrated that
issue for courts to decide]." Harless notes that the

Wisconsin legislators acted with partisan intent, namely by unearthing emails that showed they
were putting Democrats at a disadvantage. They also argued that the fact that Democrats tend to live in the state's major cities wasn't
enough to justify the lopsided nature of the Assembly map. The makeup of the Supreme Court has changed considerably since

2004 -- the last time it took a partisan gerrymandering case -- but the ideological breakdown of justices is expected to remain

the same, with four convinced that partisan gerrymanders are out of bounds and four others
believing the exact opposite. On this question, as in many other cases, Justice Kennedy is expected to remain
the swing vote. "Justice Kennedy's views," says Douglas, the law professor, "are really the whole ballgame."
Overrules deck cause public backlash
Hubbart 5 Adjunct professor of law in Miami (Phillip, Making Sense of Search and Seizure law:
A Fourth Amendment Handbook, 2005, pg. 106)
Still, the framework of past Fourth Amendment decisions on a specific issue limits the choices that the Court can make in a given
case, as the Court must necessarily make a reasoned case for accommodating the result it reaches in a way that logically appears
within the scope of past case law. Stated differently, as
a practical matter no Court, no matter what its judicial
philosophy, can rewrite the law announced in its past cases without losing public confidence.
Theoretically, of course, it has the de jure power to do so by overruling, artificially distinguishing
or outright ignoring its prior relevant cases, willy-nilly. But if it did so, it would bring upon itself
an avalanche of public and professional criticism that it could not possibly withstand. Indeed,
impeachment proceedings might very well follow. The doctrine of stare decisis necessarily
means that the Courts basic reasoning process must be deductive from, and therefore
generally consistent with, its past relevant decisions. Although this framework is somewhat flexible in nature, it
clearly has its limits which, as a practical matter, restrict the Courts decision-making process.

That kills democracy, prevents an effective congress, and allows for an

unchecked trump.
Klaas, Washington Post, 2017
Brian, Gerrymandering is the biggest obstacle to genuine democracy in the United States. So
why is no one protesting? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-
post/wp/2017/02/10/gerrymandering-is-the-biggest-obstacle-to-genuine-democracy-in-the-
united-states-so-why-is-no-one-protesting/?utm_term=.6fd9378f36a8

There is an enormous paradox at the heart of American democracy. Congress is deeply and stubbornly
unpopular. On average, between 10 and 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress on a par with public support for traffic jams and cockroaches. And yet, in the 2016 election, only
eight incumbents eight out of a body of 435 representatives were defeated at the polls. If there is one silver bullet that
could fix American democracy, its getting rid of gerrymandering the now commonplace practice of drawing electoral districts in a
distorted way for partisan gain. Its also one of a dwindling number of issues that principled citizens Democrat and Republican should be able to agree on. Indeed, polls confirm that an overwhelming majority

average electoral margin of victory was 37.1

of Americans of all stripes oppose gerrymandering. In the 2016 elections for the House of Representatives, the

percent. Thats a figure youd expect from North Korea, Russia or Zimbabwe not the United States. But the shocking reality is
that the typical race ended with a Democrat or a Republican winning nearly 70 percent of the vote ,
while their challenger won just 30 percent. Last year, only 17 seats out of 435 races were decided by a margin of 5 percent or less. Just 33 seats in total were decided by a margin of 10 percent or less. In other
words, more than 9 out of 10 House races were landslides where the campaign was a foregone conclusion before ballots were even cast. In 2016, there were no truly competitive Congressional races in 42 of the

not healthy for a system of government that, at its core, is defined by political
50 states. That is

competition. Gerrymandering, in a word, is why American democracy is broken. The word gerrymander comes
from an 1812 political cartoon drawn to parody Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerrys re-drawn senate districts. The cartoon depicts one of the bizarrely shaped districts in the contorted form of a fork-tongued
salamander. Since 1812, gerrymandering has been increasingly used as a tool to divide and distort the electorate. More often than not, state legislatures are tasked with drawing district maps, allowing the
electoral foxes to draw and defend their henhouse districts. While no party is innocent when it comes to gerrymandering, a Washington Post analysis in 2014 found that eight of the ten most gerrymandered
districts in the United States were drawn by Republicans. As a result, districts from the Illinois 4th to the North Carolina 12th often look like spilled inkblots rather than coherent voting blocs. They are anything but
accidental. The Illinois 4th, for example, is nicknamed the Latin Earmuffs, because it connects two predominantly Latino areas by a thin line that is effectively just one road. In so doing, it packs Democrats into a
contorted district, ensuring that those voters cast ballots in a safely Democratic preserve. The net result is a weakening of the power of Latino votes and more Republican districts than the electoral math should
reasonably yield. Because Democrats are packed together as tightly as possible in one district, Republicans have a chance to win surrounding districts even though they are vastly outnumbered geographically.

These uncompetitive districts have a seriously corrosive effect on the integrity of democracy. If
youre elected to represent a district that is 80 percent Republican or 80 percent Democratic, there is
absolutely no incentive to compromise. Ever. In fact, there is a strong disincentive to collaboration,

because working across the aisle almost certainly means the risk of a primary challenge from the
far right or far left of the party. For the overwhelming majority of Congressional representatives,
there is no real risk to losing a general election but there is a very real threat of losing a fiercely
contested primary election. Over time, this causes sane people to pursue insane pandering and
extreme positions. It is a key, but often overlooked, source of contemporary gridlock and endless bickering.
Moreover, gerrymandering also disempowers and distorts citizen votes which leads to decreased turnout and a sense of powerlessness. In
2010, droves of tea party activists eager to have their voices heard quickly realized that their own representative was either a solidly liberal Democrat in an overwhelmingly blue district or a solidly conservative

Those who now oppose President

Republican in an overwhelmingly red district. Those representatives would not listen because the electoral map meant that they didnt need to.

Trump are quickly learning the same lesson about the electoral calculations made by their representatives as they make
calls or write letters to congressional representatives who seem about as likely to be swayed as granite. This helps to explain why 2014 turnout sagged to just 36.4 percent, the lowest turnout rate since World War

There are two pieces of good news. First, several court rulings in state and federal
II. Why bother showing up when the result already seems preordained?

courts have dealt a blow to gerrymandered districts. Several court rulings objected to districts that clearly were drawn along racial lines. Perhaps the most important

is a Wisconsin case (Whitford v. Gill) that ruled that districts could not be drawn for deliberate partisan gain. The Supreme Court will rule on
partisan gerrymandering in 2017, and its a case that could transform and reinvigorate
American democracy at a time when a positive shock is sorely needed. (This may hold true even if Neil
Gorsuch is confirmed to the Supreme Court, as Justices Kennedy and Roberts could side with the liberal
minority). Second, fixing gerrymandering is getting easier. Given the right parameters, computer models can fairly apportion citizens into districts that are diverse, competitive and geographically
sensible ensuring that minorities are not used as pawns in a national political game. These efforts can be bolstered by stripping district drawing powers from partisan legislators and putting them into the hands
of citizen-led commissions that are comprised by an equal number of Democrat- and Republican-leaning voters. Partisan politics is to be exercised within the districts, not during their formation. But
gerrymandering intensifies every decade regardless, because its not a politically sexy issue. Whens the last time you saw a march against skewed districting? Even if the marches do come someday, the last
stubborn barrier to getting reform right is human nature. Many people prefer to be surrounded by like-minded citizens, rather than feeling like a lonely red oasis in a sea of blue or vice versa. Rooting out
gerrymandering wont make San Francisco or rural Texas districts more competitive no matter the computer model used. And, as the urban/rural divide in American politics intensifies, competitive districts will be

what truly differentiates

harder and harder to draw. The more we cluster, the less we find common ground and compromise. Ultimately, though, we must remember that

democracy from despotism is political competition. The longer we allow our districts to be
hijacked by partisans, blue or red, the further we gravitate away from the founding ideals of our republic
and the closer we inch toward the death of American democracy.

Democracy checks global conflicts

Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, 2/16/2017
Garry, Democracy and Human Rights: The Case for U.S. Leadership
http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/021617_Kasparov_%20Testimony.pdf

There existential threat today is not found

The Soviet Union was an existential threat, and this focused the attention of the world, and the American people.

on a map, but it is very real. The forces of the past are making steady progress against the modern
world order. Terrorist movements in the Middle East, extremist parties across Europe, a paranoid
tyrant in North Korea threatening nuclear blackmail, and, at the center of the web, an aggressive KGB dictator in Russia. They
all want to turn the world back to a dark past because their survival is threatened by the
values of the free world, epitomized by the United States. And they are thriving as the U.S. has
retreated. The global freedom index has declined for ten consecutive years. No one like to talk about the United States as a global policeman, but this is what happens when there is no cop on the
beat. American leadership begins at home, right here. America cannot lead the world on democracy and human

rights if there is no unity on the meaning and importance of these things . Leadership is required to

make that case clearly and powerfully. Right now, Americans are engaged in politics at a level not seen in decades. It is an
opportunity for them to rediscover that making America great begins with believing America can
be great. The Cold War was won on American values that were shared by both parties and
nearly every American. Institutions that were created by a Democrat, Truman, were triumphant
forty years later thanks to the courage of a Republican, Reagan. This bipartisan consistency created the decades of strategic
stability that is the great strength of democracies. Strong institutions that outlast politicians
allow for long-range planning. In contrast, dictators can operate only tactically, not strategically,
because they are not constrained by the balance of powers, but cannot afford to think beyond
their own survival. This is why a dictator like Putin has an advantage in chaos, the ability to move quickly. This can only
be met by strategy, by long-term goals that are based on shared values, not on polls and cable news. The fear of making things worse has paralyzed the United States from trying to make things better. There will

. The spread of democracy is the only proven remedy for nearly every
always be setbacks, but the United States cannot quit

crisis that plagues the world today. War, famine, poverty, terrorismall are generated and
exacerbated by authoritarian regimes. A policy of America First inevitably puts American security last. American leadership is
required because there is no one else, and because it is good for America. There is no weapon or wall that is more
powerful for security than America being envied, imitated, and admired around the world.
Admired not for being perfect, but for having the exceptional courage to always try to be better.
Thank you
 Stripping
Controversial court decisions will set off congressional backlash and embolden
court stripping.
Crabb 12 (Barbara B. Crabb is a United States District Judge, Western District of Wisconsin. Robert W. Kastenmeier Lecture Bridging the Divide
Between Congress and the Courts, http://wisconsinlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/1-Crabb.pdf, Wisconsin Law Review) EYC

These majorchanges in court administration put the judicial branch on a firmer footing than it had
been in the nineteenth century and gave it a larger measure of autonomy, but they did not
change the basic relationship between the two branches. The judiciary remained dependent on
Congress for the confirmation of new judges, the creation of new judgeships, funding for
courthouses, their basic budgets, and procedural rules, just as it is today. The courts still have no
independent source of funding. They have no right to be heard on congressional decisions to expand or restrict the
scope of the courts jurisdiction or to enact laws that will increase the courts workload. In other words, when it comes to matters
affecting institutional independence, the judiciary has no constitutional protection and its power is limited
to persuasion. If Congress wanted to, it could retaliate against the courts by cutting the courts
funding; disestablishing individual courts; adding or taking away Justices from the Supreme
Court; imposing crippling [devastating] restrictions on the operations of the courts; narrowing
their jurisdiction; impeaching individual judges and Justices; and refusing to confirm nominees
to fill judicial vacancies. The framers set up what could well be a recipe for disaster: giving the judiciary the last word on the
law, with the inevitable controversies that authority will provoke, and then giving it no institutional
protection. It is a little like giving a person a very old and very unpredictable gun for personal security. If used properly, the gun
may perform its intended function, but its just as possible that it will inflict great damage on its owner. Making the judiciary
the final arbiter on the meaning of the law, with the authority to declare a law or practice
unconstitutional gives it power, but a power that can be explosive and set off backlashes of
varying proportions. By no means is it a power that can ward off encroachment by the other branches. When an entity has
little power in a relationship, it behooves it to assess the sticking points between it and its protagonist, husband carefully what little
power it possesses, employ diplomacy, look for areas in which the interests of both parties are in alignment, and seek ways to
enhance what little power of persuasion it has.

Right to education proposals cause court stripping empirics

Friedman and Solow 13 (Barry, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at NYU School of Law,
and Sara, Third Circuit Court of Appeals Law Clerk with a JD from Yale Law, "The federal right to
an adequate education," The George Washington Law Review, vol. 81, no. 1, January,
www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/friedman_solow_81_1.pdf)

The second lesson we learn from the education story is that the
success rate of constitutional decisions has
varied, as judicial power at times failed to deliver significant change, or worse, instigated a backlash.
Ohios story contains both features. In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court declared that the states system
of funding for primary and secondary education ran afoul of the states constitutional mandate to provide for
a thorough and efficient system of common schools.346 The court noted it was neither advocat[ing] a Robin Hood
approach to school financing reform,347 nor instruct[ing] the General Assembly as to the specifics of the legislation it should
enact.348 But it
was ordering the legislature to make an overhaul of the states public school
financing scheme, listing four groups of education statutes which must be eliminated.349 The DeRolph I decision
spurred a backlash. Conservative legislators advocated depriving the courts of jurisdiction in
school funding litigation, enacting a constitutional amendment to give the legislature the final say on school finance
issues, and impeaching a Republican justice who had joined the majority opinion in DeRolph I. 350 None of these proposals
succeeded, but neither did significant changes to Ohios education statutes. The Ohio Supreme Court continued to find
the state in breach of its duties in 2000, 2001, and 2002,351 and after each decision, an increasingly
broad set of voices decried the holding.352 In 2003, the court terminated its jurisdiction in the
DeRolph litigation altogether, even though as a matter of basic case law, the mandates of DeRolph I and II
remained unfulfilled.353 It is hard to read this outcome as anything other than the Ohio
Supreme Court throwing up its hands. Ironically, it was six years after the Court took itself out of the mix and a new
governor was elected that the Ohio legislature finally put in place a set of sweeping education reforms of the type envisioned by the
state supreme court in the DeRolph cases.354

Court stripping is modeled world wide by other countries tanks the rule of law
Gerhardt 5 (Michael J., Arthur B. Hanson Professor, William & Mary Law School; Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota Law
School, 2005, "The Constitutional Limits to Court-Stripping," Lewis and Clark Law Review,
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1895&context=facpubs) KEN

Another aspect of federalism, to which I have alluded, is that it is not just concerned with protecting
the states from federal encroachments. It also protects the federal government and officials from state
encroachments. In a classic decision in Tarble 's Case, 38 the Supreme Court held that the Constitution
precluded state judges from adjudicating federal officials' compliance with state habeas laws. The
prospect of state judges exercising authority over federal officials is not consistent with the
structure of the Constitution. They could then direct, or impede, the exercise of federal power. The Act,
however, allows state courts to do this. By stripping all federal jurisdiction over certain claims against
federal officials, the Act leaves only state courts with jurisdiction over claims brought against
those officials. It further leaves only to the state courts enforcement of the provisions of the Bill pertaining to federal officials.
39 The popular will might lead state judges to be disposed to be hostile to federal claims or federal
officials. Hostility to the federal claims poses problems with the Fifth Amendment, while hostility to federal officials
poses serious federalism difficulties. Beyond the constitutional defects with the Act,40 it may not be good
policy. It may send the wrong signals to the American people and to people around the world. It
expresses hostility to our Article III courts, in spite of their . special function in upholding
constitutional rights and enforcing and interpreting federal law. If a branch of our government
demonstrates a lack of respect for federal courts, our citizens and citizens in other countries may have
a hard time figuring out why they should do otherwise. Rejecting proposals to exclude all federal
jurisdiction or inferior court jurisdiction for some constitutional claims extends an admirable
tradition within Congress and reminds the world of our hard-won, justifiable confidence in the special
role performed by Article III courts throughout our history in vindicating the rule of law.

The rule of law is vital to solving disease and terrorism globally the US is
modeled.
Greco 05 (Michael S. Greco, President of the American Bar Association, 12/5/'5 [Miami Daily Business Review 52.42])
What makes the rule of law so important that it attracted such a distinguished community First,
because the rule of law is so central to everything the legal community stands for, both in the

United States and around the world. And second, because we increasingly find that our nation's top
international priorities-defeating terrorism, corruption and even the spread of deadly diseases-
are being undone at the ground level by poor governance and lawlessness. As Rice eloquently told the gathering,
 weak and poorly governed states enable disease to spread
"In a world where threats pass even through the most fortified boundaries,

undetected, and corruption to multiply unchecked, and hateful ideologies to grow more violent and more vengeful."

The only real antidote to these global threats is governments, in all corners of the world, that operate with just,
transparent and consistent legal systems that are enforced by fair and independent judiciaries.
These issues are not just the province of distant foreign governments. Building the rule of law must begin at home. Recent revelations in our own country-that the CIA has
maintained secret prisons for foreign detainees-underscore the urgent need for an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate our treatment of such prisoners.

Extinction
Yaneer Bar-Yam 16, physicist and complex systems scientist, Founding President of the New
England Complex Systems Institute, Ph.D., S.B., physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Transition to extinction: Pandemics in a connected world, NECSI, 7-3-2016,
http://necsi.edu/research/social/pandemics/transition
[ FIGURE 1 OMITTED ] The video (Figure 1) shows a simple model of hosts and pathogens we have used to study evolutionary dynamics. In the
animation, the green are hosts and red are pathogens. As pathogens infect hosts, they spread across the system. If you look closely, you will see that
the red changes tint from time to timethat is the natural mutation of pathogens to become more or less aggressive. Watch as one of the more
aggressivebrighter redstrains rapidly expands. After a time it goes extinct leaving a black region. Why does it go extinct? The answer is that it
spreads so rapidly that it kills the hosts around it. Without new hosts to infect it then dies out itself. That the rapidly spreading pathogens die out has
important implications for evolutionary research which we have talked about elsewhere [17]. In the research I want to discuss here, what we were
interested in is the effect of adding long range transportation [8]. This includes natural means of dispersal as well as unintentional dispersal by humans,
like adding airplane routes, which is being done by real world airlines (Figure 2). [ FIGURE 2 OMITTED ] When
we introduce long range
transportation into the model, the success of more aggressive strains changes. They can use the long
range transportation to find new hosts and escape local extinction. Figure 3 shows that the more
transportation routes introduced into the model, the more higher aggressive pathogens are able
to survive and spread. [ FIGURE 3 OMITTED ] As we add more long range transportation, there is a critical point at which
pathogens become so aggressive that the entire host population dies. The pathogens die at the same time, but
that is not exactly a consolation to the hosts. We call this the phase transition to extinction (Figure 4). With

increasing levels of global transportation, human civilization may be approaching such a critical
threshold. Figure 4: The probability of survival makes a sharp transition (red line) from one to
zero as we add more long range transportaion (horizontal axis). The right line (black) holds for
different model parameters, so we need to study at what point the transition will take place for
our world. In the paper we wrote in 2006 about the dangers of global transportation for pathogen evolution and pandemics [8], we mentioned
the risk from Ebola. Ebola is a horrendous disease that was present only in isolated villages in Africa. It was far away from the rest of the world only
because of that isolation. Since Africa was developing, it was only a matter of time before it reached population centers and airports. While the model
is about evolution, it is really about which pathogens will be found in a system that is highly connected, and Ebola can spread in a highly connected
world. The
traditional approach to public health uses historical evidence analyzed statistically to
assess the potential impacts of a disease. As a result, many were surprised by the spread of
Ebola through West Africa in 2014. As the connectivity of the world increases, past experience is
not a good guide to future events. A key point about the phase transition to extinction is its
suddenness. Even a system that seems stable, can be destabilized by a few more long-range
connections, and connectivity is continuing to increase. So how close are we to the tipping point? We
dont know but it would be good to find out before it happens. While Ebola ravaged three countries in West Africa, it only resulted in a handful of cases
outside that region. One possible reason is that many of the airlines that fly to west Africa stopped or reduced flights during the epidemic [9]. In the
absence of a clear connection, public health authorities who downplayed the dangers of the epidemic spreading to the West might seem to be
vindicated. As with the choice of airlines to stop flying to west Africa, our analysis didnt take into consideration how people respond to epidemics. It
does tell us what the outcome will be unless
we respond fast enough and well enough to stop the spread of
future diseases, which may not be the same as the ones we saw in the past. As the world becomes more connected,
the dangers increase. Are people in western countries safe because of higher quality health systems? Countries like the U.S. have
highly skewed networks of social interactions with some very highly connected individuals that
can be superspreaders. The chances of such an individual becoming infected may be low but
events like a mass outbreak pose a much greater risk if they do happen. If a sick food service worker in an
airport infects 100 passengers, or a contagion event happens in mass transportation, an outbreak could very

well prove unstoppable. Watch this mock video of a pathogen spreading globally through land and air transportation. Long range
transportation will continue to pose a threat of pandemic if its impacts cannot be contained.
Case
 Inequality
No impact to income inequality
Tanner 16 (Michael D. Tanner, Cato Institute senior fellow, Five Myths about Economic Inequality in America, 9/7/16
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/five-myths-about-economic-inequality-america) KEN

The relationship between poverty and inequality remains unclear, in part because the number of confounding variables and broader
societal changes make any kind of determination difficult. But what
research there is generally finds that poverty
cannot be tied to inequality. For instance, a recent paper by Dierdre Bloome of Harvard finds little
evidence of a relationship between individuals economic mobility and the income inequality
they experienced when growing up . Over a twenty year period in which income inequality rose
continuously, the intergenerational income elasticity showed no consistent trend. While most studies
examine these trends at the national level, she delves into state-level variation in inequality and social mobility. Again, she finds no
evidence of a relationship, as the inequality to which children were exposed in their state when growing up provides no information
about the mobility they experienced as adults.65 We should also note that international experience parallels the United States.
Using World Bank data, which puts the Gini coefficient on a scale of 100, we can see that there are multiple countries where this has
been the case recently.66 For example, China had a Gini coefficient of 32.43 in 1990 and it rose to 42.06 in 2009, meaning China
became much more unequal. At the same time, the proportion of the population living below $1.25 a day (adjusted for purchasing
power parity), the measure usually used for international poverty lines, fell from 60.18 percent in 1990 to only 11.8 percent in 2009.
Moreover, in discussing poverty and inequality, we should keep in mind that while
the official poverty rate in the
United States has been relatively stable since the mid-1970s, the sort of deep poverty that was once
common among poor Americans has been largely eliminated despite whatever increase in inequality has
occurred over the last 50 years. Take hunger, for example. In the 1960s, as much as a fifth of the U.S. population and more than a
third of poor people had diets that did not meet the Recommended Dietary Allowance for key nutrients. Conditions in 266 U.S.
counties were so bad that they were officially designated as hunger areas.67 Today, malnutrition has been
significantly reduced. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, just 5.6 percent of U.S. households had very low
food security in 2013, a category roughly comparable to the 1960s measurements.68 Even among people below the poverty level,
only 18.5 percent report very low food security.69 Housing provides another example. As recently as 1975,
more than 2.8 million renter households (roughly 11 percent of renter households and 4 percent of all households)
lived in what was considered severely inadequate housing, defined as units with physical defects or
faulty plumbing, electricity, or heating. Today that number is down to roughly 1.2 million renter
households (1 percent of all households).70 In 1970, fully 17.5 percent of households did not have fully functioning plumbing;
today, just 2 percent do not.71 And if you look at material goods, the case is even starker. In the 1960s, for
instance, nearly a third of poor households had no telephone. Today, not only are telephones nearly
universal, but roughly half of poor households own a computer. More than 98 percent have a
television, and two-thirds have two or more TVs. In 1970, less than half of all poor people had a car; today, two-thirds do.72
Clearly, the material circumstances of poor families have improved significantly despite any
possible increase in inequality. Not only do more people across the income distribution have access to more of these
things, but adoption of new technologies and products is speeding up. Whereas it took decades for the telephone and electricity to
make their way into the majority of American homes, new products, such as the cellphone and Internet, have a much faster
adoption rate, as indicated in Figure 11. Adoption of New Technologies Source: Federal Communications Commission, Inquiry
Concerning Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications Capability to All Americans in a Reasonable and Timely Fashion, and
Possible Steps to Accelerate Such Deployment Pursuant to Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Appendix B,
https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Notices/2000/fc00057a.xls; and Pew Research Center, Device Ownership,
http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/media-and-technology/device-ownership/. Note: Breaks in the lines indicate years that
the FCC does not have data or for which is it unavailable. Thus, even
as inequality, as measured by Piketty and others, has
risen, people at the bottom of the income scale have better standards of living. It becomes an
open question, therefore, whether inequality matters as long as everyone is becoming better off. In
other words, if the poor are richer, do we care if the rich are even richer?
Theres no internal link between education and inequality and alt causes
overwhelm solvency we have data
Rothstein 17 (Jesse, Professor of Public Policy and Economics and Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and
Employment at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Fellow
at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, former Senior Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers,
former Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California-Berkeley,
2016, Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income, Institute for
Research on Labor and Employment Working Paper #105-17, April, http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Inequality-Of-
Educational-Opportunity.pdf, p. 35-36)

Chetty et al. (2014) show that children from low-income families achieve much better adult outcomes, relative to those from higher-
income families, in some places than in others. I
use data from several national surveys to investigate
whether childrens educational outcomes (educational attainment, test scores, and non-cognitive skills) mediate
the relationship between parental and child income. Commuting zones (CZs) with stronger intergenerational income
transmission tend to have stronger transmission of parental income to childrens educational attainment, as well as higher returns
to education. By contrast, the CZ-level association between parental income and childrens test scores is only weakly related to CZ
income transmission, and is stable across grades. There is thus little evidence that differences in the quality of
K-12 schooling are a key mechanism driving variation in intergenerational mobility. Access to college
plays a somewhat larger role, but most of the variation in CZ income mobility reflects (a) differences in
marriage patterns, which affect income transmission when spousal earnings are counted in childrens income; (b)
differences in labor market returns to education; and (c) differences in childrens earnings residuals,
after controlling for observed skills and the CZ-level return to skill. This points to job networks or the structure of
the local labor and marriage markets, rather than the education system, as likely factors influencing
intergenerational economic mobility

Improving some peoples economic standing will trade off with others, money
and jobs are finite.
Bruenig 12 (Matt Bruenig, Freelance Writer specializing in Poverty and Political Theory, has written for The Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The American Prospect, In These Times, Jacobin, and Dissent, 2012, Education
reform will not fix poverty or inequality, Matt Bruenigs blog, March 12th, Available Online at
http://mattbruenig.com/2012/03/12/education-reform-will-not-fix-poverty-or-inequality/)

As regular readers know by now, I am fairly skeptical of the Education Reform Movement. I am not convinced that the reforms
advocated by this well-funded movement will actually work because I suspect that the real problem is economic
inequality, not bad schools or bad teachers. But even if one believed that the policies pushed by the
reformers would be successful, a question then arises: successful at what? Education reformers observe that a

large achievement gap exists between poor and wealthy students, and try to find
ways to eliminate that gap through reforms. But why? What is the point of eliminating the
achievement gap? Reformers give many reasons, some of which are undeniably legitimate. Quality education is a freestanding good,
and our present economic and educational system denies that good to multitudes of students. Eliminating ignorance is an intrinsic
education reformers do not view reducing
good worth striving for even if nothing else results from it. However,

the achievement gap as good simply because knowledge and learning are good; they also view it as a way of
reducing poverty and economic inequality. It is not just the education reformers who think this either.
Almost every milquetoast liberal effort to reduce poverty centers around trying to funnel more poor people into college. The
reasoning for this proceeds as follows: people with college degrees make significantly more money; therefore if everyone had a
This analysis does not actually make
college degree, everyone would make significantly more money.

sense. It is true that if you take any given poor person and push them through
college, that specific poor person will probably escape poverty as a result. However,
taking all poor people and putting them all through college will not result in all of
them escaping poverty. Anyone can escape poverty, but not everyone can. The reason
you cannot scale up college as a poverty-reducer is that high-paying jobs are
scarce, positional goods. In the present economy, only so many people can
capture good jobs, not because only so many people have the credentials to do so, but because only so
many good jobs exist. The number and quality of jobs are decided by market
forces, not the number of college graduates. You could educate every single
person in the United States to the point where they held a joint PhD-JD-MD-MBA, but
that does not mean we would suddenly become a society of doctors, lawyers,
managers, and professors. The market defines how many people can hold those
positions: we cannot keep adding management jobs and law jobs if there is not
market demand for more. Ultimately, someone has to clean toilets, prepare food, and
build infrastructure. In fact, as Doug Henwood pointed out in the latest LBO newsletter, only 5 of the top 20 growing
professions even require a college degree. Putting more people through college wont change that, and will

thus have little impact on the total amount of inequality or poverty in the United
States. Although better educating the population wont create high-paying jobs out of thin air, it may marginally increase the
productivity of workers in general. But as we have seen over the past 4 decades, increased productivity does not necessarily
capturing high-paying jobs is a lot like
translate into more income for working people. In many ways,

capturing one of the tickets to a very popular. If you camp out for five days, you
will capture one of the tickets. But if everyone camps out for five days, that does
not mean they will all get tickets. There are only so many tickets to be captured
and there are only so many high-paying jobs to be captured. So closing the
achievement gap will not reduce poverty or economic inequality; it will merely
change the distribution of it. Once the achievement gap is closed and we enter into
the utopian world of genuine equal opportunity, poor and rich kids will have an
equal chance at winding up in miserable poverty. As I have written before, providing kids an
equal opportunity to compete for the scarce, non-poverty jobs is not really an
improvement, and it certainly does not make an economy just. Education Reformers
who think that they can take a bite out of inequality and poverty through closing
the achievement gap misunderstand how the economy and the labor market in
particular works.

Test scores disprove funding key money is wasted on a staffing surge.

Robinson and Scafidi 16 Gerard Robinson, Resident Fellow in Education Policy Studies at
the American Enterprise Institute, former Commissioner of Education for the State of Florida,
former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Virginia, holds an M.Ed. from Harvard
University, and Benjamin Scafidi, Professor of Economics, Finance, and Quantitative Analysis and
Director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, Senior Fellow at the
Georgia Public Policy Foundation, former Chair of Georgias Charter Schools Commission,
Director of Education Policy for the Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, holds a Ph.D. in
Economics from the University of Virginia, 2016 (More Money, Same Problems, U.S. News &
World Report, September 20th, Available Online at
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-20/more-money-wont-fix-failing-public-
schools, Accessed 07-06-2017)

Schools need extra money to help struggling students, or so goes the long-standing thinking of
traditional education reformers who believe a lack of resources teachers, counselors, social workers, technology,
books, school supplies is the problem. We agree that, at some level, resources matter to education. That said, a look back at
the progress we've made under reformers' traditional response to fixing low-performing schools
simply showering them with more money makes it clear that this approach has been a costly
failure. Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has
increased by 663 percent. Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more
personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 96 percent increase in
student population. During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent four
times the increase in students. The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times
the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven
times the increase in students. One could argue that those extra staff were needed to educate students with special
needs, who were excluded by most public schools prior to 1970. Or maybe these extra staff were utilized to provide equal
opportunity to African-American students who had been traditionally discriminated against during the Jim Crow era. This
staffing surge still exists today. From 1992 to 2014 the most recent year of available data American public
schools saw a 19 percent increase in their student population and a staffing increase of 36
percent. This decades-long staffing surge in American public schools has been tremendously
expensive for taxpayers, yet it has not led to significant changes in student achievement. For
example, public school national math scores have been flat (and national reading scores declined
slightly) for 17-year-olds since 1992. In addition, public high school graduation rates experienced a
long and slow decline between 1970 and 2000. Today, graduation rates are slightly above where
they were in 1970. We think it is time to reform our thinking about public schools. One avenue we should
consider is the important role of parents. According to a 2005 meta-analysis by William H. Jeynes, students living with involved
parents had an academic advantage of higher grades and test scores than those living with less-involved parents. And according to
Strong Families, Strong Schools, studies of families show that the family's influence on a student is more important to his or her
success than family income or level of education. Currently two states Georgia and Massachusetts are looking at ways to fix
public schools beyond more bucks and bureaucracy. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is pushing a constitutional amendment that would
allow the state to take control of persistently failing public schools. Voters in November will decide whether to transfer control of
and funding for these schools to a state entity the Opportunity School District that will either manage failing public schools
directly or convert them to charter public schools governed by a local board of parents and other citizens. The amendment is likely
to pass, despite fierce opposition from the public school establishment. Massachusetts has one of the oldest charter school laws in
the nation and is home to the highest-performing charter schools today. Low-income students in Boston charter schools generate
learning growth equivalent to 31 days in math and 59 days in reading. With results like these, we might expect people to cheer. But
this is not the case. Several groups, including the teachers' union, oppose the state's Charter School Expansion Initiative, a November
ballot initiative, arguing that charters "create separate and unequal conditions for success by failing to serve as many high-need
students as their host districts." It
is long past time to try something new to improve American schools. To
give all students an opportunity to succeed, public education needs innovative approaches for
the delivery of teaching and learning be it through the options up for a vote in Georgia and Massachusetts, or by
empowering parents with more choices in public schools. Money, while important, cannot solve our nation's public
school challenges alone: It will take new and creative approaches that involve parents and
communities, too.
The plan increases inequality by reducing wages and cannot solve distribution
of resources that outweighs
Cody 11 (Anthony, worked for 24 years in the Oakland schools, 18 of them as a science teacher at a high-needs middle school. A
National Board certified teacher, he now leads workshops with teachers on Project Based Learning. He is the co-founder of the
Network for Public Education, 1-19-2011, "Heresy: Education is Not the Cure for Poverty," Education Week - Living in Dialogue,
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/01/heresy_education_is_not_the_cu.html) KEN

Mishel also discusses the often heard claim that America must dramatically increase the number of
students who attain four year college degrees. ... the trends in the 2000s indicate that the relative demand for
college graduates is growing much more slowly than in prior decades. Plus, the wages for college graduates have been flat for about
10 years and running parallel to those with high school degrees, and they have been growing far more slowly than productivity. The
implication of these trends is that asurge of college graduates, whatever the benefits (and there are many), can be
expected to drive the college wage down. Wage inequality would diminish, but by pressing
college graduate wages down (not just in relative terms), which is not the picture frequently painted of the future. This is
not to say that education offers no advantage - it does. But sending more and more of our students to college is
not some sort of panacea for poverty. And there does NOT appear to be an increasing market
demand for more college graduates - perhaps the opposite. .... the rapid growth of the need for college graduates is
not a juggernaut launched in the early 1980s that continues to this day: rather, the relative demand for college
graduates has been slowing down in each decade since the 1980s and is now growing at a historically slow pace. It is
this slow pace of the most recent period that might be the best clue to the future needs for
college graduates. Mishel concludes by suggesting that, rather than promoting more education as a panacea, we should
pursue a ...much broader path to prosperity, one that encompasses those at every education
level. The nation's productivity has grown a great deal in the last 30 years, up 80% from 1979 to 2009, and such productivity
growth or better can be expected in the future. Yet with all the income generated in the past and expected in
the future it is difficult to explain why more people have not seen rapid income growth. It is not
the economy that has limited or will limit strong income growth, but rather the economic policies pursued and the
distribution of economic and political power that are the limiting factors. We will not educate
our nation out of poverty - as seductive as that vision might be for us. Poverty will be reduced when we figure
out how to get some of the tremendous wealth our economy is generating flowing back towards
those who need it most, and stop throwing it at the wealthy.

The environmental conditions students are in are the root cause of the
achievement gap
Klundt 15 (Chris, education and economics analyst for Forbes, JUL 6, 2015, Education Alone Will Not Solve
Income Inequality, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisklundt/2015/07/06/education-alone-will-not-solve-income-
inequality/2/#6c5cc0adb8de) KEN

We first have to understand the challenge of rising out of poverty. Students are often stuck in a vicious cycle,
suggests Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who analyzed decades of research on families from both sides of the
economic scale. He found familial situations can determine much in life, with parental characteristics
such as level of education being more influential today than they were several decades ago. Additionally,
researchers like University of California-Irvine professor Greg Duncan are seeing more affluent
families heavily investing in extra educational opportunities nearly $10,000 per child per year,
compared to lower-income parents' $1,300 per child per year. Its no wonder that schools are
having a difficult time closing gapsbecause of things that are happening at home, Greg tells me.
Many families rely on public school and cant afford to supplement their childs education. Earlier this year, a
Southern Education Foundation report showed a majority of public school students nationwide come from low-income families, with
high-poverty schools clustered unevenly across the country. These geographic disparities are amplified for children of color, in areas
like the South. Part of this is due to economic and social policies that live outside education, explains SEF President Kent McGuire.
Its these instances of geographic disparity and policies that not only reflect the challenges public school students in poverty face,
but the overwhelming burden placed on teachers ill-equipped to help them. Support for Success Living in poverty includes
numerous instabilities housing, food scarcity, familial connections that students inevitably bring
with them into the classroom. These stressful situations are traumatic for students and undermine
their ability to learn, Pamela Cantor, child psychiatrist and president of Turnaround for Children, found after her own
interactions and research with children. Its what prompted her to launch Turnaround, an organization aimed at helping schools in
high-poverty areas, and its educators, establish an environment conducive to successful learning. To best foster student success,
these learning environments need to be more flexible and function as support systems for teachers. Thankfully, organizations like
Cantors and McGuires are helping schools construct these foundational environments by promoting personalized learning
experiences that stimulate academic growth. Turnarounds New York City partner schools saw a 39 percent reduction in detentions,
along with lower absenteeism and bad behavior. Similarly, comprehensive school reform programs like Expeditionary Learning
provide malleable curriculum so teachers can adapt lessons to help all types of learners catch up and get ahead. Building
Achievement Bridges Although these efforts are commendable, we have to keep in mind its only one piece of the puzzle. On top of
curriculum-based efforts, schools need to help provide poverty-stricken students with access to important necessities they arent
getting outside the school day. Opportunities like health and nutrition education, offering free breakfast options or providing mental
health services can serve as achievement bridges for students whod normally fall through the cracks. Because if a student is
hungry, tired, or homeless, theyre already at a massive disadvantage for being able to do well
in school no matter how engaging the curriculum. We need to continue fostering ways to help fulfill these basic needs and
ensure school is a safe haven for all children to learn and grow. Education reform cant be self-contained. Battling the effects
of income inequality in our schools require changes in sectors ranging from economic and
employment policies to better health initiatives. The achievement gap will remain unless we
attempt to reform the broader environment surrounding education.
 Solvency
Education doesnt solve inequality it reaps marginal benefits which proves
theres an underlying problem the aff fails to address
William R. Emmons, Assistant Vice President and Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,
Lowell R. and Ricketts 16, Research Associate, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Unequal
Degrees of Affluence: Racial and Ethnic Wealth Differences across Education Levels, Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis, October 2016, https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-
economist/october-2016/unequal-degrees-of-affluence-racial-and-ethnic-wealth-differences-
across-education-levels

First, at every level of educational attainment, the wealth effects of education for Hispanics and
African-Americans are lower than they are for non-Hispanic whites and Asians. Second,
Hispanics and blacks see smaller increases in wealth than do whites and Asians when moving to
a higher level of education. We illustrate these differences briefly, then describe the results of an econometric model of
wealth accumulation that suggests which underlying mechanisms may be at workand some that are not.2 In particular, we found
that differences in a groups average education level, differences in family structure, and differences in income shocks or
inheritances are not responsible for vastly different wealth outcomes. Instead,
deeply rooted factors unique to the
Hispanic and African-American experiences may be at work. It is important to note that we discuss wealth
(assets minus liabilities) and not income in this article. We study wealth because it is a broad measure of well-being, summarizing
both the job-market outcomes of a family (income from work) as well as the financial decisions they make (saving and investing). For
an explanation of how races are defined, see short sidebar. Details of Findings Despite gains in expected wealth, every level of
education translates into a lower relative level of wealth for black and Hispanic families. Figure 1 shows predicted wealth by race
and ethnicity relative to a college-educated white family. Increasing levels of educational attainment uniformly yield higher expected
wealth. However, ateach level, black and Hispanic wealth is lower than white and Asian wealth.
Higher levels of education generally are associated with smaller (shallower) increases in wealth
for Hispanic and black families. The second pattern, evident in Figure 2, is that the higher the
education level of the family head, the larger the wealth gap typically faced by Hispanics and
blacks, in percentage terms; the reverse is true for Asians. In other words, comparing one education level to
the next higher one generally is associated with a smaller proportional increment to family wealth for Hispanic and black families
than for white or Asian families. Adjustments were made for a handful of observable differences in behaviors and circumstances to
estimate wealth effects. Using a data set of more than 34,000 families that participated in the Federal Reserve Boards Survey of
Consumer Finances since 1995, we studied wealth accumulation with a particular focus on race and ethnicity. We took into account:
differences in each family heads age and birth year, and the family structure (marital status, number of children, total number of
family members, provision of financial support to extended family); education of the familys head; financial behavior (detailed list of
assets and liabilities, composite index of short-term financial-management skills); measures of luck or chance (income windfalls or
shortfalls, receipt of an inheritance, health status); and the year in which the family participated in the survey. The resulting model
was very successful in accounting for differences in wealth accumulation across families, attributing most of the variation to the
observable behaviors and circumstances noted above. One
unexplained result was lower predicted wealth for
black families even when holding constant all of the observable behaviors and circumstances. Our
model allowed us to answer the following hypothetical question: Compared with other families of the same age, birth year, marital
status, family size, etc., corresponding to our full set of control variables, how much wealth would we expect a particular family to
have based solely on its education level and its race or ethnicity? For purposes of comparison, we chose as our reference family a
white family in which the family head holds no more than a two- or four-year college degree. The predicted wealth of all other
education and race or ethnicity combinations is expressed relative to each $100 of the reference familys wealth. If the links
between education and wealth were the same for all races and ethnicities, we would predict equal wealth for all families with a
given education level, regardless of race or ethnicity. Figure 1 displays the results. Our expectation that better-educated families will
have more predicted wealth is confirmed by the upward-sloping pattern of predicted wealth from left to right. For example, among
four white families that differ only in their level of education, we expect the family headed by someone without a high school
diploma to have $54 of wealth for every $100 of wealth held by the white college graduate family; the white high school graduate
family to have $73 of wealth; and the white family with postgraduate education to have $141. The results for Asian families are
similar. We confirmed the finding noted above that black and Hispanic families typically have less wealth than their white
counterparts at every education level. Asian families have less wealth than their white counterparts only at the high school
education level and only by a slight amount; in all other levels of educational attainment, Asian families have higher wealth than
their white counterparts. A
striking feature of Figure 1 is the progressively larger predicted wealth gaps
for Hispanic and black families as we compare successively higher education levels. For example, the
predicted shortfalls among Hispanic and black high school graduates are only $5 and $14, respectively, compared with the totals for
whites; the shortfalls increase to $19 and $21 for two- or four-year college graduates, and to $30 and $56 among postgraduate
families, respectively. We term this a shallow wealth effect from increasing levels of education. Figure 2
quantifies the relationship we found between education level and predicted wealth for each racial and ethnic group. Asian and white
families results look similar only for high school graduates, before and after which Asian wealth exceeds white wealth. Hispanic
and black families, on the other hand, trace out a declining wealth payoff to educationor,
equivalently, an increasing wealth gap at progressively higher education levels compared with
white and Asian families. Why doesnt education translate into wealth at the same rate for all racial and ethnic groups? Our
model is better-suited to identifying what is not responsible for the education-related racial and ethnic wealth gaps than what is
responsible. We concluded that some commonly suggested reasons why Hispanic and black families usually have lower wealth than
white or Asian families are not supported by our model. In
particular, differences in average education level,
differences in family structure, or differences in income shocks or inheritances are related to,
but not particularly important determinants of, racial and ethnic wealth gaps. Even when we compare
families of different races and ethnicities that are similar along these dimensions, which is the purpose of the econometric model,
the wealth gaps remain. This
research instead points to deeper causes: structural, systemic or
historical factors related to race or ethnicity that affect educational and/or wealth outcomes.
For example, we classify all family heads with a two- or four-year college degree as having the same amount of education. We know,
however, that there are differences across race and ethnicity in college and choice of majors. Current and historic discrimination
affects access to and the quality of education. The likelihood and amount of borrowing to attend college differ by race and ethnicity,
and the burden of repayment, therefore, also differs. Employment and advancement options may differ by race or ethnicity. Cultural
norms related to homeownership, borrowing and other financial decisions could differ, also. The
bottom line is that,
while more education is associated with more wealth among all races and ethnicities, the links
are different. For reasons we do not fully understand, the typical wealth effects of education
appear to be lower and shallower for Hispanics and blacks.

Education doesnt solve broader inequality differences in post-tax and

transfer income deck aff solvency
Susan Mayer 10, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
and the College The relationship between income inequality and inequality in schooling,
Theory and Research in Education,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1477878509356346

In the United States increasing the mean educational attainment of disadvantaged children
would increase their mean earnings, but equalizing the amount of schooling that American
children get would not do much to equalize their eventual earnings because variation in
income is influenced by many factors besides schooling, including experience and regional
variation in wages, and there is considerable variation in income even among people with the
same education, experience and in the same geographical region. Reducing income inequality is
not a promising way to reduce inequality in education, and reducing inequality in education is
not a promising way to reduce inequality in income. To reduce inequality in either income or education
requires specific policies to address the inequality. In particular reducing income inequality requires
redistribution either through the tax and transfer system or through wage controls. Differences
in inequality among rich countries are not mainly due to differences in schooling or labor
income but to differences in post-tax and transfer income. The Gini coefficient of market income is fairly
similar across rich countries. For example, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, Smeeding (2004) estimates that the Gini
coefficient of labor income is 0.45 in the United States, 0.44 in Sweden, 0.49 in France, and 0.45 in Australia. But income after taxes
and transfers is 0.37 in the United States, 0.25 in Sweden, 0.29 in France, and 0.31 in Australia. In other words these countries
achieve lower levels in income inequality through redistribution. The level of inequality is a political decision for a nation.

There is no correlation between funding and outcomes comprehensive study

proves.
Coulson 14 Andrew J. Coulson, Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato
Institute, former Senior Fellow in Education Policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2014
(State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years, Cato
Institute Policy Analysis Number 746, March 18th, Available Online at
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2017, p. 57)

Conclusion

Academic performance and preparation for college success are widely shared goals, and so it is
useful for the public and policymakers to know how they have varied over time at the state
level. The present paper estimates these trends by adjusting state average SAT scores for
variation in student participation rates and demographic factors known to be associated with
those scores.

In general, the findings are not encouraging. Adjusted state SAT scores have declined by an
average of 3 percent. This echoes the picture of stagnating achievement among American 17-
year-olds painted by the Long Term Trends portion of the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, a series of tests administered to a nationally representative sample of students since
1970. That disappointing record comes despite a more-than-doubling in inflation-adjusted per
pupil public-school spending over the same period (the average state spending increase was 120
percent). Consistent with those patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between
what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words,
Americas educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP
and the SAT.

That is remarkably unusual. In virtually every other field, productivity has risen over this period
thanks to the adoption of countless technological advancesadvances that, in many cases,
would seem ideally suited to facilitating learning. And yet, surrounded by this torrent of
progress, education has remained anchored to the riverbed, watching the rest of the world rush
past it.

Not only have dramatic spending increases been unaccompanied by improvements in

performance, the same is true of the occasional spending declines experienced by some states.
At one time or another over the past four decades, Alaska, California, Florida, and New York all
experienced multi-year periods over which real spending fell substantially (20 percent or more
of their 1972 expenditure levels). And yet, none of these states experienced noticeable declines
in adjusted SAT scoreseither contemporaneously or lagged by a few years. Indeed, their score
trends seem entirely disconnected from their rising and falling levels of spending.
Two generations seems a long time for a field to stand outside of history, particularly when
those generations have witnessed so many reforms aimed at improving education. Perhaps its
time to ask if there are inherent features in our approach to schooling that prevent it from
enjoying the progress typical in other fields.

No Progressive Spillover the Supreme Court wont apply the dignity

precedent to other contexts because of judicial ideology.
Hutchinson 17 Darren Lenard Hutchinson, Professor of Law and Stephen C. OConnell Chair
at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida, former Professor at the Washington
College of Law at American University, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, 2017 (Undignified:
The Supreme Court, Racial Justice, and Dignity Claims, Florida Law Review, Volume 69, Number
1, January, Available Online via SSRN at
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2745610, Accessed 07-30-2017, p. 6-8)

Despite several reasons for optimism, this Article contends that dignity-based litigation in
federal courts would not contribute meaningfully to the attainment of substantive racial
equalityat least not in the near future. Several factors support a more cautious stance towards
the possibility of achieving substantive racial equality through dignity- based litigation.

First, the concept of dignity remains undertheorized, amorphous, and indeterminate in judicial
opinions. Because Court doctrine does not offer a precise meaning of dignity, judges possess a
great degree of discretion to interpret and define its meaning prospectively. The [end page 6]
ambiguity of dignity as a doctrinal concept complicates its litigation value for victims of racial
injustice.

Second, in a series of cases, the Court has utilized dignity arguments to strike down racial
equality measures. Specifically, the Court has invoked the dignity of whites and the states to
justify invalidation of affirmative action policies and civil rights legislation.

Third, even when the Court has protected human dignity as a constitutional value, it has failed
to extend solicitude to some of the most vulnerable social groups. In abortion cases, for
example, the Court has disregarded the significant burdens that waiting periods, informed
consent, and other legal constraints impose upon poor women and juveniles.

Fourth, Court precedent that portrays dignity in liberal terms contradictorily preserves social
inequality because the Court has carefully tailored these rulings to limit their reach. In
particular, while the Court has utilized dignity to invalidate legislation that discriminates on the
basis of sexual orientation, its rulings do not imply broad disruption of heteronormative state
action. Precedent related to sexual orientation has limited reach because the Court has declined
to consider whether LGBT persons constitute a suspect class. Furthermore, while the Court has
linked reproductive rights and dignity, it has also lowered the standard of review for
antiabortion regulations from strict scrutiny to undue burden. Application of undue burden has
led to judicial [end page 7] validation of types of regulations that had failed under Roe v. Wade's
strict scrutiny test.
Fifth, judicial ideologynot lack of a good theoryexplains why the Court has interpreted the
Equal Protection Clause in a manner that impedes substantive racial equality. The Courts racial
equality precedent enacts the primary views that whites hold regarding race relations in the
United States. The Courts embrace of majoritarian viewpoints has led to the formation of an
equal protection doctrine that legitimizes racial hierarchy.

For all of the foregoing reasons, legal scholars should reconsider their optimistic assertions
regarding the potential use of dignity-based litigation as a means of attaining substantive racial
justice. In the near future, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will reinterpret the Equal
Protection Clause and employ antisubordination theory or similar approaches that legal scholars
have advocated. In the long term, however, changes in the composition of the Court, along with
continued politicization of racial inequality by antiracist social movements, could lead to
doctrinal innovation.
Framing