Welfare Surveillance Case Neg
Strategies written in this File
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
States CP (politics = only net benefit)
Politics Links
State Budget DA
Topicality – Federal Surveillance
Case Turns (generally not a standalone strat)
The structure of the aff was really late breaking, so case defense is a little sparse. Sorry  I will try to put
a supplement out.
State Budget DA
1NC – Transportation DA
State budgets on Transportation, education and health care are sufficiently funded
CBPP 15 [Center on budget and policy priorities, 4/14/15, “Policy Basics: Where Do Our State Tax Dollars Go?”,
http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-state-tax-dollars-go, date accessed: 7/14/15]Kruger
By far the largest areas of state spending, on average, are education (both K-12 and higher education) and health care.
But states also fund a wide variety of other services, including transportation , corrections, pension and health benefits
for public employees, care for persons with mental illness and developmental disabilities, assistance to low-income families, economic development,
environmental projects, state police, parks and recreation, housing, and aid to local governments.
Education has stayed a fairly constant share of state spending in recent decades. The share of state
budgets devoted to Medicaid has grown, however, while the shares devoted to transportation and cash assistance to low-income families have
declined. Most State Dollars Go Toward Education and Health Care Three areas of spending make up over half of state spending, on average: K-12 education States
are one of the main funders of the nation's public elementary and secondary schools, which some 50 million students -- nine out of ten enrolled school-age children -attend. One-fourth of state spending on average, or about $280 billion, goes toward public education. States
generally provide grants to local school districts (or to cities or counties, where those entities are responsible for administering schools) to fund schools, rather than
paying teacher salaries and other school costs directly. Local governments are the other primary funder of public schools. The federal government provides only about
10 percent of public school revenues. Higher
education States play a large role in funding higher education through
their support of public community colleges, university systems, and vocational education institutions. This
support accounts for about 13 percent of state spending, or some $145 billion. Health care Along with the federal government, states
fund health insurance for low-income families through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance
Program (CHIP). These programs provide health coverage or coverage for long-term care to roughly 70
million low-income children, parents, elderly people, and people with disabilities in a typical month.
Together, they constitute about 16 percent of state budgets, or about $183 billion. States spend the remaining half of their budgets on a wide variety of programs. For
example: Transportation
State funding for transportation totals some $55 billion, accounting for 5 percent of
state spending on average. These funds are used to build and repair roads and bridges and for public
transit systems.
Child support funds are key – the plan takes away key budget allocation for states
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
This massive growth of law-enforcement machinery and reach was federally driven. In 1984, the Child
Support Enforcement
promoted by OCSE
itself and by private collection companies--again, less to help children than to save the government money under the theory that the
system would help to get single-mother families off welfare by making fathers pay more. No statistical data were presented then (or have
amendment to the Social Security Act required states to adopt advisory child-support guidelines. The legislation was
been since) to indicate that the legislation would have the desired effect (Seidenberg 1997, 107-8). Given that most low-income, single-mother
families did not and still do not have valid child-support orders, that most unpaid child support is owing to unemployment, and that "most noncustodial parents of AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] children do not earn enough to pay as much child support as their children
are already receiving in AFDC benefits," higher support guidelines could not and cannot help these children (Garfinkel and McLanahan 1986, 2425). With no explanation or clear constitutional authority, guidelines and criminal-enforcement machinery conceived and created to help the
minority of children in poverty were then extended, under pressure from OCSE and other interests, to all child-support orders, even the majority
not receiving welfare, by the Family Support Act of 1988. The law also made guidelines mandatory. By one estimate, the new guidelines more
than doubled the size of awards (Comanor 2004, 5). All this legal fanfare dramatically enlarged the program and continues to do so by bringing in
millions of middle-class cases, most of which result from divorce, but for which the system was never designed. As a result, "the
number of
dollars passing through the government collection system exploded" (Comanor 2004, 8). Nonwelfare cases now dwarf
welfare cases. Welfare cases, consisting for the most part of unmarried parents, account for only 17 percent of all cases, and the proportion is
shrinking. The remaining 83 percent of nonwelfare cases consist largely of previously married fathers who are usually divorced involuntarily.
Nonwelfare cases currently account for 92 percent of the monies collected (U.S. HHS 2003, figs. 1 and 2). Despite this growth in collections--and
contrary to what was promised when the program was created--the cost to taxpayers increased sharply. Promoted as a program that would reduce
government spending, federal child-support enforcement has in fact incurred a continuously increasing deficit. "The overall financial impact of
the child support program on taxpayers is negative," the House Ways and Means Committee reports: federal taxpayers lost $2.7 billion in 2002
(U.S. House 2004, 8-69 and table 8-5).
This money does not vanish, of course. It provides a revenue stream for state
governments that officials may spend however they wish (U.S. House 1998, 596). Though ostensibly revenue neutral,
federal subsidies have made child-support collections a source of general funds. "If the state needs more
highway funding," writes one commentator, "all they need to do is raise the state's level of child support and they
can spend their resulting welfare incentive increases on highway projects and remain in perfect compliance with the
relevant programs funding requirements" (Tersak 2007). Moreover, federal taxpayers subsidize not only state government operations through
child support, but also family dissolution because every fatherless child is an additional source of revenue for states . In
addition to stiff penalties and high interest assessed on alleged arrearages, states profit through federal payments based on the amount collected as
well as through the receipt of 66 percent of operating costs and 90 percent of computer costs (U.S. HHS 1997). (When two states collaborate,
both states qualify for the incentive payment as if each state had collected 100 percent of the money.) Federal outlays of $3.5 billion in 2002
allowed Ohio to collect $228 million and California to collect more than $640 million (U.S. House 2004, table 8-4). "There
is a $200
million per year profit motive driving this system" in Michigan alone, attorney Michael Tindall points out. "It dances at
the string of federal money" (Green 2002).
Specifically, funds solve transportation infrastructure, education, and harm
reduction
Blatt 13 (David, blogger for the Oklahoma Policy Institute, 4/1/13, “Revisiting TANF,”
http://okpolicy.org/revisiting-tanf, 7/10/15 ML)
Following May’s devastating tornadoes in Moore, the new Director of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, Ed Lake, suggested the
state use $10 million in unspent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds as emergency relief to tornado victims, as was done in
Tennessee following natural disasters when he led that state’s human services agency. Governor Fallin rejected the idea, stating that traditional
relief organizations were meeting the needs of tornado victims. Director Lake’s well-intentioned suggestion did raise an important question: How
is it that $10 million in unspent TANF dollars could be available for allocation, particularly given the continuing impacts of the economic
downturn on the very low income families that TANF is designed to help? In this post, we look at Oklahoma’s TANF program, who it serves and
how TANF dollars are currently being spent. We conclude with some recommendations for how available TANF funds might be allocated.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, is the federal program created by Congress in 1996 as the cornerstone of welfare reform.
TANF limited cash assistance payments to a lifetime maximum of 60 months and imposed sanctions, including the loss of assistance, on
individuals who failed to meet work requirements. Whereas the traditional welfare program, AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children),
primarily took the form of monthly cash assistance payments to single parents and their children, under TANF, states now have much greater
flexibility in how to spend federal block grant dollars. Federal TANF funding levels stayed consistent even as states
reduced cash
assistance levels throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, which freed up money for other allowable purposes
related to strengthening families and reducing poverty. Oklahoma has seen an especially steep decline in families receiving
cash assistance payments under TANF. In 1994, the state had a monthly average of nearly 50,000 cash assistance families; by 2004, there were
just 10,000 TANF cash assistance cases. Even during the worst of the Great Recession, TANF caseloads barely increased. As of March 2013, the
program serves 7,782 families. Payments go to working-age parents in barely one-third of these cases (2,743); the rest are child-only cases. As
TANF caseloads have plummeted – a result of strict work requirements and sanctions, time limits, and other policies that discourage individuals
from cash assistance – the program serves a dwindling share of families in poverty. Oklahoma has gone from providing cash assistance to half of
all families in poverty in 1996 to just one in ten today. By comparison, about 25 percent of families in poverty nationally receive cash assistance.
TANF and Poverty 1979-2010The combination of declining caseloads and frozen benefit levels – the maximum payment a family of three can
receive is $292 per month, the same as in 1986 – has meant that cash assistance now makes up a tiny share of total TANF spending in Oklahoma.
In FY 2012, OKDHS spent $177.1 million in TANF funds, of which $22.3 million was for cash assistance. The largest
share of TANF
dollars ($55.6 million) was allocated for child care services. Of the remaining amount, major expenditures included:
◾$14.5 million transferred to the Social Services Block Grant; ◾$21.6 million for work support activities, including
transportation, client assessments, mental health and substance abuse screenings, literacy classes, postsecondary education, and client reimbursement for training; ◾$9.4 million for family formation and stabilization services,
including $7.6 million for programs associated with the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative; ◾$5.7 million for family support payments to the
developmental disabilities services division; ◾$47.9
million allocated to agency support services and administrative
costs. TANF by Spending category In the years following welfare reform, the TANF fund accrued a large unspent balance that at one point
exceeded $100 million, but in recent years, the balance has remained between $18 million and $25 million. This creates some opportunity for
modest increases in TANF support for families. In a comprehensive review of Oklahoma’s TANF program last year, CAP Tulsa made a number
of recommendations for meeting the goals of supporting work, protecting children, and promoting self-sufficiency. They recommend increasing
the program’s cash benefit, allowing TANF recipients to earn more and to keep child support payments without losing benefits, and increasing
the benefit in child-only cases. In the area of work support, the state could promote financial stability by creating a matched savings Individual
Development Account program and help recipients become more employable by increasing funding for substance abuse treatment. Perhaps the
most productive use of TANF funds might be for research to evaluate the effectiveness of the money we are currently spending. The state spends
substantial amounts each year trying to help TANF recipients transition into secure jobs and self-sufficiency. However, OKDHS has not
conducted a study of welfare leavers since the 1990s. Such a study could provide valuable data on how well the program is meeting its goals and \
how TANF can be better used to promote stronger, financially secure families.
Infrastructure spending prevents a double dip recession
MARHSALL & THOMASSON ‘11 - president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute
(PPI); found the Democratic Leadership Council, serving as its first policy director; AND*** Scott
Thomasson - director of economic and domestic policy for the Progressive Policy Institute and manages
PPI's Innovative Economy Project and E3 Initiative (Will, Scott Thomasson, “Sperling on “Deferred
Maintenance””, October 7, http://progressivepolicy.org/sperling-on-%E2%80%9Cdeferredmaintenance%E2%80%9D)
It’s hard to imagine a more myopic example of the right’s determination to impose premature austerity on our frail
economy. From Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Eisenhower, the Republicans were once a party dedicated to internal nation building. Today’s GOP is gripped by a raging anti-government
fever which fails to draw elementary distinctions between consumption and investment, viewing all public spending as equally wasteful. But as the White House’s Gene Sperling said yesterday,
Republicans can’t claim credit for fiscal discipline by blocking long overdue repairs of in the nation’s transport , energy
and water systems. There’s nothing fiscally responsible about “deferring maintenance” on the U.S. economy. Sperling, chairman
of the president’s National Economic Council, spoke at a PPI forum on Capitol Hill on “Infrastructure and Jobs: A Productive Foundation for Economic Growth.” Other featured speakers
included Sen. Mark Warner, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Dan DiMicco, CEO of Nucor Corporation, Daryl Dulaney, CEO of Siemens Industry and Ed Smith, CEO of Ullico Inc., a consortium of union
Fiscal prudence means foregoing consumption of things you’d like but could do without if you can’t afford
them – a cable TV package, in Sperling’s example. But if a water pipe breaks in your home, deferring maintenance can only lead to
greater damage and higher repair costs down the road . As speaker after speaker emphasized during yesterday’s forum, that’s precisely what’s happening to the
U.S. economy. Thanks to a generation of underinvestment in roads, bridges, waterways, power grids, ports and railways,
the United States faces a $2 trillion repair bill . Our inadequate, worn-out infrastructure costs us time and money,
lowering the productivity of workers and firms, and discouraging capital investment in the U.S. economy. Deficient
infrastructure, Dulaney noted, has forced Siemens to build its own rail spurs to get goods to market. That’s something smaller companies can’t afford to do. They will go to
countries – like China, India and Brazil – that are investing heavily in building world-class infrastructure. As Nucor’s
pension funds.
DiMicco noted, a large-scale U.S. infrastructure initiative would create lots of jobs while also abetting the revival of manufacturing in America. He urged the Obama administration to think
bigger, noting that a $500 billion annual investment in infrastructure (much of the new money would come from private sources rather than government) could generate 15 million jobs. The
enormous opportunities to deploy more private capital were echoed from financial leaders in New York, including Jane Garvey, the North American chairman of Meridiam Infrastructure, a
private equity fund specializing in infrastructure investment. Garvey warned that what investors need from government programs is more transparent and consistent decision making, based on
clear, merit-based criteria, and noted that an independent national infrastructure bank would be the best way to achieve this. Bryan Grote, former head of the Department of Transportation’s
TIFIA financing program, which many describe as a forerunner of the bank approach, added that having a dedicated staff of experts in an independent bank is the key to achieving the more
rational, predictable project selection that investors need to see to view any government program as a credible partner. Tom Osborne, the head of Americas Infrastructure at UBS Investment
Bank, agreed that an independent infrastructure bank like the version proposed by Senators Kerry, Hutchison and Warner, would empower private investors to fund more projects. And contrary
to arguments that a national bank would centralize more funding decisions in Washington, Osborne explained that states and local governments would also be more empowered by the bank to
pursue new projects with flexible financing options, knowing that the bank will evaluate projects based on its economics, not on the politics of the next election cycle. Adding urgency to the
infrastructure push was Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s warning this week that
the recovery is “close to faltering.” Unlike short-term stimulus spending, money invested in
Warning that America stands on the precipice of a
modernizing infrastructure would create lasting jobs by expanding our economy’s productive base.
“double dip” recession , Sperling said it would be “inexcusable” for Congress to fail to act on the president’s job
plan. He cited estimates by independent economic experts that the plan would boost GDP growth in 2012 from 2.4 to
4.2 percent , and generate over three million more jobs .
Double-dip risks nuclear war
FORDHAM ‘10 (Tina Fordham, “Investors can’t ignore the rise of geopolitical risk”, Financial
Times, 7-17-2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dc71f272-7a14-11df-9871-00144feabdc0.html)
Geopolitical risk is on the rise after years of relative quiet – potentially creating further headwinds to the global recovery just as fears of a
double-dip recession are growing, says Tina Fordham, senior political analyst at Citi Private Bank. “Recently, markets have been focused on
problems within the eurozone and not much moved by developments in North Korea, new Iran sanctions, tensions
between Turkey and Israel or the unrest in strategically significant Kyrgyzstan ,” she says. “But taken together, we don’t think investors can
afford to ignore the return of geopolitical concerns to the fragile post-financial crisis environment.” Ms Fordham argues the end of post-Cold War US pre-eminence
is one of the most important by-products of the financial crisis. “The post-crisis world order is shifting. More players
than ever are at the table, and their interests often diverge. Emerging market countries have greater weight in the
system, yet many lack experience on the global stage. Addressing the world’s challenges in this more crowded
environment will be slower and more complex. This increases the potential for proliferating risks: most notably the
prospect of politically and/or economically weakened regimes obtaining nuclear weapons; and military action to
keep them from doing so. “Left unresolved, these challenges could disrupt global stability and trade. This would be
a very unwelcome time to see the return of geopolitical risk.”
Turns Case – Homelessness
Specifically, state TANF funds are used to fight homelessness
Sard ’01 (Barbara Sard, Vice President for Housing Policy for Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 4/3/01,
“USING TANF FUNDS FOR HOUSING-RELATED BENEFITS TO PREVENT HOMELESSNES”,
http://www.cbpp.org/archiveSite/4-3-01TANF.pdf, 7/10/15 ML)
Under the final regulations for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grant program (TANF), states
and counties may use
federal TANF funds for short-term homelessness prevention measures without triggering the federal 60-month lifetime
time limit on receipt of TANF-funded assistance or other restrictions associated with TANF funds. This is important because many states
and counties are not using their full federal TANF block grant1 and may be willing to initiate or expand
homelessness prevention programs using TANF funds. In addition, the flexibility afforded by the federal regulations allows
states and counties to design such programs to serve a broad range of low-income families, not just families receiving monthly TANF cash
benefits. States and counties that are funding homelessness prevention programs in part with state maintenance-of-effort (MOE) funds may wish
to replace these MOE funds with TANF funds, thereby freeing up MOE monies they can use to provide other benefits. TANF restrictions like
time limits are triggered when states or counties provide housing-related benefits that are not short-term, unless the benefits are provided entirely
with MOE funds that are accounted for separately from TANF funds. States and counties that wish to provide such ongoing housing benefits to
families that are not receiving monthly TANF cash benefits would be advised to use MOE funds in these cases so the months of assistance do not
count against the federal time limit.2 Homelessness Prevention Benefits Are Largely Excluded from the Clarified Definition of TANF
“Assistance” TANF requirements such as time limits, work participation, and child support assignment apply to any family receiving TANF
“assistance.” Because “assistance” was thought to be defined broadly under early TANF regulations, states and counties often were reluctant to
use 3 federal TANF funds for initiatives for working families because they wished to avoid triggering these requirements. Under the final federal
regulations issued in April 1999, however, the definition of “assistance” has been clarified.3 It is now clear that homelessness prevention benefits
are excluded from the definition of “assistance” if the benefits meet the following three criteria 1) Benefits are designed to deal with a specific
crisis situation or episode of need. 2) Benefits are provided on a one-time basis or for a prospective period that does not exceed four months. 3)
Benefits are not intended to meet recurrent or ongoing needs.4 If families receive TANF-funded homelessness prevention benefits that are not
considered “assistance” but do not receive monthly cash benefits, they are not subject to the 60month time limit, are not counted in the
determination of their state’s compliance with work participation requirements, and are not required to assign their child support rights to the
state. Short-term or one-time benefits to prevent homelessness that do not invoke the federal restrictions on “assistance” include payment for rent,
mortgage, or utility arrears (in any amount and for any number of months) and first and last months’ rent deposits and security deposits. For
example, a state may establish a TANF-funded program to pay overdue rent or mortgage liabilities and set a maximum benefit level of $3,000 or
six months, whichever is less. In addition, states and counties can provide emergency shelter, transitional housing, or short-term rent payments
for homeless and other needy families for up to four months. Services that help families prevent eviction or locate new housing also are excluded
from the definition of “assistance.” Moreover, as long as benefits are provided to meet a short-term, non-recurrent need, they may be provided
more than once during a year. For example, during a single 12-month period, a state can use TANF funds to provide a family with both a rent
arrearage payment and funds to 5. 6 3 repair a car, pay a utility bill, or meet another short-term crisis; this aid would not count against the
family’s lifetime TANF time limit or trigger the TANF work participation or child support assignment requirements. States and counties also may
make several payments of the same type in a single year as long as each payment is made without the expectation of making additional payments.
For instance, a state may provide rent arrearage payments twice in a 12-month period if each payment is made with the expectation that it will
solve the family’s housing problem. Defining benefits as short-term if they cover a period up to four months, and permitting more than one
emergency payment in a 12-month period, are significant changes from the rules that applied to Emergency Assistance (EA) programs under the
former Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Generally, EA benefits were restricted to needs that arose over a 90-day period and
could be provided only once in a 12-month period. States that have continued to provide the same emergency benefits under TANF as they did
under AFDC-EA may wish to reconsider the type, amount, and frequency of benefits they provide. The clarified definition of “assistance” gives
states and counties the flexibility to use TANF funds to help needy families that are not receiving monthly cash welfare benefits, in addition to
helping their regular TANF caseloads. States and counties can set financial eligibility levels for TANF-funded homelessness prevention programs
that are higher than eligibility levels for TANF “assistance.” Families
that have only a one-time or brief association with
the TANF program to receive emergency benefits are not required to assign their child support rights to
the state.5 Allowing more families to qualify for these short-term benefits may help working families
retain stable housing and employment and reduce the need for more costly services such as homeless
shelters. Responding to emergency needs with TANF-only funds may enable states and counties to free up MOE funds for ongoing rental
subsidies for families that are not receiving TANF monthly cash assistance. Ongoing subsidies that make housing affordable — funded with
MOE or other state, local or federal funds — may be the most effective tool to prevent homelessness. A recent review of a broad range of studies
on the prevention of homelessness concludes: “Based on evidence that subsidized housing, with or without supportive services, is sufficient to
end homelessness for most families, and given the important role of subsidized housing (everywhere it has been examined) in ending
homelessness among people with serious mental illnesses, we propose a shift to selected strategies of prevention, such as providing housing
subsidies to those with worst-case housing needs, supporting employment and transitional assistance to poor, young people setting up households
for the first time, and focusing efforts on communities from which large proportions of homeless people originate.”6 States and counties also may
be able to use MOE funds to provide other benefits. Some states have chosen to provide cash income support to certain families — such as those
with a parent working in unsubsidized employment or with a disabled child or parent — with separately administered MOE funds so the months
of assistance do not count against the federal time limit.7 The final TANF
rules also make it easier for states and counties to
contract with community agencies to run homelessness prevention programs by eliminating the need to
collect or report data on individual families receiving TANF-funded “non-assistance.” Because of another
requirement in the final TANF regulations, however, states and counties that wish to use TANF funds to provide homelessness prevention
benefits that are not considered “assistance” must use TANF block grant funds for the current fiscal year. If states have insufficient current year
funds for this purpose but have surplus funds from prior years’ block grants, they can use prior year funds to pay for cash assistance and thereby
free up current TANF block grant funds for crisis programs. Many States and Counties Provide Benefits to Prevent Homelessness as Part of Their
TANF Programs Many
states and counties include a variety of homelessness prevention benefits for families
with children as part of their TANF programs. The types of emergency assistance states and counties provide include
eviction prevention, short-term rental assistance, assistance to prevent utility shut-offs, emergency
housing, and temporary shelter for homeless families. In the last few years, a number of states and counties, including
Florida, Minnesota, and Washington, have used TANF funds freed up by declining caseloads to initiate or expand homelessness prevention
programs. As of June 1999, 34
states provided housing-related benefits as part of their TANF programs to
families in situations that meet state-established emergency criteria. Of these 34 states, 31 provided crisis benefits to families that also received
monthly cash benefits, 28 provided emergency assistance to families that are eligible for but not receiving TANF monthly cash benefits and 25
provided homelessness prevention benefits to families that are not eligible for monthly TANF benefits.8 The table below indicates the number of
states providing different 5 types of housing-related benefits to prevent or alleviate homelessness and the categories of families eligible for each
benefit. More detail on individual state programs is available at the website identified in note 8. These state programs appear to mix TANF and
MOE funds to provide homelessness prevention benefits, though some states and counties may have used MOE funds that were accounted for
separately to provide emergency benefits to families not receiving TANF monthly cash assistance. Conclusion Using the flexibility afforded by
the definition of “assistance” in the final TANF regulations, states and counties may finance homelessness prevention benefits for all families
with children with federal TANF funds without adverse effects on working families or others not receiving monthly TANF benefits. It is not
necessary either to deny emergency assistance to certain families because they do not receive TANF cash assistance or to run the clock on
families’ 60-month federal lifetime TANF time limit to provide them with emergency benefits and services. If
states and counties fund
homelessness prevention benefits provided through the TANF program entirely with federal TANF funds,
they may have additional MOE funds available for ongoing housing assistance to working families and other programs for families that states and
counties wish to assist without triggering TANF time limits.
States are using TANF funds to fund anti-homelessness initiatives
Wogan ’13 (JB Wogan, In 2010, the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association
named him "News Writer of the Year", staff writer, 4/29/13, “Why States Are Using
Welfare to Pay for Housing”, http://www.governing.com/blogs/view/gov-why-states-areusing-TANF-to-pay-for-rapid-rehousing.html, 7/10/15 ML)
For the past three years, states used one-time stimulus funds to supercharge a promising
anti-homelessness initiative. Now that the
money is gone, at least nine states are leveraging welfare cash assistance to keep the program alive , and the
federal government hopes more states will follow. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, also known as the economic
stimulus, set aside $1.5 billion for the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program (HPRP) over three years. But in 2013, states are
faced with a question of how to cover the loss of that one-time investment. “We’re all having an ARRA hangover,” said Karla Aguirre, director
of workforce development at Utah’s Department of Workforce Services. The basic concept of HPRP was to provide short-term assistance to
individuals and families who were in danger of becoming homeless or who were already homeless. The program targeted people experiencing
some kind of temporary crisis, such as job loss, that made housing unaffordable. Assistance could mean as many as 18 months of rental subsidies,
covering the security deposit, paying off outstanding utility bills and even providing hotel vouchers. The program also covered the cost of support
services, such as landlord negotiations, legal assistance and credit counseling. Early results from HPRP were promising. In the second year, the
program served about 670,000 people, of which 87 percent exited the program and moved into a permanent home (as opposed to living in a
shelter, on the streets or doubling up in someone else’s home). Local communities in states such as Idaho and Minnesota reported similar success.
There's even some evidence that stable housing correlates with better employment outcomes: In Mercer County, New
Jersey, 57 families exited the county's rapid rehousing program between 2010 and 2012, with about 91 percent placed in permanent housing and
about 75 percent reporting an uptick in employment income by an average of $1,100 a month. “We credit [HPRP funding] with keeping family
homelessness about flat for the past few years,” says Katharine Gale, a policy director with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. “That
source is now gone.” The number of homeless families with children, according to aggregated point-in-time counts across the country, was
roughly the same between 2009 and 2012, with 77,157 homeless family households -- totalling 239,403 people in homeless families -- last year.)
“If
communities want to continue this good work that they did with HPRP, then how are they going to
manage to do that? I think one of the answers is TANF,” says Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the
National Alliance to End Homelessness. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a federal cash-assistance program for low-income
families with children. State agencies in charge of TANF should consider coordinating with local rapid rehousing programs, said the federal
Administration for Children and Families in a February memo. Afterall, about a third of homeless families are “extremely poor,” the memo said,
with an annual median income below $7,500. Roughly 41 percent of homeless families already receive TANF cash assistance, but many more
might be eligible, according to an ongoing multi-city study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Berg called the pairing
of welfare cash assistance and rapid rehousing a “philosophical good match” because “the whole idea behind TANF and welfare reform is people
should get short-term help getting back on their feet and then let them take care of themselves.”
In combining TANF with rapid
rehousing, two silos in human services are coming together, says Alexandra Cawthorne, a senior policy analyst with the
National Governors Association. That’s important because after people find a permanent dwelling, they still need help stabilizing their lives,
which might include finding a job, opening a savings account, enrolling children in school or building good credit. TANF agencies can connect
families with case managers trained in coaching people through those latter stages of self-sufficiency, Cawthorne said. Likewise, TANF agencies
can benefit from the rapid rehousing model, Gale said, because
once families have a permanent home, they’re better
positioned to tackle other barriers to leaving public assistance, such as unemployment and lack of
childcare. TANF might appeal to housing agencies as a funding source because it’s an ongoing program in all states, but as a short-term
benefit it does have the drawback of being limited to four months of assistance, Gale said.* Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Utah, Vermont and the District of Columbia already use TANF
in tandem with rapid rehousing, according to a tally by the National Alliance to End Homelessness. One of the states being touted by
federal agencies as a potential model for coupling TANF and rapid rehousing is Utah. The state’s largest homeless shelter provider, The Road
Home, partnered with the Utah’s Department of Workforce Services to implement a rapid rehousing program using TANF funds as well as HPRP
money. The Road Home rehoused 1,237 families between 2009 and February of this year, of which 87 percent did not return to homelessness.
The nonprofit also reported a shortening of average shelter stays by homeless families (71 days in 2007 vs. 35 days in 2012). Through 2012,
funding came from roughly $1 million in annual stimulus dollars and $950,000 from TANF to pay for its rapid rehousing program. Although the
stimulus-backed HPRP no longer exists, HUD’s Emergency Solutions Grant Program serves a similar purpose, albeit at a diminished level of
support. Last year HUD’s budget included $314 million in Emergency Solutions grants. The president’s budget for 2014 asks for a slight
increase, for an annual total of $356 million, with $60 million set aside for rapid rehousing. By comparison, HPRP offered about $500 million per
year explicitly for homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing. A few other options exist for replacing HPRP dollars. In Utah, The Road Home
is trying to fill the void of stimulus money with two smaller HUD programs: $225,000 in from Emergency Solutions and $400,000 from the
HOME Investment Partnerships Program. Other communities are using money from HUD’s Continuum of Care competitive grant program, Gale
said, to shore up the loss of the stimulus funds. *The story has been updated to clarify that TANF short-term benefits have a four-month limit.
Longer term assistance would trigger reporting requirements and administrative oversight that states might prefer to avoid.
TANF funds are used to rehouse families and prevent homelessness
National Alliance to End Homelessness ND, (Organization that fights homelessness,
ND,
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:i6mlimD7hrwJ:b.3cdn.net/naeh/
f38e81ed4cfdd20d14_jvm6bhnfn.pdf+&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us, Using TANF to
Support and Improve Efforts to End Family Homelessness, 7/10/15 ML)
In many states and localities, significant TANF
resources are already being spent to provide funding for eviction
prevention assistance, motels, emergency shelters and transitional housing programs serving homeless
families. The TANF resources provide support to programs that are critically needed to provide an emergency response to families in crisis.
However, there are often refinements that can be made in how the money is used and new initiatives that can be supported with funds that can
improve families’ outcomes. While states facing difficult budget deficits may be reluctant to increase spending to expand programs or support
new initiatives, they may be responsive to changing how current spending is used. Demonstrate Effectiveness and Cost-Savings The
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been a leader in re-thinking the use of TANF resources to support family shelter. By legislative
statute, the Commonwealth is responsible for ensuring that children experiencing homelessness are sheltered. As more and more families were
impacted by the recession, emergency shelter and transitional housing options were quickly depleted and the state resorted to sheltering families
in motels. Through prior experience and data, the state recognized that motels and shelters are a poor alternative to helping a family return to
housing and had
already begun work to transform their investments in family homelessness to one focused on
achieving permanent housing outcomes. Local studies found that time limited rental assistance reduced reliance on motels and
shelters, was effective in ending family homelessness, and was less costly than shelter stays. As a result, the state is funneling more resources into
prevention, diversion, and rapid rehousing strategies while working to reduce the length of time families reside in shelter. Communities that have
implemented these successful approaches are reducing their dependence on motels for sheltering families and are now moving families out of
homelessness faster than families are entering shelter. While they are achieving improved family and program outcomes, they are also reducing
costs. Explore Current TANF Spending on Homelessness Local and state homelessness leaders are exploring how TANF funds are now being
used to support homeless families. Based on this, they are developing proposals for how the funds can be used more efficiently through better
targeting of prevention assistance and through increased funding of rapid re-housing programs.
The reduced demand that can result
from effective prevention programs and shorter stays in TANF-supported shelter can result in reduced
costs and better outcomes for families. To assess the annual costs of the county‐ funded homelessness system in Mercer County,
New Jersey, Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness hired a consultant who had worked with the State’s Department of Human Services. She
found that the County was spending close to $10 million annually to support the family homelessness service system, much of it with county
TANF funds. Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness then brought in national experts to consult with county and state officials, board members,
and homeless service providers to examine how the funds might be more strategically invested to end family homelessness. The state and local
government approved a $250,000 Rapid Re‐ Housing Pilot for Mercer County which more than doubled when the County won funds from
HUD’s Rapid Re‐ Housing Demonstration for Homeless Families Initiative and received new HPRP resources.
Uniqueness/Links
Uniqueness – State Budgets High
State budgets on Transportation and education are good and increasing
Krehbiel 15 [Randy-World Staff Writer, 4/20/15, “Tight state budget put education and transportation on the
spot”,http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/capitol_report/tight-state-budget-put-education-and-transportation-on-the-spot/article_a18375ed-66045fd5-a168-08421ea545f5.html, date accessed: 7/14/15]Kruger
State funding for transportation has increased 38 percent over the past four years ,
while state support of public schools has been more or less unchanged over the past five years. One idea being
Want more for education?
floated, and apparently the one that prompted the ad campaign, is to take money from the county roads and bridges account to help balance the budget. Want bridges
nobody gets more state and local
dollars than education. Common ed is going to get somewhere around $3.5 billion in state and local tax money for operations this year, compared to
that don’t collapse and highways that don’t wreck your suspension? The money has to come from somewhere, and
$661.8 million for transportation.
Uniquness – State Budgets High – Education
States Funding education now
Cuomo 15 [Andrew-He is the governor of New York, 4/1/15, “Governor Cuomo Announces Highlights from the Passage of the 2015-16
State Budget”, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-highlights-passage-2015-16-state-budget, date accessed:
7/14/15]Kruger
“For the fifth year in a row, the State Budget holds spending growth below two percent and continues a
record of fiscal discipline that has reversed decades of budgets that increased spending faster than
inflation or personal income growth. “This $142 billion budget is the most meaningful that we have agreed to in many years, not because of what
we are spending but because of how we are spending it. We are not just maintaining services and the status quo with this
budget. We are investing in a new future for our state. “This budget addresses two of the most fundamental and intractable issues that
have vexed the state for generations – education and ethics. “ When it comes to education, the budget we approved will
transform our school system in comprehensive ways. The reforms we have included will move us to
an education system that rewards results, addresses challenges and demands accountability. “That’s why I
tied a landmark six percent increase in new school spending – raising state funding of schools to a recordhigh $23.5 billion in this year’s budget – to vital reforms, including improvements to the systems for
teacher evaluation, certification and preparation as well as providing new authority to improve failing
schools. “This year we are finally ensuring that New York’s education system will be about the students it is intended to serve, instead of just perpetuating a
bureaucracy. “I described the budget I first proposed just two months ago as an Opportunity Agenda. The importance of education reform that
we fought to include in this year’s budget shows that we believe there is no greater path to opportunity
than a good education.
States funding education now
Campbell 15 [Jon-State government reporter for Gannett New York, 4/1/15, “State budget's education plan sends shockwaves”,
http://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/local/new-york/2015/04/03/ny-teacher-policy/25267789/, date accessed: 7/14/15]Kruger
ALBANY – A
slate of changes to New York's school system tucked into the state's new $142 billion budget
are either a "dramatic shift" or a "sham," depending on your perspective. According to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the education
plan -- which includes a tougher teacher-evaluation system and a plan for taking over long-struggling
schools -- will be "one of the greatest legacies" he leaves for the state. The New York State United Teachers union says Cuomo
has "refused to consider the educational research" or listen to parents and educators. The union has gone as far to suggest parents should considering opting their
children out of state-mandated exams. It's a fight that won't end anytime soon: The
ramifications of the education-reform plan
spearheaded by Cuomo will play out over years. But the shockwaves are already being felt at the Capitol,
where lawmakers in the state Assembly debated the plan for 61/2-hours before approving it Tuesday,
which helped push passage of the budget a few hours past a midnight deadline. "We advocated, we agonized, we pushed,
we pulled and fought to make a bad situation better," said Assemblyman Ken Zebrowski, D-New City, Rockland County. The state budget includes
$23.5 billion in funding for schools, not counting some additional funds that will help expand prekindergarten programs and a $75 million fund for 27 struggling schools. It also included a multi-part plan Cuomo says will
lead to progress in schools but has led to strife with the teacher's union. That plan deals largely with teachers and "failing schools," including a new process of
evaluating educators and a system for appointing a state-approved "receiver" to step in and make changes at schools with poor academic progress.
Link – Ext – Child Support Key to Revenue
Child support used to reimburse states for TANF funds
Solomon-Fears ’12 (Carmen, Specialist in social policy for the Congressional Research
Service, 7/19/12, “Analysis of Federal-State Financing of the Child Support Enforcement
Program”
http://greenbook.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/greenbook.waysandmeans.house.gov/fil
es/2012/documents/RL33422_gb.pdf 7/10/15 ML)
Readers should note that the child support payments made on behalf of TANF children are paid to the state for
distribution rather than directly to the family. If the child support collected is insufficient to lift the family’s income above the state’s TANF eligibility limit, the
family receives its full TANF grant (i.e., not reduced by the child support payment), and the
child support is collected by the state and
distributed to the state treasury and the federal government in proportion to their assistance to the family. If
the family’s income, including the child support payments, exceeds the state’s TANF eligibility limit, the family’s TANF cash benefits are ended and all current child
support payments are then sent directly to the family (via the state’s child support disbursement unit). As mentioned above, when the CSE program was first enacted
in 1975, one of its primary goals was to recover the costs of providing cash welfare to families with children. To accomplish
this cost-recovery goal, child support collected on behalf of families receiving AFDC directly offset AFDC benefit costs, and was shared between the federal and state
governments in accordance with the matching formula used for the given state’s AFDC program. Under old AFDC law, the rate at which states reimbursed the federal
government for child support was the federal matching rate (i.e., the federal medical assistance percentage, or “Medicaid matching rate”) for the AFDC program,
which varied inversely with state per capita income (i.e., poor states have a high federal matching rate; wealthy states have a lower federal matching rate). In a state
that had a 50% matching rate, the federal government was reimbursed $50 for each $100 collected in child support on behalf of an AFDC family, while in a state that
had a 70% federal matching rate, the federal government was reimbursed $70 for each $100 collected. In the first example, the state kept $50, and in the second
example, the state kept $30. Thus, states with a larger federal medical assistance matching rate kept a smaller portion of the child support collections. The match
ranged from a minimum of 50% to a statutory maximum of 83%. Although AFDC was replaced by the TANF block grant under the welfare reform law of 1996, the
same matching rate procedure is still used. In terms of CSE collections, this cost-recovery procedure means that poorer states are rewarded less for their CSE efforts
than wealthier states. In other words, states that are entitled to a relatively small proportion of child support collections because of paying a smaller share of AFDC
benefit costs have to collect more child support payments per administrative dollar than other states to recover their costs (other things being equal). There has been
movement away from the cost-recovery goal, in part because of the changing nature of the CSE program. As discussed earlier (in the Caseload section), the
component of the caseload that is composed of TANF families is shrinking. Even though overall child support collections increased by 67% over the 11-year period
FY1999-FY2010 (see Table A-3), child support collections made on behalf of TANF families decreased by 21% (see Table A-4). In FY2010, only 14% of the CSE
caseload was composed of TANF families. Thus, the policy shift—from using the CSE program to recover welfare costs to using it as a mechanism to consistently
and reliably get child support income to families—is not surprising. In FY2009, only 7% of CSE collections ($1.9 billion) were made on behalf of TANF families (see
Table A-7); about 12% of that amount went to the families (pursuant to state child support “pass through” provisions), and the rest was divided between the state and
federal governments to reimburse them for TANF benefits paid to the families. This meant that in FY2009, 92% of CSE collections Analysis of Federal-State
Financing of the Child Support Enforcement Program Congressional Research Service 8 ($24.3 billion) went to the families on the CSE rolls.19 The comparable
figure in FY1999 was 85% ($13.5 billion); and the comparable figure in FY1996 was 80% ($9.6 billion). Funding Elements The CSE program is funded with both
state and federal dollars. There are five funding streams for the CSE program. First, states spend their own money to operate a CSE program; the level of funding
allocated by the state and/or localities determines the amount of resources available to CSE agencies. Second, the federal government reimburses each state 66% of all
allowable expenditures on CSE activities.20 The federal government’s funding is “open-ended” in that it pays its percentage of expenditures by matching the amounts
spent by state and local governments with no upper limit or ceiling. Third, states
collect child support on behalf of families receiving
TANF to reimburse themselves (and the federal government) for the cost of TANF cash payments to the
family. Federal law requires families who receive TANF cash assistance to assign their child support
rights to the state in order to receive TANF. In addition, such families must cooperate with the state if
necessary to establish paternity and secure child support. Collections on behalf of families receiving TANF cash benefits are used to
reimburse state and federal governments for TANF payments made to the family (i.e., child support payments go to the state instead of the family, except for amounts
that states choose to “pass through” to the family as additional income that does not affect TANF eligibility or benefit amounts).21 The formula for distributing the
child support payments collected by the states on behalf of TANF families between the state and the federal government is still based on the old AFDC federal-state
reimbursement rates described earlier, even though the AFDC entitlement program was replaced by the TANF block grant program. Under existing law, states have
the option of giving some, all, or none of their share of child support payments collected on behalf of TANF families to the family.22 Pursuant to P.L. 109-171
(effective October 1, 2008), states that choose to pass through some of the collected child support to the TANF family do not have to pay the federal government its
share of such collections if the amount passed through to the family and disregarded by the state does not
Link – Ext – Budget Spills Over
Federal welfare spending key to state budgets – spills over to other areas
*specifically education and Drug harm reduction
Schott et al ’15 (Liz Schott, LaDonna Pavetti, Ph.D., and Ife Floyd, Schott currently is a Senior
Fellow with the Center's Welfare Reform and Income Support Division. Vice President for Family
Income Support Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Floyd joined the Center in June
2011 as a Research Associate with the Family Income Support Division. 4/8/15 “How States Use Federal
and State Funds Under the TANF Block Grant” http://www.cbpp.org/research/family-incomesupport/how-states-use-federal-and-state-funds-under-the-tanf-block-grant 7/9/15 ML)
Connecticut In 2013, Connecticut spent over $300 million in "other areas," representing two-thirds of its state and federal
TANF spending -- about twice the share of the nation as a whole. It spent 94 percent of its federal TANF funds and 42 percent of its state MOE
funds outside of the Department of Social Services, which administers the TANF cash assistance and employment programs .
Most of the
spending was for child welfare services and early education, using TANF or MOE funds to free up other
state funds for uses unrelated to the purposes of TANF: •Child welfare. About $100 million went to the Department of
Children and Families for various child welfare-related programs and services. Of this, $56 million was targeted for case management services
and $34 million for investigations. Additional programs within DCF accounted for another $10 million. •School readiness. Some $72 million
went to the Department of Education for preschool for children ages 3-5 living in economically disadvantaged communities with family incomes
below 75 percent of the state median -- that is, below about $65,000 a year for a family of three (more than three times the federal poverty level).
Connecticut's remaining
spending in "other areas" was spread across numerous programs, mostly outside the state TANF agency. Some $20
million, for example, went to the Department of Corrections for addiction services for non-custodial parents. Another
$28 million went to the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services to serve special populations, targeting
young adults (including sex offenders). Connecticut claimed very little in "excess MOE" in 2013, so the spending in other agencies does not
reflect "excess MOE." Instead, Connecticut is an example of a state using most of its TANF money for programs and services
outside core welfare reform areas. Box 3: Some "Other Areas" Spending May Reflect "Excess" MOE States must spend at least 80
Another $30 million went to the Department of Education for other education initiatives. •Other expenditures.
percent of their historic state AFDC spending to meet TANF's MOE requirement or face a fiscal penalty; the threshold is lowered to 75 percent in
a year the state meets its TANF work participation rate. (See Appendix I for additional discussion.) Since the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 made
it harder for states to meet their TANF "work participation rate" requirements -- thereby threatening some states with the loss of some federal
TANF funds due to penalties -- a number of states have found it advantageous to claim as MOE certain existing expenditures they hadn't
previously claimed. States with MOE spending exceeding their minimum MOE requirement can obtain a "caseload reduction credit" that lowers
their work participation rate requirement. Claiming excess MOE also helps a state qualify for additional federal money from the TANF
Contingency Fund. Thus, since 2006, total MOE spending across states has risen above the minimum required levels, with 38 states reporting
MOE over 80 percent in 2013. This increase does not necessarily represent an increase either in underlying state spending or in benefits or
services for low-income families. Some of the reported MOE may represent existing state spending or existing third-party spending (such as by
food banks or domestic violence shelters) that the state hadn't previously counted as MOE. Some states have moved aggressively to claim
existing expenditures as MOE, whether expenditures in other state agencies or by third parties. In some instances, these expenditures help
increase a state's MOE above the minimum requirements. In other instances, they enable states to withdraw substantial state funds they had used
for TANF purposes while still meeting their MOE requirement. In analyzing a state's TANF and MOE expenditures, therefore, it is important to
understand the extent to which they are part of an "excess MOE" strategy. For example, compare New Jersey, which claimed 197 percent MOE
in 2013 ($489 million over its 75 percent MOE requirement), with Louisiana, which claimed 78 percent MOE ($3 million over its 75 percent
MOE requirement): •New Jersey spent $558 million in "other areas," representing 43 percent of its TANF/MOE spending. The bulk of this
spending was $452 million claimed as MOE for the state's early childhood education program. This is a significant amount, but given the state's
$489 million in "excess MOE," it may represent the claiming of existing early childhood education spending as MOE rather than a massive
diversion of TANF and MOE funds to other uses. •Louisiana spent $145 million in "other areas," representing two-thirds of its TANF/MOE
spending. The bulk went to early education, child welfare, and financial aid. In contrast with New Jersey, only $3 million of this spending can be
considered "excess MOE," which means that virtually all of the "other areas" spending represented a diversion of TANF and MOE funds to other
uses. Louisiana In 2013, Louisiana spent some $145 million, or two-thirds of its state and federal TANF spending, in "other areas."[18] Most
went for child welfare services, early education, and financial aid for college students. Louisiana used
TANF funds to supplant state spending or to cover the cost of expansions that otherwise would have required state
spending, freeing the up funds for other uses unrelated to the purposes of TANF, including tax cuts. •Child welfare. Some $34 million went
for child welfare, including child protective investigations and family services. Another $4.4 million went to providing court-appointed advocates
for children placed (or at risk of placement) in foster care. •Early
education. Some $34 million went to the state's pre-kindergarten program.
•Financial
aid. Some $33 million went to the Office of Student Financial Aid Assistance for financial aid to students in post-secondary
expenditures. Drug courts received $6 million and substance abuse programs received
another $3 million. Other programs received smaller amounts. Like Connecticut, Louisiana claimed virtually no
"excess MOE" in 2013, so it is another example of a state using most of its TANF funds for programs and
services outside core welfare reform areas.
education. •Other
Link – AT: Plan’s Effect Is Small
Even if the plan doesn’t eliminate budget surpluses, minor changes can force cuts
NYC Independent Budget Office ’01 (Provides impartial information on NYC budget statistics,
August 2001, “New York’s Increasing Dependence on the Welfare Surplus”,
www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/tanf.pdf, 7/10/15 ML
This month marks the fifth anniversary of the 1996 federal welfare reform act. One of the act’s sweeping changes was the transformat ion of the primary federal welfare program from an
entitlement with expenditures driven by the size of the caseload to a block grant. The block grant gave the states greater flexibility in running their welfare programs, as well as the opportunity to
reap savings if caseloads fell. In New York State, caseloads have fallen far below the levels that had been used to set the state’s block grant. With lower spending needed to maintain a baseline
level of assistance and a fixed block grant
, there has been a surplus of TANF funds in each state fiscal year since 1997-1998.
This brief, based largely on information from the New York State Division of the Budget, examines how the surplus has been allocated each year by the state and then reviews how New York
City allocated its share of last year’s surplus. The brief also addresses some of the implications of the state’s and city’s dependence on TANF surplus funds. Among the key findings in this fiscal
brief: • New York State’s TANF surplus has ranged from between $908 million to $1.7 billion, with a cumulative value of $6.7 billion over the last five years. • A major use of TANF
surplus funds by the state has been to expand social services, particularly child care and other programs providing welfare-to-work assistance. • The
state has also set aside a contingency fund that will grow to nearly $800 million this year to provide a reserve should the caseload begin to grow again, thus shrinking the surplus. • During
the city’s last fiscal year, $470 million in TANF surplus funds were allocated to provide expanded
services that have been baselined in the local budget. • The city’s largest use of TANF surplus funds has been for child care, with allocations to
support an estimated 26,000 new slots. • Little of the TANF surplus is used in the city for fiscal relief, replacing local spending with TANF funding. • With the state and
city now both reliant on the TANF surplus to help fund baseline services, a smaller surplus in the future
would force a choice among reducing services, raising taxes, or shifting budget priorities . • An economic
slowdown leading to larger caseloads or a major change in the size of the block grant when TANF is reauthorized next year could reduce—or eliminate—surpluses
Impact – Transportation
AT: No War
Economic decline causes global war – strong stastical support
Royal 10 (Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction – U.S. Department of Defense,
“Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, Economics of War
and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, Ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215)
Less intuitive is how periods of
economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict . Political science literature has
contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at
systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory,
rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the
often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could
usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of
miscalculation (Feaver, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a
permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner. 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that
finding that
global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections
future
expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security
behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However,
if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict
increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the
trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have
considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg
and Hess (2002) find a s trong correlat ion between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly
during periods of economic downturn . They write: The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic
conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to
which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002. p. 89) Economic decline
has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill
across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. "Diversionary theory" suggests that, when
facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to
fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995). and Blomberg, Hess, and
between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that '
Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009)
the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that
democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of
weak economic performance in the U nited S tates, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase
in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political
science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national
levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention.
suggest that
Escalates existing crises
Miller 8 – G. Robert M. Miller, journalist for Digital Journal, 10-25, 2008, “Guns vs. Shovels – The
Central Question Behind Our Next Economy,” online: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/261595
But before we look at the modern ‘Guns versus Butter’ model, it first has to be noted that this phrase was originally popularized
in a time where securing economic prosperity was a primary concern in nearly every nation. More importantly, when
these nations did experience economic collapse, nearly all of them chose Guns. There is no question that Nazi aggression
spawned World War II, however, what was happening in Europe became a world war for a purpose as central to the heart of
the capitalist as was the instantaneous end of the holocaust to the heart of the compassionate; economic prosperity. Simply said, big
wars are big money; and to truly break from the embrace of the Great Depression, a big commitment to the economy
was necessary. And due to the leadership that guided the balance between ‘Guns and Butter’ in the US through World
War II, the economy was considerably improved; this was true for many western nations.
Perception alone causes global instability
Harold James 7/3/13 (Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and
Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence, project syndicate, “financial crisis and
war” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/financial-crisis-and-war-by-haroldjames#6ObpMZcq3uXv7puL.99)
The approach of the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 has jolted politicians and commentators worried by the fragility of current global political and economic arrangements. Indeed, Luxembourg’s prime
The lessons of 1914 are about more than simply
the dangers of national animosities. The origins of the Great War include a fascinating precedent concerning how
financial globalization can become the equivalent of a national arms race , thereby increasing the
vulnerability of the international order. In 1907, a major financial crisis emanating from the United States affected the rest of the world and demonstrated the fragility of the entire
international financial system. The response to the current financial crisis is replaying a similar dynamic. Walter Bagehot’s 1873 classic
minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently argued that Europe’s growing north-south polarization has set the continent back by a century.
Lombard Street described the City of London as “the greatest combination of economic power and economic delicacy that the world has ever seen.” In one influential interpretation, popularized by the novelist, Labour Party MP, and
future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Angell in 1910, the interdependency of the increasingly complex global economy made war impossible. But the opposite conclusion was equally plausible: Given the extent of fragility, a
clever twist to the control levers might facilitate a military victory by the economic hegemon. The aftermath of the 1907 crash drove the hegemonic power of the time – Great Britain – to reflect on how it could use its financial clout to
enhance its overall strategic capacity. That is the conclusion of an important recent book, Nicholas Lambert’s study of British economic planning and the First World War, entitled Planning Armageddon. Lambert demonstrates how,
in a grand strategic gamble, Britain began to marry its military – and especially naval – predominance and its global financial leadership. Between 1905 and 1908, the British Admiralty developed the broad outlines of a plan for
financial and economic warfare against Europe’s rising power, Germany. Economic warfare, if implemented in full, would wreck Germany’s financial system and force it out of any military conflict. When Britain’s naval visionaries
confronted a rival in the form of the Kaiser’s Germany, they understood how power could thrive on financial fragility. Pre-1914 Britain anticipated the private-public partnership that today links technology giants such as Google,
Apple, or Verizon to US intelligence agencies. London banks underwrote most of the world’s trade; Lloyds provided insurance for the world’s shipping. These financial networks provided the information that enabled the British
government to discover the sensitive strategic vulnerabilities of the opposing alliance. For Britain’s rivals, the financial panic of 1907 demonstrated the necessity of mobilizing financial power themselves. The US, for its part,
recognized that it needed a central bank analogous to the Bank of England. American financiers were persuaded that New York needed to develop its own commercial trading system to handle bills of exchange in the same way as the
London market and arrange their monetization (or “acceptance”). The central figure in pushing for the development of an American acceptance market was Paul Warburg, the immigrant younger brother of a great Hamburg banker
who was the personal adviser to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Warburg brothers, Max and Paul, were a transatlantic tandem, energetically pushing for German-American institutions that would offer an alternative to British
the dynamics of the pre-1914
financial world are now reemerging . In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, financial institutions appear both as
dangerous weapons of mass economic destruction, but also as potential instruments for the application
of national power. In managing the 2008 crisis, foreign banks’ dependence on US-dollar funding constituted a major weakness, and required the provision of large swap lines by the Federal Reserve. Addressing
industrial and financial monopoly. They were convinced that Germany and the US were growing stronger year by year, while British power would erode. Some of
that flaw requires renationalization of banking, and breaking up the activities of large financial institutions. For European bankers, and some governments, current efforts by the US to revise its approach to the operation of foreign
bank subsidiaries within its territory highlight that imperative. They view the US move as a new sort of financial protectionism and are threatening retaliation. Geopolitics is intruding into banking practice elsewhere as well. Russian
Many
countries have begun to look at financial protectionism as a way to increase their political leverage. The next step
in this logic is to think about how financial power can be directed to national advantage in the case of a diplomatic conflict. Sanctions are a routine (and not terribly successful) part of the pressure applied to
rogue states like Iran and North Korea. But financial pressure can be much more powerfully applied to countries that are deeply
embedded in the global economy. In 1907, in the wake of an epochal financial crisis that almost brought a
complete global collapse, several countries started to think of finance primarily as an instrument of raw power that
could and should be turned to national advantage. That kind of thinking brought war in 1914. A century later, in 2007-2008,
the world experienced an even greater financial shock, and nationalistic passions have flared up in its
wake. Destructive strategies may not be far behind.
banks are trying to acquire assets in Central and Eastern Europe. European banks are playing a much-reduced role in Asian trade finance. Chinese banks are being pushed to expand their role in global commerce.
Failure to act crushes economic leadership which ensures peace – collapse causes
war
Posen 9 - deputy director and senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Adam, “Economic leadership beyond the
crisis,” http://clients.squareeye.com/uploads/foresight/documents/PN%20USA_FINAL_LR_1.pdf)
Thus, the
US faces a challenging but not truly threatening global economic situation as a result of the crisis
and longer-term financial trends. Failure to act affirmatively to manage the situation, however, bears two
significant and related risks: first, that China and perhaps some other rising economic powers will
opportunistically divert countries in US-oriented integrated relationships to their economic sphere(s);
second, that a leadership vacuum will arise in international financial affairs and in multilateral trade
efforts, which will over time erode support for a globally integrated economy. Both of these risks if
realised would diminish US foreign policy influence, make the economic system less resilient in
response to future shocks (to every country’s detriment), reduce economic growth and thus the rate of
reduction in global poverty, and conflict with other foreign policy goals like controlling climate change
or managing migration and demographic shifts. If the US is to rise to the challenge, it should concentrate on the following
priority measures.
A2: No War – A2: No Diversionary Theory
Diversionary theory true
Rothkopf 9 – David Rothkopf, Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 311, 2009, “Security and the Financial Crisis,” Testimony Before the House Armed Services Committee,
CQ Congressional Testimony, lexis
--Destabilizing Bilateral or Regional Effects of the Crisis: The
weakening of states can produce instability that spills
across borders or can produce social pressures that increase migration and create associated tensions
along borders. The rise of opposition groups can create an opportunity for like-minded neighbors to support
their activities and thus cause rifts and potential conflicts to spread. Political and economic weakness in
nations can be seen by opportunistic neighbors
(some wishing to produce distractions from their own crises) as an
invitation to intervene in their neighbors politics or even to step in and take control of neighboring territories or to seek to use force
to resolve in their favor long-simmering disputes. In the same vein, old animosities may be inflamed by the crisis either because they
produce tensions that play into the origins of old rivalries or because political leaders seek to play on those rivalries to produce a
distraction from their inability to manage the economic crisis. Need may enhance tensions and produce conflicts
over shared or disputed resources. A desire to preserve national resources, jobs, or capital may produce
reactive economic, border or other policies that can increase tension with neighbors. This can include both
trade and capital markets protectionism (in traditional and new forms see below), closed or more tightly monitored borders, more disputes on
cross-border issues and thus both an increase in tensions and a decreased ability to effectively cooperate with neighbors on issues
of common concern.
A2: No Collapse – Resiliency
Economy not resilient – last line of defense gone
Jon Nadler, Senior Investment Products Analyst, Kitco Bullion Dealer, Feb 13, 2009, “Easy Money.
Who Needs It?,” http://www.kitco.com/ind/nadler/printerfriendly/feb132009B.html
The first line of defense is gone. The economy is not resilient and is not stable. And the second line of
defense is eroding. The Fed already has taken interest rates to zero, and lent out nearly $2 trillion in
fruitless attempts to revive demand.
In his speech, Bernanke proposed that the central bank "can always generate higher
spending and hence positive inflation" by simply printing money as fast as possible. We're nowhere near that point yet. But the Fed hasn't
demonstrated convincingly that lowering rates to zero and lending out trillions of dollars has had any impact on increasing final demand. It
turns out that the Fed can print all the money it wants, but it can't make anyone spend it."
Economy not resilient – next economic collapse will be permanent
Jan Lundberg was previously Senior Vice President, Head of Global Discovery, a position he had since
the Astra-Zeneca merger in 1999, June 12, 2006, “A Call to Action: The Necessity Defense,”
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=65
Let there be a call to action for everyone to consider immediate direct action on behalf of the world's climate. If a small percentage of people
actually do it, this would bring the polluting economy to a grinding halt.
Due to the nature of our Humpty-Dumpty
infrastructure and lack of self-sufficiency, global economic collapse will be permanent. The cheap oil
to fuel the scope and levels of today’s trade is already mostly gone, and so a new economics and
politics will emerge. Granted, a message or goal that would sacrifice industry as we know it - along with the global economy - is an
impossible message or goal for the present powers that be. This does not mean the idea is premature, except in terms of widespread
acceptance.
Global institutions can’t check econ collapse – still too weak and regional financial
regimes prevent effective global response to avert crisis
Ngaire Woods 9/6/13 (Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, project
syndicate, “global institutions after the crisis” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-emptypromise-of-global-institutions-after-the-crisis-by-ngaire-woods)
When Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial crisis erupted five years ago, many glimpsed a silver lining: the promise
of more effective global economic governance. But, despite a flurry of early initiatives, the world remains as far from that
goal as ever. The Financial Stability Board (FSB), established after the G-20 summit in London in April 2009, has no legal mandate or enforcement
powers, nor formal processes for including all countries. The I nternational M onetary F und still awaits the doubling of
its capital (another early vow), while its existing resources are heavily tied up in Europe and its governance reforms are stalled. The
World Bank has received a modest increase in resources, but it has yet to build capacity to lend rapidly and globally beyond existing
borrowers and loan arrangements, and its income trajectory is diminishing. Yet the need for effective global economic governance remains
more urgent than ever. Banks and other financial firms roam internationally, greatly assisted by market-opening rules embedded in trade and investment treaties, but with no legally enforceable responsibility to provision adequately
for their own losses when things go wrong. Instead, massive risks have supposedly been held at bay by voluntary standards promulgated by a patchwork of public and private “standard-setting” organizations.
The crisis
proved that this was inadequate. The titans of Wall Street and the City of London were exposed as hugely over-leveraged. Extraordinary profits when their bets paid off increased their
financial and political power – which they still enjoy – with taxpayers left to bail them out when their bets turned bad. The G-20 promised stronger global institutions to prevent this from recurring. But the FSB is not
a treaty-based global regulator with enforcement powers. It continues to be a “standard setter” in a world with
strong incentives to evade standards and negligible sanctions for doing so. Furthermore, although the FSB’s standards are ostensibly
“universal,” it does not represent all countries or have formal mechanisms to inform and consult them. Regulators face a Sisyphean task, owing to the absence of
strong and consistent political support for reining in the financial titans. A well-resourced financial sector intensively lobbies the most influential
governments in global finance. The reforms of the IMF, another pillar of global financial management, cannot be
implemented until the US Congress approves them – and there is no sign of that. Even the new Basel 3 banking standards have been
diluted and postponed. For Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the delay in reforming the IMF is a serious annoyance. They became major
contributors to the Fund’s emergency loan pool (the New Arrangements to Borrow) immediately after the crisis and now provide 15.5% of the NAB’s resources. But the greater voice and voting power that they were promised –
commensurate with their status as four of the IMF’s top ten shareholders – has not been delivered. Even the selection of the organization’s managing director remains a European droit du seigneur. More seriously, an astounding
The IMF’s resources are
neither adequate nor available to respond to a crisis elsewhere. Similarly, the G-20’s pledge in 2009 to protect the
poorest and most fragile countries and communities from the effects of the crisis remains unfulfilled. The
World Bank is at the heart of these efforts, because it can pool risks globally and offset the capriciousness of official and private-sector aid flows, which create “donor darlings” (like Rwanda) and “donor orphans.” But,
89.2% of the IMF’s General Resources Account is outstanding to European countries, with just three countries (Greece, Portugal, and Ireland) accounting for 68%.
while the Bank has more than doubled its lending relative to the four years prior to 2008, this was achieved mostly by front-loading existing loans. Crisis-hit countries that were not already borrowers were largely left out. The Bank’s
failure to lend to new clients partly reflects its slowness. Even after its loan cycle had been speeded up, the Bank took an average of
13.5 months to approve credits – a long time for a country to await “emergency” help. But the Bank is also
hampered by worsening resource constraints, as the biggest post-crisis capital infusions went to regional development banks. The African Development Bank’s capital was
increased by 200%, as was the Asian Development Bank’s. The Inter-American Development Bank got a 70% increase. Meanwhile, the World Bank received an increase of 30%, while its lending arm for the poorest countries, the
International Development Association, received an increase of only 18%. Crucially, it is not obvious that the Bank has “buy-in” from emerging economies, with Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which pledged significant resources to
Further exacerbating the Bank’s financial woes, its powerful creditors have opted
to “pull back” its lending in order to protect its resources. As a result, compared to the regional development banks, the Bank will be lending less to fee-paying clients, who provide income, and engaging
in more “concessional lending,” which does not. The 2008 crisis highlighted the need for international cooperation to regulate
finance and mitigate the effects of a crisis. Yet the global resources and instruments needed to manage (if not
avert) the next crisis have not been secured. Instead, regions and countries are quietly finding their own ways to
manage finance, create pooled emergency funds, and strengthen development finance – an outcome that heralds a more fragmented and decentralized
set of regulatory regimes and a modest de-globalization of finance and aid.
the IMF, pledging only about 1% of IDA funding.
Global economic recovery is weak and on the brink – global institutions are
ineffective and lack of trust between governments prevents effective response to
crisis
Harold James 8/2/13 (Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and
Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence, project syndicate, “the snowden time
bomb” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/edward-snowden-and-the-end-of-economicsummitry-by-harold-james)
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, world leaders repeated a soothing mantra. There could be no
repeat of the Great Depression, not only because monetary policy was much better (it was), but also because international cooperation was
better institutionalized. And yet one man, the American former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, has shown how far removed from
reality that claim remains. Prolonged periods of strain tend to weaken the fabric of institutional cooperation.
The two institutions that seemed most dynamic and effective in 2008-2009 were the I nternational M onetary F und and the G-20;
the credibility of both has been steadily eroded over the long course of the crisis. Because the major industrial
economies seem to be on the path to recovery – albeit a feeble one – no one seems to care very much that
the mechanisms of cooperation are worn out. They should. There are likely to be many more financial
fires in various locations, and the world needs a fire brigade to put them out. The IMF’s resources were extended in 2009, and
the organization was supposed to be reformed in order to give emerging markets more voice. But little progress has been made. The Fund was the centerpiece of
the post-1945 global economic system. It subsequently played a central role in the management of the 1980’s debt crisis and in the post-communist economic transition after 1989. But every major international crisis since then has
chipped away at its authority. The 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis undermined its legitimacy in Asia, as many governments in the region believed that the crisis was being exploited by the United States and US financial institutions.
The post-2007 Great Recession discredited the IMF further for three reasons. First, the initial phase of the crisis looked like
an American phenomenon. Second, the IMF’s heavy involvement in the prolonged euro crisis looked like preferential
treatment of Europe and Europeans. In particular, the demand that, because the world was focused on Europe, another European (and another French national) should succeed the IMF’s then-managing director,
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was incomprehensible to the large emerging-market countries. Eventually, as in the Asian crisis, European governments and the European Commission fell
out with the Fund and began to blame its analysis for having confused and unsettled markets. On the big issues underlying the global financial crisis – the problem of current-account imbalances and deciding
which countries should adjust, and reconciling financial reform with a pro-growth agenda – the IMF cannot say much more, or say it more effectively, than
it could before the crisis. The G-20 was the great winner of the financial crisis. The older summits (the G-7 or, with the addition of Russia, the G-8), as well as the G-7 finance ministers’ meetings, were
no longer legitimate. They consisted of countries that had actually caused the problems; they were dominated by the US; and they suffered from heavy over-representation of mid-sized European countries. The G-20, by contrast,
brought in the big emerging markets, and its initial promise was to provide a way to control and direct the IMF. The new mood of global economic regime change was captured in the official photograph that was widely used in
coverage of the most successful of the G-20 summits, held in London in April 2009. In the short term, the London summit mitigated financial contagion emanating from southern Europe; gave the World Bank additional resources to
deal with the problem of trade finance for emerging-market exports; appeared to give the IMF more firepower and legitimacy; and seemed to catalyze coordinated fiscal stimulus to restore confidence. But only the more technical of
Everything else that was agreed at the London summit turned sour. The follow-up
summits were lame. The idea of coordinated fiscal stimulus became problematic when it became
obvious that many European governments could not take on more debt without unsettling markets and pushing themselves into an unsustainable cycle of increasingly expensive borrowing. And yet, however limited the
these four achievements – the first two – stood the test of time.
London summit’s achievements proved to be, the summit process itself was not fully discredited until Snowden’s intelligence revelations. It may be that leaders and their staffs were naive in believing that their communications were
Snowden’s revelations that the London summit’s British hosts allegedly monitored the participants’
communications make it difficult to imagine that the genuine intimacy of earlier summits can ever be
recreated. And, with the espionage apparently directed mostly at representatives of emerging economies, the
gulf between the advanced countries and those on the rise has widened further. World leaders appear partly ignorant and partly deceptive
really secure. But
in responding to the allegations. They are probably right to emphasize how little they really know about surveillance. It is in the nature of complex data-gathering programs that no one really has an overview. But the lack of
transparency surrounding data surveillance and mining means that, when a whistleblower leaks information, everyone can subsequently use it to build their own version of how and why policy is made. The revelations thus encourage
The substantive aftermath of the London summit has already caused widespread disenchantment with the
G-20 process. The Snowden affair has blown up any illusion about trust between leaders – and also about
leaders’ competence. By granting Snowden asylum for one year, Russian President Vladimir Putin, will have the bomber in his midst when he hosts this year’s summit in Saint Petersburg.
wild conspiracy theories.
A2: No Impact – Collapse Slow
Nature of international relations means that conflict will arise fast from collase
Craig Turpin, Executive editor of New Jersey newspapers, 10/14 2008, Critical Mass: Economic
leadership or dictatorship,
http://www.nj.com/cranford/index.ssf/2008/10/critical_mass_economic_leaders.html
A global economic collapse will also increase the chance of global conflict. As economic systems
shut down, so will the distribution systems for resources like petroleum and food. It is certainly within
the realm of possibility that nations perceiving themselves in peril will, if they have the military
capability, use force, just as Japan and Nazi Germany
did in the mid-to-late 1930s. Every nation in the world needs
access to food and water.
Industrial nations -- the world powers of North America, Europe, and Asia -- need
access to energy.
When the world economy runs smoothly, reciprocal trade meets these needs.
If the world economy
collapses, the use of military force becomes a more likely alternative . And given the increasingly rapid
rate at which world affairs move; the world could devolve to that point very quickly.
Impact – Education
Impact – Education Spending/Heg
State budget crisis forces cuts in technical K-12 and university education
LEACHMAN ET AL ‘11 – Michael Leachman – Director of State Fiscal Research with the State Fiscal Policy division of the Center; holds a
Ph.D. in sociology from Loyola University Chicago; policy analyst for nine years at the Oregon Center for Public Policy; AND*** Nicholas Johnson- graduate degree
from Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Director of the State Fiscal Project, which works to develop strategies for long-term structural reform
of state budget and tax systems, encourage low-income tax relief, and improve the way states prioritize funding, received the Ian Axford Fellowship in Public Policy,
a program financed by the New Zealand government and administered by Fulbright New Zealand. Through this fellowship, he spent six months as an advisor to the
New Zealand Treasury and the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development; AND*** Erica Williams - M.A. in International Policy the Monterey Institute of
International Studies; Policy Analyst with the State Fiscal Project; (Michael, Nicholas Johnson, Erica Williams, “State Budget Cuts in the New Fiscal Year Are
Unnecessarily Harmful”, July 28, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3550)
Since states spend more of their budgets on education and health care than anything else , lawmakers imposing large
spending cuts are hard-pressed to avoid cutting back on these essential public services. Many states also will lay off state employees or cut their pay and benefits. These actions, coming on top of
At least 23 states have
made identifiable cuts in support for public schools. In many cases, these cuts undermine school finance systems that are intended to reduce disparities
deep cuts that states have already made over the last three years, place a drag on the nation’s economic recovery. Elementary and Secondary Education
between high-wealth and low-wealth school districts, so the largest impacts may be felt in communities that are least able to compensate for the loss of funds from their own resources. Arizona is
cutting $183 million from K-12 education spending in the coming year and continues another $377 million in cuts that were implemented over the previous three years, bringing the total cut
relative to pre-recession levels to $560 million, or $530 per pupil. Colorado is cutting state spending on K-12 education by $347 per pupil compared to last school year. Florida is cutting
spending on K-12 education by $542 per pupil compared with last year. The state also has cut $13 million from the state’s school readiness program that gives low-income families access to high
quality early care for their children. The cut means over 15,000 children currently participating in the program will no longer be served. Florida also reduced by 7 percent the per-student
allocation to providers participating in the state’s universal prekindergarten program for 4-year-olds, which will mean that classrooms have more children per teacher. Georgia cut state and
lottery funds for pre-kindergarten by 15 percent, which will mean shortening the pre-K school year from 180 to 160 days for 86,000 four-year-olds, increasing class sizes from 20 to 22 students
per teacher, and reducing teacher salaries by 10 percent. Iowa reduced state funding for its statewide pre-kindergarten program for four-year-olds by 9 percent from last year. Schools serving
these children will now receive fewer dollars per child and may have to make up for lost funds with reduced enrollment or higher property taxes. The state is also cutting back support for a
community-based early childhood program that provides resources to parents with children from birth to age 5, including a cut of nearly 30 percent to preschool tuition assistance. Illinois is
cutting general state aid for public schools by $152 million, on top of a loss of $415 million in expired federal recovery dollars — a total decrease of 11 percent. The budget takes $17 million
from the state fund that supports early childhood education efforts, which may result in an estimated 4,000 fewer children receiving preschool services and 1,000 fewer at-risk infants and toddlers
receiving developmental services. The budget also eliminates state funding for advanced placement courses in school districts with large concentrations of low-income students, mentoring
programs for teachers and principals, and an initiative providing targeted, research-based instruction to students with learning difficulties. Kansas cut the basic funding formula for K-12 schools
by $232 per-pupil, bringing this funding nearly 6 percent below fiscal year 2011 budgeted levels. For the third year in a row, Louisiana will fail to fund K-12 education at the minimum amount
required to ensure adequate funding for at-risk and special needs students, as determined by the state’s education finance formula. Per student spending will be $215 below the level set out by the
finance formula for FY12. Michigan is cutting K-12 education spending by $470 per student. Mississippi, for the fourth year in a row, will fail to meet the state’s statutory obligation to support
K-12 schools, underfunding school districts by 10.5 percent or $236 million. The statutory school funding formula is designed to ensure adequate funding for lower-income and underperforming
schools. According to the Mississippi Department of Education, the state’s failure to meet that requirement over the past three years has resulted in 2,060 school employee layoffs (704 teachers,
792 teacher assistants, 163 administrators, counselors, and librarians, and 401 bus drivers, custodians, and clerical personnel).[11] Missouri is freezing funding for K-12 education at last year’s
levels. This means that for the second year in a row, the state has failed to meet the statutory funding formula established to ensure equitable distribution of state dollars to school districts.
Nebraska altered its K-12 school aid funding formula to freeze state aid to schools in the coming year and allow very small increases thereafter, resulting in a cut of $410 million over two years.
New Mexico cut K-12 spending by $42 million (1.7 percent). The governor is requiring school districts to spare “classroom spending” from the cuts, which means greater proportional cuts to
other areas of K-12 education like school libraries and guidance counseling. The operating budget of the state education department is being cut by more than 25 percent. New York cut education
aid by $1.3 billion, or 6.1 percent. This cut will delay implementation of a court order to provide additional education funding to under-resourced school districts for the third year in a row.
Beyond cutting the level of education aid in FY12, the budget limits the rate at which education spending can grow in future years to the rate of growth in state personal income. North Carolina
cut nearly half of a billion dollars from K-12 education in each year of the biennium compared to the amount necessary to provide the same level of K-12 education services in 2012 as in 2011.
Both the state-funded prekindergarten program for at risk 4-year-olds and the state’s early childhood development network that works to improve the quality of early learning and child outcomes
were cut by 20 percent. The budget also reduces by 80 percent funds for textbooks; reduces by 5 percent funds for support positions, like guidance counselors and social workers; reduces by 15
percent funds for non-instructional staff; and cuts by 16 percent salaries and benefits for superintendents, associate and assistant superintendents, finance officers, athletic trainers, and
transportation directors, among others. Ohio is cutting state K-12 education funding 7.5 percent this year, a cut of $400 per student and equivalent to nearly 14,000 teachers’ salaries. Oklahoma is
cutting funding for school districts by 4.5 percent, and makes additional cuts to the Department of Education’s budget. The Department of Education has voted to eliminate adult education
programs, math labs in middle school, and stipends for certified teachers, among other things. Pennsylvania cut K-12 education aid by $422 million, or 7.3 percent, bringing funding down nearly
to FY2009 levels. The budget also cuts $429 million dollars in additional funding that the state provides to school districts to implement effective educational practices (such as high quality prekindergarten programs) and maintain tutoring programs, among other purposes. Overall state funding for school districts was cut by $851 million or 13.5 percent, a cut of $485 per student. South
Dakota cut K-12 education by 6.4 percent, next year, an amount equal to $416 per student, and 8.8 percent in 2013. Texas eliminated state funding for pre-K programs that serve around 100,000
mostly at-risk children, or more than 40 percent of the state’s pre-kindergarten students. The budget also reduces state K-12 funding to 9.4 percent below the minimum amount required by the
state law. Texas already has below-average K-12 education funding compared to other states, and this cut would depress that low level even further at a time when the state’s school enrollment is
growing. This would likely force school districts to lay off large numbers of teachers, increase class sizes, eliminate sports programs and other extracurricular activities, and take other measures
that undermine the quality of education. Utah cut K-12 education by 5 percent, or $303, per pupil from the prior year’s levels. Washington is taking over $1 billion from state K-12 education
funds designed to reduce class size, extend learning time, and provide professional development for teachers — a cut equal to $1,100 per student. Wisconsin reduced state aid designed to
The budget also reduces K-12 funds for services
At least 25 states have made large, identifiable cuts in funding
for state colleges and universities, with direct impacts on students. Arizona cut funding for public universities by nearly one-quarter, or
equalize funding across school districts by $740 million over the coming two-year budget cycle, a cut of 8 percent.
for at-risk children, school nursing, and alternative education. Higher Education
$200 million. This would add to deep previous cuts: from 2008 through 2011, state support for universities fell by $230 million, resulting in the elimination of more than 2,100 positions (an 11
Universities have raised tuition significantly, closed eight extended campuses, and
merged, consolidated, or disestablished 182 colleges, schools, programs, and departments. Combined
with those previous cuts, the FY12 reduction brings per-student state funding down to 50 percent below
pre-recession levels.[12] Arizona also cut community college funding for operating expenses by about $73 million. The cut amounts to 6.2 percent of total community college
percent reduction in the workforce).
operating revenues and half of all state support for community colleges. California is increasing fees at community colleges starting this fall by 38 percent; for the average student, this means an
annual fee increase of $300. The state also is reducing funding for the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) systems by $1.3 billion ($650 million each). Since
FY2008 California has cut funding for the UC system by 27 percent and has cut funding for the CSU system by almost 28 percent. In response to cuts in funding, the CSU will increase annual
tuition by 29 percent, or $1,242 for full time undergraduate students (relative to the tuition rate that was in place at the beginning of last school year). UC will increase annual tuition by 18
percent, or over $1,800 for resident undergraduate students. UC tuition has grown by more than 80 percent since the 2007-08 academic year. Colorado cut state university spending by 11.5
percent over the prior year, which is expected to be offset with tuition increases of 9 percent, on average. The budget also cuts a means-tested stipend program for undergraduate students by 21
percent from what was budgeted for the current year. Florida cut state higher education spending and raised state university tuition for undergraduates by 8 percent. State universities are
increasing tuition by another 7 percent to offset cuts in funding. This comes on the heels of tuition hikes equaling over 30 percent since the 2009-10 school year. The state has also cut a university
merit-based scholarship program by 20 percent. Georgia cut funding for a popular merit-based college scholarship program serving hundreds of thousands of students by about one-fifth,
university funding by 10 percent, and funding for technical colleges by 4 percent. Iowa is cutting state funding for public universities by $20 million, or around 4 percent. This brings state
support below fiscal year 2007 levels. Louisiana enacted a 10 percent tuition increase for the state university system, or an average increase of around $600 more per year per student, in order to
make up for the loss of federal and state dollars. Technical colleges will raise tuition by an average of $700 for full-time students. Massachusetts cut funding for higher education by $64 million,
or 6.3 percent. Since FY2009, after adjusting for inflation, the state has cut funding by $185 million, or 16.3 percent. Michigan cut by 15 percent state support for public universities, and will
increase the cut to about 20 percent for universities that raise tuition by more than 7 percent. Universities are already announcing tuition increases just under that limit, amounting to $600 - $900
tuition increases for in-state undergraduate students. The state also cut funding for community colleges by 4 percent. Minnesota is cutting state funding for higher education 12 percent below
2011 levels. This includes a $194 million cut to the University of Minnesota system and a $170 million cut to the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system. Missouri cut state support for
higher education by 7 percent. The cuts continue a trend of declining state support for Missouri’s universities and community colleges; over the last decade, state support for universities has
fallen by 28 percent per student and support for community colleges has fallen by 12 percent. Nevada reduced state funding for the higher education system by 15 percent, which will result in an
increase in undergraduate tuition of 13 percent in FY12 and an increase in graduate school tuition of 5 percent in FY12 and again in FY13. New Hampshire cut support for the university system
almost in half in a single year, from $100 million to $52 million. University officials have announced that they will raise tuition 8.7 - 9.7 percent, eliminate around 200 positions, reduce
employee benefits, dip into reserves, and take other measures as a result. Community colleges also face a 37 percent cut and will raise tuition 6.5 percent for the coming year, which will cost full
time students up to $360 per year. New Mexico reduced by 8 percent state funding for public universities, which will result in a 5.5 percent tuition increase ($304 per student). New York cut state
funding for the State University of New York (SUNY) by 7.6 percent, and reduces state funding for the City University of New York (CUNY) by 4.4 percent. To help them absorb the funding
cuts, the legislature passed a bill that allows SUNY and CUNY to raise tuition by about 30 percent over the next five years. These tuition increases would affect 220,000 students in the SUNY
system and 137,000 in the CUNY system and come on top of increases already imposed since the recession began. At SUNY, for example, substantial reductions in state support resulted in a 14
percent tuition increase in 2009. North Carolina cut nearly half of a billion dollars from higher education in each year of the biennium compared to the amount necessary to provide the same level
of higher education services in 2012 as in 2011. The cuts mean that full-time resident community college students could see their tuition increase to $2,128 in FY12 and $2,208 in FY13 from the
current $1,808 per year. Funds for community college basic education courses were cut by 12 percent. North Carolina is also forcing the university system to find more than $330 million in
savings in each year of the biennium. The state also is reducing by 59 percent (or $26 million each year) the state subsidy to university hospitals to offset the costs of uncompensated care, which
the hospital system estimates at $300 million this year. Oklahoma is cutting state funding for higher education by nearly 6.7 percent. Partially as a result, tuition and fees were increased by an
average of 5.9 percent, or about $225 per student. The budget also cuts a career and technical education training program by about 6.5 percent. Ohio cut higher education funding 10 percent for
FY12, amounting to $590 per student. Students at public universities face a 7 percent tuition increase as well as an undetermined (and uncapped) amount of fee increases. Pennsylvania cut
funding for the state’s system of higher education by $91 million, or 18 percent. The budget also cuts funding for the state’s four “state related” universities (Penn State, the University of
Pittsburgh, Temple, and Lincoln University) by roughly 20 percent. As a result, the University of Pittsburgh will increase in-state tuition by 8.5 percent and Temple University will increase instate tuition by almost ten percent. Other state universities will see tuition increases of 7.5 percent. South Dakota cut higher education (and most other agencies) by 10 percent. The Board of
Regents voted to raise tuition by 6.9 percent, or $490 per student, on average. The tuition increase covers only part of the loss of state funding, and each university has to determine how it will
make up for the remaining loss of funds. Tennessee cut funds for the University of Tennessee system by 25 percent compared to 2011. Tuition within the system will rise 6 to 10 percent. Texas
reduced general revenue spending on higher education by 9 percent over two years. This includes a cut of 5 percent to college and university formula spending, a cut of 10 percent in formula
spending for health institutions, such as nursing schools, and a cut of 25 percent to funds for university research centers, graduate programs, and other non-operations spending. Enrollment
growth is not funded for any higher education institution. The budget also cuts by 10 percent financial aid awards under the Texas grant program, which combines state and institutional money to
cover tuition and fees for public school students with financial need and good academic records. The cut will likely result in smaller awards. Utah is cutting its higher education budget by about 1
percent below last year’s level, bringing the total decline in state spending to 2 percent since 2009. These funding cuts come despite rapidly rising enrollment. For example, enrollment in Utah’s
system of higher education in the spring 2011 semester was 4 percent above enrollment the previous year. The failure of state funding to keep up with enrollment growth will result in an average
tuition increase of 7.5 percent. Washington is cutting state funding for colleges and universities by more than $500 million and raising tuition in the upcoming school year by anywhere from 11
percent to 16 percent compared with last year. Wisconsin is cutting $250 million from the state university system, with nearly $100 million of that cut coming from funds for UW-Madison. The
budget freezes financial aid at current levels despite expected tuition increases of 5.5 percent system-wide and a recently approved tuition increase of 8.3 percent for UW-Madison, creating an
even larger funding gap that students and their families will have to fill.
The budget also cuts state support for technical colleges by about $70
million over the biennium, or 25 percent, and places a two-year freeze on local property tax levies that allow communities to raise funds for technical colleges.
That destroys American primacy
NAS ‘7 (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, “RISING ABOVE THE GATHERING STORM Energizing and Employing America for
a Brighter Economic Future”, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, July,
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463.html)
China and India indeed have low wage structures, but the United States has many other advantages. These include a better science and technology
infrastructure, stronger venture-capital markets, an ability to attract talent from around the world, and a culture of inventiveness.
Comparative advantage shifts from place to place over time and always has; the earth cannot really be
flattened. The US response to competition must include proper retraining of those who are disadvantaged and
adaptive institutional and policy responses that make the best use of opportunities that arise. India and China will become consumers of those
countries’ products as well as ours. That same rising middle class will have a stake in the “frictionless” flow of international commerce—and
hence in stability, peace, and the rule of law. Such
a desirable state, writes Friedman, will not be achieved without
problems, and whether global flatness is good for a particular country depends on whether that country is
prepared to compete on the global playing field, which is as rough and tumble as it is level. Friedman asks
rhetorically whether his own country is proving its readiness by “investing in our future and preparing our
children the way we need to for the race ahead.” Friedman’s answer, not surprisingly, is no. This report addresses the
possibility that our lack of preparation will reduce the ability of the United States to compete in such a
world. Many underlying issues are technical; some are not. Some are “political”—not in the sense of partisan politics, but in the sense of
“bringing the rest of the body politic along.” Scientists and engineers often avoid such discussions, but the stakes are too high to keep silent any
“creeping crisis,” is reminiscent of the folk tale about
boiling a frog. If a frog is dropped into boiling water, it will immediately jump out and survive. But a frog
placed in cool water that is heated slowly until it boils won’t respond until it is too late.Our crisis is not the result
longer. Friedman’s term quiet crisis, which others have called a
of a one-dimensional change; it is more than a simple increase in water temperature. And we have no single awakening event, such as Sputnik.
The United States is instead facing problems that are developing slowly but surely, each like a tile in a
mosaic. None by itself seems sufficient to provoke action. But the collection of problems reveals a
disturbing picture—a recurring pattern of abundant short-term thinking and insufficient long-term
investment. Our collective reaction thus far seems to presuppose that the citizens of the United States and their children are entitled to a better
quality of life than others, and that all Americans need do is circle the wagons to defend that entitlement. Such a presupposition does not reflect
reality and neither recognizes the dangers nor seizes the opportunities of current circumstances. Furthermore, it won’t work. In 2001, the Hart–
Rudman Commission on national security, which foresaw large-scale terrorism in America and proposed the establishment of a cabinet-level
Homeland Security organization before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, put the matter this way:4 The
inadequacies of our system of
education pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any
potential conventional war that we might imagine. President George W. Bush has said “Science and technology have
never been more essential to the defense of the nation and the health of our economy.”5 US Commission on
research and
National Security. Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change. Washington, DC: US Commission on National Security, 2001. A
letter from the leadership of the National Science Foundation to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology put the case even
more bluntly:6 Civilization
is on the brink of a new industrial order. The big winners in the increasingly fierce
global scramble for supremacy will not be those who simply make commodities faster and cheaper than the competition. They will
be those who develop talent, techniques and tools so advanced that there is no competition .
Great power wars
ZHANG AND SHI 11 - *Yuhan, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C. *** AND*** Lin, Columbia
University. She also serves as an independent consultant for the Eurasia Group and a consultant for the World Bank in Washington, D.C. “America’s decline: A
harbinger of conflict and rivalry” http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/01/22/americas-decline-a-harbinger-of-conflict-and-rivalry/)
Over the past two decades, no other state has had the ability to seriously challenge the US military. Under these circumstances,
motivated by
both opportunity and fear, many actors have bandwagoned with US hegemony and accepted a
subordinate role. Canada, most of Western Europe, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and
the Philippines have all joined the US, creating a status quo that has tended to mute great power conflicts.
However, as the hegemony that drew these powers together withers, so will the pulling power behind the
US alliance. The result will be an international order where power is more diffuse, American interests and
influence can be more readily challenged, and conflicts or wars may be harder to avoid. As history attests,
power decline and redistribution result in military confrontation. For example, in the late 19th century
America’s emergence as a regional power saw it launch its first overseas war of conquest towards Spain.
By the turn of the 20th century, accompanying the increase in US power and waning of British power, the American Navy had begun to challenge
the notion that Britain ‘rules the waves.’ Such a notion would eventually see the US attain the status of sole guardians of the Western
Hemisphere’s security to become the order-creating Leviathan shaping the international system with democracy and rule of law. Defining
this US-centred system are three key characteristics: enforcement of property rights, constraints on the
actions of powerful individuals and groups and some degree of equal opportunities for broad segments of
society. As a result of such political stability, free markets, liberal trade and flexible financial mechanisms
have appeared. And, with this, many countries have sought opportunities to enter this system,
proliferating stable and cooperative relations. However, what will happen to these advances as America’s influence declines?
Given that America’s authority, although sullied at times, has benefited people across much of Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, the
Balkans, as well as parts of Africa and, quite extensively, Asia, the answer to this question could affect global society in a profoundly detrimental
way. Public imagination and academia have anticipated that a post-hegemonic world would return to the problems of the 1930s: regional blocs,
trade conflicts and strategic rivalry. Furthermore, multilateral
institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO
might give way to regional organisations. For example, Europe and East Asia would each step forward to
fill the vacuum left by Washington’s withering leadership to pursue their own visions of regional political
and economic orders. Free markets would become more politicised — and, well, less free — and major powers would compete for
supremacy. Additionally, such power plays have historically possessed a zero-sum element. In the late 1960s and 1970s, US economic power
declined relative to the rise of the Japanese and Western European economies, with the US dollar also becoming less attractive. And, as American
power eroded, so did international regimes (such as the Bretton Woods System in 1973). A
world without American hegemony is
one where great power wars re-emerge, the liberal international system is supplanted by an
authoritarian one, and trade protectionism devolves into restrictive, anti-globalisation barriers. This, at
least, is one possibility we can forecast in a future that will inevitably be devoid of unrivalled US
primacy.
AT: Education Won’t Get Cut
States slash education spending – 2011 proves
CBPP 11
(Center on budget and Policy Priorities, Think tank specializing in federal and state policies, 10/7/11,
“New School Year Brings Steep Cuts in State funding for Schools,
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3569)
Elementary and high schools
are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states, and in at least 30
cuts are attributable, in part, to the
failure of the federal government to extend emergency fiscal aid to states and school districts and the
failure of most states to enact needed revenue increases and instead to balance their budgets solely through
spending cuts. The cuts have significant consequences, both now and in the future: They are causing immediate public- and
states school funding now stands below 2008 levels – often far below. These
private-sector job loss, and in the long term are likely to reduce student achievement and economic growth. Our review of budget
documents finds that, of 46 states that publish education budget data in a way that allows historic comparisons: 37 states are
providing less funding per student to local school districts in the new school year than they provided last year. 30
states are providing less than they did four years ago.. 17 states have cut per-student funding by more than 10 percent from prerecession levels. Four states— South Carolina, Arizona, California, and Hawaii — each have reduced per
student funding to K-12 schools by
more than 20 percent.
Empirically proven – education gets the axe first
CNN 12
(Cable News Network, Major National News Source, 3/27/12, Economic Recovery Skips the Classroom,
http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/27/news/economy/education-budget-cuts/index.htm)
More than eight
in 10 districts say they are inadequately funded, and more than half anticipate a decrease
in state and local revenues for the coming school year, according to a recent survey from the American Association of School
Administrators. Even in districts where state aid is stabilizing, local funding is shrinking or costs are rising faster than revenues. Many are only
now feeling the effects of the housing bust as towns
lower property assessments, which affects the property tax revenues that
many schools depend on. A model for addressing college costs Yet another year of cuts is prompting a greater share of districts to slash
teachers, classes and more. Two-thirds of districts expect to eliminate positions in 2012-13, while one-quarter are looking at furloughs. Some
57% anticipate having to increase class size. More than 48% say they may have to eliminate or delay instruction improvements, such as updating
textbooks, computers and science labs. Nearly three in 10 are considering canceling summer school. "The cuts are so drastic because those who
have already made cuts have already made the easy ones," said Noelle Ellerson, the association's assistant director. Tough choices The recovery
has yet to come to Wicomico County, a rural area in eastern Maryland. Tax revenue is up only slightly and unemployment remains high. So
Superintendent John Fredericksen is struggling to find another way to slash $1.8 million, about 1.5%, out of his district's budget after cutting
millions more in recent years. He's trying to do it without affecting the children, who are already packed tighter into classrooms than their peers in
neighboring districts. This coming year, Wicomico will charge many kids $2,000 to go to pre-K instead of letting them in for free. It plans to
close its buildings on Fridays in the summertime, and it will hold onto its vehicles for up to 15 years instead of 12. The district also hopes to save
$900,000 through an early retirement incentive plan. Fredericksen
had hoped the cuts would be over by now. "I thought
I was at the end of my last straw last year," he said. North Penn School District outside of Philadelphia isn't as fortunate. To reduce its
budget by $2.5 million, or about 1.3%, it will have to make cuts that the students will feel. "We're just starting to see a few
months of positive economic data in our community," said Superintendent Curtis Dietrich. "It's too soon to plan it into our budgets." As a result,
administrators are targeting elective classes, assistant coaches and clubs for the coming school year. The district may also cut back on paying for
students to travel to debate team, mock trial, music competitions and the like. It could also consolidate certain classes, such as art, and not replace
retiring and departing staffers. The North Penn School
District already cut 5% of its teachers, 6% of support staff
and 14% of its administrators this current school year. But it's also feeling the pinch from higher pension contribution
costs. The story is similar in Seminole County, Fla., which is still reeling from last year's budget slashing. Though the suburban district north of
Orlando is getting more money from the state, it still has to cut more than $16 million, or 3.8%, for the coming year. So when kids return in the
fall, they'll find fewer elective classes, such as art, music and languages, said Superintendent Bill Vogel. There will be 50 fewer teachers and 20%
fewer coaches, which will hit the junior varsity and 9th grade teams particularly hard. Vogel is especially concerned about the district's inability
to upgrade its technology due to lack of funds. It needs to do that to better prepare students for the innovation industry jobs in its backyard.
Ext – Heg Impact
Effective power projection stops hotspot escalation to nuclear war
O’Hanlon 7 – Frederick Kagan, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael
O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow and Sydney Stein Jr. Chair in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings
Institution, “The Case for Larger Ground Forces”, Stanley Foundation Report, April,
http://stanleyfoundation.org/publications/other/Kagan_OHanlon_07.pdf
We live at a time when wars not only rage in nearly every region but threaten to erupt in many places where the current relative
calm is tenuous. To view this as a strategic military challenge for the United States is not to espouse a specific theory of America’s role in the
world or a certain political philosophy. Such an assessment flows directly from the basic bipartisan view of American foreign policy makers since
World War II that overseas
threats must be countered before they can directly threaten this country’s shores, that the basic
stability of the international system is essential to American peace and prosperity, and that no country besides the U nited
S tates is in a position to lead the way in countering major challenges to the global order . Let us highlight the
threats and their consequences with a few concrete examples, emphasizing those that involve key strategic regions of the world
such as the Persian Gulf and East Asia, or key potential threats to American security, such as the spread of
nuclear weapons and the strengthening of the global Al Qaeda/jihadist movement. The Iranian government has rejected a
series of international demands to halt its efforts at enriching uranium and submit to international inspections. What will happen if the
US—or Israeli—government becomes convinced that Tehran is on the verge of fielding a nuclear weapon? North
Korea , of course, has already done so, and the ripple effects are beginning to spread. Japan’s recent election to supreme
power of a leader who has promised to rewrite that country’s constitution to support increased armed forces—and, possibly, even nuclear
weapons— may well alter the delicate balance of fear in Northeast Asia fundamentally and rapidly. Also, in the background, at least for now,
Sino- Taiwanese tensions continue to flare, as do tensions between India and Pakistan , Pakistan and
Afghanistan, Venezuela and the United States, and so on. Meanwhile, the world’s nonintervention in Darfur troubles consciences from Europe to
America’s Bible Belt to its bastions of liberalism, yet with no serious international forces on offer, the bloodletting will probably, tragically,
continue unabated. And as bad as things are in Iraq today, they could get worse. What would happen if the key Shiite figure, Ali al
Sistani, were to die? If another major attack on the scale of the Golden Mosque bombing hit either side (or, perhaps, both sides at the same time)?
Such deterioration might convince many Americans that the war there truly was lost—but the costs of reaching such a conclusion would be
enormous. Afghanistan is somewhat more stable for the moment, although a major Taliban offensive appears to be in the offing. Sound US grand
strategy must proceed from the recognition that, over
the next few years and decades, the world is going to be a very
unsettled and quite dangerous place, with Al Qaeda and its associated groups as a subset of a much larger set of worries. The
only serious response to this international environment is to develop armed forces capable of protecting America’s
vital interests throughout this dangerous time. Doing so requires a military capable of a wide range of missions—
including not only deterrence of great power conflict in dealing with potential hotspots in Korea , the Taiwan
Strait, and the Persian Gulf but also associated with a variety of Special Forces activities and stabilization operations. For
today’s US military, which already excels at high technology and is increasingly focused on re-learning the lost art of counterinsurgency, this is
first and foremost a question of finding the resources to field a large-enough standing Army and Marine Corps to handle personnelintensive
missions such as the ones now under way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us hope there will be no such large-scale missions for a while. But
preparing for the possibility, while doing whatever we can at this late hour to relieve the pressure on our soldiers and Marines in ongoing
operations, is prudent. At worst, the only potential downside to a major program to strengthen the military is the possibility of spending a bit too
much money. Recent history shows no link between having a larger military and its overuse; indeed, Ronald Reagan’s time in office was
characterized by higher defense budgets and yet much less use of the military, an outcome for which we can hope in the coming years, but hardly
guarantee. While the authors disagree between ourselves about proper increases in the size and cost of the military (with O’Hanlon preferring to
hold defense to roughly 4 percent of GDP and seeing ground forces increase by a total of perhaps 100,000, and Kagan willing to devote at least 5
percent of GDP to defense as in the Reagan years and increase the Army by at least 250,000), we agree on the need to start expanding ground
force capabilities by at least 25,000 a year immediately. Such a measure is not only prudent, it is also badly overdue.
Other Impacts
Impact – Disease
State budget cuts hamper disease prevention
TAH ‘11 (Trust for America’s Health. “Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and
Bioterrorism”. December, 2011. http://healthyamericans.org/report/92/)
Ready or Not? Protecting
the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism finds key programs that
detect and respond to bioterrorism, new disease outbreaks and natural or accidental disasters are at risk
due to federal and state budget cuts. The report, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), identifies
some key programs at risk due to continued cuts to federal public health emergency preparedness funds include: 51 of the 72 cities in
the Cities Readiness Initiative are at risk for elimination; the Initiative supports the ability to rapidly distribute and administer vaccines and
medications during emergencies; All 10 state labs with “Level 1” chemical testing status are at risk for losing top level capabilities, which could
leave the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with the only public health lab in the country with full ability to test for
chemical terrorism and accidents; 24
states are at risk for losing the support of Career Epidemiology Field Officers
- CDC experts who supplement state and local gaps to rapidly prevent and respond to outbreaks and
disasters, such as during the H1N1 flu pandemic and responding to the health impact of the Gulf Oil Spill in 2010; and The ability for CDC to
mount a comprehensive response to nuclear, radiologic and chemical threats as well as natural disasters is at risk due to potential cuts to the
National Center for Environmental Health. All 50 states and Washington, D.C. would lose the support CDC provides during these emergencies.
"We're seeing a decade's worth of progress eroding in front of our eyes," said Jeff Levi, PhD, Executive Director of TFAH. " Preparedness
had been on an upward trajectory, but now some of the most elementary capabilities - including the
ability to identify and contain outbreaks, provide vaccines and medications during emergencies, and treat
people during mass traumas - are experiencing cuts in every state across the country." Combined federal, state and
local budget cuts mean public health departments can no longer sustain a number of basic elements of preparedness. In the past year, 40 states
and Washington, D.C. cut state public health funds - with 29 of those states and D.C. cutting their budgets for a second year in a row and 15
states for three years in a row. Federal funds for state and local preparedness declined by 38 percent from fiscal year (FY) 2005 to 2012 (adjusted
for inflation) - and additional cuts are expected under budget sequestration. "Americans expect the public health system to have the capability to
competently protect their health during emergencies. This is not an optional service," said Mel Kohn, MD, MPH, State Health Officer and Public
Health Director of the Oregon Health Authority. "We
will be unable to absorb reductions of this magnitude simply
by finding efficiencies. We have reached the point where our ability to do this work will be seriously
compromised, with life and death consequences." "During the anthrax attacks and Hurricane Katrina, we witnessed what
happens when public health doesn't have the technology, resources, workforce or training needed to respond to emergencies," said James S.
Marks, Senior Vice President and Director of the Health Group of RWJF. " The
old adage is that it's better to be safe than
sorry. Unfortunately if we ignore preparedness now, we'll be sorry later when the next emergency strikes."
Mutated disease cause extinction
Discover ‘00 (“Twenty Ways the World Could End” by Corey Powell in Discover Magazine, October
2000, http://discovermagazine.com/2000/oct/featworld)
If Earth doesn't do us in, our fellow organisms might be up to the task. Germs and people have always
coexisted, but occasionally the balance gets out of whack. The Black Plague killed one European in four during the 14th
century; influenza took at least 20 million lives between 1918 and 1919; the AIDS epidemic has produced a similar death toll and is still going
strong. From 1980 to 1992, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mortality from infectious disease in the United States rose 58
percent.
Old diseases such as cholera and measles have developed new resistance to antibiotics. Intensive
agriculture and land development is bringing humans closer to animal pathogens. International travel
means diseases can spread faster than ever. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who recently left the
Minnesota Department of Health, described the situation as "like trying to swim against the current of a raging
river." The grimmest possibility would be the emergence of a strain that spreads so fast we are caught off
guard or that resists all chemical means of control, perhaps as a result of our stirring of the ecological pot.
About 12,000 years ago, a sudden wave of mammal extinctions swept through the Americas. Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural
History argues the culprit was extremely virulent disease, which humans helped transport as they migrated into the New World.
Impact – BioDiversity
State Budget Cuts shut down the Biodiversity Program
DeSantis ’12 (Nick, DeSantis, January 12, 2012 http://chronicle.com/article/Budget-Cuts-ForceBiodiversity/130331/, “Budget Cuts Force Biodiversity Program to Close”)
Budget cuts have forced a key biodiversity database to close, leaving scientists and researchers
without a unified tool to access biological data from across state and federal agencies.¶ The U.S.
Geological Survey's National Biological Information Infrastructure program and its popular Web
site will shut down on Jan. 15 due to the elimination of the program's 2012 federal budget. The
program's closure follows a series of drastic cuts that reduced its budget to zero in 2012 from $7 million in 2010.¶ Created in 1994 within what
was then the National Biological Service of the Department of the Interior, the
program gives researchers a direct link to
biodiversity information that would otherwise be spread across a range of government agencies. With a few clicks, researchers
can access a variety of environmental data, from taxonomic information about plants and animals
to news covering the spread of wildlife diseases. Experts said the futures of some databases supported by the program are
now uncertain, even as efforts are under way to archive the material.¶ Researchers "could do one-stop shopping with
NBII", according to Henry L. Bart Jr., a professor of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Tulane University who directs a
biodiversity research institute there. But after the program closes Sunday, he said, "they'll have to use a new resource." Mr. Bart said he expects
the closure to have a significant effect on researchers who rely on the site to browse data sets outside their areas of expertise. ¶ Maria A.
Jankowska, chair of the American Library Association's task force on the environment, said she was "shocked" to learn of the impending closure.
By the time she received the news in late December, she said, it was too late to protest:
Her associations's midwinter meeting,
at which she could have proposed a resolution on behalf of the closing program, meets five days
after it is scheduled to shut down.¶ Frederick W. Stoss, an associate librarian at the University at
Buffalo, said the resource is part of a "soft underbelly" of government programs that is easy for outsiders to criticize, but actually provides
vital information on some of the most pressing environmental problems. Mr. Stoss said some institutions are trying to work together to preserve
the material, but they are unlikely to match the convenience and breadth of the program's resources. Researchers looking for biodiversity data in
the future will likely have to hunt down individual sources instead of visiting a single access point. ¶ "Someone
has to go back and
essentially reinvent the wheel because somebody has hidden the wheel," Mr. Stoss said.¶ Before the closure, the
Geological Survey is working with its partner organizations to ensure that some of the data sets available through the program will be maintained,
though long-term access remains uncertain, according to Michael McDermott, the agency's deputy director of core science, analytics, and
synthesis. But Mr. Stoss said even if the agency's partners are able to sustain the data over the long term, the information will still be more
difficult for scholars to locate.¶ "It
just makes the search for the information and data that much more timeconsuming, if it can be done at all," he said.
Extinction
Clark 6 (Dana, Adjunct Professor – The American University's Washington College of Law, & David
Downes, Senior Trade Advisor in the Office of the Secretary of the United States Department of the
Interior, adjunct faculty of the American University's Washington College of Law, 12-29,
http://www.ciel.org/Publications/summary.html)
Biodiversity is the diversity of life on earth, on which we depend for our survival . The variability of and within species and
ecosystems helps provide some of our basic needs: food, shelter, and medicine, as well as recreational, cultural, spiritual and aesthetic benefits. Diverse ecosystems create the air we
breathe, enrich the soil we till and purify the water we drink. Ecosystems also regulate local and global climate. No one can seriously argue that biodiversity is
not valuable. Nor can anyone seriously argue that biodiversity is not at risk. There are over 900 domestic species listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and 4,000 additional species are candidates for
listing. We are losing species as a result of human activities at hundreds of times the natural rate of extinction. The current rate of extinction is the highest since the mass extinction of species that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of
years ago. The Economics of Biodiversity Conservation The question which engenders serious controversy is whether society can afford the costs associated with saving biodiversity. Opponents of biodiversity conservation argue that
the costs of protecting endangered species are too high. They complain that the regulatory burden on private landowners is too heavy, and that conservation measures impede development. They seek to override scientific
determinations with economic considerations, and to impose cost/benefit analyses on biodiversity policy making. An equally important question, however, is whether we can afford not to save biodiversity. The consequences of losing
this critical resource could be devastating.
As we destroy species and habitat, we endanger food supplies (such as crop varieties that impart resistance to disease, or the loss of spawning grounds
we impair critical ecosystem functions that protect our water supplies, create the air we
for fish and shellfish); we lose the opportunity to develop new medicines or other chemicals; and
breathe, regulate climate and shelter us from storms. We lose creatures of cultural importance - the bald eagle is an example of the cultural significance of biodiversity and also of the need for strong regulations to protect species from
extinction. And, we lose the opportunity for mental or spiritual rejuvenation through contact with nature. There are many other costs associated with the loss of biodiversity, and other values associated with its preservation.
Researchers are finding that protection of ecosystems rich in biodiversity can strengthen and diversify regional economies. For example, the estimated economic value of intact natural forests for recreation, production of fish and
wildlife, and other benefits, is one-third to three times as much as their value for timber alone, according to the World Resources Institute. These are significant costs and benefits which should be included in any economic analysis of
biodiversity conservation. Much of the current controversy stems from private landowners who resent government regulation of their lands. Government regulation is necessary to protect a critical public resource from private
destruction. However, individual citizens should not bear the full cost of protecting biodiversity, since their actions benefit society at large. Within the context of a strong regulatory framework with defined conservation goals,
economic incentives can help defuse political controversy by providing increased flexibility and rewarding private sector conservation efforts. Conservation strategies must be developed that make private landowners willing partners
in biodiversity conservation. This is particularly important given that seventy percent of U.S. land outside of Alaska is privately owned. Even more significantly, more than fifty percent of species listed under the Endangered Species
Act are found only on private lands, and many more have substantial parts of their remaining range on private property. In many cases, reforms to benefit biodiversity will require the revision of existing incentives offered to the
If biodiversity considerations are linked to
the economic incentive, the signal sent to the private sector is harmonized rather than conflicting. Private landowners
private sector by government policies. In many cases, economic policies send signals which conflict with the goal of species conservation.
benefit from public assistance in many ways. These benefits include subsidized access to vital resources like water and roadways, price supports, and tax breaks, all of which increase the value of property. For example, the American
Farm Bureau Federation has estimated that farm support payments have increased the value of farmland in this country by $250 billion. Public support could be conditioned upon requiring recipients to comply with existing laws and
to implement management practices that embody sound principles of land stewardship. In order to fully integrate economic and environmental policy, we must also examine the biodiversity impact of government subsidies.
Government subsidies often stimulate or encourage activities that damage biodiversity. Tax breaks for extractive industries are a prime example of this problem. In addition, agricultural policies have a dramatic effect on land use in
farm support programs provide perverse incentives that contribute to soil erosio n,
overuse of ag ricultural chemicals, and loss of wildlife habitat . Commodity price support programs are tied to production levels. At the same time,
the United States. As currently structured,
acreage reduction programs restrict the amount of acreage that can be planted. These policies work together to encourage intensive cropping and high levels of chemical inputs on land that is planted, in order to boost production and
negative effects of agriculture policy could be ameliorated by removing the perverse incentives, linking
support to best management practices and purchasing conservation easements to keep certain lands out of agricultural production.
maximize the government subsidy. These
Other Off Case
T - Federal
1NC Shell
Interpretation- Federal is not states
OED 89 (Oxford English Dictionary, 2ed. XIX, p. 795)
b. Of or pertaining to the political unity so constituted, as distinguished from the separate states composing it.
And, “Its” refers to the United States Federal Government and is possessive
Updegrave 91 (W.C., “Explanation of ZIP Code Address Purpose”, 8-19,
http://www.supremelaw.org/ref/zipcode/updegrav.htm)
More specifically, looking at the map on page 11 of the National ZIP Code Directory, e.g. at a local post office, one will see that the first digit of
a ZIP Code defines an area that includes more than one State. The first sentence of the explanatory paragraph begins: "A ZIP Code is a numerical
code that identifies areas within the United States and its territories for purposes of ..." [cf. 26 CFR 1.1-1(c)].
Note the singular
possessive pronoun "its", not "their", therefore carrying the implication that it relates to the " U nited S tates" as a
corporation domiciled in the D istrict of C olumbia (in the singular sense), not in the sense of being the 50 States of
the Union (in the plural sense). The map shows all the States of the Union, but it also shows D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands,
making the explanatory statement literally correct.
Violation – States run welfare
Rubin 12 (Jennifer Rubin, July 15, 2012, Obama to Clinton welfare reform: Drop dead, She covers a range of domestic and foreign policy issues Prior to her career in journalism,
Rubin practiced labor law for two decades. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obama-to-clinton-welfare-reform-drop-dead/2012/07/14/gJQAM49XkW_blog.html,
DSS)
President Obama is the chief executive, obligated by the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Obama, however, seems to have — by executive order — altered that to
read “take Care that the Laws [which he likes or wished Congress had passed] be faithfully executed. The list of laws he won’t enforce or is unilaterally amending is getting long: Defense of
Marriage Act, immigration laws, voting laws, and anti-terror laws. He won’t even enforce all the provisions of his signature legislation as we’ve seen in the bushels-full of Obamacare waivers.
After the Obama administration announced
this week that it is opening up waivers to states from the work requirements contained in welfare reform,
The latest and most inexplicable gambit is his decision to undo bipartisan welfare reform. ABC News explained: “
Republicans began to speak out against the move, complaining it completely undercuts the law. . . . Congressional Republicans decried the move as ‘a blatant violation of the law’ and contend
the waivers will actually cause harm to the impoverished Americans because beneficiaries will come to
rely on the handout with little motivation to seek employment.” The outrage is bipartisan. Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio)
released a furious statement : By gutting the work requirements in President Clinton’s signature welfare reform law, President Obama is admitting his economic policies have failed. “While
President Clinton worked with Congress in a bipartisan way on welfare reform and economic opportunity,
President Obama has routinely ignored Republican proposals, rejected House-passed jobs bills, and imposed an agenda that’s helped keep the
unemployment rate above eight percent for 41 months. Instead of working with Republicans to boost job creation, the president is simply disregarding the requirement that welfare recipients find
work. “Welfare reform was an historic, bipartisan success – this move by the Obama administration is a partisan disgrace.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking member of the Senate Finance
Committee, was likewise incensed, sending a letter together with Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), head of the House Ways and Means Committee, to the Health and Human Services Department
The 1996 welfare reform bill, otherwise known as the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), ended welfare as an entitlement and empowered states with the
authority to create unique and robust welfare to work programs. A central feature of devolution of federal authority back to the states was a
demanding an explanation. Hatch also put out a statement that read in part:
vigorous work requirement for states, including a specific set of activities that qualified as “work.”
Voting IssueLimits- state and local actions creates infinite affs with no central lit base – wrecks
preparedness
Ground- They allow the Aff to defend completely different processes like
“oversight” that dodge core DAs and the best counterplan ground.
Ext – Interpretation – Fed=/= State
National government, not states or localities
Black’s Law 99 (Dictionary, Seventh Edition, p.703)
A national government that exercises some degree of control over smaller political units that have
surrendered some degree of power in exchange for the right to participate in national political matters
Central government
AHD 92 (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, p. 647)
federal—3. Of or relating
to the central government of a federation as distinct from the governments of its member units.
Ext – Interpretation – Its’ = Possessive
‘Its’ is possessive
English Grammar 5 (Glossary of English Grammar Terms,
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/possessive-pronoun.html)
pronouns used to substitute a noun and to show possession or
ownership. EG. This is your disk and that's mine. (Mine substitutes the word disk and shows that it belongs to me.)
Mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs are the possessive
Grammatically, this refers solely to U.S. policy
Manderino 73 (Justice – Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, “Sigal, Appellant, v. Manufacturers Light
and Heat Co”., No. 26, Jan. T., 1972, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 450 Pa. 228; 299 A.2d 646; 1973
Pa. LEXIS 600; 44 Oil & Gas Rep. 214, Lexis)
On its face, the written instrument granting easement rights in this case is ambiguous. The same sentence which refers to the right to lay a 14 inch
pipeline (singular) has a later reference to "said lines" (plural). The use of the plural "lines" makes no sense because the only previous reference
has been to a "line" (singular). The writing is additionally ambiguous because other key words which are "also may change the size of its
pipes" are dangling in that the
possessive pronoun "its" before the word "pipes" does not have any subject preceding, to which
the possessive pronoun refers. The dangling phrase is the beginning of a sentence, the first word of which does not begin with a capital
letter as is customary in normal English [***10] usage. Immediately preceding the "sentence" which does not begin with a capital letter, there
appears a dangling [*236] semicolon which makes no sense at the beginning of a sentence and can hardly relate to the preceding sentence which
is already properly punctuated by a closing period.
The above deviations from accepted grammatical usage make difficult,
if not impossible, a clear understanding of the words used or the intention of the parties. This is particularly true
concerning the meaning of a disputed phrase in the instrument which states that the grantee is to pay damages from ". . . the relaying, maintaining
and operating said pipeline. . . ." The instrument is ambiguous as to what the words ". . . relaying . . . said pipeline . . ." were intended to mean.
And it’s a term of exclusion
Frey 28 (Judge – Supreme Court of Missouri, Supreme Court of Missouri,
320 Mo. 1058; 10 S.W.2d 47; 1928 Mo. LEXIS 834, Lexis)
In support of this contention appellant again argues that when any ambiguity exists in a will it is the duty of the court to construe the will under
guidance of the presumption that the testatrix intended her property to go to her next of kin, unless there is a strong intention to the contrary.
Again we say, there is intrinsic proof of a [*1074] strong intention to the contrary. In the first place, testatrix only named two of her blood
relatives in the will and had she desired [***37] them to take the residuary estate she doubtless would have mentioned them by name in the
residuary clause. In the second place, if she used the word "heirs" in the sense of blood relatives she certainly would have dispelled all ambiguity
by stating whose blood relatives were intended. Not only had [**53] she taken pains in the will to identify her own two blood relatives but she
had also identified certain blood relatives of her deceased husband. Had it been her intention to vest the residuary estate in her
blood relatives solely , she would certainly have used the possessive pronoun "my" instead of the indefinite
article "the" in the clause, "the above heirs."its is geographical.
Ext – Violation – Welfare = State Controlled
Federal involvement is limited to collecting payments, states control paternity
monitoring
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
The federal funding also creates incentives to implicate men who are not even fathers and pull them into the criminal-enforcement machinery.
One requirement for collecting federal payments is that states must institute paternity-establishment
procedures, and nothing in the federal law prohibits or penalizes designating the wrong man as the father.
"Eligibility ... depends only upon tagging the largest possible number of men, and there is no review or requirement that it be the right men,"
writes Ronald Henry (2006, 54). The
result is "paternity fraud," the practice of forcing men to pay support for
children who are acknowledged not to be their offspring. Most victims are low-income minority males, and many are young
and even underage, with few of the skills or means to defend themselves in what Henry describes as a mass judicial "assembly line" that bears
little relation to a hearing. "The paternity fraud victim is hustled through the formality, often in less than five minutes, and may not even realize
what has happened until the first garnishment of his paycheck." Henry estimates that the
number of such victims may exceed one
million. "Every child support agency in America knows that it . .. has worked injustice upon appalling numbers of innocent men." In 2002,
California governor Gray Davis vetoed a bill that would have rectified paternity fraud. After registering concern "for the children," Davis
revealed his fear that the state would lose $40 million in federal funding. Thus, an elected official openly rationalized imposing criminal penalties
on citizens known to be innocent simply in order to avoid losing money. "California has long been notorious for its high rate of 'sewer service,'
high rate of default judgments, and high rate of false paternity establishments," notes Henry (2006, 54, 58, 63, 60-62, 66, 76, 55).
The whole aff is about PRWORA – that explicitly gave states power over welfare
activities
Mandell 07 (Betty Reid Mandell, summer 2007, is Professor Emerita at Bridgewater State College, expert on welfare, Homeless Shelters:
A Feeble Response to Homelessness, http://newpol.org/content/homeless-shelters-feeble-response-homelessness, DSS)
MOST SHELTERS FOR INDIVIDUALS operate on a first-come-first-served basis, although most refuse people who are drunk or abusing drugs. Family shelters have eligibility criteria that
vary from agency to agency, and from state to state. In Massachusetts, the eligibility criteria stipulates that a family should have no more income than 130 percent of the federal poverty line
($12,740 for 1; $17,160 for 2; $21,580 for 3). The legislature lowered it to 100 percent a couple of years ago, but advocates lobbied aggressively to bring it back up to 130 percent. If a family has
$1 over that amount, they are not eligible. The program is called Emergency Assistance, and is funded by the state Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA, a.k.a. Department of Welfare).
Undocumented immigrants are allowed access to shelters only if a child was born in the U.S. and is therefore a citizen. For legal immigrants to be eligible, at least one family member must be a
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,
which turned welfare over to the states and made it no longer an entitlement program, also made sweeping changes in the
citizen or a legally present immigrant.
rules governing immigrants' eligibility for federally funded public benefits. The law denies most immigrants, including lawful permanent residents, access to many federal public benefit
programs, and gives states the option to adopt similar restrictions for state-funded benefits. A list of family shelters published by the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless9 shows that some
family shelters do not accept adolescent boys. The age limits they set vary from 12 to 18. Some accept women and children only. One shelter accepts women and children only, but no boys over
age 9. The welfare department accepts men as part of the family only if the man is the father of the children. No boy friends allowed. The application process for admission to a family shelter is
grueling. Most family shelters in Massachusetts are funded by the state DTA, and workers are obsessed with documents. Applicants must produce a document to prove they have no place else to
stay. The goal is to keep people out, not to let them in. One worker told a mother to look through her high school yearbook and ask anyone she knows to give her a place to stay. Workers ask
endless questions, some of them intimate. One of the worst application interviews that I witnessed occurred between a stylishly dressed African-American worker and an African-American
mother of five children. I was so outraged by the worker's insensitivity that I wrote a letter to the worker and the director of the homeless unit, also sending a copy to the director of the state DTA.
The director of the homeless unit was angry at me for going over his head by sending a copy of the letter to the central office, but shortly afterwards the state director put an article in the workers'
internal newsletter urging workers to treat clients with respect. The client thanked me for sending the letter and expressed her disappointment that a fellow African-American had treated her so
badly, saying, "We're supposed to stick together." She said her children (who accompanied her to the interview) were shocked to witness such insensitive treatment of their mother.
States run welfare–PRWORA decreases federal spending and gives all the authority
to the states
Burke 3 [Vee-member of CRS, 7/1/03, “The 1996 Welfare Reform Law”,
http://royce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/the%201996%20welfare%20reform%20law.pdf, date accessed: 7/10/15]Kruger
PRWORA , P.L. 104-193), signed on August 22, 1996, dramatically reshaped cash
and food welfare programs and helped reduce federal welfare spending . It replaced the Depression-born program of Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with fixed annual grants to states for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families ( TANF ) for six years, ending on
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (
September 30, 2002. It imposed a citizenship requirement for many benefits. It reduced spending on food stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), child nutrition, and the Social Services
Block Grant (SSBG). However, it increased funding for child care and created a mandatory block grant for care of children in low-income families. At the time of passage, the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the law would cut mandatory federal spending by a net total of $54.1 billion over 6 years. Restrictions on benefits for noncitizens accounted for 44% of this
total, and food stamp revisions for 43%. The 105th Congress rescinded and modified some 1996 budget cuts, restoring SSI, Medicaid and food stamp benefits to many aliens at an estimated 5-
Congress in 1997 created Welfare-to-Work (WtW) grants ($2.7 billion in estimated outlays for 2 years ) to help
states move severely disadvantaged TANF recipients into jobs, and it boosted funding for food
stamp employment and training. Highlights of Program Changes Family Cash Aid. TANF ended unlimited matching funding
for family cash welfare (AFDC) and created fixed block grants for state-designed programs of time-limited and workyear cost of $12.3 billion. Further,
conditioned aid to needy families with children. It broadened the goals of welfare to include reducing non-marital pregnancies and promoting two-parent families. It imposed a 5-year limit on
basic ongoing aid paid with federal funds
. It required states to engage recipients in state defined "work" after 24 months of aid, achieve
minimum participation rates in federally recognized work activities, and spend on needy families from their own funds at least 75% of the sum they spent in FY1994 on programs replaced by
TANF -- maintenance-of-effort (MOE) rule. Current TANF Legislation. Since September 30, 2002, when their original appropriations ended, TANF and related programs of mandatory child
care, transitional medicaid, and abstinence education have been operating under quarterly extensions of spending authority, on the same terms as in FY2002. The most recent extension was made
June 30, 2003, by P.L. 108-40. In 2002 the House passed a bill (H.R. 4737) to reauthorize TANF, but the Senate did not. Main issues of contention were work rules and child care spending. On
February 13, 2003, the House passed a new TANF reauthorization bill (H.R. 4), almost identical to the 2002 bill; and on February 14 the Senate received a very similar bill from the Senate
Republican leadership (S. 5). Both H.R. 4 and S. 5 propose to continue TANF basic grants at $16.5 billion annually for 5 years, and to increase work requirements -- imposing a 40 hour work
The 1996 law gave
states more control over food stamp operations and coordination with family cash aid, added work rules for
adults without dependents and expanded existing work requirements, cut future benefits, placed greater
limits on eligibility, and expanded penalties for violating rules. Followup legislation (P.L. 105-18) allowed states to pay for food stamps for
week and an eventual work participation standard of 70%. S. 5 includes some additional changes, notably to the food stamp program. Food Stamps.
persons made ineligible for federally financed stamps by the 1996 law, and P.L. 106-387 increased benefits for those with high shelter costs. The 2002 farm bill (P.L. 107-171) increased food
stamp spending by $5.7-$5.9 billion over 10 years. Changes include granting food stamp eligibility to noncitizens after their first 5 years in this county).
2NC/1NR - Limits
They explode the topic – too many mechanisms that lack uniformity
Greenblatt 11 (ALAN GREENBLATT, NOVEMBER 2011, States Cut Welfare Benefits – Again, Alan covers politics as well as policy issues for Governing. He is the
coauthor of a standard textbook on state and local governments. He previously worked as a reporter for NPR and CQ and has written about politics and culture for many other outlets, print and
online. http://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/states-cut-welfare-benefits-again.html,
DSS)
States such as New Mexico, South Carolina and Washington have slashed cash payments by 15 to 20 percent.
Other states are tightening work requirements, or lowering payments to those who also receive federal
disability assistance. And many states are limiting the amount of time people can spend on welfare. “We need to
encourage people to say this is truly a temporary program,” says Brian Rooney, director of policy and compliance at the Michigan Department of Human Services.
Michigan, which had been one of the few states without a time limit on benefits, imposed a four-year
lifetime limit on recipients last month. In addition to the desire to push people off the rolls and into the workforce, the state simply
could not afford to keep paying benefits indefinitely, according to officials. The federal block grant for TANF has not budged for the
past 15 years. “The fiscal reality is that we cannot afford to provide lifetime cash assistance benefits to recipients who are able to work,” says Maura Corrigan, the
state’s Human Services director. Michigan’s
budget troubles are among the worst in the nation. Obviously, a lot of
that has to do with the weakness in its economy. Given the state’s growing poverty rates and higher-than-average unemployment, kicking
people off welfare due to retroactively applied limits strikes many people as unfair or even callous.
Politics Links
1NC Link
Congressional desire for INCREASED welfare surveillance – the plan draws in
huge fights with Obama
Fobes 6-10 [Aaron-press secretary for Orrin Hatch, 6-10-15, “Hatch Urges Administration to Work with Congress on Child Support
Enforcement”, http://www.finance.senate.gov/newsroom/chairman/release/?id=98f2986e-fb54-4d21-aa67-f090533e4fa7, date accessed:
7/8/15]Kruger
Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) called on the Obama
Administration to work with Congress on welfare reform and child support enforcement. Earlier this week, Hatch, along with
Finance Committee member Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Ways & Means Committee member Charles
Boustany (R-La.) introduced legislation to prevent the Obama Administration from bypassing the Congress on
welfare reform policy. “ I firmly believe that there is room for common ground . In fact, there are a
number of features of the administration’s proposed rule that could generate bipartisan support . But any
workable solution would have to include the full participation and ultimate consent of the Legislative Branch. Any changes to the law would have to go
through Congress and not simply be dictated by the administration,” Hatch said.The complete speech, as prepared for delivery, is below:
Mr. President, I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about another matter of great importance. Last year, after the mid-term elections, the Obama Administration – quietly and without much
fan-fare – proposed a massive, far-reaching rule that would overturn a number of bedrock principles of child support
enforcement and welfare reform. Chief among them being the principle that parents should be financially responsible for their children. This was just the
latest attempt on the part of the Obama Administration to bypass Congress in order to enact policies
through executive fiat. And, sadly, it wasn’t even the first time this administration has tried to gut welfare reform. Indeed, we all remember a few years back when the
WASHINGTON – In a speech on the Senate floor today,
administration granted itself the unprecedented authority to waive critical welfare work requirements. Put simply, this latest rule would make it easier for non-custodial parents to evade paying
I am
fundamentally opposed to policies that allow parents to abdicate their responsibilities, which, in turn, results in more
families having to go on welfare. I think most Americans would agree with me. That is why I, joined by Senator Cornyn and House Ways and
Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, have introduced legislation that would prevent the Obama
Administration from bypassing Congress in yet another attempt to subvert key features of welfare reform.
child support. It would undermine a key feature of welfare reform, which is that single mothers can avoid welfare if fathers comply with child support orders.
2NC Link
Republicans love welfare surveillance –perceived as good for the economy
Seymour 12 [Don-Reporter for the speaker of the house.gov, 7/13/12, “With No Jobs in Obama Economy, White House Guts Clinton
Welfare Work Requirement”,http://www.speaker.gov/general/no-jobs-obama-economy-white-house-guts-clinton-welfare-work-requirement, date
accessed: 7/8/15]Kruger
The Heritage Foundation says the “rigorous new federal work standards that state governments were
required to implement” were the core of the welfare reform law. Whereas “[i]n the four decades prior to welfare reform, the
welfare caseload never experienced a significant decline,” the work requirements were “very successful” in reducing welfare
rolls and getting Americans back to work. In an op-ed marking welfare reform’s 10-year anniversary, President Clinton said the
law and its work requirements “create[ed] a new beginning for millions of Americans.” Welfare rolls “dropped
substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million” in 2006, and “more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients.” But with the
Obama economy hung over from a failed ‘stimulus’ spending binge, job creators handcuffed by excessive
regulations, and small businesses frightened by the president’s tax hike plan, jobs are hard to come by. So
the White House simply gutted the work requirements that have been so successful. Instead of creating
new jobs, the Obama administration is creating more dependency.
The pursuit of deadbeat dads is massively popular
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
Child support became politicized by the early 1990s, when parents who allegedly fail to pay--"deadbeat dads'--became the subjects of
a national demonology, and child support went from being a minor matter affecting a few people on the margins
of society to a sacred political cow in the national vocabulary. " On the left and on the right , the new
phrase to conjure with is 'child support,'" writes Bryce Christensen, who notes that politicians see it as "the best
rhetoric in the world": "a rhetoric unifying political figures" from both parties (2001, 63). Although Ronald Reagan
seems to have coined the term deadbeat dads, it was Bill Clinton who took it on the campaign trail. "We will find you!" he famously
intoned at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. "We will make you pay!" During the debate leading up to welfare reform, George Gilder
warned of the bipartisan bandwagon being marshaled to punish private citizens who had been pronounced
guilty by general acclaim: (Presidential candidate Barack Obama recently revived this political line. "We have too many
children in poverty in this country," he told a civil rights group in early 2007. "And don't tell me it doesn't have a little to do with the fact that we
got too many daddies not acting like daddies.")
Pursuing dads who don’t pay child support has bipartisan support
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
The campaign escalated dramatically during the Clinton years, especially following
PRWORA. In 1998, Clinton signed the
Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, which enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. In that same year, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Donna Shalala announced the Federal Case Registry, a massive system of
government surveillance that aimed to include 16-19 million citizens, even those current in their payments. "Combined with the
National Directory of New Hires," Shalala said, "HHS now has the strongest child support enforcement resource in the
history of the program" (U.S. HHS 1998b). Clinton announced soon afterward yet another "new child support crackdown." "This effort
will include new investigative teams in five regions of the country to identify, analyze, and investigate cases [that is, parents[ for criminal
prosecution, and an eightfold increase in legal support personnel to help prosecute these cases" (U.S. HHS 1998a).
AT: Obama Doesn’t get the Blame (Also a good link)
Republicans loves welfare reform–removal gets blamed on Obama
Rubin 12 [Jennifer-opinion writer for the Washington post that is an expert on congressional republicans,7/15/12, “Obama to Clinton
welfare reform: Drop dead”, The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obama-to-clinton-welfare-reform-dropdead/2012/07/14/gJQAM49XkW_blog.html, date accessed: 7/8/15]Kruger
ABC News explained: “ After
the Obama administration announced this week that it is opening up waivers to
states from the work requirements contained in welfare reform, Republicans began to speak out against
the move, complaining it completely undercuts the law . . . . Congressional Republicans decried the
move as ‘a blatant violation of the law’ and contend the waivers will actually cause harm to the
impoverished Americans because beneficiaries will come to rely on the handout with little motivation to
seek employment.” The outrage is bipartisan . Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a furious
statement : By gutting the work requirements in President Clinton’s signature welfare reform law,
President Obama is admitting his economic policies have failed. “While President Clinton worked with
Congress in a bipartisan way on welfare reform and economic opportunity, President Obama has
routinely ignored Republican proposals, rejected House-passed jobs bills, and imposed an agenda that’s
helped keep the unemployment rate above eight percent for 41 months. Instead of working with Republicans to boost job creation, the
president is simply disregarding the requirement that welfare recipients find work. “Welfare reform was an historic, bipartisan
success – this move by the Obama administration is a partisan disgrace.”
States CP
1NC States CP
States choose their own way to run welfare- Even if the CP doesn’t end Government
surveillance, it ends all uses of that surveillance
HANSAN 11 Hansan, J.E. (2011) is a career social worker with a doctorate in social welfare policy
from Brandeis University. He worked for 45 years in human service programs at the local, state, and
national levels. His early career was staffing and directing settlement houses in Kansas City, MO,
Philadelphia, PA, Peoria, IL and Cincinnati, O A brief overview of the state-federal relationship in public
welfare programs, 1935-1996 Retrieved 7/9/15from
http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/programs/public-welfare-state-federal-welfare-relationships/
Under the terms of the Act, each state had to first choose whether or not to participate in one or more of
these new public welfare programs. When a state decided to participate in one of the programs, it was then required to submit a plan
(i.e., state plan) that demonstrated that its proposed program adhered to the minimal standards in the law. States retained major control
over the terms of eligibility and the level of benefits to be paid to recipients. Initially, federal financial participation in
the cost of benefits was determined according to a formula that fixed federal reimbursement to the level of benefits established by a state. In
addition, the federal government agreed to pay fifty percent of administrative costs, or a greater
percentage in what were designated poor states. It is very important to note, these new state-federal
welfare programs were “categorical” in nature: It was not enough for an individual/family to be deemed
poor or eligible on the basis of not having any income or assets; it was also a condition of eligibility that the individual fit one of the established
categories, that is, to be aged, blind, disabled or a child living in a household without a father. For this reason, public welfare
programs were often referred to as “means-tested categorical programs.”
2NC Solvency
States pay billions for children on welfare and are full responsibility the state -most
of these cases being fatherless children
HANSAN 11 Hansan, J.E. (2011) is a career social worker with a doctorate in social welfare policy
from Brandeis University. He worked for 45 years in human service programs at the local, state, and
national levels. His early career was staffing and directing settlement houses in Kansas City, MO,
Philadelphia, PA, Peoria, IL and Cincinnati, O A brief overview of the state-federal relationship in public
welfare programs, 1935-1996 Retrieved 7/9/15from
http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/programs/public-welfare-state-federal-welfare-relationships/
to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC) provided income assistance to families where children
lacked adequate parental financial support. Assistance was granted in the form of cash benefits funded through a combination of
federal, state and (in several states) local revenues. While federal and state rules jointly govern the determination of
eligibility and payment levels, administration is the full responsibility of the states and their political
subdivisions. n FY 1982 an average 11.1 million persons per month, of whom 7.5 million were children,
received AFDC benefits at a cost for the year of about $13.5 billion, $6 billion of which was paid by the
states. Assistance levels were largely determined by the states. As a result, AFDC benefit levels varied
widely. In 1980 the average monthly payment per person ranged from $29.83 to $162.61. The actual disparity
of these amounts was narrowed by the availability of food stamp benefits for public assistance recipients. Food stamp benefits were
inversely related to AFDC income. A basic profile of AFDC mothers, from the 1979 study of AFDC by the Department of Health
and Human Services, showed that more than half were over age 30, most had not graduated from high school, and fewer than one in six was
employed while on assistance; fathers in the program were generally older than mothers, slightly better educated, and employed. The
basic
reason for family eligibility in the majority of cases was the absence of a parent–chiefly the father–
because of divorce, separation or desertion, or because the parents were never married. (In 1980, families
with unemployed fathers were eligible for AFDC in only 27 states.) Approximately 70 percent of the
families in the study had two or fewer children receiving assistance.
The State level is where our welfare programs have been surveyed and oppressed
Heinlein, 14 - (“Snyder OKs rule establishing paternity for welfare” by Gary Heinlein The Detroit News 8:17 p.m. EST December 17,
2014)
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/17/snyder-oks-rule-establishing-paternity-welfare/20564765/
Gov. Rick Snyder has signed bills into law that lay down new rules aimed at establishing paternity and making fathers
more accountable for the support of children on welfare. A key provision in the legislation, which he signed
Wednesday, sets up a procedure for determining paternity, including allowing a prosecutor to order genetic
testing of a man suspected of fathering or being the father of a child on welfare. Snyder said he approved the
package of bills because it “keeps our child support system running efficiently to ensure Michigan children and families have access to the
benefits they deserve.” One
bill amends state law to specify that Family Independence Program benefits could
be denied or terminated if a recipient fails, without good cause, to comply with applicable child support
requirements that include efforts to establish paternity and assign or obtain child support . The 13 bills also:
Declare that a positive genetic test is a conclusive method of determining paternity, if certain conditions are met, and without requiring a court
determination. Create a new Summary Support and Paternity Act with streamlined methods for establishing paternity and child support court
orders. Give parents who are struggling to make child support payments the ability to apply for alternative court-monitored options for payment.
Ensure child support is paid before assistance is granted through the Family Independence Program. Allow
prosecution for nonsupport the support payer was aware of the case. Move the authority for child support allocation and determination to the
Office of Child Support, instead of the State Court Administrative Office. “Eliminating confusion within the law will help increase the
effectiveness of our system while reducing unnecessary court costs,” Snyder said.
States solve best–1996 law means they control the majority of welfare
Burke 3 [Vee-member of CRS, 7/1/03, “The 1996 Welfare Reform Law”,
http://royce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/the%201996%20welfare%20reform%20law.pdf, date accessed: 7/10/15]Kruger
PRWORA , P.L. 104-193), signed on August 22, 1996, dramatically reshaped cash and food
welfare programs and helped reduce federal welfare spending . It replaced the Depression-born program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) with fixed annual grants to states for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families ( TANF ) for six years, ending on September 30, 2002. It imposed a citizenship requirement for many
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (
benefits. It reduced spending on food stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), child nutrition, and the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG). However, it increased funding for child care and created a mandatory block grant for
care of children in low-income families. At the time of passage, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the law would cut mandatory federal spending by a net total of $54.1 billion over 6 years. Restrictions on benefits
for noncitizens accounted for 44% of this total, and food stamp revisions for 43%. The 105th Congress rescinded and modified some 1996 budget cuts, restoring SSI, Medicaid and food stamp benefits to many aliens at an estimated 5-
Congress in 1997 created Welfare-to-Work (WtW) grants ($2.7 billion in estimated outlays for 2 years ) to help states move
severely disadvantaged TANF recipients into jobs, and it boosted funding for food stamp
employment and training. Highlights of Program Changes Family Cash Aid. TANF ended unlimited matching funding for family
cash welfare (AFDC) and created fixed block grants for state-designed programs of time-limited and work-conditioned aid to needy families
with children. It broadened the goals of welfare to include reducing non-marital pregnancies and promoting two-parent families. It imposed a 5-year limit on basic ongoing aid paid with federal funds. It required
states to engage recipients in statedefined "work" after 24 months of aid, achieve minimum participation
rates in federally recognized work activities, and spend on needy families from their own funds at least 75% of the sum they spent in FY1994 on
year cost of $12.3 billion. Further,
programs replaced by TANF -- maintenance-of-effort (MOE) rule. Current TANF Legislation. Since September 30, 2002, when their original appropriations ended, TANF and related programs of mandatory child care, transitional
medicaid, and abstinence education have been operating under quarterly extensions of spending authority, on the same terms as in FY2002. The most recent extension was made June 30, 2003, by P.L. 108-40. In 2002 the House
passed a bill (H.R. 4737) to reauthorize TANF, but the Senate did not. Main issues of contention were work rules and child care spending. On February 13, 2003, the House passed a new TANF reauthorization bill (H.R. 4), almost
identical to the 2002 bill; and on February 14 the Senate received a very similar bill from the Senate Republican leadership (S. 5). Both H.R. 4 and S. 5 propose to continue TANF basic grants at $16.5 billion annually for 5 years, and
The 1996
law gave states more control over food stamp operations and coordination with family cash aid, added
work rules for adults without dependents and expanded existing work requirements, cut future benefits,
placed greater limits on eligibility, and expanded penalties for violating rules. Followup legislation (P.L. 105-18) allowed states to pay for
to increase work requirements -- imposing a 40 hour work week and an eventual work participation standard of 70%. S. 5 includes some additional changes, notably to the food stamp program. Food Stamps.
food stamps for persons made ineligible for federally financed stamps by the 1996 law, and P.L. 106-387 increased benefits for those with high shelter costs. The 2002 farm bill (P.L. 107-171) increased food stamp spending by $5.7$5.9 billion over 10 years. Changes include granting food stamp eligibility to noncitizens after their first 5 years in this county).
AT: Race to the Bottom
States have immediate effects on each other’s welfare
Figlio* and Kolpin 99, Department of Economics, University of Florida and Department of
Economics, University of Oregon, 1999 (Received May 15, 1998; revised January 1999 Journal of Urban
Economics 46, 437]454, 1999 Article ID juec.1999.2131 David N. Figlio, Van W. Kolpin, William E.
Reid “Do States Play Welfare Games?”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119099921319
This paper uses a panel of state-level annual data from 1983 to 1994 for each of the contiguous United States and the District of Columbia, to
explore the degree to which states simultaneously set welfare benefits. Using instrumental variables estimation, we find substantial empirical
evidence that is supportive of the notion of welfare competition. Furthermore,
we find that state responses to neighbor
benefit decreases tend to be significantly larger in magnitude as their responses to neighbor benefit
increases. Our results, therefore, have potential implications for public policy in the wake of the increased decentralization of welfare policy
associated with the welfare reform of 1996. Q 1999 Academic Press We must insure that Pennsylvania resources are available to Pennsylvania
residents. }From U.S. District
Court testimony of the state of Pennsylvania, in defense of its new policy to offer
different welfare benefit levels to migrants from other states, as reported in the New York Times, October
14, 1997. At least 13 other states have adopted similar policies. Few current public policy issues have
received the attention that has been afforded to the decentralization of welfare benefit-setting. The *
Corresponding author: David Figlio. An earlier version of this paper appears as Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Paper 1154-98. We
are grateful to Bruce Blonigen, Jan Brueckner, David Card, Julie Berry Cullen, Bill Evans, Jim Hines, Sam Peltzman, David Ribar, Mark
Shroder, Joe Stone, Wes Wilson, Jim Ziliak, two anonymous referees, and workshop participants at Indiana University, the Universities of
California]San Diego, Ž.Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, and Oregon, and Washington University St. Louis for helpful comments and
conversation. Thanks also to Mark Shroder for providing us with some of the data for this project. All errors are our own. FIGLIO, KOLPIN,
AND REID438 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, passed with bipartisan support, considerably
increased individual states’ autonomy to supervise their own welfare programs. Specifically, the new law replaced the federally managed Aid to
Families with Dependent Ž. Children AFDC program with a system of block grants to states. While hailed by some as efficiency-enhancing}
states now have considerably more flexibility to devise their own welfare programs than they did under the previous law} the possibility exists
that further-decentralized benefitsetting may exacerbate an interjurisdictional externality. That is, the new law increases the possibility, at least in
theory, that states will be affected by their neighbors’ welfare benefit policies. We are by no means the first authors to make this argument. For
instance, researchers such as Stigler w x w x w x 13 , Gramlich 7 , and Brown and Oates 2 have suggested
that decentralized welfare benefit-setting could lead to a ‘‘race to the bottom.’’ How do states respond to
their neighbors’ policies? Several interesting recent papers address the issue of state policy
interdependence. Case, wx Hines, and Rosen 5 , for instance, find empirical evidence that state fiscal wx policies are interdependent.
Besley and Case 1 also show that a state’s tax changes are significantly correlated with those of the state’s
neighbors. w x w x Brueckner 3 and Brueckner and Saavedra 4 demonstrate that localities set their
policies interdependently. All of these papers use different empirical approaches that explicitly model
interjurisdictional interactions as simultaneous. The existing evidence on state welfare policy interdependence is much wx less
conclusive: while Gramlich and Laren 8 , finds evidence of a positive wx correlation between own-state and neighbor-state benefits, Shroder 12 ,
estimating a structural model and using a different time period, concludes that there is little evidence to suggest that states set welfare benefit
policies interdependently. However,
we know of no currently published paper that models state welfare benefitsetting using empirical approaches akin to those used in the literature on other policy interactions.1 This
paper makes several key contributions to the published literature on state welfare benefit-setting. First, using annual state-level data from 1983 to
1994, this
paper presents estimates of the interrelationship of states’ welfare benefits that treat neighbor
states’ decisions as endogenous, and that implicitly account for spatial correlation in the errors. Second, this paper introduces an
additional test for interjurisdictional welfare competition by presenting a theoretical model suggesting that such compet. 1 Two other
current working papers work toward rectifying this shortcoming. Ribar and wx Wilhelm 10 estimate some
models in which neighbor benefit-setting is endogenous using instrumental variables estimation, though
this is not the main thrust of their paper. Saavedra wx 11 simultaneously estimates state benefit-setting
using spatial econometric models. 2. EVIDENCE OF INTERJURISDICTIONAL WELFARE COMPETITION We are interested in
estimating the relationship between changes in real own-state welfare benefits and changes in real neighbor welfare benefits,2 in which we treat
neighbor benefits as endogenous. Our dependent variŽ. able is the change in the real 1982 dollars combined maximum AFDC and food stamp
benefits for a family of three in a state,3 and our explanatory variable of interest is the weighted sum of changes in neighbors’ maximum AFDC
and food stamp benefits for a family of three.4 These data are published in the ‘‘Green Book,’’ Background Material and Data on Programs
within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, for each relevant year. In a handful of cases, these data were clearly miscoded in
the Green Book; in the analysis that follows we omit seven suspicious observations from the analysis. However,
it turns out that the
choice of including or excluding these observations does not fundamentally change our results.
Determining Neighborhood One important task in determining the relationship between a state’s benefit
level and that of its neighbors involves deciding on the appropriate definition of who are the state’s
neighbors. Our empirical approach requires us to take a stand on how states weight each others’ decisionmaking when devising their own
policies, but since the decision rules are not observed by the econometrician, we can only speculate to which states actually might look to when
determining policy. While
there are countless possible ways of identifying which states are neighbors, we
propose an admittedly arbitrary measure of ‘‘neighborhood’’ based on state to state migration flows from
1985 to 1990, using Census data.5 In this scheme, 2 All dollar values are adjusted to be in constant dollars using the Consumer Price Index.
3 We have also estimated models in which the dependent variable is solely the AFDC benefit, and in each case have obtained similar results to
those reported herein. 4 We describe how we derive neighbor weights later in this section. 5 We have also estimated models using proximitybased weighting schemes, as well as wx purely contiguity-based weighting schemes, such as those utilized by Ribar and Wilhelm 10 , and the
outcomes tend to be very similar to those reported herein. In addition, our results from the migration-based model are similar if we do not
constrain the sum of neighbor weights to equal one. Therefore, our fears that our results might be driven solely by idiosyncracies of our definition
are mitigated. FIGLIO, KOLPIN, AND REID440 where res is the number of 1990 residents of state i who resided in state ij j in 1985.6 State i
assigns itself a weight of zero, and all weights sum to one. We choose one-way migration inflows, rather than two-way net migration flows, to
avoid the possibility of negative neighbor weights, as well as to avoid weighting states with virtually no migration flows in either direction the
same as states with large but offsetting population flows in both directions.7 We use total population migration rather than lowincome migration
to mitigate the potential endogeneity of the weighting scheme. Empirical Model We seek to relate a state’s own benefits to the weighted sum of
its neighbors’ benefits to determine whether states are engaged in welfare competition. We choose to estimate the model in first-differences,
rather than levels, to account for the fact that over this time period, state benefits have been trending downward. To account for the possibility
that some states’ trends may be sharper than others’, we control for a full set of state-specific constants, which in the first-difference context
represent state-specific trends. In addition, to account for the possibility that certain common shocks affect all states in the country
simultaneously, we control for a set of year effects. Therefore, all of our identification is coming off of de¨iations from state-specific trends in
welfare benefits, after netting out de¨iations that are common to all states contemporaneously.8 We adopt the set of control variables used in prior
empirical papers on the topic of welfare policy interdependence. Specifically, we control for Ž changes in the ratio of families on AFDC to those
not on AFDC the 6 wx Shroder 12 also uses a migration-based neighbor weighting scheme. 7
To illustrate our concerns with using
net migration flows as our basis for this weighting scheme, doing so would lead us to the conclusion, for
instance, that Oregon weights Vermont higher than it does California when determining its policies. 8 We
also experimented with including lagged neighbor benefits in the model, but found that lagged benefits
added little in the way of additional explanatory power. DO STATES PLAY WELFARE GAMES? 441 . 9 ‘‘recipiency
ratio’’ , changes in the Republican share of votes in Congres10 Ž sional elections we also looked at the ‘‘conservativeness’’ of voting behavior by
the state’s congressional contingent, as captured by Americans for Democratic Action voting scores, which led to no real changes in the . results ,
changes in real per capita state disposable income, changes
in the state’s federally-set AFDC funds matching rate,
changes in the state’s percentage of AFDC recipients who are white, changes in the state’s percentage of
AFDC recipients who are unmarried, changes in the state’s female unemployment rate, changes in the
state’s ratio of females to employed males, and changes in the state’s average weekly wages in variety
stores.11 The last three variables are intended to represent characteristics of the female and low skill labor market.12 Our results are robust to
changes in this control variable set. Specifically, our results hold up qualitatively regardless of the set of control variables employed, at least
among the sets of controls that we have tried thus far. Sample means and Ž. standard deviations of all variables measured in first-differences are
reported in the first column of Table 1. In order to treat states’ benefit policy determination as potentially interdependent, we must model state
benefit-setting as simultaneous. To do so, we model neighbor benefit changes as endogenous, using a two-stage instrumental-variables approach
similar to that used by Besley and Case wx 1 to capture simultaneity of tax policy across states. Since our supposition, which we also put forth in
our theoretical model introduced later in the paper, is that changes in benefit levels come about because of a change Ž. in one state’s or a set of
states’ primitives, we seek instruments that are likely to reflect these types of changes. We instrument for neighbor benefit
Competition states will never allow the Federal Government to maintain common
welfare plans
Figlio* and Kolpin 99, Department of Economics, University of Florida and Department of
Economics, University of Oregon, (Received May 15, 1998; revised January 1999 Journal of Urban
Economics 46, 437]454, 1999 Article ID juec.1999.2131 David N. Figlio, Van W. Kolpin, William E.
Reid “Do States Play Welfare Games?”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119099921319
//SKI Radial concavity holds for a large set of reasonable preferences. To Ž.demonstrate this fact, note that the identity us , s r s s0 implicitlyii yii
defines the best reply function b . It is straightforward to implicitly differentiate this identity and establish differential conditions which ensure
that b does indeed satisfy radial concavity. As a simple example, i suppose that the number of welfare recipients in a given state is a linear
function r : SªR which is increasing in own benefits and decreasing in i the benefits of ‘‘competitor’’ states. Suppose also that state i’s utility
function can be decomposed into the social utility received from own benefits and the social disutility accruing from the total number of
recipients, i.e., uss¨ s ycrs. Lastly, assume ¨ is strictly concave, c i i i i i i i ZŽ. 2 ZŽ Y.2is strictly convex, best replies are nonzero, and ¨ c0 yc ¨ 0 i i i Ž Ž . . Žwhen evaluated at bs , s for any s in S. The latter condition isi yi satisfied if, for instance, the third derivatives of both y¨ and c are ii
. everywhere positive.
As the reader may verify, such preferences induce strictly radial concave best reply
functions, in turn implying that the symmetry bias is as noted in Proposition 2. wx Walker 14 finds very
little evidence supporting the existence of welfare benefit-induced migration from state to state. It is
important to note, however, that our theoretical results do not actually require the presence of welfareinduced migration. Nor do they require migration, when it occurs, to impose varying costs depending on the state of origin. All that is
required is that policy makers are concerned with the benefit levels offered elsewhere. There is plenty of evidence the differential
welfare benefit levels pegged to prior residency referred to in the introductory quote of this paper is one
example that many policymakers share this concern. This is not to say that a lack of observed migration cannot itself be the
result of strategic reaction explicitly designed to mitigate migration.16 Instead, our point is that when modeling this behavior one must recognize
that public policy is often founded on the ‘‘reality’’ of public opinion as much, if not more so, as on economic fact. Moreover, new evidence Ž
wx . Meyer
9 suggests that interstate welfare benefit differentials have a statistically significant, if small in
magnitude, effect on migration after all. Our model generates the principal testable implication that states will respond
asymmetrically to other states’ benefit decreases than to other states’ benefit increases. Failure to empirically model this asymmetry Ž . Ž when
directed in Proposition 2 might lead to downward-biased in . absolute value estimates of responses to other states’ benefit decreases and upwardbiased estimates of responses to other states’ benefit in 16 One
can also think of the phenomenon of Tiebout competition, in
which ‘‘foot voting’’ need not be observed for its potential presence to have an effect on local
government decision making. Both models have coefficients with a negative sign, though this result is not . near statistical
significance . On the other hand, the interaction between neighbor benefits and an indicator for whether the
neighbor benefits dropped is strongly statistically significant in the OLS model and marginally significant
in the instrumental variables specification, suggesting that states tend to respond more to neighbor benefit decreases than to
increases. With the notable exception of the possibility that the empirical design of Ž. this test would naturally generate this result discussed
immediately below , it is difficult to conceive of factors other than welfare competition that would generate this asymmetry in estimated
responses to neighbor benefits. Therefore,
these results further support the notion that the welfare competition
described above is real, rather than an artifact of the data. Neglect as an Alternative e Hypothesis In any given year, the
modal change in nominal AFDC benefits is zero, though nominal food stamp benefits increased somewhat for most
states from year to year.17 Since we deflate benefits by the consumer price index, we consider a nominal zero change in benefits as a
real decline in benefits. As such, there remains a chance that our results do not really reflect strategic interaction among the states and rather
reflect a ‘‘neglect hypothesis.’’ Specifically, our asymmetry results could conceivably be generated if most states simply change their nominal
benefits occasionally, and increase their nominal benefits independently. In this case,
we would observe little relation between
neighboring states’ increases in benefits but most states would appear to be moving in lock-step to each
others’ benefit declines. Of course, this ‘‘neglect hypothesis,’’ if true, could very well be a manifestation
of strategic behavior, in which states, cognizant of their neighbors’ actions, strategically elect not to
change their nominal benefits when their neighbors do not change their nominal benefits. Hence, simply not
raising benefits and letting real benefits atrophy is consistent with a strategic welfare benefit-setting equilibrium. However, the fact that we
cannot distinguish with certainty strategic behavior from non-strategic neglect is somewhat unsatisfying. There are, however, other ways to
determine the degree to which our results are merely picking up a general pattern of failure to change nominal benefits, rather than strategic
behavior. Specifically, if our results are merely picking up a general pattern of benefit neglect, it would not really matter how we define
neighborhood}we should observe the same types of effects as we report above. To explore this possibility, we construct two new types of
neighborhood definitions, one based on the relative 17 We note, however, that real combined benefits increased from year to year in 34% of the
observations.
Texas and California are imitation states for welfare policies
Figlio* and Kolpin, 99 Department of Economics, University of Florida and Department of
Economics, University of Oregon, (Received May 15, 1998; revised January 1999 Journal of Urban
Economics 46, 437]454, 1999 Article ID juec.1999.2131 David N. Figlio, Van W. Kolpin, William E.
Reid “Do States Play Welfare Games?”)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119099921319
The results of this exercise are reported in the final four columns of Ž Table 1. We
observe that in three of the four regions
south, west, and. midwest the estimated response to neighbor benefit changes remains statistically
significant {despite the dramatically reduced sample sizes} and is of modestly larger magnitude than that
found in the nationwide sample. In the fourth region, the estimated relationship is not statistically significant, though the magnitude of
the coefficient remains Ž nontrivial. A coefficient of this magnitude would be strongly statistically significant if the standard error were the same
as the national instrumental variables standard error, so part of the insignificance is due to the . increased standard errors associated with small
sample size. Therefore, this region-specific analysis helps to further convince us that the results found herein are not due to some unobserved
region-specific variable. A second way of testing the veracity of these results would be to abandon altogether the concept of identifying neighbor
states and instead look at states’ apparent responses to large, politically important states, relative to their apparent responses to the neighbors of
these large states. The idea behind this exercise is that if there is some omitted variable correlated with the benefit changes of all states in an area,
and this is driving our results, then there
should be no real reason, in the absence of strategic interaction, to expect other
states’ benefits to be differentially correlated with the benefits of the large state, relative to its small
neighbors. If, on the other hand, states do engage in welfare competition, then it is reasonable to expect
that they would pay more attention to Texas than to, say, Louisiana or Arkansas, because of Texas’s
magnitude and political clout. To test whether this is the case, we replace our neighbor benefit variables
with separate variables reflecting the changes in benefits in the two largest states in the United States,
California and Texas, as well as the complete set of these states’ neighbors, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona,
New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas, for a total of nine other state variables, in an ordinary least
squares regression. Table 2 reports the coefficients on the benefit levels of, in turn, California and Texas, and the a¨erage benefit coefficients for,
observe that other states’ benefit changes are statistically
significantly more correlated with California’s benefit changes than with California’s neighbors’ benefit
changes, and while the statistical significance level is lower in the case of Texas, the same qualitative finding holds up for
other states’ relative correlation with Texas vis-a-vis Texas’s neigh` bors. The final column of Table 2 pools California and
Texas together. Here, we observe that while state benefit changes tend to be completely uncorrelated with the average benefit change of
California’s and Texas’s neighbors, state benefit changes are highly correlated with the average
in turn, California’s neighbors and Texas’s neighbors. We
Texas and California have proven to geographically and competitively to affect the
welfare plans of all states
Figlio* and Kolpin 99, Department of Economics, University of Florida and Department of
Economics, University of Oregon, (Received May 15, 1998; revised January 1999 Journal of Urban
Economics 46, 437]454, 1999 Article ID juec.1999.2131 David N. Figlio, Van W. Kolpin, William E.
Reid “Do States Play Welfare Games?”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119099921319
GLIO, KOLPIN, AND REID446 TABLE 2 Additional Evidence of Simultaneous State Benefit-Setting: Differential Responses to Large States
versus their Neighbors Ž. OLS evidence Note: Standard errors, adjusted for statewide clustering of errors, are in parentheses beneath estimated
effects. All regressions include the same set of variables in the Table 1 regressions, except that instead of weighted neighbor benefits, the
regression includes nine separate variables for the changes in the benefits of California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico,
Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The
average response to large state Ž neighbors averages the coefficients and
reports the appropriate standard error of the .Ž average of the coefficients on the benefits of Oregon,
Arizona, and Nevada in the case of. Ž .California or New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas in
the case of Texas. The first row of the last column presents the average coefficient on California and Texas benefits, while the second row
of the last column presents the average coefficient on the other seven state benefits. Benefit change of California and Texas.15 This
difference is statistically significant at the five percent level. In sum, therefore, we observe evidence that
state benefit changes tend to be more correlated with the benefit changes of big, influential states than
with the benefit changes of small states likely to share common shocks with the influential states. This
finding lends additional credence to the notion that our finding of welfare benefit competition is not driven by some omitted geography-specific
variable. 3. ASYMMETRIC RESPONSES TO NEIGHBOR BENEFITS This
section provides additional evidence that the
results presented above are likely due to welfare competition, rather than some geographically-correlated
omitted variable. To do so, we present a theoretical model of interstate competition in state welfare benefit-setting that generates the
testable prediction that states should tend to differentially respond to decreases in neighbor benefit levels, relative to neighbor benefit increases.
We then return to the data to examine the degree to which this conjecture holds up empirically. 15 This result also holds up when we limit the
geography of the ‘‘responding’’ states to any region of the country, except the southwest and far west, which we exclude for obvious reasons. DO
STATES PLAY WELFARE GAMES? 447 Theoretical Model We
begin by presenting an abstract framework for
analyzing welfare gaming between multiple states. This framework is then used to argue that it is unlikely
that states will consistently respond symmetrically to both increases and decreases in the welfare benefits
offered by competitors. Moreover, one may well expect the benefit decreases of competitors to have a more pronounced impact than
would benefit increases of a comparable magnitude. State governments are the decision makers in our model and will be
4denoted by the set Ns 1,...,n . Each state must select a nonnegative level of welfare benefits to be made available to eligible recipients.
Strategy sets are thus characterized by S R for each igN and Ss i q = S represents the space of all collective strategy
profilesroutcomes. igNi To complete the specification of our model, we assume each state igN has preferences
over the outcome set S which are characterizable by a real valued utility function u :SªR. These preferences are
assumed to thoroughly account for the benefits as well as costs associated with various strategic outcomes. In addition to direct effects
from a state’s own decision Že.g., benefits of an ‘‘income safety net’’ for the state’s citizenry and the .
financial burdens associated with its provision there are also indirect effects caused by the choices of
other states. Examples of the latter include the cost savings from interstate migration induced by interstate benefit differentials. Finally,
we note that political pressure on state officials may depend on interstate benefit differentials
independently from interstate migration. State utility functions are assumed to capture these incentives as
well. We are particularly interested in how the behavior of individual states may be affected by perturbations in the behavior of others. A
necessary condition for such comparative statics to be everywhere well defined is for Ž each state to have a single valued ‘‘best reply’’
correspondence an as. sumption we adopt throughout our analysis . Formally, we assume that for each igN there exists a function b :SªS such that
for every sgS, ii Ž Ž . . Ž X . X Ž.4 Ž X ..ubs ,s )us , s for all s gS _ bs; where we let s , sii yi i i yi i i i i yi denote the strategy profile which agrees
with sX and s for players i and i yi Ž Ž .j /i respectively. As bsis independent of s our definition is equivaii Ž.lent to the notationally messier, but
more natural formulation of ‘‘ bs .’’ . i yi Note also that an equilibrium of our model can be defined as a fixed point Ž . Ž Ž . .of the best reply
correspondence, i.e., s*sbs * s bs*. ii gN In a technical sense, there can be no debate about whether or not states ‘‘play welfare games’’ as each
state is free to unilaterally modify its benefit levels. What can be questioned, however, is whether or not the game played is in some sense
degenerate. For instance, the game may be thought of as degenerate if each state’s optimal benefit levels can be
Case
Case D – Sort
1NC – Solvency
Surveillance is self-correcting – no abuse
Children’s Bureau 6/18/15 (“Monitoring” http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/monitoring)
To help states achieve positive outcomes for children and families, the Children's Bureau monitors state child
welfare services through the Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs), title IV-E foster care eligibility reviews, the Adoption and Foster
Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) assessment reviews, and the Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System
(SACWIS) assessment reviews. AFCARS Assessment Reviews The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS)
collects case-level information from state and tribal title IV-E agencies on all children in foster care and those who have been adopted with title
IV-E agency involvement. The purpose of the AFCARS assessment reviews is to more fully assess and evaluate how an agency gathers, records,
extracts, and submits its AFCARS data. The AFCARS review
process is a rigorous evaluation of the agency's information system and
allows the review team to identify problems, investigate the causes, and suggest solutions during the review.
Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs) The CFSRs, which are periodic reviews of state child welfare systems, enable the
Children’s Bureau to: Ensure conformity with federal child welfare requirements Determine what is actually
happening to children and families as they are engaged in child welfare services Assist states in enhancing
their capacity to help children and families achieve positive outcomes Our CFSR factsheet explains the history,
purpose, and process of the CFSRs. After a CFSR is completed, states develop a Program Improvement Plan (PIP) to
address areas in their child welfare services that need improvement. Our PIP instructions and matrix document provides
guidance to states about developing their PIPs. SACWIS Assessment Reviews SACWIS is a federally funded, yet voluntary, case management
system. SACWIS is the record hub for children and families receiving child welfare support and contains a complete case management history.
After a state's automated child welfare system is operational for approximately 1 year, the Division of State Systems (DSS) conducts a review to
assess the system's functionality. SACWIS data are used to support the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) and
the Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) process. Title IV-E Reviews The
regulatory reviews of the title IV-E Foster Care program
determine whether children in foster care meet the federal eligibility requirements for foster care
maintenance payments. During these reviews, the Children’s Bureau examines child and provider case
records, as well as payment documentation, to validate the accuracy of a state's reimbursement claims of
foster care payments. Each eligibility review details the strengths and weaknesses of each state's program
and identifies technical assistance that may be needed for program improvement.
Modern surveillance targets everyone equally
Freeman ’14 (Kymone, director of the National Black LUV Festival, Washington, D.C. Mayor’s Art
Award Finalist for Excellence in Service to the Arts in 2006 and received a Mayoral Proclamation in
2007 He is the subject of one chapter of the book Beat of A Different Drum: The Untold Stories of
African Americans Forging Their Own Paths in Work and Life (Hyperion). He has authored a collection
of poetry entitled Blood.Sweat.Tears. NYC spokesperson and official poet of Ralph Nader during his
campaign in ’04. Award Winning Playwright and Radio Personality, 2/11/14, “In the age of mass
surveillance, we are all black,” http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/surveillance-we-are-all-black-kymonefreeman/ 7/8/15, ML)
On Oct. 26, 2013, I had the pleasure and honor to host the Stop Watching Us Rally against National Security Agency surveillance on the National
Mall. It was an honor to have had an opportunity to speak truth to power on national TV and it was a pleasure to see a massive sea of White faces
respond to the provocative assertion that we
are all black today. I told them that equality has finally come to the shores of
America. It is called surveillance, and it is for everyone. The often-ignored truth is that surveillance is nothing new for black
people in America. From the times of slavery that made it illegal for the enslaved to congregate without a white person present to the modern
U.S. intelligence agencies who have historically engaged in political repression, black people have always been closely monitored. In 1971,
activists burglarized an FBI field office in Media, Pa., taking several dossiers that exposed the existence of COINTELPRO (COunter
INTELligence PROgram). They passed the material to news agencies, but many organizations initially refused to publish them. The information
documented long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordering his agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the
activities of the civil rights movement and its leaders. COINTELPRO was a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the FBI aimed
at surveying, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations. These actions even included the constant surveillance of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What is surprising and should be most disturbing is that then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally
approved the FBI’s request to expand its surveillance of Dr. King by tapping his phones, breaking into his home, office, and hotel rooms to plant
bugs for electronic monitoring. This was, of course, “justified” to determine if he was under the influence of communists. No such link was ever
found, but they did produce evidence of King’s extramarital affairs. Following his own dictates of COINTELPRO’s mission statement, J. Edgar
Hoover moved to exploit this information and had copies of those tapes sent to King’s wife, and the FBI drafted a letter encouraging that King
commit suicide to avoid national shame and humiliation before being exposed. King refused and the tapes were never made public after
determining that it may have backfired and equally have embarrassed the Bureau itself, but the surveillance only intensified after King’s
acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. This resulted in the Bureau convening a meeting of department heads to “examine a complete analysis of
the avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” It is important to point out that during the Church Committee
hearings that examined the COINTELPRO’s illegal activities, the FBI’s stated motivation was “protecting National Security, preventing violence,
and maintaining the existing social and political order.” After perfecting the tactics used to pursue this agenda that included psychological
warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment;
and illegal violence, including assassinations, these tactics were all effectively applied to the Black Panther Party and other organizations.
Ironically, it was the FBI’s own wiretaps that resulted in the late Black Panther Party leader Geronimo “Ji Jaga” Pratt being released from prison
after serving 27 years for a murder he did not commit. The FBI surveillance of Geronimo documented he was 350 miles away from the scene of
the crime when it occurred. However, COINTELPRO’s mandate was to “neutralize Geronimo as an effective BPP functionary,” so the FBI
purposely withheld this information at his trial. Geronimo’s attorney, the late Johnnie Cochran, was later able to obtain his freedom when the
tapes were finally released. After 27 years, eight of which were spent in solitary confinement, Geronimo “Ji Jaga” Pratt eventually received $4.5
million as settlement for false imprisonment. This is just a brief snapshot of the history of “surveillance” in the black community. Dr. Cornel
West has often used the term “Niggarization of America” to further describe how these tactics
developed under COINTELPRO
have now been extended to all Americans, regardless of age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin,
religion or sexual orientation. Many people who accepted the virtues of surveillance when it targeted primarily Muslims, black people,
or activists now understand how disturbing it is to be surveilled as enemies of the state themselves. Equality has finally come to the
shores of America in the form of surveillance. We are all in the same boat now, and when the lights go
out, we are all black
AT: Welfare Queen Stereotype
The stereotype of the ‘welfare queen’ will continue past ending welfare surveillance
due to its fitting of white American’s preconceived notions of poor inner-city people
on welfare.
Blake ’12 (John, reporter for CNN Politics, 1/23/12, “Return of the 'Welfare Queen'”
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/23/politics/weflare-queen/, 7/8/15 ML)
President Reagan's "Welfare Queen" is still shaping U.S. politics, but did she exist and why has her story remained so potent? She's out there,
lurking in the 2012 presidential race like a horror movie villain who refuses to die. She has 12 Social Security cards, mooches on benefits from
four fake dead husbands, and collects food stamps while driving a Cadillac. She rakes in about $150,000 a year in welfare benefits and, of course,
people assume she must be African-American. President Ronald Reagan gave America a sunny "Morning in America" optimism, but he also gave
it the "Welfare Queen," an infamous character who has re-emerged in this year's presidential race. Critics have accused the three leading
Republican presidential candidates of resurrecting Reagan's Welfare Queen by calling President Obama the "food stamp president," implying that
blacks live off other people's money, and by declaring that America is moving toward an "entitlement society." Yet few people have examined
the story behind the birth of the Welfare Queen. Did she really exist? Why do people still talk about her when welfare ended 15 years ago? Can
her story still swing voters at a time when the great recession has forced more whites to rely on government assistance? For some, the Welfare
Queen is an epic political lie. Reagan invented her, and Americans keep buying the lie. "It's one of those
persistent symbols that come up every election cycle," says Kaaryn Gustafson, author of "Cheating Welfare: Public
Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty." "This image of the lazy African-American woman who refuses to get a
job and keeps having kids is pretty enduring. It's always been a good way to distract the public from any meaningful
conversations about poverty and inequality. '' For others, the Welfare Queen reveals an uncomfortable truth: More Americans have turned the
social safety net into a hammock. "You hear these horror stories going around that people are buying junk food with food stamps and paying
cash for vodka and beer and things not covered with food stamps -- that gets people mad," says Steven Hayward, author of "The Age of Reagan:
The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980." The Welfare Queen has become such a legendary character in political circles that her existence
is treated like Bigfoot. Most scholars say she never existed, while a few insist the truth is out there. Gustafson went in search of the Welfare
Queen and discovered something surprising. There wasn't one Welfare Queen, she says. There were three. The birth of the Welfare Queen story
Here's how Reagan first told the story when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. At virtually every campaign stop, he
attacked welfare chiselers by bringing out the same character, according to press accounts. "There's a woman in Chicago," Reagan said, according
to an article in the now-defunct Washington Star. "She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. ... She's got Medicaid, getting food
stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000." It was a powerful story, but
reporters investigating it concluded it wasn't quite true. Some said it may have been based on a then-47-year-old woman in Chicago, but that
Reagan wildly exaggerated her abuses. In time, though, it didn't matter what reporters said. People started repeating the story as true. "It hangs
together as a good story because it's consistent with people's perception of the real world," says Craig R. Smith, who was a speechwriter for
former President Gerald Ford and a consulting writer with President George H.W. Bush. "Like in any good mythology, you need heroes and
villains and in the Welfare Queen, you had a villain who was taking advantage of the system." Was the Welfare Queen a racist story? Smith
doesn't think so. He says Reagan always opposed segregation, and had a "terrific record" combating racism as president of the Screen Actors
Guild. "Reagan was very sensitive about being called a racist," says Smith, author of "Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History." "The
minute anybody would say something about that, he would get upset. He would say fraud is fraud." Others say the
Welfare Queen story
stuck because it exploited white America's racial fears. Reagan never said the Welfare Queen was black,
but he didn't need to. People assumed she was because of rhetorical clues Reagan dropped, says John Hinshaw, a history
professor at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. "The Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare
checks at the liquor store fits a narrative that many white, working-class Americans had about inner-city
blacks," Hinshaw says. "It doesn't matter if the story was fabricated, it fit the narrative, and so it felt true, and it
didn't need to be verified." For at least one woman on welfare at the time, the story was brutal. Madeleine Burbank grew up in the 1950s
in a white family in which everybody worked. She says she was forced to go on welfare in the 1970s after her marriage suddenly ended and she
had to raise three children alone. She still remembers the humiliation of going into crowded, dirty waiting rooms to answer embarrassingly
personal questions posed by welfare screening officials. Reagan's story validated some of the worst assumptions some Americans have about
poor people, she says. Burbank escaped welfare after enrolling in a government program that retrained her as a counselor. She eventually retired
as a psychology teacher at a community college. Still, she remembers being ashamed to tell people she was on welfare, even those who were
close to her. Once, she was standing in a supermarket checkout line when her sister whispered disparaging comments about a woman in front of
them who was using food stamps to buy junk food. "When I told her I was on food stamps, she told me that I was different. I wasn't somehow
like 'those people," ' Burbank says. "She couldn't' stand the reality that I really wasn't that different. It's too painful for people to admit that their
life can be like that." Resurrection of the Welfare Queen? Are Republican presidential candidates offering voters an updated version of the
Welfare Queen? That's the question ricocheting around political circles today as commentators argue over recent comments made by Newt
Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney. Many have heard snippets of them by now: While campaigning in Iowa, Santorum said "I don't want
to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money." He later said he didn't mean to say black people, but meant people.
Romney has repeatedly said that Obama wants to transform America into an "entitlement society." Gingrich has attracted the most attention for
his language. He called Obama a food-stamp president, questioned poor children's work ethic, and said poor people should want paychecks, not
handouts. There was nothing racist about any of that language, or the Welfare Queen story, says Hayward, author of "The Age of Reagan," and a
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, which includes conservative leaders such as Lynne Cheney, wife of former vice
president Dick Cheney. Gingrich was simply being factual when he said more Americans are on food stamps under Obama than any other
president, he says. He was making a point about an unhealthy economy. "Gingrich would say that if Obama was white," Hayward says. The
candidates are using such language to highlight philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives, Hayward says. Liberals believe that
government can offer the best path to advancement. Conservatives believe a growing private economy provides more upward mobility than
government. The "entitlement society" phrase has nothing to do with race, either, Hayward says. It reflects the belief that people should create
their own opportunities, not government. "Somewhere in the entitlement mentality is the idea of redistribution: You transfer resources from the
relatively richer to the poorer," Hayward says. The problem Republicans run into when they talk about race and economics is that most don't
know how to talk about race, says Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington. What some
people perceive as racism is often just a Republican politician's poor choice of words, he says. "They trip over themselves and it sounds terribly
awkward. By and large, they tend to live in white communities, and they don't know how to talk to blacks because they don't do it. '' Former
Republican presidential candidate Jack Kemp was an exception in Tanner's mind. Kemp sounded comfortable talking to a black audience, Tanner
says, noting that he was a former NFL quarterback. "He shared locker rooms with black players. He knew them on a personal level in a way that
Romney or Gingrich don't." Demise of the Welfare Queen Candidates will no doubt need to learn how to better communicate with nonwhite
voters in the future: They're going to be the majority by 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Demographic changes will do to the Welfare
Queen story what fact-checking couldn't do -- discredit it, says Saladin Ambar, a political scientist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. No
candidate in the future will be able to win over a majority of voters by spouting racially loaded messages. Ambar says Republican presidential
nominee John McCain received about 59% of the white vote in the 2008 presidential election, but still lost. "He got the same percentage of the
white vote that Reagan got in 1980, but lost by seven points to Obama," Ambar says. Welfare Queen-like rhetoric won't work anymore, because
the face of poverty is no longer dark, others say. Recent census data revealed that a record number of Americans, 48.6%, live in a household
receiving some form of government benefits, the Wall Street Journal reported. "The Welfare Queen has lost its potency during this recession
because all over this country you see white people lining up to get unemployment, feeding their families at food pantries, sleeping in cars and
using food stamps at the local grocery," says Mark Naison, a history professor at Fordham University in New York. Perhaps the Welfare Queen
actually should have died a long time ago. President Clinton and a Republican-controlled congress ended welfare in 1996. Its successor is called
TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Gustafson, author of "Cheating Welfare," says TANF is not an unconditional entitlement. It
comes with time-limits and work requirements and recipients have to go through a bureaucratic gantlet to verify their eligibility. "A lot of poor
people are working," she says. "They are the people giving you change when you buy coffee in the morning or handing you your dry cleaning.
These are the people who rely on public benefits." Still, an actual Welfare Queen did exist, Gustafson says. A database search of all major
newspapers turned up the first use of the term in 1974, when a woman in Chicago was given the label. Two additional women were also dubbed
welfare queens in subsequent years by local newspapers. Both were based in Los Angeles. One collected $377,458 in welfare benefits in seven
years and lived in a house with a swimming pool. She did drive a Cadillac, along with a Rolls Royce and Mercedes Benz, Gustafson discovered.
Reagan merged the identities of all three and exaggerated their abuses, Gustafson says. "Reagan twisted them around and created one character,
and tried to leave everyone with the impression that it was happening all over the place," Gustafson says. "It's totally false that these women
typified welfare recipients." While others believe the Welfare Queen will be dethroned, Gustafson remains unconvinced. "I would love to think
that will happen," she says. "But I'm hearing politicians say poor people need to learn how to work or that we need to drug test welfare recipients
-- it makes me think that
even if people aren't directly invoking the Welfare Queen stereotype, they are indirectly.
"The ghost of the Welfare Queen is still lurking."
Surveillance Good Turn
1NC – Fraud Turn
Welfare surveillance is key to check fraud which disproportionately affects
minorities- that link turns the case
Peatling 12 [Stephanie-senior writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, 12/18/12, “Welfare fraud becomes harder”,
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/welfare-fraud-becomes-harder-20121217-2bjfk.html, Date Accessed: 7/9/15]Kruger
SOPHISTICATED data-mining techniques combined with old-fashioned private detectives and dobbing
in wrongdoers are resulting in fewer people being prosecuted for welfare fraud and allowing the federal
government to claw back hundreds of millions of dollars. But, according to a report to be released on Tuesday, the idea of
prevention being better than cure comes at a cost of high levels of government surveillance over the
public as it tries to make sure the complicated tax, welfare and payments system pays the correct amount to each recipient. ''The overwhelming majority of people
are honest in their dealings with the government,'' Human Services Minister Kim Carr says. ''But responsible custodianship of this money
through an effective compliance program means help goes where it should - to those most in need.
Fed surveillance key – states fudge the data to collect more money – proves the CP
solves the deadbeat dad narrative and the aff can’t
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
The federal funding also creates incentives to implicate men who are not even fathers and pull them into the criminal-enforcement machinery.
One requirement for collecting federal payments is that states must institute paternity-establishment
procedures, and nothing in the federal law prohibits or penalizes designating the wrong man as the father.
"Eligibility ... depends only upon tagging the largest possible number of men, and there is no review or requirement that it be the right men,"
writes Ronald Henry (2006, 54). The
result is "paternity fraud," the practice of forcing men to pay support for
children who are acknowledged not to be their offspring. Most victims are low-income minority males, and many are young
and even underage, with few of the skills or means to defend themselves in what Henry describes as a mass judicial "assembly line" that bears
little relation to a hearing. "The paternity fraud victim is hustled through the formality, often in less than five minutes, and may not even realize
what has happened until the first garnishment of his paycheck." Henry estimates that the
number of such victims may exceed one
million. "Every child support agency in America knows that it . .. has worked injustice upon appalling numbers of innocent men." In 2002,
California governor Gray Davis vetoed a bill that would have rectified paternity fraud. After registering concern "for the children," Davis
revealed his fear that the state would lose $40 million in federal funding. Thus, an elected official openly rationalized imposing criminal penalties
on citizens known to be innocent simply in order to avoid losing money. "California has long been notorious for its high rate of 'sewer service,'
high rate of default judgments, and high rate of false paternity establishments," notes Henry (2006, 54, 58, 63, 60-62, 66, 76, 55).
Ext – Key to Check Fraud
More ev-Surveillance solves fraud
Lichtblau 14 [et al, Eric-writer for NYT, William Arkin-writer for NYT, 11/15/14, “More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover
Operations”, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/more-federal-agencies-are-using-undercover-operations.html, date accessed: 7/9/15]Kruger
WASHINGTON — The
federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with
officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors
or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show. At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at
large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice. At the Internal
Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more,
more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at
thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.
court records show. At the Agriculture Department,
Impact – Quality of Life
Welfare money improves quality of life for low income families
Hill 10 [Eric-Writer for The commonwealth times, 4/19/10,”Shifting the American dream, how social welfare will improve our lives”,
http://www.commonwealthtimes.org/2010/04/19/shifting-the-american-dream-how-social-welfare-will-improve-our-lives/, date accessed:
7/9/15]Kruger
Social welfare improves quality of life . Everyone wants to be taken care of in some way or another, but not everyone has that. Low er
income families struggle to provide the bare necessities for their children, and because of this they
tend to educate and provide only enough for their children to become trapped in the same cycle of
destitution . If there are free community centers, children and parents can provide a safe environment
away from negative influences, they can receive free parenting training, use exercise facilities and
develop career skills. Lately there has been a move away from community growth because of migration to cities, changes in the American economy to a
credit and banking system and financial collapse of community industries. When the government invests in social welfare, it
improves community structures for generations to come. For instance, Michelle Obama is working on a program called Let’s Move,
3.
which is designed to eliminate childhood obesity within one generation. The First Lady has lobbied the food industry to improve the health of their products, and is
re-energizing the national lunch program and President Physical fitness award to encourage more physical exercise in schools and more nutritious lunches.
Impact – Economy/Turns Case
Fraud disproportionately affects minorities and prevents economic growth
Roustan 10 [Wayne-writer for the sun sentential, 11/19/10, “62 charged with welfare fraud totaling nearly $300,000”, http://articles.sunsentinel.com/2010-11-19/news/fl-public-assistance-fraud-20101118_1_food-stamp-welfare-fraud-housing-fraud, date accessed: 7/10/15]Kruger
Boynton Beach — Sixty-one
Palm Beach County residents and one from Tampa were charged with welfare
fraud after an 18-month investigation dubbed Operation Easy Money, according to the Palm Beach County State Attorney's
Office. Investigators have arrested 44 of the food stamp recipients and 18 are still being sought, said the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which also worked on the case with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.
The suspects illegally obtained $298,000 in cash from government-issued Electronic Benefit Transfer, or
EBT, cards which were supposed to be used to buy food, said FDLE Special Agent in Charge Amos Rojas Jr. "In one egregious case, up to $14,000 [was obtained
by one person] along with other prohibited items such as cigarettes, beer and phone calling cards," Rojas said. An earlier investigation, called Operation Money for
two brothers who ran Billy's Market, at 464 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, in Belle Glade. "Gassan Ali and Imad
accused of trafficking in EBT food stamp benefits to the tune of more than $1 million ," Rojas said.
Both have pleaded guilty to grand theft and public assistance fraud worth $1.5 million between 2008 and
2009, he said. That's when the FDLE, Sheriff's Office and State Attorney launched Operation Easy Money to review EBT transactions at the store dating back to
Nothing, led to the April 2009 arrests of
Ali were
January 2006. Investigators said they found that Billy's Market employees would ring up false food purchases, return the cash to the card holder and keep a cut for the
store, sometimes up to 50 percent, with little or no food changing hands. The store itself had "sparsely stocked shelves, sometimes with cans of expired food and no
shopping carts or baskets," according to Rojas. Among the 61 accused of food stamp fraud are 16 also facing housing fraud charges for misrepresenting their incomes
or employment status to qualify for housing assistance, according to the FDLE. In addition to the housing fraud, current Tampa resident Felicia Miller Johnson, 29, is
also accused of lying about working for the Department of Corrections to fraudulently receive subsidized child day care while living in Palm Beach County, according
to FDLE investigator Bob Nelson. Some
of the 62 suspects were "driving luxury cars and they were in possession of
luxury accessories that the working public" could not afford, said prosecutor Angela Miller with the State Attorney's Office. "It's this
type of fraud that not only hurts those who need it most, but it also hinders our nation's economic
recovery efforts ," Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Michael Gauger said.
Economic growth prevents extinction
Kemp 10 (Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan,
special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security
Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010, The East Moves
West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East, p. 233-4
The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario; everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The
world
economic situation weakens rather than strengthens, and India, China, and Japan suffer a major reduction
in their growth rates, further weakening the global economy. As a result, energy demand falls and the price of
fossil fuels plummets, leading to a financial crisis for the energy-producing states, which are forced to cut
back dramatically on expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to political unrest: and
nurtures different radical groups, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists. The internal stability of some
countries is challenged, and there are more “failed states.” Most serious is the collapse of the democratic
government in Pakistan and its takeover by Muslim extremists, who then take possession of a large
number of nuclear weapons. The danger of war between India and Pakistan increases significantly. Iran,
always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and weaponizes its nuclear program. That further enhances nuclear
proliferation in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and Iran as nuclear
states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases, and the possibility of a nuclear
terrorist attack in either the Western world or in the oil-producing states may lead to a further devastating
collapse of the world economic market, with a tsunami-like impact on stability. In this scenario, major
disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for two-thirds of the planet’s population.
Ext – Fraud Turns Case
More ev-Fraud disproportionately affects minorities-that turns case
WPXI 12 [WPXI-TV station in Pittsburgh,2/7/12, “Cracking down on welfare fraud: Is it hurting the innocent?”,
http://www.wpxi.com/news/news/local/cracking-down-welfare-fraud-it-hurting-innocent/nHXBT/, date accessed: 7/9/15]Kruger
Another measure requires the use of a fraud detection program that would run welfare applicants’
information through an income eligibility verification system before providing benefits. Another reform
would prevent “benefit shopping,” where people apply for welfare benefits in a county other than the one
in which they live in order to receive higher benefit payments. “If somebody is applying for benefits
they don't deserve, then we have a responsibility , from a governmental perspective and a societal perspective, to take those
benefits away and use the dollars in a better form to help other folks in need ,” said Reed.
Surveillance is key to solve fraud which effects people that are inflicted with
poverty-turns case
Roustan 10 [Wayne-writer for the sun sentential, 11/19/10, “62 charged with welfare fraud totaling nearly $300,000”, http://articles.sunsentinel.com/2010-11-19/news/fl-public-assistance-fraud-20101118_1_food-stamp-welfare-fraud-housing-fraud, date accessed: 7/10/15]Kruger
*SAME CARD AS THE FIRST CARD IN THE ECON IMPACT-ONLY NEED TO READ IT ONCE
Boynton Beach — Sixty-one
Palm Beach County residents and one from Tampa were charged with welfare
fraud after an 18-month investigation dubbed Operation Easy Money, according to the Palm Beach County State Attorney's
Office. Investigators have arrested 44 of the food stamp recipients and 18 are still being sought, said the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which also worked on the case with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.
The suspects illegally obtained $298,000 in cash from government-issued Electronic Benefit Transfer, or
EBT, cards which were supposed to be used to buy food, said FDLE Special Agent in Charge Amos Rojas Jr. "In one egregious case, up to $14,000 [was obtained
by one person] along with other prohibited items such as cigarettes, beer and phone calling cards," Rojas said. An earlier investigation, called Operation Money for
two brothers who ran Billy's Market, at 464 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, in Belle Glade. "Gassan Ali and Imad
Ali were accused of trafficking in EBT food stamp benefits to the tune of more than $1 million ," Rojas said.
Both have pleaded guilty to grand theft and public assistance fraud worth $1.5 million between 2008 and
2009, he said. That's when the FDLE, Sheriff's Office and State Attorney launched Operation Easy Money to review EBT transactions at the store dating back to
Nothing, led to the April 2009 arrests of
January 2006. Investigators said they found that Billy's Market employees would ring up false food purchases, return the cash to the card holder and keep a cut for the
store, sometimes up to 50 percent, with little or no food changing hands. The store itself had "sparsely stocked shelves, sometimes with cans of expired food and no
shopping carts or baskets," according to Rojas. Among the 61 accused of food stamp fraud are 16 also facing housing fraud charges for misrepresenting their incomes
or employment status to qualify for housing assistance, according to the FDLE. In addition to the housing fraud, current Tampa resident Felicia Miller Johnson, 29, is
also accused of lying about working for the Department of Corrections to fraudulently receive subsidized child day care while living in Palm Beach County, according
to FDLE investigator Bob Nelson. Some
of the 62 suspects were "driving luxury cars and they were in possession of
luxury accessories that the working public" could not afford, said prosecutor Angela Miller with the State Attorney's Office. "It's this
type of fraud that not only hurts those who need it most, but it also hinders our nation's economic
recovery efforts ," Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Michael Gauger said.
AT: No Link – States Laws Solve Fraud
Maine Proves-States are awful at stopping fraud-prefer specific ev
Covert 14 [Bryce-is the Economic Policy Editor for ThinkProgress. She was previously editor of the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal
blog and a senior communications officer, 1/8/14, “Governor’s Attempt To Find Massive Welfare Fraud Turns Up Next To Nothing”,
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/08/3136631/lepage-welfare/, date accessed: 7/9/15]Kruger
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) released data on purchases made with state welfare benefits that he
claimed exposed abuse, but they only add up to less than a percent of all benefit transactions . The
data show that there were more than 3,000 transactions at bars, sports bars, and strip clubs made with
EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards loaded with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or welfare) and food stamp
benefits between January 1, 2011 and November 15, 2013. The state doesn’t track what was actually purchased, and some transactions can be withdrawals from ATMs at those locations.
On Tuesday,
Given that there are about 50,000 of these transactions every month, or nearly 1.8 million in that time frame, as the state’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) spokesman told the
, they only make up “about two-tenths of 1 percent of total purchases and ATM withdrawals,” the
Bangor Daily News
paper calculates.
AT: Surveillance Ineffective/Fraud Inevitable
Fraud will increase in the future only surveillance can detect it and stop it
Wallack 14 [Todd-is a reporter for the Globe’s metro section, mainly working on investigative stories. A graduate of Northwestern
University, 3/4/14, “Reports of potential EBT fraud increase”, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/04/state-data-shows-increasereports-potential-fraud-food-benefits/Tcwb4rnheW1Nhf7Pq9W2XO/story.html, date accessed: 7/10/15]Kruger
After widespread complaints about welfare fraud, Governor Deval Patrick’s administration appears to be stepping up efforts to reduce
abuses of state food benefits, typically distributed through electronic benefit transfer cards, or EBTs. Staff members at the
Department of Transitional Assistance reported 14,431 cases of potential fraud or abuse of food benefits
to investigators through the first 10 months of 2013, an 87 percent increase over the same period in 2012,
according to a report by Inspector General Glenn A. Cunha released Friday. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) serves
about 880,000 individuals. Department
officials attributed most of the increase to a streamlined system to report
potential fraud. Transitional Assistance Commissioner Stacey Monahan said her office more than quadrupled the
number of investigators last year to root out fraud and tweaked the computer system to make it
much easier for staff to file a report when they find something amiss.