1AC_UBI_BVWBW_V3

Rishabh Barve and Abigail Wyrick – [email protected]

Yay debate!
1AC V3
 1AC – Innovation
Advantage one is Innovation —

Automation is accelerating---Universal Basic Income is essential to prevent

mass labor displacement
Court Ash-Dale 23, investigative journalist at Queen’s College Journal The Observer, 1/29/23,
“Automation and UBI: Charting a Path to a New Future,”
https://theobserver-qiaa.org/automation-and-ubi-charting-a-path-to-a-new-future

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are disrupting the future of work in ways that have
inspired us to consider alternative economic models. The emergence of cheap, lightning-fast
labour will permanently change the job market, and perhaps the future of work. In late 2022, artificial
intelligence pioneer OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, a free online program that answers prompts and questions by generating human-like text — for

example, the title of this article. It is a smaller replica of GPT-3, a machine-learning model that can theoretically carry

out many tasks of white-collar careers. “When robots automate our fast-food restaurants,
workers will be incentivized to get better educated for a white-collar career,” said Dr. Robin
Boadway, an economics professor at Queen’s University, in an interview with the Observer. The
mass automation of minimum-wage work threatens the livelihood of millions of
undereducated and unskilled workers who, according to Boadway, will probably see a growing
market as we shift to green energy. One Stanford study predicted the project would employ 28 million long-term, full-time workers
worldwide, plus up to 100 million more in production and construction. “Jobs are going to be greener and more digital, requiring degrees in
engineering, IT, data, and business management,” Boadway said. Computers
can already do most of those tasks alone.
Online programs can write code, paralegal, and make marketing content in seconds. Humans are
a tentative means of productivity. Yet, the automation of the job market may be a blessing in disguise. The jobs that can be
automated are usually ones we don’t like. The nature of work today is often unfulfilling, under-compensated, and unrewarding. It’s ironic to live in the
most prosperous age of human history and to be so unhappy. So why are we doing this to ourselves? What if we could automate our ‘bullshit jobs’
while guaranteeing a modest standard of living for all? “I think ultimately, we
will have to have some kind of universal basic
income [UBI],” Elon Musk said at the 17th World Government Summit, describing a policy
proposal that gives every citizen a monthly allowance to afford a modest standard of living. “I
don’t think we’re going to have a choice.” Below its fanatic exterior, a universal basic income may be our
greatest asset in the Age of Automation. “I’m unaware of any UBI experiment, but we fund several basic income programs
today,” Boadway explained, who co-authored a proposal for a Canada-wide basic income. “They are tax-funded allowances that help make ends meet.”
Basic incomes are income supplements traditionally reduced depending on how much recipients
make from working, encouraging workers to find work. In the scenario of a UBI, every citizen
could be eligible for a guaranteed income. “In this economy, no such policy can exist,” according to Boadway. This suggests
only radical changes to the way basic incomes are funded can make it a reality. For one example, with big businesses feasibly and completely
automatable, the accumulated wealth of highly profitable businesses can be redistributed among every citizen. The remaining positions at industry
giants would be reserved for talented workers. A guaranteed income will allow us to let our hobbies and interests guide us to live more productive and
satisfying lives. Free to do as we please, we may return to an age of revolutionary inventors, philosophers, and pioneers. The UBI tends to
divide the room despite how much society and the concept of work will be transformed.
Skeptics argue that state-funded laziness would disincentivize workers to contribute
meaningfully to the economy or society. However, several basic income experiments have
found recipients tend to use the increased income to get better educated, improve their
careers and start businesses. The rise of unearned income does not mean the end of work but
would grow the economy and the middle class. It is impossible to predict every side-effect of a society where work is
optional. Still, believers of the UBI agree it possesses the solutions to several of society’s most significant challenges . Basic incomes have
been proven to be one of the best strategies for reducing poverty, income inequality, demand
for public services, and crime. Despite the high costs of paying for every citizen’s living costs,
fewer tax dollars would be spent on these thought-to-be unsolvable problems. “It gives
[everyone] the opportunity to invest in their lives, or in their business,” wrote Rutger Bregman,
a historian and best-selling author of Utopia of Realists. “The true business of people should be to go back to school and
think about whatever it was they were doing before somebody told them they had to earn a living.” How advanced economies react

to an AI revolution will define the livelihood of tomorrow’s workforce. A universal basic

income, which could effectively make work optional, may be a necessary feature of our digital
future.

3 Scenarios:

Scenario 1 is Populism.

Unchecked automation fuels rampant populism and novel inequality.

Hiebert ’22 [Kyle; 10/19/2022; researcher and analyst for the Centre for International
Governance Innovation; "Tech-Fuelled Inequality Could Catalyze Populism 2.0,"
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/tech-fuelled-inequality-could-catalyze-populism-20/]

Each of these tools holds tremendous potential to improve lives and help solve the world’s biggest problems. But technological
change
always produces winners and losers by giving rise to new concentrations of power and novel forms of

inequality. For example, a study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that between 50 and 70 percent of lost
wages in America from 1980 to 2016 stemmed from automation — far more than from aggressive offshoring or the
withering of labour unions. However, automation has brought about new occupations as well, evidenced by the absence of mass joblessness in the
United States over the same period. Despite the lost wages, the US unemployment rate from 1993 to 2019 stayed around or below seven percent when
excluding a four-year recovery following the exogenous shock of the 2008 financial crisis. Productivity has also increased by nearly 62 percent since
1979. But the wages of American workers have failed to keep pace, rising only 17.5 percent, signalling a deep disconnect in recent history between new
technologies being adopted and the average worker being better off as a result. Similar circumstances across the democratic world have provoked
severe political consequences over the past decade. Disaffected
populations caught on the wrong side of economic transformations and
alienated by the accompanying social changes spurred by globalization have aligned themselves with populists
pitching simplistic solutions to complex problems. Polarization has skyrocketed; international
cooperation has frayed. As the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution accelerates in coming years, upending
how economies and societies operate, a new form of populism rooted in tech-fuelled disparities may eventually consume

democratic nations. To avoid this outcome, governments must get serious about harnessing new technologies to make the democratic
process more agile and responsive to voters’ frustrations. The Coming Age of Disruptive Automation Since researchers at Oxford University published a
landmark study in 2013 estimating that some 47 percent of total US employment was at risk of automation, fears over the prospect of mass
displacements of human labour by new technologies have grown. They have also become more urgent in the
wake of the pandemic. According to one assessment, the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 fast-tracked four

years’ worth of digital adoption in business operations and supply chains, and seven years’ worth of
investment into digital-based products. American academic Erik Brynjolfsson has noted that when it comes to technology’s job-creating potential, past
trends are not necessarily guaranteed to play out in the future. “Improvements in technology can improve productivity. For most of the 20th century,
those productivity increases were associated with job growth and growing wages. But there is no economic law saying that always has to be the case.”
That seems to hold true when looking at the six largest tech companies in the world — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon,
Tesla and Meta. As of early October, with a combined market valuation of nearly $8 trillion — a bit less than half the GDP of China, the world’s second-
largest economy — they collectively employed just 2.25 million people, significantly less than the US federal government. And at least 1.5 million of
that total comes from Amazon, which launched an ill-fated pandemic hiring binge and has routinely come under fire for poor working conditions for its
staff. When it comes to digital products being created by tech companies, Beijing-based venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee predicted in 2017 that AI
would replace half of all human labour before 2030. That same year, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute appeared to
corroborate Lee’s ominous forecast. After analyzing 2,000 different work responsibilities across 800 different job roles, McKinsey suggested “ about

half the activities people are paid almost US$15 trillion in wages to do in the global economy have the potential to be
automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology.” While only five percent of the occupations analyzed by
McKinsey could, in theory, disappear entirely, technological progress has accelerated. Clearly, some jobs are in greater jeopardy
than others. The positions most susceptible to automation are based on physical activities in highly structured and predictable environments, or the
collection and processing of data, say the report’s authors. Among those most vulnerable are low-skilled positions in manufacturing, hospitality and
retail commerce. The report claims that “technical, economic and social factors will determine the pace and extent of automation,” but that half of
contemporary work activity could be automated by 2055, possibly even as soon as 2035. Others offer a more upbeat assessment, saying AI and
automation will create more jobs than they threaten by producing future occupations yet to be imagined. Analysis published in October 2020 by the
World Economic Forum — several months after the pandemic was declared, once companies had had time to evaluate the need and opportunities for
increased automation — predicted that by 2025, “a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines” might eliminate 85 million jobs, while
also creating 97 million new ones. Such positions would see work functions split more evenly between humans, machines and algorithms; machines
would handle more physical tasks while algorithms could simplify and augment human-based inputs and decision-making processes. However, while

12 million net
new jobs sounds positive, context is important. Ensuring that workers displaced by
technology can avoid joblessness by transitioning to new roles will require re-skilling on an
enormous scale, at a considerable cost and in an ever-shrinking window of time. For comparison,
governments have so far mostly failed in producing credible plans for a “just transition” for a much smaller and more predictable number of fossil fuel
workers poised to lose out as the world shifts to alternative energy sources. A decrease in human labour’s share of work responsibilities could also
suppress wage growth. Another sector ripe for disruption by automation is transportation, which accounts for approximately 29 workers per 1,000
people in the European Union. Trucking could be hit particularly hard, affecting more than 2.2 million drivers in the United States and hundreds of
thousands of workers in Canada. Self-driving vehicles in the freight industry are already being road-tested, with proponents saying autonomous trucks
will not only be safer but also reduce shipping operator costs by 40 percent due to not having to hire a human driver. The vast majority of those human
drivers, according to labour market research company Zippia, are white males over 48 years old with lower levels of education. Truck-driving is also the
highest-paid “low-skilled” large labour segment remaining in the North American economy. Elsewhere, large AI language models, systems that

understand and generate text, will eventually compete for millions of low-skilled jobs involving a range of
customer support services. Existing models can already provide strikingly accurate and original responses to human interaction — so much so that
Google researcher Blake Lemoine caused widespread alarm this past June by claiming that a chatbot based on Google’s LaMDA model had become
sentient. Lemoine was later let go by the company. The capabilities of LaMDA and its rivals, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 — which wrote an op-ed for The
Guardian in September 2020 — and Meta’s free version, OPT-175B, will expand exponentially as they incorporate audiovisual material into their data
training sets. Right now, these training sets consist only of huge troves of text scoured from across the internet. Moreover, user-friendly machine-
learning models such as OpenAI’s Dall-E and those from Midjourney AI are producing increasingly sophisticated computer-generated art and
illustrations, while others are generating music. Both will likely eliminate career opportunities in the creative industries. The
impacts of
technology will also upset social relations in other ways that can exacerbate culture wars and
grievance politics. For example, cloud computing and better virtual reality for use in business meetings will provide white-collar workers with
ever-greater job flexibility, just as climate change renders blue-collar jobs much more dangerous. This may entrench the sort of contentious digital
divide and risk imbalance experienced between office staff and front-line workers during the pandemic. Meanwhile, consumer biotechnology will
enable the well-educated and wealthy to live longer, healthier lives that will extend their working careers, possibly narrowing opportunities for young
people and new graduates. At the same time, wider adoption of pre-crime and predictive policing tools could aggravate the discrimination and
stigmatization already felt within disadvantaged communities. Policies that successfully attract tens of thousands of skilled immigrants to plug labour
gaps in the tech sector could inflate local housing prices. Many thinkers are also already confronting questions about when and how — not if —
intelligent machines could be granted some equivalent to human rights. In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Israeli historian Yuval
Noah Harari extrapolates even further. He posits that if this century’s technological advances — and the quasi-religious zeal attached to those gains —
mean citizens in liberal democracies eventually cede much of their military and economic usefulness to robots and algorithms, the political system “will
stop attaching much value to them.” The result, according to Harari, would be an erosion of the core liberal belief that each human, as an individual,
holds intrinsic value and deserves to exercise choice through democratic elections and free markets. Should these scenarios
come true,
they are likely to worsen the already growing bifurcation within democratic politics — a split
between those who believe in open economies and societies, and those seeking primacy for
their chosen social and political tribes. Populism Reinvented The prolonged, uneven fallout of the 2008 financial crisis has already
catapulted populist leaders with zero-sum ideologies to various levels of office in democratic nations across the world. Everywhere, their base of
support is comprised of voters demanding retribution against an undefined set of “elites” perceived as clinging unfairly to the top of the socioeconomic
ladder. Indeed, the meritocracy and promise of social mobility that have historically underpinned liberal democracies seem to be faltering. In 2017,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Peter Temin laid out an argument that escaping poverty in America takes 20 years of effort combined
with uninterrupted good luck. Income inequality among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development prior to
the pandemic was already at its highest levels in five decades, much of it due to the disappearance of middle-class job opportunities. More recently, a
report from the UN Development Programme released in September warned that “in a stunning first,” cascading global crises had so impacted life
expectancies, education levels and quality of life worldwide that its Human Development Index — a broad country-by-country measurement of human
progress — had declined for two years in a row, a change equivalent to “erasing the gains of the preceding five years.” The latest annual World
Inequality Report, produced by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab, sheds light on where these losses are being felt (and perceived) the most — the
middle and working classes of wealthy nations. The past two decades of globalization have narrowed inequality between rich countries and the
developing nations, while simultaneously increasing inequality within countries themselves. “This sharp rise in within country inequalities has meant
that despite economic catch-up and strong growth in emerging countries, the world remains particularly unequal today. It also means that inequalities
within countries are now even greater than the significant inequalities observed between countries.” The resulting angst
is being
channelled into democratic societies in visible and distressing ways — from online conspiracies and
extremism to the embrace of political violence and victimhood as a source of identity and personal meaning. In
short, many people in the Western world in particular are increasingly unable to deal with the

dissonance between their subjective expectations for their lives and the objective material realities they must
contend with. In 2022, the legacies of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, combined with a global energy crisis

and red-hot inflation eating away at individuals’ purchasing power, are breathing new life into populist movements.
And different types of tech-focused populists are emerging to harness this maelstrom of inequality, rage and technological advancement as a pathway
to power.

Populism sparks nuclear war.

Hymans 22, PhD in Government from Harvard, Associate Professor of International Relations
at the University of Southern California. (Jacques E. C., 2022, “Responses to Meier and Vieluf”,
The Nonproliferation Review, vol. 28, no. 1-3, pp. 52-54, DOI: 10.1080/10736700.2022.2093513)

I have argued that nuclear-armed establishments are more

Building on Meier and Vieluf’s accounting of the dangers of populism

dangerous than Meier and Vieluf suggest. Now I will also argue that nuclear-armed populists are dangerous for even
more reasons than Meier and Vieluf enumerate. Meier and Vieluf’s article does not do enough with its basic definition of nationalist populism as a black–white oppositional
stance toward internal as well as external enemies. If we take that definition seriously, it becomes apparent that the biggest problem stemming from the rise of populists is not

The biggest problem is

that they might ignore the advice of traditional nuclear and defense establishments and behave carelessly toward foreign powers.

that populism is a gateway drug to internal political violence, revolution, and civil war.12 And,
perhaps needless to say, serious domestic upheaval in a nuclear power also increases the likelihood

of a nuclear incident of some kind. Perhaps the first-ever populist government in history was led by the
Jacobin faction that drove the French Revolution forward from 1792 to 1794.13 The Jacobins expressed a
radical populist faith in the power of “redemptive violence” by “the people.” 14 They made war both inside and
outside France. To quote historian Brian Singer, the Jacobins’ violence was directed neither “at a well-defined enemy” nor “at some limited, short-term end, but to the creation
of a new regime, a new humanity.” 15 In short, they wanted to raze the old world to the ground—or die trying. The Jacobins’ favorite metaphor for their violence was lightning,
which materializes from out of nowhere to simultaneously destroy and enlighten the dark world it strikes. Their interest in lightning was not only metaphorical; Jacobin

France and the world are lucky that nuclear

ideologues such as Jean-Paul Marat were serious students of the new science of electricity.16

physics was not very far advanced in the Jacobins’ day. None of the contemporary nuclear-armed populist leaders listed by Meier
and Vieluf is a modern-day Jacobin. Most populists are merely unprincipled con artists who prey on atomized and insecure sections of the public, manipulating them to gain

the language of populism is the language of revolution and civil war, and
personal wealth and power. Even so,

pretend revolutionaries can easily be carried along by the tide of social resentments that they
have irresponsibly stirred up. Take, for instance, Trump and his followers’ dismal trajectory to January 6, 2021. We need to consider
worst-case scenarios. Trump did not actually want a civil war in the United States, but his rhetoric emboldened the not-so-small number of Americans who
do. A rigorous time-series analysis found that Trump’s presidential run in 2016 was associated with an abrupt, statistically significant, and durable increase in violent attacks by
domestic far-right extremists.17 For instance, the leading ideologist of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, James Mason, wrote in July 2017, “I am not ashamed to say that
I shed a tear of joy at [Trump’s] win.” 18 Far from standing back and standing by, Mason preached direct action to “accelerate” the onset of a society-purifying race war that he
believed would push the Trump administration into embracing full-blown fascism. In May 2017, an Atomwaffen member, National Guard veteran, and onetime physics major
named Brandon Russell was arrested for plotting to attack the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, among other targets. Police later also found traces of thorium and americium in

domestic divisions fomented by populists do not have to arrive at their logical

Russell’s bedroom.19 The

end point of revolution and civil war to increase deterrence instability and the chances of a
nuclear incident. Below I elaborate three more specific hypotheses on the deterrence consequences of internally divisive populist governments. The hypotheses
are speculative, but they logically follow from the definition of populism and should therefore serve as useful points for further discussion of Meier and Vieluf’s core idea.

Populists are likely to be insensitive to nuclear threats to the political strongholds of

Hypothesis 1.

their domestic opponents. Meier and Vieluf observe that the credibility of US extended-deterrence promises to America’s allies suffered massively under
the Trump administration. That is certainly true, but the question of whether the United States would be willing to trade

“Pittsburgh for Paris” (p. 19) has been around for decades. The new problem that populism creates
is that even homeland deterrence starts to suffer from the same credibility dilemmas as
extended deterrence. In addition to the “Pittsburgh for Paris” question, we now also have to ask whether a populist
administration in Washington would be willing to trade Pittsburgh for Portland. In a country where populist
leaders revel in dividing society against itself, deterrence theory’s standard assumption that a nuclear threat to any

part of the homeland will be treated as a threat to the whole homeland can no longer be taken
for granted.20 Whatever the president’s true intentions, foreign powers could potentially calculate that they will not be
punished for striking at certain targets within the country’s borders.21 For instance, the longest-range
North Korean missile that is currently operational, the Hwasong-14, has enough range for a nuclear
attack against Seattle but not Mar-a-Lago. 22 Would the same president who formally designated
Seattle as an “anarchist jurisdiction” in an attempt to starve it of federal dollars be greatly concerned by a credible
threat of a North Korean strike against it? 23 Probably—but is “probably” a good enough answer
for homeland deterrence credibility? Another dimension of this same hypothesis has to do with the precise locations where populists choose to
install military installations that are likely to become nuclear targets. During the Nixon administration, the objections of congressional Democrats to the planned construction of
Sentinel anti-ballistic-missile facilities near their political strongholds such as Boston and Seattle led Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to move the projects to less populated
areas.24 President Nixon believed that he needed to work constructively with the Democrats on core national security issues. By contrast, a populist president would love to see
his political opponents sweating the targets he put on their backs.25 Populists in power may even be slow to help their political opponents’ regions recover from an actual
nuclear attack. There is a lesson for nuclear analysts in the Trump administration’s intentional slow-walking of congressionally mandated emergency aid to the US territory of
Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history.26 Having long held a low opinion of Puerto Ricans, Trump reportedly told his chief
of staff and budget director that he “did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico.” 27 Would Trump have been any more helpful if the island had been hit by a man-made

Populists are
bomb instead of a natural one? Maybe if Puerto Rico could do something for him in return, which leads to the second hypothesis: Hypothesis 2.

likely to exploit their control over homeland deterrence to demand political concessions from
their domestic political opponents. At the heart of populism is a disrespect for the principle of
equal application of the laws. Instead, governance becomes a pure power game, and populist rulers
notably exploit crises as opportunities to bring domestic political opponents to their knees.
There is every reason to assume that a populist in full command of the nuclear and defense
establishment would similarly take advantage of a nuclear crisis to conduct such a shakedown. In
other words, populists in power will charge a high price for adequately responding to nuclear threats

against their domestic opponents’ political strongholds. Let us continue with the example of the Trump administration. The mass-
destructive COVID-19 pandemic offers a highly relevant analogy for thinking about the internal political dynamics of a potential nuclear crisis under populist rule. Public-
administration scholars have labeled Trump’s governing approach as “chaotic transactional federalism,” a cynical power system that “removes any vestige of certainty as
decisions are shaped based on a desire to reward or punish other political actors, or left to subnational actors entirely. Expertise matters very little in these political, partisan
transactions.” 28 In line with this, Trump responded to the COVID-19 crisis by pitting the 50 states against each other in bidding wars for vital medical supplies and for his
political favor.29 The president publicly criticized Vice President Mike Pence for reaching out to all the state governors in his role as the coordinator of the national pandemic
response, telling the press that he wanted Pence to deal only with those governors who were sufficiently “appreciative.” 30 Trump administration officials were even blunter in
private. Trump’s son-in-law and closest adviser Jared Kushner reportedly said that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE
[personal protective equipment] for his state … . His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” 31 Trump’s response to the Democratic governors’ pleas for PPE to
defend against the virus was essentially the same as his response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pleas for weapons to defend against Russia: “I would like you to
do us a favor though.” 32 The hypothesis that populists will demand concessions from their domestic political opponents in exchange for issuing nuclear-deterrent threats on

the distractions caused by internal political

their behalf may at first glance appear to be only a matter of internal politics, but

wrangling could greatly affect the denouement of a time-sensitive nuclear crisis. Foreign
powers could also be tempted to initiate a nuclear crisis precisely in order to intensify their
adversary’s domestic divisions. In addition, when facing the double burden of a nuclear threat and simultaneous shakedown by the president,
politicians from disfavored regions would likely appeal to friendly elements of the military for assistance. That possibility tees up the third hypothesis: Hypothesis 3. The

establishment’s reaction to populism is likely to increase deterrence instability at least as much

as the actions of the populists themselves. Meier and Vieluf’s article implies that the fate of the world hangs on the establishment’s ability
to keep populist fingers off the nuclear button. But the establishment’s effort to fend off the populists could itself

dramatically increase deterrence instability, for instance by sowing confusion about the chain of
command. This hypothesis is not mere speculation. Reacting to widespread fears that Trump might be tempted to launch a nuclear
attack against China or another country after his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, in January 2021, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly worked
the phone lines to reassure key people at home and abroad that he personally would not allow the president to do anything of the sort. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is
legally outside the chain of command for the execution of the president’s military strategy. Indeed, neither he nor anyone else has the legal authority to prevent a determined
president from launching a nuclear strike.33 Yet Milley told Pelosi, “The president alone can order the use of nuclear weapons. But he doesn’t make the decision alone. One
person can order it, several people have to launch it.” 34 Essentially, Milley was saying that if push came to shove, the military would mutiny. Meier and Vieluf seem to think that
Milley did the right thing (pp. 15–16). Maybe so, but he also set an ominous precedent. As I mentioned at the outset, these comments are simply intended to spark further

I would be relieved to discover that I am being

discussion about the important issues raised by Meier and Vieluf’s stimulating article.

overly pessimistic about humanity’s chances of survival with either the establishments or the populists in
charge of nuclear arsenals. But the more I study the issue, the more pessimistic I become.A
surge in populism leads to climate change---existential risks.

A surge in populism leads to climate change---existential risks.

Andrew Leigh 21, Australian politician, author, lawyer and former professor of economics at
the Australian National University, 11-5-2021,“How Populism Imperils the Planet,”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-populism-imperils-the-planet/ //RK

Humanity is running an unprecedented experiment with the earth’s atmosphere. The last time
atmospheric carbon levels were as high as they are now was in the Pliocene epoch, three to five million years ago. Back then, rhinos lived in North
America. Crocodiles and alligators lived in Europe. Trees grew in the Arctic. Ocean levels were 75 feet higher. To put it into context, a 75-foot increase
in sea levels puts many of the world’s major cities underwater, including London, Miami, Tokyo, Manila, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Jakarta,
Dhaka, and Shanghai. In the past 500 million years, the
planet has experienced five mass extinction events, each of
which wiped out most of the species on the planet. Only one was caused by an asteroid, with the other four being driven
by greenhouse gases. Studying the carbon cycle changes that led to these extinction events, geophysicist Daniel Rothman concludes that the threshold
for a sixth extinction event is when more than 310 gigatons of carbon are added to the oceans. On a business-as-usual trajectory, human carbon
emissions are currently on track to add 500 gigatons by 2100. Extreme meteorological events are bumping up against the limits of existing weather
scales. Following record-breaking heat in 2013, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology added two new colors to its temperature maps, raising the top
temperature from 122°F (50°C) to 129°F (54°C). After Hurricane Harvey, the U.S. National Weather Service added two new shades of purple to its
rainfall maps, raising the upper limit from 15 to 30 inches. Meteorologist Jeff Masters proposes that the existing five-category hurricane scale be
expanded by including a category six hurricane — what he described as a “black swan” storm. Not
every populist is a climate
denier, but virtually all climate deniers are populists. This week in Glasgow, countries are confronting the reality that
their announced measures will not come close to meeting the Paris climate targets. According to an assessment by the nongovernmental organization
Climate Action Tracker, only a handful of nations have implemented climate policies that are consistent with 2°C of warming, while a few (such as the
European Union) would come close. Most countries’ policies, the body says, are “insufficient,” “highly insufficient,” or “critically insufficient.” There is a
strong economic case for climate action. Once installed, wind and solar provide energy at almost zero marginal cost .
Averting dangerous
climate change avoids the costly impact of heatwaves that cause premature deaths and restrict
outdoor work, hurricanes and wildfires that take lives and damage property, destruction of
coastal property, and reduced agricultural yields. If these benefits sound good, they should appear doubly attractive when
the prospect of averting a global catastrophe is added to the picture. If future lives matter as much as ours, it is callous not to reduce carbon emissions.
The case for decisive action is strengthened still further by recognizing that much of the problem has been created relatively recently. As journalist
David Wallace-Wells has observed, “The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld.” Climate change is not solely a problem
bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Many of those responsible for the carbon emissions that are causing the planet to warm are still alive today. Yet
focusing on catastrophic risk — in climate change and other areas — is hampered by the growth
of populist politics. Not every populist is a climate denier, but virtually all climate deniers are populists. One analysis of the 21 largest
right-wing populist parties in Europe found that one-third were outright climate deniers, while many others were hostile to climate action. Right-wing
populists make up 15 percent of the European Parliament, but their votes account for around half of all those voting against climate and energy
resolutions. A recent study in the United Kingdom identified voters who held populist beliefs about politics .
These populist voters were
significantly less likely to agree that global warming is caused by human action and less likely to
support measures to protect the environment. Populism is on the rise. From 1990 to 2018, the number of
countries with populist leaders increased from four to 20. The best known was President Donald Trump, who once claimed that climate change is a
“hoax,” and asserted that “global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” In the current
Congress, 52 percent of House Republicans and 60 percent of Senate Republicans are climate deniers. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has loosened
controls over land clearing in the Amazon. This has led farmers to accelerate deforestation by logging and
burning. In mid-2019, satellite analysis of major fires in the Amazon showed that an area the size of Yellowstone National Park had been burned.
At this pace, this additional deforestation could push the Amazon rainforest toward a tipping point.

Populists view politics as a contest between a pure mass of people and a vile elite. Right-wing
populists often include scientists in their characterization of the elite. This has led to a spate of
clashes between populist leaders and scientists. Dutch far-right leader Thierry Baudet rails against “climate change
hysteria.” Allies of Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán included scientists on a list of people it brands as “mercenaries” of billionaire philanthropist George
Soros.
UBI solves---it is perceived as government assistance, ensures income
distribution, AND increases productivity.
Scull 22, taught MBA courses at China University of Political Science and Law, business English
and Latin American history and civilization at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and English and
western culture to employees at The Ministry of Emergency Management of the People's
Republic of China and the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade in Beijing.
(Julio, 12-21-2022, “Universal Basic Income: A Solution to AI and Unemployment,” Soapboxie,
https://soapboxie.com/economy/Universal-Basic-Income-A-Solution-to-AI-and-Unemployment)

When this time comes, society

needs to implement a system of income distribution that will more
adequately meet the needs of the vast majority of people. A universal basic income (UBI) could provide
the means to make sure wealth continues its normal circular flow between service companies,
producers and consumers. Society’s Only Solution? UBI could be the solution to a largely idle population
with no means to purchase food, clothing, and maintain a roof over their heads. Such a program of
income distribution could be coupled with a program reminiscent of the New Deal where some of those receiving government funds could be put to
work in the repair and rebuilding of decaying infrastructure. In spite of how the funds are distributed or the minimum requirements for those receiving
funds, UBI
would allow for those displaced by robots or AI to return to school in order to receive
necessary personal retooling. These recipients of public funds could start small businesses that
provide goods or services to local populations, even purchase their own robots that would help
them in bringing in additional funds. The uses for a basic guaranteed income are limitless. The idea
of UBI is not new. In its most basic form, it dates back to the 16th century in Europe. By the middle of the 19th century, the idea of an unconditional
basic income emerged. Since
its origin, various political and industry leaders have proposed some sort of
unconditional guaranteed income that would ensure national prosperity and aid those in need
to be productive members of society. Some of the proponents have been: Thomas Paine, political activist and philosopher who
lived in the 1700s, proposed the creation of a national fund to make payments to every person upon reaching the age of 21 years. Novelist Edward
Bellamy in 1887 wrote Looking Backwards about a fictional society in the year 2000 in which everyone was provided with shelter, food, education, and
healthcare. Bertrand Russell, philosopher of the early 1900s called for “a certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all,
whether they work or not.” Huey Long, politician who planned to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt before being assassinated, called for a $5,000 annual
guaranteed income to every family. Famous economist Milton Friedman favored a negative income tax with which those who earned less than a
minimum amount would, instead of paying taxes, receive a payment. ("Unconditional Basic Income Europe: A Brief History of Basic Income Ideas") In

the mid-1970s, the Canadian province of Manitoba conducted an experiment in the town of Dauphin where
money was handed out to some of its citizens. The project ended in 1979 by the then-conservative government. Evelyn
Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, recently dug up the numbers, finding that life in Dauphin had improved markedly

during that period of time. Some of the results were that children stayed in school longer, hospitalization
rates dropped, and work rates had remained high. (The New Yorker, "The Case for Free Money," James Surowiecki, June
20, 2016) Unfortunately, myopic thinking could prevent us from starting the type of national

conversation needed to tackle the inevitable displacement of a large portion of the workforce
by further advancements in technology.

Scenario 2 is Space Col.

UBI unlocks unprecedented entrepreneurship and innovation

Scott Santens 17. Staff writer for Futurism, 3-2-17. “Universal Basic Income Will Reduce Our
Fear of Failure.” https://futurism.com/universal-basic-income-will-reduce-our-fear-of-failure
*fed key warrant
MARKETS AS ENVIRONMENTS Our economy is a complex adaptive system. Much like how nature works, markets work. No one central planner is
deciding what natural resources to mine, what to make with them, how much to make, where to ship everything to, who to give it to, etc. These
decisions are the result of a massively decentralized widely distributed system called “the market,” and it’s all made possible with a tool we call
“money” being exchanged between those who want something (demand) and those who provide that something (supply). Money is more than a
decentralized tool of calculation, however. It’s also like energy. It powers the entire process like the eating of food powers our own bodies and the sun
powers plants. Without food, we starve, and without money, markets starve. A sufficient amount of money for all market participants is absolutely key
to the market system for it to work properly. If you’ve ever played Monopoly this should be apparent. The game would not work if all players started
the game with nothing. Some wouldn’t even make it once around the board. Additionally, if no one received $200 for then passing Go, the game would
end a lot sooner. Ultimately the game always grinds to a halt once everyone but one person is all out of money, which is inevitable. No money, no
purchases, no market, no game. Game over. SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS TRIAL AND ERROR With sufficient money however, markets adapt and evolve
based on trial and error. Someone thinks of something to create or do. If people like it, it does well. If people don’t like it, it goes away. What does well
is modified. If people like the modified version, it does well. If they don’t, it goes away. If they like it enough, the original version goes away. Survival of
the fittest we call it. This is the evolution of goods and services, which runs on supply and demand, which both in turn run on money and one other
thing — the willingness to take risks. RISKS AS GENETIC MUTATION Taking risks is equivalent to random genetic mutation
in this biological analogy. A new product or service introduced into the market can result in success or failure. The outcome is entirely unknown until
it’s tried. What succeeds can make someone rich and what fails can bankrupt someone. That’s a big
risk. We traditionally like to think of these risk-takers as a special kind of person, but really they’re mostly just those who are
economically secure enough to feel failure isn’t scarier than the potential for success. As a prime
example, Elon Musk is one of today’s most well-known and highly successful risk takers. Back in his college years he challenged himself to live on $1 a
day for a month. Why did he do that? He figured that if he could successfully survive with very little money, he could survive any failure. With that
knowledge gained, the risk of failure in his mind was reduced enough to not prevent him from risking everything to succeed. This isn’t just anecdotal
evidence either. Studies have shown that the very existence of food stamps — just knowing they are there as an
option in case of failure — increases rates of entrepreneurship. A study of a reform to the French unemployment insurance system
that allowed workers to remain eligible for benefits if they started a business found that the reform resulted in more entrepreneurs starting their own
businesses. In Canada, a reform was made to their maternity leave policy, where new mothers were guaranteed a job after a year of leave. A study of
the results of this policy change showed a 35% increase in entrepreneurship due to women basically asking themselves, “What have I got to lose? If I
fail, I’m guaranteed my paycheck back anyway.” Meanwhile, entrepreneurship is currently on a downward trend. Businesses that were less than five
years old used to comprise half of all businesses three decades ago. Now they comprise about one-third. Businesses are also closing their doors faster
than new businesses are opening them. Until recently, this had never previously been true here in the US for as long as such data had been recorded.
Startup rates are falling. Why? Risk aversion due to rising insecurity. GROWING INSECURITY For
decades now our economy has
been going through some very significant changes thanks to advancements in technology, and we have
simultaneously been actively eroding the institutions that pooled risk like trade unions and our
public safety net. Incomes adjusted for inflation have not budged for decades, and the jobs providing those
incomes have gone from secure careers to insecure jobs, part-time and contract work, and now recently even gig labor in the sharing economy.
Decreasing economic security means a population decreasingly likely to take risks. Looking at it this
way, of course startups have been on the decline. How can you take the leap of faith required for a startup when you’re more and
more worried about just being able to pay the rent? None of this should be surprising. The entire insurance industry exists to reduce risk. When
someone is able to insure something, they are more willing to take risks. Would there be as many restaurants if there was no insurance in case of fire?
Of course not. The corporation itself exists to reduce personal risk. Entrepreneurship and risk are inextricably linked. Reducing risk aversion is
paramount to innovation. FAILURE AS EVOLUTION So the question becomes, how do we reduce the risks of failure
so that more people take more risks? Better yet, how do we increase the rate of failure? It may sound counter-intuitive, but failure
is not something to avoid. It’s only through failure that we learn what doesn’t work and what might work instead. This is basically the scientific method
in a nutshell. It’s designed to rule out what isn’t true, not to determine what is true. There is a very important difference between the two. This is also
how evolution works, through failure after failure. Nature isn’t determining the winner. Nature is simply determining all the losers, and those who don’t
lose, win the game of evolution by default. So, the higher the rate of mutation, the more mutations can fail or not fail, and therefore the quicker an
organism can adapt to a changing environment. In the same way, the higher the rate of failure in a market economy, the quicker the economy can
evolve. There’s also something else very important to understand about failure and success. One success can outweigh 100,000 failures. Venture
capitalist Paul Graham of Y Combinator has described this as Black Swan Farming. When it comes to truly transformative ideas, they aren’t obviously
great ideas, or else they’d already be more than just an idea, and when it comes to taking a risk on investing in a startup, the question is not so much if
it will succeed, but if it will succeed BIG. What’s so interesting is that the biggest ideas tend to be seen as the least likely to succeed. Now translate that
to people themselves. What if the
people most likely to massively change the world for the better, the
Einsteins so to speak — the Black Swans, are oftentimes those least likely to be seen as
deserving social investment? In that case, the smart approach would be to cast an extremely large
net of social investment, in full recognition that even at such great cost, the ROI from the innovation of the Black Swans would far
surpass the cost. This happens to be exactly what Buckminster Fuller was thinking when he said, “We must do away with the absolutely specious notion
that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the
rest.” That is a fact, and it then begs the question, “How do we make sure we invest in every single one of those people such that all of society
maximizes its collective ROI?” What if our insistence on making people earn their living is preventing those
one in ten thousand from making incredible achievements that would benefit all the rest of us in
ways we can’t even imagine? What if our fears of each other being fully free to pursue whatever most interests us, including nothing, is
an obstacle to an explosion of entrepreneurship and truly huge innovations the likes of which have never been seen? “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-
killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.” — Frank Herbert, Dune FEAR AS DEATH What it all comes down to is fear.
FDR was absolutely right when he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear
prevents risk-taking, which prevents
failure, which prevents innovation. If the great fears are of hunger and homelessness, and they
prevent many people from taking risks who would otherwise take risks, then the answer is to
simply take hunger and homelessness off the table. Don’t just hope some people are unafraid enough. Eliminate what
people fear so they are no longer afraid. If everyone received as an absolute minimum, a sufficient amount of

money each month to cover their basic needs for that month no matter what — an unconditional basic
income — then the fear of hunger and homelessness is eliminated. It’s gone. And with it, the risks of failure
considered too steep to take a chance on something. But the effects of basic income don’t stop with a reduction of

risk. Basic income is also basic capital. It enables more people to actually afford to create a new
product or service instead of just think about it, and even better, it enables people to be the consumers who
purchase those new products and services, and in so doing decide what succeeds and what fails
through an even more widely distributed and further decentralized free market system . Such
market effects have even been observed in universal basic income experiments in Namibia and
India where local markets flourished thanks to a tripling of entrepreneurs and the enabling of
everyone to be a consumer with a minimum amount of buying power. Basic income would even
help power the sharing economy. For example, imagine how much an unconditional monthly income
would enable people within the Open Source Software (OSS) and free software movements
(FSM) to do the unpaid work that is essentially the foundation of the internet itself. MARKETS AS
DEMOCRACIES Markets work best when everyone can vote with their dollars, and have enough dollars to vote for products and services. The iPhone
exists today not simply because Steve Jobs had the resources to make it into reality. The iPhone exists to this day because millions of people have voted
on it with their dollars. Had they not had those dollars, we would not have the iPhone, or really anything else for that matter. Voting matters. Dollars
matter. Evolution teaches us that failure is important in order to reveal what doesn’t fail through the unfathomably powerful process of trial and error.
We should apply this to the way we self-organize our societies and leverage the potential for universal basic income
to dramatically reduce the fear of failure, and in so doing, increase the amount of risks taken to
accelerate innovation to new heights.

Innovation solves extinction---breakthroughs are vital to stave off numerous

existential threats.
Dr. Lucien von Schomberg 22, PhD, Lecturer in Creativity and Innovation at the University of
Greenwich Business School, “RAISING THE SAIL OF INNOVATION: Philosophical Explorations on
Responsible Innovation”, ebook
I then realized two things. First, the concept of innovation defines our age. It fuels the global economy, promises a sustainable
future, and stands at the heart of our interconnected society. Not only was the underground surrounded with all kinds of
innovations, but we have even reached a point in history where people are reading about innovation and – as the commuter would
later confess – dream of becoming innovators themselves, for public icons like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are praised in the same
way artists and scientists were in previous times. Second, the
concept of innovation is widely presupposed in
terms of the commercial value it generates. In this view, innovation is only considered valuable
insofar customers are willing to pay for it. As claimed in the tradition of economic analysis, innovation is
characterized by its competitive dynamics and is primarily directed at developing marketable products and services (Stoneman
1995). At
the same time, our geopolitical landscape faces an unprecedented crisis, overwhelmed
with global issues such as climate change, overpopulation, water shortage, a loss of biodiversity,
food security, and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic. The reality of these issues increasingly
urge innovation to generate societal value beyond mainstream economic incentive. This is particularly
the case in the context of the European Union (EU), which strives to represent high ethical standards on the world stage and thus
prioritizes normative objectives on its political agenda. To this end, the EU policy discourse has paved the way for Responsible
Innovation (RI). The core idea
here is to steer innovation processes towards societally desirable
outcomes, specifically in response to the so-called grand challenges of our time (European Commission
2015). A frequently cited and particularly influential definition of RI calls for “a transparent, interactive process by which societal
actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view on the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and
societally desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products” (von Schomberg 2013, p. 63). Under the sway of
science with and for society, the hypothesis is that innovation can only respond to the needs and ambitions of society by including all
its actors throughout the process. As such, in 2011, RI made its entry by the name of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as a
cross-cutting issue under the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation ‘Horizon 2020’. More recently, RRI has been
articulated in terms of six keys – ethics, societal engagement, gender equality, open science, science education, governance –
through which the EU imposes a strong normative view of what constitutes responsibility in innovation processes (European
Commission 2020).

Tech innovation is key to get off the rock.

Senjuti Mallick & Rajeswari Rajagopalan, 19 (Senjuti Mallick is pursuing an L.L.M. in
International Law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Graduate of ILS Law College and
Rajeswari Rajagopalan is a Distinguished Fellow and Head of the Nuclear and Space Policy
Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, Technical Adviser to the UN Group of
Governmental Experts on the Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space, former Research Officer
at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses and Professor at the Graduate Institute of
International Politics at National Chung Hsing University, 1-24-2019, accessed on 10-17-2021,
Observer Research Foundation, " If space is ‘the province of mankind’, who owns its resources ",
https://www.orfonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ORF_Occasional_Paper_182_Space_
Mining.pdf, HBisevac)

Why Mining? Technological innovation—primarily brought about by commercial players such as Elon
Musk[2] and Jeff Bezos[3]—is changing the landscape of space exploration. Leading the way in this
new-era race are the startups including Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, Ispace, and Kleos Space.[vii]
Research into the feasibility of human and robotic missions to asteroids is being conducted by both
governmental organisations, like NASA and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), as well as private
companies such as Planetary Resources.[viii] However, for realising affordable space travel and space
industrialisation, it is essential to find extraterrestrial materials such as metals, minerals and
water that do not have to be transported from Earth. Thus, the first objective in carrying out asteroid
mining activity is to obtain elements that are critical for basic sustenance on Earth. It has been
identified that the asteroid belt in our solar system contains eight-percent metal-rich (M type) asteroids
and 75-percent volatile-rich carbonaceous (C type) asteroids.[ix] The second incentive for celestial mining
companies is to haul precious minerals and cargo raw materials to Earth to fuel its fast depleting
resources. This would significantly increase the mining company’s valuation and greatly impact
the global economy. According to a 2012 Reuters interview with Planetary Resources, a 30-meter-long
(98-foot) asteroid can hold platinum worth somewhere from US$25 billion to US $50 billion.[x] These metals
are highly useful and valuable, both on Earth and in space.[xi] Third, asteroids give humans the
potential to create tools in space, since iron, nickel and cobalt are in abundance.[xii] Chris Lewicki,
Planetary Resources CEO, has said, “Using 3D printing technology one can grab material off asteroids and
3D print something that never has to be on a rocket. Tools, machines and even habitats can then be built
off Earth, reducing the cost of exploration even further.[xiii] Fourth, resource extraction is also
becoming a focus for many Middle Eastern nations.[xiv] The Middle Eastern oil states, such as Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are investing heavily in this industry as they are looking at space as a way to
diversify out of the earthly benefits of fossil fuel.[xv] Fifth, countries such as India and China are looking to
mine the Moon for extracting Helium-3, which is considered a clean and efficient form of energy. It is
thought that this isotope could provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, since it is not
radioactive and would not produce dangerous waste products.[xvi] Finally, the water available in
outer space could be used to make rocket propellants. According to scientists, since water is abundant in
outer space, in some or the other form, it could be extracted and electrolysed to derive hydrogen and oxygen,
the key ingredients of rocket fuel.[xvii] Thus, instead of carrying one’s own fuel all the way, asteroids
could serve as extraterrestrial/orbital “gas stations” for fuelling future deep space missions. This
would simultaneously make space travel more cost-effective and productive. Such ventures are also
seen to be intrinsic to further science and discovery, in addition to revolutionising commercial development
in outer space. The mining of asteroids could also provide a near-infinite supply of the precious
resources for Earth to use. [xviii]

Getting off the rock is possible --- extinction guaranteed otherwise

Everett 16 [Sean, CEO of Prome Biological Intelligence, a global biotechnology company, editor
of Medium’s news outlet dedicated to space colonialization titled “The Mission”, BS
Mathematics & Actuarial Science, MBA from UChicago, 2016, “Humanity’s Extinction Event Is
Coming” https://medium.com/the-mission/humanitys-extinction-event-is-coming-c0f84f1803f]

But the reality is that an asteroid impact, a change in our magnetic field, or the rising
temperature of Earth’s climate are all events that we currently cannot escape. There is no back-
up plan. We are, for better or worse, tied to the fate of this planet. As history has shown, that’s not a
good fate to be tied to. In fact on September 7, 2016 a 30-foot asteroid flew between the Earth and
the Moon. Our most powerful instruments only detected it with two days notice. Two days. If the
asteroid was only 1000-foot wide, it would destroy all human life and we’d have no back-up to get out of
it. Even the White House is worried about it. Five, yes five, major extinction events have occurred on our
planet that we know about. We’re due for another. And when that happens, what’s our alternative? You can’t
move to another house. You can’t buy survival, even with a billion dollars in the bank. The only way out, is up. We must
find a way to become multi-planetary if we want to save humanity, your family, and yes, even yourself.
Only this can restore the honor we seemed to have lost from the brave days of the 60s, while also ensuring our survival. It’s for the
species, folks. And as a species, we have not allowed ourselves the opportunity to blast off for the stars. Only the space race in the
60s when we were afraid enough of a self-inflicted global extinction event (read: nuclear) that we put forth the funding required to
launch into orbit and onto our moon. We didn’t have calculators back then, and now we have supercomputers in our pocket, but no
one is allowed out of our atmosphere, save for a few communication and spy satellites. Doesn’t that make you mad? It’s not some
oppressive government that tells us no. It’s us. We pay our taxes. We elect leaders. Those leaders choose Defense as the primary
budget line item, but forget about defending against the forthcoming apocalypse. Funding for NASA in the United States has
decreased from 4% of the national budget in the 60s to about 0.5% from 2010 onwards. That’s just the money side. But
in order
to move past this threshold from our home planet to space and then onto other planets, we
need to do two things: Travel there. Survive. Luckily, we can simplify the problem of passing this barrier by
sending machines in our place. Like TARS from Interstellar, they can go places humans cannot and explore the environment for
habitability and resources, even in particularly hostile conditions. Maybe not black hole hostile, but definitely Mars hostile, as the
Curiosity Rover has shown. Only now, with a
few bold, private startups are we beginning to see a re-
emergence of the space industry. We are about to pass a few very important tests that allow us
to explore and visit the cosmos. The first is launching physical things into space. This is the
catalyst that will jump start a new space race. Prices of sending cargo are falling dramatically, down to nearly $500
per pound of payload with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 heavy re-usable rocket. Note that the re-usable part is key. We can’t throw away our
“space car” every time we Uber it. And once that becomes standard and cost-optimized we might be able to get that down to $10
per pound. Imagine what could happen when it costs the same amount to ship something across town as it does into space. The
second, and this is just as important, is the wave of autonomous machines. Tesla
has popularized the notion of self-
driving cars. SpaceX lands their rocket onto a small barge in the ocean autonomously.
Companies are buying startups in the space. Self-driving will be our gift, our talisman, on the
quest to save the species by becoming multi-planetary. II. Shipping Ourselves to Space The graph below is from
the Founders Fund manifesto, showing the decreasing cost of launching something into space. It begins with the
1960s US-versus-Russia space race and extends to the present day SpaceX-versus-Blue Origin reusable
rocket race. The cheapest method we have today is SpaceX’s Falcon series rockets. With the Falcon 9 Heavy, it’s predicted
launching cargo into space will be cheaper than ever before, at $750 per pound of payload delivered to low
earth orbit (LOE)on an expendable rocket. You have to note here, however, that these statistics are as cheap as possible. It costs
more to deliver payload on a non-reusable rocket, and on something that’s further out than LEO, like geosynchronous orbit, or to
Mars. For example, based on SpaceX’s published pricing, it would be at least 4x more expensive to deliver far less cargo to Mars. So
what happens when we reduce that cost to $10 per pound? Namely, an explosion of startups, much like iOS. Instead of pushing to
production for your continuously deployed web and mobile app, we will see future developers push to production
by deploying physical things into space. “STAGE” takes on an entirely new meaning for software developers when it
means your automated regression tests fail, it could blow up a rocket and hurt people on board. That’s why SpaceX and
Blue Origins exist. To make this continuous-deployment-to-space process as cheap and fast as
possible. By Elon’s calculations, every 15 minutes. III. Self-Driving Space Explorers The most successful products for space, at least
in the beginning, will make money by pushing this stuff into orbit. Things like science experiments and new 3D printers. A company
called Made in Space creates a number of these products, including the empty box you see below used for sending things up with
Blue Origin. The box shown in gray is a specialized 3D printer that works in zero gravity. Remember how most 3D printers work. It
squeezes out a single layer of liquid ooze, and then another, over and over again until it builds up enough vertically that it creates an
object. This can be simple plastic or more esoteroic metals. But when you’re “dripping” something, held down in place by gravity,
the entire process has to be re-imagined for space. Things in zero-G would just float away. Enter these chaps. There’s
also the
very real need for oxygen, food, water, and shelter from the harsh elements. Funny how we
will end up recreating Maslow’s Heirarchy in every new voyage or planetoid we want to
colonize. And space mining is off to the races with the recent announcement of Deep Space Industry’s Prospector-1: Their vision
is to extract water from asteroids and use the chemical components to hydrate us, but also as oxygen (breathing) and hydrogen
(fuel). To do that, you have to identify candidate asteroids, physically get to them, land and attach, and then do surveying,
prospecting, and extraction. In short, you’re going to need some level of self-driving capabilities to make this happen. And wouldn’t
it be nice if it “just worked” right out of the box. Unfortunately, in space you don’t have fleets of these space craft, millions of miles
of training data, maps, or an internet connection to the cloud so how the heck are deep learning algorithms going to work? I don’t
think they will. And that’s what I believe we need a better approach

Space colonization solves extinction.

Konrad Szocik 17. *Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of Information
Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Poland. **Tomasz Wójtowicz, Institute of Security
and Civic Education, Pedagogical University in Cracow, Poland. ***Leszek Baran, Chair of
Internal Security, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Poland.
"War or peace? The possible scenarios of colonising Mars". Space Policy, Vol. 42. November
2017. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964617300371

The main benefit that could be provided by colonisation of Mars would be an opportunity to save the life
of humanity when it is life on Earth will be endangered. It seems that the greatest possible source of
dangers is the humanity itself, but beside it, the another greatest danger is probably the asteroid impact. To
provide survival of humanity, the easier and the less costly project, as Impey points out, can be an attempt to reduce threats on
Earth, and taking more care for proper conditions for human survival on Earth [12]. If
we treat the idea of Mars
colonisation as an alternative for an opportunity of survival of humanity, the mentioned running out
resources are only one of possible threats for maintaining life on Earth. If we take into account such possible threats,
it is worth considering Mars as perhaps the unique solution for further survival of humanity. Among
possible threats on Earth we can enumerate such of them like nuclear war, environmental
catastrophes, incurable epidemic, asteroid impact, or uncontrolled development of artificial
intelligence that could be deleterious for humanity [12]. Of course, the concept of the human outer space colony as a way to solve
human life could be applied probably only to some small part of the entire humanity, for instance, for these ones who survived one
of the mentioned catastrophes. Consequently, the
current work on preparation of the manned mission to
Mars can be treated as a work to provide the future further living of the human species whose
further existence on Earth in the next several hundred or several thousand years can be really endangered.

Scenario 3 is Competitiveness.

Revitalizing innovation is key to restore deterrence and prevent post-pandemic

US-China nuclear war- miscalc likely now
Flournoy, 20 -- former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (2009-2012)
[Michèle, "How to Prevent a War in Asia: The Erosion of American Deterrence Raises the Risk of
Chinese Miscalculation," Foreign Affairs, 6-18-2020,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-06-18/how-prevent-war-asia,
accessed 6-29-2021]

How to Prevent a War in Asia The Erosion of American Deterrence Raises the Risk of Chinese
Miscalculation Amid all the uncertainty about the world that will follow the pandemic , one thing is
almost sure to be true: tensions between the United States and China will be even sharper than they
were before the coronavirus outbreak. The resurgence of U.S.-Chinese competition poses a host of challenges for policymakers
—related to trade and economics, technology, global influence, and more—but none is more consequential than reducing the risk
of war. Unfortunately, thanks to today’s uniquely dangerous mix of growing Chinese assertiveness
and military strength and eroding U.S. deterrence, that risk is higher than it has been for decades,
and it is growing. Neither Washington nor Beijing seeks a military conflict with the other. Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S.
President Donald Trump both undoubtedly understand that a war would be disastrous. Yet the United States and China
could all too easily stumble into conflict, sparked by a Chinese miscalculation of the United States’
willingness or capability to respond to provocations in disputed areas such as the S outh C hina S ea or to outright
aggression against Taiwan or another U.S. security partner in the region. For the past two decades, the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) has been growing in size, capability, and confidence. China is also emerging as a serious
competitor in a number of technological areas that will ultimately determine
military advantage. At the same time, the credibility of U.S. deterrence has been declining.
For Beijing, the 2008–9 financial crisis gave rise to an enduring narrative of U.S. decline and Chinese superiority that has been
reinforced by perceptions of U.S. withdrawal from the world—as well as, more recently, by its perception of bungled U.S.
management of the pandemic and societal upheaval over systemic racism. What’s more, Washington has not delivered on its
promised “pivot” to Asia. U.S. troop levels in the region remain similar to what they were a decade ago. The current administration
discarded the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement its predecessor had so painstakingly negotiated. Senior diplomatic positions
in the region remain empty, and the United States is often underrepresented or entirely AWOL from the region’s major diplomatic
forums. There has been no U.S. answer to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, even as its influence expands through Asia and well
beyond. And Chinese activities in the “gray zone,” below the level of conflict—such as building militarized “islands” and using
coercive measures to enforce disputed sovereignty claims in the South China Sea—have gone largely unanswered by the United
States beyond the occasional diplomatic démarche or freedom-of-navigation operation. All of this spells trouble for deterrence.
The more confident China’s leaders are in their own capabilities and the more they doubt the
capabilities and resolve of the United States, the greater the chance of miscalculation—a breakdown in
deterrence that could bring direct conflict between two nuclear powers. As tensions continue
to rise and Chinese assertiveness in the region grows, it will take a concerted effort to rebuild
the credibility of U.S. deterrence in order to reduce the risk of a war that neither side seeks. DECLINING
ADVANTAGE, INCREASING RISK Since the 1991 Gulf War, the PLA has gone to school on the American way of
war and developed an expanding set of asymmetric approaches to undermine U.S. military strengths and exploit U.S.
vulnerabilities. Of greatest concern is the substantial investment Beijing has made in “anti-access/area-denial” (A2/AD) capabilities.
Ranging from persistent precision strikes on U.S. logistics, forces, and bases to electronic, kinetic, and cyber attacks on digital
connections and systems inside U.S. battle management networks, these capabilities are designed to prevent the United States from
projecting military power into East Asia in order to defend its interests or allies. As a result, in the event that conflict starts, the
United States can no longer expect to quickly achieve air, space, or maritime superiority; the U.S. military would need to fight to gain
advantage, and then to keep it, in the face of continuous efforts to disrupt and degrade its battle management networks. The
Chinese military has also made rapid advances in cyber- and artificial intelligence—thanks to China’s massive
theft of Western technology, state support for its leading technology companies, and doctrine of “civil-military fusion,” which
requires that any commercial or academic technological advancement with military implications be shared with the PLA.
Technological investments have come along with doctrinal innovations. Chinese military doctrine now holds that the side that can
make and execute battlefield decisions most quickly will gain a decisive advantage in any conflict. China’s
theory of victory
increasingly relies
on “system destruction warfare”—crippling an adversary at the outset of conflict, by deploying
sophisticated electronic warfare , counterspace, and cyber-capabilities to disrupt what are known as C4ISR
networks (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and thereby
thwarting its power projection and undermining its resolve. Among other things, this means that the United States can no longer
assume that its satellites—essential for navigation, communications, early warning, targeting, and much more—would escape attack
during a conflict. Given China’s ability to interfere with, spoof, damage, or destroy U.S. satellites, Washington can no longer take
space for granted as an uncontested domain during war. The
upshot of the developments is dangerous new
uncertainty about the U.S. ability to check various Chinese moves, which could invite risk-taking
by Chinese leaders. Deterrence could break down owing to either strategic or tactical miscalculation. A strategic
miscalculation might involve Chinese leaders choosing to blockade or attack Taiwan in the near term or
midterm based on a set of strongly held beliefs about the United States as a declining power—one racked by
internal political divisions, preoccupied with domestic crises, no longer showing up in the region diplomatically, lacking the military
capabilities that might be effective in the face of A2/AD, and with an uncertain commitment to defending Taiwan. They could
conclude that China should move on Taiwan sooner rather than later, a fait accompli that a weakened and distracted United States
would have to accept. Alternatively, a tactical miscalculation could have strategic consequences. For example, Chinese military
planning for taking Taiwan by force envisions early cyberattacks against the electric power grids around key military bases in the
United States, to prevent the deployment of U.S. forces to the region. But these same power grids also support the surrounding
civilian population, including hospitals, emergency services, and other functions critical to public safety. Any such attack would have
a high risk of killing American citizens. So rather than deter U.S. action, the envisioned cyberattacks could actually increase the U.S.
determination to respond. REESTABLISHING DETERRENCE To reestablish credible deterrence of China, the United States must be
able to prevent the success of any act of military aggression by Beijing, either by denying the PLA’s ability to achieve its aims or by
imposing costs so great that Chinese leaders ultimately decide that the act is not in their interest. And Xi and his advisers must
believe that the United States has not just the capability but also the resolve to carry through on any deterrent threat it makes.
Given China’s A2/AD networks and ability to field a far larger force in its own backyard than the United States can, U.S. policymakers
need to start thinking more creatively about how to shape Beijing’s calculus. For example, if the U.S. military had the capability to
credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours,
Chinese leaders might think twice before, say, launching a blockade or invasion of Taiwan; they would have to wonder whether it
was worth putting their entire fleet at risk. In part, the United States can develop such approaches to deterrence by using existing
capabilities in new ways. Yet new capabilities will also be necessary, and here especially, the Pentagon’s current efforts are lagging,
notwithstanding some promising exceptions. The Defense Department continues to overinvest in legacy platforms and weapons
systems while underinvesting in emerging technologies that will determine who has the advantage in the future. Although the
Defense Innovation Unit, Special Operations Command, and various military service organizations are doing a good job of scouting
for new, transformative technologies, there is a “valley of death” between demonstrating a prototype of a new capability and
getting it produced at scale and into the hands of deployed operators. And the Pentagon still lacks the tech talent it needs—at all
levels, civilian and military—and has failed to give its acquisition workforce the right incentives to adopt cutting-edge technologies,
such as artificial intelligence and unmanned systems, rapidly and at scale. There are several steps that the Defense Department can
take to accelerate innovation in service of deterrence. In the wake of the pandemic, there will be substantial downward pressure on
defense spending, as other priorities compete for funding. A flat or declining defense budget will require making tough tradeoffs
between legacy programs, which alone are insufficient to maintain the U.S. military’s edge, and the new capabilities that will
ultimately determine military success—such as resilient battlefield networks, artificial intelligence to support faster decision-making,
fleets of unmanned systems, and hypersonic and long-range precision missiles. Continuing to underinvest in these emerging
capabilities will ultimately have dire costs for U.S. deterrence. For every existing major program, both defense officials and Congress
need to ask whether buying one additional unit or platform is really worth forgoing investment in the new technologies and
capabilities that are key to making U.S. forces effective in a far more contested and lethal environment. The secretary of defense
should press each service chief to recommend tough choices, and Congress should back up the Pentagon when it makes those
choices. The U.S. military also needs to adapt its own overseas posture while shoring up the capabilities of allies and partners. It
should expect that China will try to disrupt the U.S. ability to reenforce forward forces from the outset of a conflict, in all domains—
air, sea, undersea, space, cyberspace. Accordingly, U.S. forces, bases, logistics networks, and C4ISR networks must be made more
survivable and resilient. This will require investments in stronger cyber- and missile defenses; more geographically dispersed bases
and forces; more unmanned systems to augment manned platforms; and resilient networks that can continue to function under
attack. China’s A2/AD capabilities can be thought of as having different rings of threat intensity that generally correspond to the first
island chain (the first arc of archipelagos east of the East Asian continent, stretching from the Kuril Islands, to Japan and Taiwan, and
then to the northern Philippines and Borneo) and the second island chain (further to the east, formed by the Bonin Islands, the
Volcano Islands of Japan, and the Mariana Islands)—with anything inside the inner ring highly vulnerable to Chinese attack, and
anything within and beyond the outer ring less so. Beyond the outer ring, the United States will likely want to maintain bases,
fortified against threats, for staging and logistics. But the overall operating principle should be based on “places, not bases”: within
the inner ring, the military should increasingly rely on smaller, more agile force packages such as submarines and unmanned
underwater vehicles, expeditionary air units, and highly mobile marine or army units able to move between austere, temporary
bases in order to complicate Chinese planning. Also essential will be taking a more strategic approach to security cooperation,
assessing what each U.S. ally and partner can contribute to deterrence and developing multiyear security cooperation plans for
each. The Pentagon will also need to implement a series of acquisition, investment, and workforce-development reforms.
Acquisition officials must be trained on best practices for acquiring software and emerging technologies. There must be more
funding for turning successful prototypes into successful programs. And to bolster its tech workforce, the department should work
with Congress to expand programs that offer scholarships or debt relief to students in a broad array of tech fields in return for
government service and to recruit mid- and senior-level talent by expanding fellowships for private-sector technologists. For
employees at all levels, it needs to create opportunities for skill development and viable career paths for technical talent that allow
for both promotion and continued technical development, including through rotations in the private sector. Finally, defense officials
need to accelerate efforts to develop new operational concepts—new ways in which the military will fight—in order to clarify which
capabilities will be essential, or even game changing, and to accelerate their acquisition and delivery into the hands of service
members in the field. There are ongoing efforts to develop and test “joint” (that is, applicable across the different military services)
operational concepts, such as Multi-Domain Operations, as well as service-specific operational concepts, which aim to erode the
adversary’s advantage in various ways. Determining which technologies will be essential to these will require iterative, ongoing
development and experimentation—with dedicated funding from Congress. WHERE THERE’S A WILL Effective deterrence does not
depend just on Chinese leaders believing the United States has the capability to thwart any act of aggression; they must also believe
it has the will to do so. Today, Beijing has doubts on both scores. Accordingly, along with investments in military capabilities,
Washington needs to clarify—and consistently demonstrate—its commitment to the Indo-Pacific region, making clear who and what
it is willing to defend. It must deploy more senior officials and additional military forces to the region, to underscore its enduring
presence, strengthen its relationships, and counterbalance China’s influence. It should conduct more regular military exercises with
allies and partners in the region, both to demonstrate capabilities it has already and to accelerate the development of new ones.
Ultimately, competition with China is far more than a military one, and its economic, technological , political,
and ideological elements cannot be neglected. The most consequential thing the United States can do is to
invest in the drivers of competitiveness at home—especially as it emerges from the current
crisis. It is a time for investments in everything from STEM and higher education to critical technology and twenty-
first-century infrastructure, such as 5G. It is also a time for restoring a smart immigration policy, welcoming foreign-born talent that
poses no risks to national security and encouraging it to stay and build innovative enterprises in the United States.
 1AC – Plan
The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal
redistribution in the United States by providing an unconditional universal basic
income
 1AC – Cooperation
Advantage two is Cooperation —

Scenario 1 is Poverty.

Poverty increasing post-pandemic – loss of government assistance exacerbates

it
Lee 23, CNBC Lead Producer, Markets & Politics (Juhohn, 3-7-2023, “37.9 million Americans are living in poverty, according to
the U.S. Census. But the problem could be far worse,” CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/why-poverty-might-be-far-worse-
in-the-us-than-its-reported.html)

As of January 2021, 37.9 million Americans lived in poverty, accounting for 11.6% of the total
population, according to the latest report from the United States Census Bureau. That’s despite the fact that America
ranks first as the richest nation in the world in terms of GDP.
“Poverty and economic insecurity are widely common, very commonly experienced,” said Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director at the
Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. “They are as much a part of the American story as successes to the American
dream.”

But the number reported by the Census Bureau is based on the official poverty measure, which
has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1960s. It’s calculated by comparing pretax income against a
threshold set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963.
“The researcher whose work became the basis of that measure never intended it to be used in the way that it currently is,” said
Barnes.

Grace Bonilla,
president of United Way of New York City, said the official poverty measure doesn’t
take very obvious indicators into consideration. To start, it looks at pretax income instead of actual
take-home pay. It also doesn’t consider factors such as family composition or the cost of child
care.

“It has not kept up with the way life has changed for most Americans,” said Bonilla.

As a response, the
Census Bureau developed the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011 as an
improvement over the existing measure. It incorporates into the measurement both the cost of
basic needs like food, clothing and utilities, but also government transfers and programs. It also takes
into account geographical differences and household size. The SPM rate for 2021 sat at 7.8%,
compared with the official poverty measure rate of 11.6%, mainly due to government relief
during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But some experts say that even the SPM falls short.

“It’sa step in the right direction but it falls so short of actually giving us an accurate count of
poverty in the United States,” said Bonilla. “If you have a universal brush for the whole country, you’re going to
miss a number of people that are either at risk of falling into poverty or are already technically
living in poverty but are not counted by the measure.”
VAT easily funds the whole UBI AND solves poverty.
Gale 20 [William G. Gale, The Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy at
Brookings, Brookings Institute, "How a VAT could tax the rich and pay for universal basic income,"
01/30/20, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/01/30/how-a-vat-could-tax-the-rich-and-pay-
for-universal-basic-income/, Date Accessed: 06/25/23] // ls
The Congressional Budget Office just projected a series of $1 trillion budget deficits—as far as the eye can see. Narrowing that deficit will require not
only spending reductions and economic growth but also new taxes. One
solution that I’ve laid out in a new Hamilton
Project paper, “Raising Revenue with a Progressive Value-Added Tax,” is a 10 percent Value-
Added Tax (VAT) combined with a universal basic income (UBI)—effectively a cash payment to
every US household. The plan would raise substantial net revenue, be very progressive, and be as conducive to economic growth as any
other new tax. The VAT would complement, not replace, any new direct taxes on affluent households, such as a wealth tax or capital gains reforms. A
VAT is a national consumption tax—like a retail sales tax but collected in small bits at each stage of production. It raises a lot of revenue without
distorting economic choices like saving, investment, or the organizational form of businesses. And it can be easier to administer than retail sales taxes.
The structure of an American VAT should mirror those of the most effective existing VATs around the world. It should be built on a broad consumption
base. It
should adjust (impose or rebate) taxes at the border so it applies only to goods and
services purchased in the US no matter where they are produced. Small businesses should be
exempt, though they should be able to choose to join the VAT system. Social Security and means-tested
government programs, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, should be adjusted to reflect the after-VAT price of relevant purchases. Border
adjustments are ubiquitous in VATs around the world and do not constitute tariffs. And almost all VAT countries exempt small businesses (somehow
defined). Limiting the VAT to firms with more than $200,000 in gross receipts would exempt 43 million small businesses. Finally, the UBI payment would
eliminate the burden of the VAT and give additional resources to low- and moderate-income households. My version would set the UBI at the federal
poverty line times the VAT rate (10 percent) times two. For example, a family of four would receive about $5,200 per year. My UBI proposal is similar
to, but smaller than, the version proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. A
10 percent VAT would raise about
$2.9 trillion over 10 years, or 1.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product, even after covering the
cost of the UBI. As with any tax, its effects on the economy would depend on how government uses the revenue. But all else equal,
it would be better for the economy (that is, less distortionary) than hiking income tax rates. To
avoid disrupting the economy in the short run, the VAT proceeds should be used in the early years to stimulate the economy, and the Fed should
accommodate the VAT by letting the consumer price level rise. The
Tax Policy Center estimates that the VAT in
conjunction with a UBI would be extremely progressive. It would increase after-tax income of
the lowest-income 20 percent of households by 17 percent. The tax burden for middle-income
people would be unchanged while incomes of the top 1 percent of households would fall by 5.5
percent. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the VAT functions as a 10 percent tax on existing wealth because
future consumption can be financed only with existing wealth or future wages. Unlike a tax
imposed on accumulated assets, the VAT’s implicit wealth tax is very difficult to avoid or evade
and does not require the valuation of assets. A VAT also could benefit states. While states would
not have to conform to the new federal law, doing so could improve the structure of their
consumption taxes, which tend to exempt services and necessities and often tax businesses.
Canada’s provinces provide an example of how national and sub-national VATs can “harmonize.”

AND solves inequality.

Ajay K. Mehrotra 2022, Executive Director & Research Professor, American Bar Foundation;
Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law; Affiliated Professor of History,
Northwestern University., “The Missing U.S. VAT: Economic Inequality, American Fiscal
Exceptionalism, and the Historical U.S. Resistance to National Consumption Taxes”, pg 188-189

It is well-known by now that income and wealth inequalities have been soaring for the past half-
century across the globe. Although some developing countries have seen a decrease in poverty
and a rising middle class during that period, much of the world has experienced dramatic
increases in within country economic disparities. In the United States, the growing
concentration of wealth has been particularly pronounced, especially at the top end of the
socioeconomic spectrum. While the details of this increase have been debated recently by
experts, most agree that both income and wealth inequality have increased significantly.

One prominent obstacle to addressing U.S. inequality has been the fractured nature of the
modern American fiscal and social welfare state. The combination of a highly salient federal
system of direct and progressive taxation and a more shrouded social welfare state has led to a
unique type of political cognitive dissonance that, in turn, has helped perpetuate the myth of
the “overtaxed” American—a myth that has been exploited by anti-statist politicians and
lawmakers for decades.

This fable has, in part, prevented the United States from joining the rest of the developed world
in adopting a comprehensive national consumption tax such as a VAT. Whereas most other
affluent nation-states have a VAT that underwrites robust social spending, the United States
remains an outlier in terms of both its fiscal and its social policies. As a result, the United States
is constrained in its ability to generate the large-scale revenues necessary to fund robust social
welfare programs and thus address inequality. Dispelling the myth of the “overtaxed” American
might be the first step toward a profound restructuring of American fiscal policy—a
restructuring that could include a U.S. VAT to fund new social spending and expand existing
antipoverty efforts.

UBI eliminates inequality by reducing generational wealth gaps---empirics

prove.
Howard 23, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Maine, as well as former
president of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, past co-editor of Basic Income Studies,
and co-editor, with Karl Widerquist, of two books on Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend.
(Michael, 1-6-2023, “The U.S. Could Help Solve Its Poverty Problem with a Universal Basic
Income,” Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-could-help-
solve-its-poverty-problem-with-a-universal-basic-income/)

The child tax credit expansion is one step toward a

universal basic income that could eliminate poverty without
increasing unemployment. There are 37.9 million people in poverty in the U.S., according to
2021 Census Bureau figures. Providing a government-funded monthly payment to every
individual would broadly lift them out of poverty, while providing millions of children a better
chance at a good education, improved health and higher future earnings. With 11.6 percent of
people in the U.S. living at or under the poverty line, this payment would benefit millions and
save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing the social costs of poverty. The question becomes: Can we
convince our elected officials that poverty is not a moral failing, but a social condition that can be addressed by establishing an income floor below
which no one falls?

A universal basic income, or UBI, is defined as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or
work requirement,” according to the Basic Income Earth Network. The child tax credit isn’t quite the same, because it is only for families with children;

it also phases out at higher income levels and essentially still forces people to prove they are “poor enough” to need help—a means test. A more
ambitious bill approaching the idea of UBI introduced by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones,
would eliminate the means test, thereby creating a universal child allowance. Universal benefits have
several advantages over means-tested benefits. They avoid divisions between “us” and “them,” removing the stigma associated with targeted benefits.
Uptake by the needy, a persistent problem with targeted benefits, is improved when stigma and bureaucratic hurdles are removed. Universal
benefits tend to be more popular and hence are more politically secure and better funded. And
universal benefits, dispensing with means testing, are easier to administer. The universal child allowance
would enroll all children at birth so no child would be excluded.

No country has yet introduced a universal basic income sufficient for essential needs. But in
the U.S., Alaska has enacted its
Permanent Fund Dividend, which is an annual cash payment, averaging around $1,600, that
goes to every resident without means test or work requirement. It contributes to poverty
reduction and has no negative effect on people’s willingness to work.

In the U.S., a universal child allowance and Social Security for seniors would mean that the two
most vulnerable age groups in our population would have near-universal and unconditional
income guaranteed. But of course, extending a basic income to the remaining adults faces serious hurdles. First, no one expects children
under the age of 18 to work, and keeping them in poverty is costly for everyone; according to one

estimate, social benefits outweigh fiscal costs of universal child allowance by 8 to 1. But there is a
widely held expectation that able-bodied adults should work for their income. Empirical evidence from the means-tested

minimum income experiments of the 1970s in the U.S. and recent analysis of a similar
experiment in Manitoba, among other research, support the idea that few people actually stop
working when they are simultaneously receiving a guaranteed income. Such research also shows
that those who stop working for wages do so for good reasons, such as finishing high school or
taking care of young children, and that a modest guaranteed minimum income can enable
people to work who otherwise could not. Even if a few people would take the cash without contributing to society, the
benefits may substantially outweigh the costs.

The norm that every abled person receiving cash payments should be seeking a job can also be
challenged. First, holding a job is not the only form of work. Taking care of children and elders is work—work that is performed mostly by women
without compensation. A basic income is a way of supporting and recognizing that work without

intrusive state monitoring and reinforcement of gendered division of labor.

Second, research by Belgian political theorists Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
reveals that a significant part of individual income, or the lack of income, results not from labor but
rather from luck. This is obvious in the case of income from inherited wealth, but no less true of
income connected to jobs in capital-intensive industries or income involving inherited
knowledge and technology. On the negative side, many people with unrecognized disabilities fall between the cracks of
targeted cash transfer systems. A basic income is one way to equalize such morally arbitrary luck.
Universal basic income does not give people something for nothing so much as equalize
everyone’s share of the luck. Fair giving and taking would then take place on the basis of a more
equitable starting place.

Inequality triggers an unprecedented economic crisis which cascades and goes

nuclear---defense doesn’t assume post-COVID shifts.
Maavak 21, PhD in Risk Foresight from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, External Researcher
(PLATBIDAFO) at the Kazimieras Simonavicius University, Expert and Regular Commentator on
Risk-Related Geostrategic Issues at the Russian International Affairs Council. (Matthew, 2021,
“Horizon 2030: Will Emerging Risks Unravel Our Global Systems?” Salus Journal – The Australian
Journal for Law Enforcement, Security and Intelligence Professionals, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 2-8,
https://salusjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Maavak_Salus_Journal_Volume_9_Num
ber_1_2021_pp_2_17.pdf)

Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The
catalyst has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have
profound implications for global security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective,
illustrates how emerging risks are getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical,

societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight couplings in our global systems

have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball into a full-blown crisis elsewhere. The COVID-19
pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer
be sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass
communications worldwide. This paper concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals. Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence,

VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset INTRODUCTION The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick
any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food security? Are our healthcare
systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and
ambiguity (VUCA). But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries.

Human activities within however are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, healthcare
and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined. Risks accrued in one system may cascade into
an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker, 2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour
of intersecting systems is determined by complex and largely invisible interactions at the
substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the
source and morphology of the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain

nightmare. It is also tilting the geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly
20% of global imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable. Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile”
sources components from China (Owens, 2020). An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small
businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines.

Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity.COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that
necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT)
production and delivery system serves as both an enabler and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk

management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic,
environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat
can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a).
As traditional forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of
emerging threats through a systems thinking approach. METHODOLOGY An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate
a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily informed by
the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020): • Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000;
Young et al, 2006); • Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012); • Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system
(Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and • Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic
material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources. ECONOMY

According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of
a previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown,
impacting all areas of human activity. The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might
be the worst decade in US history” and may lead to a Second Great Depression. Other forecasts
are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019). Yet another study
revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-

19 outbreak.The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great
Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion
people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact,
boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global
GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020). As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An

imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014).
The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the
rate the global middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread
social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy (Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007). Economic stressors, in
transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments. Bullions now carry more weight

than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe. After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from the Bank of England in 2019,
Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit. According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based

on historical precedents – in particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated (Dudik &
Tomek, 2019): “You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-
held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.” (Parenthesis added by author). President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s

gold-repatriation program by hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek, 2019). Indeed, with
two global Titanics – the United States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-denominated iceberg in the
middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far, wide and for a considerable period. A reality
check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a
collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a
potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty
remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The World Economic Forum, on the other
hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016). In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root
cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a).
We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade.

ENVIRONMENTAL What happens to the environment when our economies implode? Think of a debt-
laden workforce at sensitive nuclear and chemical plants, along with a concomitant surge in
industrial accidents? Economic stressors, workforce demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change –
arguably pose the biggest threats to the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation:
The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the
world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary, “vulnerable” or unpaid jobs.
Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In line with the systems thinking approach, however,

global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo. Frazzled workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984),
Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis (2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima
nuclear disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the
city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500 injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina,
2020). The environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated. Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate

Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012).
greed rather than to mundane human activity.

Production and delivery delays, caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial
overcompensation. This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely
include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation workers may also
resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global
corona-economy (Liacko, 2021). Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative,
its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million
Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems, developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and
cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications. On an equally alarming note, depressed economic
conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with
governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually
resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008). The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal
emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by
actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section. Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages –
whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark defiance

Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be

of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival.

hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a Sword of
Damocles over this decade. GEOPOLITICAL The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great
Depression. Since history often repeats itself, expect familiar bogeymen to reappear in societies
roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk on its own – may reach alarming
proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forcing Israel to undertake reprisal operations inside allied nations. If
that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger

segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon effects like these present a classic VUCA problematic. Contemporary

geopolitical risks include a possible Iran-Israel war; US-China military confrontation over
Taiwan or the South China Sea; North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies;
an India-Pakistan nuclear war; an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz; fundamentalist-
driven implosion in the Islamic world; or a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia. Fears
that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not
fundamentally change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got replaced.

Scenario 2 is International Cooperation.

Tackling inequality is key to catalyze international coop and inoculate the US

against nationalism
Kupchan, 21 – Georgetown University international affairs professor
[Charles A. Kupchan, CFR senior fellow, served on the National Security Council during the
Obama administration, and Peter L. Trubowitz, London School of Economics and Political
Science IR professor, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, “The Home Front: Why an
Internationalist Foreign Policy Needs a Stronger Domestic Foundation,” Foreign Affairs,
May/June 2021, accessed 6-23-21]

The Home Front: Why an Internationalist Foreign Policy Needs a Stronger Domestic Foundation U.S. President
Joe Biden has declared that under his leadership, “America is back” and once again “ready to lead the world.” Biden wants to

return the country to its traditional role of catalyzing international cooperation and staunchly defending liberal values

abroad. His challenge, however, is primarily one of politics, not policy. Despite Biden’s victory in last year’s presidential

election, his internationalist vision faces a deeply skeptical American public. The political

foundations of U.S. internationalism have collapsed. The domestic consensus that long supported U.S. engagement
abroad has come apart in the face of mounting partisan discord and a deepening rift between urban and rural Americans. An inward turn has
accompanied these growing divides. President Donald Trump’s unilateralism, neo-isolationism, protectionism, and nativism were anathema to most of
the U.S. foreign policy establishment. But Trump’s
approach to statecraft tapped into public misgivings about
American overreach, contributing to his victory in 2016 and helping him win the backing of 74 million voters in 2020. An “America
first” approach to the world sells well when many Americans experience economic insecurity
and feel that they have been on the losing end of globalization. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center
revealed that roughly half the U.S. public believes that the country should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate more on fixing
problems at home. Redressing the hardships facing many working Americans is essential to inoculating
the country against “America first” and Trump’s illiberal politics of grievance. That task begins with economic
renewal. Restoring popular support for the country’s internationalist calling will entail sustained investment in pandemic recovery, health care,
infrastructure, green technology and jobs, and other domestic programs. Those steps will require structural political reforms to ease gridlock and
ensure that U.S. foreign policy serves the interests of working Americans. What Biden needs is an “inside out” approach that will link imperatives at
home to objectives abroad. Much
will depend on his willingness and ability to take bold action to rebuild
broad popular support for internationalism from the ground up. Success would significantly
reduce the chances that the president who follows Biden, even if he or she is a Republican, would return to
Trump’s self-defeating foreign policy. Such future-proofing is critical to restoring international
confidence in the United States. In light of the dysfunction and polarization plaguing U.S. politics, leaders and people around the
world are justifiably questioning whether Biden represents a new normal or just a fleeting
reprieve from “America first.”

Global co-op is key to solve guaranteed existential threats

Sasnal, 20 -- Polish Institute of International Affairs head of research
[Patrycja, "Mistaking Panacea for Pathogens: The Case for Existential Multilateralism,"
Challenges of Global Governance Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, May 2020,
https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/challenges-of-global-governance-amid-the-
covid-19-pandemic.pdf, accessed 8-18-20]
The majority of the global population only fears a handful of international threats. According to a Eurobarometer poll, the greatest EU concerns are immigration (34 percent),
climate change (24 percent), the economic situation (18 percent), and terrorism (15 percent). According to a Pew survey, the top three concerns in Asia-Pacific and Latin America
are cyberattacks, climate change, and terrorism. In most polls, Africans fear economic hardship the most, but the 2019 Afrobarometer also found that a majority think climate
change is making their lives worse. According to an early Pew survey after the pandemic in the United States, Americans feared infectious diseases the most (79 percent)

followed by terrorism (73 percent), nuclear weapons (73 percent), cyberattacks (72 percent), a rising China (62 percent), and climate change (60 percent). These first-tier
global challenges— climate change , terrorism, mass migration, infectious diseases , nuclear weapons , economic
hardship, and cyberattacks—are not only substantively but also qualitatively different. That quality rests neither on the number of victims nor

on the kind of perpetrator (state, individual, or natural) hut instead on the potential to threaten the existence of humanity .

Three threats have this potential: climate change, highly infectious diseases, and nuclear weapons. Of
course, abstract scenarios are easily imagined in which human existence is endangered because of a

massive cyberattack , mass migration, or vicious a rtificial i ntelligence that leads to a conflict in which nuclear

weapons are used and humanity kills itself . Such potential futures, though, require a chain of events, whereas the three existential
menaces are present and direct. Unlike other threats, they are all global and equal. No community is immune from them or their aftermath. All three can reach a tipping point,
after which the danger spirals out of control. This set of existential threats is not conventionally recognized. The term existential threat has proliferated in political debates to
mean anything across a spectrum of minor and major challenges: the opiate crisis to the policies of the Donald J. Trump administration. In twentieth-century politics, the
expression was barely used despite the omnipresent danger of the nuclear bomb. For the past two decades, it has been mostly associated with terrorism. Terrorism, however, is
not a threat to human existence—not even to Middle Easterners, where 95 percent of deaths from terrorist attacks occur. Classing mass migration as an existential threat is
even more preposterous given how little insecurity migrants have brought to already stable host countries. Similarly, little suggests that inequality or economic hardship are

existential threats, though their complex forms and far-reaching consequences render them categories of their own. The distinction between
existential and other international threats matters for multilateralism and global governance in light
of the functional difference in the roles of the state in fighting them. The former can be taken on only by international efforts .

Other concerns can be fought in other ways: a unilateral national decision to act internally or on another state; or a
national bottom-up societal effort to reduce terrorism, disrupt cyber capabilities, or influence local migration patterns. Climate change, nuclear

weapons, and infectious diseases, however, require global multilateral efforts to prevent their
destructive potential from manifesting itself. REVIVING TRUST IN INFORMATION AND SCIENCE National responses to the
pandemic have often been provisional—decisions of utmost importance to civil liberties are taken without proper
argumentation or scientific judgment, because none is available. Not in living memory have governments watched each
other as closely as now on decisions such as when and how to lock down and open societies and economies—at least in Europe. Since the pandemic,

hunger for information and knowledge seems to have increased exponentially in i nternational r elations and
the global public sphere because specific epidemiological expertise was needed —such that was available to
only a few. Perhaps for the first time on such a scale, information is seen as directly correlated with human well-being. What scientists know about the virus—the way it is

The shortening
transmitted, how it mutates, how strong the antibodies are—is no longer seen as abstractly affecting our individual lives but directly affecting them.

of this perception chain is an opportunity for the scientific and analytical community to revive trust in experts by learning
from the experience of life scientists. Medicine advanced as a result of interdisciplinary and international teams, and innovative fast publishing procedures (short
communications and case reports). Given the importance of information to physical, political, and social life, further plans are being enacted to make scientific publications
available for free, something social scientists should ponder as well. The pandemic also exposes the weight of information in politics. First, information has been critical to
assessing how effectively governments are responding to COVID-19. Without reliable statistical information from the health sector, it is impossible to analyze the scale of the
pandemic, and therefore say anything about the measures authorities have taken. The Open Data Inventory 2018/19, which assesses the coverage and openness of official
statistics, including health data, finds them open and covered only in Europe, North America, and a handful of other countries. Second, states have used the pandemic to spread
propaganda and misinformation. China and Russia have a lot to answer for here by vilifying the European Union and the United States, as do Iran (which blamed the virus on the
United States) and several Gulf states (which blamed Iran). EXISTENTIAL MULTILATERALISM The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy sees the pandemic as a portal between the old
and new world. In international politics, this may translate into a passage from the post-1989 preoccupation with terrorism and economic growth based on consumption and

exploitation to new existential politics. Little can be said about the future with certainty except that it will face
global existential threats : climate change, infectious diseases, nuclear war. Because of the
nature of these menaces, they cannot be mitigated save by multinational , informed, and
expert governance .
Scenario 3 is Public Trust.

Independently, universal basic income is critical to resolving lack of trust in

government
Daniel Geitz 21. Freelance Health Writer and Registered Nurse, 7-13-2021. "The Government
Needs to Rebuild Trust. Is UBI The Answer?," https://aninjusticemag.com/the-government-
needs-to-rebuild-trust-is-ubi-the-answer-bb055edc0bfa.

Lack of trust in government needs to be addressed before almost any other issue in the United States.
In one of my recent posts, I discussed the lack of trust in our biggest institutions as one of the most significant factors affecting COVID vaccination rates.
I’ve been thinking more about that lack of trust recently — specifically the lack of trust in government. Polling
data tracking the
public’s trust in government since 1958 has shown a decrease over time in confidence that the
government “will do what is right.” Confidence generally tends to wax and wane depending on the country’s economic
circumstances, and increases during time of international conflict. For example, a spike in confidence is noted immediately following September 2001
(high water mark of 60% of respondents demonstrating trust) , and a sizeable dip can be seen following the financial crisis of 2008 (as low as 10% in
2011). It’s also worth noting that confidence among Democrats increases during a Democratic presidential administration and decrease when a
Republican takes the White House, and vice versa with Republicans. However, the public trust in government did not rebound
along with the economy in the 2010’s as it previously has done. In fact, public trust has been floating between 10% and 25% for
the last 13 years. For comparison, that figure was 60–70% or so in the 50’s and 60's. So what’s causing the lack of trust? One factor that cannot be
ignored is the rhetoric of of our elected officials — mostly in the Republican Party — since the late 70’s and 80’s. The idea of keeping the federal
government small and fighting overreach has been a guiding light for many individuals and political coalitions since the country’s birth. But its current
form, which has dominated the GOP for about half a century, has been especially effective in convincing large swaths of voters for generations that the
federal government is fundamentally inefficient at best and fundamentally corrupting at worst (recall Reagan’s famous line, “The nine most terrifying
words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”) However, I’m not convinced that rhetoric alone can explain the
crisis of (dis)trust that we see today. Thepast 50 years have also seen wage stagnation for the vast majority of
workers, trade agreements that have led to mass outsourcing of traditionally good jobs, an
increasingly undemocratic election system (with a few local exceptions such as ranked choice voting), and the bipartisan systematic

gutting of welfare. The past 20 years alone include an illegal war in Iraq, a boondoggle in Afghanistan, a financial crash caused by poor
housing market regulation and rampant speculation, and a recovery from said crash that failed to hold anyone responsible to account. All of

these things have had real and measurable impacts on the working class, whose material
conditions are getting worse. Even if regular people can’t identify and craft detailed arguments
to support the federal government’s policy failures affecting their lives, they know that they’re
being left behind. Unfortunately, it seems that the distrust in government is justified. I’m not reflexively in favor of
government solutions to the country’s problems, but there are certainly areas that I see the market as being incapable of solving and therefore needing
public intervention. Let’s take healthcare as an example. Strong arguments can be made for multiple types of universal, single-payer and multi-payer
healthcare systems — and it seems clear that we could craft a much better system than what we have now. However, the task of convincing someone
to transition to “government-run healthcare” (or another fearmongering label) when that same government has failed them in so many other ways is
much more difficult. It doesn’t matter whether the system would be better if they don’t trust the institution in charge of its execution. The fact that
Medicare for All polls as well as it does — usually between 50 and 70% — speaks more to the scope of the healthcare crisis in our country and the
massive campaign to adopt it from the left flank of the political establishment and activists more than anything else. If even the best-crafted policy that
would almost surely be beneficial for a strong majority can be kneecapped by the “government-run” label, how can we improve trust in
government? And because we’re seemingly staring into the barrel of the climate change shotgun, how can we improve trust in government
quickly? The best option may be another metaphorical “shotgun”: a money shotgun. Want to improve the perception of the

federal government? Blast everyone with monthly checks from Uncle Sam. If we go by the deeply flawed
poverty line, about 10% of the population lives in poverty and about 30% are either in poverty or pretty

close. The weighted poverty threshold is $12,784 annual income for individuals and $16,247 for families of two. Imagine if a $1000/month
UBI were instituted. Of course, that alone would not eliminate poverty or even come close; there are lots of factors that would decrease the
buying power of that monthly check. But it would certainly make a dent. Those who are lifted out of precarity will likely

contribute more to the economy, commit fewer crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol at a lower rate, be happier
and healthier, and serve as shining examples of the positive impact that government can have.
They might be able to go back to school, or quit that second job and spend the time with the
kids instead of paying for childcare. They will likely vote more frequently. And for the middle
class who aren’t quite living paycheck-to-paycheck, an extra thousand dollars per month could
allow for more retirement savings, less debt, and increased risk-taking ability such as a new
business venture. There’s lots of debate around the different proposals for UBI, especially around its relationship to existing welfare programs
and the question of “how do you pay for it?” I understand that the devil is always in the details when it comes to public policy and I don’t want to
diminish the complexity of the issue, but I’m not going to get bogged down with details here. But I don’t support the most recent right-wing iteration
that popped up during COVID, for instance, and would not blindly accept any UBI proposal without careful analysis. I’m currently most interested in an
Andrew Yang-esque proposal that doesn’t eliminate welfare completely but rather provides a way to transition to something more permanent that
would eliminate the need for most traditional welfare programs that tend to stigmatize those who use them. I think there are better ways to do it that
would be more soothing to my socialist tendencies, but as of now I’d rather run with something that already has an enthusiastic base of support and
could attract widespread bipartisan appeal instead of arguing over details while trust in government continues to dwindle. UBI won’t solve the big
problems that we face. But if
we blast a bunch of people with “free money” and start to see the positive
effects, hopefully trust in government could continue to be rebuilt with good long-term policy that does
solve some of the big problems.

Low levels of trust in the federal government gut democracy.

Max Stier 22. President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
organization that strives for a more effective government for the American people, has worked
in all three branches of the federal government, with Tom Freedman, 3-1-22. “Opinion | Why
Democracy’s in Such Trouble: A Crisis in Public Trust of Government.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/01/democracy-public-crisis-trust-
government-faith-00012565.

Amid all the reasons to worry about the health of American democracy, perhaps the most striking is
a new poll that captures the astoundingly low level of public trust in the federal government.
The national poll, conducted on behalf of our two organizations by Impact Research, shows that only four in 10 Americans at least

somewhat trust the federal government to do what is right. For all the concern about the rise of
anti-democratic movements or unfair laws that could be used to steal an election, that
disheartening statistic strikes at the heart of our nation’s primary democratic institution and its
ability to deal with social, economic and foreign policy challenges. If you don’t trust your government, does it
really matter what policies it pursues? While trust in the federal government has gone up and down over the years, the trend lines from

Gallup show the precarious state we are in. Although often viewed with a sense of inevitability, there are ways to
reverse this troubling development. While President Joe Biden has taken some steps, he should speak to this crisis of
confidence in our government during his upcoming State of the Union Address and take further action soon after. It’s not only democracy

on the line but his presidency as well. At least four basic responses from our leaders are needed, according to the polling — making
visible the work of career civil servants, distinguished from the political leadership; emphasizing the ways government works

on behalf of all; continuing to reform government so it is most effective and efficient; and then telling those stories to break the negative cycle.
When people don’t trust their government, they are more likely to opt out of voting and other
types of civic participation. With less engagement, the public feels less empowered to influence
government — and, in turn, government “hears” their needs and preferences less . This creates a
mistrust loop: Diminished trust in government leads to a disengaged public, resulting in
inefficient, unresponsive or unaccountable institutions, and that leads to further deterioration of
trust and national progress. This dynamic can have life and death consequences. Almost half (46 percent)
of the people in our poll who said they were vaccinated for the Covid-19 virus trusted the government compared with 29 percent of those who had not
been vaccinated. A recent study published in the journal The Lancet found that countries with higher levels of government trust had lower infection
and fatality rates during the pandemic. Our recent polling shows that more than half of Americans do not believe the
government helps people like them, and two-thirds believe the government is not transparent
or does not listen to the public. These are issues that should be acknowledged by the president and dealt with
by his administration in substantial ways to restore faith in our democracy . For Biden, rebuilding public trust in
government is a necessity for his presidency. “Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the
American people — no function more important,” he said in a speech last year about combating the pandemic. “We need to remember the
government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us.” Some of the public distrust over the years has been driven by
controversial wars, policy blunders, mismanagement and political malfeasance, but a good deal is the result of a lack of information or an inability to
differentiate the activities of elected political leaders from the critical services provided by federal agencies and the two million civil servants located
across the country. The public’s expectations and trust are often shaped by personal experiences. People applying for financial aid for college, visiting a
national park, seeking assistance after a hurricane or going through airport security may be the only lenses through which they may see our
government in action. The new polling shows that positive experiences build goodwill and trust, but even a single negative interaction can have a
lasting impact on people’s faith in government and democratic institutions. The data also tells us that the public either does not know about or
overlooks significant work by our country’s civil servants — the individuals who care for veterans and assist Americans in need, keep us safe, engage in
cutting-edge scientific and medical research, and advance our national interest. Finding ways to communicate these stories can have a big impact on
public perceptions. There is no doubt that regaining trust is a long-term endeavor that will require across-the-board improvements not only in how
government serves its people, but how it listens, communicates and effectively deals with big issues of consequence as well as everyday matters. This is
a tall order often complicated by political discord and major disruptions like the pandemic and foreign policy crises. But the bottom line is that a

healthy democracy requires our government to be effective and also requires it to be worthy of
trust and be trusted. Biden should make that clear in his State of the Union address and in his actions in the years ahead.

Democracy solves existential risks.

Francis M. Lappé 22, the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Studies at
Colby College in Maine, Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute, recipient of 20 honorary
doctorates from distinguished institutions, founder of the Small Planet Institute, and member of
the World Future Council, “Democracy's Peril and Promise: Let the Ukraine Crisis Awaken
Action”, https://www.smallplanet.org/single-post/democracy-s-peril-and-promise-let-the-
ukraine-crisis-awaken-action

The attack on Ukraine focuses the mind on a most critical question for humanity: In
our fast-changing world, what is
democracy's future? Certainly, a strong argument can be made that democratic governance is more important
than ever as humanity faces at least two unprecedented challenges: the existential threats of the
global climate crisis and a global pandemic. Attacks on civil and human rights continue as well—
challenges that can only be met with democratic governance. Why? Autocracy in all its forms has
proven to be fixed on the immediate well-being of the minority in power, with utter disregard to
the welfare of the citizenry and a healthy environment. Of course, there are exceptions. China is hardly democratic,
yet its per capita contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is less than half that of the United States. This sad fact brings home not the failure of
democracy but rather the limits of America's comprised democracy, undercut by the influence of private power—in this case the fossil fuel industry.
Nonetheless, democracy is not just a "good" thing. Only democracy holds the promise of
accountability to the whole required to meet these threats. And I would go even further. Beyond our
physical survival needs, humans have deep psychological needs—for a sense of agency, meaning, and
connection with others in common purpose. If democratic polities are not meeting these needs positively,
humans tend to grasp for other, destructive ways to meet them. Too often that means seeking
meaning, power, and connection through scapegoating others, entrenching ourselves in groups that

amplify our differences.

Extinction outweighs
Baum and Barret 18, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. (Seth & Anthony, 2018, “Global
Catastrophes: The Most Extreme Risks,” In Vicki Bier (Ed.) Risk in Extreme Environments:
Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing, pg. 174-184,
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3046668)
A common theme across all these treatments of GCR is that some catastrophes are vastly more important than
others. Carl Sagan was perhaps the first to recognize this, in his commentary on nuclear winter (Sagan 1983). Without nuclear
winter, a global nuclear war might kill several hundred million people. This is obviously a major catastrophe, but humanity would
presumably carry on. However, with nuclear winter, per Sagan, humanity
could go extinct. The loss would be not
just an additional four billion or so deaths, but the loss of all future generations. To paraphrase Sagan,
the loss would be billions and billions of lives, or even more. Sagan estimated 500 trillion lives, assuming humanity would continue
for ten million more years, which he cited as typical for a successful species.

Sagan’s 500 trillion number may even be an underestimate. The analysis here takes an adventurous turn, hinging
on the evolution of the human species and the long-term fate of the universe. On these long time scales, the descendants of
contemporary humans may no longer be recognizably “human”. The issue then is whether the descendants are still worth caring
about, whatever they are. If they are, then it begs the question of how many of them there will be. Barring major global catastrophe,
Earth will remain habitable for about one billion more years until the Sun gets too warm and large. The rest of the Solar System,
Milky Way galaxy, universe, and (if it exists) the multiverse will remain habitable for a lot longer than that (Adams and Laughlin
1997), should our descendants gain the capacity to migrate there. An open question in astronomy is whether it is possible for the
descendants of humanity to continue living for an infinite length of time or instead merely an astronomically large but finite length
of time (see e.g. Ćirković 2002; Kaku 2005). Either way, the stakes with global catastrophes could be much larger than the loss of 500
trillion lives.

Debates about the infinite vs. the merely astronomical are of theoretical interest (Ng 1991; Bossert et al. 2007), but they have
limited practical significance. This
can be seen when evaluating GCRs from a standard risk-equals-
probability-times-magnitude framework. Using Sagan’s 500 trillion lives estimate, it follows that reducing the
probability of global catastrophe by a mere one-in-500-trillion chance is of the same significance as saving one human life. Phrased
differently, society should try 500 trillion times harder to prevent a global catastrophe than it
should to save a person’s life. Or, preventing one million deaths is equivalent to a one-in500-million reduction in the
probability of global catastrophe. This suggests society should make extremely large investment in GCR
reduction, at the expense of virtually all other objectives.
Judge and legal scholar Richard Posner made a similar point in monetary terms (Posner 2004). Posner used $50,000 as the value of a
statistical human life (VSL) and 12 billion humans as the total loss of life (double the 2004 world population); he describes both
figures as significant underestimates. Multiplying them gives $600 trillion as an underestimate of the value of preventing global
catastrophe. For comparison, the United States government typically uses a VSL of around one to ten million dollars (Robinson
2007). Multiplying a $10 million VSL with 500 trillion lives gives $5x1021 as the value of preventing global catastrophe. But even
using “just" $600 trillion, society should be willing to spend at least that much to prevent a global catastrophe, which converts to
being willing to spend at least $1 million for a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. Thus while
reasonable disagreement exists on how large of a VSL to use and how much to count future generations, even low-end positions
suggest vast resource allocations should be redirected to reducing GCR. This conclusion is only strengthened when considering the
astronomical size of the stakes, but the same point holds either way. The bottom line is that, as long as something along the lines of
the standard riskequals-probability-times-magnitude framework is being used, then even tiny GCR reductions merit significant effort.
This point holds especially strongly for risks of catastrophes that would cause permanent harm to global human civilization.

The discussion thus far has assumed that all human lives are valued equally. This assumption is not universally held. People often
value some people more than others, favoring themselves, their family and friends, their compatriots, their generation, or others
whom they identify with. Great debates rage on across moral philosophy, economics, and other fields about how much people
should value others who are distant in space, time, or social relation, as well as the unborn members of future generations. This
debate is crucial for all valuations of risk, including GCR. Indeed, if each of us only cares about our immediate selves, then global
catastrophes may not be especially important, and we probably have better things to do with our time than worry about them.

While everyone has the right to their own views and feelings, we find that the strongest arguments are for the widely
held position that all human lives should be valued equally. This position is succinctly stated in the United
States Declaration of Independence, updated in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that
all men and women are created equal”. Philosophers speak of an agent-neutral, objective “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) or a
“veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971) in which each person considers what is best for society irrespective of which member of society
they happen to be. Such a perspective suggests valuing everyone equally, regardless of who they are or where or when they live.
This in turn suggests a very high value for reducing GCR, or a high degree of priority for GCR
reduction efforts.