Daniel Zakari is a current captain of the Jackson Lincoln-Douglas team. He is the 2024 Northeast Ohio Regional Big Districts Champion, 2023 Canton District Champion, a 2x State Qualifier, a 1x National Qualifier, and was in the Top 40 speakers at the 2024 NSDA National Tournament.

This topic analysis will have three parts, first an analysis of the definitions and key terms within the resolution, a framework analysis which will include the great frameworks for this topic, and finally an analysis of important arguments that are likely to come up. 

Before getting into this topic analysis, I would strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the history of the topic in general. This analysis does a great job of giving context to some of the arguments on this topic, as well as specific strategy.

Definitions and Key Terms

Resolved: The United States ought to implement a wealth tax. 

The United States - This is pretty straightforward, as ‘the’ generally limits most plans to the federal government. 

Ought - This denotes that the United States has a moral obligation to implement a wealth tax. This indicates that the debate focuses on moral obligations rather than feasibility.

Wealth tax - While there’s many different definitions of a wealth tax, one of the most standard you’ll see would be similar to the Scott 24 definition.

“A wealth tax is a tax based on the market value of assets owned by a taxpayer.”

With that, there’s a few key things to note…

1. A wealth tax takes into account your entire net worth. For instance, expensive paintings, investments/stocks, houses, boats, planes, etc.

2. Only very wealthy people would have to pay this tax. The Sanders tax, one of the most developed plans for a wealth tax in the US, would place the following taxes. 

Sanders 24

“It would start with a 1 percent tax on net worth above $32 million for a married couple. That means a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000.

The tax rate would increase to 2 percent on net worth from $50 to $250 million, 3 percent from $250 to $500 million, 4 percent from $500 million to $1 billion, 5 percent from $1 to $2.5 billion, 6 percent from $2.5 to $5 billion, 7 percent from $5 to $10 billion, and 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion.”

Other plans such as the Warren plan starts a tax for people that are worth over $50 million. 

While the AFF doesn’t have to defend a specific plan and should defend wealth taxes as a general principle, these are likely the most realistic wealth taxes that would be implemented in the United States and definitely something to look into.

AFF and NEG Frameworks

Structural Violence

This is probably going to be the most go-to AFF framework on this topic, even though it’s very good for NEG. This value criterion is more util but says that we should look towards the most oppressed groups first when making decisions. A good/standard definition for this framework is the  Winter and Leighton 99 card.

Utilitarianism

This is another good framework for AFF and NEG.  For NEG, you could argue that a wealth tax hurts the overall economy in practice. On AFF, you could argue that wealth tax would only tax a small portion of people (and those are people who are already very wealthy so it wouldn’t even affect them too much.) Thus, we ought to look towards the rest of society who aren’t well off.

Aff Arguments

Income inequality.

In my opinion, some of the first evidence that the AFF should read in the round should be talking about the massive growing wealth gap in the U.S. right now. In any topic, you always want to contextualize the current climate (status quo) before you start talking about what this new policy (in this case the wealth tax) would do. Then, come up with warranting as to how the wealth tax reduces wealth inequality whether it’s through the government investing into social welfare programs, the rich having less money, etc. You could also argue that the key to an equitable economy is for the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

Regardless of which AFF you run, almost all are going to have the impact of decreasing the wealth gap, and from competing on this topic, every round comes down to who can decrease the wealth gap.

NEG Arguments

Tax Evasion

This is one of the most common, yet strongest arguments on this topic. You could argue that we won’t see any of the positive effects of a wealth tax (that AFF claims) because tax evasion will run rampant. Thus, if you win this argument, this takes a lot of the offense of the AFF when they claim how much money a wealth tax would bring in, the benefits that money would go towards, etc.

You could use this card, Scott 24, which outlines that "A wealth tax is difficult to administer, tends to encourage tax evasion, and has the potential to drive the wealthy away from countries that enforce it.” 

Capital flight

This is another common yet strong argument on this topic. You could argue that with a wealth tax, the wealthy would leave the United States because they wouldn’t want to pay the wealth tax. As a result, the wealth tax wouldn’t bring as much money as they claim to bring in. 

For evidence, you could use a vast amount of different examples from European countries that introduced a wealth tax, such as Norway, where the ultra-wealthy fled in order to not pay. Militimore 23 elaborates that  

“More than 30 Norwegian billionaires and multimillionaires left Norway in 2022” and that “This was more than the total number of super-rich people who left the country during the previous 13 years.”

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