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We noted that there are politically affluent constituencies that when you satisfy enough people with this money, then afterwards you're going to allocate that funding to politically affluent groups. On our side of the house, the difference is very simple: the money comes through the term and dividends and also in terms of green energy reimbursement. The dividends come and help everybody and notably not just people located in a country where there's a lot of oil, but everyone in the world who has invested in them, which is pretty much everyone who has a pension. This is a far fairer distribution of money, and their side completely ignores the fact that we get a more certain and fair distribution as a whole. |
Three issues to talk about: first, was it reasonable for companies to make these profits? Second, who distributes this money better? Lastly, on Russia: first, it wasn't reasonable. The first thing I want to begin with is just explaining why this case is not profit-hungry. In case closing, government stands up and tries to claim it was, and to preempt any closing opposition material that might come out about how you can shift prices now because the reason why is this is a competitive market. It is pegged to a barrel of oil, and everybody knows that price of oil because it's in a global financial market. There are dozens of players—perhaps not enough, and we could have more competitors, but there's still a competitive aspect. Even if it could be more competitive, this means that prices stay relatively stable because there's clear transparency about what those prices are. They're closable markers, and there's competition to not form in a cartel. |
Now, in terms of this observation, what this then means is that these companies have done nothing malicious in making these profits. It is just incidental that they made more profits because of these circumstances. We told you about the enterprise risk, and crucially, what is more arbitrary: living in a country that has oil companies that can make millions of dollars or the fact that you might be a citizen who lives in a state who now gets dividends from that profit? More importantly here, as a crucial observation, this means that various thought the house doesn't actually fix the arbitrariness problem. In fact, it is actually making it worse because we think many of these companies have actually gone upon a risk in order to invest in this company and deserve a reward as a consequence. |
But Research has two different responses. First of all, is this a reason to not increase corporate tax? The difference is this U.S. specifically being targeted when tech companies during COVID did well that had supernormal profits—they weren't targeted. The problem is the inconsistency on how you treat the property rate and how you derive the right of the individual company. Then they say you just store the oil, and that means you're able to make profits later on. I think that this is sometimes true, but not always true. Think about circumstances in which, for instance, energy is high demand in the winter, or other kinds of scenarios in which you're rapidly going to go through your supplies and your stores. Notably here, if this is true that you've stored all this oil, I actually think most of their environmental benefits or long-term benefits are going to be mitigated because that means a large amount of it has been extracted, Barnabas regardless. |
No thanks. What did we tell you here as a secondary implication? We told you about monopolies; we told you about decreasing prices in the long run. We can see maybe prices will be slightly shorter in the short or higher in the short run. We think the long term of 15 to 20 years matters more. We told you about energy security and having more sources of energy so you no longer are dependent on Russia. None of that explicitly engaged with at the bottom. This argument—there is a property rate that these companies deserve. We think it is unfair to tax them, and doing so deters more companies from entering it. |
On the second argument about whether or not money gets distributed better, as I've already noted, yes, some of the money is going towards a cost of living crisis. The question here is the relative distribution and whether or not this is an optimal distribution given the comparative that I've already outlined. What we told you was twofold: first of all, the powerful constituencies are going to take up an excessive amount of that profit, and second of all, that short-termism means that without most of these governments, they are not going to care about green energy or reinvesting into these problems. The responses from Harish know that some of the money will go to the cost of living crisis; it does not make a difference. |
No thanks. The next thing that comes from this, given that the money gets distributed better, is how this affects green energy because I think part of this question of distribution is the long-term benefit here on green energy. Yes, these companies are mega-rich, but Naomi herself tells you how risky it is to enter into this field—that your technology may not pan out, that your technology may be less optimal than other competitors, the other competitors get to the market first. All of those are reasons why it is immensely risky to go into the green energy field. This means that you need a significant amount of profit in order to be able to finance and invest in that. Naomi says mega, mega-rich isn't what you need. I counter-assert you do need to be mega, mega-rich, and you can't just say those phrases in order to disprove the analysis. |
What they say is that they more crucially alter the incentive because windfall taxes will not apply to green energy. First of all, think about the justification of this policy. Do you know what politicians are going to say? There's a cost of living crisis; they've been profiteering off the citizens. The almost explicit purpose of this policy is going to be one in which you're trying to redistribute money. Has nothing to do with whether or not it's renewable or gas, which means that because of the specific context of this policy, it doesn't indeed make companies feel that going into green energy may be less attractive, given the fact that you still have a windfall tax and the profits are taxed, meaning that the efficiency gains you come from, you get from technological innovation are diminished because those profit deficiencies that you have is explicitly taken away. Harish |
<poi> |
They don't need to believe all the money is used for good rather than going to, at the very best, the middle class or rich investors are going to domestically a good amount of the reasons we told you about the salience of energy prices will be spent on these positive gains, which still win you political support, it is initially what you should does. |
</poi> |
Yes, I agree, the problem is the comparative. We say better, money, or more of the money is spent well on our side of the house, so it's directly redistributed to citizens through dividends and through green energy investments by the companies. I don't contest your claim; I outwit. |
So the crucial reason why this green energy argument matters so much is that the harms of oil are not just on oil prices but those who have been displaced from the extraction of oil, and their policy only disproportionately benefits a small subsection of people—most of them could actually benefit from oils being so high—while completely disregarding those who have been hurt in foreign countries. While we rectify that better because we solve for green energy and we also redistribute these dividends more globally. The last thing on Russia. And here I just want to note that bonds are easy to access for most countries because they are government bonds. It is very unlikely that most governments are going to default. This might be a reason why there's a high debt-to-GDP ratio, but this is also going to prove that you don't need to be reliant on Russia because you can just borrow more money, right? The fact that you have guilt fatigued by sanctions means most politicians will believe fighting against Ukraine matters more than taking out some debt. |
In contrast, on our side of the house, we get more energy independence, and of course, there might be an environmental harm in the short run. More oil fields really investigated, but green energy needs to be developed and ready first so we can stop that dependency. But in the short to medium term, before that happens, we have more independence from Russia. And yes, maybe this is in 10 to 15 years; that is still a benefit because we don't know what sort of risk they will pose in the long run. Unveiling the question is simple: do you prefer the search and benefits of redistributing these dividends to regular people and getting investment, or do you care about the uncertain benefits that come from government incentives? Very proud to oppose. |
</dlo> |
<mg> |
I'll discuss three things in this speech. One, I'm going to talk about why governments are going to be great at spending this money, which I think sort of breaks the clash between OG and OO about where this money is going, where this will be well spent. The second thing I want to talk about is instead of renewable investments made by oil and gas companies, I'm going to talk about institutional investors and the signaling impact of this tax. And the last thing I'm going to talk about is potentially maybe some stuff around the principle and why this is justified. Before all of that, I think there's a—there's two key pieces of framing that you need to do to take sort of OO out of this debate. I think the first thing you need to understand is that governments need the money. That's just there. There are two potential options here: either, as OG suggests, you have to go into slashing spending and austerity—I would posit governments will probably not want to go down this route because that is, well, that's a quick one-way ticket to getting out of power. |
Or there is the second alternative, which is either you raise taxes on other industries or you raise direct taxes on consumers, which I would suggest either makes the lives of the consumers much worse. But I would also posit that we are in a period of recession, so it probably is the debt of lots of industries or lower profitability in other industries. And, in general, the point there then is that there is vast economic suffering on the other side of the house. So any distribution that these guys do through, I don't know, like pension funds probably gets fucked to the point of which other industries are going out of business now. So if we move on to why governments are going to be good at spending this money and why there's a degree of accountability or extension material, I would posit that the first thing that happens once this tax is raised is that there is a lot of talk about this because this is an immensely political issue. |
Our leader suggests that oil and gas companies have massive lobbies, and they also have things like, you know, right-wing think tanks who publish papers, who show up on news shows or talk shows. They have politicians who lay back, who oftentimes come out against these taxes. There is going to be a lot of pushback at the point at which you increase the stacks for a longer period of time. You will have the same right propaganda that, you know, "Oh, this is going to lead to so many jobs being lost," or "Oh, this is sort of the loss that's going to happen." I would suggest that there is crucial scrutiny on how the government is spending this money that wasn't present before because the government did agree we did not have that fucking money. The second thing I would note is, as Naomi suggested, there's a large pool of money that you have now because the profits of oil and gas companies are considerable. |
I would suggest that this raises levels of, you know, just expectations about what standards of life are going to look like once this money does come in. So it raises expectations of the citizenry as well. But I would also note, in terms of framing this point, that the money that we are talking about, you know, money that's going to welfare schemes or money that's going to housing or heating or education or all of those issues, these are primary voter issues. These are not issues that are ancillary to you; these are issues that you vote on at the point of which these are directly related to your standard of life and your standard of living. I would posit a lot of people care now. I would also posit that governments have what is called a re-election incentive, which is why governments have an incentive to spend this money better than they have in the past. |
This is not the same situation. Governments are on the brink of recession, and if they want to keep their power, they have additional incentives to keep this going on. Now, I would also just add in, like, stuff that comes up with and OG responses here. Now, oh says governments are going to be really sure to spend this money because they're only going to send it to politically affluent constituencies. I just want to do a very basic wake-up way up here. Politically affluent constituencies or well politically powerful constituencies have poor people. Poor people do not have pension funds. So if their mechanism of distribution is literally pension funds or dividends, I would say the vast majority of your citizenry does not have access to those. As opposed to even if this money goes first to politically powerful constituencies, at the very least, it reaches vulnerable people that this money would not have gone to otherwise. |
In terms of impact, we, at the very least, impact very vulnerable stakeholders that their policy can never, ever impact and probably make things worse, as I point out at the top of my speech. Other industries probably die out; they slash jobs, and so on and so forth. This is extremely important in that scenario. But the second thing I would note is that governments don't only want to retain constituencies, and the point at which you're in recession, winning over other constituencies is also easier at the point in which you say, "Ah, we are the Tories, and we know that this is Liverpool, but at this point, we are the ones providing you with heating, and we are the ones that are providing you welfare." You know why? Because we're taxing all companies. I would suggest that you get a lot more political sway in historic constituencies where you were historically a lot weaker, so governments have a very, very strong incentive of actually using this money for basic good just because of the reduction uh incentive. |
But the third thing I would point out is that it just gives you room for policy experimentation. This is not—I know this is a one-time policy, but at the point at which another recession is about to hit, and I don't know, the tech industry is booming or other industries are booming, this allows you to, at the very least, create a precedent to start taxing those companies, those industries for waiting for taxes in the future as well, which I would suggest is a good thing because it gives something for poor people to fall back on in those instances. You do not have to deal with the same kind of rhetoric coming from the right-wing, which is, you raise taxes, you slash jobs, because we all know that these companies have enough profit to keep those jobs there. Nobody is slashing that that because Shell just made the highest profits they ever did in their 115-year history last year, so I don't reckon that they're going to lose jobs. If anything, this is a very profitable market; they're going to expand their stuff. I'm moving on to the next one but yes. |
<poi> |
If it's true reason is more spending, and that one false tax disproportionately hurt some companies, public detriments. Why don't you just take out, bonds, and accept that slightly higher debt-to-GDP ratio? |
</poi> |
But because, because you could go into recession—like, why would you want to—why would you want to accept something that is going to lead you to, if they're taking, like, lead you to losing voters at some stage? I just don't know why that's something that governments want to do. But the second thing I want to talk about is institutional investments into new companies. The context over here is it is a tough market, and it is volatile right now. In terms of investors, private equity funds and hedge funds aren't going out really nearly and dishing out cash; they're streaming it in. McKinsey is finally losing jobs. In terms of this, there are things that happen in the renewable sort of space in OO and OG. |
OG says, "Well, all companies will diversify," but I think OO is sort of fair in saying, "Well, they have a long-term incentive and diversification anyways; they get tax tax incentives right now, even apart from the windfall tax anyway." So they're probably already going into that, so it's unclear what the bigger marginal impact is; even if the impact is there, it's sort of marginal. They're already doing it. I will point out in the short term right now, this is great for institutional investors like private equity funds, which are again losing money or don't have very profitable industries to go into right now. I would suggest that this benefits a lot of ancillary industries, so I'm talking about lithium-ion battery manufacturers or potentially new companies coming in who want to, I don't know, create an electric car or something like that because you know that there is a higher return on profit. |
And I know that both OO and OG have sort of said that this is sort of a risky space to invest in. I don't know, like, I did use it; it's not risky. You get a lot of money if you come back into renewables anyway, so I would posit that this leaves you there. But why is the short-term investment crucially important? Because I would suggest that private equity funds have a lot of money, and secondly, their money in the short run would not have gone there had the signaling effect not been there because private equity funds are probably thinking, "Ah, they’ve extended this tax; will they extend it again?" The rate of profitability has fallen down, so the lack of certainty around this means that they're unlikely to do that, which they will in our world. |
For all those reasons, very proud to oppose. |
</mg> |
<mo> |
I'm starting in three, two, one. Let's be very clear: all government benches, including OG, actually brings the case, and CG who most repeats the mechanization, regardless of Hamza backloads, and web speech is dependent on this tax outweighing the harm of the rising prices. We agree with the government better that the government needs money. The question is whether the money will be spent well, but we will personally extend an opening opposition. We will show why this policy is shit, even if there are no rivers government incentives, no short-term government incentives, the government wants the best for us. It's still going to be absolutely harmful for three reasons. |
Firstly, the very reason closing government gives us is that there are politicians being lobbied by corporations. There are ideological differences between parliament people who want to advocate, like opening opposition does, for market freedom and letting the market solve. This proves to us it's a long and protracted bureaucratic process. It took part in Croatia seven months to impose policies like this. The reason being that we have a pro-market government in an anti-governmental position. The problem with that being it happens significantly at the risk of rising energy prices, which opening government says is so urgent. Secondly, and more importantly, energy prices are the main driver of inflation within the entire economy. |
So it's not just the price of heating that rises because energy is an intermediary good in any form of production because all forms of consumer goods and durable goods also rise, ranging from food to everyday appliances for anything you can buy in a supermarket. Which means that even if the average distribution opening government talks about happens, it only mirrors one part of the inflation. The majority is still there, and people have rising prices at the end of the day. What is the context of this, and why this is out by opening government? Because their policy is the one that causes the problem; you're sending a signal to get back to corporations that they can raise their prices as much as they want. Yes, you're going to tax them, but you're not going to cap their profit, which is to say you enter into an infinite spiral where companies continue to raise their prices over and over again, which is to say that you increase prices for consumers overall, which not only directly outweighs the harm to citizens for opening government, but it also makes the governments need more money, which is one of the primary problems that opening government wants to solve. |
Because there is nothing preventing these corporations from utilizing the current market situation to try the market price, because the market price is nothing else than an implicit consensus between corporations on the market. It's not externally set. But thirdly, windfall taxes are limited on the corporation, not in its financial activities, which means there's a huge amount of loopholes the corporations can use to simply avoid this tax—stuff like subsidiaries, stuff like shell companies. That's famous. If anything else, it's a very good incentive to shape your headquarters out of the country, which means that a lot of the things that opening government wants to happen, even if we have good incentives for the government and opening opposition, it's simply not going to happen. |
I have proven, firstly, that even in the best government scenario, the harm will exist and the policy is bad. But I've also proven that the policy directly makes the harms worse, going a step further than opening opposition.Now Secondly, let me make very clear what our path to victory is in this debate. We are going to take the government ground, assume both of the government teams win the clash on whether it's principally justified. Even within that context, on a strategically beneficial scenario for government, we're going to show that the realistic counterfactual is better than the one that the government has set up, therefore achieving victory on the government's own metric. |
What is the most likely reasonable alternative? Simply empirically based on the facts, that's going to happen if we don't have a windfall tax. It seems like price caps and profit caps have been empirically set up all over the European Union by countries like Germany. Why is this the case? Well, for reasons that both government teams give us: because people don't want to be cold, and there's bipartisan political capital because the government said it's very proximate to you, which is something that everybody votes on because people want to have lower prices. Therefore, there is capital for some kind of regulation. The question of this debate empirically, actually, outside of the paid world, the world manual or whatever, is what happens absent this policy. If this is the alternative that happens absent this policy, we will prove it's better. |
We win this debate. Why is it a better alternative? Firstly, because it provides benefits directly to citizens, i.e., I directly pay less for energy, regardless of how good the government isn't redistributing money. Secondly, in April, it stops the inflation spiral because it caps the price at a certain level, which means that the government does not need more money in the long term to make up for the higher prices that are happening and the higher inflation that is happening. But thirdly, because it is targeted at sales and not the legal person, which means it targets everything sold to you at any point, because the policy is far more far-reaching, which is to say the authority we have in the counterfactual is one that's far more direct but is far more implementable and does not cause the problem in the way that the opening government and closing government case does. |
Before moving to a bunch more of responsive work of the Harish. |
<poi> |
Opening opposition, tell us, the market is sufficiently competitive, then prices will not rise as everyone knows the cost of a barrel of oil. You tell us prices will rise significantly. Who's wrong and why? |
</poi> |
No, I'm telling you opening government runs a very opening opposition runs a very good case. This should probably win over both government teams. I'm also telling you that assuming that you win the battling opposition I can run that ground as well. I'm perfectly allowed to do that. I'm sure you, Harish, know that. Cool. A couple of other pieces of responsiveness. Firstly, all the weird Russia-Ukraine. There are four reasons why we still have support for war against Russia. Firstly, because there is above Europe nuclear war all across Europe ever since World War II, apart from the Balkans. |
And nobody cares about the Balkans. There has not been a war on the European Union's borders. Countries like the Baltic states, Poland, Moldova, etc. have a history of being occupied by Russia. The alternative is potentially dying if Ukraine has a frontier fall, and if people are willing to accept that cost. But secondly, as the government themselves concedes, there is urgency to push for renewables because we have to diversify our sources because Russia won't sell anymore. There are subsidies being offered by the European Union to do that, which is to say the cost is probably going to shift in the long term. But thirdly, there's spot dependency at the point where you do implement sanctions, where you don't put the costs from the people. You have to show something to make good for it. |
At the end of the day, you have to be able to say we were able to bankrupt Russia's war machine; we were able to attrition them into losing. At the point where we impose those thoughts, that's when you're not going to go back on them, even if the people don't support it. So I'm not sure why you lose support for the war in Ukraine or why you lose those sanctions. I also want to respond to the green energy point, right? And this is where we build the scales and where we, you know, break the demo because is it risk? Is it not risky? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's the thing: there is a particular political juncture in this situation where there is a push for green energy, not necessarily because people like it, but because they're being forced into it. |
I.e., you can either diversify your sources by buying gas from Iran or Azerbaijan or Qatar or any other actor who has the intended to ramp up the price because they know you have no alternative, or you have the incentive to become self-sustainable by shifting to renewables through things like subsidies for green energy. In support that incentive exists. I'm not sure why the government wants to slow down the process by allowing companies to have unrealistically high profit margins despite the realistic need to shift towards renewable energy at the point where we have a situation where we can justify shifting to renewables through the length of securitization, to the length that we might not like it, but we have no alternative. |
To the length that it's a geopolitical tool against Russia, we have all the political capital we need, and government wants to impose a policy that's going to accomplish artificially high profit margins on the other side of the debate, and we're not going to use this particular junction we have now. Note how slow the shift has been despite Paris and Kyoto. If we don't use this opportunity to justify to other means, we don't know when we get that opportunity again, and that's why they lose out on the debate on renewable energy. For all of these reasons, closing opposition. |
</mo> |
<gw> |
Is a great auditor, Tin was able to kiss Harish's ass and test Taha in the same sentence, so I'm going to show you the legitimate things that Taha did say because this happens quite a lot. Number one, Taha is the first person to break the clash on this money being used responsibly. Because of the opening government pushes, we get lots of money in opening opposition exposures that they are more legitimate and effective forms of redistribution. Then logically, if the team which wins the debate is a team that shows that this money is much more likely to be effectively used, Taha gives two broad structural reasons for this, which are broadly conceded for the means of opposition's extension. |
Number one, you have lots of Astro turf organizations set up by these oil companies—Americans against oil taxes, all of that stuff you have—right-wing politicians, you have right-wing op-eds, you have right-wing think tanks which are going after this government as silly and ineffective, but most of all pointing out that if cost of living is the name of the game, this is the worst way to do it. If that is true, there are heightened levels of scrutiny upon this government to use this money in immediate and effective ways to swing a voting public, which is both sides have discussed are reasonably polarized within this discussion. I think this is an incredibly important point in terms of impacting opening government's analysis and also being invulnerable to opening opposition's response on this money not being used effectively. |
Secondly, I think it does a great job of also responding implicitly to Tin's point about this idea of you could have regulated them instead or you could have done something else. One fairly World School's understanding of how political capital works, right? Like, you know there's a box of political capital—it's 100 political capitals, and we can use 100 little capitals to Policy X, which is us, or 100 to do yours, which is policy Y. One, that's never how policy works because what often happens is you take an inch, and then you take a mile. This is exactly what happened in the Wall Street crisis; this is exactly what happened with crypto four months ago at my detriment, and this is exactly what's going to happen right now, which is the point at which you say, "Fuck Off, we're going to impose the windfall tax." |
Lots of people start saying, "Why are these people making 40 billion dollars a year? Why is ExxonMobil nearly 300 billion dollars of revenue?" More and more and more people start coming out against it. This is why historically legislation gets more and more intense once you start going after a target because it becomes more and more unpopular. If anything, our government would be accused of hypocrisy by subsidizing an industry that they're not taxing. We say go after the subsidies, which is exactly what people are saying in the pages of the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which is that if you have a windfall tax, then logically you shouldn't be subsidizing this industry to tax breaks of a trillion dollars. We think we get much more change in our world at the point in which people accuse this government of this hypocrisy and of this incompetence, and helps get much more regulation in our world. |
Second, I think it's important to understand that diversification incentives exist on both sides. I think the opposition bench has done a great job of being like, "Here are the ten reasons why diversification would happen opening government side," but there's a couple more, and I'm like, fair enough. I think the way that Taha breaks the clash is by talking about signaling and policy expectations, which is realistically how companies make decisions. What will the government do next? Is it exactly what an investor is thinking at any given time, just like with inflation expectations? For instance, in this case, if the government continues this increase, as Rishi Sunak is debating this in Parliament for the last two weeks, then it signals to institutional investors that this is something that the government might do for a long amount of time. |
What this means then is that the signaling to the market shifts capital away from things like this the lithium-ion and iron batteries and different things, which helps the renewable push. Again, a very crucial mechanism in terms of proving the product push renewable energy. I think that's super, super important. The third, Jason comes up and says, "You know what? Like, why didn't we tax those tech companies when they made all that money in 2020?" Thank you. Because we want to set a precedent. We want to set a precedent for windfall taxes. The point at which if companies are making arbitrary gains out of circumstances that were no longer in their control, I think it sets up a real political discussion about when you should have windfall taxes in the future. |
In fact, we compound the benefits on opening government. We say the next time debt arbitrarily makes money because you're sitting at home because of a pandemic, again, we should windfall tax them, and we should take that gain and distribute it equitably and fairly. And finally, just on this Ukraine point, I think it's important to understand, like, you know, there's a hundred reasons to be in Ukraine. I really don't think it's a debate word argument to say this will be the reason that people don't do it. I agree with both OG and OO; I have nothing to say on that. Quickly on closing opposition then, first, I showed you that this political capital argument is vulnerable to two responses. One, political capital is not mutually exclusive in this case, but two, governments are further accused of hypocrisy. |
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