BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
The corporate sphere is a special one in this debate. Given the complexity of large corporate struc...

An increased judicial willingness to remove the privilege may damage, rather than improve, compliance. Fear of compulsory disclosure may deter candid, careful, detailed, written advice being given by lawyers to their clients. Does effective corporate regulation require the greater use of intrusive measures like the removal of legal professional privilege, or would more informal, cooperative or voluntary mechanisms – like leniency or immunity policies and discretions – achieve better outcomes?
Maintaining the traditional agricultural role of the countryside is essential. We should not only s...

We should instead encourage the countryside to modernise. The idealized vision of rural communities blissfully living together and passing down age old traditions from one generation to the other is long dead. The villagers of today demand jobs and are more than thrilled to be offered one in large-scale production farms or one of the livelihood diversification schemes. Far from being able to support others, subsistence farmers can hardly feed themselves and their families. Exploitation of small plots of land has long proven to be inefficient and in some cases even damaging to the environment. Rural life began to change a long time ago, and the process is inevitable. Without rethinking the role of the rural we will end up condemning rural populations to a life of continuous poverty they can only escape by migrating to the city. This migration may in end prove to be even more dangerous.
We should work to protect the countryside from unwelcome change. There are many ways in which we ca...

We should help the countryside embrace change. There are many ways in which we can help the countryside adapt, yet we also need to accept the fact that any change will be disruptive to some extent. Shock effects, and the negative side-effects that come with them are inevitable, and can only be avoided by simply refusing to see that change will occur whether we want it or not. As for Central and Eastern Europe, the de-collectivization process and liberalization process was indeed painful, yet it was largely demanded by the rural inhabitants themselves. While we do not deny that some people are having a hard time learning how to negotiate these new changes, there are successful models that can be implemented. In Balninkai, Lithuania, a very successful model of grassroots organizing involved people in the decision-making process and helped retrain them for the new environment they were facing. In many parts of Central and Eastern Europe people have voted with their feet and moved away from the countryside in search of better prospects. Change is already here and unless we are prepared to force these people to stay on the land, we should work with it rather than against it.
There are many problems with rural development schemes. The fact that people understand the liberal...

Rural development initiatives should be applauded. For every example of set-backs, there are many examples of the positive impact that investment has on rural communities. One only need look at Muhammad Yunus, a micro-credit pioneer from Bangladesh and winner of the Noble Peace Prize, to understand the life changing effect that a credit as small as $9 can have on the lives of rural inhabitants. These credits have opened a world of opportunities and hope for rural inhabitants throughout the world and, more importantly, have helped set free their creativity and entrepreneurship. Micro-credit has given the world community a lesson in small-scale management, perseverance and unexpected, yet much needed, financial success.
Rural communities provide a valuable safety net and should be preserved. In times of crisis and fin...

Those same people who moved to the countryside after financial crises moved right back to the cities upon securing a new job, leaving rural areas for what they thought were much better opportunities. Moving back to the village was not a choice, but rather a survival must. Modernisation of the countryside does not mean that the village could not continue to serve an important role as a social buffer in times of crisis. It means that it might be able to offer a lot more than that: an alternative to city living that could attract people not only in times of crisis. Resisting change means rural areas will continue their plunge into poverty and only reinforce dangerous trends of turning entire rural regions into international labour reserves – a heaven for a series of dangerous abuses such as child labour and prostitution.
Radical reform of the countryside that seeks to transform it into something other than an agricultur...

Poor areas, particularly rural areas, have already proven to be a great source of conflict, with or without attempts to reform it. If anything, reforms have offered young people alternatives - a job that would keep them from joining guerrilla forces or joining criminal gangs. Subsistence farming is no longer an alternative and certainly does not offer the sense of security that the proposition might have you believe it does. Poverty will always breed insecurity and while solutions may be difficult to find and fraught with failure, we owe it to ourselves at least to try.
Preserving the traditional character of rural areas benefits the environment. Running down national...

Trying to fix the countryside in some “traditional” remote past could only be done at huge economic cost. In order to support a few rural landowners, food prices for everyone else would have to rise greatly as cheaper foreign imports are kept out by trade barriers, tariffs or subsidies. Encouraging inefficient small scale production over huge modern farms will further raise the costs of production. If there is a market for locally-grown organic food, then some farmers can grow it to sell to the rich at a premium, but we shouldn’t impose massively higher food prices on the urban poor. Keeping out foreign imports would also hurt desperately poor farmers in the developing world who need markets for their crops. Even if this was desirable, we would have to withdraw from international trade/political blocs to implement it, which would hurt other parts of our own economy.
Maintaining the traditional agricultural role of the countryside is essential. We should not only s...

Maintaining the traditional agricultural role of the countryside is essential. We should not only support local traditions and sense of identity, but also reinforce a natural division of labour between the rural and the urban. Even as modern economies continue to move towards service jobs and industries, our basic needs – including that of eating – will continue to exist and be met through agricultural production. The rural is best equipped to meet these needs. We should invest in smaller agricultural schemes that follow traditional practices, invest in people and the environment that supports them, and offer the health and animal welfare advantages of less intensive food production and processing practices. This is a much better alternative to large-scale intensive farming and diversification schemes that are often purely profit motivated and may rely for labour not on local inhabitants but on gangs of cheap migrant labourers.
We should work to protect the countryside from unwelcome change. There are many ways in which we ca...

We should work to protect the countryside from unwelcome change. There are many ways in which we can help the countryside adapt to the changes that the entire world is currently undergoing. Privatization and sudden liberalization practices and investments are not always the best solutions. Central and Eastern Europe can be regarded as a laboratory for emerging and developing democracies, and here ‘shock therapy’, de-collectivization and liberalization practices had a devastating effect on rural areas and their inhabitants. Such modernising policies resulted not only in increasing poverty but also in bitter conflict over land and access to jobs in the newly created private farms and greater exploitation. These conflicts have significantly undermined the local solidarity that the traditional development of the countryside has always depended on as one of its major resources.
There are many problems with rural development schemes. The fact that people understand the liberal...

There are many problems with rural development schemes. The fact that people understand the liberalization process better and are able to function within it does not mean that modernisation is preferable. Doing away with small family farms and replacing them with larger and more diversified investments is largely dependent on the availability of credit and the stability of the banking system. In most places such credit is not available or comes with many strings attached, and even in areas where credit can be secured, the banking system may not be trusted. In Romania, the collapse of several banks giving out credit for rural development had a significant overall economic impact that could not be buffered by a relatively weak state relying on limited financial resources.
Rural communities provide a valuable safety net and should be preserved. In times of crisis and fin...

Rural communities provide a valuable safety net and should be preserved. In times of crisis and financial collapse, agriculture in rural areas has proven to be an important employment buffer, offering entire families some sense of stability upon loss of jobs due to restructuring, market or currency collapse – some of the insecurities that are part of the new global economy. In South East Asia, after the 1998 crisis thousands of people were forced to return to their ancestors’ villages where they found a home and a means to feed their family. In Central and Eastern Europe, the privatization of large industries had a similar effect, sending many people back to their villages and the traditional agricultural lifestyle. In these cases, the countryside has proven to be an essential safety net for those who would have otherwise had no other means of support.
Radical reform of the countryside that seeks to transform it into something other than an agricultur...

Radical reform of the countryside that seeks to transform it into something other than an agricultural powerhouse is particularly dangerous in places where the majority of the population still lives in rural areas and relies on subsistence farms for their daily bread. Taking away this minimal sense of security by pushing people to invest in unfamiliar schemes that might or might not guarantee more profit threatens to plunge entire countries into even more conflict and instability.
Preserving the traditional character of rural areas benefits the environment. Running down national...

Preserving the traditional character of rural areas benefits the environment. Running down national farming sectors and importing food instead of producing it at home is very damaging in terms of food miles - much energy is used to transport crops and meat thousands of miles, producing harmful emissions and contributing to global warming. Cheap foreign food is also often grown at the expense of the environment, with rainforests chopped down to create plantations or grazing. Growing food for local markets in traditional ways (e.g. without pesticides or chemical fertilisers) may be less efficient but it helps save the planet and also benefits wildlife. And preserving the character of the countryside in this way can have economic benefits as tourists are attracted to its beauty and age-old traditions.
Line item veto is a power that state governors already have

The federal government is not just a state government writ large, and the President is not equivalent to a state Governor. What works at state level would be neither effective nor appropriate for the United States as a whole. State legislatures have a different and more limited role than Congress, often with tax and spend powers that are much more restricted in the state constitution. The need for super-majorities or referendums for tax rises and prohibitions on deficit spending are the real reason states’ budgets are balanced, not the line-item veto. “Theoretical literature to date has provided no clear predictions regarding the effects of the line item veto on the tax level, and the empirical literature has provided conflicting results”.[[Leandro M. De Magalhaes, Lucas Ferro, Budgetary Seperation of Powers in the American States and the Tax Level: A Regression Discontinuity Design, Bristol University, Oct 2009, http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/economics/working_papers/pdffiles/dp08603.pdf accessed 5/5/11]] It is likely to be the same with spending. Many state assemblies did not originally meet every year, so it was natural that the Governor had to have the ability to adjust spending priorities in changing circumstances. And the Presidency has much more power and money at its disposal than any Governor, creating opportunities for abuse that just don’t exist at state level. Finally, it is worth noting that line-item veto power does not always work smoothly at state level, with courts often having to rule on whether the executive has exceeded its authority in cases that often come down to fine distinctions between appropriations, tax credits, entitlements and policy choices.
Will damage separation of powers

This proposal will not upset the separation of powers defined in the US Constitution. Congress will retain the power of the purse and its ability to check the executive. For a start, a line-item veto would not allow a President to move money around and add funding to projects he likes but which Congress did not approve; it simply allows him to excise wasteful items. Secondly, the deletions made by the President are subject to override by majorities in Congress if they disagree with his decisions. Such votes will attract public scrutiny that earmarks buried in massive spending bills currently lack, so Congress will be reluctant to reinstate egregious examples of wasteful appropriations, while still being able to check any abuses of executive power. Finally, this measure will serve to restore the previous balance of power (before the removal of impoundment power) in which the executive had more budgetary discretion than has been the case for the past 35 years. Justice Breyer in his dissenting opinion argued the Line Item Veto Act does not violate any implicit separation-of-powers principle. Supreme Court Justice Breyer The power “is far easier conceptually to reconcile the power at issue here with the relevant constitutional description ("executive") than in many of these cases… one cannot say that the Act "encroaches" upon Congress' power, when Congress retained the power to insert, by simple majority, into any future appropriations bill, into any section of any such bill, or into any phrase of any section, a provision that says the Act will not apply… Nor can one say the Act's grant of power "aggrandizes" the Presidential office. The delegation of those powers to the President may strengthen the Presidency, but any such change in Executive Branch authority seems minute when compared with the changes worked by delegations of other kinds of authority that the Court in the past has upheld. [[Justice Breyer, dissenting, Clinton, President of the United States et al v. City of New York et al., United States Supreme Court 25/6/98, No.97-1374, pp.470, 482-4 http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_case?case=4447838344519582856&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr accessed 5/5/11]] Even if earmarks were abandoned by congress no longer using them, that would in many ways upset the balance of power between the branches of government more than a line-item veto, because then the President would be able to determine much more broadly how to spend taxpayers’ money, rather than being limited to deleting individual items he finds unjustifiable.
Potential for abuse of power

This amendment would only give the President a limited power for a limited but worthwhile purpose. The media and interest group scrutiny that accompanies the Presidency will ensure that the White House will have to justify every line-item decision made. It does not affect the Congress’s power regarding policy-making, entitlement programmes or taxation. Indeed, it is little different to the existing convention of executive “Signing Statements” whereby the President can sign legislation while making it clear his intention not to fully implement aspects of it. It would create a budgetary separation of powers between the president and congress so introducing checks and balances against the abuse of power.[[Lucas Ferrero and Leandro M. de Magalhaes, Budgetary Separation of Powers in the American States: theory and evidence, Stanford University, 5/4/06 pp1-2 http://www.stanford.edu/group/peg/Papers%20for%20call/april06%20papers/Leandro.pdf accessed 5/5/11]]
Has made little difference in the past

The use of the line-item veto power by President Clinton in 1997 demonstrates the advantages of such authority. Although the power was declared unconstitutional in 1998 by the Supreme Court, while he held it Clinton demonstrated what could be achieved. He acted cautiously, only cancelling 82 appropriations, but these totalled nearly $2 billion[[It is time for congress to kill the pig, Center for individual freedom, 11/11/04, http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/line_item_veto.htm accessed 6/5/11]] – a useful contribution in itself to reducing the federal deficit, and one that suggested that much bigger savings could be achieved by a more determined President. The Congressional Budget Office agreed Congressional Budget Office The 1997 cancellations had a relatively small impact on the budget's bottom line, but that outcome may have resulted in part from temporary factors, such as last year's balanced budget agreement. [[‘The line item veto act after one year’, Congressional Budget Office, April 1998, http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=454&type=0 accessed 6/5/11]] This period also demonstrated that Congress would still retain the power of the purse, as it was able to overrule one of Clinton’s deletions, on the Military Construction bill worth $287billion, by majority vote in both houses.[[Marc Lacey, ‘Senate Votes 1st Override of Clinton Line-Item Vetos, Los Angeles Times, 26/2/1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/feb/26/news/mn-23290 accessed 6/5/11]]
The constitution should not be amended

Congressman John E. Baldacci (D-Maine) I do not take these matters lightly in amending the Constitution. However, I am convinced in this case it is the only way to provide the President with the same authority that 44 Governors already have to influence spending. [[Statement of Hon. John E. Baldacci, A Representative in Congress from the State of Maine, Item veto constitutional amendment hearing before the subcommittee on the constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, 23/3/00, p.19, http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju65012.000/hju65012_0f.htm accessed 5/5/11]] It would in general be preferable to make such a change through normal legislation, but that was attempted in 1996 and found unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Stevens in his majority opinion for the Supreme Court argued that it was necessary for there to be an amendment to make it constitutional, Justice Stevens If there is to be a new procedure in which the president will play a different role in determining the text of what may “become a law”, such change must come not by legislation but through the amendment procedures set forth in Article V of the Constitution.” [[ Justice Stevens, delivered the opinion of the court, Clinton, President of the United States et al v. City of New York et al., United States Supreme Court 25/6/98, No.97-1374, p.449, http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_case?case=4447838344519582856&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr accessed 5/5/11]]
Will mean fiscal responsibility

Amending the US Constitution to allow the President a line-item veto would be fiscally responsible. Congress has proved itself incapable of restraining spending, even as the budget deficit has ballooned in recent years. In fiscal year 2008 there were 11,610 earmarks – specific appropriations requested by individual Congressmen, mostly to benefit specific groups in their district or state - costing $17.2 billion with a total of $271 billion from 1991 to 2008.[[Gail Russell Chaddock, ‘Despite earmark reforms, ‘pork’ spending rises’, Christian Science Monitor, 3/4/08, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2008/0403/p02s01-uspo.html accessed 5/5/11]] Many of these items are “pork”, using taxpayers’ money on projects of dubious value in order to ingratiate the Congressman involved with groups of voters or interest groups. Typically huge spending bills bloated with such wasteful appropriations are voted through by Congressmen who have no opportunity or inclination to even read the whole thing. At present the President has to accept or sign the whole bill, despite their distaste for many of the items within it. The proposed amendment would change that and allow the President to sign the bill as a whole, while canceling spending he regarded as wasteful, of low priority, or properly a matter for state or local government.
Earmarks are often an abuse by congress

The present system of earmarking in Congress is wide open to abuse. The party leaderships in each house can use the offer of pork, or the threat to withhold it to enforce party discipline. “Logrolling” occurs whereby an earmark is obtained in return for support on an unrelated piece of legislation. All this leads to legislators who put party above country and vote for bad legislation in pursuit of their own vested interest. They basically “are federal dollars that members of Congress dole out to favor seekers — often campaign donors. In the process, lawmakers advocate for the companies, helping them bypass the normal system of evaluation and competition.”[[David Heath and Hal Bernton, $4.5 million fopr a boat that nobody wanted, The Seattle Times, 15/10/07, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003948586_favorfactory14m.html accessed 5/5/11]] Forcing pork out in the open by making Congress vote to defend it after a Presidential line-item veto is the best way to remedy matters. Overall the President is more accountable to the people as a whole than individual representatives, and with their national mandate, more able to stand up to powerful interest groups.
Prevent last minute omnibus appropriations bills

The line item veto could prevent omnibus appropriations bills as with a possible veto there would be little advantage to congress in bundling such spending together. In recent decades huge omnibus appropriations bills have become the norm, these are bills that “package many, often unrelated, proposals in a single, very long piece of legislation.”[[Omnibus bills, Congressional Quarterly Roll Call, http://corporate.cqrollcall.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=232 accessed 5/5/11]] Presidents have had to accept these bills in their entirety or see the federal government shut down for lack of spending authority. Presidents from the 1790s to 1974 had an impoundment power not to spend money which Congress had appropriated. This power was lost in 1974, with increasingly bloated budgets and pork barrel spending the result. Congressman Phil English (R - Penn) For far too long, Presidents have had to adopt an ''all or nothing'' approach when considering action on bills containing appropriations. This presents a predicament for them when good policies are overloaded by unnecessary spending proposals. The case for this amendment was clearly demonstrated by the FY99 Omnibus Appropriations Act last October. Many provisions in this bill were last minute ''pork'' projects that should not have been included. [[Prepared statement of Hon. Phil English, A Representative in Congress from the State of Pennsylvania, Item veto constitutional amendment hearing before the subcommittee on the constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, 23/3/00, p15, http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju65012.000/hju65012_0f.htm accessed 5/5/11]]