Rand Paul should be the next president

I accept. As PRO is affirming a positive statement, he has the burden of proof - and must prove to us that Rand Paul should be the next president. I'm not obligated to provide a counterplan. PRO says, "All of the other candidates are terrible. " This is of course nothing more than a statement of opinion. He doesn't provide any candidate-by-candidate analysis of the individuals who have already declared - and, not to mention, not every candidate who will run has entered the race yet. Even if PRO were correct - and obviouly you shouldn't take him at his word in the absence of evidence - that all of the other *current* candidates were terrible (and, mind you, that isn't a reason unto itself to vote for Rand, because Rand could in fact still be terrible, and voting for the lesser of two evils is *still* evil), another candidate who's even better than Rand and isn't terrible at all could in fact enter the race. This is an extremely preemptive judgment by PRO, and he doesn't even set up criteria that differentiate Rand from the others. Why, for instance, is Rand not terrible, but the others are? He never tells us. Therefore, disregard this. PRO says, "They talk about cutting spending and reforming government and closing loopholes and ending crony capitalism but then they vote for it. " By "they," I assume he is refrring to the GOP, and in many cases I would completely agree with this. However, he doesn't demonstrate (a) that these policies are actually optimal or desirable, and that we should prefer candidates who want to, for instance, cut spending amid a depressed economy (which is actually a horrid idea, because it depresses demand and destroys jobs, particularly now with interest rates pegged at the zero lower bound) and (b) that Rand would endorse these. For instance, what legislation has Rand pushed recently to close loopholes? Last I checked, he was voting for oil subsidies, which he and his trickle-down ilk view as "incentives. " If PRO truly believed that trickle-down economics, advocated by Rand and others, was optimal, why in the world would he want a candidate who would close loopholes, and thus raise taxes? That isn't even to say that Rand fits the bill. For instance, Rand was once on the side of cutting defense spending, but then he flipped his position and proposed actually *increasing* defense spending [. http://time.com...]. Obviously that doesn't produce any tangible good, caters to the defense industry, and only perpetuates overseas conflicts - and there's an additional onus on Rand because this actually demonstrates just how disengenuous he actually is. In other words, Rand isn't much better, if better at all, then the other candidates PRO attacked. And, not to mention, several of the GOP candidates - for instance, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina - have never even been in elected office before, so this criticism can't even apply to them. It's a sweeping generalization that cannot possibly be the case, and in the absence of specificity, you disregard it. PRO says, "They say they're populists and then take oil money to keep funding oveseas adventurism. "Again, I don't know who "they" is, but Rand Paul is just as guilty when it comes to (a) funding overseas conflict, as my last source shows, and (b) in voting for oil subsidies and accepting oil money [. http://thinkprogress.org...]. Once again, by PRO's own criteria, Rand Paul fails as a candidate. PRO says, "And they support the Federal Reserve which can print money to fund big government which wipes out people's savings. " First of all, Congress isn't simply going to abolish the Fed tomorrow, so this isn't even a realistic position that any candidate could actually take. Second, Rand Paul has not proposed actually abolishing the Fed, but only auditing that, though we know from an extensive amount of research by economists, such as Alesina and Summers (1993) [. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu...], that an audit would destroy the Fed's independence and actually lead to higher inflation as monetary policymakers succumb to short-term political pressures and the political business cycle, and pursue overly expansionary policies irrespective of their long-run consequences. The job of the Fed - and it has done this well and credibly since the post-Volcker era - is to keep inflation low, stable, and well-anchored, and it has done that. Third, PRO is just wrong in saying that the Fed wipes out people's savings. Income generally grow by the rate of inflation, and because debtors tend to be poorer on balance, keeping inflation stable, rather than plummetting, actually benefits lower-income people. Not to mention, the mechanism by which inflation rises is strenghtening demand, which also means more jobs - which is obviously desirable because income is needed in order to have savings. The reasons interest rates are so low is because the economy is horrid - because the Wicksellian equilibrium is negative. If the Fed were to pursue a contractionary policies, because wages and prices are sticky, we would see more layoffs, slower growth, less employment and this rate would fall even more. Interest rates tend to fall during bad times and rise during good times - i. e. , low interest rates are *caused* by the horrid economy, and signal that monetary policy *was* right, not that it *is* loose - so a tighter, deflationary policy would only depress savings more, whereby an aggressive policy would lead to higher interest rates in the long run, and thus higher levels of savings. Not to mention, we know what the country would be like without a central bank. We didn't have on in the 1800s or the early 1900s, and we had panics every 20 or so years. We didn't have a lender of last resort, nor was their public trust in the banking system, which led to a more volatile boom-bust cycle. That isn't the case with a credible central bank that can prop up the financial system, provide liquidity at times of stress, and properly regulate institutions so that they don't blow up the global financial system. I have refuted all of PRO's points.