USFG should adopt a Childbirth Limitation policy

I thank BlackVoid as well for sticking with the debate; I've been getting an annoying number of forfeits recently too. This has been a very fun debate. ==Impact debate== Is population growth good or bad? My opponent offers no real proof in his case, until now, of why population growth is bad. He should automatically lose the conduct point for presenting 6 reasons in his final round and forcing me to answer them all in the last round, which is generally reserved for summation. You should actually completely disregard these new arguments made in the last "speech." Should you choose not to, I'll refute his points. *Hey says: Increasing our current population causes, 1. Resource strain (2) 2. Weakened economy (2) 3. Increased unemployment (2) 4. Increased pressure on environment (2) 5. Decreased watter supply (3) 6. Faster disease spread due to population density (3)* General response: The first source is bad, the second bogus. The first source (footnote 2) only talks about environmental impacts, but none of his other claims. It is also not specific to the US, but talks about world overpopulation, which I've shown is more of a worry in developing and under-developed countries. The second source (#3 footnote) quite literally talks about neither water supply nor diseases – it is a travel website that tells you what locations to visit in Ghana. Also, if any of these 6 actually became a serious issue (we're talking way more than 100 years from now), THEN we could consider a childbirth limitation policy. Specific responses: 1. Answered by technological improvements and bad Malthus predictions 2. Answered by the Fareed Zakaria evidence, which says our continued population growth is key to our future economic success; may be true in poor countries, but not in the US 3. No reason why this is true. The economy always finds productive uses for more people. If it didn't, there should have been a lot of unemployment created since 1900, when there were only 76 million people in the US, compared to more than 300 million today. [1] 4. Solved by technology. The US environment is much cleaner today than right after the Industrial Revolution, when people complained about all the soot in the air. 5. Not a problem in US – we have more fresh water than the rest of the world (Alaska, Great Lakes); solved by technology ("Construction of wastewater treatment plants and reduction of groundwater overdrafting appear to be obvious solutions to the worldwide problem") [2] 6. Not a problem in the US – we actually have really low population density right now, compared to other industrialized countries like England and Japan; strong state governments can prevent the spread of disease through quarantine (prevent people from leaving an infected city, for example) I offer all my reasons why population growth is good in my case under C1, and thus this brings us to: ==My case== C1) Demographic Transition I offered three reasons that population growth is good: a) We need population growth to support an aging population, specifically the huge uptick in the elderly that will occur as the Baby Boomers retire. Without population growth, Social Security and Medicare will be utterly insolvent. Fareed Zakaria says that China is doomed in regard to its pension burden because of its childbirth limitation policy. This argument is unanswered by my opponent. b) Bigger populations mean larger, stronger, and more dynamic economies. *My opponent says that people immigrate to strong economies* True. Immigration is one form of population growth. Without a great deal of immigrants, the US economy would still be limited to the approximate size of the original 13 states. This just proves that population growth is good and necessary to a strong, robust economy. c) Fareed Zakaria: most innovation comes from young people *My opponent says China still has young people* True, but far fewer than they should. Zakaria says China will have more people over 65 than under 15 by 2030. The Chinese economy will be far less innovative by 2030 because of their childbirth limitation policy. *My opponent says "only a gradual decline is acceptable"* His policy is not a gradual decline because many people choose to have fewer than two kids (or no kids at all). The current average birthrate of 2.1 kids in the US is exactly that – an average. Since many people choose to have 1 or zero children, we owe this average to people who have 3 or more children, which my opponent points out is a significant percentage (28%). His own case disproves his "gradual decline" theory. Remember, 2.1 births per female is the "replacement level" for society. Our goal should – at the very least - be to keep our population constant. I don't even have to win that a growing population is good, just that a stable population is good. My opponent loses the debate at the point where he doesn't answer my Reason Magazine evidence that world population is already projected to decline by mid-century, not increase, due to the "demographic winter" that is approaching. *He says the Reason evidence is "only because people will be starving and struggling to find necessary resources because of overpopulation"* Lies. Read the evidence. It's based on current population trends. C2) Technological improvements Malthus made the same predictions as my opponent and was proven wrong. A string of neo-Malthusians have made the same predictions nearly every half century since, and none proved true. Technology has always outstripped increases in population. The Green and Gene Revolutions alone will maintain adequate increases in food production for at least the next two centuries. *Eventually technology will not be able to keep up, unless my opponent can prove that we can modify crops to regrow in 5 minutes* This is ridiculous – the US is nowhere near that level; we're barely above replacement levels now. If we ever got to that point, we could reconsider my opponent's proposal. My opponent also doesn't understand my argument about self-limitation. In a free market, as resources decline, even slightly, their prices rise. People will have fewer children as it becomes more expensive to raise them. This process is natural in a free market. C3) Constitutionality Griswold v. Connecticut is a Supreme Court case stating that the right to privacy means the government must stay out of decisions made in the bedroom. Supreme Court precedents must be followed. This also violates the 1st Amendment (religious freedom) because it forces Catholics to use contraception and forces all religious individuals to get an abortion if pregnant with their third child. *My opponent says we can overturn this law for the greater good* 1. It's not a law, it's a court case. There's a huge difference. 2. Not without overturning the 5th and 1st Amendments to the Constitution. The detriment of destroying the Constitution's protections would far outweigh any benefit of this specific law. We would have no checks on government without the Constitution. ==His case== *Growth is in the hundreds of thousands every single year* Uncited; his original source showed a decline; and a small amount of growth is good – see above. *Ghana – "biased statistics" because they don't adjust for purchasing power* The average incomes were adjusted using purchasing power parity. The average citizen in the US is 31 times wealthier than the average citizen in Ghana. ==Summary== Because US population is barely growing at all, because we need some population growth to maintain our economic strength, because technology can keep pace with population, and because a childbirth limitation policy is completely unconstitutional, I urge a Con vote. [1] http://tinyurl.com... [2] http://tinyurl.com...