Bernie Sanders Would Hurt America If Elected

Let’s tie the threads of this debate together and see if we can come to any conclusions. Keep in mind that Pro continues to bring up new research from these "objective" think tank groups. In respect to answering Pro’s statistics, I created two categories: Pro’s biased statistics, and Pro’s objective, academic statistics. I gladly responded to Pro’s objective statistics, but since I’m not obligated to extensively refute biased research, I did nothing more than point it out for what it is--biased. I’m bemused by Pro’s assertions I “dodged” a “substantial” part of his arguments. Unless my vision is failing me, I devoted an entire paragraph to the statistics I apparently dodged. I didn’t dodge any arguments, I put them in their proper context--which is that these are all ideologically biased sources who have deep political connections, entailing a lack of ability to productive objective research. I put forward three reasons to question the objectivity of Pro’s sources, none of which he responded to (dodging?). First, these think tanks rarely publish any research contradicting their founding ideology. What an odd coincidence that all of the research published by these think tanks agrees with their founding ideology! Pro did not answer to this point. Secondly, the very fact that these institutions have a founding ideology is concerning enough in its own right. Objective research doesn’t have a guiding ideology--it lets the evidence determine the ideology. If I’m a physicist researching life on other planets, I don’t call my project the ‘Aliens Definitely Exist” project, with a founding goal to “discover evidence that aliens are alive”, because that’s antithetical to the spirit of scientific research, which is to let the evidence determine your beliefs and not the other way around. All of the think tanks Pro cites have this problem--they all aim to conduct “pro-flat tax research” or “pro-Austrian economics research”, which is not how objective research proceeds. Pro dodged this argument as well. Thirdly, the think tanks cited by Pro have political ties and connections to the Republican party, even hosting some of their debates. Somehow, in my oh-so cynical mind, I doubt these centers for “objective” research are about to start promoting liberal social policies. Pro characterizes his biased sources as a counterbalance to Keynesian bias, but since I didn’t point to any Keynesian think tanks, this comparison falls completely apart. He also tries to compare my World Health Organization statistic to his own biased think tank statistics. This fails in many respects. 1) The WHO does not have explicit political goals for its research, while Pro’s think tanks do. 2) The WHO doesn’t host political debates like Pro’s think tanks do. 3) “Fairness” is not a biased standard. You can have the best health care equipment in the world, but it counts for little if nobody in your society can access that health care equipment. This is why the WHO considers both the quality of the health care and access to health care. The vast majority of Pro's sources are from biased think tanks, and since Pro has not answered to my specific criticisms about the objectivity of their research, he faces a substantial problem for upholding the resolution in this respect. Pro moves on to the question of just how poor poor people really are. Should people who work forty hours a week be living in poverty? Clearly not. Pro rhetorts to this by pointing out that nobody should have 90% of their income taken by armed men. I have no idea how an intellectually responsible debater can continue saying Bernie wants to raise taxes to 90% when I presented a quote from Bernie where he says the exact opposite two rounds ago. In any case, this is an obvious red herring and has nothing to do with the actual issue at hand. Pro then claims that nobody is working forty hours a week and living in poverty. On a personal level, this is probably one of the most disgusting and ignorant claims somebody could make about those living in poverty. There are millions of adult, male workers who single-handedly take care of a family of four who, at current minimum wages and working forty hours a week, would still live in poverty (http://tinyurl.com...). Pro claims he has "studies" to back up his assertion, but he never tells us what these studies are. According to Pro, the poor actually have it quite nice. Allow me to dispel this privileged notion once and for all. He states that 43% of poor people own a house. This backfires, because it means that 53% ( a majority) of poor people don't own a house. He states that the average poor household has a three bedroom, one and a half bath house. This is deceptive, because the size of bedrooms and bathrooms significantly varies from house to house. The average poor household might have three bedrooms, but these bedrooms are much smaller than those of other economic classes. The same holds true for Pro's points about patios and garages. Pro claims that the average poor person in America has poor living space than the average person in Europe. This is another deceptive comparison, because Europeans have less living space than Americans in general (for the same reasons they have smaller food portions--they don't consume as much as we do). For example, you can fit two average Spanish houses inside the average American house (http://tinyurl.com...). The average American household is 1.5 times larger than the average American poor household, but the average European household is about 1.1 times larger. Once you start comparing apples to oranges, considering that European has smaller house sizes in general, you can see that the American poor don't actually have it that great. Growing up poor makes you more likely to commit a crime, more likely to have a parent in prison, more likely not to get a college education, more likely to be malnourished, and more likely to suffer from mental illness and not to receive treatment for that illness. But I guess Pro has a point when he says a lot of poor people get air conditioning, a technology which came into widespread use during the 1920s. I'll make some brief points about the value of a college education. First, it's clearly not for everyone--there's always trade school. But the fact that 48% of graduates are in jobs not relating to their major does not mean the majority of jobs don't require a college degree. It just speaks to the fact that our economy is so bad (thanks Wall Street) many people cannot find anything above entry-level jobs. In reality, there are millions of jobs open in rapidly growing fields that require a college degree--ranging from environmental science to engineering. In this respect, we are short on college educations, because there are not enough technically qualified graduates to fill these positions. By providing free college, we give people the opportunity to pursue STEM degrees and gain these jobs, which will also make our country more competitive in a global economy that increasingly requires these kinds of jobs. While a lot of graduates were unemployed during the worst of the recession, Pro ignores that the situation was vastly (and still is) much worse for those who do not have a college degree, who earn less and have higher unemployment rates. Pro states that college can't make you a more intelligent person because IQ is fixed at 18. He ought to read the current psychological literature, because nobody knows to this day how exactly to quantify intelligence (or if it can be), or what test is best (it could be Stanford-Binet, it could be Wechsler). In any case, it is a scientific fact that neuroplasticity--the ability for the brain to rearrange its synaptical connections, continues throughout adulthood, so I see no reasons to believe that a college education cannot stimulate one's brain via neuroplasticity to make them a better thinker and person. As for the role of government in our lives, I've said it before: Pro's argument is just a kritik. It's interesting to talk about the right of the government to tax, but it's outside of the scope of the debate. In other respects, Pro started a debate about who should preside over our government and then questioned if we should have a government at all. Pro's arguments in this respect have not been very interesting. He started off by saying that we must collect taxes by force, and that's violent, so it must be wrong to collect taxes. This is pacifism, because it rules an action as immoral because it's violent. I challenged Pro to put this ethical statement on a sound ontology (utilitarianism, deontology, whatever), and to justify the idea that violence and coercion must be wrong, but he doesn't done so throughout the entire debate, merely repeating his original assertion that collecting taxes requires force so it must be wrong. Again, he did nothing to explain why this arrangement is morally wrong, other than using emotionally loaded language. I'll conclude by summarizing why Pro didn't win this debate. Pro's argument relied on a litany of statistical claims, but these claims were backed by questionable research. I pointed out and explained three reasons why this research should not be considered objective, and Pro did not answer any of them, instead rhetoring with failed tu quoque arguments. Since 95% of Pro's argument came from these biased sources, his ineffectiveness in defending his sources will cast a huge shadow over his performance. Additionally, as I demonstrated with numerous examples, Pro often misinterprets his sources or misinterprets Sanders' policy positions, even repeating these misconceptions after being corrected. Additionally, Pro's use of his sources was rather schizophrenic, denying income inequality in some places and denying whether it's that bad in others. Pro's anarchist argument fell flat on its face. For these reasons, Pro's argument cannot be considered compelling. Thanks to Pro for the great debate.