The U.S. should return to a gold standard

I. Housekeeping Pro is playing it pretty fast and loose with the rules at this point. He now says that he can win the debate so long as he provides any beneficial financial system that functions on the gold/silver standard. Multiple responses. First, it is Pro's responsibility to show that one of these systems is net beneficial by comparison to the status quo, which is what I am defending. He can't simply advocate that there are benefits and leave it at that - it must be clear that his case is better than what currently exists. Second, Pro has only presented one semi-clear financial system. He's tweaked it here and there, but he hasn't presented any other systems, and since next round is the final round, it's too late to do so. Third, hold Pro to his actual plan text. He presented it in great detail in the opening round and we have been arguing it for three rounds now. It has been the focus of this debate, and should remain as such. Shifting out of it in the final round, if that is his plan, would make the rest of this debate essentially moot. Fourth, practically all of my arguments apply to any gold/silver standard system. Pro has altered his case several times now to avoid my arguments, but if he decides to shift back, he bites all of the harms I've already cited. So let's be clear about how this debate should be evaluated: we have two cases, one that defends a specific gold/silver standard and one that defends the status quo. Voters should assess these systems by comparison, and determine who should win this debate based on who has the more net beneficial case. Simple. II. Pro"s Case Pro drops most of my responses to his case this round. He drops all of my evidence that the gold standard led to massive fluctuations in the value of our currency that cannot be predicted, leading to financial catastrophe.[8, 13, 14] He drops that the process of shifting over to a new currency, no matter how slow and careful, is going to lead to a massive number of lawsuits and difficulties, and that the simple process of printing off more currency incurs a massive financial harm. He even drops that all of the harms he"s asserted for the current system don"t exist. That's basically conceding that that inflation, in and of itself, is net neutral if not net beneficial, since it leads to lower trade deficits, more affordable goods, and improved 401k's.[7] As this is the only clearly linked harm to the current system that Pro has argued, that means my case is either net neutral or net beneficial. Perhaps most damning of all, Pro drops my arguments regarding paying off the debt. He"s locked himself into one of two scenarios: either we don't pay off the debt, which causes financial collapse by defaulting (the impacts of which Pro dropped), or he prints off the massive amount of money necessary to pay off the debt, causing a huge spike in inflation, which also causes financial collapse. But onto his responses. Pro can't seem to agree with himself on what his plan will be. Pro says that he never enforces a massive tariff, yet he said this in the previous round: "What we need to do is re industrialise our nation and establish a protective tariff to prevent our money from flowing out of the nation." Apparently, Pro doesn't remember his own words very well. If this tariff is not massive, money will almost certainly continue to flow out of the country, but regardless of whether or not it's large, he incurs the harms I cited last round. Other countries will respond with tariffs of their own, trade deals will suffer, other countries will abandon our currencies, and trust in the dollar will drop. Pro argues that the quantity of dollars will remain the same. He keeps shifting back and forth on this, arguing at once that the capacity to respond to crises will remain unchanged and that dollars can be printed/removed from circulation, but that the overall quantity of dollars will also remain the same. He can't have it both ways. Pro can either maintain the quantity of printed money, thereby inviting the various harms of not being able to respond to financial crises that I've cited over the last two rounds, or he can allow for the printing and buying of paper money by the government as he argued last round, which invites the various harms I cited in that round. Pro"s clarification on the Treasurer is just baffling. He stated in R3: "if we enter a deflationary depression, the Treasurer of the United States can simply order the...printing [of] more US Notes" if we enter an inflationary cycle, the Treasurer...can simply [order the] printing of US Bonds and sell them". As I stated last round, this is what the Fed does in status quo. It's what makes fiat currency fiat currency. Pro can assert all he wants that Soros is to blame for everything (a point he doesn't support, and which is just factually untrue), but he's putting in place a system that gives an individual in every new administration carte blanche to manipulate the financial system. At least in status quo, the Fed has bureaucracies and is checked by the legislature; Pro is throwing all that away and handing total control to a single individual. Lastly, Pro recants his point about having an FRR of 20% after arguing it the previous two rounds. If he returns to that system, he bites all of the harms I've cited, as he drops all of those responses. Instead, he argues for a "Federal Reserve Grading System" where an audit will be used to grade each bank, but that the FRR would be a part of that grade or, at least, something publicly displayed. Two problems. First, grading systems like this were used and abused by the housing market. Credit-rating agencies that were supposed to represent an actual market never did, often because of conflicts of interest, a lack of in-depth analysis into dirty dealings, and an over-reliance on ratings.[19] Pro is setting banks up for the exact same outcomes, and in doing so, is inviting another financial collapse through abuse of yet another grading system that inaccurately portrays the solidity of company holdings. Second, the FRR percentage is still a part of how they're evaluated, so it's still important. No clue how the US is going to distribute these certificates, which are necessary to increase that FRR percentage, but regardless of how it's done, each bank is going to want more to make itself look better to a public that will want to see bigger numbers. As a result, financial institutions will put tremendous pressure on the Treasurer to print more US notes faster in order to jack up their FRRs. If the Treasurer accepts, then that invites major inflation as well as depressed prices of gold; you can't print off more money directly tied to a static amount of gold without doing at least one of these, if not both. If the Treasurer declines, then most banks will get low ratings because they literally can't get a decent FRR, which means they decline or collapse as their customers flock to other banks that have more clout. III. (Dis)Advantages Pro's responses here are solely assertions. All he does is pull a lot of numbers out of thin air without much in the way of explanation and without addressing my rebuttals to the very points he's reiterating with them. I never said that, under a gold standard, there would be no possible benefits. What I did say is that any potential benefits are massively outweighed by the risks involved. And that"s where Pro drops the ball. He drops the harms of capping the money supply and hitting the debt ceiling, all of my points regarding inflation/deflation spikes and the gold standard, backlash from other nations in the form of tariffs and lost trade deals, the damaged perception of the dollar's strength and the resulting harms, etc. Most importantly, he drops that his case is effectively fiat currency writ large. By providing the Treasurer with the capacity to alter the amount of bills in circulation and the price of gold at will, he's removing any perception of strength that may accompany a gold standard because it"s all under fiat. And since he"s directly rejecting gold prices in international markets, he's not only stirring up trouble with other nations, he's actively rejecting any security from those markets. That will incur a heavy toll on the price of American goods abroad, as well as the value of our currency. Pro argues that the cost of our goods will be cheaper because of the exchange rate. He doesn't take into account that the pricing of our goods on the international market will remove or even reverse any effect those exchange rates might have, but let's assume it's true. As I said in R2, no one will spend on or in other countries with US dollars, which means that Pro is just incurring backlash through the erecting of tariff walls that will also invalidate or reverse any beneficial effects of the lower exchange rate. Pro argues that the dollar will not drop while we replace this currency. This utterly ignores all of my arguments regarding the effects of: 1) A weakened perception of the dollar that would result from the shift and the proposed tariff, 2) Printing as much money as is required to pay off the debt, or the harms of not paying off that debt before we shift, 3) Reduced or dissolved trade deals with other countries, 4) Other countries abandoning the dollar as reserve currency, and 5) The realities of simply printing more money in order to pay for the transition will lead to changes in how much that money is worth. Simply saying that the lower exchange rate will somehow solve for all of this is absurd - it's that same exchange rate that"s causing most of these problems. It doesn't matter if people spend their money here because these realities happen on a global scale; the US cannot unilaterally declare that its money will always be worth the same amount forever and into eternity. Using fiat to say that things will be better doesn't make it so. 19. http://usat.ly... Back to Pro.