Obama has botched the recovery

1. Yes, I believe we both can agree that in any recession a drop in consumer spending occurs. However, throughout this debate you have suggested that the reason our businesses aren't hiring is because they are worried about the future of regulations. Meaning that fundamentally your arguments do not hold consumer spending as the reason the economy is not recovering, but rather they suggest that this lack of confidence is the reason our economy is not recovering. I on the other hand have been arguing that our current position is because of a lack of consumer spending not related to any kind of worry about regulations and the future of our policies. Now, you have repeatedly argued that the stimulus is not effective for a variety of reasons whether it be because each job cost so much money, or whether because a certain amount of money has not been spent, or perhaps even because it was not more tax breaks. The fact of the matter is, is that the CBO estimates that the effect of the stimulus on the economy was the creation or savings of somewhere between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs, something that you have absolutely no evidence to contradict. Recovery.gov tallies the jobs created directly by the stimulus, but the CBO tallies the job numbers in the economy via the multiplier effect. (when you create one job obviously you create others because the person that just got a job then has more money to spend). And finally I suspect that you do not know much about the CBO because it is regarded as the most non-partisan information provider out there, members of both parties go to the CBO for information about legislation. Now these promises that the you say the administration is breaking, who cares. I'm not here to argue that the administration may or may not have kept their word about this or that, im here to argue that the policies put forth by the Democrats have had positive effect. So I don't really care if Obama broke any kind of promise. Secondly, of course each job is going to cost a lot to produce, when a company builds a building they are not just billing you for the labor of their workers. You have to pay for the land, the materials to build the building, etc. So obviously each job is going to cost a lot of money. Lastly on the stimulus your facts are wrong. Its more like 2/3 of the stimulus money has been spent. As for the tax cuts portion it was scheduled to last this long. I agree with you that the execution of the stimulus has not been perfect, many of the projects were not shovel ready. However, the administration has pumped a huge amount of money into the economy in the last 1.5 years, preventing it from going into a depression and leading to its slow recovery. Lastly, no where did I agree with you that tax cuts are even remotely as effective as government spending. In fact my arguments were just the opposite. I explained to that because there was a strong temptation to pay back debts or save any money given to consumers in tax cuts, that any tax cut was not going to be as effective as government spending. a. I don't think you understand your argument. My parents for example have to pay to have me on their insurance plans. Children don't get on their parents insurance plans for free, the parent and their employer both pay for the child to be covered. The problem until recently was that once someone's kid turned 22, no more insurance through their parents. The new law merely requires insurance companies to allow children to stay on their parent's insurance until they are 26, it doesn't require insurance companies to do it for free. In fact the parent and the employer will have to continue paying for the child to be on the parent's insurance, so there is no increase in cost in this field. And yes younger people are more prone to accidents, however they are the least likely to have terminal or long lasting illnesses meaning that are dramatically cheaper to cover than any other age group making insurance companies very happy to cover them. Then Pro discuses the 1099 forms. Whats particularly interesting here is that the cool graph that I put a link to in the beginning of my last post, demonstrates clearly that issues like this are not on the minds of employers sales are. As the article itself said, "there's no reason for us to speculate as to why businesses aren't hiring, we can simply ask them." And they did, and they found that things like this are not on the minds of employers. This argument applies to ALL of the points you made about Cap and trade, about Unions, about Health Care, and the financial reform bill. And it's something that you don't address at all in your last post. YOU DID NOT PRODUCE ANY SOLID DATA THIS ENTIRE DEBATE THAT INDICATES BUSINESSES AS A WHOLE ARE WORRIED ABOUT FUTURE REGULATIONS, I DID AND YOU DID NOT RESPOND TO THIS DATA. so please apply this argument to sections b. and c. on Financial Reform and Cap and Trade respectively. Then my opponent argues that demand for healthcare is inelastic, which is just a fancy economic term for saying that a change in price has a large affect on the demand for a particular product. The problem with that theory is that health care is a necessity, meaning that what ever the price is we have to have it. Therefore it is actually elastic. Inelastic items are usually luxury items that when the price suddenly goes up, people think twice about buying it, necessities are always elastic. As for the BP oil spill, the moratorium is only for six months, so it will hardly drive BP bankrupt. d. Of course the businesses advocacy groups are going to oppose it, the real point here is that as my survey of individual businesses points out, there is no data to suggest that businesses have this on their minds, in fact the data supports the opposite conclusion. Obviously that wouldn't work to end poverty because businesses would have to raise prices substantially to support such a high minimum wage as I said they would. 4. Please apply my data that indicates businesses are not worried about this kind of stuff to this section 5. Why would the administration enact your 5 steps to restore the confidence of businesses when the only data in the round suggests businesses aren't worried about regulation and taxes they are worried about sales. What we need to be doing is enacting policies that increase demand and consumption within our economy. The stimuls simply wasn't large enough to address the problem. The democrats tried to fix this in June of 2010 with a jobs bill, however the Republicans blocked it in the Senate. Meaning that right now the Republicans are preventing this economy from entering into a sustained recovery, another point that you didn't refute in my last post. Therefore, I'm going to give you three reasons as to why you should vote affirmative: 1. The only data to be presented in the round indicates that my opponents claims are not true, businesses are not worried about future regulation and tax increases, a key component to his case and what he was advocating. Its important to note that no where in the round does he even criticize or refute the claims of this data 2. My opponent does not refute the claim that Republicans in the Senate are blocking further programs to create jobs, measures that would very well help the economy. He didn't even contract my claim that Republicans were the fundamental reason that our economy is in the crapper right now because of their blocking of serious legislation. 3. If we take away from my opponets case all the points he argued that were based on his assumption that businesses were worried about the regulatory environment in the future, the only arguments he has left are those pertaining to the stimulus. In this section he devotes more time to pointing out Obama's previous words that he has had to go back on, and the expensiveness per job, rather than looking at the larger picture, that the Stimuls has created jobs and th