Ron Paul's Economic Policies are Superior to Barack Obama's

It appears my opponent has already conceded the proposition. The proposition was "Ron Paul's Economic Policies are Superior to Barack Obama's." While my opponent has spoken favorably of Ron Paul's economic policies he has at no point advanced an argument why the are superior to Barack Obama's. So as to not win purely on a technical mistake by my opponent, I will argue that Ron Paul's economic policies are not superior to those of Barack Obama. However, I do not wave any arguments by doing so.My opponent also has some serious sourcing problems. Many of his citations are to forum posts or blog posts of random people on the internet. I do not have space to refute each and every one, but I will do so where necessary below. I reserve the right to raise this objection again if needed in a subsequent round.First a definition:merriam-webster: Superior : of higher rank, quality, or importance [1]My Opponent must show Paul's economic policies are of higher rank, quality, or importance than Obama's. Since economic policies do not have rank the first part is irrelevant. Since Obama is the president and Paul is not[2], Obama's policies are clearly of higher importance. All that is left is quality. I will attempt to show that Paul's policies are not higher quality than Obama's. First I note my opponent has made no attempt to demonstrate the opposite. In fact my opponent only mentioned Obama three times in his argument. I will demonstrate how none of these establish the superiority of Paul's economic policies.1. "Federal spending has gone up 84% under Obama" Even if this were true (it's not) my opponent makes no argument why Obama's policies are responsible for this nor why it is a bad result. He states that federal spending has risen and invites the reader to assume that this is bad per se, yet makes no argument why it should be. Moreover, his facts are not correct. My opponent cites a conservative blog [4] for his 84% number. A chart of the actual expenditures are available at [3]. If you notice, government spending has gone from $3.2T to $3.7T during Obama's term, a gain of 15% not 84%. 2. "Ron Paul's fiscal and monetary policy is a lot better than Obama's" This is a conclusary statement and no comparison is made between actual policies. My opponent is basically just restating the proposition.3. "The danger in Obama's fiscal policy is that he keeps spending way too much, and will eventually send us into default." This is again conclusary. My opponent gives no indication of how much spending is "too much" or why the current policies will send us into default. He can't, of course, because the U.S. cannot be forced to default from overspending. Warren Buffet addressed this issue saying "The U.S., to my knowledge owes no money in currency other than the U.S. dollar, which it can print at will. Now if you're talking about inflation, that's a different question.[5]" That is, the U.S. can never run out of dollars. Buffet would give the U.S. a "Quadruple-A rating.[5]"Direct Rebuttals1. Ron Paul's Tax PlanMy opponent in this section makes too many factual errors to address them all. One example of this is his claim that "the recovery started in 1934, in 1937 taxes were raised causing the economy to plunge back." This claim is cited to a Yahoo Answers post. In addition to raising taxes, in 1937 the WPA was cut reducing government expenditures[6]. A graph of the result is available at [7]. Note how the decrease in GDP tracks the decrease in government outlays. This shows clearly the danger of deficit cutting during economically troubled times. Since Paul wants to balance the budget and Obama does not, this is a reason Obama's policies are better than Paul's.2: Ron Paul's government hands-off approachThat over-regulation is bad is a talking point, not an argument. I would invite my opponent to point out a regulation Paul would remove that Obama would keep and explain why this difference makes for a better economic policy.3: Ron Paul's fiscal and monetary policy is a lot better than Obama'sAs my opponent pointed out in point 1, cutting deficits during a recovery can lead to a fresh recession. Balancing the federal budget would be disastrous since there would be no ongoing fiscal stimulus to fill demand leakages within our economy. This could lead to deflation and the resulting decrease in investment. We have also seen above that my opponents fears of default are misplaced.ArgumentTo compare two people's economic policies we must first know what they are. For that I reference their declared positions from their campaign web sites[8,9].1. Obama will invest in the future while Paul would cut cut cutPaul's nearly religious ferocity in budget cuts would be disastrous for the long term health of the economy. He would "Veto[] any unbalanced budget" and "Refus[e] to further raise the debt ceiling"[8]. Obama would invest in high tech manufacturing and domestic energy production[9]. These sorts of government investment expenditure have worked in the past. During reconstruction, the massive government give-away of the homestead act opened up Westward expansion to individual families and the resulting conversion of prairies to farms made the U.S. the agricultural powerhouse of the world. The manufacturing infrastructure built with government money in WWII was converted to build cars and tractors in the 1950s and '60s driving one of the greatest economic expansions in history. The DARPA funded internet gave rise to the modern information age driving, yet again, a substantial economic expansion.2. Paul would adopt a gold standard while Obama would notThere are (at least) two main problems with the gold standard. First, it causes inflation and deflation to be more pronounced and oscillate quickly giving rise to economic uncertainty and great price instability. A graph is available at Wikipedia [10], but the data are included in the reliably sourced pdf attached to that page. Returning to 19th century monetary policy would be disastrous to our modern economy. Second, there simply isn't enough gold in the world. At around $9 trillion[11] there isn't enough gold to support just the U.S. economy (with a GDP of ~$15T) at current prices, much less the entire world if everyone else followed suit. Transitioning to the gold standard would require a massive inflation spike since there would not be enough gold to chase all the goods and services in the economy. It was the constraints of the gold standard that gave rise to fractional reserve banking (FRB) in the first place. I suspect my opponent is no fan of FRB. Virtually no economists think this is a good idea [12].For these and the reasons stated above, Ron Paul's economic policies are not superior to Barack Obama's.References http://www.merriam-webster.com... http://www.whitehouse.gov... http://research.stlouisfed.org... http://rightwingnews.com... http://www.foxbusiness.com... http://www.historylink.org... http://research.stlouisfed.org... http://www.ronpaul2012.com... http://www.barackobama.com... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://onlygold.com... http://www.nytimes.com...