a progressive tax system should be used

Contention I. The "rich" use more resources.Sub-C1.First, my opponent attempts to shift the burden on to myself to bring a positive case against his unsubstantiated assertion that the rich use more resources than the poor. In the last round, I pointed out that my opponent takes the rich use resources more as a presupposition to his argument, completely lacking any empirical grounding. My opponent responded to this point with more of nothing, trying to shift the BoP on to myself while continuing not to actually provide evidence of his own. On his attempted logical grounding, my opponent argues that the rich "usually buy more stuff". Remember again that no empirical evidence is provided by my opponent. If the point was "common sense" as he argues then this should be easy though.Even if we take it as a given that the rich usually buy more, this still doesn't exactly hold relevance to the debate. In debates on progressive taxation, the reason some say the rich should be taxed more is because they use more government resources, not private ones. My opponent is guilty of mixing these two concepts up completely though, putting together police protection and environmental regulation (government services) with medical services (a private service). On private services, the rich pay for them, if not, they would not be rendered in the first place.On government services though, I will point out that my opponent makes another fatal category mistake. He conflates services provided for the rich by the government with penalties and restrictions levied against the rich by the government. This is relevant to the points of financial, environmental regulations, etc. The rich are not utilizing government resource for their own benefit in the way that someone does when buying an apple. Governmental restrictions and regulations are a negative utility generally on businesses by incurring higher production or start-up costs. How does it make sense to charge the rich to pay for charging the rich?On police services, my opponent again provides no empirical evidence in support of his assertion, I will provide some in my refutation though. A study by Ohio State University examining crime rates between 1979 and 1997 found that "much of the increase in crime during that period can be explained by falling wages and rising unemployment"[1]. This is not to say that the rich as a class do not use police services, but that when evaluating the evidence posited by my opponent and I respectively the poor as a class certainly do not "simply exist" as my opponent states. If you couple this with the fact that the poor generally use socials services more than the rich and the idea that the rich dominate governmental services while the poor remain still appears as it truly is, unfounded and ungrounded in reality.Of course, all of this is really beside the point. My opponent has still refused to actually define who specifically he is referring to by the terms "rich" and "poor". Thus he cannot provide empirical (or logical for that matter) reasoning in support of the thesis that they generally use more resources and thus cannot uphold the resolution.Sub-C2.On my point that a user-based tax on actual transactions made would be a more fair and common sense tax policy then simple income-based taxation, my opponent concedes. This means that we may take it as a given that a service based tax would be more preferable in taxing those who use more government resources than a policy which makes mere unsupported generalizations. Under a service based tax, taxation would be administered based SOLELY on use of government services. Under my opponent's argument, taxation would be administered based SOLELY on level of income which might positively correlate with use of government services (which my opponent has of course not empirically backed up).Contention II. The responsibility of redistribution.My opponent attempts to defend his causal argument with a rather unorganized stream of thoughts. I apologize if I miss anything. The main way to defend his argument is by arguing that "when someone has a thousand trees and someone else does not, the poor person is by definition deprived of those resources." How does this follow exactly? All my opponent showed was that no two people can occupy the same property at the same time. This is an inherent condition of private ownership and my opponent again fails to provide any moral relevancy in the scenario or show moral responsibility on the part of someone who possesses more than someone else.My opponent next argues that my own refutation posits that since the wealthy create wealth, they have no obligation to the poor. This was not what I argued however. I argued that someone being wealthy does not provide a sufficient is-condition for a jump to an ought regarding responsibility or morality. I did not argue that wealth creation gets the rich off the hook. Moreover, my point about wealth creation was in regards to my opponent's argument that economics is some sort of zero-sum game where gain by someone necessarily means loss by another. I showed this point to be completely baseless.---Defining rich and poor---In defending the idea that the terms "rich" and "poor" need not be defined in this debate, my opponent is committing himself to an absurdity. The absurdity lies in the idea that we can have a meaningful discussion about how to tax certain groups of people without actually knowing who those people are or (more importantly) what the characteristics they possess might possibly be. So far the closest thing to a definition are the mere words rich and poor. It is not because of my supposed commitment to any debate system (I'm actually an amateur, having never debated formally. Structuring points just seems to make it easier to keep the debate clear), but because lack of relevant definitions makes meaningful debate impossible. This has left my opponent with no empirical way of justifying his points and thus no way of defending the resolution. ===Sources===[1] http://researchnews.osu.edu...