America is in a state of decline

I will endeavor to keep this debate on the high road and not sink to name calling or insult. It's self evident that America is in a state of decline on nearly every front. My opponent has attacked my position but has failed to indicate that our society isn't in fact in decline. He mis characterizes my position by saying "[America] is dying because the European and Christian core has been shrinking away." Im not saying that a European and Christian world is better at all, its just that America was founded as " one nation under god" by Christian people. I say this not be racist or bigoted in anyway but rather as a fact of life and history. The Protestant work ethic (or the Puritan work ethic is a concept in theology, sociology, economics and history which emphasizes hard work, frugality and diligence as a constant display of a person's salvation in the Christian faith, in contrast to the focus upon religious attendance, confession, and ceremonial sacrament in the Catholic tradition. The phrase was initially coined in 1904 by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. My opponent says that I don't "really have a warrant as to why shifting to liberal stances constitutes any particular decline in American society. " I thought I was very clear that America is in the state of decline on almost every front. We were a country where people didn't lock their doors and whose children were safe in their own neighborhoods. Now we must fear to let our children out of our own yards and have locks and security systems to boot. According to statistics the incarceration rate in the United States is the highest in the world. As of 2011, the incarceration rate was 743 per 100,000 of national population. In comparison, Rwanda had the second highest, at 595 per 100,000, Canada was 123rd in the world at 117 per 100,000, and China had 122 per 100,000. While the United States represents about 5 percent of the world's population, it houses around 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Imprisonment of America's 2.3 million prisoners, costing $24,000 per inmate per year, and $5.1 billion in new prison construction, consumes $60.3 billion in budget expenditures. Our prisons are filled with drug users and dealers on a scale never before seen. AIDs has spread widely in our modern society due to homosexual activity and ultimately through unsafe sex practices by heterosexuals. CDC estimates that 1.1 million people in the United States are living with HIV "" and nearly one in six of those are not aware that they are infected.1 Approximately 50,000 people become newly infected each year. A range of social factors in modern society places some Americans at increased risk for HIV infection. Prevention efforts have helped keep the rate of new infections stable in recent years, but continued growth in the number of people living with HIV ultimately may lead to more new infections if prevention, care, and treatment efforts are not targeted to those at greatest risk. Its clear that legalized abortion is evidence itself that society is declining. Over 50 million aborted children are proof of a decline in morality and in valuing human life. When abortion is used as birth control I believe that demonstrates a woeful lack of morals. Half of pregnancies among American women are unintended; about 4 in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. Twenty-one percent of all U.S. pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. In 2011, approximately 1.06 million abortions took place in the U.S., down from an estimated 1.21 million abortions in 2008, 1.29 million in 2002, 1.31 million in 2000 and 1.36 million in 1996. From 1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S. In this day and age of widely available birth control the reasons for abortion should be less than it is. Today more and more women use abortion as a form of birth control and that is sickening and an abomination. My opponent talks about African Americans who get a better education today than they used to. Yet in black communities around the country the urban drop out rate is at all time highs. It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. However, a nationwide study shows the average high school graduation rate in the nation"s largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs. But that urban-suburban gap, which in part is due to hundreds of failing city schools that some researchers call dropout factories, was far wider in some areas. While we are on education it has become cost prohibitive to many in the middle class. In 1974 a person could work over the summer and while in school while in 2014 that same year of college is paid for mostly through student loans. Today's college graduates face poor job prospects and huge loan debt to start their lives in a hole. In recent years, a number of international surveys have raised alarms that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of educational achievement. Now there is another one, and its findings represent a serious threat to the country"s future prosperity. In basic literacy, mathematics and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries. The survey was carried out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based forum and research group, which counts thirty-three high- and middle-income countries among its members. My opponent is incredulous saying that: "the decline in religious faith in America is an example of societal decline, but he doesn"t provide any warrants as to why that is." The decline in religious faith is quite obvious since many Christians feel there exists a war on religion. Our nation is so hung up on keeping religion out of the public square that being Christian is seen as anti social. I'm not suggesting that Christianity is better than Judaism, Islam or any other belief. What I'm saying is that people of all faiths have drifted from their faith in droves. The percentage of Americans who declared "no religious preference" on the 2012 General Social Survey, a large-scale national survey, was more than twice the percentage of Americans who declared no religion in 1990, and four times higher than the percentage in 1972, the first year the survey was taken. A full 20 percent of Americans declared no religious preference. "This continues a trend of Americans disavowing a specific religious affiliation that has accelerated greatly since 1990," Mike Hout, lead author of the study and a professor at Berkeley. Forty percent of self-declared liberals said they didn't have a religious preference, compared to 9 percent of conservatives. A third of 18-24-year-olds claimed no religion, compared to just 7 percent of people 75 and older. My opponent agrees that "America is fragmented along racial and ethnic boundaries." My opponent continues to miss the point of the fragmenting of our nation. People used to come here to be free, to work hard and to give their families a better life while becoming a real American. Taking pride in their accomplishments and melding into our nation of immigrants. Today immigrants come here to be free, to collect government provided benefits, give their family a better life and keep their language and culture, not melding into the fabric of our society. My opponent is also unduly hung up on racial issues, the point I'm making is we have now an almost reverse discrimination. He states: "my opponent"s apparent solution to overcoming this fragmentation is for people of different racial and ethnic distinctions to eschew their cultural roots in favor of some superseding American culture." In this comment my opponent is accurate. Thirty to fifty years ago people came to America to be an American and to have a better life, proud to be Americans. Today in America immigrants in growing numbers want the benefits of living here without any strong commitment to becoming an American. My opponent states that I seem to "ascribe little value to the cultures other than the "European" and suggests superseding them with the European. " that is ridiculous, I merely point out facts that our country was built with a strong European influence. I don't think it was necessarily better, it's just different. I'm not saying that a European influenced culture is innately better than what we have. What I'm saying is that immigrants that used to come here generally had greater religious convictions than people coming here today. I'm not arguing for a European influenced country, but it's a fact that we were a nation with a strong European or Puritan work ethic and we should be proud. Again I'm stating a fact that in the past we had a steady stream of Europeans looking to become Americans. One of the few things that my opponent got right was when he stated "there may have been points I might have missed." All I can say is YES he missed a lot of points. The leaders of our country used to stand for something and hold genuine beliefs and principals. Whether it was John Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan, they were men of ideas and principals. In the past quarter century presidents and I think all politicians have given way to getting re elected over all else and by any means. From Clinton to Bush to Obama we have elected the best that money could buy and nothing more. This is largely because in Numerica, the monied interests have bought both parties leadership and have hijacked our republic. We are no longer a democracy but an oligarchy run by whoever donates the most money and buys their devotion. In this Numerica, "Truth is treason in the empire of lies." It's gone now because the final analysis is that we will always and forever have leaders that are bought and paid for on the backs of our children and the coming generations to be smothered in debt. For all of these reasons I again state that America is indeed in a state of decline.