The penny should be immediately discontinued. (Kleptin Tourney)

Thanks for the great debate, Con! :) Pro Case --------------- Pro 1A: Consumer Confidence 1. I wasn't placing a "definitely will" burden of proof on said finance minister. However, the quotation itself shows little reason to believe that discarding the penny will lead to imminent downfall of the economy. Furthermore, most of the harms that the Minister cites have to do with not minting low denomination coins, not specifically one-cent coins. The minister's harms come from all coins. Counterplan: 1. My opponent seems to think that we don't spend money to mint anything but zinc. Any metal will cost us money to utilize, so we still spend more than the penny's elimination. 2. Cost stats still stand. See later responses. On Abuse: 1. This is still abusive. My opponent needed to detail the text of his counterplan in the first round, thereby giving us both enough time to properly discuss the merits and drawbacks of using such a metal. This is pretty critical to his counterplan, so claiming that it would be akin to "picking a random metal" is just a cop-out. 2. My opponent chose a metal that is actually more expensive, and will remain more expensive, than zinc. Over the last 15 years, aluminum has consistently been more expensive per pound than zinc. [1] Imagine how much worse the harms are at the point where we accept the counterplan. Though my opponent asserts he has a source stating otherwise, even his own source indicates that aluminum is more expensive than zinc (.9369 cash value to .9276 cash value right now). 3. The US aluminum market is incredibly unhealthy. Aluminum exports alone have tanked 43.8% in the last fiscal year. [2] Furthermore, since aluminum is so abundant, we don't have any sort of monopoly potential on it. Furthermore, guess who the number 1 producer of aluminum is? China. [3] Pro 1B: Cash Transactions Cheaper 1. Unless my opponent thinks that debit card, credit card, or check transactions are going away anytime soon, then I'm not obligated to compare the cost of cash transactions to the cost of any other transaction. I still cut spending out of the status quo, and that's all I'm obligated to do. 2. Until my opponent addresses my analysis on cost of using pennies in transactions, we can assume it's extended. Note that my opponent's initial response only states that cash transactions are cheaper than other types of transactions, which does not link at all to the affirmative advocacy. Cash transactions become more expensive when pennies are involved, which was the original argument. The wasted money still remains if you negate, even if you use aluminum. NACS: 1. Search where I told you to, please. First RD 1 source, CTRL F, "Walgreens." It's there. I promise. 2. Call B.S. all you want, but that website is just as reliable as any other source in the debate, including your CATO Institute and the blog citations. The man who maintains this website, Jeff Gore, is a physicist at M.I.T. That does give him some sort of professional, academic credibility, don't you think? However, if it'll make my opponent happy, I will email Jeff and ask him for his citation. Pro Contention 2 Cross-Application of Counterplan: 1. Apply all three of my abuse responses to the aluminum counterplan. Fail plan. 2. I'm a she. 3. Doesn't matter how much time I had. This is like waiting until cross-examination to read plan text. It isn't my job to coax his full plan out of him. He made it—he should state it up front. Brightline: My argument is that we already aren't acting freely, but no, I can't fix a $ amount to this. Foreign politics doesn't boil down to solely mathematics, and to expect that of me is downright silly. I do, however, prove conclusively that we are greatly indebted to China, which will in turn affect our foreign policy decisions with regards to not only China, but a number of other key countries. This goes unrefuted. Human Rights: 1. As the CATO Institute author readily admits, "Although market reforms do not guarantee greater respect for human rights, economic prosperity brought increased pressure for democracy in such countries as South Korea and Taiwan." South Korea and Taiwan cannot possibly be compared to China, who, as my opponent mentions, is responding to capitalist expansion into their markets poorly. If this gentleman from the CATO Institute was correct, then the Great Firewall should have been down by now. China has the manpower to lead production, and their economic ascendancy shows this. Encouraging freer trade with such a nation does nothing but entrench their buying and selling power, which in turn encourages the Chinese government to strengthen itself and shirk off the criticisms and actions laid down against it by the likes of the U.S., who are too tied to it to act. 2. My opponent's responses, and the CATO Institute article, conveniently ignore ethical concerns surrounding the issue. By funding such a country, in which the government routinely abuses human rights, we are implicitly compromising our own ideals as a nation by supporting these actions. ---------------- Neg Case ---------------- Neg Contention 1: All my opponent did was re-assert that I can't prove any of my cost stats. That's based on a lack of acknowledgement of most of the sources I used in RD 1 and a challenge of legitimacy to the first source in RD 1. Neg Contention 2: On #1: 1. I don't immediately eliminate the penny. They'd most likely remain in circulation for a while. Immediate harms cannot be accessed by my opponent, which I pointed out in my last response. 2. Extend what I said about inflation being a wash. It still is, no matter how many times my opponent repeats himself. On #2 1. This doesn't answer the response I gave. Lombra is very specific about inflationary impact of the rounding tax. What he says afterwards is that those impacts might cumulate over time, and then cites his "$2 billion in spending by 2010" estimate. He doesn't say anything about individual items…? Neg Contention 3: On #1: The price stays raised to cover your rounding tax each year. I don't get why this negates what I said, which is that the tax would only need to make up the 30% profit lost of a 6-7 cent net profit. Even if we assume the worst, an item will never go up more than 2 cents in cost. We only need to aim for the closest "5" or "0" in a price (i.e. $2.99 is rounded to $3.00, while $2.97 becomes $2.95). On #2: Though the financial implications still remain, I typo'd on cents vs. seconds. My bad. I won't concede the financial impacts of the rounding tax, but I will advocate that you disregard what I said about 2-2.5 cents in the last RD. On #3: My sources are perfectly adequate. On #4 (Theft): 1. My opponent's source only deals in credit cards, not debit cards. Moreover, food stamps are now entirely electronic, though I don't know how much of the transaction market they monopolize (I do know that 19 million people participate in food stamp programs in the US). Debit card transactions in the US are on the rise [4], so I still don't bite those harms to the point of voting against my position. 2. I also asserted that, because the likelihood of carrying all other change vs. the penny has not been properly established, and because I'm not eliminated the use of all coins, the harms won't come to fruition. I don't stop merchants from making totals that require exact change. My opponent hasn't warranted how pricing something at $2.47 is inherently less dangerous than pricing it at $2.45. [1]http://www.infomine.com... [2]http://www.aluminum.org... [3]http://www.aluminum.org... [4] http://www.jsnet.org...