Resolved: US Politics has become useless.

Unfortunately, my opponent has chosen to forfeit round 2 instead of using it to better clarify his position. I will, however, continue my argument in hopes of fomenting further discussion. What I will do this round is declaratively state the assumptions I am making regarding Pro's position and wherever possible better define vague concepts. Further, I will better establish my perspective on the matter. The assumptions I making about Pro's argument are as follows: 1. Pro chose the words "politics ‘has become' useless", which would suggest that politics has guided public policy well in the past, but only recently has become useless. 2. Politics, according to Pro, is limited to the " competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership (as in a government)" The assumption here is that the competition is between those within government. I would like to extend this definition to include all those involved in the political process, which includes--but is not limited to--voters, corporations, political parties, political action committees, lobbyists, etc. The point is that all these groups are part and parcel to the health of our democracy. 3. It seems that Pro has broken down the US society into three neatly packaged categories: the poor, the middle class, and the upper class. The assumption I am making is that Pro is referring to just economic class and as such I will use the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy's definition of middle class to include those families making between 20-100K middle class (http://www.pbs.org...), thus the poor are below 20k and the upper class are above 100K. The crux of Pro's position is that current competing political ideas and factions are misguiding public policy, which is negatively affecting society. My opponent has put forth two examples that he believes are self-evident. The first example was regarding economic policy. The evidence presented was "common knowledge" that the middle class and the poor provide a larger pool of tax revenue that upper class. This is a bit of a numbers game since a large majority of Americans fall into the middle class. Moreover, tax data is generally presented as a central tendency value (i.e., averages) or puts folks into classification of income distributions (i.e., quintiles), which can be misleading because it fails to highlight the nuances of actual tax liabilities across various income levels (http://www.house.gov...) The other example Pro uses is the environment. My opponent's proof is that the oil industry controls wealth. I would content that no one industry controls wealth and the majority of billionaires come from a way array of businesses (http://www.woopidoo.com...). In the round one, I ask my opponent a series of questions, which were never answered. To be sure, there are no easy answers to these questions, but how one chooses to address them speaks volumes about their perception regarding the claim we are debating. The first question was: "who is the final arbiter of what is good for society". From my perspective, the final arbiter is ‘We, the People'. Collectively, if ‘We, the People' feel that the policies that have been promulgated by our publicly elected officials are detrimental to our society-- whether domestically or internationally--we vote in new individuals or in some cases a new party in which to control government. The second question I posed was: "What metric can be provided to categorically demonstrate that a public policy is not only bad for society but also misguided?" One metric that can specifically gauge this question would be a scientific poll. I have yet to find any legitimate poll probing whether a public policy is both misguided and bad for society. However, we can use a larger more comprehensive metric to decide whether our economic public policies are bad for society. The metric that I am referring is termed economic freedom, where the US is ranked 9th out of 92 countries, with a freedom score of 77.8 and the highest being 89.7 (http://www.heritage.org...). Economic freedom is essentially an indicator of how free individuals are to control their wealth. Moreover, economic freedom is directly related to positive social and economic values, which include per capita income and economic growth rate (http://en.wikipedia.org...). So, we all have the freedom to create wealth. But the undeniable fact of living in a Capitalist society is that wealth creates more wealth. In other words, if you have more disposable income—whether earned through labor, capital gains, tax credits, etc.-- you have more to invest to create more wealth. That is why wealthy people tend to stay wealthy and more easily ride out economic downturns. The third question I posed was involving who's original intent or purpose of politics are we discussing. My assumption is that Pro is referring to the US Founding Fathers. My opponent suggested that the original purpose of politics is to guide public policy. First off, I don't think the US Founding Fathers defined an "original purpose" for politics. Second, they established a tradition of compromised; the debates of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 lead to the great Connecticut Compromise that created the basis for our legislative structure and representation. The Founders must have known that public policy would be hammer out on the floor of Congress they created. It should be noted that the economic data that Congress uses to debate and the public uses to formulate opinions, which guides public policy decisions, comes from the non-partisan Congressional Budget office (http://www.cbo.gov...) Politics guides every facet of public life. Competing ideas and factions is what makes the US democracy vibrant. It guarantees that we have constant pressure on social and economic issues to ensure that public policy is beneficial for all and not misguided.