Resolved: That, on balance, the rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) has had a positive i

First I will create my case and then I will refute my opponents My first contention is that the rise of bric has been negative in that it has hurt US hegemony. US hegemony has several extremely useful benefits. The primary one is that by having one hegemonic power, peace is better protected. William Wohlforth, professor of government at Dartmouth University, in a 1999 paper entitled "The Stability of a Unipolar World" examines this idea. He concluded" the current unipolarity is prone to peace. The raw power advantage of the United States means that an important source of conflict in previous systems is absent: hegemonic rivalry over leadership of the international system. No other major power is in a position to follow any policy that depends for its success on prevailing against the United States in a war or an extended rivalry." The benefit to such a system are obvious. General stability but safety is essentially guaranteed for the united states. He then elaborates on a fringe benefit " unipolarity minimizes security competition among the other great powers. As the system leader, the United States has the means and motive to maintain key security institutions in order to ease local security conflicts and limit expensive competition among the other major powers." This concept is verified when one looks at india's attempts to develop its nuclear arsenal as it has slowly risen in power or when one looks back to the cold war era when one sole hegemonic power wasn't present and as a result arms races began. The problem is that as I pointed out above the rise of BRIC has led to the beginning of the destruction to the unipolar hegemony that exists. An October 2008 article from the daily star cites Parag Khanna, Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation as stating "US hegemony is a thing of the past". Examining the rise of nations like china and india he sees the center of power shifting to where in the future it will be completely shifted to the point where china will have the same amount of power as the US. He sees india's influence over the middle east growing as well, developing a great deal of power over there. The problem with this is the reversion from the unipolar sytem outlined above negates its benefits and the rise of BRIC has started the reduction of these benefits already. Our second contention is that the rise of BRIC has led to continuing economic harms. The majority of these are related the trade deficit that has been developing with China over the last decade or so. According to the US Census Bureau at the beginning of 2008 the trade deficit was 20 billion dollars but by the end of the year it had grown to 23 billion dollars. China's economic success would seem beneficial but the actual effects are very detrimental to US success. Robert H. Smith, Professor at the School of Business at the University of Maryland spoke about the effects of the entire trade deficit of 40 billion dollars of which china is more than half of, He says that to finance it "Americans are borrowing and selling assets at a pace of about $400 billion a year" and furthermore the deficit, "reduces potential annual GDP growth to 3 percent from 4 percent." Which is cutting about 400-600 billion dollars of the GDP. While this is worrisome enough as it is, the effects go beyond that. Robert E. Scott, Ph.D. Economics, University of California, and Director of International Programs for the Economic Policy Institute, estimated that since China entered the WTO in 2001, job losses increased to an average of 353,000 per year due to the increasing trade deficit. In fact even in the years precluding this Chinas economic success was costing the US jobs. He asserts that Between 1997 and 2001, growing US China trade deficits displaced an average of 101,000 US jobs per year. Finally to top things off, the Chinese government is promoting the idea of investing in anything besides US currency. An October 2008 article from Reuters, states the governments official newspaper of china the Peoples Daily, as supporting the move away from US currency. Essentially China's economic success, has cost billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and will cost more of both in the future. Now onto my opponents case There are several problems with his first contention, the first of which is that it take numbers and doesn't attribute them in any way to the rise that it defines as from 2000 onwards. The paper from professor Krol(full txt http://www.freetrade.org... summary http://www.cato.org...) analyzes data from a time period from 1960-2007 and specifies in no way from which time period the 300 billion is from making it irrelevant by my opponents own constriction of the debate. The next problem is that $300 billion to $600 billion over the unspecified time period in no way compares to the $200-$300 billion a year the US is losing due to the trade deficit with china alone. Clearly the costs outweigh the unspecified benefits in this scenario. The third and final problem lies within his last benefit, that the BRIC nations have a large role in providing economic stability in the US, at the point of time where our economic health is dependent on another nation's health, we have clearly put ourselves in a very precarious situation. Moving on to my opponents second contention, there are several key problems with this contention as well. The first one is that all the statistics regarding GM are uncited. Furthermore, he cites 65% of sales as being outside of the country but fails to specify what percentage of this is from BRIC nations. He then cites $10 billion dollars worth of sales increases for HP to BRIC nations, but again in comparison to lowering global stability, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost per year, and hundreds of billions lost each year, 10 billion becomes a fairly insignificant number. Finally, the third contention talks about the benefits of outsourcing. The first problem with this contention is that it never attribute a single benefits to outsourcing to BRIC nations but rather to outsourcing as a whole. As a result we have no way to evaluate these benefits as relevant to the resolution. The second problem is that even if all of these benefits were directly attributed to BRIC nations, the negatives still far outweigh the benefits. 317k jobs over an unspecified length of time versus 353k jobs lost each year to china as estimated by . Robert E. Scott, Ph.D. Economics, University of California, and Director of International Programs for the Economic Policy Institute. Even looking at the resource my opponent quotes in his first contention, a study by Professor Krol, the findings are that jobs are being lost. According to the study, from"1997–2003, they found that netjob loss from trade averaged 40,000 per month, or 2.4 percent of total employment". In conclusion, my opponent finds small economic benefits hundreds of billions in total savings over time, small revenue increases, but ignores the larger picture. Hundreds of billions lost because of the trade deficits, hundreds of thousands of jobs leaving every year, general losses in economic stability due to reliance, and loss of political stability via a loss of hegemony.