Credit to: lsurocks

cut/pasted from his vdebate


A. Health Care Reform will pass
CNN, 3-11-09
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/....bill.clinton/
Former President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that overhauling the nation's health care system should be easier now than when he tried in the early '90s, despite the current financial doldrums. Bill Clinton says fewer obstacles to health care reform exist now compared to when he was president.. "I think that the consensus is overwhelming," Clinton said in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta taped for CNN's "Larry King Live." "The politics and the economics are much better now and the policies are better," he said. "They've made advances over where we were." In 1993, Clinton pushed for a universal health care plan, with his wife, then-first lady Hillary Clinton, heading a task force on the issue. Small-business groups, doctors, the insurance industry and congressional Republicans lined up to fight the plan, which was officially declared dead in Congress the next year. President Obama's plan, which offers people the chance to buy into the same health plan federal government employees use, avoids some of the more controversial aspects of that effort. "We have a simpler, clearer path to the future than we did when I was there," Clinton said. Video Watch Clinton discuss health care reform » "You don't have to have an employer mandate. You don't have to have a tax increase now," he said. "I think the obstacles are less than they were." Bill Clinton on 'King' He tried to solve the health care crisis and couldn't. Bill Clinton gives his take on Obama's plan. Tonight, 9 ET see full schedule » Those differences have made doctors, small-business owners and even some in the insurance industry more open to reform, Clinton said. Plus, Democrats now hold comfortable majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning fewer Republican votes are needed to reach the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Clinton said Obama is well-situated to handle the fight for health care reform, in part because of the fine-tuning his plans went through during his Democratic nomination fight with now-Secretary of State Hillary


B. Alternative energy causes partisanship- Congress thinks it wastes money
Green 1-20-09 (Elwin, “Congress could short-circuit Obama's ambitious energy plan”, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09020/943008-28.stm)
But first,the plan must make it through Congress. BruceBullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business in Dallas, is skeptical about the passage of those parts of the plan that push alternative energy in light of the "food vs. fuel" controversy that emerged with the growth of corn-based ethanol. "I don't believe Congress or the American taxpayer is eager to subsidize another industry that will take even more money out of the consumers pocket," he said. "Oil and natural gas are cheap now and the economics of alternative energy sources are questionable at best." Marilyn Ann Brown, professor of energy policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, agrees that when it comes to alternative energy, "the Obama platform is possibly more aggressive than he can get into an energy bill." Noting that about 3 percent or 4 percent of the nation's electricity now comes from nonfossil-fuel sources, she said getting to 10 percent by 2012 "would be a heavy lift."


C. Bipartisanship key to healthcare
Fox 3-3-09 Health and Science Editor for Reuters [Maggie, “Leaders in Congress draw healthcare battle lines” Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/healt...090303?sp=true]

BIPARTISAN VOTE Obama has said he wants a bipartisan agreement on healthcare reform, even though the Democrats have a big enough majority to force through legislation. Blunt said bringing Republicans on board would require compromise. He said he did not think Americans who elected Obama gave him a strong enough mandate to justify a major shift to government-sponsored healthcare. Waxman, whose Energy and Commerce committee will play an important role in approving any legislation, told his audience of hospital administrators that he would work with Republicans and with industry to make sure any legislation was agreeable. When former first lady and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to reform healthcare in 1994 the effort was torpedoed in part by opposition from the insurance industry and an advertising campaign that convinced people who had good health insurance coverage that they risked losing it. Waxman said Congress must "give the people the assurance that if you have got something you like, you won't lose it." Waxman also strongly supports Obama's plan for an independent organization to compare different treatments to find out which works best, instead of leaving it up to drug and device makers who have vested interests. Blunt said Democrats would get a fight on this, too. "An awful lot of people think that this is the first billion-dollar step toward the government deciding what kind of healthcare you should get," he said.


D. Health care reform critical to an economic recovery
Chattanooga Times Free Press, March 9, 2009, p. 1

President Obama's decision to move forward with a health care reform initiative this year will strike some as gratuitous work given the nation's economic woes. It is anything but. As he correctly emphasized in opening an initial round of discussions on reform in the White House last Thursday, reform of the nation's fractured health care system --and reining in its soaring costs to families, business and government -- is absolutely essential to the effort to breathe new life into our moribund economy. The nation's out-of-control spending on health care is making it harder for American businesses to be competitive, for workers to be more mobile and market nimble, for families to weather fiscal hardship and pay for insurance, and for federal, state and local governments to finance public health costs for employees, the military, Medicare and Medicaid. World's most expensive system America's health care spending accounted for a whopping 17 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product last year. That's from 65 percent more to double the amount of GDP that all other industrialized nations spend for universal care, which is uniformly provided in those countries through a mix of public or private plans that do not come through employers, and typically has better health outcomes.Mr. Obama correctly says that America's health spending and spotty insurance coverage trends are unsustainable and unaffordable. Health care spending has risen at twice the rate of inflation in recent years, and will continue to do so. The 2007 health care cost of $2.4 trillion is expected to reach $3.1 trillion in 2012 and $4.3 trillion in 2016, or 20 pe cent of GDP, according to the non-partisan National Coalition on Health Care. That growth in the nation's health care budget erodes workers' raises and employers' profits, crowds out other vital government services, and causes a medical-cost-induced personal bankruptcy every 30 seconds. The only affordable option That burden will only worsen. The only affordable option is reform and reduced health spending.
The number of uninsured Americans, mainly working adults below the age of 65, has risen to 46 million. Their ranks, now 18 percent of the under-65 population, will continue to increase more rapidly in this recession as joblessness rises. As the growing number of uninsured continue to receive core medical services in hospital trauma units, public costs and pass-through costs on premiums of the insured will mount commensurately. The president's promise to help the nation ratchet down spending (the 10 percent-to-11 percent of GDP that Germany and France spend on excellent universal care systems should be goals) is not being made with a specific plan in mind. In recognition of inherent conflicts, Mr. Obama wants Congress and stakeholders -- from insurers and providers to public health care advocates -- to develop their own proposals.

E. Economic downturn collapses U.S. global leadership
Newsweek, March 9, 2009, p. 40
Most of the intelligence community's attention is focused on how the economic crisis could produce internal upheaval in other countries, which in turn could have an impact on U.S. foreign-policy decisions. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg says the administration is also concerned with ensuring that America maintain its position as global leader. The worry is that if Washington isn't seen as staying ahead of the crisis, other countries will scapegoat the United States, protectionism will rise and the global economic system could begin to disintegrate. "History doesn't repeat itself in the same terms," Steinberg says. "But if we don't find ways to work together we could well find ourselves in a beggar-thy-neighbor situation not unlike in the 1930s." One potential sign of waning U.S. influence came two weeks ago, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visiting Beijing, forthrightly asked China to keep buying U.S. Treasury bonds. Clinton also said that "human-rights issues can't interfere" with the critical U.S.-Chinese economic relationship. (Even so, Clinton later signed off on a tough human-rights report on Chinese abuses.)

the impact is nuclear war
Zalmay Khalilzad, RAND, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1995
Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

that might win you rounds, but its not real world

xtx89 wrote:

its not real world

lol. this isnt even true.

Get on aim bastard.

BritainKennedy wrote:

Wait nvm you're debating Jesi next weekend... I can't send you anything.

Hey Babe......................................

I need that