Justification - Nationals

[Nate Wong]

This is incomplete, more to come later, but I wanted to send this out now so you guys can peruse it. A little bit of Nationals terrorism for ya.

Justification – Nationals

Top Level

1NC

The affirmative has not provided an adequate justification in the 1NC for why a net increase in investment in transportation infrastructure is necessary. Our argument is that the U.S. does not need to increase its aggregate amount of transportation infrastructure investment in order to do the affirmative’s plan.

Currently, the U.S. has a huge surplus of unspent money that has been earmarked for transportation infrastructure investment, in the form of the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. This money could be reallocated to provide the affirmative plan’s investment.

[card]

This is a reason to vote negative, for 3 reasons:

1. Inherency – If funding can be provided via surplus money, then there’s no barrier preventing the affirmative’s plan from being funded.

2. Topicality – if we prove that a net increase in transportation infrastructure investment is not necessary to do their plan, they can claim that their plan could be funded through internally reallocating money, which means they do not create a net increase. This means we would be unable to read disadvantages or any argument premised on the aff increasing the total amount of investment, which are essential arguments needed to be negative this year.

3. Vote neg on presumption – if the affirmative can do the plan without increasing the total amount of investment, you should vote for the negative because we’ve disproven that affirming the resolution – i.e. increasing investment – is a good idea.

2NC Overview

The resolution poses the central question: should the United States increase its investment in transportation infrastructure in the United States? In order to win the debate, the affirmative must justify all the parts of this resolution. Our argument is that they have not adequately justified why a net increase in the overall level of U.S. transportation infrastructure investment is necessary to do the plan. For example, they could fund the plan using the surplus money within the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, money which already has been earmarked and allocated for transportation infrastructure, but has not been spent yet by the government. As a policymaker, it is an a-priori obligation that they justify the term increase in the resolution, otherwise they should lose the debate.

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Nate Wong

USC '12, B.A. International Relations

Legal Clerk at Wolf, Rifkin, Shapiro, Schulman, & Rabkin, LLP

[Nate Wong]

[Nate Wong]

As a brief background - this is a neg argument that GBN trucked people on this my jr year all of nats. I saw some peeps roll with it my senior year too. I like this argument because it's sorta tricky to answer, really it's just the offsets cp phrased as a t/inherency arg but without having to defend the counterplan portion of it so you don't have to answer solvency questions. I like this arg at nats especially because a) You can get a lot of judges at nats who will be good for this sort of arg, like judges who really like theory but have weird ratings for the cp/da/k, b) you can truck a lot of bad teams on it, especially in front of flow judges who will just vote on the flow, c) tricky to answer.