Santa Monica College Universal Basic Income Question

Overview

For this assignment, you will be doing a modified version of the debate. Instead of recording videos and debating another student, you will simply be preparing a case for both sides of your topic. For example, if you get the topic “The United States should raise the minimum wage,” you would prepare a case for raising the minimum wage and another case against raising the minimum wage following the structure below. Your topics will all be policy propositions for this debate. You can tell a policy proposition by the words “would” or “should” in the topic. Again, it will be the government’s responsibility to construct and be prepared to defend a case that supports the resolution. It will be the opposition’s responsibility to be prepared to negate the resolution. The following are examples of negation arguments on a policy resolution: disadvantages, direct clash with the case, counterplans, and topicality.

Topic: The United States Federal Government should enact a Universal Basic Income policy.

• Affirmative: Implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) would be beneficial and there are negative impacts that a UBI could help resolve.
• Negative: Implementing a UBI would cause negative impacts. A counterplan that solves the negative impacts of not having a UBI and/or modifies the UBI.

Specific Requirements

Each person must turn in the case with their arguments and evidence for each side of their topic. For specifics of what to include based on your side, see below.

1. 1. Affirmative Cases:
      1. Top of Case with definitions, description of the type of round, and criteria for how the judge/audience should evaluate the round.
      2. One Advantage following the correct structure.
      3. A minimum of 3 credible sources with in-text citations and a source summary at the end.
   2. Negative Cases
      1. Counter definitions in case you have to challenge the affirmative’s.
      2. One Disadvantages following the correct structure.
      3. A minimum of 3 credible sources with in-text citations and a source summary at the end.

Important Dates:

Your case for each side is due Monday June 14th by 11:59pm. You will upload your cases here either as one document or two documents.

Structure

The structure of the government’s case is similar to that of the argumentation essay. The government must present harms, plan, and solvency. Harms are all the bad stuff that is occurring in the status quo, the plan is what policy you would change or institute, and solvency is how the plan will solve the harms. It is also good to have advantages, which are the side benefits (unrelated to the harms) that you realize from plan. The opposition must attack arguments that the government presents (clash) and offer disadvantages (off-case) to passing the plan. The government must provide appropriate criteria on which the debate will be judged. For a policy debate the criteria is generally “net benefits,” “on balance,” or “if advantages outweigh disadvantages.” They all mean basically the same. In this debate, points of information are required, and points of order should be used when appropriate.