We've made it to the third stock issue, which is solvency. But actually, before I talk about solvency, we need to talk about the plan. Now, the plan isn't really a stock issue. It actually oftentimes comes right in between the stock issues of inherency and the stock issue of solvency in the first affirmative constructive. Nevertheless, the plan text is the most important sentence in the entire debate around.
It is what you are having a debate over, whether or not the affirmative team's plan to fix the problems is good or not. So let's define the plan text. It's very simple. It should be very straightforward.
It's the explanation of the affirmative's legislative proposal that the U.S. federal government should pass to fix the harms. Pretty straightforward. Again, if you actually have looked at legislation from Congress, it's like hundreds of pages, very technical. We're not looking for that. We're just looking for a short explanation of what your affirmative plan would basically do.
But that's what the plan text is. The language that you need to use is, thus, my partner and I propose the following plan, and then you explain what it is. So, remember, the affirmative team has to present a specific plan that falls under the scope of the resolution. So, if the resolution is about the U.S. federal government substantially increasing incentives for renewable energy, then an affirmative team could present a plan on anything ranging from solar energy to wind turbines to geothermal energy. And so the plan text is...
usually introduced on its own after harms and inherency, but before the stock issue of solvency. And again, it uses this sentence to begin it. Thus, my partner and I propose the following plan.
The plan text should be a simple statement of the proposal that the affirmative team is advocating. You need to make sure it's a tricky balance. You don't want it to be too vague, and I'm going to show you examples in a second, and you don't want it to be too long and complex. You want it to be straight to the point, but to include any concrete details that are really, really necessary that you have in writing so that nobody doubts whether or not you're making things up.
It's important though that the affirmative team is prepared to answer questions about the basic implementations and specifics of the plan, right? You need to know just basic questions. And so what are those questions?
Those are questions like how much would your plan cost? Second, what agency of the federal government would oversee the plan? And third, how would the plan be enforced?
If you're confused about how to get to the heart of these questions, I really recommend you come to student coaching and ask the varsity members of the team. They have really good insights about how to find these questions. But hopefully you can see how if somebody didn't know one of these basic questions about their plans, that would be pretty problematic for passing U.S. federal government a national piece of legislation. I remember on the social service topic, my partner and I exploited this all of the time.
Because in general, it sounds pretty good to pass a social service. There's some sort of problem that's existing. We could be helping people. This would be good for them to get back on their feet. The government can step in.
And so my partner and I would often ask in the first affirmative constructive cross-ex, we'd say, hey, so, you know, you want to completely overhaul health care in the United States or, hey, you want to completely redo food stamps or some whatever the policy was. How much would it cost to implement this policy? And the other team would oftentimes say, well, you know, it would save billions of dollars in the long run as we no longer have the expensive costs of ER visits from uninsured patients. Or, you know, we no longer deal with children being malnourished, which has all these adverse economic implications later down the road.
Our experts say that it would save millions of dollars in the short term and eventually save billions of dollars. And we'd ask calmly, but wait, like how much money is the United States federal government going to have to add to the budget next year? to overhaul these massive social services. And the other team, again, would try to focus on how it saves money.
And then we would very calmly ask, so you're telling me you're overhauling the entirety of the food stamps program, or if it was a different debate, the entirety of the U.S. health care system, and you don't even know the basic number of how much money the United States federal government will have to add to their budget in order to make this plan feasible? And just notice right there that most reasonable people will be like, uh-oh, like it doesn't seem like this team knows what they're talking about. How can we even do a basic cost benefit analysis if we don't even know the cost?
Same thing applies to these other aspects. I think the agency of the federal government should be very straightforward, but that helps to set up implementation, as well as the third question about enforcement. So, you know, if we're talking about reforming some aspect of the criminal justice reform, and let's say you're trying to fix some issue like police brutality, and you want to implement some new policies, how do you make sure that police officers are actually going to follow those policies?
What are your checks to make sure that it's being enforced? Is it about holding funding and making it so that any police departments that do not abide by these new policies would no longer receive funding? Same thing you could think about for education reform. That was oftentimes a popular enforcement mechanism. And there are different ways that you can go about doing this, but you need to make sure that you have these details worked out with your partner before you get into the debate.
Now we can go on to some examples. So here's an example of a plan text that's far too vague. If it just said the United States federal government should reform the policing of its criminal justice system.
Everyone would be like, well, what are you changing? What aspect of policing or what aspect of criminal justice? We have no idea.
And so a negative team would rightly want to ask tons of questions about what even does your plain text do? Like this is so vague, it doesn't even specify anything. And here was a plain text actually from one of our assistant coaches, Ani Prabhu, when he was but a wee freshman.
He came a long way from then. He ended up being. He ended up making it to the final round of the national tournament in policy debate, one of the top two debaters in the entire country.
But his freshman year rhetoric plan text was hilariously long. I'm not going to read all of this, but just pause this. Just imagine being a judge in a room and just listening to a speech and pause this, read this out loud, and imagine trying to be able to follow all of this in a speech if you're just sitting there listening as a judge.
Okay, hopefully you actually paused this and read this carefully because it's actually so complex, it's hilarious. Like, you can't go into this level of detail. It's going to go over everybody's head. Remember, you are giving a oral speech.
And so if you make your plaintext too complicated and convoluted like this one here, the judge is going to have no idea what you just read at them, and they're going to be so confused. So you want your plaintext to be specific enough that it actually has some teeth to it, but not so complex and long. that everybody in the room is going to just be confused about what you just said right there.
So here's some good plan text examples from Bellarmine Affirmatives over the last couple years. Oh, look at this one. The United States federal government should substantially reduce restrictions on Syrian refugees to allow 110,000 refugees to enter the U.S., waiving all conflicting executive orders and legislation. We'd eliminate the owner's checks and restrictions that Trump put into place and return to the Obama administration's policy for admitting refugees. So notice how clear this is, right?
It specifically labels reducing restrictions for a specific number of refugees. You don't always need to specify number, but in this debate, it was important. Clarifies that it gets rid of conflicting executive orders.
They make sure to get rid of onerous checks and restrictions that Trump has put into place. So basically competing legislation and just return to Obama's policy. All of that provides a lot of specific detail.
In the second one. The United States federal government should modify the Every Student Succeeds Act to prevent military recruiters from entering schools. Recruiters should no longer be able to access students'private data, and the government accountability office should monitor military recruitment programs to make sure they're in compliance.
So notice that last sentence is about the enforcement of the plan and who would be overseeing making sure that this is actually happening. And third and finally. The United States federal government should end sales of air-to-ground strike capabilities to the Saudi coalition in Yemen. Notice that this third plan is more straightforward.
There's not a lot of ambiguity. It's not setting up a new program. It's just about ending sales of this very specific type of weapon or capabilities to Saudi. That's it. And so notice that third plan text gets to be a lot simpler.
So some plan text might need a couple sentences. Some might just need one sentence, but hopefully these give you some good examples of the different types of plan texts that you should have. Now, how do you even get to a plan text in the first place?
And how do we know whether it's a good idea? Well, this all comes to the stock issue of solvency. It's important as you're researching your affirmative cases that you don't just create a plan text out of thin air, but actually that you have a solvency advocate, which is a term that applies to a qualified expert. who has specifically advocated for the policy that you defend as your plan.
So your plan is not something you make up. Your plan is something that experts have been proposing and that you are going to use those experts to help back up your legislation. Look for long-form studies here rather than short-form articles. Like ideally, you find a great article that just really goes into depth about all of the different planks of the policy that you would be implementing so that you can really back it up.
Solvency itself, just more abstractly, is the stock issue that determines whether the affirmative plan would solve for the harms of the affirmative's case. So again, if your affirmative case is about trying to fix the harm that not enough people have Travis Scott Happy Meals in the United States, solvency is the question of whether or not your plan that you pass would actually fix that problem. So all evidence read to support the plan then goes under... this stock issue and this is one of the most hotly contested stock issues right the affirmative team typically reads a piece of evidence from their solvency advocate that details exactly what their plan does and how it would work then they typically read two or three piece of evidence on why the plan would be a good idea and solve their harms and so it's crucial that all of the affirmative team's solvency evidence is really really really qualified right this should be your highest caliber evidence because this is oftentimes the crucial stock issue of the debate if the affirmative team is advocating something as major as overhauling our entire immigration system, you'd better be able to show that qualified experts actually support the passage of the plan.
Conversely, the negative team, this is a great stock issue to try to undermine the affirmative's case. Oh, one thing before I get to the negative position. This is a very important technicality of debate, and it's the idea of fiat.
Now, what does fiat mean? It's a Latin term that means let it be done. So the idea of fiat is that what you should be debating, you imagine as an affirmative team, as debaters, both on the affirmative and negative, that the plan is passed.
That you don't have to worry about whether or not enough congressional or members of Congress would vote for the plan, whether or not, regardless of which political party is in charge of the House and the Senate, whether they would get the votes necessary to pass it, whether the government or whether the president would. approve it or whether the president would veto it, you're not going to debate about that. You can imagine that it would make the debate very narrow if you could only propose plans that you think would be feasible for the government to pass based on whoever is currently elected. That'd be a very, very, very narrow set of policies because guess what? If they could pass it, they probably already would have.
And so the effects of the plan should be debated. The idea of fiat is that we imagine the U.S. federal government passes the affirmative legislation, and then we debate whether or not it would be a good or a bad idea to do that, not whether or not it's politically feasible to pass the plan itself. So just put very simply, policy debate is about what should happen and whether the federal government should pass the affirmative plan or not, not what would happen, not whether the federal government would have the necessary votes from the right.
representatives and the right senators and the president, him or herself, to be able to pass that legislation. So hopefully that makes sense. It's just an important thing. Don't get bogged down and don't make arguments about like, well, not enough representatives would vote for this. So therefore, the affirmative plan would never even be passed in the first place.
That's not what policy debate's about. So now let's get to tips for the negative team. All right. Again, this is one of the best places to undermine the affirmative team's plan.
If you can show that their plan doesn't work, that's a very, very, very compelling reason to vote it down. So the first thing you can do is, well, just first, my general tip is to read quality evidence. If you can prove the plan doesn't work, that's one of the most compelling reasons for the judge to reject the plan. So you want your evidence to be as credible and qualified as possible. All right.
Second, diversify the reasons why the plan would not work. Don't just read three pieces of evidence that all make the exact same argument. Instead, try to make as many arguments as possible.
If you can make five distinct reasons why the affirmative plan doesn't work and really push on all five of those throughout the debate, some of them are bound to stick and it's really going to undermine the affirmative's credibility. So try to diversify the reasons why the plan wouldn't work. Third, ask questions and poke holes in the implementation of the plan.
All three of those areas I talked about before. apply if the affirmative team hasn't thought through those. And don't be afraid to make analytical arguments if the affirmative team doesn't know how their plan works.
If they don't know how the enforcement of their plan is going to work, even if you don't have evidence about the enforcement, it should be the affirmative team's burden to know the basics of their plan. They don't know how much their plan costs. Again, stand up and make important analytical arguments about why that's such a big deal.
We can't even do basic cost-benefit analysis if they don't even know the price tag of their plan. By the way, an analytical argument is just an argument without evidence that's based on logic, reason, or unanswered or conceded questions across examination. Most arguments in policy debate have evidence backing it up, but analytical arguments is...
just the term to refer to the idea of arguments that don't have evidence. Doesn't make them any less important, right? Especially if they're based in really good questions.
So again, as we get to the specific speeches, I'll get into more specific tips about how the negative team should be trying to deploy solvency. But just know, key takeaway here, solvency, usually one of the most heavily debated stock issues because it's just such a core question. Does the plan work?
It's it's really this is where the affirmative burden is really, really high to show that their policy that changes the status quo, that is passing some massive government legislation actually works. And so I really recommend as a negative team that you do a full court press on this stock issue, because if you can win it, you will. Most judges will view that as a big enough as a big enough reason to vote down the affirmative team. So hopefully that makes sense. That's three stock issues down.
If you have any questions, let me know.