Advocacy and Persuasion Assignment Topic

Animal Testing

In support of animal testing with Alexia Mazzarella.

Issue Brief

Statement- Animal testing is widely used in the scientific community to find breakthroughs that would be otherwise impossible. Without the ability to test new drugs on animals, doctors would be forced to make an educated guess on actual human patients to treat an illness that they have never seen before. However, many people find animal testing cruel and advocate against it.

Illustration- An illustration to show the support of animal testing is how an example of a person’s life being saved due to animal testing.

Ramifications- The ramifications would be listing the different drugs and breakthroughs that came through animal testing. Precautions can be listed as well to show how the scientist try to be as humane as possible.

Pointing / Relevance – Since most of the topic is showing how this affects society, we could show people what a world without animal testing would look like.

This is a basic idea of what we could talk about but there is so much information on this topic that it would be easy to expand further.

The Issue of Healthcare

Life has unexpected problems that arise all the time. Each of these issues usually require monetary aid to fix and that amount slowly builds up. Only a small amount of America’s population can financially support all these fees while the general population must cut back on other aspects of life to fund these unexpected issues such as getting sick. The United States realized that this was an issue and began insurance to be able to pay off these unexpected debts. For example, health insurance pays for medical treatment for people. They accomplish this by having everyone on the plan pay a certain amount and all the money is saved for people who need money in the future for health-related issues. However, health care had multiple issues such as not receiving enough funding. Obama focused on this issue during his first term and made Obamacare which improved the lives of millions. Now some people rely on Obamacare for health insurance for many reasons. Republicans believe that Obamacare is one of the worst plans ever put into place and President Trump has proposed a new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. However, this would have many consequences.

The idea of health care is to be able to provide affordable medical care to the lower class by having the upper class pay for them. Health care does this by signing up everyone on health insurance for a rate that is proportional to their income. The people who are healthy and do not need health care do not use it as often and their money goes towards the people who cannot afford their medical bills under the insurance. However, before Obamacare, people who did not use the health care as frequently found that the constant bills from being on the insurance were adding to be more than their medical issues overall so they left the insurance. This hurt insurance providers because as they had less people paying, they could not support as many people. Obamacare changed this so there was a tax for leaving an insurance provider as an incentive for people to stay with their insurance provider. While it is not a perfect solution, it has proven effective and health care is more affordable for everyone. Money is not the only issue though.

Insurance is a business and like many other businesses, they want to make money. The insurance companies are private corporations. As a result, it is very easy for the company to be able to favor themselves whenever possible. One example of this practice is that they would take serious risk people off their insurance as they were “too high of a risk” to support. As a result, many people paid for the insurance but it was hardly used. In the past, insurance companies even discriminated against people who lived in lower economic areas, who are the people that typically needed it the most. Obamacare regulated this by preventing any discrimination so everyone could get the coverage they deserved. Despite this, Trump has found Obamacare ineffective and has taken actions to replace it.

Conservatives in general dislike Obamacare. They believe that Obamacare is collapsing and hurting America. As a result, they put out a replacement for Obamacare that they believe is a stronger bill. One of the first important points is that subsidies to help people pay for insurance would be based off age rather than income. This would hurt many people as people are in different financial positions at similar ages. Trump is also giving a tax break to people who are very wealthy, which would decrease the overall amount of money for insurance. Finally, Trump is removing the mandate to have health insurance, making it beneficial for most healthier people to simply leave health insurance altogether. These changes alone will leave about 52 million people without insurance, which is a clear sign that this bill is not the replacement conservatives have been talking about.

Obamacare is not perfect. There are still a few issues but Trumpcare is not an improvement. The problem is that most people do not know what Trumpcare or Obamacare even do. Some people even think Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are different. This shows that not only does a new policy has to be made if Republicans truly want to replace Obamacare, but people also must be educated on this in the future as this affects everyone eventually.

Works Cited

“Obamacare Summary – The Basics Of Obama Care.” Obamacare.net. ACA, 28 Oct. 2017. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

“TrumpCare Explained.” Obamacare Facts. HealthNetwork, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

“Trumpcare vs Obamacare: How Does Trump’s Plan Compare?” TrumpCare.com. HealthNetwork, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

 

The Effects of Trump’s Budget Proposal

The United States has always had a large sum of money that it collects from citizens to fund different agencies that perform tasks for the country. Different Presidents have had different priorities and shifted the budget in different directions. However, no president in recent history has been as extreme as Donald Trump’s new proposal. Trump’s proposal states how he wants to increase defense spending by $54 billion dollars and cut on 19 other agencies. There will be serious issues if Trump’s proposal goes into plan as it will hurt many people.

One major issue for many people is security. People hear more about major news such as terrorism and possible threats from other countries. As a result, people believe the world is in a state of constant danger and begin holding prejudice against certain races. An example of this was the travel ban from the Middle East that happened earlier this year. Trump has used this fear and pushed for more defense spending to fight these terrors of the world. The issue with this is that the United States already spends the more on defense than China, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Japan, and India combined. However, the world has actually been in one of its longest eras of peace as diplomacy is much more cost effective for different countries. Also, there are less reasons to start a war now. In the past, wars were fought for border disagreements and natural resources, but globalization have pretty much eliminated these issues. As a result, increasing the defense budget would not be used in an efficient manner. Even reducing the defense budget in half would still have the United States with the largest defense budget in the world. However, the cuts have more severe consequences.

There have been cuts to 19 different agencies which each have vital roles in maintaining the country and the world. One significant cut is to the EPA, which had a 31% cut as Trump has stated “we will be fine with the environment, we can leave a little bit, but we cannot destroy businesses”. However, as stated by the overwhelming majority of scientists and the population, this is simply not true as global warming will lead to many severe consequences. Another cut that they made was to the Department of Transportation, which will remove airports from more rural areas which could not fund an airport otherwise. This is not just affecting the current generation though, it will also affect the younger generations. Wings for Kids is a free after school program for families who need to work and cannot stay at home taking care of their kid. It is essential for the kids to go to school at all, but with Trump’s new proposal, all funding for this program will be eliminated. Many more cuts are being made that will decrease funding for research, energy, and agriculture. Each one of these cuts will have a major negative effect, but the scariest part about this proposal is the support it has from leaders despite all this information.

Once people create something, most people have a bias towards what they have made. As a result, many Republicans are saying that they support this bill and that “they can ask people to pay money for defense but they cannot ask people to pay for other agencies such as the Department of Public Broadcasting”. They also state how they need more money for nuclear weapons and defense to defend from the world. This view of the world is not supported by the fact and statistics presented though, meaning that these leaders are uncappable of seeing that their bias towards their proposal is clouding the facts. This is concerning because it means that they will continue to listen to Trump and his cabinet regardless if what they are proposing is right or wrong. This leaves the citizens to speak up so the United States moves backwards due to the new administration’s “pride”.

This whole post has been very liberal and I will admit I have a very liberal mindset. I try to be open to other opinions and on many issues regarding Trump, I try to understand how the other side views this issue. However, this proposal does not show any benefit and hurts both people who support and do not support Trump. While I understand people will still not listen to what I have said because of my views, I encourage all to try to start talking about these issues and figure out what is truly best for the United States because this administration has already shown that we cannot sit passively anymore.

Works Cited

Federal Budget: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). Perf. John Oliver. HBO. HBO, 19 Mar. 2017. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

Friedman, Benjamin H., and Justin Logan. “Why the U.S. Military Budget Is ‘Foolish and Sustainable’.” Orbis 56.2 (2012): 177-91. Mar. 2017. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

Soffen, Kim, and Denise Lu. “What’s Getting Cut in Trump’s Budget.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 16 Mar. 2017. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

 

Initial Deliberation Reflection

The deliberation was about different approaches on immigration. The group delivered an approach before allowing the audience to discuss about the ideas we had delivered. The audience seemed to have similar views each time but their approach continued to change as different ideas were delivered.

During the first approach, which was closed borders, the audience seemed opposed to the ideas. Each stated how they understood the concerns of safety, but they did not believe that safety should be the main factor for immigration. To further show what they believed, they expressed the benefits that immigrants bring to the United States. For example, immigrants increase the overall economy because immigrants tend to take more manufacturing jobs for lower wages, allowing companies to increase in size. One popular counterargument is that the immigrants would take jobs away from American workers. However, the group responded by saying that there are many educated immigrants who would begin creating more businesses and jobs, ultimately creating more jobs. The next argument we used was how America focuses on other countries so much that they are helping other countries before themselves in aspects such as trade. They told us that trade actually benefits America as we have a steady supply of resources that we would not necessarily have otherwise. The other approaches brought out a different aspect of the issue.

During the second approach, which was open borders, the overall moral of letting refugees in was discussed. The situation of how the refugees were running away from terrorist groups that made their old houses unsafe living environments. As a result, rejecting them and sending them back would only result in putting them in danger. As a nation built from immigrants, that was not something the audience would not feel comfortable with. So, there are ethical and moral reasons for their decisions.

The moderate border was one last discussion to allow the audience to discuss a moderate approach, expecting them to have similar view that they had in the last two discussions, but they did not. Rather, they expressed how it may be beneficial to have a moderate immigration system, but the immigration process would need to be fixed first. They expressed how it was inefficient to have everything by paper still and how people currently find it too much of a hassle to try to become a citizen. Instead, most simply get a green card or visa. This allows them to reside in the United States without the paperwork of becoming a citizen. Each of these discussions brought to light a new issues with immigration and it will not go away anytime soon.