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Revision as of 02:14, 5 January 2006
In policy debate, there are five stock issues. They are called inherency, significance, harms, solvency, and topicality.
Significance
Significance demonstrates how bad of a problem a problem is in the status quo. Without significance, there is no case because the problem has to be significant to adopt plan.
Harms
Harms show who or what is being hurt by the problem in the status quo.
Inherency
Inherency is a barrier that prevents the problem from being solved in the status quo. Recently, attacks on inherency have gone out of favor. Instead, negative teams will usually run disadvantages. If they run a disadvantage, they cannot attack inherency because they will probably contradict themselves later in the debate.
Solvency
Solvency shows how you are going to solve your harms and inherency. In policy debate, you have to solve for all of your harms (in a needs-harms case), or most of them (in a comparative advantage case).
Topicality
Topicality is whether or not the affirmative plan does what the resolution asks. Although topicality is run by the negative team, it is presented in the first speech simply by stating the plan. If they plan falls under the resolution, then you are topical, but if it doesn't, then you are non-topical. If you are nontopical, the negative team will run a topicality argument against you. Topicality arguments consist of a thesis, definition, violation(s), standard(s), and voter(s).