QUESTION TEXT: Politician: All nations that place a high…
QUESTION TYPE: Weaken – Exception
CONCLUSION: If a nation wants to maintain its way of life then it should not allow its highest tax bracket to take more than 30% of income.
REASONING: High tax on income ➞ negative incentive for tech innovation ➞ fall behind in international arms race.
Strategically disadvantageous position ➞ lose their voice in world affairs.
ANALYSIS: This long winded argument sounds impressive, but the politician makes many unsupported assumptions. He doesn’t show that many of his premises are necessarily connected.
I drew the premises separately above. There’s no link between falling behind in the arms race and losing your voice in world affairs.
There’s also no evidence that 30% is too high. We know too high is bad, but not how high “too high” is.
___________
- The politician provides no evidence that 30% is too high.
- Here we see that reduced monetary incentives won’t do very much to lower innovation. They will lower it a little, but probably not by much.
- Right. The politician provided no evidence that there is a strategic loss if a country falls behind in the arms race.
- The argument assumed that there was a connection between these two things, but there may be no connection.
- CORRECT. This doesn’t matter. The argument says that strategically disadvantageous positions are bad whether they were caused by foolishness or historical accident.
Free Logical Reasoning lesson
Get a free sample of the Logical Reasoning Mastery Seminar. Learn tips for solving LR questions
Leave a Reply