QUESTION TEXT: Legislator: My staff conducted a poll in…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: The legislator’s constituents would support a lower income tax.
REASONING: The legislator’s constituents said in a poll that they don’t support high taxes.
ANALYSIS: This argument makes a classic LSAT error. There is a big difference between “high/low” and “higher/lower”.
The constituents might think high taxes are bad. Meaning, for example, they don’t support taxes above 45%. However, those same constituents might be fine with any tax rates that aren’t high (i.e. lower than 45%).
So if corporate income taxes are only 30%, then constituents might not want taxes any lower.
The LSAT ruthlessly tests your ability to spot the difference between an absolute measure like “high” and a relative measure like “lower”.
___________
- This doesn’t matter. The legislator didn’t claim to be speaking for the country as a whole.
- CORRECT. If the constituents don’t think that the current corporate income tax is high then they might not want to lower it.
- An answer can’t be the flaw if it didn’t happen. The argument didn’t mention “an absence of evidence that constituents opposed the bill”!
- This describes circular reasoning. This didn’t happen – it’s a rare flaw.
Example of flaw: My constituents support the bill because they support it. - This is a different flaw. It involves the author not noticing they’ve proven a point. It either requires them to ignore evidence, or make a contradiction.
Example of flaw: I know that winning the lottery always makes someone rich.I also know that John won the lottery. Is he rich? I dunno. Winning the lottery is only consistent with being rich: it doesn’t always happen.
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