#14 - Citizen: Our legislators need to act quickly to counter the effects of the recession,

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Assumption. The correct answer choice is (D).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[valegria]

Can an explanation be provided for this question?
I eliminated A , C, D, and E.
Is B wrong because it isn't specific enough?
I eliminated D because I didn't see it as germane to the stimulus.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I understood the stimulus as follows:
Legislators need to act quickly to counter effects of recession (especially unemployment)
P: major tax cut --> large increase in investment that would create new jobs
P: ~major tax cut --> ~investment growth
C: We urgently need a major tax cut for our upper class citzens.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi valegria,

Your understanding of the stimulus looks pretty good, although technically the relationship between the tax cut for upper-income citizens and the large investment that creates new jobs would be causal rather than conditional.

The assumption (meaning the unstated premise) here is that those upper-income citizens would actually use the money from the tax cuts to invest it. This is not actually established in the argument but would need to be true for the argument to make sense. This is correctly identified in Answer D.

Using the Assumption Negation Technique, what would happen if Answer D were not true? What would happen if those upper-income citizens did NOT use the money from the tax cuts to increase investment, but instead just kept it in the bank, for example? Then this argument would fall completely apart because the argument is relying on the upper-income citizens investing those tax cuts gains.

As for Answer B, it is too broad as you suspected. The argument doesn't require that "the greater the tax cut given to a group of people, the more likely it is that members of that group will invest the money;" the argument only requires the the tax cuts given to this specific group of upper-income citizens will cause this group to invest those gains. For example, if tax cuts were given to low-income citizens, there'd be no reason to assume that those low-income citizens would invest the extra money. Instead, they would probably use the money to buy necessities and pay bills.