sachinrelan wrote:
Senator: The average per capita after tax income for residents of Eastbury is $30,105. 2 years ago, it was 11% lower. This can be directly attributed to the comprehensive set of tax cuts that I helped get approved in Congress.
Which of the following statements, if true, most strengthens the conclusion drawn by the senator ?
A. The average per capita after tax income for the residents of Eastbury who fall below poverty line increased by 16% in the last 5 years.
B. The senator has not personally benefited from the tax cuts.
C. The number of residents of Eastbury has not substantially changed in the last two years.
D. The federal tax rose 6% during the 4 years prior to the implementation of the tax cuts.
E. A recent change in the estate laws did not substantially increase the average per capita before tax income of the residents of Eastbury.
In my Opinion Answer should be C
Conclusion: Tax cuts have resulted in the increase average per capita income, which was 11% lower
So the thought process which i took was
Average per capita income = Total income / No of residents
Avg per capita income could have also increased if no of residents would have decreased so if we ascertain that there was no substantial change in the no of residents/ population then it is strengthening the conclusion. So i chose Option C
Please explain why Option C is wrong and Option E is correct, as I find both are correct in this argument, as they both strengthen the argument.
I think this is a very bad question - where is it from?
We know that the per capita after-tax income has risen over the last two years. The senator attributes this to his or her tax cuts. This is not a particularly strong argument on the surface. After-tax income can increase because taxes go down, or because pre-tax income goes up. In addition, even if taxes went down, there may have been other tax cuts besides those introduced by the senator that are primarily responsible. Further, the average per capita income could change because the population changed in some way; perhaps there was an influx of high-income earners moving to Eastbury, or an exodus of low-income earners.
By POE we can work out what answer the question designer intends to be correct. A and D talk about time periods irrelevant to the argument (we're only concerned with what has happened over the last two years). B is entirely irrelevant.
C does not appreciably strengthen nor weaken the argument. If the population had increased, say, then not only would the number of people change, but so would the total income earned by Eastbury residents. We'd need to know something about how much these new people earned in order to determine what effect they would have on the per capita income; if they were all earning $1,000,000 per year, then the per capita income would go up, but if they were all unemployed and earning $0 per year, then per capita income would go down. In that C rules out an alternative explanation (change in population) for the increase in per capita income, it strengthens the argument, but only in a very insignificant way.
E is also a bad answer here. While we do want to know that average income has not risen substantially if we want to strengthen the argument, we have no compelling reason to think that estate laws have any significant effect on the average per capita income in Eastbury. There are dozens of reasons why average income could increase (employment rate might increase, or average wage might increase, for example); estate laws are (perhaps) just one of these, and there's nothing in the passage to make us think that estate laws are particularly important to Eastbury residents. So sure, E rules out one of the dozens of possible factors that could have led income to increase, but that alone does almost nothing to strengthen the argument. E would only strengthen the argument if it ruled out a significant alternative explanation for the facts in the stem, and it simply doesn't do that.
It's just not a good question.