In order to reduce traffic congestion and raise revenue for the city,

Hi All,

While i agree that option C talks about the penalties which are abolished as per the new proposal, I want to explain why did it become a contender in the first place. Once we understand that, I will be able to explain why is it not a strengthener actually.

The conclusion said that the federal govt will collect a far lower PERCENTAGE OF THE TOTAL TAX owed by delinquents than did state governments. We need to strengthen the conclusion and I will provide an example of how option C SEEMS to do that.


EXAMPLE
A person A owed 100 $ as federal and 100 $ as state tax. Now lets assume federal penalty was 10 % of the tax owed and state penalty was 2 %

So total taxes with the penalty:

Federal : 110 $
State: 102 $

However since the proposed plan only collects 100 dollars in each case, state government earned 98 percent of the total tax it COULD have received ( 100/ 102) whereas federal government only receives 90 percent ( 100/110).

BUT the problem here is that we missed a key statement in the premise itself. The premise states that the new plan allows the delinquents to pay the TOTAL owed tax WITHOUT the penalties. Then later in the conclusion it actually refers to the total tax ( without the penalties) and not actually the total tax the govt COULD have earned.

I made the same mistake and I realised that we need to take official questions just by what is written and not what can be implied. If the question does not explicitly mention COULD, we shouldnt assume.

I hope that this explaination is able to calm the storms in some of your heads. Also I am very new to the verbal analysis culture and I will be more than happy to take feedbacks from the any1 who find the explanation above flawed!.

All the best