argument 148 希望有人看一看

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TOPIC: ARGUMENT148 - The following appeared in the editorial section of Monroetown's local newspaper.

"Mayor Brown was recently re-elected by a clear majority of 52 percent of Monroetown's voters. Her re-election, however, does not show that most people in our town favored Mayor Brown's proposal for tax reduction over that of her opponent, Mr. Greene, who proposed raising taxes to improve education. It has been shown that voters nationwide tend to re-elect people already in office, regardless of candidates' proposals. In fact, a local survey after the election showed most people in Monroetown disagreed with Mayor Brown's proposal. Clearly most people in Monroetown favor improving education and therefore approve of Mr. Greene's proposal despite the fact that they did not vote for him."
WORDS: 531          TIME: 00:23:58          DATE: 2010/11/15 19:45:22

In this argument, the author draws a conclusion that people in Monroetown favor the proposal of Mr. Greene's more than that of Mayor Brown's. In order to substantiate his point of view, the author used a result of local survey to support his conclusion that Mayor Brown's proposal was not favored and stated that voters nationwide preferred to re-elect people in office. At first glance, the conclusion made by the author seems somewhat convincing, but after careful analysis, it is not hard to find that this argument has three logical mistakes.

First of all, the author cited the voice of nationwide voters, saying that they tend to select people who are already in office regardless of candidates' proposals in order to say that most people, in reality, did not favor Mayor Brown. However, this nationwide opinion cannot represent voters in Monroetown as different cities have different opinions. It is possible that in some places people like candidates who already have positions in office, but it is equally possible that in other places, for example, in Monroetown, people prefer to elect candidates who have not been a mayor before to see whether newly selected mayor can bring a change or not. Hence, using a nationwide opinion to specify the situation in Monroetown is not convincing.

In addition, the author used a local survey to conclude that people in Monroetown did not agree with Mayor Brown's proposal. This survey, although conducted locally, might not be representative enough as the author did not say any information about people who took part in the survey. One possible scenerio might be that people who took the survey were those who did not like Mayor Brown at all and such survey could not give an objective result. Without randomly selecting a large number of people to do the survey, or at least stating that this survey was made randomly, it is hard for readers to accept the conclusion made after the survey.

Finally, even if the survey did represent the fact that people did not like the idea of tax reduction made by Mayor Brown, it is not guaranteed that people would like the proposal of raising tax by Mr Greene. Although it seemed that such a reasoning is flawless, there should be direct support evidence showing that people in fact are in favor of increasing tax. In addition, just because people did not want to reduce the amount of tax does not necessarily mean that people want to increase the amount of tax as what people might like better is to keep the tax level the way it is. Consequently, even if the author stated a truthful fact, the conclusion cannot be accepted as there is no evidence directly supporting it.

To sum up, the author wanted to make a conclusion about people approving Mr. Greene's proposal by using a nationwide opinion and a local survey. However, his reasoning is logically flawed. To make this argument more convincing, the author should put more effort in developing more direct evidence about people actually supporting Mr. Greene's proposal and the reasons why people are in favor of increasing tax. In this way, the argument can be more cogent.