If this is true, then raising the bus fares, far from benefiting the city's taxpayers, would actually harm them. (A) weakens the argument, so it's not what we're looking for.

If this is true, then raising the bus fares would bring a side effect that would potentially harm Greenville's citizens and might lead to higher taxes for maintaining the streets. (B) weakens the argument, so it's not what we're looking for.

This might at first seem irrelevant to the argument. The councillors in the stimulus want to benefit taxpayers, and (C) is about benefiting people who don't pay taxes. But since (C) says that all councillors agree that it is also important to benefit these low-income residents, we have to add this information to the argument in the stimulus: even though some councillors say it's important to primarily benefit taxpayers, those same councillors would also agree it's important to provide access to transit services for low-income residents. And since raising transit fares would disadvantage these residents, (C) gives us a reason against raising fares. So (C) weakens the argument and is not what we're looking for.

Correct. Like the stimulus, the only quantifier given here is "many", which, on the LSAT, basically gives us the same information as "some." In other words, knowing that "many" voters in the city benefit from the low fares doesn't help us figure out whether it is primarily city taxpayers who benefit from those fares (notice that we don't even know that these particular voters pay the city taxes). Also, even if we were told that most of Greenville's voters were opposed to raising transit fares, what the voters wanted wouldn't necessarily be the same thing as what would most benefit them — but (D) doesn't even talk about raising transit fares. It talks about raising local taxes, which the stimulus doesn't talk about at all. So (D) doesn't weaken the argument.

This targets the first assumption we identified in the councillors' argument: the assumption that people who live outside Greenville and commute into the city to work don't pay city taxes. By establishing that these people likely do pay city taxes, this answer choice strongly undermines the councillors' assumption that many people who don't pay city taxes are benefiting from the subsidized transit fares — it creates the possibility that, regardless of how many of the bus passengers live in Greenville versus outside Greenville, it is still city taxpayers who primarily benefit from the subsidized fare. Thus, (E) weakens the argument and therefore isn't what we're looking for.