This points to a different common flaw – percent vs. amount – that doesn’t occur in this stimulus. 

The argument sure does base its comparison on percentages, but there’s no reason to think it ought to be using absolute numbers. Measuring light vs. heavy taxes as percent of GDP actually makes a lot more sense than using the absolute amount of taxed currency, which wouldn’t control for how much money people are earning.

(B) aptly describes the author’s equivocation on the term taxes. Taxes are taxes, man. You can’t just be like “My mom bought a couch! That’s a tax!”

The argument definitely attempts to give a reason (“we should consider all these other costs”) – it’s just a stupid reason.

This points to a different common flaw – hasty generalization – that really doesn’t happen in the stimulus.

There’s arguably a gap between “we should count this 7 percent (and maybe some others) as part of US taxes” and “the people of the US are not the most lightly taxed.” Maybe that 7 percent still isn’t enough to push the US over any other countries. But to describe that jump as a “hasty generalization from too small a sample” would... *ahem* unreasonably extend the application of that key term. See what I did there?

This points to a different common flaw – the false dichotomy – that doesn’t occur in the stimulus.

If you take the wording seriously, (E) needs the stimulus to say “we can either do [option 1] or [option 2], but we can’t do both,” and then really we can do both. That just doesn’t happen anywhere.

Perhaps (E) is most tempting if you’re squinting at it and think it says something like “it takes two things that really aren’t the same and treats them like they are the same.”