Candidate: Support The government spends $500 million more each year promoting highway safety than it spends combating cigarette smoking. ███ ████ ████ ████ ████ ██████ ███ ████ ███████████████ ████████ ████ ███ ██ ███████ ██████████ ██ ███ ██████████ █████ ████ █████ ██ ████████ █████ ████ ███████ ██████ ████████ ██ ███████████ █████████
The stimulus notes that though more people die from smoking-related diseases every year than from highway accidents, the government spends significantly more money every year to encourage highway safety than to discourage smoking. The author predicts that if the government shifts funds from highway safety programs to anti-smoking programs, the net effect will be to save lives.
Let's think about the conclusion here: the government will "save lives" by shifting funds from highway safety programs to antismoking programs. You could read this as a very general statement that "some lives," period, would be saved if the government shifted funds to antismoking programs, or (more likely) as a comparative statement that more lives would be saved, compared to now, if funds were shifted this way.
Notice that either way, a major assumption here is at least that the government can save more lives through its anti-smoking programs than it currently does, and that the number of lives saved through increased funding for antismoking programs will outweigh any lives lost from investing less in the highway safety programs. But what if the government has limited investment in its antismoking programs because it has already reached the limits of those programs' effectiveness? In other words, what if it knows it can't save any more people through those programs, and that is the reason it diverts funds to other areas? In that case, adding more funds to the antismoking programs wouldn't save more lives, while diverting funds away from highway safety programs might cause more lives to be lost.
Similarly, even if we knew for sure that the government could save additional lives by investing more in antismoking programs, there would be the question of varying rates of return: if one million dollars saved five lives from smoking, but twenty lives from highway accidents, the conclusion of the stimulus might still not be true. But, again, we don't even know whether it's possible to save any lives by investing more in the anti-smoking programs, let alone what the "rates of return" are on investing in those programs versus highway safety programs.
Thus, the flawed pattern of reasoning we're looking for probably runs something like this: an answer choice compares resources invested by something or someone in two areas, then points out that one area has higher "impact" by some metric. The answer choice then concludes that an improved overall effect will result from shifting resources from one area to the other, when we don't know the relative rates of "return" (resource versus impact) between the areas.
Analysis by ArdaschirArguelles
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