Q7 - The critic objests that the advocate's argument

[ptraye]

Could someone explain why the advocate's arguments work against each other?

[ohthatpatrick]

What a timely question, as our two presidential candidates shatter records for the most expensive presidential campaign ever.

The political advocate thinks that campaigns should be partially funded by public funds (i.e. the govt. should help pay for campaign costs).

Why?

1. If the govt. helps pay for the campaigns, then the candidates will presumably have to spend less time trying to round up campaign donations. (The advocate thinks this is particularly preferable for the sake of incumbent candidates, who should be doing the job they were elected to do rather than trying to get money for re-election).

2. If the govt. helps pay for the campaigns, then the govt. would be allowed to have some say in how campaign contributions are given. The advocate thinks the govt. should set a cap on the max amount that can be donated. He reasons that when individuals are allowed to donate huge sums of money, then candidates feel beholden to do their large donors favors once in office. If no contribution is allowed to be super huge, then no candidate will feel especially in debt to any donor.

The critic's response says, the more #2 limits the size of donations, the more time candidates will have to spend trying to get donations (and the goal of #1 was to reduce the amount of time candidates need to spend fundraising).

Basically, envision a little scenario:

Last campaign (unsubsidized):
Candidate X needed to raise $10 million dollars. Richguy McGee donated $2 million, and Fancypants Williams donated $1 million. The other $7 million was raised through very time consuming fundraising events, stump speeches, etc.

Now our political advocate wants to change things so that the govt. would give Candidate X $3 million to help finance her campaign.

If that had happened in the last campaign, then Candidate X would have only needed to raise $4 million the time-consuming way (and so presumably would have spent much less time fundraising)

But if the govt. ALSO put an upper limit on the amount that any individual can donate ... we'll say, $100,000 max ... then Richguy and Fancypants can only contribute $100,000 each.

That means, that along with the public funds, Candidate X still has $6.8 million to raise the long way.

Hope this makes sense. Let me know if not.

[ptraye]

so, the Critic is saying to the Political Advocate that because of the caps on individual campaign contributions -- with government funding for public campaigns allowed -- the incumbent will not spend more time serving the public, because the incumbent will, presumably, spend that time finding small donors?

is that the reason why one of the proposals made works against the other?

[nflamel69]

Is this more like describe the reasoning type of question or a flaw question? Because I treated it like a flaw question and tried to find the flaw regarding the argument without taking account of the critic argument and chose A. Obviously if the critic's argument is taken account and our goal is to describe his argument relating to the advocate one then C is definitely right...

[einuoa]

Is this more like describe the reasoning type of question or a flaw question? Because I treated it like a flaw question and tried to find the flaw regarding the argument without taking account of the critic argument and chose A. Obviously if the critic's argument is taken account and our goal is to describe his argument relating to the advocate one then C is definitely right...

It is a flaw and type of reasoning question, because it's asking you what the critic identified the flaw that the political advocate made, not necessarily what you think the flaw in that argument is. I think choice A can still be a flaw because the political advocate does neglect that A can happen, but it's not the flaw that the critic points out.

Hope that helps!