INSTRUCTIONS: PARAPHRASE OR

DIAGRAM THE ARGUMENTS AS

NEEDED
LOGIC REVIEW
GROUP DISCUSSION
Analyzing arguments paraphrasing
and diagramming
1
Genes and proteins are discovered, not invented.
Inventions are patentable, discoveries are not. Thus,
protein patents are intrinsically flawed.
Daniel Alroy, Invention vs. Discovery, New York Times, 29
March 2000
2
Why decry the wealth gap? First, inequality is
correlated with political instability. Second,
inequality is correlated with violent crime. Third,
economic inequality is correlated with reduced life
expectancy. A fourth reason? Simple justice. There is
no moral justification for chief executives being paid
hundreds of times more than ordinary employees.
Richard Hutchinsons, When the Rich Get Even Richer, New
York Times, 26 January 2000
3
Wall Street, where prices were sinking, saw the
recent employment numbers as fresh evidence of a
rising inflation rate, if not right away, then by early
spring. The concern is that a shortage of workers
forces employers to pay higher wages, and then to
raise prices to cover the added labor costs.
Louis Uchitelle, 367,000 New Jobs New York Times, 5
February 2000
4
Married people are healthier and more economically
stable than single people, and children of married
people do better on a variety of indicators. Marriage
is thus a socially responsible act. There ought to be
some way of spending the principle of support of
marriage throughout the tax code.
Anya Bernstein, Marriage, Fairness and Taxes, New York
Times, 15 February 2000
5
If you marry without love, it does not mean you will
not later come to love the person you marry. If you
marry the person you love, it does not mean that you
will always love that person or have a successful
marriage. The divorce rate is very low in many
countries that have prearranged marriage. The
divorce rate is very high in countries where people
base their marriage decisions on love.
Alex Hammond, I Take This Man, For Richer Only, New
York Times, 18 February 2000
6
Our entire tax system depends upon the vast
majority of taxpayers who attempt to pay the taxes
they owe having confidence that theyre being
treated fairly and that their competitors and
neighbors are also paying what is due. If the public
concludes that the IRS cannot meet these basic
expectations, the risk to the tax system will become
very high, and the effects very difficult to reverse.
David Cay Johnston, Adding Auditors to Help IRS Catch Tax
Cheaters, New York Times, 13 February 2000
7
Since 1976, states (in the United States) have
executed 612 people, and released 81 from death row
who were found to be innocent. Is there any reason
to believe that the criminal justice system is more
accurate in non-capital cases? If the criminal justice
system makes half the mistakes in non-capital cases
that it makes in capital cases, thousands of innocent
people live in our prisons.
Philip Moustakis, Missing: A Death Penalty Debate, New
York Times, 23 February 2000
8
The divergent paths taken by New York and Texas in
the 1990s illustrate the futility of over-reliance on
prisons as a cure for crime. Texas added more people
to prisons in the 1990s (98,081) than New Yorks
entire prison population (73,233). If prisons are a
cure for crime, Texas should have mightily
outperformed New York from a crime-control
standpoint. But from 1990 to 1998 the decline in
New Yorks crime rate exceeded the decline in
Texass crime rate by 26%.
Vincent Shiraldi, Prisons and Crime, New York Times, 6
October 2000
9
In most presidential elections in the United States,
more than half the states are ignored; voters who
dont live in so-called swing states are in effect
bystanders in these quadrennial events. An
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should replace
the archaic electoral vote system with a direct vote
system. Only in this manner will citizens in all 50
states be able to take part fully in selecting our
nations leaders.
Lawrence R. Foster, End the Electoral College, New York
Times, 27 September 2000
10
Petitioners reasoning would allow Congress to
regulate any crime so long as the nationwide,
aggregated impact of the crime has substantial
effects on employment, production, transit or
consumption. If Congress may regulate gender-
motivated violence on these grounds, it would be
able to regulate murder or any type of violence since
gender-motivated violence, as a subset of all violent
crime, is certain to have lesser economic impacts
than the larger class of which it is part.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v.
Morrison, Decided 15 May 2000