LOGIC REVIEW GROUP DISCUSSION Analyzing arguments paraphrasing and diagramming

Instructions: Paraphrase or diagram the arguments as neededLOGIC REVIEW GROUP DISCUSSIONAnalyzing arguments paraphrasing and diagramming1Genes 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 20002Why 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 20003Wall 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 20004Married 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 20005If 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 20006Our 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 20007Since 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 20008The 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 20009In 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 200010Petitioners 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