medium · GMAT Verbal
A city council member argues that the city's new pothole-repair budget is adequate because the public works department has not exceeded its allocated spending in any of the past three fiscal quarters. Since staying within budget clearly shows that the budget itself is sufficient to meet the city's repair needs, the council member concludes that no additional funding of any kind is needed for the department next year.
The council member's argument is most vulnerable to criticism on which of the following grounds?
- It treats staying within budget as proof the budget met the actual need, without considering deferred repairs.
- It confuses the number of complaint calls received about potholes with the total number of potholes that actually exist across the city.
- It presumes that individual fiscal quarters are an appropriate unit for measuring the city's long-term infrastructure needs, when a full budget year would actually be the far more appropriate unit to use here.
- It generalizes from the public works department's budget performance to every other city department's budget.
- It rejects the possibility that the budget could be increased without first establishing that the current budget has ever been insufficient.
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