Responding to the charge that Republican policies favor the rich, House speaker John Boehner said in an interview aired last Sunday on ABC's This Week: "That’s very unfair. Listen, I come from a family of 12. My dad owned a bar. I’ve got brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder."
Anything wrong with this reasoning?
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4 comments:
Just because he has a family does not tell us anything about their wealth or social status. It especially does not tell us anything about their status in relation to him. I feel this is a "Missing the Point" or even "Red Herring" fallacy.
I agree with Kyle. There is no reference to why Republicans don't favor the rich, just a small pity story about how he moved up the economic ladder. He probably thinks that he deserves the favor from all the hard work he did to get where he is today. So I can kind of see an "appeal to pity" or a "red herring" fallacy.
Could this also be a case of composition? He seems to be using the example of his family to attempt to represent republicans in general.
By all accounts some sort of fallacy of relevance, and probably more than one. I don't know about composition, but perhaps a tacit hasty generalization: not only is the sample size far too small to represent Republicans generally, but the claim had nothing to do with the socioeconomic status of Republicans, speaking only of their polices. So red herring and missing the point (in a sense ALL red herrings miss the point...)
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