Mathematical illiteracy

Kevin Alexander Gray, in a recent opinion piece, is either mathematically illiterate or hoping that you are. I suspect the latter.

Mathematical literacy has more to do with logic and reasoning than it has to do with numbers. Fabulists such as Gray hope that you are either unable or just too lazy to think through their illogic.

Gray upbraids President Obama for abandoning the poor with his most recent budget proposals. The tool he uses to fool you is the mixing of time scales. When describing the President’s budget, Gray presents you with a list of annual budget figures:

- “proposed $3.73 trillion budget…”

- “cutting $2.5 billion…”

- “slash … the $350 million…”

Then Gray castigates the President for approving “$858 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.” One is led to think that, if only that tax money had been captured, the budget reductions would be unnecessary. Only one problem - the infamous “tax cuts for the wealthy” is a ten year estimate, not annual. Just shift the decimal point to estimate the annual revenue impact of the tax cut: about $86 billion .

The Congressional Budget Office estimate of the 2011 deficit is $1,500 billion. If the President had been able to collect and apply one year of the “wealthy tax cuts” to this deficit, he would have been able to reduce it by 5.7% (from $1,500 to $1,414 billion). At that rate it would take 17 years to pay off the 2011 deficit. But in the meantime we would have accumulated an additional $25,500 billion in debt (at current rates).

The debate will continue to rage on job creation and GDP growth and taxation rates and how we enable the poor to participate in our productive economy. But those debates are not enhanced by mathematical illiteracy, intentional or otherwise.