Trump economic math simply doesn’t add up

Ata White House event on Nov.6 announcing price cuts for those blockbuster weight-loss drugs, Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz made an astonishing claim. Because the price cuts would vastly improve access to prescription drugs, Oz said, by next year’s midterm elections in November, “Americans will lose [35 billion pounds.” As though to make sure nobody missed the magnitude of the achievement, Oz hit the word “billion” with all its plosive force: “(35 BILLION pounds.”

- Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service

Well, that would be some achievement. The US population is just over 340 million. Do the math, and Oz's figure works out to an average weight loss of 347 pounds for every man, woman and child in America. Oz called the calculation “our estimate based on company numbers,” referring to Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the makers of the most popular drugs in the category. His figure was a vast improvement over what he said was his agency's original estimate of 125 million pounds. Perhaps Oz just misspoke; it’s certainly not uncommon for people to substitute “billions” for “millions” in quotidian speech. (More on that shortly.) But his casual retailing of obviously bogus arithmetic points to a broader issue with the numbers the Trump White House routinely injects into its policy statements.

The administration's suspect arithmetic is in many respects deliberately aimed at portraying some condition as better than the real numbers show. It's also reliant, however, on people’s proverbial dislike, even fear, of math — whether we're talking about calculating the tip at a restaurant or the statistical risk of dying from a lightning strike or in a terrorist attack. The mathematician John Allen Poulos described this phenomenon as “innumeracy,” the title of his classic 1989 book on the topic. As is the case in all hierarchical organisations, the problem starts at the top. President Donald Trump loves to define his ostensible political achievements and goals with big numbers. For example, he claimed in August to have cut prescription drug prices “by 1,200, 1,300 and 1,400, 500%.”