Eric the Blue

When the Secretary of Health and Human Services recently defended his boss’s innumeracy with more innumeracy, my opinion of their mental fitness for their respective jobs did not suffer–it was already too low for that. It is nevertheless an amusing episode, especially perhaps for math educators accustomed to the wayward solutions of school children. To recap:

A couple days ago, RFK Jr. was testifying in front of a Senate committee, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, was giving him hell. She noted almost in passing that President Trump’s claim to have reduced drug prices by as much as 600 percent was laughable, since the drug companies would then be paying us for ingesting their products. Kennedy defended his boss by claiming that the president had his own way of calculating percentages. Honest! Sort of like the “alternative facts” of one of Trump’s former flunkies, only now alternative math. Next day, at a press availability in the Oval Office, he amplified the administration’s take on the math of percentages:

One of the things I love about this is the reaction of the other administration officials as Kennedy explains what I’ll call “revisionist math.” Is that Dr Oz wearing a red tie and smiling and nodding while 6th-grade math is flunked in the Oval? If something costs $100, and it then goes up to $600, that is not a 600 percent increase: it’s only 500 percent. But Kennedy’s idea that if something first goes up by a certain percent, and then down by that same percentage figure, it lands right where it started is possibly even dumber. If an item costs $100, then goes up 50 percent, it’s at $150, and if it then goes down by 50 percent it lands at $75, which is not $100. One could understand middle schoolers being puzzled by this mystical phenomenon. Kennedy is the Harvard-educated Secretary of Health and Human Services for a country of 340 million that, in a phrase of journalism, is often described as “advanced.”

The kicker is that Kennedy seems so eager to debase himself. He could have just stood and smiled like the other stooges arrayed behind their deranged boss, but he felt Warren hadn’t allowed him to explain revisionist math, and a day later he was determined to do it. If only he’d gotten a percent smarter overnight. After her 14th daft speech act, George Burns used to dismiss his wife and comedy sidekick by advising, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”