American lawmakers never sat at a scarred school desk under the steely gaze of Mrs. Doiron, a harsh mistress of math and the terror of fifth-graders in Alexandria, Louisiana.
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Adding and subtracting was your only way out.
Not our Big Spenders, though. They have shunned integers for Secret Math, Magic Math, Barely Legal Math even I-Can’t-Believe-They-Did-That-Math. And it goes way beyond President Trump’s $5,000 election year payola.
Just look at the Big Floppy Clown Shoes Math at RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services. HHS subtracted millions to keep newborns healthy and then added those millions to research low sperm counts. Big red noses all around.
There’s also Mexican street food math. Why not just stop buying stuff from Mexico, our spender-in-chief mused out loud. “They have nothing that we have to have, I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.” Also trucks, surgical tools, computers, Heinz ketchup and nuclear reactors. Nothing he can’t put hot sauce on and call it a trade deal.
The guy with all our dough might have threatened to bomb the bond market, or maybe slap tariffs on the Federal Reserve, but who can tell any more?
Trade talk is no longer numbers talk at all, just “a form of self-medication from a sundowning president,” writes Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman.
Not to be outdone, math-magicians on Capitol Hill have been busily subtracting workdays. Say what you want about House Speaker Mike Johnson (really, go ahead, let it all out, I’m interested to hear whether your list matches mine), the man knowns how to gavel his way to zero.
Actually, he knows how to gavel his way to four. Between July 24 and Nov. 8, the U.S. House will have been in session roughly four full days.
Lucky for them, keeping the lights off for the other 100 or so workdays will not eat into the $174,000 salary we are shelling out to keep congressional representatives alive but nonfunctional.
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Some call this a waste. I call it a bargain. I say we round up to $175,000 and buy them a few more days away from the levers of power.
The Dutch Central Bank may have had something similar in mind. It subtracted about 90 tons of its gold from New York vaults and sent it along to London for safekeeping. Now the U.S. holds exactly as much Dutch gold as Canada. Karma math.
Deducting the gold adds a little extra rental room in U.S. vaults and subtracts quite a few sleepless nights for European bankers who have been losing shuteye, reasonably fearing that the leader of the free world would look up from his ballroom schematics and say: You know what this needs? Gold bars instead of bricks.
And he would know just where to find them.
Yet ballrooms dipped in gold are still not as unnerving as the fact that America’s $40 trillion federal debt is now bigger than the entire annual economic output of almost every single nation on Earth.
“There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number,” Treasury Secretary Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent reassured absolutely nobody. Then he compared Canada to a little yippy dog, oblivious to chihuahuas’ ranking as king of the dog bite pack in New York. Pit bulls are a distant second.
Then he compared himself to a casino boss. “I am the House,” Bessent declared, daring financial markets to outmaneuver him. And this is how we know that no, the House does not always win. Sometimes the House gets rolled, its pocket picked, its wallet stolen and its charge cards disappeared into the jaws of an Ontario-bound chihuahua.
This is the same U.S. Treasury Secretary who memorably declared “There’s no cure for stupid,” which coincidentally is what appeared on Mrs. Doiron’s blackboard after a pop quiz.
But she did teach me to recognize good numbers like this wily bit of calculation: Norton, Kansas, prison inmates dug into their own quite shallow pockets the other day and did what Congress will not: They erased more than $3,800 from $6,000 in local school lunch debt.
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Math. It’s a beautiful thing.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.