Mother Jones is running a series of articles about Donald Trump called the "Trump Files," which is pretty hilarious if you're a Democrat, and downright depressing if you're a Republican.
In one of his many, many appearances on the Howard Stern show (in which Trump usually talked about inane things like his wife's poop), Trump and his kids said they got into the Wharton School on their own merits, and not because of who their fathers were. Stern didn't buy it.
To test them, Stern asked them a basic math question: how much is 17 times 6? They couldn't figure it out. The boy variously offered 94 and 96, and the girl didn't even try, saying it wasn't a "practical application." Trump said it was 112. Even after Stern revealed the answer -- 102 -- Trump insisted it was 112; no wonder he thinks he's so much richer than he actually is.
Like the girl, many people may not think basic math is practical in this day and age of smart phone apps and Google. And, yes, the math itself is irrelevant. What's important here are the extremely useful skills of problem solving and BS detection.
There are two easy ways to solve this basic problem. Both involve breaking it down into components that you can easily answer. The first way is to realize that 17 is 10 + 7. You multiply 10 by 6 = 60, then 7 by 6 = 42, and then add them up to get 102. The other way is to realize that 17 is 20 - 3. Multiply 6 by 20 = 120, and then subtract 6 x 3 = 18 from 120 to get 102.
This mindset is essential to solving any complex problem. We can't solve modern society's problems with one masterstroke -- every problem this country faces requires addressing a bunch of smaller problems that we can solve.
Most of these problems involve numbers -- big ones: the federal budget, the deficit, the debt, tax policy, the GDP, the balance of trade, the influx of millions of immigrants, the outflow of millions of jobs to Asia, millions of unemployed people.
If you have a basic facility with numbers, you can use that a BS detector when someone spouts numbers at you. If their basic numbers don't add up, you know they're lying. If you can't understand basic numbers, you can't tell when people are lying to you.
Trump can't do basic arithmetic, and is surrounded by people who can't do basic arithmetic. If he and his people can't handle small numbers, they will be incapable of handling big ones. This is clear from his tax proposals, which are giveaways to billionaires, and would leave a giant hole in the budget, bankrupting this country.
Worse, Trump thinks it's okay. He's fine with the United States defaulting on the debt, and forcing creditors to "take a haircut." Yeah, Donald Trump wants to make America great again by copying Greece's economic model: low taxes and debt default.
A recent analysis by Moody's Analytics found that Trump's economic plan would be a disaster for the United States. Instead of being a stable haven for the world's wealth, the United States would become third-rate junk bond market. Just like the several casinos Trump used to own that went bankrupt because he borrowed money at high interest rates.
The mantra at Trump University was "OPM" -- Other People's Money. This was how Trump survived his catastrophically stupid business decisions: he used other people's money to prop up his casino corporation, then he loaded his personal debts onto the corporation, then he declared bankruptcy, leaving himself richer and all his investors poorer.
Now, the Other People are us, the US taxpayers. If we give Donald Trump our money, we know exactly what's going to happen to it.
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