Brandon Gill Shows How Math Just Doesn't Support Socialism

Brandon Gill's viral moment doing basic arithmetic on socialist proposals shouldn't be a moment at all. It should be Tuesday. But in an era where a sitting member of Congress can't tell you what a 90 percent marginal tax rate actually does to revenue, watching someone just... show the work has become content. That tells you something about where we are.

Mike Rogers' number, that 70 percent of kids who can't read or do basic math end up in prison or on welfare, is the part of this story that deserves more attention than it's getting. That's not a culture war talking point. That's a pipeline. A kid who leaves eighth grade unable to solve for x isn't going to be equipped to spot the difference between a policy that sounds generous and one that actually does what it promises. Bad math education doesn't just produce worse test scores. It produces adults who can't check anyone's work, including the government's.

That's not an accident, whatever anyone wants to call the intent behind it. School systems that have spent two decades deprioritizing phonics and arithmetic in favor of whatever the trend of the year is have produced exactly the electorate least equipped to notice when the numbers on a socialist spending plan don't add up. You don't need a conspiracy theory for that. You just need to look at the outcomes.

Gill doing arithmetic in real time and having it treated like a mic drop is almost funny, until you remember why it landed. People are hungry for someone to just say the number out loud. That's a low bar. We should be embarrassed it's the bar at all, and we should be a lot more interested in fixing the classrooms that put it there than in celebrating the guy who cleared it.