This is a huge concern! The inability to understand things that really are not that complex. A person that pays much less taxes in a quandary due to not understanding the net positive resulting from less taxes paid meaning less of YOUR money returned. Unfortunately we see that missing knowledge gap...that inability to comprehend in many facets swinging me again a bit away from gullibility to not very bright.
A little over a week ago I was on a train in Italy somewhere and was talking to four young, female students studying abroad. I asked their majors and what year of school they were in. They were juniors (three from Nova and the other I can't recall...all majors tangential to humanities). Since they were in Italy, and generally from a viewed Catholic school I asked what the population was, as well as the rough number of Catholic students. They told me the number they believed the population was and the percentage of Catholics, but couldn't tell me the number of Catholics resulting from a percentage of a population. I smiled and said that is okay, math is not your area...but really thought this is not that hard. They were able to memorize two numbers supplied to them, but were not able to make absolute sense of the information they had. Now I certainly don't know how they would vote or attempt to place them in a political bucket, but instead to only state that there are a lot of people that really don't think, but have all these separate data points supplied to them lacking in the understanding of that data which obviously can lead to misunderstandings
