The President says he cut drug prices by a thousand percent.

I have run a register for thirty years. I can tell you the exact second a number stops being a number and turns into a sales pitch. The President crossed that line a while back and has not gone looking for it since.

He says he cut the price of prescription drugs by enormous amounts. Not ten percent. Not fifty. He has floated five hundred, six hundred, a thousand, fourteen hundred. He says it the way the rest of us say “a whole lot,” except a whole lot has a ceiling and his numbers do not.

The part you can check yourself.

A price can only fall by a hundred percent. That is the entire way down, the part where the drug is free. Anything past that and the pharmacy is paying you to carry the pills out the door, which would be a lovely country to live in and is not this one.

When somebody finally asked his health people to explain, they did not back off. One of them said that if a six hundred dollar drug drops to ten dollars, that is a six hundred percent cut. It is not. It is a ninety-eight percent cut, and I worked that out on the back of an order ticket between the breakfast and lunch rushes.

Why this one sticks with me.

Most political lies are about things you cannot check. A handshake in a back room, a number from a country you will never visit. This one you can check with a calculator you have already got. They are not betting you will be fooled. They are betting you will not bother. That is the worse bet to make about people.

I have watched a lot of men say impossible things with a straight face in my section. Usually they are selling a truck with no engine or a start-up with no customers. This is the first time I have watched one sell a discount that runs clean past free and get his own staff to nod along with him.

The drugs, for whatever it is worth to you, mostly went up this year.