Fractions
Explanation
The Joke
A character shares the statistic that a huge fraction of people think one-third is smaller than one-fourth. Another character reacts with dismay, calling it depressing, but then a third character sees it as an opportunity: "It's an opportunity! We can start a tax system where people who think one-third is bigger than one-fourth pay a higher tax, and we just call it a lower fraction." The final panel, set "many successes later," shows a newspaper headline: "ALL MATH CLASS CANCELED; TAX REVENUE TO RISE," with the governor predicting "this many" revenue — suggesting that even the government officials have abandoned mathematical literacy in favor of exploiting mathematical ignorance.
The comic starts with a real and well-documented finding about numerical illiteracy (the "A&W third-pounder" problem, where customers thought a 1/3-pound burger was smaller than a 1/4-pound burger because 3 is less than 4). It then extrapolates this into a dystopian policy scenario where the government deliberately keeps people mathematically ignorant because it's more profitable to exploit their confusion than to educate them.
The Humor
The comedy escalates from an amusing factoid to a darkly logical policy conclusion. The idea of a tax system designed to exploit fraction illiteracy is funny in its brazen cynicism, but the real punchline is the newspaper at the end — society has not only embraced the exploitation but has actively dismantled math education to sustain it. The governor's quote of "this many" revenue, accompanied by a gesture rather than a number, is the perfect capstone: even the people running the scam have lost the ability to do math. It's a satire of how short-term incentives can lead to the systematic degradation of public knowledge.
References
The comic likely references the well-known A&W marketing failure from the 1980s, where the fast-food chain introduced a third-pound burger to compete with McDonald's Quarter Pounder, but customers avoided it because they believed one-third was less than one-fourth.