The reason that Americans aren't so math savvy, has been said over and over again in the comments above. It's because of the technology and resources we have at our fingertips today. As soon as we encounter a problem that actually makes us think we resort to looking for some calculator program that will solve it for us or some iphone app that give us a short cut. We are so lazy and our lives are so busy that we can't stop and think about what 7*8 is, we just type it into our phones and out pops the answer.
I can't say that all of us aren't mathematically savvy though because some Americans have to work with numbers every day. They were probably thinking that inventing these apps and gadgets would help them be able to crunch the bigger numbers much faster and lead to more breakthroughs in the math world. They don't have time for all the simple stuff and needed a way to work past it. They weren't trying to give everybody else a way out of learning, they were simply working on such advanced theories that they needed those tools.
Sadly, this technology will only continue to "aid" us in our everyday lives until only the machines are doing all of the work, not us.
