1 Million per Person
MSNBC’s Brian Williams reads a tweet: "Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. U.S. Population, 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million"
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 6, 2020
NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing”
It's $1.53 per person pic.twitter.com/dIiwCESgh8
I'd like to say this was an honest mistake on the part of these two, but I'd be kidding myself. Their reaction is what confirmation bias looks like.
The math on this is spectacularly wrong. $327MM x $1MM = $327 trillion. If Bloomberg had that kind of money he'd be 4x larger than the sum of all the economies ON EARTH. For the record, the real calculation is $1.52 per person.
Put aside the failed math of Mekita Rivas who authored the original tweet. Think of the number of people that retweeted it without a second thought. Think of the number of people at MSNBC that saw the tweet before it reached the airwaves, and then consider that Brian Williams and Mara Gay simply treated it as fact. All of that happened and went unchallenged by so many people because that tweet reinforces how they view the world.
I've written before about how the American people can't afford what the Democrats are selling, and that's still true, but that tweet and the reaction of those people who accept it as fact is why politicians (mostly Democrats) keep pushing their "free stuff" plans, because so many people have an outsized view of how much money "the rich" have and how far it will go.
What people refuse to accept is that if you want "free" stuff, you're going to have to open up your own wallet. There is still no such thing as a free lunch.