Chalk another one up to Common Core math.

According to one Washington Post contributor and a whole bunch of folks over at MSNBC, failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg could have used the $500 million he spent on his presidential campaign and used it to give every soul in America $1 million.

And if you're scratching your head trying to figure out how the math adds up on that one, don't worry - that's because it doesn't. But apparently, no one over at MSNBC thought to run the claim through a calculator before throwing it up on the big screen.

“Someone tweeted recently that with the money he spent, he could have given every American $1 million,” New York Times Editorial Board Member Mara Gay told MSNBC’s Brian Williams on "The Eleventh Hour" Thursday night.

The tweet in question was from Washington Post contributor Mekita Rivas, who'd tweeted on March 3:





But the terrible math, which was off by literally trillions of dollars, didn't stop Gay and Williams from charging ahead with it like some kind of righteous crusade.

“I’ve got it, let’s put it up on the screen,” Williams interrupted. “When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear.”

“It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing. It does suggest what we’re talking about here, which is there is too much money in politics,” Gay rambled, after Williams read the tweet.



See if you can spot the math error. 🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/V3b7pRqYUe — Scott English (@iamscottenglish) March 6, 2020



For those struggling with the basic math, if Bloomberg had taken the $500 million he spent on his short-lived and ill-fated campaign and doled it out among America’s 320 million people, that would have come out to a whopping…$1.56 per person.

But pride is often a stubborn thing. When called out on her faulty figures, Rivas, who's since protected her tweets, doubled down on her claim, saying that while her original numbers might have been off, Bloomberg still could have afforded to hand everyone a million bucks from his own personal bank account and "never notice."





If Bloomberg could afford to give all 320 million people in America $1 million each, that would make him worth about $320 trillion, nearly four times the entire combined global GDP in 2019.

And if you needed just one more little factoid to make this whole debacle even sadder, just remember: these are the people who feed us the "news" every single day.