Do we need a New Kid on the Block in the White House? Or should Donnie Wahlberg stick to Wahlburgers?
The star of CBS’s “Blue Bloods” and A&E’s upcoming “Wahlburgers” used Twitter Friday to drop a simple-sounding proposal to fixing HealthCare.gov, the website for the Affordable Care Act.
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“Why dump 600,000,000 taxpayer dollars into healthcare website?” he wrote. “Why not dump $2,000,000 in the pockets of 300,000,000 U.S. taxpayers instead?”
Yeah! Exactly! Has Obama heard about this? Except… oh wait.
According to calculators, 600,000,000 divided by 300,000,000 is two.
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So that would be two dollars for every American.
There were some other problems with Wahlberg’s otherwise great idea. There’s lots of debate about whether the website really costs $600 million. And not all of the 300 million or so Americans pay taxes. Some of them are children, tax-exempt, or lazy good-for-nothings. (The 2012 Romney campaign asked us to mention that last group.)
Wahlberg backtracked after providing Friday afternoon tweeters the chance to do what they love best: Make fun of a famous person.
“That is not a bash on our president. I respect and admire him. Just doing the math,” he said.
Later he conceded he had done the math wrong.
“I know my math is f***ed. Ha Ha Ha! Thats why I stick to acting!” he said. “Thats only $2 a person. Enough for half an aspirin! Screw it. Forget what I said! Load up the website and healthcare for all!”
Scarier than one of our most beloved celebrities making a public mistake was how many didn’t catch the mistake. (By the time you read this, a lot of their tweets may have been deleted.)