It’s good to know that Martha MacCallum’s generous salary has not prevented her from knowing that it’s downright patriotic or, as she put it, “uniquely American,” for other people to work three jobs just to make ends meet.
Apparently, MacCallum thinks her own reported $700,000 a year and estimated net worth of $8 million gives her a perfect perspective on what’s good for the rest of us:
She said about the recently-released CBO report that the Affordable Care Act would result in some Americans choosing to stop working or work less:
What’s uniquely American is that people tend to want to work more, work harder, make as much as they can for their families. Some people work 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet, and that is a value that has been considered for a long time to be something, you know, that has merit.
Kirsten Powers replied:
Just to be clear, jobs haven’t been cut, the number of hours have gone back, people have taken less numbers (of hours). People have chosen to work fewer hours.
...If you’re a person who had an elderly parent to take care of or a child and the only way to do it was to cut back on your hours and now you were able to do it because of having health insurance, I think you’d probably think it was a net plus. …Americans haven’t always worked like this. …I don’t think it’s always been normal to work the way that we work, and so I like the idea that people aren’t locked into their jobs just for health insurance and working extra hours and do other things including being with their families.
But MacCallum made it clear that the values she really cares about are making sure that her own “maker” dollars don't go to the “takers.” She said, “It’s this overall philosophy… that it’s better to work less and to perhaps have the government help you out a bit more. And that’s really the debate that’s at question here.”
Or to put it another way,"patriot" MacCallum thinks it’s better that more Americans should struggle and stay locked into jobs in order to get health insurance than to cough up any of her dough to them.
Video below, from yesterday's America's Newsroom, via Media Matters.
