Americans Prefer Economic Insecurity Over Fair Minimum Wage, Says Heiress Ivanka Trump

Workers’ rights advocates were among those who expressed a mix of amusement, anger, and shock—but not surprise—when Ivanka Trump waded into the national conversation on whether Americans should have the right to a living wage, despite her lack of experience in working to afford necessities.

In an interview with Steve Hilton on Fox News, President Donald Trump’s adviser and eldest daughter attacked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal resolution, asserting that provisions in the climate action legislation including a $15 minimum wage and a guaranteed jobs program would be unpopular with the American people.

Americans, she claimed, “want to work for what they get” instead of “being given something.”

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In fact, polls show that a majority of voters support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour from the current rate of $7.25—which has been in place since 2009, even as Republicans have pushed through giveaways to the wealthiest Americans like the $1.5 trillion corporate tax cut which passed in 2017.

A guaranteed jobs program has found support among a large swath of the public as well, with the right-leaning Rasmussen poll finding that 46 percent of Americans support the proposal in 2018.

Trump did not elaborate on specific examples of people she has met in her travels around the U.S. who expressed that they’d prefer to live in a country with no “guaranteed minimum” benefits afforded to working people.