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mahatmakanejeeves

(56,897 posts)
Thu Mar 7, 2019, 12:17 PM Mar 2019

Ivanka Trump doesn't understand work. No one in the Trump administration does.

PostEverything Perspective
Ivanka Trump doesn’t understand work. No one in the Trump administration does.
The obvious consequences of putting people who were born rich in charge of the government.

By Elizabeth Spiers
Elizabeth Spiers is the chief executive of the Insurrection, a progressive digital messaging firm.
February 27

In an interview with Fox News Monday night, senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump took time out of her usual tasks of failing to positively influence her father or materially affect the Trump administration’s policy to opine to Fox host Steve Hilton about the minimum-guaranteed-income plank of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal plan. “I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want,” Trump said, providing no evidence whatsoever. “They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where’s there’s the potential for upward mobility.”

Guaranteed minimum incomes are, many economists state, precisely what some people need to have upward mobility — they are drivers of it, not inhibitors. Trump’s assumptions about the relationship between work and poverty are typical of her father’s administration’s obliviousness to the needs and circumstances of Americans who are struggling financially. Trump, her father, President Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and many of their colleagues — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, etc. — who claim to be acting on behalf of the working classes behave as if they’ve never encountered members of that particular economic stratum.

That’s because for the most part, they haven’t. Aside from the service workers they encounter and people they employ in working-class jobs, they spend the bulk of their time around other wealthy elites. But worse, none of them has experienced the conditions that lead people to need basic income guarantees or how dangerously close many Americans are to poverty even when fully employed. When the government shut down for a record length of time earlier this year, Ross suggested that furloughed federal workers just take out loans to cover expenses for things such as food and housing, then pay them back once salaries resumed. (His own agency’s credit union was offering short-term loans at 9 percent interest.) In a country where 40 percent of American households are one paycheck away from living at the poverty level, Ross said he didn’t “really quite understand why” federal workers were going to food banks after going a few weeks without pay. For a rich guy, of course, who cares if the cost of the shutdown and Trump’s inability to negotiate gets dumped on the workers, in the form of interest and fees the government has no intention of reimbursing them for, to cover the sudden disappearance of the salaries they were due? Let them eat cake, Ross argued, and let them pay extra for it because we’re all out of bread, and it’s their fault, somehow.

Why are members of the Trump family and the Trump administration — indistinguishable in some cases — so oblivious to the needs and lives of poor and struggling Americans? One reason is that they all view themselves as essentially “self-made” despite having grown up with wealth that has enabled them to get much further ahead than the Americans whose work ethic they judge. In fact, they started out ahead. President Trump portrays himself as a successful bootstrapped businessman, although his father gave him what he calls a “small loan” that amounted to $60 million. Ivanka Trump wrote a book titled “Women Who Work” that’s mostly an exercise in self-congratulation for holding down a job in her father’s corporation while supported by a small army of nannies and household help.

I’ve experienced this personally with Kushner, who was my boss at the New York Observer several years ago, when he was still ostensibly a Democrat. I mentioned in the course of conversation that my dad had been a local lineman for Alabama Power and had worked as a contractor on the side to make ends meet — entrepreneurialism by necessity. Kushner replied that he could relate because he thought of himself as “self-made” in a way. When I asked him to elaborate, he conflated entrepreneurialism in general with bootstrapping and waxed about his first real business: buying up residential real estate in Cambridge, Mass., during his tenure at Harvard (admission secured by a generous donation to the university) and flipping it.

[I worked for Jared Kushner. He's the wrong businessman to reinvent government.]
....

Elizabeth Spiers is the chief executive of the Insurrection, a progressive digital messaging firm. Follow https://twitter.com/espiers
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Ivanka Trump doesn't understand work. No one in the Trump administration does. (Original Post) mahatmakanejeeves Mar 2019 OP
Ivanka Trump engaged in a logical fallacy RAB910 Mar 2019 #1
To them, work is for suckers. nt SunSeeker Mar 2019 #2

RAB910

(3,445 posts)
1. Ivanka Trump engaged in a logical fallacy
Thu Mar 7, 2019, 12:38 PM
Mar 2019

“I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want,”


Bandwagon Fallacy
The bandwagon fallacy assumes something is true (or right, or good) because other people agree with it.


On top of that, she knows that if properly explained most people would SUPPORT rather than oppose so she has to use the weasel words of "I think"

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