Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican Party nominee, he has begun to tergiversate on some of the issues. One of them is now the minimum wage.
With a majority of Americans in favor of increasing the minimum wage, and with Trump trying to appeal to a broad base of voters, Trump says he’s open to the idea of raising the minimum wage.
Speaking in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Trump noted that he’s “very different from most Republicans,” which supposedly means he supports giving the minimum wage a boost. If the primary was any indicator, it seems a large portion of the GOP also endorses the idea of a minimum wage and/or increasing it.
“You have to have something you can live on,” Trump said in a wide-ranging interview. “But what I ‘m really looking to do is get people great jobs so they make much more money than that, much more money than the $15.”
In 2015, he claimed that he was against the minimum wage because the United States needed to keep wage rates low in order to compete with foreign countries.
During a Fox Business Network debate, Trump said he wouldn’t raise the minimum wage because the U.S. “is a country that is being beaten on every front.” He added: “Taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard, and they have to get into that upper stratum.”
In November, Trump told MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” (via Business Insider) argued that the current minimum wage is too high and it hurts job growth.
“It’s a tough position politically. We have to become competitive with the world. Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high, everything is too high,” he said. “What’s going to happen is now people are going to start firing people.”
Trump, it appears, is enhancing his populist brand ahead of the general election.
Instead of using basic economics when it comes to the minimum wage, Trump wants to appeal to the masses.
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