WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned an overpriced croissant into a lesson on the minimum wage.
“Croissants at LaGuardia are going for SEVEN DOLLARS A PIECE,” the New York Democrat tweeted Monday morning. “Yet some people think getting a whole hour of personal, dedicated human labor for $15 is too expensive??”
She said her point wasn’t that the croissant cost too much.
“GOP taking every tweet so earnestly, making my point for me. It’s not an argument against the price of the croissant – it’s about the value of human worth,” she continued. “But I guess the idea is foreign to them since their policies treat people as disposable anyway.”
When AOC ran for Congress last year, she supported a $15-an-hour minimum wage, as well as a federal jobs guarantee.
In December, a month before getting sworn in, she shamed other lawmakers for paying congressional staff too little.
“This week I went to [a] dive spot in DC for some late night food. I chatted up the staff. SEVERAL bartenders, managers, & servers currently worked in Senate + House offices. This is a disgrace,” she tweeted at the time. “Congress of ALL places should raise MRAs so we can pay staff an actual DC living wage.”
She announced in February that no member of her own staff would make less than $52,000.
And although AOC sometimes scrambles her facts, she got the croissant price right.
“$7 for a croissant. Daylight robbery,” wrote one airline passenger, Michael Hadwin, on the Foursquare website in November.