Tag Archives: job losses

economic news

Don’t reverse vaping restriction, Mr. POTUS

No-o-o-o! Don’t do it, Mr. President! Don’t reverse a common-sense provision you announced regarding vaping, the current craze among young people who are taking up this killer habit in place of smoking cigarettes!

Your decision to ban the manufacture and sale of certain flavored vaping products was the right call when you made it in September. Now you’re concerned about job losses as a result?

Holy crap, Mr. President! What about the lost lives that will result with more young people taking up this habit?

For my money, the lives that are put in jeopardy are far more critical to our nation’s economy than jobs that might be lost if you enact this ban.

For the life of me, Mr. President, I just don’t understand these decision you make, the basis on which you make them and the process you use to finalize your policy. Or even if any policy is ever finalized.

This reversal seems to be part of your modus operandi. You have this annoying — and many times frightening — tendency to tweet these decisions out there, only to reverse yourself later. You’ve done that tariffs and foreign policy matters. Now you seem to be waffling on this health emergency matter.

Listen to those voices, Mr. President, that compelled you to enact the vaping ban in the first place.

Our children need government to intervene on their behalf … even if they insist on doing things that put their health at risk.

business news

Labor market loses jobs; no big deal … maybe

Donald J. Trump was all too quick while running for president to denigrate the nation’s stellar job growth during the final months of Barack H. Obama’s administration.

A couple hundred thousand jobs added to non-farm private payrolls during a given month? The number are phony, Trump would proclaim. The Labor Department is cooking the books, he would allege with no proof. The “real jobless rate” is something like 40 percent, he’d bellow.

OK. Today, the Labor Department came out with some dismal jobs numbers: employers shed 33,000 jobs in September. Yes, the jobless rate fell to 4.2 percent, which is pretty darn low!

But, but …

Still, the job losses aren’t the president’s fault. Really. They aren’t. Economists blame the job loss on business shuttering in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The hospitality industry was particularly hard hit along the Texas coast and throughout Florida, they said.

The good news is that the jobs are likely to rebound in the weeks ahead as Texas and Florida continue to recover, albeit slowly, from the savage beatings delivered by Harvey and Irma.

There’s no particular moral to this item, other than the jobs report issued today is no more “cooked” or “made up” than they were when they were reporting much happier economic news.

Let’s also remember that not even this president — the self-proclaimed “very smart person” who surrounds himself with “the best people” — can prevent nature’s wrath from damaging the nation’s business structure.