Working long hours.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 2/24/17

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According to reports, President Trump is routinely putting in 16 to 18 hour days. Long reputed to sleep only a few hours a night, Donald Trump is working from the very early morning until the very late evening. One can only imagine being a member of the White House staff. The pace is apparently blistering.

Doctors will no doubt tell us that President Trump’s sleeping habits are ill-advised and dangerous. I’m sure they’re right. But good for President Trump anyway. Because he is apparently aware that the window for turning the American economy around and getting its legendary jobs creation machine running again is very limited.

In his now legendary press conference of last week, the president said, “I inherited a mess.” He was referring to many things in that statement, including the state of America’s foreign relations. But he cited the domestic economy as well.

He should have. Eight years of increasingly stifling regulation, avoidance of badly needed tax reform, an increasing reliance on public benefits by an increasing percentage of the population, the burdens and dislocations attendant to Obamacare and a general anti-business attitude throughout the Obama administration; have all conspired to exact a heavy toll.

Conservatives like me and hard-left liberals like Bernie Sanders at last agree on something. The official 4.8 percent unemployment rate is perhaps the single most misleading of all government statistics. The real unemployment rate – the rate that considers those of working age who have given up looking for work – stands well above 10 percent.

In about 12 weeks another three million college graduates will enter an economy that for the past decade has produced a historically low number of fulltime jobs. We now have what some economists call a “gig” economy – one in which a high percentage of workers work at multiple part-time jobs, work as independent contractors or who do project work on an temporary basis. Most such jobs offer few or no benefits and most such employment makes qualifying for car loans and mortgages difficult or impossible.

As a result, young working age Americans are putting off getting married, buying a home and starting a family. More than 40 percent of young adults age 18 to 34 are living with their parents – a 75-year high.

That delay in coming of age economically affects everything from home building to manufacturing to consumer banking to new business creation.

All of this can be fixed by a growing economy but the hour is late. If allowed to become the “new normal,” as some liberals believe that it is, stagnation followed by decline will become inevitable and ultimately irreversible.

Just ask the Japanese. They never recovered from their “lost decade” in the 1990s. The same could become true of our lost decade that began in 2008 if we don’t move quickly.

So the president is working 18 hour days? Let’s hope that he’s spending those hours pushing tax reform, regulatory relief, energy independence and sanity on our borders.

We’ll sleep better if he does.

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Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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4 Responses

  1. Trump can do it but he needs our backing at every step. He is not just up against the liberals in Washington, Hollywood, newsrooms and left wing college types. He will be fighting many in the Republican Party. All these elites benefit from the status quo and see no reason to change. Every citizen who wants meaningful change better stay alert and be ready to speak up and put Washington on notice.

  2. Linda E Montrose says:

    Burning candles from both ends is not good and can only cause set backs if he is taken ill from lack of rest and sleep. President Trump is a dedicated man who is trying his level best to keep his word in fixing America. Rome wasn’t built in a day and the MESS he walked into is not going to be cleaned up over night. Mr. Saunders is right…President Trump is going to HAVE to have our support 110%!!! The immature way the liberals are acting are not helping matters, so WE have to take up the slack and do all we can to help. NO ONE, except Reagan, has EVER shown us this amount of dedication!!! We should be PROUD to have President TRUMP in OUR house! I know I am!!!

  3. Liz Burns says:

    Yes…you are very correct that the hour is late, but I am also hopeful for a new dawn by being a part of those that stay focused in contacting the Repub obstructionists with emails and phone calls. Sign up and “like” or heart the Trump tweets and participate in any events you can. I refuse to let this wonderful country fall to the haters.

  4. R. Eagleman says:

    We are now witnessing the difference between a successful businessman in the private sector and a community organizer. You do not become successful in the private sector with the work habits of the previous occupant of the White House or most of the legislators who feed from the same government trough. I was listening very carefully to his address last night, and it was disappointing that we never heard the one thing that would have united all Republicans and Democrats in the effort to repeal and replace the A.C.A.; and that would be “ALL FEDERAL WORKERS, INCLUDING THE LEGISLATURE, JUDICIAL, AND EXECUTIVE BRANCHES WOULD BE INCLUDED IN ANY HEALTH CARE PLAN THAT IS ENACTED FOR THE AMERICAN CITIZENS”. Case closed…….problem solved!

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