If Trump Wants to Create Jobs, He’d Be Wise to Keep His Hands Off Legal Weed

When Donald Trump promised to create 25 million new jobs over the next decade, it soon became clear that he himself would make his own pledge unattainable

How so? Firstly, without a wave of new immigrants entering the American workforce, Trump will have a hard time finding enough workers to fill these millions of jobs.

Secondly, if the forward movement of legalized pot is hindered, hundreds of thousands of jobs, current and potential, will disappear.

While new reports have indicated that the marijuana industry could create up to 300,000 jobs by 2020, a crackdown on legal weed could see these projections vanish like a puff of smoke.

Let’s hope the White House is not overly reveling in last week’s jobs report, in which Donald Trump got “awkwardly lucky,” said the New York Post.

The New York Post also pointed out that the 227,000 new jobs figure is arrived at after the Labor Department does a seasonal adjustment for January, when there is never much job growth as companies downsize after the holidays.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported at the end of 2015 that there could be over 800,000 jobs lost in the manufacturing sector by 2024, which stands in stark contrast to potential growth in pot-related employment.

As it is, the weed industry currently employs 100,000 to 150,000 workers directly involved in plant-touching companies.

Then there are countless other jobs that provide ancillary services and are benefitting from the billion-dollar industry.

The so-called green rush shows no sign of slowing down, so why would a president who wants to create jobs decide to stop it?

In addition to stripping away billions of dollars from state-sanctioned businesses and enabling that money to float back into the hands of drug cartels, any crackdown on the legal weed industry would put thousands out of work now and dramatically impact the country’s economy.

Earlier this year, Business Insider quoted an Arcview Market Research report that showed the marijuana market had posted $6.7 billion in revenue in 2016, up 30 percent from the year before.

If Trump and the radical right-wingers who surround him do not have the foresight—economic as well as social—to keep their hands off the legal pot industry, job and tax revenue losses will be stunning and social discontent rampant.

If the president wants to get anywhere near his goal of creating millions of jobs, the legal marijuana industry should be left to blossom as it has done so gracefully in these recent years.