Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:55 and sunset is 6:30 for 11 hours 35 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 39.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, Sputnik 1 becomes the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth.
Friday’s national employment figures were disappointing:
A weaker-than-expected report on the labor market released on Friday affirmed a widespread sentiment: the U.S. economy does not feel as if it is delivering prosperity to everyone.
Employers added 29,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent, data released Friday by the Labor Department showed, slower than expected growth for a job market that had appeared robust in recent months.
That resiliency has stood in tension with the strain of higher prices as inflation has marched higher since the start of the war in Iran. For most workers, wages haven’t kept up. Growth in average hourly earnings fell to 3.0 percent on an annual basis in September, well below inflation, and the slowest since the pandemic. Employment gains for July and August were revised down by a combined 60,000 jobs.
See Talmon Joseph Smith, U.S. Labor Market Shifts to a Lower Gear (‘The economy added fewer jobs in September and unemployment ticked up, while inflation has maintained pressure on markets and raised costs’), New York Times, October 2, 2026.
Only a few days ago, 1,400 autoworkers were laid off from a truck plant in Ohio:
Sipping tea from beer mugs with his co-workers, Kyle Bos listed the ways his life is changing.
Bos has two daughters, with a third due in January. At the grocery store, five items cost as much as a full cart once did. And on Wednesday, Bos and nearly 1,400 other people were laid off from their jobs at what had been the Navistar truck factory in southwestern Ohio.
The layoffs — occurring just three days before President Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday at a nearby high school — were large enough to basically erase an entire year of job growth in the greater Dayton, Ohio, area. And they are one reason why Bos, 30, plans to spend the final weeks before the November election canvassing votes for Democrats.
Asked how many times he had voted for Trump, Bos held up three tattooed fingers. But he said he’s done with the president.
“Something has to change politically in this country,” said Bos, a member of the United Auto Workers who identifies as a centrist. “Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”
See Josh Boak, A gut punch in Ohio: Nearly 1,400 laid off at truck factory just days before Trump rally, Associated Press, October 3, 2026.
Now, for Whitewater: This city has managed to add businesses, both retail and light industrial, since January 20, 2025. It’s no easy feat for a small city to swim against a national riptide. Whitewater’s successes have been commendable.
One more observation — vital to a proper economic understanding of Whitewater’s prospects — is that it will not be a choice between jobs and housing, but a simultaneous, synergistic increase of both that assures a positive, prosperous future for Whitewater. (It’s simply false, and often self-interested, when a few aged men argue that only jobs should matter now, with new housing ignored until a time between many years to come and never. On these matters, the municipal administration has the better view.)
In any event, if jobs truly and sincerely mattered to these men of yesteryear, then they’d be among those rejecting and opposing federal economic policy. Haven’t heard that yet.
Why the Diesel Fuel Crisis Has No Easy Solutions: