Manufacturing in the U.S. isn’t declining. In fact, total manufacturing output has increased by thirty percent over the past twenty years.

Figures from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis show that, even in the so-called “Rust Belt” (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), manufacturing output has increased by 14 percent over the last twenty years. In the south, output has increased 25 percent over the same period, while output has increased by 114 percent in Arizona, 78 percent in California, 70 percent in Oregon, and 39 percent in Colorado.

So why does everyone think the U.S. is manufacturing less?

The simple answer is that there are fewer jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing has dropped from roughly 16 million jobs in 2005 to 13 million at the end of 2024. At the same time, the hourly wage rate for manufacturing production workers has increased by 75%, but the cost of living has increased “officially” by 64% (I say “officially” because the official figures understate real inflation felt by most people).

At the same time, U.S. population rose from 296 million in 2005 to 347 million in 2025. So while the U.S. population increased by 51 million people, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 3 million. Put another way, one in eighteen Americans worked in manufacturing in 2005, but in 2025 only one in twenty-seven did.

All this translates into the facts that there are fewer manufacturing jobs, which on average pay in real terms about the same as they did twenty years ago. So those working in manufacturing, on average, haven’t seen significant improvement in real wages, and there are fewer jobs, largely because of greater technology and more automation. In addition, an increasing percentage of those jobs are requiring greater and greater skills.

This also suggests that increasing manufacturing in the United States won’t significantly increase the number of jobs being created, no matter what Trump and the Republicans claim.

In the world of golf, today begins the U.S. Open, one of the four major tournaments in professional golf. This year, it’s being held at the historic and extremely difficult Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, outside Pittsburg. A hundred and twenty-five golfers qualified to play in the Open, and after two rounds, the field will be cut to sixty (plus any others who tied for the last spot) for the last two rounds. The winner will take home $4.3 million, while even the 60th place finisher will pocket something like $43,000.

Apparently, some of the professionals who qualified to play in the tournament have been complaining about the length of the rough (the grass outside the comparatively manicured fairways).

My sympathy for those complaints is ambivalent. First, the rough is there to penalize golfers with less control of their game. Second, the rough is there for all players. Third, by design golf is a game/profession designed to test those who play it because there are so many variables that can affect a player, and they’re often capricious. The wind can pick up or die down at times. Rain between rounds can change how fast the green is or how heavy the sand in a bunker might be.

Every golfer faces those varying factors, and professional golfers work extremely hard to sharpen their game to minimize their impact. But when a single stroke can make a difference of anywhere from thousands of dollars to over a million dollars, it can be difficult to be philosophical.

One young and moderately successful (and single) young pro golfer actually posted what it cost him to play the pro tour, and his rough estimate was $6,000 a week, and that was with comparatively basic costs. Given that the PGA tour consists of something like 32 tournaments and seven other events, there is certainly a fair amount of mental strain as well.

All of which might also explain why I gave up golf young, especially since, despite all my efforts, I was a high handicap amateur.

Why do most human societies end up building houses, roads, and other structures?

The usual answer to that question is that people wish to provide shelter and protect themselves from the elements and other unpredictable threats, or some variation thereof.

I’ll submit that the physical growth of societies is an outgrowth of the human desire to reduce uncertainty. Human belief systems in lower-tech societies often reflect that desire as well, with prayers to the gods viewed as most capricious, which is why the native Hawaiians worshipped Pele as their most important deity.

Laws prescribe certain codes of behavior, with the goal of reducing the uncertainty caused by violence.

And that desire for certainty affects the political system as well. Older voters want to be able to count on Social Security. Most investors want comparatively predictable rates of return. Businesses worry about government policies that affect the cost of production unpredictably because they can’t plan for the future effectively.

People worry about large numbers of immigrants because they’re unknown quantities and therefore unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

Zoning laws have become increasingly stringent over the years because people fear, that without zoning, their property values could suddenly decline in an uncertain fashion.

One of the “downsides” of the “woke movement” is that its apparent goal or result to many people was to upset long-held beliefs about gender and ethnicities, creating social uncertainty. At the same time, modern technology is definitely increasing uncertainty in all areas in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Whether they like it or will admit it, most people prefer certainty over uncertainty, and on all fronts, prior to the last election, and even now, the Democrats are perceived as creating uncertainty socially, economically, and politically.

Trump’s appeal to the majority of voters lay in the certainty he projected in a time of uncertainty. Out with immigrants! Build manufacturing jobs here in the U.S.! Decrease taxes!

For the Democrats to merely oppose Trump won’t create certainty, and right now the Democrats can’t unite on a positive program which radiates certainty, and while they might take back the House in mid-term elections, they won’t hold that without dealing with the certainty problem.

I don’t claim to be a great marketing guru, with reason. When I was younger, after a tour and a half in the Navy, largely as a helicopter search and rescue pilot, I spent a year as an industrial economist, technically a market research analyst for a company that manufactured compressed air valves, regulators, filters, and lubricators for heavy industry, largely automobile manufacturers. I wasn’t a good fit. The next year I got a real estate license, and in that year, I sold two houses, just two very modest dwellings.

Then I started writing science fiction stories, quickly discovering that the few stories I sold didn’t come close to paying the bills. But the writing and economic skills landed me in paid political positions for the next eighteen years, while I wrote and sold SF novels on the side. Those novels paid much better than stories, but not enough to leave the day job, not until I wrote my first fantasy novel – The Magic of Recluce.

When I started getting those first stories published, most of what was selling in the overall speculative fiction field was science fiction, particularly novels by Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Asimov, Simak, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke. While Lord of the Rings was first published in 1955 in Great Britain, it didn’t appear in the United States until 1965. Despite the fact that Lord of the Rings sold something like 150 million copies, it took a while for overall fantasy book sales to surpass SF sales, but by the mid-1990s, total fantasy sales were definitely eclipsing SF sales.

This trend appears to be continuing. The editors I know say that it’s getting harder and harder for SF novels to be published, while the fastest-growing segment of speculative fiction is Romantasy – fantasy novels with sexual and romance content verging on the pornographic.

Part of the decline in the sales of SF novels is that the wish-fulfillment aspect of those novels gets harder and harder to pull off (if the author wants to stay close to the scientifically accurate), given scientific discoveries over the past few decades. Venus can’t be a tropical planet because it’s a hellhole in reality, and Barsoom can’t really exist, although several authors have gotten around those facts by setting their stories in alternate universes, but that makes those books science-fantasy, rather than SF.

There certainly are exceptions, such as Andy Weir’s The Martian, but they’re getting fewer and fewer. Part of that may be because SF has historically been dominated by male authors writing for male readers, and the reading rates for men have dropped dramatically since the advent of the internet. Whatever the other reasons may be, from what I can see, publishers overall are releasing and selling less hard SF, and even less fantasy that doesn’t have either sex-related romance and heavy action-adventure.

But what do I know?

Now that Memorial Day has passed, in roughly two weeks Donald Trump will preside over a military parade on Flag Day, which also marks the 250th “birthday” of the U.S. Army, and incidentally is also Trump’s birthday.

The parade, which is estimated to cost $45 million, will feature tanks and other military hardware, but what of those whose deaths, sacrifices, and all too often unseen gritty valor and lifelong suffering seem ignored – except in high-flown and soon forgotten rhetoric?

It all reminds me, sadly, of the Kipling poem “Tommy,” written more than a century ago, which illustrates how soldiers are momentarily praised when needed and later ignored and discarded.

Trump is all in favor of triumphant trappings of military success, of shiny aircraft and unblemished tanks – as most dictators or would-be dictators are. And of course, he wants a bright and shiny new – or newer—Air Force One to carry him around the world like Apollo in his light-encrusted chariot of divinity, for he is, in his own mind, a god of sorts, who’s already proclaimed that he runs the world.

At the same time, he’s cut the Veterans Administration, the only arm of government dedicated to the support and health of veterans, especially those disabled and without other support. He’s also called those who served “suckers” and “losers.” But he’ll publicly praise newly commissioned junior officers, while reducing the support and benefits of those who served in the past.

I can recall all the times I flew a vintage H-34 (helicopter) on its last legs, with patches on the fuselage where it had been hit in Vietnam and later repaired. I also haven’t forgotten searching in the darkness for one of many H-2s that went down over the ocean because there wasn’t enough funding to upgrade those helicopters properly, an H-2 that was never found, although the body of one of the two pilots was recovered. The other, whom I knew, was not.

Those aspects of military service haven’t changed that much, from what I can see, where funding goes to shiny new aircraft, without enough spare parts, and where there’s never enough funding to keep everything flying or to keep pilots in training. Just last week, the Navy announced that it’s revamping pilot training to eliminate the requirement for pilots to make carrier landings before they get their wings, which translates to less rigorous training. Both Navy and the Air Force don’t have enough jet trainers to train the pilots they need to the level they require, and the training jets they have are old and worn out. But the services and the Congress seem unable to decide on and fund new trainers, while keeping open scores of bases they don’t need because of Congressional pressure.

In, the meantime, Trump offers empty words to new junior officers, billionaires get tax cuts, Congress, for all its rhetoric, ignores too many of the pressing needs of the armed forces, and Trump will blow $45 million on a parade for his ego.