Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

I want to begin as I have been doing now for a while by alerting you to the fact that

one of you, Charlie Fabian by name, has volunteered to collect and transmit to us

suggestions, ideas, resources that any of you might have to offer

as to where we can go to plan and produce segments for this program. Simply send any suggestions

you have to Charlie.com.438 at gmail.com. Once again, Charlie, that's C-H-A-R-L-I-E, Charlie.

Dot Info-338 at g-mail.com. Today's program, we're going to be talking about manufacturing in the

United States, about

an amazing strike at the California State University System, about missiles in the Red Sea coming

from Yemen and interfering in global trade, and finally the struggle between the United States and the state of

Texas over how to deal with the problem of immigration. Important topics, and we're going to

erase right through them in order to try to get at some of the core issues. Okay, let's start

with manufacturing.

The last dozen presidents have promised to reverse the decline of manufacturing, by which they

have meant the shrinking role of manufacturing in counting all the jobs in the United States economy.

Once upon a time, this was a country that spent most of its time working in the fields,

in agriculture, or in the factories, in manufacturing thing.

But both the manufacturing and the agriculture have long since shrunk to pale shadows of what

they once were.

And it's true of agriculture, as most Americans pretty well now know, but it has become true of manufacturing

as well. We are therefore a nation, the overwhelming majority of jobs that exist are in

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