Navigating economic uncertainty on multiple fronts, Americans may be suffering from a bias toward expecting bad news. Buried among mixed signals are indicators that our Great American Bread Machine is getting ready to produce more prosperity.

No, things aren’t all roses, but at least some cautious optimism is in order.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ June employment report offers one example of muddled signals. It indicates that 147,000 workers were added to the nation’s payrolls last month, slightly more than the average for the previous year. This, along with upward revisions for May and April, appears to be good news. Yet, some analysts note that most of the new hires were in state and local governments and healthcare, undermining the idea of a private-sector boom.

It’s hard to fault anyone for well-informed pessimism. After all, there is background chatter about the possibility of a recession. (Isn’t there always?) For six months, we’ve seen destabilizing tariffs, government layoffs, deported workers and a loss of clean-energy subsidies. Making employment matters worse are reports of robots replacing warehouse workers and AI threatening to displace massive numbers of white-collar workers.

Consider manufacturing employment, President Trump’s most politically highlighted sector and another mixed bag of news and data. The president regularly reminds us that his tariff, tax and regulatory policies will bring a renewed Rust Belt and a new golden age built partly on manufacturing and a reshoring of factory jobs.

It’s unclear why manufacturing jobs are considered superior to service jobs. The average hourly wages in manufacturing in June stood at $35.19, while the wage rate in services was $36.13. Some argue that it’s more desirable to be the nation that invents new chips and designs AI applications (which fall into the services category) than to be another of the world’s high-volume producers of chips and hardware.

It will take years, if ever, to know the cumulative result of Trump’s latest manufacturing push. For now, we understand that a BLS metric called the 30-day manufacturing employment diffusion index — which summarizes how 72 individual manufacturing sectors are expanding, holding still or contracting — suggests new life.

Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of Clemson University’s College of Business & Behavioral Science. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.