You can just buy US-made products...
How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
Or is this more of an imaginary preference you're expressing right now?
How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
Or is this more of an imaginary preference you're expressing right now?
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
> Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
Huh? American workers are more productive than ever, and vastly more productive than workers anywhere else in the world.
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
America’s missing manufacturing renaissance - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/01/06/a... | https://archive.today/3qQUq - January 6th, 2026
The U.S. is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs, analysis finds - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-manufacturing-trump-tariff... - October 1st, 2025
Trump’s Trade War Squeezes Middle-Class Manufacturing Employment - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-trade-war-sq... - September 5th, 2025
USA Facts: What does the US produce? - https://usafacts.org/articles/what-does-the-us-produce/ ("Over four-fifths (83.3%) of value added to the US economy in 2024 was via services, for a total of $24.3 trillion.")
USA Facts: The diminishing role of manufacturing in the American economy - https://usafacts.org/articles/diminishing-role-manufacturing... - October 16th, 2020
Why?
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.