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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.

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Who's we? Personally, I've actively supported the traditional garment industry to the degree that it still exists.

It used to be you could just buy (for example) jeans made in America for $20. I bought such a pair back in the late 1990s. There was no need to be busy trying to "support the traditional garment industry".

Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.

As recently as the 1980s-90s (when I was a kid) 50-70% of American clothing was made in the U.S. Post-NAFTA, that declined to 3-10%.

We were also told it was important to help create good jobs in Mexico so there would be less desperation resulting in mass migration from Mexico to America. Good plan, right?

Well, it was, until the factories in Mexico also closed as the jobs migrated to China, Vietnam, and so forth. So Mexico got to enjoy the same problems America had, except they were poorer to begin with.

That's my point. You are alone and your government doesn't care.

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