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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I do want to pay more to bolster my country's domestic workforce vs subsidizing corporate shareholders and offshore workers, while also having that come out of corporate profits. shrug

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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?

Not imaginary, I have been sharing info with Congressional reps on this topic who are working on policy, as well as the data on H-1B fraud and use for wage suppression. I haven't even had to pay a bribe ("campaign contribution") to get their ear, which is nice.

> 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.

The question was how many American-made products you own.

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.

The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US. Why do I care about US made products? Corporations are offshoring services and knowledge work, manufacturing has been gone for some time and will not be back. If it does come back, it'll be mostly automated, lights out facilities (like China).

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

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

You want Americans doing non-competitive work in an increasingly competitive global economy?

Why?

Reddit is that way ->

This comment is literally just numbers about how the US has ceded low value add jobs and dominated high value add jobs.

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.

There's more to manufacturing than just rebuilding factories. You need everything from supply chains (which are going to include some foreign materials in many cases), to people who want to work in a factory in 2026, to consumers who want to pay extra for domestically made products.

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.

> You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?

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.

What’s funny about this is that I actually can’t. 2 examples:

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.

Sure there is a (growing set) of product categories you can’t buy in the US. What I typically find though is all these “we should force people to buy US” folks don’t actually own American-made goods even in categories where it’s relatively easy.

Have you tried asking your parents that 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.

Personally I’m willing to pay more to support global trade, and reduce the harmful effects of excessive nationalism and imperialism.

It's even better than that, pay less and support global trade.

Just make sure you have a degree and a service sector white collar job though.

Could you please name one non-food product in America that a typical consumer could buy that doesn't subsidize corporate shareholders? Name one thing the average American can buy that contributes to gainful employment at the expense of corporate profit.

Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.

There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.

I hate to break it to you, but corporate profits are rarely affected. They just pass on the costs of the tax directly to the consumer.

Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."

Are you going to stop at killing corporations? I can imagine a few people might also try to stop you from this people’s revolution you’re envisioning.

Democratic socialists were just recently democratically elected in NYC and Seattle. Support for unions in the US is at historical record highs [1]. ~2M 55+ people in the US die every year, ~5k per day. ~3M people turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote, young people who only see bleakness ahead. 31% of wealth is held by people over 70 [2]. This is a population dynamics story, old ideas die out, new ideas come in (Planck's principle). I'm confident support for worker vs corporate policies is high, based on all available evidence [3] [4] [5]. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income [6], as another data point. So, I'm unsure who is in the "pro capitalism pro corporation" corner to be honest, when you consider the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of equities.

No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)

[2] 31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025

[3] The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025 (4 comments)

[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")

[5] Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025 (15 comments)

[6] https://www.lisep.org/mql

(think in systems)

Your take is questionable and increasingly becomes asinine every time a boomer croaks and a young person makes it to voting age. No amount of seductive "institutions who's inner workings we will figure out late as though they don't make or break it all will provide for us" rhetoric are going to change the fact that the electorate is increasingly made up of people who have only seen institutions, both public and private, engage in accumulation of power self enrichment at the expense of literally everyone else.

I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].

[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Given how Trump’s second election seems to have been driven by the youth vote, it seems like an overly optimistic take to assume that youth vote is in the bag for progressive ideas. And we’ll see what Mondani has in store in terms of actual progressive policies that he can enact, but corporate death penalty is not on the table last I checked.

The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.

Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.

The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.

This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.

The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.

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