Apparel Industry Bailout : Where was the Textile and Apparel Industry Bailout

If you have not been living under a rock, you have most likely heard a little bit about the U.S Automakers recent request for a $25 Billion dollar bailout. Just as a point of reference if you are not good at math (like me), lets imagine that their was such a thing as a one million dollar bill. Think of what you could do with only "one" of those. If you have 25 thousand million dollar bills, you would have $25 billion dollars. Wow, that is a lot of million dollar bills.

By the way, it appears that the $25,000,000,000. would only be the beginning. The automakers clearly would need to come back for more...

Anyway, we are not on this website to talk about the Auto Industry. The reason that I bring up this issue is because I am wondering why the government did not bail out the Textile & Apparel Industry.

In the state of North Carolina alone, between the years 1996 and 2006 the textile industry lost approx. 150,000 jobs. The apparel jobs lost during the same time period was approx. 48,000 jobs. That is a loss of nearly 200,000 textile and apparel jobs in just "one" state during a ten year period. (note: I am not certain that these numbers are 100% accurate. I read this from an article on a Duke website).

200,000 divided by ten years equals on average 20,000 lost jobs per year for ten straight years. (only in the state of North Carolina). Could this have been stopped by a bailout?

If the government gave the Fashion Industry Network, only one billion dollars, I have a funny feeling that our little community of fashionistas could figure out a very sustainable method to employ textile workers here in the United States...

If you have interest in reading more of my thoughts on this subject, you can read an article I wrote last night and posted today at Does The Textile and Apparel Industry Offer Sympathy to U.S. Automa... Please note that I was pretty tired when I wrote the article... If I wrote some thing stupid, please forgive me...

You are welcome to add your thoughts on this subject in the comment section below.