More manufacturing jobs lost

In the last five years, another American manufacturing industry has quietly been decimated destroyed (see comments), and more well-paying American jobs have been lost. And once again, the Federal government is doing nothing to save these American jobs. In fact, it's helping to drive them abroad. Government bureaucrats insist it's a good thing:

According to the DEA, there were 44 meth lab busts on the local, state and federal level in Colorado last year. In 2003 there were 345 of those types of busts.
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Jeffrey Sweetin, Special Agent in Charge of the Denver Field Division, oversees DEA operations in four states including Colorado. He says decreasing the number of labs locally is a major step in the right direction.

"There were hundreds of labs seized in each of my four states every year. Now we do 2 or 3 in a state per year. So that's a great success story."

So, what's happened to America's meth manufacturing jobs? Apparently, 80% of them have been outsourced to Mexico:

Federal agents say as much as 20 percent of the meth found in the country was made here. The rest typically comes from Mexico, and the meth out of Mexico is getting more potent and more dangerous.

"There's still a demand. There's still a demand for meth so the Mexican drug traffickers have filled that demand," Sweetin said.

Mexican meth, made with cheap third-world labor, comes into this country tariff-free. And thanks to NAFTA, it may even be transported on uninspected Mexican trucks.

Shouldn't something be done to keep these skilled manufacturing jobs here in America? What do Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs think of this? Have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton addressed the growing unemployment problem among America's meth workers or promised to protect their jobs from this unfair foreign competition?

tags: drug war  economics