What "Made in America" means

 Goods made in the foreign countries selected by Corporate America when they shipped the jobs off to maximize their profits are produced by low-paid labor, often in unsafe conditions. Sort of like the way factory workers were treated in this country in the Gilded Age, before unionization and health and environmental concerns delivered a one-two punch to corporate corner cutting.

Low priced consumer goods depend on exploited labor. In the countries where the factories are, the labor might feel well compensated for now, but if they get a taste of better and better living conditions they might upset the equation. In the meantime, anyone operating an industrial facility in the United States has to pay more for personnel, even if they don't pay particularly well by US standards. 

It's easy to say that you would gladly pay more for a US made item instead of one from China, until you start doing all the math and figure out how little you could afford. And it won't necessarily be made with better materials and workmanship. So you'll be paying more to get something that is only as good as you were getting from overseas. Meanwhile, the workers will face constant pressure from management to produce more for less. At the same time management will be fighting with regulators to ease up on pollution and safety standards.

Look at automobiles: You shell out five figures for even a dinky one, and with the best of care it starts letting you down within 3-5 years. We're talking about cars made in America. Consumer goods manufacturing is designed to make you buy things. It doesn't matter where the factory is. The calculation is the same.

We're awash in consumer goods: Televisions, computers, mobile phones, kitchen and household appliances, clothing... some stuff is produced here. Most is not. If companies tried to move the volume of production here that feeds our level of consumption, it would not only drive the prices of everything way up to cover the costs of establishing that infrastructure, it would require more land area than industry previously occupied at the height of domestic productivity. There are many more consumers now.

On the plus side, consumers now have less money to blow than in the latter part of the 20th Century, so they have less ability to gorge on the output of consumer goods manufacturing.

Economy is tricky. For all of the bullshit about "wealth creation," we're working with a finite planet. In nature, good times for any species are generally followed by a population collapse. The exception might be cockroaches. They seem to be able to thrive no matter what. When times are good, they eat the best garbage. When times are tough, they eat their own dead, and cast-off exoskeletons. As humans, we're more like the predators whose numbers boom when their prey proliferates. Those predators die off after they have eaten their prey population down to its low point. In the case of humans, we're preying not only on animals that we eat, but on each other, metaphorically, in economic competition.

Big companies don't really care where the factories are, as long as the numbers work in their favor. Since we have exalted obscene wealth as the ultimate marker of success, corporate leadership is only concerned with paying as little as possible to achieve whatever their business model calls productivity. Productivity only means how much money gets sucked in and funneled to the top.