I'm managing an operation in a warehouse right now, and safety regulations require that I wear steel-toed boots while on the warehouse's floor. I went out this afternoon and bought a pair of steel toes from a Red Wing shoe store. Red Wing (http://www.redwingshoe.com) is an old American bootmaker that makes very high quality work boots and hunting boots, all entirely made in the US. Similar to Timberland or Wolverine. The boots are relatively expensive ($175-$250), but they'll last 10 times as long as $80 boots, and they're the best-made work boots in the world.
That got me to thinking about all of the other quality American stuff I buy. Bill's Khakis, Alden shoes, Levi's Vintage (a particular type of Levis, the only subbrand of Levis that is still made in America), Californian wine (motherfucking Stags Leap), a lot of beers - there are a lot of American brands that stack up well against anything else in the world. I'm hardly a typical I-only-buy-American pickup driving union worker, too. If I fit a stereotype, it'd be the European car driving person who only buys stuff made in England and France.
The sad thing is, I think a lot of Americans hardly even know that consumer goods are even made in America, anymore. Most Americans are happy buying their stuff at Walmart, an iconic American store that for the most part sells Chinese crap.
I think a majority of Americans are no longer used to paying for quality - as a whole, we're trained to buy the cheapest stuff possible, and then replace it as soon as it wears out. It's too bad.
I think there's a chance that at some point we'll collectively move away from that view, which might allow US-made goods can regain the sort of cachet that say, seeing "Made in the UK" has. It's a lot easier to sell US-made stuff in Europe or Japan than it is to sell it here.
