That's just rose colored glasses. The Schwinns, Murrays and Huffys that used to be made in the USA, were crude, heavy and frequently used low quality parts made to proprietary standards - So you could'nt even swap out to better parts. Even Schwinn eventually realized this and started outsourcing to Panasonic. And these outsourced bikes were much higher quality. Same story with GM cars, RCA TVs etc. And it's not just a matter of- oh they just have cheaper labor costs. By the mid 80's Japanese cars were uniformly more expensive than equivalent domestic cars. And still Honda and Toyota were able to sell everything they brought over at MSRP while the domestics had to throw thousands on the hood to move their junk. The US' strength is innovation and high end manufacturing. Mass manufacture of consumer goods was never our thing.

In the post Covid years we had higher GDP growth and lower unemployment than pretty much all the other first world nations. In 2023 we reached the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. By the end of 2024, we had the highest inflation adjusted median weekly wages since record keeping began in 1979 (except for the Covid era anomaly). What problem exactly are we trying to solve here?