Originally Posted by wig

The price of goods bought isn?t disconnected from wages. Essentially, Americans make too much money to sustain their current standard of living making these items. To bring those jobs back into the US you would need to either pay wages equivalent of what they do in other developing countries or suffer a general decrease in the US standard of living as prices increased to pay for higher wages.

The US is moving away from these industries because they do not produce enough wealth to keep up with US GDP. To get GDP per capita close to that of the US -- China for example -- would also have to transition its economy away from these industries.

Also, The U.S. still produces and exports a lot of goods. In 2009, for example, the U.S. exported a total of $1.057 trillion worth of goods. 6.6% of that dollar total was to China, which puts it third on the list of countries buying American goods. Canada was #1 with 19.4% of the total; Mexico was second at 12.2%.