LostInCypress makes a number of excellent points.
Yes, as odd as it may seem to some, even China has been offshoring to lower-cost producers in recent years.
In the years following World War II, the U.S. was a manufacturing and exporting colossus. It was also the world's biggest creditor nation. But after about $8 trillion of cumulative negative balance-of-payments deficits over the last few decades, and a similarly massive pile of fiscal deficits, the reverse is the case. We are the biggest debtor nation in the history of the world.
Now policymakers have seen fit to accompany fiscal profligacy with ultra-easy monetary policy, which has gone well beyond what used to be called "conventional" central banking operations. With QE (quantitative easing) the Federal Reserve is adding about $85 billion to its balance sheet each month in order to buy treasury bonds and MBSs, in an effort to pancake the entire yield curve and eventually stimulate the economy. That is, to say the least, a controversial policy. It will be difficult to wind down and may produce myriad adverse consequences. My opinion is that it isn't working very well because key structural impediments to economic growth continue to go unaddressed.
Ultra-accommodative Fed policy has driven up the cost of oil, agricultural commodities, and a number of other things. A sad irony is that since the deficit spending attributable to programs intended to help the poor needs to be accommodated by loose Fed policy, what we're seeing now is a giant Leviathan that hands out benefits with one hand, but sticks the other in the pockets of households who can't afford to see the costs of basic necessities rise rapidly.
The artificially low interest rate environment fostered by ZIRP and QE is a wonderful bonanza for those at the very top of the food chain -- dealmakers, big speculators, private equity "buy, strip, and rip" artists, C-level executives of the largest TBTF banks, etc.
For non-affluent households? Not so much.