Is made in the USA stuff any good these days? It has kind of a bad rep here, mostly due to Black & Decker / DeWalt and American cars that seem to need an incredible amount of maintenance.
Black and Decker is JUNK, and has been for a VERY long time...very long indeed. DeWalt is extremely hit or miss and generally speaking not made in the USA anymore. Porter Cable has turned into nearly complete junk. For example, I have a Made In USA Porter Cable router that is nearly 20 years old and is still going strong. Much production has moved to Mexico or elsewhere, and these routers now chew through bearings like there's no tomorrow. This happened when they were taken over. They decided that PC would be the low end line, and Dewalt would be the contractor tools. Too bad Dewalt makes so much crap too. I don't feel good recommending either brand anymore. I take it on a tool by tool basis. For example, the Porter Cable 7518 motor is STILL good, as far as I know. Their other routers are absolute junk. The Porter Cable large drill press (I forget the model now) is really not terrible, though there's STILL no way to tighten the quill for play and no quill lock, but at least most of them don't have massive play right out of the box, unlike some others I can mention.
Why do you think so many have switched to Festool, despite the high costs? For people like me, who do this kind of stuff for a living, we just simply can't afford to replace a $200 tool every 4 months. I need a $600 tool that lasts 5 years.
Much of the Made in USA stuff is still very good, but there's very little of that to be had. Honestly, it's very embarrassing that so many of "our" brands are such junk. As far as cars go, though, easily the lousiest car I've ever owned, at least as far as maintenance is concerned, was my Volvo S60. I've never owned a vehicle that spent SOOOO much time at the mechanic and that was so expensive to fix. So many electrical problems too...shameful. I couldn't keep the little yellow "Service!" light out for more than a month at a time, and I owned that stupid thing for 5 years. So far the two best I've owned was my Subaru (we immediately went out and bought another once I drove it into the ground) and my Dodge Durango. I put nearly 200,000 miles on both with very little headaches.