America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

I think most people have a very confused understanding of money(currency) and value. Workers produce value, not money. Workers get a cut of that value, which is converted to money. To get by comfortably in the US, a first world developed economy, you need to be producing a lot of value. Everything is made to accommodate high value workers.

Producing t-shirts, window fans, or toilet brushes is not high value work. The slice of value available to convert to currency for the worker is very tiny. So you end up having to play games with the economy which inevitably will blow up in someone's face. $60 t-shirts so we can pretend that the value in a t-shirt is much more than it is, so we artificially make t-shirt manufacturing competitive with, say, automobile manufacturing.

You are missing something: quantity. A toilet brush itself is low value, but the US needs 30 million per year (this is a guess, but it seems reasonable enough - every person buys one every 10 years, which seems right based on how long they last. I am likely off, but probably not by an order of magnitude so let us use that number for discussion unless/until someone really wants to find a better number). If you can make/sell a million brushes per year with a gross profit of $1 on each that is a million dollars, if labor and the machines are amortize to $.50 each you net profit is then $500k/year - many small company CEOs would be happy with that.

You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important point is low value production is always about volume.