Reason #43: Dying for Chinese Junk

The other day, I borrowed a supposedly American-made driver for use in a golf match. It worked fine on the range, but when I took it out on the course, it turned out to be a dud. Finally, on the 17th hole, I looked at the shaft. Assembled in the U.S.A., it said. Then: Head: China-Shaft: China-Grip: China. “American-made”: what a joke! More like “American-packaged.”

We don’t make much on U.S. soil anymore. That’s why Wal-Mart is our country’s biggest employer. Wal-Mart calls itself “The Low Price Leader” and its trick for keeping prices down is to import cheap goods from overseas, especially China, which supplies more than two-thirds of the mega-retailer’s inventory. (If it were a nation, Wal-Mart would be China’s sixth largest trading partner in the world.) All those bargain goodies might seem like a good thing at first blush, but they actually come at an outrageously high price.

Would you trade your child’s health for a bargain? Wal-Mart and the rest of corporate America already have. Millions of Chinese-made toys have been pulled off shelves for excessive lead and other hazards. And those are just the ones that have been discovered! Safety regulators here in the States can only inspect a small fraction of the goods pouring in from the Far East, so who knows how many more poison playthings have slipped through the cracks. Meanwhile, lax safety laws in China have maimed and sickened millions of Chinese workers. And China’s outdated energy practices like burning high-sulfur coal are fouling the air and causing acid rain to fall on our heads. So not only are we getting cheap junk like that driver I had to play with, the damn stuff is killing us.

Why Is China Kicking Our Ass?

Just a few years ago, China was a desperately poor country with a Stalinist economy. Now, they’re beating the pants off of us at our own game of capitalism. How did this happen? Well, the first answer is that they don’t play fair. When the Communist leadership in Beijing first started to open up China’s economy, American CEO’s licked their chops and dreamt about those billion potential customers behind the Great Wall. But those dreams have not come true.

China’s government bans many American-made goods outright. Even those that aren’t banned have to compete on an extremely unlevel playing field. Beijing gives big subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives to Chinese companies, not only making it impossible for U.S.-made goods to compete in the Chinese market, but giving China’s products a huge edge in our own market as well.

Even if American products were allowed into China without all the obstacles and inequities, the vast majority of Chinese consumers wouldn’t be able to afford them. Remember, China keeps the Yuan artificially weak by buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of our government bonds.

NEXT: Reason #44: How Can A World Leader Be Dependent on Foreign Manufacturing?!