Debt Free

As you push along trying to get debt free, or attain wealth through proper debt management, you're probably well aware it will be much easier to attain the first goal, and harder to attain the second if you're dead. How might you end up dead, you may well be asking? Well, one way to help yourself to an early demise is to eat tainted food, or use defective products. The announcement today that the Chinese have recently closed 180 food production or processing plants for safety violations should give you some pause.

I mean, come on! Saving money is great, but at what real cost? It's patently obvious that the Chinese need more oversight in their economy if they are going to be exporting products to other nations. If they want to poison themselves, more power to them, but keep that crap at home, please! With new tales of Chinese product recalls, from pet food to tires, surfacing on an almost daily basis, you should think next time you decide to grab that can of fish from Wal-Mart.

According to news reports, Chinese director of quality control, a Mr. Han Yi, said “These are not isolated cases” when describing the number of illegal production facilities uncovered during a recent investigation. Why did he say this? Because they found an astounding 23,000 different products that were substandard or out right contaminated. What did they find in the foods? Oh, nothing, really, unless you worry about industrial chemicals in your chicken and veggies. If you're a fan of imported victuals from our red friends west of Taiwan, you should know the actual contaminants found include formaldehyde, mineral oil and paraffin.

Mr. Yi's right, these are not isolated incidents. According to the New York Times (as much as I hate to give them any credit) in 2005 companies were found to be repackaging food waste products and selling them as fresh. Yum! If you feed your baby Chinese milk powder based formula, know that problems were found with that as well.

If American consumers, and those of every other nation were smart, we'd stop buying Chinese food products at once. It's bad enough to sabotage our economic futures by relying so heavily on (mostly one way) trade with China, and sending so much of our money there, but we could at least hope our people won't be poisoned for their troubles. You may think you're getting a great deal and saving money, but what's the real cost?

That ignores that many Chinese food products are produced using slave labor, which is the primary reason they are so inexpensive. The largest cost component of many products is labor. It stands to reason that if you can reduce that (or eliminate it entirely), you'll be able to undercut your competition. Yes, China has a huge market that American companies would greatly benefit from tapping. It would help our trade imbalance tremendously if we could get some of our money back for a change, but if the cost of our firms doing business in China is that we must import the crap they are sending us for dinner, the cost is too high.