Apparently, it’s not just children’s toys made in China that have been coated with unsafe lead paint.  A recent ABC news item reveals that at least two Chinese factories shipped contaminated steel to the U.S., and that the steel may have been installed in buildings or condominiums. AAM has previously noted that production outsourced to China typically utilizes a corner-cutting, low-cost approach.  And since lead-based paint costs less than lead-free paint, some Chinese factories have found it economically advantageous to use the leaded paint when coating steel products. Not so in the United States, where lead paint is almost universally banned from production due to potential health hazards. The United States imported 2.6 million tons of finished steel from China in 2006.  Identifying the lead-tainted steel will pose difficulties, and any resulting clean-up efforts could prove extremely costly.  There are tradeoffs to globalization.  As AAM reported in its ‘Enforcing the Rules’ study, good-paying U.S. jobs offers far greater benefits to the overall economy than the fleeting appeal of illegally subsidized imports.  The health hazards of these unregulated imports offers yet another example of outsourcing’s drawbacks.