It's surprising that US manufacturers aren't getting more attention for tainted dog food, hygiene products and toys. Everyone knows that some suppliers will take shortcuts, and that suppliers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and other places will take more shortcuts than most. So why isn't the press burning US manufacturers who failed to test products that they knew could have problems?

Some have called for the Feds to be responsible for testing all imports. First, that's impossible for the Feds to do (they can't even be sure that there aren't dirty bombs in off-loaded shipping containers). Second, every citizen would have to pay for the testing (through taxes). Much better to hold vendors responsible for testing what they sell, and possibly for carrying appropriate levels of liability coverage for their businesses.

Requiring such stringent testing would cost a lot of money, driving up costs and prices. The current administration has made it fairly clear who it favors in the Industry interests vs. Consumer interests conflict.

One thing we learn from most of this recall stuff is that we now know there is no real reason for paying top dollar for the so-called top brands of anything. It's all made by one or two companies who put the different labels on it and one company just gouges the public more than the others based on their name recognition. It's all the same junk and there is no security in buying from the most prestigeous companies!

Pick the cheapest and save your hard earned dollars for other things you would like to have.

Why not make the non-US companies responsible for supplying US-compliant products to the US? Then the companies who purchase those products would be responsible for verifying their safety in all respects. Would that drive up the cost for the product? Certainly. Would it then be more economical for the US to buy from US vendors rather than send their $$ overseas? Quite possibly. It's a win-win situation for US consumers and US suppliers and seems like a no-brainer to me.

Why not make non-US companies responsible? Sounds reasonable, but it might be a lot simpler to make the people who sell the final products responsible, whether they're foreign or domestic.

We taxpayers would have to pay a fortune to track the paint, the plastics, the metals and the packaging individually. But if we concentrate on the folks who put it all together, the job gets a lot more manageable.

When it comes to penalties, how much do we think our courts can extract from a family-owned paint business operating out of the Pearl River Delta? Compare this to the chances of extracting penalties from Mattel, Purina and Johnson & Johnson.