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NO MORE TOYS FROM SANTA
A ban on all products containing lead has cost billions of dollars and closed many small businesses. Have you noticed how difficult it is to find children's clothes with good zippers, buttons, or belts? A good bike today is hard to find. Toy cars now look cheap and no longer have brass axle collars. Goodwill and Salvation Army no longer carry winter coats with metal snaps on them.
The response was because of recalls of Chinese made toys with lead paint because of genuine lead risks in children’s toys. The Consumer Products Safety Commission in 2008 reacted and Congress subsequently produced a bill written with Congress’s usual rigid unscientific judgment.
The law, passed by Congress, however, went far beyond lead paint and resulted in a total ban of all children's products that contain any component with more than three one hundredths of one percent lead.
This meant that ordinary items as zippers, buttons, belts, hinges on a child's dresser, and even bicycles from Santa Claus are all outlawed. All of these products exceeded the legal lead limits, but unlike lead, which is on the surface, the ban included all leads contained within any metal or other substrate material. The lead could rub off these items in very tiny amounts, detectable only with very sensitive lab equipment. This lead, however, is not extractable and cannot be absorbed into a child's bloodstream.
In addition to banning these components the law imposes onerous product testing by outside labs that small manufacturers in handicraft makers simply cannot afford. Instead of spending money to expand and create their jobs, companies have diverges billions of dollars to destroy noncompliance and innocuous inventory to meet the complex new compliance obligations.
Goodwill and Salvation Army have disposed of over $270 million in secondhand children's clothing such as winter coats with metal snaps that are not affordable to test for compliance, but still are needed by many poor families.
Bicycle manufacturers make dozens of parts from expensive on environmentally friendly materials to replace handles spokes, tire valve stems, and other harmless metal parts that contain lead.
To cope with annual testing costs which run over half $1 million, domestic retailers have reduced their payrolls are limited to products they sell. Many have either closed shop or left the children apparel market completely.
This 2008 safety log cost businesses billions of dollars including more than $2 billion in the toy industry. There is an estimated $1 billion in annual losses by the motorcycle industry Council because of lost sales of children's model motorbikes and off-road vehicles. The German toy makers whose products comply with stringent EU regulations, have stopped selling toys in America. We consumers now are paying higher prices for a smaller variety of products that are no safer than before.
The commission decisions have made other matters worse. The statute on the observability of lead is so inflexible, that no children's product could qualify for it. Brass axle collars on toy cars are banned even though they have less lead than the food and drug administration allows in a piece of candy.
The Federal commissioners argue the statute past ties to her hands. The members of Congress who wrote flexibility into the law blame the commissioners. Commissioners refuse to reach out to Congress to seek clarification of the law. Congress now asks the consumer products safety commission for a list of their recommendations to amend the statute.
Congress now must consider common sense changes as allowing for higher lead content in products like bicycles were a very tiny amount could possibly be absorbed, allow the commission to focus on efforts on genuine risks to children, lower the age range covered by the law so 12-year-old children in 12-month-old babies are not treated the same, and eliminating the retroactive effect of the law which affects libraries and thrift shops as Goodwill and Salvation Army.
A change in this law will require a bipartisan fix. Is that possible with this Congress? Children must be protected from harmful products without blowing away our American economy. This law has already cost more jobs, especially in small businesses, that must help lead our country out of recession.
COMMENTARY
We consumers now are paying higher prices for a smaller variety of products that are no safer than before. Is the above example of poorly written laws, an example of how congress will handle restrictions on medical care?
Source; WSJ 12.24.09
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