"Mr. Chairman, we are asking you to please find a way that our committee can spend a morning listening for the first time to honest people who don’t belong to influential organizations and who can’t afford to hire lobbyists, experts or spokespeople, and whose very real concerns were not noticed until it was almost too late."
The above is from a very moving letter to Chairman Waxman from Representatives Radanovich and Barton. The whole thing is well worth reading.
Here is one of those honest people that Congress should have heard from:
My business plans hinge upon the availability of certain products, the safety regulations in creating products, and the selling of certain products in various venues.
I have one supplier that is closed.
I have Christian book stores willing to sell my products...if they are allowed to stay open.
I buy my things in bulk, and need to know if I can use them past 10-11 months.
I am planning and creating items for next year, now. My etsy shop is small, but this is not my only venue.
We are part of this financial mess. We are not on the side. We are small business owners, facing more and more regulations from forced sick pay, to tighter (unnecessary) regulations of our products.
Politicians need to step back and ask: "Is this Bill necessary?" "Is it effective in its goal?" "What is the full range of consequences of this bill?"
To say it is for the better of the children, is a straw man argument. We all want what is best for children. Very few people in the world want to intentionally harm children. Even fewer wish to produce potentially harmful products. There are laws to punish those who are criminally negligent or outright dangerous.
Businesses are not investing in themselves. I am certainly not. I am putting off the purchase of a new machine and a new program, wondering what my future business plans may be. The future is uncertain, and this administration is doing little to give business motivation to go forward. Helping the poor with handouts is nice, helping to provide a job is better. Remember, small businesses account for over 80% of all jobs in the USA.
And the one place we may all be going… is out of business.
The writer is the Etsy seller "My Mother Mary." She makes sweet baby products- stuffed, squishy blocks, burp cloths, hats, blankets- and for every purchase you make, she donates a blanket to a crisis pregnancy center. If she can't sell, those babies don't get blankets. The people she would have purchased supplies from did not get those orders- a consequence Congress neither intended nor ever foresaw. A good many businesses plan their lines at least a year in advance, and Congress barely gave them six months- and then made the bans retroactive with no advance warning.
Businesses can no longer trust Congress. They cannot trust the legal ground on which they stand won't be yanked from under them in a second, and they cannot trust the regulatory climate, and when you cannot have any level of trust in these things, you cannot be on a firm business setting with the option of long range planning.
Haste makes waste, and what kind of waste did Congress create when it passed this law? In addition to the waste of talent, creativity, and business acumen as small crafters and large businesses alike have to turn their focus away from creating and selling products to beating their heads and fists against the Congressional brick wall, we have Billions of dollars of wasted products. Millions of items in landfills that would not otherwise have been there- and no environmental studies on the impact of these billions of dollars in product unexpectedly added to the landfills this year, thanks to the CPSIA. One billion dollars in March alone, suddenly removed from circulation.
You know the old saying, 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure?' Well, Congress married itself to the PIRG, Public Citizen, and other Naderite organizational (whose board members have largely never worked in the private sector) views of the 'Precautionary Principle,' and now businesses will be able to repent at leisure, which they will have in surplus, as they can't actually do much business.
You may remember this claim:
The same six phthalates banned by the CPSIA have been banned in European toys for nearly 10 years.made by last month Sarah Janssen, a blogger for the NRDC (the organization which sued to make the phthalate ban retroactive so that perfectly safe items in inventory turned into toxic trash the moment of the judge's ruling). This was ironic, as I pointed out to her, because the European toy company Select pulled out of the American market as the testing requirements here were burdensome, expensive, and effectively priced them out of the market. She did not respond, of course.
But it was even more ironic than I realized. Recently I came across a comment in another blog pointing out that Germany phased out their phthalates over a period of 3 years, permitting sellers to get rid of inventory and come up with alternative materials and processes, while here in America, we 'phased' it in by banning it within six months and applied the ban retroactively to inventory.
I started googling for more information on that. Over and over in my results I would find the term 'phasing out' used in connection with these bans- most countries eased into the ban by gradually phasing it out over time. The American ban was like an anesthesia free amputation performed with a hacksaw, compared to a more humane, sane, and reasonable gradual implementation in Europe. So it's really quite dishonest for NRDC or anybody else to tell us all wide-eyed and innocent, "But these are the same phthalates banned in Europe!"
In most countries the bans were for small children, children three and under, or children five and under. Denmark gave manufacturers a year past the ban to clear inventory. Another took ten years to phase out PVCs (I'm working on another post about the differing phasing out times for various countries- email me if you have data).
Meanwhile- our country took six months, and at the last minute companies were told that the phthalates ban did, after all, apply to inventory.
As Kathleen Fasanella tried to explain to PIRG et al:
Trade show dates are locked in for two, three, even four years in advance. It’s one thing to legislate manufacturers; how will you exercise influence over trade shows to reschedule events in keeping with the new, much longer production time line this law creates? Trade shows are held in convention centers owned by municipalities and it will be impossible to reschedule those dates to permit the necessary extension of time needed to permit repeated testing in product development. The unavoidable result is that trade shows themselves will be going out of business and affecting revenues of cities across the nation. The implications of this law are far greater than many imagine.
Because Congress pass this law without communicating with representatives from all the myriad businesses the law injures, or with any actual consumers rather than the puffed up self appointed consumer 'advocacy' or litigation groups, they have little understanding of what they have done. In the past, retailers have ordered months in advance- this year's clothes were already ordered before the CPSIA passed. Now stores are stuck, and they won't be stuck again. Kathleen believes they may never order any advance inventory again.
Had Congress communicated with ANYBODY in the used book business, or maybe just a homeschooling mom, they might have known better than this:
I just had an interesting conversation with Jared at the Senate Commerce Committee at 202-224-5115. Jared told me that the Commerce Committee had been unaware that pre-1985 children’s books (he knew about that restriction already) would still have commercial importance and ongoing value for children’s use. He asked me some very good questions and seemed interested in the children’s book market.
Unfortunately, when Carol Baicker-McKee spoke with him (comments section of above post), he:
was clearly sympathetic but also clear that we shouldn’t get our hopes up — there’s lots of pressure not to change this bill for fear of losing the legitimate protections in it.
He said it isn’t particularly helpful for other people to call or write simply to restate the same points of view; they are aware that many people are concerned about the threat to older books. They are however, interested in any relevant clinical studies.
Gee. It's a shame they weren't interested in the relevant clinical studies before they passed the law. They could have used them as a foundation to create a more informed law.
I'm afraid I don't find it a compelling argument that there's a significant risk that changing the bill will result in losing the legitimate protections. I don't see how that's likely. Pin It
