Good regulations gone wrong

By Libby

 Mark at Publius Endures discovers a regulatory problem that he rightly notes should concern everyone, regardless of political ideology. It seems after the great toy scare of last year, Congress, with little debate or fanfare, enacted new testing regulations for all products designed for children. The problem is, the way the regs are written, they put an undue burden on small manufacturers and actually encourage importation of cheap junk from foreign countries. Mark explains:

This is, by the way, without regard to where the product was manufactured - domestic products, products made in China, products made in Hong Kong, and product made in Europe must all comply. While one must always be careful in trusting the data provided by interest groups, one group of affected small businesses says that the testing alone will likely run in the neighborhood of $4000 per product. Importantly, as far as I can tell, this testing needs to be conducted on each separate shipment of a product, meaning the business needs to pay the testing fee every time they bring in (or, if they are a manufacturer, send out) a new shipment.*

The marginal costs of these requirements are considerably smaller for larger - and more politically organized and powerful - companies, who can bring in larger shipments, and thus distribute the testing fees amongst a far larger quantity of products.

This also kind defeats the whole purpose of ensuring safety. Frankly I wouldn't put it past some of these manufacturers in China to find a way to slip in some shoddy lead filled toys since presumably they would only test a representative amount of the shipment.

Read the whole post. Clearly the regs hurt small business and favor corporations. I have no proof, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn the regulations were written by industry lobbyists. Mark tells us it's not too late to modify them and wonders if this isn't a project that Blogtopia could act together on. Certainly it would help if some of the bigger bloggers would get on board but in the interim, maybe some of us B-listers could generate some buzz.

Comments

[Mark]

Thanks, Libby for signing on! I'm expecting to have much more on this next week.