Boy, I’d like to see a Republican candidate kick around the Chinese for lead-paint-tainted toys the way Hillary Clinton does.
I recognize that her recommendations, below the fold, may end up just adding more product safety inspectors, and may be just one more round of Hillary’s endless expansion of the federal workforce. I recognize that if American consumers associate Chinese goods with lead poisoning in their kids, the market for American-made safe toys will boom in coming years and Chinese imports may stop appearing on the shelves of American stores. But in the meantime, I don’t mind a little regulatory saber-rattling when a combination of American toy companies’ enthusiasm for outsourcing production, and traditional Chinese quality control combine to put lead-lined toys in todder’s mouths.
Hillary’s recommendations:
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- Immediately require independent third-party testing for at-risk imported toys to ensure they are safe before they can be put on our shelves and sold.
- Dramatically increase the number of product inspectors and deploy them as part of a strategy to meet the threat posed by imported toys.
- Establish a complete ban on lead in children’s products.
- Increase and enforce both civil and criminal penalties for violators.
- Require selected companies to pay a bond pending completion of third party testing to protect consumers and taxpayers from fly-by-night foreign importers.
- Improve our system of toy recalls so that parents get swift notification and companies face swift sanctions if they don’t remove recalled products from their shelves.
I’m a small-government guy, but government ought to do the things that individuals and the private sector can’t. A Consumer Product Safety Commission that detects lead in the paint of a shipment of toys before 967,000 of them end up on store shelves shouldn’t be too much to ask.