Children's toys, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act and the lawmakers' intentions

Toys R Congress. WSJ Editorial
Ruining the kids motorcycle business
WSJ, Apr 03, 2009

Last year's Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act was supposed to make children safer by reducing the risk of lead poisoning in toys. Instead, the new law has become a case study in how hastily written regulation can club the economy and reduce consumer safety.

This bill was passed by wide margins in Congress and signed into law by President Bush in the aftermath of the controversy over lead paint in imported toys from China. The new law, which took effect in February, establishes strict limits on lead levels in products for children. Never mind that in 2008 only one American child was injured from lead poisoning from toys.

What few on Capitol Hill anticipated was how the new law would devastate the domestic toy industry. According to the American Toy Association, the new rules will cost retailers and toy makers an estimated $2 billion for compliance and removing children's products from the shelves even though they pose no real health threat. Even old children's books are being cleared from stores and libraries.

The multibillion-dollar children's motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle industry has been clobbered. Kids motorcross racing has boomed in recent years in rural and Western states. And the regulators at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) have decided that virtually all of these youth vehicles violate the new standards because of lead in the brakes, tire valves and gears. They've ordered motorcycle dealers to stop selling them, putting hundreds of dealers and the entire motorcross industry in a depression. With one stroke of the regulatory pen, an estimated $100 million of inventory can't be sold, and the industry loss may reach $1 billion.

While safety concerns need to be paramount, there is virtually zero threat of lead poisoning from riding a motorcycle. One study by Dr. Barbara Beck of Harvard finds that a youth's intake of lead from riding a motorcycle is less than the amount from drinking water. Even the CPSC admits in a letter to Congress that the lead-intake risk from youth motorcycles is "remote at best."

The introduction in recent years of smaller cycles for kids under 12 has increased safety by replacing heavier cycles more prone to accident and more severe injury. According to a study by the Motorcycle Industry Council, "90% of the youth fatalities and injuries on motorcycles occur when kids ride adult vehicles." Those are what kids will ride if the CPSC ban stays in effect. Ken Luttrell, a Democratic state house member from Oklahoma, says, "With these new regulations, Washington has only succeeded in making biking much more dangerous for kids."

The inane regulations are leading to a backlash against Congress and the CPSC. A resolution calling for a year delay in implementing the new law so the industry has time to adjust passed the Oklahoma legislature 101-0 last week. Missouri and Nevada legislatures have passed similar resolutions. California's burgeoning cycle community is so enraged that some motorcycle dealers are openly defying the sales ban. On Wednesday a coalition of toy users and manufacturers held a rally in Washington to "stop the toy ban."

But so far the folks in Washington aren't interested in what families or employers think. Henry Waxman, a scourge of private business and ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses even to hold hearings. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has called for a major increase in the CPSC budget. Don't you feel safer already?