Letter to Congressman Paul Ryan

Posted by Valerie on January 16, 2009

Congressman Paul Ryan
20 S. Main Street, Suite 10
Janesville, WI  53545

cc: hslda.org

Dear Congressman Ryan,

I invite you to read this excellent article at Forbes.com–
Scrap The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act

Thank you so much for your good letter to the CPSC regarding CPSIA. We are grateful for anything that can be done about this legislation, but to be honest, we would prefer to see protections for parents and retailers built into the law now. We’d rather not be left hoping that the law will not eventually be enforced against us as written.

The writer of the above article has read my heart: “I want to be legal.”

My husband and I own a small used bookstore in Clinton, Wisconsin, where we sell used and new children’s products including books, toys, puzzles, educational games, math manipulatives, science equipment, and other educational products for children. Mr. Ryan, our bookstore is the sole source of income for our family of thirteen. With CPSIA, we can’t legally sell used products unless we know that they have less than 600 ppm lead in every component, but we honestly cannot afford to test every old book, puzzle, board game, and science kit that we’d like to continue to stock here. We simply don’t have the resources to determine where 600 ppm lead might possibly lurk.

Jacobsen Books is a very small company and controlling our costs is a prerequisite for the ongoing viability of our business. Mr. Ryan, our family business doesn’t have the resources of Wal-Mart or Toys ‘r Us. What we have here, with this legislation, is an unreasonable burden on our consciences, as retailers. We look around at all of our worthwhile children’s products–and we really don’t know what to do. We don’t like to think that we could be breaking the law come February 10th, but we also don’t like to think about discarding a wealth of educational products “just in case.”

As I said, we’re a family of thirteen. My husband and I have eleven children ages 18 to 2. In this economy, our family already feels the pinch, but in the future we cannot expect things to get better if the cost of making every kind of children’s products is increased. We sincerely doubt that it was really necessary to create more expenses for every kind of children’s product, more expenses for every children’s manufacturer, and more expenses for every children’s retailer. Who will need a bailout when little dresses, pants, shirts, shoes, toys, and games all increase in price, all at about the same time?

Mr. Ryan, my husband and I home school our children. Many of the products that are used for home schooling in the United States are made by very small American publishers and very small American manufacturers. A product that works for an age-graded class of twenty-five in a school housing 1000 children is not always the best product for use in a multi-graded family home school.

This is probably not widely known, but homeschooling publishers and manufacturers are already very challenged by the realities of small batch sizes. Even before the increased burden created by CPSIA, small batch sizes have made it very difficult to maintain reasonable unit cost for homeschooling products. For the same size and type of book or game or toy, homeschooling companies have production costs that far outstrip the big companies’ on a unit basis. Many homeschooling products are already more expensive and more difficult to market for this reason, and this legislation will create an enormous, further burden for the small publishers and small manufacturers that serve our community.

Extrapolate from homeschooling to special needs of various kinds and all kinds of home manufacture, and you will see that an unintended burden has been created wherever a small batch size exists.

CPSIA did exempt cotton and wool–but only provided that the resulting fabric is untreated, unprinted, and uncolored. Mr. Ryan, as a father, you know that this exemption is not helpful and does not represent a speck of relief for children’s manufacturers. After weeks of letters, phone calls, meetings, and investigations, we see that the CPSC has exempted, along with untreated wood and untreated cotton, precious and semiprecious stones. This combination of exemptions makes us wonder whether the commissioners have met any parents or children in their investigations!

CPSIA will harm small businesses and it will very likely result in the loss of some important, useful products. As the new versions of some products disappear from the market, we at Jacobsen Books will be left wrestling with our consciences over what we can and cannot legally sell. We don’t know, and we can’t afford to test. What do I do, Mr. Ryan, with a children’s microscope that was manufactured before 2-10-2009? I am not a chemist, and I do not have a laboratory. Even if I did, how much time can I invest on each piece of used educational equipment that I stock?

Mr. Ryan, God gave my children parents to protect them, and God did not give the government the authority to take our place. My husband has lead solder in his toolbox, and he lets his little boys, who are 6 and 5 years old, help him with repairs. He teaches them to help, and he teaches them to wash their hands. We like being parents here, and we want the continued freedom to *be the parents* to our children.

Yes, the United States needed to do something to keep lead-laced products from coming into our country, but it wasn’t lack of regulation that created this problem in the first place. The problem, as I understand it, was a lack of enforcement. If lack of regulation didn’t let those other dangerous toys into our country, then why would more regulation prevent future dangers? As Americans, we were all appalled when the big box companies did not properly supervise their foreign factories and imported lead-tainted products into our country, but this legislation gives the mass production companies, who were primarily at fault in 2007, an even greater advantage over their small competitors.

We like to see punishments fit crimes. If small businesses are oppressed by this legislation and cannot afford to do what mega-manufacturers can easily accomplish, then the result will look a lot like a reward.

Please don’t leave it up to the CPSIA to decide not to enforce this against us. We don’t want to be left alone to quietly break the law. WE WANT TO BE LEGAL.

Sincerely,

Valerie Jacobsen
Jacobsen Books
244 Allen Street, P. O. Box 247
Clinton, WI 53525
(608) 676-6000