Here we go again!

In an effort to protect our children from the dangerous toys being important by large multinational corporations, the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC), lacking the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US, passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008.

Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys and mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and can easily update their molds to include batch labels.

The costs of mandatory testing, up to $4,000 per toy, will likely drive small American, Canadian, and European toymakers out of business. The handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, too, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.

Unless the law is modified, handmade toys will effectively no longer be legal in the US.

The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of toys that have earned and kept the public's trust and thriving small businesses are crucial to the financial health of our nation. Let's amend the CPSIA so that all businesses large and small are able to comply and survive!