NEW LAWS = National Bankruptcy Day!

Of course, we all want to keep our children safe and we trust the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commision) to ensure we are not endangering our kids with the items we buy them. However, Congress has gone a little overboard on the new law regarding children's products being tested for lead. Although the laws are very vague as to what needs to be tested and only mentions "durable" items, many responses from the CPSC imply that anything manufactured for children under the age of 12 years old, must be tested by a 3rd party for lead. This means that all clothing and custom boutique items made from home studio's must be tested, at a cost of $50-$300 per item, prior to sale of that item and a certificate, showing that it complies with the minimum lead requirements, must accompany that product. What does this boil down to? No more custom boutique creations! We are small businesses, mostly comprised of moms that work from home to help bring in some income to help our family survive, and we cannot afford to send our items out for testing prior to sale. In addition, this means consignment shops and even retail stores, will have to dispose of thousands of dollars worth of inventory that is considered "banned" because it was not tested when it was manufactured. This means those of you that like to resell your gently used children's clothing on sites like ebay will no longer be able to because they were never tested for lead. No more custom hair bows or jewelry or handpainted shoes to dress up your little ones for those special days! And this does not just effect us little guys either.
Large corporations like Gap, Ralph Lauren, Gymboree....must test each end product that is produced. So, even if they make 7 styles of jeans in 10 different sizes using the same materials, one pair of each style in each size will have to be tested (or each batch produced) Wowza!! That's a lot of tests each day, especially since the economy is already struggling with reduced retail sales. Is this the same Congress that is bailing out large corportaions and trying to figure out how to stop all of the forclosures and business failures? HMMMMM...
So, what can we do? Write to our local congress and tell them how ridiculous this new law is and hope that we can make a difference. All of these imports from other countries that contained high amounts of lead have prompted our Congress to react drastically and now they are going to bring our economy down even more!! Make a difference and help small businesses stay alive!!

There are many blogs and sites that address this, but I found this site to have some interesting information:
http://nationalbankruptcyday.com/