It’s been a while since we’ve blogged about the unnecessary and extraordinary harm done by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the 2008 legislation that has driven safe products off the market, effectively banned pre-1985 children’s books, and forced thrift stores to remove toys and winter coats from their shelves.

Hugh Hewitt, in his interview with NAM President John Engler Tuesday, reminds us of the CPSIA’s swath of economic damage, even as the radio host makes a broader point. From the transcript:

HH: Now this brings me to the key question, Governor, because a couple of my law partners, Gary Wolensky and Liz McNulty do a lot of time advising companies about the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, I know how botched up that is. I know how it’s ruined manufacturing and destroyed competitiveness, et cetera. A lot of people like me don’t really trust Congress to do any of this well. If they can’t handle something as simple as lead levels and phthalate levels in products, how could they possibly get this right?

Good question. A powerful enemy of economic recovery is uncertainty, the doubts of businesses, investors and the public about government’s intentions. If you’ve followed the impact of the CPSIA — a bill passed with overwhelming Congressional support — then it’s reasonable to fear much larger legislative adventures like health care reform or government control of carbon dioxide.

At least the excesses of the CPSIA have finally — finally! — created a consensus that Congress must act. The Consumer Product Safety Commission on January 15 sent a report to Congress about the law’s implementation, a communication that included a call for a legislative action that embraced. (Congress had requested the commission’s recommendations in the conference report on the CPSC’s appropriations bill, included in the DOT spending bill.)

John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program Tuesday to discuss “Jobs for America,” the new Milken Institute study that details the economic case for policies that will encourage competitiveness and growth of the U.S. manufacturing sector.

The program has posted a transcript of the interview — transcripts being one of the reasons we really like Hugh’s site, www.hughhewitt.com –and here’s an exchange.

HH: Now it’s a great report. It’s almost forty pages long, full of facts, full of details. What’s the key takeaway, Governor? I mean, people should go read it at the Milken Institute website, and I’m sure NAM’s got a link to it, too.

JE: We do, both Milken and NAM have links to this. We’re sending it all over Washington today to every member of Congress, to anybody that we think can influence Congress.

But bottom line, of course, it recognizes I think something your show knows well. Government doesn’t create jobs. Business creates the jobs, and we need to encourage that to happen.

And the report, I think, does something that we’ve needed to do for some time, and I’m just pleased that the NAM could have engaged the Milken Institute to get this done. We really go into the numbers. We dive deeply and say look, if you reduce corporate tax rates, if you make the R & D credit better, make it permanent, if you modernize our system of export controls, guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to create jobs, if we do all three of those things, nearly a million new manufacturing jobs, and nearly three million total jobs right there. And we’re going to add significantly to GDP. This is over a ten year period.

But the implications of this are very clear for Congress. What we need to do is encourage this investment, and get the private sector working. That’s how we get the economy moving.

Thanks, Hugh.

The Washington Post today leads its front page with a story, “Public Option gains support,” a story based on a Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

Attorney, law professor and talk show host Hugh Hewitt examines the polling methodology and reports the sample:

Only 20 percent of adults identify themselves as Republicans, little changed in recent months, but still the lowest single number in Post-ABC polls since 1983. Political independents continue to make up the largest group, at 42 percent of respondents; 33 percent call themselves Democrats.

ABC News/Washington Post pollsters called just over a thousand people, only found 20% who said they were Republicans, and they think it’s news that Obamacare is now winning the day in American public opinion overwhelmingly. I’m stunned. I think I need to go lie down.

Hewitt notes that Rasmussen reported that at the end of September of this year, the party breakdown in the country was 32.1% Republican, 37.5% Democrat. If all the rest were independents, you’d get 30.4% independent.

It’s always been a matter of principle for mainstream journalists to insist “We don’t make up the news.” But every story based on public opinion surveys blows that claim out of the water.

Here, by the way, is the .pdf text of Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill, released the week after the committee approved the measure.  It’s 1,502 pages.

UPDATE (10:40 a.m.): Kellyanne Conway (president & CEO of the polling company™, inc./WomanTrend) does a deeper analysis of Washington Post poll:

Asking an under-informed public in a poll about “public option” is incomplete. It calls for a response to feel-good phraseology rather than a probing of underlying ideology. “Public option” in health care is not so different from “campaign finance reform,” “Violence Against Women’s Act,” “revenue enhancements” or for that matter, “world peace’ and “no rain this Saturday.”

Radio talk show host, lawyer and law professor Hugh Hewitt is making the need for tort reform a central part of his public speeches these days, including remarks he’ll give Tuesday in San Diego at a meeting of California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. From HughHewitt.com, “The Unemployment Costs Of Our Tort Law System“:

[Even] though I am not a products liability/catastrophic injury lawyer, six of my partners are, and I live the practice with them, know its challenges, and know especially that we have turned America into a tort happy culture, as one would expect if you watch as much cable news as I do and see as many adds for personal injury lawyers as air every day on Fox and CNN.  We are awash in lawsuits, and it is killing not only American manufacturing, but also various service industries where customers come to be entertained or fed or both.  We have been hearing about the high cost of defensive medicine and the burden it places on health care system, and that is indeed a staggering cost, but the same suffocating burden is carried by every industry making things in America or providing food or entertainment, and it drains profits and productivity away from production and growth and thus away from jobs.

As national unemployment creeps towards 10%, remind everyone who points to it as an urgent issue that sustained job growth requires rising productivity, and that is going to require (1)an overhaul of our tort laws in every state and (2)the willingness of corporate America to push back and try cases, not settle them with quick payouts to phoney plaintiffs.  You simply cannot be serious about job growth without seriousness on the issue of repairing our busted tort system.

All praise to radio talk show host, lawyer, and law professor Hugh Hewitt, who has labored hard to spread the word about the disastrous economic and personal harm caused by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. On Friday, he interviewed Rick Woldenberg of Learning Resources, Inc., a leading activist calling for CPSIA reform, and the three-segment discussion covered all the law’s problems from A to X. (Y and Z are still out there waiting to make themselves known.)

We posted on the interview Saturday, and now Hugh Hewitt has made the transcript available. Thank you! (See also his post: “When Congress Screws Up: ESA, CPSIA and Obamacare.”)

Read the whole thing, but for now here’s the section about tracking labels. The NAM appreciates the mention, Hugh.

HH: Now in terms of the labeling, the tracking label requirement that we talked about during the break, it is effective August 14^th. Explain to the audience when you got word on how to implement the requirement.

RW: Two days ago.

HH: See, no one’s going to believe that, because it’s so absurd.

RW: Well, and there’s been a great deal of interaction with the agency about tracking labels. You know, I must say candidly, the agency has been put in a situation where they always look bad on this kind of thing, and I don’t really want to jump on their back for it. Yes, it’s really unfortunate that it took 11 ½ months, but I will say it’s not like the agency had nothing else to do. They were given a lot of simultaneous, impossible requirements to meet. The mistake I believe that the agency has made is not just admitting that it took too long, and then slow the process down to allow for the kind of discussion with industry, and the time for a smooth, reasonable implementation that a process like this would require. The idea that you can put a six page document out three weeks before it’s due, and that that would make everything okay just doesn’t make any sense. It effects 60% of the economy.

Lawyer, law professor and talk show host Hugh Hewitt tells you what business will have to consider if Congressional health care legislation (it’s not necessarily “reform”) includes a public option. From, “What will your employer choose for you?,” published in today’s D.C. Examiner:

Some of my law firm’s clients and some executives in my broadcast audience are quietly preparing for the necessary analysis that will follow the passage of Obamacare by asking their personnel departments the obvious question: Will it make economic sense to discontinue health care coverage for my employees and instead push them into the government plan?

These employers –manufacturers, builders, entrepeneuers of all sorts– cannot yet get an answer to this question because they don’t have any specifics about costs from which they can make an informed decision.

But they all know they will have to “do the math” if the “government option/public plan” makes it into law. They cannot not do so for they owe shareholders and investors an objective assessment of what will improve their bottom lines.

There are indeed U.S.-based manufacturers, smaller and medium-sized ones mostly, who like the idea of single-payer health care because it would lift a heavy burden from their companies. When your company’s costs for providing employee health care rise in double digits every year you’re willing to grab anything as a lifeline, even if it comes in the form of an inefficient, low-quality government-run system.

From Gino DiCaro of California Manufacturers and Technology Association, “Why Not California # 9 - Gregg Industries?: “Last week a single phrase shrewdly captured the state’s job woes: ‘California is catering to so many special interests, it has lost its focus on the common interest.’”

DiCaro has been writing on “Why Not California?” for some time now, and the latest entry is about business recruitment: Nevada woos manufacturers, California drives them out. His recurring theme is the anti-business tax and regulatory climate created by the state’s lawmakers and other elected officials. Consider all the “green jobs” going to other states, DeCaro noted in an earlier entry:

Could one of the main answers be that business costs are so high in California that we will never see significant green investments; that workers in other states will be the chief beneficiaries of California’s environmental mandates and that California’s brightest and best are fleeing to states that put a high priority on economic growth?  The latest cost of doing business survey by the Milken Institute finds that operating costs for California manufacturers are 38 percent higher than for their competitors in Tennessee.  Is it any wonder that investments in industries that create high-wage jobs routinely bypass California?

The state is suffering yet another budget crisis, and elected leaders in Sacramento have put multibillion dollar tax increases before the state’s voters on May 19. California-based talk show host Hugh Hewitt looks at the latest poll numbers and concludes that voters are going to reject the tax increases by large margins.

Hugh’s a partisan and he often offers advice to California and national Republicans, but partisan politics notwithstanding, he’s right on with this analysis. Washington is taking America down California’s path, and it’s a doomed direction economically and politically:

The important lesson in the California melt-down and the voters reaction top it and rejection of a tax-hike solution set is that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are following strategies very similar to those adopted by Sacramento.  People like the president just as they liked Arnold when he was elected and then re-elected.

But they hate high taxes and lousy services, complicated government schemes to regulate their businesses and their lives, and especially deceitful, self-serving posturing by elected officials. Arnold is now about as highly esteemed as Gray Davis before him.  Like Arnold, President Obama has started his time in office with high popularity, but that popularity won’t protect his electability when the public absorbs the fact that the taxes he is planning are even more staggering than those imposed in the Golden State, and the government growth he is engineering even more vast than that which has occured on the west coast.

It’s important to include the Californian-run U.S. House in this analysis. It’s almost as if there’s a strategy to make the rest of the United States as uncompetitive as California. Higher taxes, expensive energy, rigid labor markets and crushing regulations nationwide could marginally improve the Golden State’s position within the country but are a disaster in the global economy.

Hugh Hewitt, law professor, blogger and radio talk show host, invited National Association of Manufacturers John Engler on the his program last night to talk about the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. (They continued on for a second segment about EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.)

Hewitt has taken the lead among radio hosts in highlighting the excesses of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. As radio topics go, it’s a natural: Government excess putting small business owners out of business, outdoor enthusiasts hit by the hammer of government regulation, children’s books being destroyed, and Congressional leadership pretending there’s not a problem.

The segment is available here as an audio file. The CPSIA segment starts at about 14:30 in, and we’ve taken the liberty of transcribing the interview.

HH: Let’s turn to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. For many, many weeks now I’ve covered on the program using my expert, Gary Wolensky, who’s a lawyer with Snell & Wilmer, a series of interviews – and I’ve also had the Chairman, Nancy Nord, on the program – about the idiocy that is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

Over at the National Association of Manufacturers, you’ve got a great blog that covers this. Where are we with this? Are you making progress in getting the Congress to listen and fix this law?

ENGLER: You know, I think we’re making some progress with rank and file members of Congress. But this is one where the leadership has simply got to acknowledge they made a mistake. They botched the bill, and they’ve got to change it, and they’ve got to back off on some of this tight implementation. We’re not talking about putting people and kids at risk here. We’re saying that this is a regulatory scheme that’s so pervasive, and it’s right down to hitting mom and pop.

We had the big rally. You covered that and did a wonderful job. I mean, we had these companies – three, four people! … This is like going after the lady that bakes the pie for the VFW fish fry or the church social. Some of these products that we’re trying to regulate, it’s just overkill.

For the transcript of the full segment in .pdf, click here. The NAM’s Engler suggests Speaker Pelosi ask Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) to step in and solve the political and legal headache.

And thanks for saying nice things about Shopfloor, Hugh!

John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, will be interviewed on the Hugh Hewitt radio show this evening — 8:20 p.m. Eastern, 5:20 p.m. Pacific and adjust accordingly. We’ll be listening via live Internet stream from KNUS News/Talk radio in Denver, Colorado.

Here’s the link for the live stream. Or try KLRA-870 in Los Angeles.

The topic is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, an issue that Hugh has worked hard to inform his listeners about. And so has the NAM.

And so has Walter Olson, who has the latest news about the CPSC voting to stay the enforcement of the lead-content restrictions on ATVs.

It’s going to take an act of Congress to bring dirtbikes, kid-size ATVs and similar motorized vehicles back into the legal sunlight. In the mean time, though, the CPSC has consented to let them venture back out into a half-legal and temporary twilight. That’s the upshot of the commission’s new pair of decisions, in which it’s 1) granting a temporary stay of enforcement on the vehicles, just as in February it granted such a temporary stay with respect to some of CPSIA’s most impractical testing obligations for manufacturers, while 2) refusing to accord the recreational vehicles an actual exemption from the law. Because of the latter refusal, sale and service of the vehicles will continue to be in violation of the law’s terms, and dealers and families will have to hope that the 50 state attorneys general agree to follow the federal agency’s lead in forbearing from enforcing the law for the time being. [Motorcycle Industry Council; StopTheBanNow.com; documents at "What's New" section of agency site]

National radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, a lawyer and law professor, has been doing his best to keep the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act’s economic harm front and center in the public policy debate. In a column today in The Examiner, he points out what off-road vehicle enthusiasts have been saying for months: By banning ATVs and minibikes and the like designed for children’s use, the law will encourage kids to ride bigger, adult-sized motorcycles. The result will be injuries and death.

From “Voting to kill and injure kids: A congressional CYA endangers children“:

It is embarrassing to admit that such a well-intentioned law has gone so badly wrong, but is wounded pride enough to keep Nancy Pelosi –a grandmother– from acting to stop a real threat of real injury and death to children? 

Apparently so. The reluctance of Congress to do a small but urgently necessary correction to an overbroad law is a warning of what to expect when its massively much more complicated “health care reform” kicks in and the law of unintended consequences begins to roll forward.