I think we agree on the larger issue at hand, but we disagree on the means to solve it. It’s not that *big* government is the problem, per se–but *wasteful* government. A government that spends billions of tax dollars on contracting companies that overcharge for every little thing, while scrimping on the budgets for its agencies and facilities, is big, but is it accomplishing anything?

I don’t know if you’ve ever actually worked for the government. I have. Let me tell you, you’ll be changing your tune after you see some of the crappy, decrepit, substandard buildings and equipment people are forced to do their jobs with and in. The money that’s being spent to build a petrodollar empire in Iraq could be spent paying government employees decent salaries and upgrading their facilities to the 21st Century.

I think that rather than simply cutting budgets, the public would be better served with much more aggressive oversight of gov’t spending and redirecting money away from earmarks and cushy pet projects to where it’s supposed to be–doing the work of the people.

Let’s take a look at this from a different perspective. Playing devils advocate here. Ok, so we more than double the CSPC’s budget. Now what? Tell me what the CSPC is going to do to fix the problem. Truth is: nothing. Only thing you will get for your money is a false sense of security. Congress gets to pat themselves on the back and the American people get to go back to watching American Idol on TV feeling snuggly that the CSPC is on the case, when in fact creating large bureaucracies are actually counter productive. All of our problems actually come full circle to big government. We are in Iraq due to big government. Thanks to the Federal Reserve and reckless spending we need to have a way to prop up our dollar that isn’t really very valuable in the sense of a sound hard currency. How do we do that? We go to war with countries that would attempt to undermine one of the major stabilizing instruments of our currency: the Petrodollar. If we had sensible monetary policy and smaller government we wouldn’t be in Iraq in the first place and we wouldn’t need to import everything from China because it would make economic sense to do it here.

The problem is that the massive outbreaks in recalls, tainted food, and product defects comes from the precise notion you cite–that industry regulates itself. It does not.

The entire reason why these industries are profitable now is because they have offshored their production and supply to nations that have no comparable regulatory and health standards to our own. When the products are manufactured completely outside the U.S, and the regulatory authority designed to oversee them is crippled into utter inefficiency, is it any wonder why this happens?

I’m completely in favor of authorizing consumer groups to act as third-party testers and regulators on product safety. That’s absolutely the right of it. But it has to work hand in hand with governmental law that enforces penalties for those who cut corners.

Would you rather pay taxes to ensure your kids are safe or for a boondoggle like Iraq? I know what I pick.

I respectfully disagree with you. You would have us believe that it’s a good idea to raise our taxes by spending more money on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an ineffective bloated bureaucracy with a 63 Million dollar budget, 470 employees, and as Nancy Pelosi points out – one person assigned to safety testing toys. It’s naive to think that throwing more money at this will some how make them more effective. There is a saying for that and it’s called “throwing good money after bad”. A better plan would be to disband the Consumer Product Safety Commission and place the burden of product safety where it belongs. Require that goods coming in to the US be certified safe by both the manufacturer and the import company. Then base China’s import tariff on their safety record. For every product that comes over that breaks our safety regulations, the tariff for all incoming products from China goes up. That would put huge pressures on manufactures in China and the Chinese government to self regulate. Thinking that you are gaining some sort of security by trying to funnel the testing of products through the ‘Consumer Product Safety Commission’ is just plain stupid. I saw that this issue is pushing through a budget expansion to $143 Million dollars. So, if a 63 Million dollar budget bought us one person to test all the toys for safety coming in to the US, does that mean that we will now be able to pay for 2.3 people safety test the flow of toys from China?

Geoff M.

Funny…Nord was previously a lawyer and Director of Federal Affairs for Kodak – a company that was eviscerated and outsourced to near oblivion. (Don’t even ask about their environmental record).