The CPSIA Shoves the Poor Off a Cliff

Deputy Headmistress has been kind enough to let us cross-post her personal story. The original and her other knowledgeable and helpful posts about the CPSIA can be found on her blog The Common Room.

In 1992 we had three little girls, ages 2, 8, and 9.  My husband was serving out his enlistment in the Air Force, and I was a sahm.  You may have heard rumours about how little enlisted men get paid.  Those rumours?  They are mostly true.

We weren’t seeking adoption at all, but we heard of two little girls who needed a home together, and we just couldn’t come up with a good reason to say no.   One of the children was severely handicapped, and it was unlikely anybody would take on both of them (nearly 4 and 6 at the time) because of the severity of those disabilities. The birth-mother did not want them separated. And so, over the objections of everybody sensible that we knew, we opened our home to this unplanned blessing.

Unplanned?  Surely, of all the ways to add to a family, ‘unplanned adoption’ doesn’t make much sense- how is that even possible?  It’s funny to call an adoption unplanned, but it really was. What little planning we were able to do came to naught. We were supposed to take the children for weekends over a period of a few months so they could get used to us.   On the Wednesday before the first weekend visit, the birth mother telephoned and called off the adoption.  We notified our friends and relations.  The following day she called and asked the caseworker what time we were picking the girls up.  The case worker asked her what had changed. She had her reasons, and I won’t go into them here, but she did have their very best interests at heart, so the caseworker gave her a time.  And then she dropped a bombshell. “I want you to come and pick them up tomorrow,” the birth-mother said, “but not for a visit.  They need to go to their new parents now, and not come back.”

So… we went to bed with three children and the next morning suddenly gained two more children who came to us with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some immediate and distressing but treatable medical problems, and some longterm and severe medical problems- again, just two weeks before Christmas. We had no clothes for them, no beds, no presents; nothing was in readiness for them, except our hearts (and even those needed some sprucing up). (If you are interested in the longer version of our adoption story, see here.

They came on a Friday.  We went shopping on a Saturday.  Where did we go shopping?  Thrift shops, of course.  We had an immediate and urgent need for clothing, toys, and bedding for two new children, and we lived on an enlisted man’s salary.  It was only two weeks before Christmas.  The thrift shop enabled us to fill the gap between our income and our needs.

We dressed our five girls from thrift shops, consignment stores, and yard sales over the next several years.  Now they dress themselves largely from the same sources- ‘new’ clothes are supplementary.  Not only does this help their budgets, but it also is a culturally and environmentally beneficial practice.

Clothing, books, and toys purchased from thrift shops do not come with all the extra external packaging that new items do.  They are bagged in used bags donated by the public.  They arrive at the thrift shop instead of at a landfill by means of donations.  Many times stores will donate unsold inventory to thrift shops.  These are items that do not contribute toward further burdening of landfills.

Thrift store shopping is culturally beneficial as it teaches children thrift, and is a direct reproach to the consumer oriented materialism of our culture.

Thrift store shopping benefits charities- most thrift shops are run by and for charities and provide job training and other support to those in need.

And thrift store shopping directly benefits the poor- thousands of others, as we did, fill the gap between what they make and what they need by shopping for necessities such as warm coats, hats, boots, snowpants, hats and scarves at thrift shops.   Boots, bikes, and balls can be purchased used anywhere from 1/2 to about a tenth of their price new.  The impact of the CPSIA on the poor is devastating.
One reason for this legislative blind spot, I believe, is that politicians and special interest groups like PIRG and Public Citizen have little understanding of what it means to have no margin of error.

And this is important to remember- when you are poor the margin for error is so very, very thin that the consequence of what seems to some to be a very small error in judgment or very small increased cost due to poorly thought out legislation such as the CPSIA is disproportionately large. Even people who are just barely financially comfortable sometimes just can’t understand how thin that margin of error is. The poor are skating slowly and shakily on razor thin ice. The smallest mistake, theirs or somebody else’s, can send them plunging into life threatening icy waters. You very likely make exactly the same sort of foolish decisions in your financial decisions on a regular basis- but you have a larger cushion to protect you from irresponsibility, whether it’s your irresponsibility or that of legislators who pass unread bills or pass bills without hearing from ALL the stakeholders.

When you are poor, there are no margins. You can’t take money out of the budget in one area and apply to another because there are no surpluses in any area.  There may not be even be a budget.

Being forced to buy a brand new winter coat for your child because thrift shops have had to send all their used coats to the landfill in response to the CPSIA can cause far more devastation for lower income families than the complacently comfortable can imagine.  For those who live precariously from one small paycheck to the next, that legislative error might result in having to choose between warm clothes for winter and having the power turned off or not being able to buy gas for the car that week. It might mean an overdraft at the bank, which will then cost more money as the bank adds an overdraft charge, which then means other checks bounce, which means more overdraft charges.

To the complacently comfortable, this sort of scenario seems overly dramatic, but that’s because they haven’t lived there, and they don’t know what it’s like.  We do. We’ve lived out of an ice chest for three months because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn on our electricity.  I’ve been reduced to tears when the only food in the house was two eggs, and I dropped one and broke it.

Our thrift shop charges five dollars for winter coats, good winter coats.  If they have to send those coats to the landfill and poor families have to buy brand new coats, we’re looking at a coast increase of at least 75 percent imposed on the families least able to bear it, and their children will be no safer.

The CDC says that on a scale of 1 to 10, the risk to children of lead poisoning from books is maybe .05- that is a rhetorical way of saying nil.  No children I have ever heard of have had an increase of lead blood levels from the zippers on their jackets.

Because I have lived it, the poor to me are very real, living, breathing people, with real flesh and blood children who will be immediately harmed by the impact of the CPSIA as it is written.

To legislators and the special interest groups who pushed this bill through, the poor appear to be an abstract concept, useful for exploitative purposes, as poster children for pet causes, as tools for emotional manipulation and rhetorical propaganda. And that is why they shrug over the reality that they have chosen to impose a very real and immediate harm to poor families by quadrupling clothing expenses for their children in order to avoid the negligible at best and utterly unproven risk of increased blood lead levels in the zipper pull or snaps on a ten year old’s coat.