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American Toy Makers Want Exemptions From Regulations

When times were simpler -- back in the day of hula-hoops, PF Flyers and Spauldeens -- everyone knew perfectly well what a toy was. No more. Andrew Martin reports that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been swamped with manufacturer's requests to define products such as model trains, baseball bats and Halloween costumes as something other than as a "children's product."

It all goes back to the toy recalls of a few years ago that prompted the commission to enact the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. With it come regulations that manufacturers of many products feel are overly onerous and unduly affect small American companies (since most of the products that caused the trouble were made in China for big companies).

The law protects children, says Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety at the Consumer Federation of America, and the commission should err on the side of children rather than manufacturers. "I think there is some reasonable ambiguity," she tells Martin. "But I think that the ambiguous universe is quite small."

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