William Pryor: “let me start our conversation this afternoon about the consumer product safety bill with a chart. I will come back to it…”

“let me start our conversation this afternoon about the consumer product safety bill with a chart. I will come back to it in a few minutes, but as the camera focuses on this chart, these are the toys that were recalled in the last year. You can see it starts in March of 2007 and goes to February of 2008. Represented on this calendar are the record number of recalls that we saw last year. I am sure members of the public recall over the summer months--May, June, July, August, and even into September--there were a series of newspaper articles, news magazine stories, television, radio, in addition to Internet stories about the excessive number of recalls. Really, this matter came to the public's attention through the toy recall issue. Now, of course the Consumer Product Safety Commission deals with a lot more than just toys. Toys are very important, and it is a big piece of what they do, but the CPSC does a lot more than toys. But this chart shows the toys, to give a sense of how many recalls we are looking at every year. And what we have done is, we have picked one item that would represent that recall every month. You can see that most months it is four or five recalls in that given month. So the CPSC has been very busy. Unfortunately, that is part of the problem. They are overwhelmed with the marketplace today, and it has been very difficult for the CPSC to keep up with the tremendous number of imports.”