Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – – even when you’re copying something really stupid. California’s Prop 65 law gave us signs in Starbucks and elsewhere saying, “This product contains chemicals known to California to cause cancer and birth defects.” Prop 65 also gave over $20 million to plaintiffs’ attorneys in 2018 and it gave us a big taxpayer funded government bureaucracy to regulate the program. The one thing it hasn’t given us is any benefit for consumers. Cancer and birth defect rates (Prop. 65’s targets) are the same in California as everywhere else in the country where Prop 65 doesn’t apply.
In our never-ending search for truth, The Food Lawyers® planted an illegal audio/video “bug” in the offices of NY state assemblypersons Mary Big and Jim Government and recorded the following conversation:
Mary: Those rubes in California have gotten ahead of us with Prop 65 – – a law that creates a big government bureaucracy and lines lawyers’ pockets without providing any benefit to consumers.
Jim (frowning and rubbing his chin): I know … … I know. We have to catch up.
Mary: I’ve got it. We’ll create our OWN version of Prop 65. Then we’ll have our OWN big government bureaucracy that hassles businesses and provides no benefit to consumers.
Jim (still frowning): I don’t know. We’ll need a place to build a big courthouse to handle all that useless litigation.
Mary: No worries, we have all that land where Amazon was going to build their New York Headquarters before we drove them off. Now, instead of people stuffing things into Amazon boxes, we’ll have lawyers stuffing money into their pockets.
Jim (Banging his fist on the table): Great idea. Who says we don’t know how to create jobs?
Mary and Jim shake hands and then head out to lunch paid for by their $172 per day tax-free New York government expense accounts.
The Food Lawyers® Analysis:
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced a New York version of Prop 65 – – complete with New York’s own list of chemicals and New York’s own warning language. Problem is that California’s and New York’s chemical lists and warnings aren’t interchangeable. That means products will need one warning, or the other warning, or both warnings, or (gasp) NO WARNINGS. This means manufacturers will need to produce all kinds of different labels for different areas (CA, NY, everywhere else) and track them all over the country. That will increase costs, and that will (of course) be passed on to us consumers. All for no benefit to us consumers.
But there’s actually light at the end of the tunnel (and it’s not an oncoming train). The same thing happened 2015 when Vermont and some other states started passing laws requiring various kinds of GMO (genetically modified organism) warnings on foods. The federal government stepped in and passed a law that knocked out all of the state laws in favor of a watered-down federal law where the warning doesn’t even have to mention GMOs – – it can be a QR box on the label.
Nothing says “GMO” to me like a QR box.
So now that Prop 65 and the NY version are getting crazy, expect the Feds to step in and give them both the GMO-treatment. The Feds will knock out both states’ laws and create their own watered down version. Heck, they’ve already got the QR symbol. They’ll just need to add a couple more squiggles.
Now, the only downside will be that a whole bunch of plaintiffs’ lawyers in California and New York, and an army of bureaucrats in both states, are going to have to find other work.
Boo Hoo.