NY Liberal Lawmakers Actually Blame Tide for Idiots Eating Pods
Generally speaking, conservatives believe individuals should be held personally responsible for their actions, while liberals seek communal responsibility and governmental regulations in response to the actions of individuals.
This generality was recently reinforced by a pair of elected Democrat lawmakers from New York City who want to force laundry detergent manufacturer Tide to produce less appealing and more difficult to eat laundry pods, so idiots won’t be so tempted to poison themselves,according to WABC.
The two Democrats, Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas and state Sen. Brad Hoylman, provided more details of their proposal on Tuesday at the New York Capitol in Albany.
According to USA Today, Hoylman and Simotas sent a letter to Tide parent company Proctor & Gamble urging the company to make Tide Pods less colorful and enticing and to secure them in more difficult to open packaging, in the hope that fewer teens and young children would be able to consume them as part of the absurd and dangerous “Tide Pod Challenge.”
“We want to make sure these poisonings are prevented. It’s easy. All we have to make sure is that public safety trumps their profits,” stated Simotas at a news conference.
“We’re asking for all laundry detergent pods to be uniform in color. We don’t need them to look like Gummy Bears in order for consumers to use them,” stated Hoylman. “We need to impose clear warning labels on all packaging, including each pod.”
In their demand letter to P&G, the two New York City Democrats wrote, “While our legislation would only protect New Yorkers, we urge Procter & Gamble and all manufacturers of colorful detergent pods to offer the same protections to the nation and immediately commit to the precautions set forth in our legislation.”
But, according to USA Today, a statement from P&G essentially dismissed the demands of the lawmakers as “nothing new” and explained both how they have already made packaging more difficult for children to open and how the color of the pods really plays no role in the accidental exposure of children to the toxic substances contained inside.
As to the notion of individually wrapping each pod, that would “not be helpful in reducing incidents and may have unintended consequences,” such as producing more plastic waste that would have an impact on the environment, something Democrats should be keenly aware of and on track to avoid.
“Finally, consumers have a choice: Those who prefer a single colored pac can use Tide Free and Gentle, which is all-white. Tide is also available in a liquid and powder product form,” the company concluded.
According to the New York Daily News, P&G spokeswoman Petra Renck stated last month that “nothing is more important to us than the safety of the people who use our products” and took note of the fact that the company had already taken several steps to address the misuse of their product, such as adding a bitter taste to the outer layer of Tide Pods and rolling out a public safety ad campaign featuring popular New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski to discourage abuse of the product.
Brian Sansoni of the American Cleaning Institute trade association stated, “There are major things that have already been done to prevent unintended exposure,” and added that legislation would be both unnecessary and ineffective in countering the idiotic Tide Pod challenge.
“This is blatant intentional misuse,” he said. “It’s tough to legislate against that kind of decision making.”
Really what it all boils down to is the personal responsibility of parents with small children and the moronic teens who know better than to eat the pods, according to upstate Republican Assemblyman Joseph Errigo, who said the legislation would place additional unnecessary burdens on the manufacturer.
“There’s no easy way to spin it other than to say the people who are participating in this trend are old enough to know laundry detergent is not safe for consumption, and the people behind this legislation should know that it’s not the manufacturers who are to blame when people make stupid decisions with their products,” Errigo stated, according to the Daily News.
We couldn’t agree more, and hold that this legislation is pointless and little more than an effort to place blame for consumer actions on manufacturers while simultaneously absolving the consumers of responsibility for their own negligence or misuse of a perfectly legitimate product that is safe when used as directed.
Please share this on Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know about the New York City Democrats who want to hold Tide’s parent company responsible for the utterly stupid “Tide Pod challenge.”
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