×
Small issues matter. Dana Milbank has a particularly snarky column today criticizing Rep. Bart Stupak for holding a panel yesterday on regulation of bottled water.He quips:
There must be something in the water in this town. The nation is entangled in two wars, a deep recession and a flu pandemic, and the people's representatives are hard at work investigating the menace of . . . bottled water?He concludes that the hearing went poorly for Stupak’s misguided healthy water quest, with witnesses testifying that bottled water wasn’t actually any dirtier than tap water. But Milbank got it wrong. While thinking of fun water-related puns, he seems to have missed the recently released GAO study on bottled water, which found that it is not subject to the same regulations and disclosure requirements as tap water. Because of gaps in authority (the EPA regulates tap water, the FDA bottled water) the public does not have access to information about the source or safety of the bottled stuff. In fact, most bottled water drinkers say they drink it because it is cleaner than tap water, though this is rarely the case - and the environmental impacts of bottled water are well known.Congress can close the regulatory gap and require the proper labeling of a product that is 2,000 times more expensive to produce (really) and no healthier for anyone than tap water. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing the people’s representatives should be doing.Yet Milbank’s column is a reminder of the difficulty of pursuing effective, generally agreeable small policies. As Tim reminds us, even painting roofs white to slow global warming is controversial. It’s an unfortunate trend, because good, small policies have the potential to affect change while requiring minimal sacrifice. Despite their frustrations, Congress has the attention span to focus on more than one issue at a time. So here’s to small policies, which deserve more focus than we tend to give them. --Christopher SopherChristopher Sopher is a Prospect summer 2009 intern.
