Treasury Department Slips on Ladders (a "John Snow is an idiot" moment!)

[JoeMemphis]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It was the anecdote that politically seemed too good to be true. And it was. Treasury Secretary John Snow was set to say on Friday that "frivolous lawsuits" had caused the U.S. ladder industry to fold.

"There is not a single company left in the United States that makes ladders. The lawsuits got to be too much for the ladder industry," read comments Snow prepared for a conference sponsored by the Small Business Administration.

But when the department discovered there were some 11 producers selling $850 million worth of ladders in the United States, those words were left unspoken and deleted from a speech text posted later on the department's Web site.

Note: You'll have to cut and paste the entire URL below in the first response -- for some reason the pipes "|" are throwing off the auto-URL linking on this board.

[JoeMemphis]

1. Cut and paste this URL for the story

news1.iwon.com/odd/article/id/394379|oddlyenough|03-30-2004::10:46|reuters.html

[unblock]

2. they just hate product liability suits

republicans want to make the usa safe for faulty ladders.

ladders are not expensive at all, and yet people entrust their limbs and even their lives to properly functioning ladders. it makes perfect sense that a sizeable percentage of the price of a ladder is for safety. for better or for worse, the american way of ensuring that manufacturers actually build safety into their products is the good old product liability suit.

[JoeMemphis]

3. Anyone surprised that Snow (along with Mankiw) are still employed?

You'd think that Bush might want to win this election, not lose it because he has two huge idiots working for him who have the political savvy of dirt and are not afraid to show it.

Nonetheless, I hope Bush is dumb enough to keep Snow and Mankiw in the public spotlight like this.

[Jim__]

4. Does it bother anyone that even though the "fact" was not true

they had already identified the cause? How could they possibly know that all the ladder manufacturers left the US due to excessive lawsuits when, in fact, the ladder manufacturers did not all leave?