In reference to Rhode Island state Rep. Arthur Handy’s March 29 column, “A bill to promote economic growth,” he needs to do some more homework. He states that the Economic Growth and Fairness Act would “bring our sales tax into the 21st Century” by expanding it to include certain services, and then uses the example of a mom buying diapers at the market paying 7 percent sales tax on her diapers, compared with the “mother who can afford the luxury of a service that picks up her dirty diapers, launders them, and delivers them back to her door [who] pays no tax at all.”

I have a news flash for Mr. Handy! Based on national studies that I easily obtained in about 30 seconds on the Web, it costs on average $39.90 per week for a mom to buy single-use diapers at the local market and $17.50 a week to use a cloth-diaper service for the same amount of diapers! (See http://www.diapernet.org/whycloth.htm.)

For Representative Handy, who apparently has trouble with numbers, that means on average that it costs a mother $2,075 to buy disposable diapers at the store and $910 per year to use a cloth diaper service.

As a former owner/operator of a Rhode Island-based cloth-diaper service, I can confirm firsthand for Mr. Handy that the majority of my customers were not Mr. Handy’s luxury moms; they were lower-income households looking for an alternative to the high cost of disposable diapers. By introducing a tax on cloth-diaper services, Mr. Handy and his bill are actually making the less expensive way of diapering kids in this state more expensive for those lower-income households that now use this service as a way of making ends meet.

If this one example of Arthur Handy’s “lack of doing his homework” is indicative of the methods he used to come up with his bill, then he should seriously reconsider what he is doing in office, never mind what the ramifications of his bill might really mean for this state.

LEE MERRILL

Cranston