Yes, the tags—those little rectangular pieces of fabric that say stuff such as, “Wash with like colors” and “Do not ingest.” These are my daughter’s favorite forms of entertainment.

Believe me, I’ve tried to convince her otherwise. We play endlessly with her Lamaze block set, and all the kid wants to do is eat the tags that stick out of the biggest cube. On her stuffed stork, she’ll sometimes suck the beak, but most of the time just fiddles with the tags.

L seems to obsess over the tag on pretty much every toy that has one. She’ll even mess with tags on burp cloths, t-shirts and pants (provided she can find them).

Since most baby stuff comes with at least one tag, L’s fondness for these toy extremities makes our lives pretty easy. Now the only questions are how long these tags will keep her little (but growing) mind occupied, and when she’ll start demanding tags with logos from Yves Saint Laurent and Facconable.

This isn’t exactly a news flash. According to 2009 data from Easy Analytic Software, infant gear sales soared at $1.66 billion in 2008, and are expected to reach $1.86 billion by 2014. Baby gear sales have more than quadrupled in the past 20 years, according to ABCNews.com.

These numbers come from today’s post on The Mommy Files, a fun and informative blog by former editor and current friend Amy Graff. In the blog, Amy shares her observations from a Target parking lot—arguably Ground Zero for evidence of how the Baby Industrial Complex (or BIC, as I, and author Sam Apple, like to call it) has duped us all.

I won’t get into Amy’s specific points; you can read them all here.

The bottom line: we upper-middle class folks buy a lot more baby crap than we probably should, and we buy most of it because some marketer knows exactly how to guilt us into doing so.

I use the word “we” purposefully; after reading Amy’s post, I went out and bought a Bumbo. To me, this seemed like the perfect tool to help L learn how to sit up (not to mention that a friend and L’s doctor recommended at her six-month visit that we give it a whirl).

Could we devise a strategy (with pillows, most likely) to help L sit on her own? Of course we could. Did our own parents have the luxury of a Bumbo to get us to sit? Of course they didn’t.

But the Bumbo is out there, and with shipping, it’s still less than $50—arguably a critical price point for BIC marketers, since many of the other unnecessary accoutrements we’ve purchased L eked in just under this same invisible/imaginary financial wire.

By this point in L’s life, I’ve devised a philosophy that if I can spend $50 for even 24 hours of L’s happiness (and therefore our sanity), I’m willing to go there.

Call me a yuppie. Call me a marketer’s wet dream. Hell, write a comment below in which you rip me a new one and outline how people like me are responsible for our economic collapse, environmental problems in China and—somehow—child obesity. Then look in the mirror and tell me you haven’t been swindled by the BIC yourself.