Tipsheet

Thanks, Obamacare!

I stopped off at a Chipotle in Silver Spring, Md. for a quick dinner this weekend, only to see the evil pervasiveness of Obamacare on display in front of me on the menu:

I discovered, to my own shock and horror, that taking a massive amount of food, wrapping it in a tortilla, and eating it may not be a good idea! My beloved burrito could contain almost 1000 calories!

Actually, because I'm a responsible, educated consumer, I know that my favorite burrito (barbacoa, pinto beans, green tomatillo and cheese) contains roughly 850 calories.

At a time when hundreds of thousands of people are subject to lose their health care coverage and premiums look to be skyrocketing across the country, this looks like far from the worst outcome of Obamacare. And it's not the Chipotles of the world who are going to be really hurt by calorie requirements on menus, it's going to be the small, local chains that choose not to expand beyond 19 restaurants because of the added costs of renovating all their menus at every store (not to mention actually having to estimate the nutrition facts of sometimes-variable dishes). As Ed Morrissey at Hot Air investigated,

The pressure of this law will eventually force restaurants like Davanni’s to reduce consumer choice as a way of managing the overwhelming burden of maintaining their disclosures. Smaller chains that succeed in satisfying their customers and managing their business used to be rewarded with growth, but this law will put an artificial cap on expansion at 19 locations.

Not to mention all of this is in spite of evidence that requiring calorie counts doesn't actually "work" in the government's efforts of trying to get Americans to eat less. This isn't the worst evidence of Obamacare's harmful effects, but it's just another lesson of the law of unintended consequences and empirical data that Democrats refuse to pay attention to in their social engineering schemes.