Consider yourself enlightened. In The Times this week:

Buried deep in the health care legislation that President Obama signed on Tuesday is a new requirement that will affect any American who walks into a McDonald’s, Starbucks or Burger King. Every big restaurant chain in the nation will now be required to put calorie information on their menus and drive-through signs.

Now that the 2000-page health care bill has passed, we are learning all sorts of interesting things about the goodies, or restrictions on goodies, packed into its nooks and crannies like bits of the afikoman on the first night of Passover.

What is a “big” restaurant chain, you ask? According to the authors of Obamacare, the magic number is… 20. That is, if you own a restaurant chain with more than 20 stores, you’re on the hook.

I don’t imagine this will be particularly onerous for large fast-food corporations such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, which have already spent money on testing for calories and posted information online. But it will force a lot of businesses in the 20-30 range to incur heavy costs (chemical evaluations + menu changes) or cut down on the number of stores.  As Ed Morrisey notes:

The impact on businesses will be disproportionate to their size.  Large restaurant chains with standardized menus can handle this mandate less expensively per dinner sold, thanks to the economies of scale, which is why Chili’s has the information on their national website.  Chains under 20 locations will get exempt.  But what about those chains with just over 20 locations?

This might explain why the National Restaurant Association, probably more beholden to Big Fast-Food than Felipe’s Taqueria, supported federalizing restrictions which had already been adopted by several states and cities.

The impact of Calorie Cop regulation on small businesses shows up  in various subtle ways — price increases, wage decreases, slower growth – while the evidence for the efficacy of these restrictions is mixed at best.

To be fair, we were warned by Speaker Pelosi:

“I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

Oh, that darned fog of controversy! How it seems to roll in whenever we try to remake a substantial portion of the U.S. economy in our image!

Now, I won’t grumble about the fact that these little nuggets of extra paternalism went mostly unreported until after the bill passed. With the news media strapped for cash, how could we expect them to pore through thousands of pages of Good-Hearted Legislation for the Less Fortunate Among Us as if they were Bush-era torture memos?

Image Credit: NYT Blog

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