Bloomberg’s Blunder:

On the front page of most New York papers this morning is the Bloomberg Administration’s decision to propose the banning of trans fats in restaurants across the five boroughs. Whether Bloomberg’s ban passes or not doesn’t matter because as of this morning the damage has been done to thousands of restaurants with the risk of all of them going out of business.

The ramifications that will take place from the precedent set yesterday by Bloomberg is dangerous. First the ban will only cover restaurants still allowing city residents to by hundreds of products with trans fat in their local supermarket. However it is still early and if the ban passes a spillover effect into the supermarkets can still occur forcing hundreds of products to be pulled from the shelves.

The biggest risk to the city and its small business restaurant community will be economically. The admission by Dr. Thomas Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, that trans fat is a “dangerous” ingredient along with the bill will be used in courtrooms across the city as America’s litigation society will storm the castle and attempt to raid the banks of every restaurant across the city.

Over the last couple days we have been reading about the door being open for people to now sue tobacco companies over light cigarettes. Thanks to mayor Bloomberg the door has been open for New Yorkers to sue any restaurant. My father has lived in NYC for 65 years; he’s had four heart attacks and a quadruple bi-pass. He has also eaten in hundreds of restaurants from steak houses to Italian restaurants. His situation is can be copied thousands of times over and Mayor Bloomberg has just given people like my dad a free ticket to sue and personally put a restaurant out of business.