Bag charge

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed its most recent ostrich legislation. From here on all stores that offer paper bags (plastic bags are illegal) must charge $.10 for the bag.

This is the third piece of incomprehensible San Francisco political gobbledygook.

The first was a local universal healthcare bill that took away the invoicing for service that free medical clinics had previously been using and set a minimum insurance health coverage for all businesses operating in the city ($4,700 per employee). Restaurants responded two ways.

They added a surcharge on the menu. Everybody pays more at restaurants in San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors has forced a change in the wording on the surcharge but every restaurant finds a way to change the wording to make sure higher prices prevail.

The real twist was the creation of healthcare trusts into which the $4700 per employee was submitted. The employees then had to fill out paperwork with documentation to cover any medical costs. Restaurants quickly found that employees rarely used more than $1,000 of this trust fund per employee in a year. Every restaurant ended up with a bonus of the unused health coverage funds that was never available from traditional health insurance.

Then the ostrich supervisors passed a law making sure that no toys could be given to children at fast food restaurants unless the child meal met some imaginary health-food standards. McDonald's and two other chains simply added a $.10 charge for the toy.

This should give us a clue on how the new bag charge will be handled. The stores will give coupons to offset the cost to the customer. Why is that so hard for the ostrich politicians to anticipate?