Assembly Candidate Dhillon decries Brave New World of San Francisco Food, Health Regulations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 4, 2008
Contact:  Dhillon ’08 Community Affairs Liaison Alisa Farenzena,
(415) 706-0407

Harmeet K. Dhillon, candidate for California Assembly, District 13,
criticized the latest wave of Orwellian regulations threatening to drown
San Francisco residents and businesses in a sea of social engineering.

“San Francisco, under the leadership of Tom Ammiano on the Board of
Supervisors and his fellow travelers, is increasingly coming to resemble
both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, where the government monitors your every move, tells you what’s good for you,
decides who can sell you cigarettes, forces your employer to lay off your
co-workers so it can pay to subsidize an inefficient public transit system
and forces your favorite restaurants to raise prices to pay for Ammiano’s
pet project of pseudo universal health care,” Dhillon asserted.

Dhillon’s opponent, Supervisor Ammiano, infamous for his effort to force
employers to pay for a costly city health-care program, is also behind
legislation forcing “chain” restaurants to post nutritional data on their
menus. “The menu-labeling law San Francisco passed in March is arbitrary,
expensive and unfair to the restaurant industry because it sets different
standards for restaurants of the same chain located in different cities,”
Dhillon said. “Any policy regarding nutrition information should come from the state, not the local, level.” Dhillon supports the lawsuit filed by
the California Restaurant Association to overturn Ammiano’s legislation.

“Californians are responsible for making their own choices about what to
eat, where to drive and whether to indulge in harmful activities such as
smoking in private or in open spaces — and we don’t need the government
interfering in every aspect of our private decisions on these matters.
What’s next — physicians in a nationalized health care system measuring
our waists every year, as they do in Japan, and bombarding us with
finger-wagging messages about our health to bring us within
government-mandated guidelines?”Dhillon posited. “It’s time for San
Franciscans to stand up to the nannies and demand their right to eat,
drink, smoke, drive and park with the minimum of government interference
and scolding. Let’s let the supervisors socially engineer each other and
those who voluntarily buy in to their costly and overbearing schemes, and
leave the rest of us alone.”

Mayor Gavin Newsom also came up with an idea to control what people eat: to charge a new city fee to stores that sell drinks with high-fructose
corn syrup. “As if we are not already taxed enough, now we have to think
twice about reaching for a Coke, and the corner grocery store needs to
collect yet another fee to be paid to yet another bureaucratic bottomless
pit” Dhillon commented. The mayor also proposed the legislation that the
Board of Supervisors approved on Tuesday to prevent pharmacies like
Walgreen’s and Rite Aid from selling cigarettes.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi last week announced a scheme to require all
businesses with 20 or more employees to subsidize public transit and/or
provide door-to-door shuttle service for part-time and full-time
employees. “This is yet another crippling mandate sure to drive businesses
from San Francisco and into adjoining counties and states,” said Dhillon,
herself a small-business owner. “Government should provide tax incentives
for businesses to ‘go green,’ not impose onerous regulations and taxes to
achieve socially desirable goals,” she explained. “In San Francisco, ‘go
green’ increasingly means that businesses and consumers will go with their
green (dollars) to other jurisdictions to spend them.”

Another two such measures floated in recent weeks — Newsom’s idea to close parts of the Embarcadero to cars on two upcoming Sunday mornings to encourage outdoor exercise, thereby blocking traffic to the vibrant
Fisherman’s Wharf district; and Supervisor Chris Daly’s idea to
permanently close much of Market Street to cars, are also opposed strongly
by Dhillon. “This is an eminently walkable city — I myself walk to work
regularly. But there are plenty of parks and open spaces for healthy
exercise — there is no need to further hamper businesses and inconvenience drivers by closing major thoroughfares in the name of special interests.”

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