Joe's Restaurant

Joe owns a pizza restaurant. It's not a big place, maybe about 40 seats. At any given time he has 5 employees working. Joe's been in business now for 5 years. He has never made a profit. Joe says that business is not good because he doesn't advertise enough. Truth is business is not good because he serves lousy pizza. In fact nothing he serves on his limited menu is all that good. People come once and never come back, so most of Joe's customers are tourists who don't know any better. It's amazing that Joe stays in business.

I talked with Joe awhile back and he said he was ready to make a change at his restaurant. He was going to increase the size by adding enough space for another 60 seats. He was also going to add a few more items to his menu. Even though he has been losing money since he opened, he figured if he just invested another $100,000 into the business, things would get better. To pay for it he said he would just raise the prices on the menu. I asked him if he was going to change anything about the pizza and he said no. I asked him if he was going to change anything about any of the food he currently serves, and he said no. I asked him if he had ever prepared the kinds of menu items he was considering adding, and he said no. I shook my head, wondering if Joe had any business sense at all.

Joe went ahead and built his addition to the restaurant. He added a few more items to his menu, still everything he served was pretty bad. People stayed away just like they did before. They knew the food was terrible, the service was inconsistent, and it was expensive. People figured they could make a better pizza on their own. No one could understand how Joe stayed in business for this long. Despite having few customers, he always kept a staff of 5 people on duty, even though they mostly just sat around doing nothing.

When I think of what is going on with our country, specifically how much money is being spent in the name of "stimulus" and how much money is being added toward bigger governmental programs, as well as new programs, I think of Joe's restaurant. President Obama wants to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into a nationalized health program, billions of dollars into a larger more intrusive federal educational system, hundreds of billions of dollars into an unproven energy plan, and on and on. You would think that there must be a current governmental program or department that serves as a model for excellence, a model that Obama could point to and say, "this is the kind of excellence I want to see applied to all these larger, newer programs". I wonder what that program or that department could be. The IRS? The current Department of Education? HHS?

Just like Joe's pizza, the federal government is not very good at what it does. If it were a business, it should probably go out of business. Instead, Barack Obama believes that if only we spend more money, add more items to the agenda, and charge citizens more money for all these great services, then everything will be good. Before spending all this money, increasing its size, and adding even more items to its menu, maybe the government should prove that it can get things right with what it currently serves. Right now their pizza stinks. And here we are ready to give them even more money to make even more pizza that stinks. Does that make any sense to anyone?

Imagine if Joe's restaurant was in your area, along with 6 other pizza restaurants. Now imagine that Joe had the power (or the money) to close down the other 6 restaurants, leaving his as the only choice if you wanted pizza. If you like your pizza, it's kind of a scary proposition.