If US political parties ran your school lunchroom...

If the US Democratic party ran the school lunch room, a school lunch would cost on average $74.27. If students couldn't afford to pay for their lunch, they could get on a program, which meant everyone else who could afford to pay, paid for them. This accounts for a good chunk of the $74.27. The lunch room would be well lit, with soothing music coming from speakers in the ceiling, and students would get a hug from the principal when they left to go back to class. There would be ninety four cafeteria workers behind the lunch counter, three of whom would actually be working. This wasteful over staffing minus $3.00 actual food cost, accounts for the rest of the $74.27. Due to much line cutting and confusion, fostered by a general lack of discipline, the line for lunch would frequently be very long, sometimes out into the hall, down the hall and even outside the school building. Students from other schools, and even ordinary people off of the street would get lunch paid for by the few who had money. Everyone would have the same sized tray, and would eat the same meal every day: Creamed corn, green beans, and a meat patty with skimmed milk to drink. There would be no other menu. However, if you knew which crooked Democratic lunch lady to ask, and slipped her a twenty dollar bill, you could stick your hand in the secret slush fund cookie jar and make off a handful of cookies. Occasionally, due to a flagrant disregard for planning, the food would run out near the end of the year, leading to unrest among the students. The democratic lunch ladies would blame the previous Republican lunch ladies' administration for the food shortage.

If the US Libertarian party ran the lunch room, there would be no lunch ladies. There would be no tables, there would be no lights, no soothing music. There would be no trays, nor utensils. No hugging, (although students could hug if they wanted to, even if the preferred to hug someone of the same gender) and certainly no cookie jar. The lunch would be free to each student who would have their own key to the school pantry. No student from other schools, and certainly no one from off of the street would be allowed into the lunch room. If a student wanted to open a can of food, they would have to bring their own can opener, if they wanted hot food, they would have to bring Sterno and a lighter. The students would sit in groups, not at long tables. If students wanted to smoke while eating, they could smoke. If they wanted to pray before meals, they could. If they wanted to perform the Star Spangled Banner by exhaling pot smoke through a kazoo, by golly, they could. The wheelchair-bound kids would have to fend for themselves, unless someone else helped them out. Students who could not figure out how to prepare food would go hungry. Due to lack of a viable fee schedule for lunches, food would tend run out, and the Libertarian lunch ladies would blame both the earlier Democratic and even earlier Republican lunch ladies for the food shortage.

If the US Republican Party ran the school lunch room, a school lunch would cost a reasonable $3.00. There would be a single round table in the middle of the room, stacked high with the best food. Caviar, fillet mignon, fine wines and treats would be heaped on the table, like a giant ant hill of food. The lunch ladies would sit close around the circular table, eating the feast in a grotesquely corpulent display of gluttony. Any bits of gristle, peel, bad fruit, etc would get pitched over their shoulders to the second row of chairs, in a circle behind the first. These folks closest to the Republican lunch ladies would eat what they wanted, and discard the least desirable bits to the row behind them, and so on until the last row. The net effect is that the Republican lunch ladies pay $3.00 for a buffet table with the world's best cuisine, and the folks in the back row pay $3.00 to lick the crust out of a cupcake wrapper. The students in the back row would be malnourished, and the wheelchair-bound kids can't reach the floor to pick up the scraps, so they would starve to death. If the food happened to run out, the Republican lunch ladies would simply send thugs to invade the lunch room of a less powerful school across town to secure a steady supply of food. Then they would blame the Democratic Party lunch ladies from the previous administration for allowing things to get to the point that force was needed to fix the situation.