Paul Krugman's joke for the day (Warning: may include snark)

I am posting this without necessarily agreeing with it in specific, but I always liked the original version of the joke.

Bad

As the Obama administration apparently prepares to launch Hankie Pankie II — buying troubled assets from banks at prices higher than they will fetch on the open market — it occurred to me that an updated version of an old Communist-era joke may be appropriate: under Bush, financial policy consisted of Wall Street types cutting sweet deals, at taxpayer expense, for Wall Street types. Under Obama, it’s precisely the reverse.
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Update: Maybe I was too cryptic. The original joke was, “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the reverse.”

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/bad/

that economists are lousy comedians...

"Actually, that was not a stimulus package of any sort. Instead, that was a product of the fatally flawed and poorly conceived strategy of compromising for political gain to which Democrats have found themselves married."

"So a horse walks into a bar. He says, "Bartender, I would like an opt-in universal veterinary health coverage plan." The bartender says, "Hey, buddy, why the near-universal coverage? Don't you know that the current system of patched insurance coverage ends up leaving gaps and inefficiencies that actually end up costing society over the long run, and that for any plan, the people least at risk will attempt to opt out and the people most at risk will attempt to opt in, leading risk to be unevenly distributed?"

"So a robber goes, "your money or your life!" And I go, "Well, I'm considering my options here; while my life is a highly valuable asset, I admit that I have already lived quite a long time, have quite a bank account built up, and also am heavily insured. While I certainly am in no hurry to part with my life, you must realize that this is a decision of great magnitude."

So a duck walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender asks him to pay, and the duck says, "ordinarily I'd ask you to put it on my bill, but my recent history of reckless borrowing has put me in a very tight bind, and so I am paying off my loans with most of my income, and I am no longer buying anything I cannot pay cash for. For that reason, I will only have one drink tonight instead of my usual two, though I am aware that this decision is going to necessarily lower your income and thus deepen the economic spiral in an imperceptible but very real way."

"Thank you. Being tenured, I'll be here every week. Tip your waitress enough to offer her sufficient incentive to modify her behavior."