The Economist rushed to the front door of his sumptuous home and threw it open to smell the sweet odor of *ECONOMIC RECOVERY*...
...only to find a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit standing on his doorstep.
"Who are you?" the Economist asked. "What do you want?"
"I want a job," the man replied.
"Not to worry. The *ECONOMIC RECOVERY* is well underway!"
"But I still don't have a job..."
"Don't you understand how important the *ECONOMIC RECOVERY* is to the future well-being of the country?"
"I'd be a lot happier for the country if I had a job."
The Economist wearily rubbed his eyes. He found it hard to keep up his enthusiasm for the *ECONOMIC RECOVERY* in the face of this man's impossible demands; there always seemed to be one person who insisted on spoiling his finely crafted econometric models!
The Economist looked at the man, who seemed to have sprouted a twin. "Who the hell is that?" he asked.
"My brother," the man replied. "He needs a job, too."
"Great! Why don't you bring out your whole family!" the Economist blurted.
"I was planning to," the man replied. A dozen men, women and children appeared behind him.
The Economist slapped his forehead with his palm, a gesture of frustration he learned at the London School of Economics. "No! No! No! No! No!" he said. "Now is not the time for negative thinking! An *ECONOMIC RECOVERY* is a time for unbridled enthusiasm for the joys of the free enterprise system!"
"We would have a lot more unbridled enthusiasm for the joys of the free enterprise system," the man remarked as dozens of people walked down the street towards the Economist's sumptuous home, "if we had jobs."
"You don't seem to understand," the Economist insisted, "how fragile an *ECONOMIC RE -- get away from there!" The Economist shouted at the children of the man, who were poking around the sumptuous hydrangea bushes along the side of his sumptuous home.
The children shrugged and ran to their father, getting lost in the crowd of hundreds, possibly thousands of people on the street behind him. "Friends of yours?" the Economist asked.
"We have something in common," the man answered.
The man ducked into his sumptuous home for a moment and returned with a sumptuous bullhorn. "Now, I want you all to quietly disperse and return to your homes," he loudly ordered the crowd. "You may not be aware of it, but we are in the middle of an *ECONOMIC RECOVERY*! But, they are fragile things, *ECONOMIC RECOVERY*s, and if we aren't behind it one hundred per cent, we may slow it down. I repeat: go home and enjoy the *ECONOMIC RECOVERY*!"
"Most of us would have homes to go to," the man pointed out, "if we had jobs."
The Economist gritted his teeth, refusing to give in. "Look, you," he snarled, "I don't want to hear about your petty problems. I'm telling you that we're in the middle of an *ECONOMIC RECOVERY* -- and I have the statistics to prove it!"
The man looked behind him. One million, two hundred thousand people crowded on lawns, spilled into side streets and generally milled about in a menacing fashion. "There are statistics which don't fit into your models," the man commented, "which you cannot ignore."
"Oh, yes I can," the Economist smugly responded. The streets were immediately empty.
At his front door, the Economist breathed in the odor of *ECONOMIC RECOVERY*. So sweet!
