Changes in the '90s made the DMV much, much more efficient. And you can print out most of the forms online, to make your visit even quicker.

The video might have made sense in the 1980s or before, but really - it doesn't make sense in, um, reality.

The other day I heard (on NPR, natch) some GOP senator making the same wisecrack about health care. "If you like standing in line at the DMV, you'll love nationalized health care," or words to that effect.

Idiot senators must not live in the real world. I'll take my DMV over my insurance company any day of the week.

I would have to pay fees to drive in other States, and probably notify them if I was leaving the country / expected to run up large amounts of mileage in advance or have my license suspended.

Indictments in one place wouldn't turn up in another because none of them would talk to each other.

I could have licenses in multiple States and use whichever one was cleanest when pulled over for speeding.

When applying for a license I would be able to lie about outstanding parking fines without any come back

They might reposses my license but I would simply get one in another State.

On the whole, it seems better to me that the DMV doesn't make loans and banks don't issue drivers licenses.

The DMV near my house has gotten really fast these days, and I'm not even smart enough to schedule an appointment ahead of time. Considering that they serve all the drivers for a state of 35 million people, they actually do a decent job in my experience. I'm not saying they do it with a smile, and I'm sure tons of people would disagree, but they've gotten pretty efficient, in my experience.

Let's hope that is the case - and that all the banks will give the money back once they're finally stable. That said, I'm pretty surprised by the market response to the news that the CEO of company said that his outlook for the future of the company is bright. Th government can back out not just when the company posts profits over two months-but when it is known whether that bank will be stable and can absorb losses during the scenarios that will be run as part of the "stress tests".

Maybe they attack the DMV without cause because after many yeas of going after the post office, too many people have figured out that the post office is cheap and efficient. At least every state has its own DMV, so there's a better chance of finding one that's bunged up.

Hey, I know: if we're looking for an example of bunged up bureaucracies, how about banks? Oops.

...well I haven't found Ferrell and his apple dumpling gang funny in a long while so it didn't surprise me that this was so off-key.

What bothers me is how much the meme that "government is incompetent" is just assumed to be a laughline. I hear that a lot on NPR where it is just PRESUMED that government providing services will screw it up when the private sector will magically make it efficient and "fun" for the customer. Some decent economists have done research on how the lowly toiling bureaucrat in a private sector firm doesn't act much different than the same one in a government job. And between information asymmetry and monopolistic and oligopolistic behavior, the private sector is often heavily incentived to screw its customers (on a short-term or long-term basis or BOTH) than a neutral passive government worker who basically is happy to serve customers and then turn out the lights at 5 and go home.

It is all about incentives and frankly those incentives are so out of whack in the private sector that government intervention is likely the only way to fix things right now.

Let's not nationalize Citibank, and then see how much fun it is waiting in the unemployment line.

Today, Citi came out and said they'd been making money for the past 2 months. If they haven't failed yet, and they're making money, wouldn't that mean that they've gotten all the help they need to pull through?

I have nothing ideologically against nationalization, or government intervention in the economy. But it's an awfully expensive thing to do, and if the life support already provided is adequate, it doesn't seem like the most useful way to spend public funds.

Based on my recent experiences with Citibank, my experiences at the DMV were far more joyous and simple.

This video is very not funny and they completely missed the mark. Citibank is pretty much already a nightmare, even before the financial crisis it sucked.

Anyway, retail banking for the lower end (those of us with less than 100,000 in assets at a bank) has pretty much become a bare bones, fee-you-'till-you-bleed operation.

They charge you for using another bank's ATM on top of the fee that bank's ATM charged you. They charge you if you fall below the minimum balance. A friend of mine owas once asked to pay a deposit fee - a fee for depositing a check into his account at the bank.

Heck, they'll even charge you for not doing anything they can charge you for. My former bank tried to charge me a fee for not having any transactions in an account during the then-recent month.

I've been in and out in under ten minutes. Driver's license renewal took twenty minutes, but that's probably because they had to take my picture and check 5 kinds of ID to make sure I wasn't an incompetent terrorist. If I needed to do something that complicated at my bank, I think I'd bring food and a sleeping bag.

What could be more Kafka-esque than a big bank? They have teams of people whose only goal in life is to screw you. They charge you for using another bank's ATM on top of the fee that bank's ATM charged you. They charge you if you fall below the minimum balance. A friend of mine owas once asked to pay a deposit fee - a fee for depositing a check into his account at the bank.

In contrast, my local DMV in Philly pretty much tells you what you owe and you pay it. For that matter, our state-run liquor monopoly is nothing if not efficient. (Although it would be nice to buy wine from a wine lover instead of a civil servant who only drinks mango schnapps and failed the exam to be a postal worker.)