Hm... Oh! I know;
There. that works!You can see that right? No? Crap... Well it's an HTML countdown to 1st November. Use your imagination
So I don't have any more Nanowrimo stuff to talk about today. I know, I know you're heart broken.
What I do have instead is...
ok I got nothing. Today is a bit of a bust. I know that the US presidential debate was on thursday, but I haven't seen it - beyond what they showed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From what I understand Mitt Romney lied a lot and Obama pretended he wasn't there, failing to call him on the lies.
I know Jon Stewart had a debate with Bill O'reily on saturday - which was frikken awesome - but I think that the debate stands up for itself, there's not much to say.
If you can afford to watch it ($4.95) here's the link. If you can't afford it then it's totally not on the internet anywhere... honest.
Personally I think that Jon won - not least because O'reily took a moment out of his tiume to say that the brittish health system is so bad that every englishman's teeth are falling out, for the reccord; not true - I think that his points made more sense and had a lot more basis in reality. While Bill spent the majority of the time refusing to listen and claiming that the best way to beat their 16 trillion dollar national debt is to cut the funding PBS recieves. For the reccord, PBS recieves 130 million, aka 0.0008125% of the debt.
Personally I think the major problem they have is that Americans want everything but don't want to pay for it. As I said (and it says at the top of the non-mobile site) this is personal opinion, not fact. People I talk to in america complain about tax all the time, the republican politicians are always talking about lowering taxes, they complain about the price of petrol (gas? car power fuel stuff, whatever you call it.) but looking at the numbers...
There is no nationally imposed VAT, there are state imposed Sales taxes and similar, but nothing national. The Sales tax varies between 0 and 10.25% whereas in Britain we pay 20% on most products, with a reduced rate (5%) on home energy and necessary renovations and no VAT on essentials (groceries, water, prescription medications, public transport etc...).
America's income tax is between 0 and 11% for the states and 0-35% nationally (roughly 0-46% altogether) wheras Brit it goes up to 50%.
Gas/petrol price in america is, on average, $3.90 per gallon (£2.45 per gallon), while in Britain it's £5.12 per gallon ($8.20 per gallon). Sure, we complain, but not as much as I hear some people.
I don't know if any of that matters. I'm not an analyst. I'm not a business person (I failed business class actually) but in Britain we have a $1.4 trillion debt.
It seems to me like maybe it's a factor.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you'll say that because there are so many more people in America they have higher bills, but surely with all that extra man power they should be earning more money aswell?
Again, I dunno. It just seems odd to me that I see and hear people demanding so many things from the american government, but refuse to allow them to raise taxes so that if can be paid for.
But sure, cut Sesame street; that'll solve the problem.
Video-Rumble-in-the-air-conditioned-auditorium clip.
- James
P.S. See what happens when I don't have anything to say? I start making claims that I know better than the last superpower!
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