Good for you, if you don’t talk about it, you’re letting them get away with it.

I mean, how many people could that money support for the duration of the war as it stands, you know, ordinary people that aren’t carrying guns?

I was really happy there for a moment.
Now I gotta go get the Prep H.

Me?

The government couldn’t think of a better way to spend that kind of money other than a one-time cheque?

The charitable donation thing is good, actually because you get a tax receipt for it, too, so you’re sticking it to them twice.

90 degrees is far hotter than I can handle not being preganant… anyone having to put up with that desrves a medal, let alone air conditioning.

…But that’s the point about the £60, it’s not enough to do anything with for most people, except perhaps help feed the family for a few days and in the context of the economy it’s nothing but a gesture. I don’t have children, and I’m perfectly capable of ‘cutting back’ (I don’t drive, we have a tiny house and I steal food from work), but for most families that’s just not an option.

Similarly, my debts are academic… and by that I mean my student loans, and since I earn way below the threshold for paying them back I tend to just ignore that. I don’t even have a credit card. but still, I’m feeling the pinch.

Consumerism, it’s what got us all into this mess, and I’m not entirely sure that buying our way out of this slump is going to work. There has to be a theoretical point where you’re left with nothing else to buy and nothing else to sell.

Despite having a sound social security system in the uk (and above it all, the NHS, who are responsible for patching me up on so many occasions) our big worry is an aging population with no pensions provision. It’s on the horizon, but it’s quickly approaching us and no one seems to have any solid ideas about how to sort it out… again, £60 in September isn’t going to help old people heat their homes this coming winter.

You’ve raised an interesting point there too, about the millitary… our current economic troubles have been pinned on sub-prime mortgages and some rather dodgy investments, but very little of that is linked with our current wars, which, let’s face, cost a bomb. Nor does it reference the political and economic consequences of our actions. We’ve (UK and US) hardly made ourselves endearing to any of the countries that produce oil and other fuels as our actions are largely viewed with suspicion. I’d like to know just how much money has been spent by my government on a war that nobody wanted and tally that against the £60 handout, which I suspect will be peanuts in comparison.

The truth is, these ARE short term fixes that rely on a common stupidity that Americans (and I suspect many others) have. We don’t know how to NOT spend money. A larger (and growing larger) percentage of our citizens are in terrible debt (and not the, I’m paying off my mortgage and car payments kind of debt but the I can’t pay it off at all kind of debt) and continue to spend. People’ll get this money and they’ll spend it because capitalism and commercialism have joined forces to create a ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW consumer culture that doesn’t know how to save for a rainy day.

Added to the fact that social security isn’t very secure for my generation, our national debt is out of control and owned by countries like China, and the fact that both China and the EU now have better buying power than us… and the only thing that keeps the US a superpower is the fact that we spend more on our military than probably the rest of the world combined and we have more nukes than God.

However, for just £60 of my not-hard-earned-money I could blow Joseph’s mind… that sounds like a bargain to me, and now I’m wondering if smoke would come out of his ears.

I didn’t now about that one, but apart from being apt, it is genius… and true. Except, they’ve been doing that for years, and I think the magic is starting to wear off…

We have the 2012 olympic games coming here too, against most people’s wishes (especially the French, but also our own citizens). We’re expected to foot the bill for that, a decision in which we had no say and are unlikely to benefit from in any permanent way (a sports centre in London is about as useful to me as a McDonalds on Mars).