On tuesday this week we had our weekly scuba meeting. The meeting lasted all but 5 minutes... But then as always, to the Pub. (Now some of you might be thinking that im blowing all my money on alcohol... Well i'm not. As of late I have not been getting an alcoholic beverage at the pub at all... i found that coke and water are the cheapest things there.) At the pub the club was just chillin and talking about whatever comes up. I've been finding that since im and international that many of the locals are curious about the US. So i feel obliged to enlighten them. The one diver starts out talking to by saying "So im going to assume that the states are just like in tv shows... I expect that you all hang out in a local coffee shop all day and dont have real jobs (refering to friends)." He was joking of course but i just had to laugh and shake my head at that. Little does he know that we hang out at Sheetz not a coffee shop....
Into the night we hit a variety of subjects. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to them about sports. The one diver is a rugby player for the Uni and he was telling me about that, and then we merged that to American Football which as i may have stated before is very hard to explain if you have never seen a game... Then we got on the subject of the Olympics ( i am well versed in this topic), and we noted that the british are best at the sports where you're sitting down... Rowing, cycling, etc...
The conversation then moved to a coffee table and some couches where we discussed Health care, School Systems and other small topics of the same nature. The english have a nationalized healthcare where basically you pay taxes on it and its free when you go to the doctor. Yes im aware this is very socialistic. But the locals know nothing different and when i explained our health care system they could see how that would work too... Thank god for understanding rational people lol. They asked what the plan was that Obama had drafted and i explained it to them. Turns out that theres is more socialistic than Obamacare, which is more like the German system of health care, opt out...
Their University system is based in the simple philosophy that education should be free as long as you want it... so they pay taxes also on that and basically go to uni for free... they have to pay somewhere on the order of 3K pounds a year. Which most of them pay with a government loan that they'll pay back eventually after getting a job. They were dumbfounded when i told them that i pay something like $22K a year for school tuition. But i think it all comes out in the wash... because they get taxed out the nose. Ranging from about 25% to 50% depending on your salary. Those are just estimates for taxes... I think i pay around 15% at my low level Quiznos job and i think its ridiculous. There seems to be no sales tax though so thats good for me at least...
Until next time...Cheers!
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