US expats thinking of giving up their citizenship.

Hah...Poppy...I'll raise you on the utility bills and such...and see you please mate...

 

Well Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world. On day they will just buy the soon bankrupt US and expand. Poppy will have 4000 acres in Texas, some cows to poke and a big hat !! taxes will be a distant memory !!

Gaines

 

Texas..taxes....remember the Alamo...

 

I call...Our -30/40 C cold trumps runny noses in the UK. Hard for most Canadians to understand how peeps die in the UK due to cold. Y'all have plenty of hot tea. We only have cold beer and brackish tap water treated with emasculating flouride.. Heard Pimms is good though. [What is a Pimm?]
Yes we have oil. No they will not share it with me. We got a 100 cheque from Ralph Kline once. But there is a concerted effort to make our oil seem "dirty". ..Thinking mid East oil is bloody- so the protesters would rather have a pristine wilderness here, and a graveyard yonder...Who is funding the anti Alberta oil? OPEC nations? Gah, don't get me started - because I got nothin' intelligent to say.

 

They say you can see Canada from Alaska, but you can't really because there's a bunch of trees in the way. Yet, beyond those trees is an entire culture based on the proposition that men should slide around on ice and beat each other with curved sticks. It's an exotic, dangerous and primitive land. Sometimes a man will rise above the brutality and through sheer willpower and the force of his mighty intellect, display the greatness that is Canada. And that man is Alan Thicke.

 

Whoa. Just a minute...I will not have our national pastime being disrespected just for laughs. Alan Thicke is a Saint, and should not be the subject of low brow foreigners attempt at "humour". Nice try Sarah Palin aka KB.

 

There was only one Canadian I ever had complete respect for,

Diefenbaker Rules!

 

Oil Dividends...
Alaska always sounds like such a sensible place.

I believe you can also grow and keep a moderate amount of... medicinal herbs... in your house too.
I like the sound of Alaska.

 

We have loose women...

 

...but we don't have Alan Thicke.

 

Lets be honest, if we didn't pay them to live there and let them get stoned would anyone in their right mind choose to live in Alaska?

 

There isn't an "oil dividend." The dividend comes out of a stock market fund that has a lot of different investments in it, though some are indeed oil companies. Back in the 70's during the oil boom, the state only had 200k people and suddenly had billions of dollars in windfall taxes. They invested the money in two funds. The largest one pays the dividends that still run the state (no state taxes!), and a smaller one makes annual payments directly to stockholders - Alaska residents.

People outside the state never understand that, but I think it's important that everyone know it's pure capitalism. Most states are never going to have an oil boom (though the Dakotas are right now), but if they took excess taxes and rolled them into a fund instead of buying gold-plated courthouses, you'd soon have at least part of the state revenues coming out of that fund instead of peoples pockets. Such a scheme requires politicians with some sense of fiscal sanity, and it requires voters to elect such people.

If fiscal sanity were introduced into our political world, we wouldn't need to double-tax people living abroad and we could lower taxes on people living in the US.

 

I very much beg to doubt the ones highlighted... ;-)

These are the market prices:

Bottle of Wine (Mid-Range) 10.00 € (range 9.00-12.00)

Domestic Beer (0.5 liter bottle) 2.50 € (2.00-3.00)

Imported Beer (0.33 liter bottle) 2.40 € (2.00-3.00)

Pack of Cigarettes (Marlboro) 5.40 €

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Finland

For the car prices see my post nr 38. A car tax in Finland is 12,2 %-48,8 %, depending on the CO2 pollution - plus 24 % VAT on top of that.

 

Interesting special K...We pay aboot the same per 750ml bottle of wine [prefer my wine in a 4 litre box].

Our beer comes mostly in 375ml. So price seems equivalent. We have imported beer but they are all probably skunky because only the gays [nothing wrong with that] buy it. And like Iran, yes- there are no gays here.

Aannd, we win, because I paid 13.75 for a pack of smokes. Which I believe was artificially inflated by the Germans for some nefarious reason. http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/09/former-german-chancellor-stays-one-step

 

Holy Cow, after thinking long and hard, methinks Bella has taken a liberty regarding one of our true Canadians.
Diefenbaker is not a dog on a TV show [well yes]...Makes me very suspicious because NOBODY here watched that show. So you have exposed yourself, Bella [if that's really what I call you, sometimes] as a NSA spy [ who has been tasked with low level Canuck cable tv observations ]. Just shoot yourself now, before they make you listen to Nickelback.

 

Oh. A hard nut eh?...You asked for it. Turn it up men- make sure ur earplugs are in: Lets start with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB0DU4DoPP4 and see how Bella reacts.