*Actually, good English teachers and accountants know that bankruptcy only applies to individuals. The alternative is "insolvency" but that only really applies to companies. A new word is needed?

Last Wednesday’s budget was shocking.

Over a pint of beer, my flatmate and I came up with some controversial measures:

Taxes Rises

The national debt is massive. Tax rises are inevitable. The alternative is to print money and inflate our way out of trouble (sound familiar?)

• The "Levi’s Tax" – tax on jeans with a waist size over 40 inches
• VAT to 20%
• Basic rate to 25% (OUCH OUCH OUCH)

Spending Cuts

Time to trim the fat.

• Cancel the Olympics – the money could be put to better use.
• Prescribe running shoes instead of medicine.
• Privatise schools and introduce a school voucher system. Efficiency savings all round.
• Cancel the £2000 rebate for cars – bad for the environment, everyone will still buy foreign cars anyway.
• No more agricultural subsidies. This is the real meaning of Fair Trade.
• Goodbye department for culture and sport.
• Cancel the aircraft carrier and issue everyone with a pitchfork.
• Cancel Christmas
• 99% pay cuts for junior doctors who once attended Merchant Taylors Boys School (sorry guys).

Tax Cuts

Tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Keynesian-style.

• Reduce employers National Insurance rate
• Give child benefits to schools to provide breakfast and free school uniforms
• Cancel the tax disc and increase fuel duty instead
• Cancel TV licence – expensive to administer.
• 50% tax on incomes over £1,000,000, not £150,000. I don’t think we should be scaring away the entrepreneurs.

Reforms

Reforms as a platform for the future. Monetarist-style.

• Massive investment in education
• Make engineering glamorous again
• More business/entrepreneurial education from an earlier age
• The environment – Carbon taxes, congestion charging

We sound like right-wing nuts. The other stuff wasn’t legal to publish. Suggestions?

Another away job for me this week. I got to go to Bath this time. It’s a beautiful city and I got to see a lot of it on my two runs.  Graham is intent on winning the £50 so I had to take my running shoes and go running up (and down) Bath’s hills. Annoyingly, I had forgotten my iPod in the rush to leave on Monday morning, only for the train to be cancelled anyway. I have already applied for compensation.

Liverpool Football Club

This season is the closest that Liverpool have come to winning the league that I can remember. It has been a great season – plenty of goals and insane comebacks. But the hope of a league title died in a pub in Bath on Tuesday night. A great game, eight goals, but a 4-4 draw wasn’t the result that we needed.I had dared to hope in the past month, but I was disappointed again. There’s still a mathematical possibility, but I don’t want to hope again.

I’ll have to go back my dream of audit tests that pass and numbers that add.

I’m comfortable being a geek (and wearing the thick glasses to prove it). I immerse myself in technology. I admit that I do depend on the Internet a lot.

I’m currently got two laptops set up side-by-side. One is used for watching the re-run of the Chinese Grand Prix. The other is used for email and writing this blog. My phone and my (sister’s) pink iPod is not too far away. I’ve spent the weekend setting up a beta version of the Windows 7 operating system. I now have three operating systems on one computer. I’ve also set up Twitter. I don’t usually follow the latest fads – except for technology.

Google

I’m a slave to the Google corporate machine. I use the following services regularly:

• Gmail – all my email and (nicely alphabetised) contacts are up here.
• Calendar
• Documents – used for the online spreadsheets for my challenges
• Reader
• Maps
• and Google search – of course

Other tech stuff

• Blog (obviously) – how much longer before I run out of stuff to write about? Not before any readers leave.
• Facebook – I don’t use anymore, but contemplating rejoining
• Twitter – I’ve not made up my mind about Twitter. Clever communication method or self-indulgent Generation Y crap?
• Phone – still use a bog standard phone because I’m too stingy to pay for a smartphone
• Windows XP – still better than Linux / Vista / Windows 7
• Camera – none, both my previous cameras are still lost somewhere in China

Was life easier when I didn’t spend ages dealing with email every day?