As far as healthcare coverage, for serious illness, or surgery my insurance (which only costs about 1,000 dollars a year pre-tax money) I pay nothing out of pocket. Cancer, Heart surgery, etc. I'm covered up to 2 million dollars, which should be enough. For other things, sure I have to pay I think 10% or 20% but not for serious crap. I would rather pay 1,000 pre-tax than have to pay for it in taxes someway. Another thing to consider, a lot of people say only the Rich are getting rich, that's simply not true. Massive amounts of the money that you find in mutual funds belong to 401ks and IRAs opened up by middle class families, and with the reduction in capital gains taxes these have been taking off. I see a lot of Americans having a descent retirement provided they wathed their 401k and managed it. And all the info needed to do so is easily available. I agree, it would be nice if everyone had healthcare. But it is a fact that the Average American has more access to better technology and more money is invested per capita in America on new medical research than all these other countries people are mentioning. Just look back at my post with the links and read for yourself. Long wait times for procedures, like Kemo therapy DO exist in both Canada and Europe. I also posted a link to that in one of my posts. I like how Europe gets off being all cocky about stuff, maybe America should have left you in the Nazis hands. It's been 60 years since then and Europe acts like America is the enemy, and when we protected Europe thru the 80s against Russia. If not for US having a lot of forces in those countries and deterring the Russians they probably would have rolled over the rest of Europe. I'm just incensed at the lack of thankfulness. The US gave Billions and Billions of dollars to help rebuild Europe and now some people would mock that the US is weak and in shambles. Perhaps you'd all rather be speaking German. And as for the Canadians. Really....that countries financial health is closely tied to ours. So why even talk about the US economy going down the tubes.

To bring my discusson back on target... great cartoon about 360/Wii, in particular the last frame. http://wii.ign.com/articles/763/763534p1.html It's so true...

StormProphet : you were wrong about taxes too. Your article says the same thing I was saying actually. Read it again. These 48 % applied only to the <1% of France population which are really rich people (have very high incomes, like 200k € a year or more), and it's not even the case anymore, as it's 40 % now. So 99+% of France is paying far less taxes than that, far from the 50 % you were saying. I happen to live there, you really thought you could fool me on that subject ? And like I said, Wii's preorders from *december* are still not fulfilled here, and the price is 250€, so we're screwed by Nintendo. But we're screwed by MS too, as the XB360 is 400 € or 500€. Same policy for Sony PS3.

30% tax?? that's A LOT! Here in Greece the tax is 18% only

It's even worse than I thought. Preorders are still plentiful every week in France. I already said that people who preordered in December still don't have their Wii. But from a France Nintendo sales person, we learn that it will be very difficult to find a Wii in all of Europe for all of 2007, because there's one factory for all of Europe, and several thousands Wii are preordered 2 weeks before they can even be made ! He said december preorders won't be fulfilled before march ! Some few people canceled their Wii preorders, and put one for PS3 instead. Well, all the best for Sony. It's terrible news for Nintendo, this can't be good at all.

Ookaze, you got fed a line of crap. Wii's are all manufactured in Asia and then shipped to their respective territories. I don't know where this one factory for Europe nonsense came from. With Nintendo upping the amount of Wii's they manufacture from 700,000 a month to 1 million a month, the situation should be improving shortly.