Comparing apples and oranges

Our beloved government has done it again: they have shown that they think us to be morons. While it is true that a significant portion of our population has had a very limited education, it does not mean that even this part cannot see through the bull-dung.

I would like to direct your attention to the latest utterance: We should not complain about the price of petrol or houses because Great Britain, Finland, Australia and probable Japan all pay more for the same items than we do. Nothing wrong with the facts there, but let's take a step back for a bit. You see, our friends over there in the first world do not only pay more for their their houses and fuel for their cars, their employers also pay more for their labour. Significantly more in fact.

Take yours truly as an example. I earn roughly R10 000 a month as a relatively wet-behind-the-ears computer programmer. My good friend across the water in the USA earns that in Dollars. He pays just as much for housing as I do, but he earns 7.56 times as much as I do at the current exchange rate. He also pays about 25-40% less for his Opel Astra OPC than I would have IF I could afford one.

Yes, we pay less for electricity than everyone else in the world, but compare African countries to other African countries please! I spend about 40% of my salary on the installments on my Corsa Lite and the cost of getting said Corsa Lite to the city center five days a week. My friend, on the other hand would only spend about 7%.

As an interesting fact: my meager earnings are only about two-thirds of the minimum wage ($12 an hour X 172 hours per week = ~R15 000) as stipulated by the United States government.