Interesting Tidbits

I have started reading the German newspaper as a way to continue improving my German. It's a slow way to go, but at least I'm getting some new information while I'm doing it...

Yesterday I got the first two paragraphs of the first two articles translated (I did say it was slow - especially when the articles are on Politics...) and here's what they said, (in a nutshell.)

The German Federal government is passing a change to their Constitution which says that they will not be able to incur debt after the year 2020, which I assume means that eventually they will have no debt at all. (To be more specific it says that the Lower House of Parliament (Regional or State Government) won't be able to, but the Upper House (Federal House) will have a little play room.) And Bas tells me that the EU requires a certain debt to income ratio of member states before they join, and that member states must then maintain or continue decreasing that ratio. Explains the power of the Euro, sounds like the American government should take note...

The next article was on the European elections, which will be held this week (June 7th.) It says that there was a poll out which stated that 66% of German voters will not vote or do not know who they will vote for. Merely 30% of the questioned feel strongly or very strongly interested; and 69% are interested only a little or not at all.

And as you may know, we watch British television here, so I am very well versed in all of the current British political issues (huge MP expense scandal going on...) and BBC shared a statistic this morning that said that the number of people who voted for the winner of Britian's Got Talent (Yay, Diversity won!) is SEVEN times the number of people who will be voting in the European election.

When it comes to the EU, it seems that people just aren't informed enough, not only about the candidates, but also the EU jurisdiction and the extent of their powers. Another interesting thing I learned watching BBC is that it is the EU requirements on recycling that cause our dreaded trash situation (see here). All of the forced trash separation and the bi-weekly pick-ups are designed to encourage people to make the effort to recycle - because if you don't, you'll run out of bin space! Certainly worked for us, we recycle everything!