The most expensive country in the world...

For the last months I've been wanting to buy a new graphics card to my G4. I'm tired of the GF2MX performance, and thought that the Radeon 8500 would be the best choice for my Mac. But this is one of those times that I just wished I lived in the US... Because the card here in Norway costs.....

can you guess..?


"250 $?" you say? no.


"300 $?!" nope...


400 american dollars!! 😡 Or 3,300 NOK. They never lowered the price on the Radeon 8500 here in this exotic distant scandinavian part of our world!

And behold, the price of a new GeForce 4 Ti (norwegian price); 550 U$D. I should buy one of those instead... Better performance, only ( 😛 ) 150 $ more expensive than the Radeon.

Norway is known to be one of the most expensive countries in the world, and I've really experienced that now... But the Mac-prices over here is really high too, so I could take a risk and buy a PC Radeon 8500 for "just" 275 $ and flash it...

I'm not sure about the import taxes here in Norway and how high they are, but the taxes that apply to almost everything you buy is really high. Currently 24 % to be exact...
The norwegian government recently lowered the taxes on grocery products by 10 %, but 24 % applies to everything else.
And the taxes on what we earn in this country is really high too... Either 36 % or 49 %. For example, if I make 50,000 $ a year, only 25,000 $ or 32,000 $ is mine. The rest is taxes... I don't know why it's either 36 % or 49 % and what it depends on, but the numbers are correct.

And the most frustrating is that the government makes a LOT of money on oil! Remember that Norway is one of the richest countries in the world and a big oil nation. The government has an oil fund where all the money they make on the oil taxes goes to. And every year the amount of money they make on this increases... Last year I think about 20 billion $ went to the oil fund! And that's just tax income based on oil export and domestic sale... And to put it in perspective; the total "national budget" last year; 75 billion $. A lot less than the US, but we're only 4.5 million people here in Norway... So the oil income made up about 27 % of the total national budget. But the question remains; where does all those money go? I know the government spends a lot of money on roads, transport and the wellbeing of the poorer groups in the society, but the relation between the huge income and the amount of money the government spends isn't correct when counting in the oil fund. I wonder who's responsible for that fund and where all the money goes... I know the nation uses a lot of money on international help and support too, but the income based on the taxes for oil, tobacco, alchohol, food, etc. is huge. It's really expensive to smoke in this country, and beer on restaurants, pubs, etc. costs around 6-7 $ for 0.5 litre.

It must be expensive to come to Norway as a tourist... For me, who live in Norway, it's not a problem with those taxes/prices. Luckily, I don't smoke, and I don't drink a lot, and I have a good schoolarship (spelled right?) so I get about 400 $ a month. Free! Hehe. All students in Norway get this amount of money each month, as long as they don't fail the exams... So basically, I think Norway is the greatest country to live in, because we all have high incomes and takes the advantage of the "high standard" the country provides when it comes to roads, transport, medical, schools, infrastructure (broadband (yay!), TV-cable networks), etc. I think the government of Norway's goal is to clear the differences between the rich and poor in our society. There's really few poor people in Norway, and they get a lot of support from the government, but I know it's easy for the rich people to get richer than it is for the poor to get poorer. But the richest man in Norway has a fortune of "only" 500 million $ (Compare that to mr. Gate$...), so they have succeded in a way.