... is that it's getting really hard to live life without it.

A few months ago my car broke down.  I phoned up the AA, who arranged for it to be towed to the garage, and for a rental car for me for a few days. Shortly after, I got a call from Avis, who told me they needed my credit card details so they could take a deposit for damages, fuel, etc.

I gave them my Maestro card number - and they said that they only take Visa or Mastercard, not Maestro.  So, I tried to give them my Visa Debit card.  They wouldn't have any of that, either!  Only credit, not debit cards accepted here, no sire.  On asking why, they said "it's company policy".

Last week, I used my T-Mobile SIM card in my laptop to try to read a message on Facebook.  It told me that there were parental controls (!) in place and I would need to remove them before I could access the site.  So, I click on "remove content block", and a page later get asked for credit card details.

Guess what?  Maestro doesn't work, Visa Debit doesn't work, and neither does my prepaid credit card from virgin.

So there are now 2 reasons i've needed a credit card, despite being lucky enough to have enough cash in my bank to not need one.

While credit cards may provide purchase protection, they're also fostering the deep rooted attitude towards credit so many people in the UK and America have today.

Mortgages, HP, car finance, credit cards, bank loans, pay advances - all instruments of the current "financial crisis" - although I don't think it's a crisis any more than capitalist punishment for being greedy bastards.  all of us - not just the bankers.

Avis & T-Mobile are just as much to blame for the economy being the way it is right now as anyone who is in negative equity.

The national average for salary p/a is 23,746 GBP.  After paying tax at code 474 and national insurance, that's 1,495.48 per month.

Assuming you could somehow live off half of that, then you could save 8,972 a year.  That's 22 years of saving and living off an impossible amount to save 200,000 - the price of a semi-decent house outside of home counties.

Ohh, and hang on - we've just spent 22 years saving - we've not been able to go on holiday, or more importantly pay for a pension.  Or pay council tax at perhaps 1000/year!

Houses are too expensive because we've got too many people and not enough land.  To reduce house prices, we either need to have less people in the UK, or find more land to build on.  We actually have plenty of land that's not built on, but it's mostly being used for farming & agriculture - a noble and important part of our economy, unless we want to dig ourselves into holes for the future by relying on other countries to give us food.  Because we joined Europe and had a shoddy immigration policy for so long, we're probably stuck with the population as it is.

So i'd like to propose another solution: we swap some of the Icelandic debt in return for part of their country.  We can defrost the land, and then provide it to British people for building houses on.  The economy would boom due to all the houses being built, will generate lots of jobs due to all the building and staffing new high streets (which Icelandic companies already have experience in running), house prices in the UK would be in less demand, there would be less people in the UK, and as a result, house prices here would fall.

I should become a politician.