It's not that her figures were wrong, she/they just picked the ones that looked best and ignored parts of the data that didn't suit them. For example her statement made it seem like all the 88% of Scottish households she talked of were capable of paying more tax, but in that 88% are all the pensioners in the country, a distinction made in the tables they got the data from but ignored by them. They also chose to use data from an earlier report 2009/10 instead of 2010/11 because the tax paid percentages were lower, i.e. the figures looked better for the point she wanted to make. I think if she'd done something like that in her own tax return the inland revenue would have prosecuted her for fraud.
If there are so many pensioners in that 88% then doesn't that highlight yet another problem being pensions, which the White Paper did not answer properly and caused concern with professionals from ICAS? Even looking at those figures linked to, 52.7% is still a very high figure for a small country - especially when considering they've apparently stripped out a lot of public spending from those figures.
I also find that people on the Yes Campaign can never except that there are negatives and when there's no clear answer you just get supposition. I find this unrealistic and raises my suspicious that Independence is more about patriotism rather than financial sense.
It's also not right that the SNP have a larger majority in the Scottish Parliament than all the other parties combined. This allows one party far too much power and the whole point of the MMP system was to prevent such.
Rhetoric such as "no other country that went independent has ever wanted to go back" doesn't wash with me. How do we know if they do or don't want to go back to a union? Pride may be preventing it, perhaps they aren't wanted back? Maybe the politicians are preventing the people's wish? Who knows. But then take Crimea, they wanted to go back with Russia. Of course I'm sure the Yes Campaign will have something to say about that such as Russia planted millions of Russian spies to vote for it, or it was rigged or some other excuse.
Regarding Scottish Independence, I appreciate it's difficult to know because there are so many unknowns and many questions can't be answered accurately but this reasons alone only strengthens my opinion that we should be in a position were we can comfortably absorb any unforeseen problems without any heavy impact on the public, but at the moment it feels more like it's a case of if there's problems then we'll all have to batten down the hatches and suffer financially for potentially a few decades at the least - just so that megalomaniacs such as Salmond can have their moment of glory and blinded patriots with a hatred towards England can shout Freedom in the streets - who also call to boycott businesses just because they are against them (Nationalism strikes again).
At the moment I work hard and my family have a comfortable life - the future looks reasonably financially secure for us. I decided to have a few dotted days off last month and I've never seen the streets so busy. I guess there must be a lot of shift workers and mature students about lol. People say don't judge a book by its cover, but it doesn't take a genius to see that there's a lot of people about who have no interest in working. I don't feel that there's a great work ethic here at the moment - we've got Polish labourers who'll work 80 hours a week without a complaint, in fact they ask for more hours. We can't even get Scottish guys to show up on Monday morning. So we don't employ them. We do have Scottish guys coming in asking to sign a comp. slip saying that they've been looking for work so that they could continue to get their benefits. We offered them to go out and labour and their faces would turn sheet white. Things like this anger me but I can't see how an independent Scotland would improve on this as what do we really have, the SNP and Labour. Both in favour of lining the wallets of welfare claimants.
I don't have the time to go analysing statistics from multiple sources to try and verify their authenticity, I'm too busy working and paying tax lol
But it's going to take a lot more convincing for me to risk my son and future family growing up in poverty.
