THE news that Scots have paid an additional £750 million in tax is no surprise ("Scots paid £750m more income tax after changes", The Herald, January 8). But yet I see no improvement "on the ground" from this. Many smaller communities could be regenerated for £1-2 million. I expect a quarter of this sum would be a huge boon to an individual school. How many private enterprises could be started with some "seed corn" funding for sums infinitely lower than this?
This also does not include the additional £12 billion that Scotland receives from the UK Union dividend, something that would disappear in an independent Scotland and would not be replaced by an equally generous independence or EU dividend either.
I pay £100 a month in council tax and pay £144 a month to get to a 25 hour-a-week job on minimum wage, but yet the Scottish Government it is utterly non-existent in my life and the lives of other hard-working, responsible and diligent Scots (although, given its record of "assistance", we should be grateful).
Take a good look around you. Do you really feel like the astronomical sums of money being spent in Nicola Sturgeon's Scotland are being spent wisely? Surely we need to start asking pertinent and searching questions about where, why and on whom these sums are being spent?
David Bone, Girvan.
MARY Thomas (Letters, January 8) takes me to task for not reading the Growth Commision report. Her admission, however, that there will be much work to be done to bridge the gap between Scotland's performance and potential does not inspire confidence.
I take the view expressed in the report that making oil revenues central to the case for independence in 2014 was a mistake and that there is a need to balance optimism and realism.
There may be no forma
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