STEPHEN DAISLEY: With 'business friends' like the SNP, who needs liquidators?
Here's a brainteaser for you. What do you have to add to £1.7 billion to get £600 million?
The answer is the SNP. According to independent analysis from the Scottish Fiscal Commission, Scotland's higher income tax rates ought to pull in an extra £1.7 billion a year in revenue.
Unfortunately, Holyrood's coffers are only bringing in around one third of that, in a phenomenon the commission calls 'economic performance gap' and I call 'Shona Robison'.
Russell Findlay was very exercised about the matter at First Minister's Questions. John Swinney, on the other hand, was less worked up.
'The important point to consider,' the FM said, was that higher taxes meant more money to spend on public services.
There is no tell like: 'The important point to consider…' It invariably means: 'This subject is politically awkward for me, and it'd be jolly good of you to move on.' Let's talk about all the dosh raised rather than the dubious efficacy with which it's spent.
Swinney preferred to think of it as 'differences in policy outcomes' as a result of 'people on higher incomes paying slightly more in taxation'.
The outcomes are different, all right.
Findlay brushed this aside as 'more smoke and mirrors' and noted that 'economic performance gap' had cost Scotland £5.4 billion over the last decade.
Thank goodness this isn't a government that constantly complains about a lack of funding, otherwise this would be embarrassing.
Swinney boasted that 'we take a number of steps to invest in the economy', which would be fair enough if they didn't keep taking the same steps over and over.
The Ferguson Marine yard can attest to ministers' flushness with the cash, the islanders not so much.
The FM boasted that his was a 'business-friendly SNP government'. With business friends like this, who needs liquidators?
Findlay couldn't stifle a titter, and who could blame him with material like this?
'I will try to stop laughing for a minute,' he chuckled, before accusing the Nationalists of 'throwing all the money away'.
Miffed that Findlay had alluded to the cost of welfare spending, Swinney growled: 'What benefits would he cut?' For good measure, he charged Findlay with wanting to 'consign more children to poverty'.
I knew it was a bad idea for Findlay to unveil his Reopening the Workhouses (Scotland) Bill before thinking it through properly.
The Tory leader remarked that he wanted people out of poverty, which is why he didn't want them dependent on benefits. Swinney replied: 'This government will do what it always does.' Blame it all on Westminster?
Anas Sarwar, his new Hamilton MSP Davy Russell perched proudly behind him, raised the plight of workers at Alexander Dennis, the Scottish bus manufacturer which is relocating south of the border, with job losses on the cards.
Sarwar snarled: 'The Scottish Government is procuring more buses from China than it is from Scotland. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has bought almost four times as many buses from Alexander Dennis.'
Things have come to a pretty pass when Labour is doing business with capitalists and the SNP is taking its custom to the Chinese Communist Party. No wonder capitalism remains stubbornly un-overthrown.
The award for the most heroic attempt to crowbar independence into an entirely unrelated question must go to Lorna Slater.
She got to her feet to press the FM to roll out free school meals across more local authorities but, some-where along the way, she segued into a spot of separatist sabre-rattling.
'Now is the time to demand that Keir Starmer set out exactly what conditions he believes need to be met to trigger an independence referendum for Scot-land, so that we can get out of this unequal union,' she demanded.
The Prime Minister should have some fun with these conditions. Brechin City beats Celtic on penalties to win the treble.
A leap-year blood moon when Mars is in retrograde and the Wurzels are back in the charts. The Scottish Greens take a collective vow of silence and move to Micronesia.
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