On Saint Andrew’s Day, Ctd

A reader writes:

I'm entertained that you managed to frame the case for Scottish independence almost entirely in terms of English concerns – how typically Sassenach. Still, I'll offer a couple of thoughts from the perspective of the classic Scot, i.e., the long term expat.

It seems to me that the whole tone of the English wanting to offload the Scots is tied to three basic issues: 12 years of a Scottish-dominated Labour Party government, the drying up of oil revenue, and the extent to which Scottish devolution did nothing to address the more contentious issues of the West Lothian and English questions of governance or the Barnett formula.

The first of these three stirs basic little Englander bigotry – things aren't going well, let's blame the Scots, they're everywhere. It's the middle class version of English shopkeepers refusing to take Scottish pound notes as far as I'm concerned. The second of these was inevitable, and one might say in return, the revenue went to HM Treasury while the oil was flowing at a rate far greater than it came back north, so don't be a bunch of ingrates.

The third is the hardest to deal with, which is presumably why no government has bothered to take a comprehensive and coherent approach. Structurally, the current approach to the Scottish Parliament and Westminster Parliaments is an affront to equity in self-governance among the Home Nations. There's no reason for it not be addressed beyond, I would suppose, party politics, and the challenges of having a Parliament for the Union that could be completely at odds with any or all of the Home Nations Parliaments / Assemblies. Certainly if I were English I'd be exercised about MPs from Scottish constituencies voting on purely English matters.

As for the Barnett formula, that's going to fade in time anyway, and it's not like there aren't funding inequities at the regional level within England – they just don't have an official name. It's also not like the Tories couldn't have taken a swipe at it before, since it's not like there was much Tory support in Scotland to lose, electorally speaking. If Thatcher was willing to write off Scotland for a generation or more by giving them the preview of the Poll Tax, I can't imagine (or remember, to be honest) why she was unwilling to kill off the Barnett formula.

I must admit to bristling at your suggestion that Scotland could be disposed of by the English as being an artifact of history, a relic of empire, but mostly that's a small country chip on the shoulder. We helped build the empire, and kill the natives, but you're right, those days are past now… and after generations of inept government policy at a national and local level, and a wholesale failure to innovate, there's really not much else for Westminster to take.

And in truth it would probably only do Scotland good to be cast off. If nothing else, it would force some clear choices about taxation, the size and scope of the public sector, industrial and education and policy, and so on. I'd like to believe that my long-left-behind countrymen-and-women could recreate themselves to be a Tartan Denmark, but I suspect that old political habits would die hard and there'd be a rush to get money from the EU. Still, we've already got the chilly disdain of Eurocrats, being shot of the English might not be the worst thing ever. It would be typical if after more than 30 years of talking about finding a new landlord or maybe even buying their own place, Scotland was evicted.

One small note: when I said that Britain was a function of empire, I didn't mean that England colonized Scotland. The union, one might recall, began with a Scottish king (and queen, of course) assuming the English throne. I meant that colonizing the rest of the world was a critical Scottish-English project that brought the two countries together. The Scots played an enormously disproportionate role in seizing new territory and policing the planet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With that joint mission over, it's hard to see why the two countries need to stay together as rigidly as they now are.

Size Matters

Ackerman calls out the WSJ:

[H]ow is this a “limited” troop increase? The Journal says that the troop increase will total around 30,000. The Washington Post’s headline says 34,000. If either figure is correct, that means Obama will order tonight a greater troop increase into Afghanistan than President Bush ordered into Iraq in 2007 for the iconic troop surge. What’s more, there are about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today, versus about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in January 2007, so relative to the existing base total of troops, this Afghanistan troop increase is way bigger than the Iraq one. Agree with it or disagree with it, there’s nothing “limited” about it.

The degenerate right has to find a way to attack Obama even if he is doing what they support. That's why I assume and hope that Obama is not fool enough to believe that the GOP will ever ever back a Democratic war president – even if he does everything they want. Their partisanship is total, as Cheney demonstrates. Cheney, the de facto GOP leader on the war, could even interpret the biggest proportional surge in either Iraq or Afghanistan as "weakness". It may be madness; but it's a funny form of weakness.

Chart Of The Day, Ctd

Chart-financial

A reader writes:

Your series of charts on debt appears to be conflating consumer credit and private sector debt.  Private sector debt includes businesses as well as households.  Although much attention is paid to household and government debt, these are both smaller than the debt of the private financial sector, according to the Federal Reserve.  What is even more worrisome is the rate of growth in financial sector debt:  In 1958, financial sector debt was 6% of GDP.  Last year, it was 115% of GDP.  Compare this to total government debt, which is actually little changed as a percentage of GDP since 1958.  If you want to get a handle on what's going on with the financial crisis, an examination of the explosion of debt in our financial institutions would be a good place to start.

Larger image here.

Is Huckabee Cooked?

Weigel rounds up conservative reaction to Huckabee granting suspected cop killer Maurice Clemmons clemency. TNC's read:

It's worth reviewing what actually happened in the Maurice Clemmons case. Huckabee, apparently, reduced the sentence of a guy who was given 100 years in prison, for crimes he committed between the age of 16 and 18–none of which were murder or rape. I just find it impossible to criticize him for that decision. What I was trying to get at yesterday–albeit rather meekly–was that people who have an issue with Huckabee would do better to look at the laundry list of fuck-ups and loopholes which allowed Clemmons to remain free.

Clemmons was shot dead this morning.

Clemmons And “The Clinton Regime”

Joe Carter, who worked on Huckabee's campaign as Director of Rapid Response, weighs in on Huckabee's latest clemency scandal:

After reviewing hundreds of cases and interviewing numerous people involved in the process, I concluded to my own satisfaction that the governor’s actions and judgment were generally defensible. Yet there remained about a half-dozen situations in which even after reviewing all of the information I was unpersuaded that justice had been served. Although I was sympathetic with some of the justifications offered for making the decisions, I found them inadequate for a number of reasons.

For example, in a number of the cases—and almost always in the most controversial requests for commutation—there was sense that the petitioners were attempting to redress injustices committed by the “Clinton machine.”The disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates that peaked among conservatives in the early 1990s remains palpable among Republicans in Arkansas. Many of the petitioners and supporters of the commutations and pardons were truly convinced that they were simply rectifying injustices committed by the former Democratic governor and his cronies. (This was especially true in the infamous Wayne DuMond case where the victim was a second cousin of Bill Clinton.)

Health Care Premiums Go Up, And Down

Chris Good, Brian Beutler, and Karen Tumulty summarize the CBO report on health care reform and insurance premium prices.  Megan's take (follow up here):

[M]any people will not face the full costs of their treatment–slightly more than half of the people in the individual market are expected to receive subsidies.  But that just means that someone else will have to give up those thousands of dollars.  It looks to me like health care spending as a percentage of GDP is going to be higher, not lower, when all the changes are phased in.