How about spending less rather than taking more tax, Mr Mackay

HOW many of us wake up in the small hours in a cold sweat, fret-ting that we pay too little tax? Anyone who looks at their payslip regularly is unlikely to find much motivation for another day of work in the figures detailing tax and National Insurance deductions.

Yet Scottish political debate is governed by the growing belief that tax rises are somehow inevitable — that, in fact, many of us would like to pay more tax to bolster public services.

There is a lot of euphemism around — including John Swinney’s warning on Sunday that ‘we have to put resources in place to pay for all of our commitments’. (More of your resources, he means.)

Nicola Sturgeon has said she does not ‘want to put people’s taxes up, and I make no apology for that’ — but then went on to call for an ‘honest, frank debate’ about taxation.

For all her unapologetic desire not to increase taxes, the First Minister has already said that she will consider opposition proposals to hike taxes, including adding 1p on all tax bands.

The Left-wing consensus is that tax rises are unavoidable and indeed morally laudable.

They are necessary to fund some of the noble ‘commitments’ Mr Swinney mentioned, including the removal of the 1 per cent public sector pay cap.

Some in the private sector whose wages have been frozen as the cost of living rises might question the logic behind these assumptions.

No one at the SNP conference — a festival of denial and baseless self-congratulation — has been keen to draw attention to rather bleak economic data showing that growth in Scotland from April to June was only 0.1 per cent.

Economist John McLaren calculates that Scottish growth has been roughly a third that of the UK over the past 30 months — 1.2 per cent compared to the UK’s 4.5 per cent.

And now the solution for which the SNP is seeking support at the Scottish parliament is a tax hike.

This threat follows the Nationalists’ decision last year to make Scotland the highest-taxed part of the UK by refusing to lift the threshold for higher rate taxpayers in Scotland in line with the rest of the UK.

Finance Secretary Derek Mackay once admitted he had no knowledge of the Laffer Curve — the economic principle that the more an activity such as production is taxed, the less of it is generated.

He also described those paying the higher rate of tax as ‘rich’ — a description many senior nurses and teachers would struggle to recognise.

Yesterday, Mr Mackay was demanding more tax powers for Holyrood and signalling further misery for higher rate taxpayers as he condemned the UK Government.

He told delegates at the SNP conference: ‘Where we choose progressivity, they choose tax cuts for the richest.’

‘Progressivity’ is an ugly off-shoot of the all too ubiquitous and nebulous term, ‘progressive’. It seems to mean leeching progressively more and more out of people’s already diminishing salaries.

And why? To pay for the state, which in Scotland has become a sprawling behemoth, encompassing not only local government but also quangos and even charities that depend on the taxpayer for their continued survival (and many of them exist largely to champion and implement Scottish Government policy).

MSPs yesterday condemned the scandal of public sector fat cats being rewarded with massive ‘golden goodbye’ payoffs — despite steering their organisations into calamity.

Then there are disasters such as the Edinburgh trams project — set to cost taxpayers £1billion and now the subject of an ongoing inquiry.

Waste is rife but taxpayers are expected to pour more of their hard-earned cash into the money pit — not that, legally, they have any choice.

The real ‘honest, frank debate’ the SNP needs to have is over the extent of the ‘commitments’ the SNP funds — including ‘free’ prescriptions — and the disproportionate size of the public sector. It accounts for more than a fifth of total employment in Scotland (compared with 16.9 per cent south of the Border).

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the gap between public and private sector pensions in Britain is the widest in the developed world.

The OECD found UK civil servants’ pension promises were so generous that an average worker joining the workforce two years ago will receive a 6 per cent pay rise when they reach retirement.

But you can be sure that the two words you won’t hear from Miss Sturgeon when she addresses delegates today are ‘tax cuts’ — an idea regarded as pernicious, greedy and anti-public services by the Left-wing parties.

The Scottish Greens — now a kind of subsection of the SNP — want to see a new 60p income tax introduced for those earning more than £150,000 a year, and called last year for a new 43p rate, starting at £43,000.

And yet with infinitesimal growth, what the economy needs more than ever is an immediate stimulus — the kick-start that would come from slashing taxes.

Holyrood has the power to vary tax bands but a rise or drop in the higher rate would have to be mirrored for the basic rate, and vice versa, so any cut would also benefit the lower-paid.

Tax rises mean the entrepreneurs trying to grow new-start firms face a disincentive to expand; tax cuts, on the other hand, could make Scotland a magnet for new business.

Simply allowing people to keep more of the cash they earn means they have more to spend — and to devote towards paying credit card debt. The idea that paying more tax would lead to better public services is also demonstrably false because the high levels of tax we’re already paying clearly haven’t brought about improvements in schools and in the NHS.

And is there any point throwing yet more cash at unreformed public services?

John F Kennedy inherited a top rate of income tax of 91 per cent and faced Republican opposition in reducing it to 70 per cent, but his policy change resulted in the US moving from deficit to a £2.4billion surplus by 1965.

We can only hope that Mr Mackay’s knowledge of Kennedy is greater than his appreciation of the Laffer Curve, given that Scotland has a ‘net deficit’ of more than £13billion.

But don’t hold your breath because the SNP also has to pay for the perpetuation of Scotland’s benefits culture — as entrenched as the dominance of the public sector.

The Scotland Act gives Holyrood control of a package of 11 welfare powers, and a study last month showed that spending on these benefits rocketed by 12 per cent — or £290million — over the past five years, to £2.8billion a year.

The SNP is a party that boasts former MP George Kerevan as one of its economic thinkers — the man who this year described the euro as a ‘perfectly sound currency’.

The easier option is to throw more of your money at state handouts and into the coffers of fat cat quangocrats, and that doesn’t come cheaply. So stop complaining — and embrace the ‘progressivity’.