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haha. No, actually they don't. It is actually written in law that we CAN'T have a deficit, and a condition of the Scottish parliament is that we can only spend the money we are given by Westminster. However even though we don't have any debt, we do pay debt payments on the debt created by the UK. Which should really be called the English debt because again, its a provable fact that were we independent we would have been in surplus for almost all of the last 30 plus years and would have no debt at all. 

Or maybe you're referring to The GERS figures and the "15 billion" black hole we would allegedly have if we were independent?  First of all, looking at our current position we currently have a 90 Billion "black hole" i.e. deficit, as part of the UK, and studies show that that could increase by as much as another 60 billion once Brexit properly kicks in. So a 150 Billion black hole then, 10 times bigger than that 15 billion. 

Well, ten times bigger than it would be if that 15 billion actually existed. Because, of course the GERS are not actually representative of the finances of Scotland. 

As with all these things the devil is in the detail. While a simple catch phrase about a black hole makes waves in the papers and is easy to shout about, as with all these things it’s pretty much a lie. all of this information is easily researchable and confirmable with a little  Googling.

the following is some information about GERS and why their false, copied and pasted from another post I amde on a different website. As well as the GERS stuff it also repeats some more information about policing, education etc 

- GERS is an ESTIMATE of Scottish finances

UK government refuses to give the Scottish Government access to a lot of important data – and as a result much of it is total guesswork.

-  GERS misses out a LOT of the money that Scotland would have were it to be independent

As well as being less than accurate on what it does include, GERS also misses out a lot of the welth that would be generated in an independent Scotland. The revenue from any goods exported from the UK are counted as originating from the port they leave the UK from. As almost all goods shipped around the world leave the UK from English ports, the fact that Scotland is a net exporter of goods (while the UK as a whole is a net importer!) has no bearing on Scotland’s finances as all of the revenue from exported whiskey, salmon and all of our other produce is counted towards the UK. Similarly, any business that has a head office in England (i.e. most of the large high street chains, supermarkets etc) reports it’s profits as UK profits, with no consideration for the proportion that was actually received from Scottish shoppers. Similarly, other business tax such as VAT is also reported UK wide, and no attribution is given to Scotland for the proportion it raises.

On the flip side of this, we pay somewhere around £30 billion a year to the UK for “services” that are considered to be UK wide such as defence spending. But we don’t receive anywhere near that same money back in actual spending. Only a fraction of what we pay in defence spending is actually spent in Scotland, and it is the same with all of the other “services” we pay for. We pay costs towards the UK regeneration fund, even though almost none of that money gets spent in Scotland and we chip in for London’s sewer system, the various new high speed rail links, airport extensions, and a whole host of projects that have no bearing on Scotland at all.

All of these points above tell us .....

- GERS was deliberately designed from the outset by the UK government to make Scotland (and the non-Tory parties) look bad.

It was confirmed in a leaked memo from the then Tory Scottish Secretary Scottish Secretary to the Prime Minister that the GERS were specifically designed to “undermine” the UK government’s rivals, and to demonstrate to the public that self governance (devolution at that time, and then independence laterally) was a bad thing.  

“I judge that it is just what is needed at present in our campaign to maintain the initiative and undermine the other parties. This initiative could score against all of them.”

- The curse of Oil

One of the main cornerstones of the attacks against an independent Scotland’s financial viability is that the world oil prices have fallen, and this would have significant harm on our ability to spend. Or as many would joke, we are cursed as the only country who has discovered oil and became poorer as a result!

Like everything else the reality is quite different to many people’s opinions. Firstly, looking at the most recent figures, the revenue collected by the government for oil has fallen by 97%, which should be a crushing blow for us. But in reality is has only lead to a 0.45% change in our finances. Less than half a percent. Hardly the huge supporting pillar of our government’s income as unionists would have you believe. The reason for such a small change is that Scotland doesn’t actually see the benefit of most of the oil revenue. While the prices are low now, in the dozen years up to 2011 the cumulative annual oil revenues came to more than £80 billion (not million).

But of course, none of this money had found its way directly to Scotland, it all went into the Treasury’s coffers in London, and only about £8 billion ever made it back across the border. Therefore what unionists do their best to avoid telling you (or even themselves) is that Scotland ALREADY survives just fine without most of its oil income without oil just fine, as it all goes to Westminster and we don’t get to keep it, even in good years. If we were independent, a return to about 10% of the previous high value of revenue generated would be all that was needed for Scotland to actually have an overall increase in our income because we would be keeping ALL of this money ourselves and not giving around 90% of it to Westminster.

As has always been said by the Scottish government, oil revenue when available is a bonus, not something that we need to rely on.

(And as a side note, I do not recall unionists ever praising the Scots’ generosity in these huge contributions to the UK for the previous 30 years when oil was at a high value, for much of which the UK was in such dire economic straits that it could hardly have got by otherwise.)

On top of all of this, its important to remember that the dramatically lower oil price we are currently experiencing is a man made, deliberate choice by the OPEC countries as they try and hold on to their piece of the oil market. While geo-politics and multi-national business is very complicated, what it all boils down to is that, with fracking continuing to grow in the USA and Russia finding significant reserves of oil in its own borders, they are becoming more and more self sufficient and oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia have less demand for their product. Rather than easing back on production as a result they continued to produce oil at the same pace and oversupply the market, hoping to deliberately drive the price down low enough to bully some of these other producers out of the market and make it too unprofitable for them to continue (as for example China has done in the past with rare earth metals such as neodymium to corner the market on the electronics industry).   We have seen a little of the effects of this in our own North Sea as the industry has had to downsize a little and shed some jobs, but this isn’t a situation that can last forever. The world has called their bluff and kept producing anyway, and now even with their vast wealth to cushion the blow of lower prices, the OPEC countries are beginning to feel the pinch and are easing up, causing the price to begin to rise again. With the OPEC countries financially unable to sustain this indefinitely, and with the demand for energy in the world only ever increasing, it is guaranteed that oil will return to its previous price, and higher, in the next few years.

- But, who makes most of the decisions about the Scottish economy again?

Even IF it were a true reflection of all of the finances of Scotland, it’s worth pointing out that it’s hardly a great reflection on the decisions of the UK government. Scotland has been part of the UK for 308 years. It’s had its own parliament for just 5% of that time. Even now, almost all key economic levers – taxation, welfare, immigration and many more – are directly controlled by Westminster, as is a huge chunk of “Scottish” spending. If the economy is a mess, who’s made it so? Certainly not the SNP or Scottish government.

However while we consider which parts of the economy are controlled by who, if we look at the areas that Scotland DOES have control off.......

NHS – Scotland has outperformed ALL areas of the NHS in the rest of the UK for the past 20 months.

Education – The ONS recently announced that Scotland is the most educated nation on this planet. University tuition is free; there have been more Scots entering university than ever before. People from deprived backgrounds entering Scottish education has increased by 9%. Meanwhile in England university tuition fees are 9 grand, they can’t choose what type of schools they want their kids to attend and girls are selling themselves for a degree in Psychology due to student debt!

Police –Despite huge cuts forced on it by the UK government, (and a huge VAT bill that not other police force in the UK needs to pay!) Scotland has maintained their frontline police force at 2010 levels. While in the specific categories of violent or sexual crimes there has admittedly been a small increase of 5.2% and 6.2% respectively, crime overall is at a 40 year low. Contrast this to England, where police numbers have been reduced by 14% and crime is on the up with a staggering and rather worrying 27% increase in violent crime and a 36% increase in sexual crime.

Energy - Scotland is a nation that is self-sufficient in oil and can export it. The UK is a state that imports oil. Scotland is also a nation that is self-sufficient in gas and can export it (with the UK again being net importer of gas), and it is also a nation that is self-sufficient in Electricity production and can export it. Again the UK is a net importer of electricity.

As an added bonus, for the second year in a row Scotland had a full day where it was able to produce ALL of its energy requirements from wind power alone, and even had some left over for export.

The list goes on and on. Despite only having control of a fraction of our resources and only being able to make decisions on a fraction of our economy, and in the face of huge budget cuts imposed on it by Westminster, the Scottish government is able to work seeming miracles in the areas it has power over, and is able to do a much better job than its southern counterparts. Imagine what we could do if we had access to all of the extra billions of pounds we raise, and were free to make far better decisions about how to use them!

And anyway......

- The “£15bn black hole” in GERS screamed across every newspaper this week is a fallacy, because the target balance of a government is not zero.

Almost every country on Earth – except for that other oil-rich nation of 5m people bordering the North Sea which isn’t Scotland – runs a deficit. Governments don’t operate like households, which at some point have to balance the books and pay off their debts. Under normal circumstances governments always run a deficit because that’s how you create growth. When you use that deficit to invest in your people and the infrastructure of your country (rather than giving tax breaks to multi-national corporations and the super rich to stash away in their offshore bank accounts), it is a good thing and leads to a growing and stimulated economy.

So you never have to fill that “black hole”. The only issues are whether the deficit is too big to service the debt payments on, and whether it’s permanently big (a problem) or goes up and down (generally not a problem). Scotland’s is the latter.

In 2010 the UK’s deficit was a bigger share of GDP (11%) than Scotland’s is in the latest GERS figures (10%), but nobody said it proved the UK wasn’t a viable independent country, because most people aren’t self-hating morons desperate to portray their own nation as a financial basket case. As long as the deficit isn’t ALWAYS that high you’re fine, and Scotland’s is usually much lower.

(And remember – the UK, which still controls around 40% of Scottish spending, doesn’t just generously gift Scotland the money to plug its deficit because it loves us so much. It takes out borrowing in Scotland’s name, whether it’s for stuff Scotland actually wants or not. Scotland gets no say in whether it wants or needs nuclear submarines or giant aircraft carriers or not. London makes the decision and puts it on Scotland’s tab.)

If a sustainable deficit is (say) £10bn and your actual deficit is (say) £12bn, then the size of the “black hole” you need to address in a bad year – by generating extra income, borrowing or reducing spending – is £2bn, not £12bn. But that makes for a much less dramatic newspaper headline.

- GERS – by the universal agreement of everyone except Unionist politicians and the Scottish media – has no bearing whatsoever on the finances of an independent Scotland.

That’s a fact which just can’t be repeated too often. To name but one extremely significant example, an independent Scotland’s balance sheet would be massively affected – to the tune of billions of pounds a year, a huge chunk of the deficit – by the details of the independence settlement and in particular how much UK debt Scotland agreed to inherit.

It’s highly unlikely, for all sorts of reasons that have been explored at length by others previously, that this would be a straight per-capita share, and a more realistic figure – half that or less – would instantly reduce the deficit to a degree that would have, for example, more than balanced the drop in oil revenues this year.

When Ireland gained independence from the UK, it negotiated an agreement which gave it none of the UK’s debt whatsoever. If Scotland – which has a very strong negotiating position – were to do the same its “true” deficit (see Fact 3), even in a very bad year like 2014-15, would be almost wiped out at a stroke.

Brexit is also a huge change in circumstances that hasn’t been taken into account by the future projections of GERS. The impact of Brexit on the Scottish economy is impossible to measure, but what everyone on all sides seems to agree on is that it’ll be bad. (Which is why all five Parliamentary parties in Scotland campaigned for a Remain vote.)

Data published by the Scottish Government suggested that the damage could range between £1.7bn and £11.2bn a year. There could of course also be economic downsides to remaining in the EU while the rUK left (depending on Scotland’s trading terms with the rUK), but it seems highly likely that the net balance of staying in the EU would be significantly positive for Scotland. The black hole created by STAYING in the UK could easily be far worse than any extra temporary deficit that was created by independence.

The point is that GERS factors in none of that, and is therefore an even poorer guide to an independent Scotland’s finances than it was already, by a long way.

And finally.....

- GERS is also totally irrelevant in the context of independence for a second crucial reason – the entire point of independence is to NOT keep doing everything in Scotland the same way it’s been done in the UK.

As seen in the areas that we DO have control of, the Scottish government tends to make very different decisions to Westminster, to the vast benefit of the general population rather than the rich few. Offsetting the bedroom tax, free tuition fees and prescriptions are but a few examples of this. Given the power to run our whole economy, the idea would be to not continue in the way that we are (which is exactly what the GERS are based on, assuming things stay the same as they are) and to make much better choices that would grow our economy, stimulate growth and begin to take the country and its people out of the self created debt situation that the Westminster government has put us in. 

i guess you are referring to the ONS report? while it is true they claim less in work based benefits than they pay in (just) this does not cover council costs,housing benefit, council tax benefit, schools and the nhs costs.