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A happy new year to you.

This comes with a recommendation that you seek your happiness somewhere that money and markets don't dominate.

And here's a multi-billion story for the early days of 2009 that will still be around for much of the next decade, with the bills still being payable for perhaps decades after that - the new bridge across the Forth.

Even for those who never use it, it will still affect everyone in Scotland, because the roads, other bridges, railways, schools and hospitals everywhere could be starved of capital spending while the £2bn (a latest estimate, and very much a ballpark figure) is found for a big bridge at Queensferry.

The question is how it's going to be funded, and we've just learned that the SNP Government's proposed funding mechanism has been rejected by the UK Treasury, as lacking in credibility.

The idea, as set out nearly a month ago, is to bring forward spending from future decades so that it can be spent in the next few years and then cut from subsequent years.

It's a strange way of accounting.

Faintly absurd

The SNP's critics say it's to distract attention from the failure of the party's Scottish Futures Trust proposals to provide a funding solution for the bridge or, so far, much else.

But you could also argue that the proposal is intended to highlight the faintly absurd position in which Holyrood finds itself.

If that was the intention, today's Treasury's response has helped make that case.

Treasury Secretary Yvette Cooper has said the SNP proposal is not credible, and has suggested alternatives.

One is to use the Public Private Partnership, or Public Finance Initiative, as it used to be known.

But she admits that will soon have to come onto government's balance sheet, so the main attraction of that is being lost.

She also knows opposition to PPP/PFI is an article of SNP faith.

Alternatively, the Scottish Government could squirrel money away by underspending over the next few years.

Missing link

But isn't this the same British government that is eager to find projects to bring forward to spend like fury so that it can kick-start the economy with a big fiscal boost?

On ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Scotland yesterday, Ms Cooper's boss, the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, responded to the SNP idea: "Their particular scheme where they were asking to borrow money from budgets which are yet to be allocated over an extremely long period - that's something that we simply don't do".

Really? Is he sure? Isn't that what government borrowing is all about? Isn't that exactly what has happened with PFI/PPP contracts signed for at least 25 years?

The missing link in this argument is the inability of the Scottish Government to issue bonds. Councils can do so, and the rail operators can borrow to build the Government's priority projects.

But the Treasury has never liked the possibility that an irresponsible Scottish administration could breach the UK's borrowing targets.

That argument doesn't look so strong these days.

It is hard to imagine any Scottish government so irresponsible that it breaches borrowing limits on the scale Mr Darling has achieved in recent weeks.

One element that could be overlooked in this exchange of letters between Holyrood and the Treasury is that they are both agreed the bridge needs to be built.

Scottish business couldn't agree more.

Huge headache

The idea of having the Forth transport link severed, if corrosion on the current bridge forces its closure, would cause a huge headache not only to the Fife economy but up to the north east and into the Lothians.

And business is already suffering from the costs of congestion on the current bridge crossing.

So there's a challenge here for the two administrations to show they can work together in a mature way towards achieving a shared goal.

If there are to be no bond-issuing powers for Holyrood, could this be a case, for instance, of the Treasury issuing bonds on behalf of the Scottish Government and guaranteeing them, while annually top-slicing the Scottish block grant with the costs of servicing that debt as it has to be paid off?

A final thought: the plan outlined by infrastructure minister Stewart Stevenson last month had £1.7bn sliced off the previous price of the new bridge, primarily by removing the public transport element and putting that onto the existing bridge as a dedicated bus crossing.

It could then have the new bridge with two lanes in either direction.

False economy

But two lanes in both directions is the current capacity on a bridge built for the traffic volumes envisaged 50 years ago, but which is now jamming almost every rush hour.

You could take a few buses out of that congestion, but how do we know that all this spending is going to leave anything more than the current traffic problems?

Could the reduced budget be a false economy?

According to Transport Scotland, the Government's infrastructure arm, there will be two lanes each way, as at present, but there will also be a hard shoulder in both directions.

That ought to reduce the congestion caused by accidents and breakdowns.

The Scottish Government's climate change targets mean they don't want to increase capacity for single-occupancy private vehicles.

For lone drivers, £2bn of bridge buys lots more jam tomorrow.