Texas Secessionists Appear to Change Their Policy | Newsweek
A campaign group pushing for Texas to leave the United States and become a fully independent nation has suggested the Lone Star State wouldn't have to take a share of America's national debt if it secedes from the Union.
A campaign group pushing for Texas to leave the United States and become a fully independent nation has suggested the Lone Star State wouldn’t have to take a share of America’s national debt if it secedes from the Union.
Read More: https://www.newsweek.com/texas-secessionists-appear-change-their-policy-1897495
Professor Matt Qvortrup took a viewer’s question on whether an independent Texas would owe any share of the federal debt. His answer was no. Under international law, he said, a new country has no obligation to take on the debt of the country it leaves. He cited Belgium, which refused a Dutch demand that it pay part of the Netherlands’ debt, and said an attempt to write a treaty forcing new countries to take a share never won enough ratifications to become law.
Qvortrup said he had taken heat in the press for arguing that Scotland could become independent and walk away from the debt. Some countries chose to pay anyway. When Czechoslovakia split, the two new countries divided the debt by population. Ukraine refused its share of the Soviet debt, then started paying so it could borrow from international banks.
A poor new country might need that credit, he said, but an economy the size of Texas’s likely wouldn’t. He came back to the legal point at the end: Texas could become independent and send the bill back.
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