We all find it hard to cut back. But the Government just can't, it seems. It is acting like one of those ladies who still buy designer clothes, but have them delivered in plain paper bags. Ministers talk about austerity, but they are still trying to buy votes with our money.

I'll sell my radio if I have to listen once more to the advert whistling about the wonders of the DirectGov website, or the one that says that tax credits are “a two-way street, so tell us if your circumstances have changed” (fat chance). Another gives a hotline number to find your local college (heard of Yellow Pages?), because, it claims, “our future is in your hands”. If only it was.

Sadly, our future is mortgaged to the insane spendaholics who fund this propaganda and who, we learnt yesterday, created 30,000 new public sector jobs last year while the private sector cut 105,000. Average public sector pay rose by 3.7 per cent, while the pay of those of us in the private sector, who foot these bills fell, by 1.1 per cent. Some of us will soon have to sell our cars, not just our radios.

I wish politicians could wean themselves off their fatal assumption that spending is the answer to every problem. Surely the biggest lesson of the past ten years, since the Blair/Brown spending splurge began, is that throwing money at inefficient services can create as many problems as it solves.

We have spent an extra £90 billion on the health service, the third-biggest employer in the world after the Red Army and Indian Railways. We have Third World maternity wards, elderly patients discharged with malnutrition, lower cancer and stroke survival rates than most of Europe and Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, which has apparently allowed more than 400 people to die through sheer neglect.

Why? Not for lack of money. Not for want of teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists or radiographers. But because the law of diminishing returns kicks in particularly viciously in heavily unionised, bureaucratic, monopoly services.

Even Derek Wanless, Gordon Brown's health adviser, has agreed that the extra cash put into the NHS unleashed a crazy kind of inflation that simply made everything from new buildings to IT more expensive. Labour exacerbated that problem by giving contracts to GPs, consultants and teachers that paid them more to do less. Used wisely, extra cash is a quid pro quo for convincing professionals to accept unpopular reforms. But ministers, luxuriating in their largesse, struck some hopelessly poor bargains.

We have also suffered from what I call Parkinson's Second Law. This is the rule that meetings, feasibility studies, vanity projects and pointless activity expand to fill the budget available. So you get armies of people creating forms for other people to fill in - 10 strategic health authorities and 152 primary care trusts, 47 learning and skills councils and 9 regional development agencies, including the “One NorthEast” development agency, which has rebranded itself this month as “One North East” at a cost of £7,000. This agency is supposed to encourage private investment in the economy of the North East, which in 1997 was 54per cent dependent on state spending. It is now 66 per cent reliant on the State.

Misplaced spending is not just financially damaging. It also creates complexity that obstructs people from doing their jobs. Britain's tax regime has become so complex since 1997 that Tolley's Tax Handbook has doubled in size and rivals India's as the longest in the world.

But this does not just affect accountants. It also lets down the most vulnerable people. Take Baby P. He died not because Haringey Council had no money: he was visited 60 times by different agencies. He died because bureaucracy had grown to a point where no one took responsibility for him. This Government created safeguarding boards, children's trusts, Cafcass, Sure Starts, children's services departments, and required them to work together. This means that people are attending meetings rather than seeing families, ticking boxes rather than exercising judgment.

Child protection is not the only example. Firefighters and police support officers have been told not to rescue drowning people since the Health and Safety Executive prosecuted the Manchester fire authority over the death of a firefighter. Nurses are told not to lift patients. Judges are given such detailed sentencing guidelines that they have barely any discretion.

Contrary to what politicians fear, some of us would welcome some cuts as a liberation. Parents want the Children's Database to be scrapped so that paedophiles cannot stalk them. Charity workers hate humiliating and pointless “security” checks. Teachers would like to discipline pupils without fear of tribunals. And so on.

Real politics is not about spending other people's money. It is about taking difficult decisions and judging what is fair. Is it fair that immigrants denied entry to Britain stay anyway, with the aid of state-funded lawyers? Is it fair that average pay in the public sector is higher than in the private sector? Who is serving whom?

It is a moral imperative that we rethink the State, as well as a financial one. But the media must play its part. John Humphrys elegantly savaged a minister on the Today programme yesterday because 70 further education colleges have been told they will not get the money they had expected for new buildings. I would rather he had asked why a further 250 colleges are being built. Can that be a priority?

“We are not going to behave like flint-faced turbocharged accountants,” David Cameron said yesterday. But “inefficiency is unaffordable”. If only Gordon Brown was big enough to agree, instead of pursuing a scorched-earth policy that will leave us, like the husband of the lady buying secret designer clothes, even more burdened with unnecessary paraphernalia.

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