Budget week! Taxes are up to what economists call “critical” levels, pensions devalued, “green” taxes threatening. Half your earnings flow towards the Treasury. Why? Extreme poverty has certainly been alleviated in the Labour decade, with some helpful if often maladministered innovations for the very poor; but for the average solvent citizen the payback is problematical.

Public services are at times so shaky that you end up paying privately: even Gordon Brown has no NHS dentist. Where some services are good and some lousy, such as Brighton schools, it is policy to divvy them up by lottery. Where the services are excellent, like top universities, there appears to be a prejudice against allowing oversolvent people to use them. Thus from the middle class rises a low growl of protest and offence; we may seem affluent, it wails, but it is all done on debt and overwork and hardly seeing the children.

Not all of this feeling is justified. But it is real, and will probably lose Labour the next election. Whether or not that happens, there is one mood-elevating solution ready to hand in every home: aggressive frugality. Maybe it is time we emerged from the consumer daze, changed our habits and raised two fingers to the Chancellor. Use less, waste less, pay less tax. Reduce it either by earning less on purpose — no more overtime, hurry back for children’s tea — or else dodge tax by saving in Isas and pensions and national insurance bonds. I foresee a new era of stimulating meanness. It will be worrying for those who write about “must-have” fripperies and designer bling, but they can retrain as advisers on using up old cheese and making lampshades out of string.

Last week’s Wrap figures on food waste inspired the thought. Few revelations could be more shaming than the fact that we waste more food even than the Americans, chucking out three million edible tonnes every year. In the same week, Farmers Guardian and Country Living launched a “Fair Trade for British Farmers” campaign, urging supermarkets and consumers to pay a decent rate for milk and meat rather than squeezing the producer and offering “two for one” promotions. This would both protect the countryside and alleviate the poverty of small farmers in remote areas. The classic argument that supermarkets bring against paying decent rates to food producers — that cheap food is an “essential” — is torpedoed by the new waste figures.

One newspaper with an enviable gift for finding unself-aware punters willing to write public diaries got a woman to record her week’s food. Throwing out eight butcher’s sausages and six rashers of organic bacon, she bleats “there was no choice” because she planned a fry-up and didn’t have one and then had “no time” in the week (the minute spent putting a tray of sausages and bacon into an oven clearly being impossible for someone described as a “writer”. Blimey, most writers I know would welcome the displacement activity).

Then she threw out half a cheesecake, a carton of expensive soup and a baguette because she didnt feel like soup and nobody wanted a sandwich. Using up half a turkey was ruled out because the family are “sarcastic” about turkey curry; leeks went west because they passed their technical sell-by date; next day some untouched mackerel and crãme fraîche hit the bin because she likes “spontaneity” and spontaneously decided not to make paté after all. The total throwaway in the week was — even at supermarket prices — worth £46.37.

Which, given present tax levels, probably meant more than £80 of family earnings; just think what you could do with the time it took to earn that. Make a curry. Use up some old cheese and leeks in a nice little bake. Or pay the farmers 20 per cent more for good local food and still save £37, nearly £70 of gross earnings. Put that in a pension every week and in a year it’s worth £2,500, even at basic rate tax, even if the stock market is static. Ha ha, Moriarty, we’re rich! Oh, and we just saved the environment, too: we bought less, we bought local and the turkey in the curry was not a disgusting shed-bred Hungarian Bernard Matthews lump. It tasted nice instead.

Perhaps we have all being going through a mass adolescence of slobbish, unheeding shopaholic wastefulness interspersed with panicky outbreaks of overwork in jobs we hate. Perhaps this economic “growth” that government brags of is rubbish, literally: we waste our lives to pay for things we don’t need or much want, because having them temporarily eases the sadness of the wasted life, the family dislocation, the lack of time for unpaid, cheerful community work and play. We buy fancy shoes and overprocessed packaged food and throw away clothes that clog the wardrobe and the landfill; we fly discontentedly and dirtily round the world looking for unattainable perfection of life. At the same time we pay high taxes to fuel the Government’s own waste — on consultants and the Dome and Trident and gold-plated pensions for MPs and their apparatchiks, on mad cumbersome vetting of every dinner-lady, and patronising health advertisements wailing about our “tidal wave of obesity”.

Perhaps the answer to it all is defiant frugality. Cheeseparing, not undertaken in a glum spirit of poverty but in a mischievous spirit of raising two fingers to the system, refusing to break our backs to fund a wasteful and greedy government machine, and deliberately salting away any spare money in tax-free savings rather than buying electronic things that rapidly break or “spontaneous” two-for-one mackerel fillets that stink out the fridge for a week and the bins for a long, long council fortnight.

It’s spring. Today’s text is: stuff the Chancellor, mend your old shoes, use up the old cheese, get a life!

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