Crack open the Krug. From today, everything you earn is yours to keep. Today is Tax Freedom Day — the day on which average taxpayers stop working for the Government and start working for themselves.

On second thoughts, perhaps a glass of Blue Nun would be more appropriate. Far from celebrating, we ought to be commiserating with each other. Last year, we could start keeping our own money three days earlier; when Labour took office in 1997, Tax Freedom Day fell on May 25.

Total public spending will, on Gordon Brown’s plans, have increased by 40 per cent in real terms between 1999-2000 and 2007-08 — the equivalent, after inflation, of an extra £120 a week cost for every household in the country. Someone has to pay for Mr Brown’s largesse, and that someone is you.

If spending on this scale is sensible, its wisdom ought to be demonstrable. The idea on which such a policy rests, after all, is that the Government knows better how to spend the country’s GDP than the people who created that wealth in the first place. The evidence suggests otherwise. The NHS budget, which has risen (in England) from £33 billion in 1997 to £76 billion this year, is a prime example. Spending increased in 2003 by 8 per cent; output rose by just 4.1 per cent. Productivity is falling just when — using the Government’s argument that increased “investment” is a prerequisite of improvement — it should be rising.

It is bad enough that the Government takes our money and squanders it; but in so doing, it compounds the problem by weakening the private sector. Private sector productivity growth is almost 5 per cent, compared with productivity growth across the whole economy of 3 per cent.

The Office for National Statistics labour force survey shows that a quarter of all jobs are now in the public sector (in fact it is higher, as the data excludes outsourced workers). Half of all new jobs created since 1997 have been in the public sector, a rate of increase twice that of the whole economy. This transfer of resources from the relatively efficient private sector to an underperforming public sector is the precise opposite of what is needed.

Tax is supposedly a complicated issue. In reality it’s quite simple: we are handing over more of our money, watching it vanish, and then seeing it limit growth. Bizarre or what?