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I was lucky. A short while ago, I was cycling downhill and encountered a deep pothole. The front tire bent into a figure-eight shape. I was thrown over the handlebars and, with no time to put my hands out, came down on my face. My protective gear absorbed the brunt of the blow. I emerged, remarkably, with just a few cuts and bruises.

My glasses were banjaxed, my cycle was in need of serious work and my attire was ripped. Altogether, that pothole has cost me about £450. I count myself lucky again – I can manage the cost. Yet the crucial fact remains: repairing a pothole runs between £45 and £90. Ignoring it leads to higher expenses. God knows how many other people have pranged their bikes or wrecked their car tyres in the same hole. Between us, we may have paid hundreds of times the cost of its repair. When persons sustain major injuries, the health service inevitably shares the cost. One of my correspondents tells me: “It's been three months of healing from a bicycle mishap involving a pothole that led to a hospital airlift for critical injuries. As well as a brain haemorrhage (despite a helmet), I had numerous broken bones and can’t yet walk without crutches.” The expense for the healthcare system is enormous; his personal toll is beyond measure.

Austerity – which leaves our potholes, alongside many other gaps in public provision, unfilled – does not save money.

Quite the opposite, it results in significant financial loss. The tax breaks for the affluent are matched by continual costs for the majority.

Misguided savings are widespread. For example, the government may at last be persuaded to remove the Tories’ vicious, Malthusian two-child benefit cap. However, numerous individuals haven't realized that behind it lies another barrier: the household benefits ceiling. If additional support for a third child is granted, it could breach the household maximum, resulting in minimal gain.

This benefits ceiling leads to severe and twisted outcomes. It guarantees that rental costs, even in subsidized housing, are nearly always out of reach for impacted families, largely led by single parents. The result is that they are thrown into temporary accommodation, which local authorities must provide at far greater expense: roughly £2.3bn a year. Compulsory temporary housing also limits job prospects for adults and educational results for kids, causing immense distress that leads to health issues, thereby creating additional financial burdens.

Back in 2019, a parliamentary group urged the government to “perform a comprehensive cost-benefit study of the benefit cap”.

Officials declined the appeal, yet mentioned they would consider it later. I checked with the Department for Work and Pensions – it still hasn’t happened.

Sustaining poverty among citizens is a pricey extravagance. Destitution continues in affluent states because of governmental opts to preserve neediness. This choice is driven by two imperatives. One is a longstanding, ingrained and unreasonable notion that poverty is a fault requiring penalty. The other is the elite's requirement to foster apprehension, so workers persist in taxing and degrading labor for meager compensation.

Consider the case of adult social care.

Roughly 2 million seniors are deprived of essential support. Numerous younger people who might work with adequate care are prevented from doing so. About 2.6 million individuals, predominantly female, have abandoned careers to look after relatives, with no viable options. They forfeit roughly £5,800 per year in income, a huge collective expense for the nation.

Lack of proper care forces many into the NHS system: at any given moment, 13% of beds hold patients needing social care. Proper funding would provide a major economic boost, as good care requires a large workforce. Per the Future Social Care Coalition, each £1 put into care work produces £1.75 in the broader economy. Yet, according to a parliamentary probe, data on the repercussions of inadequate care “is disgracefully sparse or ignored in governance”. The administration calculates the outlays for delivery, yet ignores the penalties of omission.

The shortfall in government funding for social care has caused a financial crisis in almost every local authority.

Other services are being cut to the bone. The pothole issue, simply put, stems directly from the social care shortfall. In any exploration of the costs and benefits of social care spending, you could include the price of people being airlifted to hospital because the roads are falling apart.

Naturally, we must avoid simplifying all matters to cost-benefit terms: essential outlays often have a net fiscal cost, part of maintaining a compassionate society. However, we ought to highlight the sheer irrationality of tallying only public expenditures without acknowledging gains.

The government, using a definition that means nothing to people falling into potholes, or into temporary accommodation, or into debt, insists austerity has ended, as there has been a slight, albeit temporary rise in public spending as a percentage of GDP.

But with numerous vital services still underfunded, the official definition turns into an elaborate falsehood. A more honest definition of austerity is a decline in services caused by a shortfall in funding.

The bill for a crisis caused by the ultra-rich – the 2008 bank crash and the vast state bailout it triggered – has been handed to the poor. Yet this is neither required nor unavoidable. If the government opts, the next fiscal plan could set a fresh direction, sparing us from damaged eyewear, twisted bikes, injuries, homelessness, neediness and disregard, as the super-rich retain their jets, boats, resorts and extra residences.

They must bear the expense via income tax, wealth tax and a more equitable local tax or property valuation system, or the rest will face greater burdens.

There would be a cost – a political cost – for the government in confronting the massive infrastructure of persuasion the very rich have built, and ending our 14-year sentence of austerity. But the cost of failing to do so, for all of us, is so much higher.