“There is no money!” This has become a favoured refrain of governments north and south of the Border, particularly over the last 12 or 18 months. It is patent nonsense, of course. Not only is there money, from a government perspective there has never been more of it. Tax receipts have never been higher and, indeed because of the rapid wage inflation during the cost of living crisis they are accelerating rapidly.

What governments and finance ministers mean when they say there is no money, is really that there is no extra money because they have already spent it. For the Scottish Government, in particular, the additional financial responsibility offered by the latest Scotland Act, which created a more direct link between tax policy and receipts has come at precisely the wrong time; a time during which the Scottish Government was moving inexorably leftwards, accelerated more recently by the coalition agreement with the Greens.

We are being squeezed in a vice. One jaw of that vice is that we do not spend tax well, which effectively eliminates our ability to make that money work harder. In the areas of education and healthcare, for instance, we spend an average (healthcare) or above-average (education) amount of taxpayers' money compared to other rich countries, but our outcomes are either average (education) or significantly poorer than average (health).

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In other words, we get less bang for our buck than comparable countries, and by extension there is clearly significant inefficiency and waste. We could, if we organised ourselves more like our European neighbours, get the same outcome with less money, or better outcomes with the same money.

The other jaw of that vice, of course, is that we do not behave like a country which understands how to increase the size of the pie. Our economy is not growing. This is a UK-wide problem, but the policy focus on growth differs between the Scottish and UK governments, with UK policymakers at least talking the talk on economic growth, even if they appear unable to walk the walk.

In Scotland, we have one party of government, the Greens, which explicitly opposes economic growth. The other, the SNP, during the course of the leadership of Nicola Sturgeon, gradually loosened its commitment to growth in favour of the far cuddlier concepts of the wellbeing economy (in plain terms, less capitalism) and progressive taxation (in plain terms, high taxes).

There is nothing progressive about tax policy which discourages work, discourages migration, discourages innovation and discourages investment. In the real world, there is no single greater method of increasing the amount of money in the government's pocket than economic growth.

The Herald: What's to be done about pensions?What's to be done about pensions? (Image: PA)

However, it is also true that even best-case scenario levels of growth will not be enough to fund Scotland and the UK’s current public lifestyle in the long-term. Whether you are watching the UK’s Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, or Scotland’s Finance Secretary, Shona Robison, you are watching someone who does not want to tell you that they are pushing water uphill with a rake.

Because they are politicians with reputations to protect, with email inboxes to manage, and most importantly with election cycles to consider, there is little or no incentive for them to level with you, the voters, about the relative uselessness of the tinkering that they announce a couple of times every year.

The truth is that while baking a larger pie is important, it is largely futile when two obese diners, the NHS and the benefits system, continue to demand an increasing proportion of it. Never has "feed the beast" been a more apt idiom. It is time, I think, for more honesty. Voters can cope with honesty and reality to a far greater degree than politicians tend to give them credit for.

In the area of social security, for instance, the half-truth has already been established. When, more than a decade ago, the UK Government introduced auto-enrolment into workplace pensions, it established the notion in the heads of workers that they would become increasingly responsible for funding their own retirement. This has continued to develop, and in this week’s Autumn Statement Mr Hunt took another important step towards self-funding in older age when he announced the "pot for life" model, which will put the employees rather than the employers in control of where their and their work’s contributions go.

The half-truth needs another nudge towards a whole-truth: today’s younger workers will not receive a state pension. We need to understand that now. There will always be a targeted, safety-net state pension for those who have been unable to save enough during their working lives, and there will of course need to be a runway rather than a cliff-edge. However, with two workers for every pensioner by 2050, compared to 10 workers for every pensioner in 1900, it is as sure as night follows day that the universal state pension has to go.

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If the reality of funding older age is the half-truth, the NHS is the zero-truth. In an exclusive article for The Herald earlier this month, former NHS Chief Executive Paul Gray said that the NHS is “not sustainable in its present form”. Quite.

Two European-style changes need to take place in the NHS to make it not only enviable, but merely viable, in the long-term. The first is the gradual increase of individual funding and the gradual reduction of state funding. In the medium and long term, a system similar to pensions auto-enrolment applied to health insurance is an obvious and credible direction of travel, along with a permanent state contribution. Most large employers already offer wholly or co-funded health insurance, so once again the concept of healthcare as a product which costs money is established with many workers.

However there must be another side to that coin to ensure that workers are not simply forced into paying even more for even less, and that is a complete reform of the supply of healthcare. Improved outcomes will not be possible without expanded capacity in healthcare, particularly for elective procedures, and that will mean a significant expansion in independently-run hospitals and health centres, with the NHS doing much less, much better, much like the original model of the NHS, and individuals given much more control over their healthcare choices.

Mr Hunt’s tax cuts will be welcomed, even if he is taking with one hand what he is giving with the other. Ms Robison should follow, and bring income tax back, at the very least, to parity with England.

But, in the final analysis, if we continue to ignore the elephants in the room, it will matter very little.