When Michelle Obama became First Lady, all eyes were on her wardrobe: what stylish new designer outfits would she be trotting out for all of us to comment on? As it turned out, many were disappointed that this tall, athletic-looking woman with impressively toned arms, who has the kind of figure top designers love to dress, opted to choose the type of clothes which any middle class suburban Mum would wear.

She confirmed that most of her clothes came from the ready-to-wear section of popular shops found in any mall. Last year she famously wore a $169 dress for a photo shoot for Essence magazine. The message was loud and clear: “in these times of austerity when we are asking you to cut back, I’m cutting back too.”

Although over the last two years she wore the occasional couture dress for more formal occasions, Mrs Obama still continues to favour affordable clothes, making her one of the most relatable First Ladies in a long time. The decision to choose labels such as J.Crew, the Gap, Saks Fifth Avenue and Target has also indirectly helped boost the stocks of the brands she wears, according to a study published in this month’s Harvard Business Review.

“Each single appearance of hers could move a stock price by $14 million,” said Prof David Yermack, who carried out the study.

While this is good news for the American clothing market, there’s also a lesson to be learnt here for those who choose to pay attention.

If you are telling the country that times are tough, and that voters need to make sacrifices, then you have to practice what you preach.

I suggest our ministers take a leaf out of Michelle Obama’s book…not because of any chance they will wear designer clothes, but because they need to start cutting back on the unnecessary spending in their ministries. I’m pretty sure that if you had to add up all the “extras” it would come to a (recurring) tidy sum. Above all, it would send a very clear signal that it is not just the public which is feeling the pinch and should be curbing back on its expenses to make ends meet.

It is clear, however, that this is not going to happen: the insistence on frivolous over-spending is a malady which has now taken a firm grip on the whole country.

Spend it

When the average person takes stock of his finances and his heart skips a beat at the realisation that he is deeply in the red, he can handle it in one of two ways.

He can decide that, once he’s already in so much debt, he might as well keep splurging and living the high life anyway because it won’t make much of a difference. He reasons that he has no hope of ever paying it all back in this lifetime, so why bother trying – and then to combat his misery, he consoles himself by booking another holiday and charging it to Mr Visa.

Solution number two is less pleasant but more rational: he can decide to sit down and make drastic slashes in his spending, deciding what he can do without so that he can take control of his debts and get back on budget. This route will definitely require a dramatic but essential surgical operation (all those in the banking sector please look away), whereby he takes a pair of scissors, takes all his credit cards and cuts them in half.

The country’s finances, whittled down to their bare essence, work pretty much in the same way. I’ve never studied economics, and am unable to reel off the differences between one school of thought and another, but I do know one basic fact: you cannot spend money you do not have. This is as true of governments as it is true of whoever handles the household budget.

I think where people often get it wrong is that they cannot accept this kernel of truth, or even if their heart grudgingly accepts it, their brain rejects it immediately, refusing to believe that they cannot have it all. No, you cannot have it all – life is not fair, and the sooner everyone wakes up to this reality the better it will be for all of us. I have never been able to understand people who insist on burying themselves in hire purchase payments and a string of loans just so that they can live what they believe to be “the good life”. It’s all an illusion isn’t it, because in their heart of hearts even they know they are in over their heads.

On a much larger scale (and more worryingly for us), this is the predicament this administration is now facing. It wants to start several hefty projects at once and spend money on everything in sight while selling us the illusion that everything is just fine, when anyone capable of totting up the sums has known for a long time that the deficit was spiralling out of control. People with half a brain just look at this spending orgy and ask, where is the money going to come from?

The Nationalist party in government has always worked on the theory that if you throw money at the problem rather than getting down to its root cause, then the problem will go away.

News Flash: the problems are still there.

We still have a bloated civil service, we still have entities which are draining the government coffers, and we still have a very cavalier attitude towards public spending on items which are loosely termed as “hospitality”. According to a recent parliamentary question, €291,000 was spent on hospitality in the first four months of the year by the Office of the Prime Minister alone. The sum allocated for OPM for the whole year is €405,000 – you do the maths.

When the electorate reads about the money (coming out of our taxes) which is thrown around by government departments and ministries on trivial things, you can almost hear the collective gasp of shock. We hear about mismanagement of funds and inefficiency in the way things are being run, and yet the money keeps pouring out, gushing out as if there is some kind of unlimited supply.

I think it is about time we reach for those scissors.

Do you use the bus?

When I switched on a TV breakfast show this week and saw a heavy-set man sporting a thick black beard, wearing a checked shirt, an ill-fitting blazer and a white tie, I wondered what Labour’s Mario Vella was doing talking about the public transport reform.

It took me a minute to realise that this was Austin Gatt’s spokesman Emanuel Delia (talk about an uncanny resemblance). As he was extolling the merits of using the bus rather than one’s car, a sharp caller asked him whether he had used the bus to get to the studio that morning.

Touché.

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