IONE Lee complained about the state of the roads in Tavistock in last week's newspaper. It's not just Tavistock. It's pretty much the same across the UK. In the last five years, the coalition government made swingeing cuts to council budgets. Some budget items, such as education, are ring-fenced, so the cuts fall on a proportion of the budget, bumping up the individual cuts in percentage terms. It's all part of George Osborne's plan that's supposed to be working. The Government is committed to 'balancing the budget' by cutting public expenditure rather than investing to generate extra income so there's worse to come. It's not as though the level of the national debt is particularly bad. Ours is 80% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That of Japan is 220%; Italy, 120% and France, 96%. Even Germany, that nation of fiscal rectitude, has a debt of 71% of GDP. With historically low interest rates, the debt isn't a problem. The biggest Labour government deficit running up to the banking crash in 2008 was 3.3%. This level was exceeded in 10 of the 18 years of the previous Tory governments. According to Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton, when the bankers' crash erupted in 2008-9, the budget deficit reached a peak of £159-billion in 2009-10.    Alasdair Darling as Labour chancellor stimulated the economy with two expansionary budgets in 2009 and 2010.  As a result the deficit fell the next year to £141-billion and then again to £121-billion the following year — a reduction of £38-billion in two years — a record that Osborne couldn't match in five years. If it's clear that Darling's plan was working, it's equally clear that austerity didn't work and continuing it won't improve matters. Perhaps we are a nation of masochists. It's difficult otherwise to understand why a majority of the electors should have voted for more of the same. I didn't. K Vines Horrabridge