The arithmetic is simple but compelling. In Bermuda, 43 per cent of Government spending goes toward public sector salaries and benefits.

So very close to half the Government Budget is already earmarked for payroll and associated expenses before a single penny can be spent on actual services and programmes.

Think about it. Almost half the money is spoken for before we can purchase a single new piece of equipment for our hospital, pave and maintain our roads, upgrade our schools, protect our environment or ensure Police and other emergency response agencies are appropriately enough maintained to safeguard our community, our property and our lives.

The general rule of thumb in any reasonably managed small business is that only about a third of expenditure should go to meet payroll and other expenses.

When the figure begins to creep north of that amount, the long-term sustainability of an enterprise is thrown into question.

A company simply won’t make sufficient profits to keep it viable: the money won’t be there for the infrastructure and staff investments necessary to support the business and keep it competitive.

There are obviously many differences between public and private sector financing. But the bottom line for both is that when you cannot grow revenues sufficiently, you ultimately have to reduce costs. Deficit spending cannot be maintained indefinitely.

In the private sector, lines of credit are cut off by the banks. Much the same thing applies in the public sector: lending agencies balk at throwing good money after bad when it comes to jurisdictions permanently awash in red ink.

Bermuda’s public debt now tops $2.1 billion. Without Government efficiencies taking place in tandem with policies aimed at stimulating and maintaining an economic upturn, that figure could easily double in just four years.

Public spending now stands at $1.112 billion annually. Revenues are just $956 million, with part of that sum obviously required to service the debt we have already incurred.

So maintaining spending levels even in optimum circumstances — meaning robust and sustained economic growth between now and 2019 — would still see us running a deficit of approximately $300 million annually.

Some have proposed targeting the super-rich with what would amount to new forms of super taxation. Quite aside from the dubious logic of radically increasing taxes on the investing and job-creating classes at the very time the economy needs their enthusiastic participation (and money) more than ever, whatever increased revenues were realised by doing so would not even begin to make up the shortfalls we face.

Ultimately, deep Government spending cuts are as unavoidable as they are unpalatable to Bermuda’s public sector unions.

For without belt-tightening by Government along with the concurrent success — by no means guaranteed — of a raft of measures intended to create new jobs for Bermudians through increased investment in the private sector, fiscal disaster is assured.

The Island will soon be so far down the economic hole that the climb back up would be like attempting to scale Everest without oxygen and crampons.

As the Finance Minister has said, the simple reality for Bermuda is this: the status quo is the enemy. Changing that status quo will, by necessity, involve challenging the once sacrosanct status of the Island’s blue and white-collar public sector workers.

Controlling Government spending will require greater accountability, efficiency and fiscal responsibility from the civil service, a sector which comprises approximately one-fifth of Bermuda’s workforce.

It will also requires civil servants to recognise that the top-heavy, ponderous and overly regulated Bermuda bureaucracy as currently constituted not only squanders time, money and other resources, but in some instances actually works against the possibility of coming up with genuinely productive, creative and innovative solutions to some of our problems.

Indeed, more and more Bermuda residents find themselves believing the public sector’s preferred method of problem-solving is to strangle those who have the problems with endless red-tape. So privatising or partially outsourcing some of the services now provided by Government to improve efficiency and save money not only makes good economic sense it just makes sense, period.

Marching, sloganeering and chanting, as public sector workers have been doing all week over a proposed extension of their furlough days, may serve to temporarily vent the anxiety they understandably feel at this juncture.

But at best such protests will only postpone the inevitable, not alter it.

They can either work with the Government of the day to identify and implement cuts that will ensure the maximum savings while inflicting the minimum amount disruption on their memberships. Or they can find themselves in the same unhappy position as Barbados’ public sector workers.

After steadfastly ignoring all warnings about the grave economic crisis that island nation was facing and turning a deaf ear to appeals for cooperation when it came to restructuring and reducing civil service costs, it was announced in December that 3,000 Barbadian public sector workers would be pink-slipped in 2015.

As is the case in Bermuda, the arithmetic in that country was simple, compelling and, in the end, entirely unavoidable.