What would it take?

[JoeRedskin]

Originally Posted by mredskins

Probably could find gains in inefficient government spending without having to raising taxes.

Call me jaded but I've heard that old chestnut a time too many. Every president, governor, mayor and school board chair or other elected official has raised the battle cry "We will eliminate waste and save [billions/millions/thousands/a couple bucks]."

Here's the problem: Yes. There is waste - a lot of it. I would assume that it accounts for a significantly larger portion of the budget than in the private sector [In 2012, one estimate put it at 7% of the budget. I would imagine that in private companies it is closer to 1% maybe less - I couldn't find any studies]

However, the problem is that the majority of waste in government (as in money misspent through overpayment, wrongful payments, or losses due to penalties or failure to take advantage of discounts) results from the sacrifice of "efficiency for fairness" or in a more classic example - Mussolini may have been a dictator, but the Italian trains always ran on time. Generally, however, I have found, that, what most people mean when they say "cut waste," is that the government should cut programs they don't like or think useless. Good luck with that.

As an aside and a recent example from my own experience on the efficient v. fair issue:
Government client receives an unprecedented offer from vendor. The vendor will double its investment in the public entity AND will maintain pricing of the service it provides at current levels over the next six years. The entity - and its public customers - were already extremely happy with the service provided by the vendor. There were only three other vendors in the entity's municipality providing this particular service and none of them had ever made offer as good as this.

This was a unilateral offer from the vendor - meaning that the government entity was not seeking a bid and the current contract had another year to run. The ONLY thing the vendor sought was to be exempted from the competitive bid process when the current contract expired -- if it had to go through the long, demanding, and expensive process of actually preparing a bid for submission to the appropriations and finance committees, it was just going to use its last submission with a lower investment and up its rates by its standard price multiplier/algorithm. No brainer right? Nope. The government entity is legally barred from accepting bids outside the competitive process's public scrutiny in order to ensure that backroom kickback deals aren't being done with corrupt officials.

So, the governmental entity will end up losing a several hundred thousand dollars b/c it is legally barred from accepting a deal that a private entity would snap up before the vendor could finish their sentence.