I'm not convinced. The public generally is not really aware how the money is being spent. And all parties tend to promise tax reductions that never come. How exactly is the population going to get out of this?
Also the fact that the UK has spent the last 9 years trying to cut everything to balance the budget and instead mainly managing to damage the nation.
And BER is costing money every day. It might be cheaper to tear it down and start again from scratch.
I think there is publication by the "society of tax payers" listing all the wasted tax payer money. Too few people read it though.
https://www.schwarzbuch.de/ - I see it is even free. And I have never read it, either. Will order a copy now :-)
I think as long as people are reasonably pampered (enough money left after taxes), they don't care enough.
In my opinion it is also the way the system is set up: taxes for employees are deducted before people even receive their money. So they have less feel for how much is being deducted. Self employed people see it differently.
I had an employed person deny this recently, but I am not convinced.
With perfect information I might expect 3% savings from optimal changes. As perfect information is NP-hard, I expect the the reality to be that attempting to cut the waste will result in mistaking useful things for waste, and cutting those useless-seeming-useful-things will cost at least as much as is saved from cutting the actually-useless-things.
This reply ran away from me a bit, for which I apologise. I don’t see how to improve it though.
This problem is equally present in the private sector. If it wasn’t, we’d never — for example — have had the financial crisis. I would go so far as to say that the waste in the private sector is the main signal for improvement in your own argument, so eliminating it becomes asymptotically difficult in the same was as error reduction while training an AI.
To put it another way, how many businesses use free markets internally? It’s not none worldwide, but it is none of the places I worked.