As others have pointed out, this is independent of whether we're talking about the government or private sector.
Regardless, when I see workers on a road crew standing around I don't think "wasted tax dollars", I think "money going back into the economy."
Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.
Look at the amount of money wasted on the the war on drugs.
Where do you think wealthy money is if not in the economy?
Being leveraged to extract rents, the very enemy of productivity.
How about tied up in physical assets like artwork, which they then use in a scam to lower their tax liability? That seems like one option, explored within the article under discussion.
being able to boot people is a huge difference. You could make the company millions in one month and be fired the next month by a private company, simply because it gave them an extra dollar for their quarterly earnings statement. There's an actual process for ejecting an incompetent public sector employee, to a point that it's much easier to reassign them instead. Contractors are a whole other issue as well, especially with the ways government signs contracts.
>Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.
that should theoretically be a function of the stock market... we all know how that ends.
But tbf, after a decade of a many public sector projects, I have first-hand seen really incompetent and wasteful actions on huge scales. Perhaps there should he a whistle blower program for reporting such things?