Costs can always be taken out of a business, a government budget, a household budget, a personal budget and more. It happens every single day when people actually start to question things and are pressed to act on costs.
It's human nature, we abuse costs that are not directly paid by us. It's not science or magic that when pressed for cost reductions and efficiencies/ unlocking under utilized assets and looking for new suppliers and more.
It's not that corporations are ALWAYS better at cost reductions and holding the line on expenses, it's that they are incentivized to look for them a lot more than governments.
When nobody cares, you get crazy things happening that people don't bat an eye to. Anybody remember the federal government's $1000 tab for inflight lemon and limes on government aircraft?
https://nationalpost.com/news/govern...-catering-bill
Anybody really believe that on an annual basis, Air Canada and Westjet are spending over a billion a year to hand out garnish to Canadian travelers?
Read a management book a while ago, former CP rail, CN rail CEO Hunter Harrison. Was told by former management that costs couldn't really be trimmed at all, it was mostly done. He gave an example of how he went into the downtown Calgary offices and saw rows and rows of Fedex Boxes. When he inquired what was in the boxes, he was told it was new laptops to be delivered...........to SE Calgary. Gave the tech guy quite the lecture about how Fedex sends shipments to Memphis, Tennessee and than back up to Calgary. He couldn't believe the gravy train he ran into from a cost perspective.
Nobody is claiming you reduce transit and roads budget by 50%. I am sure there are several departments that can reduce costs, expenses and more by 10%+ along with finding more hidden value/efficiencies. I am not advocating for mass layoffs and significant salary/benefits reductions.
It's not just about being a little more frugal or being more value oriented, it's also bring prudent, logical, pragmatic and more. You don't need to write the Calgary Flames ownership a massive taxpayer funded chq for an arena to increase their overall wealth, income and asset value and then debate and debate and debate repairing a downtown Inglewood pool for $600k.
It's ok for expenses to go down and stay the same in a lot of categories, the sky will not fall.