This paper addresses bureaucracy and its effects on expense, but it sort of makes the assumption that lowering the price is the goal. It seems to me that high c

This paper addresses bureaucracy and its effects on expense, but it sort of makes the assumption that lowering the price is the goal. It seems to me that high cost is convenient to artificially "create jobs" and bureaucracy, hence it's a feature, not a bug. An example from my local city: our small city (33k pop) won a $10mil grant for downtown revitalization. The money is supposed to help stimulate small business growth in the downtown. The administration spends $1.1 mil tearing down a parking garage, another $600k building a parking lot on the same piece of land of the garage, and they've got their fingers crossed they can get a developer to build an apartment complex there, which means they'll have to tear up the parking lot. The cherry on top is knowing we also commissioned a report to study downtown parking trends, and know that even on the busiest day up to 80% of parking spaces are unused. But the administration celebrated the 10-12 construction jobs they created. Anyone who has taken a basic economics course would recognize this as the Broken Window Fallacy, but our officials either don't know or don't care (my guess is the latter). Spend lots of money - create useless jobs - that's how a productive economy is supposed to work, right?