It's so easy that nobody's interested in it.
No. It's a topic difficult to talk about and raise awareness and a lot of money is interested in keeping the status quo.
It's difficult enough to talk about that you write this post without explaining the issue enough for the reader to understand how the auction mechanism exactly differ from the status quo and what the status quo happens to be.
That 1% that you want to save comes from somewhere. At the moment that money goes to some bank. That bank can afford to spend some of that money to lobby the politicians in charge to stay with the status quo. Politicans who don't understand the details of auction mechanics and who have to trust some expert that he knows how to issue bonds.
Recently I talked with a guy from Grant Street Group. They make, among other things, software with which local governments can auction their bonds on the Internet.
By making the auction process more transparent and easier to participate in, they enable local governments which need to sell bonds (to build a high school, for instance), to sell those bonds at, say, 7% interest instead of 8%. (At least, that's what he said.)
They have similar software for auctioning liens on property taxes, which also helps local governments raise more money by bringing more buyers to each auction, and probably helps the buyers reduce their risks by giving them more information.
This is a big deal. I think it's potentially more important than any budget argument that's been on the front pages since the 1960s. Yet I only heard of it by chance.
People would rather argue about reducing the budget by eliminating waste, or cutting subsidies to people who don't deserve it, or changing our ideological priorities. Nobody wants to talk about auction mechanics. But fixing the auction mechanics is the easy win. It's so easy that nobody's interested in it. It doesn't buy us fuzzies or let us signal our affiliations. To an individual activist, it's hardly worth doing.