Asklemmy

Ignoring all direct political alignments, also keep in mind that such problems are never trivial.

If they were, sooner or later we would have long solved them, even with enough idiots willfully not wanting them.
But it's not easy. For example, California by and large cannot print money. And it's not like the things you mention are the only problems any modern society faces, especially on a multi-culture multi-urban multi-layer multi-level scale like the whole of California.

That is to say, if a bridge collapses, that's urgent to fix. More so, to people in the immediate area, than to work towards a living wage with a 10-15y plan on how to deeply and permanently change and transform the job market and job situation. But now some money needed for the latter went towards the former. And a host of things are "on fire" every single day. Could you still put down policy changes? Sure, but if you cannot at least start on putting them into action, there's no point. You'd just end up wording them in such a way that whoever comes after you could trivially ignore them, and you don't want that.

And then we get into issues that do not benefit from human mass survival, and in fact would often benefit from the lack of it, like climate change, ozone depletion and species extermination. Which also cost insane amounts of money to work on, and if we're being honest should take priority as they would automatically make all other considerations useless if we don't first focus everything onto such basic issues.

So in short, it's usually a combination of:

• Lots of problems
• All kinds of problems at the same time
• Lots of needs-fixing-right-now problems
• Lots of 105% prioty problems
• Lack of resources to fix all of those above + then also add more to the pile.