Why problems don't get solved

It's simple:  the government doesn't want to solve problems.  The politicians want the problems in order to agitate for more power.

Here's some examples of relatively easy problems to solve from Instapundit stories this morning.

1. Skilled jobs go begging.  The jobs are out there, but nobody knows how to do them.  Yet we spend billions on education that could have educated people who can do these jobs.  This is a systemic problem.  Millions of jobs like these could be filled if the government did their job better.  The excuse is that they don't have enough money, but with a deficit of well over a trillion dollars, that argument doesn't sell.
2. Any effort to cut the budget runs into a brick wall.  This probably happens because there's a belief that more is better.  But if all the money that gets spent doesn't do the job, more debt can be worse.  See Europe for an example of where this leads.
3. Look at the US Space Program.  It put a man on the moon in 1969, but has done nothing comparable since then.  Yet it continues to spend billions.  You could have had several more moon programs done from scratch for what the government has spent on space this last 40 years, but NASA can't put a man in orbit today.

Perhaps its not quantity of spending that's the problem.  It's quality of the spending.  The kind of spending that gets results.  The only results that politicians are interested in these days are the type of results that increase their budgets, not their accomplishments.  Especially the kind of accomplishments that solve problems.  But the government has definitely gotten bigger.   They've accomplished that.