The American voting public has not the interest or attention span in tackling small complicated problems. The politicians they elect therefore has little interest or motivation to fix these small complicated problems because doing so usually involves spending political capital on compromises. Sometimes a few of them get big ideas about civic duty, but not very many people vote for that. They just vote for whomever yells the loudest about their set of pet issues which are usually red herrings erected to distract the population from actual issues. (abortion, gun control, immigration, etc. not that this issues are _unimportant_ but politicians use them to secure power on both sides and keep up the yelling because if they actually solved them, they would have to tackle the sorts of issues that threaten the powerful)