Candidate A says, "We need to cut benefits now to make sure the pension has enough money in the future." Candidate B says, "No we don't." Everyone votes for Candidate B.
It's not like we accidentally elected people who don't value the long term. It's that voters don't value the long term when there's real short term money at stake.
The US has a massive problem with the perception of "government usefulness", heck you've got whole political wings solely trying to appeal to "the only good government is no government" mentalities.
As a result, barely anybody wants to pay taxes for anything, in their extremely egotistical and narrow-sighted definition of "freedom".
The reason why many on the right are wary of government programs is because they’ve watched the government horribly mismanage their tax money over and over and over again. It’s not necessarily because politicians and bureaucrats are necessarily stupid or evil, it’s because the government is generally not incentivized to do a good job, since they don’t face competitive pressure like businesses in the private market.
Isn't that exactly the kind of mindset that facilitated this whole situation in the very first place? "Government can't handle money, that's why we gotta privatize everything".
And if that would be true, how come it wasn't a private business that took us the moon, with all the resulting auxiliary inventions, but the combined effort of a whole nation in education and research [0]?
"A better job" isn't always the one that "makes more money", some ventures don't need to be directly financially profitable, in some fields introducing a profit-incentive can have rather negative consequences (Education, Healthcare) and in others, it's just perverse (for-profit prisons).
Would any private company have taken the risk, of flying to the moon, back then? Hell no, because there was literally no money in it back then, it was all just a big venture of "wasting money".
That's why I don't think literally everything needs to be "profitable", we can't eat money and money doesn't make anybody a better person.
It's also friggin weird how on issues like this there's never "enough money", but when it's about tax-cuts for massive corporations, which is, in essence, nothing but handing out free money to private businesses, then there seems to be always plenty of enough money to justify it.