> However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away.
All of those (except the UBI) exist in most developed countries.
There are many problems, from taxes (the poor already pay zero, the rich avoid them, the middle class gets fucked), to foreign/illegal worker (why pay a fair pay to a local worker, if you can employ a foreigner for cheaper), to widespread corruption, anti-covid measures (mostly printing money and giving it around, bringing high inflation), to political sanctions (eg. ukraine war - it's no different than eg. the war in afghanistan or iraq or libya, syria, etc., but somehow we act as if it is, and with many political steps inbetween, the gas prices and food prices are soaring high), to people abusing all the buzzowords you've mentioned in countries that have them.
Honestly, if just the police and courts did their jobs, and all the corruption was punished (from heads of government, to paying plumbers under the table and people abusing social benefits), a lot of the problems would be solved.
In my country, we just had an election, and the two most pressing matters were healthcare (fscked) and housing prices (double fscked). Noone on TV ever mentioned how much an average worker pays for healthcare (it's automatically deducted in two different ways from your "gross-gross" paycheck), because people would get mad and ask where does all the money (a lot of it) actually go,... and also noone asks why we can have cornfields and cows in prime locations of our capital city, and even more prime development land in other cities, and the government (from national to local) doesn't allow building there, to bring the prices down.