My view is that you can't have functioning, stable societies without strong social ties. And in the U.S. much more so than in Western Europe, those social ties have broken down, especially across racial and socio-economic lines. And when middle and upper class people have no personal investment in the social institutions that lower class people depend on, there is nothing the government can do to fix that.
I'll give you a concrete, personal example. I'm moving to Wilmington, DE because my wife is starting a job there. Wilmington is one of the most dangerous cities in the country, adjusted for population. It's also about 60% African-American, and 25% of the population is below the poverty line. My wife and I have identified one of the few neighborhoods in downtown Wilmington where we'd be willing to live, a new development by the riverfront. The development is literally walled-off from the rest of the city. I-95 divides it from the neighborhoods to the north-west. The Amtrak line, built on a raised stonework viaduct with only a few points of access underneath, separates it from neighborhoods to the north-east. The river and a wildlife refuge separates it from neighborhoods to the south and southeast. None of the people in the city who work for the law firms or the banks, or DuPont, etc, send their kids to the downtown public schools, and as a result have no investment in the quality of those schools (even though its overwhelmingly their tax dollars that fund those schools). The two groups of people live in a city where the downtown core is just a mile across in each direction, and yet somehow live and work in a completely disjoint set of residential areas and workplaces, segregated by race and class.
So tell me how the government is going to fix Wilmington, DE? Or Camden, NJ? Or Baltimore, MD? This is a situation that is replicated all over the country and it's intractable.