As long as we continue to focus on "money" in economic and social spending issues and not the resources that money is meant to deploy we will not find the happy medium you are looking for. The average person is also "NOT" qualified to make decisions involving public spending because they have no logical perspective relating to money "creation", as their entire experience is dictated by the money they can, and must, "find" before spending.

Even the brightest politicians are easily captured by the "pay for" trap that says we must first "get" money to spend, completely ignoring that every dollar spent is a "NEW" dollar, not someone's taxes, and that it becomes someone's monetary asset in the private sector the moment it is spent into existence. We can tax our way to equality, but not to prosperity. Prosperity, including simply allowing for population growth, requires more to be spent than is "collected", "ALWAYS".