Excellent article, "Good Ideas that are Bad Politics"
DailyKos has an excellent article entitled "Good Ideas that are Bad Politics".
To generalize - one of the down-sides of democracy is the descent into crowd-pleasing vote-buyers; bread and circuses, if you will. Politicians will put much more effort into raising money for a new road than for maintaining an existing one; the guy that gets something built is memorable, the guy that keeps it running is a footnote.
I guess the problem boils down to "we, the public, are lazy" - we elect politicians to make decisions for us, then we don't pay attention to what they're doing, and we have forgotten about it by the next election. Is there any way to avoid this? Are there any forms of government that perform better, or is this the "least worst" we can do?