I agree that these topics are dominated by irrationality. I think you are pretty much spot on, specially on the second point, but you are also missing an important aspect.

The problem with politics is that you have a status quo from where you operate and you are massively constraint in the possible directions you can go. For example, you simply can not go against social security and things like that because the way these programs have been designed ensures that they are almost immortal.

I disagree with you that these easy technocratic solutions exists. There are fundamentally different positions that people can have and actually do have, I just think that whatever these positions are, they matter little because they are not reachable anyway.