this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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How does a smaller population make it easier to pay those incentives? Less people also means less tax income and vice versa
Country size has a huge impact on the ability to make sweeping changes to infrastructure and public opinion. A country the size of one US state can do whatever they want and it's not going to take 50 years to implement.
South Korea has broadband everywhere? Sure, they are a rich country the size of Indiana and lacing all of that fiber is trivial compared to the entire land mass of the US, or worse, Russia or China. Governmental demands scale much differently the larger the country, and tax doesn't scale in a 1:1 manner to its land mass.
If you want to make changes like that, you tell each state they're supposed to e.g. upgrade everyone to fiber and then the local government of each state handles it. I thought that was the whole point of having those states.
Tax rates in general are higher there, and not all taxation scales with population (corporate tax, for instance). It also depends on how the government allocates the money it spends—Norway doesn't have the US's ridiculously inflated military budget.
The issue is how the US is spending tax money then and not the population