The cost per capita is the same, so your argument doesn't really make sense. By the way, I see that argument every single time when someone proposes the USA to do something better. "It's a big country, we can't fix anything".
Until you consider how the US Government runs any program into the ground, is blanketed with regulations and bureaucracy, and generally hurts the people who it's supposed to help.
Here's a few examples just in case you need some evidence:
Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AmTrak, No Child Left Behind, and the Fair Housing Act.
I would be more in favor if the government had a good track record with some of these programs, but when you see how horrible these programs are run, you feel like we really can't seem to fix anything. Sad but true
To respond to a point from the first article you linked (one which I think generalizes well):
"So why isn’t the USPS making innovations and meeting customer needs like Outbox? Simple: because consistent financial support from the government eliminates incentives to do so."
Anybody who thinks it really is that simple is someone to be wary of when getting information or analysis.
The biggest reason USPS doesn't make changes like this is that congress ties its hands -- free market devotees don't want it competing in new areas. Or even old areas, like postal banking/payments (imagine the outcry here if someone decided maybe a public digital/physical payment infrastructure might be beneficial if competitive with the various private services). Some don't want it doing anything at all, but they can't really get rid of it, so they join up with the next group: budget-watchers who want it revenue neutral (which it managed pretty well for a long time)... AND now subject to pension/healthplan requirements well above and beyond any private standards. Meanwhile, cutting service is seen as a no-go.
Some people have actually speculated subjugating the USPS to this set of no-win requirements is actually an intentional strategy to bolster the case for privatization, which would pretty much have been a non-starter before 2006.
You could say that this proves that the US Government is ineffective, I suppose, but in a representative democracy, what that mostly proves is that US politics either prevents good policy thinkers from being elected or prevents them from effectively doing their job. Or letting others do theirs.
There may be an institutional component too (our legislature in particular is less representative than one might think), but I suspect the biggest factor is cultural/philosophical.
"Until you consider how the US Government runs any program into the ground, is blanketed with regulations and bureaucracy, and generally hurts the people who it's supposed to help."
Sounds exactly like the complaints I read on my social feed from fellow Finns :).
It is in the nature of some people on the libertarian / autistic / engineering spectrum to look at any issue out there and reduce it to trivial financial arithmetic. It's not out of ill will, it's just that this is their entire reality.
His point was that the financial arithmetic isn't prohibitive. A box full of stuff costs the same amount whether you give out 5 million or 300 million (in fact, economics of scale says that the US could probably do it cheaper than Finland can). We have 300 million people (or whatever the birthrate is) which is certainly more than Finland has, but we also then have 300 million taxpayers.
Sure, the absolute cost is higher, but the cost per capita is not.
Well, about 300 million people, but less than 100 million taxpayers. About 130 million workers in the US [1], of whom about 30% have a negative income tax rate[2]. Doesn't completely change your point, since less than half of Finland's population works as well[3], but I thought it worth mentioning.
Just because you have a zero or negative federal income tax rate doesn't mean you don't pay any taxes in the US. These people are still paying 7.65% payroll taxes on that income, sales tax, property tax, and the seemingly endless list of other taxes and government imposed fees we all pay on many other services. Since most social welfare programs are funded by a combination of federal and state taxes I don't think the number of people paying federal income tax is meaningful one way or the other.
"The employment rate of employed persons between 15 and 64-year-olds in April was 68.7 per cent, which was 0.2 percentage points higher than a year earlier. Employment rate for men fell from the previous year to April by 0.1 percentage points to 68.6 per cent. The female employment rate increased by 0.6 percentage points to 68.8 per cent. For seasonal and random variation, the trend was 68.7 percent."
