Often you can look at costs per capita and rates this basically puts population size out of the picture. It’s still an issue but not near as much as people like to use it to explain away everything. Whenever the question is raised about better infrastructure etc people are told that we have too many people here or more people than these nations that do so well, but oftentimes those nations spend less per capita on every single infrastructure program than we already spend on the same programs- the difference is that they get a lot more from their taxes because most of our public sector systems have some corporate interest involved trying to take as much “profit” as they can out of that system- what it amounts to is a state funded hyper inflation cycle so the US spends more for pharma, healthcare, education etc than most nations do per person and yet we see less bang for the buck because of the extraction techniques that seek to provide as little in the way of goods and services as possible in order to skim as much off the top as possible. This system is reinforced by lobbying which is basically legalized bribery, and these folks are who is really in control of the US legislative policies for the most part from local to state to the federal level.