I never criticized the article, which is about social safety net and child happiness. I'm criticizing the claimed taxation level required to have nice things.
Wasteful/not wasteful is mostly orthogonal to high/low. If high taxes, in a wasteful system, results in happy people, then that means you can get the same result for less. Meaning people get the same benefits, while keeping more income. Or more benefits, for the same taxes.
People seem to think that high taxes correlated to happiness is evidence of a non-wasteful government, but it's not. Happiness is not the only metric that matters. If it was, then being happy with corruption would be a virtue.