who are the "wrong people" that massive social programs enrich? Can you give an example? Most of federal spending is medicare, medicaid and social security; which are immensely popular with voters of all kind.
If you ask people if they support the abstract idea of having a military so we're not invaded by foreign forces, or having a program to prevent the elderly from dying in the streets, they say yes.
But then you ask them whether social security should send a larger check to a retired Jeff Bezos than a retired firefighter on a fixed income, or the government should spend billions of dollars on equipment the military itself says it doesn't need but the Congressman from the district which is getting the contract to build it says that it does, and the public support for that falls off pretty fast.
And those "features" cause those programs to cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than they need to, which money could otherwise go to infrastructure and schools and tax cuts for the middle class, all of which are also immensely popular with voters of all kinds. But won't happen when the programs absorbing more than three quarters of the total budget are administered in a federal system where the Congressmen are rewarded for bringing home the pork and Florida is an important swing state full of retirees.
And the DoD and the VA are also considered separately, but let's not pretend they're unrelated. If you have twice as many soldiers today then you need twice the VA budget tomorrow.
Well, there's also Defense, and then service payments on the debt. Those are the big 3 without question. So "the wrong people" must be in there somewhere?
But the real reason we give more to the feds is because if we didn't it would be AWESOME for places like New York, Minnesota, Texas, Delaware, California etc, and TERRIBLE for places like Wisconsin, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida.
Now, consider how the above is impacted in the wake of Citizens United where $1 == 1 vote, and Corporations are People Too.