The "much more" is much, much, much more than anyone thinks. The federal budget is tremendous. People cannot conceive of trillions, yet the federal government alone spent over six of it a year, three years in a row.
Virtually nobody has a problem with tax funds being used to build roads and bridges, fire departments, and whatnot. It's everything else that's contentious. Public schools are visibly wasteful, with the number of students and teachers overall remaining largely constant, but the number of administrators having increased many-fold in the past decades; at this point it's a jobs scheme for adults, not an education scheme for children. Nonprofits received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support illegal immigration. Et cetera.
So many things in the federal budget appeal to a fringe minority of advocates, yet the money hose continues to flow. This is not the way that a federal government with clearly delineated limits should work. Something is wrong.
In part, because of comments using wording like "hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars" as if it were huge, when it describes a pretty miniscule part of the 6,000,000 millions in the budget. (It also misses those same immigrants paying billions in sales and other taxes here, including quite a bit of Medicare/Social Security funding they'll never get back.)
As a result, Americans have a massively skewed idea of where it all goes; they think NASA gets 6.4% of the budget when it gets 0.5%, for example. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-budget-estimates-opinio...
Defense, healthcare, and social security make up the vast majority of Federal expenses. Education is, comparatively, a pittance; nonprofits serving immigrants don't even show up on the chart as a full pixel.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Mand...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_US_Federal_Disc...
> The federal government provides 10.5% of funding for public K-12 education.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
Just like how "collect as many taxes as possible" isn't actually a good goal, just "make the citizens wealthier" isn't actually a good goal either because it says nothing about the distribution of that wealth.
If we enacted a law that made 99.9% of all citizens absolutely destitute to the point where they must eat rotten food found in the trash to survive, but this law also multiplied the wealth of Bezos and Elon a millionfold, then that would successfully "make the citizens wealthier" in sum.
Taxes are used to run society, from it's roads, fire department, education, social services, and much more. A lot of people are pushing to cut down on those things, to decrease the bounty that society offers regular people who partake, because "we just can't afford it." and the reason we can't afford it is because there is an overly focus on "make the citizens wealthier" even at the cost of most citizens.