Are you simply calling the entire government a "welfare state" or do you believe that something like military spending is off the table for making more efficient? Because people very obviously would complain about shifting military spending to social programs and military spending is almost certainly the biggest differentiator in spending between us and those "'social democracies' such as Finland, France and Canada" that OP was talking about.
Again, percentage of government money that goes to social programs is less relative to military, but only as a percentage. Look at things like spending on public healthcare (Medicare / Medicaid) or public education, America spends as much as social democracies in absolute terms. Just relative terms its less because we're a wealthy country and produce a lot of wealth that we tax. It's not a money problem
We can't really have this conversation from the mindset that the status quo is inherently apolitical. The US spends more than those "social democracies" on the military in both absolute and relative terms. Since total spending is the same, that means we also spend less on social programs in relative terms. These are all political choices and refusing to revisit a previous political choice is an active political choice.
I might agree with cutting military spending if it’s an actual measurable impact to my finances. But I sure wouldn’t be for reallocating it to the black hole that is other federal spending. Fix the outcomes first. We already spend more on healthcare than most of those social democracies. Show me similar outcomes per dollar spent and then we can have a conversation about increasing it. Until then, it’s just more money funneled to the fraud and grift machine. Not that the military isn’t that too, but the difference to me is once you get the population “hooked” on such budgets you can never reduce it. The military is at least able to be reduced as shown in the past 30 years. Everything else is growing faster than those reductions.
I would also be generally for cutting military budget if it was 100% reallocated to reducing the debt. But that’s almost impossible since money is fungible.
TLDR; we’ve already tried reallocating and utterly failed at showing any reasonable outcomes.
I'm not who you asked (and I think the levels of military spending in the US are a huge problem) but IMO Americans are not inherently more corrupt than the French but they are currently much more tolerant of corruption than the French.
It is hard to imagine the level of corruption currently being openly flaunted by parts of the USA government happening in France without the country burning down.
Whether or not this tolerance is inherent or is the result of both learned helplessness and real disempowerment through the US government having already failed the average citizen for so long is up for debate.