I think that's a big part of it, the "they earned it" bit. I think there are two other problems: people don't realize what the government does for them -- this is the problem of the "submerged state" -- and people think that government spending is, by default, wasteful.

Having seen the inner workings of a number of large companies (think Intel-sized), I'm quite confident that waste is almost always more a function of organizational size than sector; there are efficient government bureaucracies, and wasteful ones. Same for anything big beyond a certain scale.

A third thing I think is lost on a lot of people is what the impacts of wealth disparity are on the citizenry, and this is stuff that doesn't always have an immediately visible line connecting the two. But, one thing off the top of my head, public health in countries with greater wealth disparity tends to be worse.

There's more, and I'll edit the comment to provide more examples later, gotta run for now.