You have to look at the areas where the feds dole out the money that the states should be raising themselves like education, welfare, health [[not Medicare), highways, transit, and other federal grants and see how they are allocated between the states before you say that Michigan is unfairly treated.
This is way too narrow. You have to look at why stuff is distributed as it is. Leaving aside the fact that there wouldn't be a lot of retirees in Arizona without massively subsidized federal water projects, federal installations aren't distributed in any reasonable way. South Carolina is buried under military bases because Mendel Rivers was head of the Armed Services committee for a long time. West Virginia is full of random federal offices because Robert Byrd was head of Appropriations. You probably remember why the Johnson Space Center is in Houston. In general there is a lot of stuff in the south because there was a long period where Southern Democrats had seniority in Congress and put it there.

And while I would not call the distribution of Social Security and Medicare unfair, it is a fact that it takes money from some places and puts it in others, and that has real consequences for those places. It isn't dishonest to point that out.