Inflation is just the new deficit. Trotted out when convenient, ignored when not. Spending money on CopsTroopsCIA is not inflationary, nice things are.
The other one, of course, is if we do a nice thing for THESE PEOPLE but not THOSE PEOPLE then THOSE PEOPLE will be mad.
Should we do a nice thing for THOSE PEOPLE TOO? Oh hell no. There's always a reason.
Anyway my general point is it is not worth engaging with transparently bad faith arguments from transparently bad faith actors. We are a rich country that can afford nice things, we choose to spend the money on hospital executive salaries and new yachts for defense contractors instead. That's it. That's the argument.
Perhaps I'm a surprisingly trusting soul, but I suppose it's taken me 20 years to realize that practically everybody in The Discourse has no qualms about lying in service of whatever agenda they are, for some reason, attached to. You can't refute bad arguments, because the people making them don't care, they'll just move on to the next bullshit.
Distractions.