Seems to me like it depends on what happens to the money after it comes back, if indeed it does so. If the government "un-prints" the money, destroying it, then indeed it was merely a loan from everyone that holds dollars, and not outright theft. But if that money goes back into some kind of general fund, then it doesn't matter what happened in between.

Also, I wouldn't say it's clear that healthcare or space exploration aren't assets, even in the strict financial sense you mean. What's the expected taxable value of a citizen? If you invest less than that on keeping them alive, then their life is an appreciating financial asset. Similar logic applies to space programs, if the space capacity you fail to build out ends up being something you buy from another country (as in the case of US astronauts riding to the ISS on Soyuz). And of course this is the shallowest of analyses - there are substantial additional hidden (financial) costs to letting your citizens die, or being dependent on foreign powers for space infrastructure.

The thing I find puzzling, and possibly telling, is that conventional wisdom tells us inflation ought to have spiked after the 2008 bailout. Instead it plummeted, indeed briefly became deflation. This tells us that money became very scarce. Why, after so much money was printed and handed out? Because it all went to the banks, and they essentially pocketed it and didn't lend it out. So what exactly was the purpose of doing that?