If anything both sides of the political spectrum doesn't want to get into showing China as the demon because unlike the previous cold war, they are not sure if they can win it or even force a draw. China is too powerful as it stands and getting more powerful as years pass while the current superpower is busy fighting it self with culture wars.
China is indeed extremely powerful but it has peaked.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/02/04/china-h...
https://www.ft.com/content/3146a413-9aba-4fd4-86a7-671bce0e6...
If a couple of (supposedly bad and kinda not working) chinese spy baloons were suffient to suddenly make the US go nuts, and spend a lot of defense budget scrambling fighters around and shooting down UFOs, that was a lot of bang for the buck.
Or, if the USA just shots down everything once it enters its territory, future dirt cheap, "don't even have to be smart" bio/chemical weapons platform.
I doubt if the expenditure has been significant. The US has a lot of air to air missiles, pilots who need flight time, etc., and a lot of that stuff is a sunk cost.
There could potentially be a big increase in cost in the days that follow, for the US and for Canada. It's valuable, fragile human beings who need to do dangerous things like dive for surveillance balloon parts, or go out onto the ice to collect them, but the cost of scrambling some fighters and firing some Sidewinders by itself can't be that high. If scrambling fighters was all there was to it, the costs could probably be rationalized as a valuable training exercise.
I would venture to guess that if you tried to reduce everything to a dollar cost, the cost to the civilian economy of closing a portion of the airspace on the East Coast a few days ago to facilitate the interception of the balloon was higher than the cost of all these military operations to date.
> make the US go nuts
Yes, measured by the whole "make the Americans act crazy" metric, they're doing great. It's like Judo or something: we Americans just need a little push...