I think what the comment is saying is, if the government is spending a lot of money inefficiently (i.e. spending $100,000 on a weapon that has $10,000 in raw materials plus layers of bureaucracy that are hard to quantify as costs) and accruing a lot of debt in the process, it is hard to understand what your cost is for basic things.

I think you'd at least want to get a 1-1 ratio for spending to drive growth and ideally an actual ROI. The government is operating like a VC funded startup right now