Are you notified every year how to claim your pro rata share of the US Treasury’s income? I didn’t think so. You pay into it, and you get your share back via services and stability. Same deal here.
What Mike said, but also, of all these deals (Bear Stearns, Fanny/Freddie, AIG), the only one where the entity has been actually taken over by the government is Fannie and Freddie, and that was always a quasi-public entity anyway. (Though if you want to talk scandal, we could talk about the fact that Fannie and Freddie’s debts are not being counted against the deficit!) The others are like, as Rachel put it, a student loan—we’re giving money to someone who wouldn’t be able to get a loan otherwise in order to accomplish a social good, or at least that’s the theory. We have no control over the companies, and it’s not an investment, which is good, because that means the loan has to be repaid. The question isn’t ultimately whether it was a sound financial decision (the whole point of a bailout is that it’s providing money to someone who the market has determined is not a good risk), but whether it successfully accomplished a social good that would not have been accomplished otherwise.
That’s the answer I was looking for, thank you.
