Isn't the point of our government to break up industries to big to fail so things like this don't happen? Congratulations you solved a problem that your institution is supposedly designed to prevent.

The average American were the main ppl who lost their houses and jobs and got jackshit back from those bailouts. (Besides a measly 20 billion back from the bank bail out. Our government budget is in the trillions)

No one is saying forgive 1.7 trillions tomorrow but it is MORE than possible to forgive that much debt over time and recoup it. Especially since as soon as that debt is gone ppl will buy shit like houses, take out loans for businesses, and have kids which all add economic value and tax revenue.

That profit worked out to be about 0.6% rate of return on a loan to failing businesses on the verge of bankruptcy. Do you know anybody on the verge of bankruptcy who's ever received a loan with rates like that?

Taxpayers would have been better off holding onto the company stock and receiving a portion of the profits today.

We were robbed.

The economic loss of losing a generation and a half of workers who will be unable to save for retirement and will put a giant strain on the economy in 40-50 years when their brains and bodies are shot, but they can't afford to retire because the money that they could have set aside went to paying student loans. It's going to be way cheaper in the long run and a better investment to forgive student loans now, than to wait for all those people to hit retirement age and not be able to afford to retire, holding down jobs that should be opening for new generations and screwing over the youth once again. Not that newer generations will be as big, since those strapped with student loans are choosing not to have kids because they can't afford it. Also if our social safety net for retirees (Social Security, Medicare, etc) is already strained, we'd better give people the best chance we can at being able to afford to save for their own retirements.

If anything, the ROI on paying off student debt is better long term than the auto and bank bailouts - because the cost of not doing it is going to affect the economy for generations.

At best you are misinformed.

GM paid back the loan but didn't pay back the 45 billion dollar stock swap.

The Bank Bailouts were paid back, but the excessive reserves were not which dwarfed the loans.

For scale imagine I gave you a small city and 1000 dollars. You paid me back 1050 dollars. Then I never shut up about how I made a profit and enjoy my small city. No exaggeration a small city is the kinda money we are talking about. The excessive reserves program went into the 100s of billions.

As to the auto industry bailout, would you rather have had a major American industry simply collapse?!

There's allegedly 94 American automobile manufacturers, per Wikipedia. If there's a disruption that would collapse all of them, that would be extremely serious - something which should be handled by making sure the industry is not at the whims of the economy.

The simplest quick-fix is having the company give partial ownership to the government in exchange for a bailout, and the alternatives involve arguing about what color to use on the bike shed.

What does it matter to the auto industry to be saved if no one is buying their cars?

The population can only bear the burden of these bailouts for so long before collapsing. Then nobody will survive.

The people in debt are the plankton of the ocean. They seem insignificant until they are gone. Then the whole ecosystem collapsed.