Instead of a bailout, lets do a stock offering, with the government as the purchaser. This way, the government can sell it's shares later on and get the public's money back.
One thing to remember is that the current share price of companies is based on the value that buyers and sellers are agreeing to. There are many more people who own shares and are unwilling to sell at the current price. When someone talks about Boeing costing $51B, that doesn't take into consideration that many people holding Boeing shares wouldn't sell at that price. That's the price you can buy at if you're looking to buy 1 share. If you're looking to buy all the shares (or a substantial portion), there probably aren't enough sellers at that price.
The point of that is to note that companies will reject money that comes with terms or pricing that is too bad. If you offered to give Boeing $60B in exchange for 100% of the company, shareholders would reject it. Might as well take your chances that the company will survive. Fire all employees, eliminate all payroll for a year, and then try and re-start in 2021. If you ask too much, investors have other options.
For the government, these other options are really bad for the economy - and ultimately for government revenue. We don't want a situation like that if there's a way to avoid it. If the government lends $10B to a company at 0% interest and it means that the company keeps paying $5B per year in taxes instead of filing for bankruptcy and paying $0 in taxes, that's still important even though the government is getting no interest. One thing that people don't realize is that the government basically already owns parts of companies - the government gets a percentage of the profits. If those profits go down, so does government revenue.
The TARP bailout was smart. Dividends to the government were between 5% and 9% interest along with warrants for shares. Usually banks bought the warrants back from the government rather than the government converting them into shares and selling the shares, but it's essentially the same as what you're talking about (without throwing the market into chaos as the government tries to find buyers for hundreds of billions in shares).
Could the government have gotten more? Maybe. Berkshire Hathaway got a couple deals at a slightly higher interest rate before the government started stepping in. However, some banks wanted to reject the government's help because it was expensive - they thought they had enough reserves to weather the storm without help.
It's bad that the public thinks of these "bailouts" as free money. They aren't free money. It makes a lot of sense for the government to be a lender in a time of crisis since they're the only lender that can print money. If the government lends with an appropriate eye to risk and sets reasonable interest rates and secures those loans against the companies, it's a really good thing for the economy.
Personally, I think that the government should also be working on the individual side as well. In some ways, they are. Unemployment usually covers instances where you're temporarily unemployed for things like this. I'd go even further and say that the government should save money for rainy days and give people grants (rather than loans) to keep everything normal. Bailout loans wouldn't help a lot of people who wouldn't be able to pay back an 8% loan easily. However, grants would go a long way to making sure that people were taken care of.
If people start spending less money, it has cascading effect. Businesses employ X number of people assuming a certain number of customers. If their customers go down by 10%, they probably need 10% fewer employees. Then those laid off employees start spending less causing other businesses to lay off unneeded employees. Then those new laid off employees spend less causing... and so on.
We want the country to go through this crisis as smoothly as possible. The government should lend money to companies on terms that are good for the government and good enough for companies that they'll take it. We don't want companies thinking that they should take their chances or shut down for extended periods of time beyond what is necessary for public health. We don't want a huge drop off in government revenue if companies shut down more than is necessary for public health.
I largely agree with your thesis here, but I wanted to point out that the taxpayer has a right to be cranky when executives receive large compensation packages during bailouts.
These compensation packages are a small part of the bailout money, and it's unfortunate that the people with the most knowledge of the company's position and needs are the ones who put it there. They're not fungible and there's no good way to say, "Fix this for zero salary before we fire you and start looking to claw back some of your prior bonuses."
Most taxpayers do have little idea what's going on, but they're at least on point about the injustice of that. Preventing that involves rather substantial changes, and doing them after the last crisis and before the next one -- exactly when politicians, some voters, and business all start to get cranky about burdensome regulation. Voters who said "I told you so" have some justification and a right to be pissed.
> If you offered to give Boeing $60B in exchange for 100% of the company, shareholders would reject it. Might as well take your chances that the company will survive. Fire all employees, eliminate all payroll for a year, and then try and re-start in 2021. If you ask too much, investors have other options.
Well then, the investors or government should just wait for the chapter 7 or chapter 11 filing if an offer is rejected. If one never comes, it was rightly rejected; and if one does - well, the party with the cash gets to set the terms.
