“Only an idiot could call it welfare in the context of individual oriented social programs.”
The TARP bailout alone was over $400 billion. And I don’t see how you can call it anything other than welfare for insolvent banks. The government did get most of the money bank because it assumed an equity interest in those institutions — in other words, it nationalized the banks! This is called socialism. And the President who created TARP was a Republican. Obama, a Democrat, de-nationalized the banks.
Life is not what the polemicists say that it is.