CEO's we getting their fat bonuses (tied to share prices) for years, inflating said prices with buybacks, and now, when shit hit the fan, they are dumping half-bankrupt companies to the public?
And a lot of that money is being borrowed, so it's even worse than it seems at first blush. Not only are the rich getting richer, but we'll all have to pay for it eventually. So recent history is the government doing the opposite: they were giving away money during the boom, making it harder to do countercyclical interventions in a crisis. And this from the supposedly fiscal conservative party.
Are you (excuse my french) fucking kidding me?
Source: https://itep.org/notadime/ (dollars in millions)
Company (U.S.) ~ Income ~ Federal Tax ~ Effective Tax Rate
Alaska Air Group ~ $576 ~ $-5 ~ -1%
Delta Air Lines ~ $5,073 ~ $-187 ~ -4%
JetBlue Airways ~ $219 ~ $-60 ~ -27%
The most taxes paid was by Southwest, at 21.4% ... Which is a 60% of my personal tax! When can I get personal tax rates like that???
One way to view the government's role here is that it shifts around externalities to achieve efficiency. You can put cap-and-trade restrictions to absorb negative externalize in high-pollution industries and redistribute that to consumer/producer markets that suffer from the pollution.
You can probably apply a similar piece of reasoning across time. Government can tax industries during booms and then redistribute that during busts.