Confusing Result with Initial Purpose

Good morning,

I was discussing politics with a few people and the conversation got derailed on one point where I think someone was using flawed logic, but I'm not sure. One person said they liked Bernie Sanders but he didn't want his taxes to go up. I told him he should listen to Jill Stein because she questions how we can afford things like a decades-long war and a huge bank bailout, but we can't afford things like healthcare-as-a-right and relieving student debt or free/highly subsidized secondary education.

With that point, a third person jumps in and says that the war is a fair point, but the bank bailout is not because the government ended up making money on the bailouts; the government took stock in the banks as part of the deal and then sold them at a profit. To me, the fact that the government made money on the bailout doesn't make it a flawed argument in this context and I spent the next 20 minutes discussing this one point and the conversation got further derailed when he said that the bank bailout was a one-time expenditure but free health care is an on-going one (this isn't the point Jill Stein makes, but at this point the conversation was beyond repair).

I have two reasons why I think the fact that the government made money doesn't make it a flawed argument for Jill Stein to make:

1. The government didn't bail out the banks because they saw it as a savvy investment, they did it because the banks were in trouble and needed help. Even if the government knew that they were going to lose all of the bailout money, they still would've had to do it because the economy couldn't handle all of these big banks failing at once. The fact that they made money is an added bonus that they couldn't have planned for.

2. Going in, they didn't know that they were going to make money on the deal. Therefore, they must have been willing to, and even planned to, lose that money in full. That said, Jill Stein is correct to argue that, if we can afford to bailout the big banks, we should be able to bailout the students who are living under mountains of debt. To me, the fact that the government ended up making money is irrelevant since they couldn't have expected that and needed to make sure they could afford to lose it all. Theoretically, then, they could have AFFORDED to bailout the banks and not made any money on the deal, thus why can't they AFFORD to bailout the ones who hold the student loans?

Am I wrong in thinking that the government making money is irrelevant in this context? Is it fallacious to confuse a positive, unintended result with the primary original intention?

"Is it fallacious to confuse a positive, unintended result with the primary original intention?"

I don't think it is fallacious, I think it is just problematic. For example, if I kidnap a baby from a house that gets destroyed by a meteor minutes later, and I attempt to justify the kidnapping by the fact that I saved the baby, it would never fly. This is more of a form of lying. Now if a third party attempts this justification, it could be that they just don't have the facts (i.e., they didn't know my intention of simply taking the baby), so they are just wrong and not making a fallacious argument. But in your example, did the government really not expect to get any of the money back? Did they have reasonable expectations that this would be a good investment? Depending on these answers (which I don't know), your opponent's objection to Stein's comments might be reasonable.

While it is rather complicated, a strong case can be made that the U.S. government did not make money on the TARP bailout, and in fact lost billions.
See: wallstreetonparade.com/20. . .

This aside, the intention of TARP was to prevent a total collapse of our nation’s financial system. Arguments exist pro and con whether the bailout was in fact necessary, and whether our economy would have collapsed without it; the point is, it was not done with ‘conscious benevolence’ as those making the case for our government assuming the burden for all outstanding student loans. However, keep in mind, if such action was implemented it would not be ‘free’ but would come at a tremendous cost to the U.S. taxpayer. Tax dollars are fungible, and funds expended for this purpose would otherwise be used for myriad alternative functions. Whether using tax-payer dollars to relieve student loans makes sense depends on your perspective, and is essentially a value judgment. It is not a matter of logic.

Thus, the question of unintended consequences is not relevant to this issue, and I see no fallacy here.