In fact we rewarded them. We bailed them out by printing a lot of money. We then printed more money during the pandemic to pay people to stay home and watch Netflix. Probably a lot more examples. All that money flowing around that has no basis in actual productivity or value created. It's got to correct at some point. One of the corrections is how much more everything costs now, but I don't think that has fully absorbed the excess.
> We bailed them out by printing a lot of money.
We did. We created about $4 trillion. That just about neutralized the $4 trillion that evaporated in the crash, and the result was that we did not go through a deflationary collapse. You know that they did not create too much, because inflation was basically nothing for the next decade. It was flat until Covid.
Covid... yeah, that was inflationary.
I would argue the second instance (pandemic) was much more nearly what a good government should do than the first one