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Ehh, if you're going to factor in opportunity cost then you must also account for the would-be impact to the overall economy had TARP not been enacted.

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This isn’t opportunity costs, the government had to sell bonds to do all that because wasn’t sitting on cash.

I’m just saying that I don’t think “it was a profitable program” is true.

Factoring the overall benefits to the economy is obviously the right way to judge it and is (mostly) unrelated to its direct profitability.

I hear you but ISTM that "it was a profitable program" is more (partially) accurate than "the government just gave money away to big bad banks that should have gone into healthcare and education instead"

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