I was wondering recently if the idea of opportunity cost is the same for governments that can print their own money versus all other entities. I'm not entirely clear on how the that automaker bailouts were financed but would that money even have existed if they hadn't used it for the bailout? It's not like the government was going to create that amount of money and put it in a savings account.

A more appropriate way to look at it might be whether the money earned more than it cost the government to service the debt. IIRC servicing government debt is not inflation-adjusted, so it's probably more informative to compare it to the cost of the debt not inflation adjusted-growth.

But this gets pretty weird since it's not how finance works for entities that cannot print their own money.