It really isn't though. Sure, at some level of abstraction, someone, somewhere, will have to pay for it, but this is clearly distinct from one's capacity as a taxpayer. All banks, however, benefit from the trust in banking system, so make sense for them to foot the bill. It's unclear how much of that will directly materially affect the average US depositor compared to letting SVB clients lose their shirt and thus erode the trust of the entire banking system.
If in the end the government is needed to (at least temporarily) backstop any deposits anyway, then why have commercial banks for deposits in the first place? Might was well give anyone an account at the Fed or something like that and fund loans and other assets at commercial banks out of bonds, CDs, etc. and never deposits.
> Might was well give anyone an account at the Fed or something like that
That's an interesting proposition, that was simply unfeasible from a practical perspective until very recently.
A consumer bank needed branches, and tills, and vaults, and all sorts of things to serve customers, so it was just unfeasible for most nation-states to eat the costs of all that - while private entities were incentivised to set all of that up so that they could raise money to invest for their own profit.
Now that money is increasingly a purely digital construct, a true National Bank could actually be feasible at low cost, providing a 100% safe deposit system for consumers that will never pay any interest. Private banks would likely still exist, they'd just provide more incentives to depositors (i.e. higher returns). This would make private banks a bit less central to the whole system, and make society a bit more fault-tolerant in this area.
It's an interesting policy proposition, and maybe talking about it would be a bit more productive than the average thread on banks.
