> Someone's going to end up getting left holding the bag, and it's going to suck for them, and it's not going to be fair. Life isn't fair. There's going to be edge cases, and those edge cases won't be dealt with correctly, but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think you underestimate how big the edge case of "landlord" is and exactly how that would play out. There are more than 50 million commercial properties in the United States and most of the owners have loans against those properties. If we don't bail them out, those loans don't get paid, and then the bank doesn't get paid, if the banks don't get paid, they gain a bunch of assets that no one can afford and go belly up, which we already decided in 2008 is not an outcome the system can tolerate.
There's no "buck stops here" that doesn't end with lenders because our system is built in such a way that debt is the leverage we use to build wealth. As long as that is the case, we either have to choose between unwinding the system and a hitting rock bottom that may not be recoverable or bailing people out and spreading the cost via taxes and inflation.
Trying to target the pain to a specific class of people is nearly impossible in our system, it is giant and interconnected and someone will profit off of that, and it will almost never be the "little guy."