Write down the existing homeowners’ loans to current fair values. Permanently, no restrictions on re-sale or renting. Hell, make the new mortgages assumable. End of story. Real estate bubbles aren’t wealth creators. And development for its own sake is deleterious to the environment.
As far as working hours, plenty of places that are doing well economically (Germany, Australia) have restrictions on hours and vacation time. We shouldn’t aspire to be China or Japan, where people commit suicide from overwork.
BTW – wealth creation via inflation or encouraging people to buy more of the same trinkets made in pestholes with no labor or environmental standards is a f**king sham. If anything, we should be aiming for genuine innovation combined with environmental sustainability.
I’d be all for “free” money for clean-energy projects, ranging from solar, to wind, to new nuclear plants. The goal should be to phase out fossil fuel use inside of 20 years. This should be combined with a tax on fossil fuel energy that starts small, but doubles every year or two. The carrot and the stick, make it so that in 20 years, using fossil fuels for power generation, heating, or driving will be prohibitively expensive, while clean sources will become cheap as economies of scale grow.
