I drive a Subaru Crosstrek. It isn't the most fuel efficient vehicle on the earth but it's pretty good among vehicles that can handle the terrible dirt/gravel/unimproved roads I'm often on. I've owned a couple of big trucks, but I used them hard every week. I don't need one now. If that changes, I'll buy another one. Some of those big trucks are actually pretty efficient these days, although speed affects that a lot. "I can't drive 55" but it would save a lot of fuel if you could.
My wife has been a school kitchen manager for a number of years. Lunch debt is such bullshit. We funded free school meals for all students for a year during covid and it cost $10 billion. We could have funded school lunches for many years just with what we've sent to the Ukraine. We don't have it because we have no way to influence the people we elect to do the things we value. It is clearly not something our elected representatives value.
In my area there are tons of bigger trucks. Delivery box vans, dump trucks hauling dirt or gravel, garbage trucks, school buses, fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, box trucks with 8 meter boxes (don't need special license to drive). Not to mention full 18 wheel semi trucks that are everywhere and especially our highways. Almost none of our trucks, are cabovers, they have huge hoods on them.
Those pickup trucks really are usually the smallest trucks we see, and when you're in one you still feel like you're in a smaller vehicle compared to a lot of the other vehicles on our roads. It's not brainwashed when it's observable. I've lived in Europe the US and the roads are very different experiences.
Lower inflation doesn't mean lower prices - which we need, and/or higher wages - it means prices are going up a little more slowly. Pointing at a $9 jar of mayonnaise with an "I did this" isn't going to win many people over.
I'm in Ohio and I voted against him, but if you are involved in real estate even a little you're definitely going to be selling some property to a foreign investor.
It's not a big obstacle to your theory in your mind. A lot of rural people would go to war before being forced to abandon their properties. It becomes a pretty big problem to reality then. And in some of the more rural areas the backroad dirt or gravel connectors are maintained by the residents. You should spend a couple of days exploring the upper peninsula in Michigan. You need at minimum an AWD vehicle with a foot of ground clearance. There's honestly like one paved road.
I don't live in a place like that, I live in a shitty suburb with no sidewalks or bike lanes, or even a shoulder on the road. You can't go anywhere without a car, it's deadly. But I do vacation in places like I was describing almost exclusively. And most of them would never move to a city. But you'd just force them? My politics are anti-authoritarian. If I understand you correctly, you would empower monsters to do heinous things to your own citizens.
Except we already have built it wrong. Maybe if the government bought all of those houses and re-zomed the land forbidding houses but we're talking more than 10 million homes (probably WAY more) probably $4 trillion+ and that isn't even accounting for building new infrastructure. Not to mention people would refuse to leave their land. Realistically this is probably a $50 trillion undertaking.
Canada is about to be prime real estate