The premise is a little bit off I think. We didn't "take 20% and do whatever we wanted" as he suggested. We just mis-allocated. We got overly interested in houses.
We have to produce before we can consume. Many of the brightest minds and much of our productive workforce became involved in building over-sized houses. There was much money/paper shuffling that basically boiled down to pretending lots of stuff about over-sized houses. We didn't need so many houses. Unfortunately, we borrowed that production capacity from ourselves in other areas. Now we're short on all sorts of the things we should have been producing instead of too many houses. We have to work extra hard now to get caught up on those things. Oh and all of the businesses that basically existed in order to make pretend money based on too many houses are hosed.
We have to produce before we can consume. Many of the brightest minds and much of our productive workforce became involved in building over-sized houses. There was much money/paper shuffling that basically boiled down to pretending lots of stuff about over-sized houses. We didn't need so many houses. Unfortunately, we borrowed that production capacity from ourselves in other areas. Now we're short on all sorts of the things we should have been producing instead of too many houses. We have to work extra hard now to get caught up on those things. Oh and all of the businesses that basically existed in order to make pretend money based on too many houses are hosed.
There. Mine's shorter.