What is the smartest consumption-smoothing method?

In a recession, production (GDP) falls. To prevent a large loss of well-being, consumption has to be smoothed so it does not fall as much as production. But how to smooth consumption? This is a particularly important question in light of the COVID crisis: A first possibility is for households to borrow during recessions and repay this debt during expansion periods (households have a finite lifespan and have to repay their debt). The problem is a financial imperfection: households lack access to sufficient borrowing capacity to perform this type of consumption smoothing and banks are reluctant to lend to households during recessions; A second possibility is for the government to borrow, transfer income to households and then deleverage later by taxing households. But there is a problem here, too, as governments may find it difficult to sharply increase their debt (which would drive up long-term interest rates and lead to a crowding-out effect); A third possibility is for the central bank to distribute money to households during the recession, which has been done in 2020 (helicopter money, equivalent to monetisation of the fiscal deficits that result from the income transfers to households). The tricky question is then what happens after the recession: Either the central bank takes back this money (by selling bonds), which weakens consumption like when the government taxes; Or the central bank does not take back this money (normally, in order to be effective, helicopter money does not add to household debt). But this gives rise to another form of household tax after the recession: either an inflation tax or a tax on the buyers of financial or real estate assets via an increase in the prices of these assets. In each case, consumption is smoothed: it is boosted during the recession and then taxed after the recession.