"We’re in debt up to our eyeballs; 30 Trillion dollars of it by the looks of it."
Debt, for the monopoly issuer of the nation's currency, is a misnomer. That word has done more damage and caused more suffering than almost any other in government. As long as the national spending on public purpose benefits and programs is seen as reliant on "revenue", via taxation or borrowing, it will be viewed negatively. Tying spending together with revenue creates adversaries where they shouldn't exist and promotes further elevation of the wealthy as "job creators".
It also fuels the deep resentment of the federal government that promotes libertarian extremism and borderline sedition as we have seen recently. People, especially when they are strapped financially themselves, are very protective of "their" tax dollars and how they are spent. The supremacy of the wealthy depends largely upon the general lack of government funding of basic guarantees for the working class and poor.
"We’re borrowing money from a rising global power -China (among others) to keep our economy afloat."
This is the nonsense most people have been led to believe, largely by their leadership who should know better. China traded real resources and labor for the dollars it "loaned" to Treasury in the form of bonds. It can use those dollars to purchase other resources denominated in US dollars, or it can gain some interest for them. In either case, those dollars already existed and can only be used within the US monetary system. It has no way of converting them to its own currency and would have no need for them if it did. Like the US, it creates its own currency as it needs it within its domestic economy.
"If fewer and fewer countries hold our debts and currencies, the US dollars abroad eventually return home, further inflating the costs of everything, leading to a deeper crash in our standards of living."
More erroneous econ and assumption that the monopoly issuer of a fiat currency is somehow dependent upon "getting" its currency from some external source. A bit less dependency upon foreign labor and resources might be just the boost America needs to revitalize its production and shift away from the "service" economy that never fulfilled its promises. The line separating us from manufacturing our own products is always the cost of producing them here plus the cost of transport.
Are cheap trinkets really a sound basis of an economy if they come at the cost of personal gain from our own productivity for any except the wealthy? The general use of US dollars for global trade has decimated the balance between capital and labor in extreme advantage to capital. That would change if American labor was better able to exert influence on government as it did pre-'60s before neoliberalism became the national religion.
"I believe Dalio’s analysis of the changing world order. We’re close to losing our ‘exorbitant privilege’ and the American Empire seems to be trembling at the edges of decline."
Dalio's perspective is entirely from that of capital, even if he seems genuinely concerned for labor. He views the federal government from that perspective as well and is unlikely to consider any benefit funded by money creation as a net positive. However, if the government doesn't provide some net payment for the real resources and labor it demands it effectively "steals" those via clawing back any such payment in taxation. Deficits should always be viewed in the context of payment, not a burden. Without creating additional money that can net retire private sector bank debt or be net saved the economy will continue to erode from the bottom upward. Deficits can be too large, but they can also be too small and insufficient to their purpose as Congress is Constitutionally mandated to supply new money "for the common welfare".
