Remember I said that exploitation seems to be a really useful way to characterize how US and western society as a whole operates now.

So about that:

Governments print the money they need to monetize the public debt.

The direct cost is inflation at all levels - financial assets and goods and services.

We work in order to gain the PRIVILEGE of obtaining debt units (dollars.)

The worst thing that can happen in the US is that your ability to earn the privilege to transact those debt units is taken away.

And the velocity of money in the economy, touted as strength, actually shows how weak the dollar is.

An investment guy I follow on Youtube made this cogent argument: money works as a means of transaction AND as a means of value storage, and those are TWO DIFFERENT use cases. If faith in the currency as a store of value reduces, then everyone seeks to unload dollars by spending, and seeks to obtain more resilient stores of value. IE, spend a lot in dollars and hoard precious metals, or crypto. (His video - watch it and you will feel your brain swelling in size: https://youtu.be/19c_nf8RtVg?si=qD-hATYM1vSSTLGW )

The US dollar is an egregious example of exploitation.