Thomas Edison was smart enough to understand why the rest of mainstream american opinion did not. Money has no intrinsic value. Fiat money is not slavery. Sovereign debt is not slavery. In this quote Edison is spot on, on the problem of social justice. Uttering currency and giving it to the people, the workers responsible of creating wealth, creates aggregate demand. Demand drives sales. Sales drive production. You don't eat because you've made yourself a sandwich; you made yourself a sandwich because you're hungry and you want to eat.
A country with monetary sovereignty indebted in its own currency cannot go bankrupt. The monetary system is just a spread sheet. Basic accounting, which the ancients worked with, states that a man's surplus is another man's deficit. A man's income is another man's payments. A man's savings are another man's loans. These two elements always balance themselves out to 0.
In the modern economy there are 3 elements: government, private sector (households and companies), and the foreign sector. All three of these cannot be in surplus at the same time. One needs to be in deficit, in order for the other two to be in surplus, and the only one able to run deficits without going bankrupt is the government.
Government is not a household. Government creates fiat by circulating currency in its expenditures, and it destroys it via taxation. Government does need to borrow its own money first in order to spend it. Government does not borrow to "finance" its fiscal deficit. Furthermore, government does need to produce debt in order to run fiscal deficit. We're stuck with the bad habits of the gold standard era. An era of perpetual wars. And those claiming that metals can't be speculated upon/manipulated, you guys need to consult actual history to see the truth.
A net government deficit of lets say 10 billions dollars enters the private system as excess reserves, which the banks compete to turn into loans and deposits. (Loans create deposits by the way)
Therefore, that's the only way the private sector can save. If government works to reduce the budget deficit, then the private sector is seeing its surplus reduced. If the government achieves budget surplus, the private sector is running a deficit. That means recession. In the course of the business cycle, if the government isn't running a deficit, then the economy would stagnate.
All recessions of the 19th and 20th centuries in the US have come on the heels of government surpluses.
The Clinton surpluses did the same thing. The Fed back then had two options. Either do nothing, and the economy would stagnate in the short term, and contract in the mid turn, or - since it could not longer buy government debt to expand the money supply to facilitate growth - it could turn to buy private debt.
Fiat money backed by "nothing" creates inflation. Where's the inflation in the fiat countries who produce? Can't spot it. Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of more than 220%. And you know what the chances are for Japan to go bankrupt? 0% That figure is the same for the USA.
How lucky are you americans? The whole world wants to sell you physical goods in exchange for your paper dollars, out of which your government will never run out of.
If you want to blame someone for the poverty inside your country, blame your government, not the chinese.
China exported so much because it needed to defend itself. The chinese couldn't buy strategic resources and technology with the yuan. For those kinds of things you need universal accepted currency, i.e. american dollars. In the future, they'll focus on domestic consumption.
Unlike the ancient and medieval periods, where production preceded financialization, in modern times, financialization preceded production and distribution. You contracted a credit in order to gather resources and labor, then you could start producing. All money is debt. Yet, debt isn't a esoteric thing. It's just some numbers on a spread sheet. The ancients knew how to calculate the growth of debts over time and of their payments/interest. And they knew when to expect those debts to become unbearable/unpayable. That was when they canceled them. In fact, that's what new rulers did, when they entered the office. The first thing they did was to cancel the debts of the previous administration. Allowing the people to go bankrupt, meant casting them to into servitude (slavery). That would bring with it migration, and a lack of manpower. That made the kingdom weak in the front of barbarian assaults or enemy kings/despots.
In conclusion, unlearn all the neoliberal and austrian myths, and start researching accounting reality. Unlearn that demand curve follows the law of demand. Unlearn the myths about debt, metals, and fiat. Document yourselves about the Theory of Chartalism, which describes everything to the letter.
If you're a citizen of a country which has monetary sovereignty, and which is indebted in its own currency, don't stand for austerity, don't stand for bs. Don't fear arbitrary ratios between debt to GDP or deficit to GDP. Inflation is the real yardstick. We can have full employment with price stability. As long as unused resources and unused labor is there to be located in society, there's no reason not to expand the fiscal deficit. In order to cover the GDP output gap. Unlike the EU, the USA has two seminal things: monetary sovereignty and a surplus recycling system.