Look, there are lots of opinions out here, and outspoken financial gurus are notorious for being a little crazy and hard to understand.

I like this article b/c it moves toward bridging that gap. Most people don't understand "what" the federal debt it, they just know it exists and that it has lots of zeros. This article doesn't quite speak to those people, but it's getting there, so congrats.

Me, I'm going to cut straight to the quotes:
All they can do is sell the securities they've got.
Yes this is true (I guess they can trade them too) and you use this to segue into interest rates. But there's something else here: this stuff needs to be cashed in for services or commodities at some point.

Right now there are hundreds of billions of dollars in money still waiting to be cashed in for stuff. You talk about exchange rates, but right now it's a game of chicken in terms of exchange rates. The US dollar is being held afloat because:
1. Everyone has them
2. They're the unit of trade for oil
It's a game of chicken b/c everyone wants to get the most real value from their little IOUs. But if everyone decided to try and cash in all of their US debt notes, the economy would just collapse and inflate away the rest of the IOUs.

Now, without any real stretch I think that it can be generally agreed that the average US standard of living will go down in the next few years (not up). There are simply more powerful downward forces than upwards forces right now.

And so I really like this comment: Finally, expect a lower standard of living. b/c it's not generally expected right now. In fact, most people expect the "infinitely expanding" standard of living which is really part of the money problem we're having.

So kudos, but I think there is one issue with which I will disagree completely:
The US (because it is large and well-endowed with both natural resources and skilled workers) could actually produce most of what it needs domestically.

This is utterly false. I'm a Canadian currently living in the US and I know this to be simply untrue. The US can clearly produce enough food for your its purposes, but the US cannot produce enough oil, gas, lumber or energy to support itself right now.

Lumber:
All told, those imports fed nearly one-third of the 65 billion board feet the U.S. consumed, according to statistics from U.S. Census Bureau's

Energy:
35% of the energy in the US is currently imported. And that demand is growing, who remembers rolling blackouts in California?

The US cannot power its long-term energy growth right now. The reason these numbers are very important is that the current US economy is founded on the concept of inexpensive access to energy sources. I live in KC right now and most people don't live anywhere close to work. There's no good public transportation, so people expend tons of money just getting to/from work. And most of the shopping is done on these multi-mile major thoroughfares filled with shops. These shops are completely inaccessible to people without personal vehicles. There's a whole major shopping center (Legends) that's like 30-45 minutes drive from where basically everyone lives. It's just "out in the middle of nowhere" off the interstate, but everyone merrily piles into the car on the weekend and drives out!

And that's just the tip of the energy iceberg: constantly increasing personal square footage over the last decades requires extra heating/cooling, bigger TVs, bigger fridges, more powerful computers...

Of course, I guess it all gets back to your last point: expect a lower standard of living and expect that lowered standard to include a lot higher valuation on location and "local living". Not being accessible by public transportation is going to hurt some businesses who long ago exchanged "cheap land" for my gas and time.