You're drawing a false equivalence. A dollar (or a gold bar) does not represent a specific amount of goods or services that any specific counterparty is bound to deliver. So in general no, money is not inherently debt.
> 4. If you believe the good times are going to keep rolling, and any bad times will, on average, pass relatively swiftly (people do have a tendency to persevere), then not borrowing money results in a lost opportunity cost.
On the flip side, creating inflation channels wealth up towards the top, to those who are able to better bear the burden of roundtripping through the inflating assets rather than saving in dollars. Plus the lagging effect of wages means that they only rise after the people earning them are feeling enough pain to demand more.
Even taking the CPI calculation at face value, it does not represent the whole of inflation. We would expect prices in a technological economy to be level or trending downwards, due to basic market optimization. Every time some innovation makes things "cheaper" and yet their real prices still go up, we're getting hit twice!
I'd say the long term effects of centralizing the economy (ie the wealth imbalance we're dealing with now) are more harmful than forgoing a little top-down metric of "growth". We have a "shortage of jobs" precisely because people at the bottom are still stuck chasing 40 hours a week to service debt, rather than having been able to build wealth (ie economic negotiating power) in dollars.
And of course all that too-hot "growth" is occurring by churning through real natural resources, suboptimally even. If you care at all about sustainability or global warming, and you don't look at the US's monetary policy and weep, you need to study deeper.