It would stop the outflow of dollars but wouldn't address the debt.
First things first. Start with trade, proceed to a balanced budget, then address the debt. Regarding the debt; the first thing we need to do is encourage American investors to buy more gov't debt and thus return it to our shores where it is less likely to be used as a political or economic weapon against us. China is not our friend.
If the value of the dollar drops then imports become more expensive. What do people in the US buy that is totally unaffected by the price of imports?
I'm thinking that the inflation of wages would take care of that. Remember that we are going to devalue our currency by printing more of it. If Obama's minimum wage goes to $9 plus per hour, which bumps most other wages up as well, that will give Americans the money needed. China is already under pressure to revalue their currency upwards. To meet our devaluation they would have to devalue theirs yet further, possibly causing more economic pain for their own citizens. The wild card is the desire by the Chinese to enjoy the higher standard of living that they have been earning but not enjoying. They can only be put off by their gov't's highly political monetary policies for so long.
A short term loss in exchange for a longer term gain can be something that works although when so many people work with budgets that are very finely balanced a fairly small shock makes the difference between a budget that just about works and a budget that doesn't work at all. If your population is anything like ours there are going to be millions of Americans with little to nothing in the bank to fall back on, so your short term pain just pushed millions of people into a place where they can't pay their bills. Perhaps many of them could adjust if they dropped expensive cable TV packages, cellphone contracts and other non-essentials but you'll also have a lot of people whose budgets are already cut right back and who have nowhere else to go.
I admit that there will be pain, and not just for us. I think that hoping, or worse yet
planning, for a painless recovery is unrealistic.
Even less realistic is the notion that we can 'compete' our way out of our trade problems. There is an ever-growing supply of cheap labor offshore. We will never outcompete them unless we reduce our standard of living to loincloths and mud huts (and you don't want to see me in a loincloth; not a pretty sight).