"The last four bond drives came up so short we just printed money instead. Ask any smart boy on Wall Street, he’ll tell ya. Our dolls next to worthless, we’ve borrowed so much and nobody’s lending anymore."

This is misleading. A government printing loads of money to finance its expenses should cause inflation. While 1941 and 1942 did see inflation over 10% (which was high given hardly any inflation at all in the 1930s, it dropped in 1943-45. Higher inflation levels would return, but after the war. Some Bureau of Labor statistics on the Consumer Price Index for the period can be found here.

Furthermore, the US government was not just funding the war by printing dollars. A large portion of it was financed by a vast overhaul and expansion of taxation, namely income taxes. Much of how the US income tax system functions is actually a result of wartime measures.

The Roosevelt administration had pursued federal income tax reform in its first term. After tax reform passed in 1935, the top income bracket was 79% collected on incomes over $5 million (which applied to literally one American, John D. Rockefeller). The minimum taxable income level for a married couple was $2,000 a year, or more than what three-fourths of families actually earned. A couple with two children and earning $4,000 a year would have been among the top tenth of household earners - and would have paid $16 in income taxes. Fewer than one in twenty American households paid any federal income tax at all, and it was a small portion of federal revenues collected.

The Revenue Act of 1942 radically and permanently changed this. The minimum taxable personal income threshold was reduced to $624 (or about half of the median annual income), which meant that some 13 million more Americans had to now pay federal income taxes (only some 4 million had met the threshold before the war). Rising wages and employment meant that by war's end some 42.6 million Americans were paying income taxes. One of the ways taxpaying permanently changed was by changing the method of collection. Before 1943, income taxes were paid to the Treasury quarterly (much as you still do if you're an independent contractor). But daily needs for wartime financing found this method too slow, and in 1943 it was switched to withholding directly from employees' paychecks, as it continues to this day. The percentage of income taxes as a total of federal revenue shot up to a level where it also remains to this day (more than corporate taxes). Congress would eventually resist further proposed tax increases by the Roosevelt administration, passing a Revenue Act of 1943 over FDR's veto with large numbers of tax exemptions (another feature that continues to this day). Nevertheless, some 45% of the US war cost of about $304 billion was funded directly through taxation, a level higher than had been the case for the Civil War or World War I (albeit lower than Germany's 48%, the UK's 53% or the Canada's 55%).

The rest of the cost was funded through borrowing, or through the issuing of war bonds. While much of the funding came from personal subscriptions to war bonds, notably the Series E Bond, we should be clear that this only accounted for about a quarter of the $200 or so borrowed by the US government during the war years - the rest was borrowed by banks and other financial institutions. Commercial banks alone went from holding $1 billion of US bonds in 1941 to over $24 billion in 1945. It was actually financial institutions cashing out these bonds after the war that caused the rise in the money supply and inflation. If you asked a smart boy in Wall Street about this and they told you everything was financed by printed money during the war, they were either pulling one over on you or not very good at their jobs.

"Ships aren’t being built, tanks aren’t being built, machine guns, bazookas, hand grenades. Zip."

I'm not sure how a US Treasury official could claim this with a straight face. It was pretty obvious even to the American public just how much the US was producing for the war effort. US industrial output was already the world's largest in 1941, and it doubled in size in four years. By 1942, the US was already outproducing all of the Axis powers combined, and overall by war's end produced an estimated two-thirds of all Allied military equipment: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, 2 million trucks, 8,800 naval vessels, and 87,000 landing craft. For every one major Japanese ship launched during the war, the US launched sixteen. I don't have tables handy but I believe 1944 was the highest year for war materiel production, and the only reason that 1945 saw a drop is because of orders being cancelled with the war's end that year.

"don’t be surprised if your plane doesn’t make it off the runway because the fuel dumps are empty and our good friends the Arabs are only taking bullion."

This line actually caught my eye first, and seems very weird. The bullion line is actually true, kind of. Standard Oil of California had first gained a drilling concession from the Saudi Arabia in 1933. Texas Oil later bought a stake, and after years of little result, finally oil was struck in 1938. The company name was changed to Arab-American Oil Company (Aramco), which is still Saudi Arabia's major producer of oil. The Saudi Arabian government bought out the company in the 1970s, but until then it was a consortium of American corporations operating a concession. By agreement they paid royalties to the Saudi government - the original 1933 deal was four gold schillings for every ton of oil pumped. Of course, Aramco was a private company, and from 1934 the US Treasury would only redeem US dollars in gold with foreign governments, and private US persons were not allowed to keep gold. Aramco therefore had to obtain gold from other sources, such as the Argentine and South African governments, in order to pay its royalties. The US Treasury sometimes helped to facilitate these deals, but it was not supplying gold directly.

Even with that being the case, the US itself was still by far the biggest producer of oil in the world, pumping some 60% of the world's crude (the second and third biggest producers were Venezuela and the USSR). While security of oil supplies was of vital concern to the US and all governments during the war, especially as usage rose, the US was still exporting oil to Allies rather than importing it in large quantities from the Middle East.

Honestly, the picture painted of the United States - high inflation, industries going dormant, the country paying through the nose for Middle Eastern oil, and GIs suffering the effects of an indifferent American public - sounds much more like 1975 than 1945, and I suspect that is what Clint Eastwood was really taking as his inspiration (I'm just blaming him even though he didn't write the script). In conclusion, Letters from Iwo Jima is better.

Sources:

David Kennedy. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

Richard Overy. Why The Allies Won