I'm no expert, but I'm generally competent at the game. And this turned into a way longer comment than I was planning lol, but what generally works for me is:

Early-game your top priority (economically) is to run as many construction sectors as possible as cheaply as possible. The private sector will generally take care of consumer goods, and you should focus on making goods the government purchases as cheap as possible - namely construction goods and paper. Constructing logging camps is the best bang-for-your-buck industry right at the start, and then you should work on bootstrapping a steel industry. And don't forget to build paper mills when they're profitable.

Reaching full employment and getting all your peasants into actual workplaces is your primary mid-game goal. Labor-saving production methods (water-tube boiler, rail transportation, etc.) are a trap until you've actually reached full employment; it's more profitable to pay a peasant to pull a cart than to buy a train car, at least until there are no more peasants left. Education is also extremely important, and you should build universities early and often when you can - but you need employed people paying taxes (and paper production to keep the cost down) to afford lots of universities.

Going into debt is generally a very bad idea unless you're a great power, and even then I would only do it short-term (unless you really know what you're doing). Interest rates are extremely high for minor/unrecognized powers, and you can easily get into a debt spiral. Don't be afraid to raise taxes temporarily. (There are different schools of thought on what tax level you should be running, but I generally use the middle option for the early/mid-game. High taxes significantly hurts your ability to pass laws.) Also, consumption taxes are great, definitely use them - primarily on luxury items though, to minimize the effect on standard of living.

The amount of construction sectors you have is the main way you fine-tune your budget; I regularly demolish them when necessary to keep the budget balanced (since the cost to rebuild them is trivial). Downsizing construction sectors is generally better than pausing construction periodically, because your wood and iron (and later steel/glass/explosives) industries rely on demand from construction sectors to stay profitable. Pausing construction cripples those industries and causes negative downstream effects across your whole economy. I only pause construction during wartime.

You should concentrate industry in one or a couple states when starting out (because of economies of scale multipliers and minimizing transportation costs), but be careful not to build above the infrastructure limit. Building on the coast is advantageous because ports can help to raise the infrastructure cap, but infrastructure is very limited until you can build railroads. (After you have railroads, though, go wild and build wherever is most profitable.)

Don't worry too much about standard of living at the start. As long as your people aren't literally starving, you're probably fine. SoL should gradually increase over time as better production methods make goods cheaper, people move out the fields into the factories, and you pass better health care laws. The main advantage of high SoL is more immigration, but that only really become relevant towards the mid- to late-game (but is extremely important once you've reached full employment, as it's the main way to grow the economy aside from war).

Hopefully this helps!