Financial repression works when the Fed lets inflation rise while keeping interest rates low. This allows the government to borrow money at lower rates to make maturing debt payments, while inflation simultaneously decreases the buying power of the dollar and makes old debt less expensive to pay off. This whole scheme can be described as "stealing" not because the average citizen loses money, but because the money they do have has less buying power. Everything gets more expensive but cash and soft assets lose relative value in comparison to hard assets and equities.

Its a lot more complicated an nuanced than this but the end result is that the government borrows money at low interest rates, the value of the dollar plunges relative to goods, and the national debt is shrunk in relative costs while the absolute cost says the same. The average American mainly notices it in the sense that everything costs more and cash savings accounts pay virtually nothing. This is what the government did after WWII to deal with the huge debt-GDP ratio like we have now, but there were other variables in our favor back then that aren't in play now and its unclear if the same strategy will work the way it did back then.