I.O.U.S.A (IOUSA), the Movie
Last night I had a couple of hours to kill, and I decided to check out the documentary called I.O.U.S.A. The bottom line: you should probably see it, especially if your’e a personal finance blogger :) And if not, it’s not the worst eight bucks you’ll ever spend.
I’m not going to bedazzle you with facts and figures, but the summary goes as follows:
- Whether you like George Bush, or hate him, you cannot possibly disagree with the facts — the man did more to increase our national debt than any other executive in history … and he’s done it in something like six years.
- Most people don’t get the concept of “sticking future generations with the deficit bill“, but the concept is simple — say, your Mom and Dad opened a credit card with unlimited credit limit when they were both freshmen in college, and charged everything they needed (or thought they needed) without any restraint. Twenty years later, when they are in their fourties, you turn 18 and instead of you opening your own line of credit, you inhert their gargantuan debt, even though you’ve done nothing wrong. Would you like something like that?
- Don’t believe the political hype. Most people are unwilling to understand that you can’t BOTH cut the taxes AND expand entitlement programs the same way you CAN’T quit your job AND also travel to Hawaii every month.
Not exactly an eye-opener, but a good flick overall. Nothing you Dave Ramsey freaks didn’t know anyway …
• I commend you to “In Debt We Trust” by Danny Schechter. He studied the subject for years, and the film is recent and timely. It covers both systemic and individual angles, and he updates weekly. He’s a multi-Emmy Award winner, including while working for 60 Minutes. His documentaries tend to be great. He has also done a connected book by the same name. See Indebtwetrust.com.
PS I tried to comment about the shrinking value of five (dollars) when I added — but your machine has no sense of humor . . . BTW, by enter number, do you mean written out or numeral? (I’m about to find out) Answer: It should have been a numeral, even though you’ve written it out . . . someone snoozed through English?
Comment by Marol — November 11, 2008 @ 7:38 pm
Thanks … yeah, I gotta fix that addition anti-spam thing … sorry :)
Comment by How To Be Poor — November 11, 2008 @ 8:55 pm
This movie is really good at scaring you. Some of the projections are absolutely bone-chilling. But it largely overstates the problem — the deficit is currently at a manageable level of 3% of GDP. And we need to run a deficit in this economic downturn to ensure we don’t have skyrocketing rates of unemployment. The flim also ignores one of the best solutions to the “problem” — health care reform. If our health care system were as efficient as other industrialized nations, and if Medicare/Medicaid were able to take advantage of these lower costs, then our deficit problem would basically disappear. Check out the Center for Economic and Policy Research, they have a nice graphic that demonstrates this well: http://www.cepr.net/calculators/iousadeficit/calc_iousa_deficit.html
Comment by Matt Sherman — November 13, 2008 @ 2:22 pm
Although I agree with you, I am conditioned to look at trends rather than precise figures at specific points in time. The scary trend that I am seeing is the idea that we can cut taxes for everyone AND fight two wars abroad AND take care of entitlements AND continue to fund Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid, all in a political climate that created generations of people crazy enough to think we can do it all.
Why can’t we just come out and say: we are going to cut some programs and certain taxes, and RAISE certain other taxes to get out of this hole, and in return, we’ll show you EXACTLY how we’ve spent your money? I guarantee it would create at least a few watchdog NGOs that would DEMAND raw data dumps of all expenditures for further analysis.
The problem is trends … couple it with insane level of political tamarity (like, when Paulson repurposed bailout funds, or when the Fed refused to disclose $2B), and you have yourself a clusterfuck that’s a lot scarier than any deficit.
Comment by How To Be Poor — November 13, 2008 @ 2:42 pm