According to the Associated Press today, the outgoing Bush administration plans to borrow “a record $550 billion through the end of the year to back the financial bailout.” So when President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January 2009, he’ll have to deal with even more than the gargantuan national debt ($10.5 trillion and counting) that he was expecting just two days ago. It’s a debt that celebrated filmmakers Patrick Creadon and Christine O’Malley say threatens to swallow up every single American, yet few American citizens really understand it. Their film, I.O.U.S.A., screening as part of the free ITVS Community Cinema series at the downtown Nashville Public Library Wednesday, November 19, at 6 p.m., aims to change that, or at least shed some light on the situation.
Co-presented by NPT, the screening will be followed by a discussion with Geert de Lombaerde, editor of the Nashville Post, who will moderate, and Kevin Crumbo of Kraft CPAs Turnaround & Restructuring Group. Crumbo is also the chairman of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce’s International Business Council and an adjunct faculty member at Vanderbilt Law.
About the film:
According to election day polls, no subject occupied voters minds more than the state of the U.S. economy. I.O.U.S.A. brings this seemingly daunting topic to life by providing a provocative, sometimes humorous and ultimately inspirational look— one that is also consummately non-partisan — at a passionate two-man crusade to halt our impending financial meltdown. This is the story of former U.S. Comptroller General Dave Walker (a.k.a. the nation’s top accountant) and Concord Coalition executive director Bob Bixby, who travel like town criers across America on what they call a “Fiscal Wake Up Tour.” Town by town, they’ve been arming citizens with information about how we got into a sticky financial mess, why we must act right now to stop it, and what we can each do to begin to free the nation from the stranglehold of this colossal debt.
1 Comment
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