I.O.U.S.A. (2008)
3/10
Underwhelming.
12 November 2008
This film does a very good job at scaring people. Some of the figures and projections are bone-chilling. However, it largely overstates the problem. We've handled deficits before. We ran an enormous deficit during the WW-II era (over 100% of GDP), so the current deficit (around 3% of GDP) is not a "fiscal cancer" as the IOUSA team would have you believe.

More importantly though, the film missed an opportunity to offer a real solution to the deficit problem -- health care. If our country's health care system were as efficient as the systems in other industrialized countries, and if programs like Medicare/Medicaid could take advantage of these lower costs, our deficit problem would virtually disappear. The Center for Economic and Policy Research has a nice graphic that demonstrates this well: http://www.cepr.net/calculators/iousadeficit/calc_iousa_deficit.html
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