I.O.U.S.A.: New Movie to Focus Public Attention on Budget Debate

Meet Bob and Dave as they travel the country in a van doing the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. Article photo by Roadside Attractions.

The cover picture of the AARP Bulletin was innocent enough: two babies, arm in arm with their backs to the camera. But the message was a knockout punch.

Each baby in America in February 2006 was born with an outstanding debt to the federal government of $156,000.

That was the cost of paying the nation’s unfunded liabilities—the accumulated national debt, which now approaches $10.5 trillion, and the Medicare and Social Security payments promised to citizens that exceed available funding.

Since that cover was published, the picture has only gotten worse. Today the total of those unfunded obligations is fueled by rising health care costs, a soaring federal budget deficit and unyielding demographics. Together this translates into outstanding debts of $175,000 per newborn child, $410,000 per worker and $455,000 per household, according to David Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office.

Slowly, the stark nature and consequences of these numbers are coming into view—even at a theater near you!

Applying the focus are Walker, Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, and Peter G. Peterson, retired investment banker and founder of the Peterson Foundation. They’ve sponsored what’s called the Fiscal Wake-up Tour featuring Walker and Bixby’s cross-country warning and lecture tour. On Aug. 21, they introduce a new film, I.O.U.S.A., that opens in 400 cities across the nation.

More lecture than entertainment, the film resembles Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It presents the stark truths of unbalanced budgets and savings and trade deficits and the risks associated with not addressing them. (Be a Budget Hero: Try your hand at balancing the budget.)

The remedies are not simple.

“What do we as a country need to do?” Walker and Peterson ask in an introduction to the film. They then provide their answer: “We need to: stop digging our fiscal hole; reform Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs to reflect Americans’ longer life span and economic realities; constrain other spending growth; reform our tax system while generating more revenue; engage in comprehensive health care reform; increase national saving; and elect responsible leaders.”

AARP CEO Bill Novelli will help kick off this national opening on Aug. 21 by joining Peterson, Walker, Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen and investor Warren Buffett (see his annual report) for a panel discussion of risks and remedies. It is a town hall discussion hosted by Buffett in his Omaha, Neb., hometown and moderated by CNBC newscaster Becky Quick and will be broadcast into the 400 theaters premiering the film.