I.O.U.S.A. User Reviews

This film does a very good job at scaring people. Some of the figures and projections are bonechilling. 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/i- ousadeficit/calc_iousa_deficit.htm

11/12/2008, 6:06 pm