Liberty Maven

I.O.U.S.A

A special live event and screening of a documentary on fiscal responsibility entitled I.O.U.S.A. was held this evening. Ron Paul had a small part in the movie (actually two), but it was one of the more crowd pleasing moments of the entire movie. Paul’s clip showed him questioning Greenspan and telling him that if a doctor had the same failure rate at meeting his goals, patients would die. Then silence and everyone staring at each other, including Greenspan, all dumbfounded. Hilarious. The packed theater thought so too as the crowd laughed heartily and loudly.

The movie as a whole took great pains to be non-partisan and was quite successful. Ron Paul was the only Presidential candidate in the movie painted in a positive light. In fact he was utilized as an expert, especially during the discussion of the Fed and it’s power. The unflattering moments were saved for George W. Bush in the final part of the movie on the “leadership deficit”.

Bill Clinton received some positive air play for balancing the budget in the late 90’s. I was pleased that they then accurately added Social Security and Medicare to the budget equation showing the surplus being wiped out.

The movie was divided into four chapters each representing a single deficit America faces: budget, savings, trade, and leadership. No previous knowledge of these topics were assumed; therefore, the movie does well as an educational film. It is also quite entertaining at times. Outside of Ron Paul’s funny moment I enjoyed the trade and leadership chapters the most.

The general “feel” of the movie was main stream and middle of the road. There were no real solutions presented, just factual statistics.

While I found the movie quite good the live discussion following the movie found me shaking my head more often than not. On the panel were David Walker (Former GAO head), Pete Peterson, Warren Buffet, Bill Niskanen (CATO Institute), and Bill Novelli (AARP). While David Walker and Bill Niskanen were not bad, Warren Buffet was horrid. He spoke in dreamy platitudes. David Walker took some offense at Buffet saying (I’m paraphrasing) that we really don’t have anything worry about with respect to Social Security because our GDP growth (productivity) will continue to get bigger as the years go by. Walker quickly pointed out that the numbers don’t lie and the numbers take future GDP growth into consideration. Thankfully that shut Buffet up for a bit.

When Peterson suggested (and Walker agreed) that we need to make some hard choices such as mandatory savings accounts of “2 to 3 percent” I wanted to yell at the screen. Peterson was quick to point out that such an idea would not be handled by government. This I didn’t quite understand. How can the government not be involved? The truth is that government would create the law to make savings mandatory which would then amount to yet more regulation over the economy. All panel members agreed that encouraging savings was very important and none of them disagreed with the mandatory savings idea. No, not even Niskanen from CATO, the supposedly libertarian think tank. Niskanen also very “un-libertarianly” suggested raising the retirement age to 70 to help with Social Security.

Niskanen, for his part, did also promote private Social Security accounts and made the point that we need to stop looking at government for solutions to all of our problems. This latter comment drew quite loud applause from the crowd. This made me happy until I heard the woman sitting next to me emphatically and hypocritically say, “That’s right”, when Bill Novelli (AARP) said that we shouldn’t privatize any portion of Social Security.

David Walker’s best point was when he said that if we were to only spend money only on what is expressly permitted by the Constitution we could do so with 32% of our current budget. He suggested that means there is room for cutting the federal budget by 68%.

Peterson made a great point (repeatedly) that our founders never meant for lawmakers to be career politicans. They were meant to serve for a short period then go back to their “real” jobs and serve the U.S. economy.

Overall the discussion rubbed me wrong because not a single panelist said the two magic words: free market. At least not in the context of eliminating regulation and allowing the market work its magic. Indeed the panelists all seemed to have some new federal government solution to our problems. This was especially true of Novelli.

The movie will be playing for a week in select theaters starting today (Friday). Do yourself a favor and go see it. Bring your friends or family along for the experience. Hold your own panel discussion in the car on your drive home from the theater. You really didn’t miss much by not witnessing the “expert” panel discussion last night.

Now that you sat through my own review check out the Washington Post’s review of the film. The reviewer didn’t really like the film, although his focus is more on style than substance.