More Important Than “An Inconvenient Truth”

From the desk of Roy Furr, Monday, 6:24 pm

Aside from the loaded half-truths, scientific irresponsibility, and one helluva sales job that went into Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” that movie moved America… and the world… to take action on global warming.

But now there’s an even bigger crisis facing us — a crisis that all sides now admit is nothing short of Earth-shattering.

It’s called debt.

• A culture of unaccountable spending has put our National Debt above 10 trillion dollars. That means if we were to reduce the debt by $1 every second, it would take over 316,000 YEARS to pay off the national debt.
• For 2 years in a row American’s savings rate was negative — meaning we spent more than we made. The last time that happened was the Great Depression (and at that time this piss-poor economic trend happened AFTER a stock-market crash). When the savings rate is negative, less is invested in long-term improvements of the quality of life, and more is invested in paying down debt. By living high on the hog this year we’re setting ourselves up for bread lines and soup kitchens in the years to come.
• Social Security is currently running at a surplus — this means more money is being brought in than is going out to pay for the program. Unfortunately, that money is being spent elsewhere within the federal government. When that surplus becomes a deficit (when the brunt of baby boomers retire) by 2017, Social Security will start sucking funds away from other federal programs. Then, this culture of unaccountable, irresponsible spending will get really nasty.

And those are just the beginning.

For one, we’re borrowing that money from somewhere. And no, it’s not Americans, like we did with bonds during World War II and before.

Nope, we’re borrowing the money from China and other economic super powers who at some point may come knocking. And they won’t be nice when we’ve screwed ourselves into a position where paying is too difficult. (They could bury the value of every penny of our currency by maliciously off-loading our debt.)

Listen, it’s your responsibility (and mine, and everyone else’s) to really start to think about whether or not we should be accountable for spending less than we make, and storing away the extra to keep ourselves solvent and our economy strong.

It’s also our responsibility to look at what goes on in Washington D.C. and decide if we want to continue to put up with politicians borrowing money from sources that may not have our best interests at heart, to pay for bloated programs that may be causing more harm than good.

That doesn’t even get into the businesses that take advantage of irresponsible borrowing (such as the banks and lenders that sold ARMs as ways for people with bad credit patterns to buy a home they couldn’t afford).

And the challenge is to do it all in a socially responsible way — that doesn’t just lop off support for those who need it.

We’re coming into some tough times here, folks. And we’re going to have to hunker down and maybe not get everything we want, when we want it.

But the end result will be a better life, a better country, and a better world.

I don’t have all the answers, but at least I’m asking some questions.

Which leads me back to the movie that started this rant — “I.O.U.S.A.”

By all measures I can come up with, it’s more important for Americans to see “I.O.U.S.A.” than it ever was for them to see “An Inconvenient Truth.” It’s more pertinent to our sustained health and that of our children. It will matter more in the short term… and if we can manage to really get its lessons and apply them in our life, it will matter more in the long term too.

It may not be available in theaters near you right now, but you can go to the website http://www.iousathemovie.com/ and watch a “Byte-Sized” 30-minute version. Do it now. For my sake, for your sake, and for the sake of our children.

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