My wonderful sister Nina, who lives in South Alabama and throws a great party every year, owns a small business and is one of the few Democrats in her area sent me a movie called The National Debt Road Trip today. Her husband Mike, a Republican whom I love, sent it to her. She forwarded it to me, saying, “wish I had time to see if this is accurate or not?”

As you can imagine, I have some thoughts about it. Here’s my response to her.

True or not, it allows the viewer to assume the math is correct because the narrator sounds so sure of himself. However, it leaves some very salient facts out or shades them a bit….
The speed that Obama has us driving now is based on “projections.” Projections do not equal actual outcomes. It is very possible that Obama will get his way with the budget and we will “travel that fast on the debt highway,” but it is not assured. Nor is it assured that tax revenues (which this little movie doesn’t mention at all) will stay lower than they have been in a long time thanks to the recession. Federal debt is made up of two things: spending and revenues. If revenues rise, the brakes will be hit on the debt car. Yet this movie doesn’t mention the vastly reduced tax revenues that have come about as a result of a recession, the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression, and that are the fault of a “failure” of the US economy based largely on Republican efforts to deregulate everything except a woman’s right to choose.

Similarly, the movie leaves out the very salient facts that a large part of the debt spending is due to that recession (which does seem to be slowing if not slowly reversing). Nor does it mention that the first stimulus came under the Bush Administration. NOR does it mention that many, many, many economists say that debt spending now, because of the recession, is necessary. Yes, it’s a big debt. But we’ve got a big whole in the economy and the government needs to fill it. And now! Otherwise, Mike and all of his Republian friends and all us Democrats are gonna be sitting on the breadlines because there will be no economic infrastructure to support the way we live.
And if they tell you that private enterprise can do it better without government interference, point out the health care system, or the banking system, or Enron to them. They’ve done a bang-up job making sure everything runs smoothly for the rest of society, eh?

In short, this movie is a straw-man argument designed to sound intelligent and reasoned. But it leaves out many salient points that make all the difference in this discussion. It makes for an easy to digest sound bite, but it is far from a full picture of the situation.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 8:24 am and is filed under Just some ramblings, Politics, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.