A parade of American presidents, from Eisenhower on, all warning of the inherent peril of runaway spending. A Saturday Night Live skit. A graphic presenting America's budgetary history as a roller-coaster ride of epic proportions. An out-of-control screed by an analyst losing it in front of a national TV audience.
I.O.U.S.A., a documentary being screened three times at this weekend's 10th annual Maryland Film Festival, uses every tool available to drum home its message that deficit spending is bad, that a country built on it is heading for nowhere but trouble. It's a message both cautionary and, given the film was in gestation long before home foreclosures and spiraling gas prices sent the American economy into a tizzy, disturbingly prescient.
Sitting in a restored Sons of Italy hall on St. Paul Street, the film's co-writer and executive producer, Addison Wiggin, takes no joy in events that seem to be proving him right.
"It doesn't do much good to feel vindication," he says. "Even if we're right, people still need to know what to do at this point."
Wiggin, 40, is executive publisher of Agora Financial, a financial research firm and publishing group that is just one of some 20 companies operating under the umbrella banner of Agora Inc., a Baltimore-based holding company. For nearly 30 years, operating for much of the time out of some of the grandest historic buildings in downtown Baltimore, Agora Inc. has been advising its customers on the good life, offering tips on how to make money, how to stay healthy, how to travel first-class.
Wiggin and the economic brain trust at Agora Financial have been decrying deficit spending for years. He and Agora Inc.'s founder, William Bonner, co-wrote Empire of Debt, a 2005 warning shot across the country's economic bow that laid out Agora's position pretty clearly: America can't continue spending more than it takes in. Deficits will eventually prove ruinous. The mountains of debt on which much of the American economy is built are destined to crumble, and the results won't be pretty, as the dollar loses value, prices skyrocket and retiring baby boomers start wishing they'd saved some of that money they couldn't wait to spend back in the salad days.
I.O.U.S.A., directed and co-written by the husband-and-wife team of Patrick Creadon and Christine O'Malley (WordPlay), is Agora's first foray into filmmaking. Its timing, opening in an election year, Wiggin says, is no accident. The idea is to work the film's message about the danger of deficits into the presidential debate. Just as An Inconvenient Truth raised the alarm about climate change, I.O.U.S.A. longs to do the same for deficit spending.
