Okay, it's a propaganda flick directed more broadly against government social programs, but the review appears on the front page of the business section, not the opinion section where it belongs. The film is intended to scare people about the size of the government debt, as is indicated in the subhead. To further this goal the review reports the size of the debt and the projected future growth in the debt in trillions of dollars, not relative to the size of future GDP. Every competent reporter and policy analyst knows that virtually no one can understand what it means to have a debt over all future time of $53 trillion, a number presented in the review. On the other hand, if the review had told readers that the projected debt is equal to 6 percent of future income, then nearly all readers would be able to understand its meaning. Using the $53 trillion figure is an effective way to scare people, but not to inform them. Perhaps more importantly, virtually the whole debt story is due to projections of exploding health care costs. If per person health care costs in the United States followed the cost path in Germany, Canada, or any other country with better health outcomes than the United States, then the debt problem would be relatively minor. The makers of this film have an agenda (apparently shared by the Washington Post) to seriously cut Social Security and Medicare. To advance this agenda, they deliberately deceive the public about the nature of projected budget shortfalls and conceal the fact that the projected crisis is entirely a health care story. An honest film on the projected debt problem would be devoted to discussing the U.S. health care system. (The review implies that this debt view is correct because the makers of the film anticipated the housing meltdown in 2007. Any competent economist should have been able to foresee the collapse of the housing bubble. It was not necessary to believe scary stories about the debt to recognize the bubble.)
--Dean Baker