Student-Founded Anti-Debt Group to Make Its Film Debu

Group's film premieres across the country this weekend.

August 20, 2008 —On Thursday night, August 21, 400 selected theaters and civic venues across the country will debut an unconventional film that is distinctly un-Hollywood. The film, a documentary that has already earned Sundance Film Festival acclaim, tells the thorny, complex, harrowing story of the national debt.

It features—along with Berkshire Hathaway mogul Warren Buffett, Peter Peterson of the Blackstone Group, and David Walker, the former comptroller general of the United States—a small, determined group of students who graduated from Phillips Academy in 2007. The spring before graduation the PA students had launched “Concerned Youth of America” (CYA) with a press conference in the rotunda of the Massachusetts State House. Jonathan “Yoni” Gruskin ’07, CYA founder and executive director, and classmates Prateek Kumar, Sarah Guo, John Gwin, Martin Serna, and Michael Tully sought to build a national network of high school and college students who are concerned with America’s rising national debt.

Directed and produced by the husband and wife team of Patrick Creadon and Christine O’Malley, the film—called I.O.U.S.A. One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt.—“boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the US and its citizens. Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions, ” according to the film’s Web site.

Gruskin, who first saw I.O.U.S.A. in April at the Philadelphia Film Festival, calls the film “surprisingly entertaining, even funny,” and very effective at getting the message to young people. “Most people I know have walked out of the theater asking ‘what can I do about the national debt?’” he added.

Reviews have been favorable. Reuters News service has written that I.O.U.S.A. “may be to the U.S. economy what An Inconvenient Truth was to the environment.” The film’s producer found out about CYA through the PA Web site, where an article had been posted about the 2007 launch. The film crew traveled to the University of Pennsylvania, where Gruskin is a rising sophomore. They interviewed Gruskin and Tully, and filmed the group preparing for and staging various events on campus.

CYA will count nearly 30 chapters on college campuses across the country by the fall and will continue speaking in high school classrooms about the issue of the debt. Gruskin says high school teachers have welcomed CYA speakers eagerly because so many are trying to generate student interest in the issue.

Peterson, the billionaire who has just established the Peter G. Peterson Foundation with $1 billion in seed money specifically to educate younger Americans about the national debt, has bought the rights to the film as a primary education vehicle. The Foundation is also funding The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, organized by the Massachusetts-based Concord Coalition, with economists from liberal and conservative organizations and members of CYA to tour the country beginning this fall. This week Peterson has taken out full-page ads in major newspapers advertising the film and its issue. Gruskin was one of many who signed the ad