Roll up your sleeves, America, before you lose your shirt!

If you are looking for a better understanding about our national economic crisis, you won’t find a more sobering nonpartisan look at it than in the PBS documentary, “I.O.U.S.A.”

In less than an hour and a half, this honest but chilling film delves into the state of our economy and the roots of our recession long before the housing bubble started building out of control.

The movie is so enthralling, it is difficult to write about it without just repeating it verbatim.

The filmmakers interview some of the biggest names in economics to break down how the federal deficit ballooning into the double-digit trillions is destroying the strength of our nation and threatening the futures of not one but many generations of Americans to come. Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffet, former Treasury Secretaries Paul O’Neill and Robert Rubin, Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition and former Controller General of the Government Accountability Office David Walker all discuss the dangers of prolonged deficit spending.

The problem is so bad that even the liberal think tank The Brookings Institute and the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation are working together to help find a solution to the problem. (Do you have any idea how badly those two groups hate, loathe and abhor one another? For them to work together on anything, the situation must be dire.)

The filmmakers also work wonders explaining many vital numbers and definitions without the documentary boiling down to some sort of numerical soup.

There are plenty of fascinating historical details, too. For instance, did you know that the United States came into existence $75 million dollars in the hole to cover the cost of the Revolutionary War–a pretty good reason to go into debt. Yet, the founding fathers and the generation after them did all they could to pay off that debt. Even without the help of a federal income tax for many of those years, the U.S. was finally debt free in the 1830s. The federal government hasn’t been debt free since then!

“I.O.U.S.A.” is not all doom and gloom. It offers practical advice every citizen can take action with to combat the problem. From personal savings to calling your national representatives and riding them to do more to balance the federal budget and pay off the crippling deficits.

It is easy to draw parallels to the impact of this film with regard to American fiscal policy and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and its impact on the global warming crisis.

But before I do that, you’ll have to excuse me. I have some important phone calls to make.