By Dustin Tyler Joyce
April 23, 2007

The Conference of Mayors’ Council for the New American City has established the Mayors’ National Dollar Wi$e Campaign: Financial Education for America to help Americans and their families learn to manage their debt and credit. For more information on this ongoing effort, visit www.dollarwiseonline.org, or call Dustin Tyler Joyce, manager of the Dollar Wi$e Campaign, at 202-861-6759 or send e-mail to dollarwise@usmayors.org.

How many credit-card offers did you get in the mail today? This week? This month?

It takes only a short walk to the mailbox to realize that America has a money problem. We spend too much, save too little, overextend our credit, and undermine our future. And we’re not just talking about the federal budget.

Americans and their families are drowning in debt and bad credit—sometimes with literal and tragic consequences. Maxed Out, a provocative new feature-length documentary by James Scurlock about America’s debt-ridden culture, introduces a couple searching for their missing mother. She was last seen at a local gas station, where she put $7 of gas into her car. She drove off, and hasn’t been heard from since.

She amassed a considerable debt years earlier through a gambling addiction. The day of her disappearance, debt collectors began calling by the dozens. Her family began discovering overdue bills hidden throughout her house—under furniture, in the attic, in boxes inside boxes.

Viewers first meet Lynn Stavert at a garage sale. She is selling her possessions to pay off her debt. She explains that her husband passed away a few years ago, and she had trouble paying all of her bills. At one point, she turned to high-interest check cashing to make ends meet. This avalanched into a growing cycle of debt, and while debt collectors are garnishing her wages and have liens against her home, she is unable to repay. At the age of 57, she stands to lose everything she’s worked for her entire life. When asked what she has thought about doing in the face of all that debt, she admits through her tears that, as she is driving, she sometimes considers not stopping at a stop sign and ending it all. But, she says, she couldn’t do that to her family—her son had also committed suicide.

Each year, thousands of bright young students walk on to college campuses, eager about a new life experience and excited about prospects for the future. Yet the average freshman receives eight credit-card offers in the first week at college. Maxed Out interviews two women whose children were swept up by the deceit of easy credit. One evening, the daughter of one of the women called her mother, distraught because she had just lost her part-time job and didn’t know how she would be able to make payments on her credit-card bills. Her mother reassured her not to worry about it and that they would talk about it the next day. Shortly thereafter, her daughter was found dead in her dorm room, her credit-card bills scattered across her bed. She had hanged herself.

The son of the other woman, Jane O’Donnel, was a National Merit Scholar at The University of Texas at Dallas. He continued to receive credit-card offers in the mail, even after he had hanged himself not knowing how to face his tremendous credit-card debt. The viewer realizes that these are real people—who had killed themselves because they were in so much debt—when their mothers bring out photos of their deceased children. (According to Jump$tart, 45 percent of college students are in credit-card debt, with the average debt over $3,000.)

Maxed Out goes behind the scenes of a debt-collection agency, whose proprietors liken themselves to pirates, making victims walk the plank. The film follows investigative journalist Mike Hudson as he reports the devastating effects of the credit industry on victims in Mississippi, New York City, and Pittsburgh. The documentary compares the facts with congressional testimony from Julie Williams, former acting Comptroller of the Currency. Harvard professor Liz Warren discusses the enormous size of the problem.

Above all, Maxed Out exposes the complicity of Congress and the White House in their leniency on credit companies and sustaining and encouraging America’s debt culture.

At the end of the film, a local news report shows a car being pulled out of a river. The reporter states that the bones inside are believed to be those of a woman who disappeared months before—a woman last seen at a gas station filling her tank with $7 of gas.

Statistics are beginning to show that America’s personal financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. In a nation of so much wealth, many of our citizens are struggling just to get by—and it’s not only the poor. As former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testifies in the film, “The size of our problem out there is very large. I regret to say that the word billion does not encompass the nature of the problem.” Nowhere will the long-term effects of this crisis be felt more than in our nation’s cities. This film exposes the problem thoroughly and in a way that will capture your interest. It is definitely worth your time.

For more information on Maxed Out, including film clips, showtimes in your area, and other reviews and media coverage, visit the film’s Web site at www.maxedoutmovie.com.