Flashback video: The Deficit Trials, 2017
Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
4/5/2010
Hot Air reader Diane R sends us this blast from the past — from 1986, in fact. WR Grace exec J. Peter Grace paid director Ridley Scott $300,000 to produce this 60-second commercial scolding America for its deficit spending during the Reagan administration:
The best way to describe this is, well, quaint. A $2 trillion national debt? Horrors! In actuality, using the Barack Obama budget plan, we’ll be looking at a national debt ten times larger than that by 2017. Do you think Ridley Scott will want to update this commercial with Obama in the dock instead? Naaaaaaaaaah.
Addendum: WR Grace is, at the moment, defending itself in court against allegations of conspiracy to cover up the dangers of asbestos exposure in its Montana mining operations.
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Advertising: Deficit Trial
Time
8/25/1986
A group of children in tatters sits in judgment on an old man. He is charged with having allowed the federal deficit to run rampant. “Are you ever going to forgive us?” he asks them pathetically. This 60-second commercial, titled The Deficit Trials: 2017 A.D., was made for W.R. Grace, an international chemical company, and was rejected for broadcasting by all three networks last winter. Too controversial and far too one-sided, they ruled.
Nonetheless, the ad will air this week on 150 independent stations across the country. The spot, says W.R. Grace Spokesman Christopher Tofalli, is “done in good taste on an important issue.” That’s just the problem, says NBC Vice President Rick Gitter: “It’s so well done. It expresses a view that budget cuts are a moral imperative.” Which was exactly the point. J. Peter Grace, the company chairman, served as head of President Reagan’s Commission on Waste and Inefficiency in Government.
H/T Moonbattery: Outcome of Obamunism Predicted in the 80s:
Long before Comrade Obama was put in a position to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy of collapsing capitalism through excessive public spending, people were well aware that our government’s profligate ways could not be sustained…
