The United States government spends more than it collects, its citizens save less than they used to, and both habits are financed increasingly by foreign lenders. This film lays out that arithmetic through interviews with Warren Buffett, former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill and Robert Rubin, Blackstone CEO Pete Peterson, Congressman Ron Paul, and Empire of Debt author Bill Bonner. Its structural device is four deficits: the budget deficit, the personal savings deficit, the trade deficit, and what former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, who resigned in 2008 over Congress's inaction, calls the leadership deficit. Walker appears repeatedly as the film's throughline, touring the country to warn audiences about the national debt with charts and historical comparisons to Rome and other empires that spent past their means. The film stops at the end of the Bush administration, so the debt figures and projections it cites do not include the spending that followed. It is pitched as non-partisan, aiming its warnings at both parties rather than one administration.