WILMINGTON — Let's take a moment to talk about freedom. We live in a country where we are told we have the freedom to live our lives the way we want.
But how much freedom do you and I really have, as members of the 99 percent of our economy, to live the American Dream?
To hope that our children get a really good education and go on to school beyond high school, to become productive members of our American community?
How much freedom do we have to read to our children every day when so many of us have to work two and three jobs just to put food on the table?
So how did we get here?
We got here through 40 years of supply-side economic policy - a belief that if the levers of our economy favor money flowing to the producers, that money will trickle down to the rest of us.
* * *
The right wing of our political system keeps claiming that “spending is the problem.”
Our economy is 70-percent driven by consumer spending and founded on the continuous movement of money through it. Spending is what happens when money moves out of one pocket into the moving river to land in another pocket where it can be spent again or parked.
So who does spend? Three segments of our economy do.
1. Producers spend by investing (another word for spending) in buildings, materials, and machinery needed for production, and they spend to pay wages to people to operate the machinery or provide services, and they spend to pay taxes.
2. Consumers spend to acquire the basics of life, food, and shelter for themselves and their children. They spend on transportation to and from work. Then, if they can, they spend for education, recreation, and other amenities of life - and they, too, spend to pay taxes.
3. Government spends tax money collected from producers and consumers to support our communal life, to buy the things we need but could not have unless we do so collectively.
These expenses include our roads and bridges; the apparatus that lets us feel safe (military, policing, fire, and emergency services, and disaster recovery); the programs and services that shape our collective future (public education, research, space exploration); the levers of fiscal policy that direct the flow of money; the services that give each of us the freedom to feel safe when we eat our food, drink our water, take our medications.
Government honors our democracy's basic value of fairness through a judicial system, to protect the rights for members of a minority. It subsidizes producers to broaden the vitality of our economy and to encourage new businesses. It supports those of us who are economically disadvantaged with some basics of life: housing, food, health care.
All of this government spending gives both producers and consumers increased freedom to also spend.
* * *
This collaboration keeps our economy going. As the simplest example, a producer spends on the materials and labor to produce a car, a consumer spends to purchase the car, and the government spends to build the roads to drive the car on. All three parts need to have the freedom to spend to create that cycle.
So what does this “spending is the problem” drumbeat from those among the political right mean? Whose spending are they talking about, and what are they spending it on?
Whose freedoms do they want to enhance, and whose freedoms do they seek to curtail?
This is a fundamental question in our present economy which has, after 40 years of trickle-down theory, resulted in a whole economy that has extracted from 99 percent of us the freedom to spend even on the basics of life.