Editor’s note: This commentary is by state Rep. Ann Manwaring of Wilmington, a Democrat who is a member of the House Education Committee.
[L]et’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 favored money flowing to the producers, it would trickle down to the rest of us. This is an odd set of beliefs in an economy that is 70 percent driven by consumer spending.
And yet the right wing of our political system keeps claiming “Spending is the problem.”
Tax money collected from producers and consumers is spent to support our communal life, to buy the things we need but could not have unless bought collectively.
So who does spend? Our economy is 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.
Three segments of our economy spend. 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. Consumers spend to acquire the basics of life, food and shelter for themselves and their children, transportation to and from work, then if they can, for education, recreation, other amenities of life, and they, too, spend to pay taxes.
The third segment that spends is government. Tax money collected from producers and consumers is spent to support our communal life, to buy the things we need but could not have unless bought collectively: our roads and bridges; the apparatus that lets us feel safe — military, policing, fire and emergency services, disaster recovery; to shape our collective future through public education, research, space exploration; to support the levers of fiscal policy that direct the flow of money; to give each of us the freedom to feel safe when we eat our food, drink our water, take our medications; to honor our democracy’s basic value of fairness through a judicial system, to protect the rights for members of a minority; to subsidize producers to broaden the vitality of our economy and to encourage new businesses; to subsidize those of us who are economically disadvantaged with supports for the basics of life – housing, food, health care. All of this government spending gives both producers and consumers increased freedom to also spend.
It is this collaboration that 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 cars on. All three parts need to have the freedom to spend to create that cycle.
So what does this drum beat from the political Right mean when they say spending is the problem? Whose spending and spending on what are they talking about? 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 which has extracted from 99 percent of us the freedom to spend even on the basics of life.
