An Italian offshoot of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network shows that Millennial policy priorities reach across national borders.

In 2010, the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network created the Blueprint for Millennial America, a generational vision for the country we hoped to see by the year 2040. In the conversations that established the backbone of the blueprint, we identified a core set of values shared by Millennials. The top three -- a deeply held concern for equity, a respect for the individual and society, and a belief in community empowerment and self-determination – represent a commonality that we think underlines what is unique about this generation of Americans. We are a group that seeks self-empowerment and strives to improve our society, but not always through the traditional power structures.

Over the last year, a similar project has been taking root on university campuses and among active Millennials – except this time it’s in Italy, where students have stepped up to take charge of their country’s uncertain future. “Pensa 2040” has taken the values-based collective ethos of the Roosevelt Blueprint and the Budget for Millennial America but introduced an Italian perspective. More than a thousand Italians have participated in conversations similar to those that built the Blueprint, and a Millennial vision for Italy is coming into focus.

If we’ve learned anything at the Campus Network, it’s that ownership of the process is equally as important as ownership of the outcomes. From what we’ve seen so far, the leaders of the Pensa 2040 process have carried on the successes of the Thinks 2040 framework by being willing and able to customize their discussions for the people in the room and the issues that are near and dear to their hearts. Holding discussions that engage people through the fundamental framework of values, and in so doing asks participants to examine which issues they truly believe are the most important, can yield a deeper and more lasting engagement on the issues that the community decides on together. 

So, what happened in Pensa 2040? The top-ranked value listed by the Italian Millennials reveals a clear difference between our two cultures: a deeply held respect for the idea of “legality.” This concept, rooted in Italy’s ongoing problems with the mafia and organized crime, extends to ending tax evasion and corruption within government. The very fact that the idea of legality would be a core value reveals a desire for order that is not at the forefront of many Americans’ minds. Still, some of the outcomes that students hope for in this category include a fair tax system and a more effective and fair legal system – important underpinnings of the Government By and For Millennial America discussion. 

It is in the second and third values expressed by the Italian students that we find a direct match with their American counterparts: equality and respect for the rights of the person. These essentially match word for word the underpinnings of the American Blueprint, and we find kinship with a generation focused on an absolute right to citizenship, same-sex marriages, and “civil service for all” (outcomes under “Uguaglianza”) as well as a right to health and full access to the sorts of “primary goods” that people need to be active and successful citizens (outcomes listed under “Rispetto per i diritti della persona”). There is something here, direct and definable, that speaks to a global generational identity. 

This sympathetic outlook makes sense: there are more and more shared experiences for people across borders and oceans. Not only could we jump on Skype to hear the results of the Pensa 2040 discussions, but many of the core issues facing Millennial Italians are the same issues facing American students in the Campus Network. Global climate change, economic uncertainty, and the challenges of a consistently volatile yet ever-more-interconnected world mean that the experience of being young often establishes a stronger bond than the experience of being “American” or “European.” While the 39 percent youth unemployment rate in Italy dwarfs the 17 percent unemployment rate for American youth, both countries are experiencing talk of a “lost generation,” and anyone trying to get a job out of college right now can tell you that unemployment is only a part of a bitter cocktail that includes low-wage jobs and student debt.  The economic example serves to highlight a greater truth: that a generational movement is real and important. 

Pensa 2040 has moved from the conversation stages to the building of a values-based blueprint for Italy. Students are working with other stakeholders now to write policy recommendations for Italy going forward, and to follow in the footsteps of the Campus Network by creating a crowd-sourced and collaborative budget for Italy that tackles their ongoing economic woes from a place of shared values. We’re excited that Italian students have taken on a part of our brand of collective discussions and are using it to build something equally as empowering and exciting for themselves. Look for a Blueprint for Millenario Italia entro il 2014! 

Alan Smith is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's National Policy and Program Director.

"Made in Italy" image via Shutterstock.com

Arbitrarily limiting revenues and cutting critical services doesn't boost efficiency; it just shifts the burden onto citizens.

The 2013 tax-filing deadline is just a few days behind us, but many Republican members of Congress have already started talking about this year’s revenue intake. Due to CBO projections that federal revenues in 2013 will be the highest in history, Republicans are arguing that the real issue with government is that it has a serious spending problem, and that it is too big and too inefficient to allow for domestic economic prosperity. Predictably, their solution to this problem is to cut taxes and spending. But this approach could actually create more of the inefficiency they claim to oppose.

If we want to build a more efficient government and increase economic prosperity, we should not slash critical government services or restrict revenues across the board. In fact, in a still weak and recovering economy, limiting revenues can heighten inefficiencies in government in a way that exacerbates resource inequalities. We can look to the effects of state property tax caps in Massachusetts and California as local-scale examples of what happens when we try to shrink government just for the sake of shrinking it.

In 1978, at the height of an anti-tax wave, California voters passed proposition 13, a cap on residential and commercial property taxes. Under the new law, increases in tax rates on assessed real property values essentially cannot exceed 2 percent per year. In addition, the law imposed two strict requirements for how new state and local revenues can be raised: State taxes can only be increased either by ballot or with a supermajority vote in both houses of the state legislature, and special-purpose taxes by local governments can only be increased by a supermajority of votes in a local election.

Similarly, Massachusetts’ proposition 2 ½, passed in 1980, limited property tax revenues to 2.5 percent of an area’s assessed property value while also capping growth in revenue from those assessments to 2.5 percent per annum.

Arguments in favor of these initiatives assert that caps on taxes are a needed move to increase government efficiency and to relieve strained families from the economic burden of higher taxes. Essentially the same ideas are permeating the national debate around the federal budget and deficit reduction as deficit hawks claim that government is too big and its spending is too much of a burden on the economy. Recently, as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konzcal notes, evidence has been growing that this argument is built on shaky ground.

Caps on annual property assessments, which had been a statistically stable source of revenue, forced municipalities to scramble to adjust to the permanent loss of resources, resulting in haphazard cuts and unreliable financial decision-making. Coupled with the movement to give more direct power over taxation to the voters (see CA proposition 218, the Right to Vote on Taxes Act), this state of uncertainty has only calcified – and uncertainty does not breed the efficient government systems that anti-tax advocates have promised.

Furthermore, instead of providing “efficiency savings” to state and local government, reduced revenues have simply shifted the burden of providing services from a stable entity onto the backs of the affected communities. The price of basic government operations doesn’t suddenly get cheaper because there is less revenue. It forces officials to sacrifice important programs to cover basic operational costs, and often the people who relied on those programs are those who can least afford to take the sudden hit. For local low- and middle-income communities in California and Massachusetts, this meant school funding shortages that exist to this day. At the federal level, the mounting effects of sequestration on various services and workers are setting up similar long-term problems.

Everything is amplified in a weak or recovering economy. Direct cuts to services that low- and middle-income communities rely on only exacerbate economic inequality and further hamper future prosperity. Families who already are having difficulty paying bills will be forced to deal with new challenges, from cuts to student aid and Medicaid to being laid off or furloughed.

In setting our fiscal course for the next several years, Congress should take a hard look at the risks taken by the states and avoid caving into the idea that revenue is a necessary evil to be restricted as much as possible. We can agree that our common goal is a smarter, more efficient government; however, cutting revenue streams to force reform is not the smartest, most efficient policy to achieve that goal.

Joelle Gamble is Deputy Field Director of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

Millennials don't want a government that just talks at them. They want to build it together.

There is a paradox in the Millennial generation’s relationship with government. On the one hand, research shows that we firmly believe government can and should play a role in solving society’s most urgent and complex problems. We’re less interested in big government vs. small government than we are in better government -- making our democratic systems more inclusive and more responsive. On the other hand, despite seeing government as a theoretically important tool, this generation is opting out. We don’t see ourselves reflected in the decision-making process in our governments, in the values undergirding policies, or in the issues being debated by our representatives.

Still, opting out doesn’t mean this generation has checked out. We are engaged politically, just not in the ways and systems that previous generations have engaged. We don’t want to be courted for our votes and then kicked to the curb until the next big election. We want to build systems that meet us where we are, that is, in community-based service projects, where we see things directly change as a result of our voices, ideas, and action. In short, we need complementary systems that create the sort of direct connection not found in our representative democracy. But how?

The process of creating the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network’s Government By and For Millennial America document suggests a series of answers. Over a period of six months, this student-designed, student-driven, and student-written project engaged more than 1,000 Millennial voices and resulted in a 56-page document. That document in turn framed a network-wide vision for how the Millennial generation wants its government to function. It also produced hundreds more pages of expanded research and writing and a series of conversations on campuses around the country that pushed students to think beyond the constraints of the current political milieu and articulate a blueprint for their ideal government.

This output alone is testimony to the dedication of our students, but how and why did we get their buy in to generate these results? Simply put: the integration and use of participatory democracy. The starting point of this whole project was the creation of democratic spaces that enabled students to collectively deliberate and decide what they thought were the main challenges and opportunities facing the realization of their ideal government. These initial conversations were intentionally stripped of any political jargon and instead focused on values: if you had a blank slate, what values would be embodied in your ideal system? By using values as our foundational building blocks, we made these democratic spaces accessible to anyone, regardless of their experience in policy, and enabled the gradual development of a shared language and understanding of what government can and should be.

Of course, as any political theorist will tell you, participatory democracy is not only about erecting accessible spaces for discussion. It is also about building up the capacities and orientations of citizenship so that those spaces can be effectively used. The vital question then becomes: how do we build such a citizenry? How do we push young people to look beyond their individual wants and needs and think and act in terms of the public? We attempted to answer these questions through political education and the collective exercise of power.

From the beginning, Government By and For Millennial America was an open-ended project. This was both its most exciting and maddening feature: a project with no predetermined outcomes, no predetermined framework, and no predetermined process for making decisions or conducting research beyond what had emerged from student discussions. While this setup had the very real potential for spectacular and rapid implosion, it also allowed students to see that their work was more than simply filling in the spaces on a test. We continuously practiced the collective exercise of power, and in so doing, vested the project with the kind of control that Millennials seek.

This was more than just a logistical challenge of figuring out our own timeline, peer-reviewed editing processes, voting procedures, and so on. Intellectually speaking, it also meant venturing far beyond our individual areas of expertise to learn with and from other students and experts on issues outside our comfort zones, being flexible in how we integrated the regular influx of ideas shaping our ever-evolving body of work, and tying together strands of thought that previously seemed so disparate into the unified framework we were building together.

Imagine, then, the implications of such a project for how we engage in the larger political sphere. There is no reason why this same dual process of building capacity and investing people with real responsibility can’t be expanded to the questions that bedevil local governments or be used to turn around a company that has run afoul of public opinion. Participatory budgeting, for example, gives local politicians a way to get their constituents invested in the budget process in a way that yields real growth, continued participation, and better decision-making.

Of course, this is not to say our process was always rosy – in fact, there were many times when it lagged or stalled. But when schedules freed up, the project was revitalized again: trans-state conference calls to discuss the newest idea, a flood of new interesting and innovative policy write-ups, or a wave of new students eager to be brought into the fold would get us back on track. The power of democracy does not lie in waiting for these sporadic highs, but in the intermediate “lows.” There is something incredibly precious in the messiness of the sometimes slow and arduous back-and-forth that characterizes all experiments in participatory democracy.

We are a team of people with diverse identities and diverse opinions. We were grappling with incredibly tough issues through a medium that demanded collective engagement, deliberation, and decision-making. We learned together, had revelations together, and were able to build a collective lens for how to understand the individual problems plaguing government and the ways in which they were connected. That potential for real change, to be really seen and heard, and to grow so much as an individual in a community -- that is powerful. That is why Government By and For Millennial America should be viewed as more than just a bunch of good ideas in print. It’s also an example of how to engage with a generation that is in danger of being written off as self-interested, but that we believe is looking for a different way forward.

Elizabeth Stokes is a Working Group Fellow for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's national initiative, Government By and For Millennial America, and a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. Alan Smith is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's National Policy and Program Director.

Study group image via Shutterstock.com.

President Obama's SOTU mentioned Medicare, but he still fails to realize that young people are ready for even greater investment in health care.

Last night, President Obama delivered a State of the Union address that outlined an ambitious second term agenda while touting a steadily recovering economy and asserting the need to strike a budget deal that preserves the generational promise of Medicare. What he did not mention, however, is an underlying but oft-neglected truth: that our national health care debate still neglects the needs, perspectives, and interests of young adults. The State of the Union may be stronger, but for young Americans around the country, its health requires a new prescription. This is perhaps most critical in two key but distinct areas: innovation and mental illness.

Consider, firstly, that the health reform debate—subsumed into the longstanding clashes on the federal debt and deficit—has lately centered on cost cutting. Thus far, such discourse has largely been framed as benefiting young Americans, those who, the argument goes, will bear the brunt of the nation's debt burden in the absence of immediate cuts to the federal healthcare budget. However, from a young person’s perspective, there exists compelling evidence for a converse narrative: public health care as an incubator for innovation. The safety net that health care provides actually emboldens young people to take risks, to try creating the next Facebook or Google, rather than play it safe for fear of being denied care in later years. 

Evidence of the critical role that public health care can play in entrepreneurship and innovation is plentiful in the research literature. For instance, a recent RAND Corporation study observed the prevalence of so-called "entrepreneurship lock": a phenomenon in which prohibitively high costs of obtaining health insurance as individuals preclude workers from leaving large firms that can offer subsidized premiums to strike out on their own. But we can also look across the Atlantic to see the catalytic properties of such social insurance—and the costs of not providing it—in action. For example, Sweden, a nation that possesses a social safety net among the world’s most robust, ranked 2^nd globally on the INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index. The US, with comparatively meager public insurance, came in at a distant 10^th. Such nations as Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Switzerland–hardly bastions of Randian self-sufficiency—also handily outstripped our own ranking on this measure.

This is not to say that public health care is the only factor that will determine the fates of Googles to come. But this data should prompt us to reformulate our rhetoric around programs like Medicare and Medicaid: not as hammocks, but springboards. We should not be focused on heavy-handed cost-shifting measures that merely limit the scope of coverage, but instead how to thoughtfully modernize the fundamental societal value that these programs provide. It is precisely this values-based approach to national health care financing that young Americans value most greatly, as attested to by thousands of students in the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network’s recently published Government By and For Millennial America.

Arguably the most significant example of this false dichotomy between cost and value is mental health care. Much has been made of our healthcare system’s dismal performance on health indicators, but in no field does this ring truer than in psychiatric care. Yet what’s often overlooked is that mental healthcare is, above all, a youth problem, afflicting no demographic more than my fellow young Americans—my classmates, colleagues, and friends. Millennials, as a demographic, report rates of depression well above the baseline: almost 9 percent of 20-somethings in America are thought to have developed major depression, panic disorder, or anxiety. The shocking nature of this statistic is only amplified by considering that a full 75 percent of diagnosable, life-long mental health illnesses develop by age 24. Yet an estimated 75-80 percent percent of youth in need of mental health services do not receive any care.

But potential solutions abound, even for such a complex problem. If states are the laboratories of our democracy, mental health has proven no exception. Even while the U.S. lags nationally on mental health—rated a ‘D’ by the National Alliance on Mental Illness—states like Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maryland lead the pack in developing thoughtful, innovative proposals to improve the quality and coverage of care. Moreover, a recent study out of UCLA in California demonstrates that sound mental healthcare can actually be a cost-saving measure.

Ultimately, progress on both of these fronts depends on whether our political leaders choose to prioritize young Americans across the nation. The health of an entire generation hangs in the balance.

Rahul Rekhi is a student at Rice University and the Senior Fellow in Health Care Policy for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.