After marking Reagan's 100th birthday this weekend, a blueprint for how reclaim the narrative about the tax code he distorted thirty years ago.

Many of us were disenchanted with President Obama’s compromise that kept the Bush tax cuts in place until 2012. But while it's easy to fault the president for failing to fight for increasing the tax rate for those earning over $250,000, the reason the GOP prevailed goes well beyond the intestinal fortitude of the current administration. This was a capitulation thirty years in the making.

Ever since the beginnings of the Reagan presidency, Americans have been bombarded by conservative mantras that consistently bemoan the supposed evils of progressive taxation. It is impugned with the pejorative description “confiscatory” or derided as a system that “penalizes success.” And at the heart of this message is an appeal to an atomistic impulse that constantly -- and needlessly -- pits the interest of the self against the interests of we as an American people.

But beyond refuting these stock conservative narratives, liberals have failed to articulate cogent arguments that frame progressive taxation in economically efficient and morally authoritative terms. The permanent extension of the Bush era tax rates is looming as a central issue in the 2012 presidential election. It is therefore not only critical that several foundational arguments be put forth in opposition, but that they also be part of a wider argument in support of progressive taxation as a vital component of wealth creation for both the individual and society.

Below are a few memes that if successfully injected into the public discourse would help transform the tax issue from being a losing discussion of confiscation into a winning question of basic fairness.

Progressive Taxation As An Antidote to Miserliness

As was the case during the Great Depression, we are currently experiencing an economic crisis of abundance, not poverty. There is great wealth out there, but it is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Yes, uncertainty plays a role in decreased investment activity. But so does the signature behavior of the miser: hoarding.

Large corporate entities are hoarding profits to pay bloated dividends and executive salaries or simply sitting on them instead of investing back in their businesses or paying their workers a better wage (thus stimulating demand). This is the scenario of savings exceeding investing that the economist John Maynard Keynes warned us about. Only government has the ability to prevent corporate miserliness. It alone can unfreeze credit and get capital circulating again.

When such hoarding takes place, the threat of taxation is a handy device to get money circulating again. A truly progressive system should present such hoarders a choice: either invest a portion of those profits in non-executive salaries and purchasing equipment or pay a premium tax.

The tax compromise of 2010 was a lost opportunity. While the GOP was harping about the national debt, Obama should have used progressive taxation to call the opposition on its campaign of misinformation. Instead of caving in, the president should have used the bully pulpit of his office to explain the economic inefficiency of extending the lower tax rates for our wealthiest citizens. We give tax cuts to those making less than $250,000 because they are more likely to spend it, while those earning above that income line (and especially those earning seven figures and more) are more likely to sock it away, taking money out of circulation. There is little or no stimulus effect to giving millionaires a four percentage point tax break; there is no economic benefit offsetting the widening national deficit that results.

The frame of the miser is a powerful image. More importantly, it is one that is easy to understand. It is Scrooge before his Christmas Eve epiphany; Henry Potter trying to shut down the old Bailey Brothers Building and Loan Association. More importantly, the concept is well grounded in Keynesian economics, defined by the master economist as “unreasonable but insistent inhibitions against acts of expenditure as such.” Indeed, it is a highly emotional term. But unlike many of the inflammatory epithets hurled by the right (“socialist,” “Marxist”), it is an authentic economic term of art.

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Equalizing Sacrifice

Perhaps the weakest link in the right’s tax argument is the idea that progressive taxation is based upon a system of confiscating wealth from the useful only to be given to a lazy rabble. This is nothing more than the old tactic of divide and conquer, injecting an “us versus them” aspect into the discourse.

Last year when some of the already wealthy heard that their federal tax rate should be adjusted a mere four percentage points up to 40%, they overreacted by complaining about the costs of nannies and gardeners. In 2003, Michael Novak tapped into this high-end sentiment. He equated progressive taxation with "confiscation" while quite recently his fellow neoconservative Robert P. George argued that taxes must remain low for moral reasons. Both arguments perfectly echo the conservative claim that higher tax rates on the wealthy constitute "a penalty for success."

This idea has gained more traction than many of us would like to believe. Just recently I spoke with two friends who repeated the claim when I suggested that the well-to-do could handle a modest increase on their federal tax rate -- especially those corporate CEOs who either hoard their companies' profits instead of investing in new equipment or, better yet, workers' salaries.

But such notions as "confiscation" and "penalizing success" have little to do with the realities we face as a people. "The goal of progressive taxes," historian Harlan Beckley observed of the economist Monsignor John A. Ryan’s argument on the subject, "…was to equalize sacrifices, not to achieve equality. Taxes should never be so progressive as to discourage socially useful activity or deny rewards for productive efficiency." To put things into a contemporary context, imposing a 40% tax rate upon an unmarried CEO earning seven figures a year is a bit more just than a rate of 35% -- especially when a married laborer earning $35,000 a year pays a federal tax rate of 25%. Even at the higher rate, the former should have more than enough superfluous income left over to meet his daily needs.

And a 40% top federal rate is far from onerous. Writing in the early 1960s when the maximum federal tax rate exceeded 90%, the conservative writer Willmoore Kendall declared that if the top bracket were to be lowered to 40%, it would allow anyone to become "smacking rich." Kendall’s words should be part and parcel of any argument in support of progressive taxation.

But beyond admissions made against interest by conservative thinkers, the original arguments in support of progressive taxation are as valid today as they were almost a century ago. Again, as Monsignor Ryan observed in 1916:

The reasonableness of the principle of progression has been well stated by Professor [Edwin R. A.] Seligman: "All individual wants vary in intensity, from the absolutely necessary wants of mere subsistence to the less pressing wants which can be satisfied by pure luxuries. Taxes in so far as they rob us of the means of satisfying our wants, impose a sacrifice upon us. But the sacrifice involved in giving up a portion of what enables us to satisfy our necessary wants is very different from the sacrifice involved in giving up what is necessary to satisfy our less urgent wants."

It is not merely the percentage of taxes paid that defines justice, but the payment in proportion to wealth created by each individual after which the basic necessities of life have been first satisfied. The working poor and the lower echelons of the middle classes should not be forced to pay a “flat tax” rate equivalent to wealthier members of our society; the overwhelming majority of the former’s income goes to basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. They have little or no superfluous income. Thus, their tax burden should be the lightest.

Those who espouse the evisceration of such useful taxation are frankly arguing on behalf of an oligarchic few. It must be pointed out that there are top tax bracket Americans such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others who understand the discrepancy in sacrifice reduced tax rates for the wealthiest of us produces. With this in mind, those who call for flat rate taxation (Steve Forbes immediately comes to mind) would also be those whose contribution to the common good would be decreased. At the same time, the benefits they derive from that same common good remains unchanged: greater access to power, police and military power protection of their higher amount of treasure, and greater economic opportunity. It is nothing less than the notion that certain individual citizens give less simply because of their higher income status.

The complaint about the cost of nannies and elite private schools for their children not withstanding, progressive taxation does alleviate burdensome national debt; it does finance job-creating infrastructure construction; it does control inflation and it does prevent the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few -- all while expanding the ability of more Americans to prosper.

Indeed, the dogmatic opposition to progressive taxation is the economic mindset that elevates the wealth of a few fortunate individuals while the other 98 percent of their countrymen have their right to create wealth impeded. That, in no uncertain terms, is not the American way.

Frank L. Cocozzelli writes a weekly column on Roman Catholic neoconservatism at Talk2Action.org and is contributor to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. A director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, he is working on a book on American liberalism.

Young people are taking matters into their own hands and working to effect change across a number of issues.

This past Sunday would have been Franklin D. Roosevelt's 129th birthday. During this jobless recovery, we should remember that, beyond simply being the 32nd President of the United States, FDR was a fearless leader who redefined the role of government during our country's darkest hour. How? Roosevelt used an active government to create jobs, provide relief to disadvantaged citizens, build our country's infrastructure, win World War II, and, more broadly, address the needs of the American people. He advanced a values-laden, progressive vision for the everyday American.

Thousands of young people across the country are carrying on his legacy by putting forth their own progressive vision. The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network is releasing a New Deal for the Millennial America -- a blueprint for the progressive future that we, young people born between 1980 and 2000, are determined to inherit. Each generation designs its own path, and each American generation redefines the American dream. With the launch of the Campus Network's Blueprint for the Millennial America, the Millennial Generation is declaring their vision for America's future and imploring our leaders to take note, grab a shovel, and start building it with us.

So what will 2040 look if we have our way?
Over the past year, the Campus Network convened thousands of students from across the country in Think2040 conversations, asking them to define their vision, values, and priorities for our shared future. The results were compiled in our Blueprint for Millennial America. The report details how we plan to change the system from inside, employ ourselves, think long-term, and create a more equal, accessible, empowered, and community-minded 2040 America. Want specifics? In the Millennial America, our priorities are:

1. Educational Attainment

Our generation sees educational attainment as the key to opportunity and abundance. And we recognize that to remain competitive in the Next American Economy we will have to out-educate the rest of the world. Providing equal access to quality education is also a pathway to closing our country's growing wealth disparity. We need to improve K-12 education and increase college access and affordability to do that.

The best part? Millennials have already started moving toward this goal. Innovative young people, like Roosevelt Campus Network alum Kirsten Hill, have envisioned and implemented student-generated education programs like the SILA project. SILA (Students Improving Literacy Abound) is a university-partnered reading program in New Orleans that has paired over 100 Tulane students acting as mentors with second and third graders to decrease the achievement gap and increase literacy rates.

2. Green Living, Working, and Innovating

We recognize that to build a green economy, our generation will have to win the energy race with an effort that mirrors the Apollo program of the 1960s. The cost of fossil fuels is going to increase as countries like China and India compete for limited resources. We need to be innovation hawks and invest in green technology and infrastructure now to ensure that the windmills, solar panels, and fuel cells we use tomorrow are manufactured in the United States.

We need to cultivate healthier food systems. By supporting urban agriculture and other alternatives we can secure access to fresh and healthy food for all Americans. This will increase the security of our communities by ensuring that food comes from local sources.

Millennials aren't leaving their future to chance. We're creating a greener America today with a call for proposals to ensure our energy security and local movements to build community gardens, like the effort led at Arizona State University by Joshua Judd and other Roosevelt members.

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3. Wellness and Coverage

Our American Dream is more often a loft in the city with diverse people, food, culture, work, and a hybrid than a McMansion in the suburbs. It includes our wellness, and this New Deal for the Millennial America includes the guarantee that livable cities provide access to healthy food for all American people. The Millennial Generation -- the most under-insured of any alive right now -- also demands insurance coverage for all and innovative efforts to ensure access to preventative care.

We'll get there by 2040, starting with groundbreaking efforts to provide care to some of our most vulnerable. A Roosevelt member from Colorado College, David Silver, for example, is helping to pave the way to health care access for rural American using excess T.V. bandwidth to provide preventative care via "telehealth."

4. Entrepreneurship and a Social Safety Trampoline

Why are Millennials moving back to the forgotten places in America: post-industrial centers like Detroit, New Orleans, and Cleveland? So they can create a sweeping impact and experiment with new forms of entrepreneurship and social innovation. They are organizing employee-owned businesses, starting co-ops, and, in the case of Roosevelt alums Joe Shure and Rohan Mathew, creating successful nonprofits like the Intersect Fund to empower would-be entrepreneurs through microloans and start-up support.

But in order to pursue our innovative ideas, we need security; a flexible social safety net. And we need financial institutions that are responsive to their communities. Wages have stagnated. Benefits have decreased. As government protection of our social insurance has been cut over the last 30 years, the income inequality in our country has also significantly increased. Millennials demand equal access and equal opportunity. Our safety net should inject funding into the system when it's needed, provide retraining opportunities, ensure health care and unemployment insurance, and, instead of catching people near the bottom -- like a net -- function like a trampoline and bounce everyone back into high-functioning roles in society.

To reduce the socioeconomic gap in this country, everyone should pay taxes on their income, even if they make a lot of it -- their fair share. By just repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, we could move substantially closer to lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship by investing in a strong safety net and providing this essential economic security to all Americans.

5. America as a World Super-Partner

Millennials want the United States to continue to act as a global leader. But they envision the U.S. as a "super-partner" in world affairs. They favor a proactive U.S. foreign policy that stresses the use of "smart power" to achieve global security through active diplomacy, efficient development, and sharing defense responsibilities with its allies. Young people are already working to prove the effectiveness of this approach. Roosevelt member Jacob Helberg, for example, is working directly with Haitian NGOs to implement his idea to build a micro-community in Haiti reflective of the best practices learned by other nations.

If you're skeptical that our generation can accomplish all of this, we're working to prove you wrong. Because we're committed to fiscal responsibility in addition to the list of priorities above, we recognize that our priorities have the burden of cost, and, at a time when the nation is locked in heated debate over the budget, we're answering the call. While organizations from across the spectrum are rushing to put forth their plans, the Campus Network is designing our own ‘Budget for Millennial America' as we speak.

Want to help?
The greatest lesson to be learned from examining this list of Millennial values, priorities, and initiatives is that young people nationwide are prepared to design the innovative solutions and campaign for the change required to achieve our vision.

Do you have your own ideas for change? Contact one of our student policy strategists so that you can get involved in our national policy initiatives. Get published in our 10ideas series. You can even get paid to work with us over the summer in Washington, DC or Chicago through our Roosevelt Summer Academy program. We're designing and achieving the future that we want to inherit.

Thanks for paving the way, FDR. Happy Birthday, and we hope we're making you proud.

Hilary Doe is the National Director of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network. Reese Neader is the Roosevelt Campus Network's Policy Director.

How can Obama rally the nation in the midst of a growing political crisis?

Historically, our elected leaders have risen to the occasion in moments of national trauma. President Bill Clinton conspicuously did so after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. But it is unclear whether the current president can respond in comparable fashion, particularly since his cynical (and now patently insincere) embrace of the mantra of change also fueled much of the anger now permeating the country.

Symptomatic of the President's failed vision are the appointments of Gene Sperling and Bill Daley. Both figures represent more conclusive evidence (as if we needed more) that the progressive agenda is currently dead. Shipping in a JP Morgan executive to be White House Chief of Staff, as Obama did with Bill Daley, isn't a cause of any of this. It's just a nice symbol of what our political culture has become -- now more than ever in the era of "change you can believe in." It is, as Roger Hodge eloquently phrased it, "the mendacity of hope." Along with the appointment of Jacob Lew, Sperling and Daley simply represent the other side of the revolving door. That's the door that sent Peter Orszag to his multi-million-dollar a year reward at Citi for his 18 months in an administration that lavished the bank will all sorts of generous gifts and subsidies from taxpayers, many of which continue to this day.

The public essentially made its bed in the midterm elections, as irrational as that response might have seemed to many. The Republicans will consequently hold court for a while. They will determine the agenda for the media. Meanwhile, the electorate has become irrelevant again because they don't write checks. Yes, the polls will show that they don't like anything their elected Republican officials want to do. But so what? What can they do or say? MSNBC will cite the polls. The Republicans won't care. The banksters won't care. They've already won.

The "two Americas" theme will continue. Stock market participants won't be particularly disturbed by growing anger and hopelessness in the country because, by and large, all they care about are the markets and their bonus checks. The electorate's increasing dissatisfaction will be a side show. They voted (at least some of them did) and now have to live with the consequences of that vote.

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Meanwhile, Obama will try to govern via more Clinton-style "triangulation" and "compromise" (although "compromise" is actually a charitable way of looking at it, since he has already capitulated to Wall Street). He wants to bring big business into his administration. Why? Business profits are sky-high. Contrary to the rhetoric, this has not been an administration that has been particularly "anti-business". The administration's instinct for solving a problem of fraud or criminality is to wish the problem away or "move forward" without any consequences for bad behavior.  But it is also a manifestation of our political system's impotence to respond to the problems of long-term unemployment and a general hopelessness about the system's ability to craft sensible long-term solutions to our longstanding structural problems.

Businesses themselves do not want to see the income distribution go the other way. We have a Russian-style oligarchy emerging in our midst. Our president could take a populist line for the next election, but he won't, because that's not who he is. He will hope that by wooing business the economy will do a little better. That is what he thinks he needs. So he too will set the agenda.

And so it will go on. Neither party will change its ways a whit, and there is nothing any one can do about it. We appear to be experiencing a slow-moving train wreck in the making, but as my friend Tom Ferguson taught me ages ago, if you want to have a happy ending, go see a Disney movie.

**For more on the growing crisis in the American political system, see Lynn Parramore's interview with Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Ferugson: "Are the Parties Over?"

Marshall Auerback is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a market analyst and commentator.

Two conservative ideologies are at work behind the huge prison population.

Following Lynn Parramore's piece on on solitary confinement, it's important to note that criminal sentencing reform will be on the table in 2011. Collapsing state budgets and ever-increasing prison populations (and the costs associated with them) will force the issue. Republican Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has recently endorsed a plan to help reduce the prison population.

As this issue unfolds, it is important to understand how we got here in the first place. First, having so much of our population behind bars is a new phenomenon, going back to 1980.

(Sources: one, two.)

The widespread acceptance of two strains of conservative thought have led to this. The first is the school of thought known as the incapacitation theory, a theory that says, in the words of James Q. Wilson: "Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people."

The second is known as the broken windows theory, the idea that a neighborhood could be separated into orderly and disorderly people. As disorder sets in, orderly people flee or retrench from the neighborhood, and new disorderly people are emboldened to enter and take over. It also includes the idea that a police force doesn't solve crimes but rather maintains order. In this vision, the police don't investigate and present evidence to a prosecutor, who then presents evidence to a jury.

There’s an important rhetorical trick that the broken window ideology brought to the table, one that caught progressives off guard and brought in liberals hook, line, and sinker. As Bernard Harcourt has noted, it transforms the idea of offensive acts into harmful acts. Public drinking and loitering aren’t harms, but they are offensive to some. Broken windows allowed people to believe that offensive behavior leads to (by creating the potentials for and inevitability of) legal harms. It also became backwards compatible, allowing people to think that harmful acts were obviously preceded by an offensive act; criminalize and ruthlessly prosecute the offensive acts, and you can prevent the real harms from taking place.

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It's worth noting how broken windows, instead of acting as an alternative to incapacitation theory, acted as a supplement. But how did we get to incapacitation in the first place? In the law and economics approach of the Chicago School of Becker, Posner, Coase, etc. it is hard to balance the idea that crime is committed after an estimate of costs and benefits. Risking 30 years in prison to rob a store for $80 can't really be squared away. So what the incapacitation school argued is that it can't, unless you consider that criminals have a cognitive makeup that makes them impulsive and "present-orientated." Wilson makes reference to this in his 1975 book "Thinking About Crime": "Lower-class persons...immediate gratification...inclined to uninhibited, expressive conduct." This is the idea that delayed gratification is an essential part of the social contract and that those who are incapable of it are likely to become disorderly and commit crime.

Here's Edward C. Banfield, a professor of Urban Government at Harvard and the chairman of President Nixon's task force on the Model Cities Program, who was a mentor to James Q. Wilson:

[T]he many traits that constitute a "patterning" are all consequences, indirect if not direct, of a time horizon that is characteristic of a class... The lower-class individual lives in the slum, which, to a greater or lesser extent, is an expression of his tastes and style of life... [T]he indifference ("apathy" if one prefers) of the lower-class person is such that he seldom makes even the simplest repairs to the place that he lives in. He is not troubled by dirt and dilapidation and he does not mind the inadequacy of public facilities such as schools, parks, hospital, and libraries; indeed, where such things exist he may destroy them by carelessness or even by vandalism... [T]he slum is specialized as [a site] for vice and for illicit commodities generally...

[S]ince the benefits of crime tend to be immediate and its costs (such as imprisonment or loss of reputation) in the future, the present-oriented individual is ipso facto more disposed towards crime than others... The fact is, that no one knows how to change the culture of any part of the population... [T]he policy maker usually must take certain cultural and psychological traits as given... If he is to change a city's potential for crime it must be by manipulating situational factors, which is to say inducements...either by raising the cost of crime or by raising the benefits of noncrime... [Society must] abridge to an appropriate degree the freedom of those who in the opinion of a court are extremely likely to commit violent crimes. ("Unheavenly City Revisited", 1974)

[A] cohort of present-oriented persons could as a rule be expected to commit a good many more crimes of certain types than a matched cohort of persons who are not present-oriented. ("Present Orientedness and Crime", 1991)

There are two things to note about this. The first is that, even if it isn't self-conscious, this is an appeal to use thicker psychological descriptions in order to supplement economic models. The cost-benefit analysis of why someone would commit an armed robbery doesn't make sense unless you also assume the robber weighs current gains much more than future losses. In this sense, we would call this "behavioral economics." It's ironic, since many assume the turn towards thicker psychological descriptions in economics will naturally lead towards more progressive outcomes. But here a behavioral turn has been used to justify a massive expansion in the punitive aspects of the government alongside a massive buildup in the carceral state apparatus.

The second is that we should all become more familiar with Charles Karelis' arguments in his excellent book "The Persistence of Poverty". It's a slim volume and makes a great afternoon read. Karelis proposes we start to distinguish between pleasure goods and goods that are relievers, and realize that some goods can act as both. His thesis is that there is diminishing marginal utility in pleasure goods, but that relievers have increasing marginal utility. “…[P]aying the first bill in a stack of overdue bills does little to relieve a guilty conscience.”

Karelis takes a moment to do some intellectual history digging and finds that the current economic obsession with decreasing marginal utility comes from Jeremy Bentham equating happiness with the absence of unhappiness. Bentham, as well as the Mills, thought of happiness as reciprocal to unhappiness, like the relationship between tall and short. So increasing happiness is the same as decreasing unhappiness. Maybe, maybe not. But the problem is that this relationship is carried over to the goods that effect happiness and unhappiness.

People in a state of increasing marginal utility will display things that look like pathologies from a more secure footing -- binging and not smoothing, low and high extreme work output instead of constant labor -- but are perfectly rational given a state where every good has a reliever quality.

I'll continue in future writing about a new liberal vision of crime and punishment.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.