In the second installment of the Roosevelt Institute's new weekly Bloggingheads series, "Fireside Chats," Fellow Mike Konczal sits down with Jacobin's Peter Frase. In the clip below, they discuss how the Occupy movement fits in with the broader American left. Mike says that "as a liberal I view this as a whole good cop/bad cop thing," allowing mainstream progressives to say "the system needs to deal with us conventional liberals lest our partners come in the room and go nuts."

Mike notes that progressives have largely been disappointed with the Obama administration because they feel it's been too passive and ignored the big issues. Even though the Occupy movement has focused on broad principles instead of making specific demands, Mike argues that "people in the liberal space are just excited that people are talking about inequality" and "that there's an actual youthful energy that in some ways the administration set up and then just let disappear." At the same time, Occupy has exposed some rifts within the left due to an anti-state anarchist streak that Peter calls the "evil twin" of neoliberalism.

Vote by March 14 for the Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline to win a free both at Netroots Nation!

Watch their full conversation below for more on what a liberal utopia looks like, whether the welfare state should be replaced with a guaranteed income, and whether all our work will one day be done by robots and Star Trek replicators.

If we put women back to work, lifted them out of poverty, and funded social services they rely on, fewer women would turn to abortion.

It seems the cat's finally out of the bag these days: conservatives aren't just concerned with saving the babies from abortions when it comes to reproductive rights. They are now outspoken about being against access to contraception -- and some of them have even come out against non-procreative sex. Women's rights activists have long warned that they were coming for our birth control; now it's hard to deny they were right all along.

One big clue this whole time has been a simple fact: if conservatives are so hell-bent on preventing abortions, one of the best things they can do is support family planning services and access to contraception. Yet the last time we saw an openly pro-family planning Republican was the '80s, when George H.W. Bush was in office. Meanwhile, all Republican 2012 candidates have signed personhood pledges that endanger many forms of contraception, Santorum himself has said birth control is bad, and I've lost track of how many times Republicans have tried to defund Planned Parenthood, which supplies contraception to low-income women. But as Irin Carmon laid out, the connection between increasing access to contraception and lowering abortion rates is very clear.

There's another clue that this isn't about saving the babies. It's the blind eye conservatives have turned to the economic factors that are leading more women to turn to abortion. A new report, "Abortionomics: When Choice is a Necessity," shows that "lower incomes and rising unemployment are affecting Americans' choices about pregnancies," and in the recession abortion rates, particularly among poor women, are on the rise. Stephanie Poggi of the National Network of Abortion Funds says, "A lot of women are... telling us, 'I've already put off paying my rent, my electric bill; I'm cutting back on my food.' They've run through all the options." In lean times, a child can seem like an overwhelming expense.

It's not terribly shocking that when incomes are strapped, millions are out of a job, and many are falling into poverty, women are thinking twice about having a child. Raising a kid in this country is not a cheap undertaking. For a two-parent couple making under $57,600, the USDA estimates the costs of raising a young child to be $10,950 a year. The total cost of taking care of that child until he or she turns 18 averaged $226,920 in 2010, up nearly 40 percent over the last decade. As one woman in the report puts it, "I totally cannot afford another child. I knew immediately [upon learning about her pregnancy] what I had to do."

Those without a job don't have the income to cover these kinds of expenses. Over 12 million people are unemployed right now; almost 6 million of those are women. One unemployed woman in the report who chose abortion says, "At this time I am not working and neither is my partner... We are unable to support a child under our present circumstances." If Republicans are concerned about reversing the rise in abortion rates, they need to focus on putting people back to work making decent pay. Putting women to work in large part means spending money at the state level to keep them on public payrolls.

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

But even after women are back at work, we still have to wrestle with a big factor: the high number of women living in poverty who seek abortions. One study found that 69 percent of women having abortions in 2008 made incomes lower than 200 percent of the poverty line, while women in that income category make up only 35 percent of the overall population. In fact, the report says, "while abortion rates generally have declined over the last 20 years...rates have increased among low-income women." And a lot of women have been falling into that category lately. Recent Census numbers show that women's poverty rate rose to 14.5 percent in 2010, the highest since 1993. Their "extreme poverty rate" -- those whose income is less than half of the federal poverty line -- is at 6.3 percent, the highest on record.

The link between addressing poverty and lowering the abortion rate may be uncomfortable for conservatives like Mitt "I don't care about the very poor" Romney, but it's one of the most important factors. As the report notes, "low income women often have difficulty affording preventive contraception and sometimes address this problem by reducing frequency or dosage use, thereby increasing the risk of unintended pregnancy in the group most likely to decide they are unable to afford to support an additional dependent."

And lastly, the point conservatives may enjoy the least: we need to increase spending on social services. As the report puts it, "As funding for social services declines, more women may be expected to determine that economic constraints make abortion the only viable option." The report is mostly talking about services that provide access to contraception. But there are other services that we're cutting back on that will impact the decision to have a child. For example, 37 states pulled back on child care support in 2010 due to tight budgets. Yet the average cost of full-time care ranges from $3,600 to $18,200 annually. That's a huge part of the cost of raising a child, but we're giving parents less support to pay for it.

Women choose to terminate pregnancies for all sorts of reasons and should be able to access abortion care when they do. Tight budgets aren't the only reason to choose not to have a child. But economic factors that prevent families from having children should be high on conservatives' list. If we ease those families' financial situations, they may not have to turn to terminating a pregnancy. But instead conservatives are fighting access to contraceptives, cutting off funding for services that would make life easier for women living in poverty, and blocking job creation policies.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

At a time when government support for education is under attack, a reminder in FDR's own words that the progress of our nation depends on a well-educated citizenry.

Today, many argue that the government can't afford some of its most fundamental tasks, including support for education. Some politicians have even gone so far as to question the very idea of public education. But President Franklin Roosevelt knew that mass education requires government support and that cutting such support in times of economic need is penny wise and pound foolish, since a prosperous economy and decent society require widespread education.

On February 22, 1936, President Roosevelt traveled to Philadelphia, PA, where he received an honorary degree from Temple University. Roosevelt used the occasion to emphasize the critical role of government in advancing education. He pointed out that it was altogether fitting that the day was George Washington's birthday, since "What President Washington pointed out on many occasions and in many practical ways was that a broad and cosmopolitan education in every stratum of society is a necessary factor in any free Nation governed through a democratic system."

Roosevelt went on to add that the progress of a nation cannot and should not be measured solely in material terms. Instead, a nation must also look to progress in "the things of the mind." He pointed to the great advances in education over the previous 50 years and how his administration had worked to ensure that the burden of the Great Depression "should not include the denial of educational opportunities for those who were willing and ready to use them to advantage."

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

Increasing levels of education, according to Roosevelt, "has given to this country a population more literate, more cultured, in the best sense of the word, more aware of the complexities of modern civilized life than ever before in our history."

Roosevelt then described the timeless qualities of a true education. First is "a sense of fair play among men. As education grows, men come to recognize their essential dependence one upon the other." Second, true education instills "a sense of equality among men when they are dealing with the things of the mind. Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all."

Finally, and most importantly, true education requires the unfettered pursuit of knowledge and the truth. At a time when Nazi storm troopers burned books and banned "degenerate" art, and Stalinist commissars sought to bend biology to the will of the state, Roosevelt declared, "No group and no Government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned. The truth is found when men are free to pursue it."

Though spoken over 75 years ago, Roosevelt's words still hold true. Today we must also confront challenges to sound education, as some still seek to impose their own agendas on the pursuit of knowledge. Most importantly, Roosevelt understood that the essence of democracy is a free people engaged in the search for truth and understanding in an effort to make a better world for themselves and their children. As Roosevelt said, quoting Kipling, "On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!"

Philip Klinkner is the James S. Sherman Professor of Government at Hamilton College. He is the author (with Rogers Smith) of The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America and he is currently writing a book on the 1936 election.

Democracy can't function unless both sides are willing to debate the actual proposals on the table instead of trying to change the subject.

I got hit with something of a one-two punch Tuesday on National Review Online. In two different articles, I'd referred to William Voegeli's book, Never Enough, which argues that liberalism's aspirations for the welfare state are essentially boundless. Both Reihan Salam and Voegeli himself take issue with my argument, but both seem to me to be changing the subject.

Let's take Salam's post first. (He's an old friend and one of the smartest young conservatives I know.) He's responding to the column I wrote about Mitt Romney's "I'm not concerned about the very poor" comment. I treated Romney more generously than anyone else (including Romney himself, who took it back). I took the gaffe, along with Romney's speeches about the "entitlement society," to indicate that he's aligned with House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan and Voegeli in arguing for a safety net carefully limited to the very poor, rather than a more expansive set of supports for those moving out of poverty.

I've got Ryan and Voegeli all wrong, Salam says. (No word on Romney.) They aren't about cutting programs for the near-poor at all. Rather, it's that they are concerned "that the U.S. public sector isn't doing a good job of putting taxpayer dollars to good use." After a long digression about a McKinsey report on public sector productivity, "Baumol's disease," K-12 education, and various other topics, he claims that the "core idea" of Ryan and Voegeli is this: "We need to do a better job of imposing fiscal discipline on the public sector, but...we also need to give public sector managers the tools they need to impose organizational discipline."

That's it? All this huffing and puffing about the "entitlement society" and slashing spending is just about helping bureaucrats do their jobs better? In his piece, Voegeli accuses me of depicting liberalism as "meek and earnest." I would say the same about Salam's depiction of conservatives. I'd also note that he doesn't cite a single word from Ryan or Voegeli to support this benign interpretation. He's arguing that Ryan's changes to Medicaid (turning it into a block grant) and Medicare (turning it into a Groupon to buy private insurance if it's available) are really just a better way to "align incentives" to reduce overall health costs, a goal we share. The Medicaid block grants are just a way to give states incentives to cut costs, because they can keep all the money they save, rather than sharing the savings with the federal government, as in the current system.

This is an argument worthy of a very long separate response, but in short, it's just wrong. States have plenty of incentives to cut costs and there are 84 Medicaid waivers for states that manage their programs more effectively. Unless the block grant is extremely generous (and thus more expensive than the current system), states, which have little ability to control health costs, will respond by simply cutting Medicaid eligibility. Likewise, Ryan's Medicare plan will, as the CBO has shown, increase total health care costs, the opposite of what Reihan claims is the "core idea."

Then Reihan reverses and admits that Ryan and Voegeli are about cuts, not just better management, but only cuts to invisible programs that serve the well-off. Ryan and Voegeli are really "allies," he says, of Suzanne Mettler, whose book The Submerged State calls for reconsideration of invisible and regressive programs like the mortgage-interest tax deduction. I consider myself an ally of Mettler as well, in every way, so maybe we can all just get along. Ryan has "emphasized the importance of 'broadening the tax base,'" Salam claims, which is true, but his budget didn't offer any specifics and he would give the savings from unnamed tax-expenditure cuts away in even more regressive tax cuts. Likewise, Voegeli's book never mentions the mortgage tax deduction or any of the other big tax expenditure giveaways in his definition of the welfare state. The vision Salam's describing -- of an efficient, well-managed public sector with fewer tax breaks for the well-off -- may be his own, and I could live happily in his world. But it has nothing at all to do with the new conservative consensus represented by Romney, Ryan, and Voegeli.

Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

Voegeli himself weighs in to take issue with a different article, part of a debate with Stephen Hayward, who drew heavily from Voegeli to make the claim that liberals want essentially a limitless welfare state. Again, this is an argument adopted by Romney, so it's not purely academic. I didn't think that was an accurate description of liberalism, which I argued is all about finding the right limits or boundaries between public and private, government and market. If sometimes those limits are not based on an abstract principle, but on living in a democratic society and paring our aspirations to reality, those contingent limits are no less real than "principled" ones. I used as an example single-payer health care, which I'm not for, and never have been for, even though I've never had a good answer for people who point out that it would be fairer and more efficient. I just think pursuing it is a waste of effort.

Voegeli sees a "gotcha" -- the actual liberal principle is "whatever we can get away with." So if I'm setting aside single-payer in part for political reasons, "conservatives have every reason to go on Fox News and rant about socialized medicine, but zero reason to sit down for an edifying, collegial seminar that hammers out the details of the next incremental expansion of federal authority and spending."

I don't see how that follows at all. If, say, I were president and proposed a market-based expansion of health coverage, it is what it is and not something else. It's not a secret incremental plan to get to single-payer. "Ranting about socialized medicine" in this case would simply be dishonest. (And, obviously, this is not hypothetical, except for the fact that I'm not the president.) And refusing to sit down and negotiate about an actual proposal on the table, especially one similar to what conservatives had advocated for years, is simply a defection from democracy. The fact that some supporters of the actual proposal on the table might have trimmed their original aspirations is no justification for treating them as if they had not.

In plenty of cases, the limitations to my liberalism might be "principled" (which is to say, I could articulate a principle), but other people might have different principles. That's politics in a democracy -- an unending effort to balance various people's principles and aspirations and find what John Rawls called the "overlapping consensus" that works for most of us.

As Voegeli notes, sometimes the range of political possibility, or the overlapping consensus, changes. Fifteen years ago, gay marriage seemed as unlikely as single-payer health care and even most liberal politicians voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. Within a few months from now, a quarter of the population might live in states that allow them to marry the person they love. But Voegeli uses this to change the subject entirely, to what he regards as liberals' commitment to "rigging or nullifying" the democratic process through court decisions. That's not something I'd written about, but it doesn't seem to help Voegeli's argument at all. First, it has nothing to do with the "welfare state" or expansion of public benefits. Second, the democracy card cuts both ways. The Ninth Circuit did just throw out a California constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that had passed with 52 percent of the vote, but by the same token, the constitutional provision would have barred the democratic process in California from ever recognizing same-sex marriage -- and the legislature has twice passed same-sex marriage. And as Jeff Toobin points out, liberals for at least twenty years have been very wary of making gains in courts that they can't achieve through other democratic means. Almost everyone who favors gay marriage (with the interesting exception of Ted Olson, apparently) was gratified that the decision did not go further and actually declare a constitutional right to marry.

But I'm not sure what Voegeli's point is here. Does he object to judicial review in all cases? Citizens United was no less a nullification of a democratic decision. Possibly, like Newt Gingrich, he objects only when the decision goes against his own political preferences. That's hardly principled, though I hope he doesn't go so far as Gingrich, who would eliminate entire circuits if he didn't like their rulings. (Talk about no limits!)

I should conclude by saying that I engaged with Voegeli because I found his book fascinating and challenging. It's far more worthy of your time and money than, say, Charles Murray's latest bit of hackwork. In a sense, my frustration with Voegeli when he says liberals and conservatives have "nothing to talk about" is that it is such a potentially interesting conversation, whether in the form of an "edifying, collegial seminar" or something more raucous.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Roosevelt Institute.