“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Oglethorpe University, May, 1932

A blog post published earlier today on Naked Capitalism raises an interesting question – what exactly is the Roosevelt legacy? For us at the Roosevelt Institute, we believe it is based in engaging in dialogue and promoting progressive people and ideas. It is also about encouraging young people to get involved in public service and public policy debates.

When deficit hawks seized control of the budget debate in 2009, students from our Campus Network expressed serious interest in proving that their progressive vision for America’s future -- originally captured in the Blueprint for the Millennial America -- was not only innovative, but also achievable from a fiscal perspective.

With that in mind, our organization, in consultation with our board of directors, agreed that our Campus Network should participate in a program sponsored by the Peterson Foundation to develop a budget plan. Other participating organizations included the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Center for American Progress (CAP), Bipartisan Policy Center, American Enterprise Institute, and Heritage Foundation.

By way of background, our Campus Network is a student created and run think tank that formed as the Roosevelt Institution in 2005 and merged with the Roosevelt Institute in 2007. It is currently made up of some 10,000 students and young professionals at more than 80 campus chapters across the country. It was the only student-based organization asked to participate.

The Campus Network employed its Think 2040 engagement model -- which asks students to outline their shared vision for the future before figuring out which policies to push -- to drive the creation of the plan. A number of our fellows, including Bo Cutter, Jeff Madrick, and Mark Schmitt served as advisors. Some 3,000 students participated in the rigorous development process. While some of the ideas fit clearly into the wheelhouse of what many consider acceptable progressive thought, we recognize that other ideas might not correspond as neatly with that space. By design, the students who developed the plan represented a wide swath of the ideological spectrum. We were heartened, though not surprised, to find that the next generation of leaders has a decidedly progressive inclination.

But regardless of what you might think of any particular policy in this document, we encourage anyone -- progressive, moderate or conservative -- to read this impressive and rigorous piece of work. It not only represents the unfiltered and untainted voice of the Millennial generation, it is also a powerful contribution to the current budget debate that can stand up in any forum.

As for the source of the funding, our hope is that more full-throated progressive funders would support similar efforts. We, of course, would gladly participate in such programs, although the outcomes, no matter who sponsored it, will not change. The Roosevelt Institute supports an open exchange of ideas, and it has and always will maintain its support from individuals and organizations that understand and are respectful of our core values and intellectual independence. That’s why Franklin Roosevelt had his Brains Trust and Kitchen Cabinet. It’s what was intended when the Institute was founded. And it is the legacy we are committed to carrying forward.

Andrew Rich is the President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute.

As the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network releases its progressive, practical Budget for a Millennial America, those who helped craft it will explain their innovative ideas and tough choices in a series of posts. Today Zachary Kolodin argues that progressives should be fighting over the budget on their own terms.

Congressional squabbling over the federal budget can seem like a bunch of noise and politicking. But the federal budget provides a healthy, proactive way to demonstrate progressive priorities. Sure, we can call foul in response to every cut proposed by the GOP. But we'd rather be able to make a full-throated argument for the budget we want -- not just in 2012, but in 2016, 2020, and so on. Using the budget to reveal a path to progress, rather than allowing our opponents to use it as a weapon, is not only possible, but is an effective tactic.

So how can we do this? First, outline a progressive vision for the future. What does our world look like? Second, show people how we can start building the road to get there. There's no credibility unless there is a road.

How does something as supposedly grim and boring as a budget do this? It is vehicle for making our goals concrete and achievable. Try telling someone that you can prove America can fully repay the loans of talented Americans willing to become great teachers, provide universal kindergarten, and that we can afford it. Not only that, but we can simplify our tax system and ensure that middle- and low-income people pay the same or less than they already do.

Sign up for weekly ND20 highlights, mind-blowing stats, and event alerts.

It also bolsters our cries of foul play when the GOP tries to cut education or Social Security using "fiscal responsibility" as their justification. We can feel confident when we push back because we have our own fiscally responsible plan. If conservatives fight it out on this turf, we don't need to ask for a change in playing field. We can go head to head on their ground.

The time is ripe for this conversation. Discussing the federal budget after a financial crash that caused the Great Recession allows us to tell a story about how we got to this point. Hate national debt? Then let's fix American banking so we're not left saving Wall Street fat cats again. Hate spending so much on Medicare? Okay, let's make sure that health care reform works, because there aren't any other plans that chart a path to affordable health care and lower costs.

We aren't going to win arguments with the right by allowing them to dominate key narratives like the story of the federal budget. This is an argument we should want to have because we can win. It allows us to tell a very specific story about why we are where we are and how we can get where we want to go.

We at the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network want to have these conversations. That's why we asked more than 3,000 young people to outline their vision for America in 2040. And that's why we convened our 20 top student policy experts to create a federal budget proposal based on these findings. Over the next week, we'll be posting a series that touches on different aspects of the Budget for the Millennial America. Be sure to check in tomorrow.

Zachary Kolodin is the Director of the Future Preparedness Initiative at the Roosevelt Institute.

Despite claims to the contrary, the Whiskey Rebellion was no anti-government crusade -- it was a battle for progressive taxation and regulation.

The seething social, political, and economic struggles over public and private finance that marked our founding period came to a head in the late fall of 1794, when President George Washington, back in the saddle for the first time since the Revolution, personally led nearly 13,000 troops into western Pennsylvania to subject its populace to a military occupation. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton served as Washington's major domo for the operation -- and he took over full command when Washington turned back to Philadelphia. Under Hamilton's command, troops rousted citizens from beds in the snow and ran them to holding pens. They detained on no charge hundreds of people against whom the executive branch knew it had no evidence, administering searches and seizures of property and subjecting detainees to harsh conditions and terrorizing interrogations. After spending indefinite periods in privation and fear, most of the detainees were released -- inevitably, as there hadn't been evidence for their detention. The whole operation was conducted in the absence of warrants, any resolution of Congress, or legal suspension of habeas corpus.

Prosecutions were never the purpose of the arrests. Troops soon arrived at every home in the region and required every male over the age of eighteen to sign an oath of loyalty to the federal government. Not surprisingly, most complied. Such was the context in which the U.S. government established its sovereignty in what was then the restless, defiant, trans-Appalachian West.

The real issues sparking the 1794 suppression of western Pennsylvania have been trivialized, at first by Hamilton himself, as "the Whiskey Rebellion." Just as Hamilton hoped, historians and biographers have contentedly gone on marginalizing the democratic-finance movement that Hamilton dedicated his career to obstructing and tried to give the coup de grace in the suppression of western Pennsylvania.

But the resistance wasn't about whiskey, and Hamilton knew it. It was about public finance and national economics.

The resistance did begin in objections to the first federal tax on a domestic product, an excise on distilled spirits. That tax had been authored by Hamilton himself as linchpin to his comprehensive funding-and-assumption plan for supporting investment in the federal domestic debt and making that debt a national engine. But whereas Hamilton's famous political enemies in government -- the opposition party coming to be associated with Jefferson and Madison -- objected on general principles to Hamilton's activist approach to federal government, the ordinary people on whom his tax operated most painfully were objecting on other, more pragmatic grounds.

They'd hoped for a government that would protect them against what they saw as the avaricious merchant-class lending industry, and they saw the whiskey tax as a betrayal of those hopes, a continuation, even an amplification, of finance policies deliberately favoring elites and obstructing ordinary people's efforts to get their hands on political and economic power. The rebels began by making disguised attacks on tax collectors -- in the classic "regulation" style that the unenfranchised had long employed to promote more democratic public finance. Then they began raising what had been known in 1776 as "liberty poles" (the Washington administration now deemed raising the poles seditious). By 1794, when the western counties of Pennsylvania, along with some in western Virginia, in correspondence with sympathizers in Kentucky, were marching under a new flag and threatening secession from the United States, their goals went well beyond regulation.

They sought to form a new, western country, with direct access to trade on the Mississippi, cultivating a new kind of democratic republic in which ordinary people would thrive. The rebels were well armed and well organized, some of the toughest people America has ever known. Hunters, trackers, dirt-farmers, laborers, craftsmen and marksmen, they were rank-and-file veterans of the worst theaters of the Revolutionary war; their fathers and grandfathers had been harassing eastern government, both British and American, for many years. The prospect of their seceding and forming a government of their own, hostile to the U.S., was a terrifying one.

It’s free! Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s key headlines, delivered straight to your inbox.

And of course it wasn't realistic. In the end the rebels' ruthless illegality was overcome by Hamilton, using his own ruthless illegality, on behalf of President Washington, in the occupation of western Pennsylvania.

I've written in detail elsewhere, as have others, about how Hamilton's tax, which he sold to a financially naive Congress as an innocuous duty on consumption of a luxury item, was in fact carefully calibrated to cartelize the distilling business, favoring big merchants, eastern financiers, and federally-connected western cronies and putting small farmers out of business, all while using the tax revenues to pay interest (untaxed) to well-heeled investors in U.S. debt. Also widely discussed in Whiskey Rebellion literature (though not by Hamilton's biographers!) are Hamilton's eager anticipation of leading a military effort against U.S. citizens somewhere in America to enforce finance policy, and his manipulating, along with Attorney General William Bradford, the prosecution of tax resisters to create a pretext for bringing that plan to fruition in western Pennsylvania.

But in the context of today's debates over taxation and public debt, it might be more important to look at some specific things the so-called whiskey rebels objected to in Hamilton's polices. Hamilton biographers haven't done so, and taking at face value Hamilton's own tactical dismissals of his populist critics' objections, they have confused many of the most important issues in founding finance.

Although the rebels protested and ultimately mobilized militarily against a tax, they were neither inheritors of the Boston Tea Party nor forerunners of today's Tea Party movement. Unlike the Boston Sons of Liberty -- upper-middle-class men who objected to Parliament's taxing American's without representation, as well as to a bailout of a company deemed to big to fail -- the whiskey rebels wanted government not merely to observe the classic liberties of propertied Englishmen but to promote the equality of the less- and un-propertied. And unlike many in today's Tea Party, the rebels of the 1790's did not object to federal taxes per se. Their slogan wasn't "no taxation" or even "less taxation" but "equal taxation." They rightly identified the whiskey tax as what today we would call regressive. In their first of many unsuccessful petitions for repeal, they complained that the tax was unjust because it didn't operate in proportion to property. They saw clearly, in a way Hamilton's enemy Madison never would have, that the tax was designed to hit the poorest hardest, favor the east over the west, and end local efforts at popular finance.

Nor did they object to an activist federal government. They just wanted it to be activist on behalf of labor, not wealth. Anti-federalists did try pandering to the economic populists epitomized by the whiskey rebels, but one of the most important rebel leaders was the preacher and activist Herman Husband, the first to be arrested by Washington's troops and sent to prison in Philadelphia. Husband's sermons were anything but antifederalist. Like Paine, another radical democrat with high regard for the progressive power of government, Husband called for a national government that would use its might to ensure equality. Unlike some of their fellow populists (then and now) both Paine and Husband saw power invested largely in "states' rights" as likely to be socially and economically regressive.

The "madman of the Alleghenies," as Husband was called, envisioned a strong national government with social security; taxes on investment income; and slow, centrally managed inflation. Referring to the process by which democratic populists overturned the Pennsylvania government in 1776, he suggested that the rank-and-file militias might succeed in taking over western Pennsylvania. He was in his seventies when federal troops marched him over the Alleghenies and all the way to Philadelphia, where he lay in jail in awful conditions. Unlike many of those arrested, Husband was actually charged -- with sedition. But the jury found him not guilty.

No matter. Detention was punishment enough -- and for Americans, the occupation of western Pennsylvania was example enough. Husband had been terribly weakened by his ordeal, and he died on his way back to western Pennsylvania. His grave is unknown. The obscurity in history of one our most original and prescient thinkers on finance, government, and democracy is emblematic of the obscurity of the real causes of the Whiskey Rebellion, the cogent thinking of the men who became rebels, and the open conflict between Hamiltonian finance and American democracy.

William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History. He has spoken on unexpected connections between history and politics at the National Archives, the Kansas City Public Library, and various corporate and organization events. He blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com.

One snow capped mountain. 200 economists, journalists and financiers. And a couple of ghosts.

Soaking in the turn-of-the-century grandeur of the Mount Washington Hotel at this past weekend's Institute for New Economic Thinking conference, I felt the presence of ghosts.

The Spirit of Unbridled Capitalism lingered in the memory of Pennsylvania railroad tycoon Joseph Stickney - millionaire by age 30! -- who built the jaw-droppingly expensive, castle-sized hotel on the loftiest peak in New Hampshire as a symbol of America's new financial might. The hotel also became a symbol of financial folly: On its opening night in 1902, Stickney toasted to "the damn fool who built this white elephant" and died shortly thereafter (JP Morgan attended the wake). Reverberations of Stickney's capitalistic excess echoed through the weekend's conversations as economic heavyweights -- several of them Nobel laureates -- still struggled to explain just why the financial sector had grown so monstrously reckless that it nearly sank the world economy in 2008. A few who had been at the centers of government during the crisis and its aftermath, like former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former Obama adviser Larry Summers, congratulated themselves and those gathered for heading off a worse disaster with smart economic policies. Not everyone looked convinced.

Several speakers, most memorably the eloquent Simon Johnson, expressed serious doubt as to whether Dodd-Frank and other measures taken since the crisis had the ghost of a chance of preventing another meltdown. The Roosevelt Institute's Thomas Ferguson warned of the dangerous feedback loop between politics and economics, noting that the tsunami of money heading into the post-Citizens United system in the U.S. did not bode well for taming Wall Street. For his part, James K. Galbraith wanted to know why we weren't talking more about financial fraud and perhaps, oh, some jail time for those who perpetrated it. Nobody had a particularly good answer for that.

The Ghost of American World Supremacy was present, too, lurking in references to the hotel's most historic event, which occurred in 1944 when the Bretton Woods Accord was signed here. The upshot of that deal was that financiers from 44 countries agreed to peg their currencies to the US dollar in order to stabilize the world economy, thus ending the dominance of the British pound. Fast-forward to a chilly April weekend in 2011, and you find economists from both home and abroad hinting solemnly that the days of dollar hegemony may be coming to an end. There were murmurings that America had become an untrusted global partner and an economic wild card. The spectacle of our political deadlock (the shutdown was still a possibility when the conference started) brought questions as to how America could possibly act to help effectively regulate the world economy when we could hardly address our own. It was observed that a symbiotic relationship exists between components of the international economic system, and that the China and the US, for example, were using the same vital organs: If one economy became sick, the other would suffer, too.

It’s free! Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s key headlines, delivered straight to your inbox.

The world-wide attempt to square the circle of austerity + growth was a subject of frequent concern and head-scratching among economists who could not understand how the public had been made to swallow this myth. Japanese economist Richard Koo implored us not to draw the wrong lessons from his home country and presented a formidable series of graphs demonstrating that austerity is a recipe for disaster. Even Larry Summers said that he found "the idea of expansionary fiscal contraction" in today's world to be "every bit as oxymoronic as it sounds." We'll try to send Congress the memo.

Finally, the Ghost of Progressive Economics hovered over the gathering in the legacy of John Maynard Keynes and other economists, like Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, whose work had been shunted aside during the years of free market fundamentalism (those are over, right?). When Keynes came to Bretton Woods in 1944, the memory of the Great Depression was fresh in his mind. Beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies, mass unemployment, and shrinking demand had made chaos out of the world economy. It was Keynes's vision of active public management of the economy that helped create the decades-long period of stability and growth that followed Bretton Woods.

Whether a full revival of progressive economics was underway over the weekend was not entirely clear, but there were certainly stirrings. Several speakers embraced the theme of economic equality and deplored the declining standard of living among all but a privileged few. Old paradigms were called into question: William Lazonick, for example, argued forcefully that the stock market had done very little for ordinary people and had actually stunted the kind of innovation and job creation needed for recovery. Some economists questioned whether contemporary economics ought to draw theoretical inspiration from biology and natural systems, rather than physics, which has been the norm. What can we learn from nature? they asked. How does evolution reinforce resilience? What can the spread of pandemics tell us about the spread of economic illness? I found myself intrigued by the possibilites, but unsure whether systems developed over millions of years can really help us respond to crises that develop within weeks. The dinosaurs were resilient, true. Until that damned asteroid.

There was a recognition that economies are fragile and have complex "ecologies" in which the dynamics between crisis, innovation and sustainability must to be properly understood. A theme that emerged several times during the weekend was just how badly economists have done in creating models that had any kind of predictive ability. Given that fact, it was widely agreed that early warning systems, flexibility, and backup systems were needed to minimize the impact of crises.

Rob Johnson, Director of INET (also a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute) expressed his hope that economists will begin to explore "the intersection between economics as a science and economics as one of the humanities" and to consider "how each enriches the other." This is perhaps one of the boldest ideas of all, given the infatuation of the economic field with statistics and scientific modeling. But economics, after all, is about people. And people are funny creatures: part animal; part spirit. Not, in the end, very scientific.

Lynn Parramore is the editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute fellow, co-founder of Recessionwire, and the author of Reading the Sphinx.

**Follow Lynn Parramore on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/lynnparramore