#1228 Budgets

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2017

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

"Jefferson regarded the national debt as a national disgrace."

This week, President Jefferson (as portrayed by humanities scholar Clay S. Jenkinson) explains his reasoning behind his federal budget and why he felt it was essential to pay down the national debt that he inherited. We also learn about some of the people who helped Jefferson develop the budget, including Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.

Jefferson dedicated his administration to reducing the national debt as severely as possible. As always, there are parallels between Jefferson's time and ours. He wanted to cut taxes and the size of the federal government, but he also wanted to cut the size of the Army and Navy; you don't hear that kind of talk much in our time. In this case, Jefferson was an idealogue about fiscal responsibility.

Find this episode, along with further recommended reading, on the blog.

Read Clay's Jefferson Watch essay, "The Most Jeffersonian Thing in America".

Clay will be performing as Thomas Jefferson at the Ferguson Center for the Arts in Newport News, VA on April 19th. Find more info and buy tickets here.

Learn more about Odyssey Tours and the summer 2017 Lewis & Clark adventure on odytours.net.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome podcast listeners. This week we talk money.
0:03.6	Jefferson wasn't a good manager of his own money,
0:07.4	but he was a brilliant manager of the people's money.
0:10.8	He was maybe the most fiscally severe and responsible president in the
0:15.9	entire run of presidents in American history. He had some good advice. We talked
0:20.3	about that a bit in the show, but I was particularly interested in Albert Gallatin.
0:25.3	I didn't know a lot about him, still don't know a lot about him, but it would seem that he was the
0:30.5	guy, he was the nerd in the office really crunching numbers if you look at some of the
0:35.2	letters between he and Jefferson.
0:37.0	Well, they both understood that a national debt is a really bad idea and...
0:41.5	Yeah, but somebody had to put all those numbers and columns and
0:43.8	add them up and say here they are Mr President and I think it was him.
0:46.4	Galatin was outstanding at this. Jefferson didn't really understand economics he
0:50.3	certainly didn't understand the details of economics, and so he chose this brilliant
0:56.2	financier, Albert Gallatin, who was Swiss-born and French educated.
1:01.0	He was a Pennsylvania politician, disliked by the Federalist.
1:04.0	They tried to deny him a place in Jefferson's cabinet.
1:07.0	Jefferson appointed him by what's known as a recess appointment.
1:10.0	But he turned out to be magnificent, and he was even maybe better than Hamilton.
1:14.8	Hamilton set up the system but Gallatin stabilized it.
1:17.8	That's kind of what I came away.
1:19.3	We should probably talk about that sometime in the future.
	...

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