Alice Rivlin, Fed Vice Chair Who Was Budget Hawk, Dies

Clinton, whose health and budget policies Rivlin sometimes criticized publicly, appointed her to the Fed in 1996, and she stayed there as vice chair until 1999. She returned to Brookings as a senior fellow, writing prolifically on monetary, fiscal and health matters.

In 2010, Rivlin served as co-chairman, with former Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico, of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force.

Rivlin remained a commentator on budget matters into the era of President Donald Trump, criticizing the economic proposals in his 2018 State of the Union message.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, she said he’d waited too long to start repairing U.S. infrastructure, and wasn’t addressing the looming deficit increases likely to be required by an aging population, with Trump’s tax cuts adding to the problem.

Increasing Debt

“No one is talking about how we pay for it in the long run,” she said. “We are headed down a track where our national debt keeps growing.”

Born Georgianna Alice Mitchell on March 4, 1931, in Philadelphia, to Allan Mitchell and the former Georgianna Fales, she dropped her first name. Her father taught nuclear physics at Indiana University.

She graduated from the Madeira School in Virginia before earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Bryn Mawr College in 1952. She got a master’s and a doctorate in the same subject at Harvard University’s Radcliffe College.

She later taught at Harvard, as well as other schools including Georgetown University and George Washington University. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Prize in 1983 and was elected national president of the American Economic Association in 1986.

Her published work included “Caring for the Disabled Elderly: Who Will Pay?” and “Reviving the American Dream,” studies published by Brookings. In the latter, she argued that the budget deficit was “the biggest single impediment” to reviving an under-performing U.S. economy. She called her views those of a “fanatical, card-carrying middle-of-the-roader.”

She married Lewis Rivlin, a Justice Department attorney in 1955. They divorced in 1977, after having two sons, Allan and Douglas, and a daughter, Catherine. She married Sidney Winter, an economics professor, in 1989.