I.O.U.S.A - Addison Wiggin [48]
They passed a law called the Budget Reform Act of 1974 that set up the Congressional Budget Offi ce. And I was very lucky; I got to be the fi rst director of that offi ce. I was there eight and a half years. I loved it. It was a fascinating thing to do. I loved it in part because I like working for the Congress. It is a very interesting group of people, and the issues are interesting. And I think I also liked it because it was entrepreneurial. I got to set up this whole new organization. That is a little bit like starting a new company.
Q: Let ’ s jump ahead to 1993 and the Clinton administration. What was your title during the Clinton administration, and can you explain to me how the policy was determined in January of 1993? How did that battle go about, and how do you feel the results turned out?
Alice Rivlin: In early 1993, I was the Clinton administration ’ s designated deputy director of the Offi ce of Management and Budget. The fi rst director was Leon Panetta. Somewhat later he became Chief of Staff for the president, and I became the Offi ce of Management and Budget director. But in the early period, even before the inauguration, when we were working out of Little Rock, we were really focused, the whole economic team was focused on c07.indd 100
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what the president thought was the highest priority: Figure out what I am going to do about the budget. The budget was in defi cit, [and] everybody was worried about it. We knew that if it stayed on the track that it was on, that the budget defi cits would keep rising. We would have to borrow more and more money.
And we would be paying higher interest rates on that government debt. So it was a high priority among the economic team to fi gure out how we were going to get the budget defi cit to come down. We had a lot of discussion about how fast it should come down.
The president had made promises during the campaign. He had said he was going to have a big infrastructure program to improve roads and bridges. He had said that he was going to have a middle - class tax cut. He had said that he was going to do health care reform which, indeed, he tried to do. And that he was going to do welfare reform, which eventually we did achieve. But we could not fi gure out exactly how we were going to do all of that and still have the budget defi cit coming down. So we had a lot of discussions about it, fi rst around a big table in the Governor ’ s Mansion in Little Rock, and later around an even bigger table in the White House. And there was controversy within the Clinton team about how fast the budget defi cit could come down. I was one of the so - called hawks, along with Bob Rubin and Secretary Benson at Treasury, and Leon Panetta. We all thought that getting the budget defi cit down was extremely important to the future of the economy, and that making a strong move on the budget defi cit would bring interest rates down. So we were focused on that. Others were focused on two things: One was whether the president ’ s campaign promises could be paid for. And the other was whether bringing the defi cit down too quickly would be bad for the economy, because we thought that the recovery from the recession was a bit shaky, and nobody wanted to derail the economy and bring it to a screeching halt. As it turned out, the economic recovery was actually stronger than we thought it was going to be. So we were not skating on quite as thin ice as we thought. But that was a worry.
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Interviews
Q: Are you proud of what you were able to accomplish as a team and as an individual?
Alice Rivlin: I am extremely proud of what happened as a result of the Clinton