Former Fed Board vice chair: U.S. politics too polarized

A polarization of issues has caused inefficiency in American public policy, said a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.\nAlice Rivlin, a prominent Washington figure who has been involved in the Federal Reserve, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, spoke to about 75 students and professors Thursday in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs atrium about polarization in today's political discourse.\n"I am profoundly worried, even frightened, that our policy process will prove unequal to the task ahead," Rivlin said. "America appears polarized into non-communicating blocks that make us increasingly unable to engage in civil discourse" about important issues the government has to consider.\nRivlin, a Bloomington native, said politicians are more polarized in their discourse, which creates a communications divide, but emphasized that the two major parties are not actually that far apart in ideology. She believes if politicians could get past the partisanship that is so prevalent in Washington, a lot more could be accomplished on major issues.\n"The chronicle of her career is nothing short of breathtaking," said SPEA Dean Astrid Merget. Astrid added that Rivlin is a model for careers in public policy.\nRivlin said she believes public policy schools like SPEA must take the initiative in reshaping the structure of political discourse.\n"I nominate the public policy schools to organize a high profile, visible national campaign to restore civil discourse and turn partisan posturing into dialogue," she said.\nBut she noted it would not be easy, saying that it would take a "serious commitment" of University officials, students and faculty to bring about any serious change.\nA longtime opponent of conservative fiscal policy, Rivlin criticized President Bush's tax cuts in her 2004 book "Restoring Fiscal Sanity."\nRivlin was vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1996 to 1999. She worked closely with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who will retire in January after more than 18 years in the position.\n"He's sort of become a mythic figure," Rivlin said of the aging chairman. The President has nominated Ben Bernanke, a senior White House advisor, to the position. Rivlin said she is happy with the nomination.\nA graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Rivlin studied economics, and even took an economics course at IU one summer. Her father, an IU physics professor, developed his department's first cyclotron.\nRivlin grew up on east 10th street and is visiting Bloomington for her high school reunion.