Contributor

Isabel Sawhill, Senior fellow, Brookings Institution

Biography provided by participant

Isabel V. Sawhill is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. She serves as director of the Budgeting for National Priorities project and co-director of the Center on Children and Families. She holds the Cabot Family Chair. She served as Vice President and Director of the Economic Studies program from 2003 to 2006. Prior to joining Brookings, Sawhill was a senior fellow at The Urban Institute. She also served as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995, where her responsibilities included all of the human resource programs of the federal government, accounting for one third of the federal budget.

In addition, she has authored or edited numerous books and articles including Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005: Meeting the Long-Run Challenge and Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget, both with Alice Rivlin; One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America's Children; Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net; Updating America's Social Contract: Economic Growth and Opportunity in the New Century; Getting Ahead: Economic and Social Mobility in America; and Challenge to Leadership: Economic and Social Issues for the Next Decade. Her research has spanned a wide array of economic and social issues, including fiscal policy, economic growth, poverty and inequality, welfare reform, the well-being of children, and changes in the family.

Sawhill helped to found, and now serves as President of the board of, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a nonprofit organization devoted to reducing teen pregnancy in the United States. She has been a Visiting Professor at Georgetown Law School, Director of the National Commission for Employment Policy, and President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She also serves on a number of boards. She attended Wellesley College and received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1968.

Recent Responses

October 4, 2010 02:35 PM

RE: How Would You Steer Fed On Quantitative Easing?

Quantitative Easing Is Only Tool Left I am very much in agreement with Jeffrey Frankel. The risks of a double-dip or a prolonged period of stagnation are uncomfortably high since there is no sector that is adding much to demand and one sector – federal and state government – that is subtracting from that demand. Ideally, we should have some additional fiscal stimulus combined with steps to restrain the longer term accumulation of debt, but our politics doesn’t seem to make that feasible. Under these circumstances, the Fed has no choice but to try some additional quantitative easing. Whether… Read more

August 30, 2010 12:17 PM

RE: Fed Option: Buying More Debt

Don't Leave it to the Fed I think too great a burden is being put on monetary policy to get us out of the woods. The options discussed by Bernanke at Jackson Hole all sound reasonable to me but are weak reeds on which to prevent a long period of slow growth or a double dip. I don’t think anyone should be worrying about inflation right now; and whatever risks are built into the need to eventually unload these assets on the Fed’s balance sheet, they are small compared to the risks of allowing the economy to stagnate or… Read more

April 26, 2010 01:57 PM

RE: VAT Or Not?

Use VAT for Tax Cuts Now A VAT has a lot to recommend it. It is a relatively efficient way of raising revenue, producing far fewer distortions than the current income tax. Moreover, by encouraging saving and productivity, it is exactly what the nation needs to raise future standards of living. A 10 percent broad-based VAT could produce in the neighborhood of $500 billion a year by 2012 according to the Brookings-Urban Tax Policy Center. In my view, the way to make this politically palatable while advancing other policy goals is to use some of the revenues to… Read more

March 22, 2010 12:26 PM

RE: Maestro Looks Back

Do Bankers Pay the Rent? Greenspan argues that monetary policy didn’t contribute significantly to the housing bubble; he lays most of the blame on a glut of global saving that lowered interest rates worldwide. He also argues that if the Fed had tightened more in response to “irrational exuberance” it would have damaged the real economy at a time when overall inflation was under control. He provides some empirical evidence to support these arguments but I still find it hard to believe that the fed funds rate didn’t affect longer-term rates, including ARMs, and thus the housing market. But he… Read more

February 8, 2010 11:09 AM

RE: A Few Questions On Freezing Tax Expenditures

Target the Health Exclusion I think the spirit of Len Burman’s argument in his Washington Post oped on tax expenditures is exactly right. Tax expenditures are just a form of back door spending. Although they may be used to favor certain types of spending, they also distort decision-making and lose a ton of revenue – over $1 trillion a year. They also tend to provide the biggest benefits to those in the highest brackets, tilting the tax structure in favor of the most affluent. Yet the public is only dimly aware of these key facts. Given the current political impasse… Read more

December 1, 2009 02:32 PM

RE: Obama And The Deficit

The Administration will likely propose to reduce the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2016 in its next budget. This goal is a far cry from the older norm of trying to balance the budget and shows how serioulsly out of balance the budget is and how much we have had to compromise our fiscal goals as a result. Can the Administration achieve even this limited goal? I think not. They may find a way to achieve it on paper but if the economy remains as depressed as most economists believe it will over the next 5 years, the big changes in spending or revenues that would be… Read more

November 2, 2009 04:55 PM

RE: A BRAC For The Budget

I applaud the 10 Senators who are calling for a bipartisan commission on the budget. Too bad there are no Republicans in the group so far but perhaps that will change. And too bad some other Democrats, such as Pelosi, are also opposed. In both cases, they are ducking their responsibilities unless they come up with specific proposals to reduce long-term projected deficits – which is not happening and is not likely to happen any time soon. In the meantime, we are courting all kinds of trouble from slower growth, to an economic crisis, along with reduced flexibility to… Read more