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The pandemic has caused a steep economic decline in the U.S. But many experts worried we were already in trouble before the coronavirus because of the rise of economic powerhouses with huge populations, such as China and India. That has also been a concern of Matthew Yglesias who has a radical solution for our economic woes: take the current U.S. population and triple it in the decades to come.

Yglesias, the co-founder of Vox and the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger,” walks us through his progressive proposals, which he argues are far from fantastical. 

Three Takeaways:

• President Donald Trump may have urged his supporters to "Make America Great Again,” but Yglesias’ ideas for sustaining America’s dominance on the world stage are pretty different from the President’s. Instead of limiting immigration, as the Trump administration has, Yglesias believes we should, “recruit as many smart, skilled immigrants to our shores as we possibly can.” He also supports reform efforts that would provide millions of undocumented immigrants with a pathway to obtaining legal status.
• Besides welcoming in vastly more immigrants, Yglesias also calls for family-friendly government policies which he says would encourage Americans to have more children. For example, he points to the American Family Act, supported by Democrats, which proposes a new tax credit that would give families with children under the age of 6, $300 a month per child and also increase the credit for children under 17. 
• Yglesias says we should be especially worried about China’s growing economic influence and purchasing power, because the Communist country’s values and standards do not align with our own. He points to the impact that Chinese censors have had on the global content of movies produced by Hollywood, as one example.

More Reading:

• Even before the pandemic hit, birth rates in the U.S. had reached historic lows. Listen to our interview with economist Melissa Kearney, who predicts there could be up to half a million fewer American births next year because of the financial impact of COVID-19. 
• The experience of the 1980 Mariel boatlift is often used by those who want to restrict immigration to the U.S. but, according to this op-ed in Time Magazine, “its real history is more complicated.”
• Check out these latest findings from the Pew Research Center about the U.S. immigrant population.