Engage the BRICs
Suggestion for all Republicans running for the White House: Start talking about the BRICs — the big, rapidly growing, emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China. That’s where the future is happening, and if we want the future to return to America, we ought to pay attention to what they’re doing in places like Beijing and Mumbai. We should also bear in mind that closed or even partially closed political systems — for example, those in China and Russia — will have a much harder time, in the long term, sustaining their growth. Americans are inclined to think that we’re always on the verge of being eclipsed by someone else. In the eighties, it was the Japanese; today, it’s the Chinese. Better to engage than to fear. Better to embrace the dynamism of the BRICs than to worry about what comes next.
Two preliminary proposals:
1. Eliminate, or dramatically scale back, visa restrictions for all BRIC citizens with a graduate degree. Russia, for example, is teeming with engineers, physicists, computer programmers, biochemists and mathematicians who make, at best, a few hundred dollars each month. These people would be a tremendous boon to the United States. But not just the United States. The federal government spends millions of dollars every year, via the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, trying to make places like Russia more democratic. The best way to make regimes democratize is to force them to compete for their human capital. Right now, Russia doesn’t have to compete for its human capital because, for the most part, it’s trapped in Russia.
2. Slash the U.S. corporate tax rate in half, from 35 percent to 17.5 percent. We can debate all day long the justice and desirability of a more progressive or regressive tax code, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to redistribute some of the wealth (and no, Governor Perry, Social Security should not be abolished), but this much should (by now) be indisputable: Corporations will go wherever they have the easiest time making money, i.e., creating jobs. One of the great advantages that corporations, big and small, working in BRIC countries enjoy is the “slipperiness” of those systems. Corruption and a certain vagueness when it comes to the commercial-legal regulatory regime make for a much more energetic and fast-moving climate. Things happen, and fast, because there are no rules, or the rules are poorly enforced. We should be happy that bribe-taking is not nearly as prevalent in the United States as in the BRICs, but we should be very troubled by the relative cumbersomeness of doing business here. Creating things — widgets, jobs, capital, whatever — should be easier in America. We can start with our corporate-tax rate.
