The U.S. needs to do more than just 'clamp down' on China-owned TikTok: '1 Billion Americans' Author

‘1 Billion Americans’ author Matthew Yglesias joins Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi and Alexis Christoforous to discuss how the U.S. can rise economically and take on China's rivaling power.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: All right, while the US grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, the nation still has many tasks at hand it needs to address. Top of mind, climate change and China's rising global influence. Now, in a new book out today, titled "One Billion Americans," the author makes his case for helping America prosper while, at the same time, tripling its population.

Joining us now is the author of "One Billion Americans" and co-founder of Vox, Matthew Yglesias. Matthew, good to see you this morning. This is a big call to go from one-- go to one billion, potentially, from what, a little over 300 million now. How-- what changes would that cause in society?

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: You know, it would, I think, be a lot of change, mostly for the better. We have right now an incredible number of cities across the Midwest, and to an extent in the Northeast as well, that have depopulated over the past several generations-- Detroit, Saint Louis, Cleveland, smaller ones, Binghamton, Utica, Rome, and we could revive those places.

Most rural counties in the United States are shrinking right now. They're aging and they are losing workers. And if we return to a sort of a politics of growth, a policy of growth, we can have a more prosperous, more dynamic society. And we can also be looking forward to winning international competition with China in the military space, but also in the economic space.

Right now, companies all around the world, they need that China market. And it means that if Chinese censors want to say what we can put in our movies, they want to say what our basketball coaches can say, they're able to dictate that. And if America can recapture its leadership position, we can have an economy that's thriving, but that's also living our values.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFORUS: But Matt, there's already so many resources that are strained right now, when you think about the health care system, the country's aging infrastructure. I mean, adding more people to the mix, to me, seems a little absurd.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: (LAUGHING) Well, in a lot of ways, what's straining our health care system is the aging of the population. It's not the number of people, but it's our demographic shape. So one thing we can do, encourage people to have more children. This is a lot of the book. Do more on the child care front, do more in terms of a child allowance, bring more immigrants in. We should be bringing immigrant medical professionals in really, really easily. We should be creating a more sustainable population pyramid where these things can work.

Infrastructure, some places-- New York City, the infrastructure is old. It's a little bit overburdened. It needs investment, things like that. We've got lots of other places, though-- Saint Louis area, the thing that is taxing the infrastructure there is that they don't have the population to support it. Old pension obligations are soaking up all of the money. And if you can bring people back in, you make it easier to sustain these things.

BRIAN SOZZI: Matt, what does it mean to the US economy over the next decade? The Chinese population is already at one billion, and it's going to grow even more. What type of influence will that have on our economy?

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Well, in some ways, trade with China has been very beneficial to the United States. We've grown more integrated. But there was this great hope in the 1990s that economic integration would lead to exporting our politics to China. The idea was they were going to get on the internet, they were going to use computers, freedom would blossom. That obviously hasn't happened. Technology has become a powerful tool for oppression there, and they are in fact exporting their values because our companies want access to that market.

Right now, the Trump administration is trying to take a new approach. We're going to clamp down on their video meme apps. It's a big story in the business world. But that's not going to get it done. I mean, we need to actually be the leader. We need to be the place that companies want to be. That way, our values, our system can set the pace for the whole world rather than letting China.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFORUS: Now how realistic is it that we can get to a billion people in this country? Because if you look at the numbers, the world's population is expected to actually start shrinking in the next 45 years. And you talk about immigration, people bringing-- bringing people into this country. But how do you convince people to have children or to have more children? I mean, do we need an overhaul of health care, and do we need universal paid maternity leave, maybe, as an incentive to do that?

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: We absolutely do. So right now, Americans tell surveyors they'd like to have 2.5, 2.6 children on average. That's been steady since about 1980. But the number of kids people actually have keeps shrinking. It's gone from 2.5 to 1.81, 1.7. It's going to shrink even more in this pandemic. People look at how the school system has stopped functioning. And it's a horrible burden on families.

And we need to address that. So that means paid parental leave. It means the child allowance, just money, flexible money. It means investments in daycare. It means thinking about what we do during the summertime, when-- affluent families are OK. They find some camps, things like that. Poor families really struggle. But we can bring those numbers up by investing in children, investing in the future. It's a big deal. It would be a large change.

But it's something that's in line with our values. I mean, we know that zero days of paid maternity leave is not the right number. Nobody thinks that. And yet, that's where we are as a country. And we need to move forward on these things. We need to take it seriously. Progressives like to talk about this stuff. They're sort of touchy-feely, help people out. But conservatives, you think about family values. You think about what does that really mean? And it has to mean doing things to take care of children and to make it possible to have and raise families

BRIAN SOZZI: Matt, you mentioned video memes apps-- video memes apps a while ago. I immediately thought of TikTok here. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think TikTok represents a national security risk?

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: I mean, I think it's reasonable. There's a black box algorithm that powers TikTok. And it's a company that is very heavily influenced by the Chinese government. If you think back to the Cold War days-- three television networks, competition with the Soviet Union-- we wouldn't have let Soviet company own an American broadcast television network. It just wouldn't have happened. So it's a reasonable thing to be concerned about.

At the same time, if we are worried about the whole world and the idea of Chinese propaganda sort of permeating it, we are not going to be able to address that just by cutting ourselves off from Chinese companies and Chinese things. We need to be in the Indian market. We need to be in Africa. We need to be in Latin America. And that means we need our domestic market to support these things, as it traditionally has.

Google, Facebook, all of those things were grown here at home. And that's, in part-- I mean, it's a culture of innovation. We have a lot of strengths. But it's also-- this is just a really big country. This is where entrepreneurs want to take their products. And we need to secure that status for the future.