too big, too small or just the right size? i'll talk to two of the world's foremost economists, larry summers and paul krugman. then, what is the quad? president biden met with the leader of japan, india and australia, a new block focused on deterring china. will it work? i'll talk to an expert. and the biotech revolution brought us to the covid 19 vaccines more swiftly than anyone imagined possible. it is given us the ability to edit genes to cure diseases and the innovations on the horizon are even more extraordinary. i will ask walter isaacson to describe what is next. but first, here is my take. within hours of being inaugurated, president biden began to roll back donald trump's most egregious immigration policies including the so-called muslim ban which biden called a stain on our national conscience. he signed six actions geared toward a more humane and generous policy and outlined a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship for more than 10 million undocumented migrants living and working in america. the biden administration has begun the work of reversing literally hundreds of other rules, regulation and fees put in place by trump all designed to make it harder for foreigners at every stage of the process, from tourists to immigrants, to enter or stay in the united states. unfortunately, all these vital efforts could be undermined by decisions that are producing a new immigration crisis on america's southern border. in recent years, hundreds of thousands of central americans have tried to enter the united states to ask for asylum. the trump administration initially used cruel tactics including separating children from parents and putting them in cages. but eventually arrived at a practical policy. it stopped taking in asylum-seekers at the so southern border, forcing them to wait in mexico for cases to be resolved and negotiated agreements to send people back to central america to seek asylum in a neighboring country rather than in the united states. now biden has overturned those policies and that combined with expectations of a more generous approach to immigration have contributed to the surge of migrants. nearly 180,000 people have arrived at the southern border or tried to cross illegally in 2021. more than double as many as in the first two months of 2020. these numbers will increase as it gets warmer. officials at the border are already overwhelmed. there has been a mueller reportly large surge of unaccompanied children, probably the result of a biden decision to create an exception to them to a trump rule barring migrants on health grounds. as of friday, they were scrambling to find places to house some 4,000 children languishing at border patrol stations anlds looking at an airfield and an army base, the truth is the asylum system is out of control. the concept of asylum dates to the years after world war ii when the united states created a separate path to legal status for those who feared religious, ethnic or political persecution. a noble idea born in the shadow of america's refusal to take in the jews in the 1930s. it was used sparing. applying to cases of extreme discrimination. but the vast majority of people entering the southern border are traditional immigrants fleeing poverty and violence. this is a sad situation, but it does not justify giving them special consideration above others around the world who seek to come to the united states for similar reasons but go through the normal process. trump already smells blood. having been elected in 2016 in some large measure because of fears about the illegal immigration, he's already attacking biden on this issue. it dominated his speech at cpac last month, where he said with his usual hyperbole -- >> joe biden has triggered a mass of flood of illegal immigration into our country the likes of which we have never seen before. >> last week he claimed many people were criminals and covid carriers. the tragedy is that is this border crisis and trump's demagoguery around it could hinder biden's efforts to achieve reform of the whole system. asylum-seekers make up a small minority of immigrants. there is a much larger group that -- those that want to reunite with families. these immigrants and would-be immigrants now face a hostile environment than at any point since the united states ended quotas in 1965. you could see it in the numbers with pandemic restrictions on top of everything else, immigration to the united states has plunged to levels not seen in four decades. some of the world's best and brightest are now choosing to good to more hospitalal countries, from canada to britain to australia. without immigration, the united states fey faces a dire demographic future. it means fewer people and fewer young people which would mean less growth, less dynamism and less opportunity everyone. that is the real immigration crisis, not the one at the southern border. go to cnn.com/fareed for a link to my column this week. and let's get started. ♪ >> i believe and i believe most people do as well, this historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation, working people, middle class folks, people of both of the country a fighting chance. >> reporter: that was prieb on thursday just before signing the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill into law. it was passed, it should be noted, without a single republican vote despite shows polls that it had support of around two-thirds of all americans. to make sense of it all are two of the world's mest distinguished economist, paul krugman is now a columnist for "the new york times," larry summers was treasury secretary under president clinton and director of national economic council under president obama. paul, let me ask you, what is the headline here of how we would describe this bill? how do you think it will go down in history? what i'm struck about it i think in my adult lifetime this is the first major fiscal policy where the benefits go primarily to the poor. >> yeah. this is definitely -- i can't think of anything like this. maybe if you have to go back to the new deal to see anything like this. you certainly don't see -- we don't have a fiscal expansion on this scale, a spending expansion on this scale, you have to go back to the korean war to find anything about that magnitude and that was during a war and this is concentrated into the bottom half and the bottom 20% of the income distribution. >> larry, you have dealt with the politics of this kind of thing, both under the obama and the clinton years and i'm thinking the obama stimulus which got not a single republican vote. what do you think the calculus of republicans is here? two-thirds of the country seems to approve it. what is going on? >> i'm not going to try to speak for republicans, fareed. look, there is a historic achievement in reducing child poverty in this fiscal stimulus. it is cost is about 7% of the total. i think the concern about this bill is that its sheer scale, the economy needs a lot of energy but if you put too much water in the bathtub, it starts to overflow. as i look at this bill, we're just trying to pour too much water in and i wish it were actually true that even a third of the money was going to people who were in poverty. most of it is not. most of it is going to the middle of the population and it is going in one shot transfers, not in things that are ultimately going to build and strengthen the economy. and that is why as much as i admire the effort and as i much as i admire the progress against poverty, i am worried that the sheer scale is going to crowd out our doing what we need to do to compete with china, to build back better the president's principal aspiration and i'm worried this will lead us to difficulty down the road as inflation picks up and the fed has to respond. >> paul, you you've described this as a different from a stimulus, more like war-time spending. and i was wondering how you would respond to that, which is that it was the war-time spending of the vietnam war that conventional wisdom holds that led to the runaway inflation of the 1970s. >> yeah. first of all, there were a lot of other things that happened in -- to lead to that inflation. and it also took many years of sustained irresponsible policy to get us to the stagnation of the '70s which we think we remember but more is a myth than analogy. a korean war was a brief huge expansion of spending. which did lead to a fair bit of inflation for one year. and but not to sustained inflation. so it wasn't actually, it turned out to not to be a big problem and it is not nearly on that scale. so far what it is worth, there is a lot of other people who are actually in the business of making forecasts who think that this is a -- this is a big bill. and there is a lot of stim us. even if it is mostly about stimulus but it will not cause a massive overheating. i could be wrong and larry could be right but the consensus view is not one that is raising alarm bells about the scale of this bill. >> and larry -- >> i'm not so sure, paul. first of all, interest rates in the first quarter of this year current trends continue will have risen by more than the first quarter of any year in the last century except for 1980. so markets are sending a pretty clear signal of concern. second, you cut things off in the fourth quarter. if we have an economy that is rapidly growing and is above potential, the inflation could well materialize in 2022. third, look at the -- look carefully at the magnitude of this stimulus. we're talking about something that is on the order of 14% of gdp, and people like you, people like me, most economists until very recently thought that when you have a dollar of stimulus, it added about a dollar or more to gdp, and if that works out, any time in the next two or three years, we're going to have a problem which is what markets are recognizing. >> so paul, let me ask you just about the size. because it is not just this -- this bill, right? if you add the two previous bills passed under the trump administration we're at 30% of gdp. is there some point at which you would get worried? >> i'm not going say -- look, if this is designed as a stimulus, designed to get maximum bang for buck then we would be getting numbers that might be a concern. but it wasn't. and my take on it is that biden is going to be in a position to say, hey, look, we got a blooming economy, a bunch of you have gotten checks, government could do lots of good and that he'll be in a strong political position to do what needs to be done to invest in the future. larry's view is it is going to be inflation taking off, oh, my god, big government is a villain, biden is the rein cornation of jimmy carter who is still alive and that is the problem. of course, larry could be right. but that is not what my numbers say is likely to happen. it is not what the private forecasters think are going to happen. and we'll just -- unfortunately, pretty much, this is a done deal. so now we're just going to see what really actually happens. >> next on gps, does this new role represent the most important piece of domestic policy legislation since the new deal? or the war on poverty? the debate continues when we come back. 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>> i don't think -- think we've used up a lot of space and particularly economic space on this bill. it just defied belief that you could commit $2 trillion to a program that contains no public investment and not have less capacity to put -- for public investment than if you have not made a commitment of that magnitude. i just don't find it plausible. and i think we're taking very substantial risks. it would have been much better to have talked about large sums like this, but to have talked about things that would help us compete with the chinese, that would talk about things that would help us prepare children for the 21st century, that would help us save the planet rather than what we've done here which is make transfer payments in virtually every direction. and, yes, when we do that to the poorest people, that is exactly right. but some of the transfer payments we've made i think are quite misguided. for example, i believe strongly in unemployment insurance, but i do not believe in a program where the majority of unemployment insurance recipients are getting considerably more money than they got when they were working. i think full insurance is enough, insurance past that point is too much. and that in a way is emblematic of why i'm concerned about what this program is going to do to the economy. >> paul, i wanted to ask you, there was an interesting column by steve prostein, "the washington post" economic columnist, i think it was his final column and he said that he -- i think he's a pretty straightforward liberal but he said i worry a lot about a new liberal orthodoxy that says deficits don't matter, debt doesn't matter, you can borrow as much as you want, spending always pays for itself and i think he was suggesting it as m mirror image view that you've criticized of republicans, the tax cuts pay for themselves. can one just borrow unendingly, are you not worried? >> no. is it possible to have a spending program that is too big. are the things that larry is worried might happen as a result of this plan, are those things that can happen? definitely. if i'm okay with $1.9 trillion but if someone had come along and said let's do $4 trillion this year, then i would say, oh, that is inflationary. that is too far. but the really important thing i think, if we're trying to think about this future, is that this is a short-term, this is a crisis response. it is a rescue plan. it is very front-loaded. >> larry, you get the final word. >> here is the irony fareed. there is a lot that is good in this program. but i think it is advocates try to have it both ways. on the one hand, when a concern about inflation is raised, it explained that it is emotionally temporary and transient and just a relief program and really just a special one-year thing. on the other hand, most of the time they're explaining how it is the most fundamental revolution in american policy since the new deal and you can't really have it both ways. you can either have long-term transformation, or you could have temporary action. and what i would have liked to see more is a program of this scale or larger that was paid for and was focused on investment and contained the necessary relief. this program goes vastly beyond, as my unemployment insurance example illustrates, what was necessary to provide relief and it doesn't, with the exception of the childcare anti-poverty thing which is very important, it doesn't really do much that either represents a revolution in social investment or in social policy, or revolutionary investment in the future of our country. and i think that is something that we're going to look back on and regret. not that we did something. but that we were more careful and calibrated in the design of what we did. >> we are going to have to leave it at that and obviously we'll watch what happens and perhaps have the two of you back to do a midterm analysis. thank you very much. paul krugman and larry summers. >> thank you. next on "gps", china is worried president biden might be forming a exclusive clique with the leaders of three nations he met with on friday. what is all this about? 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