China is also courting trouble.  Recently  in the name of censoring pornography  China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1.  Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy.  Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate.  You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad. 

We should be taking advantage.  Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here.  They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant.  The world’s best brains are on sale.  Let’s buy more! 

Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American. 

We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster.  As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.” 

Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America.  Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler. 

Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page.  Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters.  Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.