Gina Raimondo shares economic insights during talk at Brown

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Gina Raimondo, who served as the 40th U.S. secretary of commerce from 2021 to 2025 and Rhode Island's governor from 2015 to 2021, spoke at Brown's Watson School of International and Public Affairs about today's most pressing economic challenges, covering everything from inflation to manufacturing to how AI is affecting jobs.

Raimondo, a senior fellow at the Watson School for 2026-27, engaged in an Oct. 26 conversation with Watson School Dean John Friedman, a professor of economics, and answered questions from students. The event, titled "A New Playbook for Economic Growth," was part of the school's Dean's Fireside Chats series.

"These chats are an opportunity to have really open and substantive conversations about issues that are central to our economy and our country, and they link to the Watson School mission of promoting a just, peaceful and prosperous world," Friedman said.

The following are excerpts of Raimondo's remarks from the event.

On the development of the data centers powering AI:

I think we want to lead the world in AI - it's a great thing that we lead the world in AI [and] we don't want to lose that spot. And you need data centers to do all the computation, and you don't want those data centers in other countries… That's bad for our national security. That being said, these companies don't need tax breaks to build these… These are like the richest companies ever on the planet Earth. And so, I think the thing is, they should pay their way. They should not get a tax abatement. They should generate and pay for their own electricity and energy. They should probably make investments in these communities above and beyond what they're doing.

On tariffs:

Tariffs are nothing but inflationary, and … once tariffs are put on, it's very hard to take them off. I spent hours with President Biden trying to get him to get rid of the Trump tariffs from the first term, and I couldn't get it done. Mostly because no president wants to be the president that lets down American workers, so I wouldn't dismiss that. I think tariffs are here to stay.

On the national debt:

I think it's going to take a full-blown debt crisis, which we're inching towards, to have any responsible action in Congress. And I actually think Europe will go first, and then the U.S… I think we're hurtling towards a global, massive debt crisis, and if that happens, then Congress will wake up and fix it. When I was treasurer, I fixed Rhode Island's public pension system, which is extremely similar to this problem. The actual solutions aren't the hard part. I could have written down in three days, working with the actuary, the solution to how to fix the pension. Same thing for the national debt. But you have to touch Social Security, you have to touch Medicare, you have to touch taxes, you have to touch these third rails, which is why I don't think anything will happen until we're in full-blown crisis.

On capitalism:

I am a capitalist. There has been no other form of economy that has been shown to work and be sustained as well as capitalism. When I was the governor, I was obsessed with growth. Rhode Island's economy wasn't growing. Growth forgives a lot of sins. If you grow the pie, everyone's piece is a little bit bigger if it's broadly shared. But if you have a situation where you have people buying a $100 million home to knock it down and start over, and millions of people working 40, 50 hours a week and in poverty, that's not broad-based growth. That's not what sustains democracy. That's capitalism that's not working and needs to be reformed.

On childcare policy:

The average family in America with young children pays more a month for childcare than on their mortgage. When I was recruiting TSMC, which is a Taiwanese semiconductor company, to come to America, they were asking about childcare because they needed to hire thousands of workers, and some, obviously, had to be women. I lobbied to have a childcare center on campus, and I wasn't that successful because a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill said it was social policy. The Taiwanese businesspeople thought it was crazy that we wouldn't just have a childcare center on the campus.

On her advice for Providence's next mayor:

Here's my strongest piece of advice for whoever is the mayor elect. Don't use your position as mayor of Providence to advocate for national policy. Don't use your notoriety in this position to propel yourself to any kind of national fame to advocate for the [Democratic Socialists of America] agenda. Your job as mayor is to keep the streets safe, to keep the schools high quality, to fix the roads, to get the trash picked up.

On her new project, RAISE US :

I launched a new nonpartisan nonprofit. It's called RAISE US, and our mission is to help America get through to an AI economy without a period of high unemployment… If every American company pursues short-term profit and disperses people because of AI, we're going to wind up with very high, very destabilizing unemployment, and we're going to be in a world of hurt as a country… We're working with governors, bipartisan, all over the country, [and] companies. I've raised a quarter of a billion dollars, including from companies, and we're saying, let's try new things - new forms of unemployment insurance, new forms of safety net to get a worker from A to B, new forms of job training, apprenticeship, new kinds of incentives for companies, so they think about redeploying instead of just firing people. My view is nobody has the answer, including me. But we have to try some things, and experimentation will lead to some answers… Brown has been a great collaborator. We're going to pilot some stuff, measure what works, which [the Watson School is] helping us with, and then scale.

On U.S. reliance on global supply chains:

If the president of China woke up tomorrow and said, "I don't want to sell any more penicillin in America," there would be no more penicillin in America in about a week. If he said, "No more AI semiconductor chips are going to be sold to America," there would be no more AI. There would be no more data centers… If I went down the list of all of the critical components and tools that the United States military uses and told you how many are made exclusively in China, you would be shocked, I think, and dismayed.

There were a lot of externalities that we didn't think about, including national security, including Americans losing their jobs, and so we put our blinders on, totally obsessed with efficiency, lower costs, higher profits. And … today [we are] extremely vulnerable because we're overly reliant on these countries … for critical things.

When I said capitalism as it's playing out in America isn't working for a lot of people and needs to be reformed, I'm not necessarily sure policymakers intended for these extreme outcomes that we're now seeing. It makes sense to incentivize capital investment, right? … But if you only look at that, you leave out other things that really matter to have a healthy, prosperous country, like broad-based economic growth, like national security.