David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the good news is we have only until 10:00. The bad news is I am going to use every second of it. Let's race through this because originally, I think I was going to go almost an hour. Maybe this is mercy. I want to walk through just a couple of concepts here. One, we are going to talk about one of my intense frustrations. I have talked about this for a decade or more. Please, how do I get my brothers and sisters on the left and those on the right to understand we have turned the whole discussion of healthcare into financial engineering? Work with me on this. Many of us know ACA as ObamaCare. It is a financing bill. It has community rating in it, so the guaranteed access, but it is a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill. It just had a little better actuarial modeling in it. Medicare for all is a financing bill. We don't have the discussion about what we pay, the waste, the fraud, the adoption of technology, the adoption of cures, the adoption of how we deliver, the adoption of making us autonomous because we can wear our medical lab on our body now. I wear one of the data rings, and I experimented with a Dexcom in the last couple of weeks. Instead, we are going to beat each other up around here. The Democrats are going to try to make a political issue out of it. We are going to basically fumble because we had trouble explaining that we have turned healthcare into financing. They want to hand out billions and billions of dollars more to insurance companies to buy down rates. Let's actually walk through some points I want to make. This is the first one. I desperately hope this number evens out as we go through the rest of the year. Our model right now says in the first quarter of this fiscal year-- remember, October 1, we began the 2026 fiscal year. For every dollar we are taking in tax collections, Mr. Speaker, we are spending $1.62. The original model was, every $1 in, we would spend $1.42 or $1.43. Our spending is up. What is driving that spending up? It is the refinancing of our debt at higher interest rates, because we had all that debt we sold a few years ago at very low interest rates. The fact of the matter is healthcare costs keep going up. The stupid discussion we are going to have here is a financing debate--how much more subsidies should we hand out--and not a discussion of what we are going to do to change the price of healthcare. Let's actually take a quick run through this. I am going to try to explain a couple of basic things about the ACA. Most of us know it as ObamaCare. This chart is hard to read from a distance. ACA goes into effect. I want us to step all the way back out to where we are here when the enhanced subsidies--these are subsidies on top of subsidies--is $40 billion. Over here, the basic subsidies, the growth of the subsidies since the pandemic, is another $75 billion. On top of the base subsidies, they are $80 billion. This is only 7 percent of the healthcare market. Let's take a look at that. This is so hard for people to understand. I was listening to one of my Democrat colleagues speak the other day. It was a complete distortion field of the truth and what was going on out there. They say all the healthcare is going to go up this much. Are they willing to admit they screwed up? They created an absolutely distorted model. By screwing up all the incentives, everyone's healthcare costs went up, even though the ACA, ObamaCare, is only this little wedge here. It is 7 percent of the healthcare population. The vast majority of the other population gets it through their employer, veterans, Medicare, and Medicaid. Then I need my colleagues to see this other wedge there. That is the portion that is not getting subsidies from taxpayers. The rest of this right here is getting subsidized. I will show a chart in a moment where 41 percent of this population that is being subsidized in the ACA had no premium at all. You as a taxpayers bought their healthcare. Is that really what the Democrats promised us? Does anyone remember President Obama saying that healthcare premiums will be lowered by $2,500? Folks will get to keep their doctors. Should we hold the left to their own standards? As conservatives, we need to get off our heinies and start explaining that if we continue this model, we are all screwed. We need to step up and say we can do this better. We have technology where we can lower premiums rather dramatically. I have been coming behind this microphone for a decade. I will try to go fast enough to touch on it. I did this board the other day. I just need to show you this is what they call an economic scoring of the enhanced premium tax credits, which is basically the subsidies on top of the subsidies. Functionally, only 38 percent of that $40 billion is actually going to cover actual insurance where people are going to use it. The vast majority of it just disappears. It either doesn't get used, or it may have disappeared with the brokers or the insurance companies. Something is horribly wrong in this money. Yet, when we actually start to look at the studies and articles, here is the GAO report about the ACA. It has a simple line here. ``Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Preliminary Results from Ongoing Review Suggest Fraud Risks in the Advance Premium Tax Credit Persist.'' Then you read it, Mr. Speaker, and it is page after page after page of different types of fraud. People have been signed up and had no idea. Brokers are going to prison right now because they have been signing up folks in the system. ``ObamaCare Is a Mecca for Fraud,'' The Wall Street Journal from just a couple days ago. ``Open Enrollment is Healthcare's Most Expensive Lie.'' How many more studies do we need to explain that you are being defrauded, Mr. Speaker? If this were helping people be healthier, then bless it, but, instead, the Democrats are terrified to tell the truth because the model they built is only 7 percent of the population. Almost one-half of that population is getting the healthcare for free, and it has created a distortion field of costs. I will give you a simple test, Mr. Speaker. Ask yourself, go back 10, 15 years ago. Let's go do 10 years ago when the ACA goes into effect. Mr. Speaker, how much have your healthcare costs, your insurance costs, changed? Remember, Mr. Speaker, insurance is different from healthcare. How much have your costs changed? Did they meet the promise that was given to you: We are going to make things more affordable. It is not the Affordable Care Act, and that is the reality of the math. So let's continue to walk through parts of this. The number of subsidized zero claims is fascinating. The enhanced subsidies that came out after COVID were only supposed to be 5 years. The Democrats voted for this. I don't think a single Republican did. It was their plan. This was Democrat policy, and now they are acting all uppity saying: Well, you Republicans need to fix our mistake. Almost 11 million who were part of that enhanced population never made a claim. We are now seeing studies, data mining, looking at a huge portion of these people had no idea they had been signed up. It is rampant fraud. Let's have a little more fun here. How many who were enrolled with these enhanced subsidies ended up having no skin in the game at all and who had no cost? Last year, 41 percent had no cost. You, as a taxpayer, Mr. Speaker, paid for their healthcare. This year we modeled it. It is going to be around 39 percent. Think about that, Mr. Speaker. Is that what you were promised? Is that what you were told? As we start to walk through this, 6.4 million people this year were improperly enrolled in subsidized ObamaCare plans costing taxpayers $27 billion a year. Understand, Mr. Speaker, what this means. It is rampant fraud. Mr. Speaker, how many members of the Democratic Party, the left, have you seen come behind the microphone saying: Hey, we really like subsidized healthcare, and we really like the level of fraud, so we don't want to change anything? Mr. Speaker, 96 percent of all applications representing fake enrollees were approved on the ObamaCare marketplace and received subsidies. Understand, Mr. Speaker, do you remember, we were promised: Well, the website is going to find fraud. It turns out that 96 percent of the fraudulent applications going in where someone is just bleeding the system got approved. The system doesn't stop the fraud. This is your money, Mr. Speaker. You are paying for fraudsters, and you are paying for brokers who are going to jail. Our debate here is: Well, we want to give another $40 billion to the fraudsters, but there will be a portion of that that will get some buydown on their healthcare costs. In 2023, one Social Security number--and I used this one just because it is so easy to understand. Remember, there is a system that is supposed to be mining this for fraud--one Social Security number was used and got 125 policies. How do we not catch that? We are really that bad at this. I am not going to make you go through that. Mr. Speaker, this chart is almost impossible to read. I am going to put it up on my website. What you need to understand is that these are the different ways people ended up in healthcare.gov or healthcare.care. The broker community goes and walks you through, but what we are discovering is that it has no actual checks for fraud. Have the Democrats stepped up and said: Okay, we know a huge portion of this cash we were handing out after COVID has been disappearing. It is not going to make our brothers and sisters healthier and provide them access to care. Are they willing--no, they are not--to actually fix this system so we are not bleeding American taxpayers? Now let's actually talk about some solutions. First, I need everyone to understand how perverse the system is. I have come behind the mike over and over and over and over and said: You have this technology that you can wear, this thing you can blow into, this thing here that can diagnose. This wearable here is actually more accurate than a human doctor. The Apple watch now is an FDA approved medical device for the heart, it should be allowed to prescribe. I need you to understand, Mr. Speaker, how perverse healthcare has become moneywise. This one is absurd but it is easy to understand. Here are a couple of articles: Paper industry, drugmakers spar over requirement to print prescription forms. Mr. Speaker, to show you how absurd the world has become, there was a simple attempt to say: We are just going to put your prescriptions on your phone so when you get them you can see all the side effects. Mr. Speaker, do you know that all that paper that is printed? We had lobbyists here and a U.S. Senator who blocked it saying: No, my paper industry. When the paper industry was able to stop a simple money-saving reform because apparently cutting down trees and turning it into paper pulp and printing it is more important than something that would have been dramatically more efficient. It has gotten that absurd. We attempted to basically run a piece of legislation because we did a study on how they duplicate MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds, and CTs there are. We have some numbers that look like it could be as much as $25 to $35 billion a year. Do something crazy. When you get your knee MRI, Mr. Speaker, put the data, the images on this so when you go to the next doctor a week later, it is right there: Doctor, let me hand it to you. Not get another scan. We already have lobbyists running around the building saying: No, the duplicate scans are part of our profit model. Where are my own brothers and sisters, particularly on the conservative side, saying: We want to unleash technology. We want to unleash doing this a better, faster, and cheaper way? For those Members who run around saying: PBM reform. Fine, but understand that every study we have right now is that PBM reform saves a fraction of a fraction of money, and it is already happening. Mr. Speaker, you will start to see companies now ditching the middleman and starting to sell directly. Go look up Civica RX for anyone who is in front of a computer. It is a co-op making drugs, selling insulin cheaper than our Federal Government-subsidized price. The fact of the matter is legalizing, encouraging, and incentivizing disruption in the market is where you get all sorts of different channels. If PBM is the best price, God bless them. If the drug company wants to sell directly to consumers, bless them. If a co-op wants to get together with your Medicaid system, the hospital system, or insurance company and they decide that we are going to manufacture our own and we are going to do it cheaper than the government-subsidized price, then bless them. There are ways to crash the price of healthcare. We have one right here. It is a discussion of AI. AI went through someone's medical bills and started realizing how much mis-billing there was in there. What if we did something very, very simple: Legalize one of my AI billing--we call it clean claims. Where here is the doctor's note, here is the insurance contract, they meet, and it gets paid. How much staffing and other things would you save but also how much more money? We have the technology. I just can't seem to get our brothers and sisters here willing to accept the bills. Here is another one that is incredibly optimistic. If you have a subscription to Wired magazine this week--Mr. Speaker, and it is something we in our office have been working on for years now--they call it a fentanyl vaccine. It is not technically a vaccine. It is a protein binder that attaches to the drug making it so it can't pass the brain-blood barrier. There is an entire article in Wired magazine. We did some research. I had trouble believing this number. I had one of my economists actually go back and double check it: $1.5 trillion in 2020 is the cost from fentanyl. There are solutions, Mr. Speaker. We need to step up and start understanding there is a moral way to approach the cost of healthcare, and it is not a bunch more taxpayer subsidies. It is actually lowering the price. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, to begin, I am going to yield to Chairwoman Foxx, and then we will have some fun with math.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the good news for the team here, I am not going to use the rest of the hour. I promise you I am not going to go that long. That is the only happy part of this I have for you because I thought I would actually use this week, I would come and show you all the creative ideas we have to take on debt and deficit and get wages growing. Mr. Speaker, we had an incident today where the Budget Committee was inviting Members to come in and sort of give our priorities. My comments to the Budget Committee--I brought them some work that has been done by the Joint Economic Committee economists. One of my only joys I have here anymore is I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D. economists. It turns out they are really good at math. I handed it over. I said that we need to tell the truth about math. I say this almost every week, and I beg for someone out there to hear it. Regarding debt and deficit, we are buried in debt, but it is primarily interest and demographics. I would love to blame the Democrats. They want to blame us. I have shown over and over that, as a country, 40 years ago, our fertility rates started to fall. I am going to show it on the board. This year, we functionally have double the number of 65-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, but we have the same number of 18-year-olds. It gets worse next year. The year after that, it gets worse. The year after, it gets worse. Yet, we built Social Security, Medicare, and these things on a model that had population growth. Mr. Speaker, I am only one-third through the paper. It is always dangerous to come behind the microphone and act like I know what the hell I am talking about. Let's actually walk through it. This was brought to me by some of my economists. The National Bureau of Economic Research has a number of folks from Cambridge. It is not Cambridge, England. It is Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are little institutions hanging around there such as Boston University, MIT, Harvard. Apparently, they are freaking good at math. The headline here should actually make us pucker up, ``Measuring What Matters: Why Italy May Be in Better Fiscal Shape than the U.S.'' Then, we go in here and start to understand the punch line of this paper. I will do my best to describe this. Please, someone out there, if there is anyone listening, it basically says that if we keep things the way they are--the current tax policy, spending policies, and pension policies--to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, and Federal employee retirement, it will require 104 percent of the income of the next generation. This isn't building bridges. This isn't modernizing the military. This is just the retirement system of the United States. Doing so requires levying lifetime net tax rates exceeding 104 percent. We need 104 percent of the next generation's income. It is not 100 percent of their income but 104 percent of their income to meet our pension healthcare obligations. Is that going to work? We have the research. How many people are going to come behind this microphone the rest of this year and the next year and actually say: Hey, we have a demographic problem. We have a spending problem. Let's actually walk through some of the things we do know. Every day, I send out something called the ``Daily Debt Monitor.'' It is a text message. We have a few thousand people who subscribe to it. We have probably a lot more people who don't want to get it. It tells us how much we have actually borrowed. Mr. Speaker, this always goes on. This is the conflict between the White House, Congress, and those of us who actually have some responsibility on spending, budget, economics. They say: David, you are scaring people by telling people how much we are borrowing so far this fiscal year. Think of this. We are what? I should have calculated this in my head before I got behind this microphone. What are we, 73 or 74 days into this fiscal year, Mr. Speaker? In that 70-some days, we have already borrowed $788 billion as of yesterday. If we stay at this rate, we will click off another $1 trillion of borrowing. From October 1, the beginning of this new fiscal year, to before Christmas, it is another $1 trillion of borrowing. Once again, the left will blame us. We will blame them. No one wants to have a conversation of how healthcare costs are exploding on us, and we refuse to do the things to lower healthcare costs. Instead, we will spend months around here debating subsidies because we have turned healthcare into financing and not the actual price of services and healthcare. Mr. Speaker, I need my colleagues to think about this. That $788 billion in that 73 days or so is like $148,000 a second in borrowing so far this fiscal year. If we average it out over 12 months--I did see the number. It is like $73,000 a second if we take the last 12 months. That is what we are borrowing. Don't worry. Be happy. Don't tell the truth. Yet, I have done presentation after presentation over these years, saying that in 8 years, 8 budget years, 30 percent of all of our tax receipts in this country go just to pay interest. If interest rates go up 1 percent, 45 percent of all tax receipts in 2034 or so go just to pay interest. Yet, the clown show--excuse me--the Congress will find shiny objects and will find things that will enrage them. They will go really hard on getting on cable television tomorrow night and say something inflammatory so the dopamine hits. Mr. Speaker, how often do we go home and have meetings with our constituents? There will be this one person who found something on the Internet, and it sounds like a conspiracy theory. I would argue the greatest conspiracy in our society is the unwillingness to tell the truth about basic math. Once again, let's go back. Let's go double down. I was told ``double down'' is actually saying when I have a good hand. Maybe it is not appropriate for this. Let's see what the report says. Assuming the current generation makes no contributions to reduce the U.S. fiscal gap--that basically means taxes, contributions, and incomes stay on the track they are on, and there is not suddenly much higher taxes or much further paydown--a newborn today, a new generation today, would pay a 104 percent net tax rate. Mr. Speaker, 104 percent of their income would be required just to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, Federal pensions, and railroad retirement pensions. It will not cover the rest of government. It will not cover a new building, a new bridge, the State Department, the FBI, or the military. It is just to cover our unfunded liabilities, Mr. Speaker. Where is the fiscal commission? Where is telling the truth? What will happen if we don't get our act together and adopt the technology, adopt the revolutions in healthcare, adopt the things that make our brothers and sisters healthier, adopt the things that actually raise wages, or adopt the policies on immigration that maximize growth instead of the importation of poverty? We are being handed reports that say, if you actually look at the underlying math: You are worse than Italy. When Greece has a better credit rating--Greece, right now, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States--I struggle. Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. I keep trying to find out ways to describe this. Yet, in this place we call Capitol Hill, I will walk into a room with some of the budget documents and say: Hey, I am here not only as a Ways and Means member, I am number four on Ways and Means; I am the Oversight chairman, so I chair the Joint Economic Committee, our economists have come up with some numbers we really should talk about. I look around and everyone is getting up and leaving because we don't want to know. So let's actually deal with a couple of other facts. Remember, Mr. Speaker, last summer, I think it was July 4 this last summer, we raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. We have already burnt $2 trillion. So we borrowed $2 trillion of that $5 trillion of authorization. We are doing a calculation by April 27, so in 1 year and a few months, we will hit the debt ceiling again. Remember, Mr. Speaker, the debt ceiling is just the authorization to borrow what you have already obligated. When you get the clown show that says: You can't raise the debt ceiling. Then I say, okay, I can do that. Tell me the portion of government you want me to cut, Mr. Speaker? Because this fiscal year, for every dollar of taxes we take in, we are going to spend $1.43. I am happy to work with you. Let's not raise the debt ceiling. Tell me the functioning half of government--because, Mr. Speaker, you have to understand the economic effects if you stop the spending. So, Mr. Speaker, what is the 50 percent of government you want me to cut tomorrow? Consider that only about one-quarter of U.S. spending is actually voted on by Congress. We vote on defense and what they call nondefense discretionary. The rest of the spending, the rest of the 75 percent of the spending is Social Security and it is Medicare. They are the things that we call entitlements. They are earned benefits that are on autopilot. Well, David, they stole my money. No, they didn't. We just stopped having children. The number is a couple of years out-of-date, but the average couple in America gets about $73,000 more from Social Security than they put in. It is a crap rate of return, but Congress, the AARP, and the union groups back in the Bush administration--this was W--when there was discussion of: Hey, can we take maybe a small sliver and put that into markets? If we had done that 25 years ago, then today's retirees and those moving into retirement would be dramatically better off. It is too late. Remember, in only a couple of more years all the baby boomers are 65 and up. So the demographic curve is here. It is just math. It is just math. These numbers get worse. So that is the debt ceiling. Let's actually have a little bit more fun. Medicare. There is a trust fund with Medicare. You pay it on your FICA tax, Mr. Speaker, your payroll tax. Except we have a little problem. We calculate in early August 2032, so 7 some years from now, the Medicare part A trust fund is gone. Hospitals are probably the largest lobbyists here in Washington, D.C. They are all up and down the hallways. Are they ready for the 11 percent cut in spending? Because in less than 7 years this is coming. So let's add something else on top of that. This is the one--and I am told I need to stop cussing behind this microphone. It shocks me because I will get some very important people around Washington, D.C., who get upset with me for this portion because apparently--particularly as a guy who is in the 50/50 district--we are never, ever, ever, ever supposed to use the word Medicare or Social Security. So let's actually have some fun here. The Social Security trust fund is projected to be depleted in late 2032, so 7 some years from now. When this happens, then we double the poverty of seniors in America. Mr. Speaker, if you are on Social Security, then you will get a 24 percent cut in your check. There is math and there are models out there, and you will double the poverty of seniors, and we will double the number of baby boomers on the street. Do these two things together, the trust fund for Medicare and the trust fund for Social Security, being gone in 7 years, to capitalize it--so that is happening in 2032. If you took 2033--and I am sorry but the dates are important--and said for that full year, we are going to just reach into the general fund. We are just going to use the general fund. It is over $600 billion, and then the next year it is bigger and the next year it is bigger. So it is functionally about 60 percent of the entire defense budget, just to make up that shortfall for that first year. Mr. Speaker, you would think something this--to use my little girl's term--ginormous would be a big deal around here. Yet, what happened in this place, because it is so perverse, is that right now there is some leftist political consultant saying: Hey, Schweikert used the words Social Security and Medicare, let's design our attack ads for the next campaign. They spent millions of dollars in the last campaign beating the ever- living crap out of me because I cared enough to want to fix this. When this place cares more about what the political consultants can design as an attack ad, then where is our fiscal commission? Where is the fact that we are putting people who can do math into a small room, turning off the air-conditioning, and saying: Come up with a plan to save the future? Or is just doubling poverty of seniors functionally our political plan? The left says that we are just going to raise taxes. I have done presentation after presentation on the floor here. I have shown the math. Every tax hike of the Democrats--so a tax on capital gains, a tax on income, a tax on corporate taxes, you can go grab the entire Bernie Sanders playbook, and we have had it scored, and you do its economic effects, and we do the maximum tax rate before the tax receipts roll over--produces about 1.5 percent of GDP of the economy. I am so sorry for the staff because they have all heard me say this a dozen times: When we do the cuts, the actual spending cuts and their economic effects, it produces about 1 percent of GDP. So what is that, Mr. Speaker? It is 2\1/2\ percent. If we do the borrowing we did from the trust funds last fiscal year, we borrowed almost 7.2, 7.3 percent of the entire economy, then does anyone see the problem? We borrowed over 7 percent, but all the solutions of raising taxes and cutting spending over here come in at 2\1/2\ percent. It is called a fiscal gap. But, David, you are not allowed to talk about these things. We need to just pretend. What sort of pretending is it going to be in 7 years when grandma gets a 24 percent cut in her check and when the hospital won't see her because they had an 11 percent cut in their Medicare compensation and they no longer can afford to see seniors? This is coming. This is real. This isn't pretend. This isn't feelings. It is called math. Please understand. I am giving up. I have spent one-and-a-half decades of my life behind these microphones running around here and actually producing actual legislation to fix it. I can't even get my fellow Members of Congress to cosponsor the legislation just to take on fraud in Medicare part C, let alone fix things. You know, David, it has the word Medicare, and we are not allowed to say that. I need to do a correction from last week because I was going so fast at one point, I didn't describe this chart well enough. I was actually trying to just say that tax collections are up, but capital gains are up 64 percent. Remember, Mr. Speaker, capital gains are only about 7 percent, where income taxes and taxes on wages are up 5\1/2\ percent. That is amazing. However, remember, Mr. Speaker, income taxes are over one-half of all income into the Federal Treasury. I didn't want to say: Hey, 64 percent of all tax collections are up because of capital gains. That is only the little sliver that is capital gains. A 5.5 percent increase in wages is amazing. The problem is that spending is up about 9 percent. If we could just hold our spending flat--except our problem is our demographics. This year, every day we have 13,000 of our brothers and sisters turn 65, they move into their earned benefits. We made a social contract. In 1990 or 1991, when the fertility rates in the United States started to roll over pretty hard, we never built a model saying, oh, heavens what happens when you don't have enough young people. Let's make some more people mad with the truth. The customs duties, the tariffs, have actually been very helpful. They are important. I actually think we need to come up with a much broader scheme on international tax collections, particularly imports and dealing with other countries and their value-added tax, what we call a VAT tax, and how they arbitrage or they refund it when you export to the United States. However, if we send them something, they attach their VAT back on. It gets a little confusing. We actually held a hearing today in Ways and Means on the international tax system because if the Supreme Court, whether it be this month or in the coming months, changes the President's authorities on tariffs, maybe those of us on the tax writing committee should step up and do our job. I need to tell you the truth about the math. Let's have a moment here. Let's do 2025. That is the chart here. The $77 billion you see right there on the chart, that was already the law. That was before the Trump Presidency. That was tariffs. Customs duties is the proper term. The President added other rules, mechanics, tariffs, customs duties. They gave us another--a total of $155 billion. That means we collected, in the 2025 fiscal year, an extra $118 billion. That is a lot of money. Remember, in 2025, we were borrowing $6 billion a day. You can do the basic math. That is like 18 days of borrowing, was the increase we took in 2025. It is helpful. It is helpful. Do not walk away from it, but also don't make up numbers that it is going to pay off the debt. In 2026, we modeled that the base tariffs, base customs duties, would produce about $84 billion. Wonderful. The total we model is $324 billion, meaning we are going to get an extra $240 billion this year, if President Trump's tariffs are allowed to stay in. It is really helpful, but it is basically 1 month of borrowing. It is 1 month of borrowing. If you go on cable news tonight or cable talk and you say: We are going to get a refund--math is math, and I really wish this body would get better at telling the truth about it. Just a couple more boards, then I am going to give everyone back their life. Then I will go home and deal with the angry text messages I am going to get from people who don't like it when I tell the truth. You don't want that one, but it basically says CBO actually did some remodeling, and we calculate that total customs duties over the next 11 years will bring in about $3 trillion. That is a lot of money, very helpful. But you have got to understand, over the next 10 years, what took us 240 years to build up in debt, we almost double in the next 10. It is estimated by 2035, we are somewhere around $63 trillion to $65 trillion in debt. You actually start to see the squeeze where publicly sold debt, compared to borrowing from the trust funds, goes because we are depleting the trust funds so there is less money so borrow out of them. In the next 10, 11 years, we almost double what took us 240 years as a country to build up in debt. Here is the thing that is really hard to talk about. I actually saw Elon Musk this last week saying: We have got to have the productivity. We have got to not be afraid of AI. I wish he would also talk about synthetic biology and all the cures and the fact that we are curing diseases. The President did an amazing thing of getting the prices down on glutides. We know obesity is almost 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. If we could cut that in half, could you imagine the growth of the economy, the family formation, the savings to the debt and deficits, if we helped our brothers and sisters get healthier. There are policies that will work, but you never hear them evangelized behind these microphones because either they are complex or they don't set off a dopamine fit of anger. We have got to deal with this reality, and this basically says demographics. We have fewer 18-year-olds than we did 20 years ago and almost double of number of 65-year-olds. That is going to continue. It is happening all over the industrialized world. We are actually in much better shape than so many other places in the world. But we don't tell the truth, saying, hey, it is math. We are going to have to find a way, because we are magically not going to have millions and millions and millions of people in diapers, little people. I am 63 and my wife is 63, and we have a 3-year-old and a 10-year- old. I am optimistic about the future. I had better be. Either that or my kids are coming to my nursing home. Sorry. I didn't mean to say that. This is the reality we are up against. Just one more board. This is hard to see. It is important for anyone who is actually listening, who actually has a fondness for basic math. This isn't that complicated. We now model, in the Joint Economic Committee Republicans, that there is over a 50/50 chance that the United States, this calendar year--so 2025, the calendar year we are in--will be close to zero population growth. Why is that a big deal? We built our Social Security system, we built our Medicare system, and we built much of our entitlement, our earned benefit system, on a concept that we grew population-wise and therefore grew economically, therefore we grew in GDP, therefore we grew in productivity, and therefore wealth grew in the country for everyone. What we are trying to show in these charts is, you can see from 2004 to 2024, the difference--this was under 18. We functionally have the same, but the number of those 65 and up going from 36 million to 61 million. Yet what is fascinating is if you go with no immigration, or even with immigration, we still end up upside down. It is just demographics. Yet when the President tries to talk about this, he gets attacked. When people like me try to say there is a way to set off productivity so we don't live poor, that the future is prosperous, that this is another American century, instead we engage in sort of clown-show type politics because we want to satiate the theater instead of the economics. There is a path to do amazingly good things for your retirement and for my kids, but the fact of the matter is that, Matthew, my 3-year- old, when he hits 23 or 24 years old, every tax in the United States has to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. Have we really made the moral decision that the next generation lives poorer or will be poorer than we are? Is that what America has become about? It doesn't have to be that way. Are we on the cusp of an amazing productivity curve with artificial intelligence, with synthetic biology curing diseases, and with robotics being able to produce products cheaper and faster? Possibly, but you have to understand that we have lots of laws that this place has made that it is illegal to modernize a port. It is illegal to modernize a rail system. It is illegal to actually adopt technology that can read your body at home and prescribe to you. We have barrier after barrier so that when we talk about deregulation to make the economy grow, we also have to talk about the deregulation that the armies of lobbyists in our hallways are here to stop us from doing because it will force a change in their business models. Once again, it can be another American century. The future can be absolutely amazing, but we need to get our act together and stop lying about the numbers, tell the truth about the demographics, and then actually think boldly. We can do amazing things. I just haven't had an amazing conversation around here in years. Mr. Speaker, I am going to go and apologize to all of the people I have just made mad. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I have missed all of you. I don't know if you missed me. We are going to actually try something tonight, and some of what we are going to do this evening is a little bit complex. It is going to be a little bit thick, but we have double-checked and triple-checked the math, which means that a number of our brothers and sisters will turn their ears off almost immediately because, remember, Mr. Speaker, we all work in a math-free zone. A couple of items of order first. I thank--though I don't know if they were screwing with me or having some fun. I think it is ``Forbes Breaking News'' that took about 12 or 13 hours of these floor speeches and put them up on YouTube. I have actually had a couple of people who obviously don't have lives who have been watching them, and we have been playing this game of: Here is the prediction, Schweikert, you made over the last year. Here is what you have right, and here is what you have wrong. First, I got wrong my prediction on interest rates. I really thought the 10-year bond would be closer to 5. It is at 4.1. However, things like the U.S. getting downgraded, things like the semaglutides crashing in price by the end of the year, we have actually gotten right. The one thing I wish I had gotten wrong was the debt and deficit projections. For the trolls out there who immediately say, ``Well, there is all this spending in the tax bill,'' most of that hasn't started yet. If you actually look at the breakdown of what is going on, what the two drivers of U.S. sovereign debt are, they are the very things that we are not allowed to talk about. It is interest and demographics. We are going to walk through some of the reality of the math because this is how perverse this place has become. The Democrats will blame, and Republicans will blame, and we are going to blame shiny objects, things that actually have almost no actual value to our future, to this Republic, and where we are going. As we start this, I need everyone to embrace a couple factoids. We have 7 years until the Social Security trust fund is empty. No one stole the money. We just didn't have enough young people to keep the ratios. So, in 7 years, the math right now says a 24 percent cut. In 7 years, we double senior poverty in America. In 7 years, the math says: You are going to start to see baby boomers doubling homelessness. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. Hospitals right now and others who are part of the Medicare part A cash flow take about 11 percent cuts. In 7 years, we double the spending on Medicare. We go from $1 trillion right now to $2 trillion. It is demographics. Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you some of those charts, but let's first walk through the craziness. I have had some administration folks and other folks talk to me about tax receipts being up, and they are. There is a whole series of things we have done to reduce spending, but none of it appears to be big enough to deal with the cost of the refinancing of debt that is coming off the very low interest rates from a few years ago to the much higher interest rates today, to the medical inflation, to the healthcare utilization, and to just the things that are basic driven by our demographics. Let's deal with some reality. If anyone has a question about my math, you can look it up online, Mr. Speaker. Go to the Treasury's website. This is important. We are now 51 days, I believe, into the new fiscal year. We are 51 days. Mr. Speaker, do you realize we have now borrowed $628 billion in the first 51 days of this new fiscal year? Treasury has put more--is holding almost $900 billion in cash, which they typically operate with about $800 billion because of the in and out, but you start to realize, at the current borrowing rate, we crossed $1 trillion this fiscal year before Christmas. It is not Republican or Democratic. It is demographics and interest, but that isn't a lot of fun because our political consultants need something where we can attack each other. By doing that, we are incapable of an honest conversation of the bleed. Understand a basic principle, Mr. Speaker: At this rate of borrowing, when you are clicking off $1 trillion in just 4 months, 5 months, then you have decided the bond market, basically, is the most powerful organization in ruling your country. It is not us as policymakers. It is not the White House. It is the bond market because if you do the last 12 months, we have been borrowing about $6.3 billion a day. So far this last 51 days, we are borrowing closer to $12 billion a day. It is just math, except we are incapable of actually talking about it. Think about these microphones here, Mr. Speaker. How many people since we got back from the shutdown have you heard, on the left and the right, get behind these things and say, ``Hey, guys, the greatest threat to your Republic is actually the math''? This group hates something Donald Trump does. Our side doesn't like some of the things they do. Okay, great. The lack of civility is crushing. However, one of my personal theories is the reason you just had a 40-something-day shutdown, Mr. Speaker, is that it is not like the old days, where you could have bought the Senators' votes. Hey, if you vote for us, you get a bridge. We now have to deal with the fact that we don't have cash lying around. We are going to borrow. You will start to see this. We went from $37 trillion to $38 trillion in 71 days. There were lots of excuses for this. There was, hey, we had the debt ceiling, had to repopulate, pay back the internal borrowing we did, those things. Except the difference is here we are into the new fiscal year after the debt ceiling has been raised, and the burn rate still looks really similar. I am sure all the committees, all the leadership, all the folks who are helping us watch the bond market and the liquidity and our ability to borrow are all paying attention to the bleed rate, but it is math. It is real. Mr. Speaker, our debt to GDP when we closed the '25 fiscal year actually got slightly better, but we also rolled some of the borrowing into the next day, which hit a new fiscal year. It happens all the time. You have strike dates of when you can actually pay certain bills, Mr. Speaker, but this one isn't in question. Last year, for every dollar of tax receipts we took in--this is customs duties. This is excise tax, income tax, corporate tax. Everything we took in, we spent $1.43. This year, for every dollar we take in, our budget says that we are going to also spend $1.43. How long can we do this? How long can we do this? Mr. Speaker, my 3-year-old--and, yes, I am this age. My wife is my age. We have a 10-year-old and a 3-year-old. There is a dataset out there that basically says that when my 3-year-old is about 22, 23 years old, so 20-some years from now, every tax in America, every tax, needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline spending. Mr. Speaker, how many people have you had come behind this mike and who have just said: Look, is this moral? Is this really what America is all about? Yes. I am going to show the slides that show what the Democrats say: We will just tax billionaires and rich people. It doesn't get you anything close. It doesn't close the gap, and you know it. For our side, we are going to cut spending. Really? It doesn't get you close because we are not ready to have the revolution of how we spend money. That is because adopting the very technologies, the cures, the things we can do, this army of lobbyists outside this door loses their blanking minds because we are requiring them to either change their business models or make the bureaucracy do it differently or maybe come up with the conclusion we shouldn't do it at all. Once again, for every dollar we take in of tax receipts, we are going to spend $1.43. Why doesn't that almost create a sense of panic, of agita, for the left or the right? Is it just that we run into the problem of telling the truth to our voters after maybe we have lied to them? It is rich people that we don't tax enough. It is waste and fraud. It is illegals. All of those are real, except, in the scale of the spending, they are just not that much. It is just the insanity of what is going on. Look, I am trying to help you understand wages. Let's back up. Tax receipts are up. Spending is up dramatically more, but most of the tax receipts that we are gaining are almost all capital gains. So, of the increased tax receipts, only about 5.5 percent of it is actually the growth in wages. Almost 65 percent is capital gains because the stock market has been doing well. So, once again, we are back to the world of financial engineering. Those of us with assets, we are doing great. You keep hearing people talk about the K-shaped economy. What they mean by that is if you are on the lower tier, you don't hold assets, particularly after the years of inflation. Those with assets, the asset is inflated, and they are just fine. If you didn't hold assets, you are poorer today. For my district in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, I think our calculation is, after sort of the first year of the Biden administration, if you don't make today at least 28 percent more than you did then, you are poorer today. Now, there is almost no cycle where magically prices start to come down. The way you deal with this is economic growth, wage growth. Is prosperity moral? Is it Republican or Democrat? It is just the right thing to have a society where people's lives get better every day. This is just a board I have used before, but it is just to make a point for anyone that is paying attention. This is the 10-year bond. Right now, the United States isn't at 4 percent. We are about 4.1. Okay. We can sell a 10-year bond today for about 4.1 percent. I need you to look here. Greece can sell a 10-year bond today for about 3.3 percent. When Greece has a better strike, a better--let's call it a credit rating. It is technically not a credit rating, but when Greece can sell a bond cheaper than the United States, should that actually raise the hair on the back of your neck? Are you thinking about the fact that the United States, for the industrialized countries, is like number 12? Let's call it the credit stack, the ability to sell a 10-year bond. Why are other countries able to sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the biggest economy in the world, the country with the reserve currency? Does anyone pay attention to this? People say, ``Oh, David, that is not fair. Greece engaged in fiscal consolidation.'' They are actually lowering their debts, where we are now over 100 percent of debt-to-GDP. There are no plans to tell the truth about it. If you tell the truth, you might get unelected. You have a dozen countries that can sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States today, Greece being one of them. Let's get into some of the complications. When I say one of the primary drivers is interest and demographics, remember, if you have $38 trillion--and remember, we play this game. The United States does this. Other countries don't do this. Here is $30 trillion that we have to go to public markets. People from all over the world, primarily from the United States, buy our bonds. It is in your pension. It is in the bank note you buy. There are another several trillion that are actually borrowed internally. It is not magic money. We still owe the Social Security trust fund money, the Medicare trust fund money. When we borrow the cash out of those trust funds, they are paid interest, so it is still an obligation. It is one of my great frustrations when you hear some of the government economists say, Well, publicly borrowed money is this. Yes, but the internally borrowed money we still owe interest on, are we not going to pay it back? It is borrowing. When I come back and say demographics, understand age groups as a share of the population, from 2004 to 2024, so a year-plus ago, we had 1.4 percent of the population was 18 years old. In 2024, 1.3 percent of the population was 18 years old. It is just demographics. The United States, in around 1990 to 1991, started to roll over in the number of children we have. For the people who are into the natalist policies, we spent lots of time researching this. There is no magic solution. You have a country out there that, when you have your third or fourth child, they buy you a house. It still hasn't increased fertility rates. There is a crazy math set, and I have never vetted it, saying, like, South Korea in 150-something years, there are almost no South Koreans left. It is happening all over the industrialized world. This is why getting tax policy, regulatory policy things, so correct--because we are going to have to be able to find a way to have productivity grow and grow so we can raise people's wages because so many of our brothers and sisters are poorer today. The way you raise wages is two things: inflation--well, that doesn't get you anywhere--or productivity. You can't be afraid of AI, synthetic biology, robots. People go, ``Oh, David, you are not supposed to say that,'' but it is true. Next year, the number of 18-year-olds is lower, smaller, than this. The year after that, it is smaller than that. Then, it is smaller than that. America is now running into a situation where we have too many classrooms and too many schoolbuses and not enough senior centers. This place is doing an amazing job at having an honest conversation about the United States' demographics and where we are going. ``Oh, David, we are not supposed to talk about that.'' How do you make public policy if you can't even be honest about the most basic parts of the math? The other part of the punch line here is, 20 years ago, 12.3 percent of the population was 65 and up. Mr. Speaker, 20 years later, it is, functionally, 18 percent. It is not double, but it is pretty darn close to double those who are 65 and up. Look, a weird little factoid: When I was a teenager in the 1970s--and I remember this number. There was, functionally, $7 spent for every young person and $1 spent on seniors. Today, that is flipped. It is just demographics. The baby boomers have moved into their retirement years. We have a societal promise we have to keep. We made a promise, but once again, in 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is gone. In 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is gone. We are going to lie our heinies off around here. If we just tax rich people more--and I will show you the slides. The math doesn't work. Once again, we work in a math-free zone. Let's have a little more fun with reality, change in population by age. Now, this board is controversial, but the math is accurate. I will see if I can try to describe this in a way where we can all absorb it. In 2004, we had, functionally, 77 million that were 18 or younger. We estimate, in 2035, if we do not have immigration--remember, this year, we expect almost zero population growth, so let's first do those who want no immigration. In 2035, we have only 64 million that are under 18. With immigration, you still have fewer people. That is over 20 years. Okay, fine. Maybe that is the policy decision of our society. In that case, don't stand in our way when people like me are trying to find ways to actually have productivity, wages grow. This is something very unique that the United States is up against: massive amounts of debt. Massive amounts of debt. Remember, so far this fiscal year--God, I have to do this math really quick. I think we are borrowing like $130,000, maybe $131,000 every second. If I take it over the last 12 months, it is like $71,000 a second. So you have this massive debt, and then a population that is flat, and where we are going right now, it actually could be declining over the next decade. Not by a lot. Tell me how I make the economy grow. How do I make sure your pension is there? How do I make sure your access to healthcare is there? How do I make sure your wages go up? There are ways we can do it, and I have come up behind these mikes over and over and over and talked about the adoption of technology, about redesigning government. We have bills that actually would save $3 trillion, and I can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor them because they are hard. I will get lobbyists who will say mean things about me. So let's keep just doing the shiny objects. Let's just keep doing the petty around here. I think yesterday was the 14th time we have tried to reprimand or censure a fellow Member. Let's just do more of that because it gets great Twitter traffic, and we don't have to talk about the fact that that day we borrowed over another $6 billion. Actually, if it is just this fiscal year, it is closer to $12 billion that day. So let's take another look. Change in employment status of native born and foreign born. This is something that is really, really interesting. We are actually taking a look right now for what we believe is sort of this fiscal year's snapshot. We actually have foreign born actually going down. Now, some of this is self-deportation. There are things going on, we don't have enough data to completely understand it, but my problem is: I don't actually have enough folks for the civilian labor force. Look, something funky happened in this morning's unemployment numbers where there was a good pop in jobs, maybe almost 2, 2\1/2\ times what many of the economists expected, but did you notice unemployment popped up? Now, that is typically saying: Oh, we don't like that. I need you to think about this. We have been desperate for more of our brothers and sisters to come back into the labor force, but here is my problem: How many of those folks are coming back to the labor force because they can't pay their bills because wages still haven't gone up enough to make up for the years of inflation? We actually don't know completely yet, but we do know that our brothers and sisters out there are stressed out of their mind when you start to look at credit card delinquencies, car delinquencies. ``Our impairments'' is the better way to phrase it. We need to get our heads out and start thinking about those policies that get the economy working, a tax code that actually gets investment in the next generation. But are we going to adopt policies? All right. Let me go jump on a landmine. Does it make sense to have a government that goes out and owns 10 percent of Intel? So your government is the largest shareholder of Intel. Okay. I love Intel. But I can actually show you some brilliant economic papers that say that it should be four different or three different companies; here is the fab; here is the engineering; here is this and that. The concept of creative destruction. Here is how the thought experiment works: If you are old enough to remember Blockbuster Video, should we have slowed down the internet so that Netflix could not have put Blockbuster Video out of business? That is sort of what we are doing today, we are choosing the winners and losers instead of the creative destruction that starts the next cycle of productivity. We need the creative destruction in our economy to have the rebirths of the newer, better, and faster. Yes, it is always uncomfortable. It is also really great free market economics. And it is as if we have repealed the rules of a free market economy in this country right now. So let's actually take another look. Now we are going to step onto the next, much bigger landmine. Let's talk about Social Security. Social Security finances and worker-to-beneficiary ratio. This is how many workers there are compared to our brothers and sisters receiving. Do you see the red lines here? This is actually the trust fund. You will notice, actually, around 2020, the trust fund had $5 trillion in it. In 7 years, it is all gone, and no one stole your money. The average couple, it is a crap rate of return. You have to understand. If 20, 25 years ago, you had been allowed to take a little sliver and put it in the markets, you would be dramatically better off moving into retirement, but the left lost its mind on the discussion. The unions lost their minds. AARP lost its mind. But now we can look back. We have 25 years. We can actually do the calculation and tell the truth. They were wrong. But it is too late to do anything like that today because the population bubble has already moved into their retirement years. So here we are. At 7 years, that trust fund is gone. What is also interesting--it is a little hard to see in this chart-- as we get into the outer years, you are getting to the point where you have 2.2, 2.3. So you and your spouse or you and your partner functionally will have one retiree, and that is the way the system was designed. They didn't think about, when they designed things like the Social Security trust fund, that we would have a day when the population of young people in the United States actually was declining. It is demographics. We know the math. We have known for how many years that we had baby boomers and 67 million of them. Yet, this place because it is crap politics to tell the truth about math, we lie. We make up things. Well, we tax billionaires. I am going to show you boards that every dime of every billionaire in America would only run the government 9 months, and, also, you would put the world into a depression because most of that value is actually in stock. So if you happen to have some stocks in your retirement fund, it is all gone. We are going to crash everything, but it is a thought experiment. There was someone who had an article out this last week that talked about saying: Well, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, we will just borrow it from the general fund, and the general fund will borrow it from the debt market. Okay. Let's see. When you start to look at the scale of debt, do you see the red here? That is already where we are going. That is already in the baseline. This line here exploding up, that is as if we took the Social Security trust fund--and I don't believe this even has the Medicare trust fund, which is also empty in 7 years. If anyone really wants to understand how difficult the policy choices are and, also, how--let's have a brutal moment--the Members here don't tell the truth, particularly my brothers and sisters on the left. We will just tax rich people. Please go look up Jessica Riedl's calculations from the Manhattan Institute. There are a couple of great articles. They walk you through the math. Every tax--so do the Bernie Sanders math. We are going to take people over $400,000, $500,000, and we are going to maximize tax. You maximize everything. It is almost a Laffer curve. We are going to tax you to the point that it rolls over. On every tax, you get 1\1/2\ percent of GDP in new taxes. Okay. It would probably be really helpful. On the Republican side, the things we talk about cutting, we only get about 1 percent of GDP. Last year, if you do the internal borrowing, we borrowed about 7.6, 7.4 percent of the entire economy. We are actually looking that in 2035 we are going to borrow 8.4 percent of the entire economy, and the solution I get from the left covers 1\1/2\ percent. Often, the solution I get on my side is 1 percent. Does anyone see the math problem? We are all going to go home and talk to our partners and audience and say: If I just cut taxes, or if I just cut things. Maybe we have to do that, but it doesn't get you close. Once again, 1\1/2\ percent from taxing all the rich people, and 1 percent of GDP in the cuts we have actually articulated. I have 2\1/2\ percent. In 9 budget years, we are borrowing 8.4 percent of the entire economy, and that is assuming interest rates don't go up. Remember, in 9 years under today's interest rate scheme, 30 percent of tax receipts go to just the interest. If interest rates go up 1 percent, it is 45 percent of all tax receipts of the United States in 9 years would go to just interest. I will say this, and I have said it how many times behind these microphones and people go, David, that is interesting. Please never say that again because I don't want to actually have to explain this. If we do the math, take every billionaire in America, get full face value of everything they have. Sell every stock, every yacht, every this, every that, you covered government for 9 months. That is assuming you don't put the world into a depression. You don't crash all the stock markets. You don't crash all the asset markets. It covers 9 months. Why do we live in this fantasy world where people throw out solutions like this that they know are absolute frauds? Because it is great politics. It is crap math. Let's actually go on to one of our current debates. I watched someone come to the floor yesterday on the subsidies on top of the subsidies in the ACA. Let's call it ObamaCare because that is the common vernacular, but it is the ACA. We are having the debate because the Democrats actually did these enhanced subsidies on top of the subsidies and those subsidies expire. Let me do this one backward, so there is a little more understanding of the line. How much of the healthcare population in America is actually in the ACA? It is really important. Forty-eight percent is employer sponsored, 7 percent we believe is uninsured, veterans are about 3 percent, Medicare is 18 percent, and Medicaid is 22 percent. Now over the next couple years that flips. Only 7 percent of the healthcare population is actually in the ACA. That is the entire population that is receiving the enhanced subsidies, so the subsidies on top of the subsidies, is a fraction of that. Now you have to also take a look at what is wrong in that math. We actually keep looking at these numbers over and over. We have been analyzing them with our joint economic economists, and I have a couple Ph.D.s in healthcare economics. We are trying to understand what the hell is going on with these numbers, but you start looking at it after the COVID subsidies. Do you know you got 41 percent of the population that is actually supposed to be just receiving government subsidies to make it more affordable and they are paying zero? Do you understand what they did with the subsidies on top of the subsidies? They took populations 400 percent of poverty and up, and in some areas, you have four or five kids, you have people making $400,000, $500,000 qualifying, except that is a small population of them but they still would qualify. Why is this important? Mr. Speaker, if I could have some way to burn this on to people's psyche. What the ACA, Medicare for All--the Republican alternative had better actuarial distribution, but they have tried to turn healthcare into financial engineering. What you have done is, is financing, is subsidies healthcare. Well, we will tax these people and we will subsidize this population. Listen to the debates here. It is about subsidies on top of subsidies. It is financial engineering. Now, it is healthcare. Why it is healthcare is because it is easy. It makes the lobbyists happy. It makes the people receiving the money happy because no one gets cut. No one has to do a new design. No one has to actually stop new technology. No one has to fixate on our brothers and sisters. If obesity is 47 percent of U.S. healthcare, none of the money goes to making our brothers and sisters healthier so they live longer and they don't have multichronic conditions because we are just going to subsidize them. It is perverse. Could you imagine the $35 or $40 billion that the Democrats are demanding for the subsidy on top of the subsidy for populations that are upper income? If some of that money actually went to lowering the actual cost of healthcare instead of the financial engineering of subsidizing insurance companies because that is what they are talking about. Let's just go to this one and see if I can make this make sense. This is a bit complicated, but we have been trying to do the analytics of how much the subsidies have screwed up the price of healthcare. If you walk through it, we can actually chart where the subsidies come in and it actually raises the price of healthcare. The way the insurance companies retain their profits--we have actually built a model that shows, of the stunning amounts of money we are spending, only 34 percent actually goes to the insured and their healthcare. Another 28 percent is disappearing into people that didn't even know they had insurance. I am sure we all have been reading the articles that a third, 30 percent of those in the enhanced ACA subsidies--so the subsidies on top of the subsidies--didn't even know they had health insurance. A couple days ago, you saw someone got convicted of or pled guilty to a couple hundred million-dollar fraud scheme where they were signing people up, getting the money, getting the government subsidies, those things, and the people had no idea they had insurance because they really didn't. They were just taking the money. The system is absolutely screwed up and we have 38 percent disappearing in the insurance malaise. This is what we have turned healthcare into. It is a financing. I beg of my brothers and sisters here, we have pieces of legislation, dozens of them, that would change the cost of healthcare. When we think we may have spent $25 to $35 billion last year in duplicative MRIs, X-rays, CTs, ultrasounds, why not a simple piece of legislation that when you get your MRI, it is attached to this thing so it is portable to your next doctor. Is that that scary? Except the lobbyists show up and say, David, you don't understand. The duplicative scans are part of our profit model. Oh, I am not supposed to say that out loud. We have dozens of things like this. We have turned healthcare into being about the money instead of our brothers and sisters living better, living healthier. Mr. Speaker, what if some of the money goes to the cures so we don't finance your misery, we finance your freedom from that misery? I say these things and tomorrow morning there will be an army of lobbyists or an army of groups from my district saying, David, you don't understand. We need the cash. Don't make us do it in a modern fashion. Mr. Speaker, I am going to make the argument prosperity is moral. Curing people's misery is moral. Using the technology that makes you sovereign, that makes you free so you can help take care of your own health, is moral, and what we do here is absolutely immoral. We don't tell the truth about the debt. We don't tell the truth about the demographics. We don't tell the truth about the damage we are doing to your retirement, my little kids' future. We don't tell the truth that if we would actually legalize technology--and I am serious about this--legalize it, how much healthier every American could be and we could crash the price of healthcare. Will this go on deaf ears? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, for everyone's sanity, I hope not to go 60 minutes. I might go 40. Mr. Speaker, first, the good news. If anyone else is a geek out there, there is this app put out by the Atlanta Fed, Atlanta Federal Reserve, and what they do is they do certain samples in trying to constantly estimate what the gross national product, GDP, will actually be. A little while ago, they actually updated it saying the U.S. economy looks like it is running at 3.4 percent. That is remarkable. If you stop and think about it, this is absolutely--think about all the headwinds and all the things over tariffs and all these other, the economy actually is surprisingly healthy. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am up here today and every other week is, our fiscal year ends in a couple weeks and our best estimate is this fiscal year we will have borrowed $2.4 trillion, maybe $2.5 trillion. We have one model in our office that says more than $2.5 trillion. That is like $70,000, $72,000 every second of every day we are borrowing. Let's think of a world where you are borrowing $70,000 a second, yet the economy is actually fairly decent. What is going on? Is it Republican? Is it Democrat? It turns out it is the very thing we hate to talk about. It is the cost of interest and the cost of healthcare, and that healthcare is primarily driven because we are unwilling--Mr. Speaker, you are a doctor, if I remember. We are unwilling to have the honest conversation of how we deliver, where we can revolutionize the cost, where we can adopt technology because we are in the incumbent protection business. We protect incumbent bureaucracies and incumbent business models. If we don't take this seriously, do you think you can have a country that is borrowing $70,000, $72,000 every second? Do you think you can keep that going? Remember, once again, I am going to try to show versions of this. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In 2032, 7 years, halfway through that year, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In 2033, the first full year, our best estimate is that there is about $140 billion shortfall. Mr. Speaker, in 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Meaning, in 2033, if you are going to cover Medicare and Social Security, you are approaching almost $600 billion. How many of us get behind these microphones and actually talk about things that are truly terrifying? Are we really going to avoid dealing with our actual jobs? Are we going to allow the doubling of senior poverty in America in 7 years at the same time we are bankrupting much of the medical system? In 7 years, grandma gets a 24 percent cut in her check and our model says that it will double the poverty of seniors. Yet, often the solution we get is, well, we will just raise taxes. Okay. The first year of the shortfall--I am rounding up a bit--it is $600 billion. You really think you are going to do a $600 billion tax hike. Here is my battle. I have tried for years and years and said, we need to do a fiscal commission. The fact of the matter is, we have the same number of 18 year olds as we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of Americans, our brothers and sisters, who are now 65 and up. Twenty years ago, we had 35 million Americans 65 and up. Now we are at 70 million Americans that are 65 and up, and I think we have another 10, 15 million that will be 65 and up in the next few years. We are incapable of telling the truth. How many of us want to get up in front of our voters back home or put into our newsletter saying, we have a demographic financing crisis? Are we going to do all the things necessary to skyrocket productivity because wages--sorry. Do you remember your high school economics class? Wages go up by inflation, but that doesn't mean you get anything. You are just treading water. Our wages go up by productivity. Are we going to do the things that are necessary for productivity? It means Democrats and Republicans need to stop saying things like you can't automate ports. You can't automate this. We don't want to allow that technology. There is a way to make this not be dystopian. Mr. Speaker, I am so tired of coming behind this microphone. The poor staff here has to be just exhausted, but I am trying not to speak like a machine gun anymore. I am trying to slow down. Every time I come up here, the numbers are a little bit worse and what is frustrating is, the economy is actually doing fairly well, but it is the scale of the debt because we keep spending and spending and spending. Let's actually do some of the charts to try to see if I can get this to sink in. Next year, for every dollar of tax collection, we are going to spend $1.43. Let's do that again. For every dollar in tax collection next year, starting in a couple weeks, October 1, we start the new fiscal year. This is for the 2026 fiscal year; we are going to spend $1.43. How long is that sustainable? For everyone going in your head, oh, we will just raise taxes. Let's do this again. In the way back machine, like in the beginning of the year, I think I did entire presentations on Democrat tax proposals and what we have talked about in just cuts on the Republican side. Our best estimate is this fiscal year, which we are finishing in the next couple of weeks, we are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the entire economy. Our borrowing would equal 7.3 percent of the economy. Every tax hike that we have scored that the Democrats have proposed, capital gains, income tax, corporate taxes, the whole litany, when you do the economic adjustment, it comes in at 1.5 percent, maybe 1.6, but the math is easier, 1.5 percent of the economy. That is what we get for all the tax hikes. For those of us on the Republican side when we walk through, we can cut this, we can cut this, we can cut this, it is coming in at about 1 percent of the economy. Anyone see the math problem? I got 2\1/2\ percent and that is all you have ever heard behind these microphones, but we are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year. How many idiots like me will get up behind these microphones and tell you the truth? Next year, for every dollar of tax collections, we are going to spend $1.43. Let's say you are the most liberal Member here. Do you have any understanding when this hits the wall, the devastation, the crushing of poor people? How about if you are the most libertarian or free market? Do you understand the crushing of the economic system, which has produced so much prosperity, that will happen when we are in crisis mode? Let's not let it happen. Let's actually walk through this because this is actually one of my things. We are actually borrowing a little over this. We borrow about $6.5 billion a day. I always love the debates here: We are going to save $100 million. Great. Great. We borrow about $260, $270 million an hour, so a quarter trillion dollars an hour. We will have debates here that go on for sometimes an hour to save functionally a minute, half a minute. We have had one where it was like 15 seconds of borrowing. In 9 years, we are over $10 billion, my math is closer to $10.5 billion a day. That is just the structural borrowing. One of the deceiving things is, over the next 10 years, we functionally spend $70 trillion, and you will get someone who says: Well, you guys voted for this. Well, you guys wanted to tax this. You actually start to help them understand, saying, we are talking fractions of our exposure. I accept, you don't need to be an accounting major or math major to be a Member of Congress. We make some very pretty charts, though. For anyone who actually gives a darn about what is going on, every single month, the Joint Economic Committee Republicans publish a monthly fiscal update. We have tried to make it as simple as possible to understand, page after page, to show you what the hell is really going on. One of the things that is incredibly frustrating is we live in a world where so much of what you are going to find on the internet right now isn't true. Let me prove it. Here is an article I was very disturbed to find out: Complex infection keeps the Pope in hospital. This is Newsweek from a couple days ago. Apparently, the Pope is in the hospital. This is actually a story that was posted September 8, except the small problem is, this Pope has been dead for months. Welcome to the quality of what we call news anymore. This is Newsweek. They just let their AI generate a story, fill it up. There is no human that bothered to look at it. Yet, you and I have to help our voters. Our constituents call us and say: Is this true? You can't find the story. You ask them if they can send it to you. You think, well, that doesn't make any sense. It is someone who hit a computer button. What also happens when we actually see stories like: OMB says Trump's economic agenda will cut the deficit in half. I am trying to find the policies. You start to go over it, and many of these stories are actually someone was giving a speech, and so the AI wrote a story. It is not actually what was said. My frustration with this is, I have Members here right now who say: David, we are going to take in $300 billion in tariff receipts--customs duties if you want to be accurate--next year. We are fine. Okay. Next year, we are borrowing about $270, $280--sorry, we will borrow about $2.5 trillion in the 2026 year. So $300 billion is very, very helpful, but you are still borrowing $2.2 trillion. We haven't actually done all the economic effects of does that actually change purchasing behavior. Actually, we have some great stories today on the Bloomberg terminal of companies that look like they have been actually undervaluing their customs duties, meaning they are lying to the Customs Service, and we are taking in less receipts than we should. The scale of what is going on is just intensely frustrating. Let's actually start to also knock down one of the urban folk legends: It is defense spending. How often do we go home and I will have a liberal person saying: If you would just cut defense, we would be fine. Okay, here is your problem: Healthcare is about 28 percent of our spending, Social Security is 22 percent of our spending. This is 2025 to fiscal date. Net interest is 14 percent of our spending. If you do all the other outlays, it is 14 percent. Income security, that is actually--well, it is what it is--10 percent. National defense is 12 percent. It turns out national defense is now number 5. The thing that is actually in the Constitution is actually number 5 in the spending stack. Your government is functionally an insurance company with an Army. You laugh, but you know you are going to quote that later. Let's actually sort of take a look. This is net receipts by category, 2024 compared to 2025. Hopefully, this will make sense. I am going to put this chart up on our website later because I know it is really hard to see. If you actually take a look at what is happening, how do we finance this government? It is mostly individual income taxes. Now, for someone who says: Well, it should be corporate. Remember, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, all across the country we were moving to LLCs, professional partnerships, pass-through entities, so much of what you would have seen back in the early 1980s, 1970s, 1960s as corporate now passes through, so some of it was a corporate structure. You always have to be careful when you say: Why are corporate taxes down so much? It is now because it flows through on the individual line. I am just trying to make that point. Take a look at this. Here is Social Security and retirement taxes. Well, that is FICA. Actually, you were getting $1.7 trillion last year. This year it is up 3 percent. This year it is $1.761 trillion. Corporate income tax, last year we took in $529 billion. Then you start to look at customs duties. Now, this is interesting. I am going to say this two or three times to try to make a point. In the 2024 fiscal year, we took in $77 billion in customs duties. That is tariffs. All right. We estimate this year it is going to be up 146 percent, but that is $190 billion. That is a lot of money, Mr. Speaker, but 177 minus the 190 . . . Did I mention, next year we are set to borrow about $2.5 trillion is our estimate? CBO, I know, has a number that is lower, but I will tell you in this fiscal year, my Joint Economic Committee was more correct than CBO. If we are borrowing $6.5, $6.7 billion a day, you can do the math. The step-up in customs duties, we might be picking up 3 weeks of borrowing. This is my frustration. What happens when our brothers and sisters get in front of televisions or put out things and say stories like: Well, DOGE is going to pay for everything. Well, the customs duties, the tariffs are going to pay for everything. Then some of us have to actually try to make the math work. The voters are much smarter than we ever give them credit for. Hell, I think they are much smarter than we are. Maybe we can tell them the truth. We have got a problem. Interest and healthcare costs are consuming this society, consuming this government. You start to take a look at the debt outlays, and you start to see, well, Social Security taxes, oh, they are up 8.3 percent over last year. Excuse me, sorry, this is outlays, so spending on Social Security went up 8.3 percent over last year. It is the baby boomers. We actually have an unusual thing happening. If you take a look at the Social Security actuary report, a lot of our brothers and sisters are choosing to retire at 62, which actually is hurting productivity because many of these folks are very productive workers, but they are fearful, saying: Well, in 2032, I get a 24 percent cut, so I am going to take my money now. That is another reason why we should fix that cliff, but you are not allowed to actually talk about it because the other side will run attack ads beating the crap out of you in the next election because you dared talk about the morality of actually fixing these things. Look, right now, I am in a 50/50 district. There is someone over at the DCCC taking clips saying: He said the words ``Social Security.'' We have our attack ad. Then, we wonder why no one here will work on it. The point on the net outlays is, last year, we spent $7.746 trillion. This year we are going to spend $7.148 trillion. Remember that 2025 is an estimate because I still have a couple of weeks, and there are always weird timing effects at the end of the year where we roll a bill over into the next fiscal year. What happens with our total receipts? We are going to take in $5.254 trillion and spend $7.148 trillion. The point there is that we are spending a hell of a lot more money than we are taking in. A bunch of the money is not stuff you can touch. It is Social Security and what goes into the Medicare part A trust fund. Let's go down to geekdom. On your FICA tax, your payroll tax, a portion of that is Medicare, Social Security, unemployment, and other things. That tax only covers about 38 percent of Medicare. The other portion of Medicare, it can be 10 to 15 percent, is you paying copays if you are in traditional Medicare. The rest comes right out of the general fund. That is why the fact is that, in the next 7 years, Medicare goes from $1 trillion of spend this year to $2 trillion, in 7 years. It is demographics and healthcare inflation. This gap, from here to here, is the annual deficit, 7.3 percent of the entire economy. For those who want to say that it is the legislation from--no. This was structural. This is what we were built on. The increase in spending, once again--discretionary, what we talk about, what we work on, keeps getting smaller. Defense as a percentage, as we are going down from years--years ago, defense was number one. Now, the way you actually stack it, it is either number four or number five in our spending. Yet, if you go home and tell people that, what continues to shock me is how many people say, ``If we just did this.'' Show them the math that you just covered about 30 minutes of borrowing, and they look at you angrily because, my belief is, the political class for so long hasn't told the truth. Let's go on our truth binge. Anyone I am making unhappy, grab your phone, grab your computer, and go hit DOGE.gov. It is right there. It is live right now. You can go look it up. I actually really support using technology to crawl through every ounce of this government. In the NDAA, year after year--and I got it attached this year, the ability to use AI to audit the Pentagon. Remember, the Pentagon has now gone 8 or 9 years. It is unauditable. That is the term. It has not been audited. We don't even know the stuff we own. On DOGE's own website, at this moment, they say they have found $206 billion. Now, the reality is that only a fraction of that has actually been executed by us in Congress or the White House. If we are going to borrow $2.3, $2.4, $2.5 trillion next year, 8 percent, and that is if you have the face on it. We have all seen the articles. They have only been able to actually execute on a fraction of this. Yet, I can show you some of our colleagues who run around and say: Well, with DOGE and the customs duties, we are going to be fine, so, Schweikert, shut up. We don't have to tell people how much trouble we are in. Don't go and mention that the Social Security trust fund is gone in 7 years and that they are taking a 24 percent cut. Don't tell anyone that the Medicare trust fund is gone in 7 years and that their hospital is probably going bankrupt. Yay, this is what we got elected to do. Yet, 2025 total receipts--receipts are tax collections. It is just Ways and Means speak. We don't call them taxes. We call them receipts. For this year, we gained 3.7 percent of our total receipts from customs duties. Wonderful. We can have a whole other presentation, debate, on its effect on the economy, who actually pays it, whether is it paid by the consumer or shipper. Fine, we will have the intellectual debate later, but it is more revenue receipts coming in. Our best guess, if we give the full faith of what we believe, $300 billion next year, 5, 5.6 percent on top of all the additional tax collections. It is helpful. Borrowing, in many ways, is a tax. It is a tax paid for in the future, probably by our kids. It is a tax paid for with interest. Stop pretending we have solved the problem. Here is where it gets really uncomfortable once again. This is sort of the Social Security chart, and the point was the trust fund balance. We peaked about 2001, 2002. Baby boomers were in the peak of their earning years, but here, it is gone. We need to step on this. If you are someone out there and you say they stole the Social Security money, no, they didn't. It was loaned to the Treasury. There are some great articles. If you go back to the original design of Social Security, they thought they would have a certain amount of money. They would loan it for building bridges, dams, and all sorts of things and get yield, but they loaned it to the Treasury. The Treasury pays a fairly decent interest rate back. Our Treasury pays the interest back to the Social Security trust fund twice a year. That is why there are certain months where there is this sudden, big spike of interest payments that are credited to the Social Security account. The chart is the chart. About halfway through 2032, so 7 years from now, the trust fund is gone. Here is the irony of our budgeting. When we talk about future debts and deficits, CBO is instructed to act like we just keep spending the money. The actual Social Security law says you have to cut benefits. If you follow the Social Security law, that is a 24 percent cut. In reality, about halfway through 2032, be prepared to have your check cut by 24 percent. Our calculation is a few months later. We double the poverty of seniors in America. The fastest-growing homeless population is baby boomers right now. Look at this chart. Look, I just threw this one on. It is a little more complicated than I wanted to do tonight, but this is actually showing the increases in spending. One of the reasons I brought this chart is trying to help folks understand. We are all so acculturated around here to Social Security is always going to be the biggest spend. Except, when you get in the out-years--I accept some of this is 20-some years from now, 25 years from now. Actually, healthcare costs, this is something we could actually have a miracle in changing. I have come behind this mic over and over and said we are on the cusp of miracles. A couple of weeks ago, I went to New Hampshire to a lab where they were growing undifferentiated islet cells. Apparently, islet cells don't need antirejection drugs to get bodies to be able to start making their own insulin again. There are crazy ideas. Mr. Speaker, can we do a thought experiment? I am probably going to get beat up for this. This is a thought experiment. Give me some leeway on it. I am trying to help our brothers and sisters, and anyone crazy enough to watch this, to think. We have turned healthcare into a financing debate. The ACA, ObamaCare, was a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. It was mostly borrowed money. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. It was a little bit of an actuarial curve, but it was a financing bill. The Medicare For All Act is a financing bill. I am begging us: Could we have a revolutionary thought between Democrats and Republicans, maybe if we actually talk about what we pay and what we get for what we pay? The debate right now is about a number of the expanded subsidies on the ACA expire. There are parts of the country where there are high medical costs and high income, where a person can make up to $600,000 a year and get $4,000-plus in subsidies paid to the insurance company. Here is the perversity. These subsidies, the $33 billion it would take for one year--$40 billion if it is made permanent--are paid to insurance companies. Mr. Speaker, here is just a crazy thought experiment. Ozempic goes off patent in Canada in January. States like Florida and Colorado have already gotten the FDA to approve reimportation. We actually have a chart that is looking at the potential of generic manufacturers producing it from $60 to $120 a month. This is a crazy thought. We know Milken researchers a couple of years ago said obesity is 40 percent of U.S. healthcare. Diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare. It is 31 percent of Medicare. How many lives are lost right now because of multiple chronic conditions? What would happen if we took a portion of that money for our brothers and sisters who are on Medicaid, Indian Health Service, VA, or other subsidized government programs and we actually said: Screw it. We are going to allow the reimportation. We are going to buy it. It is off the patent. We can actually get an incredible deal. Yay. What would be the actual cost of healthcare? What would be the health statistics of our brothers and sisters? What would the effect be on labor force participation, family formation, and all the other crazy things we have seen in this data? What would it look like 1 year from now, 2 years from now, or 3 years from now? That is actually the thought experiment. Do we want to hand $33 billion of subsidies to insurance companies, or do we want to affect the actual cost of delivering services and maybe have our brothers and sisters live healthier and longer? Why can't we think this way? Is that Republican or Democrat? I would argue it is just moral. It is trying to be creative with the limited resources we have. Every dollar of that is borrowed. Why wouldn't we want a society that is actually getting healthier? I am just trying to come up with solutions. There will be an army of lobbyists outside my office tomorrow, beating the crap out of me, because it turns out sick people are business models. It is cruel to say that. It is just really cruel to say that. We have to change it. The morality of cures, the morality of--and it is also really good economics. Mr. Speaker, I have two last boards. I want to make a point. We updated this as of a couple of hours ago. We are actually remarkably lucky. In other industrialized countries, the debt is starting to scare the hell out of bond markets. A bunch of our longer term--10 years and out--have actually been operating very efficiently. Does it bother anyone that France just took down their government because they were trying to do some fiscal consolidation? They won't let them deal with their debt, but they can sell a bond for about 50 basis points cheaper than we can. Greece is actually about 70 basis points cheaper. When Greece takes a 10-year bond to market, it is a substantially lower interest rate than the United States. If we look at the credit rating of what people are willing to buy the debt for, all of these countries have a better credit rating than the United States. Mr. Speaker, there are 18 States that actually have a better credit rating than the Federal Government. I don't know other ways and I keep struggling to find ways to get folks to take this seriously. Once again, Mr. Speaker, the hallways will be full of people knocking on our doors, saying: We want more money. They don't show up to say: Hey, we have an idea to do something better, faster, and cheaper. We want a free market. We believe in creative destruction. Mr. Speaker, I never liked the CHIPS Act because it directs cash subsidies. Often, subsidizing last-generation technology leads to what is going on right now. Should Intel give up 10 percent of its ownership? What would happen if Intel were forced to break up? We might end up with four or five creative, efficient, and cutting-edge companies. As an example, one company is doing design. Do we remember our high school economics class? Creative destruction is what brings us to that next level of productivity, which raises wages. For working people in my district, who are not making about 27 or 28 percent more than the first year of the Biden administration, they are poor today. I think at the end we came in number two. Yet, I have seen some numbers in Arizona that are making me very nervous on the growth of unemployment and the stagnation of wages. There are ways to make this another American century. The first thing we have to do is tell the truth. We have a country that is borrowing $70,000 to $72,000 a second. How long do we think we can keep that up? Yet, if we get our taxes from a regulatory system and legalize, once again, creativity, legalize productivity, instead of barrier after barrier--those barriers may be great politics. They show up in our fundraisers and help us. Maybe we can get a union to vote for us, but it is crap economics. Mr. Speaker, I am incredibly optimistic for the future. I am 63. My wife is 63. I have said this a few times, and people think I am insane. We have adopted a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old. We are the luckiest family on Earth. When my little boy is about 21 or 22 years old, every tax in America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. My kids will be part of the first generation to be poor because of our unwillingness to tell the truth. Is that the America we aspire to? We are better than this. I am sick and tired of having the leadership and others say: David, we will do it after the next election. Mr. Speaker, guess what? There is always another election. I believe the American people would reward us if we demonstrated to them that we told them the truth. We tried to do hard things and we saved the future, because that future is coming very fast. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, instead of an hour of another economics presentation, we need to have a conversation. Is the evil winning? A couple of hours ago, one of my constituents lost his life. There is a 16-month-old whose daddy is not coming home. There is a 3-year-old little girl whose daddy is not coming home. Erika, the wife, can you just imagine what is going on right now? Do we really now live in a country where words take your life? Last weekend, it was either Monday or the weekend--and Andy will know the proper name. There is a newspaper called the Beehive or something like that--forgive me for not knowing the name--and it actually did a whole expose on Charlie Kirk coming to universities in Utah to actually spread his message. If you actually read it, it was a classic conservative message of hope, of loving people, of believing marriage and prosperity were really good for Americans, and a message for young people. The other half of the article was about how many people in Utah hated this message and what they would do to stop him because, as you know, having a conversation now is--particularly, if it is conversation that doesn't support collectivism, the left, and some weird dystopian view of what America is--your kids don't have a dad that comes home. Look, I am not here to try to make this a drama. Maybe we hyperpersonalized it a little bit. I have a 3-year-old little boy at home, and I have a 9-year-old girl. My little girl is scared to death. When she is home with mom, she has to walk through the house every evening and make sure every window and door is locked because we had someone attack us a couple of weeks ago in a Costco parking lot. This is America. Great job. I have asked a couple of my friends who knew Charlie Kirk better than I do--actually, my brother knows him better than I do. The morality of a life that is taken at age 31 that was actually just trying to make us better--and that cost you your life? What is wrong? Every Member of this body, particularly on our side, I beg of us, understand and embrace this message of love, conservatism, prosperity, hope, and the morality of family. We have to make sure this legacy of a young man who was actually having a remarkable impact on a society that is lost--let's keep that message alive because it is worth fighting for. The idea of someone losing their life for words--I am going to sit down. Andy, bail me out here. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs), my neighbor.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. Boebert) and I were talking in the back. I yield to her to please share her thoughts.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I have a challenge for everyone out there who thinks you know things. A little while ago, I was sent--and I hope this is either a bot or just someone who is having a mental health issue, who was putting out horrible, evil comments. You could tell this is a person who has never actually listened, never actually gave a moment. Here is my challenge to particularly my brothers and sisters on the left, a lot of us on the right, and those who consider themselves populists everywhere else in between. I need to apologize. My world, I see the world through math. It is sometimes a little cold. Maybe I should learn to spend more time like Mr. Kirk, with just the morality of family, of prosperity. My challenge to you is to go online, go actually watch some of the actual videos, not the interpretation of them, not someone who is offended because it is a violation of their collective dystopian view of the world, but the actual videos. Go find something where Mr. Kirk is basically saying here is the philosophy. Here is my hope. Here is where I actually think that if we embrace this, all of us, our society would be better, more prosperous, more loving. I challenge you, before you start to actually think you understand--why is it some of us who sometimes are best of friends, sometimes we beat the crap out of each other, and we are all here saying the same thing to you? Do words that I actually believe are based on what we are as Americans, based in our founding documents, should those words take your life? Should they leave a 16-month-old, a 3-year-old, and a wife without a father and husband? Mr. Speaker, if the movement is going to work, if the movement is going to save our future, if the movement is going to give hope to a generation that in many ways has been crushed by so many things we have allowed to happen, it needs someone like Charles Kirk going out and saying: Look, there is hope. Here is a path. Go watch the video. Go watch and read what is written. If we are going to have an opinion, make it based on actual information and not on some propaganda on social media. This can't be what we have become, but it is. There is a pit in my stomach when I think about how Steve Scalise almost lost his life and when the President was shot at. I have heard stories from Members, which we try often not publicize, who have been assaulted and had a bullet through their office windows. I think about my own experiences with my children in my arms. We are politicians. There is a certain risk and a certain insanity that goes with doing this. How many of us are out there who have built a very powerful and very successful organization but are also telling a story that is America? It is actually what made us. Go read the actual documents. Go watch the actual videos. After that, if folks have an opinion, it is their opinion. They are Americans. We get to have a belief, but don't make it a belief based on ignorance. For everyone in my community, in the Phoenix and Scottsdale area, Charlie's home, I ask them to please pray and extend kindness. I say to his family--Erika and his two children--he is not coming home. Please, God, let's not make this what our future looks like. We have got to be better than this, even when the messenger that is ultimately a message of optimism and prosperity and morality and love takes a life. Mr. Speaker, I come up here every week and talk about the economics and how terrified I am about the debt, deficits, and demographics. Maybe I should just be terrified of what our future looks like when we have someone at 31 years old, who has built a following just telling the truth--Mr. Speaker, I have to stop myself from rambling because I have a thousand thoughts going through my head. Many of them are quite angry. I promised myself I wouldn't come up here and do a tirade. Let this be a moment of reflection and particularly for those who fill my text message, fill my emails, and fill my mailbox at home with hate. If there are people on the left who are full of burning hate, maybe now is a good moment of reflection for what those folks have brought to our society. Is this really what we are? Actually take my challenge. Go actually watch and go read what Charles Kirk was actually trying to communicate. People might actually find out it is not that foreign to where their hearts are at. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, ranking member, and my good friend, in some ways, this is a budgetary discipline amendment. The fact of the matter is, we have been doing a project with the Joint Economic Committee for a couple of years now, where we have been going up and down budgets and finding resources, money that has been appropriated that has sat in accounts, sometimes for years and years. My argument is that many of these things I actually don't oppose. You belong appropriating it again. You belong engaging in the budgetary discipline. If we are truly doing regular order, we should say that this was originally appropriated in 2015. It is clean coal, which is an actual one. The money is still sitting there, since 2015. Maybe we should reexamine it, reappropriate it, or pull it back. Instead, Mr. Chair, we actually estimate there is over a trillion dollars sitting in accounts. Mr. Chairman, much of it are things that I like. It is not about liking the appropriation. It is about budgetary discipline of going up and down and reviewing everything because maybe there is a newer, better, and faster way of doing these things. Yet, the fact of the matter is that we play this game where we leave this cash sitting in these accounts and then stack on it and stack on it. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, to my appropriator friend, this is the game that we play, and this is where we talk past each other. Can I give an actual example? Clean coal technology, appropriated August 18, 2015; unobligated balance, $2 million. In the scale we deal with, when we borrow approximately $6.5 billion every day, we are, right now, burning through about $71,000 to $72,000 a second. That is our borrow. I actually think I voted for this in 2015, but it is still sitting in the account, unspent. Maybe, if we are doing our jobs, we should go back through and say: Do we still want this? Do we still want to do this? This is our job. Instead, we are stacking. Mr. Chairman, I will say it again: We are borrowing close to $72,000 every second. The Joint Economic Committee and our math is that we are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the entire economy this fiscal year, the fiscal year that we are in right now. When you hear the economists both on the Democratic side and the Republican side running around saying: We should only be borrowing 3 percent, that would mean almost $1.8 trillion of cuts this fiscal year to get to a 3 percent borrow. Most of the borrow, or the vast majority, is interest and healthcare, but we are not allowed to tell the truth about those mechanics. Is it appropriate to be engaged in stacking? This is something that was appropriated in 2015. It has sat in the account, static, but we are just going to stack on top of it. It is not about the belief that it is good for the country, good for the economy, and good for this. It is the budgetary discipline of: Are we going to tell the truth that we have something that we call ``forgotten funds,'' and it equals billions and billions of dollars sitting in accounts? If we are going to be adults, be professionals, and do our jobs--I am sorry--every single one of these line items belongs in this budget, being modernized, reviewed, and determined whether it is still needed. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I missed all of you now that we are back. I get teased back home of doing these things that seem more like an economics lecture. That is actually not the goal here. It is actually just to sort of walk through the reality of the math because so much of this body is about theater and not about facts. As my wife a decade ago said: David, you get to go and hang out in a math-free zone. Let's have some fun with facts and math. Mr. Speaker, next year, the 2026 fiscal year, 3 weeks away, take a guess: For every dollar of tax collections--for every dollar of tax collections we get next year, what are we going to spend? For every dollar of tax collections we take in next year, we are going to spend $1.43. This one number right here should scare the hell out of people. Instead, the hallways around here are full of people demanding more spending. Just a little while ago in my office there were more people saying: Can you get us a grant? Can you get us more money? Can you regulate our competition? For every dollar of tax collections this year--we still have 3 more weeks before the fiscal year is over--my estimate is that we are going to spend $1.39. Next year, it is $1.43. How long do you intend for this to go on? Here is your problem: Most of that increase in spending is not some sort of crazy this or crazy that. It is interest. Remember, interest rates are up. We still have to finance about $10 trillion of refinance this year, and we are going to bring about $2.4 trillion or $2.3 trillion in total new debt this year. Next year, the baseline was we are going to borrow $2.5 trillion. It is probably going to be less $300 billion because of customs duties, tariffs. Yet, here is something I beg of everyone. Whether you are on the left or the right, burn this into your psyche: We borrow about $70,000 to $72,000 every second, and almost all of the growth in that borrowing is interest and healthcare costs. Mr. Speaker, I am sorry. Forgive me. I enjoy tormenting you. I don't mean to. Think of this: In 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Under the law--under the law, grandma takes a 24 percent cut in her check. In 7 years, we double senior poverty in America. Yet, if you are an idiot like I am, and you get up and say: We really should work on this. The Democrat consultants are going to beat the crap out of a Republican and vice versa for even mentioning the fact about the math. It is not Republican math. It is not Democrat math. It is in the Social Security actuary report. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you are running a hospital or one of these where the part A trust fund is your revenue source, you get an 11 percent cut. In 7 years. This year, we are going to spend $1 trillion on Medicare. In 7 years, we spend $2 trillion. It doubles in 7 years. It is demographics. It is not personal. It is not Republican-Democrat. It is what we are as a society. We have the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of our brothers and sisters who are 65. It is math. Behind these microphones this week, how many people have come up and actually talked about math, about the demographics, about the economic future? I would argue that understanding the math is moral. Is it moral to look the other way and in 7 years double senior poverty? Yet, you will get the living crap kicked out of you around here if you actually tell the truth about the math because we have spent so many decades lying to the American people. Mr. Speaker, I have this board I have used for a while. It was saying that right now we are borrowing $6 billion a day. I apologize. This number is wrong. We are borrowing $6.5 billion dollars a day, and there is the theatric problem. You get people saying: I am going to save a couple hundred million dollars. That is wonderful. Let's see. If I am doing $6.5 billion a day, that is almost $270 million an hour. There is the fraud around here. It is the inability to understand the scale of what is going on. Let's understand that borrowing is a tax. It is a tax paid for in the future with your retirement, my kids, but it is a tax paid with interest. We have a society who so desperately wants free stuff. They want money. The 100 times I have come behind this microphone and show the charts saying, I want every dime of my Social Security. Of course. Of course. Most people don't realize the Social Security formula actually is progressive. If you are a high-income earner, you get less of your money. If you are lower income earner, your FICA tax, you actually get more, but in the mean, you get about a $72,000 spiff for that couple. It is a crap rate of return. However society, the Democrats, back 20, 25 years ago decided that the idea of putting a little money into the market was a horrible idea except for the fact that now we look back 25 years later, it was a wonderful idea. Poverty rates of return and those things would have been dramatically different, but it is too late now. We are well into the population bubble of baby boomers. The driver that we don't like to tell the truth about is that same couple for every dollar they put into Medicare, you are going to get about $6, $7 back. Most people don't realize that about 38 percent of Medicare comes from the trust fund, about 15 percent comes from your copay, the rest comes right out of the general fund. Are we allowed to tell each other, the lobbyists, the activists, the people on social media making absolute crap up? How about our voters? Are we allowed to get in front of them and say: This is serious. This isn't a game. We right now are borrowing about $6.5 billion every single day for this fiscal year. We are down to the last 3 weeks, so you have a really good sense of what we borrowed. In 9 budget years, it is well over $10 billion a day. Yet, a couple hours ago, I offered an amendment that basically said there is all these dollars--and I am going to talk about this probably two, three times--that were appropriated. I showed one example of money appropriated in 2015. It wasn't a huge amount of money, few million bucks, and it has never been touched. We just leave it sitting in the account. We borrowed it, we are paying interest on it, but it just sits there. That is insane. You hear budget geeks go: We should do zero- based budgeting. Absolutely, because you can say, oh, we did that. We were going to do this. In that case, it was actually a clean coal program, but no one actually ever qualified for the grant so the cash sat there. There was like $36 billion of stuff that has been sitting in the accounts for more than a year and some for half a decade. Yet, we are so dysfunctional, we can't actually start from the beginning and go line by line by line. It doesn't solve the problem, but it helps. Let's actually walk through math reality. I am a Ways and Means guy. I chair Oversight Subcommittee on Ways and Means, but I also chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D. economists that work for the committee, and we try so hard to do intellectually honest math. Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone, but I am a dinosaur. I actually believe in free markets. I actually believe in the elegance of competition. We are actually going to touch a little bit on the economics of creative destruction. If you want productivity--because I am going to show in these charts where we are demographically, if we don't have an explosion of productivity, we can't make wages go up. If you are a working person in this country today--particularly like in my Phoenix-Scottsdale area, if you are a working person today and you haven't had about a 28 percent pay hike in the last 4 years, you are poorer today. It is called inflation. The biggest tax in modern history was those 3, 4 years of inflation because we now get to pay back our debt with inflated dollars. We are crushing people. The way you make wages go up is two things: You raise people's wages because of inflation. That just means you are treading water, or productivity. Now some of the things we did in the reconciliation budget that we passed before break is expensing, research and development expensing, things to try to get investments to do things better, faster, cheaper, but we are going to have to have the brutal discussion of--you functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds coming in and next year it is going be lower and the next year it is going to be smaller and the year after is smaller. People like me, baby boomers, with gray hair, there is a whole bunch of us. We have got to legalize technology. Is it rational? I will say this a couple times. Is it rational to make it illegal to automate a port? I would love to have the dockworkers and the unions love me. Maybe they would even send financial help and say nice things about me, but it is not about that. It is about the entire continuity of society, when we create these barriers for automation, for doing things better, faster, healthier, and cheaper. If you are going to have a command and control economy, let's just admit we are populous. We want to run the economy. We want to own businesses. We don't believe in the economic theories of creative destruction, creating new, better, faster, but give up on the productivity cycle and then you tell me how people's wages go up. You have a middle class that is getting absolutely crushed and squeezed. Their purchasing power is stagnant, if not reduced. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is going to happen through policy here. It is like no one here went to their basic elementary school economics class. The chart here--I am going to try to make a point--is customs duties. We all talk about tariffs. I heard a Member a couple days ago say: Customs duties. Tariffs are going to pay for everything. No, they are not. Now, they do pay for most of the big, beautiful bill. The fact of the matter is, last year we took in about $77 billion in customs duties. This year, we are going to take in, our best guess, is $190 billion. Except the problem is, did I mention to you a little bit ago that we borrow about $6.5 billion a day? The increase in tariffs, customs duties, is going to pay for like 11 days of borrowing. Out of 365 days, we just covered 11 days of borrowing. For anyone who is watching, much of what DOGE was doing was fascinating. Go look at DOGE.gov right now, and you will see a couple of hundred billion dollars of potential savings, though only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction has actually been executed because we in Congress can't even do basic rescissions. We did a rescission before August. It was a total of like $9 billion, so if you are borrowing $6 billion, we covered a day and a half of borrowing. It was war here for 6 weeks to save that much money. We are living in a mathematical delusion where people don't understand that is 12 zeros. They don't see the difference between a trillion and a billion, but the fact of the matter is, we need to start telling the truth about the math. Let's walk through. Let's get a little more geeky. This morning, there was something called the JOLTS data. It is basically ADP's attempt to sort of take an estimate of what is happening in jobs data. There has been a lot of slop in the numbers. Look, we were beating up BLS before, but remember, we also have a response rate to the surveys that is down dramatically. Sometimes you get big revisions, and then the next month you get a little more data, and the next month you get more returns, and you can finally calculate. In the JOLTS data, there is a fascinating number to look at. The number of jobs was fairly flat, but unemployment looks like, our best model, it is going to stay steady because we are finding we don't have as many workers looking for jobs. It is really worth taking a look at that, as we are starting to see the demographic implications of how many of our brothers and sisters are choosing to take retirement at age 62, when for years we have been looking at there are, like, 7 million prime-age males missing from the labor force. That was actually one of the controversies when we were trying to do some of the reforms in Medicaid, saying that should we ask folks to at least look at participating in the economy and the society because, Heaven knows, we need them. Look, this may be a little bit geeky, this chart, but the basic premise is, when you are taking a look at labor force participation, back here is the recession. We had, like, 70 percent of the population participating in the economy. Today, we are down here below 62 percent, or 62.5 was our 2025 estimate, and we believe it is going to continue to fall. Is this people just sitting on the sidelines? No. It is more complicated. As a society, we got older. We have done entire presentations--and I know this is controversial and uncomfortable--of our brothers and sisters when you have entire States where more than half of the population qualifies as being obese. We are not being mean, but the Joint Economic Committee a few years ago did a major study saying, hey, it turns out obesity costs about $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending over 10 years, and there is the Milken study from a few years ago saying 47 percent of all U.S. healthcare. Maybe the morality is getting our head straight and saying we help our brothers and sisters get healthier so they can participate in the economy, so we have more labor force participation, so the economy grows, so productivity goes up, and so wages go up. However, we are incapable of a unified theory around here because it would require thinking in math. To get a little more sarcastic, we actually are fixated on just some of the budgetary problems. We actually believe there are hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that are subject to rescission. They have been sitting in accounts for years. Instead, we just did an appropriations bill a little while ago, where we stacked on top of stacks. Why is it so terrifying to the army of lobbyists, the people back home who want more money to say, hey, we are just going to look at everything because we found occasions where we are doing an appropriations that there was an appropriation done 3 or 4 years ago, and the money is still sitting in the account. I can understand the scale, if you are borrowing $270 billion a month, maybe fixing this, but we don't have a choice. Is anyone else at least at all freaked out a little bit looking at what is happening around the world right now, what is happening to French bonds, British bonds, Japanese yields on the long end of the curve? When you see the long end of the curve going up and up, that lets you know the entire world is getting really nervous about long-term debt. Ray Dalio, the billionaire, has been giving speeches around the country. He even wrote a book saying you have a math problem. The entire industrialized world basically is at zero to negative population growth. Our brothers and sisters who have gotten older, who are moving into their pension years, their healthcare years, where are the savings to keep financing all these governments that are borrowing? His argument is there is not enough savings for all the borrowing. Then, you get the idiot who says: Well, we will just print the money. Of course you will. What is that thing called again? Yeah, inflation. You debase the currency. Yes, you pay for it with inflated dollars, but everything you have, your savings, become worth less. You make real estate and things more expensive, so the next generation can't buy a house. We are basically--it is an economic term--oh, yeah, we are screwing over the next generation and maybe our own retirements by not telling the truth about the math. It doesn't have to be dystopian. There are ways to deal with this stuff. We just don't have a lot more time. Look, we have something called the Sunset Act. We have been looking at regulations, command and control, that are woven through the economy, particularly post-Biden administration, where they regulated at breakneck speed. They are up for review. They need to be modernized. Part of the question is, if you are going to regulate air quality, do you do it the same way you did 30 years ago, when you actually have remote sensors that can be in your pocket, or do you need the million- dollar-a-year tower to do it where you look at the entire marketplace? The fact of the matter is, there are better, faster, cheaper ways, and much more elegant, and you get the bad actors. We have actually done some economic modeling, and it turns out we can actually add a real pop to GDP growth, the size of the economy. GDP growth is important because that is actually your living standard. When we grow, you live better. It turns out, it is not deregulation. It is smart regulation. Find this bureaucratic control of economic growth and let's just review them. Should we still do it the same way we did 20 years ago? Let me give you a conceptual. A year and a half ago, I met with a Phoenix-based company that is actually building a ginormous drone. They intend to do ground-penetrating lidar, radar underneath this drone. Let's say you want to build a pipeline or a road. They are going to fly it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and penetrate the ground to see if there are archaeological, geological issues, these things. At the end of the week, they claimed the AI, the artificial intelligence, can write the entire environmental and engineering report. What would it have taken for people to go out and walk the site? A couple of years. We have already been being lobbied by, ``We are the archaeological guild. We are the geological guild,'' we are this and that because we don't want to be replaced by the technology, so it should take 2 years. We are going to do permitting reform, saying we want to do it in half the time, so we are going to have these people walk twice as fast? That is the way this brain around here works. We are going to make it so that they walk twice as fast. Are we out of our minds? That technology is not in the code yet. We have not legalized saying, I can let AI, even though they claim the statistics of it would be more accurate than humans out walking the site. We can do things dramatically faster. There was a great article. I think it may have been in The Economist or the Financial Times a couple of days ago that was making the point that China has become a country of engineers. We have become a country of lawyers. Why does it take us so long to build something? Why does it take us so long to do the things that would make us more prosperous? It sort of becomes obvious in that one line: We are a country of lawyers. Our competitors are countries of engineers. Look, when we start looking at actual GDP growth--maybe this is a better way than using the chart. The long-run economic growth, almost all the credible economists in America say that we are going to get a nice pop in the next year or two from what we did in the reconciliation budget. Great. Then, because of our demographics, we start to hit going back to the mean. It is only like 1.8 percent GDP growth. We cannot make it if we grow at anemic rates, but you can't do it through a bunch of handouts and subsidies. It has to be from unleashing markets. It is why I am concerned, seeing things going on where we are taking ownership interests in companies. Look, this one is going to be uncomfortable. Let's go back 15 years ago, the Great Recession, when we bailed out a car company. Yes, we were saving jobs, except for long-run economic growth. There are some brilliant papers that have been written, saying, after a couple of years, you would have had the same number of jobs and three or four creative, smaller, innovative car companies, one doing electric, one doing sports cars, one doing--that is actually how creative destruction works in the economy. It is like a phoenix. It is the rebirth. When you stop that rebirth from happening, you don't get to clean out the legacy headwinds, the things that are slowing down the innovation. You basically perpetuate the inefficiencies. It doesn't make you popular telling the truth, but we all knew this. Should we have bailed out Blockbuster Video 15 years ago because there were tens of thousands of people who worked for Blockbuster? Should we have put Netflix out of business? Should we have slowed down the internet? Should we have stopped the revolution of technology where you go home now and hit a button? You say that is absurd, David. No. It is the same sort of concept. Should government have stepped in and stopped innovation? We have done entire presentations here where you talk about the morality of cures. If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare, should we spend more money on helping people maintain their misery? Probably. Should we spend what is necessary to cure the disease? What would be the economic impact? There is a brilliant study from a couple of years ago talking about maybe one of the leading, if not the leading, contributor to income inequality in America. It is actually health, except we will get lobbied by groups that are upset saying: If you kill the disease, what happens to my business model? This is how perverse this place has become. Where is the passion? Where is the vision? Where is the innovation? Where is the optimism? Look, I am 63. My wife is 63. I have a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old. The 9-year-old is remarkably loud. We are blessed. We were able to adopt. It is the most greatest joy in life. Mathematically, my children will be part of the first generation that is going to be poorer than their parents. That is the American ethos now? The Americans' ethic is that we are going to make our kids and grandkids poorer because we want stuff? This is what we have become because we are so damn afraid to do things that are hard around here? Look, I am going to do this slightly out of order. Ten weeks ago, when we were doing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, part of my deal was, Mr. Speaker, that I don't like some of the things that are in here, but I really want to offer legislation to pay for it because I think there are some eloquent things we could do to offset. The deal was, okay, go ahead. See if you can get anyone to sponsor it and vote for it. We have been chasing for over a year. Go read The Wall Street Journal articles, the MedPAC report--the amount of fraud, waste, misalignment. Some of it is perfectly legal misalignment. We are the idiots that screwed up the law in Medicare part C, or what I was talking about a little while ago, cash that has been sitting in accounts for years that could be swept that we are paying interest on. This number is getting bigger, a talent-based immigration system. We educate people and send them home to compete with us--and the President's golden visas. It came in over $3 trillion of savings. We wrote the bills. We had Ph.D. economists help us model them and get our numbers right. We got a preliminary number from CBO that the Medicare Advantage modernization saves $1.8 trillion, making it the biggest savings bill in U.S. history. Mr. Speaker, guess how many cosponsors we have? Zero. Zero because it is hard, complicated, difficult to explain, but it is really good policy. There are solutions. Toughen up. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from California (Mr. Kiley).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from California for his remarks, and as I always say to Californians, don't take Arizona's water. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to do a run-through of a couple things here. I am going to try to walk through some economics. Then I am going to actually try to walk through some warnings that are in the documents that are around us that very few people seem to bother to read. Then I am going to actually do some things that are hopeful because I think sometimes I am a bit dour, and I don't do enough of this. First off, in August, Republicans are going to go out and tell the morality of people's taxes not going up next year. What we did in the reconciliation budget: incentives to invest in America, to build new plants of equipment, for working people to have some things to actually draw them back into the labor force, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, some of these things. If you actually look at one of the reasons those things are in there, and we are actually starting to see some of the models of the economic side, seeing some very optimistic things that we think are going to change labor force participation, small changes. The left will actually sort of do a bit of schizophrenia such as you cut spending over here, but too much of this money is borrowed. I agree too much is borrowed. I want to cut more spending, but then you attack us when we try to actually point out misalignment, bad acts. What was the report that just came out a couple days ago, where we found 2.8 million of our brothers and sisters enrolled in subsidized ACA plans as well as Medicaid plans. They don't want to talk about that because it screws up their pitch when you actually walk through what we see in the math. We know the American people believe and understand the morality and the great economics of encouraging those that are able-bodied, able to work to participate in society. If anyone is a geek out there--it is probably 4 or 5 years old--the University of Chicago, four of their Ph.D. economists wrote a brilliant paper talking about: If you actually ask people to participate in society, in the economy, to take a job, even if you give them welfare or government subsidies, because they have an attachment to the economy, to work, at the end of 10 years, those who had the work requirements actually end up much wealthier and off of government support. It is the morality of learning to get up, building an attachment, learning skills, and moving up in an organization. There was a time when it was actually the left's ethos, that the argument of work is moral. Somehow that left the Democratic Party. Let's walk through a couple things. I have used this board for months now. It will probably be the last time I use it. Understand baseline over the next 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office, we are going to spend $86 trillion. Think of the screaming and gnashing of teeth and protests that are all ginned up, you cut $800 billion from this, and a little bit from a couple other things, it was less than 2 percent of that spending. Are you telling me that the left doesn't believe that if you are spending $86 trillion as your baseline spending, and understand--I am going to show you some of the charts and how much of this is basically demographics. We got old. Our healthcare costs money. I am going to show you a couple charts that I really want folks to understand. But for the American people, when you see someone from the Democratic Party behind a microphone saying, they cut spending. It is this off of the base of this. It is the lack of understanding. One of the points that you keep trying to make over and over again is, was it the Democrats' plan that they wanted to raise taxes on everyone? Because that was automatic; that was coming at the end of this year. Your taxes were going up back to the pre-2017 tax reform. Every once in a while, you will get someone who says, well, you shouldn't have extended the tax policy for the highest income. Okay. That is a tiny, tiny portion of the total dollar amount. When they had control of everything, they didn't do it. But just from a point--and this is more for everyone to understand, particularly even staff. You see the blue here, nondefense/defense, every dime of that is borrowed. I think this year we will probably borrow, let's call it, $400 billion for Medicare. We are going to actually hold a contest shortly to see who can guess the final borrowing for this year. The economy has actually been pretty good. We are tracking customs receipts. Many of you think of it as tariffs. We may have another $70 billion on top of baseline. It is probably going to come at $2.2 trillion of borrowing this year. This doesn't have the tax reform, many of those things built into that base. How do I help folks understand? Here is where we are already at, and this will make sense in a little while. For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. We spend $1.39 for every dollar we take in tax receipts. If you saw that previous chart, you would have noticed that only about 24 to 26 percent is in discretionary, what we really get to vote on. That is why we end up having to use what we call these reconciliation budgets. The 1974 Budget Control Act allows us to move a bill, if it has certain fiscal properties to it, through the Senate without having to get 60 votes. It is all a dance to deal with the 60 votes. If we were actually a little more honest about math, maybe we wouldn't have to do this dance. Why this is important is--I am a little freaked out because this is the MedPAC report. I know every Member of Congress has read every word of it because it is really important. There is a chart in here that if you actually read the footnotes--now, look, for anyone that is paying attention, I am trying to bring Medicare Advantage back where the incentives actually are about helping populations be healthier and not about risk scoring them that--it is a concentration of illness, but the incentives are that if populations are healthier, the plans can make more money. But inside here is also a great data point, Mr. Speaker. This year, we are going to spend, let's call it, a trillion dollars on Medicare. How many of you would guess what we are going to spend in 7 years? The model in here says in 7 years, we go from $1 trillion a year on Medicare to $2 trillion. We double Medicare spending in 7 years. Now, part of that is demographics. Starting, functionally, 30 years ago, we started having a lot fewer children. So if we took today and stepped back 20 years ago, we had about 35 million of our brothers and sisters who were 65 years old, 30 years ago. Today, we are approaching about 70 million of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up, so more than double. Go back 20 years ago, the number of 18 years olds we had is pretty much the same as the number of 18 year olds we have today. Next year, the number of 18 year olds goes down, the year after that it goes down, and the year after that it goes down. Is that Republican or Democrat or is it just demographics? It is a little hard to campaign on that. It is a little hard to attack the other side, but the fact of the matter is, if we all read our data, we don't have a choice. This is the Social Security Medicare actuary report, another thing I know every Member here has actually read. Seven years from now, the Medicare part A trust fund, which is about 38 percent of Medicare spending--the rest comes out of the general fund and members' participation, I think is about 15 percent, the fees they pay--but that 38 percent, that trust fund is gone in 7 years, meaning hospitals, surgery centers will have an 11 percent cut, but I know we are all going to talk and work on how we are going to revolutionize the cost of healthcare. One of the classic problems around here, Mr. Speaker, is for some reason the left--and many of us on the right--we talk about healthcare as a finance problem. The ACA was a finance bill. It was who had to pay, who got subsidized. Medicare for All is a finance bill. I would argue the Republican alternative from a few years ago was a finance bill. It had a little better actuarial curve, but it was a finance bill: who got subsidized, who has to pay. I beg of our brothers and sisters around here, open up your brain. We live in a time of miracles. We are going to have some conversations about how you change the view of healthcare. It is all about what we pay. Can we change the cost by doing it better, faster, cheaper with technology and our brothers and sisters being healthier? If we don't, we will have problems like what is shown on this chart. Today, 16 percent of all tax receipts go just to interest. In 9 budget years, actually 9 years straight up, in 9 years, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go just to interest. Heaven forbid, if we had a 1 point movement in interest rates, my math is 45 percent of all tax receipts would go to interest. When you see people come behind these microphones, how many people are saying: Hey, how do we convince the bond markets? The bond markets are basically on the edge of running this country now because when you borrow $6 billion a day--next year, I think we borrow $6.5, maybe $7 billion a day. In 9 years, we are over $10 billion a day. Let's see. That is, what, $70,000 to $72,000 a second. I have this aggregator on my news, and there are some crazy articles. A couple leftwing economists are saying: Borrowing doesn't matter, people are always willing to buy U.S. debt. Okay. Let's pretend these leftwing economists are right. We can continue to borrow and borrow and borrow. They purposely sort of forget the punch line. Let's say we could borrow forever. At what point are there no more services, purchases, government helping our brothers and sisters because it is all covering the interest costs on the bonds? So let's say--I think you are a little insane--you believe we can just borrow forever, you are a monetarist, but even the fragility in the monetarists, you saw in the previous few years of inflation that their model didn't work. Also, in addition to that, we are going to pay the interest. In 9 years, baseline under a favorable interest rate model, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go to interest and, Heaven forbid, if interest rates were to come up 1 percent because we have to--this coming year, I think we are going to refinance $11 trillion, the year after that I think it is $13 trillion because we stay so short on the financing term, we sell short-term debt instead of longer-term debt because it turns out there is not as big an appetite. We are in this world where in 9 budget years, it will be $10 billion a day. I am just going to run through a number of these things fairly quickly just to sort of get to the point. National health expenditures as a percentage of GDP, this will make sense in a moment. In 2033--so functionally, what, 8 years from now--over 20 percent of the economy will just be healthcare. Why? The Joint Economic Committee 2 years ago wrote a report--and I thought I was going to get the crap kicked out of me, but we spent months and months and months grabbing every bit of literature and saying: Can someone tell me what obesity costs America? What it costs society? What it costs family formation? What does it cost? We came up with a number 2 years ago of $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs. We had some mortality statistics, the number of multiple chronic conditions, the misery out there. What is fascinating is we have some articles right now talking about that we may have actually hit something crazy, and it is an odd way to phrase it, but it is what the researchers think, we may have already hit what we call peak obesity. When we published the report 2 years ago, we still had about 4 or 5 more years of growth of obesity. In some States, actually approaching 50 percent of their population are technically obese under the BMI calculations. It looks like in the last 12 months we may have started to bend the curve. We are trying to recalculate. Is this a sign of incredible hope that we know so much misery in our society--because there is a brilliant paper from about 7 years ago saying the leading contributor to income inequality in America, it turns out, isn't education. It turns out it is health. When you think about it, the cascade of costs of someone with severe diabetes, when we already know diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare. What if things like this actually could help our brothers and sisters? Is this Republican or Democrat? It is just good policy. It has just always been uncomfortable to talk about. Maybe society is starting to open up, saying, hey, maybe a healthier society actually is a really good, really moral thing. Look, as we walk through these, I want to come back and sort of hit a punch line here. These charts have been available to us for years. The curve keeps getting steeper. When you have someone say they are a protector of Medicare, that is great. I am with you. It is an earned benefit. We made a societal promise, are they telling the truth about its financing? Oh, David, we can't do that, someone will say something mean about us. In 7 years, what else will also be empty? The Social Security trust fund. I am sure you all dove into the Social Security Medicare actuary report and saw the point in there where it says in 2032, 2033--actually we think it is 2032--our brothers and sisters on Social Security will take a 24 percent cut. Our model says we double senior poverty in America. That is absolutely immoral. Have you also read the papers, the scale of tax hikes, of policy? Now, is the left offering to work with those of us on the right who are willing to step on the third rail and do the moral thing to actually take these on? Hell, no. Mr. Speaker, I have talked to so many people on the Committee on Ways and Means and other committees who basically look at me in terror and run out of the room. The political consultants care more about the power of the politics than the fact that in 7 years, Medicare is $2 trillion a year. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In the first full year, if we want to backfill that shortfall on Social Security, one of the rough numbers we have is $618 billion. Basically, what is that? It is two-thirds of what the entire defense budget is. There is a lack of understanding of the scale of almost the dystopianism that comes from what happens when these trust funds are empty.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I will learn to talk faster. To the poor person trying to take my words down, I apologize. I am going to skip over some of the other charts. Mr. Speaker, you get the punch line. In the next decade, the vast majority of debt is driven by interest and healthcare costs. We are often very uncomfortable talking about it. Let's actually talk about things that are great and that if we would get the policy right, we could lower that healthcare cost. It is not just an argument about who gets subsidized and who gets financed. It is what would be really good for society and really good for the budget. We all saw The Economist article the last couple of days that talked about the miracle of how much the statistical benefits were having on the number of cures for cancer, particularly lung cancer and blood cancers, and their model that we are on the cusp of having major breakthroughs. We saw this article a couple of days ago about a Microsoft platform. I didn't even know they were specializing in this. What was stunning about the datasets they had in here was that AI systems diagnosed patients four times more accurately than a human doctor. I just upset some of my brothers and sisters in the doc caucus, but the data is the data. Mr. Speaker, should we legalize technology? If I have something I can blow into called a Breath Biopsy and if it is statistically as accurate or more accurate than a human and knows what I have, should it be allowed to prescribe? It is uncomfortable, but it would help crash the cost of healthcare. It would actually help us with the fact that we have a shortage of medical professionals. We are on the cusp of these things. As a matter of fact, that technology has been around for 5 years except it is functionally illegal. We don't reimburse it, and we don't allow it to prescribe. We are on the cusp. An hour ago, Sam Altman with OpenAI was down the hallway. He and I had a few minutes of conversation about a new healthcare stat that is going to go public in about a month. He seemed incredibly optimistic that its accuracy will be off the charts. Should we legalize the use of technology to help our society be healthier? Should we allow it to prescribe? It is uncomfortable because this place is a protection racket. We have to understand. Congress is mostly about one thing. It is about money. The left pretends it isn't. The right pretends it isn't. It is about money. When we start to say maybe we can use technology as a competition to help our brothers and sisters be healthier and, therefore, change the cost of healthcare, somebody is going to say: I make money on that. You are now going to have me compete against a data system that is more accurate than I am? We see it over and over. A new Apple Watch AI model can reveal hidden health conversations. Here are a couple things I have been most interested in the last couple of years. There is a great article. I did a whole speech on it a couple of years ago. AI discovered a whole new categories of antibiotics. Remember we were all panic-stricken that we had diseases and bacterial infections that we didn't have antibiotics for. The antibiotics weren't working. AI discovered a whole new category of antibiotics that the literature said it would take humans 20 years to develop. Instead of being afraid of the technology, maybe we should get our heads straightened up. In our society we have a shortage of young people. Baby boomers like me with gray hair are getting older, and we are going to consume a lot more healthcare. Can we embrace the technology? That technology sets us free when we start to realize the things that are going on. We just had a doctor of radiology in our office. He walked us through the statistical abstract of breast cancer and the scans and showed that his AI platform was remarkably more accurate. It is cheaper, faster, and more accurate. Why wouldn't we embrace it? We don't reimburse it. The barriers to entry here are protection rackets saying we are not fighting for what is fastest, best, and cheapest. We are often here because we know our incumbency. We really are on the edge of miracles. How do I get the left and the right to understand the math is the math? Demographics are the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. It is hard to campaign against the other side. Maybe we can take a couple of months off and actually do good, quality policy and legalize properly vetted and properly certified AI to prescribe. This August, with the wearables, I am going to do an experiment with this Oura Ring. I am buying some Dexcoms to manage my glucose. Have we all seen the app where we can take a picture of food and it calculates glucose and calories? How can we create the incentives? Maybe we should look at the ACA. Instead of just smoking in three age categories, we can add a fifth category that is an incentive for our brothers and sisters to manage their health. Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is people who are not taking their drugs for hypertension and are not taking their statin. Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is over $600 billion a year. There are solutions. We can make a difference. Embrace the technology. Change the cost. Have a healthier society. It is the most powerful thing we can do for U.S. sovereign debt. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are having a really exciting discussion with my buddy of how CBO actually does scoring on things. I was trying to explain that some of the things we consider absurd are actually our fault because it is the law that we have passed to tell CBO how to do the scoring. Mr. Speaker, I want to make an apology to everyone because this one will go a little longer than normal. Yes, I know. Everyone can grab a cup of coffee or something. Hopefully, the Sergeant at Arms--we are apparently not allowed to drink coffee on the floor. Whatever happens, don't get caught, right? Mr. Speaker, I am going to try three things tonight. I will upset a number of folks. I am sorry. My math will be accurate because we have spent the last couple of days double-checking it. I am going to try to do something a little insane. I am going to walk folks through the Social Security actuary report. We are just going to do some of the most basic parts of it so folks understand what the reality is. Number two, I am going to walk through actually something that really bothers me because I have a number of politicians on the left and the right who spend day and night making up math. Mr. Speaker, can you believe that? They attack the CBO. They attack the Joint Committee on Taxation, this and that. I am going to walk us through parts of the accuracy and what we call the variance report done by the Congressional Budget Office and try to demonstrate--yes, there are mistakes. They are actually more accurate than most of the outside groups. That is uncomfortable because one of the other things I am going to touch on--and this is tough--is we have aspirational documents coming from the White House and from our own folks here on what growth can be. We can actually do remarkable growth, but we have to do very difficult policies to make it work. Are we going to do talent-based immigration? Are we going to do incentives to automate, to modernize, to use technology, or to even use AI? My fear is we want to take credit for very high growth numbers, as in GDP grows this, but we are not willing to do the hard lift with the policy. With that, I will explain why that is so important. The growth of debt, the drivers of debt, is the thing it is hard to tell the truth about. I am going to show some charts in a little bit, Mr. Speaker, that show over the next 10 years interest is the number one driver of debt and then healthcare, Medicare, almost exclusively. It is hard to explain that it is actually like 65-35 now. The some $22 trillion dollars that are baseline and then stack everything else on it that is going to be borrowed over the next 10 years, about 60 or 65 of that is just interest. Whether we like it or not, the reality of it is this country, our Federal Government, is an insurance company with an Army. We don't have enough cash in the bank to pay for all the promises we made as part of that insurance coverage. Let's have at it, Mr. Speaker. I keep bringing this chart because it is a really simple visual. Think of the people who almost attack us in our hallways and say: How can you want to cut spending? We show them this chart that says baseline spending. It is $86 trillion over the next 10 years. All we are talking about on the House reconciliation budget--and my understanding is the Senate, our good friends down the hallway, their cuts and spending are even more anemic. It is 2.3 percent. $86 trillion is the baseline spending for the next 10 years. We are trying in the House reconciliation budget to cut $2 trillion. That caused absolute panic because Washington, D.C., is about one thing. It is about money. When so much of America makes its money off D.C. policy, this has caused absolute panic, but it is a fraction. Mr. Speaker, when you see the new data on what is happening in healthcare costs--we have got some new data today that the numbers are even worse. Almost no one has actually started to do the math--the fact that the Social Security Medicare actuary report from 4 days ago actually has an 11 percent cut coming in the Medicare trust fund in 2033. That is not actually in the baseline debt numbers. Mr. Speaker, are we just going to pretend that we didn't get older as a society? Let's actually walk through. Mr. Speaker, I have done this chart for a decade. About 74 percent of all spending is on autopilot. It is what we call mandatory. It is interest, it is Social Security, it is Medicaid, it is Medicare, and it is other promises that are built into the formula. Members of Congress almost never ever get the chance to vote on any of this red. The only time it will ever really come up is if we have a reconciliation budget. All the blue, defense and nondefense, is 25, 26 percent of our spending. Every dime of it is borrowed. Please, anyone who cares, get this in your head: Every dime--other than some of the things in the reconciliation budget, every dime a Member of Congress will vote on, many for their entire careers, is borrowed money. Mr. Speaker, you see this 26 percent that is in blue, that is defense and nondefense discretionary. This year we are on track for every dollar we bring in in tax receipts--that is corporate taxes, that is individual taxes, that is everything--we are going to spend $1 in, $1.39 out the door. Does anyone see a math problem? Mr. Speaker, 1 month ago, Moody's actually downgraded U.S. debt, so now the three big rating agencies have lowered our credit. We actually have 18 States in America that have a higher credit rating than the Federal Government. If anyone bothered to actually read it, it was actually really well done. There were a lot of details. Mr. Speaker, you would have had to have gotten it through a Bloomberg Terminal or pay a subscription. We are blessed to have a Bloomberg Terminal. Yes, they got attacked by people who want to keep spending money who said: Stop. You can't downgrade U.S. sovereign debt. The other two rating agencies had done it years earlier. The punch line in there is that in less than 9 years--and this was assuming interest rates stayed stable--in 2034, 30 percent of all tax receipts just covered interest. If interest rates went up 1 percent, Mr. Speaker, 1 percent, in 2034, then 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts pay interest. Are we paying attention? Yet, the first words I will get from my brothers and sisters on the left are: Well, just raise taxes. I will show over and over here, Mr. Speaker, that if you look at times when we had high marginal tax rates, low marginal tax rates, we basically always get about 17 to 18, sometimes 18\1/2\, percent of the economy in tax receipts. There is our problem, it is that split. Right now if we are sitting in the almost 18 percent of the economy we are taking in in taxes, but we are spending 24--and understand, over the next few years it goes from 24, to 25, to 26--that gap is the annual deficit that gets piled on to the debt. I have lots of charts here that actually start to show--let me see if I can find my favorite one here--that when we actually raise--well, actually, I hid it in the back so we will do that as a whole section. How many understand we borrow $6 billion a day? How many understand in 9 years we are borrowing over $10 billion a day? Right now that means we borrow $72,000 a second. In 9 years we are functionally borrowing over $100,000 a second. The reason I try to break it down like that, is I am trying to find a way to make numbers like this, absolutely crazy numbers, work. Mr. Speaker, so you have that. My Democrat brothers and sisters have legislation they have introduced over the years. They have never actually brought it to the floor even when they controlled this body and controlled the White House. It gives you a sense, Mr. Speaker. Economic study, go on Manhattan Institute, Riedl, it is about 1 year, 1.5 years old, they did the scoring on all the Democrats' tax proposals. Here is the problem: Increasing taxes, Mr. Speaker, when you did actually all of them--and I am going to do this in a couple of fashions--you basically got to the point that when you did all the corporate, the estate, the individual, and then you did the economic effects, you got about 1.5 percent of the economy. All the taxes hikes--every time we have someone over on that side saying: Just raise taxes--if we do every one of their tax proposals, then we get 01.5 percent. Hopefully, everyone knows what the joke is. We are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the economy this year, and in 9 years we are borrowing 9 percent of the economy. How do we tell the truth to the American people that we are going to have to embrace things that are actually hopeful? The cost of healthcare--it is always fascinating, I always thought I would get beaten up for saying this behind the microphone, and, shockingly, we have had people being remarkably kind to us. The economist in my Joint Economic Committee--and it was a hard report to write--a couple years ago wrote a major study saying: What does obesity cost America? That is not Republican or Democrat. It is just what we are. It means, every time you say that, Mr. Speaker, did you make all the people who make money off certain foods, off of certain healthcare, and other things, nervous? We came up with a number 2 years ago. It was $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending over 10 years. Now this one is a few years old. Milken did a study, he said that 47 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending was associated with obesity. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just the math. It is something we could do together around here. How do we help our brothers and sisters be healthier so they live longer? How do we help them so they could maybe have more family formation, live a life, participate in the economy, and use a hell of a lot less healthcare? Mr. Speaker, you know the perversity around here. When we start talking about maybe we need to modernize how we do agriculture in America, what we grow, because we concentrate functionally on like five crops. What should we do? This is a question--and I have been attacked by Democrats on this--is it moral to give an EBT card, modern food stamps, to someone to go buy onion rings? I love onion rings. It is one of my addictions. I am working on getting off of it. Is it moral with taking hard-earned money, rare resources--remember, it is borrowed money now--and say: Go eat crap. Now the people who sell onion rings come lobby us and come attack us and say: People should have the choice. They should with their own money. The fact of the matter is, when we looked at some of the data of the 7 million prime-age males who are missing in America, we have a data set that says about one-half of that population may be missing from the labor force. They are missing from the American labor force not because of drugs and not because of video games but because of health, because of obesity. Are we allowed to talk about it? Mr. Speaker, a bit of trivia. Let's do something I consider wonderfully funny and amusing. In the last 20 years, what is the only success that has happened in the United States of helping young people get healthier? Remember, under Michelle Obama's initiatives with President Obama, I think we spent, it was $16 billion or $36 billion, but some number like that, and it had absolutely no success. This was the dietary issues and the food issues, trying to get young people to go exercise. Can anyone guess? Come on, this is a play-at-home game. It was Pokemon GO. I know it sounds crazy, but the gamification actually was the one great example of success for the last couple decades of helping young people get healthier. What if we took that knowledge of, hey, these incentives do work, and actually legalese that and made that part of how we deliver healthcare services or how we allow insurers to provide incentives because the ACA ObamaCare is a finance bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. You have three age groups and smoking. You could be creative enough to add a fifth category that says you can provide a series of these sorts of incentives, so when you wear the digital ring, wear the smartwatch on your wrist, or walk 5,000 steps, at the end of the month, we are going to give you something. Is that Republican or Democratic? Or is it just using data to try to keep our brothers and sisters healthier? The stock answer is to just raise taxes on rich people. The math doesn't get you anywhere close. It may make you feel better. It may make you feel better, but I am going to show you numbers that should scare you half to death. Let's continue to try to run through healthcare expenses. We are going to have to update our charts because we got one just a couple of hours ago and didn't have a chance. It actually had the spending growth on healthcare over the next decade actually accelerating again. Here is part of my problem. Nominal, which means before inflation, we actually have domestic productivity growing at 4.3 percent over the next decade. We have healthcare growing at 5.8 percent. It is geeky, but that margin keeps separating and separating. Unless we are willing to do policy, whether it be technology or incentives to stay healthy, these sorts of things, if that separation continues, the debt picture is actually worse. Mr. Speaker, at some point, I am going to show a slide here that if you actually take some of the policy we are working on, the baseline between now and 2035 of the $22 trillion we are supposed to borrow, some of the potential financing costs of what the Senate is doing right now, the higher interest rates, we are not exactly there, but we come close to doubling U.S. sovereign debt over the next decade. That took us 240 years, and we functionally double it in the next decade. Let's get to the really uncomfortable stuff. I have to admit that I am only two-thirds through the Social Security actuary report. I have one on my desk that has highlights and little questions and things that I have to get my economists to go back to help me understand. For some, I actually don't like some of the math I see. I am going to try something, and we are going to try to build a chart on this. This is crazy math, but we see it in the report. You will have lots of activists say to just open up immigration. That will take care of the Social Security shortfall. Remember, the report says, in 2033--so, what is that? Seven or 8 years from now, there is a 23 percent cut coming in Social Security checks. That means we will double--we have had witnesses that explained this to us. We will double senior poverty after 2033. Are we ready to do that? Is that moral? Yet, I will get folks who will say that if we just open up immigration--it turns out that is actually not the math because one of the real reasons they moved up the date of the exhaustion of the Social Security trust fund was actually flattening of wage growth. It turns out there is no free option here. We have some charts that show some things. Here are people who are undocumented in America. They are working under stolen Social Security numbers. They are giving into the system, but they are never going to get anything out. Then, you look at the suppression of wage growth. I know this is geeky, but I sort of need to lay a marker on the suppression of wage growth. When you bring in millions of people across the border who have similar skill sets, and they are often willing to sell their skill sets for even less money, Social Security actuary reports are now modeling a flattening of wage growth. That is one of the things that has actually shortened the life of the Social Security trust fund by a year. The next time someone says that we just need to open up the borders, that that will take care of the Social Security trust fund, it turns out that it doesn't work that way. You actually didn't get anything from it. You did a suppression of working people's wages, and this one takes us out about a decade. I don't know why people don't think, don't understand, these almost basic economic--we all went to our high school economics class, right? Here is what is coming. You have the 23 percent cut coming in 2033. If you are watching this and don't plan to be around in 2033, you don't have to care. The one that we have had almost no discussion about is that the Medicare trust fund is gone in 2033. That means if it lives off its income, its tax receipts from the FICA taxes, it is still an 11 percent cut. The next time we get someone here saying that we need more money for our hospitals, outpatient surgeries, and hospice care, point out to them that, in 7 years, there is an ugly cut coming. This 11 percent shortfall isn't even in our long-run CBO projections yet because a year ago, to give you an idea of how these numbers eroded in 1 year--I think 2054 was in last year's actuary report for when the trust fund was gone. How many people over the last week, because this has been out for almost a week now, have you seen come behind these microphones and say maybe we should all work together, do something that is mathematically honest, or just even tell our voters the truth that, in 7 years, you are getting a 23 percent cut in your Social Security check and, by the way, another 11 percent cut in your hospital coverage and other things because the Medicare part A trust fund is gone. For those who don't understand, and that is most of us, of the portion of your payroll tax that goes to Medicare, about 38, 40 percent of it is covered by the trust fund. That is the hospital portion, as we typically refer to it. The rest of it actually comes out of the general fund. One of the most difficult numbers I have in my dataset here--because this is the one that I see people get upset about--is the primary driver of U.S. debt. Interest? It is healthcare. For every dollar you put into Medicare, you are getting $6 to $7 back. That delta is uncomfortable to talk about, but it turns out to be that and interest are the primary drivers. All right, you start to actually look at some more--and I put this chart together just because I thought it was really interesting. We finally actually have really good data that has been designed on what happened during the Biden administration having the border open. We got some direct effects of, hey, we got a little bit more tax receipts and potential effects over time, but it turns out its deficit effects are more than two times because of the consumption of services. It turns out that when someone tells you this is going to grow the economy, it is not in the economic literature. It may be in your aspirations, in your heart, or how you feel, but it is not in the economic literature. Tell the truth about the math. National health expenditures as a percentage of GDP--remember, a couple of moments ago, I told you we are trying to figure it out. We just got another report that we expect the growth of healthcare spending to pop almost 3 percent more than modeled. That is a lot of money. Here is the punch line: We estimate that this year, right now, we are right here. We are spending about 18 percent of the entire economy on healthcare. In 9 years, it is over 20 percent. Those differences are monstrous. That is functionally a 12.8 percent growth in the cost of delivering healthcare in that 9-year span. This is going to tie into why I am talking about some of our growth rate projections. How do you hit these folks who are running around saying: ``David, we are going to grow at 3, 4, 5 percent GDP growth.'' At the same time, interest and expenditures are chewing up everything around us. How does that math work? Then, I am going to show you some of the demographics. I am going to probably say this twice just so it starts to bleed in. Today, we have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago. We have doubled the number of people 65 and up. So, functionally, we have the same number of 18-year-olds--it is no one's fault. It is not Republican and Democratic. Starting in 1990, U.S. fertility rates rolled over. We have a shortage of young people in America. Tell me how I grow the economy if you are not going to let me do things like automation of ports, automated rail, AI, technology, allowing AI when it has the right data to be able to prescribe, and people go: ``Oh, I don't like that.'' Fine. Tell me how much poorer you are willing to live. It is economics. If I can't grow the economy, yet I am being buried in debt service and increased costs for providing the services, tell me how I am to pay for it. There is a path where I can make this math--I can't pay it off. I can stabilize it and make this another American century, but, damn it, how do I do it in a body that is just terrified of telling the truth about math or just basic economics? This is the reality. This is our latest report. In 2033, 20.3 percent of the economy will just be healthcare. Considering government is functionally the primary payer, I think we are well over half of all healthcare spending coming out of the trust fund and the general fund. Does anyone see a problem? Do you remember, a moment ago, I showed you that the Social Security and Medicare actuary report said that there is an 11 percent cut coming in 2033? Are we going to let that happen? Probably not. Are we going to reach into the general fund to pay for it? Probably. It is not in the debt projections yet. The scale of this is off the charts. Back to the math problem. If I am making someone unhappy, be mad at the math, not me. Be mad at all the people who have never told you the truth with a calculator. How do I save my future? Remember, my little boy turned 3 years old yesterday. I have a 9-year-old. Yes, they are adopted. It is a miracle. My wife is my age. Yes, we have screwed up my retirement. It is the most fun I have ever had in my life. My child will be the first generation to live poorer than his mommy and daddy. Great job, America. This is our morality. People will say: ``No, it is going to be great.'' Great. Okay. I hope it is great. Tell me how I do it in the math. Walk me through the economics. Walk me through what we are going to do to maximize GDP growth or what we are going to do to change productivity. People will say that we are going to just grow. Okay, tell me how. That is our problem right now. We are using these wonderful, aspirational words, and we are not doing any of the policy. The reality of it is that Social Security, Medicare, and net interest account for 80 percent of the spending growth. If you are a Member of Congress, how many protesters did you have in your office this last couple of days? ``You can't review. You can't go after waste and fraud and Medicaid.'' Medicare Advantage, The Wall Street Journal has done a five-part series that, if you add it all up, is $1 trillion to $2 trillion of waste and fraud over 10 years. ``That is hard. You can't actually talk about that.'' If we can't do the work, how do you save the country? How do you save my kids' future? How do you save your own retirement? Maybe we can just keep lying to each other and the public because the public really doesn't want to hear these things. There is a path to make this math work, but you keep telling me that we are going to take off on productivity, but then you see the charts of available young people to participate in the labor force. The number keeps falling and falling. Remember, we have the smallest group of 18-year-olds as a percentage of population in U.S. history, and next year is even smaller, and the year after that is even smaller, and the year after that is even smaller. ``David, we are going to grow like crazy.'' We can, but you have to do policies that maximize productivity. ``Productivity might cause creative destruction.'' We are not allowed to do free-market economics anymore. Remember, we are populists now. If you embrace that you are going to drive this country--we will still be greater than any country on Earth, but we are going to give up so much. Prosperity is moral. The growth is moral. We are killing ourselves, but we are making promises that aren't in the data. They are not on the charts. You have an idiot like me who gets behind the microphone week after week--I am not smart, but I am good at math--and tries to explain by saying that there are ways to make it work. Mr. Speaker, 1 month ago, after almost a year's worth of work--I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four in the Committee on Ways and Means. I chair the Subcommittee on Oversight. It is public now. The press broke the story. We have been doing investigations after The Wall Street Journal did that major series on Medicare Advantage-- the amount of fraud, the people being diagnosed with diseases they don't have, people being dumped on VA even though they had the Medicare Advantage insurance, and people being dumped in hospice care. If you don't know about it, grab your computer and google: The Wall Street Journal MA. The MedPAC report--I have come to this floor year after year. I am sometimes thinking, Mr. Speaker, that I am the only idiot here who reads the MedPAC report. It is like this, but it is not a hard read. In there, it will say that when we started Medicare Advantage in 2005, it was designed to come in at 95 percent of the cost of fee for service, but its model was that we were going to incentivize the folks who manage the care to make money by helping you be healthier. The incentive was that we were going to help populations be healthier. The MedPAC report for the beginning of this year, today, comes at 120 percent of fee for service. Just that delta from the 95 to 120 percent over 10 years is like $2 trillion. Think about it. We are knifing each other right now, trying to figure out how to finance as much of this reconciliation budget as we can. I am an idiot, as I have been told by my wife over and over, because I thought we cared. We spent 6 months writing the modernization to Medicare Advantage to make it so it incentivizes to help our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up who choose Medicare Advantage, which is 55 percent of the population, to get services so that they are healthier. The Joint Economic Committee economists say that, over 10 years, it is $1.76 trillion of savings over 10 years. The preliminary score from our conversations with CBO--it is not in writing, but preliminary--is $1.84 trillion, making it the largest savings bill in U.S. history. It doesn't take away a single service. It fixes the misalignment in the system. Mr. Speaker, how many cosponsors do I have? The bill has been introduced for 1 month. Remember, we are tough. We are going to help stop this borrowing. We are going to take on the debt. I have zero cosponsors. We have visited almost 100 Members of Congress in their offices. ``David, this is uncomfortable. It has big words. David, it has the word `Medicare.' '' I beg of you, understand the scale of this debt. I have people now who won't even look me in the eye as they walk down the hallway because they are fearful that I might ask them again and again: ``Will you sponsor this? You tell me you care. Help us. Help us do the right thing.'' Yet, if I try to show what is going on--remember our baseline. Over the next 10 years, we expect to spend $14.67 trillion on Medicare Advantage. It is not Medicare but just the Medicare Advantage portion. All we are trying to do is save about 10 percent of that. That is the alignment of incentives. Stop telling me how much you care. Stop telling me you are a budget hawk. I am a budget hawk. I care about the budget. But God forbid, I am not putting my name on something that actually does something because that is hard. I am the guy in the 50/50 district. I am in one of the most competitive districts in America, and yet I am willing to stand up behind this microphone and tell the truth and actually put it on paper. My economists did a model over the next 10 years with what is happening demographically in America. We have a shortage of young people. President Trump said something that was brilliant on the campaign trail. He said: It is insane we educate people, then we send them home with their degrees from the American universities to compete with us. That sparked an idea, and then we got our economists to do the modeling. It creates about $150, $160 billion of additional tax receipts in the 10-year window, but in the second 10-year window, it explodes. We wrote an immigration reform bill, moving the American immigration system to a talent-based system, but it has the word ``immigration'' in it so that scares the hell out of the political class because reporters will lie about it. The activists on Twitter or X, whatever it is, will lie about it, but the economics are incredibly important. If you are going to move this country to raise its productivity so we can raise wages so we actually can survive what is happening in the actuary reports of Medicare and Social Security, guess what? You almost can't close the numbers unless you do something like this. The reason I am doing this is, we added the President's Gold Card, but it is skills based. I get people saying: I don't know how I feel about that. How many of you have a Dr. Patel? It was meant to be funny. I am from Scottsdale. It is one of the greatest medical communities in America, and a bunch of our great, amazing talent has come in from all over the world. Stop bathing in folklore and start bathing in math. Our third bill to pay for the reconciliation budget is less of a cut. This is using data to find where the hell is all the cash. It turns out if you add it all up, there is $1.5 trillion sitting in accounts up and down government. It was appropriated 3 years ago, but they never built it. There is a great example of hundreds of millions of dollars that were set aside for one State. It is in the account to build a bridge. They chose not to build that bridge. Cash is still sitting there. We call it Total Discretionary Balances Subject to Rescission. We call it forgotten funds. We are paying interest on that money. Almost every dime of this was borrowed money, and some of it has been sitting in accounts for years. Why is it so hard? We have the legislation. I have introduced the legislation line item by line item by line item saying let's just grab that cash, even if you just went back to know your money, or maybe the ones that are just a couple years out, it is a half a trillion dollars. Grab that cash and bring it back and put it under Treasury. If we as Members of Congress want to appropriate it again, appropriate it again. I just gave you three pieces of legislation: I gave you fixing Medicare Advantage, alignment of the incentives. Moving to a talent-based immigration system, which, in the long run, is one of the most powerful things we can do for GDP growth for productivity. And capturing the forgotten funds. I just paid for most of the reconciliation bill. Wouldn't that solve a bunch of our problems around here? Wouldn't that solve a bunch of the fighting? Wouldn't that solve a bunch of the stress when we are saying: We are going to borrow how much? This year, we are going to borrow $2.2 trillion. At the end of 2026, if we do what I think and the Senate is going to try to jam us, that is $2.5, $2.6 trillion of borrowing that year. But David, we are going to have all this magical growth. Look, I accept I am a senior Member. I have staff. I have really smart economists. I just brought you three bills without cutting a service to anyone. I found $3.3 trillion of savings and not a single cosponsor in Congress. I am going to try to do this next little section here. I don't want to be a jerk. I am going to hurt some people's feelings. The math is important. Why the math is important is because there are solutions. The reason I am doing this is, I think it was Monday or Tuesday, I had a Member I was talking to, great Member, brilliant in their area of specialty, really smart. I have spent my whole life doing budgets and healthcare finance and a few other weird things. They said: David, CBO is always wrong, the Congressional Budget Office. They make up things. It is way off. Okay. For anyone that keeps telling you that, this is what you call a variance report. CBO puts it out every year. I know every staffer and every Member of Congress grabbed it in January and actually read the data. If you look at the calculations--and I didn't actually bring one of the boards, which probably is good because it was really obnoxious. What did happen to that board? CBO projected when we did the 2017 tax reform, 2018, 2019, just before the pandemic, they were like 99.5, 99 percent accurate. Don't tell anyone because it will make it harder for us to lie around here. Then you get Members saying: But over the next 5 years, they weren't accurate at all. Does anyone remember there was this little thing called COVID? Does anyone remember what Congress and the world actually did? We dumped how much cash into the world market. You are accurate to here, and then all of a sudden, we dumped how much cash? Do you think there is a chance when you borrow trillions and trillions of dollars, pump it out into the economy, you don't have your tax collections go up? Oh, but David, they didn't project that. They didn't predict that. Come on, people. Stop it. Because even now, when we get back to baseline after we got beyond COVID, they were still remarkably accurate. I found the chart. It was hidden back there. It is on the smaller board. The fact of the matter is, what they projected and what actually happened--and this is actually 2018, not 2016, so I found a printing error--99.5 percent accuracy. Mr. Speaker, they are not always accurate. Of what they projected for the clean energy tax credits and inflation reduction, they missed by miles because they didn't actually pay enough attention to the fact that they were uncapped. There are a number of things where they absolutely screwed up, but the fact of the matter is on tax collections, the numbers have been good, and we need a scorekeeper. My grandfather used to have this saying: It doesn't matter how you play the game. It is who keeps score. He thought that was hysterical. How do we convince the American people we are serious about economic growth, productivity, taking on the debt and deficits, and not bankrupting their future when we spend almost every day saying: Well, we don't like the scorekeeping. Then you look at every outside group, the Tax Foundation, Yale Model Foundation, all these others, and it turns out CBO was more accurate than they were. I am not standing here to be a defender of them. I am actually being a defender of my brothers and sisters here. Please, I know it makes our lives easier when we can attack the scorekeeper. We can say the scorekeeper didn't get it right, therefore, pay no attention when they say we are trying to add $3, $4 trillion of debt. We are better than that. There is a reason so much of the economic press is just mocking us and making fun of us. I understand it is good politics. You get to go home, get in front of the audience that is not reading the Economic Press and say, they didn't get the it right. Let's treat our voters like they are adults. They understand what is going on. These are the scores from Yale Budget Lab, from Penn Wharton, from Congressional Budget Office, from Joint Tax, Tax Policy Center, American Enterprise Institution, Tax Foundation, and then here is what we are telling people. Is every other Ph.D. economist wrong? It becomes an excuse not to do the things I was just complaining about when an idiot like me comes and says: I found you $3.3 trillion in savings. David, we don't have to do those hard pieces of legislation. We don't have to explain those bills to our constituents. We don't have to take on the lobbyists who are going to be all upset with us. We will just tell people that it pays for itself. So everyone else is wrong because it makes our life as policymakers easier. Somehow, we are going to have magic growth, magical thinking when just today parts of the latest census data came out. The population 65 and older rose by 3.1 percent in the last year, while the population 18 years old--under 18 decreased by 0.2 percent. I am trying to make an argument that--I love the partisanship. I love a good fight with my Democratic brothers and sisters, but what happens when the debt and deficits are demographics? If we can blame the other side, we will just do this ping-pong back and forth--they are in charge, we are in charge, we are in charge, they are in charge--and we will blame each other. Then we are going to have a failed bond auction, and interest rates are going to explode. Remember, there are datasets--I presented them here on the floor-- that just a single point of interest going up over the next decade wipes out almost all the good we are trying to do extending the tax reform of 2017. Mr. Speaker, there is a way to make this work, and I am mentally just exhausted. Maybe I need to consume more coffee or maybe I need to stop caring so much because I am really worried. There is a way to make this work. There is hope, but what happens when no one will hear a word you are saying because it requires doing hard stuff and pisses off some lobbyists or some group or some group that is in our office that wants us to regulate their competition's business or give them something? We used to be the party of fiscal sanity. I still think we are. We can get there. We can do it. Maybe we just need to understand the math. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Green caught us a little bit off guard. He suddenly stopped, and I am not used to him doing that. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try a couple of things tonight, and I am going to try to do this as efficiently as possible. I hate doing it this way, but part of what I am going to do tonight is respond to basically a little bit--actually, a whole bunch of just a little bit of misrepresentation that keeps coming into our office. Every week for years, I come by here, and I sound like an idiot economics professor when I walk through the math, trying to help our brothers and sisters here in this body who might be crazy enough or might not have enough of a life to watch a presentation like this. It is a simple philosophy. At the end of the day, the math will always win. I am going to try to do three things here. I am going to try to actually get the reality of what happens and how the tax system works. When our brothers and sisters on the other side say to just raise taxes, that that will cover everything, I am going to show, with our history, that it doesn't work that way. The second thing is that I am going to show a series of proposals that we have made--and these are only my responsibility, so don't blame another Member of Congress. We have this current reconciliation budget and another one that sort of starts again this summer because, remember, functionally, depending on timing, we could have three bites at the apple on reconciliation. Why do we do reconciliation? It is a way to get through the filibuster in the Senate under the 1974 Budget Control Act. I have brought pieces of legislation to reform Medicare Advantage because you have seen The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica stories of, functionally, the criminality that is going on. The MedPAC report basically shows hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud because of what some of the insurers are doing. I am a big fan of a capitated healthcare delivery model because your incentive is to help people be healthier, but if you have a system where you can make stunning profits by scoring people as sicker, we have a misalignment. That is not what Medicare Advantage was designed to do. It was designed to actually provide a package of delivery to make you healthier. I am going to show a little bit of data on a talent-based immigration system. Over the previous weeks, I have come here before and shown that we have a demographic crisis. We have a shortage of young people. Think about this bit of math. Twenty years ago and today, we functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds, but the number of people who are 65 and up has doubled. Over here, I have my 18-year-olds. Over here, I have gone from 35 million to now almost 70 million of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. You have a shortage of young people in this country. Unless you deal with that reality--but you don't want to open up the borders. That is the disaster. You make people poorer by bringing in people to compete with your working poor. That is the cruelty of what the last administration did. They crushed working people's wages. I want to grow the economy, grow productivity, and make this society wealthier. We are the only country in the entire industrialized world that hasn't moved to a talented-based immigration system so that we can grow and compete. I am slightly off the rhythm I wanted to use. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world competed for hydrocarbons. In the last decade, we competed for rare earths. This decade, and the economists say maybe over the next two decades, the world is going to knife each other for smart people. In a world that basically is heading toward flat population growth, maybe we should show up to that battle because we educate people here. We educate them with our system, and then we send them home to compete with us. Have we lost our minds? To President Trump's credit, he has talked about this repeatedly. Forgive me, but I am going to have to reach over here to do a little sorting of these charts because they are out of order. First, I need to work out some principles. If you actually look at our history--I am going to show a couple of charts of this--times when we have had fairly high marginal tax rates--actually, let me do it on this board. This one is actually a little easier to understand. Actually, let me just use this one. It is not the board I wanted to start with, but let's work through it. If you take a look at what we spend and take in, in tax collections, here is your structural problem. We have had times with very high marginal tax rates and very low marginal tax rates. Go back and, since the 1970s, we always seem to end up somewhere between about 17\1/2\ to mid- to high-18s high marginal tax rates. We are still getting 18 percent of GDP in tax receipts. When we talk about these things, you will often hear us talk about a percentage of the size of the economy. It is too confusing doing dollar amounts because of inflation and those things, and the dollar amounts change. When you hear someone pretending to be an economist, we are going to talk in percentage terms. We have had times where we have had very low marginal tax rates, such as after the Reagan revolution. Yet, we still have the same percentage of the economy in total tax receipts because the economy grew bigger. Our crisis, particularly in the last decade or two decades, is this gap here. We are heading toward now spending 25 percent of the entire economy. Think about this. This year, where the economy has actually been fairly decent, we are doing okay in our tax receipts. We are right on target, but with our spending, we are going to borrow about 7.2 percent or 7.3 percent of the entire economy this year. That gap is the debt and deficit. When our brothers and sisters on the left keep saying things like raise taxes, we have done that. Remember, we have been experimenting with this since--what is it?--the 16th Amendment. We have had times of raising the high marginal tax rates and low marginal tax rates. Somehow, the size, the growth, of the economy is what fluxes. Therefore, the receipts we get--we call them tax receipts; we don't call them revenue--the receipts always sort of stay right there in that mean. If I can get my boards in some sort of order so they will make sense to us--forgive me, as I get myself organized here. I put them in out of order. What should scare us to death is, right now, basically the percentage of all tax receipts required to cover interest. This year, for every dollar we take in, 16 pennies of it cover interest, just interest. In 9 budget years, 30 percent--actually, in 8 budget years, 30 percent of every dollar we take in, in tax receipts will just cover interest. I didn't bring the chart. Maybe I should have because they have been mixed up. If we had a 1 percent increase from what we expect baseline interest rates to be, Mr. Speaker, would you dare in your head guess that, in 2034-2035, 30 percent of all of our tax receipts is just covering interest? Mr. Speaker, 1 percent interest increase, we get up to 45 percent of all tax receipts is just covering the interest. That should scare the crap out of people. Are we allowed to explain that almost every dime--well, the vast majority of the debt increase over the next decade is interest. God forbid, we tell the truth. It is Medicare. We got older. We have a shortage of young people. Let's actually sort of walk through some of the reality of what our brothers and sisters say on the other side. I have used this article before. It is one of the best in explaining the reality of the math and also the reality of the lies. They are just outright lies. We have to tell the truth. This is written by Jessica Riedl in 2023. What was done is, they took all these tax proposals that the Democrats have proposed, the ones we have scored, and then did the economic modeling. Let's raise the capital gains tax on rich people. We will take wealthy people and we will raise their marginal income tax. We will raise their estate taxes. All the things that we get in our townhalls and discussion groups, everyone says just tax rich people. That takes care of the problem. Here is the math. The beautiful thing about what Riedl did here is she actually took economic data from all sorts of studies from leftwing groups and from just statistical modelers. When you read it all, almost every proposal the left has given us, if you add it up--so raise the estate tax, raise investment taxes, raise corporate taxes, raise individual income taxes, by the time you are done, you might pick up another 0.5 of GDP in taxes for the U.S. Treasury. Did you hear my voice a couple moments ago? This year we are borrowing 17.3 percent of the entire economy. Next time you have someone on the left say just raise taxes on rich people, go online to the Manhattan Institute, pull up the study, and walk them through the actual math. I have a chart for those on the Republican side when we walk through some of the things we want to cut. We can have a revolution in the cost of government if we are willing to redesign. There is a difference between redesigning programs and cuts, but many of the things we talk about cutting, we get only 1 percent. Once again, why this is so important here, when the left says, well, you don't have to cut anything. Just raise taxes on rich people. That is not what even their own economic literature says. Of course, that would require literacy, wouldn't it? Someone would actually have to sit down and read the stuff with a calculator. We have a crisis. Having a society that is getting older is not Republican or Democrat; it is just what we are. It is math. Look, if we are not willing to tell the truth, we can continue to use our campaigns--all right. I will take a slight non sequitur. We are going to get a new Social Security-Medicare actuary report in the next couple weeks. I know we will all be just giddy to actually read it and see what it says. If we look at last year's, it basically said: In 2033, so 7 years, 8 years from now, the trust fund is gone. It is empty. That is because every month Social Security gathers payroll taxes and there is a shortage, so they take their special T-bills, because they have loaned money to the general fund, and they cash those in. They get that money back from Treasury. Treasury goes out and borrows the money, but they get that plus interest. In 7 years, they have no more special T-bills to cash in with the general fund at Treasury. In 7 years, if you get a Social Security check, you are taking a 21 percent cut. We will double senior poverty in America in 7 years. It will double senior poverty. This is a really moral place. How many idiots--excuse me--electeds do you see come behind these microphones and say: It is a Democrat problem. It is a Republican problem. It is a human problem. We are going to fix this. And then the lying that goes on here. Last year, I did an entire series of charts, which the Democrats turned into attack ads, that showed raising the cap. If every dime someone earns is subject to the full Social Security tax, it only covered 38 percent of the shortfall. We didn't even do the economic effects as to how much the economy slows down when you do that. The solutions you hear repeatedly from our brothers and sisters on the left just mathematically aren't true. They will say just raise taxes. You get 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. In 9 years, we are borrowing 9 percent of the entire economy. Well, for Social Security they will say just raise the cap. Okay, but don't give any benefits. That is the other part. Keep the benefit formula where it is today. Tax people on every dime above that formula. What is that today? It is about $170,000 today. Take every dime above that, put the full 12.4 percent Social Security tax on it, but don't give any benefits for that. It will only cover 38 percent of the shortfall. I think we were modeling it for 2034, the first full year, the shortage--they even said we will just pay for it out of the general fund. I think it was $608 billion, so almost two-thirds of our entire military budget. If you are someone that comes to me and says: David, I want to protect the country. I want to protect the military. I want to do this. I want to do that. Well, tell the truth about our demographics and the earned benefits that actuarially are collapsing around us. We are terrified to step up and do the math and then tell you the truth. We can start to actually walk through actual solutions. If I came to you right now and said--let's see if I can find the right charts here. I did a whole presentation over and over the last 3 weeks on Medicare Advantage. In 2005, the Republican idea was to buy capitated managed care policies for seniors. The idea was that there would be a benefits package and the insurer would actually make money by helping people be healthier. Over the years, some of it was in ObamaCare and other things. It got screwed up when the insurers were making money by scoring people as sicker. In 2005, the model for Medicare Advantage said it is going to come in at 95 percent of the fee-for-service cost. Look, I am sorry to geek out on this, but this is important. Remember, 55 percent of Americans are on Medicare Advantage. I represent an area with terrific penetration because we have very robust networks and those things in the Phoenix area, but it was supposed to come in at 95 percent of the cost of fee-for-service. Today, according to MedPAC, because I know we all read the MedPAC report, it comes in at 120 percent. Just that difference last year is $100 billion. When The Wall Street Journal does five major series on the fraud, misrepresentation--let's call it misalignment. When the Justice Department has leaked out, making announcements of not only civil suits but criminal suits, criminal investigations that are going on, maybe this place should pay attention. The beauty of it is, this type of scale for waste and fraud being the largest in the entire country--remember, our preliminary score from CBO of Medicare Advantage is $1.840 trillion, making that bill the single biggest savings bill for a single bill in U.S. history, and I have already introduced it. You see the discussion, the debates going on in the Senate right now, but it is scary because you have got to get up in front of the American people and explain, okay, this is Medicare, this is Medicare Advantage. What we are concerned about is not the healthcare you receive, your earned benefits, it is what the insurance company over here is doing. That is why they are under criminal investigation. I am sorry, it is uncomfortable, but our job here is to tell the truth and make the math work. The second thing--the reason I am walking through these is we have introduced three bills that cover every dime, every dime of the reconciliation budget, and add, I think, maybe even an extra trillion of savings. Remember how I mentioned before one of the crises we have in the United States is we don't have enough young people? We have introduced a talent-based immigration bill. Now, I am actually surprised I haven't taken more beatings, but I am sure they are coming. We are functionally the only country left in the industrialized world that uses a familial-based immigration system. It is, your family sponsors the next person, the family sponsors the next person, and so on. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, everyone else has gone to a talent-based system to maximize economic growth in their countries. We haven't shown up to that. However, if you listen to what President Trump has talked about of the insanity of educating people and sending them home to compete with us, maybe if we move to a talent-based immigration system, we stop educating them here and then sending them home to compete with our economy, it turns out that actually comes in at producing $152 billion of savings. The amazing thing is, in the second decade, that with some of the expensing of research and development, those things, you get a substantial economic growth. You get productivity. This is how you actually grow the economy so you have the resources to cover our promises. The other bill we are doing that is actually going to be sort of fascinating--let's see if I can try to explain this. This one is less about cutting spending. It is about finding cash that is sitting up and down the government in accounts. Some of these things have hundreds of millions of dollars that have sat there for years and years. We call it unobligated funds. I did this chart just to try to explain. There is no year. It is sort of cash that was assigned there, but the way it was authorized, there isn't a particular year it has to be spent. There are those that it was actually a 2-, 3-year commitment where you borrowed the money, we stuck it in this agency's accounts, and it sits there, but it hasn't been spent. Then there is those where it is actually money that they never used all of it. The crazy, crazy thing, if I came to you and said what would you guess--now, as a policymaker, I deal with the reality, I am never going to get all of it, but if you add up all that what we call the forgotten funds money, it is $1.524 trillion. If anyone else is playing along, I have Medicare reform, $1.8 trillion, and talent-based immigration, $150 billion. Let's say we were able to get just part of the expiring provisions, that is $540 billion. I just covered every dime of the reconciliation budget. There is no borrowing, and you maximize economic growth because you are not engaging in the crowd-out effect of having to go to markets. Remember, we borrow $6 billion every day. In 9 years, we borrow $10 billion every day. We have got to do things like this so we are not competing with you or your family trying to get a mortgage, trying to get a car loan, trying to see what your credit card interest rates are going to be. Think of this, in the last 12 months, half of all the debt in the U.S. bond markets, half of it has just been the United States Federal Government. Your school district, the company that wants to expand, all the bond market that is supposed to be helping finance the growth of this society, this country, half of it now is just the Federal Government, and it is going to get worse. I am giving you three bills that cover every dime of the borrowing. None of them cause burning and slashing and gnashing of teeth and the whining that happens around here. It turns out they are all really good policy. This is the constant argument I keep trying to make to our brothers and sisters here, we are going to have to do policy, and policy is hard. It is complex. There are armies of lobbyists walking around this campus here, and the inefficiency of the Federal Government is their profit model. There are bureaucracies who despise the concept of saying maybe you should use technology. I have a report on my desk from the IRS. I have only read the first three or four pages. It is an analysis of their data. It turns out the crazy thing, the chat, the computer answering the phone at the IRS, has a higher favorability rate than when a human answered the phone. Maybe we should stop being scared of adopting the technology because, remember, last year's taxpayer audit said only 31 percent of the phone calls to the IRS were getting answered, yet the IRS union attacks you for saying maybe we could use technology. Oh, we can't do that. Well, now we have the survey data that shows the chat that answers the phone, that answers your questions, that walks you through your tax form also has a higher favorability than the human. It is uncomfortable, but it is math and the facts. I will try to walk through a couple of these things. I am just going to show this board, even though I am going backwards. I mentioned my boards are out of order. See that red area? That would be the savings on the Medicare Advantage. There is still $14-plus trillion--trillion-- being spent on this program over the next 10 years. The crazy thing-- this idea of fixing the waste-fraud misalignment--this reform bill could be Republican and Democrat because anyone who has bothered to actually read the MedPAC reports for the last half a decade knows we have a problem. How do I get the talent around here to not be terrified of the army of lobbyists and actually step up and do what is hard, but do what is right? Mr. Speaker, I apologize, I am going to try to go a little bit faster here and see if I can get to some of the points that would help make sense. I was just saying this a moment ago, but maybe it is easier with the visual. This is baseline. This is our baseline. Almost every dime of this growth from the baseline spending is the growth of interest and Medicare. Today, we borrow $6 billion a day. In 2035, functionally for us it is nine budget years, we borrow $10 billion every day. Okay, let's do that simple math in our heads, 10 times 365, and it is actually not 10. It actually comes in, I think, at $10.4 billion, so it comes in like $3.8 trillion is Moody's who did the analysis on this, Moody's Analytics, that in 2035 we are going to borrow $3.8 trillion that year. We are going to borrow 2.2, 2.3 this year, and that is just sort of built off of what our baselines look like. Why this should terrify us, CBO has us over the next 10 years adding another $22 trillion of debt. If interest rates move--because now you need to calculate the higher interest rates. If you start to put those dollars in--we are not completely there, but we are getting close to the next 10 years, we borrow as much as we did the previous 240 years. Okay, this has got to be the dozenth time I have said this on the floor, and I can't seem to get it to sink in, but that is the underlying math. What should also be scaring people to death, yet the hallways are full of people coming into our offices demanding more money, the United States now is like number 12 or 13 on the credit stack, meaning take a look, Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. We have 18 States that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the Federal Government, but yet we borrow money to send to our States. Take a look at this. Does this not just curl anyone's toes? Yet, somehow, magically, we think the money tree is going to continue. Look, let's see if this visual helps. Think of the protests, the whining. I won't use the word ``bedwetting'' because I think that is just inappropriate for Members of Congress to say. The baseline is that the Federal Government intends to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. $86 trillion is the CBO baseline. All we are talking about in the budget reconciliation was a $2 trillion savings. To give you an idea of just how absurd this debate is, tomorrow, we are going to do, I think, a rescission vote. I think it is tomorrow. Maybe it will be Thursday. Think of the angst, the protests. ``We are upset. David, you can't lower spending.'' Let's see if we can do this. How many hours are there in a year? There are 8,700 hours in a year. Work with me on this, Mr. Speaker. The rescission package takes care of 28 hours of that 8,700 hours of borrowing. Yet, listen to people come behind these microphones. It is like the world is coming to an end. Please understand that this is just the beginning. We want this Federal Government to be able to stabilize and survive. We have economists on the left and the right saying that if we can get to about 3 percent of borrowing of GDP, we can stabilize. We are borrowing 7.3 percent this year. In 9 years, we are borrowing 9 percent of the entire economy. Understand what this means. That would be reduced spending this year. We are going to spend--what?--$7.3 trillion this year. You would have to reduce Federal spending by $1.4 trillion to get down to 3 percent borrowing. The vote we are going to have in the next day or so on the first part of the rescission package covers 28 hours of borrowing for the whole year, yet I know I even have Members on my side who are all puckered up, running around saying: ``How do I explain that?'' Do you understand how much trouble we are in if we are borrowing about $72,000 every second of every day? In 9 years, we are borrowing over $100,000 every second of every day. I have shown before in the charts and the reports that the Democrats' plan to just raise taxes on everyone doesn't get you anywhere close to what is required. Remember, every tax hike they have, 1.5 percent of GDP, and we are borrowing over 7 this year. We need a revolution in how we deliver services. Yet, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you right now, look at the lobbyists walking up and down our hallways. They despise--the bureaucracies despise--anything that changes their business model. I want to extend the policy, Mr. Speaker. I know my boards were a little disjointed because they came in out of order, but the concept was very simple for this presentation. It is three things. The scale of the borrowing--there are actual policy solutions that you can pay for everything we are doing right now. It will actually open up our brains, open up our minds, and open up our calculators. Actually, look at it. A number of the solutions actually don't need to be partisan warfare. We will turn them into partisan warfare because we care much more about winning the next election than we do saving the Republic. Mr. Speaker, I am in a 50/50 district. I am blessed. I represent a really well-educated population. They are fairly prosperous. They are smart people, and they have tolerated--not because they are thrilled about what I say, but I think they believe what I say. I go to great lengths to get the math right. There is hope. There is a path. There is a solution. I also have one of my economists who makes it very clear. We may have only about 36 more months, and then we start to hit what is referred to as sort of the interest rate feedback loop. Remember, a year ago, I think we had 3 or 4 months where this government had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. If today the 10-year bond is at 4\1/2\, realize that if it goes to 5\1/2\, in 9 years, 45 percent of all of our tax collections are just interest. Let's not let that happen. Let's get our act together. Let's communicate to those people we borrow money from that we are serious about some fiscal sanity. That is how you maximize the efficiency. That is how you lower the interest rates for every American. That is how you give our kids and your retirement a future. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to just do a couple of very simple things here. I will walk through that. I believe there are actual solutions. The problem is they are hard, and it is one of those occasions where I think we play this game. We talk around each other because we talk our book. We talk what gets us elected. We talk what raises us money. We talk what enrages our base so that they are more politically involved. The fact of the matter is a substantial amount of that is just a boldface lie. For anyone who is really interested just in sort of the academics of what goes on here, I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. If you have your search engine, look up ``AI Review of Congressional Speeches.'' There is an academic group. This is in like Nature, so it is a peer-reviewed article going back over 140 years of congressional speeches. It basically says that the use of facts has absolutely crashed. If you actually read it, it has crashed. We now talk about our feelings and intuition because that is how we manipulate people. Mr. Speaker, it is in Nature publication right now. Go pull up the academic article. That is what goes on behind these microphones day after day after day, is we have people who tell stories. We tell about our feelings, but we don't seem to actually bother doing something called math. The family slogan is: The math will always eventually win. I am going to do this a couple of times here. We are in the middle of the reconciliation budget battles, the propaganda, the things that get said that are true or not true. My argument for everyone here is that there is a way to pay for lots of this. It still doesn't save us. As a country, we borrow about $6 billion a day right now. Next year, we are going to borrow about $7 billion. I am going to show you some charts. In 9 budget years, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. The vast majority of that is demographics. Turns out it is not Republican, not Democratic. One of the great lies here--and I have done entire presentations here where I took a whole hour a while back where I did every tax hike that the left has proposed and the scores and its economic factors. Actually, we did a bunch of the cuts in spending and those things, Republicans. These tax hikes came out to 1.5 percent of GDP. Our cuts came out to about 1 percent of GDP, a big 2.5 percent. Looks like we are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the economy this year. And in 9 budget years, Moody's says--I am going to show this board a couple of times--we will be borrowing 9 percent of GDP. Now, I am sorry. Most people--David, we don't know GDP. What do you mean by that? Just understand the scale is--so often, the solutions are never meant to hit you with a dopamine hit. They are meant to manipulate you. When I say ``you,'' I mean the voting public, often our staff, trying to even manipulate each other. We have spreadsheet after spreadsheet around us talking about what is going on. My point I am going to come back to, Mr. Speaker, I have introduced legislation to fix what MedPAC has talked about now for years, back when the Democrats controlled all this place, now that the Republicans control this, but we are all too scared to actually read something that is in a big binder that actually has math in it that would be hard and difficult because, let's be honest, it is really hard putting a couple of hundred pages of facts and details in a tweet. The fact of the matter is that MedPAC, The Wall Street Journal series, and the ProPublica series have gone over Medicare Advantage. If any of you have your phone and like tracking stories, put in ``Medicare Advantage fraud'' right now. You will see at least five major articles from The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, and some of the others. In some of those articles, if you actually add it up, it is $100-plus billion a year in fraud. We have introduced a piece of legislation. The preliminary number is around $1.7 trillion to $1.84 trillion, making it the single-biggest reduction bill, I believe, in modern history--actually, in history at all. So, I just got you $1.8 trillion. We have also introduced a talent- based immigration bill. If you want to hit the GDP growth numbers that we keep talking about, that the left has even talked about, and that the President has talked about, you can't do it without a talent-based immigration system. Read the literature. As even the President has said, it is insane. We educate people, and then we send them home to compete with us. Are we out of our minds? Do a talent-based immigration. Keep people. I am going to show you another chart in a moment that is saying that we have to deal with the reality. If the primary driver of debt in America is demographics, it is functionally Medicare; in a few years, Social Security, when the trust fund is gone; and interest. If you go back 20 years ago, the number of 18-year-olds we had then compared to the number of 18-year-olds today is almost identical. The number of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up has almost doubled in that 20 years. Are we allowed to tell the truth about our brothers and sisters? Those of us who are baby boomers with gray hair have changed the math in our country. When I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar that was spent on people 65 and up, there was $7 spent on young people. Today, that is reversed. Today, we spend $1 on young people and $7 on those over 65. It is the deal. It is part of our societal commitment. Fine. Keep our promises. The way you keep your promises is to know your math because, at some point, you have to finance it. So, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Part C, deal with the waste and fraud issue from the insurance companies managing it. Make it so the incentive is to help our brothers and sisters be healthier instead of making billions and billions of dollars scoring people as sicker. Read the articles. Turns out, I think this bill the Democrats would like, the Republicans would like, and people who do math will really like. Talent-based immigration is great for long-run economic growth. It actually fulfills even things the President talked about on the campaign trail. The third one is functionally our bill that I have done for years and years around here. It is called the forgotten funds bill. Now, in some ways--got to be honest--this isn't new money. It is cash we have borrowed and have given to agencies, but they haven't been authorized or haven't spent it. Mr. Speaker, off the top of your head, will you raise your eyebrows a little bit if we call this SF 133, so it is money that has been appropriated, sitting in their accounts, so it is cash. We are paying interest on it because that money was borrowed. We estimate that it is over $1.5 trillion. If you grab that cash and realize you don't have to pay interest on it anymore, talent-based, MA reform, you just paid for our reconciliation bill and put some more money in the bank. My point is that if we would actually think about policy, the modernization, doing things better, faster, cheaper--next week we are going to do a--I think one of our Democratic colleagues a couple of moments ago was attacking some of the--we will call it the DOGE cuts. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. When I go home, people say, David, I need you to balance the budget. Great. Tell me what 40-plus percent--because you have to deal with the economic effects--of government you want us to cut. The fact is, with just the movements in interest rates this year, it is approaching a couple of trillion dollars in additional interest over the next 10 years. Look, no one needs another speech from me doing interest rate fragility, but the fact of the matter is the bond market is on the cusp of running this country, except that is really hard to explain to our voters. If you are a Democrat, you don't want to explain that because you want to keep handing things out and doing the lie that we are going to tax rich people. Then, you show the charts saying, okay, it just takes care of weeks of borrowing, and that is it for an entire year. Those of us who run around saying we are going to just cut waste and fraud, got to cut waste and fraud--I am going to show you some charts. We need to redefine, redesign, modernize, and use technology on how we deliver services. Let's walk through a couple of things. What is the real reason we are doing the reconciliation budget? It comes down to one thing, at least for me. Our taxes are all going up next year. In my district, it is over a couple of thousand dollars for an average family. In some of my ZIP Codes--look, I represent a fairly prosperous district; I represent Scottsdale and Phoenix--it is over $3,000. For my average, it is a $2,062 tax increase next year. I have been really happy to hear how many of my brothers and sisters on the other side have gotten behind the microphone and talked about how they don't want--small businesses in my district will be hit with a 43 percent tax hike, and that is the law. That is already coming. They are going to give us ideas on how we keep this from happening? If you think like an economist, this is sort of maintaining today's policy instead of what is in the law, where everyone's taxes go up. It maintains consumption, but you don't get the same type of economic pop of doing things that create investments in productivity and those things. This is your reason that we have to battle through this, and the absolute absurdity I get from some of our brothers and sisters out there, you can't cut--this is just heresy. It is brutal. We are baseline going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years, or we are talking about reducing. It looks like we are not going to hit the number which will enrage me. It is $2 trillion. You see the stack of coins there. That is $86 trillion over the next 10 years. That was baseline spending. All we are talking about cutting is functionally 2.2, 2.3 percent of it. Then I think of the rage, of the theater, of the protests, and of the nasty text messages. You don't realize that just a couple ticks in interest--I think I can almost do the speed math in my head. If I had 70, 75 basis points, it is more than all those cuts. If we went back to the interest rates we had in the early 2000s, I think that would add another $3 trillion, $4 trillion over 10 years of just interest. The theater around here is about telling stories. It is emoting the emotion, but damn it, does anyone own a calculator? Mr. Speaker, what was it, 10 days ago, 2 weeks ago, Moody's downgraded the United States and part of the point--because I know we all read it because it was such a big deal. You subscribe to Moody's, you downloaded the report. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for letting me have a Bloomberg Terminal. I chair the Joint Economic Committee so we bathe in the math. In 9 budget years, we are spending--9 percent of the entire economy is borrowed, and that is based on our baseline. I said that twice. In 9 years, the borrow will be $3.8 trillion. Mr. Speaker, most of that growth is interest and healthcare. I am sure we are all around here trying to revolutionize the cost of healthcare by curing people, by using technology, doing it better, faster, cheaper, helping our brothers and sisters live healthier, instead of in misery with their chronic conditions. So often the debates behind these microphones are about needing to spend more money to help you maintain your misery instead of curing it. The complete lack of vision around here of the morality--when you realize couple of the great studies from a few years ago is the number one contributor to income inequality in America wasn't education; it was healthcare. It was the health of the population. What happens when your brothers and sisters have diabetes, when they are crashing repeatedly? It turns out if 33 percent of all American healthcare is just diabetes, if 47 percent of all American healthcare is obesity, why wouldn't we take those on? Yeah, it means doing some very difficult things. It means having a brutal discussion about agriculture policy, nutrition support, and how we are going to deliver healthcare through our clinics and other things. It is really great economics, and the morality of having people live longer, be healthier, be able to have families, family formation. We are going to show a couple numbers here. If you have 7 million prime-age males missing from the economy, and one of the datasets says it is not drugs; it is actually obesity and other things, what do we do incentive-wise to help our brothers and sisters, particularly those prime-age males, get back into the economy and participate in the society? In 9 budget years, we will go from borrowing $6 billion a day to borrowing $10 billion a day. Why doesn't this just set people up saying, okay. I don't want to raise my brothers' and sisters' taxes. We need to do some things to get the economy to continue growing and get investment back in productivity. That is why you do expensing, research and development expensing, and other things of that nature because you need the investments and productivity because we have got to raise wages. Now, we are going to do a little economic geekdom. Remember the previous few years where we had high inflation? Most of America is poorer today than they were 4 years ago, and that is basically inflation. Your dollars, your salary became worth less. In my district today, if you don't make about 27-plus percent more than you did 4, 5 years ago, you are poorer today. You are not magically going to make the cost of everything in your life go down, particularly in an environment where interest rates are going to be higher because we are borrowing so damn much money. It is not just us. Germany is backing the debt markets. The world is bingeing on debts. If you think interest rates are going to come crashing back down you are delusional. The world has only so much savings. What do we do, Mr. Speaker? Well, you do things so you invest to create productivity. The incentives within the tax code, regulatory code to invest in things so you can raise wages. Remember after 2017, one of the datasets we had, I think it was 68 percent of all the corporate tax cuts that enraged the left went to workers' wages. It turns out that the way you make our brothers and sisters whole from the years of inflation is you have got to get the growth. You have got to get productivity stepped up. In this chart--and please understand, this one upsets both Republicans and Democrats. I have even had people in my own party saying, David, you have got to stop telling people the truth. Even just a little beyond baseline, that is if we had no legislation at all, what took us 240 years, we are almost going to double in the next 10. Let's think of that. The day we were all re-elected or elected last November, public sold debt, so this is debt that is auctioned off--the Japanese own some, the Chinese own some, but we own most of it--was around $28 trillion. We will almost double that in the next 10 years. We have to deal with reality. If you are going to rage at me because I said the bond market is going to be running our country soon, don't rage at me. Crack open an article about bonds and the stress and bond vigilantes and term premiums and what all these things mean and what happens when just clicks of interest rate consume every available dollar that you and I might want to invest in medical research or the left wants to do whatever the hell they want to do and it is going to be consumed by paying interest. Demographics, which is the primary driver of our debt, is not Democrat or Republican; it is just who we are. We have a shortage of young people. There are lots of us who are baby boomers and we are going to continue to lie our backsides off. If you keep looking at the charts and just understand, the 65 population has nearly doubled in 20 years, while the number of 18 year olds is basically the same. You would think these would be the types of data that we could all get together and say, all right. That is math. It is what we are. It is indisputable. It is math. It is Census Bureau. It is from census data from the Biden administration, so as a Republican using it, it isn't partisan, it is just math. How do we keep our promises as a society, as a country, as a population that used to, at least, make an attempt to be moral? How do we keep our promises in--what is it--7 years now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Basically, meaning, if Social Security follows the law, my math a couple weeks ago was a 21 percent cut in Social Security checks across America. So 2033, it is gone. Mr. Speaker, 2034 is the first year with the 21 percent cut meaning we double senior poverty in America. We are going to double senior poverty in America. How many Members have you seen come behind these microphones and talk about the morality of, guys, 7 years from now, let's double senior poverty, and then, let's do everything we can to talk about it. By the way, the solution you get is to just raise the cap. Okay, raise the cap. Do you realize just eliminating the cap on Social Security at that time covers only 38 percent of the shortfall? The first full year, our math last year we did was $609 billion or $608 billion. It is almost two-thirds of what the entire defense budget is. That is 7 years. We should have been working on this 15, 20 years ago, but the fact that an idiot like me gets behind the microphone and even uses the word, it will be an attack ad next week because, God forbid--this place cares more about winning the next election than doing what is right, doing what is moral, owning a calculator. This place is absolutely perverse. Here is another thing. Let me enrage my brothers and sisters because so much of what we are having to deal with in this reconciliation budget--look, I hope the scorekeepers are wrong. I hope the Joint Committee on Taxation economists are wrong. I hope the Ph.D.s over at CBO are wrong. Because much of it is extending current tax policy--what we get today--instead of what is in the law, where just individual taxes go up--what?--$3.1 trillion over the next 10 years, and add in the passthroughs to small businesses and those things, add in another several hundred billion dollars. That is the law. It is coming. Just extending that, you don't get a huge pop in growth, but you do maintain consumption. Where you get the growth is some of the other things--the expensing, the research and development, those types of things, a couple of the tweaks we are trying to do, and also the incentives to invest. If our brothers and sisters are going to say we are magically going to grow at these sorts of rates, I wish they would actually give me a reference, give me a credible economist, maybe a guy, a gal, someone with a Ph.D. in actual economics. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D.s. These are the numbers they come up with. Back to solutions, we have introduced a bill. Our first number was $1.76 trillion in savings just reorganizing and redesigning the incentives within Medicare Part C, Medicare Advantage, as everyone knows it, where you are incentivized to keep your brothers and sisters who are on the program, you make money by helping them be healthier instead of scoring them as sicker. Our preliminary number from CBO wasn't $1.706 trillion over 10 years. It turns out they gave us $1.84 trillion as a preliminary guess. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, we will get an official score. Is this Republican or Democrat? It is just fixing the waste, fraud, and misalignment in the program. Look, I fully expect within minutes I will have attack ads in my home district beating the crap out of me, and I am in a 50/50 district. Maybe it is an occasion where a few more of our brothers and sisters here take a risk, particularly those in overwhelmingly partisan districts. They can afford to tell the truth. Try it. If an idiot like me in a 50/50 district will get up and tell the truth about the math, why will no one else here? Do the charts. These charts aren't magic and secret. They have been in the MedPAC report for most of the last decade if someone would just bother to open it up, crack the binder, and read it. You can see the savings and alignment. The model that comes back is that seniors on Medicare Advantage will be healthier because the incentive is to keep them healthier. We have to do some designs. We have to say that you should be within one plan for maybe 3 years, so there is an investment in helping you be healthier. There are things we did in there to make it work. The bill has been introduced. Yet, if you look at the total spend over the next 10 years, it is still $14.67 trillion as the baseline spending over the next 10 years. We are just trying to deal with what article after article has basically said, that this is fraud. If anyone else has their phone in their hand and wants to look up something, look up the number of criminal cases that are open right now. The Wall Street Journal--the Justice Department, I guess, has been leaking. It is no longer civil suits. It is criminal suits, saying people are going to go to jail. Has there ever been a moment where particularly the left and the right can get together and say that we need to fix the incentives in this program? Also, it is great economics, good healthcare, and great vision for the future. No, David. You see, we care too much about winning the next election and beating the crap out of the other side. Then, you hear some of the brilliant things that are said about Medicaid. Now, I need to disclose that it has been many, many years. As a child, I spent two terms in the State legislature. I was never going to run for office again. Because I was so tall, smart, and good- looking, I got to--well, it had nothing to do with the fact that I was the vice chair and my chairwoman actually had a brain aneurysm. Also, they had just indicted 10 percent of my State legislature. Remember, the fastest way, Mr. Speaker, to move up in an organization is to have 10 percent of the people go to jail. I was a 28-year-old kid in my State legislature, and I was chairing the health committee. Arizona does something very unique in our Medicaid system. We were the last State to enter Medicaid. We didn't enter it until the mid-1980s. I was actually a part-time page during the negotiations. In Arizona, we do something odd. We buy managed care policies, so we functionally buy HMO policies for--the technical term is our indigent population. We actually do it really well. We were the first ones to do pharmaceutical benefit management and those sorts of things. It is an interesting intellectual argument, and I wish we could actually have a little more highbrow discussion here. Should a State like Arizona be rewarded for how efficiently we deliver and the quality of our services compared to so many other States that are just ripped with fraud? You start to see cumulative improper Medicaid. This is not Medicare. This is Medicaid. It is supposed to be healthcare for indigents. That is the law. Payments since 2019 are over $400 billion. If you actually look at the literature, people who have analyzed it--here is a Paragon study, written by a Ph.D. It basically says that Medicaid reported functionally half a trillion dollars over 10 years, but their analysis when you do all of it is $1.1 trillion of improper payments. Think about that. If you just fix this, if you just fix this one issue, that covers everything that is being discussed right now in trying to reform Medicaid. This would require work and also reading a hell of a lot of accounting documents. Look, I am going to run through these boards really quickly because I have already gone, Mr. Speaker, longer than I want. People forget that we actually had a time slot here where, functionally, we sort of stopped some of the measurements and some of the enrollment criteria. If you look at the overall rate of improper Medicaid payments, if you have a multitrillion-dollar system and it is 5 percent, it turns out that pretty much pays for what E&C did a couple of weeks ago. Are we willing to invest in the technology to go fix it? Look, remember how I was just telling you in a previous life I actually helped--I was not there during expansion, but I was county treasurer years later where I managed some of the dispro share moneys. That is sort of the geeky talk. This is a chart from The Wall Street Journal, and they just happened to pick out my State. I love Arizona. Look, if you get to represent Phoenix and Scottsdale, you are one of the most blessed human beings in life, but the point that The Wall Street Journal was trying to make in putting up this chart is that, in Arizona, we put money--$363 million-- back in the general fund because of the way they do their provider tax. They are actually making money from the Federal Government. We idiots--excuse me, this fine august body, we borrow the money. We are borrowing money. A State is doing a provider tax. It covers their match, and then, they are sticking money in their general fund from our borrowed money. Why is this good? Mr. Speaker, I am just going to skip to the last one because we need to tell the truth. With our great financial burden, we are elected. We are functionally the board of directors of the biggest enterprise in the world. We represent a quarter of the world's economy. Does this body act like a board of directors? Do we pay attention to the math? Do we pay attention to how we take care of our customers, the American citizens? Do we pay attention to the reality? Social Security, Medicare, and net interest account for 80 percent of the spending growth over the next nine budget years. If we do the 30 years, it is everything. If we do the 30 years, military and nondefense discretionary are scheduled to grow slower than tax receipts. Are we even allowed to talk about these? Are we even allowed to tell the truth about the math? Mr. Speaker, we have been collecting every article we can that talks about--and some of these are Republicans. Some of these are Democrats. Some of these are Conservatives. Some of these are just academic economists. Here is one that talks about the growth of males of prime age in Medicaid. What is fascinating about this particular study is they spent an average of 6.1 hours per day, or 184 hours a month, on all socializing, relaxing, and leisure activities. We get attacked for saying we are asking for work requirements. Understand how many States--my State already has an application in for work requirements. I think we already have work requirements--forgive me if I get this wrong--in ten others. If we take a look at the chart, a number of the States had applications in. The applications were approved. Then the Biden administration took over, and something happened either through court or action here. They started rolling them back. If I say right now there are 7 million males of prime age missing from the labor force, Mr. Speaker, if I come to you and say we want tax receipts to grow, that means we need participation in the economy. If anyone wants to geek out, probably about 5 years ago the University of Chicago did an amazing study on what work requirements do in benefit programs. At the end of the decade, the participants are wealthier because they may get the benefit, but the work requirements changed their participation in the economy. It raised their skill set. They moved up in the economy. In many ways, if we read the academic literature, those who oppose things like work requirements have to read the literature. They are crushing people. They are destroying their economic futures, their ability to learn skill sets, and how to participate in the economy. Maybe we have people around here that permanent poverty--that level of cruelty--is what is built into their political manifesto. I refuse to believe that. I believe we all want the right things. Page after page of this data is here. We will have these trite debates and arguments based on feelings. Then we will wonder why tomorrow is no better than it was today and the day after that will be no better than the next day. There is hope. There are ways to make this work. There are ways to stabilize the debt. There are ways to make this society much more prosperous. Prosperity is moral. I am wondering if we are intellectually capable of actually doing the work. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.