David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The gentleman may want to leave before I do this chart because this chart really upsets people.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is more complicated, and I have to do about a half-hour presentation to talk about it because it is more than just the disability payments that are part of Social Security and SSI.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. That is coming out of part of the FICA tax, but it is the labor force participation. When you create incentives in society not to be part of society, then you lose all sorts of things. Let's do this slightly out of order. I was going to do this slide to talk about the scale of what you and I have to deal with. What happens in society when you functionally finance people being sick? Let's be brutal. We should do some fairly revolutionary things in the farm bill because we give people money to buy onion rings. I would say that is immoral when obesity is almost one-half of healthcare costs. I have a slide that shows the Milken Institute study from a couple of years ago. It is 40 percent of all healthcare spending in the country. We are dying. Then, we have this other issue that we are not having children. This last year, fertility rates in the United States collapsed to 1.62, meaning France has more children than we do. You tell me how we finance things like Social Security, Medicare, and these things, which are pay-as-you-go. Today's taxpayers are sort of paying the benefits of today's retirees, which is the way it was designed because we always expect population stability. In 15 years, this country has more deaths than births. We are having the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger. A child born today, particularly a male child born today, is estimated to have a shorter life expectancy than you and I. There is something incredibly immoral happening, and I would say it is our own policies. We have incentivized leaving the workforce. We have financed unhealthy living. We do a number of things where we have indemnified being alive, healthy, and part of society. It is immoral what we have done under policy, and most of the policies have been brought to us by that side. We make the sin of continuing it. Here is the punch line. This punch line is really uncomfortable, and you may want to run away from me because I am an idiot willing to tell the truth. The average family is going to get back Social Security money and about a $72,000 spiff for the average couple, which is a crack rate of return. Most people don't realize that your Social Security payment is actually progressive. If you were at the lower end, you get a decent rate of return. If you are at the higher end, you actually get a substantially negative rate of return. For every dollar you paid when you paid your FICA taxes for Medicare, we now calculate you get $5 to $6 back. This right here and the financing costs to that is the primary driver of U.S. debt. I have been booed. I have had someone throw something at me. I have had a woman stand on her chair and scream at me that she wants every dime. It is fine. It is an earned benefit. You earned it. My argument is that we need to think more like revolutionaries. Legalize the technology. Do the financing of the cures, the very things where we could crash the price of healthcare and have a healthier and more moral society, maybe with family formation, maybe where young working men aren't dying younger, maybe where obesity isn't killing off substantial portions of society. It is moral, and I need us to think much more because complex problems, the terrible things, often require complex solutions, and I don't know if this place is capable of thinking of complexities.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes, but we have a plan. We have a plan.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Of course. How much of that is on borrowed money right now?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. This is probably going to be the first time you have ever heard this, Chip. I don't think you are cynical enough. That is actually very funny for those of us who know Chip. We have actually created a motto in our office: Money, power, vanity, but most of the time, it is about the money. I would argue that Congress has become substantially a protection racket. We protect incumbent bureaucracies and incumbent business models. When someone comes to us and says: Hey, I have this thing you can blow into and, boom, it will tell you that you have the flu, and it can bounce off your medical records and order your antivirals that Lyft can drop off in 2 hours. That technology exists. We will find a way to make that illegal. We will make it so you can't be reimbursed. It will be illegal for an algorithm to write a prescription--those sorts of things. There is a revolution of technology around us where we can make our lives so much easier. You and your family can have more time, and we can crash the debt and deficit, and young people don't have to live poorer than their parents because that is what the math says. This will be the first generation coming up right now that will be economically more disadvantaged than their parents. That is immoral, and we can stop it, but we have to think disruptively. Maybe I am a little bit of a utopian on some of this stuff. The Democrats, all their taxes, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP when you do economic effects. I have offered some pretty brutal amendments here, which are never going to pass, on cutting spending and nondefense discretionary. If you let me have everything, I can get 1 percent of nondefense discretionary, 2\1/2\ percent. The runway rate this year, I think it is going to go down near the ending of the last quarter of this year, but we are burning 8, 9 percent of GDP in borrowing. Here is my problem: If you are borrowing about 8 percent of GDP and everyone's proposal, because this is our campaign talking points, is down here, we have to revolutionize policy. There is our problem because there will be an army of people in the hallways here really cranky at us because we are forcing them to compete, have a vibrant economy, and bring technology, disruption, and productivity to market. It means they have to change their business models. The bureaucracies have to actually be, in many ways, replaced with technology.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. And government.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oddly enough, I get this crazy thing where I will get business models that are built on today's way of healthcare reimbursement, which need sick people to exist. They will come in and say: Okay, I am wearing two hats. For my business, I need to stop you, Schweikert. It is like the fights we had here on telehealth and digital medicine, those things. They fought like crazy to stop that, and then, in the next sentence as they are walking out the door, they are saying: But we want it for our family. We want the technology. We want the time. We want to be healthier. We want this. That is actually why I am hoping at some point the morality of what people would want for themselves and their families, they will see actually it is good business, moral, and really important for the future survival of this Republic.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You have to keep trying. My argument is that there is a path. Madam Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating us, but there is a path where you can make this math work. The problem is it is going to be hard. There are going to be people who are upset because you are making them rethink how they do their business. You are going to make bureaucrats either rebuild their bureaucratic model or actually go find a job in the private sector, but we don't have a choice. Be prepared. There is a way to save us. One of our economists has played some math games, and the theory is depending on where interest rates are at, because functionally the bond market is getting close to running this country, depending on where interest rates are, you may have 3, 5 years, could be longer, where a movement in the bond market starts to consume all your variability. At that point, it is almost too late to do major policy. At that point, you are doing policy to pacify those whom you are trying to sell your debt to.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. This election you just saw, you have the prosperity of your family and the tax code, but you have an opportunity to use that stressor. Mr. Roy, this is actually where my punch line at the end was going to be: Are we nimble enough to use the stressor of the expiring tax provisions to get us to think about things we could do to change the cost of government because it is like the debt ceiling around here and other things? Without those and without a stressor on this place, this place will not do anything that is hard. Let's think creatively. Let's do quality math. Let's be hopeful, but let's demand that the public understand the scale of the problem and that there is hope. It just is that hope isn't perpetual. We may only have a few more years, and then the revolution is too late to be able to make the difference. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. My own family doesn't watch.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. And?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend from Texas, your intro was actually brilliant because we are going to try to do something this evening that is going to make a whole bunch of people really cranky. Mr. Speaker, let's see if I can frame this in a way that I don't sound too much like a jerk. Week after week after week after week, I have come to the floor here and walked people through saying, the blue here, that portion we get to vote on and that every dime a Member of Congress votes on is on borrowed money. This is all borrowed, plus actually a portion of your Medicare, if you look at the math, is actually borrowed. Gross interest is going to be $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expense in this government. One of the arguments I deal with over and over is trying to find moral, effective ways that we can save ourselves; that you could actually impact this remarkable amount of debt where we are hovering around borrowing about $100,000 a second. Every second of every day, we are just a little below that. Then the really uncomfortable is when you walk through the data, it is interest and healthcare. I am not a doctor; I am good at math. The dear Lord gave me one thing, I am good at math, but I thought I would try something new and exciting. How about if I brought, A, my friend who just happens to be benefited with a medical school education. That is why we will call him Dr. Harris and talk about if healthcare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, why not engage in the morality of a society that is healthier, that could be more vibrant? I have come here, and we have talked about diabetes being 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare, being 30 percent of Medicare spending, the cascade of conditions that come from obesity in America and the morality of loving our brothers and sisters and having a healthier society. My economists right now, we are working on our reply to the President's budget. We are vetting all the math, and we are highlighting things. We are still about 2 more weeks from our publication. We estimate that obesity will result in anywhere between $8.2 and $9.1 trillion in excess medical expenditures over the next decade. Maybe the most powerful thing you and I could do for U.S. sovereign debt and burying your retirement and our children and our great- grandchildren and our great-great-grandchildren in piles of debt would be to actually work on policies to make us a healthier society. You get the benefits of the morality and really good math. I just happen to have a medical doctor who is a Member of Congress who is on the Appropriations Committee who has an expertise that I don't have and can talk about things that I can't say, but understand, we mean this from a portion of optimism. There is a path here, but we have to do something that is brutally uncomfortable for us: We have to tell the truth. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Harris). Is that a fair set up?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yet, I promise you, tomorrow, we will have things on our phone attacking us for telling the truth. Mr. Speaker, I am going to argue our willingness to come here and tell the truth--I love people. I want them to flourish. Doctor, we are about to have our fifth year of prime-age males where their life expectancy is shorter. You were actually walking me through some of the math earlier. Does anyone care? The concentration I see of the lack of family formation, productivity, the ability to participate in society, the healthcare costs--what would happen if we had a society where we were not afraid to talk about the stigma? We are saying there are policies. I have the stacks of charts and these things, but there are policies we can engage in to make a difference. This is on topic and uncomfortable, but one of the things I come here and talk about over and over--let's just use this chart down here. Medicare is singularly the primary driver of our debt. It is healthcare costs. It is an earned benefit. You paid your 40 quarters for Social Security, but the average couple will have paid in $227,000 in FICA taxes, the portion that goes toward Medicare, but they get back $725,000. That differential right there is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. Do you do what some of the folks around here want to do, my Democratic colleagues, where they want to basically say Medicare for All? We are going to ration it. It is going to be government everything. The doctors you have are going to be government employees, that sort of model. Or should we actually take on something much more moral, much more creative, and much more, I would argue, doable? Let's look at the government policies we engage in where we subsidize people's misery. Could we turn some of the very programs we have to make them more moral and help make our society healthier? Doctor, I know that has been one of your fixations. You have been in front of committees over and over, talking about things we could do, everything from agricultural legislation, nutrition legislation--the things I do in Ways and Means, trying to finance access to therapies to make people healthier.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. And sicker.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Doctor, the morality argument I really want us to make is the way we have designed these programs, as they were originally designed decades and decades and decades ago, we now understand, we are financing people's misery instead of financing the opportunity to be healthier, to be part of society, to actually live longer. It is uncomfortable, but we have to have a moment of honesty. I don't understand the left's fixation on basically using borrowed money to finance misery.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. On the economic side, we call it knock-off effects, second-degree, third-degree effects. In some ways, they are not even that. They are just the principal effects.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. Would this explain my ice cream problem?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Doctor, look, my personal philosophy, I am probably a little bit more libertarian here. Have what you want, but understand, A, should government finance things that make our population less healthy, and, as a matter of fact, make much of the population very sick? The reality of it is when the majority of healthcare partially is financed in some fashion through government, we have an interest. In some ways, it sickens me, but that is the reality we have to sort of mechanically deal with. The statistics, the data, are just crashing on us since the pandemic, the curve of our brothers and sisters who are getting sicker and sicker. Now, I am dealing with some of the data we are looking at of those moving into their retirement benefits being also much sicker and trying to figure out how we finance that. We are financing it with partially borrowed money. It is honestly a good economics and moral argument. Maybe we should change the way we do nutrition assistance in America. Maybe we should change even down to some of the agricultural policy of adding more variety. I have given presentations on the concentration of certain crops and the whole way commodity pricing works, and the black swan theory of that level of concentration, God forbid something ever happened to one of the crops, but it all ties together. It is a unified theory. If I care about healthcare spending--and, understand, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill. We are right now doing the hardest thing in Congress. We are actually talking about what we pay for. Could we actually reduce healthcare spending by having a healthier country, a healthier population? That would actually be much more egalitarian with prosperity.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is fascinating when I am home in Arizona, the number of folks I walk up to who will almost pull me aside and say: I can't believe you were willing to talk about that. You told the truth. It is almost like they weren't ready to have those of us from the political class do something that is uncomfortable. The math is the math. If you take a look at mortality statistics, is it moral to have a society, particularly working, prime-age males--I mean, you were actually quoting some of the statistics in our previous conversation. They are dying younger and younger. What we have done to younger people in the country, what we are doing to seniors, we can fix this. We just have to be willing to do some difficult policy here--it is not difficult policy. There are some experiments out there--and you and I have not talked about this before, so we are winging it--where it was the food box and saying that we are going to deliver to our brothers and sisters who need nutrition support a box. There was a problem. Sometimes, the fruits and those things were thrown away, so they experimented with other ways to deliver it. It was in a microwave pouch, and it turned out that it was working. They were making people healthier, and then that pilot program disappeared. We are talking billions and billions of dollars, which means there will be armies of lobbyists in the hallway here tomorrow really cranky about what we talked about. Can we make the argument that we should do the right thing? Is this Republican or Democrat? It should be just the right thing.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am more optimistic than you.