David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, last week I promised I was going to do something a little more positive tonight. It is complicated because I basically have a compulsion. Being from Arizona, I sit on an airplane 10 hours a week; 5 there and 5 back. I use these news aggregators, and I collect articles. Afterwards, my staff and I do follow-up and research. I just gathered up some of them the last couple days. These are positive things happening in our society, but one of the number one reasons I am going to show them is they are things that actually could make our lives better, make us healthier as a society and assist with, as you know, my fixation on the debt. Before we start to actually focus on the debt and deficit--and I am going to try to minimize my sarcasm, but you have got to give me a moment here--we should be very proud of ourselves. We did something very special today that we have never done before other than in the middle of COVID. Over the last 2 months, our borrowing has increased so much that we are at $80,600 a second. We did it. I am so proud of us. I knew we could actually spend ourselves into oblivion. We did it, we crossed $80,000. We are at $80,000 a second, and we are only a few ticks away from getting to $7 billion a day. When I think about the fussing that goes on here on the floor where we are knifing each other for this or that, unless it is covering almost $7 billion in savings, that day we actually went negative. Just a point. Interestingly, the data shows since the beginning of the fiscal year--we are 2 months and a week or so into it--Social Security is number one. Social Security is always going to be number one. I have gotten picked on a little bit for bringing my charts showing that we are going to have $1 trillion this year in gross interest. Some folks say, well, that is not fair, you are paying interest to the Social Security trust fund. Okay. Well, guess what? Even if I use what they call net interest, which is only the interest we pay out to people who bought U.S. bonds, interest is still, so far this fiscal year, the second biggest expenditure in this government. Social Security is first, interest is number two, then defense, then Medicare, then Medicaid. Just a little bit of fiscal housekeeping there. All right. As a body, as Members of Congress and our staff, I need all of us to start thinking. We live in a time where there is a technological revolution happening around us. How do we use that technology to make people's lives easier, better, and give them more time? I am going to start with one example that I think is so incredibly obvious. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee for the Ways and Means Committee, so I have the IRS. We have come up here a number of times just enraged that during the Inflation Reduction Act Democrats moved an additional $80 billion to the IRS. They tell us, well, it is for collection and customer service. What would happen if I came to you today and said, have you ever tried calling the IRS and sat on hold forever or got their response saying: Hey, could you call back another day? Or, give us your phone number, and we will get around to calling you back? I am going to give them credit here; they tried an experiment. The IRS actually did an experiment this last tax season, and it served 13 million people, and it was a chatbot. Most people say: Oh, I don't like AI. However, think about this: When you call an airline today, most of the time do you think you are actually speaking to a real human? What if I could call the IRS and actually have the phone picked up right then, and I can ask a certain question: What do I put on this line? I have this issue, where do I find the document for this? Is there a YouTube video I can watch on how to fill out this form? The experiment worked. It was actually incredibly positive. I have had their technology people in my office multiple times, even last week, and I am told it is going to get expanded for this next tax filing season. You are going to get the phone answered. What happens if the ability to do a chatbot at a government agency could mean better and faster customer service and, let's be honest, save a lot of money because you don't have to hire as many government bureaucrats? It is a moment where those of us who are very concerned about that additional $80 billion going to the IRS could actually say: Okay, there is an argument. We have got a real customer service problem, how about using technology? Well, the experiment is working. How do I get my brothers and sisters here when we do our oversight, when we think about our job of making government faster, more efficient, more affordable, and less borrowing--oh, less borrowing--to say what other agencies could basically get rid of buildings full of people answering the phone and move to technology that is crisper, faster, better, cheaper, more accurate, and can actually give you the link so that you can see the video on how to fill out the form. That is where this discussion is going. There are positive things happening, or at least possibilities if I can get this body to think. Let's actually go on to one of the other ones that I am absolutely fascinated with. I have actually worked on this for years. There is this thing called carbon capture. Most of the left despise it because it would allow you to continue to use, particularly, natural gas, and yet there are breakthroughs in the technology right now to capture the carbon, sequester it or convert it into other products. I actually have functionally a whole library of MIT and others who have had breakthroughs on how to do it. This one is about facilities being built. There are even crazy experiments going on around the country and in the world on what they call ambient carbon capture. Where the concept is what happens when you can actually start to capture the carbon right at the point source, turn it into another fuel, sequester it in the ground, use it for extraction of other hydrocarbons. There is a solution here. The problem is it doesn't fit the narrative of my brothers and sisters on the left. However, if you actually look at the math, particularly with 45Q, which is an incentive to capture this carbon--look, one of the biggest emitters you have in the country is making concrete. Okay. What if you would grab the carbon and put it in the concrete? Yeah, the concrete turns gray, but it is the sequestration of it. There are positive economic growth solutions for our brothers and sisters on the left who have climate change concerns, but yet we talk past each other. I have saved article after article on topics, including speaking about new technology that could capture carbon and water out of thin air. This is ambient carbon capture. It is out there. It exists. How do you get this body to start reaching this century of technology? Instead, we often sound like it is still the 1990s. It is here. We have actually had some of these experts, some of the researchers, the one on MIT's breakthrough from almost 2 years ago. I bring this because this is a particular subject area where the left wants one thing, we want one thing, and I argue there is a technology that actually solves both of our problems. Part of my point tonight was instead of just talking about the dystopian terror I have of the speed and growth of debt--and the fact of the matter is that no one wants to have the conversation with me that from today through the future most of our debt is going to be healthcare costs, and if in 9 years we start to backfill Social Security, it is demographics. What do you do to create as much economic growth, as much prosperity as possible? One of the number one things we have to do in time is start to talk about not how you finance the price of healthcare, but, rather, how to disrupt it. I am going to jump around a little on this. The ACA--ObamaCare--a decade ago, wasn't a healthcare bill. It was a financing bill basically saying you cover this, and here is how you get subsidized and here is who has to pay. The Republican alternative was a financing bill, here is who has to pay and here is who gets subsidized. Medicare for All is a financing bill, they are not about what you pay. What is the actual cost? What if I came to you and said, let's actually think about the things we can do to make our society healthier, make our society so we don't need the same level of healthcare services? The next board I am going to show you is a fairly radical thought. Let's actually walk through this because I have been collecting articles on this concept for a while. This last year, somewhere close to 100,000 of our brothers and sisters in America died of a drug overdose. Number one was fentanyl. Come to Phoenix, Arizona, in Maricopa County, Arizona, we have three people who lose their lives every single day due to fentanyl. What if I came and said, hey, there is a healthcare solution. Turns out we are on the cusp of having a vaccine. I am not an expert on this, but I have read the articles, and apparently fentanyl, because it is a synthetic, is remarkable at capturing the receptors in your brain and just dramatically changing your brain chemistry. It turns out there are scientists all over the world working on the concept of filling those receptors. If anyone is industrious enough, google right now or use your search engine ``vaccine for cocaine.'' It is a different formula. It is a binding to a protein. I started following this a couple of years ago when there was an article about a vaccine for alcohol addiction. We scream at people and say: ``Just tough it out. Go to your meetings.'' You should do both of those, but what would happen if you could start to remove the high from some of these incredibly addictive drugs? Remember, these things are chemicals. They are not plant-based. This world is so much more dystopian. What change would happen with the homelessness in our urban areas if this was available? How many people out there could you help back into society? It is a tough conversation. There are some really tough ethical questions where you have someone who comes in off the street. They are addicted to fentanyl. There is a fentanyl vaccine available. Do they have to be able to choose it themselves? Probably. When are you in your right mind that you can make that type of decision? This is on the cusp. This is projected to be here potentially next year. Are we intellectually, ethically, and financially ready to deal with the opportunity of a disruption of something that is tearing many of our cities and communities apart? This is optimistic. This is loving people. This is also trying to figure out a way to take on human misery. How many times have you had an idiot like me come to the floor of the House and say maybe we should start to think about policy if there are now going to be vaccines coming that actually block the receptors for these types of drugs? Would that be good for society? If it would be good for society, how do we carry it out? I think this is just moral, besides the fact that if you actually look at the 10-year cost of it, it may actually be a huge economic benefit and saver to municipal governments, city governments, State governments, and also our Medicaid subsidies. It just may be the right thing to do. There should be hope. There should actually be excitement about these sorts of things. As we walk through a few more of these--and forgive me. There are so many subjects here. I am going to bounce around on this one only because this is one I have been collecting for years. A couple of years ago, I came across an article by some scientist who actually had been focusing on methane. For those of you who care about math, methane apparently has a substantially higher impact, according to formulas we are given, but a much shorter life span in the atmosphere. The capture of methane was going to cost a fortune. Some of the early Biden administration rules are that they wanted costs upstream and downstream of the production of natural gas. Scientists wrote this article saying: Did you know that clay, when it is also adjusted, I believe it was with copper oxide--you get the joke here if anyone actually has a scientific brain. Clay and kitty litter with copper oxide acts like a methane sponge. It is incredibly inexpensive. I proposed it to some of my Democratic colleagues who claim to really care about climate change, methane, and all those things. They just looked at me like I was a heretic because I was giving them a solution that didn't require massive government subsidies. Here we are, a little bit later, and the articles continue on with the ability to do the capture, and even the ability to use that methane capture in agriculture, and the fact that there are actually even some new attempts to do it. You don't have to bankrupt us. Is it enough to come and give speeches about how much you care about climate change and then not actually understand the science that makes it so you can do something without crushing people's livelihoods, crushing your retirement, and leaving your future generations in debt? Call my office. We have dozens of these articles we collect. We subscribe to some really crazy blogs and scientific publications. In this place, does anyone actually read the literature? This is supposed to be a happy, optimistic speech, so forgive my exasperation. Let's talk through some of the other things that are going on. I know everyone was reading and enthusiastic about the first CRISPR drug that made it through the final bit of its process and apparently is heading to the streets now. The FDA has approved it for sickle cell anemia. It is incredibly painful. This drug will be outrageously expensive, and we need to find, for just basic morality's sake, how we make it available. The point here is that it works, finally. We have talked about CRISPR and the ability to alter a genome and add some gene sequencing. It is here. It has been done. It is approved. It is available. One of the miseries in our society actually now has a cure. We have proposed ideas of a healthcare bond, the ability to be able to buy the units, cure our brothers and sisters, and then use the future healthcare savings, because they no longer have that affliction in the future, to pay it back. If someone else has a better financing mechanism other than just borrowing money, let me know, but get ready. There are dozens of these types of pharmaceuticals--genetic, bio, other things--that are in the pipeline that we have almost a moral obligation--if it ends misery and also allows our brothers and sisters to once again fully participate in society and the economy, we have to deal with these. This is optimistic because we actually have been trying to find a cute way to say cures are the solution. This is where I often get in a fuss. I am going to spend a bunch of time at the end on diabetes. A fuss I have with a number of our Democratic Members--we go at each other pretty hard here because their version of morality is to put up more clinics to help manage misery. I keep looking at them and saying: Will someone read the scientific literature? We are on the cusp of cures. What is more moral? To spend money to build more clinics, or to spend some money to get more economic growth because you have ended the misery? How do I get this body to see that vision, that it is great economics, great growth, and also moral? Let's walk through just a few other of these things. This is another one I am really interested in. It is in phase 1 right now. How would you feel about a vaccine for breast cancer? This is a brand-new board. I only have a couple of the scientific papers on it, but so far, it looks like it is working. What would this mean for society? What would it mean for testing? What would it mean for mammograms? What would it mean for expenditures in the future? What would it mean for people like my wife who have gone through some misery here? Is this the right thing to pursue? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but they are well into their phase 1, and their early data is great. Think about it. You see, I am trying to create thinking here. What happens if one of the ways we reduce future debt and spending is that we ended misery, disease? Cures. These are the sorts of things I wish we actually brought in front of our committees and talked about, that we actually had staff who would understand the basic science. I have brought versions of this next one to the floor for about 3 or 4 or years. We even had a debate yesterday in the back of the room here when we were doing a piece of legislation that I thought was purely theater and saying: What is the simplest thing you can do tomorrow that, by the end of next year, you could have a major change in spending on healthcare? People look at you and don't know. What if I told you 16 percent--and this has been peer-reviewed multiple times--16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is associated with people not doing their pharmaceutical maintenance? It is someone like me. I have hypertension. Can you believe that? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, I am most likely not to have a stroke. Someone that takes a statin, those pharmaceuticals are incredibly cheap. They have been around for 50 years. It turns out--and this board is now 3 years old. Our latest number is over $600 billion. That is 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending in a single year. You are not going to get all that, but what happens if you could get 10 percent, 20 percent of it by just a pill bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning or a text message you would get on your phone asking: Did you take your statin? It is worth thinking about. How many people do you know who don't follow their regimen on insulin? We have technology to help each other stay on the program within a year by just saying that we want a pill bottle cap that beeps if it is the type of thing you use for maintenance. For grandma, it is the type of thing that if she has to take these in the morning and these in the afternoon, it drops the pills in the cup. It already exists. It has existed for years. We have done presentations to the committees around here saying the day is here. We all agree this is real. Why is it so hard? We had someone come to present us with a package, saying: Do you realize there are certain pharmaceuticals that are so incredibly expensive? Put them in sterile blister packs, and when someone has gone through their treatment, don't throw away what is left. If it is in sterile packaging, why can't it be given to a Medicaid system or helping the poor? We just don't think here. We are so used to saying we will just spend more money. Please, give this some consideration. Is this Republican or Democratic? It is neither. It is just technology. It would be a partial solution. If it is 16 percent, that means this is, like, 34 percent more effective than the piece of legislation we jumped up and down and made a big deal about passing yesterday on suspension. One is theatrics; one is actually a solution. We need to learn math. Here is where I start to soak myself in kerosene and play with matches. It is math. The math will always win. I have no intention of hurting someone's feelings, but we really should start to talk through some of this. This has been incredibly well vetted. It is in article after article. Mr. Speaker, 5 percent of our brothers and sisters are actually over 50 percent of our healthcare spending--actually a little over 50 percent of all healthcare spending. These are folks with multiple chronic conditions. Many of them have a miserable life, but our ability to change this 5 percent here is a remarkable savings on debt and spending, and the morality of people having a decent life. Why is it so hard to focus on this? We actually have article after article that we have been collecting on the ability to use AI to discover cures. This is happening all around us. Why haven't we updated our policy? Why haven't we worked with the FDA, saying, hey, AI can reduce parts of your population statistics. So you go into your phase 1, you get certain data back, you can use AI to model your populations. You can cut the time bringing solutions and cures to market. The ability to actually change what the concept of telehealth is. Is telehealth grabbing your phone and FaceTiming someone, or is it the things you have on your body? Is it the wristwatch you have? Soon we will have blood glucose and oxygen and heart rate and those things. You will functionally have a medical app on your body. You should be allowed to take that data, run it through, and if it can be certified by the FDA, it should be allowed to prescribe. Now this is heresy I just said, but the fact of the matter is if you update it on your body--or like that flu kazoo I came here and showed on the floor years ago; the thing you blow into. It is a breath biopsy that within a couple moments says, hey, you have this virus. We are bouncing off your medical records. So it bounces off your phone: Here are your medical records. You are not allergic to this antiviral. We are going to order that antiviral, and maybe Lyft or Uber drops it off at your house in a couple hours. That would be a good thing, except for the fact that we functionally keep that illegal, and if we don't make it illegal, we make it so it can't be reimbursed. It is a solution. Remember, part of this discussion is what did we do to change the cost and the ability to be healthy, not who is going to subsidize your healthcare premium, your insurance premium. We have article after article. There are actually some miracles happening here in starting to understand cell dynamics, which is a big deal if it starts to come around in the next few years. Remember, we have a certain misery in this country we have to deal with. This sort of goes back to my fentanyl vaccine. We may be able to walk into a fifth year of life expectancy falling, particularly for prime- age males. It is bad enough you live in a country that in about 18 years we will have more deaths than births, but what happens when life expectancy in this country is shrinking? We are going to get to one of the reasons for that. How about this. What would happen if there was a universal flu vaccine; instead of playing this game every winter saying, did they get the mixture right? Well, it is only about 30 percent effective because it turns out that the genome of the flu that actually started to circulate wasn't the one they expected. What if they figured out a way to do the snip on the protein? Have you ever seen the data of the economic impact of a major flu season; how many people don't go to work? It is really good economics. I will argue, it is embracing science in a way that is good for all of us. Look, I have article after article of these breakthroughs that are actually not in the lab right now. Many of them are actually being tested. Why can't we get this body to say, hey, that one should be getting an XPRIZE, because if they can bring that to market 1 or 2 years sooner, think of the misery we can end. Oh, and it is really good for the budget deficit. Hey, this one we need to work with the FDA, if we actually have to move someone over here to be able to do the review process instead of it being piled up on some overworked bureaucrat so it sits there for a year. We need to think through the fact of the timing of a cure. The faster it comes is moral, and it is also great economics. Let's actually now go where it gets even more uncomfortable. The amount of mocking I took a couple of years ago, and then the science actually turned out right, but I never got that reporter--and, look, the DCCC is always going to attack us, but you would think they would actually see the morality in ending misery in people's lives. Diabetes is the single most expensive disease in America. It is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of Medicare; 31 percent of Medicare is associated with diabetes. A few months ago, we actually had a Healthcare Innovation Summit downstairs. We actually got six Members of Congress to show up. We invited all of them, but six showed up to meet the company that looks like they have a cure for type 1 diabetes. The other company sitting next to them looks like they had a path for type 2. There are four or five companies. If type 1 is an autoimmune disease, what happens if you could teach your body not to attack itself? That one is actually, I think, heading towards its phase 1. If these things are so expensive in society, why can't we actually fixate on them? Of the $327 billion spent on diabetes in 2017 by insurance and government, we are going to knife each other around here for a few hundred million, maybe several billion dollars in savings. Incremental changes here on just helping our brothers and sisters if we could get to a cure for diabetes. Now here is where it gets politically even trickier. Researchers exploring the use of gene therapy to show promising results for diabetic retinopathy. Madam Speaker, I represent a Tribal population that apparently, I have been told, is the second highest per capita population of diabetes in the world. It is not a poor Tribe. They are incredibly well managed. They are prosperous. As we have learned now, because of the GLP-1s, obesity really has a huge genetic component. The hormones you produce to know you are full are different between you and I. What happens to our brothers and sisters who are going blind because of diabetes? We are on the cusp of a cure there. I would actually go even more creative. If anyone is willing to read something that is a little bit complex, about 6 months ago, the Joint Economic Committee Republicans--a couple of them have Ph.D.s in economics--wrote a response to the President's budget. But we took it further. We said, think about what we could do for society if we were willing to actually do something about obesity in America. Remember I just showed you that 5 percent is 50 percent of healthcare spending? Some of the data from the economist came back and said, hey, almost half of healthcare actually has an association with obesity in America. This is where it gets tricky, but math is math. In that, they did very conservative math. They were coming up with saying, hey, at the end of 10 years, that is $5-plus trillion dollars of savings. And if you did the multiplier effects, you might actually be able to work, family formation, labor force participation, life expectancy. You start to add in those other benefits, it could be several trillion dollars, besides the basic morality. So how do you get there? How do you come here and actually have a conversation without someone accusing you of nasty things because you showed you cared? Well, we have some new categories of drugs, the GLP-1s. One apparently goes off-patent next year. Could we actually, as a policy here in Congress, encourage a co-op? Make the one that is off-patent, add competition, crash the price? The fact of the matter is, someone like me who comes and fixates on the debt--and the Democrats over there fixate on wanting to tax people more--for the last couple months, I have come here and shown you the academic literature over and over that says you can raise rich people's taxes all you want; you hit the economic ceiling and you get about a point and a half; maybe if the sky opened up, you can get up to almost 2 percent of GDP. Over here we have talked through almost everything we were able to cut, and there are only a couple of percent of GDP that we could ever cut and survive, just get the vote. The problem is if you take away the fraud of crediting back the administration the student loan money, if you add it all up, we borrowed almost 8.4 percent of the economy last year. So borrowing last year was 8.4 percent of GDP. Did you hear my math? If taxing rich people only gets you a couple percent of GDP and the cuts we want to talk about--and many of the cuts I am absolutely going to vote for, but it is only a couple percent of GDP. Does someone see a problem in the math? It has to happen through policy. Is having a healthier society that needs dramatically less healthcare moral? It is surely great damn economics. The point of tonight's presentation is actually clear: There is hope. We have calcified intellectually. The left somehow thinks there is a path to tax your way to prosperity. I have tried to show repeatedly that if we did every tax the Democrats talk about to save the Social Security trust fund, you get close, you still actually have very substantial cuts. I mean, we have tried to model it, but let's say it covered everything. You have just used up all your gun powder. If two-thirds of all future borrowing is functionally Medicare, where do you get the cash for that, because you have used it to shore up the Social Security trust fund. That is actually part of the intellectual vacuousness of this place. It is, we will just tax more. There is not enough money, but we are not going to tell anyone that because it doesn't fit with what we said on the campaign trail. How many times have some of my brothers and sisters on my side said it is foreign aid? Then you show the chart that every dime of foreign aid is about 11 days of borrowing. Remember, we are on the cusp of borrowing $7 billion a day. We are over $80,000 a second now. We are going to have to change through policy. I have done videos on how you could have a revolution on environmental data by crowdsourcing the data. I even made a whole cartoon. It is on YouTube somewhere about crowdsourcing environmental data; that if you did that, you don't need the current enforcement mechanism. If you have enough data, you will catch the bad actors. It would open up the economy, promote growth, and you would catch the clowns that are breaking the rules. I have shown that to people in here that have said, oh, but that would cut a whole bunch of jobs at the EPA. That is the point. It is better, faster, and better for the environment and a hell of a lot cheaper and fairer. I guess my rambling in my closing, Madam Speaker, is that there are solutions. There is hope, but they are only going to come about if we have intellectually a fairly dramatic change in how we have sort of calcified on policy, because all these things are disruptive. All these things are going to have armies of lobbyists who do not like them because you are changing their business model, or armies of bureaucrats showing up in your office explaining that you are changing the laws. That is the point. There is hope. It just requires us to change. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, thank you for your patience as we get ourselves set up here. Mr. Speaker, I obviously try to do this every week we are here, and my goal is not to sound like some idiot economics professor. I am trying to point out the biggest thing that is ahead of us, the reason we are here, and the hardest thing we talk about. I want to start off by saying that, apparently, I hurt some people's feelings in the last two floor speeches when I walked through the math, and I don't care. The math is the math, and the math will win. The math always eventually wins. This is substantially a math-free zone. Another thing I want to point out for some of the folks who end up watching a video of this and they get cranky that there is no one in the House. That is actually the way it is supposed to be. They are supposed to be off in their committees or other places working. This is our chance to talk to the body. Please understand that we are on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of televisions right now talking to staff. The reason I show up with these charts is trying to see if you can breakthrough and understand just the scale of what is going on. Remember, we have a debt and demographics issue, and that is the thing that just enrages me. If you are on the left, you say we don't tax enough. If you are on the right, we can't cut enough, which I am more on the cut side; however, you still got a mathematical problem. I will show you in some of the slides that you can get rid of every dime of Defense and every dime of discretionary and you are still borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars. Last year, we borrowed 8.4 percent of the economy. Ever hear these discussions about having a 2 percent GDP growth? Okay. Fine. That is what long-run projection is. We borrowed 8.4. That is just the borrowing, not the spend. That is what we borrowed. It is also one of the reasons we have tried now not to talk in percentages of GDP because no one has any idea what the hell you are talking about. Mr. Speaker, let's actually have some fun here. We are going to actually try to break this up in two or three different presentations over the next couple weeks. Today, I am just going to relay out the math, see if any of it still sinks through. Then next week, we are going to try something that we haven't done in a few months. We are going to come in with optimism that the breakthroughs in healthcare, the breakthroughs in technologies, the opportunities that are out there will help us bend the debt curve. Once again, I am going to go back to a sentence I had a couple moments ago, for those who will text my office, call my office, fuss at me when I am in Costco and say, ``David, I want you to balance the budget this year.'' I can do it. You just have to be willing to let me get rid of all of defense, all of discretionary, and $300 or $400 billion of your Medicare. That is how upside-down the numbers are. Let's walk through some of this. We are two-plus months into this fiscal year, and the number one spend this fiscal year will be Social Security. Now, let's talk about this for a moment. Social Security is its own trust fund, its own funding mechanism. None of the money is spent in the general fund; it is loaned to the general fund. Social Security gets these special Treasury notes, and then they are paid interest twice a year. If you ever geek out and you are someone who watches U.S. debt and all of a sudden there is this sudden spike, often that is actually because we made our twice-a-year interest payment to Social Security, but it is separate. You have also got to understand the flip side of that. In 8 or 9 years, when the Social Security trust fund is empty, it doesn't have a claim on the general fund, either. CBO put out a number of 2033. The Social Security actuaries, which I think are a year behind in their reports, had projected 2034. However, let's use CBO's number. CBO projects that a 25 percent cut in your check is coming in 8\1/2\, 9 years. For the average couple in America on Social Security, I think that is like a $17,400 cut. We will double poverty in the senior population in America. Okay. It is immoral, and the solution we get is, okay, just raise these taxes, do the cap. Now, we are still working on the math because it turns out Tax Foundation, the actuaries, and CBO have vastly different modeling numbers. We found a couple interesting nuggets, the Democrat bill does cut benefits, it cuts benefits on high-income earners where they told us they would never cut benefits. We are starting to realize rhetoric is often different than reality when you are trying to make the math work. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks we will actually have nailed down the actual impact, but right now it looks like raising the cap on Social Security, doing these other mechanisms still does not close that $616 billion shortfall. That is a $616 billion shortfall. That is the very first year the Social Security trust fund is gone. Why this isn't talked about constantly here, when defense is like $830 billion, and just the shortfall in a single year in Social Security is over $600 billion, does anyone see the scale we are talking about? Understand, if we use the tax solutions, where you say we are just going to raise these taxes, we are going to take everyone over $400,000 or just everyone, and you are going to pay the extra 12.4 percent, and then we are going to tax some of these unrealized capital gains and these things to make up that difference. Okay. If that is the Democrat solution, you have just used up your entire opportunity because there is no more money. What do you do with the other two-thirds of the borrowing, which is the shortfall in Medicare? You have no more capacity. We are going to walk through that. Why this board here is so important to understand is: in 2024, Social Security will be $1.450 trillion this year, so $1 trillion, $450 billion. Social Security is our number one spend. Gross interest, that means the interest we pay to Social Security but also the interest we pay to whoever has been willing to buy one of our bonds, is over a trillion dollars this year. Interest now is number two. Interest is now number two this fiscal year. That wasn't supposed to happen for like 8, 10 years, and it happened. Number three is Medicare. Number four on our spend is defense. When you have someone who runs around saying, Cut defense, that is where all our spending is, they are either willfully ignorant or they are just out of date, they are just so out of date. Demographics is the driver of our debt, and it is so hard to talk about that because for one thing, it is not Republican or Democrat. Us becoming gray hairs, it is not Republican or Democrat, it is math. The solutions may ultimately be partisan, but what we are as a society isn't. I am going to be much more gentle because I have someone behind me, so I am not going to throw the boards. That was also one of the complaints. One more time, the exact thing I just said, but I made it into a bar chart because the bar chart is much easier to see, particularly on the television. This is our Social Security. This is interest. Now, if you say, David, it is not fair to use gross interest because we are paying ourselves. We are not paying ourselves; we are paying the trust fund. Remember, we just talked about Social Security being its own. If you want to conflate the two, then you are sort of breaking the wall, but God bless you. If you just go to net interest, it is still right there as the second biggest expense we have in the Federal Government this year, and then you have Medicare, and defense now is number four. Why does this matter? The number of folks who live in this sort of mathematical fantasy world--and just skip 1965, you can see, but do you see this red here? This is last year's spend. Seventy-three percent of the Federal Government's spending was on autopilot, we don't get to vote on it. You get elected to Congress; you do not vote on 73 percent of all the spending because it is formula. You worked your 40 quarters; you got Social Security. You hit a certain age and participate; you get your Medicare. You are part of a certain tribal group, you get this. These are things that are formulas. You fall below a certain income, you get these. Defense was 13 percent of our spending last year. Well, defense is really tricky. Yes, we need modernization. Maybe some of the large weapon platforms need a revolution in technology, those things. That is fine. However, the fighting you hear, the fighting that ultimately removed the Speaker, the things that go on here are over this little green wedge here that is 15 percent, 15 percent. The punch line you need to just burn into your mind, all of this green is borrowed, all this blue is borrowed, and last year about $400 billion of the red was borrowed. Everything a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Sink that in. Everything we vote on is on borrowed money. The frustrating thing is we have absolute battles here on the floor and in our committees, trying to save a little here, trying to save a little there. Fine, we should do it. One of the reasons the approps bills are taking so long is we are breaking them down line item by line item, saying, does this make sense? But stop pretending that at the end of 10 years you will even notice those differences. They won't even show up as rounding errors because we are borrowing. This is really important to me and forgive me if it is slightly narcissistic. I don't mean it to be. We are trying to find some way to communicate math. We started something in our office a couple of weeks ago where you can go to our official website, and you can sign up. Just give me your name and your cell number, and every day we are going to text you--and I know this is really exciting--what the day's borrowing was and what the day's tax receipts were. We are going to do it two ways, so we are doing it absolutely intellectually honest. We are going to give you a 364-day clock, so no timing effects because you know Treasury, at the end of the fiscal year plays some game where they roll some of the spending into the next year. There are all these timing effects. Following that, we give you the actual fiscal year. Mr. Speaker, I won't ask you to actually answer this because I am actually not supposed to have the dialogue with you, but it is always fun to point at you. What would you guess we are borrowing per second, a per second borrow? I think as of yesterday, because we printed this a couple days ago, we were at $78,480 per second. You can sign up on our website and get this wonderful text message sent to you every day with the actual facts, not the made-up crap that goes on here. The number of times I hear people speaking behind these microphones, and you are pulling out your calculator and wondering, where did they come up with that? They just make things up because these numbers are so difficult. If you actually do so far this fiscal year--and it will change as tax collections come in--we are over $112,000 per second in borrowing; and of that $78,000 we are borrowing right now per second over the last 364 days, $30,000 to $35,000 of that now is interest. It gets worse because a lot of the bonds we sold over the last couple years--because we are idiots--we sold short on the curve, so we had incredibly low interest rates, and now those bonds are going to have to be refinanced at these higher interest rates. I am going to put this chart back. We are just trying to help people understand. Interest is one of our great fragilities. What that means is, what happens when Congress is no longer in charge of the Federal budget, but the bond market is? The bond market gets cranky. Look, 3 weeks ago we had a 30-year bond auction--I appreciate the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee letting me take my subcommittee, and we brought in some of the bond market experts. The hearing, once again, denigrated back into Republican-Democrat talking points, which frustrated me because we were supposed to have a serious conversation. Three weeks ago, we had a 30-year bond auction where the broker- dealers, the market makers had to take 24 percent of it. Now, everybody that is listening, you just went, huh? What happens when there are so few buyers or there is so much inventory that has to be sold that the broker-dealers don't have enough credit line to take it all down? Does that become a failed bond auction? Do we start to see stress in the world bond market? Remember, the entire world uses our bonds as the oil, the liquidity that keeps financial markets working here and around the world, our mortgages, everything else. Intellectually, I don't think we understand the serious nature of what a chart like this tells you when you start looking at gross interest just marching along, and then this is functionally the last 12 months, so you had some of the lower interest rates in the beginning of 2023. Remember, interest rates didn't really start to move until April last year, and this is showing, just in the last 12 months, we functionally added $923 billion in financing costs on those interest rates. This year it is going to be over a trillion. Then you come over here, and you start looking at things like net interest. Net interest is ultimately going up, gross interest is starting to--the two lines are meeting. Why? Because the trust funds are getting smaller and smaller because they are shrinking. Remember, the transportation trust fund is gone in a few years. Medicare part A, the hospital portion, is gone in 7 years, Social Security is gone in 8\1/2\, 9 years. You have got to understand that also has an effect on our borrowing because we can't borrow internally. I don't think you need to see this board because I have said it like six times, we are borrowing $1 trillion gross interest this year. This one is important. I feel like an idiot, I feel like I am the only one coming up here and screaming about this. It is like, Schweikert stop telling us things we don't want, there is math involved. What was the movie, there was a joke, or is it Chevy Chase on ``Saturday Night Live,'' 30 years ago I was promised there would be no math? This chart is very, very simple. We have done an estimate with the Joint Economic economists that we are going to bring this fiscal year $9.6 trillion to the bond market. About $2 trillion of that will be what we call virgin, that is new borrowing to cover our shortfall because about 30 percent of everything we spend is on borrowed money. The rest is being refinanced. You go, what do we care, it is refinancing? We are now refinancing at much higher interest rates. If we are blessed, you know, 10 years, a little over 4, but that thing used to be at 0.6, 0.7. That gap is why we estimate--and so does Treasury, so does OMB--that we are going to spend over a trillion dollars in interest, and now it is our second biggest expense. It just continues. How do you think about this? We actually had 2 months last year--now, this is timing effects when tax receipts come in and those things-- where we were borrowing to make our interest payments. Think about that. We were borrowing to be able to pay for our borrowing. Does anyone care? Is it just too complicated? This is the reality. Yet, if you ever listen to us, and, in particular, my brothers and sisters on the left, they will be behind this microphone saying, if we just tax rich people, we will be fine. Let's keep spending. These are major components of the 2023 Federal budget. I am not going to walk you through all the line items, but here is the basic point. If you break it out per household, last year, our spending was over $48,000 a household. Okay. Receipts, that means tax collections, everything, you know, from excise taxes to income taxes, capital gains, all of them. We spent $48,000 per household last year. We took in $33,800. Anyone see a problem? Structurally, this gets uglier every year, uglier the next year, uglier the next year. It is not because of mandatory spending. It is not because we are spending more money on foreign aid or spending more money on this and that. It is demographics. I can show you slides, and I am going to show a couple of these. It is always the ones I get the most angry emails about. Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of the spending from today through the next 30 years, 100 percent, according to the CBO--and if anyone has ever read the CBO reports--Medicare and its interest for its shortfall. Remember, its cash shortfall is I think $88 trillion over those 30 years and Social Security, if we choose to backfill it, in 9 years when the trust fund is gone. It is functionally healthcare and if we choose to backfill Social Security. So Medicare--healthcare, is the primary driver. It is 70-plus percent of all future borrowing. The brain trust here, we will come behind these microphones, and we talk about financing it. ObamaCare is a financing bill. The ACA is a financing bill, who gets subsidized and who has to pay. Let's be honest. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill. It is who had to pay and who got subsidized. Medicare for all is a financing bill. None of it is about the adoption of technology that makes people healthier. I have come behind this microphone a handful of times this year and showed the data from the Joint Economic Committee, the Republican report, go to Chapter 3, and we did some very difficult things, and they worked very hard. I vetted this for weeks. We did the thing we hate to talk about, but it is amazing, the numbers. We talked about diabetes and obesity in America. What would happen if I could come to you right now and say the most powerful thing you could do to roll down U.S. sovereign debt is take on obesity in America? The morality. It is also one of the most powerful things you can do for income inequality, for my Tribal populations, for the rural poor, for the urban poor. We actually had some other crazy data talking about the labor force participation that would go up and family formation. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just moral. It is a solution. It was a few trillion dollars over the 10 years--the single most powerful thing you could do. How many people have you had come behind these microphones and want to talk about we need to help our brothers and sisters live? We are about to have a fifth year of life expectancy falling in America. Our brothers and sisters are dying. If you look at the data, drugs are right up there. Obesity is even higher. Is it just because you are going to get nasty people saying horrible things about you on social media? Well, screw them. Morality is on our side. It is great economics. It is also the right thing to do, and it is really hard around here. Let's actually talk about one of the other things. If I get one more leftist, well, you guys supported tax reform. Okay. The single biggest movement in closing income inequality, single biggest movement in raising wages without raising inflation because it allocated money. Smartly designed tax reform actually puts the money where it gets the greatest amount of productive growth. Remember your basic high school economics class. What are the two ways you get paid more? Inflation. Well, that doesn't get you anything. When your check goes up for inflation, you are just treading water. Productivity. We had stagnant productivity for a couple decades. We did tax reform at the very end of 2017, and we had 2018, 2019, the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic, and it was the ultimate Goldilocks because we were growing. Wages were going up. The poor were getting less poor. We didn't set off inflation. Income inequality is shrinking. The Democrats keep saying, well, the face cost of that was going to be $1.7 trillion. Yes, we were taking in dramatically more tax receipts than we ever expected, and it actually added a whole bunch to the life expectancy of Social Security. Stunning amounts of money came back repatriated from overseas, but it was a tax cut. The same brain trust on the left who is attacking tax reform forgets in just 20 months, President Biden's initiatives have added $4.8 trillion to the 10-year deficit. They come at us hard. We did tax reform, and the face value of that was $1.7 trillion, but they have added $4.8 trillion, and it is like they forget. This also set off--the best economists--I want to be honest on this-- set off half of inflation. Some of it was supply chain. Half of it was the amount of stimulus the Democrats dumped into the economy. I have done it here on the floor showing that the 30 months of inflation we just had was the single biggest modern tax hike. Whether you know it or not, you have been crushed. If you live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale market, and you are not making 22, 23 percent more today than you did 30 months ago, you are poorer. The brilliance of the left's not liking inflation but not screaming about it or trying to crush it because there are things we could have done in this body to help roll down inflation, but it would have required policy, and it would have required them to admit it was crushing the working population, particularly the working poor, and the dirty little secret is it changed the debt to GDP because inflation devalues the existing debt. You get to pay it back with inflated dollars. Whether you know it or not, you are about 20 percent poorer today than you were 30 months ago. If your paycheck hasn't gone up, if you are in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, if you haven't gone up about 22 percent, you are poorer today. It is math. We keep coming back to the understanding of the scale of the drivers of our debt. I am not going to belabor this board. I have done it before. We can get rid of every dime of discretionary. There is no defense. There is no State Department. There is no Supreme Court. There is no Congress. That might actually be a good thing, but there is nothing. You are still borrowing. Even at the end of 10 years, you are still borrowing. To help you understand the scale--and this one I have done entire presentations on, and this is the one where I get the most interesting comments from Democrats. Well, we need to tax people over $400,000 more. Okay. Dirty, fun little secret. If you made $400,000 4 years ago, 3 years ago, today your purchasing power is probably 320, 328. Part of the scam here is let inflation run a bit. You have heard of bracket creep; same sort of concept. There is a great paper out there. It is on the Manhattan Institute's, Brian Riedl, where he basically took all sorts of studies, leftist studies, OMB studies, CBO studies, and said, Mr. Speaker, what would happen if you basically maximized every tax rate, if you took people over $400,000 and said, I am going to maximize their income tax? There are formulas now because we have really good modeling for this. We can get them up to this tax rate before it changes their economic effects, and the revenues actually go down. Maximize their capital gains. Maximize their estate tax. Maximize everything. Adjust for the economic effects. If you don't believe me, go read the paper. You will get about 1.1 to 2 percent of GDP in new tax receipts. Okay. Let's split the difference. Let's call it 1.6 of new taxes by maximizing every tax rate of those over 400,000. Okay. The reality is the majority of the people that make over $400,000 vote for Democrats anyway, so I don't know why we keep trying to say, but the economics are theater. Back to the point when we began. What did we borrow last year? Anyone listen? We borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP--8.4. The Democrats' solution covers 1.6 of it. When they do that, the capacity we need to be able to cover the shortfalls in Social Security, Medicare, if there is a disaster, if there is a war--we have no more capacity. This is how fragile we are as a society and intellectually vacuous, the debate here is. Mr. Speaker, how much time is remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I will try to wrap this up in the next couple boards so the gentleman from Texas can have his time. This is pretty much the same thing. We actually did the modelling on the permanent deficit, its interest carrying costs. That is what is over here in whatever earth tones that is. One of the things I have heard the Progressive Caucus talk about, there is some absurd thing called the oligarch's tax where they are going to find really rich people, and the richer they are, they are just going to take portions of their unearned income or their assets. Okay. Fine. I guess that is where the left's brain is, but you have to stop lying to people about the math. It only covers a tiny fraction of the borrowing. Part of this even comes from one of the progressive group's own math. It is revenge for people who made a bunch of money, who vote for them and contribute to them, and then they make up the math. This is such an absurd place. Look. Maybe no one actually cares. I have come here in the past and sort of showed the trajectory we are on to the amount of our economy that will be in debt, and we are already right here. Remember, this is a chart that if you actually start to do the baseline, and you start to actually do different baseline annual growths--you have to understand, in less than a decade, if our annual growth does not exceed the mean, meaning we only grow at a half a percent over those years, we are already at 125 percent debt to GDP. Now, because we are the reserve currency, we get a little bit of a SPIF for more capacity, but basically you have to understand the number. The time for doing something was actually a couple years ago. Every day we wait, the policy options--and this is going to be part of my closing, and I am going to say it two or three times. The policy options close because there are things you need to do policywise. If you look at all the taxes the left wants to do--I just showed you a slide--it comes in about 1.5, 1.6 percent of GDP. We borrowed 8.4 last year. The things we can cut. I can get you a couple of points of GDP we can cut, and I am willing to do some very difficult cuts. Is it rational for us to borrow money on our nondefense discretionary and send it to States and jurisdictions that have their own taxing authority? We are basically playing a game of here is some free money that we are borrowing. Well, that is $300 billion of the discretionary, but that is a fraction of the GDP. The two ends here, that means the actual structural deficit that is actually from the demographics, you need a revolution in the costs. You can't tax enough, and you can't cut enough. It is math. Once again, another model out there that shows once you do the actual economic effects of taxing the rich, it gets you only a fraction of the 10-year deficit. I am going to close on this board because it is the board that enrages most people. It is the one that has been modeled by left groups, right groups, some of the honest universities, back to the point I have made. This board is already a year out of date, meaning when it says over the next 30 years, we will have $116 trillion in borrowed money, we have a model in our office that is approaching $130 trillion with the higher interest rates. On this one, $77 trillion of that shortfall over the next 30 years is Medicare. It is healthcare costs. Another one is a $38 trillion shortfall if we backfill Social Security and the shortfall there. It is immoral what this body is doing by avoiding, and every day that we avoid, you find yourself saying taxes are your only opportunity, though I have just spent the last half an hour trying to explain policy is where the money is at. Making people healthier is the single-biggest thing you can do to reduce the U.S. debt. Actually, you reduce it but stabilize it because we are going to continue to grow it because we are getting old, and our healthcare costs are going to go up. Can we use technology? Can we use cures? I could come to you tomorrow and point out the simple fact that 33 percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes. A revolution in our brothers and sisters with diabetes, which we know how to do it now--we actually have pharmaceuticals that are remarkable, and I am not thrilled with talking about pharmaceuticals, but the math is the math. We sometimes have to deal with the reality in front of us. If we can cut diabetes in half in America--let's see, 15 percent of U.S. healthcare costs is about $700 billion a year. If you cut 33 percent and then get the economic effects of people being able to work and other things, so a trillion dollars a year. I mean, you start to understand this doesn't have to be dour. It doesn't have to be dystopian. There is hope. It just requires thinking and maybe owning a calculator and reading. We are too busy saying the same crap to our voters because they applaud for us. Even though it is 20 years out of date, we say the same crap over and over. I have been here 10 years. When I first got elected, 1 out of 8 was 65. Today, it is like 1 out of 5.8 is now 65. Demographics is our destiny. Why are we incapable of telling each other the truth? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, as I am getting myself organized here, I am going to try something tonight as a variance of something I have done now for years. I am going to try to walk through some of the math, but please understand to anyone who is insane enough to watch this, particularly to staff here on Capitol Hill, I am trying to treat people like adults. I am not spinning you. I am not going to give you the latest poll talking point. I am not going to give you magic math. This is a moment where we desperately need to understand the scale of the problems. Mr. Speaker, let's also please understand that the people you see come behind the microphones here on the floor--and there are a lot of issues. There are a lot of problems--but I will argue, though, the systemic threat to this republic is the math. First off, for anyone who actually doesn't have a life, I strongly encourage you to go to our office's website--I think it is Rep David-- and sign up for text messages. We call it the daily debt update. Every single day, 5 days a week, you will get a text message from me that says what we borrowed today per minute and the interest costs. I break it out per year. Then I also say what we borrowed so far this fiscal year. We give you 364-day clock, so we get rid of timing effects. Then I am going to show you what we have taken in, or what we call receipts. Some people call them tax revenues. That is wrong, technically. Government doesn't have revenues; we have tax receipts. We now have several hundred people who have signed up for this. The point is, if you got yesterday's text message, you would see we are borrowing about $78,000 a second. Now, try to explain to me there is not something horribly wrong. One of the points I am going to try to make here off these charts is the scale. Now, my brothers and sisters on the left basically turn to us and say, just tax rich people more. That will take care of it. They want to tax rich people more. They can read. It is their own economists who do these reports saying that that actually doesn't get you anywhere close to reality to deal with the gap, and I am going to show you their own numbers. Now, I need to throw some of my own side under the bus. A lot of my brothers and sisters here on the Republican side, we are going to say if you would just cut this portion of discretionary spending, that would make a big difference. No, it wouldn't. We were playing with some math--and it is not done yet because I haven't vetted it--that almost everything we have been debating here for the last 3 or 4 months, at the end of 10 years, it would basically be a rounding error. You would have trouble even seeing it. We were playing with one bit of math that in 10 years, we are functionally scheduled with these new interest rates, borrowing about $3.1 trillion in a single year and if all of our cuts actually happen, it might actually not be 3.1, it might just be 3. It is real money. I think we should still do it, but stop pretending that it is saving the Republic. Let's start from the beginning. Let me get my charts organized. This is important, and I am going to keep doing it till I start hearing fellow Members say this out-loud repeatedly. Let's ignore 1965, but do you see this here? This is last year's fiscal year--23 percent was on autopilot, mandatory, earned benefits. You turn 65, you have worked your 40 quarters, you get Social Security. You get Medicare. You might be part of a certain Tribal group that might be a contractual part of a treaty obligation. There are certain benefits you get out there that aren't earned if you fall under a certain income, but they are part of mandatory. We as Members of Congress don't get to vote on it. That is on autopilot purposely. It was the intention of the left to put it on autopilot so it just happens. Do you see the green? That is what you call nondefense discretionary. That is what you all think of as government. That is the FBI. That is the State Department. That is our salaries. That is the Supreme Court. That is everything. The blue, 13 percent of the budget is Defense. The punchline you need to understand is last year every dime of nondefense, that green part, was borrowed. Every dime of the blue part was borrowed. Plus, about $400 billion of the red part was borrowed. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money, plus a chunk of mandatory. If you said I am going to balance the budget, God bless you. First, you got to shut down all the Defense system. Defense Department is gone. You have to get rid of all of government and you have to figure out what $400 billion you have to remove from Medicare. That is the math. The math will win. The math is the truth, and we make crap up around here. You got to understand the scale. If someone tells you that we are not taxing rich people enough or someone will tell you it is foreign aid and waste and fraud. Fine. Then go after waste and fraud. We should be vicious on it, but don't pretend that it does anything. I think we did a calculation last year and foreign aid was like 7, 8, 9 days of borrowing. Remember, we are borrowing $6\1/2\ billion a day. That is several times more than most of what we have been debating here for months. I know it is great theater, but the math is the math. The point I am going to try to make in this presentation, if anyone is listening, is the left saying just tax rich people more, doesn't get you there. For my brothers and sisters--I am one of them--who want to reduce spending because government is too big--also doesn't get you there anymore. You are going to have to deal with policy. You are going to have to deal with policy ideas that make healthcare less expensive. You are going to have to deal with policy that makes it so it is something you want to stay in the labor force. You have to do things that not only reduce the cost of surviving in our society, but also make this economy grow, and those are policy. One thing we are almost incapable of doing here because it is complex and the armies of lobbyists in the hallways get upset because they don't want us messing with their current business model. Same thing with the bureaucracies. The bureaucracies here go to war with us when we say you could use technology to do that. Let's actually walk through last year's budget. This is real. Seven weeks ago, we closed the books on the 2023 fiscal year. We spent $6.371 trillion. Tax receipts were only $4.436 trillion. Does anyone see a math problem? This is why it is important to understand those numbers. That means we borrowed 8.4 percent of the entire economy was borrowed just last year--8.4 percent of GDP was borrowed last year. In a couple slides here, I am going to show you that taxing the rich, the Democrat proposals when you actually adjust for its economic effects, you might get 1\1/2\, maybe 1.6, 1.7 percent of GDP, but you borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP last year. I know that sounds geeky, but the reason you often speak in percentage of GDP instead of dollar amount is because of the amount of inflation we have had. Remember, if you live in my area, I think I have the highest inflation in the continental United States. In the last 30 months if you are not making 22 percent more, you are poorer in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. You want to know why the working middle class and the working poor are so cranky, because it is brutal out there for them. The economy is actually okay. We are seeing some uncomfortable signs of really slowing down, which worries me. If you get my daily debt update, you are going to see something is wrong on tax receipts. The FICA numbers are falling, and it looks like they are about 5 percent where they should be which should be an alarm bell that something is happening in the labor markets, but if you are from the Phoenix- Scottsdale area and you haven't had about a 22 percent pay hike in the last 30 months, you are poorer today. Then you wonder why there is such stress out there in our society. If I came to you right now and said what is the number one spend in the United States Government? It is Social Security. This year we are going to spend about I think--well, I have it on the chart--$1.450 trillion will go out in Social Security this year. The punchline on this slide is, I want you to understand gross interest. That is interest we paid to people that bought U.S. bonds. It is also the interest, when the Treasury borrows money out of Social Security, we pay it interest. Interest will be over $1 trillion this year. Interest in the United States this year is the second biggest spend. The third biggest spend is not Defense, it is actually Medicare now. The growth rate of Medicare and interest are the primary drivers of future spending. Then we will talk about how many people lie about what is happening in Social Security, but we will get to that. Defense is now the fourth. Defense is now number four. Every time you run into a leftist that goes just cut defense, could you remind them it is actually number four now on the hierarchy of spending. If I had shown you this chart a couple years ago, you would have thought I was out of my mind. It has happened. Gross interest this year will top $1 trillion and the net interest, which just means to outside bond holders, now is well over $800 billion. You do realize that just the net interest, if you just want to play the game and say, well, I am not going to count interest we pay to borrow from our trust funds, the net interest is going to be more than defense. Why is this not our fixation? Why are there people who are terrified of a debt and deficit commission to actually tell the truth about the math? When I come to you and start saying $1 trillion is just interest, understand why that is so dangerous. This week, interest rates are down a bit. Three weeks ago, they were up. Our best guess is that this year looks like we are going to bring about $9.6 trillion to the bond market. This is going to be not borrowing internally. This is going to be issuing bonds out to whoever will buy them. We guess about $2 trillion will be virgin. We have excess spent this year, so we are going to have to issue $2 trillion of bonds to cover our excess spending. The rest of it is refinancing because the idiots--excuse me, that is not fair. There is a video of me, going all the way back to Secretary Lew, screaming: Interest rates are low. Go longer on the curve. Go longer on the curve. Sell 30-year bonds. Get us out on the curve. Lock in the low-interest rates. The arrogance of the Treasury: No, you don't know. You are a Member of Congress. You are an idiot. What do you know? Now, we are going to pay the price for it. We are getting our heads kicked in because of the short-term thinking that is Washington, D.C. What you see here in blue, that is refinancing. That is all the 30- day paper, the notes, the bonds, much of which is coming due. You are going to bring $9.6 trillion to market at interest rates that are how many times higher than we would have financed 1 to 2 years ago? Welcome to our world. That is why this math is having such trouble. I just want to make a point. I will get behind these microphones and sometimes when there is a chance to do a colloquy with one of my Democrat colleagues, they will say, ``Well, you supported that 2017 tax reform, and it was going to cost $1.7 trillion.'' Then, we start to talk through that. ``But tax receipts went up dramatically in 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020. Income inequality shrank at its fastest in U.S. history.'' It was in many ways the ultimate Goldilocks economy before the pandemic. We were having to rescore, rescore. Then, you will get, ``But you were going to spend $1.7 trillion. That is what you voted on whether or not more tax receipts came in.'' Okay, fine. In the first 2 years they ran around here, in the first 20 months, they voted for $4.8 trillion of additional spending. Let's see, end of 2017, we did tax reform that grew the economy and made the United States competitive in the world. We shrank income inequality and had some of the greatest growth in income and wages without inflation. The tax receipts and revenues were coming in dramatically overprojected before the pandemic. Step up and be intellectually honest. In 20 months, they spent $4.8 trillion of spending, and we are already finding it is rolling over already. Take a look at the tax receipts from the Treasury over the last couple of quarters. Even when you make the adjustments for the California declaration of emergency, there is something going wrong. This type of stimulus is not working. Keynesian economics is not working, for anyone who pays attention to that stuff. Let's go back once again to interest rate fragility. In 2022, interest was $475 billion. In 2023, interest was $569 billion. Remember, this projection was only from a couple of months ago. We were going to spend $805 billion. Now, it is almost $840 billion. If you do gross interest, it is over a trillion. If you see this chart, interest went up 38 percent last year in cost. I haven't done the math, but with the scale of the refinance, we think it is going to be up another 30, 40 percent in spend this year. Aren't you thrilled? This is the brain trust here. Our growth and spending is going to be healthcare costs and then interest. That is going to really help the economy. Once again, just to reinforce it, because I am finding if I don't say it over and over, there is almost this pathological avoidance of math and the truth around this place: Social Security, number one; interest, number two; Medicare, number three; defense, number four. I can't wait to see how many of our fellow Members and staff can repeat this. For a bit of the punchlines, my brothers and sisters on the left keep saying the solution to everything is we are going to tax people over $400,000. Let's pretend we all agree that is what we are going to do, that is how we are going to save Social Security. Remember, when you have a Member--and there are a couple of clowns around here holding up little whiteboards and doing these things saying Social Security doesn't add a dime to the debt and deficit. They are absolutely right that it doesn't--yet. I think it was some of the folks who are involved in AARP and those things who wrote letters to the editor over the last month saying to not blame Social Security for the debt. They are absolutely right. They are telling the truth, and I hope that is intellectually where they are at, that no money from Social Security should ever go into the general fund, but no general fund money should ever go into Social Security. Is that our deal? In 9 years, 2033--so that is like 8.5 fiscal years--there is a 25 percent cut in Social Security checks. If you are the average couple in America, $17,400 is going to be your cut. We will double senior poverty. That is the moral imperative we are being given by the left. You can't talk about Social Security. When they do put something on paper, it doesn't come close to closing the gap. We are doing some scoring on a couple of the Social Security bills. I was going to bring the charts, but we are not done with the math yet. We think it might close 50 percent, 60 percent. However, the punchline is, you have to understand, if we do that, there is no more capacity. There is this concept if, let's say, you are a high-income earner and have done really well in life and are making over $400,000 a year, today, if you live in Connecticut, New York, or California, you are probably already paying at a 50 percent tax rate. If Congress adds another 12.4 percent, which would be just Social Security on that, now you are at 62 percent. There is actually lots of great economic data that say if we take it beyond that, your incentive, you are going to say: ``Screw it. I am not working. I am going to cut back my hours. I am going to find other ways. I am just going to live off my savings, my investments.'' If you do just pieces of these legislations, they actually take that $400,000 population and push them into the mid-60 percent of their income. Maybe that is the Democrats' plan, but they need to look at their own economic literature written by their own leftist economists that basically say when you get into that low, mid-60 percent tax rate, the revenues go down. It is called a tax maximization concept. There is a good paper out there if anyone wants to read it. It is probably about 3 months old. Brian Riedl, Manhattan Institute, basically took a series of economic papers and said, what is the highest capital gains tax you can do before it rolls over, the highest estate tax you can do before it rolls over, the highest income tax? It is a nice paper. It is a little long, but it is a really simple read. They add it up, saying take people over $400,000 and maximize every single one of their taxes. Let's do it. When you worked up all the numbers--go read it for yourself--and then do the economic effects because you will change the economy, you are going to get maybe 1.5 percent, maybe 1.6 percent of GDP. It is from the U.S. Treasury, the Tax Policy Center, OMB, CBO. I mean, this isn't rightwing Republican math. Does anyone remember what we borrowed last year? 8.4 percent of GDP was borrowed last year. Tax maximization on over $400,000, let's say you get 1\1/2\ because that makes the math easy. Does anyone see the math problem? Social Security and Medicare, when you start to look at it over the next decade and a half, go out to 2040, the best projection is it is running about 5\1/2\ percent of GDP short of cash. Does anyone see the math problem? You get 1\1/2\ percent by taxing rich people. Fine. However, just the shortfall in Social Security and Medicare is over 5\1/2\ percent of the economy. Come on, guys, stop lying. Stop making crap up. I know it is great politics. It is great wedges, but at some point, we have a moral obligation not to have the doubling of senior poverty. How many baby boomers are you willing to put on the street by making crap up on the math? For our own side, I know every time we mention Social Security, I will get ads beating me up at home. Go online in the Phoenix market right now, and there is probably already an ad up saying: Schweikert talked about Social Security. Beat him up. I am trying to save it. Chart after chart, the reality of the math. Take a look at Bernie Sanders' oligarch tax, which is taxing unearned capital gains, taxing the wealth. It graduates up so that if you are really rich, they take a big portion of your wealth. With everything, it gets you up to a little less than $4 trillion over 10 years. Great, except the shortfall is like $18 trillion, $19 trillion in that time. Great talking points. It gets you on MSNBC. You can say crazy things. No one is going to audit your math. Does anyone actually care about what is going on, or is it more important to win the next election? We go back and forth over and over. Taxing the rich wouldn't pay for the deficit in 2033. We have done the tax maximization, and this slide is actually already out of date. We went back several months ago. The projection was that we were going to be borrowing about $2.5 trillion in the 2033 year. Now, we think it is $3.1 trillion, and most of that change is just interest. If you tax the rich, as proposed by the President, it doesn't even get you $500 billion when you do the economic effects. If you are someone on the left side and your answer to everything is just tax the rich, grow up. I mean, it makes it really hard to say, ``Don't you care about the elderly? Don't you care about these programs? Don't you care?'' If you care, pay attention to the actual math. Understand, just Social Security spending, this was earned. We owe this. We have no idea how we are going to cover the shortfall because even 2100 and some of the other bills will raise a bunch of taxes. They still don't cover the shortfall, and you have taken away all the optionality that was going to be--that tax hike was going to be used to cover the shortfall of Medicare. It was going to cover the shortfall of everything else in government. At some point, you have hit the wall, and understand, Social Security last year went up 11 percent. Our model right now says it goes up slightly under 9 percent this year. When you start seeing double digits--9s, 7s, 8s--on a program that this year will be $1.45 trillion, you start talking real money, and you have a math problem. This is the slide that gets the most angry calls to my office, so let's do it because it happens to be accurate. As a matter of fact, it is already out of date, but this is the last official update. From today through the next 30 years, Medicare and Social Security are pretty much 100 percent of all borrowing. The last update was about $116 trillion in borrowing. If you add in today's interest rates, our numbers come up closer to $130 trillion. If you add in today's interest, our number is getting closer to $130 trillion of borrowing. The discretionary part of the budget, because of its slower growth than tax receipts, is estimated to have almost $2 trillion to the positive over those 30 years. Medicare is $80.5 trillion when you add in the interest; cash shortfall. Social Security over the next 30 years is $35.8 trillion short. Shouldn't we fix these? Don't we have a moral obligation to keep our promises? Is the scam here--and, Mr. Speaker, this is the point of this floor time. I am trying to figure out a way to say, here is your policy split. The left wants tax hikes. The right--and I am one of them--wants spending cuts. You can maximize both of those, and it doesn't get you close. You have to do policy. Policy is hard. Policy requires thinking. Policy requires saying ``no'' to people that might contribute to you. Policy says, I need you to actually read something. There are things you can do. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I will talk faster and not do all the boards. I have come to this mike how many times over the last few years and done things, saying, let's talk about the policy revolution. Cures are part of the solution: Cure disease, change technology, adopt things. If healthcare and interest are our fragilities, then do things to bend that cost of healthcare. I have come here and shown things where you could use technology to functionally, dramatically disrupt the cost of healthcare. We have come here and talked about things like this where you can blow into it. It is a breath biopsy. It is like having a medical lab home in your cabinet. Yes, we make things like that illegal because this place often is a protection racket. It is a protection racket for incumbent bureaucracies and business models. If we could disrupt the cost of so many things in our society, whether it be healthcare, whether it be the way we do regulation, you could actually set off GDP growth. You could lower the cost drivers of this government. By doing that, you lower the cost of the financing. You tell the bond markets how serious we are. Maybe they give us some love and credit on our interest rates. There is a path where this can work. You just need Members of Congress to deal with the reality. Tell the truth about the math. 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, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, to the chairman and ranking member, their stamina is impressive while going through all of this. I still think we should change the House rules and allow us to drink coffee on the floor. Mr. Chairman, the first amendment here is basically just shifting some money to diabetic retinopathy. The reason for this is that we have a fixation about diabetes and cures and procedures that are actually now making a difference. In the last couple of years, there are now a couple of drugs but also a laser procedure. What is important about this is if you are 40 years old with diabetes, one out of three people is going to start to suffer this disease of the eye where the veins are being traumatized by the diabetes. All I am trying to do here is move some money because there is progress being made, and I would like it to continue being made in this category. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, to the gentlewoman, I am trying to be just an honest actor on this one. It is something we have spent a lot of time on. The reality is that diabetes itself is something I wish as a body we would actually have a much more honest and, in some ways, brutal conversation. We expect it to be about 33 percent of all healthcare spent, 31 percent of Medicare. It turns out if we were willing to talk about diabetes and even the more difficult discussion of obesity and the cursors, it could be the single biggest effect on U.S. debt but also in labor force participation. Let's be honest. We are taking on misery. Where this partially also came to us is the new procedures partially pioneered and advocated by these is now a diabetic retinopathy eye laser surgery and trying to get these more into the field. So this is a shift. We actually believe it is reasonably well-vetted. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, this is actually one of the occasions where we as Members of Congress actually should take a little bit of a victory lap. For those of us in the desert Southwest we have something called Valley fever. It is a fungus in the soil. For most people it causes a little bit of scarring in the lung, It may seem like you have a flu for a few days. For some people--and I always mispronounce this--there is a differentiated version where it breaks out of the lung. I have a neighbor who is a former Vietnam helicopter pilot that within his hands he has to have the Valley fever carved out of his bones. It is horrible. I met someone at the National Institutes of Health a few years ago, a young African-American male that was just traveling through the Southwest, picked up these fungi, picked up a spore, and it was dissolving his spine. They were wiring him back together. Well, guess what has happened? Almost 8 years ago Kevin McCarthy, who is also in one of the pandemic areas, as I am, myself, in the Maricopa County area, we actually started to do this. We moved some resources around. We are on the cusp of the vaccine. The canine vaccine is out, we believe, this December, and it turns out they believe that basically the same formulary will work with humans, and the phase I trials in humans, I actually believe, begins this coming year. What is miraculous about this is the concept of a vaccine for a fungus, and it may actually cover much more than what we call Valley fever. This is a big deal. This is actually in some ways a small amount of money, considering the amounts that are spent on this particular disease, but it is partially because as we are getting ready to head to the human trials now, it just seemed rational to sort of keep the progress going. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, should I be creeped out that we are about to have a group hug? It is late at night. Look, for those of us that refer to this often as cocci, this is more than just the desert Southwest. Do you understand we are now actually seeing versions of these fungi in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other parts as it moves through the country. Why this one is important, instead of just plussing up something to just continue to maintain services, this is actually moving some resources around because we are on the cusp of the cure. For those of us who have ever tolerated my evening diatribes, I believe the morality is in the cure, in the misery, in the cost. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, look, this is actually a just an amendment I have introduced on a number of these bills to make a point. I am not going to ask for a vote on it, but I do want us to conceptually think about something, and I have been trying to find forms to say it over and over and over. We borrow every dime we as Members of Congress vote on. Every dime of defense is now borrowed. Every dime of nondefense discretionary now is borrowed. Last fiscal year we had, what, 300 billion, maybe 400 billion of let's call it Medicare, but in mandatory, that was borrowed. In this piece of legislation 26.2 percent is our best calculation of the resources here--and many of them are really good programs, but we are borrowing it to send it to entities that do have their own taxing authority. It is an uncomfortable conversation, but I do want us to think about it as we get more and more of our financial stresses, as our borrowing costs now--we saw Treasury yesterday basically released an update saying gross interest this fiscal year will top a trillion dollars. Do you know what that means? Social Security is our number one spend; interest just became our number two spend; Medicare is our number three spend; and defense now is our number four spend. We are not going to balance the budget through discretionary, but somewhere here--I don't know how to get it into our lexicon and our culture that everything we now vote on as Members of Congress comes off of borrowed money. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I am not going to go into correcting the TCJA math, but I would point out Democrats functionally, through the Biden administration, have borrowed $4.8 trillion in functionally 3 years. The 1.7, actually the multiplier, if you look at the tax receipts, being on Ways and Means. I do want to go to a point. The gentlewoman actually just made my morality argument. These are important programs. They serve a purpose, but yet our failure to actually address the debt, because the fact of the matter is the primary driver of U.S. debt is our demographics, something we don't like to say. We got old. Today, and the 30 years forward, 100 percent of the growth of debt--and our office now is calculating $130 billion to $140 billion during that time, particularly if we start to calculate in the new interest rate regime. Medicare, and if we backfill Social Security in 9 years when the trust fund is gone, it is going to consume every available dollar. You are going to see programs like this that we care about squeezed. Actually, my point is, if these are moral, if they serve a purpose, our inability to have an honest conversation about the debt is immoral. I have come here today--and even last night, I spent 1 hour showing Democrat tax hikes, fine, but the tax hikes that have been proposed for every category on $400,000 and up only brought in about 1.5 percent of GDP when adjusted. We borrowed 8.4 last year. We have a math problem, and I am saddened because it will always break down to Republican versus Democrat. It is demographics. I think the reason I do this amendment is to force a little bit of contemplation of the reality we are at, that if we don't do this, these are the sort of cuts that are in our future. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, it feels like it has been a while since we had these. I think it has been 6 weeks since I have been behind this microphone, 6 weeks since we basically shot ourselves in the temple and all the other craziness that went on. The amazing thing is in those 6 weeks, you would be stunned how much the numbers, the debt numbers, have moved against us. This is just a fascinating time. Think of this: within a month or so, we have actually been having to recalculate our projections of debt deficits and what was going on. If that doesn't give you a sense of this thing called interest rate fragility, basically meaning as interest rates go up it is consuming more and more and more of the available resources that you could have either put into your communities or maybe into military or other things. I am going to show you a couple charts in a moment. Interest, the Office of Management and Budget, Treasury just a couple hours ago did an update that shows that gross interest this fiscal year will not be the fourth biggest expense, it will be the second biggest expense. Social Security, interest, Medicare, defense. Now, that is a gross number, but we are going to talk about what gross and net means in the U.S. Government interest rate world. Let's actually walk through some of the parameters here. Once again, our basic rule is if you don't like math and don't want to deal with reality, please stop watching. This is our update from 2023. Mr. Speaker, 73 percent of the spending Members of Congress functionally have no voice on--we don't vote on it--that is mandatory, it is Social Security; it is Medicare; certain veterans' benefits; certain Tribal benefits, those things that are a formula, we call mandatory. They are mostly earned benefits. Some are benefits you get because you fell below a certain income, but they are a formula. You see this green and this blue. The blue is defense. The green, 15 percent, that is all other--let's call it nondefense discretionary. The blue obviously is all of defense. That is 13 percent. All of this colored area right here, the green and the blue, is on borrowed money. Every dime Members of Congress vote on is on borrowed money. Then last year, about $400 billion of this red was on borrowed money. So as we kick each other's heads in here, which a lot of it is well worth doing, fighting for a little here, a little there, we are borrowing about $6.5 billion a day--I think on the average of about $77,000 or $78,000 a second. One of the reasons I come back to this is being home this weekend and having some conversations with people--these are smart people. I represent one of the best educated districts in America. You have these conversations, and people say, David, if it just weren't for waste and fraud; David, if it weren't for foreign aid. For my friends on the left, I am going to show a bunch of slides here because I need to nail this down. They say, if we just would tax rich people more, we would be fine. None of that is true. You take the math and take every Democrat proposal starting with this one and do tax maximization on those over 400,000. On estate tax, income tax, capital gains tax, you do the tax maximization, and then do the economic model, and you get about 1.5 percent of GDP. Last year we borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP. It turns out 1.5 is a hell of a lot less than 8.4. This being a math- free zone, I thought we might do this several times to see if some of it sinks in. Once again, 73 percent of our spending is on autopilot. If we don't really move defense, all we are fighting over right now is within this green wedge--15 percent of our spending. That is what is going on. Let's actually talk through what is happening around us. If I had come to this floor a year or two ago and said gross interest in the 2024 fiscal year was going to cross over a trillion dollars, you would have laughed your hearts out. Guess what? OMB, a couple hours ago, confirmed gross interest is going to be over $1 trillion this year, making it the second-biggest expense of this government. Does anyone understand, a couple years ago, 3 or 4 years ago, we were looking at numbers of 300, $400 billion? We have more than doubled it. Does anyone care? Is it just one of those, you know, we can just continue to ignore it? A couple months ago, I came here and showed some charts that in this fiscal year we are going to bring 9.6--that was our best model--$9.6 trillion to market. About $2 trillion we estimated to be virgin, new, issuance. That is from the borrowing from this year. The rest is what we call refinancing. It is the short bonds, even some longer bonds. Many of these bonds were really low, I mean, just slightly above zero, and they are coming back for refinancing. All of a sudden you have how many trillions and trillions of dollars that are down here with almost no interest expense to this government to our taxpayers, and now they are coming in, and we are starting to see mean interest moving over 3 percent, and it keeps going up. This should be what we talk about on the floor. If this continues, it consumes everything in its path. Is interest Republican or Democrat? It is just something we have to pay, but trust me, we will find a way to turn it partisan. This is one of the punch lines I need us to try to get our heads around. We are modeling for the 2024 year. So the fiscal year we are in now, we just finished our first month of it, Social Security we expect to come in about $1.45 trillion. Gross interest. As of a couple hours ago we adjusted it. Actually, our model was a billion dollars over this, but CBO came in and said gross interest is now over a trillion dollars. Now, if you want to do net--and now might be the time to explain the difference. What is the difference between net interest and gross interest? When Treasury reaches over to the Social Security trust fund--which is also gone in about 8 or 9 years--reaches over and grabs that money and spends it, we put special T-bills, Treasury bills over there, but we have to pay them interest, and we pay them interest twice a year. It is still an expense. It is still money that got paid for the rent of this money, and you take all the trust funds, and that is the difference between whether we are going to pay as the Treasury is coming back and saying 839--I need to disclose, my model, our joint economic model is closer to 879, and we have been more accurate the last 2 years than Treasury has, but gross interest, money we will spend on interest as this government is now over a trillion dollars. Our third biggest spend now is Medicare. Medicare moved up 12.3 percent last year. For its scale, interest moved up 38 percent. Medicare moved up over 12 percent. Those are the primary growers in borrowing and spending. Then number four, the fourth biggest expense now is defense. You run into someone at the grocery store back home and ask them--particularly if they lean on the left side, and they almost immediately viscerally go straight to defense. How many of them will believe defense is now the fourth biggest expenditure? It is no longer the first. It is not the second. It is not the third. It is the fourth. Interest now has become the second. If I had held up this chart a year ago, you would have stared at me like I was out of my mind. It has happened. It has happened. We have talked about how this was coming, and in some ways it saddens me that the prediction has come true. You have got to understand when you start seeing these--and we did it in chart fashion to try to make it more visual. Here is Social Security. Here is interest. Here is Medicare. Here is defense now. Healthcare costs and interest. Your government is an insurance company with an Army, and the interest payments just keep coming. We actually believe this number is wrong, we think it is out of date, but the point of this chart is to show you what interest fragility is doing to us. In 2022, we spent $475 billion in interest. In 2023 we spent 659, and we thought that was outrageous. Our number is actually 880 for primary interest, not gross. Even if we use the most conservative number we have been given, and this number is already now a month or so out of date, you are looking at another 30 percent growth in just that spending line. That is not counting for the interest we pay ourselves from the borrowing when we borrow out of the trust funds. Look, I know this didn't move the markets, and it won't move the markets until we start to have a really stressed bond auction, but you already know that two of the biggest credit rating agencies have done an actual downgrade. Moody's last Friday basically put us on downgrade watch. They still let us have our AAA, but they said we believe the bias is now negative. You do realize there are five, six countries now out there that have better credit ratings than the United States. Good job, guys. We should all be very, very proud of ourselves. Not that anyone here pays attention to the bond market, but why I keep coming back to the bond market is because we are incapable of doing our job here telling the truth about the math. Remember, 100 percent of the borrowing from today through the next 30 years is demographics. It takes away some of the political fun out of it, doesn't it, when you can't sort of say, well, it is this or that. We got old. Take a look at the baseline data. It is healthcare costs, it is interest, it is Medicare, it is Social Security, and it is in, functionally, 9 years when that trust fund is gone. This is a chart of what happened, I think it was Thursday or Friday, we had a 30-year bond auction. Did anyone pay attention to the fact that it was substantially what they call undersubscribed? It wasn't a disaster, but there were definitely signs of stress. It shot up. That is what this line is here. They had to spike up the interest rates on those 30-year bonds to get the buyers, get them sold, and I believe--and I may have my number wrong--I believe the primary dealers, this is actually a special deal they have with Treasury, the primary dealers had to take down, had to buy almost a quarter of these bonds. In past years it would have only been around 12 percent. That is a big deal. The fact of the matter is you had to turn the switch, and the dealers had to take down the bonds because there weren't enough buyers. Does anyone in this body pay any attention to the fact that if we are borrowing $6.5 billion a day and then we are about to refinance several trillion dollars this year, how much of this we have to bring to market every couple weeks? If this had gotten a little bit worse, this would have been the headlines over the weekend. Let's actually start to walk through, once again, our realities. The reason I am walking through this chart is I am going to spend some time on where the spending is. I am going to spend some time on where the tax receipts are and who pays them. We are going to spend some time on some of the proposals out there to show how hollow they are, because I am so tired of having conversations with people who I know are smart and they are so wrapped in folklore about the U.S. debt and deficits. Even in this body, we will knife each other. Trust me, I have been involved in those knife fights. I have offered some of the most brutal amendments on this floor for cutting spending. We will go to war with each other, and the debate time on the floor, if we are borrowing $77,000 a second, there was more borrowing during the time of the debate than the amendment would have saved. Social Security is about 21 percent of our spend. Now, you always need to think of Social Security as unique. It functionally has its own tax line, FICA taxes. Why do we keep coming back and paying attention to it? This is one of the brutal dishonesties I get, particularly from our brothers and sisters on the left. I actually watched one Democrat Member over here--I think she is running for Senate in California--on one of the leftwing cable television shows holding a little white board going: You see, it adds nothing to the deficit. She is absolutely right. Social Security adds nothing to the deficit. In 9 years, we double senior poverty, because in 9 years there is a 25 percent cut to Social Security. I am going to walk through some of those slides to understand the scale. That is one of the reasons, if you have someone talking about debt and deficits and they are talking about the future, if they are not talking about how to save Social Security, they are completely dishonest, they are absolutely hollow, and they are immoral. I am going to show also the proposals being given to us by the left on what we can tax only gets you about 20 percent. I am going to show the charts that say just get rid of the cap, tax everyone the 12.4 percent, and you only cover about 20 percent of the shortfall. We have no concept of the scale. Remember, the shortfall is functionally three- quarters of what we spend on defense. There is this lack of understanding of how brutal the math is. No, you can't actually tax your way out of this, and, no, my brothers and sisters, we can't actually cut our way out of this, because the growth is actually because we got old. We made promises, and we haven't figured out how to finance them. It is a moral imperative that this group gets off its heinies and starts putting some batteries in their calculators and starts understanding the scale of what we are talking about. Social Security is 21 percent. Medicare is 13. National defense is 13. Interest is 10. That was last year. That interest now is closer to 13, 14, 15 percent of our total budget. Just in that 1 year, now that we are starting to refinance our bonds and the trillions we are having to sell that are new borrowing at those new interest rates, this whole hierarchy is changing. We get what for paying the interest? Now, if you are one of the people that goes: Well, we are paying China. China only owns, we think, maybe $800 billion, $900 billion of our bonds. Still a lot of money, and, yes, they may hold certain of our bonds offshore. Our best guesstimate is Japan owns more and is our number one that we are indebted to, but that is only like a $1 trillion or $1.4 trillion. Most of the rest is actually what we finance ourselves. We owe our own pension systems, like your retirement. If you have a 401(k), you will find out that part of this U.S. sovereign debt is in it. This is important to understand when we start talking about the growth of our obligations. This year, 12,000 of our brothers and sisters turn 65 per day. Sixty-five years ago, this was one of the peak years of the baby boom. We get 12,000 baby boomers turn 65 per day right now. Our estimate is Social Security this year will pop up to $1.450 trillion. That is about 7.9 percent growth, even though the COLA is only a fraction of that. Last year the COLA was 8.3, and the spending went up 11.1. How did it do that? Because of the increase in population. A decade ago, 1 out of 8 Americans was 65. Two years ago, 1 out of 6 was 65. It is demographics. How often do we ever talk about the reality of our demographics? How many of you saw the article from the Census Bureau that was put out a couple days ago? Did you see what is happening on our fertility rates? Looks like in 15, 18 years, this country has more deaths than births. We have about 40, maybe 50 years, and actually then we roll over, and the United States actually might start to have a declining population. It is demographics. That is part of our job here, but it would require math. Let's actually walk through something that just frustrates me so much, because I believe it is moral to fix it and immoral to avoid the conversation. The fact I talk about saving Social Security, I get attack ads back home; because he talked about it; let's attack him. It is not 2034. It is 2033. We have a mistake on our boards. I apologize for that. We estimate in functionally 9 budget years, the very first year the trust fund is gone, the shortfall is $616 billion. First year, the trust fund is gone. Let's go to the solutions we get from our left. Let's just tax everyone over $400,000. We are going to tax them the 12.4 percent tax, unlimited income, and they get no benefit for it. All right. Except the problem is, the best math says that gets you about $86 billion. Remember, $616 billion is the shortfall. I did this on a single year to make it more understandable. $616 billion is our shortfall in 2033. Taxing everyone over $400,000 the 12.4 percent tax and giving them no benefit only produces about $86 billion. Let's get rid of that. No cap at all. You get your benefits up to-- what is it? Next year I think it is $168,000. We are going to tax everyone above that the 12.4 percent, but you get no benefits. How much of that first year's shortfall would it cover? Remember, the shortfall is $616 billion. You cover $164 billion of it. Twenty percent? This is the solution we are being given. Does anyone understand the scale and the fact that to recapitalize something that is burning through in a few years, that is three- quarters of a trillion dollars a year shortfall. What does it take to recapitalize parts of that Social Security trust fund or to actually have enough taxes? I am going to show you a slide in a little while where you can go to a 20 percent VAT tax in the United States, with all of other taxes, and you still can't get close to covering the Social Security shortfall. Why isn't this place terrified about this? Because it is such a great political issue to attack people who try to save it. Is it moral, the fact that in 9 years, you double senior poverty in America? That is what is being laid upon us. You see these parasite groups that fill up our email boxes: You can't talk about that. Just tax rich people more. I am going to keep showing you, it doesn't get you anywhere near what is required. We are going to have to do really difficult but really complex--complex problems all have simple solutions that are absolutely wrong. It turns out complex problems require complex solutions, and in this case, they require a hell of a lot of math. The reason for this chart, all the big trust funds are gone over the next 8.5 to 9 years. Transportation is gone. Medicare part A is gone. The big behemoth, the Social Security trust fund, is gone. I am glad we are spending lots of time working on the fact of how we are going to not dramatically increase senior poverty in this country, how we are not about to do what is necessary to protect our brothers and sisters, what is necessary to grow the economy. I have a 16-month-old son. I have an 8-year-old daughter. No making fun about being an old dad. My wife is exactly my age. Do they have the right to live as well as we did? If you look at the math, the basic math from CBO says something like in 20 years, every single U.S. tax needs to double just to maintain baseline services. Does anyone here actually care? Is it too hard? Is this too difficult? I thought this is what we were here for, to basically have common prosperity. Instead, we lie, or we lie through avoidance. Even with 100 percent tax rates on small businesses, upper-income families, when we did the math, we are heading toward times--remember, we borrowed 8.4 percent of the GDP, so this slide is already out of date. You do a 100 percent tax--which obviously anyone with the most basic elementary school economics class, when you take everything, no one works at all. If you take every dime of upper-income families and small businesses, you might cover 5 percent of GDP. Think about that. If we borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP last year, during a time when we are being told how wonderful Bidenomics was, how wonderful the economy was, does anyone see something is horribly wrong around us? Then you start walking through the actual pay-fors. The reason this slide is really important, this is just Social Security and Medicare. The shortfall is about 5.5 percent of the economy. We are using 2040 as the base year. If you have 5.5 percent, that is the amount of the economy that is short and you start walking through. One of the reasons I grabbed this board is if you impose a 20 percent VAT tax, a national sales tax, it doesn't even come close to covering half of the Social Security shortfall. That is a 20 percent VAT tax. Understand, VAT taxes basically crush the middle class. We have this fight around here about the middle class, the working poor. These numbers are terrifying, but we will do everything we can to avoid telling the truth. In just 20 months, President Biden added $4.8 trillion to the 10-year deficits. To all the people who spend their time attacking the 2017 tax reform--that did an amazing job of closing income inequality, then this little pandemic thing hit--when it was first scored, might be $1.7 trillion, then add some interest on it, but it turns out it had dramatic impact on growing tax receipts. In 20 months, our brothers and sisters on the left basically laid in $4.8 trillion, like 2.5 times more than the tax reform. Are they willing to be intellectually honest and say maybe they are a little duplicitous in their language? These things start getting geeky. One of the problems is, when you start dealing in very large numbers on U.S. budget issues and at a time of inflation, the most rational way to do it is you do it by percentages of GDP, except no one knows what that means. It is actually the proper way to do your comparisons because it basically normalizes what would be your inflationary growth. This is important to understand where the tax receipts come from. The top 20 percent have an effective tax rate of about 15 percent of their income. The second quartile, the next 20 percent down, have 5.7 percent of their income. The bottom 40 percent of the income earners in America actually get money from the government. They don't pay taxes. They get money on income taxes. The working middle class, if you are in that third quartile of 20 percent, you are in that 40 to 60 percent, you are paying 2.2 percent of your income. Do you understand after the December 2017 tax reform that in the United States our income tax actually got more progressive. More progressive, not less progressive. The working poor and the working middle class, before tax reform, actually paid a higher percentage of their income to taxes than they do today. How many times have you ever heard that? We have real trouble telling the truth about math around here when it doesn't actually fit one person's campaign ad. The facts are the facts. This is a new chart for us. I am trying to figure out how you figure out where the tax receipts come from. Let's have a little fun. If you are part of that top 20 percent--and understand the top 20 percent it turns out is a lot lower than $400,000, depending on parts of the country. The top $400,000 and up, you are in the top 5 percent of the income earners. Understand what we are grabbing here. They actually would pay about 209 days of the Federal budget. The next group pays 44 days. The next group pays 19 days. The bottom 40 percent pays 5 days. If you go from people that are very, very poor up to the 40 percent of the population, they pay for 5 days of the Federal budget, and then 88 days is borrowed. Basically you see that 25 to 30 percent of what we spend is borrowed. This is the math. Our brothers and sisters on the left believe we are going to finance the rest of the government from this population up here. I am going to show you the slide saying, okay, maximize their tax rates. Maximize them up and down, everything, and then normalize it for the economic effects. You get about 1.5 or 1.6. It just doesn't get you there. Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time I have remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The reason I am doing this again is that I have just grown exhausted trying to work with some of my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side who I have walked through the math with, and say, here are some ideas and things we can do. They say, no, people just want us to tax rich people more. Okay. Fine. Maybe do it. The next day, can we go back to talk about the problem because you didn't fix anything? Taxing the rich could raise, at most, 1 to 2 percent of the GDP by maxing out all the different tax rates and then adjusting for the economic losses. Let's say you get the full 2 percent. We borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP last year. I know I have come back and done this again, but is anyone paying attention? Let's walk through this in a little more detail. I will do this quickly. Maximizing sustainable revenues from taxing the rich. Let's actually maximize income taxes. Raise the top two income tax brackets by another 10 percent. There is a whole model out there--I need to explain this for someone who doesn't live in this economic world. There is this concept that you can raise taxes to a point where you maximize receipts--technically, the government doesn't have revenues, they get receipts--but the next incremental tax hike rolls over and you start to get fewer receipts. Capital gains is actually in many ways the most sensitive to this. There is sort of this maximizing rate--and we actually have very, very good models on this now. If you took every single tax and did the maximizing of the rates, and that is what we have actually seen here, from removing itemized deductions to paring back retirement income abuses, and all the other things, everything you can do, you can go up and down the list, and you start to see the calculations. The Manhattan Institute and Brian Riedl, about 2 months ago, has a fairly detailed paper. It is all referenced. It is not only referenced from the Tax Foundation, joint tax, CBO, but even some progressive groups are in the footnotes on how this math works. This is if you maximized every single tax. Why this gets important-- why don't I just skip to the punch line. It looks like when you do the economic adjustment you get 1.1 to 2 percent of GDP by taxing the rich. Okay. Maybe we should do that. Maybe it will make us feel better because God knows we now make our public policy here by our feelings. The point I keep coming back to is we borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP last year. If you actually do the blend, you get about 1.5 points. That is how childish the discussion is here. You asked for real math and real policy decisions. We, on the right, are going to battle each other and try to cut parts of nondefense discretionary. Okay. There is a bunch of that I would love to get rid of. It is a really interesting ethical question. Is it ethical for us to borrow money and give it to entities around the country that have their own taxing authority? That is going to be politically really unpopular. It is sort of absurd that we do that. About 40 percent of nondefense discretionary is actually transferred to these entities that have their own taxing authority. If you are functionally borrowing $80 billion, $90 billion a month, we just covered 3\1/3\ months' worth of borrowing by wiping out most of the discretionary budget, and then the next year it gets worse, the next year it gets worse, the next year it gets worse. Remember, 100 percent of the future borrowing is driven by Medicare, and then in 9 years the Social Security trust fund is gone. I showed you the scale for that. Mr. Speaker, I have come behind this microphone for years now and walked actually through some really interesting things we can do. We saw during the 1-minutes some of our brothers and sisters came up and talked about this being National Diabetes Awareness Month. Diabetes is the single biggest cost of healthcare. Actually, it is the single biggest cost to this government. It is 33 percent of healthcare and 31 percent of Medicare. I have come up here repeatedly and talked about what we can do in the farm bill, the new blood glucose monitors, the discussion of some of the GLP-1s and the effect they are having on obesity and diabetes. There is a path, and it turns out the Joint Economic Committee, about 4 months ago, the Republican side--we actually went where we are not supposed to go, but it was real math. We talked about our brothers' and sisters' longevity. The fact is that in the last 4 years the life expectancy in the United States has fallen. If you actually look at the math, what is the number one reason? It wasn't drugs. Drugs was up there. It was obesity. Let's actually have an honest conversation because it also turns out it is not only a moral battle to save our brothers and sisters from dying young, it also is the most powerful thing you can do to start to stabilize U.S. debt is helping Americans be healthier. Isn't that something neat? Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is just the right thing to do. We were coming up with a few trillion dollars over 10 years by taking out obesity. Because of diabetes there is heart disease, kidney failures, and all these other things. I am just trying to do two things here: First, I am trying to get to an understanding of how brutally ugly the actual debt and deficit math is, and that the solutions being provided to it are just fantasyland, ridiculous, childish, and asinine. The second thing I am trying to do when I come behind the mike, there are things we can do to have a revolution and stabilize this debt, and none of them are going to be easy. In the complexity is the morality. We could work with people to be healthier. We could bring technology to make life easier, to provide more access, particularly to healthcare, and you would disrupt the cost. The hardest part for us as electeds, you have to deal with those armies of lobbyists marching up and down your hallways. You have to look them in the eye, and say, in many ways the morality, the cure, is in the disruption of doing the right and moral thing. I just don't know if this body has the intellectual prowess to deal with that. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, a couple years ago, we dove into post offices, particularly those that did not appear to be financially vibrant and surviving. We realized much of the data we were working on had holes in it. We couldn't get certain lease costs or were they real estate owned. All I am trying to do here is just get updated data, because at some point we are going to go back through. You have all been watching the accounts. We are going to go back through that discussion again of how we shore up the finances of the U.S. postal system. It would be nice if we go into that having actually high-quality information and the optionality that information would provide us. That is as complicated as this one is. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, what the ranking member is saying is fair. The goal here is to have much better information, because the reality is we are going to go back through that uncomfortable exercise again. It is probably a year or 2, maybe 3 years out. The world has changed. This is one of the great difficulties we have around here, and it is sometimes hard to accept. In a weird way, we are sort of a protection racket. We protect incumbent models of business, incumbent processes, incumbent bureaucracies, but how many of us are now paying our bills on this thing? How many of us are communicating on this thing and not licking an envelope with the risk of a paper cut? Come on, that was funny. The world is different. I know we have a certain sensitivity to the history and to the communities, but we are going to have to deal with the financial realities that is modern America. That is all I am trying to do. If we are going to deal with those, let's have quality information so we understand. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend and colleague from Arizona and the ranking member. Mr. Chairman, we remember the EIDL loans from during the pandemic. We have some documents that say there may be as much as $62 billion in impairment. Understand that there is a difference between impairment and delinquency behind those. We actually have an intense concern on some of the articles and other things that have come to our attention that the collection--look, this is never a happy conversation when you are talking about going out and collecting loans, but this is money that is owed to the hardworking taxpayers. It is only fair. We made a deal. We actually believe if we take the mean of some of the reports we have been best able to get, there is about $33 billion that is ready for, functionally, some type of hard collection. They are substantially delinquent. We are here fighting over dollars. We are fighting over pennies sometimes. If there are billions of dollars out there that are owed back to the Small Business Administration and those things, we have the legal obligation to go collect. That is the deal. The amendment is trying to move away from an article in The Washington Post that was basically saying the Small Business Administration had either slowed down or stopped pursuing collections. Let's go collect the money. As we are lifting every seat cushion around here trying to find resources, there is a stack of resources here. The other thing it would also help us understand is how much fraud ultimately there was in the program, but without the collection efforts, you actually cannot truly document those numbers. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, let me say to the gentleman from Maryland that he will be happy to know that he actually accepted, en bloc, two of my amendments. Mr. Chair, I am blessed to chair the Oversight Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, and within there is the use of technology. We have actually had to deal with the reality, if you are actually reading some of the reports that are coming from the IRS, that they can't seem to hire the people to do the audits. Apparently, there is a shortage of people with accounting and that type of talent. We actually brought two amendments--both made it into the en bloc, so I appreciate that--to actually go and use AI and technology to talk about exactly what the gentleman from Maryland said. I actually believe in many ways that is more ethical and moral because I can audit an algorithm. I can't audit someone's heart or their personal politics. We actually have demonstrations also on the customer service side with the use of chat AI and those things, but that is IRS. We are here talking about the Small Business Administration. I am trying to be intellectually consistent. We did our amendments there to pursue a rational use of technology. If it is true that there may be, according to this article, an estimated $62 billion in past due pandemic loans, if it costs more than $62 billion for the Small Business Administration to go collect $62 billion, the world has come to an end. I mean, let's be intellectually consistent here. This agency has the legal obligation to collect these loans. My fear is there may have been so much fraud that there is almost this discomfort of peeling back the onion and saying one-third of the book or 20 percent of book, whatever it is, will never be performing loans. Mr. Chairman, to my friend from Maryland, this is actually just moving some money around so the Small Business Administration does what they are actually supposed to be doing and what is actually already part of the loan. We are actually moving some resources so it can be accomplished. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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