David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the appropriations process. I have some sense of how difficult it has been for both sides. This is the 2019 fiscal budget. Was that really, really that difficult, that draconian? Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, as the designee of the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Buck), I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, as a traditional courtesy, I am offering this for Mr. Buck, who has been very kind to us. This is an amendment I think we have all seen versions of. It is structurally very simple. It moves the appropriation amount back to the 2019 fiscal year. You all know the reasons. We have all had this discussion and debate here. It is before the pandemic plus-ups, reaching back to a year where the economy was good and the mechanics were good. Apparently the agency seemed to be able to do its work. Here we are a couple fiscal years later, but we keep plugging back in the plus-ups that were supposed to be the pandemic emergency. This actually rolls it back to 2019. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, this is one of those amendments I just felt I needed to make a point here. It is a brutal amendment, but we did some calculations. Fifty-seven percent of this appropriation within this piece of this budget goes to entities that have their own taxing authority. Why do we care about that? Do you realize every dime we are appropriating here, every dime we get to vote on, lives on borrowed money? We borrow every dime of defense and every dime of discretionary if you look at the 2023 budget. It looks like we are going to do the same thing in the 2024 that we are working on right now. We borrowed $300 billion to $400 billion of functionally what is Medicare. I know that no one really wants to go near this because it is radioactive and uncomfortable, but it is math. This is from a couple hours ago, Bloomberg's headline, Bloomberg Analytics. It is behind the paywall, so if you have a Bloomberg terminal, go look it up, ``U.S. Debt Interest Bill Rockets Past a Cool $1 Trillion a Year.'' They are estimating that our interest bill for this fiscal year, total gross interest, is $1 trillion. Stop and think about that. That means Social Security is the number one spend, interest just became number two, Medicare just became number three, and defense is now number four. These are numbers we were not supposed to hit for a decade. It is here. Sometimes I feel like an absolute idiot because I come behind this microphone--and I have done this for years--and we walk through numbers like this. People just stare at you and say, well, that is not interesting, that is math. The math will always win. Our amendment here is tough, but it makes a point. Is it moral, is it ethical, is it rational to borrow money and give it to entities that have their own taxing authority? Trust me, I have been the treasurer of the fourth most populous county in the United States. I know how hard it is to be the tax collector. I was the tax collector in Maricopa County. It makes you really popular when that is your title. Understand what we are doing here. We are going to borrow money to send it to entities that ultimately do have the ability to raise the receipts and revenues. The last comment I will make on this for my brothers and sisters on the left, how often do they scream at us: We should raise revenues. Okay. Guess what? Talk to your locals. Let them raise the revenues. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I actually give the ranking member kudos for being intellectually honest. That is actually part of my point. The numbers now are brutally uglier than even Simpson-Bowles. It is one of the things we don't like to say because it doesn't look good on a campaign brochure, but functionally every dime of future debt from today into the future is actually demographics. It is healthcare. In 9 years, do we backfill Social Security? It is intellectually honest to say: We are borrowing every dime we get to vote on as Members of Congress. I keep wanting to say that over and over and over. Every dime of military, every dime of nondefense discretionary is now borrowed, plus, probably my math is about $4 billion to $5 billion of mandatory. Now we will live on borrowed money. Until that starts to hit our intellectual lexicon of what we say and how we think, it makes it very hard to try to make the argument that if we don't step up and do this, the bond market is going to do it for us. Remember, we borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP last year. To my brothers and sisters who say the solution is often to raise taxes on the wealthy, the best model says that we can only get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP by maximizing every tax on $400,000 and up. Mr. Chairman, 1\1/2\ percent isn't anywhere close when you just borrowed 8.4 percent. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is fun to have one of these where we all sort of agree on it. Let me put in a little character--you heard some of the basic mechanisms. The Salt River Project is a waterpower quasi-municipality. It is very unique. It actually predates statehood for us. Think about that. It actually was put together before we actually became a State. What is unique in Arizona is--many of you have heard the discussion of the thing called the duck curve. In the late afternoon you get lots of photovoltaic power and then the sun goes down, and you don't get lots of photovoltaic power, but we still run our air conditioners. We need some ginormous batteries for those of us that live in the desert Southwest, hence, comes the concept of pumped storage. Where this is at is actually where I live. I live probably 25 minutes away from this. It is the lake I grew up on. To try to get this visually, picture a series of lakes that are our water reservoirs for the Phoenix area, and then these cliffs that are just tremendously high--it is a very impressive area--and the concept of using gravity as a battery. I appreciate everyone from our delegation who has been very, very helpful on this, but this is one of those occasions where it makes sense. It is environmentally sound. It actually allows us to take care of something that is somewhat unique for us in the Southwest; and that is the solar power we produce. Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is, I do hope all of our brothers and sisters here, later on, vote ``yes'' in suspension.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, this is actually an amendment that is brutal. It is not a happy place to go, but I am trying to be intellectually honest here. Every dime we vote on as Members of Congress is now borrowed. Remember, Mr. Chairman, the last fiscal year we borrowed 8.4 percent of GDP. Every dime of military is borrowed; every dime of nondefense is discretionary, which is functionally what we are going over right now, and, what, $300 billion, $400 billion of Medicare. For my brothers and sisters on the left, their solution is often: Well, raise revenues. Mr. Chairman, we are engaged in this insanity right now where we are borrowing money to send it to entities that have their own taxing authority. I have been the treasurer of the fourth biggest county in America. I managed the bank, I managed the tax collections, and I managed the finances, or parts of the finances. I understand local government and the burdens there, but we had taxing authority. Is it rational in a society, particularly with the higher interest rates, for us to borrow and then send the money to entities with their own taxing authority? Mr. Chair, I understand both on Republicans and Democrats, we despise this because there are lots of things we like. There are things I like that I voted for for years now, but I just look at the math, and I keep wondering: Is it both moral or rational for us to borrow money and send it to entities that have their own taxing authority? If these programs are so important, which many of them are, there is a solution. Those entities can actually produce the receipts and revenues themselves. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I think the chairman actually was generous. I think it is a lot more than a sledgehammer. This is like a small nuclear weapon. Partially that was the point. Obviously, I care tremendously about IHS and have worked really hard on that. I am just trying to work through this. I want to put this in a moral paradigm. I have my 15-month-old sitting behind me, but this is no longer about the next generation. It is about your own retirement. We have a math problem. It is a brutal math problem. One more time: We borrow every dime of discretionary; we borrow every dime of military; and now we are actually borrowing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of what is mandatory. Some of this breaks my heart, but I don't seem to be able to communicate to my brothers and sisters how ugly the math is. One more time: As of yesterday, we were borrowing $78,000 every second. $78,000 every second. For our friends on the left, they care about this. We care about this. It is just so hard to turn off the faucet. The very last thing, and then I am going to sit down and shut up and go away. The debt is primarily driven by demographics. It is something we don't tell honestly, but we got old. If you actually look at from today through the next 30 years, 100 percent of the projected debt, 75 percent of it is Medicare, 25 percent if we backfill Social Security in 9 years when the trust fund is empty. Do you see any of this debate--and I know this is small compared to the scale we are borrowing, but I have to find some way to get people to start understanding the scale of this math because the math always wins. Sometimes it takes a while, but the math will always win. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. They are paying the interest on it now.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. $800 billion next year.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) for a memorial.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I apologize to everyone as we are sort of organizing the slides here. Mr. Speaker and anyone that is listening, okay, so the House is in a fairly cantankerous spot right now. Part of my frustration and part of the reason for actually grabbing this hour is--what is a more elegant way to use the words ``I need to stop the lying.'' Actually, I don't think we are supposed to say that on the floor--the people just making crap up. Let's actually have an educational discussion here. If you don't like math, please just turn off your television and stop watching because this is becoming a math-free zone around here. Why is there fighting here on the House floor? What is the fussing? You do understand every dime a Member of Congress votes on now is all borrowed money. There is a very good chance--we will know actually next week when the final Treasury data is posted that for this fiscal year, the 2023 fiscal year which ends this weekend, we will borrow--and I am sorry, but this is how you need to think about it--we will borrow, functionally, 9 percent of GDP. So 9 percent of the entire economy will be just the borrowed money. Not the spent money, the borrowed money. We are hitting numbers that should be terrifying. I don't know why they are not terrifying to the folks on the left. You just saw it. They just came to the microphones saying we want more money. Where does it come from? Let's actually walk through some basic facts. This isn't Republican or Democrat math, it is just math. My family motto is ``math will always win.'' It may take a while, but the math will always win. The reason for this chart, Mr. Speaker, is--one more time try to visualize--this is the 2023 budget. In that 2023 budget here is what we call discretionary spending. This is defense and nondefense. We have 1.7 on this chart. It is actually closer to $1.8 trillion. This wedge over here is actually--let's just call it Medicare. Social Security still has its own trust fund, which is out in 9 years. When you hear Democrats saying, well, we don't borrow anything for Social Security, you shouldn't be talking about it. Well, the trust fund is gone in 9 years, and the recapitalization of it is brutal. Once again, my brothers and sisters on the left don't want to actually deal with the math because it is such a great campaign hit on anyone that actually cares about not doubling senior poverty in 9 years. Back to this chart. When you look at this, you have to understand, this blue wedge is all we get to vote on. All the red, the 72 percent of spending we call mandatory is on autopilot. You get that benefit because you worked your 40 quarters. You earned your Social Security benefit. You worked a certain amount. You have paid into your Medicare. You turned 65. You get that benefit when you hit a certain age. That is the vast majority of the spending, and it is also--if you go from today through the next 30 years, it is 100 percent of the future debt. It is demographics. I say this over and over and over and over. The idiot class around here who wants to say, no, it is Republicans not willing to tax people more, stop it. I am going to walk you through all the Democrat tax proposals and show you how little of GDP it creates even at tax maximization. There is this concept of at this rate you maximize tax receipts without rolling over the economy and rolling over the fall of receiving less tax receipts. I am going to show you the math on maximizing. It is nowhere near what the Democrats keep telling you, and it is really crappy economics. One more time, this board is incredibly important. You want to know why there is fussing around here? It is all borrowed now. And what has happened in the last couple of months interest rate-wise? Think of this as just a thought experiment. August 1 until today, the movement in interest rates--just that movement in interest rates is about $50 billion of interest next year. We are borrowing over $6 billion a day. That is functionally--let's take a look here. If you take a look at our borrowing over the last 12 months, it is $72,932 a second. $72,000 a second. That is why the idiocy here of people who say, well, I am going to save a million dollars here. That is real money, great. But let's see, if you're borrowing $72,000 a second, that is how many seconds did you just cover? The $300 million that was stripped out of one of the bills, okay, fine, but it is 57 minutes of borrowing over an entire year. There is this delusion--every dime, I believe, of foreign aid is--I used to say 12 days of borrowing. Someone pointed out it is actually closer to 9 days of borrowing. For us in the political class, math is hard. Our audience often doesn't want to hear it because it doesn't satiate the feelings. We make public policy now by feelings, not a calculator. So you have a world now where you get up and say, hey, it is demographics. We got old. Healthcare costs are the primary driver of debt, and they look at you and say, no, it is waste and fraud and foreign aid. You show them the little chart that says, okay, I can get maybe a couple weeks of borrowing eliminated, what would you like to do with the rest of the year, and people look at you with daggers. Then you have the left who just makes crap up. I don't think it is meant to be evil. I think it is just that you get something in your head and you repeat it over and over and over, and the math is delusional. I am going to walk through some boards here. When we get to them, some of these are really complex, but I am going to do my best so they make sense. How do you save this republic if you have a bunch of people who can't even agree on the most baseline? This was on the CBO, Joint Tax, basically their datasets. No one reads their reports. The Joint Economic Committee, which I chair the Republican side, we did a brilliant report 2 months ago. We gave actually options where you could save this country. It is crazy stuff. If you could actually eliminate, moderate, take on, do the moral thing with our brothers and sisters and talk about diabetes and obesity, it is a few trillion dollars over 10 years. It would require complex policies and decisions to do things that are difficult. The only reason I hold that board up, this board is from 3 weeks ago and it is already out of date. What does this board say? It basically says next year, interest will pretty much equal the defense budget. Interest will equal the defense budget. The reason it is out of date is just the movement of interest rates in the last 3 weeks. On the U.S. 10-year sovereign, interest will be more than the entire defense budget next year. If it continues, if the trend line continues, there is a very good chance that interest isn't going to be $800 billion, $830 billion; it could be starting to approach a trillion dollars next year. Why is that a big deal? Well, let's do something else interesting. For people who have never really thought about it, how does the United States finance itself? Remember, 30 cents out of every dollar we spend is borrowed. Where does that 30 cents come from? We issue bonds. Every couple weeks, like 3 days ago, Treasury issued $30-plus billion of 5- year instruments. It went out at the very top of the range price-wise. You sit there and have to calculate. Coverage was a little disturbing. It was only like 2\1/2\ coverage. I know that doesn't mean anything. It basically means the huge lines to buy U.S. bonds weren't there. The line is getting shorter and shorter, interest to buy our debt, which often means the interest rates are going to go up. What happens to bonds that were sold in previous years? Because the last three Treasury Secretaries, Republicans and Democrats, did something stupid and we couldn't get them to change it because it benefited them politically that week, is they went very short-term on the bonds. I am going issue 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, when interest rates were almost basically free. Guess where we are at right now? Those bonds are coming due. In the next fiscal year, if we bring $2 trillion of new virgin issue--that is the borrowing for next fiscal year. Remember, this year we are going to borrow 2.3, 2.4, but let's just pretend next year is about 2. We have a little problem. There is about $9.6 trillion of borrowing coming either as virgin issues or refinance next year, and it is all at these higher interest rates. Your government is functionally an insurance company with an army and a budget problem. What do we look like at the end of 2024 when we have just refinanced a little bit under $10 trillion at these higher interest rates? It basically means that dystopian number you use to go into the 2025 budget cycle of a trillion dollars interest coverage, if you are into the military, interest buys you how many new weapons? If you are into a social justice agenda, interest buys you what? This is what we are doing to ourselves, and it is the reality, and the interest rates keep moving away from us. Let's continue on some of the more difficult stuff. Just simple math. We are going to spend some time talking about how do you fix things when you can't even get the other side that you need--we have to do this together. It is complex. It is hard. It is politically brutal because this place has functionally lied to the public for decades. Let's use the most optimistic--and I believe at least one side of these numbers is absolutely wrong. It is basically saying next year, the projection months ago was the 2024 budget year was only going to borrow about $1.7 trillion. I think that is wrong. I think we are going to 2, but let's say it is 1.7. Let's say we did the most confiscatory tax ever. We basically took every American, if you make $500,000, every dime you make above that, we take all of it. Every dime belongs to the government and people keep working. The basketball player, the scientist, the entrepreneur just keeps working. They say, well, I made my $500,000; the government is going to take every other dime; I am just going to keep working and paying it all into the government, which is a fantasy. That is not how economics work. Just for a math experiment, let's say we are going to confiscate every dime of people over $500,000. You raise about $1\1/2\ trillion. Did I mention the borrowing from CBO months ago was projected to be $1.7 trillion? You can't even cover the deficit if you had a fantasy number of taking every dime of those high-income earners. Yet, I will show slides like this at certain townhalls where I have a number of Democrat activists, and they look at you and go, well, that is Republican math. No, actually, I think this one came from Cato, but I have some that are from OMB, CBO, progressive budget priorities. It is all the same. We are living in a mathematical fantasy world. I am going to go out of sequence here, because I am angry that I saw a California Member on CNN a little while ago basically holding a little white board and completely lying to the press, because it is such good politics: Republicans shouldn't talk about Social Security. It doesn't add anything to the deficit. Absolutely true, because there is a trust fund that has cash in it for 9 more years. What happens in 9 years? Here is the reason we want to talk about it, to save it. In 9 years, the average couple on Social Security gets a $17,400 cut. You double the poverty of seniors in America in 9 years. It is absolutely immoral. The recapitalization of this is going to be complex, because that first year--so 9 years from now, the first year shortfall is $616 billion. Okay. Do this with me. You don't have to be good at math for this. This isn't that hard. Nine years from now, boom, the trust fund is gone. You have got a $616 billion shortfall in 2033. Okay. Big deal. You don't care. It is 9 years from now. Here is the Democrats' policy. We are just going to raise taxes on those who make $400,000 and up. The Democrats' piece of legislation is $400,000 and up, you are going to pay the 12.4 percent FICA tax, all of it. Great, okay. Raise the taxes, every dime, you get no benefit from it. Let me slow down and let me explain. Today, you pay your FICA tax up to, what is it, $160,200, and then it stops. You don't pay the Social Security tax above that because you don't get any benefit for it. You create this doughnut hole under Democrat policy and then you start paying the tax again when you hit $400,000. That produces $86.3 billion in 2033, 2034. Let's use 2033, because that is the year that Social Security is gone. Can anyone do the math with me? $86 billion of new taxes, $616 billion shortfall. Anyone notice a math problem? You are covering one- seventh of the shortfall. That is the Democrat solution. Let's actually do the grander one. I will get people who say: Well, David, we will be just fine. Just eliminate that cap and make people pay the full 12.4 percent Social Security tax on every dime. If a person makes a billion dollars, they pay it on that. They get no benefit, no benefit for those higher taxes. People say that solves the problem. Then you show them this. Remember, the first year is a $616 billion shortfall. Eliminating the Social Security cap produces 164,700. You are basically covering 20 percent of the shortfall. This is the Democrats' grand solution. This is why, for those who own a calculator around here and have a soul of not wanting to double senior poverty, we are willing to get the crap kicked out of us by the activist left saying: But you are talking about social security; you are not allowed to do that. We are trying to save it. We are trying to save it, because you have people manipulating you and lying to you about the math. This is immoral. In 9 years, you double senior poverty in America, and their solution only covers one-seventh or 20 percent. This is what you have been given. Then you wonder why there is friction. What if you have friction because some people want to tell great stories and some people would actually like to save the country? Let's walk through a few more of these. Mike Kelly, Congressman from Pennsylvania, is my senior so he sits to my left in the Ways and Means Committee, which annoys me. I need to explain part of the inside joke. In Congress, there is only one committee that is solely by seniority. It is called the Ways and Means Committee. When people to your left retire, quit, go away, you move up. If they are on this side, that makes no difference to your life. He is senior to me. Mike Kelly also chairs the Tax Subcommittee. No one else has been willing to do this math. Our brothers and sisters on the left keep saying we will tax our way out of the crisis. The first chart, I was trying to be somewhat brutal, saying, okay, tax revenues versus expected deficits under different wealth models. Here is actually the deficit. This is the baseline deficit number. Here is what you got. The Sanders wealth tax, I understand, is probably unconstitutional. This is where they would come in and say, even though this isn't your income, we are confiscating some of your wealth. The big one they are pushing right now is the oligarch tax, where they are going to come in and say if you are really rich, we can come in and every year take 8 percent of your wealth. The problem is, I have got $1.8 trillion, and this thing is basically covering what? $230 billion of shortfall? It also blows up the economy, and it doesn't get you anywhere. I am not here to defend really, really rich people. I am here to defend math. Mr. Kelly has a personality. I am like a walking calculator. Tell me, why am I failing to communicate the reality that the proposals we are getting are absurd? They only cover a fraction of the shortfalls. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kelly) for a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is worth pointing out, for everyone looking at that, you see that chart of defense and let's call it nondefense.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is all borrowed. Every dime of that today is on borrowed money.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Plus another $400 billion of the mandatory. So many of our brothers and sisters around the country don't understand. It is so out of whack now because all--look. The number one growth is healthcare cost, but that is sort of on autopilot because every time we try to fix it, the lobbyists, the Democrats, lose their minds. We are just trying to save the country. We end up having the fights that are going on right now over that $0.14. There is waste, fraud, and things that we need to fix, but it is a fraction of the budget, and it is all on borrowed money, which adds the additional stress of there is a morality of squeezing everything we can out of it.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. In other words, you are telling people the truth: I drive you nuts.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I think in some ways you just described why the fussing over the budget documents is going on. We put together some interesting slides here that we have never presented before. We took these from a researcher at Manhattan and a couple of other places. Then Joint Economics, some of my economists, did some math here. We set this for 2033. We actually had a year that is 10 budget years from now. We did not put in the fact that the Social Security trust fund is gone, and there is $616 billion that needs to somehow be recapitalized. That is actually not in this deficit number. We also rolled the number. The baseline for anyone that is really geeky out there, we ran this to the standard debt-to-GDP number. There is a new update on what debt will be 9 years from now that is now $3.1 trillion. If interest rates stay as high as they are spiking right now, it could be as high as 3.7. We are going to use the $2.5 trillion. The reason this board exists is we took--and I have a bunch of slides we are going to walk through, but I need to set up the pitch first. If we took every tax that our Democrat colleagues talk about in the Ways and Means Committee and did what they call a revenue-maximizing rate, there is a rate that you can charge that the economists--this is economic modeling where you maximize tax collections before it rolls over and people change their behavior and the tax collections go down. We actually added it up--maximize estate taxes, maximize income taxes, maximize corporate taxes, maximize capital gains taxes. We maximized everything, and then we also came back and said, all right, here is the maximum number taxing the rich. This is the top 2 percent. If you make $400,000 or higher, you are part of the top 2 percent of income in America. You have to understand that. Then we also did if you did the economic effect, what they call the dynamic score, which is always the real number we get. So here is our $2.5 trillion borrowing. If you did the full max on Democrats and got every dime, you get about $700 billion. If you actually do the real number where the dynamic score comes in about $450 billion, you have just maximized all taxes. It gets you a fraction of the talking points. My reason for going through these boards--how do I say this politely without sounding like a jerk? Our brothers and sisters have to decide. They may actually believe these numbers, but they are not real. How do you make public policy that saves this country when half of your brothers and sisters here say: No, we just tax people over $400,000. We will be fine. You show the slide, and it is nowhere near that. It is the unwillingness to deal with the reality of the math. This is one you and I have talked about a couple of times where if you basically look at our history--go back to 1950 because, actually, what is fascinating is from 1950 until recently, you actually have history where sometimes we have had really, really high marginal tax rates, 90 percent for the top income earners. After tax reform, you are lower, but you took away a bunch of the deductions. You took half of society and removed them from the tax rolls. They don't pay income taxes. We actually built lots of charts that sort of show, during times of high tax rates, you get pretty much the same part of the size of the economy in taxes. Low marginal tax rates, you get the same part of the economy in taxes. There is this concept that it always goes back to the mean, so the way you get more tax receipts to government is growth in the economy. That is the magic. That is how you get more tax receipts. It is growth. When we have really high marginal rates, chart after chart shows you get the mean. When you have had very low, you get the mean, but it is a bigger pie because the economy starts growing again. You show this to our Democrat brothers and sisters, and they will often say: I have seen that, but my voters don't like that because it doesn't satiate the feeling of punishing.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You are not going to do movie reviews, are you?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, in some ways, Mr. Kelly and I are the yin and yang of districts. I have a very highly educated district, a fairly prosperous district. I represent Scottsdale, Phoenix. I am blessed to have grown up there. I have to accept that the economic experience that a lot of my people have is going to be very different than his, but we are all in the same boat. Let's get back to trying to help people understand the reality. I do need to amend something Mr. Kelly is saying, though. We used to talk here that this debt is an existential risk to our grandkids. I am sorry. It is a risk to your retirement. There is the reality and the math. If you are retiring anytime now and in the near future, you have to understand that we are heading toward the time when we are going to have to turn the printing presses on. When we turn on those printing presses, we wipe out your savings. Besides the misery we create for the devaluing of the dollar, devaluing of every bit of your savings, making it so our kids can never afford--high interest rates out to the future, but it is not a crash. It is actually an extension of potentially decades of misery. Folks don't think this way. I keep coming back to trying to make the tax collection argument. Let's talk about why this is so important. Here is the 1950s, when we had a 90.5 percent tax on the top income earners. Here is a deep secret: The tax code today is more progressive than it was back then because they had the lower middle class pay income taxes back then. Today, they are off the tax rolls. Back then, 7.2 percent of the economy came in in income taxes, even though we had 90 percent. You go over all the years there has been tax reform, so 2020, let's do that year, we functionally had a mean tax of 37 percent, not 90 percent as that high part of the marginal tax rate, but we are getting 9.2 percent of the economy. Most people have no idea what I am talking about, but here is the economy, and here is a really high marginal tax rate. We have a history of this, and repeatedly, you are only getting about 7 percent of the economy in taxes. We lowered the marginal tax rate for these top brackets, and now we are getting over 9 percent. We get dramatically more because the economy got bigger. Show this to our brothers and sisters on the left, and they will often say, yes, I know, but it doesn't feel like I am punishing people. The amazing irony is that the highest income Americans vote for Democrats, not Republicans. It is the bizarreness. Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Kelly to ask how many billionaires he thinks are in his district.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, there is a path where this works, and I want to double down on something. I want to make it perfectly clear: We are not defending rich people, not defending poor people, not defending the middle class. We are just trying to tell the truth. This is how it works. This is about a society that prospers. Prosperity is moral, and we first need to shut down the excuses for not actually doing anything, saying oh, don't worry. Democrats do it. They had all sorts of chances to do it before this session. They knew the math was a fraud, but it makes for great talking points because then they can get on MSNBC or CNN and say we should just do this and we will be fine. It is not true. There doesn't seem to be a reporter in this city who owns a calculator. This is one Mr. Kelly and I have actually touched on. What happens when you have really high capital gains rates or really low capital gains rates? It turns out, when you raise capital gains rates really high, like some of our Democrat proposals, you actually get less revenues. We have charts of this going back to '54 when we started to play with some of those rates. I am going to show some numbers here when we get ready to close that if everything was at revenue maximizing, whether it be capital gains, estate, income, even corporate, take a look and you are only going to get about 1\1/2\ percent of the economy in additional revenues, additional receipts. This year, we are borrowing 9 percent of the entire economy, and there is the elegance of really good pro-growth tax policy. I have been on this floor dozens of times, and Mr. Kelly and I have talked about this for a couple of years now. There are things you can do to crash the price of healthcare--the adoption of technology and taking on something that is very uncomfortable, obesity and diabetes. We need to take on things that are killing our brothers and sisters. Remember, in the last 4 years, life expectancy in America has gone down. Next decade, we have more deaths than births in America. How do you help people understand? It is beyond just those of us who are math and budget geeks. The morality is what Mr. Kelly talked about, which is why I asked him to come share this time with me. I need someone like him who is able to talk to people's hearts because sometimes I don't think I do it well. I sound like an accountant on steroids. The morality of opportunity, the morality of prosperity, the morality of our brothers and sisters--and I don't care if you are one of my Tribal communities, your rural communities, an urban community, take a look at the statistics of our brothers and sisters who are dying of diabetes and other diseases when we actually can have incredible impact of having them be healthy. How do you get this body to see that, sometimes, great math is also great morality?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. They are not allowed to actually see them react to you.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am sorry you have to hear it all the time sitting next to me, but the math will win. The math will always eventually win. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.