David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker pro-tem, we are going to do a couple things tonight, but first, just every once in a while, when we get behind these mics, and you have got to get something sort of off your chest because it really annoys you. If I see one more headline from the scribes who are basically the Democrat propagandas--and I am sorry to be that mean. I have tried to treat the press respectfully over these years, but, you know, the Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare. Okay. Up until a few hours ago, I was the senior Republican over Social Security in Ways and Means Committee. No one has asked me. I talk about Social Security every single day when I am here. I have never met a Republican Member ever, ever, talk about cutting Social Security. So yesterday, I grabbed one of the reporters out here who had it in their story but had no names. I walked up and said, okay, tell me who this is because I really need to talk to them. I can't tell you. It is a reporter thing. I can't explain that to you. No, no. You need to tell me who is telling you to write stories that the Republicans intend to cut Social Security. I am the ranking Republican--I was up until a few hours ago--over Social Security. I have spent the last year of my life working on it. No, no. I can't tell you who. If you are going to make crap up, stop doing it in a way that you hurt people. You know, for my Democrat colleagues, I know power. I know you desperately want to be back in charge, but the fact of the matter is, the math is the math. You all saw the CBO numbers from a couple days ago. Social Security runs out of money in 10 years. Do you care? The fact that CBO is saying there is going to be a 23 percent cut in Social Security recipients' checks in 10 years, we will double senior poverty. Do you care, or is the politics of weaponizing it more important than saving retirement security? This is perverse. This is called reporting around here? If you want to weaponize something, weaponize something that doesn't crush people. I feel better getting that off my chest. All right. I want to do a little something I consider a bit amusing and maybe a little sadistic. A week ago or so when we were here, I did a presentation on structural deficit. I was trying to talk to the new Members of Congress, you know, my friend from Oklahoma, others. What is actually going on? Where does the debt come from? The fact that 10 years from now, you have almost a $2 trillion structural deficit. That $2 trillion is functionally interest, a trillion bucks, and the growth in Medicare and a little bit of Medicaid. I did something I almost never do. I actually read the comments. Look, I am appreciative. Almost 600-some-thousand people watched the YouTube video. You get these comments like, well, cut foreign aid. That will balance the budget. Just don't pay Members of Congress and Senate, and that will balance the budget. So we had a conversation in our office. How do I explain the scale? Look, if you are not used to 12 zeros, or in this case, the current deficit, 14--if we are at 31 trillion, that is 14 zeros. If you are not comfortable with the math, maybe I can find an easy way to discuss this. If this comes across a bit sarcastic, I mean it to. So we actually built a little calendar, and we thought this would be sort of fun because we have too many people out there--they hear the political class get behind the microphone and say, we have a spending problem. Then they come up with stupid--excuse me--ideas that really don't save us. So let's actually walk through these. Let's start with the one I consider most amusing. A number of the comments were, just don't pay Members of Congress and the Senate. Okay. Great. So this is a calendar of the year; 12 months, 365 days. If I said this is just the borrowing, so this is a calendar every day we borrow the equal amount, and we are going to base it on last year's borrowing, so it is a real number. If you didn't pay any Member of Congress--and maybe we shouldn't get paid for the quality of our work; I am not going to argue about that-- how much of the debt deficit would it take care of? Well, it turns out it is this little, tiny sliver down here. We calculate it is about 28 minutes for an entire year. That is all. You got a whole 28 minutes. What would you like to do with the other 365 days, you know, 364 days, 23 hours or 23 and a half hours? You get the point. I know it may make you feel better. I lashed out. I was mad. But you have a country that structurally is going to be buried in a scale of debt where you are starting to flirt with a debt crisis and a failed bond option in a decade or so. This is not a game. This level of debt takes down a republic. So let's do a couple of the others here just for the fun of it. I will explain with these colors. So whatever color that is--I guess that is like a turquoise--foreign aid. Every dime of foreign aid, if you removed it, hey, functionally, you just got rid of maybe 17 days, and we threw everything into it. So you got rid of 17 days of borrowing. What would you like to do with the rest of the year? Well, if we got rid of the 2017 tax reform and played the fake scoring that every dime would come in, and you didn't lose the growth effects that we got from the tax reform and all those other things, you basically get 2 weeks of borrowing. Okay. Well, this obviously isn't working. So if we went to a marginal 50 percent tax rate, a 50 percent tax rate, which some of the Democrats have actually proposed, you basically take care of 6 weeks of borrowing. Now, you slow down the economy, but let's just pretend the money keeps coming in. You walk through, hey, how about a 35 percent marginal tax rate on corporations? Well, you got rid of maybe--you maybe could get another month and a half of borrowing, just borrowing coverage. That is assuming that you get all the revenues in, and you haven't slowed down the economy, slowed down GDP, which is pretend. Okay. Let's do one of my others. You know, you take out itemized deductions. Okay. You got rid of a week. To understand almost all the ideas that are out there, really, on the scale of it, if you threw them all in, you can't even get rid of half the year's borrowing, and that is for last year. Understand, this year, we are going to probably borrow a little less than a trillion dollars. In 10 years, we have doubled it. I beg of our brothers and sisters here. If the Democrats don't want to help, don't want to play, don't want to tell truth about the math-- and the math will always win--I beg my Republican brothers and sisters: Let's be the truth tellers. Yes, there is waste and fraud. As of a couple hours ago, I just became the chairman of the Oversight Committee in Ways and Means, and there is waste and fraud we are going to grind into. There is a chance unemployment fraud and some of the pandemic fraud may be the largest fraud in human history. We are going to find out what happened. But I need you to think of our world and our government. We functionally have become an insurance company with an Army. So I want to walk through a couple of the other comments you get just so I can get them off my chest. When you look around the House here, you notice there are no people here. These are what we call the special orders. It is a chance for Members to come to the mic and walk through something, tell a story. We are on probably a thousand televisions around Capitol Hill. So sometimes when I do this, I am not actually talking to my constituents at home in Arizona. I am actually talking to the staff. I am talking to the new Members of Congress to help them understand here are the numbers I see. I am the senior Republican in the House on something called the Joint Economic Committee, so I have a handful of economists who are just freaky smart who are in my office pounding information into my head every single day. I know it is not the shiny objects. We want to talk about a laptop with secret documents, and a Chinese spy and this and that. Those are shiny objects that you can see on cable television tonight. I will argue, these numbers are what take out the Republic. So let's actually go over some of the other comments I get over and over and over, particularly when I have talked about Social Security; and this is back to the cruelty the Democrats and the press have been doing this last 2 weeks, trying to light people's hair on fire with basically, what's the proper term, oh, yeah, lies. For the average American who is going into Social Security today-- remember, I keep seeing these comments: If I could just get all my money back. Okay. If you are willing to make a deal with the Republic saying if I gave you back all your money on Social Security and Medicare, would you sign up for that deal? Because we would take it in a moment because when you see what you get back, you realize this is actually where much of the structural deficit comes from. When people say, well, the money--there is no lock box. You don't want it in a lock box. You want it in T bills so you get interest back. Social Security for years ran a surplus. That was building the trust fund because we had this demographic bubble coming called baby boomers. We saved and saved and saved. Then, a couple of years ago, we started having more people move into retirement than functionally what they were paying, workers were paying. So every month, when the check goes out, you take the FICA income that is associated with the old-age, survivor's system, the Social Security system, send that out. But we needed a little bit more, so Social Security would take its Treasury bill, present it to the Treasury; Treasury would give them cash plus some interest. For many years the interest rate was actually a spiff over--higher what you would get on the market T bill. The money wasn't stolen. It was put into T bills, just like you might do with your extra savings. Stop making stuff up. So the average American, the typical retiring couple--let's do it that way because it is easier math, will receive--well, let's not do the Medicare number. Let's first do the Social Security. That couple, the average, over a lifetime of work--so this is 35-plus quarters, sometimes 40 quarters--will put in $625,000 in FICA on the Social Security portion of that tax, and they are going to get back a little under $700,000. So they make a little bit of money. Now the reality, if you had put that money in your IRA or something like that, it would have been multiples of this. If you remember, George Bush tried to have the conversation of taking particularly young people, allowing them to take a sliver and put it in private accounts because it would have a much higher rate of return, and the Democrats and the unions went berserk on that. But now we can look back 25, 30 years and it would have been a hell of a lot better today for Americans if we had done it. But the politics of it is the control freaks wanting control of your money. This in inflation-adjusted dollars, so it is like for like. You get your money back, plus a small spiff on Social Security. You could have had a lot more if you put it in markets and in other places, but you get your money back, inflation adjusted. Okay. That is not what drives the debt. Our problem with Social Security is our number of workers. It is Medicare, and this is hard to talk about, but math is math. I know many people will come up to me, Schweikert you can't talk about that. You are going to get unelected. I am in one of the most competitive districts in America, but at least I am in one of the best-educated, smarter districts in America, and understand whether you like me or not, I am telling you the truth on the math. Here is the substantial portion that drives about three-quarters of all U.S. sovereign debt. The average couple, in their lifetime of working, will put in $161,000 into Medicare. Remember, the Medicare tax you pay as part of your FICA, your payroll tax, is just for the part A, the hospital portion. The rest of the healthcare spending you get when you become 65 and are on Medicare comes out of the general fund. The average taxpaying couple put in that $161,000, and they are going to get back $522,000. This number is based on sort of before the inflation cycle. We are working on some math but I wasn't able to vet it; that the amount of money we expect in medical costs for our brothers and sisters on Medicare actually has gone up rather substantially which, that means when you say 161, 500 plus, that gap, now multiply that toward how many; 70 million Americans 65 and up, and the number grows with baby boomers because, what, just the baby boom population is what, 76 million? You see the driver of U.S. sovereign debt. The solution is not cutting. The solution is having a revolution of the cost. ObamaCare was a financing bill. It is who had to pay and who got subsidized. Actually, it was mostly about subsidizing. The Republican alternative actually spread out the actual numbers so you got some efficiency but it was still about who had to pay and who got subsidized. Medicare for all is all about subsidies. But those are financing bills. They don't touch the problem. The real problem is the cost of delivering healthcare services. For people who might say, well, he is not giving us a solution; go look at the probably 70 hours I have over the last few years on the floor here. Half those were bringing solutions. Most of my solutions are uncomfortable because they require disruption. It is technology. It is a thing you can blow into that knows you have the flu and allowing it to prescribe. Taking on the big things, curing diseases. It turns out cures are remarkable at crashing the price of healthcare and just the basic morality of it. If diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending, and there is a chance out there that there is being some success in curing Type 1 with a CRISPR-altered stem cell treatment, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but the literature right now says there are about six people who have been cured of Type 1. We need to know this. We need to find out over the next decade could it be for Type 2. What do we do on the farm bill, on nutrition support and everything else. Is that a possibility? Because if you could disrupt that cost--do you realize if you could disrupt half, just half of the diabetics' cost in this country, you would actually wipe out the substantial portion of the next 30 years debt. These are moral, but they are also financial ideas, and we run away from them. It is almost easier for Members of Congress to talk about cuts than it is competition to disrupt business models. So understand, the next time you have someone saying well, if I could just get all my money I paid back in FICA taxes, we will make that deal, because you are getting--that couple is getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they put in. It is the math. Whether you feel that way or not, it is the math, and that is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. Now, we made this deal. This is a societal contract. People worked their hearts out. They paid into FICA. We made a deal as a society. Our job, as the brain trust here, as Members of Congress, we have got to figure out how to make this work. You start to look at how fast these numbers are eroding. I have already said this a couple of times; maybe seeing it on a board makes it easier; and I am trying--one of the criticisms was too many of my boards had too many numbers on them. I am trying to make them easier to read. Let me know if I am succeeding, but I am trying. This is a really simple chart. It basically says, here is where we are today. In a decade, structurally, just functionally, Medicare and Medicaid, and then if I add in interest, then there is another, functionally, just my cost there I am heading toward a trillion-plus dollars just from my Medicare. Medicaid adds another quarter trillion dollars of borrowing; and then somewhere in there I have almost $1 trillion of interest. That is what I look like a decade from now. So people run around here and say, I am going to cut and give you a 10-year balanced budget. Okay. Tell me what part of paying our bonds you are going to cut. That is $1 trillion of the deficit 10 years from now. You have got to do that. All the people--you are going to default if you don't raise the debt ceiling. No, you are not, and I will do another presentation in the coming weeks on, stop making crap up. The United States has plenty of cash flow to cover our sovereign debts and the majority of our earned entitlements. It is a lot of the discretionary we don't have enough cash for. These are big, complicated, and then to have, as I started with, the trite Democrats and wanting an edge in the press, making it really hard to do something that has got to happen bipartisan. Mr. Speaker, I know we are up against time. The last one I am going to show very quickly. This is your 10-year chart. It is very simple. This is Social Security. This is the healthcare entitlements. This is everything else. This is what we are up against. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the tolerance from everyone. If I hurt your feelings, I am sorry. It may be too much caffeine and just being too damn cranky around here. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I don't know if I can top my friend from California's great white shark attack or talking about airline delays, but we are going to do something that is particularly amusing and fun. We are going to talk about why the fiscal house of the United States is collapsing. For a number of folks who have watched my floor presentations, a lot of this is going to be familiar. This is a primer, particularly for our new Members. Right now, we have hundreds and hundreds of new staff with the new Members here in the House of Representatives. Hopefully, on the thousand-some televisions around the campus where you have C-SPAN on, please, if you actually are interested, if you really want to understand how much trouble we are in, give me a few minutes of your time. Actually, give me almost an hour of your time. Let's sort of walk through the reality. I am going to walk through some of the solutions that are absolutely wrong, and then we are going to talk a little bit about the reality of the math; and the punch line we are going to come back to multiple times, is really simple. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is our demographics. Those of us who are baby boomers, we got old. And the political class here, unless we are willing to tell the truth, there is no path to saving us from a failed bond auction, a failed debt crisis, a world where we all live dramatically poorer. And it doesn't have to be that way. Look, I know I am a broken record, but damn it, somehow, we have got to get this to start to sink in. So let's actually walk through some of the reality. I always start with this chart because it is just easy to get your head around. This is 2022. Now, the funny thing is, it looks like 2023, the percentage that is mandatory, that means it is on autopilot. Members here, people like me, we won't vote on it. This is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These things that are a formula. This percentage actually went down in this budget year. It is not going down because we are spending less money; it is because we are spending so much more money on discretionary, it actually took several points more of the percentage of spending. Now, a lot of that was one-time spending. We will fade back down, but you got to get your head around the majority. The vast majority of U.S. spending is what we call mandatory. It is entitlements. It is you get because you work so many quarters. It is because you turned a certain age, because you are a certain Tribal group, because you are a certain level of poverty, you get these benefits, and they are automatic. It is a formula. And then over here, you see this little green part, that is discretionary. That is what we call nondefense discretionary. This is what everyone thinks of as government. That is your foreign aid, that is your FBI, that is the IRS, that is all of those things. And here the blue, that is defense. I am going to show you in some charts later, my brothers and sisters on the left, will often throw out rhetoric of cut out defense, get rid it. Believe it or not, it is not even enough money to keep us in balance. You could get rid of every dime of defense. There needs to be an understanding of reality. Your government is an insurance company with an Army. I know that sounds like trying to be somewhat humorous, but it happens to be the truth. Think of it that way. So what is the primary drive, if I came to you right now and said, you are a new Member of Congress, you have made a passionate pitch to your voters that you are going take on the deficit. Did you stand in front of your voters and tell them over the next 30 years, 100 percent of the deficit is Medicare and Social Security? The rest of the budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, actually has a positive balance. Over the next 30 years, and this is based on the 2022 numbers, with inflation some of this is actually worse today. And we are not going to get the updated numbers till probably mid-February using the Congressional Budget Office. Functionally, the shortfall of Medicare is about 75 percent of all of our borrowing. The shortfall of Social Security--and the reason you put that on there, understand, look at the Social Security actuary report. It is not Republican; it is not Democrat. These are people that actually own calculators. With the COLA that was just given, you lost almost a full year of life. So there is this trust fund. Yes, it is Social Security money that we have paid in over the years. It is in loan to the Treasury. The Treasury gives special Social Security T bills and then when Social Security needs money, they cash them in with Treasury. Fine. And then, actually, the Treasury goes out and borrows other money. That money runs out in about 10 years. Two years ago, I believe, the Social Security actuary report said, when the trust fund runs out, our brothers and sisters who are 65 and older or who are 62 and older or whoever are just taking a Social Security check will get about a 27 percent cut. I think last year's actuary report said about 25 percent cut. It is based on--here is our projection of the revenue and FICA taxes we take in today, and then it goes out the door. There is some data out there that says 10 years from now, unless we fix Social Security, you are going to double poverty among seniors. What is the moral aspect there? How many of this body are ready to actually deal with the political nightmare cascade of the trolls who lie--oh, excuse me--the politicians, trying to tell the truth about a multi-multi-multi-multitrillion-dollar system that is out of money and the negative shortfall. You do understand, I think the model said like in the next 60 years, 65 years, it is like $212 trillion short. That is just the Social Security trust fund, and it is gone in about 10 years. It lost almost a full year of actuarial life with this year's COLA. These are the things that we are here to fix instead of the trite crap we come behind these microphones and talk about. These are the things that destroy a society because it breaks our promises. Don't laugh at me. My wife and I are both 60 and I have a 6-month- old. We adopted another child. When my 6-month-old is 25 years old, two things: We either blow up the debt and deficit, which we are probably going to do that, too, or double the U.S. taxes. When he is 25 years old, we have to double corporate taxes, import fees, tariffs, everything else, every we call a receipt, we got to double. It means top marginal rates like 70-something percent. That is just the Federal. Do you understand what these numbers mean? This was based on having $114 trillion of borrowing in today's dollars, and these calcs were done before this inflationary cycle. This is what takes down a republic. How serious is this body really about telling the truth about the math? Let's walk through the fragility. Once again, I am doing this substantially for the new Members and the new staff here to understand what reality is. All day long, you are going to get pitched by people with shiny objects or: ``I need you to regulate this so I don't get competition in my business in the home district.'' ``I want some free money.'' ``I want you to give me a grant.'' We get this inbound all day long. We get the crazy conspiracy theory that has nothing to do with reality, and that consumes our time instead of thinking about this math and coming up with actual solutions. We have come to this floor over and over with solutions, except it seems to terrify our brothers and sisters here because it means, A, telling the truth about the math, and then it means we have to do things really differently. You have to legalize technology. You have to legalize the disruption because it is not about changing who pays. Before I do this, let me see if I can explain this. For my fans on the left who love ObamaCare, the ACA, understand that it is a financing bill. It just moves the money around. I get subsidized over here, but this group has to pay. The brilliant Republican alternative was a financing bill. Now, we actually did a more elegant job of spreading it along the curve so you got some efficiency, but it was still a financing bill. It is who had to pay and who got subsidized. Medicare for All is a financing bill. None of those ideas in regard to healthcare change what we pay. They just move around who pays. Until the conversation becomes about what we pay, you can't save us because the debt doesn't change. With my very last board, I am going to do something that is a little cranky and a little mean. I am going to make fun of some of my own work, but I am going to tell the truth that a lot of times when we talk 10 years to balance, you do realize one of the things we are doing is saying we are going to take this portion of the spending and are just going to give it back to the State. We are going to take this portion of the spending and make the users of Medicare, or users of this group, we are going to make the individuals pay. We are going to take it off the Federal books, but we don't change the spending as you would do the calculation as a percentage of the GDP, or gross domestic product. That is what is so important here. Unless we legalize the disruption, and do this quickly--I had a meeting earlier in my office today with someone that is really smart. He has been here for a long time. He is a medical doctor. He is one of my favorite Members: David, you have to go slower. People aren't going to embrace it. The bureaucracy is going to fight you. Do you know how many vested interests there are in the lobbyist class and down on K Street? We are watching the numbers erode. I am going to show you a slide here that, structurally, 10 years from now, we may have a structural $2 trillion a year deficit. That is the structural deficit, and half of that will be just interest. Is this body ready to tell the truth about the math? Because the math will always win. One of the other things that terrifies me here is that we are not telling the truth about the fragility of interest rates. I am going to do two or three slides here, but you start to look at what happens if interest rates are up. Rising interest rates could push up the national debt toward 300 percent. Get this. If the mean interest is 3 points over what CBO projected last year, which, believe it or not, is actually closer to the mean of interest we have paid over the last 30 years, so we go back to what was normal for the last 30 years, we are at 345 percent of debt to GDP. It is all gone. If you care about the poor, there is no more money for them. If you care about defense, there is no more money. Basically, every dime is just covering interest. Government is gone. The fantasy that goes on around here of let's talk about shiny objects but avoid the real crisis ahead of us--I am going to show a bunch of slides that the Democrats' proposals of raising taxes doesn't work and a bunch of the Republican ideas of let's get rid of waste and fraud. We will get rid of foreign aid. Do you realize every dime of foreign aid covers about 12 days of borrowing? Last year, we borrowed $43,600 a second. How much of the conversation here is about my little Matthew, who is 6 months old? What is his future like? Does anyone here give a damn about your kids, your grandkids, your own retirement? This is everything. This will take us down. Will this body take it seriously? You start to look at the charts. This is where we are at right now. Understand, the CBO model is now starting to look at that 10 years from now, 2032. That may seem like forever, but it is 10 years. What were you doing 10 years ago? Do you remember? It wasn't that long ago. We are heading toward a structural cost just over $1 trillion, just in interest, just the interest cost. Now, add on another $1 trillion interest in spending, and remember, in that 10 years, just Medicare and a portion of Medicaid go up $1.1 trillion. The total budget 10 years from now goes up, I think, just a little less. The CBO model from a year ago was about $2 trillion more that we are spending. We take in about half a trillion-plus more on due tax receipts. It basically means you are heading toward a structural deficit close to $2 trillion a year, and that is the baseline. Now, how many of you ran for office here and said, ``I am going to balance the budget''? Okay. Your structural deficit 10 years from now is $2 trillion. What are you about to do? ``I am going to move it to the States and let them pay for it. I am going to play a shell game. I am going to tell my voters it is waste and fraud. I am going to tell my voters I need to tax businesses more.'' We got old. I am sorry, but go back to that second slide. Every dime of the borrowing for the next 30 years is three-quarters Medicare, one- quarter Social Security. Look at the comments that will be on the video of this and people say: ``Oh, that is not true. Get rid of Ukraine.'' Fine, strip it, but you just got rid of 12 days, 14 days of borrowing. It is this lack of ability to do math here, but I am glad everyone gets their feelings satiated. You have to understand this is the baseline we are at right now. Thirty years from now, half of all tax receipts go just to interest. In Ways and Means, we call it tax receipts, tax revenues, whatever you want to call it. Half of it. There is a model out there that if we are 2 points higher than the CBO model, in 30 years--it actually comes closer to 25 years--all receipts, if we kept the same tax code so all the things expire, all the tax reforms, we go back to the bad old days, and we have 2-point higher interest rates, so that is still lower than the previous 30-year mean. Every dime of tax receipts in about 25, 28 years, every dime goes just to cover interest. There is no more government. We are nothing more than a bond house paying out interest. Does anyone here understand this? Doesn't this make anyone nervous? Am I the only idiot getting up here and trying to point it out, saying we are going to fall off the cliff? Does anyone else care? This is the stuff that is real, but we are going to have a great conversation of virtue signaling probably over the next couple of weeks. The math is out there for everyone. Anyone that is watching, just go to CBO, some of the other groups that give a darn about the debt. It is all over the charts. You can get emails every single day talking about what is happening and the differentials. We all ignore it because it is really uncomfortable to go home and stand in front of an audience of your voters and tell them the truth because we have lied to them for so long. The Federal Government has a spending problem. Now, this may not look like a lot, but you start to look at average tax receipts. I have two or three slides that if you ever want to argue this--I have done this with leftist groups trying to show when we raise taxes and when we lower taxes, we always get within a certain band of about 18 to 20 percent of tax receipts in as part of the size of the economy. There is just this sort of law of physics and taxes. You raise taxes really high; the economy and growth slows down; you get 18 to 20 percent of GDP in taxes. You lower taxes; economy grows; you get about 18 to 20 percent in taxes to GDP. It is just about 100 years' worth of data, okay? It is what it is. What is happening is our spending, you see this huge spike there. That is COVID. We went to crazy town. It became an excuse to fund every dream, every group, trying to buy the vote for you. Then, you go back to our baseline, and that baseline grows and grows. You have to understand that spending here, in just about 10 years, crosses about 25 percent of the entire economy. Yet, our best model is we might be getting 18, 19 percent of the economy in taxes. That differential year after year buries us. It is not falling revenues. Look at it. Even in the long term, the best CBO data still has us hovering around 19 percent of the economy in tax receipts, and it is within the mean of functioning since the 1960s. There were years here where we had very high marginal tax rates, some years where we had very low marginal tax rates, and look at the band. Do you see, if I go way out, if I go out to 30 years, our spending hits 30 percent of the entire economy? Thirty percent of the entire economy is spending, and every dime of this growth out here is demographics. It will be the shortfall of Social Security and Medicare. Why is that so hard? It is not Republican or Democrat. We got gray. Look at my hair. There are fixes. I have come here dozens of times. I have walked through innovative solutions that disrupt the price of healthcare, that disrupt the bureaucracy, that make us more efficient, that make us grow. We ignore them because, it turns out, complex problems require complex solutions, and it is not one magic bullet. I am sorry. Am I allowed to say ``bullet''? It is not one magic solution. It turns out you have to do a dozen things, and you have to do them all at once. Yes, you have to fix immigration. You have to legalize technology. You have to change the way bureaucracies work so that bureaucracies start using these supercomputers to collect data instead of making you fill out paperwork. There are solutions out there, but damn it, this place needs to get rid of its 1990s solution and join this century. I bring this board just to knock down one of my leftist friends who always said, ``But you guys did tax reform, and you cut receipts.'' We are taking in $1 trillion more a year today than we did the year after tax reform. It is spending $1 trillion more today, so that is like a 25 percent growth in receipts, in revenues, in tax receipts post-tax reform within, functionally, 4 years. Don't tell me it is the tax reform because the tax reform grew the size of the economy. Do you remember what it did to the Social Security trust fund? It saved us for a couple of years because there were so many people working. Could you imagine if we hadn't had the tax reform when we hit the pandemic? Could you imagine, if we hadn't had that healthy economy, what the numbers would have looked like? I am sorry, I know this is repetitive, but there is a reason I am saying it over and over. I am trying to break through to people who have never really thought about the truth of the math. Eliminating every dime of defense, in the long term, does nothing. Think about that. Here is defense. Defense is going to be sitting around 2.7 percent of GDP, and we are heading toward a time where just Social Security and the healthcare entitlements out here are over 15 percent of the size of the economy. So defense is under 3 percent of the size of the economy, just Social Security and the health entitlements are over 15. Does anyone see the issue? But, yet, I will have my brothers and sisters on the left say: It is defense, we need to cut it. Fine. It doesn't do anything. The scale of the dollars is so out of control, we have got to stop living in a fantasy world. I know it is good politics. I know it is good virtue signaling. You get your reporters and constituents at home going: Yay, that is true. None of them own a calculator and if they do there are no batteries in it. You have got to understand, entitlement programs--I don't like it when you call these entitlement programs; call them anything you want; call them mandatory spending; Call them earned benefits, they are earned benefits--it is a societal problem. I don't give a damn what you call them, it is still about the spending. You need to take a look at what it is driving. Over here is the growth over those years: defense, just Social Security, other mandatory, Medicare, all these, the growth in these mandatories here. How many Members here are bold enough to tell the truth? Because when you tell the truth on this stuff you get attack adds, you get groups that raise money, lie about it, beat the crap out of you if you are a Member of Congress. I can't talk about that, David. In that case, you can't actually talk about the debt and deficits. Medicare. Medicare. Medicare. Much of my life I have done healthcare finance. As a child, I was in my State legislature for a couple terms and I was working on our Medicaid system. Even then, you'd have the experts come sit you down, and say: You do realize how much trouble we are in. Well, here we are 30 some years later. Look at the curve. The curve. This isn't that long from now. We are looking at numbers that are only functionally a decade from now. This drives all policies. If you are a Member and say: I care about the environment. Where are you going to get the money? I care about defense. Where are you going to get the money? Healthcare is consuming everything. I believe CBO in a couple weeks is going to update these numbers and they are going to look much uglier. We have some of the back-of-the- napkin math we have done with the Joint Economic Committee, but I used last year's CBO number for this chart. Here is my point, once again: Over the next decade there is functionally a trillion dollars of additional spending on Medicare. If you add in Medicare and Medicaid, it is one-something. Take a look here. When you get out here, this is a $1.1 trillion increase, that is nine budget cycles from now. It is not 10 years. It is nine budget cycles from now. So if I came to you and you saw the earlier chart, it said, okay, a decade from now if the nominal interest rates stay where they are at, our interest cost is $1 trillion a year a decade from now. Now my additional spending on Medicare and Medicaid is an additional trillion dollars. Does anyone start to see where a structural deficit of $2 trillion a year is? Now, you promised your voters you are going to balance the budget. What are you going to do? Just stop paying the interest on our debt? Okay. Stop paying Medicare? Stop paying Medicaid? Fine. How about Social Security? Because remember, 10 years from now the trust fund is gone. Our brothers and sisters who are on Social Security that rely on it are going to take what, around a 25 percent cut. Are we going to let that happen? It is coming. The math is real. You can't pretend it away. And you start to look at some of the lunacy that we get from our friends on the left. Oh, let's just tax more. Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families, you can't even come close. So take all their money, and just assume that you live in some magic fantasy world where everyone keeps working. Let's live in fantasy. This is what you get. My spending in 30 years is--my borrowing is about 12.4 percent of GDP. If I take every dime of someone who makes $500,000 or more, the next dollar, we just take it, you get about 5 percent of GDP, and that is pretending people would keep working. The math is the math, and we need to stop lying. Look, if you don't believe me, you go look up CBO. Go to Brian Riedl, Manhattan Institute, he does a beautiful job of taking OMB data, CBO data, some of the others out there, and puts it on charts so that it is absorbable. He walks through all of your solutions. What if we repeal the tax cuts and raise the taxes on low-income people? How about if you get rid of every tax idea that is out there? All the Democrat solutions. You still fall incredibly short. You get a fraction of what is required. You go on some of the other solutions that have been offered. No easy pay-fors for Social Security or Medicare programs. Everything falls short. I need more than 6 percent of GDP. And if I take almost every solution, I only pick up a fraction of that. The math is the math, and the math will win. Now, here is the point where I am going to make some of my own friends on my side a little cranky; I am going to tell the truth. Many of the solutions we run around here and tout: We are going to balance in 7 years. We are going to balance in 10 years. Do you understand the fraud? We say: Well, we are going to cut Medicare. Okay. We are going to shift it to the individual. We are going to do this. We are going to take Medicaid and we are just going to cut our spending because we handed it back to the States. They are shell-gaming the math. They are not willing to actually tell the system we are going to legalize technology. This exists today. The thing that looks like a large kazoo, you can blow into it, it tells you you have a virus. It bangs off your phone to know you are not allergic to certain antivirals, and orders your antivirals, allowing that algorithm, that technology, to write a prescription. You can't do that? Why? Do you know anyone with a diabetic pump? All day long that algorithm is prescribing to them. We have got to get this out because if you can't have that type of technology disruption--my other idea is a much grander theory. Five percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are over half of our healthcare spending. We are in the time of miracles where we are seeing cures. We, as a body, need to basically do an Operation Warp Speed as a way to save ourselves from our own crushing debt. Bring those cures. If it is true that a San Diego company--which has just been bought up and was working with CRISPR--has now cured about a half a dozen people of type 1 diabetes--and we are trying to bring out one of their researchers to come talk to us in February--if it is true, if there is just the slightest opening of a door, there is a path there. I know that is type 1. I know type 2 we have our health issues. What we do in our farm bill--the fact that so much of our society has become almost self-destructive with obesity--yes, I may have just hurt your feelings--but dammit, when government has to pay 70 percent of all healthcare costs, we as a society should care. I represent the population of probably the second highest per capita diabetes in the world, one of my Tribal communities in Arizona. When I meet people who are blind in that community, who have lost parts of their feet, is that compassion? So what would happen if we can marry up legalizing the technology that will make your life easier and more convenient and make you healthier? Yes, it means that you don't walk into the urgent care center, because you have a breath biopsy in your home medicine cabinet. Legalize the technology. Then we push as hard as we can, if we are in the age of miracles, cure, cure, cure because that is more moral and compassionate. And, dammit, it has an amazing effect on U.S. debt. Do you remember how many times I showed you that 31 percent of all Medicare spending is related to diabetes? What would happen if you cut half of that? Yes, it is lifestyle. Yes, it is what people eat. Yes, it is exercise. What would happen if we can give people back islet cells that produce insulin again? We found a way to cure hepatitis C. When I first got here, this body was getting ready to try to figure out how to have hundreds of thousands of people get liver transplants, and it was going to bankrupt Medicaid systems all over the country. Then someone came up with a hepatitis C cure. It was really expensive, and we bitched about the cost of it, except for the fact that it cured them. And 7 months later there was a second drug that crashed the price. Was that moral? Of course it was. Was it really good economics? Was it just compassion? Yes. I need this to become part of our lexicon that the solution is disruption through technology. Optionality. But it is also the morality of we need to push those cures out because it is really good economics. Instead of giving lists of things of here is how we are going to cut the debt and deficit, we are just going to shift it to someone else to spend. Is this body--and particularly to the freshmen and the freshmen staff that I have been trying to talk to with this speech--this will be the most important stuff you deal with in your time here. It is not the shiny object that may get you on FOX News tonight. It is not the shiny object that gets you applause when you go into your townhall meeting. Oh, we did this. This stuff is hard. It is complicated. You are going to be lobbied like a war. They are going to spend money in your district beating the crap out of you because you are taking away their money. It also saves this country and gives my little Matthew, who is 6 months old, a future. That is the morality. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to continue sort of a theme that we have been working on, and it is fairly simple, yet the solutions are really complex. First is trying to get a reality on what is going on with the math. I am a broken record. I absolutely am, but we are going to walk through this again. Doing this a week ago, we actually did a whole bunch of technology disruptions that would crash the price of healthcare, that would clean the environment, that would make bureaucracy much smaller, make us much more productive and wealthy as a society, help the poor, help the working poor, help the working middle class. It is fascinating. Sometimes we all make the mistake of reading the responses, trying to understand, saying are we getting the message through. A number of our brothers and sisters out there are kind enough to comment, kind enough to help us, but also kind enough to say: ``Hey, I didn't understand this. I don't understand what this number really means.'' We are going to delve into a couple of those because the crisis is here, and it is not Democrat or Republican. I am going to argue it is much more difficult. It is demographics. There is a whole bunch of mess that I believe our Republican majority next year is going to have to clean up, and God willing, we will have the fortitude to do it. But the fact of the matter is, over the next 30 years, there are some really ugly numbers, and it has to do with the fact that we got old as a society. Our baby boomers are retiring, and almost no one is comfortable telling the truth. So, we are going to rapidly go through a number of these. Look, this is a board I show over and over just to try to help people get their heads around it. See this red here? We are not even going to talk about 1965. We are going to stick with 2022, so last year's budget cycle. Remember, we are running on continuing resolutions, so there is all sorts of other budgetary malfeasance going on around here, but here is where we are at. Do you see this red here? That is for last year's budget cycle, 71 percent of all the spending, and it is on autopilot because this is: Hey, I turned 65. I get a health benefit. I worked so many quarters, and I turned 65 or 70, wherever you choose, and you get Medicare or Social Security, or you served in the military. You have to understand. The vast majority of your government is on autopilot. This blue here, that is defense. So, 13 percent of the 2022 budget was defense. The other 16 percent was what we call nondefense discretionary. That is the EPA. That is the FBI. That is the Park Service. That is everything you actually think of as government. It is functionally only 16 percent of the spending. There are a number of us who keep looking at different ideas and different numbers, and we keep trying to say: What would happen if we actually took all the outlays and rolled them back to 2019 before the pandemic? But some of the math--forgive me, but we were working on this as we were walking over here to the floor--you have a math problem. First off, the discretionary has shrunk from--let's see, it is $52 billion bigger in 2022 than it was in 2019. So that is real money. But what has exploded are two things, the mandatory Social Security, Medicare and all these other things that are formula and interest. In 2019 we spent basically $376 billion in interest. We are functionally heading towards doubling that in the coming budget cycle. So we have got to decide, if I could adopt the 2019 budget, we would actually, with the really substantial increases we have had in tax receipts, tax revenues, tax collections, whatever you want to call it, if we adopted the full 2019 budget then we would be even. How many Members of Congress are ready to get up here and say we are going to cut Medicare, we are going to cut Social Security, we are going to cut veterans benefits, and we are going to actually somehow pay less interest on our debt? The point I am trying to make is the vast majority of what is government is autopilot. And what we actually debate, the theater around here--so in 2019, 50 percent was what we will call discretionary, 50 percent was defense, the other 50 percent of that $1 trillion 33 billion, half of it was true discretionary. I'm trying to make the point, if you are going to save us, it has got to be an actual discussion, mostly about healthcare costs. I am going to show you some boards here. This is another one I bring back and forth. I am shocked how many of my brothers and sisters actually--hopefully, watching parts of this, or their staff are watching parts of this on their televisions, there are a few hundred televisions around this campus--will digest--and for some of my brothers and sisters on the left, they actually get really upset with me on this, you can't tell people that. But it is the math. Over the next 30 years, so starting today, 30 years from now--I am getting tired of hearing myself say this, but I can't seem to get my brothers and sisters around here to digest the number--we are functionally going to borrow $114 trillion in today's dollars, and $38 trillion of that is the shortfall in Social Security. When we add up here is our shortfall and here are our financing costs, $80.5 trillion is the shortfall in Medicare, so about 75/25. How many politicians do you hear, Mr. Speaker, how many accountants, how many smart people do you see talking on financial television saying, Hey, we are heading toward a debt crisis, and it is healthcare costs. Oh, by the way, the rest of the Federal budget actually has about $1 trillion, a $1.9 trillion positive balance. You have to understand, Mr. Speaker, it is autopilot. These are earned benefits. Your society, your government, and your country made a deal with you, if you work this many quarters and you reach this certain age, if you are part of a certain Tribal group or other things, then you get these certain benefits. Fine. Do you think back 20 years ago if we had taken a little sliver of Social Security and allowed the individual to put it in private accounts, the accounts would have been so much more robust? The Democrats absolutely demagogued that, oh, it is the end of the world. And now here we are 20 years later, and we are a decade away from the Social Security trust fund being gone. How many Members here get behind these microphones and are willing to tell their constituents the truth, that you are headed toward a 25 to 27 percent cut in Social Security unless we come up with some big, bold solution? The problem is the Congress says, Oh, let's just raise taxes. Except the problem is that that is just the Social Security portion. Medicare is three-quarters of all the coming debt, and the amount of taxes you have to raise--are you prepared for the amount that that actually starts to slow down the economy? So there is another board. I haven't shown this one in about a year. This is actually 2020 data. The numbers are actually much worse today because of healthcare inflation. I live in a place that has about 12 percent inflation, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area is the highest in the continental United States. But base inflation, healthcare inflation, is up around 16 percent. So these numbers are much uglier today. This is really uncomfortable, and this makes people upset. But it is the math. A typical couple retiring--so let's say you are retiring right now. You functionally are going to receive 3 bucks for every dollar you put in. It is the math. Now, on Social Security, basically you get what you put back in. You get a little bit of a spiff, but if you had actually been able to put those dollars into the markets or into some bond, you would be much better. But on Social Security you basically get back what you put in. The problem is for that couple on Medicare taxes, you will have paid about $161,000 in taxes, and you are going to get about $522,000 in benefits. It is this gap right here that bankrupts our country. It is healthcare costs. It is the math. I know it upsets people. If you want to read the actuarial reports, Mr. Speaker, we will be happy to send them to you. But it is the truth. At some point, the political class needs to start treating the public like adults and tell us the truth even when it is not what the political class here has said, It is waste and fraud; we don't tax rich people enough. All that is a fraud. And going on right now, you have got to understand, the numbers are rolling on us. All the trillions and trillions of dollars of stimulus that were pumped into the economy has set off inflation that has made almost every American poorer. You have to understand that inflation is higher than wage growth. You are poorer today than you were 1 year ago. How many of my brothers and sisters on the other side do you see get behind the microphones and show like they give a damn that America's workers and poor people are poorer today? Well, let's subsidize them more instead of blowing up the economy. And now you start to look at what is going on. At this moment, we are already at one-quarter trillion dollars in debt. Remember, our fiscal year began October 1, and our spending is still exploding. The Federal Government spent $500 billion last month, and we are supposed to be out of the COVID spending craze, and we are not. I bring this chart just as a simple, simple get our heads around the projection. So these two lines here are the 2021 COVID. You see, there just huge amounts of government spending. But what is important here is, do you see this line right here? That is just if you go back to normal life, get rid of these 2 years, just a normal life, the debt is going just where everyone has modeled it. This isn't new. This has been talked about for one-quarter of a century. Does anyone remember when one of the senior commanders of the U.S. military came here to Congress and testified and said, I believe the greatest threat to the United States in the long run is our debt? The spenders around here said, no, you can't talk about that. One of the reasons I believe the public should be just livid with us is our unwillingness to treat them like adults. The other thing that is going on--back to telling the truth again-- the 1980s, does anyone remember the 1980s? Apparently, if you did the mean of the interest on U.S. sovereign bonds at that time, we were financing around 10 percent interest rates. But we had this artificially low interest. Now it would have killed you if you were a saver. It killed you if you were trying to save for retirement. It was great if you wanted to go into debt. I need you to look at something here, Mr. Speaker. During 2020 we had an average of 2.2 percent which was the CBO calculation. They even project that when we go off into the future we are going to double that. And it is already doubled today. So do we go back to the magic times where we are saying, Hey, we are around 2 percent, 2010, 2 percent for the decade? Or do we double it? What happens if we double U.S. interest rates? If we go up 2 percent, 30 years from now we are at 280 percent of debt to GDP. Do you know, Mr. Speaker, if you go up--I think it was, what was the math long term--I think it is like 25 years of 2 percent increase on here basically consumes every projected dollar of tax receipts? It is all our money. How many of us plan to live another 25 years? How many of us really believe we are going back to the age of 2 percent or less interest on U.S. sovereign debt? How many of us agree with the Congressional Budget Office that because we are going to be borrowing so much of the world's capital to finance our debt that we are going to push up interest rates for ourselves and the world, and by doing that we drive ourselves into bankruptcy even faster? Now, you don't actually go bankrupt. What happens is the economy slows down, you live in this flat-lined economy, and there is almost no prosperity. There is no growth, jobs become scarce, and every day you fall further behind. But that is the future. The crap around here is heading there. But we will do some great virtue-signaling bills. Maybe we will ban plastic straws or do something really useful. And you sit down with our progressive friends and say, okay, let's walk through your math. Your math, not mine, your math. And understand, if I take your wish list, free college, the climate proposal, jobs guarantee, the Medicare for All, and then add them already on in the 15.7 baseline deficit, which is already higher today because of the growth in interest rates, and then I turn around and say, okay, we are going to tax all unearned income over $1 million. So if you own rental houses, we are taking every dollar. If you make more than $1 million, we take every dollar. And we will add into that we are just going to take all the wealth of billionaires; every dime of it. Hey, why don't we take basically the entire defense budget, and we will just wipe out all defense protecting the country, even though that is constitutional? It doesn't get you anywhere. This is the wish list on top of the fact we are already upside down. Do you understand how loony this place is? If you go over and over the math, the roster, the tax hikes, if we do all the tax hikes, hey, a 50 percent income rate for anyone making $200,000 or more, then you start to say we will eliminate all deductions. We are going to take payroll tax, so your FICA tax, and we are unlimiting it, so it just goes through the ceiling. Hey, you make $1 million, you pay 15.3 percent on that, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment. You take all those corporate taxes and put them back up to 35 percent. And then live in a fantasy world that you didn't slow the economy down. Do you know you only get two-thirds of the way to covering the structural deficit that is already built in? That is assuming the fantasy world of hey, I just taxed the crap out of my country, took all of the available investment capital out of the country and consumed it in taxes and government spending, but the economy will still maintain the same GDP growth and there will never be another recession or another virus. The inability to have adult conversations around here about the proposals are lunacy. They are great politicking. You go home, stand up in front of the town hall, you tell them these things--you are lying to them--and everyone applauds and says, oh, I really want free stuff. Then you take the best estimate--understand, this number, the 2021, is probably double last year than it will be in the future years because this has huge amounts of COVID fraud. Many of us believe COVID unemployment may be the single biggest fraud maybe in world history. We have seen some underlying reports that it could be a couple hundred billion dollars. But let's pretend that the fraud and waste of 2021 was something we could capture and that we can get every damn dollar. That is $662 billion. That is amazing. Now, it is a one-time thing. You get it back. We were able to collect every dollar and stop all the waste and fraud. Great. Except that we are heading toward $2 trillion deficits at the end of the decade. So we took care of about a quarter of it. Now, we need to work our heinies off to get every dollar of waste and fraud out of the system. We need to stop designing insane systems where we hand out money and we are going to figure out if you should have gotten it a year or 2 years or 3 years later. We have got to stop the fantasy that there are simple solutions. Last week, I stood here, and I showed the board, saying, do you know, if we got rid of every single dollar of foreign aid, the $38 billion of foreign aid, it paid for about 11 days of borrowing--not spending-- borrowing. I know we have been told over and over, Hey, there are simple solutions: Tax the rich; get rid of foreign aid; waste and fraud. There are rounding errors in the scale of what is hitting us. But there are solutions, and dammit, I need us all--whether you be on the left or the right or the public that is trying to understand--be willing to think differently. Be willing to stop this insanity of, oh, we will just do an entitlement reform. Like that is ever going to happen. How many Members of Congress are going to come here and say, I cut Social Security and Medicare. It is never going to happen. Nor should we. Those are promises we have a moral obligation to keep. Another moral obligation is: How do you finance them? How do you keep them? And every Member who refuses to tell you the truth about the math is also putting them at peril. You can't lie, my brothers and sisters on the left, you got to tell the truth. Playing this game--oh, the 2017 tax reform, oh, it crashed revenues. Do you understand we are a trillion dollars higher in receipts--for those of us on the Ways and Means Committee--than we were when we did the 2017 tax reform? It is a spending problem. If I had come to you in 2017 and said, Hey, 4 years from now we are going to be taking in $1 trillion additional revenue, you would have laughed your heinie off--but we did. How can we still be so upside down? How, in this year, when we are still not doing the crazy level of COVID spending, are we still a quarter of a trillion dollars--and we are only, what, into our second or third month of this fiscal year? I beg of us--you look at charts like this and you understand, it really is a spending, it is a structural spending problem. As I was just showing you the really uncomfortable slide, over the next 30 years it is Medicare and Social Security. It is what it is. You look at the projections. This slide is incredibly important for all my junior economists out there. We have times since the 1960s until today, we have had very high marginal tax rates, we have had low marginal tax rates. And guess what, we always seem to come in with high tax rates, low tax rates; good economy, poor economy. We always seem to ultimately come in right about 19 percent of the size of the economy in revenues, in receipts, in taxes. I need you to think about that. If I want more revenue, I need an economy that grows the size of the Nation, the wealth of this Nation, the prosperity. The poor get less poor, the working middle class get rewarded for their work. Do policies that grow. And the benefit of that is how you get more tax receipts. Because you have got to look here--understand that our spending is heading toward 30 percent of the entire size of the economy. I know these are geeky numbers, but those are stunning numbers. Yet, the number of times--I showed you before all the projections--well, we will just raise taxes. Then you look at our history when we have done that. The growth--the size of the economy have flatlined or they shrank. The total dollars in aren't what you prayed for. I want to do a little bit of hope, and I also want to talk about a couple opportunities. When we get back--I don't know when we come back to basically do this horrible omnibus and all these things whether I will get some floor time to go into more depth. Mr. Speaker, can you share with me my time remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to finish this up in 6 minutes and yield back to you. I need us all to come back and think creatively. If I came to my brothers and sister here who are elected, our staff who are all freaky smart--a lot of them institutionalized, but they are smart. The public, who, if they knew the underlining numbers, their creativity could break us through on the crap we are doing. If I came to you tomorrow, and said, I need ideas that crash the price of healthcare. That for the 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions that are well over 50 percent of our healthcare spending, what do we do to make them less sick--maybe even cure them? What do you do to deal with environmental issues but do it in a way where the economy still grows instead of this model the Democrats have brought us--we are just going to subsidize everyone--and then wonder why the math ultimately blows up on us. There is one opportunity that specifically interests me. I never want to hear another Member basically come behind the microphone and say, We need to regulate this more--or on my side--we need to deregulate this more. Can I beg of us to use the language--why don't we try some smart regulation. Why don't we join this century and use the technology we all walk around with. We all walk around with supercomputers in our pocket. We had the Supreme Court case, it was West Virginia v. EPA, that basically says Congress has been derelict in its duties for years-- decades. Hey, EPA, wink, wink, nod, nod, we want you to do this, but we are not willing to tell our voters what we are willing to do because we are getting lobbied over here, so we are just going to hand over all of our congressional authority, our constitutional authority to a bureaucracy. The Supreme Court said we got to stop doing that. We do it with the EPA, we do it with securities regulations, we do it with everything. Guess what it means? We are going to have to start acting like adults in this body and actually start reading our bills, working on the details, coming up with rational ways to make society safe, healthy, but prosperous. I have a little video out there if someone wants to go look at it, it is Schweikert environmental crowdsourcing on YouTube. It is just the simple concept of--you know there are things that you can attach to this that actually would calculate air quality, you know, PM10 or organics and other things. What would happen if you had a couple thousands of those floating around your community? You would always know what is going on. If you had someone painting cars behind your house, you would catch them immediately. If you had a model like that, do you need the same 1938 command and control system? So I am the motorcycle paint shop--do they really need to file paperwork and fill up file cabinets full of paper because we all know file cabinets full of paper make the air quality cleaner. If you had a crowdsource model of data, the government could say, screw it, we are going to leave you alone and we are just going to get the bad actors. If you are playing by the rules and you are using your scrubbers and playing by the rules, you get left alone; you don't need the permitting model. You can crowdsource the data. You can do this with sound and water and transportation and smart cities. It would crash the size of the bureaucracy--and I know a lot of folks would say, What about all the government unionized workers? This is about getting a productivity bump and then holding that bump long term because even if we can use technology to crash the price of healthcare and we don't get enough growth, I can't make the numbers work. I have a 5-month little boy we are adopting, when he is 25 years old his tax rate will be double all of ours. It is already baked in the cake. It is done. We have already done this to our kids. Corporate tax rates. I don't know why corporations don't have to disclose that their taxes are doubling over the next 25 years. We make them disclose things about potential environmental impairments, why didn't they have to disclose the fact that we are going to be doubling their taxes? It is baked into the cake. Because the whole baseline services that we have promised with our population getting older, everyone's taxes are about to be doubled over the next 25 years unless, of course, you use technology to crash the price and dramatically increase the productivity. This one borders on silly, but it is making a point. The left is absolutely fixated on methane. Okay. Methane is a huge greenhouse gas-- okay, we will give them that. You know, a couple years ago we had to recalculate its half-life. It is down to, what, 8 or 9 years, for those of us who actually geek out on this stuff. And, oh, we need to start shutting down the use of hydrocarbons. We need to start calculating the methane load for any barrel of oil or any Btu of gas. Then there are articles out there saying, you know, there is actually a real cheap, cheap, cheap solution--I am going to be a little silly--I believe it is copper oxidized clay. It is kitty litter. Do you know you can take a well or some other methane production source and it absorbs like a sponge, and it is dirt cheap. You know why? Because it is dirt. How many Members of Congress have you seen here saying, We need to bring the researchers who did this--and their academic studies--bring them here because we want to understand this. Is there a way we could actually be making the environment cleaner, better, faster, and still keep the economy growing? No. They are hell-bent on shutting down the use of hydrocarbons even though there are solutions. Why wouldn't this place expand its intellect and be willing to at least bring in the scientists saying: Wow, you did this study, and it really works. Last week--and I got a little crap for this, and I want to make the point again--we calculate over half a trillion dollars a year in spending for people who don't take their pharmaceuticals properly. I agree. You know, being someone with hypertension, I am working really hard to work out and eat better and see if I can bend it and never have to take a calcium inhibitor or even a statin--that is cholesterol. We know for a fact that if a population were to take their prescriptions--and some of this is true for diabetes and everything else--it is 16 percent of all healthcare spending. What if you could get half that? Right now we estimate the number is probably $520, $530 billion a year in healthcare costs because grandma didn't take her pill, or someone stroked out or those sorts of things--where the pill is pennies. So a pill bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning that costs 99 cents and reminds you to take it has hundreds of billions of dollars of potential impact. Is that difficult? Well, apparently around here that idea is difficult--the lack of science, the lack of math, the lack of basic creativity. And then there is my holy grail. This is truly the holy grail. Truly, I pray to the dear Lord, let what I am reading be true: 33 percent of all America's healthcare spending is diabetes; 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes. Most of that is type 2, it is not type 1. Type 2 in many ways has a lot to it and it is ultimately an autoimmune, but it is partially self-inflicted. Is this body willing to have one of the most difficult political debates and conversations it has ever considered in modern times? Are we willing to change the farm bill? Are we willing to change the incentives of what we incentivize our brothers and sisters to eat? Are we willing to incentivize our brothers and sisters to be healthy? You all saw the numbers of the misery this place brought to the Nation with the shutdowns and how many of the ZIP Codes around this country have doubled their obesity numbers. Why this is important is apparently we have been on the cusp--we have had a handful of people who look like they have been cured of type 1 diabetes--it is less than a year, maybe it ultimately doesn't work, but this is a big deal. Why aren't we working on it? Why aren't we? Because if it is 31 percent of all Medicare spending, and we were able to help our brothers and sisters who are getting their feet cut off and going blind, wouldn't that be the compassionate thing? Wouldn't that be the moral thing instead of this damn conversation we have here? ``Well, let's build more clinics so people can manage their misery.'' I beg of you, if we are on the edge of a cure for--you saw last week it finally got approved--hemophilia, got a single-shot cure, really expensive. Work out the financing. Cystic fibrosis, we may be on the cusp. Sickle cell anemia--why doesn't this place seem to give a damn about people's misery and suffering? By the way, they are part of the 50 percent that is also really good economics. I ask anyone that is watching this, think differently. Curing our brothers and sisters, fixating on economic growth, crashing the price of technology by legalizing technology, is the only path I can come up with that saves us from the crushing debt. The fact of the matter is, if you look at the models, it means the next couple of decades could be really prosperous. I just need this place to act very differently. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. No, no, no. This is one, it is a little more ethereal, but it is in the field. It is being tested right now. I am not going to do the whole thing about a C4 plant and a C3 plant. Remember your high school biology class. But what would happen in a world--I am sorry, this slide is a little old, so it is a little beaten on. How do you get the Agriculture Committee to have an honest conversation saying, you do realize there is about to be a revolution in food? This whole thing called synthetic biology: They basically figured out how to take a plant--our high school biology plant--the plant really, really wants a carbon molecule so it turns it into a sugar so it can grow. It accidentally grabs an oxygen. It doesn't need the oxygen, so it has to spend all this energy getting rid of the oxygen so it gets a carbon so it can grow. What happens if the plant every time got a carbon molecule? In some plants you could have a 40 percent improvement in growth; dramatically less water; dramatically less land needed; dramatically less fertilizer. This is being tested right now, I think it is University of Illinois. It is out there. How much discussion have we had that there is a revolution coming in agriculture? And it would be incredibly productive. It would be incredibly disruptive because, what happens in agriculture land if, all of a sudden, I have crops that grow dramatically more efficiently? But it would also be amazing for the environment. At 40 percent production improvement--which you are not going to get, but if you did, theoretically--in world agriculture, you do realize that would be like removing every car off the face of the Earth. How many hearings have we had on is this coming, is this feasible? No, because that would require thinking, something we just don't do here. The other thing I am going to give you is just a conceptual idea, and if anyone is crazy enough, go on YouTube, Schweikert Environmental Crowdsourcing. Five, 6 years ago, I did a little YouTube cartoon. It is like 90 seconds, with this concept, you could actually attach a little environmental sensor to the bottom of this. How about if in your community you had a couple of thousand people driving around with a little environmental sensor saying, hey, we are keeping an eye on the air quality. Hey, it is spouting off. I have some clowns over here painting cars in the back of their house, but the motorcycle paint shop over here that has its filters, it is not setting the alarm off. Leave them alone. What would happen if your environmental data was living data? You wouldn't need people to go fill out paperwork. You don't need an inspector. Do file cabinets full of paper make the environment cleaner? They don't, they just build bureaucracy. What makes the environment cleaner is knowing when someone has done something stupid and stopping them. Crowdsourcing. The data is living. Use a living data model. And guess what? You can do that for water, for sound; you can actually do it for health. You can do it for all sorts of things. How many hearings has this place had to discuss dragging our regulatory environment; and it is not deregulating, it is smart regulating. Make us more efficient. It turns out, the data says that we would be healthier, cleaner, faster, and you would get the bad guys, and you could build a model where you just leave the good actors alone. If you are the motorcycle paint shop, and your filters are working, and your booth is working, why should you be bothered? Just leave them alone; and if they screw up, a crowdsourced environmental sensor model will catch them instantly. You would be amazed the pushback you get because, well, we are a consulting firm. You just put us out of business. Hey, I work for the group. I shove paperwork in the file cabinets. Why do you want to unemploy me? We are going to have to have the discussion if we intend to survive, where we are going population-wise, debt-wise. Remember, functionally, in 10 years, we have two $1 trillion running deficits, and it is demographics. It is trying to pay for healthcare. We have got to have the growth, and we have got to have the technology disruption and healthcare, or we are in for some very dark times. The fact of the matter is, we could have incredibly prosperous times for the future. But that prosperity is only going to come if I, and you, and the people who are willing to listen to this are willing to pound on Members of Congress and our staff and the lobbying communities and our creative thinkers out there and say, okay, guys. There is hope out there. There is hope. We just need to be willing to think differently and embrace the disruption and embrace an economy that actually starts to do good things for our people, instead of basically being a protection racket for incumbent models. It is uncomfortable, but there is hope. But there is no hope if we keep doing the same thing. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for letting me do this. We are finding the only way it is going to sink in is if I keep coming and giving more and more examples that there is hope if we just do things differently. So I thank the gentleman for giving me some of his time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We make it illegal.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. But you think about this; if I really cared about that community--and you see where this ties in, this is back to that unified theory. I believe much of my healthcare I can use technology, but I need access to the broadband. But I am going to wait for the wire to show up because that is incredibly inefficient. But I do have an option right now where something like the Starlink satellites, I could actually put up a little oval-shaped dish so they have the broadband, so they can use the healthcare technology, let alone the education technology and the other things. I need you to see this as a unified theory. But, instead, we are going to take that tax that is on your cell phone bill, hand it out to companies, and then we are going to wait another decade for that wire to get out; and it never gets there, when they already have access to broadband. This could be urban, too. The technologies exist. So let me go to crazy town.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. When I had my midlife crisis, I didn't want a new wife or a Porsche, I just wanted a long-bed pickup truck; and mine is 10 years old.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. What is yours? I drive a long-bed pickup truck.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, you got to admit, a lot of people love Representative Keller. It has been fun, actually, watching them come up to the microphone and say actually sweet things about him. But the best thing is his granddaughter, my little girl just loves playing with her. That is something I do hope this body does more of in the future--our kids. In the last couple of years they haven't been here. Before the pandemic, we would look out and people would have their families here. I will tell you, that helped in the relationships. My little girl would go and jump on Maxine Waters' lap because she loved her necklace. I still have a great picture of that. Until this day, every time I see Ms. Waters she asks about my little girl. In some ways, it is those family units and how you build human relations in this body. Just a thought for what is left of the majority and those things. We need to sort of think about the things that bind us together once again as people. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Keller giving me a little bit of time here. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons we are doing this is we have been trying to do a series of presentations, and I keep being fussed at that I should do them shorter because we are trying to throw out lots of ideas. For the last year, I have been coming behind the microphone and walking through just how terrified I am, and how terrified I believe all of us should be, on what is going on in the numbers. We are going to do the routine again. The beauty here is there is hope, and I am going to keep bringing ideas that do a couple things. Number one: Make us freer, healthier, wealthier, but also show a path that we can grow, and we don't have to be crushed by the coming debt. Let's sort of walk through some of this. We always start with this slide because this one really bothers everyone. This one makes everyone angry and it is the math. Today, we have $31 trillion of debt. In the next 30 years we add $114 trillion of borrowing. Every dime of that $114 trillion that is coming, 75 percent of it is Medicare, 25 percent is Social Security. The rest of the budget actually has a positive balance. We got old. Is the graying of America Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is just demographics; it is what we are. The unwillingness to deal with the reality that if you want to save the country--if you do not want my 5-month-old little boy that we are adopting, my 7-year-old little girl that plays together with others, if you want to save their future--do understand, today, 25 years from now we have to double their tax rates; we have to double your tax rates; we have to double corporations' tax rates just to maintain the baseline spending, and that is still with us going to like 140 percent of debt to GDP. Do we understand how bad the numbers are? It is demographics. So what do you do? I am trying to pitch sort of a unified theory for us to think about. I am sorry this upsets people, but the math will always win. Instead of the craziness that goes on around here with where ``I got my feelings hurt,'' maybe the most powerful thing we can do is demonstrate we give a damn. Growth is moral. Growth helps Democrats and Republicans, it helps poor people, it gives opportunity to the middle class. It is good for all of us. We are trying to say, okay, I have been spending lots of time behind the microphone talking about technology that can crash the price of healthcare. We are going to do a little more of that today. But I am going to also talk about other ways we can do regulation that keeps us still healthy and safe but is much less bureaucratic and much faster. I am going to come back in the next couple weeks, if we get time, and talk about revolutionizing the tax system that incentivizes us to make things in America instead of functionally a tax system that incentivizes us to buy things made in other parts of the world because that is what we have today. We are going to also talk about immigration--it is really uncomfortable to talk about, you are going to have to decide as a society: Do we keep the open borders that I have in Arizona where we functionally have a mass poverty movement into the United States? Or do we move to a system that maximizes economic growth? You have got to decide, if you want us to have the money to be able to pay for Medicare, I have to have the economic growth. Then the other thing is, what do we do to incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor market? You just became 65. Are there things that we could do in a spiff on your Social Security, so you stay in the labor market? How about if we let you keep your half of the FICA? What can we do? There is a crazy piece of math out there for under 35, particularly males--they are not participating--there are numbers of them who have disappeared from the labor markets. This makes some of the math really difficult if you are trying to grow because it is not enough to have the disruption in the cost of the healthcare, if on the same side over here we don't have the economic growth. Mr. Speaker, I am going to run through these fairly quickly because I want to keep the theme going. I am going to be dogged about this because we are going to save this country. We need to think a little bit differently because right now we are still having the same debates that we were having in the 1990s on this floor. Last night, I mentioned this. Tonight, I thought I would bring the board with me. What would happen if I came to you tomorrow, and said: Hey, there is this thing that looks like a kazoo, and you blow in it and it almost instantly tells you you have a virus. It instantly bounces off your medical records. It instantly could order your antiviral. Oh, and by the way, the newest versions look like they can detect about 25 different dead cancer proteins. Wouldn't that be really good for our constituents? Wouldn't that be-- the ability for that hardworking family, that working mom, to not try to find a way to take the day off from work, to be able to organize the kids, to find out if she can go into an urgent care center, but functionally have a breath biopsy in her medicine cabinet? I will argue that it is both moral, it is faster, it is healthier, and it crashes the price of healthcare. This body keeps that type of technology illegal. It is something that would save so much time for the working people in this country, and we keep it illegal because this place is so much like a protection racket. It is not utopian, there are a dozen different versions, and it exists. Much of it has already made it through the FDA. Our problem is we don't reimburse it and we don't make it legal so it can write the script. If you don't reduce the cost, you can't do marginal--I have some people come in here and say, well, we have an idea. We can remove 2 or 3 percent out of healthcare costs if we do this. We had 16 percent healthcare inflation in many of our markets so far this year. Great, we can find a 1 or 2 percent rounding error. Do you understand how much trouble we are in? Your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. It is going to be an insurance company where the insurance side is going to start consuming every dollar and the army is going to have to get smaller. It is demographics. It is the reality where we are. Why wouldn't this body take an experiment and say let's make it legal. If you can find insurance, if the manufacturer can find insurance for it, FDA approves it, why wouldn't we let this write a script? There are dozens and dozens and dozens of these things. For those of that walk around with these smartwatches or your fancy supercomputer in your pocket, the fact of the matter is, we should be using every piece of technology to crash the price of healthcare. Last night, I came and showed some slides about a path, and who knows, maybe it doesn't work. But there might be a path for a cure for diabetes. Diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending. It may be the leading contributor to income inequality. You go, huh? Look at the data. Look at my data sets of who is suffering, who is going blind, who is having their feet cut off. I represent a tribal community with the second highest per capita diabetes in the world. Is it moral not for us to go and throw every smart idea and sometimes the resources we need to cure it? Wouldn't that be more moral than this crazy ass argument of, hey, let's go build more clinics so we can help people manage their misery, because that is what we do here. We are better than this. Well, no, we are not better than this, but we could be. So let's go a little further down the crazy line of, what do you do to grow the economy? So think about what we did last week. We are going to stop this strike because we are going to fight for the way we move goods out of the port and put them on trucks and then put them on a rail car and move it over here. Yes, we have all the environmental issues of, yes, it is really dirty, it is really filthy. Oh, but the Democrats in their inflation reduction--crazy name for what the bill actually did--bill, made it so if they are going to take the green money, they can't actually do certain innovation; they can't automate because they have to protect all their longshoremen union folks because that is who writes them checks. So in one hand, we give great lip service; we have got to fix the supply chain; we have got to get greener in the economy. And then they make it illegal. It is in your legislation. You did it. Yet, at the same time, we have brilliant innovators--and these things aren't Republican, they are just the next generation of innovation--of autonomous rail platforms. You take the container off; you put it on the platform. You hit the button and you say, go to the spur over here and dump this at the warehouse. Go take this and put at the manufacturing facility. It is electric. The environmental load is dramatically cleaner. It would be a revolution of efficiency. We keep saying, well, we have got to fix the supply chain. Well, damn it, you made parts of fixing the supply chain illegal. Why does this place act like a barrier, a protection barrier of allowing innovation in the economy? We do this over and over and over. Most of the Members don't know it is happening. But we have functionally made that disruption that grows the economy, that if we don't have that growth, we are absolutely--we are in real trouble. Go ahead.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. How many times--and you have some of this in your district--will we get the lobbyists and the folks come in--and this has been going on for 30 years, so this is sort of one of the running joke scams around here. We need money for rural broadband. We do. I have--well, communities in Arizona--I don't represent them--they have been waiting 20 years for that line to get out to the chapter house on the Navajo reservation. The fact of the matter is every inch of this country actually has broadband right now. They just happen to be satellites. We have what, five companies? A couple of them already have most of the satellites up.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Excellent. Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is part of what we are talking about: Legalize the technology that will make our lives easier, better, faster, raise accessibility, and, yes, it is going to cause a disruption. If you are an investor in the urgent care system, you may not like telemedicine. You may not like these things. But how many of us used to go to Blockbuster Video, stand in line, and have the nice person hand us a suggestion on a movie because the one we really wanted wasn't there? If they had hired enough lobbyists, would this place have slowed down the internet to keep Netflix? I need you to think this way, and this is what I am asking anyone that is viewing. It is the reality of it, when you looked at that first slide, and we talked about trillions and trillions of that coming from just the shortfall in Medicare. If this were 20 years ago or 25 years ago, you would have this debate with the left or the right. Well, we are going to do entitlement reform. No, we are not. Does anyone remember the experience that this body had back in the early 2000s when someone was willing to talk about trying to save Social Security back then, and it became political ads, fundraising? The math was true, but the politics were great to destroy then George Bush and the people that were willing to tell the truth about the math. This place will pay lip service, but it is not going to happen. The path I am proposing is embracing what we have gotten really good at in this country. I mean, this is a supercomputer. Think of the power that is in this thing. Yes, it is an iPhone. It is expensive. But it is--what?--10,000 times more powerful than the old IBM PC I used to have. Take that concept, and what would happen if we would legalize technology to crash the price of healthcare? What is one of the biggest drivers of healthcare costs in the country? The number one? It is a little uncomfortable to talk about. It is diabetes. The fact of the matter is 31 percent of all Medicare--Medicare, not Medicaid--Medicare spending is related to diabetes, and 33 percent of all healthcare spending is related to diabetes. It is crazy. I represent a Tribal community that is actually pretty well off. They are incredibly well-managed, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Tribal community right alongside Scottsdale, and they have gaming, sports, and all sorts of other things. They are very good at what they do, and they are the second highest per capita population, I think, in the world for diabetes. Their sister Tribe, Gila River, is number one. Is it moral if I came to you right now and said, there is a path, and yes, it might not ultimately work, but there is a path out there of a stem cell treatment working with CRISPR where they have tagged it so you don't need antirejection drugs? Yes, it is type 1, but there is a proof of concept that is starting to work where they have actually had a handful of Americans who they have been able to transfer the stem cells, and their islet cells are now producing insulin. Remember, I just told you 33 percent of all healthcare spending is 31 percent of all Medicare. It would be the single biggest thing you could do for debt. It would also be one of the most moral things you could do for our brothers and sisters who are out there suffering, who are going blind and losing parts of their feet. There is math out there that health may be one of the primary drivers of income inequality in society. You can't work if you have a family member who you are having to take care of because disease is ravaging them. This is forcing the body to think differently, that if a cure is moral, but it is also really good economics and would help us take on the primary driver of our future debt with healthcare, why wouldn't you fixate on that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters that have chronic conditions that are over 50 percent of all healthcare spending? The 31 percent that is actually Medicare, that is just diabetes. How about a Moonshot? If I came to you right now and said they are having some success, why can't we bring these? I have been trying now, under Democrat control for a couple of years, and look. Being in the minority, we basically get told to go to hell. I will talk to my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side, and they say that is amazing but don't believe it. Shouldn't we go out and build a bunch more diabetes centers? Great. You are going to help people manage their misery. How about curing it? Isn't this the moral thing to do? By the way, it would be the single most powerful thing you could do for U.S. sovereign debt and my 5-month-old's economic future and your retirement. This is just a taste of the disruptive ideas we are going to try to bring here over the next handful of times I get in front of the floor. There is hope, but this body needs to start thinking that we care. This body needs to start acting like we give a damn. Instead, we spend so much time doing theater. Look, I care a lot about what is on Hunter Biden's laptop. Well, not really. I do care about the media hiding it and screwing with our elections. That is important. They mentioned at the end of the decade or so we are going to have $2 million a year deficit and it goes up from there. You have got to decide: Are you going to save the Republic? Are you going to embrace the morality of the prosperity? Start understanding the science, the synthetic biology, the opportunities around us where we can cure people. Because I am going to argue that finding a path, whether it be the single shot cure that is now available for hemophilia, which is really expensive, but it cures hemophilia. Now, we should probably come together as a body and say, hey, why don't we work out a financing mechanism so we can use the future savings to pay for the purchase of the drug today? Because wouldn't that be the moral thing to do. And, oh, by the way, it gets rid of that chronic condition. Sickle cell anemia, we are so close. There are so many things out there where--we talk about the lack of productivity in society. What would happen if we cured so many of our brothers and sisters so that they are able to participate in the economics? Part of this closing here--we are going to talk about sort of the unified theory to save the country. Part of that unified theory--this is the economics--is embracing the technology. And yes, disruption is scary and it may mess up your business model, but it is moral. Talking about immigration--really hard--but the fact of the matter is, importing poverty by open borders crushes the working poor because now that is who they are competing with. We need talent. With the fertility rates all across the western world, in the next couple decades there is going to be a fight for smart people. Over here is a tax code that fixates on growth. Maybe it is time to stop subsidizing, importing stuff from other countries, and functionally taxing ourselves to send things out of the country. You realize, we functionally crush ourselves in the way we design our tax code today? Why wouldn't you flip that, so you incentivize? Make it here. The other thing is regulatory. If I came to you tomorrow and said you could crowdsource air quality, you don't need buildings full of paperwork shoved in file cabinets. You could make the air cleaner, better, faster. Things like what happened to the water in Detroit or other places-- actually it wasn't Detroit. Sorry, I am from out West--but the little thing that you are able to sample your water or the thing you can put on your lapel. Madam Speaker, I am going to beg of us, and I am going to bring boards talking about there is technology around us where we can crush the size of the bureaucracy to get cleaner, better, faster, healthier, and grow. And the growth is moral and the growth gives us a path to not be crushed by the debt that is coming with that. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, forgive me as I get myself somewhat organized as is the chaos when you use lots of boards. Madam Speaker, we are going to sort of do something in sort of a continuation on a theme. A couple weeks ago, I was behind the microphones here, and it is something I have done a lot, and I walked through just how much trouble we are in as a society. The debt is coming, and it turns out that debt is not Democrat or Republican, it is demographics; we got old. But before I start to walk through what I believe is the thought process of the solutions that actually can save us, I am going to ask some favors of anyone who is crazy enough to give us time to watch some of this. I actually do read the comments when these things are put out on social media. When you look around the room, there is almost no one here, but we are on several hundred televisions right now around the campus. Right now in offices in the buildings there are young people working on policy papers who have this on their screen. This is part of the way we communicate with each other. There is a purpose. The second thing I am going to ask, as I start to walk through these ideas, is open your minds. Some of these will offend Republicans. Some are going to offend Democrats. But the math, the math is true. And the family motto: ``The math will always win.'' There is hope out there, but every single day this place continues to operate like a clown show. And I am sorry, that was very mean to clowns. Being sarcastic and being mean, the scale of what is coming at us and the immorality of not dealing with it terrifies me. So we are going to do a quick recap. The next 30 years--and these are last year's CBO numbers, this is before inflation has been calculated in--we functionally have, and the newest one was 114, this one is $116 trillion of borrowed money coming. That is in today's dollars. So think about that. On this board we are going to borrow $116 trillion or $114 trillion. We have about $1.9 trillion--we are in the positive. So where is all the borrowing coming from? Every dime of borrowing over the next 30 years, 75 percent of it is Medicare, 25 is a shortfall in Social Security. That is immoral. But it is math. We got old. Baby boomers started retiring. It is math. How many conversations have happened on the floor today saying: Hey, this is going to drive all public policy because it is going to consume every dollar? This is the reality. Madam Speaker, we are in the process of adopting a little boy right now. He is 5 months old. He has been with us since his first few days of life. It is a joy. When he turns 25, we have to double--his tax rate will have to have doubled what we all pay, and that is just to maintain the baseline of services. So if you think about where you are going to be 20 years from now, Madam Speaker, 25 years from now, are you ready to pay double the taxes? We make businesses actually do disclosures now saying: Well, global warming, environmental change, you should have to disclose that. Damn it, should those same businesses have to disclose the fact that their tax rates are doubling over the next couple of decades? It is baked in the cake. It is this math. Unless you have a revolution in two areas: crashing the cost of healthcare and economic growth. And growth is moral. Think about the end of 2017, 2018, and 2019 when the poor got dramatically less poor, the middle class got much more prosperous, and income inequality shrank dramatically. It is moral. In this place we are going to fight over the stupidest things because it is easy to understand, it is theatrical, and I have $100-plus trillion of crushing debt coming on top of the $31 trillion already out there, and that is going to crush all of you. If you think you are retiring, Madam Speaker, if you think my little boy or my 7-year-old girl, when they hit their peak earning years, are going to live more prosperous than we do, then we need to engage in some sort thought revolution, and that is what I am asking everyone to give me. I am going to do this in a couple of series, so this is going to be over a couple of nights. But I also need you to understand how dangerous it is. Debt markets are smart. Those debt markets out there where we are having to borrow trillions see Congress is actually starting to take this stuff seriously, we will be benefited by the price of money into the future. Right now they don't think we are taking it seriously. Do understand, Madam Speaker, if interest rates on U.S. sovereign debt go up 2 points--my math says about 25 years, this board was actually originally off a print that said 30 years--then every single dime of U.S. tax receipts goes just to cover interest. We need to take a step back and think about that. We are piling on so much debt, and the curve expands. In about a decade, we are running into almost structural $2-trillion-a-year deficits, and it gets bigger from there. It is demographics. Almost every dime of that borrowing--75 percent will be Medicare and 25 percent will be Social Security--yet around here we will beat the crap out of each other for even mentioning Social Security and Medicare. But to save it is to actually understand the math. What would happen if we don't convince debt markets that we are going to take this debt seriously? The CBO model that was a year ago was, hey, the mean interest rate on U.S. sovereigns is going to be like 1.78. Now it is like 2.8. But if it remained around 4, you do realize, Madam Speaker, in two decades every dime just goes to interest. This is what we are handing to our kids. So I also need to crush some of the stupidity out there. I accept the political class in our campaigns and those things, there has been a certain lack of truthfulness. Democrats will say: Well, let's tax rich people. Do you realize, Madam Speaker, if you took every billionaire in America and took every dime they had--every dime, and the price of their yachts didn't crash--if you took every dime, then you could run the government for maybe 7\1/2\ months. Now, you would crash us into a massive depression. The scale of this spending and the debt is just ginormous. I love that word. But also for us on the conservative side, we often have our people who get behind the microphone and say: If we got rid of foreign aid; get rid of every dime of foreign aid. Last year I think foreign aid is about $38 billion. Let's see, last year we were borrowing $26 billion, $26,444,000,000 every week. So get rid of every dime of foreign aid, that is what, 10\1/2\, 11 days? What are you going to do with the rest of the year? Think of that. Every dime of foreign aid, maybe 11, 12 days of borrowing; and remember, our borrowing is going to double functionally over the next 10 years. We need to tell the truth about the scale. So if I get one more person on my side saying: Well, if we got rid of waste and fraud or foreign aid; or they say: Just tax the rich people more--the math doesn't work. It is great campaign rhetoric and looks good in a brochure. So you saw in the first chart we have $114 trillion of borrowing, and that is last year's number before inflation coming. There are solutions. So let's actually start to be optimistic because there is hope. But we first also have to have that moment of reality. Stop talking about things that are rounding errors. We should still do some of them, like price transparency. Many of us on the Republican side believe very much that you should know what the price of everything in healthcare is. Great. Let's do it. But the best academic study says: Well, maybe about 1 percent, 0.1 to 0.7 is what the academic studies said if you have price transparency because we have the third-party payer system. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. But don't think it makes that big of a deal in a society while I have healthcare markets around the United States that just had 16 percent inflation. Think of that. The healthcare costs in some of these markets went up 16 percent. Madam Speaker, if you want to see a lot of detail, go to Brian Riddell's charts, Manhattan Institute. This is one of them. It talks about all the different ideas, both particularly from the right and mostly from left: If we did this sort of tax, then here is how much more tax we get over a decade of GDP. When you start to add it up, then you start to realize that none of these get you even close. If you double the tax rate, take people and move them from 35 to 50 to 60 to 70 percent tax rate, then you don't get anything. And that is without an attempt to do the economic effects because there is a math reality that those ones in the tax world--I am on the Committee of Ways and Means--and it is for 100-plus years. When we lower taxes, we basically seem to get about that 18, 19 percent of GDP, the size of the economy, in taxes. When we have raised taxes in the United States, you seem to get about that 18 or 19 percent of GDP in taxes. It is math, and you have got lots of history on this. So when you have raised taxes, we are still getting this size, much of the economy, but the economy gets smaller. When you have lower taxes, the economy gets bigger, and you get this percentage. It turns out that right now we are getting almost $1 trillion more in receipts, revenues, and taxes than we were getting just a couple of years ago. A lot of that is based on the growth that came after tax reform. A lot of it was the amazing amount of government spending here that we had some of that stimulus that we are going to take some taxes in on money we put out; we still have to borrow the money, so we are screwed from that--sorry, an economic term. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of the folks who predicted: Oh, revenues are going to crash. They didn't. Society got much more productive. Expensing turns out to be most valuable thing in tax reform because it forced us to do investment and growth. At one point we will talk about that. So let's talk about right now the primary driver of U.S. debt over the next 30 years. Some reality: 5 percent of our brothers and sisters are over 50 percent of all of our healthcare spending. Now, these are our friends, our neighbors, and our family members who have multiple chronic conditions. The majority of healthcare spending comes through government. The majority of this population is getting their healthcare through government. If this is the primary driver of costs in our society and the primary driver of debt, wouldn't we think about what we can do about that 5 percent of our society that is out there suffering? It is worth thinking about. So if I came to you right now, Madam Speaker, and said: Let our ideas we have out there that are doable in divided government that won't scare people too much or won't bring the armies of lobbyists down saying: Oh, we are screwing up their business model, but also have that morality of actually potentially working and doing something good--I am going to start with something really simple and then get more complicated--what would happen, Madam Speaker, if I came to all of us and said: Did you know that it is estimated that 16 percent of all healthcare spending is people just not taking their meds? So I have hypertension. I take a calcium inhibitor. I don't stroke out, and it is a really, really, cheap, cheap pill. As long as you take it, it is incredibly effective. Madam Speaker, how many people do you know who take statins for their cholesterol? There are drug regimens where if you take them and take them according to the prescription, you are healthy, and you are safe. But when you don't, you stroke out, and that costs hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It turns out that is 16 percent of all healthcare spending. You do realize that is over a half a trillion dollars a year in healthcare spending. So why wouldn't we have a conversation around this place and say: Okay, we all walk around with these little supercomputers in our pocket, we have seen these studies now saying that people not adhering to their pharmaceutical regimen to stay stable is over 16 percent of healthcare spending, why wouldn't you do something silly like a solution? It turns out that they have pill bottle caps that beep at you if you don't open them in the morning. When you are really busy running around saying, oh, I forgot to take my calcium inhibitor for my hypertension, the thing is beeping at you. The other ones also will beep at your phone. I know this sounds silly, but could you imagine, instead of 16 percent of healthcare being the cost of people having not maintained theirs, we cut it in half? That is $250 billion, $300 billion a year, and it would have been what, a $0.99 to $2 pill bottle cap that beeps at you, or the one that dispenses for grandma her mixture of pills that she is having trouble remembering. We are walking through simple ideas that could pass here. Why wouldn't we have this discussion? There are other derivatives and discussions that make people uncomfortable, like for high-priced medicines. Put them in sterile packaging so if someone passes away, they can go back to the health co-op or whatever is out there and reuse them. There are all sorts of these ideas. Think about something as simple as this. This is half a trillion dollars a year. For something you need, why wouldn't we invest and say, hey, put the pill bottle cap on that beeps at you if you don't open it in the morning? Is this simple enough conceptually? There are ideas like this that have massive dollar impacts, and we never even discuss them because they are simple to absorb. I have been here multiple times and talked about the item you can blow into. In our office, we have nicknamed it the flu kazoo because that was cute, people got it, but it is a breath biopsy. I showed it, I think, a couple of weeks ago on the floor, that there are all things where you can functionally have a medical lab in your home medicine cabinet. But here is the disruption. This is what makes so many people angry. If I brought you something right now, for a couple hundred dollars, you could have it in your home medicine cabinet. You could blow into it and instantly tell you if you have the flu, instantly bang off your medical records, instantly order your antiviral, and Lyft or Uber could drop it off at your house in 2 hours. Wouldn't you like that? For everyone here who talks about accessibility, remember, I just talked about having a little person at home. It is a lot easier to blow into that thing for the breath biopsy and get the prescription delivered than it is to go wait in an emergency room or try to get that doctor's appointment. Believe it or not, that technology is illegal. The way our laws are set up right now, that disruptive technology is illegal. It is crazy. Why wouldn't you allow that algorithm that statistically is more accurate than a human to write a prescription? Would it make your life better? Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, Ron is one of the good guys. For those of us who are blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee, many times it is one of those committees where you have to do adult stuff that affects not only this country but the world. Having people that you can talk to and work it through with is important. Ron is going to be missed. I thank him for being one of the good guys. Madam Speaker, this is going to be sort of a two-parter. I am going to come back in 2 weeks and provide solutions, but right now I need to define the problem. As you know, right now around the Capitol complex, we have dozens and dozens of brand-new Members and hundreds of potentially new staffers. They are all trying to find their office and which way is up and where the bathrooms are; I mean, all the things we go through when we are brand-new around here. My fear is no one is telling these Members that are new--and even talking to the Members who have been here a while--the truth. The truth is the math, and the math always wins. We are in real trouble. What scares me is with some of the things going on in the economy right now, with where interest rates look like they are going, with inflation now becoming structural, it is potentially just devastating to the individuals out there, our brothers and sisters in the country, just the affordability, being able to afford a house, food, but you have got to understand what it also means to the stability of this country. Let's actually walk through it. Some of this is big-boy math, it is going to be complex, but there are a couple punch lines in here I want to be remembered. I am not going to take you back to 1965, but let's do last year. This is last year's budget cycle. Understand, over 71 percent of all of our spending is on autopilot. The fact of the matter is this is what we call mandatory. Only 13 percent was defense, 16 percent was discretionary, what we functionally debate here which we really fight over. But this mandatory here, you see red, your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. This is health, Medicare, Social Security, other benefits, pensions for military, for government workers, those sorts of things. This is mandatory. And it is on autopilot. I don't think there is a Member here who has ever ultimately voted on this red portion. It is a formula. You turn 65, you get certain benefits. You serve in the military a certain amount of time, you get certain benefits. It is autopilot. Defense, well, that we debate, we work through, but the fact of the matter is defense sort of stays within a certain mean of the GDP. And then domestic. The crazy thing, domestic, actually, as a percentage of GDP, at the end of a decade will be flat. So where is all this debt coming from? Where is all this growth coming from? I am going to give you an answer, and it is going to make people really unhappy. You need to understand, when we talk about just last year's borrowing, does anyone out there understand how big it was? Okay. So we borrowed, functionally, $1.375 trillion. How much is that? It is $114 billion a month. It is $26 billion a week. It is $3.7 billion a day. It is $159 million an hour. It is $2.6 million a minute. We are told with big numbers, how do you get it so it is understandable? If I came to you right now and said to you, how much last year did your government borrow every second? Anyone in this body able to answer that? It turns out it was $43,600 a second. We borrowed $43,600 every second last year. Does anyone see a problem? Or is it one of those things that as long as we are handing out goodies and subsidizing the folks who will vote for us or contribute to us, the world is good? Where is all this debt coming from? Brian Riedl, Manhattan Institute, basically just put out a series of slides where they take the Congressional Budget Office, the OMB office from the administration, and sort of look at it and say, what is driving the debt? Today we hold $31 trillion of total debt. That is borrowing from trust funds and everything, but that is the total debt. But from today for the next 30 years, based on a previous interest rate calculation--so we haven't even plugged in the new higher interest rates that we are borrowing money on--anyone want to guess what the borrowing is from today to the future, how much money? We are going to borrow, functionally, $114 trillion. There is a $114 trillion shortfall. Now, the interesting thing--remember on that previous slide, I was saying, here is mandatory, here is discretionary. Well, it turns out the discretionary military we calculate today to actually have about a $1.9 trillion surplus over the next 30 years. So where is $114 trillion of borrowing coming from? This is really uncomfortable. I will tell you, I believe the Democrats did something actually really crappy during the election, but it is a knife fight. I accept the knives come out, it is all about winning. But when you had campaigns out there--``They are going to cut your Medicare''--you can't even have an honest conversation here what is going on. The shortfall in Medicare, when you add in the interest cost, is $80 trillion. The shortfall in Social Security is $35.8 trillion. The entire borrowing over the next 30 years is Social Security and Medicare. We got old. The fact of the matter is this place didn't pay any attention. There was this thing called baby boomers. You get the clown show around here that says, well, we will do Medicare for All. That is a financing bill. It had nothing to do with what we pay. ObamaCare, that is a financing bill; who gets subsidized, who has to pay. The Republican alternative was ultimately a financing bill. You need a revolution in what we pay, not who pays it. But that is actually more uncomfortable here than actually having a debate over raising taxes or doing entitlement reform, an actual discussion of should we legalize technology, should we legalize the things that actually create disruptions in providing our brothers and sisters the healthcare that we as a society made a deal? We are going to keep our promise on Social Security and Medicare. Well, I think we are. I mean, the fact of the matter is, what is it now? In a decade, because of the new COLA increase, we just shortened the lifespan of the Social Security trust fund by, what?, almost a year. So you have a little bit over a decade, and our brothers and sisters who live on Social Security are heading toward a 25 percent cut. What is this place going to do? Medicare is just unsustainable. The stunning amount to finance our brothers and sisters, our promise for those who turn 65 and get Medicare, to finance it, basically consumes every dollar of this government. It is math. It is the reality. How many of you during this last campaign had an honest debate, honest conversation, anyone who was even willing to talk about this? Really dangerous because the other side will run nasty ads about you to scare people, yet by not dealing with it, you are sentencing our seniors to misery because at some point this hits the wall. So what is going on? Why am I even more dour right now than I was several months ago? It is inflation, it is the cost of everything. It is the affordability in our society. But you are crushing people. We are going to walk through a little bit of that. But you have got to understand--I am sorry, I am going to geek out on interest rates for a moment, but then I am going to try to show what it actually means to everyone in this country. What we are doing to you and so many of our brothers and sisters out there, you don't understand how--oh, I am sorry, it is a sort of high-level, technical, economic term--how screwed you are. Let's sort of walk through this. We were building budgets a year ago on an assumption that U.S. sovereign debt when you did the 2-year, the 5-year, the 10-year, the 20-year, the 30-year, the blended interest rate, the weighted daily average, it was all these fun calculations. Actually really interesting stuff. We were originally about 1.78 we thought would be our mean interest rate. Then last--what was it, was this March or May?--March we recalculated because of this thing called inflation. Oh, we are going to be up to 2.10. Then the reality of it is that we ended up at a recalculation of, hey, the U.S. mean now is heading toward 2.85. That is on the 10-year. We have some economists around us who are starting to say, it is going higher; it is going higher. I am going to show you a couple things here of what happens to us as a country if the way the Federal Reserve has to stop inflation is raising, raising, raising interest rates, breaking the labor market because you understand within there, even though there is this delay effect, that also means what you and I have to pay the interest back on all the borrowing, and the biggest part of the borrowing cycle has not even hit us yet because we are just now starting to absorb and get ready for the huge spike in costs because of our demographics. Remember, baby boomers, the final tail end of the baby boomers is moving into their retirement benefits, and as they get slightly older and a little bit older, a little bit older, the Medicare costs start to really go up, and we haven't even hit that financing cycle. It is coming. What happens if we have to finance that at the higher interest rates? You start looking at some of this. Three months T-bill back in March was 0.2. That was our Biden administration estimate for the 3-year. The actual 3-year right now is 1.75. Let's see, what is the difference between a 0.2 and a 1.75? Can anyone say ``a whole lot''? This may not mean much to you, but this is money your taxes are going to be paying back. Here is the punch line. I am going to make it really simple. What if this inflationary cycle stuck with us? What if instead of that, what was it, 1.78 or even the 2.3 percent interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt, what if it were 2 points higher, just 2 percent higher? Fifteen years ago, that is where we were at. Remember, we actually had a reprieve, a completely fake economic reprieve for a decade with artificially low interest rates. We were borrowing, and the Federal Reserve kept interest rates lower, particularly since 2008. Now, we are about to pay the cost of it. What would happen if we paid that 2 percent higher? Functionally--and my math is a little bit less--the end of 30 years, 100 percent of all tax receipts, of all taxes, all tariffs, all everything that comes into the government, 100 percent goes just to pay interest. You have to understand how sensitive we are as a government, as a society, as a country, how fragile we have made ourselves because we structurally are going to borrow another $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion-- there is one estimate of $1.4 trillion--this year. We are never paying off anything. It gets worse and worse because of our demographics as we get older, unless we crash the price of healthcare. Two weeks from now, we are going to talk about things we can do to accomplish that. Are you prepared to live in a country that if our mean interest rate goes up 2 percent and stays there, all tax receipts go just to cover our interest? There is no more government. There is no more military. There are no more benefits. There is no more Social Security. There is no more Medicare. That is why it is so crucial around here to have an honest conversation where people put batteries in their calculators. Instead, this place is living on theater. Oh, modern monetary policy--we can spend all the money we want, and look, nothing happens. Oh, got it. Didn't work. I can show you right now the largest tax increase in modern history has happened in the last year. If you live in my Phoenix-Scottsdale area and are a working person, you are a hardworking taxpayer, and you have not had a pay hike, do you realize you have lost 6 weeks, maybe more, of your labor? We are still at 12.1 percent inflation in my community. You have lost 6 weeks of your labor. If I had walked in and told you that I was going to take a month and a half of your salary, that that is going to be my new tax hike, you would have lost your mind. But if we do it through this thing called inflation, where we strip the affordability of your groceries and your gasoline and everything else in your life, did you notice it? Well, you know there is a problem. You know life has gotten much harder. You know sometimes you get to the checkout stand and are taking things back because the price just doesn't work on your budget. The perverse thing, you are going to see a chart here, my next one, where actually there is going to be this little drop in sort of the debt-to-GDP and those things. That is because that inflation actually has been a tax. We lowered the value of your income. We lowered the value of your savings. At the same time, we lowered the value of all this debt because we are going to pay it back with what we call inflated dollars, which is wonderful up until the next year or 2 when we have to refinance the debt and refinance the new spending at the higher interest rates. Then that little benefit of taxing you through inflation goes away, and we are off to the races, and it becomes hell. Remember, this has brought down other countries for hundreds of years, and it is right in front of us. No one seems to come behind these microphones--they talk about it, educate about it, and for the last couple years I have come here behind these microphones and tried to show solutions, and then it drives the lobbyists out of their minds. Let's take a look at this. Let's see if I can make this work. These are deficits during the Biden administration fiscal year 2023 budget baseline versus a 1 percent rise in interest. Do we all agree that we have had at least a 1 percent rise in interest rates? Yes. Do you see this one little bit of a fall right there? This orange is what happens when you tack on the additional interest. That little fall is, functionally, the fact that we devalued your dollar. That is our little benefit from taxing you in a way you didn't know. But then, boom. Functionally, the budget cycle we are about to work on is the 2024 budget cycle. You are basically going to have a budget deficit of $1.4 trillion, and then, boom, it is $1.5 trillion. You get out a couple more years, you are heading toward $1.75 trillion. In less than a decade, you are well over $2 trillion a year in just borrowing. This chart explodes if we go beyond that 1 percent rise in interest rates. Structurally, even if I say we are going to go back to living in that world of that fantasy artificially low interest rate, we are still heading toward $2 trillion a year borrowing. It just takes 10 years. This is insane. Right in here, interest will be just the basic borrowing. All of defense, a whole bunch of discretionary, and other things will all live on borrowed money. Most people have no idea what the concept of debt-to-GDP is. It is the concept of: Here is the size of my economy, and, yes, we are borrowing all this money, but look how big my economy is, and that economy's ability to finance--just like your income finances your credit cards. As long as your income keeps going up faster than the debt on your credit cards, you can live. You are going to be okay. What happens when your economy isn't growing, when your income isn't growing as fast as you are borrowing on those credit cards? At a certain point, it comes to an end. We are heading toward a time where if we add--this is our baseline. If we start adding a little bit of higher interest rates because we have to finance the debt, we have to sell our bonds, the bond markets are expecting higher interest rates because of inflation--you start seeing the chart where you are hitting a world where at the end--now, I know these are 30-year projections, but remember, we are selling 30- year bonds. The baseline number is 185 percent of debt-to-GDP. That means the debt will be 85 percent bigger than the entire economy. If we had 3 percent higher interest rates, the debt is, functionally, 245 percent bigger than the entire economy. Do you think we ever get anywhere--because this is what we are doing to ourselves. This is already baked in the cake if these interest rates go up. But this down here, the base CBO assumption--remember, we are already over 100 percent. Right now, our borrowing is already substantially bigger than the entire size of our economy. It is why growth is moral but is also necessary. If we don't start growing this economy and we are continuing just the borrowing-- remember, what was the primary driver of our borrowing? Medicare and Social Security. We got old. It is demographics. Getting old is not Republican or Democrat; it is just who we are. That is driving most of our borrowing. We are not adopting policies that maximize growth at every opportunity. We are destroying the future. I need my brothers and sisters on the left to at least embrace some basic truths. The very end of 2017, we did tax reform. Some people go, oh, it was tax cuts, except the rich actually pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes today than they did under the old tax system. But, 2022, tax receipts, the highest in U.S. history by far, and this is under the new tax system. If you are going to demagogue us for doing tax reform, trying to bring businesses back to the United States and get them to domicile and manufacture and do things here in this country, you can at least pull out a chart and show me where the revenues disappeared because they didn't. They are right here. We brought in $4.8 trillion in tax receipts last year, and we are still borrowing $1.3 trillion. The spending has just exploded around here, and now we hit our structural deficits because of our demographics. It gets uglier and uglier, and we have made ourselves incredibly fragile. God forbid we ever have a failed bond auction or an undersubscribed one, and interest rates start to spike. Do you understand what happens to the entire world, let alone your savings? We don't need to do this to ourselves. There are solutions, but this body is incapable of having that debate. Dear God, please, with a Republican majority, no matter how thin it is, maybe we will actually try to do something honest and adult with the calculators. You keep looking at the charts, and there are charts out there. It is not revenues. There is this whole line of thought out there that has been worked on by the left and the right that we raise taxes, somehow we stay within a certain mean of the size of the economy. When we have lowered taxes, somehow the revenues come back up. Taxes always seem to come in just right about here. If this is 20 percent of GDP, you raise the taxes, the economy seems to shrink, the growth shrinks, we fall back to the mean. You lower taxes, the economy grows, the revenues come back. You have decades and decades of data. You look at the charts, and it is pretty darn clear. We are going to take in 19.1 to 20 percent. Sometimes we fall down to 18 percent of the economy in revenues, in receipts, in taxes. The art here is to design a tax code, design a regulatory code, adopt embracing of technology and other things that maximize growth. The ultimate solution is grow, grow, grow, and then adopt disruptive technologies that lower prices, so affordability. Imagine if you had a society once again that was growing, your wages were going up, but inflation wasn't; where your healthcare costs were actually going down; where your savings, your investments, your planning for retirement, your ability to help your kids go to college got better. We can do that. We did that in 2017, 2018, 2019, even the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic. There is a model to do it. All that progress, all that closing income inequality, making the poor less poor, the hardworking, tax-paying middle class, making them more prosperous, it is all gone. The Democrats succeeded, in 18 months, in crushing the people of this country by really crappy policy--great virtue signaling, just incredibly good virtue signaling, really crappy policy. Once again, I need my brothers and sisters on the left to buy a calculator and understand if you came in and said I am going to take every dime, you make small businesses, rich people, high-income earners, if I take every dime--if you make $500,000, the next dollar we just take everything. You have heard this, oh, rich people aren't paying enough, take every dime. You, functionally, don't get anywhere. This is assuming that they continue to work as hard, that they make the same amount of money so they don't change their behavior at all. It is a math experiment, and you get about 5.1 percent of GDP in taxes. The problem is our borrowing is already about to hit 6 percent, and in a couple more decades, we are over 12 percent. It is a fantasy. Look, the Republicans have their sin, too. We will often say, well, waste and fraud, foreign aid, that is just almost a rounding error. Remember a little while ago, $40,000-plus a second in borrowing? The scale of the problems ahead of us is terrifying, and it is no longer getting postponed to the future. I have gotten in front of audiences, and, A, they will boo when you try to explain to them the truth of the math. They say, Well, I was told this 10 years ago. Yes, but we had 10 years of artificially low interest rates that allowed Congress to engage in really crappy policies. What is that saying, ``the chickens are coming home to roost''? I am not particularly good at colloquialisms. But it is time. It is here. Will this new Congress with a divided government step up, tell the public the truth, tell our new freshman class the truth, and actually take on a really tough decision? Madam Speaker, do you want a society and a country that is prosperous, innovative, and disruptive but we are growing so fast and so healthy that you can imagine a world where healthcare prices aren't going up twice as fast as inflation, where your wages go up faster than inflation, and where affordability when you go to the grocery store or your gasoline station doesn't take your breath away? We can do that. At least I think we can do it. I just want to know: Are we going to have partners on the other side to do what is honorable? Because growth is moral. Are we going to do the right thing for our society, for our brothers and sisters out there, or are we going to continue with virtue signaling? Because virtue signaling may be brilliant politics, but it is really crappy economics. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I'm going to do my best not to sound frustrated and defeated. I actually do believe there is hope. But somewhere here--and I'm going to show the numbers--we have got to figure out some way, particularly my brothers and sisters on the left but even some on my side, to understand what is going on in the math. The math will always win. Tonight, I am going to throw a lot of math, a lot of the facts. These facts functionally decide whether this country survives or not. These facts decide whether we are going to have prosperity or not. And the avoidance of the math around here, the avoidance of the actual math. The level of cruelty, the level of just viciousness that will make to the poor, the working middle class, to anyone in this country, because the actual economic data that has flowed through to today is pretty damn ugly. Let's start to deal with some reality on the math. And this board is already out of date. In the next 30 years, CBO--and this is from a couple months ago-- says, in today's dollars, 30 years from now, we will have $138 trillion--and the reason I had to do this is because the number keeps changing, and this is already out of date--$138 trillion of borrowed money. And this is one of the hard things, because we are terrified to tell our voters this, but it is the math. It is the truth. Every dime of this borrowed money, from today's $31 trillion of borrowed to $138 trillion borrowed, is the shortfall on Medicare. It is the shortfall on Social Security. It is the demographics. And what is terrifying is this Medicare number, when healthcare right now has doubled the inflation rate, doubled the inflation rate of the rest of the country. I represent the highest inflation in the continental United States; the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. We are sitting around 13 percent. And in my marketplace, we are being told 20-plus percent is my medical inflation. This number explodes. How many times this last week have you had anyone come behind these microphones and say: I am terrified what I just did to people trying to head toward retirement. I am terrified what we have done to the next generation. This is reality. This is the math. And this doesn't really have all the spending. President Biden, unified control of the left, has been here, what, 18-some months. Congratulations, he added $4.8 trillion to the deficit. Remember the campaign rhetoric? Oh, they're going to be responsible, they are going to balance things--$4.8 trillion to the deficit. Here is where the math gets terrifying, and I am just livid that no one is willing to walk behind these microphones and tell the voters the truth because we need to hand out cash, so they vote for us; so they cuddle with us and say, Oh, we like you. Thank you, Mr. Congressman, for funding this, funding that. This is going to make sense in a moment. The end of 2021, we functionally had zero percent interest when you did the adjustment for--here is our inflation and here is UST bills, when you do the WAM, the weighted average daily. September 22. We are at 3.1. We are now calculating. And this is real interest. So, yes, bonds and T-bills are up here, but when you adjust for inflation, we believe the futures are going to continue to go up. For the next few years, as far as we can see on the current futures market, interest rates are 2, 3, 4 points higher than the Congressional Budget Office's modeling. What does that actually mean? Let's just do the easiest one. If we are 2 points higher than what the CBO had projected just a few months ago, in just a decade you are well over 126 percent of debt-to-GDP. But it gets crazier. Remember, what I am saying here is with inflation, with expectations, and the speech I did last week where we showed you data after data after data points. First, the lie from earlier this year: Inflation is transitory. It was never transitory. Anyone that said that didn't show up at their economics class. Look at the structural inputs we saw last week. Inflation now is structural, meaning the Federal Reserve is going to either have to bust the labor markets because this place is incapable of doing what is necessary, which is incentivizing savings, and incentivizing, in a big- time way, productivity. Because if you don't make more stuff--and I know it is supply side and supply side is a rightwing, except it is economics. It works. If we don't get more productive as a society--it is an economic term--what is it--oh, yeah, we are screwed. So do understand, under the current CBO protections, and this is from months and months ago before they plugged in the inflation data we are in right now, in 30 years, 50 percent of all tax receipts, we are just paying interest. Now, most of this is not Republican or Democrat, it is demographics. We got old as a society, but this is our future. Now you put in the crappy fiscal decisions and economic decisions this place has made over the last 18 months, and you start to see what the future actually looks like. This is from the CBO numbers. This is CBO data from a year ago, that if we had just a single percentage point higher mean on U.S. sovereign debt interest rates, in 30 years, 70 percent of all tax receipts are consumed by just paying back the interest. Not paying down the principal, 70 percent just paying interest. So what happens if where we are at right now becomes long term? Because we are right now 2 points plus on that CBO model. If it were to last 30 years--and I don't believe it will--but if it did--you have got to understand this is from CBO last year--if we ran 2 percent higher on U.S. sovereign--so T bills, the 10 years, the 30 years, you know, 2 percent higher, 100 percent of the tax receipts of this country go just to pay our interest. Doesn't this scare the crap out of anyone? Does anyone here own a calculator with a battery in it? Mr. Speaker, I have a 12-week little boy that just came to us. And, yes, my wife and I, we are going to be old parents, but he is 12 weeks. If this is our future where because we have borrowed so much money, because we have set off inflation, because we have blown up productivity--and I showed last week that productivity per work hour is actually crashing. It is falling. The incentives to participate in the labor markets are not working. So we say, Well, we have this great unemployment number, except if you look at the U6 data and those things, why are there so many millions of young males missing from the workforce? The incentives we should be engaging in to get older Americans to stay in the workforce, what can we do to incentivize that, because if we don't, this is our future. One hundred percent of all tax receipts being consumed just paying back the interest; not paying down the debt, not paying for government. It is just the United States have basically become functionally an insurance company with an army. At the rate we are going, we are not going to be able to pay our insurance benefits: Social Security, Medicare, VA, Indian Health Service. It just drives me to the edge just in anger; the trite, the crazy. We are going to talk about anything that we think will motivate our voters or get them to get excited or maybe give us money, or this and that, but to tell them the truth on how much trouble we are in. I accept that maybe I am a heretic. Maybe the job of a Member of Congress is not to come behind this microphone and tell the public the truth. I accept these are big numbers; we are talking trillions. Think of this: The shortfall in Social Security over the next 65 years--and I know it is a long time, but that is actually how you do the Social Security. I am the ranking Republican on Social Security. The shortfall in just Social Security over the next 65 years is $202 trillion. In, functionally, a decade it is out of money; and at that point, you take a 25 percent cut. We will double the number of our brothers and sisters who are seniors who will be in poverty. How much discussion do you see around here that anyone here cares about people? But we do brilliant virtue signaling. We virtue signal the hell out of this place, and then when it comes to anything requiring a calculator--and all of your phones have a calculator on it--we do, what? Mr. Speaker, I am going to show this because hopefully this will make sense. I am going to try to tie in that there are solutions. There are actually things we could be doing. With the amount of money the left has spent in the last 18 months, if that money had been actually directed to things that actually would have made a difference, hell, they might be heading toward the majority again--they are not--but we also would save the country, and there would be optimism. Instead, we do pandering. We spend our money on basically buying the next generation of votes. So, look, this is actually really a societal problem, and we need to have an honest discussion about it. And this is terrifying, because Members are terrified to come behind these microphones and say anything where the Twitter army is going to attack you. But the 2021 estimate, 37.3 million people, up from 26 million, will have diabetes. I'm going to show you a slide in a moment that we may have doubled in certain areas the number of our brothers and sisters who are obese during the COVID shutdowns. Why is this board important? Our estimates from a couple years ago was that diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending; diabetes and the associated. Mr. Speaker, I represent the population with the second highest diabetes in the United States. It is a Tribal community on the side of Scottsdale. You want to meet the misery? Come visit. I will introduce you to families who actually are doing okay financially, and grandma's feet have been cut off. So the solution in this place is: Well, we will build more diabetic clinics. We will find ways to help people maintain their misery. I know I am going to get crap for this: Body mass index approximately doubled during the shutdowns. We have been trying to dive into why the excess mortality numbers from this last year, and we are trying to do it intellectually honest, intellectually robust, saying: Here is our COVID deaths. Here is our fentanyl deaths. Mr. Speaker, come to Phoenix, Arizona, and see the number of people now living in alleys. Talk to my local police about the number of bodies they are picking up every week who are dying on fentanyl because fentanyl has become so incredibly cheap. We are now the distribution center because the border is wide open. But, hey, these are loving, caring Democrats who don't give a damn about the border. But understand the misery. But this just hit us saying: Oh, God, what happens in society if we just doubled obesity in the country? We know what this means, and we also know that diabetes in the previous model was 33 percent of all healthcare spending. We know this health index: lots of folks gaining weight during the time that we were locked in because that was the brilliance of this government. How many people have we made sicker and more miserable? Maybe that is the reason those young people aren't in the workforce. Maybe that is the reason productivity isn't working. It is a unified theory: health, immigration, and technology; all these things come together to make this country healthy. The reality is we are in trouble. We are in just real trouble. The debt is exploded, now the interest on that debt is exploded, and the elements where we say: Well, we are going to cut--look, the Democrat mantra is: Well, rich people don't pay enough taxes. I have shown boards after boards after boards. You can take every dime they have, and you functionally don't cover but a fraction of the crushing debt that is coming. Republicans have their sin. We will say: It is waste and fraud. Well, it turns out that waste and fraud and foreign aid are just a fraction. They need to be fixed. They are all things that probably should be fixed. They are part of the formula. Think of the cash the left spent on some of their legislation on giving cash to the Big Pharma that make insulin instead of doing something that would have been much more brilliant. Not too many miles from D.C., here in Virginia, there is a co-op that is actually about to make I think it is about eight types of generic insulin, and they are going to make it less than the subsidized price. Why wouldn't you pass legislation saying: We are going to bring that online, and we are going to do the things to incentivize this type of working together. By the way, this is how you bring entries into the market because the additional competition is what lowers price. But, instead, the brain trust around here says: We hate Big Pharma. Hey, here is a bunch of cash. Here is billions of dollars. That was the Democrat solution. It was fascinating how many groups actually wanted the cash much more than they wanted the competition because this place is always about the money. This is something I have been trying to pitch here. Maybe it won't work. Maybe it is just too utopian for this place to get their heads around. But I think we now have a half a dozen Americans who have been cured of type 1 diabetes. I did a whole functionally 40 minutes here on the floor a couple of months ago walking through the process of the stem cell being tagged with CRISPR so the body doesn't see it as foreign; so you can do it in a biofoundry, so you can make lots of this; and then putting it into the body, the islet cells actually start to attach, and it produces insulin. Mr. Speaker, why wouldn't you put a fortune into bringing this and seeing if it works? The Operation Warp Speed, the Democrats can call it anything they want, because this is moral. This is actually loving and kind. Mr. Speaker, if you look at the previous slides, then you understand we have a debt avalanche, and now the interest on that debt avalanche is about to crush us. We need our brothers and sisters to be healthy and able to participate in the economy. There are some fascinating things we have been working on showing that, hey, income inequality, why is this population poor over here? We would always get from our brothers and sisters on the left: Well, it is racism. It is education. It turns out it is a hell of a lot more complicated. It turns out if we actually start to dig into the data, we actually start to see health--health--and the fact that crime and people break your bones and steal your stuff--but health was an incredibly large component of why some of these urban populations--my Tribal populations--weren't participating in the economy. It was diabetes, the commonality of diabetes in these populations. So why wouldn't this be everything? We are going to take on the farm bill and make it so we can help our brothers and sisters in type 2 get healthy. Yes, it will take time, it will be controversial, and it will be difficult. But if this is the modern plague, when you saw the numbers of the growth of diabetes, why wouldn't we throw everything we have at it? Because from a math standpoint, it is singularly the most important thing you and I could do for U.S. sovereign debt. Think of that, Mr. Speaker. It is crazy, but if 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes--and that number is about to grow substantially because of what we have done the last couple years--and Medicare is 75 percent of all the future debt, ta-da, the math doesn't take a brain surgeon. So let's actually start to walk through more of the things that are actuality optimistic and hopeful, and maybe when Republicans are the majority here, we will actually have the competence to try to do hard and complicated things to actually make people's lives better. I just pulled this up as just a thought experiment except for the fact that the product actually exists today. It is functionally a home biopsy. You can get this and have it on your shelf at home. It actually will be functioning a laboratory where you can put some saliva on it, some other body fluids, and it calculates, it talks to the phone; it talks to the algorithm; it gives you a diagnosis; and it would be in your home. It would help crash parts of the healthcare. Now, this technology is substantially illegal if you allow the algorithm to write a script in this country. We also know that healthcare costs are the things that are about to crush us. You would think that this place would be contemplating: What can we do in the technology disruption? But, instead, the brain trust here somehow thinks: Well, the ACA, ObamaCare. No. Mr. Speaker, you have got to understand that was a financing bill. The Republican alternative was one, and Medicare for All, they are financing bills: Who gets to pay and who gets subsidized. In Medicare for All everybody is subsidized. Those are financing bills. They have nothing to do with what--with what--we pay. This is one of the ways you disrupt the cost of healthcare. But I believe this place is terrified because you just took, what, hospitals are the largest lobbyists here in Washington, D.C. They should love and embrace these types of technology disruption. We are just afraid to have that conversation with them. The other thing is actually one of my pieces of legislation. It is just a simple idea. What is inflation? Let's first go back to our high school economics class. Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. Okay. We can make more stuff. Part of my argument is reform the Tax Code and reform the regulatory codes--things we did in the 2017 tax reform with expensing where we had that productivity spike--because investments and things that make the society more productive means you can pay people more. The other side is also too many dollars. How do I get my brothers and sisters to say: Don't take that cash that is sitting in your checking account and go buy another big screen television? What if this place would give an incentive and say: Take the cash and go put it in your retirement account? Believe it or not, it accomplishes much of the same thing. We have gotten some nice write-ups on the piece of legislation Congressman Donalds from Florida and I are doing that says: Let's provide an incentive for people to take excess cash and instead of spending it in the marketplace continuing the inflationary cycle, put it in retirement security. But, instead, Congress seems absolutely content on letting the Federal Reserve blow up the economy. You already see what is happening around the world. When the United States has inflation and we start to raise our interest rates and money comes screaming in from the world and the U.S. dollar spikes up and the other currencies in the world collapse, and yet they need to buy fuel and food in U.S. dollars, then understand the decisions Democrats here made 2 years ago--a little less than 2 years ago--to push out almost $2 trillion in excess spending that set the match on the inflation kindling, you just blew up much of the world. This time next year there will be countries around the world that can't make their debt payments. Mr. Speaker, do you think we will hear anyone on the left actually come behind the microphone and say: We screwed up, we didn't show up at our economics class, and we just blew up the world? Because they did it in my community. I have 13 percent inflation in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. Mr. Speaker, if you work and you haven't had a pay raise, then you have lost a month and a half of your wages--a month and a half of your wages. That is the biggest modern tax hike. I tried to explain this last week: Who are the winners and losers in inflation? Society and people who save money, that young couple who is trying to save to get their family going, and that retired couple. They are crushed. Who is the biggest debtor in the world? This place. We have $31 trillion of borrowed money. And guess what, Mr. Speaker? We now get to pay back that $31 trillion--or at least the interest on it--with deflated dollars, with cheaper dollars because we lowered your economics, and we made it cheaper for us to do. That is one of the reasons why there is this sort of whisper here in Washington, particularly the Treasury-type folks, who say that inflation is horrible. But at least in the short term, Democrats are almost giddy that, hey, by the end of the year, the debt-to-GDP ratio in real dollars will actually close. It is not because they did anything to grow the economy. It is because the dollar value has crashed because of inflation. The value of the debt, because you are paying it back with deflated dollars, that debt to GDP in real dollar terms will close. Now, the punch line is a year or so from now when we have had to sell the new bonds at the higher interest rates and the higher interest rates and the higher interest rates, then it moves against us. That is like those slides I told you where we had long-term interest rates, 2 percent over CBO model, it is 100 percent. One hundred percent of all tax receipts go to pay just interest. This is where we are heading. Shouldn't this be the number one conversation in this place, the survival of the country and the survival of my new little boy? But it doesn't give a damn because it is math and our voters--let's face it--our voters want the shiny object because it is our fault because we are terrified to have a conversation with our voters saying: If we don't do these things, then we can't save Medicare and we can't save Social Security. That becomes the attack ad. We do it to each other. I believe Democrats are much more duplicitous in it. But math is scary, and it doesn't need to be. There is hope. Mr. Speaker, I just bring this one up because this was in a recent article talking about some of the productivity effects, the GDP growth effects when we got the parts of the Tax Code right. We didn't get everything we should have. But, Mr. Speaker, I need you, if you want a real living example, to look at the fourth quarter of 2017. Because remember, the fourth quarter of 2017 got the benefit of expensing even though the tax reform didn't finish until the end of 2017. But we did that retrospective. Then look at 2018. Look at 2019. The shrinkage of income inequality. The poor got much less poor. The working middle class had a couple of their most prosperous years in modern history. African-American females had this amazing growth in wages and job opportunities. But it is a demonstration. I know it is heresy for the left to compliment tax reform. It wasn't tax cuts, it was tax reform, because the actual receipts, the revenues that came in, the number of times our friends on that side said: You are going to put us into depression. I am waiting for my apology because we actually took in more money. Corporate receipts went up. Thank God we had actually that robust of an economy and that robust of a tax system when the pandemic hit. Could you imagine if we didn't, Mr. Speaker, how miserable we would have been? The last thing, this is not meant to be a non sequitur. It is meant to be a closing on the discussion of the misery. I am a border State. I know most of the Democrat votes aren't anywhere near the border States, so you don't give a damn about us, but I am dead serious. I am blessed. I have just an amazingly wonderful congressional district. It is where I grew up. It is my home. It is my obligation to try to defend them. Even neighborhoods that don't vote for me, come drive with me, and come see the misery that is living in the alleys behind these houses. Fentanyl has crashed in price in the Phoenix area. I have a Phoenix police sergeant who is my neighbor. He was telling me, a year or 2 ago, $120 to get high for the day. Today, it is like $12. Now, we are finding a new form of synthetic opioid crossing our border. It is 10 times more potent than fentanyl. Maybe you don't give a damn about people in the Southwest or the misery of the little 14-year-old girl who just died down the way from me, taking one pill. But when this stuff gets left on a countertop somewhere at your favorite wine bar, and everyone in the room is dead, will the left take seriously the misery that their open border policies have brought to us? Look, my pitch is really simple. The economics are all screwed up. The Democrats set off inflation. That piled on the debt, piled on our demographics, piled on our healthcare. We are in real trouble as a nation. If we would embrace the disruptions of technology and the incentives for productivity, we can at least bend the curve. We are not going to pay down the debt, but we can bend it so that debt-to-GDP is survivable, but you have to get other policies right. This place is having no conversations that are actually serious, honest, and important, and I don't know how this became Republican versus Democrat. We are now just talking about the survival of our Republic. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I will do my very best not to use up that time. I am not even sure I should do this one to all of you. We will come back to that previous one and see if we can make it make more sense. Let's see. The left has been in control here for, what are we, about 18 months? Since President Biden was sworn in, off the top of your head, before looking at the slide, how much has been added to the deficit? Under unified Democrat control, how much have we borrowed? Remember, you have a President who almost gleefully gets behind a microphone and says, I have lowered. Well, that is because some of the borrowing during the pandemic was insane. We borrowed $4.8 trillion, and here are some of the things: the rescue plan, the omnibus, you know. You start to add in just the growth of spending, and then what is fascinating is we are now finally starting to see some of these charts that have interest. It is one of the reasons I wanted to touch on that. You do realize our borrowing costs today have almost doubled. Actually, I think they have more than doubled since the day President Biden was sworn in. There is a model out there that says if you had a 2-point higher interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt over--functionally, I think the model was 25 years, 2 points higher. We are 2-plus points higher right now. But if that were to be sustained for about 25 years, at the end of that 25 years, every dime of tax receipts from this government pays nothing but interest. Now, back to the slide where I was fixated on productivity and economic growth. Are you getting the pitch? If we would stop the clown show and start to fixate on things that help people--and is helping people really Republican or Democrat, because this place isn't doing it. We subsidize people. We sure hand out a hell of a lot of checks, but almost none of that makes society healthier and more productive. There is a path. When you start to see things like this and realize when we factor in the new interest rates, the amount of just the financing, just the financing on $4.8 trillion of additional borrowing we have done in--what?--the last 18 months, when the 2 year today was in--what?--3 and a half, still going up. Why isn't there a sense of worry around here? I mean, you all walk around with these cell phones. You know, there are calculators on them. This was just an attempt--and I know the slide is noisy. We were just trying to work in the components of GDPNow. Let's see if I can make this make sense. If you are crazy enough to have been watching this, there is an app you can go to right now and download it from the Atlanta Federal Reserve. It is called GDPNow. What they try to do is take datasets as they come out, and it is a formula. It is pure math. This isn't like the New York Fed, which actually does attitudinal things and sort of purchasing attitudes and savings attitudes. GDPNow is just cold, hard math. This was an attempt to try to show, hey, here are some of the components. GDPNow is a real GDP calculator. What is going on, because as you know, GDP in the first quarter came in negative, but there were genuinely some timing and some energy effects on that one. But GDPNow in the second quarter came in negative, and that one was-- well, it looks like it is structural. As of about 2 hours ago, the GDPNow web app you can put on your phone--a couple of weeks ago, they thought this quarter was going to be about a 2\1/2\ percent growth rate, which would have been nice. It sort of meant, hey, the fall of economic expansion looks like it had bent and was coming back up. As of a couple of hours ago, now it has fallen all the way down to 0.3 with negative bias, meaning these inputs that the Atlanta Fed is using continue to fall. I am going to predict we are heading into a third negative GDP quarter. Now, are we going to have the same argument that we had last quarter? Well, technically, two negative quarters is not a recession. Technically, we have this little committee over here, and they decide if it is a recession. So, we spent a week trying to decide: Should we call it a recession? Should we say we are not in a recession? My attitude was: Who cares? How about we do something that would be much more compassionate? Let's go talk to the family down the street that is just trying to survive and ask them how they are doing. I am going to get up here and geek out on the components that actually go into a GDP calculator. My real request is this place functionally start to understand the crappy policies we have made the last 18 months. We can reverse course. We can do things policy-wise that get economic growth, get productivity, produce hydrocarbons, produce the things that are components for prosperity, or we can continue to functionally export misery, not only throughout our country but throughout the world, because that is what we have done. Be prepared. In a couple of weeks, you are going to find out we have had another quarter of negative growth. We are going to have the press and the Democrats say: Oh, but that is not a real definition of recession. That is a committee over here. Let's talk about migrants being shipped to, you know. Instead, we will do everything we can to understand the scale of the economic dislocations that policy around here has done in the last year and a half. Understand, Republicans: We are going to take the majority of this House this November. My math, from what I can see policy-wise, even if we controlled everything, it is going to take years to fix. Remember the opening here? I tried to explain something, and that was called the yield curve. When you have an inverted yield curve, what does it mean? It is not that complicated. My 2-year T bill, I give you money to hold a 2-year Treasury bond, full faith and credit of you, the taxpayers, or a 5 year, a 7 year. All those are paying higher interest rates than if you bought a 10 year. That lets you know the markets now believe inflation is here for years and years. The data on these boards now says inflation is here for years and years. How much policy do you see coming from our brothers and sisters in the majority demonstrating they care enough to actually take on the misery, or are we just going to engage in the political theater, the virtue signaling, to survive the next election cycle? Madam Speaker pro tempore, I apologize for the discombobulation of not having the boards set up. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive my getting organized. The floor has been moving a little faster than we expected. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try a couple of things and try not to bore everyone out of their minds over the next hour. Some of what I am going to touch on is going to be a little technical. Part of it is really cranky. I have a number of different boards, and they are going to try to hit different points in different orders. I will beg of staff, help me sort of get them all stacked up right here, if we could. First thing, I want to go to geek town for a moment. Just to put this in perspective, I have come to this floor since January talking about inflation. Now, how many of you remember the discussions we were all having--actually, it would be more had at us--that inflation was transitory. Now, they sort of apologize--the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary Yellen, hopefully the White House, though the White House seems to be disconnected from reality--that it is not transitory. If you saw the numbers that came out last Thursday, Friday, we have something called structural. What does that mean to anyone? Does this place even care to understand? First, let's do the first bit of geeky. When you hear a discussion that the yield curve is inverted, how many of you immediately reach over to your television and say, ``Oh, God, I have the wrong channel on,'' and turn it off? It is not that complicated. It is a way of people using big words to try to sound smart. Inverted yield curve just means, hey, I expect over the next 2 years to have higher inflation so the value of my dollar goes down faster than I do over the 10 years. That means if I buy a 10-year bond, I might be willing to take an interest rate here, but I expect inflation to be so high in the next 2 years, I want a higher interest rate because, theoretically, it is real simple: When things take longer, you should have more risk and, therefore, want a higher interest rate. Why is this important to a conversation on the floor of the House? Go look on your favorite financial website right now. The 2 years has a higher interest rate than the 10 year. The 5 years has a higher interest rate than a 10 year. The 7 year has a higher interest rate than the 10 year. That is the markets telling you that they expect inflation to be with us for years. You also saw in the inflation report we received last week, you saw my brothers and sisters on the left: Hey, energy prices are down--yay. Oh, why is the core inflation so high? Congratulations, you did it. Functionally, 30 years of substantial stability in inflation, and we got ourselves a wage-price spiral. We dumped, in March 2001, so much money into the economy that it set off what is called a wage-price spiral. Wages go up; you have to raise your prices. Well, if you raise your prices, you have to pay your workers more. If you pay your workers more, you have to raise your prices. What happens when that becomes embedded into the structure of the economy and energy goes up and down? And how many of our friends on the left keep saying, ``Well, it is Ukraine''? Of course, if you remove energy prices, you still have inflation built into the core. This is really, really horrible, dangerous, and brutal. Does anyone here give a damn about poor people? Does anyone here care about the working middle class? Does anyone care about people trying to retire? Mr. Speaker, you have got to understand the brutality. Because where does that money go? I am going to show some boards here. I represent the Phoenix- Scottsdale area. I have the highest inflation in the continental United States. I am still trying to figure out why Alaska has an urban zone that is higher than mine. But functionally I have the highest inflation in the country. If you live and work in my community and did not have a pay hike--I am going to show it, and you are going to hear this multiple times--you now work for a month and a half for free, Mr. Speaker. This place functionally taxed you. One month and a half of your labor has been stripped from you. And the money doesn't disappear. What happens is your wages become worth less purchasing, but that wealth transfer from you, Mr. Speaker, is actually a form of tax because the $30 trillion over here of borrowed money your government has, actually now it gets to be paid back with dollars of less value. Whether you know it or not, Mr. Speaker, if you are my neighbor in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, you have been taxed out of a month and a half of your wages. And thank you. You helped to actually buy down the U.S. debt because borrowers benefit from inflation, but people trying to save, people getting ready to buy a home, getting ready for retirement, and people just trying to survive get crushed. So if you had listened to the floor the last couple of days, Mr. Speaker, how many times have you had someone come to this floor and actually show they even care? No. We will give some great speeches about: Hey, 50 illegal crossers of our border got shipped to Martha's Vineyard. Ooh. Come to my State. That is like every few minutes. I am a border State. Come down to Yuma with me, Mr. Speaker, and let me show you what the hell is actually going on. But in Washington, D.C., I am still waiting for my brothers and sisters on the left to come behind these microphones and apologize for, functionally, what is the biggest tax in U.S. history. We are now rivaling what happened to this country in the late seventies and very early eighties, except the crisis is much more complex now. Here is why: Yes, you had the wage spirals, the price spirals, and the fuel spirals of the late seventies, but we had a beneficial demographic. We had lots of available workers. Today, we have this crazy thing going on where our available work population because of our demographics--my fear is the Federal Reserve is going to have to break the back of employment in this country to squeeze out inflation. Are we all ready for that? Because we Republicans in this legislature and in this Congress have come behind these mikes multiple times--I have introduced legislation and said, Look, what is inflation? Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods. You can do one of two things. You can squeeze the dollars out of society so all that free money the Democrats gave away over the last couple years will raise interest rates, pull liquidity out, and take it away; or we could make more stuff. I am going to show a couple of boards here of what has happened to productivity in the last couple of quarters. We are crashing. Our productivity is crashing. So when you do the fancy math, Mr. Speaker, and you are not making more stuff, it means what the Federal Reserve is going to have to do to us is more and more brutal. And I think actually some of the markets are actually starting to wake up the last couple of days and are starting to understand the malfeasance, the economic malfeasance, of this place. But then again, I sometimes wonder: Do I work with a bunch of people who don't own a calculator or didn't show up to their high school economics class? Because this isn't that complicated. We use big, fancy words. We do brilliant virtue signaling. But the math is brutal, and I think we need to wake up when we saw what the President did, what was it, on ``60 Minutes'' a couple of days ago. It was a complete disconnect from what is happening to the middle class and the poor going on in this country. So let's actually use a few boards here just to try to provide some textual facts to how this all works. Now, I am just trying to make a point, and this is for myself. I represent the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. Now we have the highest inflation in the Nation. So maybe if you are in a community that, hey, you only had 7 percent, my folks are breaking 13. Try being a working family that is trying to survive in a world where your purchasing power lost 13 percent and your rents are still going up. Rents are eventually going to come down when the Federal Reserve has started to break the back of employment. That may be as much as 18 months away. We are finally starting to see our home prices start to tip a bit because a Firstrust first mortgage these days is now well over 6 percent if it is a conforming loan. But it is fascinating. It is also the communities that have had some of the greatest economic prosperity because there are people moving there who also seem to be suffering the highest inflation. Mr. Speaker, let us start to actually look at some of the drivers. This is July 21 to July 22. Okay, energy, hey, it is 2.7 percent of that inflation. But start to add in shelter, start to add in energy, and start to add in--and come back up here and all the other things, and this is the stuff right here, this, this, and food, just skip the energy portion, and that is how we are making the argument. You saw it in the CPI data this last week. It is now structural. It is now structural. At some point, if I lose my mind, I am going to talk about what happens now that the U.S. dollar is going up. Remember, why is the U.S. dollar now starting to go up? I know we are geeking out. Our interest rates are going up. If you are in a country over here, you can say, Hey, I can put money into a U.S. dollar-denominated bond and get this high interest rate. I am going to pull my money out of this country and put it over here. Okay. So now there is a hunger to convert to dollars raising the value of the dollar. Okay. Do you understand we are now exporting our inflation around the world? So the crappy economics this place did, now you are kicking the rest of the world's head in. So we also talk about how much we care about the poor and how much we care about the poor around the world. Does anyone understand here when we blow up our own economics, we export our bad policy? It is very much like when we did the tax reform at the very end of 2017, because we did so many things right and boosted economic growth so substantially and GDP growth, and we lowered income inequality and all these good things were happening here in the United States, the World Bank actually raised worldwide GDP projections because when we got our economics right, the rest of the world actually got less poor. Well, now you are seeing the other side of the coin, Mr. Speaker. When we get our economics wrong, we also export misery. Mr. Speaker, some of these charts you have all seen before. I have had them here on the floor, and it is just basically trying to show what has happened. Just look at this line here. This is functionally what is happening to your ability to afford things. And you will notice it happened, functionally, almost the day this place had unified leftist control, when the Democrats took control of the White House, already had control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and they pushed through their policies. You can almost see, hey, policies change, and, yes, look at the time of the pandemic, but at least when it came to your purchasing power and your ability to survive, it was fairly stable. This line coming down here, do you see that collapse? That is thanks to you for Democrat policies. We have been trying it. If anyone has a suggestion on a better way we could do this, I am trying to visually come up with some way because we are often engaged in sort of a malpractice here. We use big, fancy words. We talk about, well, I have 13 percent inflation in my Phoenix market. I have been trying to find a way to describe what that actually means to a working family. So that is where we came up with this concept of saying: Do you realize how many days of your labor you have lost? And then we have tried doing it where you also adjust it for what the gasoline prices are. How many days of labor do you lose for higher gasoline prices? If anyone has a suggestion how graphically we can sort of show, here is the labor you lost just because of higher fuel prices. But here is the labor you lost just because of what has happened. In my area it is air-conditioning prices. In your area, Mr. Speaker, it might be heating. We are going to have a fun winter for those of you who don't live in the desert. But also our core inflation, we have been trying to do things like show a calendar. Is there another way you can help the American people understand the stress they are feeling? What is the old saying? There is a lot more month left instead of cash at the end of the month? It is real, and it is pervasive. There also needs to be an understanding. The inflation that this place set off this last year will be part of our economics for a decade or two. So, Mr. Speaker, if you are the person thinking about retiring a decade from now, I sure hope you are re-looking at everything you need and how many dollars you have to set aside. What is your housing? What is your healthcare? Because you have got to also understand there are some inputs here. So let's say the mean inflation in the country is 8, 9 percent. Healthcare in the country is functionally running double that. Mr. Speaker, are you ready to have your copay on your future healthcare be doubled what it is today? Because that is what is coming at you. So, yes, the Democrats have pushed a subsidy bill on drug prices, but that doesn't cover the fact that inflation is about to come and kick your head in. And, once again, it is also reaching into the general fund, putting it over here. We are going to borrow the money; we are going to try to find some way to tax it from you or tax it from my kids. You know the world has changed, Mr. Speaker. Let's see if I can actually find some of these to make it a little easier. But you start to realize when even the left-wing talking head Democrat apologists who hold economics degrees are basically standing up and talking about the misery the Democrat policies have brought to this country. So let's see. We have Jason Furman. How many of us have ever seen Jason Furman say a single nice thing about a Republican? Of course not. He basically makes his living berating those of us on the right and basically defending Democrat policies. The math has gotten so ugly he can no longer defend what Democrats have done to people in this country. The medium CPI excludes all of the large changes in either direction and is a better predictor of labor market slack. Now, this is important, where I'm trying to get here. Jason Furman is basically trying to help us understand that we are busting through a 9.5 percent annual rate in August, which is the single highest monthly print in the datasets which started in 1983. I don't mean this to be disjointed. I want it to sort of become crisp. The core of inflation is functionally higher than any time it has been published since 1983. Mr. Speaker, how old were you in 1983? Do you remember the level of misery? Congratulations. This is what the policies around this place did. And then you get a clown who says, Oh, it is Ukraine. It is this and that. No, it is not. This stuff was in the futures market long before. Mr. Speaker, do you remember a year ago September when the futures markets in energies and those things were blowing off the charts? That was telling you this was coming. But that would require some economic literacy. Look, I accept some of this is geeking out when you start to try to do CPI and core CPI. The simple point of a chart like this is it is not like, hey, we had this huge fluctuation of fuel prices, but everything else was fairly normal. Sorry. It is not. This is my Phoenix area. When you start to realize that my folks are living with over 13 percent, it might be a reason why a lot of us from the West are incredibly cranky because we are just now getting the announcements of how much our electricity is going to be going up. For the rest of you in the country--you know, we are about to hit our lovely time of the year when the temperature comes down, and we are not running our air conditioners. You are all getting ready to turn on your heat. Have all of you in the colder States, have you started to budget your money for what is about to hit you in your heating bills? For my brothers and sisters on the left, you better hope that it doesn't get cold before the election day before your folks start to see their power bills. Just sort of making the point--food prices continue to increase with food at home having the largest annual increase since the end of the 1970s. I was in high school in the late 1970s--I am willing to admit it--and fashion was pretty horrible and inflation was worse. I remember watching my President get up on television, wearing a sweater, explaining that we were going to have to live poorer. I remember this old guy running for President, who was actually optimistic, saying, hey, if we open up our reserves and natural gas and those things, we will live better. That was also one of the great ironies that I think the oldest candidate running for President, Ronald Reagan, had the biggest portion of young people voting for him. It was because of optimism. I desperately want to get behind this microphone and demonstrate optimism. I have a 7-year-old and an 11-week-old--at my age--that is being pathologically optimistic. I want my little boy and my little girl to have an amazing American life. The American dream is not some sort of piece of rhetoric to me, it is what we are structurally; it is a gift we are given. The math is horrendous. My 11-week-old son--that just came to us as a surprise--in 30 years, he is entering sort of the beginning of his peak earning years, and the United States will have--on today's dollars and today's math, without inflation calculated in it--this is from CBO a couple weeks ago, and they had not put long-term inflation into the math--$128 trillion of borrowed money in today's dollars. That is $128 trillion borrowed money in today's dollars. So, of course, this place is fixated on how we are going to save that next generation and how we are going to create economic prosperity and economic growth because growth is moral. Oh, sorry, I take that back. It is moral to some of us. Control, power, voting out $4 trillion of borrowing since this White House and since this unified Democrat government--with a stunning amount of that money being transferred in subsidies to people that vote for them--and they don't demonstrate even a hoot of caring for survival of people who are going to be in retirement. And for these young people, that is another Congress' problem. If this place had a soul, we would be fixated day after day on what we are going to do to make more stuff to bend inflation so the Federal Reserve doesn't have to break the back of people's lives. Of a future where instead of having the debate of--hey, ObamaCare, let's subsidize things more, the Republican alternative, which was also a subsidy bill. Screw that. Why don't we do something that is rational? Maybe we should change the price of healthcare, adopt technology, cure things. Look, I have done dozens of presentations here on the economics of cures, the economics of technology disruptions in healthcare. Yes, it means you have to say ``no'' to armies of lobbyists. It is also the only mathematical way I can find you save this place, save this country, save this experiment, save little boy's economic future, my little girl's future. We are not going to do it, because it doesn't hand huge amounts of power and control to the left. It is not a check from government to someone that is going to turn around and write one political party a check. It is that cynical. What do we do? We are going to watch cable television for a couple days, complain about 50 migrants who illegally crossed into the country showing up in Martha's Vineyard because that is easy to understand and it is good television. The same day--you got how much poorer that day because of inflation. You got that much closer to Social Security having no money left in the trust fund. That $128 trillion I just mentioned to you, every dime from the $30 trillion borrowing we are at today to the $128 trillion--the model says every dime of that increased borrowing--75 percent is Medicare, 25 percent is Social Security, and the rest of the budget is in balance. Okay. The problem is right in front of us. Let's do something bold and fix Social Security. Except the Social Security proposals around her are absurd. There are some things we can do where you don't do taxes in a mechanism where you actually slow the economy down, and therefore, lose much of the economic growth you were trying to fix to be able to have revenues in FICA. Then the revolution I have talked about so many times here on the floor of disruption of cure diseases. I don't mean this to sound like a non sequitur, but it ties in. Diabetes is basically a third of all healthcare spending. Type 2 is really complex, some genetic, a lot of it lifestyle, but we help fund it through how we do the farm bill and other things. We know there has been a breakthrough, it is only like a half a dozen people, and it is very short-term, so we don't have the longer latitudinal data, who have been cured of type 1. Think about the hundreds of billions of dollars this place basically was handing out--that we all know we are going to be here a year or two from now holding hearings on how much was stolen, wasted, handed out to political cronies, and favoritism. Could you imagine if we took a fraction of those dollars, and said: Well, diabetes is 31 percent of all Medicare spending, it is 33 percent of all healthcare spending, maybe having the revolution of a cure there--really hard. Oh, by the way, it is also the single biggest thing you can do for U.S. sovereign debt and the future economic growth of the country. It turns out when we look at poverty--the number of our brothers and sisters who are really below the poverty line--I have some Members hear that say, oh, it is racism. Oh, it is education. It turns out health may be the number one component. Grandma just had her foot cut off because of diabetes. What does that do to the entire family structure's ability to participate in the economy? Maybe the moral discussion--I represent a Tribal community that has the second highest per capita diabetes in the world. Number one is right down the street; it is the sister Tribe. If you actually cared--having the disruptive conversation of, screw it, we are going to find a way to have this health revolution because it is great economics. It is also moral. It is compassionate. It is loving. And saying that we are going to build one more clinic--we are going to build more clinics. That is compassion? We are going to help teach you how to live with your misery when there is a path for a cure? It is just that optimism that should be part of the ethos of what we are. Maybe it doesn't raise us political money. Maybe it is not good campaigns. Maybe it is beyond our intellectual comprehension around here. God knows, the intellectual gravitas of this place has just almost become trite when you hear the debates and discussions we have on the floor. The economics are sound. The compassion is noble. And it is actually the right thing to do. Yet, I can't tell you--I have been doing this for a few years now--the poor staff here who has had to listen to these speeches and watch me hold up these boards and then try to scribe it down--which I apologize when I do the machine gun talking. There is a path here. I am trying to find a couple of the slides that are just terrifying me right now. I accept the media--excuse me, the Democrat propagandas--media, same thing--don't want to talk about inflation and what it does to people. Don't want to talk to what it does to retirees and young couples and those things because it is not going to help their friends win. But maybe understanding it--maybe actually having it be written about in a moral aspect, a moral discussion of what we are doing to working families in this country might actually get some of us off our heinies to come here and do things, saying, hey, you do realize there is policy we can engage in. Naming a piece of legislation the Inflation Reduction Act, when it does no such thing. When it comes back being scored as, hey, you know, several years from now it is still borrowing money. The way the Democrats were scoring, saying, well, we get inflation reduction by taxing people and yanking money out of the economy by lowering productivity and taking their money away. Oh, by the way, all the savings ended in the future years, and it is all gimmicks. That is not me talking. That is actually liberal groups that were scoring the bill that were outraged on the fake economics. You start looking at this growing divergence, the split of inflation in metro areas and other parts of the country. San Francisco where you now have people abandoning it has only about 5.7 percent inflation. Where they are coming to, places like my community, I am busting through 13. Can you see why I'm concerned? I am looking for a chart. My fear is I don't have it here, it may be in the piles over there. There was data out about 10 days ago talking about productivity. Now who knows what productivity is? Okay. The way they do the model, you know, the people that score this, they basically say, hey, we have this many workers and those workers produce this many units of production. Okay. And we have been doing this modeling for a very long time. It is really good for the economy when a worker actually produces more every day than they did the day before. That is not just because, hey, they made the production line go faster, it is because we got the tax code, right, so they did investments. One of the amazing things that happened after the 2017 tax reform is we did something called expensing it. Now, part of that expensing you actually got to take--I am going to geek out--the last quarter of 2017. So that is why there is this sudden lift in the end of 2017, even before the tax reform was done because we did something retrospectively. Then the next couple years, boom, you saw all this capital coming back in from the rest of the world because we fixed the international repatriation incentives to bring money back to the country. Then we said, if you go buy a piece of equipment that will make you faster, better, cleaner, more productive, we are going to let you--instead of depreciating it over the next decade, we are going to let you take it on day one. Yes, we take a big hit today on tax receipts, but--eventually that was going to happen on the tax receipts, it just happens over a longer time, but we take it today--here is the catch, we get a sudden pop of productivity. So there is more economic activity and that new step up in activity means we get more tax revenues in the next couple years. Guess what happened in speech after speech of our brothers and sisters on the left? This is a giveaway to the rich. It is a giveaway to the big corporations. I have quotes from a half dozen Members, senior Democrat Members here, who told us we were going to go into depression because of what the Republicans did in tax reform. Guess what happened? Within a year, the poor started getting less poor. The middle class got much more prosperous. Income inequality started to shrink. Food insecurity shrank. Corporate tax receipts grew. How is that possible? Because it turns out that getting the tax and regulatory code meant investment in things that made us more productive. When you make society more productive, what are the two ways you get paid more? Inflation, which just means you are getting compensated for really bad public policy. The dollar is worth less, so we are going to pay you more so you just hold even. When your paycheck goes up for inflation, you didn't gain anything. The other thing economics tells you is you pay people more because they are being more productive, and that productivity is absolutely necessary if we are going to survive our demographic curve, if we are going to make our promises on Social Security and Medicare. You have to understand that all this has to work together. You have to do everything from immigration policy to environmental policy to tax policy to regulatory policy. You have to get all these things right. Instead, we are going just to do the try it around here, and we are going to do great virtue signaling. Why this board is important is the quarters now where we are starting to see Democrat policy kick in, we are having an absolute crash of productivity. So, you are saying, but we have all these people working. Okay, but the math is the math. They may be working, but something is going on out there. Maybe this is the phasing out of the expensing, which was part of tax reform. Some on our side are trying to make it permanent; Democrats oppose it. But this is really bad. You need this to look very different. Even if you just cared about inflation, productivity is one of your cures. If you get someone here who says Congress doesn't have influence, this is about monetary supply, and it is the Federal Reserve, yes, it is. My argument is when we pump out spending that is going to require borrowing, and the Federal Reserve basically acts like our daddy who indemnifies us from really stupid policy and buys up our debt, we are functionally creating monetary policy by our profligate spending. Instead of putting those dollars into things that change productivity, change people's ability to survive and have wealth and economically grow and, therefore, bend the inflation curve, we did just the opposite. We handed out money at one point to encourage people to stay home. Somewhere here I think I have the Larry Summers chart. Remember a couple of years ago, Larry Summers was, like, an absolute hero of the left, great academics, well spoken, well respected, and then he made the sin of saying: Please don't do this. Dumping another $1.9 trillion on the economy when you are not asking people to either step up their skills or actually participate in the economy, please don't do this. All of a sudden, the left, as they do because he didn't engage in sort of the theater of virtue signaling, turned on him. Oh, he is evil. He is bad. Well, it turns out, he was right. The amount of misery these crappy economics have created to people in this country, the number of people who are poorer--one of the projects we are working on in our office is, in a decade, the Social Security trust fund runs out of money, 12\1/2\ years. We haven't calculated in the inflationary cycle yet. That wasn't part of the trustees' report. Let's say this place continues to do what it does, which is nothing, and we don't fix it. With the cost of everything being higher, even though you have the Social Security COLAs, you have to still pay your healthcare copays, which are inflation doubled, at double the rate. You may be heading toward doubling the number of senior Americans who are in poverty. The number of Members here who are getting behind the microphone and saying, ``Oh, this is just transitory. It is Putin's tax hike. It is the evil oil companies.'' No. It is crappy policy. Larry Summers and others told you it was. They told you this was coming. You are trying to continue to virtue signal or blame other people. Madam Speaker, may I ask how much time remains.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is one of those--you have already touched on C.T.'s resume. But I get to do something that is a little unique right now. I am not going to give his resume again. He was my neighbor. He and Mary were my friends. Have you ever had someone in your life, and they are just sort of an acquaintance, and they just ooze something really unique called love. C.T. was a big guy, powerful voice. He could sing and the rafters shook. Every time he gave the prayer at a Kiwanis meeting, or a Republican meeting, or something else, I almost felt like I was going to do an altar call. And being Catholic, that is actually a little odd. I thought that would be funnier. He and his wife did something amazing. They were involved in everything from my school board to the Arizona clemency board. The fact of the matter is he had a powerful impact on a lot of us who live in an upper income suburb on the side of Scottsdale, Arizona. It is a beautiful place. I remember sitting down with him and saying, ``Okay, C.T., you are my neighbor. You are my friend. Why are you a Republican?'' In this powerful voice, ``David, son, I am going to be part of that abolitionist party,'' and then he went on to explain his history, his life. I know often we break down into partisan this, partisan that, but to have someone who didn't look like every other suburban person in this neighborhood, and yet, his intellect, his love, his wife Mary's love-- they became icons in the community because of their intellect, because of their love, and because of their leadership. It proved so powerful for the community because so often when there was something happening, one of the first things we all did was say: Well, we have to ask Dr. Wright. What does he think? What does he feel? What is his understanding of what is going on? We lost him a couple of years ago, and the community has mourned and felt a little bit more hollow since. By naming our post office, I am hoping my 7-year-old daughter and my now-10-week-old son will see the plaque and will tell the story, and it will become part of the heritage of my little town, Fountain Hills, Arizona.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, for everyone here, this is a subsidy bill. And this is the classic difference between the left and the right. They are functionally subsidizing. We on the right actually want to change the market. We want competition. So I am going to pull out one very simple example. In here, we have $2.5 billion of subsidies for our ports to get greener and more efficient. But then the Democrats slip in language that says human- operated, meaning you are not going to take on the unions, you are not actually going to make it more efficient, you are not going to actually embrace disruption and technology. We keep coming to the floor and talking about things that would make our ports greener, faster, more efficient, feed the supply chain--these electric rail cars, except you functionally just made them not happen. This is a subsidy for those unions, those folks who right checks to the left. You claim you are making the environment better and cleaner, but then you build the very barriers in the language that stop those good things from happening.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that I may hereafter be considered to be the first sponsor of H.R. 4720, a bill originally introduced by Representative Reed of New York, for the purpose of adding cosponsors and requesting reprintings pursuant to clause 7 of rule XII.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I have got to tell you, being on the Ways and Means Committee and never actually engaging in some of your Rules debate, you guys are really polite with each other. But here's a simple question: What are the two times in life you think you know everything? When you turn 13 years old and the day after you get elected to Congress. I am going to argue the arrogance of this place right now doing a piece of legislation like this. Why is this bill, the underlying bill, the underlying rule here so dangerous? And why this resolution actually fits this. Basically, the underlying bill is industrial policy. Let's face it, some of the scoring is saying this is $400 billion, and it is the politicization functionally of a category of incredibly important industry, grants that you saw the President a couple days ago talk about--now you are going to have to come in front of me. Do you understand how dangerous that is for an economy? That arrogance of the political class thinking you understand what the next disruption is. The controlling of intellect, the controlling of taking risk. If you actually gave a darn about American competitiveness, of where chips--and who knows, quantum, and all the other possibilities of data management, data movement, of processing--are going, you would fix the Tax Code, you would fix the regulatory code. If you care about China, deal with the made-in-America tax, the fact that they refund the VAT; and when we export, they put the VAT back on, and it makes us not competitive. You also now have to deal with the reality, when The Economist is writing articles that we are heading toward a glut of chips. Look, I am from Arizona. On the side of my district, I have a $16 billion investment from Taiwan Semiconductor. Down the street I have Intel, I think they are spending $18 billion. It is coming. But the brain trust around here is we are going to do industrial policy. We are going to control the money. It will be great for fund- raising. And the concept, once again, is we have politicized everything. Think of now the debate we have had the last couple days, is two quarters of negative GDP, well, that is not a recession. Okay, technically it might not be because the definition of recession now is a committee that is politicized. Could we at least have some benchmarks here in Congress, here in Washington that we know what the rules are? I don't mean your type of rules. I mean the rules for society, the rules for tax policy, the rules for how we allocate capital, because you are offering right now functionally $400 billion of subsidies, controls, management, and industrial policy, government. Why don't you just nationalize the chip industry because you are pretty much heading that direction. This is a simple amendment. In some ways, it is actually very symbolic of we can't even agree anymore on what a recession is. Okay, fine. Let's just make it a rule instead of making it a committee of individuals that get to express their opinion and their feelings. I would love to actually offer something more complex. Maybe we should go back to the old misery index debates of how many people can't afford living anymore. You do realize the inflation from just the last 12 months, my constituents--I represent the highest inflation in the Nation--get to work about 6 weeks without compensation. The purchasing power of their lives has crashed so much, they now work a month-and-a- half for free. These are the brilliant policies this place has brought. It is time we actually start to set some benchmarks on what the rules are. Simple amendment. Just saying, hey, we will call it a recession when we have two consecutive quarters, and we can stop the politicization of everything here in Washington.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that I may hereafter be considered to be the first sponsor of H.R. 4270, a bill originally introduced by Representative Reed of New York, for the purpose of adding cosponsors and requesting reprintings pursuant to clause 7 of rule XII.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, if I came to the body and said the bill we had all been working on, H.R. 8489--when you have someone like Lloyd Doggett and someone like me, and we are actually working together, we are working on some of the antifraud provisions, program integrity provisions, you actually had something this body was doing where we weren't beating the crap out of each other. It was something that actually might be good for people in the country. Instead, we turned it back into another opportunity for political gamesmanship. It is my intense disappointment because it is our language, substantially something I have worked on for years, that was grabbed for the pandemic. We all know it expires the day the pandemic is declared over. It is time to take this opportunity--I know there is an army of lobbyists out there that despise telehealth because it changes the populations that walk in the threshold. To hell with them. Let's finally do what is right.