David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, one of the reasons and one of the focuses for tonight's presentation is I am just frustrated because of the silliness that not only has become this body but even when you listen to the White House, Madam Speaker. So the White House is terribly concerned that on Thursday we will get the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I believe it is on second quarter GDP. GDP now is the Atlanta Fed calculator. It is a wonderful app if you want to look at it. It is basically saying: Hey, we may be negative, and when we were all in high school they said that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, well, that is a recession. Technically it is not. Yes, there is a committee that decides it. That is what we argue about. Has this place lost its mind? So the press cycle becomes: Oh, are we in recession or not? It is not, technically. If it goes negative it will be a recession. But isn't this horrible that we are talking about this? Let's just pretend and stop worrying about it and actually let's try something unique. Could we actually talk about what is happening to people, what is happening to the country, what is happening to the budgets, the debt and the deficits, the actual thing that will either make or break society, which will make people's lives more miserable or more prosperous? Because right now we are in avoidance of all the big things. But we do have some great virtue signaling bills. I mean, I had the blessing earlier today of my telehealth bill being stolen from me and handed to another Member because, well, we needed the politics. Hey, good job, majority. But I have to give Democrats credit. They have done some amazing things in, what, their 16, 17 months of absolute control, when they won the House back in the 2018 election. So this is a chart I have had here multiple times. Yes, it is all beaten up. The number is from, functionally, the 2021 CBO numbers. A couple of hours ago we got the updated numbers. For anyone wanting to know why I am using tape, apparently it is against House rules for me to reach over and use a big marker and write on the boards. But the number we had been operating with is in, functionally, 29 years we are going to have $112 trillion of debt in today's dollars-- not inflation-adjusted dollars, but in today's dollars--and it is almost all Medicare and Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance. A couple hours ago--and I have only made it through the first dozen pages of the new CBO report, and you can get it online, Madam Speaker, it is only 90 pages--we moved from $112 trillion last year to-- congratulations to the Democrats, they got us to $138 trillion--$138 trillion of borrowing in the next 30 years in today's dollars. Now, the reality, we are never going to get there. We will blow up before that. But this talk, the virtue signaling, the insanity of this place, well the Democrats are getting in; we are going to pay for everything. We are going to do policies that are fiscally sensible. Well, okay. Congratulations. CBO just actually took us from $112 trillion to $138 trillion on the math. It is just stunning. Does anyone around this place give a damn? And maybe I am a little on the cranky side. You know, I had a miracle happen about 3 weeks ago. I was at home, and the phone rings, and my little girl's birth mom had a little boy; so now I have a little boy. So my wife and I, we have a 30-day-old baby at home, so there hasn't been a lot of sleep. And I am holding this little guy, and I am going, he is only 30 years old when this happens. And the economy most likely blows up long before then. Does anyone here care about the next generation? Does anyone here care about your own retirement? You have got to understand how fast the numbers are rotting away from us. But at least we are going to have a debate for the next couple of days of are we in recession or not recession. Well, technically two consecutive quarters are not technically a recession; and the White House cares a lot about that because we know that it is about the message and virtue signaling as the economy around us is burning down. And I am going to show you some numbers here. Could we try something new? How about let's go back to a type of misery index? How miserable are our constituents? How miserable is America and the public? And we are going to look at some slides here that show you just how much of people's wages have been stripped from them. So a simple slide, and this is from the new CBO, from a couple of hours ago. We did our best to put it together, and it is not going to make a lot of sense. But basically, what I am trying to show is, $138 trillion of borrowing in today's dollars. That is a pretty steep curve. Every bit of this steepness here that you see here is Social Security and Medicare. How many of us here are willing--I am the senior Republican, I am the ranking Republican over Social Security. We are busting our humps to try to come up with a bipartisan way to save the program, in a functionally--in a decade. If you are on Social Security, you are going to have a quarter of your Social Security check disappear. Let alone, we expect, just because of inflation, your copay on your Medicare is probably going to more than double. The number of our brothers and sisters who will be seniors at the end of the decade, who will be moved into poverty because of what the Democrats have done this last year and a half; does anyone care about them? And then, this is the stuff we have been able to start to pull out from the CBO numbers that should start to scare this place half to death. If you start looking at what they call the alternative scenarios, and that is actually when inflation or interest rates have small variances, and the speed that, if you actually go to the baseline scenario, but if you actually start to go to a scenario over there where interest rates are just 2 percent, 3 percent higher than the predicted average, you actually get in a line here in about 20, 25 years, every dime of tax receipts, every dime of tax receipts just pays interest. There is no more government. There is no more military. There is no more medical research. There is no more education. There is no more Social Security and Medicare. How many of you are going to spend your August going home and telling townhalls how you are going to protect Social Security and Medicare, but you are not willing to actually talk about the real math? It is real. This isn't Republican or Democrat; it is math. And this place has basically become a math-free zone. And look, this is a chart I bring up here all the time because it is nice and simple and graphic. 77 percent in 2001, was mandatory. Okay. This is Social Security and Medicare. These are things we put on formula. We don't vote on any of this. Well, about 10 percent of our budget is defense; unlike, I had a Democrat just last week saying oh--no, defense is 10 percent of our spending. The entire budget that we, functionally, truly vote on, discretionary is now to 13. And guess what? This is the `21. The new numbers, the mandatory now is about 80 percent of all of our spending. Discretionary, if you adjust for inflation, has basically been flat for a decade. There is some stuff we vote on substantially because of what Republicans did when we still had control here. We flattened out discretionary spending. But unless we are going to tell the truth of what is going on here-- we are getting old as a society. Last year was our lowest fertility rate in U.S. history. And once again, in 10 years, people on Social Security are going to be taking one hell of a cut. How many people here, when the political class is back in the home district this August, will stand up and talk about what they intend to do to save the program? So now, let's talk about the current misery. This is what the left's policies have brought to people. Earnings lost due to inflation--and let's use the Phoenix/Scottsdale area because that is where I live. That is my home. That is who I am here to protect. And let's just use the since August 2020 date so it is nice and simple. You, functionally, have just lost 1.9, almost 2 months of your labor. So you are, functionally, almost--in the Phoenix area, inflation has been so high, you are almost working for 2 months, and you are getting no compensation. You, functionally, have had the value of your labor stripped. You have lost a couple of months. If I make some of the adjustments, you start to realize you will get to work for about 57 days. You get to go 57 days for free. So instead of me standing in front of you and saying well, the Phoenix has had 12.3 inflation, and if I use CPIW, with the other adjustment which adjusts food and fuel, it is 13.1. Screw talking about the percentages. Congratulations. Even if you are part of the population that has had wage hikes, if I take the average wage hike in my community, you are, functionally, working at least a month to a month and a half for free, and this has been done to you in less than a year and a half. Does anyone care about the working people? The people that get up in the morning, the retired couple, the young couple that is trying to put their home together to maybe 1 day be able to afford a house? I have no idea how people are surviving out there. And does this place--we are going to have a debate on whether we are technically in a recession or not because that is our talking point for the week. And look here, I am going to give you two boards here, just to try to understand; and we have been trying to adjust, so let's just use something like healthcare support occupation. And this is just the loss of purchasing power just due to fuel prices. And I even rolled the fuel price back down. You, functionally, lose, every month, 4 days of labor. You start to think about what these costs mean. So let's use that's even bigger. Let's actually use--this one I love. Does anyone recognize this? This is our congressional calendar. You know, this is the days we are here supposed to be doing the people's work. Take a look, functionally. Come down here. You will notice a couple of months with Xs on it. Those are days of labor you lose. You may get your paycheck, but it has no new purchasing power. Actually, it has lost purchasing power because of inflation. Anyone watching C-SPAN today, how many of you heard people come behind these microphones and actually demonstrate they care about you? They care about your savings, your retirement, your future, the future of my kids, your kids. The average working person in my community--because I represent the community with the highest inflation in America--has lost 40 days of their labor. Their purchasing power has been stripped from them in a year. And I am going to get a little geeky for a second. Do you know where the value has gone? You do realize inflation, basically, benefits debtors, and crushes workers and savers. Okay. Who is the biggest debtor in the world? We are. The United States is the biggest debtor in the world. We are basically--one of the wink and nods that are going on, I believe, with the administration and the majority here is oh, inflation is bad, wink, wink, nod, nod. But it is really reducing the value of the debt in real dollar terms, because inflation is a tax transfer from you to the debt because it devalues the borrowing by deflating the value of your purchasing power. So we strip purchasing power from you, but by doing that, when we pay back the debt, when we pay back the debt, the debt is paid back by inflated dollars. It is a tax. So when the left actually promises--when the President promises, we are not going to tax anyone under $400,000; the hell you are not. And in my community, you, functionally, have just taxed everyone 12.3 percent, new additional tax this year. You stripped that value from them. And the wink, wink, nod, nod, fancy economists, basically realized, hey, but we devalued the debt by that much. So you have got the stealth tax. And now you start to realize why America is poorer today. So the Democrats get elected. We just went through 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020, one of the miracle moments of this country. We closed income inequality. Wages were growing. Inflation was flat. Poor people became less poor. The working poor become more prosperous. The middle class became substantially more prosperous. Wages were up, what, several thousand dollars in real purchasing power. Every dime of that is gone. And look, I am friends with a couple of the Democrats, and they despise these floor speeches because it is so uncomfortable to hear that their policies have almost been dystopian in destruction. But it is math and at some point the math will win. And the fact of the matter is, all the progress this economy, this society, the closing income inequality, the reduction of food insecurity, it is all gone. In a year and a half of, functionally, Democrat control, it is all gone. You are poorer today than you were the day they were elected. And all that progress we made in that '18, '19, the beginning of 2020, from the tax reform, the regulatory reform, it has all been stripped from you. But yet, we are going to sit here and argue about, oh, are we in recession? Oh, is it two quarters? No, you are not technically. We will do anything around here to either virtue signal or avoid real issues, while people are getting crushed. We have got to stop the whining, the small ball around here, and start doing something that makes people's lives better. And yes, I can go out and snip all of the nice headlines talking about, oh, it is not a recession. Oh, you know, God willing, don't think we are going to go into a recession. Okay. Fine. Let's pretend God's willing. Let's pretend we are not in a recession. Let's remove that word. How could we then pretend--could we just pretend--you are willing to virtue signal on everything else. Are you willing to pretend we actually care about people, care about the economy, care about the future, care about the debt and the country collapsing because of the rate we are borrowing? And there are other things in the data that let us know, if you are a data geek, and you actually sit and watch the financial news channels, and the talking heads, and the spokespeople from the White House, you are not being told the truth. And how do you make public policy when it is the political theater is the only thing that matters? It is the spin. We have become an Orwellian body. We should be ashamed of ourselves. I am the senior Republican for also the Joint Economic Committee, as well as being the ranking member, the senior Republican over Social Security. We have been holding Joint Economic hearings instead of doing what we used to do, where the left would have their economists; the right would have their economists; we would bring in really professional people, and we would try to understand what was going on and how we could make society healthier, wealthier. Instead, we are going to bring in people and we are going to talk about the economics of whatever the pop culture--gun violence today, or we are going to talk about--we don't do real stuff anymore. We are basically writing people's campaign brochures now. This is really important because unless we as a body can get the incentives right to get up labor force participation--I know these are geeky terms but our brothers' and sisters' participation in the economy, I do not believe we can get the productivity back where we have to be to take on inflation, to start to stabilize the economy in the future. We have a problem here. This should have been the trend line. Something is going on. We have millions of our brothers and sisters who have disappeared. Of course, you have a great unemployment number. We have great unemployment numbers. They are really low, except we have millions of people who disappeared. They are not participating. Once again, it is spin through not telling the truth about the math. Now, it gets even darker and more misleading. I am sorry to be geeking out, but you do realize we have multiple agencies, multiple groups that do the calcs of what is unemployment, what is labor force participation, and who is participating in the economy, and there is some crazy divergence going on out there. There is something called the establishment survey. That is what you get every week, every month on this month's unemployment--we have everyone working. Except at the very same time, there is something called the household survey, and that is showing numbers that have hundreds of thousands of people who have moved into unemployment. How is that possible? How is it possible that two government surveys in the same sample times are starting to produce such divergence in the numbers? I would love to tell you that I know, but I haven't had time to dig into this. But there is something going on there. There is some noise within our economy, yet we are all pretending. This is the talking point the left keeps giving you. Well, we are not in recession. Look at the employment data, except, also, I need you not to look at the household survey because that number is going in the wrong direction. Remember, how does the Federal Reserve take on inflation? They break the economy. They break the labor markets. They raise interest rates like they did today. And the dirty secret is, oh, I don't think we will drive it into recession--wink, wink, nod, nod. Of course they will. That is how it works. They need to break the wage-price spiral, which is real and has begun. You all know what the wage-price spiral is, right? Prices go up, so I have to pay my workers more. Well, if I pay my workers more, I have to raise my prices. Well, if I raise my prices, I have to pay my workers more. Well, if I pay my workers more, I have to raise my prices. You end up in this ratcheting effect, and we are in that right now. A couple of months ago, we would have a debate on the floor with a couple of my more geeky colleagues, and they would still want to try to say, oh, inflation is transitory. No. It is structural now. It is built into everything you are buying. Fuel prices go up here, but eventually, the distillates from that fuel that are in that mug that holds the milk that you go buy is now in the components of production. It is structural. That is a real problem because we are trying to do some of the math about what happens, God forbid, if we have substantially higher than normal inflation for a year. God forbid it is 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, even if they start to knock it down, and there you bring the Fed in. What is the Fed doing right now? They are jacking up interest rates. They are making your life more miserable. They are functionally trying to put you out of work. They need to raise unemployment. They need to create the elasticity in the employment markets. So, all of a sudden, that wage-price spiral--you are willing to work for less because you need the job. But you already see the data right now of how many of our brothers and sisters are just trying to maintain their life. Their rent has gone up. They are using their credit cards. Now, their credit cards are going to get substantially more expensive because interest rates are going up. Now, we are actually seeing articles that the Treasury may have to write checks to the Federal Reserve. One day, I will do a whole Fed presentation on how it actually works. But when they raise interest rates, they are actually raising interest rates on what they are willing to pay on bank deposits. Therefore, they are paying interest on the bank deposits. The Federal Reserve needs to get cash to pay a rate of return on the bank deposits, and they get that from the Treasury, which is a little crazy, but that is how it works. You start to think about the math. I know these are just statistics, but they are also people. They are people, and this place has just become cruel. I guess the virtue signaling here is only done when it is a good line for a brochure, and I know it is half an hour of talking about economic data, but these are people. We are trying to do a breakdown right now of how seniors survive. You do realize how many of our seniors, even with the Social Security COLA that may be over 8 points, their copay on healthcare--because, remember, some of the healthcare inflation has been double baseline CPI. Many seniors now have to pay 20 percent of that, so they are bleeding. The COLA for Social Security doesn't keep up with actual inflation, and it is also a lagger. I won't walk through the table, but understand we are trying to do the math here of how many of our seniors basically are moving into poverty, and we are trying to do something latitudinal over a decade. By the end of the decade, what population has just this cycle of inflation done? On Thursday, when the second quarter GDP number comes out, and the White House and Democrats say, ``Oh, we are not in recession. It is not a technical recession,'' how many of them are going to get behind a microphone and say, ``I don't care whether we are in recession or not. I care about seniors who are about to become poverty-stricken.'' How many are going to say, ``I care about the family that is having trouble surviving.'' Where is the empathy in this place? Does anyone care? We make public policy by feelings, by virtue signaling, not by a calculator, and I accept I sound like an accountant on steroids. It is my sin. But these are people. We are going to sit here, and we are going to fuss like crazy over little symbolisms. We are going to fight over the naming of a post office. At the same time, someone is going to go home and realize they have to figure out whether they can pay the air-conditioning bill or be able to have enough gas to drive down to the food bank. There are ugly things happening out there, and it doesn't need to happen. We as Republicans have some ideas to stop it. It may not completely stop inflation, but at least it would help. The brain trust on the other side, the idea is, well, let's send them a check. That is what caused the problem. Please, can you have some folks that actually showed up for their basic economics class be the ones making public policy here? Let's stop hurting people. This isn't partisan. This is our job. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, you hear everyone here all say something nice. We all like telehealth. I am frustrated because I can't get my head around why we are not going further. Outside the internal political theater, those of us who have worked on this legislation since the day we got here and then all of a sudden wake up one day and it is a different bill with someone who I have never even heard of working on it, God bless. The majority gets to do things like that. We want a change in the price of healthcare. Can we come together and unleash technology? Telehealth is more than just looking at the phone and doing FaceTime or now talking. It is the wearable. It is the thing. It is the thing you lick. There is technology with which we could be crushing the price of healthcare, and instead, we are doing little incremental steps here. There are a couple of problems with the bill the Democrats decided to bring to the floor. It is for 2 years. We compromised to 4. If you want capital investments in the technology, you have to give us at least 4. It should be permanent. There is also something in here that is just frustrating. You missed the language on health savings accounts. You have 32 million people now who functionally are not going to have access to be able to use those accounts for their telehealth. Madam Speaker, there is just a frustration here because we all talk pretty about this, and then we are unwilling to do the things that could potentially help us all by disrupting the price of healthcare and increasing access, maybe making people's lives better. Instead, it just became more political theater. We should be ashamed of ourselves. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I have been coming behind this mike every week when we are here, sometimes for half an hour or an hour, and I have been basically taking the bark off our brothers and sisters on the left because of my belief that so much of the policy here hurts people. I have shown over and over the working poor are getting poorer, the poor are getting poorer, the middle class--I mean, last week, I had charts here that showed that, in my Phoenix-Scottsdale area, we have the highest inflation in the continental United States. You get to work a month-and-a-half for free just because of the change in our inflation index. Even when you plug in any salary growth we have had in our marketplace, you are functionally donating over a month of labor that you get no purchasing power for, no compensation. That is inflation. I have tried in those previous speeches to turn to my brothers and sisters in the majority, the Democrat side, and say: Hey, here are some things we could do policy-wise to take on inflation. Inflation is not just a monetary issue; it is also things we can do on policy, the fiscal side. I thought I would go to crazy town for a moment and show some things that are optimistic. The fact of the matter is that a lot of them aren't necessarily right or left. They are just technology adoption. We have to stop doing the dumb--sorry, I think it is a break in decorum if I curse on the floor, so you can just fill in the blank there--but the virtue signaling, like we just did a half hour ago on the floor. It is theater. I understand the polling numbers are miserable for my brothers and sisters on the left, so they are going to throw out every virtue signaling vote, whether it is actually legal or mechanically sensible or even has any place in reality. So let's go to what is really going on and some things that would be good that we could do together. First off, we need to understand the scale of how much trouble we are in. This slide is almost a year old, but the fact of the matter is that we are in a world right now where your government is an insurance company with an army. It is a way to think about it. We are an insurance company with an army. Then you start to understand, over the next 30 years, Medicare and Social Security are 100 percent of future debt. That future debt, from last year's CBO number, is $112 trillion in today's value. If you add in inflation, our calculations are now blowing through $120 trillion of borrowed money. Now, the fact of the matter is, almost every model says we can never get there; we blow up long before that. But you have to understand, mandatory--that is Social Security and Medicare and other things that we have made that are formula. Over here is the defense, and over here are other domestic programs. Only about 13--actually, I think this coming year it may be less of everything we spend is really--it is FBI. It is environment. It is research. It is this tiny sliver down here. The reality is, what is driving that mandatory monster that is consuming everything? It is Medicare. About three-quarters of all the spending, about three-quarters of all the debt that is coming, is Medicare. The vast majority of Medicare comes out of the general fund. It is healthcare costs. The brain trust around here--we will do things like the ACA, ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, Medicare for All. They are all financing bills. We play games around here. It is about who gets subsidized, who has to pay. A number of the boards that I am going to show today are about healthcare disruption to change not who pays but what we pay. There is a reason you don't go back to Blockbuster video anymore. There was a technology revolution where you no longer go wait in line at the local strip mall, get a little silver disc, and take it home. Half the time, three-quarters of the time, you couldn't get the silver disc you wanted because somebody else already had it. Today, you go home and hit a button, and you have dozens of streaming services. That is a technology disruption. If Blockbuster video had hired enough lobbyists, this place would have slowed down the internet to make sure Netflix couldn't exist. You need to think about what goes on here. Let's start to walk through and understand how much trouble we really are in. This board is a year or 2 old. You start to add in. When you do Social Security and healthcare entitlements, it is this line. The rest of the budget is actually in decline or flat. Defense is down here. You can wipe out every dime of defense, and you can't keep up with the growth of the debt being caused by Social Security and Medicare. That is not Republican or Democrat. We got old as a society. Does anyone ever hear about baby boomers? This place basically didn't figure out baby boomers existed until the last couple of years. It is demographics, and it is happening all over the industrialized world. When you look at our numbers--and we are working on this right now in our office--of what has happened the last couple of years, sort of the post-COVID baby bust--remember, last year was the lowest fertility rate in U.S. history. The math is getting really ugly. I am the ranking Republican over Social Security, and we had the Social Security actuary report come out a couple of weeks ago, saying: Hey, we added a whole year. We now have 11, 12 years before Social Security runs out of cash, and we just live on the revenues. But they missed inflation. They also screwed up, I believe, on the fertility rates, population growth. Let's start to walk through it. If healthcare costs are the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, what can you and I do? What could this place do? Some of this stuff will not work, but, damn it, we need to try. We do enough virtue signaling here where we say pretty words, and then we walk off the floor and say: Well, that is never going to actually happen, but, damn it, it is a great campaign ad. Maybe it is time we start to try to do some of the things that are really difficult. Some basic math--first, come down to this line. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is associated with diabetes. That is type 2 and some type 1, but mostly type 2, 33 percent of all healthcare spending and 31 percent of all Medicare spending. Why wouldn't you absolutely fixate? Look, we won't call it Operation Warp Speed because that had something to do with Donald Trump, and the left despises him, so give it any damn name you want. But come on, people. If I came to you and said 33 percent of all of our healthcare spending and 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes and Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, can't we hold hands together and jump and say we are going to throw everything we have at this because we know there has been a breakthrough? Now, it is only like a half dozen people who have been cured of type 1 diabetes, and we don't have any long-term data on it, but it is optimism. First, I want to go over my frustration. You will see this as a policy split on the way the brains around here work differently between my brothers and sisters on the left and those of us on the right. A few weeks ago, this place committed to give, I think it was $36 billion--might be 38--but I think I remember $36 billion of cash subsidies to Big Pharma, which they were railing against, saying they are charging too much for insulin. And the way we are going to stop these crazy insulin prices is, we are going to give a bunch of cash to the very people we think are charging too much. Does anyone see the absurdity? Instead of creating, Hey, we are going to incentivize competition. We are going to put more people in the marketplace. We are going to make the systems work--no, because the left is addicted to handing out cash. Well, it turns out at the same time they are doing that, not too far from here, in Virginia, there is functionally a co-op that had been put together years ago that is in construction right now that is going to bring a number of generic insulins to market at less than the new subsidized price. And the fact of the matter is, what the Democrats did a few weeks ago in trying to subsidize Big Pharma's insulin production, may have blown up some of the economics and the financing behind this. Why wouldn't we have said, for a fraction of the money--say we are going to set aside some money. We are going to help these folks get their permitting, their reviews. We are going to actually put FDA reviewers on site as they are building so that the day the clean rooms are up and ready, it can be in production. Add competition, not subsidies. And it exists. And think about this: They are talking about $55 for a whole box; $30 per vial. That is cheaper than the legislation we passed a few weeks ago where we are handing out, what, $36 billion in subsidies to Big Pharma. You see the craziness around here. The virtue signaling was more important than actually something that made people's lives better, and actually added optionality and competition. And this isn't a Republican or Democrat, this is a solution. But I guess there is a hell of a lot more power--maybe better fundraising opportunities--when you are handing $36 billion to the very people you rail against and then--wink wink, nod nod--here is the cash. This place has actually become perverse. So back to where I was going. I have talked about this over and over because it is one of my personal fixations. The discussion of an end to insulin, where there has actually been--and we saw the first academic article on this last December, and we try to track it, functionally, every week, we try to follow what is going on. One of the trials that is actually in the FDA phase is on hold right now as they are doing some safety efficacy. But the fact of the matter is, we have a half-dozen Americans, who through a stem cell and now the newest ladle is they are taking it and apparently tagging it with a CRISPR mechanism, so the body doesn't see it as foreign. The elegance of that is that means that this mechanism works. You can do a production line of these insulin-producing cells--the islet cells. I always get made fun of because I mispronounce that. But the ability to get someone's body to produce insulin again, why isn't there just excitement around here? Remember, 33 percent of all healthcare spending is associated with diabetes. If there is a potential, just a potential, we can cure our brothers and sisters--and yes, it is going to cause all sorts of difficult decisions around here when you start dealing with type 2. I represent the population with the second highest per capita population of diabetes in the Nation. My Tribal communities, Salt River Pima- Maricopa, amazing community; smart, well run. And genetically, they are number two and their sister Tribe is number one, they are a population that has diabetes. Next year, we are going to be doing the farm bill. Within that there will be nutrition support. One of the ways this place has always passed the farm subsidy bills and nutrition support is they merge them together. How about if I came to you and said, Let's just have a really uncomfortable conversation instead of the EBT card--which is sort of the modern-day food stamp. If you have someone who wants to sign up for the program, saying to them, We are going to try to cure your body and get your body to make insulin again, but you have to do the nutrition program with us. And that may be 2 years of a food box showing up three times a day at your house, where it is microwavable; Lyft can drop it off. But what is more elegant? From a society standpoint, what is kinder is, Here is an EBT card, go to Jack in the Box--I love the onion rings--and you can use the EBT card at Jack in the Box. Is that really making society healthy? Better? Because we have also been doing some experiments in the Joint Economic Committee, just trying to do math. And starting to realize health--the fact that you have a household member who has severe diabetes that may be heading to get a foot cut off is a component in income inequality. I thought that was the holy grail to my brothers and sisters on the left. Let's try to make our brothers and sisters healthier. And the fact of the matter is, if there is something going on out there in the literature, why wouldn't we take some of the dollars we spend here, the things we put into pure theater, and say--this science is already in phase 1. Whether it be through tax incentives, whether it be through other types of incentives, how do we get this into the field? And then we, as a body, have to have really difficult discussions because you're not going to give someone stem cells to get their pancreas to start producing insulin again if they are still morbidly obese. I mean, this is a big boy conversation--a big person conversation, knowing we are not allowed to use gender identity anymore. But what is merciful? What would be great for the budget? What would be great for society? What would be great for productivity? Because at the end of the speech, my hook is going to be inflation is killing our country. It is blowing up the future of young people. It is eating the savings of older people. How do you get productivity back in the society? It is actually disruptions. It turns out if you can disrupt things like this, you have this virtuous circle. And how many times does this body even talk about doing big things that are actually really good for everyone. And if it is true, you would think the majority here, who basically controls all the power, one of the first things they would have done is invited the researchers who had gotten together with CRISPR and the stem cell and brought them in here and said, Let's have a conversation. How real is this? How far is it? What resources, what incentives, what things could we do in the capital stack to get money to invest in it? What could we do as a body? Because if this is really 33 percent of all healthcare spending is associated with diabetes. Could you imagine? Even if it was a fraction of that population of our brothers and sisters, we are removed from the suffering. I have pitched over and over and over to people with power in this body saying, Invite the researchers here. We need to understand this. And instead, over and over, my brothers and sisters on the left seem to say, no. We care more. We are going to build more diabetes clinics. We are going to build more community-based clinics. And I am saying the disruption is the solution. Cure the damn disease. It is going to be hard. There will be things that will go wrong. There will be people who will call us names because we are trying to say, Well, we need to do the nutrition, and maybe some exercises, as we get ready to make this investment in you. But it is the moral thing to do for our society, and also economically really smart. Let alone, also think of the economic expansion we get when we live in a society where we have so many of our brothers and sisters who can't participate in the economy because parts of their lives are miserable, their health issues. The cure is the solution. Patching people up is--it may be great virtue signaling but it is not that merciful. So that is sort of the theme. I am going to walk through these boards. Now, let's go through other things we could do as a society to disrupt. So how many times have we all been here on the floor and we hear about the Build Back Better? Yes, we can spend more money and that would be good for inflation. And you sit there and scratch your head and say, My elementary school economics teacher was wrong. But they are working on it in the Senate. We are being told there is a pared back version coming. In that pared back version, would you believe there is a provision that you can't automate the ports in California? Huh? You have to back up and think about this. So I have a White House-- and some of my brothers and sisters here on the left, inflation isn't their fault. It is not the incredible amounts of spending; the trillions of dollars being handed out to people without any requirement for them to participate in the society or the economy. It is not their fault. It is supply chains. And one of the first things they really want to do is a piece of legislation that would restrict automating the ports. Huh? There is a worker shortage. There is a technology shortage. We have ships parked, but the longshoremen write checks to Democrats so they will slow down--you can't have it both ways. So the fact of the matter is, the language is there. I have had a number of people look at me and say, Oh, that can't be. No? That slipped in, and it is still over there in the Senate draft. This is absurd. I will argue the disruption is the cure. So it is not only automating the ports, it is the second half. There are some brilliant articles out there with some technology now that say that the rail spurs in the Port of Long Beach, the Port of Los Angeles--some of the others--and these are some former space engineers that have designed this--you take the container, you park it on the electric rail car, and you tell it where to go. And it just goes automatically to the spur, to drop it off, this and that. Functionally, you go from an automated port to an automated travel delivery system. That is forward thinking. That is policy that is rule set that popped that productivity, popped the problems in the supply chain. Ta-da. You did something positive, and when you do that, you also take on inflation. And instead, this body is trying to stop the very disruptions that would make our lives better. They are pandering to a group that writes them a check. But it exists. I mean, there are fun articles about these automated freight train cars. And they are electric. You just, boom, put the container on it and tell it where to go. Look, we have a demographic crisis. We have trouble with workers. We have all these things. The disruption is the solution. Do you see any attempt around here? Instead, we have debates here where we sound like it is still the 1990s. So one of the other battles here is energy prices. And I have had an ongoing, reasonably friendly discussion with a Democrat who's from back East, who is a friend--and I will call him a friend: Oh, we have to stop hydrocarbon. Oh, natural gas isn't this clean. Oh, David, you don't understand. Yes, natural gas when properly burned for energy, those things may be 40 to 50 percent cleaner than other fuel sources, but you have methane leakage. Okay, I'll do that with you. And we know the methane math on the latest calc is like 8.79 to 1 in its greenhouse effect if you do the math. But it also has--as we know, the new math has a much shorter half-life. That's why so many of the global warming models from a year or two ago are actually wrong because we are now recalculating methane. But it turns out that some experiments have been going on the last two years of, functionally, a solution for capturing methane, particularly in oil and gas and pipelines. And I am going to be a little silly here because it is a dirt-cheap solution. It is clay. I think it's a copper-oxidized clay. It's like a sponge for methane. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But there are a couple good academic papers saying, Hey, you do realize we could functionally take kitty litter, pack it into wellheads, pack it into the pipe fittings, pack it into the other things, and it is a methane sponge. Why wouldn't we take a run at this? Instead, the Malthusians around here that basically run this place, say, No, we are going to restrict ourselves because, oh, God, we can't have access to this. No, the solution is in the disruption. I am just excited about this one because it is super cheap. It is not some of the grandiose, build a new regulatory body, build an inspection, build these huge tankers that sit on top of the wellheads and capture the methane. Turns out it could be functionally copper-oxidized kitty litter. Does anyone around here read? So I have had a proposal here, and for anyone who is bored out of their mind, go to Schweikert environmental crowdsourcing. There is a YouTube video I put together a couple years ago that basically said, look, we all walk around with these super computers in our pocket. What if I came to you tomorrow and said, Instead of the regulatory model we use right now to protect air quality and you can use those for water and other things, where functionally you fill out pieces of paper, you take them to your local regulatory body--your EPA, county air quality, whatever you have in your area--and they stick it in a file cabinet. And everyone knows that file cabinets full of pieces of paper make the air quality better, right? No, it's documentation so one day someone can sue you. What would happen if I came to you and said they exist today and they are not expensive. If you had a couple thousand people in your marketplace, a few thousand--something like Maricopa County, which is huge--had a little attachment on their phone and it does air quality samples? You crowd source the problem. You no longer need people filling out pieces of paper for their permitting because if someone screws up, you catch them immediately. The elegance of this is the clowns that may be painting cars in their backyard behind your house, they are never getting a permit, they are never getting caught unless you had a crowd source model where the UPS driver, the soccer mom, everyone else is walking around with a little thing attached to their phone or a Bluetooth on their car or attached on the side. The beauty of these things--they do PM10, they do volatile organics. There is even one out there, a little panel, that actually does radioactive, which there was a discussion of putting those on UPS vans. The solutions are out there. Think of how different the world would be. I want to open up a motorcycle paint shop. I have to go get an engineer to stamp my air quality permit. I have to go get the scrubbers. I have to do this, do this, do this, do this. What if the solution is, hey, here are the things you have to do. You don't need a permit because the moment you screw up, we catch you that same day. It is a living. Do any of you use Waze when you go driving? It is a living crowd source model. These ideas exist out there. In Detroit where they had the water issue. There is a little ring out there that is like $39. If you put it under the sink, you would have caught it. You could have crowd-sourced the information and not gone through multibillion dollars of misery. The unwillingness of this place to understand what century we are in. If someone gets bored, take a look at that YouTube video, it sort of explains the concept. For those of us in the West, this is a crazy one but it's worth thinking about. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Desalinization. You know we know there is a number of desalinization plants along the coast of California. There are even some discussions of some in Mexico and other places and around the world, but there is always an issue of the brine. You have got to really spread the brine out, so you don't create intense areas. Now, there are some researchers out there that are going, hey, that brine--did you know, there may be all sorts of really neat stuff in that. There may be rare earths. As the desalinization plant is mining potable water, we could be mining the brine for rare earths. I am just begging the people around here--think--think a little more creatively because this place is absolutely dystopian anymore, and there are solutions out there. Is this Republican or Democrat? I am sure someone will make a contribution to one side or the other and then immediately the other side will say, oh, that is a Republican idea. The fact of the matter is it is worth at least understanding. It turns out, I have an absolute fascination with carbon capture. There is actually a tax credit in those things that I am the lead author on that is out there in law and other things. The break- throughs--it turns out we are getting really good at this. There is ambient where they are actually pulling in the air. There is point source. There is a power generation outside of Houston called an Allam cycle where they actually blow up the natural gas, and they don't heat up steam to throw the turbine, they use the actual gas from the burn. It has no smokestack; they capture every bit of it. We are actually getting really good. And all over the world there are researchers spending time on this. There was even an amazing paper about 2 years ago, MIT came up with a nanotube electric-charged plate that goes on, off, on, off, but it actually crashed the cost of capturing--and they were doing it ambient. They were just blowing air across it, and it crashed the energy to do carbon capture. Okay. So my brothers and sisters on the left say they are the ones that care about the environment. Okay. But we are the ones actually doing the policy that is practical that works, that we don't actually put ourselves back in the stone age, and options to grab the carbon. There are multiple versions of this. This is actually--there is an actual facility, and I think this one may actually be in Canada--and, yes, it has Gates Foundation money and others. This is an active ambient capture. It apparently does amazing things. This technology is only a couple years old, and it is already out of date. The technology is moving so fast. This isn't pie in the sky. This isn't theoretical--they exist. What could we do policy-wise other than me doing the 45 on the tax code to try to say, hey, we are going to give you a tax credit for carbon you have captured if you sequester it or put it in concrete or other things. Are there things we could do? This becomes a moment where those of us who believe the use of hydrocarbons is basically keeping a society prosperous. My brothers and sisters on the left that want to eliminate hydrocarbons--maybe there is a technology solution that brings us together. It is worth understanding and working on. How many detailed hearings have we seen here where we brought in the engineers? Not the talking heads, not the lobbyists. Not another idiot doing virtue signaling for us, but the actual engineers. You know, those types where you have to have a conversation where you own a calculator. This stuff exists. There are other revolutions happening around us that are incredible opportunities--very scary, very wonderful. We are going to do the farm bill next year. I grabbed this article almost 2 years ago and we have been tracking it, and they have had some success. I am going to geek out for a couple seconds. I will try to do this as quickly and lightly as I can. Do you all remember your high school biology class--C4 plants, C3 plants. These plants actually need a carbon molecule to grow because they turned it into a sugar. But the dear Lord--there is actually this weird little glitch where sometimes the plant grabs an oxygen molecule, and it goes: Oh, I don't need this. And it spends its energy purging the oxygen molecule and going back trying to get a carbon. What would happen if researchers--through a little synthetic biology--could tweak it so every time it grabbed the carbon? Some of the researchers think for some plants that could be a 40-- now, on some of the other articles I am reading it is down, in some others plants it might be in the 20s, 25, 28, there is a 30. Think about it. If I had a crop that could grow 40 percent more efficiently--40 percent less land, 40 percent less fertilizer, 40 percent less water. The disruption to the world--you basically just fed the world for the next century. Worldwide agriculture functionally produces 2.2 times more global greenhouse gases--I guess is the term the left uses--than every car on Earth--2.2 times more. So if I had a 40 percent improvement, just this synthetic biology on plants would be equal to removing every car off the face of the Earth. Now, we all know the math is going to turn out that way--yes, there will be lots of people who resist it because they are scared of technology. Why wouldn't we have this part of our conversation if we care about--those of us that live in drought-prone areas--care about the environment and care about feeding the world. This is the future. What is the chance anything like this will be part of the farm bill next year? Pretty much zero because it is a disruption of technology, and this place basically has become a protection racket. We protect incumbents. Not incumbent Members of Congress, incumbent business models, incumbent associations, incumbent bureaucracies. We don't ask them to leap into the future. This is the future. This one I use on occasion, it is fairly snarky, but I think it makes a point. How many care about plastic in the ocean? Oh, the hands go up. Here in D.C. I don't think we are allowed to use plastic straws because everyone knows D.C. plastic straws were critical to ocean-wide plastic except there is almost no plastic from North America in the ocean. It turns out that 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers--8 in Asia, 2 in Africa. Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa. If you actually cared about plastic in the ocean, would you be writing your checks--or in this case, your credit card--to groups that go out and say, we are going to go out and capture plastic. Great. Or wouldn't we adjust some of our technical foreign aid, our response in environmental aid? Saying, we are going to go to those 10 rivers, 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa, and we are going to do something like we are going to create a value for the plastic. All of a sudden, I have an economic solution. Instead of dumping it into the river, we are going to collect it. See, this is an actual solution. The problem is the solution takes away the virtue signaling. This place lives on telling great stories demonstrating you care. It doesn't give a darn about actual solutions. Ninety percent of the ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers. Go to those rivers and let's deal with it. Another thought experiment--and now I am going to do a lot more on healthcare. I accept a number of these will not work. I accept a number of these will make some people angry because it blows up their business model. Remember, money, power, vanity, but most of the time D.C. is about the money. What is the single most powerful thing this place could do tomorrow? If I said between now and the end of the year, I want to have a disruption in the cost of healthcare. But, David, that is only a few months. D.C. is not capable of actually setting off a revolution in a few months to do something powerful for the price of healthcare. What if I came to you tomorrow and said: The models say--the research says--and this one we have known for years and years and years and years--16 percent of all healthcare spending is actually people not taking their medicine--not taking it properly or not taking it at all. If you have hypertension and you don't take the calcium inhibitor. You have high cholesterol; you don't take your statin. It turns out you stroke out; you have a heart attack; you cost the system a fortune. You stay on your meds--actually, they are cheap, they are safe, they are very effective. We have decades and decades of history on their effectiveness; you stay healthy. It turns out you could actually just say for certain types of health pharmaceuticals, put the 99 cent pill cap on it that beeps at you when you didn't open it today. If you want to do the fancy one--this slide's a little year or two old--there is the fancy one where the pill cap actually talks to your phone and the phone tells you you didn't take it. Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare costs--it would be $570 billion a year--so over a half a trillion dollars a year. What would happen if tomorrow this place got together, and said: Hey, for some of our populations that we know are likely to miss taking their pills, or grandma is having some cognitive issues, or someone is just busy in their life, let's spend the 99 cents on the pill bottle, give them the thing that beeps when it is not open. If that actually helped even a fraction--maybe it is not 16 percent, but what if we were able to do half of that? We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars. Is this Republican or Democrat? It smacks us in the face. There is just no constituency here lobbying or writing us checks for this. The solution is in the disruption. The disruption is part of the technology. Before I do this slide, I need to tell a story and see if I can put this in perspective. Mr. Speaker, there is a reason I seem to just annoy the hell out of so many folks here because this is a challenge to how we think. A few years ago, I was reading one of my crazy blogs. It is a material science blog, oddly enough. A professor, I think it was Duke, I may have the university wrong, she had been working on this breath biopsy where you could put breath across it, and it could designate if you have this category of flu. The model basically said that once we know that category, then we can bounce off your medical records on your phone, and it can just automatically work your antivirals. It has been worked on and worked on. Think of this, Mr. Speaker. It is a flu kazoo. You blow into it, and it can designate, and the latest models and experiments now are picking up dead cancer proteins. When a cancer cell dies, it throws off a DNA strip. Some of the sensors are getting so good they can actually identify them. What is the problem with something like a breath biopsy? I wish I had some brothers and sisters here in the body to yell at me. What is the problem with it? You blow into it, it bangs up your medical records, and it orders your antivirals. What is the problem with it? It is illegal. I am allowing an algorithm to prescribe. The Social Security Act says I will see a doctor, not an algorithm. Now, the fact of the matter is wink, wink, nod, nod, if you have something with a diabetic pump, they already have an algorithm that is prescribing, and they have been doing it for years. This is not new. If you had it certified by the FDA--and there are algorithms certified by the FDA--why wouldn't we make them reimbursable? Why wouldn't we do some simple conceptual ideas that you could have technology in your home medicine cabinet that you lick, you spit, you urinate, or you blow into--whatever it is--and you can monitor your health? That technology exists today. One of the reasons the capital stack won't invest in it is it is functionally illegal, and they are basically betting that the lobbyist armies will keep it illegal here because--I have to be honest--it will change the foot traffic in many of our medical facilities. It will also save society from the debt implosion that is being driven by future healthcare costs. So, you have to decide: Are you going to save us? Are we going to protect the world from disruption? It is back to my Blockbuster example. Should Congress have stopped Netflix or streaming and protected the renting of the little silver disks? That is, functionally, what we do in healthcare. There is technology out there coming. The newest version is of folks with the Apple watches. The reality is if I can know your O2, your temperature, your pulse rates, then the algorithm may say: Hey, you might have a problem here. What happens with the new versions that are stunningly accurate? We have math for a number of these that are more accurate than a human. Yes, it is scary. Disruption always is. If we don't have a disruption in the cost of healthcare, then there is a technical economic term: We are screwed. There are lots of these at-home biopsy-type tests. You have all seen the one because it had some great pop culture last year of an iPhone app where you could zoom in on a mole, and the algorithm behind it was stunningly accurate: Yes, you need to get that thing cut off because that is skin cancer. Why aren't we promoting things here? Mr. Speaker, I have been at war since I got here on telehealth. I had a piece of legislation over and over, and I could never get a hearing on it for telemedicine, telehealth, until the pandemic hit. Then, they functionally took our language--I was actually doing this with a couple of my Democrat colleagues. They took our telehealth expansion language and put it into law for the pandemic. Mr. Speaker, do you know that the expansion of telehealth goes away the day the pandemic is declared over? The argument used to be: Well, David, you don't understand. Seniors aren't going to figure out how to hit the button and use FaceTime to talk to their doctor. Seniors aren't going to figure out how to put something on their wrist or on their chest or blow into it. You don't understand. It turns out they were wrong. I am looking forward to this body deciding: Are you going to be with the lobbyists or the expansion of access to healthcare through telehealth? Because this goes away when the pandemic is declared over. Here is another example. It is just another breath biopsy. These things exist. They have put them together. What is fascinating is this slide is about a year or so old, and it keeps going and going. They are working now on a number where it is a breath biopsy to detect different types of cancers. Why doesn't this place find joy and embrace the solutions? Mr. Speaker, you start to understand that, outside the folks that politicized messenger RNA and didn't understand the mechanisms and all those things--but we are getting so close to treating so many diseases, whether it be my fascination with the stem cell being able to set off insulin production again, to the fact--I am going to show a number of slides here where an incredible number of the cancers, particularly soft cell, we can set off your body to fight them now using messenger RNA. We are getting right on the cusp. If I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said: Hey, malaria, certain cancers, HIV, influenza, heart disease--the heart disease one is fascinating, teaching your body through a messenger RNA how to build certain protein stacks to help rebuild heart damage. It is here. How much discussion do you have in this body? How many experts have we brought in saying that technology is the cure if healthcare is what is chewing us alive? Do we do another bill on who is going to get subsidized and who has to pay? Do we do another group saying: Oh, there is a group out there we are not taxing enough. We need their cash to throw into Medicare because we all know the crisis that is happening on Medicare financing. Why is this place incapable of having a conversation about crashing the price of healthcare? I am going to go through a number of these because I collect these. I spend 10 hours a week on an airplane, and I get bored easily. I read a lot of things. I keep coming across these. This one is really interesting. It is immunotherapy for brain cancer. Now, it is not the solid tumor, but they think they have had amazing success on this. This was one of those we didn't think we could do anything with, and it looks like there is an immunotherapy for brain cancer. Here is one. I have not read the details on this because I just saw this on my flight, I think, a couple of days ago. A drug cures 100 percent of colorectal cancer patients in a small initial trial. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But this is what we need to be fixating on. Instead, what we are going to do here is watch the bill that comes from the Senate, where they are going to blow up the capital stack for the very research that finances these sorts of things. A couple more, just for the fun of it. Biotech--and I think this one is already out in phase one, in multiple phase ones; I don't know if it has reached phase two--malaria. You do understand, Mr. Speaker, for much of the world, malaria is just a brutal, vicious disease. I saw some data a couple of months ago. They were only about 30 percent effective. Believe it or not, that is actually terrific because if they have hit 30 percent effective, we can through adjustments and through other factors. Could you imagine the amount of misery you could end in the world? They could get a 50 percent effective vaccine for malaria. Instead, we will do certain types of foreign aid. Instead, it turns out one of the most powerful things we could do for the world is our intellectual property, fixing what we incentivize, and it is not handouts of cash. It is to fix the regulatory model here, fix the capital stacks, fix the tax incentive, and you do amazing things for the world. I did a presentation on sickle cell anemia last year, and I got a little over the top on getting a little technical. I used to have about a dozen slides on this one. But it turns out we think we know how to do a certain type of gene editing with a couple of other optionalities for sickle cell anemia, and this one is out there in trials. Isn't that a moral thing to do? The fact of the matter is, do you try to help people maintain their misery? Or when you actually see data that says there is a path, do you pursue the cure? My argument here is the cure is better for us as a society financially, productivity-wise. Just from a purely ethical and moral standpoint, removing someone's misery is a pretty neat thing to do. This is a heart disease one. I just found it fascinating that through a functioning CAR T, which is the derivative of the mRNA, you are setting off your body. In this case, instead of it going after a disease, it is actually repairing damage. I think this one is coming out of the Boston area. There is a reason that these folks have Nobel Prizes. When you start to understand these infectious diseases, herpes, diabetes, the other things, we are on the cusp of having cures, and the misery that I believe the last 16 months of really bad policy here have brought to this country, the damage inflation is doing, the damage that is going on at the border of my State, the homelessness, the fentanyl, imagine, Mr. Speaker, if this place would set aside some of the virtue signaling legislation--oh, this is going to get the other side in the next legislation; oh, that just writes a great ad--and you brought in the engineers and experts in the different areas that we all claim to pretend we know something about and say: Here is what the future looks like, and if we get it right, the future is amazing. A little while ago, Mr. Speaker, you saw a little girl behind me. I have a 6-year-old. Two weeks ago, out of nowhere, my phone rang, and the birth mother of my little girl had a little boy. Now, my wife and I have a little boy. I have a 3-week-old. It is my primary reason for running again. I have to find a way to beat this body into submission to understand there are good things out there, but it doesn't work into our current political construct. It doesn't work in the way this place raises political money or keeps certain friends. The cures are disruptive, and disruption is the future. Disruption makes society healthier, better, wealthier, and more productive. That productivity solves the inflation problem, and it solves so many other things. How do we move this body to stop being terrified of its own shadow and saying, screw it, we are going to do what is right, not necessarily what is easy or political? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, then you start to understand the other policies we are going to pay for, for decades. Don't laugh. I have a little girl who is about to turn 7. Out of nowhere, my wife and I now have a little boy that is functionally 18 days old, one of the greatest gifts God has ever given us. But I look at my little girl and I look at these other children that are first graders or second graders, and we are seeing some terrifying data on what the left's policy of locking down schools and--``you are going to do it through a computer screen''--are we prepared for the data we are already seeing on what is happening on standardized math scores around the country? You do realize--this is, once again, like the inflation--it is a cascade effect that we will live with through the next decade, unless we sort of step in and fix this. This is a derivative of Democrat policies, when you start to see standardized math test scores suffering all across the country, particularly in those States and communities that engaged in the almost excessive lockdowns for theater. It was virtue signaling. The math never said it. This is a fascinating one. Growing debt would result in a per-person income being lowered, functionally $9,000 lower, or a 10 percent reduction. What this study is trying to do is trying to understand--as the left basically says: Our solution is we are going to send someone money. What does it functionally do to future prosperity when you start to actually see what this does in future purchasing power for your income? Now, it is a complicated formula. Part of it basically says you don't have as much capital revolving in the economy, so you don't have much investment in productivity, so the society doesn't get healthier, wealthier, better, or faster, because all of that cash is functionally financing U.S. sovereign debt. But are you prepared? Because this is what the left has brought you. As the debt skyrockets, you get to live about 10 percent poorer. Now, stack that on the fact that you have lost a couple months of your labor. Tell me I am not wrong to be angry about the cruelty and the complete avoidance of the misery this place is creating across the country. And then you start to look at where our future is. Remember, eventually the math wins. The pretty words here may get you reelected, but the math will always win. This is where we are at. And you start to look at what is going on. The interest--because the piling up of debt, Social Security, Medicare, interest is now functionally crossing, in the next few years, across all defense spending and all Medicaid spending. You understand, this is Social Security, this is Medicare, this is interest. A number of my friends on the left say: ``Well, if we cut defense.'' The green line is defense. I know you may care more about this coming election, but we have got to stop the misery. Just minutes ago, the Atlanta Fed's GDP calculator just announced that the second quarter looks like it wasn't 1.2 percent negative; it is 1\1/2\ percent negative. Remember your high school economic class? Even though it is not technically correct, congratulations, you brought us 2 months of negative GDP. Please, to the majority, stop hurting people. Let some of us--I will give you the ideas. Put your own name on them. We are better than this. It can't be all about the next election. If we don't stop this, we are about to get a decade of misery because of crappy decisions made in the last 16 months. That is just not fair. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I thank my friend from Florida. Madam Speaker, we are going to try to do the rapid boards and try to show some data of what is going on out there. What I am going to do is going to be a little harsh, but I need to beg the majority to think about the information. The data we are going to show may just prove, please, you have got to stop what you are doing. You are hurting people. The cascade may already be built in. We may now have years of really ugly, really bad, hurtful, cruel built into the economy. Now, look, part of my premise is that good policy is not only good for the United States, it is good for the world, it is good for growth, it is good for the future, it is good for poverty, it closes income inequality. You actually go back to after the 2017 tax reform. The Democrats came to these mikes and said: Oh, the world is coming to an end; there is going to be a recession. None of it was true, and they knew it wasn't true even though an economist said it wasn't true. You had some of the greatest growth in U.S. history, some of the fastest closing of income inequality, the poor got dramatically less poor, but you also saw GDP around the world got better. Look, when I am holding articles like this about how many may die this coming fall because of food shortages, that is not the Democrats, but the Democrats' inaction is their fault. They run this place. They run the House, they run the Senate, they run the White House. Instead, the White House, along with the Democrats here, decide hey, let's burn some more ethanol by taking our food, our grain supply, and instead of doing the rotation, saying we need to stop this, we need to turn that into animal feed, you know, there is a fertilizer shortage, let's grow soybeans, the things to get prepared. They were so worried about their next election. The idiocy of this place is they were willing to sacrifice people around the world. That is the cruelty that continues to be Democrat policy. Let's actually sort of walk through what Democrats are doing to Americans. When I am holding boards with quotes from Jason Furman, something is wrong in the world. ``The decline in real average hourly earnings at this point is terrible, the fastest pace of decline in 40 years.'' What is Jason Furman saying? He is basically saying people are getting poorer every single day. The Democrats have owned this place now for, what, 16 months? You have got 16 months functionally of people being poorer every single day. But what does that mean? You have Republican after Republican. You notice the Democrats almost never want to talk about what they have set off. We bring boards like this, and we say: Hey, do you realize your eggs are 33 percent more expensive? Nondurable goods, if you take the whole category, there was a number a couple days ago, the inflation number that was almost in the 30s on nondurable goods for that monthly snapshot. But I need you to think much more grand in understanding inflation. Inflation is a lot more than you are paying 21 percent more for your butter. I need you to understand what inflation means to you and your family's survival and the cruelty of this place not giving a damn, the cruelty of this place being unwilling to actually do real legislation that would help. They basically have decided: Oh, we are going to pretend it is the Fed's fault, it is Russia's fault, and this place isn't going to do anything. We are going to let the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates to the point where they put lots of people out of work, have that misery, and somehow Democrats think they are not going to be held responsible for what they have done? I was trying to come up with a way to help someone understand what inflation really means to your life. Well, this is a snapshot of the Democrats' congressional calendar. I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, highest inflation in the continental United States. If you are a worker in my area and you haven't had a pay raise, but you still actually do things like eat, drive, live in shelter, do you understand how many days you are now working for free? You need to think this through. You work so many days, but take a look down here, you functionally have lost almost 2 months of labor just for the inflation from the last 16 months. Think about that. If I came to you right now and said, Hey, guess what? You are going to lose 41 days of your labor. You are going to work for the government. Actually, you are going to work for the government for free. Because what is the great scam? Where did this money actually go? I need you to conceptualize the value of your time that has been stripped from you. It didn't just disappear. That value functionally went to debt. It lowered the value of debt by raising your own costs. So you have actually sort of transferred a bunch of your wealth to the U.S. sovereign debt. It is a little ethereal to process, but that is functionally what happened. So the trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of debt this place has piled up, the Democrats found a way to tax you. They basically set off inflation. They took away a couple months, a couple months of your labor, and then functionally transferred it so that will pay back these trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of debt but will pay it back with dollars that are worth less. Do you see the picture? Maybe that is the real reason the left here isn't on fire trying to save people from this misery. And it is dead serious. You can do the June 2021 or since December. If you do December, particularly for my Phoenix area--and I am the highest inflation in the continental United States. For the entire country, apparently urban Alaska--who ever knew that was a subcategory economic zone?--is slightly higher than us. But if you go back to since December 2020, you have lost 1.9 months of your labor. The reason I am trying to chart it this way is people go, Oh, eggs are only 20 percent more, how many eggs are you going to eat? I need you to think about this, of how many days you are working not to feed your family anymore, not to pay your mortgage or your rent. You are basically giving it away. It has been ripped; it has been stripped away from you. And you start to think about that. If you go since June 2021, you have lost 40 days of work that has been stripped away from you, the value. You worked for 40 days for free now. If you go back to December 2020, you now worked for 57 days. If you live in the Phoenix area, our inflation has been so high you worked for 57 days for free. This is what Democrat policies did to you. Tell me this isn't cruel. Do you understand what this does to the working poor? We get this great speechifying here; the virtue signaling is great. But somehow Democrats get judged on pretty words, and we get judged on what we accomplish. Look at what we accomplished after refining, fixing, reforming the tax code. Look what we did economically for the working poor when we fixed the regulatory code. Look at the misery. Look at the misery you have set off. How many presentations here, how many pieces of legislation have come to the floor? Those of us in the Ways and Means Committee, Republicans, we keep offering ideas and saying, We will do this in partnership with you. There are things we can do legislatively to help take on inflation. We could no more get one of our amendments heard around here because it is being controlled out of Nancy Pelosi's office. If you start taking a look at what inflation has done to my community--and I know this chart is noisy and there is a lot of movement on it, but you start looking at the median price of a home. Remember, when we talk about housing, you get knifed in two different directions. The price of the house goes way up, but the value of your savings that you have been saving up to buy that house goes down, so you get it on both sides of the seesaw. You wonder why housing insecurity is just skyrocketing in this country. Once again, great speeches. Maybe we will throw a bunch more government money at it, but those are their policies that have made people's lives miserable. This chart, you see that line that just collapses? That is the value of your hourly earnings. You may be being paid more. Great. Hey, I got a 5 percent pay raise. But in the Phoenix area, CPI-U went up, what, 13.1? Traditional CPI went up 12.1. Great, you got a 5 percent pay raise. Where are the other 7 points? You functionally are 7 percent poorer every day. These are more than just charts. These are people. These are people just trying to find a way to air-condition their house, pay for the gas to get to work, to feed the family. I understand I often come behind this microphone and hold my boards up and sound like an accountant on steroids. But these are people, and your country is poorer, substantially poorer today. All the progress we made after the 2017 reforms on the tax code, which created the miracle of economic growth and closing income inequality. The poor got less poor. They succeeded in stripping it all away. It is all gone. The thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of increased purchasing power for the working middle class, it is all gone. The left's policies are basically arsonists to this country's prosperity. And yet the brilliant policies of what they did a year ago when they pushed out another $1.9 trillion and required no work, asked for no work, asked for no job training. They just gave away money. And now we can't figure out why we can't get the population back into the labor force. How do you think we are going to get productivity back? How do you think we are ever going to get inflation back under control? If inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services, guess what? You can do two things: you can have the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates and crash the economy, and that seems to be the Democrat playbook, just put people out of work, let's just push up misery. Or we could get together in this place and find ways to help people, make our society, make business more productive. Help people have an incentive to take some of that cash and instead of going to buy a new television, put it aside for their future retirement. There are things we could do. The policies that would get our brothers and sisters back in the labor force are absolutely key. Do you think as Republicans we could ever get a Democrat to let us have a simple amendment, even though some of the ideas were ones we agreed upon a year ago? It was a Republican-Democrat idea, but, today, oh God, we can't let the Republicans actually have something that might be good for society and actually may help knock down inflation because it encourages people back into the labor force, and therefore we could pump up productivity and therefore we have more goods and services to chew up the massive currency that the Democrats handed out from this place. When I talk about the misery, it is not a snapshot, if I get one more idiot--and I am sorry, that is mean, and I probably broke decorum there. But if I get one more person who didn't show up at their basic economics class come behind these microphones and say, Well, it is transitory. No, it is not. You have got to understand what is going on right now is these inflation numbers are becoming structural, meaning this misery is built into the next decade of your life. When you see a chart like this, you start to understand the CPI and then the medical expenses. So you may be over here and then you come along, hit 2022, and you start to understand: How are you going to afford your healthcare in the future? Is the Democrats' goal: We will just subsidize it more? I am going to show you a slide that the Democrats' approach is saying: Let's just give away more money. We will cover up our sins by giving away more money. It turns out, we have now some great studies that say: As they pile up the debt, it also makes your life miserable and slows down your economic growth and slows down prosperity in society. This is one we just came across, and it is a GAO study. You have got to understand what the left's policies are doing. We need to create a whole new misery index. Forty years ago when Ronald Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter and they had high inflation and high unemployment, he created this misery index. It was just a way for people to understand the brutality the left's policies were doing to people's lives. Maybe we need to create new one. Because this is a really weird cycle. We have high employment. We have a demographic bubble that goes against us. We are getting old very fast as a society. We have incentivized, we have financed people not to participate in the labor force, and we have handed out lots of free money that had no attachment to labor. Then you start to find out that GAO's own study basically was looking at homelessness. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a number of the Democrats that were giving beautiful speeches about how much they care about homelessness. I have ZIP Codes in my community where homelessness has doubled in the last year. There are some real problems in areas of Phoenix. What happens if I come to you and say, a $100 increase in median rents was associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate? So what they are basically saying--and this is a GAO study--as rents go up, particularly in those sort of ``C apartments,'' or those basic living places--as those rents go up, for every $100, their study was finding another 9 percent increase in people displaced from housing. Once again, the Democrats' solution will be, well, let's subsidize them, let's give out some more money, let's not do the things necessary to flatten out so we have economic stability in our society. The homelessness, let alone what is going on on the border in my State and the fentanyl in my neighborhoods, also turns out our instinct was right--we found the study--that the inflation the left has set off is now making people displaced from their housing. They are living in alleys in my neighborhoods. You start to look at the other misery index that they have brought to my community, the fentanyl. You have got to understand the amount of fentanyl that is pouring across my border. I have already done presentations on this. It is partially anecdotal because I don't think there is actually a public exchange. But when I have Phoenix police sergeants telling me that it is down to like $12 to get high for the day on fentanyl where a year ago it was over $100, does that tell you there is something really wrong on the border? Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am going to yield to my friend from Florida, the sheriff, such time as he may consume. War on Affordable Energy

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I promise you, I am going to use all 5 minutes. This is the cruelty now to poor people, to the working poor, to that hardworking middle class, to those retirees. When you come to them and say, all right, let's take a look here. Forgive the colors, but the green would have been if we had hit the 2 percent sort of Federal Reserve benchmark inflation goal. This here is where we seem to be annualizing right now, and this is some of the newest projection for the next couple years. It is about 7.4. But when you see this bar come down, it basically means the $100 you had in 2022, if you get to 2032, so a decade, that $100 you have, if we stay at this sort of inflation rate, functionally, you have lost half of its purchasing value. So you have saved and saved and saved and saved and saved, and if you start running--if the current interest or current inflation environment were to hang around for a decade, at the end of that decade, half the value is gone. You have lost half of your savings. This is what is going on. What if it is just for 2 years? You start just doing it for 2 years, and you start to realize you have lost almost a quarter. Then you compound that out to you want to retire one day. You want to finance your kids' school. You want to do these things. Do you understand how the difference of your earning power has to change just to make up for the loss of the value? I represent a community that is going through 11 percent inflation rates. Then the last one in the last how many seconds I have. Please. Please. Someone hire an economist to talk to the White House. A gas tax holiday? I mean, you can hear the economists rolling on their backs laughing right now. Mr. Speaker pro tem, thank you for your tolerance tonight. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, just because we are doing some organization and because we are all up against the tyranny of the clock, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney). Rugby World Cup

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try something tonight because I am very, very concerned this place isn't paying attention to the numbers and how much trouble I believe we are in. My argument and my thesis is very simple: If I am wrong, I am wrong; but if I am right and this place didn't prepare because of the numbers we are seeing, then we will damage the people, we will damage the economics, we will damage the country, and we will damage our future. We are not taking it seriously enough on how the numbers are eroding and how fast--how fast--the numbers are eroding around us economically. Now, originally, this was going to be a 1-hour presentation. Now it looks like I have 22 minutes because of the tyranny of the clock, so I will try not go too fast, and I promise I will dispose of some of the boards. As always, wave at me if I start rambling at high rates of speed. This is our baseline. The problem is this chart is now a year and a half old and the numbers are much worse. The reality, 29 years from now, CBO--this isn't some off group; this is our Congressional Budget Office-- functionally says we have $112 trillion. My back of the napkin now says $120 trillion of publicly borrowed debt in today's dollars, not inflated dollars. Functionally, 75 percent of that debt is Medicare. Twenty-five percent is Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance. Well, what happens to Medicare particularly when you start having inflation like we do? And I represent a district that has had over 11 percent inflation. I represent the district with the highest inflation in America. Let's actually start to walk through what many of the experts are saying. And remember, I am trying to make a very simple point here. I am worried about my country. I am worried about our debt and the ability to pay, and it is skyrocketing; and then the cascade effect of how many people are getting poorer. Remember, in the first 15 months of Democrat control here, Americans are dramatically poorer today than they were a year ago. So let's actually walk through this. When Larry Summers--when I am coming to the floor using quotes for Larry Summers--you have got Larry Summers. In order to do what is necessary to stop inflation, the Fed is going to raise interest rates enough that the economy will slip into recession. That is one of the Democrats, at least up until he had heresy of telling the truth on Democrats' $1.9 trillion spending last year, and then you put him on the outs. But up till that moment he was Democrats' favorite economist. But now he is basically telling us we have structurally built in so much inflation, we are going to have to have the Federal Reserve force us into recession. Do you know what happens to people, what happens to poor people, the working middle class, the working poor when you are in a recessionary cycle, and how many years it takes for the public to get their lives back? The economy is heading for a hard landing when we are now starting to see over and over and over the very economists that, a month ago, were saying we might be able to negotiate a soft landing. Oh, we may just tip a little bit of growth and unemployment and come back. And now those same economists, a month later, are saying, no, we are heading toward a hard landing. We are going into recession. By the love of the Dear Lord, I hope they are wrong. But if they are right, have you seen a single thing this body has done to prepare? The U.S. economy is heading for a hard landing, and this one is important. We have got to understand. We are starting to see numbers now that--and we had a Member of the majority here, I think a couple of days ago, come and somewhere they threw out, oh, but there is all this excess money in the people's savings accounts. That isn't true anymore. You do understand, the personal savings rate has plummeted from 26.6 percent a year ago, functionally, a year ago, to 4.4 in April, and it continues to vault. And understand, that personal savings rate of 4.4 is below where we were before the pandemic. If we start to hit recession right now, our brothers and sisters out there don't have that cash reserve in their bank accounts. Do you understand the concept of fragility? And now we actually start to see the other thing that really genuinely terrifies me, and we are going to do a couple of slides on this. And I know I am going fast but we are up against the clock here. We have a mandatory shutdown in about 20 minutes. Treasury yields are really starting to decline. And you have got to understand, we basically had budget projections, Congressional Budget Office and others, who had been basically building analysis of what will the debt look like? And they were using remarkably historically low interest rates. A year ago we had expert after expert coming in front of the Ways and Means Committee and other places, Joint Economic Committee, oh, we are going to be in historically low interest rates because we are getting sold as a society. We have all these people saving. We are going to be more like Japan. Turns out they are wrong. Remember the previous slide? The savings rate from the largesse of the giveaways, just structurally we are getting demographically older. We should be retaining. It is gone. The savings are gone. And now we are going into an interest rate cycle where they are having to start to raise interest rates on Treasuries and everything else to attract capital from around the world. If you have been watching the U.S. dollar, you understand what is going on with this. What happens when U.S. sovereign debt--if interest rates are 2 points historically--so we go a 30-year run, and if we are just 2 percent higher than what CBO modeled last year, 2 points, in about 25 years, I believe the math is, every dollar of tax receipts, tax revenues, goes just to pay interest. There is no more government. We are just covering our debt. Do you understand the fragility we have done to ourselves with this inflationary cycle? The average interest rate being paid on Federal debt--and this, I know this board is a little hard to read and hard to see. But historically, go back to the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the period that we have modeled is way down here. This was not normal. God forbid, if we go back to normality in U.S. sovereign interest rates, and then we are functionally running $30 trillion of debt, do you understand how much of--the left wants to spend money on these things. The right, we want to defend the military. There is no money. And you saw the first board that basically said the massive, massive shortfall in Medicare. Remember, Medicare is mostly a general fund expenditure. It is like only 20 percent of it really is a part A trust fund, and that is gone in 5 years. And it has begun. It has begun. And the other thing, it is more than what we borrow today. It is the amount of U.S. sovereign debt. And I didn't bring that board, and I probably should have, that has to be refinanced every month. So you may borrow $1 trillion this year, but you had to refinance 5 or 6 or $7 trillion, and every dime of that now is reset at the new interest rates. And the higher interest costs--and I am going to do a couple of variations of this. But this is functionally, 9 budget years from now. If it is going where we think it is going, publicly held debt--you are now in the 126 percent of GDP. And most of this movement here, when you start to see this movement, it is the financing costs. It is the financing costs of this government. Because the real explosion of our demographic spending, you know, the fact that in 7 years, 22 percent of our country is 65 and older, that explosion of the baby boomers costs-- it really starts--it has already begun, but it really, that curve really starts to take off at the end of the decade; at the very time we are already pushing 126 percent of debt to GDP. Does anyone understand the level of fragility? It is this inflationary cycle. Democrats did something horrible March last year. They didn't listen to their own economists because they were so busy living in this fantasy world of free money. Give it away. People will love us. Don't require them to participate in the economy. Now we are paying the price. If you are trying to save for retirement; if you are a young couple trying to get ready to buy your first house, there is a technical form for it in economics. You are screwed. Because every single day that savings you have is worth less. If you are a saver, your savings today is functionally about 7 percent less valuable than it was a year ago. I mean, those of you who intend to retire one day, have you actually started to think about that the value of the savings you had, if you put it in safe things like bonds or savings accounts, is substantially less valuable today. Its purchasing power is less today than it was a year ago. If this continues for a couple years, do you understand how many more years you really need to work? Do you understand how much more savings you have to have? Do you have an understanding of how much you are going to have to help your kids buy that first house? This is not a game. Two weeks ago, I came here, and we tried to do some of the math on the board of how many seniors. If the current inflation cycle lasts for about 24 months, we basically were trying to do the math of, okay, here is what happens to seniors' savings. It falls, the value of it. It is functionally transferred to government. What happens to the COLA? Well, the COLA and Social Security never gets close to keeping up to the actual inflation rate because of the lag problem. That 20 percent copay you have on your healthcare, and if healthcare inflation is almost double the CPI rate, and you've got to pay that 20 percent, we were looking at math that said you could potentially double the number of seniors in poverty in a decade. Has anyone here actually wanted to dig into that math and start to understand? This is not a game. I know there is a desperate attempt by the administration and my Democrat colleagues, oh, this is inflation because of a war in Ukraine. This is greedy oil companies. No, it is not. You believed in modern monetary policy, and it blew up. Remember, much of this inflation was structurally built in before the war in Ukraine. You see it in these sorts of numbers. By the end of 2021--and remember, that is before Russia's invasion, right?--credit card debt climbed to $856 billion. It is a 28 percent annualized increase in the fourth quarter of last year. It had already begun. People were already borrowing on their credit cards because prices were going up so fast. So the way they were supplementing their consumption is they were building up debt. I have showed you the board before. Savings rates have collapsed. We are now seeing credit card debt explode. When those hit up the wall-- you see what happened 3 weeks ago--consumer sentiment collapsed. It is because all of a sudden I can't keep financing my lifestyle by using up my savings and chewing up credit card debt. This is going on right now. Where is the concern? Does anyone here care about people and what is going on to them economically out there, outside the walls of this building? The U.S. economy is heading for a hard landing, and this is just functionally that same thing, once again, by other sources talking about the growth of credit card debt--or, excuse me, the collapse of savings rates. Credit card balances, once again, really, really--from other sources, saying the growth. This is a real problem. If we were in a time of prosperity--a couple minutes ago, I was in the back room. I saw the spokesperson for the White House. These are fine economic times. Have they lost their minds? Do they own, like, a subscription to any economic journal? To say things are fine at the same time you can see the aggregated data of savings collapsing, credit card debt exploding, interest rates going up, interest rates and sovereign debt, and now start to understand what that is going to mean in the financing of this government. Now you have got to deal with the Democrats' policy set. The fact of the matter is, thank God, the Senate has a couple Democrats that actually may have saved the country--it is hard to say that--by stopping the Build Back Better and the just stunning amount of debt the left wanted to build on. When you start seeing numbers saying that if the Democrats' package had passed, we functionally would have gone from about $17 trillion of publicly-held borrowing before the pandemic to $44 trillion by the end of the decade. This is if the Democrats' spending plans and borrowing plans had passed. An absolute, absolute lie, and we have shown it over and over, oh, it is all paid for; except it wasn't. It wasn't even close. I think in the Build Back Better, the best estimate we were able to come--and we used their math--was they were covering about 30 percent of the expenditures, and they were covering it in a way where they were going to raise certain taxes that would have actually slowed down the economic growth that we are desperate for. Now you start to see my fear for the country. When we start to model what happens to the projected Federal debt under various interest rate scenarios--and I know I am sounding like a highly caffeinated accountant on steroids, but this is the stuff we are paid to read and understand. We are not paid to stand behind these microphones and virtue signal. But, God, that seems to be what we do here. We do policy by virtue signaling. Let's come here for just one moment. Here is functionally where we are at. If you start to say, okay, the mean of U.S. sovereign debt, the 30 years, the 10 years, the 20s, you know, up and down, CBO's baseline basically says we are at 202 percent of debt to GDP. With a small increase going back to almost normality, with the historic average over the last 30 years, we are starting to hit numbers close to 300. If we actually were slightly above historic normal, you are at 357 percent of debt to GDP. Does anyone believe this economy doesn't collapse long before that? People run from the U.S. dollar. They dispose of U.S. debt. Can you imagine what the chaos, what the misery, what the dystopian nature of economics would be in this country if you start to run up these levels of debt. You already saw in a previous chart we are heading toward 126 percent of debt functionally at the end of the decade. Debt to GDP. That is publicly held borrowed money. At the same time, you are going to be up against the Social Security trust fund running out of money. Social Security recipients are heading toward a 25 to 27 percent cut. The Medicare trust fund will have already been gone for 5 years, so we still haven't figured out what is going to happen to the payments to doctors and hospitals within that. This is not a game, and it is in front of us. If we get here a couple years from now, and all this is blowing up on us, and this place pretends they didn't know, maybe I could sit them in front of the hours I have spent behind this microphone going over the math. The math is in those binders that are sent to us two times a year. Here is one of the things that truly terrifies me, as you start to get into the new interest rate scenarios. This isn't long term. This is basically, yeah, we start to think of what mean rates mean, and you start to add in just a 2 percent change. That 2 percent--and this is within the current 10-year window--you start to basically add $13.4 trillion additional--well, debt, and this marginal here is just the marginal increase because you start to chase your tail. I have a chart, and I need to actually have it graphically made so it is easier to see. We will be financing the debt that we are financing. We will be chasing our tail, and that is where we are heading. Now the cruelty. Mr. Speaker pro tem, may I ask, because I am looking at the clock above. Can you tell me how many minutes I have?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Look, this is functionally the same chart as the last one, except the point I am making on this one is we functionally moved from 1 trillion 726 billion up. Before that, we were at $1.3 trillion of household savings. The savings basically has collapsed. Is anyone talking about this? Remember, that was supposed to be the big Democrat talking point is, yes, we gave away a lot of money, but, look, we shored up people's bank accounts. It is gone. It is gone. And it wasn't done through productivity. It wasn't done through investments that lead us into a greater future. The left keeps on saying, well, you invest in green energy. Fine. But that is not what you did. You basically adopted almost every policy-- you do realize in the 15 months the Democrats have been in charge, we are burning a hell of a lot more coal today. The 2021 number is 23 percent more coal was burnt to produce U.S. electrical energy because they blew up the natural gas markets. They made the United States dirtier, according to the greenhouse gas calculations. So even on that they screwed it up. And then here is sort of the punch line of why I am here tonight. You see the chart, you see the red, the red line? Is that red or maroon? Let's go with red. Do you see this chart right here? That is for folks under $40,000 a year. And red basically means severe hardship. They are in economic stress. This number here has exploded under the 15 months of Democrat control. This is what functionally they have caused by inflation, by everything around them. They have taken almost modest quartile of incomes, and they are brutalizing the poor. They are just brutalizing the working poor. Now, those folks over $100,000, yeah, but most of it is no real hardship. Their income category, they are doing not fine, but better. But you get down to $40,000 and less. So if you ever let someone on the left tell you they are the ones who care about the poor and the working poor and the working middle class, they may care. They may care, but they brutalize them by their policies. Look, it is in the math. Once again, the math doesn't lie. The math will set you free. But we seem to do policy by virtue signaling here, not by some of the most compassionate, which is do the right thing. You have a model. Take a look what we accomplished in 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020. The number of our brothers and sisters that were less poor, it was one of the most amazing economic revivals in U.S. history. Yes, we had the pandemic. Yes, it was miserable. But think about this. Almost every bit of those gains are gone, and not gone because of the pandemic. They are gone because of the last 15 months of horrible economic policy that set off inflation, has set off optionality, has flatlined productivity, and actually really screwed up the next decade of our economic future. These get a little more difficult to show, but basically you are trying to sort of demonstrate when we hit the Biden inauguration, so this is the moment where Democrats had absolute power here, and how quickly the financial cushion disappeared. Now, a lot of this disappeared because you have the occasion where we are going to hand you a bunch of cash, but we are also going to set off inflation. It turns out the inflation chews up the cash a lot faster than we are handing out free money. As of April 2022, the average retirement benefits--now, this is going to make complete sense, and in the scale, the reality is much, much worse, but we are trying to do a calculation of if you are getting retirement benefits, how much are you losing? How much is it changing? Our first calculation was about $162. Now I need you to add a couple more months to that. What we are starting to try to model is every month people on a fixed income, how much poorer are they getting. And that is also adjusting, say, they have COLAs, so they are going up, but the actual purchasing power, even adjusted with the COLA, they are falling, they are getting poorer every day. Now we are finally starting to get some of the data. The problem is we are about 3 months behind on trying to do hard calculations. Now you start to look, and this one is really important. I don't have a brilliant way to try to lay this out. When we look at different demographics and what they consume, a young family is going to have different consumption than a couple in their seventies. This one is going to be much more medical costs, and this one might be education and a new bicycle. So what happens when you start to realize that food energy, when you start to see it moving in the charts, but then you come down here and start to see medical services, where they are in the inflation graph, and then you try to adjust them to populations. Then you realize you are ending up with this crazy sort of bell curve of misery, where older Americans are getting crushed, and younger families are getting crushed because they don't have assets that are inflating. And this is what is going on. I don't know why there is not a fire drill around here. I mean, what would it take for those of us as Republicans to basically turn to the Democrat majority and the White House and Speaker Pelosi and the left who is in charge here and say, we actually care about Americans. We are willing to work with you. Let's actually do the fire drill. Let's actually do the things that set off productivity. Let's fix expensing on the Tax Code. Let's do this, let's do that. What can we do instead of just letting the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates and put people out of work? And that way Democrats can blame the Federal Reserve and not their own policies because they need deniability. Our job is to make people's lives freer, economically more stable, better, but also someone like myself--and, yes, I have a 6-year-old daughter, and my wife and I are the same age. It is the greatest thing that ever happened. Yes, I am an old dad. Greatest thing that has ever happened. What is my moral obligation to her future? Seriously. For every person who on occasion actually shows up and works here, what is your moral obligation? What is your moral obligation to your parents and your grandparents but also to these kids? We already have this demographic curve that is going to make fixing inflation much more difficult, and we are basically shifting. If you are functionally under 40 years old, and you are still voting for the left, please, please go to an economics class. Go buy a calculator. Understand the amount of misery that has been shifted onto your future. My back-of-the-napkin math basically says for someone who basically is getting ready to graduate college today, when they hit their peak earning years, their tax rate will have to be double what today's is just to maintain today's benefits. Congratulations. Look, Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, I still have a number of charts, but basically they are all saying the same thing. You get to when the Democrats took power, and just what they did in blowing up affordability in our communities, blowing up affordability, productivity in the country, and it was Democrat policies because it is more than just what we voted on here. It was basically threatening investors. It was threatening: The SEC is going to come and start to look at your investments. It is threatening. They used the regulatory state, they used the up and down, even the virtue signaling within businesses. I mean, how many businesses basically sold their souls so Democrats wouldn't say mean things about them? You start to look at family economic insecurity, and it just has exploded again since the Democrats took power. Mr. Speaker, and to whoever is interested, I am blessed to be the senior Republican for the Joint Economic Committee, so I have access to some very smart people, and we are just doing our best to try to understand the numbers but also what we can do with the numbers. Last week I became the senior Republican for Social Security, and, you know, you are reading the actuary report, and then you are teaming it up with the actuary report for Medicare, and you start to realize the scale. The numbers here are stunning. The numbers of zeros. And we will get the clown show around this place that says, well, if you fix waste and fraud; well, if you get rid of foreign aid; hey, if you just tax rich people some more, everything will be fine. None of those things are close to being true. The scale of the problem that was already built into just our demographics and our promises, remember, the shortfall for Social Security and Medicare when you pile on our current debt is $120 trillion, and that functionally hits in 29 years, and that is adjusted to today's dollars. Add in inflation, and the distortion. So my last comment I really want to try to share is one of our projects we are working very hard in our office is if the Democrats' inflation continues for 24 months, how much of our society will be in poverty? How many seniors, how many younger people because of the distortion? They functionally have wiped out all the amazing economic progress we made in 2018 and 2019 and the first quarter of 2020. Congratulations, you hated the last President, you hated the Republicans and what we did for the economy. Fine, you got rid of it. You wiped it all out. But understand, in just 15 months, we have whole regions, whole populations, whole segments of our society that are several percent-- sorry to put it in a percent--poorer today. It just doesn't go away, and you can't just do another transfer payment to make it up. Turns out who you vote for does make a difference. Now, America gets to pay a price for what they did in the last couple of elections. But they were lied to. They basically thought virtue signaling was policy, and it wasn't. It was about winning elections. At some point, Mr. Speaker pro tempore, the calculator tells the truth. Mr. Speaker pro tempore, at some point, we should be judged by our accomplishments for the American people. If that accomplishment is misery, be held to it. If it is prosperity, take joy in it. But we need to step up and demonstrate that we actually understand what is going on in our communities and that we are willing to step up and try to fix it instead of talk away from it. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do a continuation on a theme. Last week, I came to the floor and sort of walked through what inflation was doing to seniors. Today, I am going to try to walk through what it is doing to the poor, the working poor, the middle class, all of society. One of the difficult things I am going to do, and I know it is somewhat rhetorical, is ask my brothers and sisters on the left: Are you happy with what you have accomplished? Democrats took, functionally, power here 15 months ago. They had the House, the Senate, and they took the White House. And we got to see the playbook. This is important because we often are so busy chasing shiny objects here, we never sort of talk about some of the economic differences and the way the left and those of us on the right view the world. The left sort of believes in this model of consumption. Send people checks, and they will go buy stuff and, somehow, that will make society utopian. Of course, it also sets off really bad societal problems like: ``Hey, I have money. I don't have to participate in society and the economy.'' ``Hey, I have money. Let's just go buy stuff today,'' and it sets off inflation. Those of us who actually showed up to our economics classes, we believe in this concept--it is often referred to as supply side. It is much more complicated. That is productivity in a society, when you are going to pay someone more money, when a worker is paid more money, it is, functionally, from two things: inflation, which doesn't mean they got anywhere. As a matter of fact, when you raise someone's salary because of inflation, they are often always behind the curve. The second part is productivity. There was investment in plants and equipment to be more productive, to have that newest, best, functional product. That is a supply-side model. That is, functionally, what we accomplished in tax reform. The other challenge I will give to our friends on the Democrat side is, take a look at our couple of years when we did regulatory reform, when we did tax reform, 2018, 2019. The middle class got much wealthier. Income inequality shrank. Food insecurity shrank. Minority populations had their best economic period in the modern economic time. I would visit the homeless shelter in downtown Phoenix, and St. Joseph the Worker had a list of businesses that were desperate for anyone who would just show up. Now, the contrast: The Democrats took over, and, functionally, 15 months ago, they moved $1.9 trillion of spending. I have been to the floor multiple times. I have shown you all the charts saying, isn't it fascinating that almost on the day you did this, you can actually see actual, functional, price changes in the wholesale markets? You can actually see the curve going: Hey, they passed a bill; there is inflation. Now, some of that is not completely fair because some of it was actually already built into the policy sets the Democrats had adopted. When they blew up the capital stack, meaning when the Biden administration took over, and they had a compliant Democrat Congress and a Democrat Senate and, particularly, the left controlling the House of Representatives, when they threatened capital markets for investing in hydrocarbons, when they threatened capital markets for investing in the transportation of hydrocarbons, moving natural gas--oh, you are going to build a pipeline. We are going to do everything so that you have to report to the SEC. We are going to basically make it so the companies, the investors in this, have to do documentation of their environmental scores. You wonder why September a year ago you actually looked at the futures markets and saw it was already beginning--natural gas, crude prices. So, the horrible prices you are paying today at the pump, it is not because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That just moved it forward. This was already built into the Democrats' policy set. Let's actually focus on something that is the derivative, that is the next level over from last week's. Last week, we focused substantially on what the left's policies were going to do to seniors, how many of them will be in poverty a decade from now because of inflation today. But let's actually sort of talk through inflation through the economy because my fear is we do the headline discussion. Hey, did you see the number last week? It was 8.6. My community, it is 11 something. I happen to live in number one or number two, the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, inflation in the Nation. But what does it actually mean? It is much more than the little number you saw saying, ``Hey, last month it was this.'' It is: What did it do to your retirement a decade from now? What did it do to your kids' and your grandkids' ability to ever purchase a house, to ever build up savings, when every single day their savings become worth less? There is a reason inflation is the bogeyman. It is because it functionally is government. You have a government with debt the size of our economy, and we are out there taxing all of you. Whether you understand it or not, that is the scam of inflation. This is what the Democrats have set up. Every single day, your savings becomes less, but also, the value of that massive debt the United States has becomes less because we are transferring your wealth. We are, functionally, devaluing your savings and then devaluing our debt because it is being paid for by inflated dollars. I don't believe it is purposeful, but now that they have set it off, I promise you, there are economists in this government who basically look the other way and say let it run this way for a couple of years. Think about it. The actual value of the debt, in constant dollars, stays the same, but--well, excuse me. It decreases because the dollar value has changed dramatically. It is cruel. It is crushing. And the economic violence that the Democrats' failure to understand basic economics has done to the poor, the working poor, the middle class--please, just stop hurting people. It is math. Let's take a look at this. We all got the May number, and we saw the price increases, the PCE. But when you started to look at the Consumer Price Index, 8.6--now, do you happen to remember before May, April, March, ``Oh, we have hit peak inflation.'' That is absolute crap. Structurally, how many of you have actually looked at the gas pump this month? Have you seen where gas prices are? Put that as a factor in the inflation and tell me that prices are going down, that prices have stabilized. There is an argument out there that we have hit a plateau. It just happens to be an outrageously high plateau. I don't see it yet. We are in, functionally, what you call a wage-price spiral right now. I was made fun of about 3, 4 months ago when I came here and said that I think we are on the cusp of a wage-price spiral. Well, guess what? I was right. What is a wage-price spiral? A business raises its prices. Well, for my workers to be able to afford things, we need to raise their wages. But if we raise their wages, well, we have to raise our prices. Well, if we raise our prices, you raise your wages. It is the puppy chasing its tail. Right now, the only solution the left is offering, the only solution the Biden administration is offering, is to let the Federal Reserve break people's backs. Raise interest rates enough. Pull liquidity out of the market. Break their backs. Put people in the unemployment lines. That will slow it down. The cruelty of what has gone on here--and there are other solutions. I have been here to the floor multiple times saying there are things we can do tax policy-wise, incentives to save, other things that would be great for retirement security, great for growing the economy, and would help. It doesn't solve the Federal Reserve's problems, but it would help. The problem is, I would need my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side to basically open up an economics book and say: Yes, maybe making more stuff, maybe becoming more productive, would be good for society, and it would be good for pushing down inflation. But God knows, the way the Democrats run this place, I can't even get an amendment in the Ways and Means Committee anymore, assuming they would actually hold a real hearing. This place is nothing but virtue signaling anymore, but it is a virtue signaling that--if they would actually talk about what they have done to people. The hits keep coming. You start to look--and I know some of these charts are noisy. One of the tough things about talking about this right now is, these numbers have been moving so fast, trying to make sure you are using credible, third-party sources so you are just not making up numbers out of your own office and building a pretty chart, but you go out and find the experts. The experts can't keep up with the movement of the prices, the economic distortion that is going on. Part of my challenge is: Go look at your 401(k) right now. Are you happy? Now, you need to add in also that the fact of the matter is the money you have in there is substantially worth less than a year ago. So it is not that your savings, your investments, have crashed. Also, it is buying about 10 percent less stuff anyway, so you needed to discount rate that. You understand that we have real negative interest rates right now. That is one of the reasons the Federal Reserve is probably going to have to jack up rates dramatically more than the talking heads are telling you on cable finance news. Think about it. If you are living in a country where the interest rate--let's just use 10. It is an easy number. I know the number was 8.6. In my community, it is probably 11. Federal funds rates, let's do a 10-year. Let's use 3\1/2\. Do you see that gap there? That is actually negative. You invest in a 10-year T bill, a 10-year U.S. sovereign instrument. You just lost all that. The model basically says the Federal Reserve is going to have to jack up interest rates to close that gap. And be scared. Be scared. I have been here on the floor with charts before that basically said if the mean interest rate is 2 points higher on U.S. sovereign debt for, like, 25 years, at the end of that 25 years, every dime of tax receipts, every dime of tax revenue, goes to just interest. Do you understand the scale of the dystopian misery that the Democrats' economic policy has set off? Yes, it had great virtue signaling. We are going to give money to all these people. Great job. They are all poorer today than a year ago when you handed out $1.9 trillion. You start to look at who you are hurting. You start to look at folks in Social Security. Well, they are already upside down another percent. You start to look at major healthcare programs. Well, the inflation there, packing into that. You start to take a look at other mandatory spending. Well, at least that has actually been deflated upside down because they don't have the same COLA kickers. But you start to add up what is going on, major changes and projected outlays. The budget process here is going to be really interesting coming next year when we take the majority because the mess that has to be cleaned up economically is not going to happen in a year. For everyone who may be participating and crazy enough to listen to me, it is going to take years and years, maybe a decade, to just clean up this, functionally, 24-month cycle of what bad decisions did. For everyone listening, please, rethink your retirement. Please rethink your savings. Please rethink your investments. You are poorer today than you understand because it multiplies out into the future, and I am scared. I mean, we did one model in our office, and I have some boards here that are going to sort of touch on this, but let's see if I can try to describe it. Let's go back to my retiree. You are on Medicare, okay. So there is a hold harmless on the cost of Medicare, but not your co-pay. So if medical inflation is going up at almost double the inflation rate, so we had what, 8.6, but we have some charts that show medical inflation in the previous month may have been as high as 16, 16.8. So if you have almost double, that 20 percent of cash that comes out of your pocket also just doubled. So you are going to get an 8 percent COLA on your Social Security, okay, and your Medicare premium will adjust some, but your co-pay is skyrocketing. If you carry that out through the decade, the number of our brothers and sisters who will be in their retirement who will be in poverty--it is math. But, damn it, doesn't this place care about people, or is it just too painful to step up and say we screwed up? Well, they screwed up. We are going to reach across the aisle. We are going to actually work with people who actually showed up to their economics classes. There are some ideas that would be good--and they should be bipartisan--that actually would help productivity, help people save for retirement, and would be great for bending the inflation curve. Do you think any of us could get an amendment, actually even listened to? Because they don't care. It doesn't fit. Remember, we do public policy now by virtue signaling. The incredible difference--I am realizing the difference between my brothers and sisters on the left and those of us on the right is my constituents judge us on what did our policies accomplish? I swear to you. The media and the left judge their folks on what was their intention? What were their feelings? Because if they were judged on what they have accomplished, they have accomplished misery. As of May 2020, inflation is plateauing, really, rather than peaking. Understand what these economists were basically saying is this isn't transitory. We were promised that over and over and over from the Treasury Secretary, from the President, from Democratic leadership, even my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side on Ways and Means. Oh, it is temporary. It is a supply chain spike. No, it isn't. Such horrible policies. They built a structural inflation problem. Now you are in a wage price spiral, and many of the economists are now saying it is not a peak and a fall--it is a plateau. One of the things that scares the crap out of me--and I am sorry, but I don't know a better way to try without crossing the line and cursing and getting my words taken down--is you hit the inflationary cycle with stagflation, meaning you functionally have some economic growth. You have employment. The Federal Reserve is jacking up interest rates, so you are trying to push up some of the employment. You are going to see some unusual charts and data we have here. But the inflation is sticky, and you basically have a plateau of inflation, you have a plateau of misery, and you are not able to raise it and crash it. One of the reasons I come to you with that as a personal theory--and it drives some of my economists nuts on the Joint Economic Committee when I say this--is I think we have a much more difficult demographic problem. Inflation in the late 1970s, very, very early 1980s, you had this huge baby boom population that was available for labor, available with new technologies, investments to spike productivity. We have got a demographic problem. Functionally, in 7 years, 22 percent of America is 65 and older. We have gotten old. We have huge, massive social entitlement promises that we have a moral obligation to keep--the financing of Social Security, the financing of Medicare. Remember: Every new dime of debt over the next 30 years is just Social Security and Medicare. I know a lot of folks don't like to hear that, but it is. It is our demographic. We got old. The rest of the budget is functionally in balance. Really hard to break a stagflation cycle without that available population spike to have that productivity to start to say, hey, we are going to make more stuff. We are cracking inflation. When you start to see some of the smart economists saying hey, we have got a problem. We are plateauing. It is not a spike. This may be the mean for a while. What is amusing, in a very dark way, is I have used this chart once before, so it is the projection of where inflation was going to go. The number of talking heads who would repeat the White House's line that oh, it is transitory, or it is just temporary, or it is Putin inflation. Come on. At some point, treat the American people like adults. They may not have spent their life bathing in the numbers. They don't go home every night and read The Economist magazine and these things, trying to dig. That is our job. That is what we are paid to do. Other people need to take care of their families and have a life and try to survive these prices. But the trend line on inflation is heading toward almost a 10 percent plateau. God, I don't think we are going to get there, I really don't, but that is my charting. You know, this was our target. We are nowhere near our target. We blew through our target by 2.8 percent. I am trying to show the happy talk that was going on in the previous three or four months. Oh, inflation is transitory. They have been wrong. I am going to do something slightly jerky. I have been here on the floor, and I got it right because we actually looked at the real numbers. You know, when you looked at the April inflation and realize, well, damn it, April inflation, they were calculating--they had fuel prices, they had base energy going down .6, .4, based on the numbers. That isn't what happened in May. I mean, all you had to do was break it apart and look at the numbers and own a calculator. But remember: We work in a math-free zone. You start to understand. I know I am a Republican. I come behind the microphone, I sound like an accountant on steroids. That is not my point. These numbers are people. These numbers are hurting people. There are millions--matter of fact, almost all of America is poorer today than they were 15 months ago when the left took power. Judge us by that. It didn't need to be this way. I mean, you know, what is it, Larry Summers--I mean, a leftist economist is begging the Democrats, saying, don't do this. Don't do it. Don't do it. You are going to hurt people. Oh, no. I am a Member of Congress. I understand better than a guy with a Ph.D. from Harvard. Turns out the Ph.D. leftist from Harvard who was begging you not to do what you did; you went ahead and did it. Now you have a Republican quoting him on the floor. Only large businesses--now, this one is important--are adding sufficient numbers of workers. So you remember how President Biden, I think it was yesterday, got behind the microphone and said, but we have such great employment. The pessimism on small- and medium-size businesses has skyrocketed, and that is actually where much of our job creation and disruption in the economy and new spikes of productivity come from. They are the risk takers who will try new methods and systems. So, right now, big business has still been doing the hiring. What happens is that function where the Federal Reserve goes about jacking up interest rates, they are going to crush mid-market and small businesses. I hope it doesn't come, but every number I look at says it is going to come: the recession the Democrats have brought us. Is it going to continue the movement of the United States being a country of oligopolies, because we are going to wipe out a bunch of our small businesses? Our regional, smaller, mid-size businesses get wiped out, but the big boys stay because they can afford the regulatory--they can actually participate in capital markets. Is that going to be the outcome once again, that this, once again, becomes more and more a monopolistic economy? You also know the problem with that is you don't get a productive society when you have massive players that control so much of the society, the economics. Some of these numbers--you have got to understand, this number was the worst reading in 49 years for the smaller- and mid-size businesses doing hiring. So you functionally have almost two economies running at the same time. But this economy here, the small and mid-size, are most of our employment. Be worried. These numbers are not warm and fuzzy. Now we start to go to some of the cruelty that the Democrats' economics have done. You see that bottom line? Those are functionally real wages. So, hey, here are inflation wages. Hey, I got a raise. Look, wages are going up. Real purchasing power. I am poorer today than I was the day before. So when you hear leftists come behind these microphones and talk about income equality, they did it. It is driven by crap policy like this. This is what is going on right now. Real wages. People are getting poorer every single day. Yet, there are folks here who are willing to just completely mislead on facts. Oh, but wages are up. Yeah, they are up. But they are not up nearly at the pace of inflation. This is really dangerous. You have got to understand, if numbers like this continue, this is what tears apart societies. This is not a game. This is beyond me being a Republican, and I am beating up on Democrats. Please. I know we are heading into election season. I know everything is about knifing each other, but this chart is actually--this line here is people. These are people getting poorer every single day. We keep offering suggestions, and we can't even get an amendment considered. I understand the partisan cruelty to our side. We are not in charge. You are in charge. But why the cruelty to your own constituents? Because this did not need to happen, and it doesn't need to continue. There are solutions, but maybe those solutions also require something very difficult. You know, if you are in a 12-step program--and God knows I have had enough family in 12-step programs--what is the very first step? Admit you have a problem. Democrats, I challenge you. Take the first step. Admit you screwed up, you screwed the American people, and you are willing to make it right. You are willing to work with us who own calculators to make it right, to help our brothers and sisters not continue to be poorer every day. These numbers should start to scare you. There are a number of economists out there I believe who have gotten this wrong. They say, well, we handed out so much free money in 2021, everyone had so much cash in their bank accounts, they set off inflation because everyone went out and bought a new television. Fine. Okay. What happens by the end of 2021? By the end. So several months ago, credit card debt was climbing and had climbed rather substantially. That basically lets you know the way people were maintaining their consumption, their lifestyle. It wasn't that they were building it in their earning power. They chewed up their savings. They were using debt to maintain their lifestyle. This is dangerous because at a certain point you hit that debt wall and you have how many of your brothers and sisters who, all of a sudden, now are in real financial stress. When you start to see 28 percent annualized increase in the fourth quarter was the fastest on record, basically saying, hey, fourth quarter last year was the fastest on record of credit card accumulation of debt. So when the White House, when my Democratic colleagues say, well, things aren't that bad. Yes, we have inflation, but look how good the economy is. You built an economy on fake money, and now people are borrowing it through their credit cards. At the end of the fourth quarter, there was a sizable but shrinking pool of excess liquidity. So what they are basically saying is, do you remember how a number of us were coming to the mike and said, hey, Democrats, your $1.9 trillion that you did, what was it, end of March 2021, you pumped all this liquidity into the marketplace, as you set off inflation. People shored up--they paid off some debt. They had lots of cash in their bank accounts, and it was substantially gone by the end of last year. So how have people been financing the consumption of these incredible price hikes over the last few months? We are hunting for the latest borrowing data, but we are seeing some preliminary numbers. A lot of Americans now are in substantially more debt, so they are poorer than when the Democrats handed out $1.9 trillion. So within a year, they set off inflation, and they made people poor, and now they are upside-down in debt, and they have got to figure out a way to pay for it. It is like every economic nightmare. Everything you could do wrong has functionally been done in the 15 months of Democrat power. Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, may I inquire how much time I have remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I appreciate you and the staff's patience as I am racing up the elevator. We are going to do something that is new to me today. And please wave at me if I start machine gun speaking. And I have gotten teased about it a bit, so this week, I got to become the ranking member for the Republicans, that is sort of the senior Republican over Social Security in the Ways and Means Committee. And it is an area I have had a fascination with since I got here because, you know, it is $1 trillion a year, and it is running out of money. So, the last few times I have come behind these microphones, I have turned to my brothers and sisters on the left and begged them to stop doing what they are doing because we have showed board after board after board after board of how many people they are hurting, the working poor, the poor, the working middle class. It is just being destroyed by Democrat policies. And I appreciate the virtue signaling. I understand maybe for many of them they didn't understand the most basic economics of what inflation was going to do and crushing people. But now, all of a sudden, I have the responsibility--I take this really seriously. How do you save Medicare? How do you save Social Security? And it is not a game, and it is not just little adjustments here. You talk to groups, even fellow Members, and they somehow think a little adjustment here, waste and fraud. A little adjustment here. We are talking trillions. Remember, our best math right now is functionally, over the next 30 years, just Social Security and just Medicare, when you add them together, and then the financing costs, are close to $120 trillion short. So functionally, every dime of future debt is the shortfall of Medicare and Social Security. It is demographics. We got old. At the end of this decade, 22 percent of us are 65 and older. A country like Japan, it is 30 percent. Japan has dramatically higher savings rates. At the end of this decade, 22 percent of our neighbors will be 65 or older. And we functionally have nothing set aside for that. Medicare is moving to being 100 percent general fund. The Medicare trust fund, the part A, the hospital portion, we got a good number a couple of days ago, so now it is gone in about 5 years. And we have no idea how we replace that because the model right now, as it is written in statute, is hey, just stop paying doctors and hospitals. That is going to work really well, isn't it? And we will see here, the actuarial report for Social Security got extended out a bit. But functionally, in a decade, our parents, our grandma and grandpa, the model is at this moment, 27 percent cut. And that isn't the true story. It is much, much, much darker. And I am going to do my very best here. And look, I have got to be honest; I am only partially through starting to dig through the numbers that Keith handed me, and we are trying to understand the Medicare actuaries and the Social Security actuaries. They just published their report, but it is based on data that may be as much as a year out of date. They have missed much of the inflation cycle so--one of the benchmarks was February this year. Well, think about what has happened to inflation since then. And I am going to do my best right now to present the cruelty, just the cruelty of what the left has done to the poor, but particularly to the elderly poor. And once again, I will give them credit. I don't think it was meant, but there is a misunderstanding here of what inflation does, because it is not just today. It is not just this year. We are trying to build a model here of how many of our brothers and sisters who are older at the end of this decade are going to be living in poverty because of what this place did this last year. So my best model right now is about 22 percent of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and over are living in poverty today. And it is a back of the napkin math, and I may be wrong. God, I hope I am wrong. But if inflation stays substantially above the mean for a few more years, it is going to be a third of our retirees who are going to be living in poverty. This is what they did. And so, in past weeks I have come behind the mike and said, here are ideas to knock down inflation. If inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, let's make more goods. Right now, it is the passive approach. We had Janet Yellen in front of the Ways and Means Committee yesterday, and it is basically: Well, we are going to let the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates, put a bunch of people out of work. We are just going to raise the misery, but it is their problem. It has nothing to do with the crappy economic policies that have been pushed through this body. How about some things the left and the right could agree upon? Instead of just spending trillions and trillions of dollars, how about incentives and mechanisms to create productivity because when you make more stuff, that is the most elegant way to knock down inflation. Of course, that would mean for our brothers and sisters on the Democrat side to accept something called supply-side economics. First, we need a little bit of a reference here. These numbers are almost 2 years out of date because we haven't gotten a CBO updated number yet, which I believe should have already happened. Projected 2051, so that is basically 29 years from now. Outlays as a percentage of GDP--this is policy. This should be driving every bit of policy around here. We chase shiny objects all day long, but we are basically saying, hey, Social Security and Medicare, the dedicated revenues, the revenues we expect to be getting in over that 29 years are going to be about 6 percent of GDP. Outlays will almost be 21 percent of GDP. The rest of the budget, revenues actually exceed outlays. Once again, we have to get this through our heads. Medicare, Social Security, the baseline from a couple of years ago was $112 trillion. My math says it is about $120 trillion of borrowing. The rest of the budget is in balance. Why isn't this what we talk about every single day? Don't we care about the 22 percent of our brothers and sisters who are going to be 65 or older by the end of this decade? Do we have not a moral, an ethical, an economic obligation to fix a system that is collapsing and has been collapsing for years? You have all heard the saying that it is the third rail. I have been teased by some of my colleagues here. ``Schweikert, you are an idiot,'' which may be absolutely true. ``Your willingness to take on Social Security, have you decided to end your political career?'' You can't get in front of microphones and tell people the truth about the math. They don't want to hear that. They have been lied to for decades, and they believe the lies because the lies are comfortable. You can't show them the slides of what is actually about to happen. Yet, how do you fix something unless you admit there is a problem? This place is like an alcoholic who is unwilling to take that first step at their 12-step meeting, admit they have a problem. If this board doesn't tell you the problem, I don't know what will. This board is 2 years old. Once again, I don't have an updated number from CBO. This shows $112 trillion of borrowing solely from Social Security and Medicare. Obviously, Medicare is functionally three- quarters of the problem. Social Security is a quarter of the problem. But that is $112 trillion, 2-year-old number, my current number, $120 trillion of borrowing in today's dollars, so inflation baseline dollars. The inflation that has exploded in the last year because of Democrat fiscal policies makes these numbers much uglier. Just as a reference to understand why I am so concerned and why I am mad this place isn't on fire with almost a level of panic over these numbers, when you see this scale of debt, in a couple of decades, if the mean borrowing cost is 2 points higher, in about 20, 25 years, every dime of tax revenues, tax receipts, every dime is just the interest cost. Do you get that? Do you realize the level of fragility we have given to this country? Do you care about people, care about kids? Do you care about seniors? Then this should be the fixation because this is real math. Unless somehow the Democrats have come up with a way to repeal the laws of mathematics, this is what we are up against. Yes, you will be booed when you get up in front of an audience and say: ``Hey, do you realize with Social Security, in about a decade, you will get about a 27 percent cut? That is not even calculating the dramatic increase in your Medicare portion of your premiums that for many seniors will eat up every dime of their Social Security check.'' This is real. It is the biggest thing going on in our country at this moment, but it is like a slow-moving avalanche coming at us. It is going to wipe us out, but it is not here yet, so let's worry about something else. Just to emphasize a little bit, Medicare faces a $78 trillion cash shortfall over the next--and this is now 29 years, and the number is worse now. Once again, I just haven't gotten an update because these are `21 numbers. We should already be starting to project the `22 and `23 numbers. But do you see that? We have about $20 trillion coming in in payroll taxes and almost $98 trillion in projected expenditures, and this is before the inflation cycle. Medical inflation, baseline inflation, is going to drive these numbers up dramatically. Maybe this is too much of a current snapshot, but you are starting to see it. Everyone just got--if you are on Medicare, you just saw it, or you just got it. Functionally, your healthcare costs just bounced up for part B $250 a person, $500 a couple. The dirty number is that that is not even close to what is coming. That is what you just got. You are going, whoa, it went up $500. But functionally, 2 years from now, we may get as much as an 8 percent COLA because, remember, the COLA adjustment on Social Security is about 24 months behind. It takes that long to get the calculations. A community like mine--I represent the Phoenix-Scottsdale area--has the highest inflation in the Nation. My area is over 11 percent inflation. But they will do a national mean, which will probably be closer to 8-something, and you are not going to get that for a couple of years. You are going to get 3-plus, 3\1/2\-plus this year. You are going to get to live poorer, substantially poorer, for the next couple of years, and the COLA is not going to keep up. The basket that is used to calculate doesn't keep up, and it has already begun. The eating up of how you survive in retirement has already begun. The money is disappearing. We are working on this. This is a work in progress. This is a dangerous speech for me to be giving because I am going to anger a number of people who don't want to know the truth. I am going to anger a bunch of my brother and sister Members here who are terrified their voters find out. The fact of the matter is, I will be back in a couple of weeks revising these numbers, but this is from some of the best literature we found when I found out I was going to be taking on the responsibility over Social Security. What this board is basically saying is this is your cost. If you are 65 years old today, and you are stepping into retirement, we expect your out-of-pocket to have gone up about $85,000. It is an assumption that healthcare inflation remains at 1.5 percent over the Consumer Price Index for 2 years. This is the change you get if it is 2 years. The problem is my Joint Economic Committee is saying the structure of inflation may be with us for a decade. Now, it may not be running at like my neighborhood, 11 percent, or your neighborhood, probably 8 percent, for another 7 to 10 years, but it is going to be higher than normal. We are having to rebuild all of our models. What does this mean, though, if it is just for 2 years? If you are 45 years old, the change in your cost when you hit retirement that you are going to have to be contributing to the healthcare portion--so you get your Social Security check, the portion that is put off for the healthcare, for Medicare. You are 45 years old; just these 2 years of the above inflation. It is a quarter million dollars, and that is out of your pocket. We keep talking about, well, here are your fuel prices today. Fine. Be outraged about that. You should be. But understand the cascade effect, that we are going to drive so many people into poverty through the rest of this decade and at the end of this decade, and this place is silent. We are just silent on the damage we are doing to people's survival because the shiny object is what is at the gas pump right now. You should be enraged. The economic devastation, the misery the left has foisted on this country--and I am sorry. I am being a bit of a jerk, but they did it, and they were warned. They were warned by my kind. Well, they were warned by my kind, but they were warned by their own economists. Yes, they have about a dozen economists that said, go ahead and spend the trillions. It won't make a difference. Please stop listening to them. But you did have a number of your leftist economists who said: Don't do this. You are going to hurt people. But it buys us votes, and they did it. Congratulations. This is your future, and this is only if the increased inflation lasts for 2 years. What if my model is correct, and it lasts throughout the decade? This isn't my math. This is some literature we are finding out there. We haven't had time to break it down and do our best vetting, but these all came from big boy researchers, well respected. This is a little hard to get our heads around, but we are going to do our best here. Short-term healthcare inflation can have devastating retirement consequences. What they are saying is with the spike today in healthcare costs, you turn 65, you start getting your Medicare, you start getting your Social Security, the change in cost you have for the next 20 years is in these numbers. They are basically trying to say, what happens if you are 65, you have 1 year of the current medical inflation, and this is underestimating it. The latest number I had as of this week was in the high 16s for healthcare inflation. This one is 15.8. But just the increase in your healthcare cash; this isn't your Medicare payment. This is cash coming out of your Social Security check, out of your bank account. So, you are 65. It is going to be an additional $72,000. But if you are 45 today, and this increased inflation is only for 2 years, it is $434,000 of additional spending you need to be prepared for in your retirement. This is the math. Just a little bit of healthcare inflation today. So if the baseline is 8.3--that is my prediction for tomorrow's May number. We will see how accurate I am. Healthcare is almost double the baseline inflation. If it ran at that for 2 years and then went back to the mean, and you are 45 years old today, so you retire 20 some years from now, the change in the baseline of your future cost is now approaching a half million dollars. Well, in this case, $434,000. Let's be a little more accurate. Is anyone here talking about this? How many people, with the savings you have right now, with just trying to survive buying that tank of gas today, are going to be able to save enough money for future expenses? That Social Security check you have basically disappears, shrinks away, because you are now having to deal with the inflationary costs. That is why my back of the napkin math or back of the envelope math, if I can use the colloquialism, is starting to say, oh, my God, I hope my math is wrong. But where this is going right now, I think we are heading toward about a third of our retirees being in poverty in a decade. Remember, Social Security was an antipoverty program. But, once again, crappy public policy here by the left, and this is the decades and decades of future misery they brought to us. Does anyone on the other side own a calculator or actually showed up at their economics class? Social Security income functionally gets erased by rising healthcare costs. Now, this is what brought me to do this on the floor. This last weekend, I had inklings I was going to get the responsibility over Social Security for the Republicans, and so I don't sleep well. The only way I fall asleep often is I sit up and read, and I try to read stuff that is actually important to this job. I came across this article that didn't have good math in it, but it was functionally alluding that the healthcare inflation--and this is beyond just all the other inflation of just trying to buy food and pay for your rent and everything else, just healthcare inflation--was going to destroy, was going to consume many, many, many seniors' entire Social Security check. I don't get credit for this. My staff actually found this. But let's actually go back to our 45-year-old, this bottom line. This is for a couple--because they found this on someone else's literature, so I can't take credit for the math. A couple, they are going to get about $1.153 million, $1,153,000 in Social Security benefits when that 45- year-old couple basically enters their Social Security benefits. Okay. But with the inflation that has been built in--and this is, I think, only a couple years of inflation, but the calculation over 20 years, with the change of inflation, so they are going to get $1,153,000 of Social Security benefits, but they are going to spend functionally out of their pocket $1,543,000 in healthcare costs, and that is with Medicare. Does anyone see a problem? So you start looking at the lifetime retirement healthcare costs when it is 1.8. Based on cost projection, two years of inflation cost projection, functionally their healthcare costs in this model are 156 percent. So every dime of their Social Security check, plus another 56 percent that they are going to have to find other resources to pay for, just to cover their healthcare because of inflation. The couple that turns 65 today--or actually a month or so ago when this calculation was done. Remember, this calculation under calculates inflation. This was done almost back in February with those numbers, and inflation turned out to be much worse. That couple, as a mean across the country, is going to get about $968,000 in Social Security benefits over what we calculate as the average mortality numbers lifetime. Seventy-one percent of their Social Security income is going to healthcare costs driven by, substantially driven by this increase in inflation. So if anyone is listening right now, God, I hope I am wrong. Start saving every dime you can because this government's Democrat policies from this last 2 years have absolutely screwed you over. We are going to spend the rest of the decade fixing the damage that was done in the last 15 months. The math is the math. If I am being hyperbolic, I am doing it because it is important. I don't want to live in a country where a third of my seniors are in poverty because of a decision they made a year ago. This is the actuarial report on Social Security and Medicare when the trust funds are gone, and there is a problem with their math, and that is it was done on February's baseline. Inflation is dramatically higher than what we thought the February baseline was. Now, the economists are saying it is going to last much longer, meaning these dates are going to erode. But functionally, you are 66 months, according to the actuary report, and Medicare part A, the hospital portion, is gone. So functionally, you go into your hospital, and your doctor doesn't get paid to see you. How is that going to work out? Seriously, who is going to pay? The new number is about 150 months for Social Security. I think that is wildly optimistic in this inflationary time. But the baseline model, how are you going to do it? Do you plan to live for another 10 years? Okay. Whether in those 10 years you are on Social Security or you are heading into retirement, are you prepared to have not 25, but 27 percent of your Social Security check disappear? At the same time, I am showing you charts saying, hey, you are 65 today. Because of medical inflation--if it lasts where we are at, 2 years--76 percent of your Social Security money is going to healthcare costs, and we are also then going to reach over and reduce your Social Security check by 27 percent. Does anyone else see a problem coming? This place doesn't own a calculator, and yet as I used to get teased when I was a child, the math always wins. But this place will avoid the math because it is hard. It is the sort of thing that gets you unelected. It is the sort of thing that makes your voters mad. It is your absolute moral obligation to fix these programs without lying. In a future presentation, I am going to come back here, and I am going to also overlay the private pension systems, the multi-employer pension systems, all the other shortfalls, and if any Member here uses the words ``retirement security'' and isn't bathing in fixing these numbers, they should be ashamed of themselves. Madam Speaker, I apologize for the amount of caffeine I have had today, but I am not here to be hyperbolic. I am here to beg of this place to stop chasing the daily shiny object that may get us some press, get us a few minutes on cable television. This is the hard work we are elected to fix, and it is also our moral obligation to save the future. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall No. 233. Members Recorded Pursuant to House Resolution 8, 117th Congress Barragan (Beyer) Bass (Blunt Rochester) Brown (MD) (Blunt Rochester) Brown (OH) (Beatty) Calvert (Valadao) Cardenas (Soto) Castor (FL) (Soto) Castro (TX) (Correa) Cawthorn (Moore (AL)) Crist (Wasserman Schultz) DeSaulnier (Beyer) Evans (Beyer) Frankel, Lois (Wasserman Schultz) Gomez (Garcia (TX)) Gottheimer (Pallone) Grijalva (Garcia (IL)) Jacobs (CA) (Correa) Johnson (SD) (LaHood) Johnson (TX) (Jeffries) Jones (Blunt Rochester) Joyce (PA) (Keller) Katko (Upton) Kim (CA) (Miller (WV)) Kind (Beyer) Kirkpatrick (Pallone) Lamb (Blunt Rochester) LaTurner (Mann) Leger Fernandez (Neguse) Loudermilk (Fleischmann) Lynch (Connolly) Mace (Donalds) McEachin (Beyer) Meeks (Jeffries) Moore (WI) (Beyer) Moulton (Neguse) Murphy (FL) (Rice (NY)) Ocasio-Cortez (Takano) Payne (Pallone) Price (NC) (Manning) Rogers (KY) (Reschenthaler) Ruiz (Correa) Ryan (Beyer) Sanchez (Garcia (TX)) Schiff (Takano) Sewell (Kelly (IL)) Sherman (Beyer) Sires (Pallone) Smith (NJ) (Kelly (PA)) Spartz (Banks) Strickland (Takano) Suozzi (Beyer) Swalwell (Veasey) Taylor (Fallon) Thompson (MS) (Bishop (GA)) Titus (Connolly) Tonko (Pallone) Trahan (Connolly) Vargas (Takano) Walorski (Banks) Waters (Garcia (TX)) Welch (Pallone) Williams (GA) (Neguse) Wilson (FL) (Neguse)

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It shows you how fast you can talk if you have been just sucking down coffee all day, Mr. Speaker. I should throw this out: I have had the pleasure of sitting there when I have someone on the other side, and I know it is sometimes like fingernails on a chalkboard, and you are a good guy to tolerate because I am frustrated. I am frustrated that this body is not living up to what we are capable of. There are lots of reasons and lots of excuses. But, please, to anyone here, no more going behind the microphone and saying: but it is all paid for. The math up to this point of just what has been passed--this isn't what has been proposed, what is proposed is off the chart--just what has been passed, the left has functionally increased the deficit by $2\1/2\ trillion dollars. That is actually using the much more favorable CBO scoring. So no more pretending and saying everything is paid for. It is not. All I'm trying to do here is a simple point: judge us as conservatives and Republicans by what we did policywise in 2017, `18, and `19 and the good it was for the country. It was good for everyone across the board. And then take a look at particularly the last 15 months. I beg of my Democratic colleagues: reach back, figure out what we did that worked, steal the ideas and call them your own. But the country deserves so much better than what they are getting from this body today. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do the impossible. We are going to do like 20 boards in 30 minutes. Just please wave at me if I start rambling at hyper rates of speed. One of the reasons for today's presentation, it is somewhat of a follow-up from a couple of weeks ago, but also somewhat of just this frustration of statements from our brothers and sisters on the left, from the President, even the comments this week of: Okay, Republicans, where is your plan? Have you seen the numbers of bills that we have offered to take on inflation, to promote economic growth, to promote fairness? None of them can get a hearing around here. My point comes to something very, very simple. We intend to judge the left over what you have accomplished the last 15 months, and we will make it to 2 years. Are the poor better off, the working poor better off, the middle class better off? Is the environment better off? Is the world safer and healthier? Then, we expect you to turn around and judge us when we had the majority and the White House. Take a look at 2017, '18, '19, and we will bookend the pandemic, and judge us. I believe you will see the policies we brought to this floor, to this country, made the poor less poor, the working poor substantially less poor, the middle class much more prosperous, and it didn't have the cruelty that Democrat policy has executed the last 15 months. Look, I am not being hyperbolic. It is a crappy environment out there. It is just exhausting having to do this every couple of months because of the willingness just not to tell the truth here by my brothers and sisters on the left. Once again, tax reform was done at the very end of 2017. Speaker after speaker, the Speaker herself, came to the floor and told us how this was a giveaway to the rich, that it was going to crash revenues, that we are heading to recession. None of that was true. We ended up having a couple of years there before the pandemic--and I am going to show you, if we hadn't had it, how miserable the pandemic economics would have been. The fact of the matter is, when we passed tax reform, corporate tax receipts--we don't call them revenues; we call them receipts if you are on the Ways and Means Committee--went up 75 percent, far beyond CBO's early projections. The fact of the matter is individual income taxes were up 27\1/2\ percent, and 80 percent of that was paid by the top 10 percent. Bit of trivia, Mr. Speaker pro tem, and to my Democrat colleagues. Our tax reform was more progressive, meaning the top tier of income earners were paying a higher percentage, a larger percentage, of the Federal income tax burden than the previous tax system. Stop lying about what we did because what we did was pretty darn amazing. When you think about just the economic effects, income inequality shrank, food insecurity shrank, and we did it without inflation. Look, I accept there is a huge divide here. Democrats don't particularly like Republican policies. We obviously don't like theirs. Fine. Do you care about poor people? Do you care about the middle class? Then step up and just steal our ideas. We will be happy to let you take them if it is good for America. But the crap that has been moved here in the last 15 months has just been cruel. Let's go back and, one more time, take a look at the actual math. If you take a look at the middle income, what was happening in that mean of our country--and this is adjusted to, I believe, 2019, so it is all consistent. You take a look at that growth, the opportunity, and you take a look at what happened when we did tax reform, just the incredible growth of income. This is real purchasing power. This is adjusted for inflation. The fact of the matter is, take a look at these miserable years here during the Obama administration, where we basically just flatlined, and we stayed there. The 2008 recession was brutal. Why did it take years and years and years and years and years just to get back to mean? The fact of the matter is regulatory policy, tax policy, and trade policy make a difference, and you have to basically embrace something. Maybe this is where some of the left and right divide is. As a conservative, I believe growth is moral. I believe my daughter and the next generation of Americans deserve to live better tomorrow and the next year and the next decade better than they did yesterday. Instead, the policies of this administration and this Congress have made America poorer. Once again, you take a look at what was being said here. That blue is what all the pretax reform trend line was. This is where we were going. We were all excited that we might get slightly over 2 percent GDP growth. Understand, when we talk about gross domestic product growth, it is a big deal because it builds on itself. It is like a staircase. When you get another 1 percent here, 1 percent may not seem like a lot to you, but it becomes the new basis for the next year and the next year. When you start to look at that over a decade, it starts being remarkable amounts of wealth that is distributed throughout society. The red is what we accomplished by fixing the regulatory and tax system around here. The fact of the matter is, if you care about the middle class, if you care about the working poor, if you care about this society, if you care about our future, embrace the truth. Embrace that it worked. If you want, say you could have done it better. But the fact of the matter is, what we accomplished worked. This is taking a little bit to geekdom, and I am sorry about that, but how horrendous the Democrats' forecasts were on accuracy, and how, when Republicans took over the majority, we functionally nailed it. As a matter of fact, for 2018, we substantially underestimated the amount of growth we were going to accomplish with our regulatory and tax reform. I know this may not seem important, but it is because, once again, in this place, we play this game: ``Well, CBO says this.'' But for some reason, when the Democrats are in charge of this place, CBO gives these projections, and we never get there. When Republicans are in charge, CBO gives us projections, and we touch them or exceed them. Then, we turn around and see the President and Democrat leadership talk about it as if it was some dystopian time. It is just this bizarre place, being judged by what we actually accomplished just as we intend to judge you and what you have done to this country. This one is actually important because we are going through this right now. There is an argument that inputs in inflation is basically it is too many dollars--simplistic--too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. You can do what the Federal Reserve is doing right now, which is basically squeeze dollars, squeeze liquidity out of our society. It will drive us into a recession, and it will raise misery, and people will lose their jobs. But that is what is being required to get out the excess liquidity that the Democrats here--not a single Republican voted for it--did to this country. There is a reason Larry Summers begged you not to do it. You know, big-time Republican Larry Summers, right? He begged you not to do it. You did it anyway, and you set it off. You basically took a flaming log and threw it on the kindling. Then you run around and say, ``Well, it was Russia.'' I am going to show you over and over here that it was going on before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am going to show you that your policies, for years, are what set off energy prices. But one of the inputs, if you want to tamp down inflation, that we as Members of Congress can do is incentivize society. You incentivize industry to make more stuff. Some of the ways you do that is you get more of our brothers and sisters to participate in the economy. The fact of the matter is that was also one of the miracles that we accomplished with tax reform, the number of folks that came from the sidelines and came back into work because it became profitable for their lives, because there were opportunities. Once again, is growth moral? Because what we accomplished was pretty remarkable. I know it may be hard to try to get your head around some of these charts, but the fact of the matter is the spike we saw of people coming back out of retirement and going back into the labor force and young people, I guess, dropping their video games and going into the labor force, it didn't set off inflation. In many ways, what it did was help set off productivity so we had those amazing wealth effects there, particularly in 2018, 2019, the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic. Look where we are at today. Today, we are now seeing articles that labor force participation--our numbers of brothers and sister who are going to choose not to participate in the economy, who are going to take early retirement, not come back into labor--continues to leave us flatlined, leaving our country with the solution the left is going to give us for inflation is to let the Federal Reserve drive us into a recession. That is all you are giving us right now. This chart is absolutely fascinating for folks. Remember how Democrats believed they made people's lives so much better by functionally handing out cash? Did you know that our brothers and sister had a hell of a lot more cash in their bank accounts before COVID? The amount of economic growth that was happening over here--they weren't spending it as fast as they got it. It was actually starting to go into their future retirement, their retirement security, the money for their kids' education. The fact of the matter is the chart is the chart. These are the increases in household income, household checking deposits for the lowest 20 percent of quartiles. I despise that term. The fact of the matter is these are our brothers and sisters who are considered to be at the bottom 20 percent of the income quartiles. You see this dramatic change in how much money they had in their checking accounts? Over here you can see--here is the blip where we sent out COVID money, and here is where they are today. It is gone. As a matter of fact, it is now lower than it was pre-COVID. This is the Democrats' great success in the Keynesian stimulus model of handing out cash. Our brothers and sisters have less cash in the bank than they did before. When we were doing it through economic growth and not handouts, our brothers and sisters out there--if you care about the poor and the working poor, you made them poorer. If I get one more Democrat here who comes behind the microphone, and says: Well, energy prices are because of the invasion. Come on. We all know that isn't true. How many times have there been votes in this House and every single Democrat voted no to construction of new refineries, no construction to even provide permits for new refineries, no new drilling? We have vote after vote after vote and this has been going on for decades. You have all heard this discussion of when the Biden administration took over and they functionally took their regulatory apparatus, and said, you give a loan, you are a pension system, and you invest in hydrocarbons. We need you now to file new disclosures on what you did for the environment and greenhouse. What are your risk levels? You functionally basically created this chilling effect for what we call the capital stack, the access to capital to extract and refine hydrocarbons. It sounds a little geeky. Let's make this simple. It is not because of the cancellation of the pipelines; it is a little bit. It is not because of the lack of leases; it is a little bit. It is substantially because in 2020 you had the collapse of the useful hydrocarbons because everyone is staying home. If you remember, we went to negative oil prices. Lots and lots of fields and lots of delivery systems shut down. A year later, we desperately need those back into production. The Democrats have taken over everything and now they make it damn hard to get any money. They make it damn hard to put that field back into production. What did you think was going to happen? I am going to show you in a couple of charts--it is a couple charts away--the pricing that we are paying today for heating and cooling our homes, for filling up our vehicle, was coming before the invasion. What Russia is doing to Ukraine just brought it forward by a few months, but you could already see it in the futures market. Don't you remember last fall we were having discussions here on the floor about how people were going to heat their homes this winter? Once again, you are going to have the President and Democrats say, well, it is Putin's inflation. It is just not true. It is Democrat policy. The fact of the matter is--think about this--when we functionally hit 2019 and going into the first part of 2020, we were energy independent. We functionally had accomplished the miracle that we had not seen for 30, 40, 50 years. Imagine if we had that today? It shows you how much damage the left has been able to accomplish in 15 months. There is a great irony here. One of the pledges of the Democrats when they were running in the last election and the Biden campaign, and even the people that ran against me--we are going to clean the environment. We actually care. We are going to deal with greenhouse gases. Their lack of understanding of basic economics--they do all these things, they screw up the capital stack, they screw up the ability to extract natural gas, natural gas goes way up in price, and power plants all across the country have to convert back to coal. Congratulations, guys. Last year, America burned 23 percent more coal because you raised the price of the dramatically cleaner natural gas so much they had to convert back to coal. So when the environmental party--at least the party that claims to be. But if you look at the math, the Republicans' ability to get natural gas to the market cheaply and efficiently is what got us so darn close to those Paris accord numbers, just organically, because we believed in economics. The control freaks here that thought they controlled the energy markets--sorry, guys, you made it much worse. You made it much worse. The math is the math. This is math coming from the Democrat administration admitting they made it much worse. Once again, if you take a look at the futures market--and this is long before the invasion--when you see these spikes, this is almost a year ago, it was already coming because the constraint on supplies was already built into the policy of Democrat control of this government. The misery today--even though there is going to be this desperate attempt to say it is Putin's inflation and Putin's gas prices--it is just not true. Some of us were on this floor last October saying that we were already seeing this in the futures market. The only thing the invasion did is just brought it forward by a few months. You wonder why you have inflation. Let's see. Left policies blew up the energy market. Left policies financed massive amounts of liquidity and the incentive to functionally stay home and not be part of a productive society. Great Democrat policies again. Take a look at the misery index--which actually I should do a calculation. I should go back and try to figure out--in this misery index we would probably just do inflation and how many people are living on the street and how many kids are dying of fentanyl overdose because the border is open. That may be one of our coming projects. The fact of the matter is, the CPI calculation--and this is just from the last couple of weeks--is now well over 14 percent, and we are seeing food, energy, shelter coming close to 20 percent. These are the core components. This is year over year. This isn't the little transitory--do you remember how we were promised over and over by the administration and my Democrat colleagues that it was transitory? This is year over year. This is your version of transitory? If you want to make Americans poorer, what are some of the cruelest things you can do? Let's go back to our working poor. What are the two things you do to crush the working poor? Inflation and open up the border. You flood the population with individuals with similar skill sets and then you make the core things you need: food, rent and fuel-- if you are rich, which we know the Democratic Party now has become substantially an elite party. If you take a look at your money, it is rich coastal people that write the checks. It is what it is. That working class, particularly the poor working class, are just getting their heads kicked in. The only solution we get from the left is, well, let's send them more checks, even though that worked brilliantly a year ago. If you start to look at fuel, 58.8, gasoline up 43 percent. Then you start taking a look at changes in food and shelter. In my community, I represent a population that has had the highest inflation now for almost a year and a half. The calculation that just came out last week, my community just suffered 11 percent year-over-year inflation. Last January, the year-over-year inflation was 10.9. My community has gotten poorer, substantially poorer, because of Democrat policies. Now you start to think about that middle class, how much of their income actually goes to buy fuel or, in this case, buy food? You get the con job here saying, well, the core CPI says this. Okay. When you adjust core CPI, the consumer price index, and you start to think about individuals of--if I am in the working middle class, that hardworking middle class, or even some of the lower quartiles, the amount of your income that goes to food, fuel and shelter, you start to realize across the country that it is not 8.1 or whatever that number is that was the national average, it is over 10. It is folks with assets, like a bunch of the Members here. They own houses, they own a second house, they own a vacation home. They are invested in real estate equities. They own some REITs holdings. They are doing fine. All those adjust with inflation. But for our brothers and sisters who are just trying to survive, we are kicking their heads in. It is policy that came from the floor of this House that did it. You start to think about the share of income now having to be spent just on shelter, when our lowest quartiles, or quintiles, however you prefer to say it, is now over 24\1/2\ percent for our lowest quintile to basically just pay for their rent. These are nationwide numbers. This isn't my Phoenix-Scottsdale number where it is actually substantially higher. Congratulations to my community, Democrats brought you 11 percent inflation. Yay. After redistricting--I am blessed, I have an amazing community, but my community voted for Joe Biden by a couple of points, but they didn't vote for this. If you want to make someone that is retired, if you want to make a working person poorer, do this. This is misery. The unwillingness--this is an uncomfortable analogy, but I think it works. Does anyone have a friend that they tried to help through being an alcoholic and you took them to their 12-step meeting? What is the first step? They admit they have a problem. My brothers and sisters on the left here won't admit they have a problem because they won't admit they did this. Let's start going over some of the brilliant policy ideas--and I only use this one as a simple example because it is easy to digest. In the Democrats' Build Back Better, they have been speechifying to us that supply chains are setting off inflation, we need more production, we need this. Then they slip language into their own legislation that says--but you can't automate the ports because we are beholden to the unions. Think about that. The Build Back Better has a provision in there, slipped in there, hidden in there, that you can't automate the very things that technology disruptions can help make us more productive, so that we can actually start to drive inflation down and get the wealth cycle back to our brothers and sisters here in this country. They are more beholden to their union constituency than the working men and women of this country. Then here is the very last slide. Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Ellzey). Recognizing Midlothian Innovative Learning Experience

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to do something this evening that isn't sort of traditional for me because I mostly do economics. I tried to do that circle of how everything ties together, and I accept I get a little geeky. For those who are trying to keep an eye on the history of our words, wave at me if I start speaking too fast because I have had a lot of coffee today. Today, I am going to try to talk about what I saw on the border last week, but I am going to try to do it in a slightly different way. You have had lots of us come up here--and I am going to do part of it; I am going to show the boards and the numbers and all that. In economics, there is this concept of a second-degree effect, a third-degree effect. I wish I could come up with a definition for a misery effect. The fact of the matter is, let's pretend it is really done out of compassion. Let's pretend our brothers and sisters on the left, this administration, their approach to the border is because they are heartfelt, and they believe this is kind and compassionate. My argument here is going to be really simple: Please think through your definition of ``compassion.'' Now that we know there are functionally 700 migrants who have lost their lives trying to cross the river, or when I was with the Border Patrol last Wednesday in Yuma, Arizona, and the Border Patrol agent, she was telling me of the heartbreak of finding a couple of children dead in the desert just a few hundred yards from the border, how can that be our definition of ``compassion''? And then we are going to have to walk through the reality of the misery you have brought to my State, my community. Last Thursday, we did a roundtable with the true experts in our community in regard to fentanyl and drug use. I was sitting next to a mother who lost her teenage son by taking a single pill. You have us come here and talk about the fentanyl crisis. Do you understand the scale? Phoenix has functionally become the distribution hub of North America. One of the reasons--and I am going try to show it in the numbers here. When the border is just crowded with populations coming across it--and I stood there for a good 3 minutes, and there were 30- something people coming across the border. Over here were some other migrants crossing over the dam. Over here is the Border Patrol agent saying, I am in the concierge business. I basically take people, I walk them over to the trucks, and we take them to processing, and when we do that, whole sections over here on the border are left unmanned. Then you wonder why a sergeant who is a Phoenix police officer, my neighbor and friend, tells me a year ago it cost about $112 for some poor soul to get high for the day. Today it is $12. If you believe in basic economics, when the price crashes by 112 to 12, do you understand the depravity, the cruelty that Democrats' definition of ``compassion'' has brought to our own communities? I will try to do this--and I have done a version of this before--you have got to think of the effects of the policy that the left is engaged in. When you open up the borders, you get more drugs. If you get more drugs, you are getting more homeless. If you are getting more homeless, you have increased crime. And then you have deaths. How many people in the last day or so have come behind these microphones and said, Well, according to the latest statistics, we have 112 Americans who died of fentanyl that we know of. Well, our problem in the Phoenix area is not only fentanyl, it is meth, and it is other things. How do I get the left to be willing to understand, if you love and care about people, your version of compassion is cruel? So let's actually walk through some of the obvious, and then try to add a little bit of color and see if we can make this sort of come together as an understanding. First, let's just do the basic math. We are being told, Hey, we are heading in this fiscal year already to almost a million people. I had the experience last Wednesday of standing there. I have some distant relatives who do some farming down in the Yuma area, so I am an Arizonan, and I am at the border dozens of times. I went and visited the Border Patrol station, and I know some of the folks there, and I saw the faces of individuals who feel like they have just been crushed. They are law enforcement, and they are not able to protect the border because they are functionally in the people management business. They are taking people here and moving them over here so they can be processed, so they can be let go, so they can get a return order 6 years from now. This is what is going on. Then they turn to you and say, I am here to stop drugs and weapons and potentially horrible people, terrorists, coming across our border, and I am now functionally in the human transportation business. That is what we have turned our Border Patrol into. Then you meet with some of the Customs and Border Protection officials, and they say, Yes, you know, fentanyl may be coming right through the borders, but they only have to go several hundred yards that way and there is no more Border Patrol because all of them are taking care of people; you can just walk across. Somewhere here I am going to try to do the other part of the discussion, where we talk about potentially if that is a million in the first half of the year, is it a couple million? Will the left have an honest discussion with us of why their version of compassion has a level of human exploitation that is really uncomfortable to talk about? The agent I was standing there with turns to me and says, You understand most of these people who are walking across right now are going to spend the next few years of their life paying off the cartels, those are the costs that they had to commit to to cross the border. If they can't pay it off with a job that they are not allowed to have, do they have to pay it off with their body? Do they have to pay it off with smuggling, moving narcotics? Is anyone here willing to take a step back from sort of the radicalized ideology and say this is not compassion, this is cruelty? We are functionally in the business of human exploitation right now, that is our border policy. Yet, when we see numbers of border encounters have increased 278 percent, it is just another guy coming behind the microphone here and sounding like an accountant on steroids. These are people. And is it enough that several hundred of them will die at the border? Is it enough that many of them are going to have to engage in activities that are just absolutely exploitive to pay off the coyotes? Is it enough that the cartels are now said to be making billions of dollars on human smuggling? And they are using that money now to actually build their own little factories, so they can make the precursor chemicals for fentanyl and synthetic opioids because it is cheaper than getting them imported from China? We financed their Industrial Revolution. Think about this: The left says, Well, inflation, these things are supply chains. Well, dammit, they did a great job. We solved the cartel supply chain. We financed them enough so now they can make their own drugs from precursor chemicals all the way up to stamping the pill. You have got to think about those second-degree, third-degree effects of misery that really crappy policy brings. Why have there been so many on the right and now a handful of Democrats--who are obviously concerned about their elections and realizing what they have embraced, but they are not willing to sign the discharge petition on title 42--why are so many of us talking about this: The Border Patrol--if you have an honest conversation with them-- will turn to you and say, We are maxed out. And if you double the populations that are approaching the border because you functionally have removed title 42 so they don't get sent back, they get processed, it is no longer being overwhelmed, it is just a catastrophe. There functionally will be no protection on our border, and once again, U.S. policy is functionally financing the cartels. Congratulations. The misery, the murders, the exploitation, which is U.S. policy. That is functionally what we have done here, but you did it in the name of, Well, this was compassionate. It is an amazing definition of ``compassion.'' Now, let's actually get to some other bits of misery. This number is a fraud. The reason this fentanyl number is--saying we have had 133 percent increase of capturing, collecting, stopping fentanyl at the border--when you meet with law enforcement down on the border they say most people we can't catch; we are too busy taking care of these million--now 2 million potentially--people crossing the border. What a great system. Let's see. The cartels get to march people to the border. They may get a few thousand bucks a head, so they get financed there. And because Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection are overwhelmed, it creates these massive openings where you can just move lots of narcotics across the border. And here is what should be ripping your hearts apart: I got to sit next to a mom who told the story of her teenage son taking a single pill, a single pill that was stamped as something completely different, and 2 hours later that mom didn't have a son anymore. In Arizona, 95 percent of our kids that died in the previous year-- out of the 60 who died, 57 of them were from these fentanyl pills. Is there any love and compassion and caring for these moms that have lost their children? What is going on here? Is the ideology of this administration of the Democrats here in the House, are they so radically calcified that the definition of ``compassion'' is the death of 57 Arizonan children? Is that really where they are at? Because that is the outcome. I don't know how else to humanize this story, but this is what we have done. Yet, now we see some of our brothers and sisters on the left, once again, saying, Well, we are actually concerned now, too. But you notice they won't come sign the actual piece of legislation so we can vote on it to actually stop that increase. Forgive me, I can't stop myself with the charts. Part of it, when you start seeing the explosion of increase--and it is Arizona, it is my community that is the one that is crushed--when you start seeing Arizona having a 79.5 percent increase in, functionally, fentanyl pills crossing our border, and that is what is captured. Remember, I mentioned before I did the ride-along with the Phoenix police sergeant? And in parts of the discussion he was saying, Yeah, it is about $12 now for that heartbreaking, homeless person there sleeping in that alley to get high for the day. That is what we have done. We have ZIP Codes now, I am being told, that the homelessness has doubled in the last year. And what is the consistent policy thing that happened in the last year? The Democrats opened up the border. So let's play economist for a moment. What are the couple of things you do to make the working poor and the poor, to make their life more miserable? Okay. Inflation. We have done a great job at that. Remember, one year ago, March, we functionally dropped another $1.9 trillion on the economy. You look at the charts and, boom, there goes inflation. My community had functionally a 10.9 percent inflation increase. I represent the community that had the highest growth of inflation year to year. Do you know how many people no longer can afford their apartment-- functionally, can't afford? You are crushing the working poor. But you can do more. You can open up the border. And this was actually left-wing economists that wrote these papers about 10 years ago. If you want to crush the working poor, import millions of people with similar skill sets. So one of the classic definitions of the profile of someone as working poor is they may not have finished high school, but they are selling their labor. They are out there hanging drywall, working their hearts out, they are trying to find a way to get out. And now they are going to compete against who knows how many people who are going to work in the underground economy. You have added millions of people with similar skill sets. So how are they going to get the money to pay off their smugglers? Don't you think they are going to be coming in the back door saying, I will work for cash; I will do this and that? Now you have other things that make the poor poorer: Crime, drugs, someone stealing their stuff because they need money. And you look at all those numbers. The Democrats are in their, what? Now, 15 months of control. Every single number. Income inequality, the poor getting poorer, misery, death, retirees getting poorer, the middle class getting poorer. Great job, guys. Great job. Tell me something you have done that hasn't increased misery in this country. I know this is uncomfortable, but I am doing it on purpose. Sometimes the smartest thing is to just stop what you are doing. Take a breath. Maybe the ideology is a false ideology. Back up. I am sorry the former President was into border security. But do you remember a decade and a half ago when it was the hallmark of Democrats that were concerned about illegal immigration? Do you remember it was Republicans and Chambers of Commerce that wanted to flood the country with cheap labor? Isn't it amazing what happened here? It was only about 15 years ago that the left were the protectors of working men and women. We will not flood the country with cheap labor. We need our folks to be able to have a working wage. Oh, we are going to open the border now because it is compassionate, and we are going to screw up everyone's life. What happened? When did the Democrats abandon the middle class, the working poor? Is it they weren't voting for them enough? It is about the math. Now, we are moving beyond pounds, we are heading towards tonnage in the amounts of fentanyl coming through my State. Let's put this in context. You see this little picture right here, those few crystals there? That functionally is enough to kill you. So that is a penny. Those? That kills you. When does this become terrorism? Because it is already functionally killing our children. Does anyone care? Now, we have got to go just a little bit further down the rabbit hole. The border agents report over a thousand percent increase, and these are the ones in Texas. The argument I was given by our friends at Customs and Border Patrol is they are not catching much of it. But it goes further. You have got to understand what has been happening in my community. This is just one of a dozen headlines when there is a bust and it is enough to functionally kill every single person in my State. There was a bust the night before we did our fentanyl roundtable. There was enough to kill everyone in my county, and I have the third or fourth most populous county in the Nation. Do you understand the scale? When you have the experts here saying, Well, David, you don't understand. Prices have so crashed, a couple of years ago it would be several dollars a pill. Now it might be, at wholesale, 45 cents a pill. When it gets that cheap, you want to try to understand why it is in your elementary schools, your high schools, throughout your community, and the homeless campuses. That is the cascade effect. So I'm begging the majority to just take a breath for a moment, back away from the radicalized ideology and just take a breath and say, Do you actually love and care about people? Will you accept the misery, the death, just the dystopian devastation that is happening in our communities right now because of an open- border policy? That is what it is. And title 42 is not a solution. It is just trying to stop the catastrophe. Sign the discharge petition. Prove that your rhetoric actually fits reality. Or maybe the constituencies are now so gerrymandered and intellectually calcified that you can't tell the truth. Another chart that absolutely proves we have turned, functionally, our legal apparatus to protect the Nation into, functionally, a transportation service, ICE. Immigration enforcement is, functionally, beyond the border in our communities. Those who got through, who were not stopped, it is up to law enforcement. How do you catch someone and functionally remove them from the country? You see where we were in 2019. And then you see where we were in 2020. And do you see the crash over here? These deportations? Now, what is fascinating is this line way up here was actually even further up during the Obama administration. Did the left basically just crash this because the last President was so hated by the left for protecting working men and women that if he said it is Black, you had to say White? You had to walk away from it? We would be elated to get back to the actual law enforcement protection of the border numbers that were there during the Obama administration. There is this weird irony, and I just show this so folks understand the bizarreness of Democrat management leadership of this government right now. So illegal immigration goes up--well, it is not immigration, it is illegal captures at the border, presentations, those things--278 percent. But legal, if the person had just got their Ph.D. in electrical engineering at ASU and they can't process the paperwork, legal immigration has crashed. So at the same time we get the complaints from businesses that they can't hire anyone, that we need talent to grow the economy. As you saw the brilliance today, GDP actually fell pretty substantially in the last quarter. Yay, Democrats are doing a great job. One of the factors of economic growth is when you bring in smart people. Well, that has crashed but we are imparting massive numbers of poverty into the country. That is the left's version of compassion. I accept that some of this presentation is a little bit on the aggressive, maybe slightly jerky side, but I don't have another way to basically say, Is this really the Democrats' vision of America? Is this really how you think we are going to make poor people less poor, the working poor more prosperous, the middle class much more prosperous? The thought experiment is very simple. Anyone out there, contact my office with something, give me a single thing in the last 15 months of absolute Democrat control of this Congress, this government, that the left has done that has turned out to actually be good for America, good for working people, good for poor people. You have made rich people a lot richer. Isn't that amazing? Income inequality was shrinking dramatically in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020. Pandemic; Democrats take over--boom. All the things they told us that they cared about basically have gone to crap. And the math is the math. But as you all know, we work in a math-free zone. And maybe at some point we will tie our hearts, our compassion, to the actual facts. And when we do that, the really bad things that this Congress and this White House are doing to the American people will stop. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one more time, I am going to do something that is a little difficult, and I apologize for you being the poor person in the chair when we do this. I am going to walk through inflation. I don't think we understand the damage, the economic violence, that is happening to the poor, the working poor, and the economic future of the country. Sorry, guys, the Democrats get the blame on this one. We are going to walk through the facts, the mechanisms, but also maybe a couple of solutions. This is going to be a tough one. So if you like economics, stay tuned. If you don't like math and economics, I suggest you get away from this presentation as fast as possible. Also, another weird aside because I get this question all the time: The Chamber is empty, but we are probably on 1,000 televisions throughout the campus here in the House and the Senate, with staff and Members, and that is, in many ways, partially who we are communicating with to think differently. First off, 1 year ago, I think it was March 21, 2021, the Democrats did one of their huge stimulus bills. Not a single Republican voted for it. That is the moment you can track the explosion in inflation. I am stealing Larry Summers' quote from one of his presentations a couple of days ago. There was a piling of dry kindling, and the Democrats decided to take a kerosene-soaked log, light it on fire, throw it on that kindling, and boom. Now, we are having a number of our economists saying we may have inflation for an entire decade. This is not transitory. Do you remember over and over and over when Treasury Secretary Yellen--who I used to have amazing respect for, but now she has become a partisan--would say to us, oh, it is transitory. A number of the Democratic economists would say it is transitory. They are no longer saying that. They basically admitted they screwed up, and a lot of people are getting hurt right now. I am going to show over and over, if you are a middle-class person, if you are part of the working poor, you are poorer today than 14 months ago when the Democrats took power. Let's have a little bit of amusement here. You may all remember this. This is from before the stimulus bill, from a year ago. Larry Summers, not a big Republican--come on, Larry Summers has classically always been one of the left's favorite economists, except when he told them: Don't do this. Don't do this. You already have pumped so much cash into the system. Remember, Mr. Speaker, the world is sort of split. The left believes in sort of a Keynesian model of consumption economics. The right sort of believes in productivity: make more things. It is referred to as supply side. They decided to stimulate consumption and hand out lots of money, and now you are poorer today than you were a year ago, Mr. Speaker. The left's own sort of biggest voice, Larry Summers, basically begged them not to do it. But there is a policy around here: buy your votes and spend lots of taxpayer money. Even today, The Wall Street Journal has an editorial featuring many of the comments from Larry Summers talking about how he expects actually a pretty severe recession now. We are going to pay a price for my brothers and sisters on the left basically failing their basic economics class. So let's actually walk through it. Here is basically the chart, Mr. Speaker, and you can see the inflationary expectations when the Democrats took power, when they actually passed their big stimulus bill, and off to the races. My community in January had a 10.9 percent year-over-year inflation. Some of our models right now say that this month and next month we are actually going to be having inflationary spikes. I need you to have a concept. So everyone is fretting right now: Oh, the Federal Reserve is going to raise interest rates. It is 2 percent. They might actually go one-half of 1 percent. Mr. Speaker, if you go back to the early, early eighties and the Paul Volcker time, they had to raise the Federal funds rate equal to inflation. If today the actual inflation rate as of this moment is not 6 percent but closer to 8, 8.1, are you ready for a Federal funds rate at 8? Because that is what it takes. Because understand, Mr. Speaker, if you are borrowing money today at a Federal funds rate of 2, 2\1/2\, and inflation really is closer to 8, there a huge, huge gap. Those need to actually be in alignment because you have a negative actual interest rate. When you are borrowing below what inflation is costing, if the dollar goes to this value every day and you are paying this, you have substantial negative interest rates. What do you think is going to happen? So back to the reality. This is what we have done. Actually, I take that back. We didn't do this. The Republicans didn't do it. The Democrats did it, and they did it without a single--without a single-- Republican vote. This line, functionally, is your income, Mr. Speaker, and, yes, it has had a little bit of movement up, but this is your purchasing power because your income has become worth less. In January when we got the 2021 basic data, the mean in our country was about 2\1/2\ percent poorer. Their purchasing power, they became poorer. Inflation has only increased since then. The reality of it is that really bad economics end up hurting people. You will notice, Mr. Speaker, it is this White House saying--in an absolutely almost laughable--well, it is Putin's inflation. Of course, it was going on long before Putin invaded Ukraine. Well, it is the Big Oil companies. Except it was Democrat policies that created the natural gas shortages last year. They are desperate to run away from the responsibility of what they have done. It is not part of this board deck, but, repeatedly, I have come to this floor and tried to walk through what the two things are, if you want to kick the working poor's head in economically; what do you do? Well, inflation, right? Here is another article right now from The Washington Post--a truly conservative publication--``Fed official: Inflation falls hardest on poorer families.'' So the excuse of saying: Well, inflation really wasn't hurting the poor. I mean, come on. We are back to reality. You are killing and you are crushing, economically, the poor. So number one is inflation. Number two, if you actually look at the data on those folks we put in that category of the working poor, they are individuals who often didn't finish high school or they didn't go to college. They sell their labor. Do what the left has done this last year: open up the border. Have millions--millions--of people cross the border and come into the country who offer similar skill sets where their economic value is they are going to sell their labor. And now you take the population we love and care about, but we are crushing that working poor, and say, Hey, you now get to compete with a couple of million new residents who are going to sell their labor. The policy of the last 14 months has just been brutal. You see it in the budget data, Mr. Speaker. Income inequality has gotten worse since the Democrats have taken charge. Food insecurity has gotten worse. Minority populations' incredible gains that happened in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic have been lost. So if you actually care, Mr. Speaker, if you say, I care about economic growth, economic growth is moral, then would you keep doing policies that keep hurting people? It is math. At some point I would be elated if the left said: Okay, they accept that their model doesn't work and basically has never worked, and instead of spending massive amounts of money--we are going to talk about the danger the country is now in because of the incredible levels of spending and how fragile. There is this fragility concept of interest rates and debt we are going to walk through in a bit. If the Democrats really cared, they would basically steal the supply- side economics, call it their own--they have done that before on other things--and say, We care about poor people. We are actually going to help them. But you can't do it this way. Every single day the Democrats have had absolute control, people have gotten poorer. Once again, there was one Democrat that voted ``no,'' so I will give that person credit. Zero Republicans voted ``yes,'' but 220, 211 voting ``no.'' This is what they called the American Rescue Plan, except now we need to be rescued from the Democrats' American Rescue Plan. Some of these slides are going to get a little thick. Purchasing power of $100--we talk about inflation, but most people don't really process what it means. So let's actually pretend that the baseline inflation that we believe we are at this last quarter, about 7.4, if you had that for 10 years, so if I gave you $100 today, Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago what would the purchasing power of that $100 be? It, functionally, is about $40, $46. You have lost more than half of it. Basically, your value and your wealth got cut in half. Now, if you are on the rich side, Mr. Speaker, you own lots of real estate and you have lots of assets. With inflation, basically those assets become a hedge. But if you are a young family, if you are someone who is retired, you are living on a pension or you are living on your savings or you are trying to get a family started, every day being able to participate in the American Dream gets harder. There is a reason inflation is one of the most destructive forces in the world in societies. It is because it is the ultimate spreader of income inequality. Those who have assets basically are indemnified from inflation. But if you don't have a bunch of assets, you are this. That is what happens to you. Your dollar at the current rate of inflation will be cut in half in a decade. This is the result of the policies of this place from the last 14 months. And now we are seeing models saying that it may not be at 7.4. Some are saying it could be 4 or 5. Now, I am a little more worried. But some of the best experts are now saying that inflation now may be structurally built in for this next decade. Do you understand the damage that is going to do to the American people? Just some of the different slides trying to understand what the trajectory is right now. We are basically looking at what was projected to be some of the inflationary trends. The current line, basically, is starting to look at about an 8, 8.4. I actually think this year-- remember, last year: Oh, it is transitory. Oh, it is just a seasonal spike. It is a supply chain spike. Now we see the studies that say: Hey, no, half of the inflation from last year--so if you are my community, 10.9 year over year was policy from this body. It wasn't Federal Reserve; it was policy from this body. The other half: Well, we will call it supply chain. But then you have to read the rest of the article. It basically breaks down that the stresses in the supply chain were workers, misallocation, those things, that also happened to be substantially related to Federal policy. This is an occasion where the Federal Reserve may be a sinner of keeping interest rates too low too long, but Congress, 1 year ago with their American Rescue Plan--not a single Republican voted for it--decided to throw kerosene and matches when their own Democrat economist, when Larry Summers is saying: Don't do it. Congratulations. You made America poorer. Now, there is this concept out there called a wage-price spiral. This is really important to get your head around, Mr. Speaker, because there are those out there who think: Oh, the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates a little bit, some of the container ships will come in, and the supply chain and everything will be wonderful. That is not the math. There is this concept of, well, prices went up, so I need to be paid more. But if I need to be paid more, the business, to keep its margins, needs to raise its prices. Well, if they raise their prices, I need to be paid more because the business needs to keep their margins, and I need to be able to afford the goods and services. You start this sort of ratchet, it is referred to as a wage-price spiral, and it becomes an unholy circle where wages and demand make a circle. The firm needs to keep its margins to stay in business, well, then you have higher prices and you have higher inflation, and you chase each other. One of the only ways economists have to break this is you have two choices: You do a bunch of policies very quickly to spike productivity. Well, that would mean my brothers and sisters on the left will, basically, walk away from their economic theory and say that they just became supply-siders and we are going to do everything we can to make more stuff. Or we go into a recession. A number of economists basically now say that we are heading to recession, and Larry Summers actually thinks it is a pretty tough recession coming. It is a really miserable, horrible thing to do to people who are just getting out of a pandemic trying to get their lives back together. You hit them with inflation, you flood the borders, you push up crime, you push up fentanyl deaths in my area, and now you are going to run the country into a recession. Yay team. This is from last week. I am told some of these numbers have actually gotten worse this week, but we didn't have time to print a new board. Citibank basically now says 25 percent chance of a recession before the end of the year. Goldman, they were at 27\1/2\ last week. I am told some of these numbers are now up. Economists like Larry Lindsey, I think, is predicting before the end of this month we will actually start to hit the very first steps of a recessionary cycle. Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, prices have gone up faster than your wages. So every day you are getting a little bit poorer, then you begin to pull back on your purchases. The model basically says that is what kicks off a recessionary cycle. Now, in the past, when you did your high school economics class, it was, oh, inventories go up too high and you stop buying stuff and you bleed down your inventories. There is such a thing as an inflationary- driven recessionary cycle, because all of a sudden, you don't have the same purchasing power. You actually saw some of the consumer data hitting last week that, all of a sudden, consumers are starting to change their behavior. Larry Lindsey may have it right, that these Democrat policies are basically paying off what Larry Summers told you was going to happen. Trust me, I never thought I would be behind this microphone saying Larry Summers got it right. Now, you actually go into what are some of the other stressors that will make it so inflation doesn't taper off. Remember: What is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. So you can slow down, you can crush, you can remove liquidity. You can have the Federal Reserve basically bleed off some its inventory of bonds and other holdings. They can raise interest rates, and that squeezes down the money supply. Or the other side, you can make more stuff. But it would require our brothers and sisters on the left, who run this place--they run Washington; they have the Presidency; they have the House; they have the Senate--to do things to incentivize our brothers and sisters not to retire early; for young people to get into the workforce; for some of the populations that, you know, it is dystopian policies of COVID where we forced so many working families and working moms out of the labor force after those miracle years of 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020, where we saw wages, particularly for women of color, just miraculous numbers. Then comes the policy of shutting down the schools, shutting down the economy. Those are the populations who you can see have just been crushed. Unless we get back to levels of participating in the economy, you can't get the productivity. So, could you and I come together, as people on left and the right, and say we are going to incentivize our brothers and sisters who may have chosen to retire to come back in? We are going to incentivize individuals to come back into the labor force because we need to make more stuff. This is not complicated economics. It is just a lot of complicated decisions, and it will require the left, basically, to walk away from some of their orthodoxy. The other thing--I show this slide just to point out what is happening demographically. It is also an opportunity, but it is also really tough. We actually have a situation here, if you look where we are at, you come to the 10-year marks, so at the end of the decade, we, functionally, are heading at parts where 20, 22 percent--actually, I think 22 percent of the population at the end of the decade are 65 and older. What are the leverages we would have here in Congress to encourage those individuals to stay in the labor force? We have already done some things in regard to the Social Security tax penalties, but could we do more of that? If this is about a labor shortage that is also going to continue the inflationary cycle and you have the choice of making people poorer by shoving us into a recession or making more stuff, what are the levers you can pull to incentivize capital investments by businesses and organizations and then our brothers and sisters get into or come back into the labor force. There are also other reasons, and this does tie together. You understand how fragile--this is a basic chart showing how soon Social Security and the Medicare part A trust fund--most of Medicare is actually a general fund expenditures. The hospital portion, what we call part A, is in a trust fund, and they are out of money. By 2027, Medicare part A is modeled to be empty, and this number is actually sooner because of what we did last year. This board was printed last year. The Social Security trust fund is out of money, I think, in 2032 or 2031, it may be our best guess now. If we have more of our brothers and sisters in the labor force, these numbers go out, if you have productivity. But there is a small problem. As inflation kicks off and the COLA mechanisms and Medicare healthcare costs keep going up, we are not absolutely sure what happens if we don't get more labor force participation, more people in the economy working. All the costs here, these numbers, these bankruptcies, running out of money, Social Security and Medicare part A may be happening a lot sooner. So the brain trust around here has this idea that says, hey, let's take the Medicare benefit age and instead of making it 65, let's make it 60, because that way we can have the bankruptcy of it happen much sooner. It is good politics; it is great virtue-signaling from the speechifying. It may be good at getting reelected, but it is horrible economics. To understand how bad the economics have been, this is a slide I made last year, at the end of last year, to understand what 2021 was like from a fiscal standpoint. The punch line, when you look at all of these numbers, is we were borrowing over $47,000 every second. Every second we were borrowing $47,000. You wonder why we kicked off inflation--excuse me--they kicked off inflation? You also wonder why your country, from a financial standpoint, is so fragile. I am going to show you a slide here at the end. It is basically the punch line at the end, that if the 2 points higher interest rate holds for a couple decades, at the end of those decades, every dime of revenue, receipts, into the Federal Government just covers interest costs. Does anyone around here own a calculator? Don't give me, oh, we need more tax receipts, because the fact of the matter, post tax reform, you had number 2 and number 3 highest revenue years in U.S. history, adjusted for inflation, real receipts adjusted for inflation. You are going to notice, even last year was the highest highest ever. And the only reason these two weren't number 1 and number 2 is I think 2014 had a weird timing effect on some paybacks from TARP and some other things. The folks here don't tell the truth about math and say, Oh, you guys did tax reform at the end of 2017. Yeah, but we grew the economy at a breakneck pace, the poor got dramatically less poor, and tax receipts came screaming in, particularly from overseas, unlike what was predicted by the left. Oh, it is a giveaway, except we took in a hell of a lot more taxes. Remember, the new tax code, that we are still under today, was more progressive than the old one. In other words, the rich are paying a higher percentage of Federal income taxes than they were before we did tax reform at the very end of 2017. But that was a supply side type of tax reform, encouraging people to make more stuff, to make the society more productive, to provide more opportunity. It worked. But it wasn't, basically, the giveaway model that the left embraces, and, therefore, they repeatedly lie about it. Yes, think about this. Even with all the horrible things that went on in 2020, a slight reduction in total tax revenues, receipts; 2021, highest ever. We basically broke through $4 trillion dollars. Our problem is, we still took that $4 trillion and then spent a couple trillion on top of that, so we borrowed a couple trillion last year on top of all of the cash that came in through taxes. With all that borrowing, you start to realize the fraud, the danger. You see this whole section here, that green? That is magic money. That is, functionally, the Federal Reserve buying our debt. So they basically lay a claim on banking deposits, a theoretical claim, and buy it. So when you have $5 trillion thrown in, do you blame the Federal Reserve or do you blame us, who basically are running these massive deficits and debt? Look, the Federal Reserve is like the family member of an alcoholic family that keeps buying them beer. They basically have enabled our bad policy decisions. If we had to pay the actual price for a lot of this crazy spending--but by doing what they did here--and the next time you have someone say, Oh, it is Japan, well, Japan is down here. China is there. This is the Federal Reserve, and then this is, functionally, individuals. I am going to show some of the slides that really worry me of what is the appetite for people to basically buy a U.S. bond to help us keep financing this crazy debt and deficits and the fact that every day the bond is actually worth less money. If you go by a 10-year bond today--and I think the post I saw just before I came in here, it was sitting at about 2.5. If it is true that at this moment, inflation may be running somewhere from 6 to 8 percent, how much are you losing every single day in your value? People are loaning the money and taking a negative rate of return. That isn't going to go on long. That is when you hear this discussion of inverted yield curves. I was going to do a whole presentation on yield curves, and the staff, basically, looked at me in terror, so I am not going to do that to you. Just basically understand, when you hear the term ``inverted,'' it basically says, theoretically, if I loan you money on a short-term, I should be willing to take a lower interest rate, because there is less risk than if I loan you money longer. I should ask for a little bit more premium, because more bad things, more unknowns, more black swans can happen. When it inverts, it basically says: I expect something bad in the short term, but eventually it will work itself out, so I am willing to give you longer-term money at a better yield or at a better price. The yield curve has, right now, two things that should send you some very weird messages. The short term is inverted and then comes back and inverts. But at the end of the curve, longer term, you start to see people are getting very worried about those 20 years, 30 years of long- term U.S. debt. You are starting to see it in the actual pricing of our debt, and that should be signaling you some very scary messages. A chart like this--and I am not even sure it is completely accurate yet. I think the numbers are actually worse. We are right here. We are, functionally, now working on the 2023 budget, and they are basically trying to tell you: Hey, be prepared; we are going to be well over a trillion dollars a year. Eight budget years from now, just the interest cost is a trillion bucks. That is assuming the CBO's baseline interest rate that is nowhere near high enough. So we were already heading, at the end of this decade, to trillion- dollar-a-year just borrowing cost. That was just the interest. Remember, it is not what we borrow today; it is what we borrow today and all of the other debt that has to be refinanced. Because when the bond that was sold 10 years ago comes due, we don't pay it off. We just sell more debt and refinance it. If you have a $100 billion option of new debt, new borrowing, because of our incredible spending, there may be another $200 or $300 billion on top of that, that's what we call the roll, the weighted daily average. Just have that in your head. Functionally, in 8 years, interest-- interest--is a trillion dollars a year. And the hits keep getting worse. This is before the craziness of the spending. This board was printed, I think, in 2021, so it missed trillions of dollars of additional borrowing and spending. We were already scheduled to borrow $112 trillion of running debt in today's dollars in 29 years. Three-quarters of it was Medicare, functionally, one-quarter of it was Social Security. The rest of the budget is substantially in balance. Inflation now is about to drive medical costs up, and inflation actually changes the COLA of Social Security. These numbers get dramatically worse. But there is a scam here. I am going to do my best to try to explain this. You are retired. You have savings. You are getting your Medicare, your Social Security. But your savings, as this inflation continues, every day is worth a little less money. You hear the term, eating away at your value. If inflation is eating away at your value, where does that value go? It basically goes to this side of the ledger. When you are paying back those bonds, that debt, you are paying it back now with less valuable dollars. It is basically a transfer from everyone that saved, particularly our retired population. Remember, at the end of the decade, 22 percent of the population is 65 or older. The population that has saved, they become poorer, and that money is transferred to being able to pay back our debt. But now you get to pay it back with inflated dollars. It's a secret backdoor way to strip savers, older Americans of their wealth, and move it to pay back the crazy amounts of borrowing that are going on. So now we structurally will also make--it really affects our retired population; they get poorer. But it is also a way to pay back the amazing amount of debt with what you call inflated dollars, less valuable dollars, and it is a wink-wink-nod-nod. There are some economists, particularly here in Washington, who will actually say, Don't say it out loud, Schweikert; but we almost need to do this because there is no way this body is capable of doing the policies that would create the level of growth and economic participation that would raise everyone's wealth, everyone's prosperity, and, therefore, the tax receipts and the less need for social entitlements and social transfer programs. We can do really good policy for really good economics, or we can just inflate our way out of part of the crushing debt, and it looks like Democrat policies have decided we are going to inflate our way because that is what has happened here. That is the decision that has been made. This chart is a little hard to get our head around, but what is important about it is to get our sense of how fast, since January `21, the levels of borrowing through the Federal Reserve are going. This one basically says since January `21 there has been another $2, $2\1/2\ trillion of transfer from Federal Reserve absorbing U.S. sovereign debt. Basically, they are creating magic money to help us keep financing our spending. That is also money because of our fiscal decisions. Inflation didn't come out of nowhere. This is the third time I am going to say it. Even Democrat economists were warning the majority here that this was coming, and you decided to kick Americans in the head. So, think about this: President Biden, Speaker Pelosi made a decision, and so far in President Biden's term we, functionally, have well over $2\1/2\ trillion of additional debt piled on. It is a remarkable record. In a time when we were coming out of the COVID dystopia, we piled on another $2\1/2\ trillion plus created all sorts of other unfunded liabilities. The next slide is really important to get our heads around. There is this concept of fragility. If it is true, we may be heading into not just--because we all agree the fraud of saying the inflation is transitory, okay, that con job has now come to an end. Now, the left is going to try to say, well, it is Putin's inflation, it is Big Oil inflation. Americans aren't stupid. I am particularly blessed, I represent one of the best-educated districts in all of America, so I have freaky smart people in my Phoenix-Scottsdale district, and they get this. But there is this concept of fragility. What happens to the country if interest rates are just a bit higher than we have modeled? Do you have a sense of what happens? This board is from a year ago when we did the math. If interest rates are just 2 points, 2 percent--which is already happening--2 percent higher than CBO's baseline, Congressional Budget Office's baseline, functionally, in 29 years, every dollar of tax receipts, tax income, however you want to call it--in Ways and Means we call it receipts-- every dollar just pays the interest bill. It buys nothing. There is no more money for education, space travel; there is no more money for Medicare, Medicaid; there is no more money because all we are paying is interest. This is the fragility. This is how dangerous you have made this country's economics by borrowing so much money and then screwing up the economics. My point of this 45 minutes of rambling: Inflation--very, very dangerous. There are policy decisions. Those policy decisions will require the Democrats to walk away from their orthodoxy. They will have to admit they have been worshipping a false economics god and join us in doing things that are, actually, good for society, good for poor people, good for the working poor, good for the middle class. And then, dear God, hopefully we are not too late, because if Larry Summers is correct that we are actually going to go into a pretty harsh recession, you want to kick people in the head; you want to destroy the middle class; you want to make it so it takes years to get back to normality; and now you have economists saying the inflation may be with us for a decade. Even if Republicans take back Congress and then take back the White House, it could be a decade before we repair the damage that this body did in 14 months. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, you do realize what is going on here, and I am going to be a little sarcastic because I am frustrated. Insulin prices are outrageous. But why is it outrageous? The fact of the matter is our regulatory mechanic and our payment mechanic are the very things that broke this, and here you do a piece of legislation that will break it more. Please, I beg of the majority: Hire an economist. And I will walk you through some of the facts on it. So, Madam Speaker, you are doing a bill here where you are going to subsidize the dollar amount in the back, but you are still going to keep the regulatory mechanics the way they are in their archaic designs, and then you are going to be joyful that individuals will pay what, $35 a vial? At the same time we are subsidizing it billions and billions and billions of dollars. Does anyone have a subscription to an aggregator on healthcare policy on your side? You do realize, there is a co-op coming out of the ground right now that is going to be $50, $55 for a box of five. It is lower than your subsidized price. And this is their market price. If you were doing something good for society, you would actually be moving this covax to the top of the regulatory stack and say: We want them to get permitted and licensed as fast as possible because they are still a year plus away. But it is being built right now, and you are about to screw up the solution. And if you really, really, really, really care about people--remember, I represent the population with the second highest number of diabetes. I represent a Tribal community that is number two in the world. Come with me some time and let me introduce you to people who have had their feet cut off. If you actually care about solving the misery, then read the science journals that made it clear last November, December, the success. We know how to cure. And for my friend over here, you have a family member type 1--I know I need to go through the Speaker--but a family member with type 1, we know how to cure it now. And there is even the next generation of this. We have even learned how to do the stem cell, the isolate cell, tag it with a CRISPR so you can do a bio-foundry, meaning it doesn't have to come from your skin cells, we can basically now cure type 1 and the same technology will work for type 2. But we are going to have to deal with some societal issues. If you want to end the misery in society don't build more clinics, don't do a subsidy, get this technology to people. And for those of us who are fiscal hawks and actually care about where we are going, you do realize that 31 percent of all Medicare spending is just diabetes. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes. And so the brain trust here decides: Hey, let's subsidize this by billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, screw up the movement to actually have cures to actually have a co-op provide the product dramatically less expensive. Remember, the co-op is going to bring it in cheaper than the subsidized price without all the taxpayer money. Please, I know the virtue signaling here is powerful. The economics are crap.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. So in the President's proposal, in the Democrats' proposals, they want to tax the rich more. The new President Biden's budget, I think, has 36 new taxes in it. But here is the great irony. Okay. So they want to do this one tax where they want to functionally tax unrealized capital or unrealized gains which is the taking--it will be ruled unconstitutional. But it is an interesting concept. We want to make a simple proposal that something both Republicans and Democrats might agree upon, stop subsidizing the rich. We have come here to this floor a couple of times and shown there are $1.4 trillion every 10 years that the left subsidizes the rich. And so what do the Democrats do? They say: We need to tax the rich more. Okay. And then they put in Build Back Better you can make $800,000 a year and we are going to hand you $125,000 of tax credits--not tax deductions--credits. Does anyone see the lunacy going on here? So the virtue signaling is rich people aren't paying enough, and then over here we are going to give them 1 trillion-plus dollars in subsidies, and then they are going to add more in their Build Back Better for more rich people to have more subsidies. It is just infuriating. Does anyone actually read this stuff? Does anyone own a calculator? Mr. Speaker, you start to see the numbers. I have a number of these slides here, and the point is really simple: policy after policy, if you can afford your fourth $6-million house on a beach somewhere, do you deserve subsidized flood insurance? But all through this government there are items like that where we wink and nod, we say we are going to tax rich people more, and then we are handing out massive subsidies. As a Republican, I want to cut spending. You say you want more revenues, Mr. Speaker. Great. Stop putting through the Tax Code, regulatory code, these programs of wink, wink, nod, nod, a bunch of subsidies to people who write checks. So, Mr. Speaker, you have had a number of, particularly, Republicans who have come behind the microphone and said: You canceled the Keystone pipeline. You made it really hard to put new land into production for pulling hydrocarbons out. That is actually not the big thing that the left did. What the left did are things like this where the Securities and Exchange Commission is functionally adding new rules that if you invest in hydrocarbons or you are a pension system or these, you are going to have to fill out paperwork to explain your effect on global warming. What are your effects on carbon? They functionally did what we call, they screwed up the capital stack. So you could have a natural gas field that was substantially shut down when prices collapsed during the pandemic. It is ready to go, but you need a bunch of capital to put it back into production. And where do you go to get a loan, Mr. Speaker? The Democrats did something brilliant, if the goal was to make us much poorer and dependent on foreign countries' hydrocarbons like Venezuela. They said, Okay. We can do the regulatory side, by that is a little bit obvious, but if we make it so no one can get capital to actually put these fields into production, they have succeeded. Do not let someone try to con you, Mr. Speaker, that what you are paying at the gas pump today and what you had to pay for your heating bill yesterday happened because of Putin's invasion. Natural gas prices exploded last September, October. Mr. Speaker, do you remember this room being full of people wanting to talk about how we are going to survive the winter heating bills? That was because if this. It didn't just happen. But my proposal is, okay. I am fascinated with the use of natural gas. Our friends on the left, our brothers and sisters on the left, say, But, David, yes, it may burn about half the CO 2 emitting as coal, but there is methane. Let's see if I can find this slide. The technology that is out there to basically gobble up methane--and maybe this works, maybe it doesn't work, but the fact that the technology exists and it has been scientifically proven to work, why wouldn't we pursue that saying: If you could get your natural gas out--because remember, President Biden just promised we are going to ship a bunch of liquified natural gas to Europe, except we don't really have the production right now and you can't get capital for it and the left is going to protest leakage from methane. Well, it turns out you can take clay, a copper oxide--so it is kitty litter. Think about that. It is a cheap solution to absorb that methane. Why wouldn't we bring the brain trusts around here and say, We need the natural gas desperately. Some are worried about the methane bleed. Fine. Let's find a solution. It turns out there may be a really inexpensive one. Why don't we invest and pursue it? There are solutions. Instead, around here, it is the Malthusian economics of let's just shut it down and see how long people are willing to live in poverty and misery. The transportation bill again: What is one of the most powerful things you can do to move traffic in urban areas and suburban areas, Mr. Speaker? Technology. It turns out if you actually care about the environment and you want to move more traffic, invest in the technology that synchronizes the stoplights that tell you when school is out, so it synchronizes the lights, the on-ramps to a freeway that tell you when an ambulance is coming. The studies over and over and over say whether it be in an algorithm or an AI-managed smart grid system for traffic is one of the most impactful things you can do, Mr. Speaker, to clean the air because you move the traffic. We couldn't get anyone here willing to even listen to one of our amendments on the left about promoting that type of technology. There is a biotech revolution going on around us and substantially this is happening because of what we did in that 2017 tax reform which moved--exploded--the investments. Whether it be messenger RNA, my fascination with synthetic biology, the stem cells, there are disease after disease after disease and misery after misery we are about to cure. We know how to cure hemophilia now. I think we are on the cusp of knowing how to cure sickle cell anemia, an incredibly painful disease. They are here. This place should be doing everything we can to promote getting those things to market safely and quickly, as fast as we can to end the misery. By the way, it has amazing financial benefits to the economy and to our tax base. And you start to look at the innovations that are coming right now from the biotech industry. One of the reasons I did this--and I didn't bring the other slides. Then, the left offers their H.R. 3, which, functionally, the economists, even the leftwing economists, said, yes, it will lower some drug prices, because we are basically going to do scarcity pricing. Functionally, we are going to say you can't have certain drugs if it costs more than a certain amount, like they do in Europe. But it will also crash the capital stock once again. A lot of you are going to die because you are not going to get this next generation of cure, and this amazing cycle of cures that are coming goes away--great virtue signaling. The left will tell you they are about to do a piece of legislation to lower drug prices, and we all go ``yay,'' because they are too high. But by the end of the decade, there are fewer cures, and the value goes away because you didn't remove people from being sick. It is all about curing people. In the misery, help bring those cures to market. Personalized medicine, let's legalize it. I showed you the wearables, those things. This here should be part of your ability to stay healthy. Legalize it. Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a tricky presentation, and I want to apologize immediately to those who have to try take down our words. But tonight, I am going to actually try to focus on solutions. Last week, I spent an hour behind this microphone begging our friends on the left, begging our Democrat colleagues to stop doing much of what they have been doing. And I demonstrated that it has been hurting people. Last year was miserable for the working poor, for the poor, for the middle class. And in some ways, it is our own fault in this body because intellectually, this place is calcified--that is my word of the day. Because we see the math. We see the facts. And we have the folks lay out what is going to happen. But because it is already part of, particularly in this case, the left's dogma, we do it anyway. And then we act surprised here a year later when my community had 10.9 percent inflation last year. Year over year, how many people is that crushing? And now we are seeing some data. And this is important; this isn't transitory. A number of the most powerful modelers in the economic world in this country are now starting to ring the alarm bells of both: We are heading towards a recession and that inflation may now be with us for decades because of how we have screwed things up in this place. First, this is as of almost today, you have Goldman Sachs now saying there is a 27\1/2\ percent chance of a recession--not a slowdown, a recession, which means two quarters of negative GDP by the end of this year. Citi is at 25 percent. J.P. Morgan is still at 15, which were the numbers from last week. These numbers have skyrocketed. If you and I looked at this three weeks ago, it was 9 percent. Does anyone here actually care about people? Do you care about working men and women? Do you understand what a recession does to people? How long it takes to get your feet back underneath you? Let alone the head kick we are giving to the American public with inflation. So here is my goal. I am going to race through just a boatload of slides here, and I am going to throw out concept after concept after concept. Some of them are marginal. Some of them you are going to go, Oh, that makes sense. But the point is, there are actually solutions. If the left would ever allow us to offer a genuine amendment in committee, to actually have a genuine discussion and debate, maybe we could change some hearts and minds in this place, or just even enlighten some intellect around here. But that isn't what this place does. So let's actually start to walk through the bill that a number of folks are so giddy about today. I am fixated on diabetes because of what it does and the misery to parts of my district. I represent a Tribal community that is number 2 as a percentage of population who suffer from diabetes. Come to the reservation. I will introduce you to families that I have known where mom has her feet cut off. But to tout the bill that was passed here today as a solution is an absolute fraud. You do realize the con job that the Democrats are touting here? And I am not sure it is purposeful. I don't think they spent time understanding. First, you basically created a subsidy bill for Big Pharma. Congratulations. You didn't reduce the price. What you did is you created, functionally, $20 billion of subsidy to buy down the price of insulin. And you bought it down with a fraud because you are doing a-- well, we are going to pretend that the Trump administration's rule in regard to rebates is in effect, which it was never going into effect. So you made magic money again. And at the same time, you just took away the pressure we could have done together to actually get a real solution on the price of insulin. And some of that solution could have been something as simple as the co-op that is in construction right now, that is saying they are going to bring $30 a vial, $55 a box--and a box is 5 vials--of insulin to market in a year. So if we were actually doing solutions here, the Democrats' bill, working with Republicans, would have been, We are going to put it in the stack for licensing and permitting. We are going to put aside some money to make sure that they get their factory up and running in Virginia as soon as possible. And, oh, by the way, this is substantially less expensive than the subsidized version that is going to cost society $20 billion. And you are handing that to Big Pharma. Isn't that amusing? I mean, amusing the speechifying here. And the Democrats' approach to helping people who can't afford their insulin is to blow up the market, screw up the incentives, and then screw up the actual solution. And the solution is coming. Does anyone actually subscribe to something where they read? And you have got to understand, we need to go--and the whole debate around diabetes, we have got to go much, much further. Mr. Speaker, 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes; 33 percent of all healthcare spending. Understand, in 29 years, the United States is scheduled to have about $112 trillion of borrowed money in today's dollars. Mr. Speaker, 75 percent of that is just Medicare, but if 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes, cure it. And you go, But, David, how would we do that? Well, I have been to this floor a dozen times over the last 12 months saying the research is happening. The early numbers look good. Guess what? It succeeded. Hey, the phase 1s worked. Now we are actually on another set of phase 1s where they are actually using CRISPR to tag the stem cell that has become an isolate cell to make it so you can do a biofoundry. And it could be a production line, so it doesn't even need to come from your skin to get the stem cells. Meaning, if we would get our reimbursement sets straight here, our licensing sets straight here, our incentives lined up. The modelers say in about 5 years you could actually be rolling out--the cure to type 1 is actually the easy part, it is the cure to type 2 which is much more difficult. We have to have a brutal conversation of nutrition support and maybe nutrition support that is healthy. Encouraging our brothers and sisters in my Tribal communities, the lifestyles and things, to be ready to actually accept the cure. But the fact of the matter is it is here. So what did the Democrats just do? They did a subsidy bill for insulin that is going to cost $20 billion. How about if they had taken that $20 billion and put it into the price for getting this cure to market? It is just an example we don't seem to get our heads around. The world works in incentives and disincentives. We have made it so bureaucratic and so expensive that we are in an incumbent protection racket here. It is not incumbent Members of Congress, it is incumbent bureaucracies, incumbent business models, and the disruptions like this that would end so much misery and also be the single biggest thing we can do to affect the debt in this country. We applaud ourselves for voting through a bill that actually will have made things worse. If there is an economist in the room and you walk through saying, well, because you just functionally government- subsidized this, you just took away the pricing pressure to actually have the revolution of both the cost and the cure. I am begging my brothers and sisters here to think. There is this incredible hope. They have already had the successes in the phase ones, and now the ability to actually tag it and make it so you don't need to be on anti-rejection drugs. Think about what it means to the health of the country. Why would I go to diabetes right after showing you that the projections of a recession at the end of this year are skyrocketing because you are heading in an approach where you are making a substantial portion of our population--making them available to participate in the economy. Mr. Speaker, I am going to throw out a really uncomfortable subject for a second. I am the senior Republican on the Joint Economic Committee and we have been trying a little side project for almost a year. What makes people poor? What is the real cause of income inequality? And unlike the rhetorical crap virtue signaling that is said around here, we are actually starting to find out there are a lot of things, but health, education, things of that nature that we can affect are actually major precursors, then you look at the amount of the population that is in the lower quartiles that either they or their family or because they have someone who is horribly sick substantially because of renal failure or diabetes. My other side of the argument is why this is moral to pursue. It also would end lots of misery. It would actually really help the poor. It actually might squeeze down income inequality. It is sort of the trifecta. Yet, I will do these presentations on how it works and that it would be amazing for economic growth, and if it truly brought more of our brothers and sisters to be able to participate in the economy, it would also be really good for inflation, too. I have done this slide multiple times. I'm trying to sort of explain the mechanisms of a stem cell and you can now direct--think of it as a biofoundry mechanism, sort of like CRISPR. You can direct that stem cell to become an insulin-producing cell. In the previous slide you can walk through how you can actually do this in a fashion that it can be almost a factory production. So even beyond the personalized medicine concept. Why this is so important is we are on the cusp of a revolution to make people's lives so much better--so much healthier. Instead, what we have done in this place over the last 12 months is we have set off inflation. We have set off crime. We have set off homelessness because of really, really bad policies. Lots of great virtue signaling. There have been beautiful speeches behind these microphones telling you how much we care and how we feel, and then the economics are just horrible. Some more of the disruption that I believe would be great for the country--and the technology is already here, we just have to learn how to legalize it--is your ability to wear something on your wrist. This is one of my favorites. I am just going to walk you through a concept. This is a breath biopsy. A couple versions of this out there think it would be a couple hundred dollars, at most, and you could have functionally a medical lab in your medicine cabinet at home. Blow into it. Within a couple moments it tells you: Hey, guess what, you have a virus. It can then bang off your medical records, order your antivirals, and maybe Lyft or someone can drop it off at your house in a couple hours. Would that make your life easier? Would that give you more time with your family and faster to get healed? Would it help crash parts of healthcare costs? Remember, three-quarters of that $112 trillion is healthcare, it is Medicare. Healthcare is what is substantially bankrupting this country. Do you know what the problem with that technology is? It is illegal. The fact of the matter is you would let this breath biopsy be able to order your antivirals, allow the algorithm--and the data says the algorithm is more accurate than those of us that are humans. I know that just hurt a bunch of people's feelings. If you legalize the technology you could have a disruption in the price of healthcare. You could make this society--our country-- dramatically more efficient and give us more time with our families and be healthy. It would be an economic virtuous cycle and a healthy one. It would just require us around here to actually have to deal with the avalanche of lobbyists that hate this technology. As I said before, we are sort of calcified intellectually around here, aren't we? Mr. Speaker, now I want to talk about the heresy that is in President Biden's budget and the solutions. How many times have you gotten up here and seen the Speaker herself, multiple times--tax reform in 2017 was for the rich. No, it wasn't. CBO--more revenues came in. Corporate tax receipts leaped 75 percent after we reformed the tax code a couple years ago. The fact of the matter is--what we call receipts in Ways and Means, revenues as most people would think of--coming into in government went up dramatically. Why that was so important is that 2018 and 2019 were our most successful years in modern economic history of poor people getting less poor, the middle class doing better, income inequality shrinking, food insecurity shrinking. Minority populations had the biggest movement ever in U.S. history in getting less poor, getting wealthier. That income inequality gap shrank because we got the tax incentives correct. But because it was Republicans that did it, there is this running away from it--we have seen--great job, guys. Think about what has happened to this country in 1 year. You are poorer today than you were 1 year ago. The fact of the matter is the setting off of inflation--God knows some of the other things that have gone on and we are going to touch on them--we are poorer today than we were 1 year ago. Yes, there was COVID. We stood behind these microphones a year ago and said, you don't want to keep dumping money the way you are doing, you are going to set off inflation. They told us to go jump in the lake. Congratulations, they did it. Now some of the economists are telling us a recession by the end of the year, oh, and maybe 10 years of an inflationary cycle before we can squeeze it out of the system. Once again, if you actually look at the charts, it was actually working women that exploded. This big of a movement here--I know this chart doesn't express it--that type of steep curve increasing is remarkable. It is just remarkable in what happened after tax reform. It was actually working women, substantially those from minority populations, that had just remarkable increases in income. They are the ones that also got crushed during the way we approached the pandemic. Anyone that tells you, oh, it was this huge give-away of money. Well, it is sort of amazing because it was the second and the third highest receipts or revenues in 2018 and 2019. You got to remember there was a little bit of a con in 2017 because the expensing went in-- you could expense in the last quarter before the tax reform. So the fourth quarter of 2017 you could begin expensing. So this actually had some of the economic growth effects pulled into the previous year--I know I am geeking out a bit--but it continued. One of the reasons we actually economically held up pretty well is the Democrats haven't been able to repeal the 2017 tax reform. And I know this slide is a little hard to see, but it is the best one we could put together in the short timeframe. Guess what? We crossed over $4 trillion in revenues and receipts. If you go back--think about that, it was only a couple years earlier that we were at $3.3 trillion. You understand, that is like a $700 billion increase in receipts in a time when the Democrats told us we had eviscerated the tax code and gave it all away. At some point the calculator does tell the truth. So back to our earlier thesis. Getting the tax system correct is amazing for the economics. This is the other side of the question I want to ask. How many here believe growth is moral? I will try to argue over and over that economic growth creates opportunity, and those opportunities driven by that growth is moral. I wish I could just get us to focus on--that growth also is a way we survive the debt bubble that is expanding like an alligator mouth. Here is the size of our economy and here is the scale of the debt. You do understand that CBO basically says in 9 years, every single year just our interest payment will be $1 trillion. That is where we are heading. Here is a crazy thought. If I needed to tap down inflation today but I wanted to do it by not solely having the Federal Reserve do monetary policy, which is squeezing cash out of the system--remember, inflation is what, too many dollars chasing too few goods. You have the monetary side of inflation pull the dollars out of the economy. The other side is to make more stuff. This year, expensing. The reality of it--tax reform--it was the expensing that drove much of the economic expansion, the investment in productivity, it goes to 80 percent this fiscal year and then drops down I think to 60 percent the next year. Do a mechanism where you add a bonus. If you say: Business, if you are willing to take some of that cash functioning out of the system and go invest it in productivity capital, buy a new plant, put in new equipment, do things that will make it so you can pay workers more. We make more stuff because when we have more stuff you knock down inflation because it is now the number of dollars divided by numbers of stuff. Crazy idea. Do a tax adjustment. Mr. Speaker, say we are going to give you a bonus on your expenses to encourage you to take that money out of liquidity and buy things that make us more productive as a country. It is a win-win, and it has the benefit of being a long-term benefit to society. It is sort of. We have been working on this. This is just as a thought experiment. And it may not be brilliant, but it is more the concept of right now. Today there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. Then create a deal with business in America saying, Hey, if you take some cash, set it aside, functionally, ah, screw it, and you are going to put it into new equipment that makes it more efficient so you can have more goods, better transportation, better supply chains, that is what we want to incentivize instead of trying to buy things today and shove them in a warehouse because you are worried the price is going to go up tomorrow. This is the type of thought experiments policy we should be pursuing, Mr. Speaker, if you need to knock down inflation but you want to do it by growing as an economy. Instead, around here, we are going to sit around on our backsides and let the Federal Reserve basically squeeze us out and put many people through months and months and months of recessionary misery because that is how we are going to knock down inflation. Another part of the thought experiment: I have some new areas--if I am blessed enough to represent in the coming cycle--and we did some polling. And they came back that crime is their number one issue. I went on a ride-along with a sergeant who is actually a friend. He was showing me neighborhoods saying, You do realize the homelessness in these neighborhoods has doubled in a year. Doubled. He is explaining to me that someone now can get high for a fraction of the cost they could a year ago. Every single one of those are what we call knockoff effects, second-degree, third-degree effects. Do you all remember your high school economics class? You opened up the borders. What did you think was going to happen? My community of Phoenix is flooded with narcotics. As a matter of fact, we just had a bust a couple months ago. There was enough fentanyl to kill every single resident in Arizona. So the compassion that this administration and Speaker Pelosi wanted to show for the border, thank you, because you are killing my neighbors. The homelessness--I don't believe the Phoenix market is the only area that is seeing incredible increases in homelessness. The crime--go on to the city of Phoenix's heat map and click, click, click, and you can see the expansion of the crime and where it is moving and the number of overdoses. The fact of the matter is when you screw up a policy, then you need to think through the knockoff effects. You screwed up the border policy. How much misery did you bring to society? Remember, we have done a number of presentations. What are the two ways you make the working middle class or the working lower class poorer? Inflation. We are doing a great job at that. And you flood the marketplace with people with similar skill sets. So if you are that individual who may not have finished high school, but you are a good drywaller and you are busting your backside--and it is hard work; I hung drywall as a young man--we just flooded the marketplace with people of similar skill sets. Does anyone around here own a basic economics book? So let's go to a couple other things. So the principle there is, get the border policy right because there is this incredible irony--legal immigration for individuals with specific talent sets that we actually need in this society, the young man who just got his Ph.D. at Arizona State University and is leaving because the State Department's ability to process visas and ability to be immigration has functionally become nonexistent in the last 2 years. But over here, a couple million cross the border. Does anyone see just the weird irony of the Democrats' policies of, they hurt? I don't think they were meant to hurt. I think they had the virtue signaling quality of sounding compassionate, but that is not what has happened. So let's actually walk through a couple of things that are actually additional solutions. How many times do we talk about supply chains? And you have seen the latest data. It basically says--and I am not going to argue with it because I haven't had a chance to break down the numbers--half of inflation is we spent too damn much money. But half of inflation is second degree knockoff effects in supply chains. So we just did the transportation bill. The transportation bill was substantially green oriented, very little of the money actually went to roads and bridges. None of it actually went to disruptive technologies. But there are ideas like this, where this was some SpaceX engineers who are out raising capital to build this, where you would actually have autonomous trains. So you pull a container off, stick it on one of these, the autonomous lorry right underneath it on the track drives it to the warehouse it is supposed to be dropped off at. So you are telling me we have a crisis in truck drivers in the Alameda Corridor outside L.A. Our ability to use technology, why didn't we incentivize this sort of thing? But do you want to know what the Democrats chose to incentivize in their Build Back Better, Mr. Speaker? It wasn't creative things to make us more productive as a society. It was ideas like this: in their legislation it is illegal for the ports to automate. Huh? But they just told us that they were trying to fix the supply chains--except for the numbers of giveaways to the unions they put into their legislation that you can't automate the ports. So on one hand, Mr. Speaker, you have breakthrough technology that says that we think we have a way to move these containers. And then the next thing that the brain trust around here does policy-wise is, we are going to make it illegal for you to do the automation that would move the supply chains that you are telling us is half the inflationary spike. There are solutions. Stop putting up these impediments and start embracing the technology to fix the problem. Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time I have remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Forgive me. I have been trying to talk fast so as to not chew it all up. Mr. Speaker, in a couple of the pieces of legislation that passed here, we have put aside boatloads of cash to run wire to rural America, and they deserve to have internet access. I thought this slide was amusing, but you are actually seeing it happening in Ukraine right now. These are a bunch of little kitties in a Starlink satellite dish because apparently a Starlink satellite dish stays a bit warm in the winter so it defrosts itself. See, it is cute-- kitties. But the fact of the matter is, every inch of North America now has broadband internet. It is a bunch of satellites flying over us. So, let me get this straight: In Ukraine, they are now using this, Starlink, to be able to communicate, but we can't seem to get our brothers and sisters here in the House of Representatives to understand there is a solution to broadband all over the country. They just happen to be flying in low-Earth orbit above our heads. It is here. Instead, we are going to turn around and put out billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of subsidies to put more fiber and more wire in the ground to the middle of nowhere. Mr. Speaker, there is a huge disruption coming. We need to make sure that our regulatory and policy sets are ready for this. This is another thing that would also dramatically help this coming decade's inflation cycle. Researchers, particularly at the University of Illinois, have done this remarkable thing. I did a series of presentations on this a year ago. I will do this real quick. You-all remember your high school biology class. You remember a C4 plant, plants that really, really want carbon to turn it into a sugar and grow. But they accidentally grab an oxygen molecule, and they have to spend all of this energy purging that oxygen molecule and go back and try to get a carbon molecule. I know this is a little geeky, but it is important to get our heads around it. They have come up with a way to tweak the plant so, every time, it always grabs the carbon so it turns it into a sugar. Some plants will grow 40 percent more efficiently on the same land, the same fertilizer, and the same water. You do realize, just that basic math--and it won't turn out this way, but just conceptually--that is like removing every car off the face of the Earth. If our brothers and sisters really care about the environment, they would be running as fast as they can to allow these types of available technologies to feed the world and feed our country. Yes, it would be a disruption, but these things exist. Mr. Speaker, the other topic I want to touch on is a tax policy. This is a conceptual one. How many of you have ever heard of a VAT tax, a value-added tax? Okay, so much for the enthusiasm. A value-added tax is what substantially most of the rest of the world uses. If we are going to have a conversation about: We want businesses back in the United States; we want manufacturing back in the United States; we want to take on China; we are going to do tariffs; we are going to do these regulations; and we are going to do import and export controls--great. Realize most of those aren't really going to do much. Here is how I am going to try to explain what the rest of the world does to stick it to the United States. This is a picture of a beautiful Audi. Let's pretend it is a $100,000 car. My guess is, this one is a little more expensive. It is being made in Germany, but someone in Scottsdale, Arizona, is about to buy this Audi. When it is in Germany, there is a 19 percent VAT tax on it, a value- added tax. But the moment it leaves the shore of Germany and is on its way to the United States, the car has been exported. They give them back the $19,000, that 19 percent. When it comes to the United States, it is $19,000 less than it was sitting there in Germany. When it hits our shore, we put a small tariff or duty on it. But the $100,000 Tesla that is made in Texas, when someone in Germany is buying it, it has all the tax load--corporate tax, income tax, all the other things that we would do in the United States--in that price. When this car leaves the United States, we don't refund 19 percent of the taxes. It hits the German shore, and they put that $19,000 on top of the price. So, we get it both ways, coming and going. When we want to export, other countries put their VAT tax on our products. But when they send a product to us, they take it off. We can be incredibly competitive. We can automate in ways to make up for labor differential costs. Our energy costs are actually much more competitive than the rest of the world. Why isn't all manufacturing in the United States right now? It is because we are basically getting arbitraged on the value-added tax because the rest of the world refunds it. Until we fix that, all the talk of ``we want made in America,'' the math doesn't work. There are a couple of creative solutions. They are technically difficult, where you would have to take that refunded VAT and put it back on at our shore, so, functionally, everyone is treated exactly the same. The $100,000 American-made car and the $100,000 German-made car have the same tax load when they are being sold in their respective countries. I have been trying to figure out a way to try to explain this concept simply, but the tax system, the current tax system as it is, is one of the reasons it is so difficult to compete with other countries' manufacturing, because they refund that value-added tax. Mr. Speaker, the last thing is, I am truly worried about something. I believe it is going to affect the United States, but I fear it is going to affect the entire world. How many of you have seen the stories that a number of the agrarian economists, food economists, believe that this coming fall, parts of the world are going to starve? The price of fertilizer is up dramatically. The price of grain is up dramatically. Putin's war on Ukraine has screwed up the grain markets. Do we have a moral obligation to step up and understand that, 6 months from now, part of the world may be starving? What happens in the world when you have people going hungry? You have violence and horrible things happening. We see it coming. All the things we are seeing in the futures markets, the price of fertilizer blowing up, if they don't actually affect food supplies, if I am wrong, it is a free option. But if I am right, we should be pulling the alarm cord. We should be begging farmers--in our farm policy, our ag committee, we should be removing set-asides, encouraging ways to take corn that would be used to make corn-based ethanol and turn it into animal feed, using the rotation that is already happening to soy because soy only uses--it is not my specialty--a quarter or a third of the amount of fertilizer. If this is about to happen to the world, and we see it 6 months ahead, what is our moral obligation to pull that alarm cord and get it right? By getting it right, we also help our own inflation and maybe a couple of million people don't die in sub-Saharan Africa. Mr. Speaker, I know that was a lot of different subjects thrown really quickly. If someone is interested, almost everything I touched on, we have done much longer presentations on how the policy would work, how it would help inflation, how it would make people's lives healthier and better. But my point tonight is a really simple one. Stop doing the things that ultimately are hurting people. Start looking for the optimism and the opportunity that can make America more prosperous, that can make the poor less poor, and that can actually knock down inflation. It would actually be able to be done together. A lot of these ideas aren't actually Republican or Democrat. They are just disruptive. If we would embrace the disruption, this could be an amazing decade. Right now, the data we are getting today, we may be in for years of misery because of policy from this last year. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney). Partisan Games--Supreme Court Justice Thomas