David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, it is neat to see us actually have something that we are all doing together. A bit of trivia, at the end of this decade, 22 percent of our population will be 65 or older. Retirement security is--besides just the moral imperative--it is going to be the financial, it is going to be the driver of almost all sovereign debt. Look, there are a couple dozen provisions in this legislation, and in many ways they look like tinkering, but they come together. If you happen to have a profession where you have a mandatory retirement age that might be 60, 65, the ability to do catch-up--to be a small business and knowing what you can contribute to your 401(k) when you are doing your taxes instead of trying to guess at the end of the year--these things all come together. We are also going to have to look forward in the coming year and deal with the reality of what did inflation do to the cost of future retirement? The taxation on, really, gain, that isn't purchasing power, but is inflation. This is a terrific first step and it is neat to have us do something together.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to apologize right now, because I have had a lot of coffee, and I am just cranky today. I am just cranky. I also apologize for those who have to try to keep track. I will, on occasion, try to slow down. I torment them on occasion by talking too fast. I started to do part of this a week ago and only wanted to do a little part, but we have a 10 o'clock shutdown rule, so I got up against the clock and had to stop. So, God forbid, they let me have the entire hour, which means I brought a whole bunch of boards. A week ago, I pitched to some of our friends here a really mean, difficult, and absolutely honest question: Tell me something good that has been done in the last year of absolute control of Congress, of the White House, and of, functionally, the levers of our Government. Tell us something good that has been done policy-wise, legislative-wise, that has passed here for working men and women, for the future of my 6- year-old daughter, for people's retirement security, what has actually happened here. Then I am going to walk through a whole bunch of things where the words, the virtue signaling, the discussion had great language, warm and fuzzy and caring, and it has actually been devastating to poor people, to the working poor. I don't think they meant to, but the fact of the matter is, at some point, my brothers and sisters on the left have to have a brutally honest conversation with themselves of what their policies are doing. We are going to start with, being from a border State, immigration. But it is not immigration. It is opening up the border. What has the Democrats' policy, what has this President's policy, on functionally ignoring the border, done to my community in Arizona and to the country. First, let's also get our heads around the scale of the numbers when you start seeing that border encounters increased 278 percent, functionally, in a year, when you start seeing numbers over 1.7 million crossings, when you start seeing crossings that are in the millions. But do you remember all the speechifying that was here a year ago? Do you remember how mean the last President was? We are going to be compassionate and loving. Does anyone here understand the economic concept of first degree, second degree, third degree effects, what you have done to my communities in Phoenix, what you have done to the communities in this country? Let's show the actual math. Now, I also have an economic premise, and we have done this presentation multiple times. They were written by liberal economists that talked about the two things you do to make the working poor poorer. Number one was inflation. Well, congratulations. We are going to talk about that. Number two was open borders, and it was a very simple concept. If you look at the profile of our brothers and sisters who we would categorize--and I hate these categories, but we do them for policy purposes--who are considered the working poor, they are often our brothers and sisters who did not graduate high school, who sell their labor. That is their income. You open up the border and import millions of individuals who their economic contribution will be to sell their labor. One of these economic papers, written a decade ago, says you have just taken the working poor in the country and made them poor for another decade. One of them talks about that their income, at the end of the decade, will be at least 6 percent lower. For all those folks that like to preach about compassion, where is the compassion for those who are just grinding it out, trying to survive here? Do you understand that, at some point, the math always wins? Let's have a little fun here. Here is my premise, and I am going to try to do this on a number of these boards. You open up the border. We are going to talk about how many of our brothers and sisters and families and the kids in my community and across this country are now dying of fentanyl. I did a ride-along a month ago with one of my neighbors who happens to be a police sergeant in a portion of north central Phoenix. He is telling me that, a year ago--and I am not going to get these numbers exactly right. It was like $70 to $100 for that addict to get high, and now it might be $12. Remember your basic economics classes. When a price crashes, what does that mean? The availability has skyrocketed. We are also going to talk a little bit about--I have ZIP Codes in my community where the social workers, the charities, some of my churches are telling me homelessness has doubled in 1 year. Have you seen the crime numbers? We have to deal with reality. Then, we probably should have an interesting conversation. What makes poor communities poorer? If you have made drugs available, if you have flooded the communities with homelessness, if now you have also increased crime--and do you see the death numbers of our brothers and sisters who are dying of drugs? Are we willing to have a basic understanding--when you make a really crappy decision that we are not going to enforce the border because it is more compassionate, do you understand the cascade of misery that the left has brought to many of their own constituencies? The fact of the matter is, a lot of these neighborhoods that are suffering this aren't the ones voting for me. But, dammit, I care because their misery should be all of ours, except it is not politically expedient around here because it basically proves the rhetoric: Let's defund the police. Let's defund ICE. Great job, guys. Look what you did to your neighborhoods. Look what you did to our communities. Look at the misery. Look at the death you brought. And the math will always win. For every Member and staffer who may be on one of the televisions around this campus, if you are watching, I want you to have the experience I have had where you have to pick up the phone and talk to a mother who had their child die because they thought they were taking some party drug, and it turned out to have fentanyl in it. That is the misery. And you are on that phone, and the tears are running down, and you are terrified. I have a 6\1/2\-year-old, the greatest gift God has ever given me. I am terrified that this is the society that you get when you put the left in charge. Did they mean this? The rhetoric doesn't say so, but, dammit, will they actually stop and take a look at the outcome of their decisions? When you see a 133 percent increase, people in our communities are dying. They come behind these microphones and tell us how they are the ones that care. Fine. Maybe you should be on the next phone call with me when you are talking to that mother. You can explain to them that it was compassion to open up the border and make it so drug prices crash, so now fentanyl comes screaming into my community, and their child gets to die. There are consequences to really bad policy. It may have been great rhetoric when you had a different President, but the misery has been foisted on our neighborhoods, our suburbs, our communities, and particularly the communities that the Democrats claim they care about. If you look at what is going on, on the drug overdoses--by the way, I brought this because, believe it or not, for anyone watching, there are rules where I can't reach over here and write on this, so we did something sort of silly. We had to print it and put some tape on it. There is your number for 2021, and that is only as of October. We don't have the final data. So, congratulations, Democrats. Over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters are dead, of our children, of our next generation. And there are still a couple more months to be added to that math. I don't believe it is purposeful, but I believe there is an embarrassment of saying, oh, God, what have we done? The number of times around this place you make a policy decision, you campaign on it, it is in your brochures, you have given speeches, and then you find out it crashes and burns and creates more misery, that willingness to get up behind a microphone and say: I am wrong. I have had a couple of those, where I thought I understood the math. I thought I understood the societal implications. I am waiting. Now, we did hear a little bit of it. I was optimistic. The President got behind that microphone up ahead of me and said: Let's fund the police. You could hear the grumbling of a number of our brothers and sisters on this side because they had campaigned on something very different for years. Now, let's talk about other levels of crime, and this is not my area of specialty. I do Medicare finance. I do trade. I do taxes. I love working on the geeky stuff. Yes, it doesn't get you on television. You don't raise lots of money because you said something crazy, but it is important. It is what keeps the economy going. It is what keeps prosperity, and I believe economic growth is moral. But we have been working on a side project on the Joint Economic Committee, and here is our outline. What makes people poor? Well, you get people that say, oh, education, racism. You start looking at the data sets and truly grinding in, and then things we could do something about, and you start seeing things that pop off the data if you are willing to open your eyes and own a calculator. Diabetes actually pops off as one of the top things when you see the concentrations of our brothers and sisters with diabetes. When you actually see crime--and this is one that almost is never talked about here. Communities often that have the most economic misery, is it a chicken and the egg? It is a little hard to get ahead in life when people keep stealing stuff or killing your family members. Maybe it is time. Reagan, back in the 1980 election, had something called the misery index. It was, functionally, inflation and unemployment. Maybe it is time we could do something much more effective and create the Biden and Democrat-controlled misery index. We could just lay out how many of our brothers and sisters are OD'ing, how many of our brothers and sisters are dying, how many of our brothers and sisters are victims of crime, how many of our brothers and sisters are sicker today, how many of our brothers and sisters now have mental health issues because they spent a couple of years locked up, how many of our kids are almost afraid to take their masks off now. Think about the sort of psychodrama that this place has foisted on the citizens of this country. And the hits keep coming. Look, I put this one here more just as a--and I know I am being a bit snarky, but I have to get it off my chest. The number of get-togethers I had a year ago, so during 2020, and fussing and screaming: Why aren't you doing more about COVID? If we had Democrats in charge, people would be healthier. We would solve the problem. Do you remember President Biden's campaign promises? Do you remember the Democrat leadership's promises here? Put us in charge. We will take care of it. So, a time where there are therapeutics, a time where there are vaccines, you did a great job, guys, a great job. Because do you see the math? A hell of a lot more of our brothers and sisters died in a time where we actually had the tools. What happened? My argument is rhetoric sure does sound a lot better than actually explaining competence. Now, let's talk about--in my 8 minutes I had last week, it was basically trying to have a conversation of what the Democrats have done making the environment worse. And you go, huh? The fact of the matter--and I will show you the slide here in a moment. As soon as the Biden administration took over--but it even goes back to 2018 when the Democrats won the House. They basically set off a campaign or jihad, whatever colloquialism you want to use, and it wasn't, hey, we are just going to cancel pipelines. What was it? In 2020, President Biden, in a debate with Bernie Sanders, said there will be no more permitting. No more permitting of pipelines. No more permitting of wells. It was an absolute promise. Well, to his credit, he kept his promise. But did anyone stop for a moment to think about what they were going to do? So, functionally, what is ESG? I can give you the quote, or we can just do something really simple. It is when you basically add such a risk premium to investing in any type of hydrocarbons. So, you are a pension system, you are our pension systems, you are the California teachers, you are a mutual fund, you are an index fund, and you are going to now have to, with all the threats and things coming through the administration--this isn't votes. This isn't a proclamation from the President. This is the infrastructure of our society and our financial markets basically raising a risk premium for investing in natural gas, for investing in the infrastructure of hydrocarbons. Well, what happens? What happens when you do that? Because remember, it wasn't the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Go back to last September and October when natural gas prices shot off the charts, and there were people here coming--people on the left--you know, attacking hydrocarbon and natural gas companies. But the fact of the matter is, we were talking about how miserable this winter was going to be, what was happening to your fuel prices. And look, I have never actually seen heating oil. I am from the desert. I have lived in the desert my entire life. I have seen pictures of it. And then you see people saying it is two, three, four times more expensive for these people to heat their homes, and then you also realize the ZIP Codes they live in and who they vote for. They voted for it. But the reality of it is, there is a punch line here. When Democrat policy drove up the price of natural gas so high that power generation all across North America converted back to coal, you realize the United States burnt 23 percent more coal last year. I mean, did anyone just do the basic math? Okay. You are going to engage in policies that make natural gas dramatically more expensive. The next least expensive fuel, all of a sudden, became coal. Congratulations. Now, during President Trump's time, the use of coal--and this was a guy who claimed to be a coal supporter--went down dramatically because natural gas crashed in price. Remember, the last 15 years, the movement we had to become dramatically less carbon-centric, you know, greenhouse gas formula, heading towards--for those who cared about the math on the Paris accords, was almost exclusively, exclusively the use of natural gas because, remember, we took off so much baseload nuclear, we took off more baseload nuclear in the United States in the previous 15 years than we actually did produce new photovoltaic and wind. So if someone says, oh, it is because of all the clean energy generation. No, it is actually because of natural gas displacing coal. I mean, the math is the math. This one we need to share. Anyone notice if you were here--and this is even for the poor staff here, please don't move your eyes or anything because someone will take a shot at you for it--a couple weeks ago, before the State of the Union, we came to the floor here, we had to wear masks. Then we all hear about polling being done by the White House and the Democrat leadership, and all of a sudden, we find out, hey, turns out the public is over it, even Democrat-based voters are pretty much over the enforcement of mask mandates, and did you notice pretty much a little bit after the Impact Research poll that the Democrats did, 48 hours later after the poll was published, guess what happened? I don't have to wear a mask on the floor anymore. Policy by virtue signaling instead of a calculator, it is theater. Welcome to how this Congress has been run. It happened. It happened. Look, I am not the only one to point this out. Even a number of leftist publications said: Isn't it just amazing, as soon as the Democrats got a poll that it no longer was popular even with their base, all the masks come off? Even the people, even the experience of a couple of the Democrat matriarchs that fussed at me not to get into an elevator with them because I wasn't wearing a mask in the hallway, which I was very respectful, I didn't, 48 hours later didn't care that I was in the elevator with them without a mask because the polling said it was okay. I am happy to know we now make public health policy on the Democrat side with polling. But it is real. It happened. So let's actually have a little bit more fun here. The absurdity of Democrat policy. Guess when statutorily--the Democrats passed this about 3 weeks ago, they set a date. They set a date when the pandemic will be over. Not based on science, not based even on their polling. They set a date. Congratulations, it is September 30, 2025. Two years ago, when we were actually working together on this, we had a collective understanding we were worried that emergency rooms, hospitals were going to be just packed, we wouldn't have enough ventilators, we were racing for vaccines. We didn't have antivirals. But there was, I thought, a collective societal that we declare a pandemic. Do you remember 15 days to slow the spread? We will all stay home for 15 days, slow the spread. And here we are a couple years later. We have antivirals; we have vaccines; we have therapeutics; we understand the virus; and the policy set is to make September 30, 2025. Now, we should actually let whoever is watching know the joke. It is about the money. This place is always about the money. There are lots and lots and lots of special spending line items that come with the declaration of a pandemic, and this pretty much locks in saying, hey, you know, this person may hate vaccine passports or hate masks or this and that, but wink wink, nod nod we have made sure the declaration of the pandemic is until 2025 so we can keep getting the largesse of the SPIFs on the cash. If that is what it is, tell the truth. Say, look, you know, we buy our elections by handouts through our policies here. Okay. But tell the truth. I have a personal fixation on diabetes, and I have done speeches, presentation after presentation on this, and I want to walk through why. Look, we will come back to this two or three times. This slide, the numbers are much higher now because this slide is from a year ago because the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, hasn't given us an update. But 29 years from now, we are scheduled to have $112 trillion of borrowing, and that is in today's dollars, so adjusted for inflation. Functionally, 75 percent of that spending is Medicare. 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes. 33 percent of all healthcare spending in the United States is diabetic related. I represent, I believe, the second highest percentage of population, one of my Tribal communities that I represent--I love them dearly--they are number two in, we think the world, in the percentage of their members who have diabetes, and their sister Tribe is number one. Come to my community sometime. I will take you out in the community, introduce you to some of the families I have known my whole life, and grandma has her foot cut off. So the President did something a lot of people cheered for: Hey, insulin is outrageously expensive, we are going to subsidize it. Okay. Fine. Fine. Does anyone on the Democrat side actually read any of the healthcare, the pharmaceutical, the science journals? The facility is almost up and running where it is a co-op. If they actually cared about crashing the price of insulin, someone would have paid attention that it is already here. This stuff is about to roll out. A number of the pharmacies and hospitals got together and said: Screw this, we are going to use a market. We are going to go around, and we are going to make it ourselves, and we are going to do direct sales. They are talking about no more than $30 per vial, $55 per box. It is not requiring government subsidies, regulations, because you know how efficiently that works: We will subsidize it, but the cost of the bureaucracy to do it will be a nightmare. But does anyone pay attention? I was here about 3 weeks ago talking about if the left really wants to be compassionate--and I can get my brothers and sisters on the right to be loving and compassionate--we know how to cure type 1, at least that is what the science journals are saying. We have figured out how to take a stem cell and direct it to become--I always mispronounce it--an islet cell to produce insulin. There is now even a new version where the taking of that cell and adjusting it with CRISPR so the body doesn't see it as foreign so you can actually have a constant line. Wouldn't it be miraculous if you actually had some thinking people here that said: Screw this, instead of patching up people's misery, we are going to subsidize insulin so you can live in misery, just cheaper? And back to my previous comments that we have been working on a model about what creates income inequality, what creates poverty? We are actually seeing health and crime and these things. Hold it. We know diabetes is actually for our brothers, the urban poor, my Tribal poor, rural poor, is truly everywhere. If you cared, wouldn't you throw everything you have at this concept of, okay, we know how to cure type 1? The articles, if you read through them--and some of it is thick--is, yeah, the same concept, you could take someone with type 2 and get their body to produce insulin again, but you would actually have to have them engage in much healthier life practices. Would we be willing to have the really brutal conversation here of we are going to change how the farm bill works, we are going to change how nutrition support works, and those who would actually like to see a future where their diabetes type 2 is cured, would they be willing to work with their community to eat different? Would we be willing to work on that? Would we be willing to deliver, have Lyft deliver food boxes to the home and say we are loving, caring about your future and your health, and we don't want you to be like the grandma who is a friend of mine who has had her foot cut off? And if you will do this, the societal trade will be, we will do the stem cell to islet cell to get your body back to producing insulin. And, oh, by the way, diabetes is the single biggest contributor to U.S. sovereign debt. So for those who are fiscal hawks, great. For those who actually give a darn about people, wonderful. And, instead, our solution coming from our President standing right there is: I am going to subsidize insulin. I am not going to cure the misery; I am just going to make it cheaper. Where's the vision here? So now let's actually go back to the previous, the two things you do most to make the working poor poor. Okay. We talked about opening the border, making them compete with others with similar skill sets. My numbers are already out of date because it keeps getting worse. You also crush them by making everything they buy--because if you are poor, if you are that working middle class, if you are just hardworking middle class, the amount of your income that goes to food, the amount of your income that goes to rent, the amount of your income that goes to driving is substantially more than the vast majority of the people in this body. The income we are paid, we are in the top quartile. And then we also have some of the richest people you can imagine that are here, and it is always funny hearing them talk about--when they are worth millions and millions and millions of dollars, but to the family that is struggling out there, this has been a really crappy year. I will point it out, and I am going to do it a couple times. Guess which community had the highest inflation rate in the United States? Mine. I had 10.9 percent in my neighborhoods. You want to talk about kicking people in the head? That is year over year. This is what unified Democrat government has brought you. You are poorer today than the day Joe Biden took office. And then the hallmark here used to be, well, the gap between the rich and poor, income inequality. Well, guess what? That gap, particularly in 2018, 2019, was the greatest shrinkage in modern economic times. 2018, 2019, the fastest movement of the poor getting less poor, the fastest movement of food insecurity shrinking. Congratulations, Democrats, you have done a great job. It turns out income inequality really started to expand last year. Inflation crushing people. Except if you own lots of assets. If you are one of the rich people here, and you have multiple houses, you have lots of stocks and bonds, you have other things, you got richer or at least your assets went up in value. Does anyone else see the cruelty going on here, or does it just not fit because you have a pasty White guy here giving the speech? But the math is the math. I mean, at some point the math will always win. And my brothers and sisters in the Phoenix area--now, Phoenix is a big community. Remember, Maricopa County is the fourth most populous--I still think we are catching up with Harris County, but fourth most populous county in the country. It is functionally almost seven congressional districts. And my brothers and sisters in the Phoenix area had a 10.9 percent inflation year over year. Go talk to those families and explain to them how, hasn't this been a great year for you? Aren't you happy you voted for this? And then you start to look at some of the other data. And I have got to give the left credit. They have done one thing that I didn't think could happen. I am seeing some polling coming out of my community where, not by a little bit, but by almost double digits, Hispanic voters are now going to vote for Republicans. And then you see this and you start to understand why. Look what has happened, particularly to the African American and Latino voters--or the population, what has happened to their rents? 28 percent increases. They may have thought Democrats were their protectors, but Democrats have basically been their tormentors because the policies have been so badly designed. And when they were voting for these, we stood here and explained, do you understand what you are about to set off? And the arrogance--well, in a weird way, thank you. It looks like now the Hispanic vote may actually be Republican. Is it because we are so wonderful, or their policies have been so brutal to those communities? So let's have the hits keep going. The United States--you have heard this over and over and lots of other people have come here and talked about this, but it is worth saying again. What happens when a nation has the ability to be secure in its energy? What happens to a nation when you are Germany; when you are basically beholden to someone else's hydrocarbons? And there is one here, and I am going to do this a little bit out of order because I find it absolutely fascinating. We should do this one two or three times. Now we understand that a decade, a decade and a half ago, the protests in Germany, and now we find out much of the activism here, the researchers, the reporters, the journalists that actually do investigative, hey, this stuff may have been financed by countries that sell hydrocarbons. I can't imagine who that would be. But we now know the stories in Germany--you have seen the stories of the suitcases of cash going to their green movement to shut down their base load nuclear, and Germany today is dramatically dirtier in greenhouse gases than they were 10, 15 years ago because they are living on Russian hydrocarbons and coal. And I think out of the 20-plus nuclear facilities, I think they have one facility and they are scrambling to find out can they put them back into service. It turns out, same concept here. I would love for our brothers and sisters on the left to help us actually do an investigation of who has been financing these shut down the pipelines, shut down much of the--particularly natural gas, which I have a great fondness for natural gas because of its miracle on reducing greenhouse gases. But it looks like much of that part of the green movement may have been financed by countries that could care less about the world's global warming. But it was more about market constraints so they could sell more of their product. And once again, we had become energy independent. We had become an exporter. The Biden administration takes over, and all of a sudden, the extortion games begin. The threat games begin. You start to find out you are going to be invested by the Securities and Exchange Commission because you may not have disclosed your global warming impact on your investments. And then you wonder why it was actually months ago that natural gas prices went through the ceiling. I was going to say exploded, but that is a really bad pun. It is in the charts. It wasn't an invasion of Ukraine. It was the election of Democrats really, really screwing up policy. And now, we don't actually have a complete answer on this. I am hoping it is purely for technical reasons because a couple of weeks ago I did a couple of charts here showing how much base load nuclear is coming offline. And the fact of the matter is when that comes offline, even with adoption of all the clean energy, all the photovoltaic, all the wind, we actually are upside down. We will have to actually use more hydrocarbons. And then you hear the story this week that the Feds have rescinded license for a Florida facility that is under construction, which I understand there are stunning amounts of capital already sitting there. I hope this is temporary. But you would think this would be the type of thing we would be struggling, saying we really want non-carbon emitting base load power in this country. Except for the fact of the matter is--and it is reality--photovoltaic, wind, they write a lot of checks to the Democrats. It is a dark thing I say, but the fact of the matter is, I can walk you through policy after policy after policy here where it seems to be chasing--I mean, look at H.R. 1 and the other things that this place has passed which had ultimately nothing to do with access to voting. It had to do with building a model that elects Democrats. I mean, financing Democratic campaigns with six to one money; industrializing ballot harvesting because they have the networks to do that? I mean, it is just-- But, once again, we virtue signal. We say pretty words, and then just hope that the public never finds out what is actually underlying in the real piece of legislation. And back to what I said before, congratulations Democrats. You burned 23 percent more coal last year. Yes, I am from Arizona. We are one of the photovoltaic--I mean, it is a Holy Grail where we are. Power actually almost goes to zero for two, three, four hours in the afternoon because we produce so much. But let's get the policies right. We need storage. There are some breakthroughs in storage now. I have a fascination with the rust iron battery. It doesn't work in a car because it is really big, really heavy, but it works in a utility scale. But will the left take responsibility that they say one thing and the proof, they burnt 23 percent more coal last year. They made greenhouse gases worse. Pretty rhetoric isn't good math. And the movement of natural gas--so the folks that say we have got to stop pipelines; have you seen what the pipelines actually look like in the United States? They are everywhere. So the brain trust here raises lots of money; does lots of campaigns. We are going to cancel something like Keystone so they can put the oil on railcars, or maybe shove it out to the West Coast of Canada so it can be shipped to Asia? Because heaven knows, when they crack it, refine it, they do it in a really clean, well-regulated, EPA-controlled facilities, right? It had nothing to do with what was good for the environment. It had to do with what was good for raising money. And now the brain trust gets to deal with the mess they have created policywise. So now we get to see great stories that we are out visiting Venezuela. We are out visiting other countries that functionally are either--I accept the humiliation. Let's take the humiliation. But if my brothers and sisters over here are truly committed to their green agenda, aren't they just horrified that the decision and policies that they have set up have actually made the environment worse, and now we are actually going to go to countries that actually do it in a filthy fashion. Huge global warming impacts in the way they pull their hydrocarbon, and that is actually who we are reaching out to to ask for their help. Of course, I think the real reality, the reason they do is because they have an idea what is about to hit them this election cycle because they have made working men and women's lives, the hard working men and women's lives in this country more miserable, and they are pedaling as fast as they can to find a way to back off the damage they have done. So let's also see the efficiencies. Remember, we are going to have an administration with no drama. We are going to bring professionalism back. Well, great. Passport backlog now at 2 million. VA claim backlog over a quarter million. IRS returns backed up over 24 million. SSA hearings, taking functionally almost a year. Tell me something--so back to my opening question, give me something, anything, one thing that unified leftist control of this government has done to make people's lives better; to make the future of this country better? It has been like a misery factory. And then, the next board, I want to point out, and it is just one of dozens of examples, but it is for people out there who may be paying attention to understand what is said over there has nothing to do with what they actually do. So remember the build back better, you had the Speaker and the President and their spokespeople, well, if we spend all this money, if we engage in this policy, it will be good for inflation. Mr. Speaker, can you tell me my time?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, so, tucked into--now here is the great irony. So we found this, tucked into their thousands and thousands of pages of build back better, because, remember, on one hand, they are telling you, hey, we are going to make things more efficient. We are going to actually help reduce inflation. Oh, except for the way that if you actually find out it is a bunch of pandering to the unions, and they made it so you can't automate ports. Huh? So you are giving us speeches about how the supply chains are the real responsibility for inflation, and build back better is supposed to help inflation, except for you have done the very things that will make it so just the opposite happens. You have made it so I can't automate ports legally anymore. So all this money, your largesse, you are going to throw out will go to green stuff at ports, but you can't make it more efficient. You lied to the American people. And how many of my brothers and sisters on the left even knew these sorts of little land mines were tucked into. I mean, they had the unionization of all the government employees in my State if they want the largesse money for family and medical leave; yet they had to do it through a collective bargaining agreement. The legislation was pandering to those who financed their campaigns, and it would make people's lives more miserable. I mean, think of that. Inside their build back better was you can't automate ports. You can't make this stuff up. And then you start to realize, why do we have so many unfilled jobs? Something went horribly off the rails here. When we functionally--and I need to update this chart because apparently the number is actually even worse. But we have--I have a fixation on demographic issues. I have done lots of presentations here on the floor, because demographics are actually the primary driver of our U.S. sovereign debt, and Democrat policies continue to make the policy sets around that worse. So we have 1.5 million more of other brothers and sisters who have said, I quit, I am out of here, I am taking early retirement, I leave, than we expected. Instead of encouraging our brothers and sisters to stay in the economy because we have got to step up productivity because if we don't step up productivity, we can't start to knock down inflation. Remember, what is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods. There is a couple of ways you attack inflation. You can squeeze down the money supply, and you saw that happen with interest rates starting to go up. Or you could also do what Reagan did in 1981. People forget this. Paul Volcker is jacking up interest rates and jacking up interest rates. Congress, a Democrat Congress at that time, also did a tax cut, a tax reform to try to make business more productive so they would make more stuff. Remember, too many dollars chasing too few goods and services; make more goods and services. Then, when you are driving people out of the workforce, how do you make more goods and services? Get the policy sets right. You say you care about inflation, you care about it crushing working men and women, and then you do the very things that continue to make it worse in a society. When we get through this period of misery, we still have the thing that wipes us out as a society, leads us to decades of misery. The current calculation basically says, in 29 years, my new math says we get to be about 210 percent of debt-to-GDP. That is publicly held debt. Remember, last year, we were borrowing functionally $47,000 a second. I know most of this place just cares about surviving the next election. I mean, look at the legislation that keeps being offered. But is there at all a moral responsibility here to understand this destroys your kids, this destroys your grandkids, this destroys the future generations? We will be handing the next couple of generations a much poorer--they will live poorer--country than we inherited. This is $112 trillion of publicly borrowed money adjusted for inflation. This isn't my math; this is CBO's math from a year ago. This is before the crazy spending of last year. Mr. Speaker, when I came to the mike, I shared with you I was a bit cranky, and I had had a lot of coffee. I don't believe Democrats are evil. Misguided, yes, but I believe many of them are my friends. They have good hearts. But you have to stop the policies that hurt people. You have to stop hurting people, and you have to stop making the Nation poorer. There are a number of us whose ideas, that aren't even traditionally Republican, we could embrace. I mean, curing diabetes is one of them. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is just moral. Maybe, once in a while, let a Republican have an amendment or an open debate because there is a path. There is a path where we can make our future better, but you have to stop the bloodletting. Mr. Speaker, I am going to go back and have some decaf. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we have a bit of the tyranny of the clock, as you know, so I am going to try to do this somewhat rapidly. There has been a lot of speechifying today. I am frustrated because I don't have an elegant or delicate way to say this, but people keep making crap up. Let's actually walk through some basic math so we understand something. Does anyone here have any memory of last fall when a number of us were coming behind these microphones getting ready to talk about the winter that was coming. Do you remember the discussion of about how high the power bills, the heating bills were going to be? It is because fuel prices--hydrocarbon prices--didn't just go up because of the Russian invasion. If you look at the charts, this began functionally when the left took power. It really began in 2018 and really took off when they had unified control. It didn't just happen. As a matter of fact, there is a number of charts out there and futures contracts that were basically saying the prices you are seeing today at the gas pump--they just showed up about 6 months early--that that is actually where we were going because consumption and supply wasn't keeping up because of what we have done to ourselves. You see it already. Do you not remember last October and September crossing $6 on natural gas? It was already coming at us and it was our own fault. How does this craziness happen? We keep getting folks coming behind the microphone and saying: It is because of the Keystone pipeline; it is a little bit. It is because of some of the drilling bans; it is a little bit. It is mostly because over, particularly this last year, but also going back when the left took power after the 2018 election, they basically started to threaten capital markets. If you are a company and you invest in hydrocarbons, I think the SEC should look into you. If you're CalPERS or a pension fund and you invest in hydrocarbons, we are going to look down upon that. As a matter of fact, we are going encourage universities and other pension funds no more investing in hydrocarbons. What did you think was going to happen? When you actually see this frustration and the absolute distorted rhetoric coming from the White House--well, there are 9,000 drilling permits out there. I think most of America already understand that is lunacy; you get a permit, you find out if there are any hydrocarbons in the ground. But how do you go to capital markets and get any money to stick that straw in the ground? This continued. Over and over, the Biden administration's executive orders missed the mark. It was actually talking about the Treasury coming at anyone that is putting capital markets into hydrocarbons. Understand what you are paying at the gas pump, what you are paying to heat your house. You voted for this. If you voted for the left, if you voted for them in 2018, if you voted for them in 2020, you voted for this. You voted for that price because this is what they promised us. Do you remember the discussions here, the debates here? We are going to make it so you can't raise money to finance a pipeline, to finance new hydrocarbon extractions, to finance natural gas. What is so ironic about this--just quote after quote after quote. Pension systems and others--the idea was strangle hydrocarbon extraction, oil and gas, and make it so they don't have the capital to open up new wells, to invest in more efficiencies. The left actually got what they wanted. Are they now willing to admit that they got what they wanted there? We are now seeing $5 gasoline. You see the price of natural gas. Guess what, congratulations, we burned 23 percent more coal last year because they made natural gas so expensive; we moved from one fuel source that was dramatically cleaner than coal, but you raised the price so high. Remember, power generation is regulated. Power plant after power plant after power plant around America moved back to coal. So now you have the brain trust in the administration saying things like: Well, go buy an electric car. Except that electric car is going to be powered by coal because the dramatically cleaner burning fuel of natural gas you have just made really expensive. A couple of months ago we came here to the floor and talked about natural gas and the concerns the left has said over it--well, what about methane--showing them some breakthroughs of really inexpensive ways to capture that methane. There is a rational argument there. Methane is a 9-1, but has only now a shorter half life of what is considered to be a greenhouse gas. Instead of saying, hey, we are going to look for technologies that deal with the problem there, the left's opinion is, well, let's wipe them out because those who invest in green energy finance and write checks to Democrats. The green mafia basically owns the Democrat Party. Then you go look at other absurdities that is Democrat policy. I am sorry I had to grab an older slide. Do you realize the amount of baseload nuclear we have in this country that is going off line? You do realize over this 10-year period the United States is going to get dirtier? This is even before the left functionally raised the price of natural gas so much that power plants moved back to coal. We are moving so much clean baseload nuclear off the grid that it doesn't even offset every bit of photovoltaic and wind we have put on the grid. We give lots of pretty speeches here. We do lots of virtue signaling, but the math is the math is the math. The virtue signaling creating policy has actually raised more greenhouse gases. Look what Germany did by shutting down its baseload nuclear. They now burn massive amounts of coal. They got dirtier. You have heard speech after speech here today about how much we despise Putin, but we also know his propaganda wing absolutely supported the left's movement to strangle these hydrocarbons. This is what you get when you make crappy policy. It didn't happen overnight. It is going to take us years to fix this mess. Can I beg the Democrats: Stop hurting people. Stop making the poor poorer. Stop crushing the middle class. Come back to sensibility. Guess what, there might be a bonus there, and that is all the coal that is being burnt, all the dirty imports, you would actually get a benefit of the greenhouse gases, but you got to come back and do math again. Madam Speaker, I think I am up against my time and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is going to be one of those moments where you sort of walk through. We obviously had the State of the Union a couple nights ago. Instead of just sort of walking through my frustrations with it, I want to dice up a couple of things that I considered the most outrageous, but also a continuation of a theme, and that is something has happened here. My brothers and sisters on the left over here, somehow, somewhere in the last year or two have moved into trying to make public policy by virtue signaling. And I think I will prove this. And I am open, if anyone out there from my Democratic colleagues can give me something you did in the last year of absolute power and control here in Washington, D.C., that actually made the lives and the country better or that over the next decade will make their lives better. It is almost like we are in this clown show of you get rewarded for saying pretty words and be damned the actual outcomes. So let's walk through some of the reality. Now, you remember at one point we were talking about energy, and the fact of the matter is, the world is financing Putin's war machine. Remember, it was last October that natural gas prices exploded, and it was obvious. You set up policy sets as soon as the administration took power, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, trying to do all sorts of restrictions, which the courts had to roll back, so now the administration threw up new restrictions. What did you think would happen? And you can actually, though, look at the lunacy that are policies from the United States; and I will also blame Western Europe. These are the pipelines. This is how you finance functionally a gas station with nuclear weapons, which is functionally what Russia is today. And you start to understand--and a couple weeks ago we came here and even on a YouTube channel we tried to explain policies that have happened in places like Germany. Go back a decade ago. Do you all remember when the green left movement in Germany--now that we know it was backdoor financed by Russia--was out there protesting we need to get rid of the nuclear power plants, the baseload nuclear? I think they got rid of 20- something plants. There are only one or two still functioning, and they are scheduled for decommissioning. Germany actually got dirtier, you know, so the very people that used to preach to us about global warming, about greenhouse gases got dirtier. They are burning more coal. And, also, they don't just take natural gas from Russia and oil from Russia, now they even take coal from Russia, and you actually see the pipelines. So at the same time, a sort of Malthusian left here has been trying to strangle American hydrocarbons--and understand, I am a huge fan of natural gas. The last 15 years, the remarkable reduction in greenhouse gasses coming from North America is because of natural gas. Remember, the decommissioning of North American nuclear power, baseload power, pretty much equals all the clean energy, the photovoltaic, the wind, that has gone in. So you can say, Oh, look at all these new solar panels, but the fact of the matter is the amount of nuclear we have removed--so how do we get so clean? Remember, a year or two ago, we were within a margin of even hitting the Paris accord, something we didn't sign on to because of the use of natural gas. So as we are starting to restrict ours, you see the pipelines coming out of Russia moving into Europe, instead of us expanding ours and saying we are going to liquify natural gas and get it out of here, sell it to the world, balance the payments, grow the economy. So there's great irony, think of the virtue signaling here over and over. Even a couple days ago, when we were getting a briefing, and there was the discussion of how we get more energy exports to Europe as they are engaging in the sanctions. And someone from the left screams out, But what about the environment? You do realize the Democrats and Biden policy had us burn 23 percent more coal this last year. The policy so jacked up the price of natural gas here in the United States that power is regulated. Power facility after power facility converted back to coal because the brain trust on the left and in the White House so restricted access to natural gas, prices went up dramatically. Remember we went from, what, $2 on the futures market to at one point we hit $6? And it didn't just happen because of the invasion of Ukraine. Those numbers were hitting last October. If you care about the environment will someone on the left hire an economist that owns a calculator? We burned 23 percent more coal last year. This is a direct result of crappy policy. And then you think about being from Arizona. I did a ride along about a month ago with a police officer that is a friend of mine. And he was taking me through an area that he has patrolled for 28 years. And he was saying, I am seeing neighborhoods here that have doubled the homelessness, the number of overdose deaths that are happening in these neighborhoods has exploded this last year. Do you not think when you let the borders open up that you are not screwing over America? Look, we have come here over and over and said, What are the two most economically violent things you can do to the working middle class? Inflation and opening the borders, where you flood the society with people with similar skill sets. And these weren't conservative economic models, these were done by leftist professors a decade ago that said, when you take the working poor and flood the market with people with similar skill sets, you inhibit their economic growth, their wages. One of them said this population will be poorer for a decade. The fact of the matter is when the left allows the open borders-- because remember, that was going to be compassionate except for Americans. I am now being told that drug prices in the Phoenix market have crashed. Now, in this area I am no expert. My mother was a substance abuse counselor for many years, heard many heartbreaking stories. But when you have the patrol officer telling you that a year ago it may take $70, $100 for someone to get high that day, and today it can be less than $10, the basic rule of economics tells you something. And it is fentanyl which kills people. So now, all the sudden, I am seeing more drugs, I am seeing more homelessness, a dramatic increase in homelessness. I am actually seeing a huge spike of crime. And then the deaths. If you are playing economist, we all talk about second-degree effects and third-degree effects but does anyone here actually have any love and compassion in their heart to understand the misery, just the misery that the Democrat policies have been virtue signaling. We are going to be compassionate. We are a loving country. We are going to open up our borders. But what about the misery that has been foisted on so many people? And the tricky part is, if you look at the economic model, even if we went back to normality tomorrow, because of the populations that are here that are going to compete for those moderate-skill jobs, you will have suppressed income opportunity for a whole segment of our country for a decade. And then the President gets up and goes, Well, you know, the tax cuts for the rich. Come on. Look, I know Democrats love to use fact- checking, except when it is actual fact-checking. Tax reform that was done in December 2017 made the tax code more progressive. Once again, the top 10 percent of income earners pay a higher percentage of the Federal income tax today than they did before tax reform. The left knows this, but God forbid, they tell the truth. And look, once again, 2015 had a timing anomaly on tax receipts. For those of us in Ways and Means they are tax receipts. 2018, 2019, two of the highest receipts revenue in history. So number two and three, and if you do the timing effects, it is number one and number two. The fact of the matter is there was tax reform, and more money came in. If you and I did a survey of Democrats, how many of them would actually know that, or actually if they knew it would be willing to say it in front of a camera? The fact of the matter is corporate tax revenues, receipts, rose by 75 percent, the repatriation of money the companies had been leaving. Do you remember the complaints from the Obama administration about how many companies were leaving the United States? They stopped leaving. They started coming back. But we also saw individual income taxes went up, what, 27\1/2\ percent according to CBO, and that 80 percent increase was paid by the top 10 percent of income earners. You know, I understand things that grow the economy, supply side, that create a more egalitarian society, that make the poor less poor, that crushed food insecurity, that actually, for minority populations, had the fastest wage growth in U.S. history is really uncomfortable for folks on the left because they have to admit that they are sort of--and it is not even Keynesian, it is like a bastardized Keynesian model of throw lots of money and pretend everything is okay model because that is what the left's economics are these days. It is just bizarre, the fact that some people like to call it supply side, it is just the incentives to make more stuff, the incentives to hire more people, the incentives to have a growing economy. Because I am one of those people--and I actually believe most Republicans are--that growth is moral because that growth provides a chance. Look at the math. You know, after what we called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, do you see the curve? Do you see the growth in wages? And the yellow line here is female wages. They exploded. Their growth dramatically outpaced males. It was the best income growth ever for women of color, the best income growth ever for the very minority populations that we hear the virtue signaling pandering to, but the difference is the Republicans actually delivered it. Yet, the left's model is: Hey, we will just send out checks, and we will send out some more checks, and then we won't ask anyone to go get job training or actually work for the checks. Then you wonder why America today is poorer than it was a year ago. I mean, it is the math. I know it is uncomfortable, but it is the math. Working men and women, the working poor, are poorer today than the day Joe Biden, the day the Democrats, took absolute control of this government. You see it on the charts. The fact of the matter is, when you see the spread--we are here. That spread, that is substantially income inequality, and it is blowing apart. It is becoming like an alligator mouth driven by the left's policies. Do you accept you are hurting people? It is economics. It is math. You can virtue signal all you want, but eventually, the math always wins. Then you take what the left has done in inflation. You are making Americans poorer. I know this is hard to see, but you are making people poorer. I mean, the other day, there was a New York Times Noble Prize economist saying: Well, the poor aren't getting that poor because of the data. Well, no. He forgot to also--and he knows this, that inflation has moved up the price of housing. Inflation, you will see what's happening in fuel and in food, but the housing index, the way they do the calculations in CPI has a--think of it as a shock absorber. Your rent goes up a couple of hundred bucks per month for the rest of the year; that doesn't actually enter into the CPI. It is slowly baked in because you have just signed a contract for a year, right? The willingness to rationalize and lie so you can continue the virtue signaling of fantasy, the math is the math is the math. And the terrifying thing is, okay, yes, you are at a 7-plus percent inflation last year. In areas like mine, in the Phoenix area, it was 9 percent, substantially because of housing. Then you go back to the homelessness and you understand why people of very modest income can't even afford a basic place to live. We are looking at data in the Joint Economic Committee. We could hit 10 percent this year. You understand how kicking people in the head with policies that make them poorer screw up their retirements, their ability to feed their family and have any savings. What was the President's solution? Well, we are going to look at businesses and ask them to function with less profits, and we are going to just pay less. Huh? Did anyone listen to the speech? The Ukraine portion, great. Yay. We all cheered. But as the President walked through the economic portion of his speech, it was, A, not truthful, and economically delusional. So we want to come here with a couple of ideas, and we would be elated if the majority actually takes them and runs away with them. So, back to our elementary school economics class. What is inflation? Classic definition of inflation: too much cash chasing too few goods and services. Will we agree to that? Look, I know this is uncomfortable, but the reality of it--Democrat policies are actually hurting people. Maybe we can actually turn the ship around. So if I came to you and said it is too many dollars chasing too few goods, you have what the Federal Reserve will do, which is start to pull liquidity out of the market--you know, the extraordinary measures, buying U.S. sovereign debt, which has functionally enabled Congress to spend like crazy because the Federal Reserve is buying our bots, raising interest rates to pull liquidity out of society. But that is going to hurt people, too, right? Your interest rates are going to go up. Your credit cards are going to go up, and everything else. How about a President that comes behind the microphone, Democrats come behind the microphone, and actually offer real, big-boy solutions that actually, A, are founded in economics but, second, would actually be good for society, would actually work. We want to propose a couple of quirky ideas. Just think of it as an idea box. If I came to you tomorrow and said one of the reasons you have inflation is the Democrats last year shoveled out so much cash, there is so much cash out there moving around, that there is too much money facing too few goods--great. What would happen if you turned to Americans and said: Hey, instead of going and buying that new big-screen television, we are going to encourage you to take a few hundred bucks and we are going to give you the spiff to go put it in your retirement account. Hell, we will let you use pre-tax money, and we will call it a Roth IRA. It would help retirement security. It also would be a way to pull-- functionally, the same thing the Federal Reserve is trying to do--pull liquidity out of the markets. Republicans and Democrats both would probably stand up and say: Hey. So let's see. We could pull a whole bunch of the dollars out of the economy that are chasing too few goods and put them into people's retirement so they have retirement security. Hey, this should be a win- win. Did you hear anything creative like that? Instead, you hear the virtue signaling. Or how about one of my personal fixations, productivity? Remember what was the most powerful thing we did in tax reform? We built an incentive for businesses to take their money and build better plants and invest in more fishing equipment so they could pay people more. The President goes, well, the corporations made billions of dollars and didn't pay any taxes. We built a tax code saying: Take your cash and make your company more efficient so you can pay people more so the economy grows. Once again, remember, we are borrowing. Last year, we were borrowing $47,000 a second. If this economy does not grow like crazy because that debt curve, as that becomes more and more of an alligator mouth of here is our debt, here is the size of the economy, that gap is what wipes us out. If we can grow and keep that ratio of debt to the size of our economy--growth, growth, growth. Well, the idea is if you are trying to take on inflation, you know you need a society that becomes more productive because, long term, that means people will be paid more. We become wealthier as a country and the ability to deal with the demographic curve, that is the primary driver of our debt--do things like, hey, instead of just doing expensing on your capital goods, we will give you a little bit of like a bonus-type of depreciation to do it. These are economic ideas that would both help inflation but also make us more robust as an economy, as a country, if we have to take on the challenges of the world. So I beg of our brothers and sisters on the left, I don't know how to get you to stop hurting people. You use very pretty words, brilliant virtue signaling. For those who aren't thinking, it sounds great until you sort of sit there and say, hold it, how does that work? There are ideas out there both the left and the right should be able to embrace to take on inflation, to stop hurting people in the country. But instead, this place seems to reward itself by flowery language. We are judged on our intentions, not our successes. Look, this is what I am begging for: There are ideas at work, but the first thing we need to do is stop doing the crazy stuff that is hurting people. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, last week, I got behind this microphone, and we were actually trying to show something that was a bit optimistic. But like everyone else on our side, the frustration we are going through on so many of the Democrat policies that I don't think were meant to be mean-spirited or so dystopian in the damage they cause, particularly to the working poor, which is one of my fixations-- sometimes, the economics is the economics, sometimes virtue signaling over the unintended consequences. I want to go over something and try to explain why I think this is such a big deal for both those on the left and those of us on the right. There is actually a window of optimism, but it is going to take a policy pivot. Last week, I got up here and talked about--remember, I gave a couple of presentations last December, a major success in curing type 1 diabetes. Now, it was really only one use case where they were able to take T cells and convert them into insulin-producing cells. In that particular one, the individual would need some immunosuppressants because of the body's reaction to it. Now, we have an organization that is doing some of the same technology with T cells, turning them into insulin-producing cells but with CRISPR as a partner. They are doing a tiny tweak. The model says the body won't recognize it as a foreign cell, and you won't need immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of your life. Conceptually, why is this such a big, big, big deal to have a cure for type 1? If you dig through the literature, it says that, at least for people with type 2, we might have a way to get their body-- actually, we do have a way--dear Lord, let the technology be true and actually coming forward--to help individuals in type 2, their bodies to produce insulin again. Then, we have some other big policy things we would have to do here. We would have to have an honest conversation of how we do nutrition support. We would have to have an honest conversation of what we do in the farm bill, what we encourage Americans to grow, instead of just sort of the commodity crops. North America used to grow 3,500 different types of grains. Maybe you design a farm system that allows both regional and uniqueness for different arid climates and others, sort of a cacophony, or whatever the proper word there would be, for optionality because there is a food security issue when you only grow certain crops. God forbid you have like what is happening in parts of Europe, where olive trees have a type of fungus. Olive trees that are hundreds and hundreds of years old are dying. We make ourselves much more fragile in food security. I sort of say that because I actually see an elegant solution coming here if we could change the way we view public policy. It is often this right-left paradigm of the left's version of wanting to be compassionate. They are going to build more clinics for those in urban areas and Tribal communities and even certain world populations that have just stunning percentages of type 2 diabetes and the misery that comes with that. Put up more clinics. My argument is: Screw that. Let's cure it. If we are seeing technology that may lead us to a cure, put the resources forward that create the disruption because curing a misery is so much more wonderful than helping people being able to maintain and live within their misery. Oh, by the way, for those of us who are absolutely fixated that the debt is going to destroy this Republic, it makes a hell of a lot of difference. Let's walk through some of the math of why I wish we were having this level of optimism that the technology disruptions we have now of knowing how to cure so many diseases actually may be the path that we start to take on the crushing debt that is coming. This is important. This is year-old data from CBO. It is a year out of date. The numbers today are much worse. In 29 years, $112 trillion of publicly borrowed debt in today's dollars; the vast majority of it is Medicare, Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance. Why this is so important is the political class, particularly here in Washington, we have lied for decades to our constituents. The left will say: Oh, rich people don't pay enough. We spend too much money on defense. Republicans say: Oh, we have to get rid of foreign aid, waste, and fraud. Maybe those are true, but they are not the driver of the debt. The debt is demographics. We are getting old as a society. You are going to see some slides later on that really will kick you in the head on these numbers. That $112 trillion of publicly borrowed debt as projected by CBO last year--and this is a number that says there are no more pandemics and no more recessions. How many of you want to have a secure retirement? How many of you give a darn about your kids? Well, think about one little factoid here. You just saw that Medicare was the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. What was it? $77 to $78 trillion of borrowing over the next 29 years? Thirty-one percent of Medicare is just diabetes. Now, you are seeing the tie. If I come to you and say: I hope it works, but considering the numbers and the benefit of if it does work, why aren't we, at least the left and the right, saying let's end people's misery? Oh, by the way, by doing that, one of the greatest effects we can have on society is actually curing these diseases that make us poorer, sicker, and actually are the primary drivers of our debt. Mr. Speaker, 31 percent of Medicare spending is just related to diabetes--33 percent of all healthcare costs. So, remember, Mr. Speaker, the problem with this place is ObamaCare, the ACA, and the Republican alternatives were finance bills. They weren't about what we spend, they were who got subsidized. That is the math. The Democrats' bill had three tiers, the Republican had four tiers, but it was who was cross-subsidizing whom and then how much was coming out of the general fund to subsidize those groups. They were spending subsidization bills. They had nothing to do with what we spend. My argument is if we would embrace the technology, push it forward-- and we have changed a bunch of laws to legalize the very technology that will disrupt healthcare costs--then we save Medicare. But we also end a hell of a lot of misery in our society. And is that Republican or Democrat? I am sure at some point someone will contribute to one side or the other and we will turn it into partisan, right? But at least between now and then it is technology. And, once again, I fixate on this also: 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are the majority of our healthcare spending. If you say you care about healthcare, Mr. Speaker, is it nationalizing health care? Well, once again, nationalizing health care, the Medicare for All, doesn't remove any costs. It just collectivizes how you can ration. If you want to reduce costs, cure people, and end the misery, once again, 5 percent of our brothers and sisters are the majority of our healthcare spending. You already see what is going on right now, Mr. Speaker, with some of the messenger RNA, some of the new stem cell therapies, the number of diseases we are curing. We now have a cure for hemophilia. We are about to have trials for sickle cell. You already see in so many diseases we are taking on, so many of the blood cancers today, we can cure. But the 10,000-pound gorilla is diabetes. Maybe it is a little bit utopianism, but we have seen a perfect example of this. Do you remember this body just a decade or so ago, Mr. Speaker? We were having a real stressor. We were having to have conversations with State Medicaid systems on how we were going to pay for all these liver transplants for those people who may have had too good a time in the seventies. Remember, we had hundreds of thousands of individuals in the United States that we thought were having failing livers from hepatitis C. Liver transplant clinics were being funded and organized all over the country, and then, suddenly--I think the first drug out was Sovaldi--we figured out how to cure it. And the drug was outrageously expensive, it was something like $88,000, but it was a fraction of the cost of a liver transplant and then someone spending the rest of their life on anti-rejection drugs. And then another drug came to market with a slightly different technology. The price crashed and saved a fortune and ended lots of future misery. We lived in the last decade an example of what I am talking about. But I beg of my friends on the Democrat side: Think about your legislation like H.R. 3. We know H.R. 3 functionally makes Big Pharma bigger because it incentivizes them to take their current portfolio of pharmaceuticals, make little tweaks, and keep them. But the capital staff for the small biotechs that are disruptive is crushed. There are good articles out there, and there are good economic papers that make it very clear. If the Democrats get their way, it is great politics. It is absolutely brilliant politics. Talk about drug prices, how outraged we are. We are outraged. But, Mr. Speaker, are we outraged to the point that you are going to kill the next generation because they don't get the next pharmaceutical that is curative? We need to think maybe more with a calculator like economists, maybe economists with a soul and a heart rather than: Hey, this is brilliant for the next election cycle. Back again, think about the body, the place we work in. We go home, we campaign, and we say all the wonderful things we are going to do. But the fact of the matter is, this last fiscal year, 77 percent of all the spending here was on autopilot. It is what we call mandatory. Ten percent was defense. Thirteen percent was everything else. We act as if we are here doing something when if you put defense and say we are just going to keep the baseline where it is at and the 77 percent is mandatory--Social Security and Medicare, you fall under a certain income, you are part of a certain ethnic or tribal group or you hit a certain age--it is automatic. It is formulaic. This is all we get to focus on. This is what all the theater here is about. And one of the reasons I think the theater has gotten so hyperbolic is we know this is what wipes us out, and not one person here has actually voted on this. It has been, except for the last handful of votes the Democrats moved forward, we were adding, like we just did today, in a piece of legislation that actually added to mandatory spending because it is easy. It makes you look like a hero. Hey, all we protected is there. But we don't have the resources to pay for it. To give you an idea, Mr. Speaker, of how crappy the last fiscal year was and how much we borrowed, these slides are all out of date now. The numbers are much worse. One of the reasons I grabbed this one is, take a look here. This was 2030. We are going to hit $30 trillion of borrowing. Well, we hit that last week. Think about what we have done. And there was a time here a couple of decades ago the discussion was: Well, are you willing to do entitlement reform? Take that off the table. I know it is great political rhetoric, but it is too late. The vast majority of baby boomers are already in their retirement age. We missed the window. The window was a quarter century ago if we were going to do entitlement reform. Other than the things we have come here and talked about, the massive subsidies that we give actually to really, really, really rich people, when it is their third home on Martha's Vineyard and we give them subsidized flood insurance, or the Democrats' Build Back Better bill which if you would be making $400,000 or $800,000 a year and you were going to get--what is it, $125,000 in tax credits if you bought the right electric vehicle, the right solar panel. At some point we need to have an honest conversation. We calculated over the next 10 years there are $1.4 trillion of subsidies for really rich people. So instead of the constant rhetoric of let's tax rich people more and make them pay their fair share, maybe we should just stop subsidizing them because the subsidies create distortions. So back to the thing we don't do here called math, the 2050 number, we were saying we were going to be at 195 percent of GDP. That number, the best calculation as of today is 15 points higher than that. We will be well over 200. And that is a baseline, not another pandemic, not another war, and not another major recession. Then we start to deal with our newest reality, and I should have grabbed the slide, but you see part of it here. There is a model put out by CBO that says that if interest rates over the time of that 29- year period, if the baseline borrowing costs of the United States was 2 points higher in that 25 year, then every dime--every dime--of tax receipts will go just to pay interest. We have made ourselves that fragile, that if the cost of borrowing money goes up by 2 points on U.S. sovereign debts over the baseline, then every dime in the future just goes solely to cover the interest costs. We have lost our minds. And yet, think of the crazy stuff we debate here. It is as if we are desperate to debate the shiny objects, the stupid, little indignation of the day, and at the same time we are borrowing $47,000 every second--$47,000 every second. That is why I keep coming behind these mikes saying that it doesn't have to be this sort of dystopian, crushing future. I need the majority to think differently, and I need my minority over here to think differently. Because here are some of the drivers, and this is really uncomfortable. I have been booed in front of audiences when I have given this presentation, but the math is the math, and the math always wins. We can virtue signal, we can tell anecdotal stories, and we can talk about how compassionate we are. But at some point, the math will win. This is important because I am going to show you the sister slide to this in a couple of moments, and you need to get your heads around this. The money you put in taxes, into Social Security, and the money you are going to get out of Social Security are pretty close to each other. You actually get a little bit more out. It is a fairly even deal. But that chart you were seeing, Mr. Speaker, is substantially driven by this. So the average couple--and this is someone who is retiring right about now--has put in about $161,000 into Medicare, and they are getting $522,000 out. And those are adjusted dollars. So, ceteris paribus, whatever the fancy term is, that gap there is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. So, Mr. Speaker, what happens when you talk to millennials? We all have in our offices over here kids born in 1985, and they just think they are never going to see any of this. These are actual surveys where they already see themselves in enough financial pain, and they are worried. Then they have people like me get behind the microphone and show them the slides and basically say: If we don't do something about this, your retirement--and this is a technical economic term--you are screwed. We need to start using language like that around here because somehow the fancy language doesn't seem to sink into the thick skulls here. Do you care about this generation? These 25-year-olds we have in our offices who are freaky smart, they are working their hearts out, and they look at the numbers saying, Oh, my God, when they start getting near their retirement age, the United States will have a couple hundred percent of debt to GDP, and if interest rates are up, if interest rates are up--I didn't bring the slide--there is one model that says that 2 percent higher baseline borrowing costs, we go from that 210 percent debt to GDP in 29 years to about 300, 320 percent because of the multiplying effect because we never pay anything off. The model as it is as of today says that millennial, that person born in 1985, they are going to put $236,000 into Medicare. And if we don't do something to disrupt the cost of healthcare, then they are going to take out over $1.2 million, and this makes the curve steepen. When you see the CBO curve, you wonder why it starts to steepen. It is this delta there. There is a hope. There is a path, but it needs to be everything. I have my healthcare disruptions, but I have also come here and talked about how you can change the immigration system to maximize economic growth and not crush the working poor. When we open up the borders--we have brought the papers here--we crush the working poor because we flood the country with people with similar skill sets. Mr. Speaker, in the last year and a half, we are what, 1.7 million behind in legal immigration. The kid who just got the Ph.D. from Arizona State University and we are sending him home. You have seen the healthcare. If you care about the environment, the concept of radically changing the way we look at regulation using crowdsourcing and data instead of the 1938 model of stick paper in file cabinets, a Tax Code that maximizes economic growth. Are we willing to have really disruptive conversations, or should we go to a border adjustability model, so you don't have a tax arbitrage for around the world to move products to the United States instead of making them here? There are ways, and the trick is, the model says you have got to do all of it almost at the same time. And this place can barely agree on what time of day it is. Then we have seen policies around here that when so many of our brothers and sisters who are older, are basically saying it is the rational decision: I am leaving the labor force. One of the other parts of that growth model is everyone is needed. Every American is needed. We need your talents. We need your labor, particularly if you are older. Would this place be willing to provide certain incentives? So you are 65, you don't need to retire. But we are going to fix parts of the way we tax your benefits to incentivize you to stay in the labor force. There are ideas that work that basically make the future something optimistic. My wife and I joke about this, and I have said it behind this microphone a bunch of times. We are both 59 years old and I have a 6-year-old daughter. You know you are pathologically optimistic when you are 59 years old and you have a 6-year-old daughter. But darn it, doesn't she have the right, doesn't the kid that is growing up in a neighborhood of poverty have the right, doesn't the person who is older have the right to have a decent retirement? Don't we have the right to be in a nation of optimism where we told the truth about the math and our demographics, and then we provided an optimistic vision that gets us there instead of the crazy stuff that has been posed this last 12 months that we keep showing economists after economists--and these are not conservative economists. Many of them are from liberal groups saying: You do realize that Build Back Better by the end of the decade make people poorer? But it was great politics. Stop the crazy. Buy a calculator, and then if we do it by math, I think you could actually see this body work together because an optimistic vision can be ours if we just fixate on the disruptions that make the future great. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Thank you, Madam Speaker. Then when you are done doing your ride-along with the Phoenix city policeman, he is heartbroken. He has actually even moved out of the very neighborhood that he loved, that he has patrolled because even he thinks the property crime, the violent crime, the people living in the alleys has become too much for even him and his wife. But the other thing he talked about was how many overdose deaths, how many people--now, we need to accept, a lot of this is a combination of COVID policy, economic policy. We are hunting for the 2021 number, but everything we have gotten so far, we have created misery out there. Go pick up your community newspaper. Do they even still talk about how many have died from overdoses or has it just become so commonplace it is not worth reporting on that type of misery anymore? And then you start to look at the crime statistics. And, look, Democrats often accuse Republicans of talking about crime to scare people. That is not where I am at. My district is an urban-suburban district. I care about these lives, but I also am fascinated by the economics of it. Well, it turns out we did inflation, we did housing, we did the devaluing of people's labor by opening up the border, but we almost never have the conversation of how do you move out of poverty when people keep stealing your stuff? I have what I will call an acquaintance, he is almost a friend. As a kid I used to hang drywall. He still has the drywall business. Now he has passed it on to his kids and his grandkids, and they are really good. They can do a level 5 smooth coat. That has always been my dream to learn how to do that the right way. It is a weird hobby. And he talks about they are now not doing projects in certain areas because people keep stealing their stuff, and it is really hard to keep people employed. It is really hard to be that micro-entrepreneur where you are selling your talent, and your talent is functionally your willingness to show up and the fact you have a couple drywall spades. So we are also working on a project now in our office to try to understand how much of income inequality, people being poor, is the fact that they live in a crime-ridden area, crime-ridden ZIP Code where people keep breaking their bones and stealing their stuff; and by stealing their stuff, they can't accumulate assets, and how much of that stuff was the very things they need for work. And then you overlay just the incredible spike of deaths, of murders that are happening in parts of the country. Now, maybe this is a societal reaction to locking up parts of the population, idleness. I don't know. I am not a sociologist. But we have to understand, so many of our urban areas across the country, there is misery. But there is hope. If we could get our policy sets correct around here, there is incredible hope because we do have a society that desperately, an economy that desperately, a country that desperately needs people. They need workers. You see the workforce shortage continues even with today's numbers. We need to talk a little--I will do this; this might be a weird transition. Really good unemployment numbers today. Even though unemployment actually went up as a percentage, but the number of jobs, which that is a good sign, people being willing to take the jobs, be a little careful, we need to retake a look at what they call the labor force participation number because it has been reindexed. Every year you actually try to do a calculation. We haven't had a chance to look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' underlying numbers. There was a beautiful spike in labor force participation. We need to figure out how much of that, though, is they changed the numbers of the population that is available to be in the labor force. But today was a good number. But the wage inflation number was really dangerous because we have talked about one of our models we have in the Joint Economic Committee is that if we spike much more, we are on the cusp of a wage-price spiral. And that is just a great way to create misery in the society because those are really hard to break. Once again, we were doing, in 2018-2019--I believe much of it came because we fixed some great inequities in our Tax Code. But something, if you start to look at the data, why in this last year has there been this massive number of retirees--a million and a half more--than we ever modeled for? Why are so many people basically saying screw this, I am out of the labor market, I am disappearing? At the very time that if we were actually doing policy where you wanted to deal with the debt, you wanted to be able to keep having enough receipts, tax revenues to be able to keep our commitments on Social Security and Medicare, if you wanted to lower the misery in the country, you would be doing policies that would be trying to get young males into the workforce--there is a weird number there where they are not showing up for the workforce--but also folks who are eligible for retirement, early retirement, to stay in the workforce. Those are policies that I think Republicans and Democrats could agree upon, labor and business could agree upon, and yet I sometimes feel really lonely around here talking about these things. But it's the math. You see these numbers. When you are losing a million and a half folks who are choosing to retire early, you do realize the data basically says a large portion of these people in a few years, particularly if inflation continues for the next couple years, will be in poverty. One of the greatest ways to minimize poverty for folks in their retirement years is to have them delay retirement. Something is perverse out there when we have created a society that is incentivized to go take your Social Security at 62 and take the cuts, the lower benefit. I am just really concerned about this. And then you start to take a look at other population dynamics. And this goes back to my earlier statement that I believe in this coming decade, actually the decade we are in and the next one, the fight for smart people will be akin to the pursuit of rare earths or hydrocarbons or those things from the past. You see it, this is happening all around us. There is a collapse in the demographics. This is China, U.S., Europe, and it is for all of us. We are less bad than some of the others, but it is miserable. And it is the great opportunity of saying if we would fix the Tax Code--and, yes, maybe it is time to look at border adjustability, so we stop having the arbitrage, and when we try to sell things there is this massive tax arbitrage of manufactured goods from the United States. But this is our reality. And yet this place will live on being enraged over the next mask mandate or this or that. Those are big deals. But they are not what is going to wipe out this Republic. Being unwilling to deal with the fact of our math. And so think about this. We should be ashamed--and Republicans have part of this, too, as part of our sin. A small part, but part of it. We have been trying to do the math. Take a guess how much money we handed out per family in COVID aid. It is out there. So think of this. I just showed you a bunch of slides saying working men and women have gotten poorer in the last year, but the debt exploded in the last 2 years, and now we are doing the math, saying, do you realize we put out over $76,000 per household in cash, that was COVID cash? Over $76,000. That is our best math at this point. And we have been having to go up and down different budget reports. But do you feel, anyone here in this room or around the country, do you feel you got $76,000 worth of value the last 18 months? But that is what we spent, and that is what we tacked onto my little girl's bonds that she gets to pay for. Maybe the concept of throwing more and more cash and blowing up inflation and destroying the incentive to work and delinking society from the nobility of work--oh, by the way, that work actually makes them much less poor. Now you actually start to see that, over the last couple years, it made more sense not to participate in society. This is what we did. Maybe they weren't thinking, maybe they didn't mean to, but this is what we did. So we delinked--we functionally financed staying home. Then the last little perversity of just from today, you will hear many of the left try to tout that $350 billion bill they just passed here in the House. If you dig through it, it is like, you know, a 5- year plan, government-planned economy. It really is sort of terrifying. But there is a little gem stuck in the left's bill they just passed. Do you realize in there you have the pandemic ending in 2025? It is not based on: Hey, we have antivirals now. Hey, we have vaccines now. Hey, we now have home PCR tests. We have all the things we said we needed. They are here, but instead, we are going to keep the pandemic going--and that is what you all just voted on--until 2025. My argument is, it is about the money. The pandemic declaration has become a conduit to hand out cash, hand out cash to your favorite groups to make corporate America, hospitals, and others addicted to the Democratic Party because they are handing out cash. And now, we just passed a piece of legislation that says the pandemic ends in 2025. I beg someone out there: Please listen. Turn course on the policies. Come up with a unified theory that moves prosperity because economic growth, prosperity, is moral. But almost every act moved by the Democrats this year, almost every initiative from this White House, has made America poorer. It has made America more dangerous. And now, they are passing pieces of legislation to make sure we stay in this sort of dystopian chaos for years more. Take a breath. Look at the data. Look at the misery this place has created over the last year. And seriously, I beg of you, consider having some self-awareness and some reflection and stop it. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, before we begin, I actually want to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert). Honoring the Life of Tristan Krogius

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we all get behind these microphones on occasion and we want to share something. And tonight, I am going to try to stay on a theme. I am going to try to walk through one of my intense frustrations around here that we keep making public policy. Let's be honest. We just passed--the Democrats, I don't think a single Republican voted for it--a $350 billion bill that originally was labeled as America COMPETES Act. But if you look at the math in it and the spending in it, it is functionally, hey, let's give lots of money to our special interests who actually support them politically. So here's the theme. If I came to any Member of Congress, any one of our staff, anyone out there listening in the public and said, What makes people poor? Seriously. What makes our brothers and sisters who are working poor poor? And you get these discussions, Oh, we don't tax rich people enough and transfer their wealth, or we don't do this, or we don't do that. And it turns out, when you actually look at the math, almost none of those things are actually true. It is complicated. So we have been doing a project for almost a year in our office, of trying to understand what is different. So we held a hearing recently, on health disparities. Guess what? There really are health disparities between certain urban minority populations, my Tribal communities in the Southwest. But why? Also, take a look. There is crime, crime differential. When someone steals your stuff or breaks your bones, you're not able to go to work, you're not able to accumulate. You actually start to look at all these things that are societal factors. You open up the border, you are competing against others with similar skill sets, labor sets. And my argument is, over this last 12 months of unified leftist, unified Democrat control of government, we are just crushing people. We are crushing the working poor. We are crushing the middle class. And the data--I am going to prove it. But one of the most interesting things we have been looking at--and we have actually taken some ridicule for fixating on this, but the math is the math. I would typically start these presentations with take a look at the accumulation of U.S. sovereign debt. It is exploding. Twenty-nine years, $12 trillion, and that is based on last year's CBO math. It is Social Security and Medicare, primarily Medicare. But 31 percent of Medicare spending and borrowing is just diabetes. But also, that other project we have been doing of what makes certain populations poor. Well, it turns out our brothers and sisters who are often working poor or just trying to survive, have dramatically higher health problems, and it is primarily diabetes. In rural poverty, in my Tribal poverty, in my urban poverty, look at the diabetic numbers. So wouldn't the most compassionate thing be to not do what the left keeps saying, we are going to build more clinics, help people live with their misery. But how about doing something revolutionary? How about curing, how about investing in curing our brothers and sisters who suffer? And we are working, and it is hard, and it is difficult math. But what would happen if you got a cure to income inequality? Well, then you would have to eventually adjust for crime and open borders and all the other things that we are going to talk about. And we have taken some ridicule saying, well, type 1, type 2 diabetes, you can't--well, it turns out we have been tracking the science. And there was a time we used to have this constant debate here where Democrats would accuse Republicans of not following the science. And we are obviously, particularly with COVID, accusing the Democrats. But does anyone here actually have an alert on their search engines to track the news stories of some of the really amazing stuff happening? So this is a story, functionally, from yesterday, and it is a unique approach. They are functionally doing a CRISPR-altered stem cell. And the beauty of that is, what happens if I can get your body to start producing insulin again? And because we know type 1 diabetes, and part of type 2, is an autoimmune reaction. Your body is killing the cells that produce insulin. And so with that little bit of CRISPR technology, your body doesn't recognize it, and doesn't kill the very cell that is producing the ability to take on your glucose. It has begun. It has actually moved into type 1. So think of this. We just spent $350 billion--well, at least the Democrats are trying to--and something like this, if you had done a version of Operation Warp Speed or call it whatever you want if that is too Trumpian for the left. But the single biggest driver of U.S. debt is diabetes; 33 percent of all healthcare spending; 31 percent of Medicare spending. You would think this place would be almost giddy. Now, maybe it doesn't work maybe, ultimately. But the ability to say, we are going to do something that is noble, compassionate, loving, and cure the misery instead of keeping populations sort of trapped in their misery because they are beholden to one political party's largesse. It is beginning. This is the type of disruption--this is symbolic of the type of disruption that makes the country wealthier, more prosperous, and minimizes misery. And we have been talking about this technology coming for about a year. Why are we not doing more investing in it? So the White House has an initiative. Wonderful, but they need to redesign--and the same thing here in the House--we need to redesign where the resources of primary research, or the incentive to bring a product to market, or the timing it takes to make it through the math of a phase one, phase two, phase three. We do it the wrong way. Just as the Democrats' bill they just passed where it is command and control, it is almost a 5-year plan. The Federal Government will decide who gets a grant, who doesn't get a grant. You now have to come be really nice to the administration and your Member of Congress if you want money for your business. The arrogance of this place. One of the hazards of Members of Congress--it is like that running joke: What are the two times in life you think you know everything? When you are 13 years old, and the day after you get elected to Congress. The debate here often sounds like it is a decade out of date. But think about the board I was just showing. If there really is--and it is now in phase one trial--an ability to cure type 1 and make a dramatic difference in type 2, try to understand what that means for the financials of the country and the world, what that actually means for health and misery. But also, what it potentially means for populations that we talk about constantly, we virtue-signal constantly, but we don't actually do something in raising their living standards, raising their economics, closing income inequality, And instead, we are in a body right now with unified Democrat control where the solution is, send someone a check. Well, sending someone a check doesn't end the misery. Disruptive technology like this is what cures the misery that is what we should be almost evangelizing here. And I know that is hard. So let's talk about some of the other things that make the working class poorer, the working poor substantially poorer. We saw--and I know there have been many Members here who have come and talked about inflation, but I don't think we have understood the misery it ultimately brings. And it is the slow type of misery, because every time we go to the grocery store, that piece of protein you wanted, or that milk, or something else gets a little bit more expensive. Your paycheck may have gone up, but somehow everything you are buying goes up more. And we are going to walk through a couple of boards here, just showing the fact of the matter under Democratic unified control of government, our society has actually gotten poorer, even though we have pumped stunning amounts of money, of cash into the society, and we are going to sort of show that. So understand, we all saw the number at the end of the year, 7 percent inflation. In my home, I am from the Phoenix area, we are approaching 9 percent, a lot of that is driven by housing. Imagine what this index did to homelessness. We are going to see some statistics here of the narcotics and other things that have been coming across the border now that we have sort of an open border policy from the left. And instead, I would like to talk about the economics and the misery such policies have brought and how it all ties together. So let's go back a little more on inflation. If you think about inflation, how many times have you heard our brothers and sisters on the left get behind their microphones and talk about, it is increasing inequality? So I thought that was the Holy Grail here. Close inequality. But yet, their policies keep growing it. We are seeing some numbers here where there is about $3,500 of additional spread of inequality, driven by a single year's worth of policies that drove up inflation. And the solution from the left is well, we are going to send them another check, even though the check is actually what substantially drove creating inflation. Remember, basic economics. Remember your elementary school and your high school economics class. What is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. Real simple. The real world is actually a little more complicated, but that is classic. So you have two things: You can keep jacking up interest rates to squeeze out liquidity of dollars chasing those goods or, or and, or plus, you can do the other side, like we did in 1981. They raised interest rates. But people forget, the first year of President Reagan, even with a Democrat Congress, they adopted tax cuts and policies to make more stuff. If you have lots of dollars out that chasing things, you have got a couple of solutions. You could squeeze the dollars out of the economy to lower inflation, or you can make more stuff, because it is too many dollars chasing not enough goods. Okay. Make more stuff. It is a classic supply-side solution. Make the tax code, the regulatory code, the incentives to make more stuff. Instead, we just passed a $350 billion bill that functionally puts government in charge of grants and control of what they want, instead of the information part of the market, where resources, where the ability to act quickly, we should be incentivizing the animal spirits to go make more stuff as a way to lower this inflation that is crushing people. And it is a much more elegant way because it creates jobs, it creates products. But for some reason, the left is almost maniacal in a Keynesian view of the world saying, well, do lots of stimulus. Madam Speaker, they seem unwilling to even accept the data produced by their side that says they have raised the misery of so many Americans. Understand that the math at the end of the year was pretty simple. Inflation went up, and people's wages went up, but there is a gap. The gap keeps growing, and that gap is the fact you got poorer last year. This is the one that I am still just shocked there is not more discussion about. If you see the percentage of monthly change in real wages--remember, you may get your paycheck. Your paycheck may go up. If your rent, your fuel, your food, everything else in your life went up more--you see how many months people got poorer. If you look at the way we are doing policy here, it is the administration and my Democratic colleagues' willingness to continue to spend money at just stunning levels in ways that the economics say you are going to actually make people poorer. Planned economy hasn't worked particularly well anywhere in the world. You start to see the data of the gap, and we have not tried to present this in a mean way. The fact of the matter is, the Democrat policies--remember, they took over Congress 3 years ago. They now have unified government after the last election. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is growing. Do you remember 2018 and 2019 and the vicious rhetoric that came from our brothers and sisters on the left after we did tax reform? Yet, in modern economic times, it was the greatest success we have had in shrinking income inequality. You are going to see some boards here where food insecurity, it worked. Our brothers and sisters on the lower quartiles--and I always hate that term. The fact of the matter is, they became dramatically less poor. Then when the Democrats take power, they abandon the very things that were working. Their policies, at some point you have to admit to everyone, because we are feeling and seeing it, you have made the rich richer; you have made the poor poorer; you have increased the misery. Madam Speaker, we all know the saying. When something isn't working, stop it. Take a breath. Take a look at what was working. It turns out the ideological calcification that is Congress now is more important to that dogma than what actually works. So, we sort of walk through these. I know this seems like a lot, but we keep trying to make the point over and over that the data is factual. It is not just information by virtue signaling. The data is the data is the data. This is my comment from the quartile. So these are our brothers and sisters. We are calling them the lower 20 percent. Well, how much of their income goes to housing, transportation, food? Now, you notice these numbers are off the chart. That is because they also receive subsidies, earned income tax credits, other things we do to try to make their life less miserable. Somewhere along the way, this body forgot that if you are poor, I mean truly poor, that bottom 20 percent, the majority of your income goes to housing. What did the Democrats accomplish this last year? We blew up the price of rent. There were speeches from a number of us from 1 to 2 years ago, saying you need to create the safety net. You need to create a bottom so the economy snaps back, but be careful. When you create too much liquidity, government spending, you are going to blow up the cost of everything for people. It happened. What is the solution? The left now talks about doing another stimulus bill to make their lives even more miserable. Maybe it is the arrogance of: These folks in the poorer quartiles, they have been indoctrinated. They are going to vote for the left. So just abuse the crap out of them. They are still going to vote for you. The fact of the matter is, if you look at the real data of who votes for the Democrats anymore, it is the urban elite. That is who finances their campaigns. It is no longer the working men and women. They migrated much more to the Republican side. So maybe what I am seeing is politically logical, but economically, it is brutal. The math is the math. At some point behind the math are people who are suffering. Think about this. You just saw on the chart where the lowest couple of quartiles spend most of their money just trying to do housing. Take a look at what we have done to the housing prices. This is mostly rent. You know, when you are in that bottom third, you are a renter. How many people right now who are renting we now are responsible for economic policies, liquidity of cash, where we have blown up the cost of housing, blown up the cost of rent, that we now will have trapped so much of America into being permanent renters for the rest of their lives? They are never going to build that savings account that owning a house is and that became part of being able to retire and is part of the American Dream. The math is the math. You look at African Americans, Latino populations, and the amount that has moved into struggling just to cover the rent, it has blown up dramatically. This just doesn't disappear. You don't wake up tomorrow and say, hey, we decided we are going to do economic policies, regulatory policies, tax policies. So we make a lot more stuff. Yes, the Federal Reserve pulls liquidity out. It fixes inflation. Oh, isn't it neat? All the rents went back down. It doesn't work that way. How long before these populations get their incomes back where they can actually survive, where just the cost of having a place to live isn't consuming almost every dollar of their lives? We don't talk enough about the policies here and the misery they have created. Yet, we have pumped so much cash into the system that we take a look at State and local, and they are sitting on boatloads of cash. There is another really interesting trend line here. How did this happen? We had the speeches here 1 year ago, 1\1/2\ years ago. The world is coming apart. The world is falling apart. Yet, somehow state and local tax receipts actually held up dramatically well. We overshot the mark. Then what did we do? Even though we knew they were doing just fine, the actual fall in receipts, which is the proper term for tax collections, was marginal. What did the Democrat policy do? Let's send them more cash because that is their constituents. I want to walk through some of the other aspects that we believe left policies are making the working poor, the middle class, poorer. Here is a simple concept. I have said it over and over, but you have to understand it is this layering effect. Let's say you are that individual that didn't graduate high school. The value you bring to work is your willingness to work. So you are the person hanging drywall. You are doing labor. You are doing landscaping. Your goal is one day you hope to own the landscaping company. You hope to own the plaster company. What you sell is your labor and your willingness to work. What are the two ways you crush that population economically? We just did the inflation. We saw how much of their income now is going to just surviving. The second thing you do is you make them compete against millions of others with similar skill sets. So there is this great economic argument. If you want to grow American GDP, immigration is a big deal, but it has to be immigration that has a multiplier effect on everything from tax receipts to productivity. You don't import massive poverty. It is uncomfortable to talk about it this way. The fact of the matter is, being a border state, what is happening at our border? You are not bringing folks who grow the economy. The data says actually what you are doing is you are making the working poor poorer. I don't know how often anyone here will talk about our crisis at the border, which is real. Come to Arizona. Go to Texas. The societal impact, when you do it this way, we can get into some of the really interesting economic data saying, hey, when populations leave this country, you have just actually wiped out the ambitious populations because these are people willing to pack up and leave. You actually hurt the departing country. The fact of the matter is, you also hurt the folks here. The numbers at the border are just stunning. I mean, when you start thinking of, during this administration, a couple of million folks, they may be wonderful people. It is not about them. It is the impact of the very people we claim we care about, that we claim we are trying to help. We claim we are trying to close income inequality. We claim we are trying to make the poor less poor. Then we do everything we can to crush them. It is just the economics. I just can't figure out what the left is doing intellectually. They know this number. If it was a decade, 10, 15 years ago, all the literature we keep finding, it was Democrats who were fixated on locking down the border because they knew it hurt the poor and the working poor. They used to accuse Republicans of wanting open borders to push down labor values. Do you remember? It wasn't that long ago. The argument was flipped. There goes my theory that maybe the left truly has abandoned working men and women in this country because they are no longer their defenders. They are almost the defenders of someone who needs a cheap landscaper. The border numbers are real. I mean, when you start seeing the data coming from the administration itself, they make it really hard to find the actual facts. When you see numbers that are 278 percent increases, you start to realize what this is going to mean. There is a great paper. We came here and talked about it a few months ago. It is a decade old. It talks about what happens when you get these waves of illegal crossing, and they get rolled into your economy. It was talking that it would take a decade for that lower quartile, the poor middle class, the working poor, for their incomes to start to come up. It was solely a division of a number of people with similar skill sets attacking the same types of positions and work. It was a Democrat paper. I mean, it was written by folks who made it very clear they were on the left. Isn't it fascinating how quickly the understanding of demographics and population dynamics--what it does to the very people that our friends on that side used to say they cared about? We do lots of virtue signaling here and lots of pretty words. The data is the data is the data. The policies are the policies. The policies are killing the middle class. They are killing the working poor. You start to look at these things, and here is the great irony. Think of this. Last year, the last 2 years, legal visas have collapsed. At the same time, you have these huge runs at our border. Now, this probably requires a much more deep dive on economic multipliers and certain types of skill sets and those things. The fact of the matter is, these populations up here, we know we get an economic multiplier. These populations over here, it is uncomfortable, but it is the math. It becomes a contribution from society to them. We did a presentation about a year ago and talked about if you saw what was happening in the entire industrialized world--remember, the only place in the world right now with positive fertility rates is sub- Saharan Africa. I know this is geeky, but it is important. I know it is not politics by shiny object, which is now what Congress is about. This is important. The Western world is collapsing demographically and fertility-wise. The driver of U.S. sovereign debt is our demographics. We are getting older. Somehow Congress didn't figure out there were baby boomers until the last year or two, and now they still don't really want to talk about it; so for 65 years they just didn't know we were coming. But what happens when you even see data--China's demographics are collapsing. Europe's we know have been collapsing. Even countries like India, we are seeing their fertility rates fall off rather dramatically. The model basically says in the coming two, three decades, it won't be worldwide fights over hydrocarbons like we had functionally in the 1970s or rare earths. Remember how many people would come behind these mikes just a couple years ago, rare earths, we are all going to go to war over rare earths. Turns out now that we know how to do the iron-air battery and all these other things, the rare earth consumption looks like there may be a path around the massive needs. It turns out over the next couple decades it is going to be the battle for smart people, and that is a really interesting thing to think about. So if we do the brilliant thing with unified leftist government, we make sure that legal visas, legal immigration crashes, but we open up our border to bring in more poverty and misery to even our own poor. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. It is just like every policy set has great headlines, great talking points, acting like you are caring, and you are completely avoiding the misery Democrat policies keep bringing to the society. And then there are the things we sort of call second-degree, third- degree effects when you open up the border. Come to my community of Phoenix, see the dramatic increase in homelessness. Does anyone else out there care? I did a ride-along a couple weeks ago with a neighbor who is an officer, and we spent 4 or 5 hours driving around. He has been doing this, like, 28 years, and he's telling me he has never, ever seen--that the homeless population has doubled; the crime, people breaking in and stealing stuff, but they are stealing stuff from other poor people. The violence. And then we start to see the data of my southern border in Arizona, the amount of narcotics. One of the classic--if you want to play economist, the price of drugs that are killing people has crashed. When you see the narcotics fall in price, what does that tell you? There is a hell of a lot of them. So, okay, maybe it is leftist orthodoxy you need an open border, but did they have to flood my neighborhoods with narcotics? Did they have to spike the homelessness around the country, particularly in Phoenix? Did they have to make more people's lives miserable? Because that is what the policies of this administration and the Democrats who control this place have done. I don't think they meant to do it. It was obvious if they thought like an economist instead of virtue signaling for policy. Remember, we make policy now around here by feelings, by what we can say behind these microphones to get someone to send us money, even if it is crap and really hurts people. And you start to see the misery the Democrat policies have put on our streets. And of course their solution, well, we are going to send them a check. Of course, the check will also continue the cycle of inflation, making people poorer. It is just--I almost wish we could have, where there is no television cameras, no mikes, put ourselves in a room with a couple people who own calculators and say: Let's walk through what has worked in the last 25 years and the things that haven't worked. Madam Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I may have a slightly different tone here. I was born in an unwed mother's home in downtown L.A., and so were all my siblings. In my late thirties, I got an email out of nowhere, and it said: Hi, David. I am a friend of your sister's. Here is your information. Here is your birth mother. We had a family discussion. I sent a very carefully worded note, and a couple of weeks later, I got this phone call, this tiny voice crying--and I am crying now also on the phone. And she is saying: I go to mass almost every day. On your birthday, I am terrified. Are you having a good life? How has your world been? And I am crying on the other side, basically saying: Look, I have had a great life. I got adopted by a family that brought me to Arizona. I get to live in the Phoenix area. I have a wonderful brother and sister, who were also born in the unwed mother's home. It became an amazing experience. My mom, who is right here, and this is my birth mom right here, they became best of friends. I have never told this part of the story here, but my birth mom--both of them have now passed away--had an early type of Alzheimer's, a type of dementia. But my mom here had sent her all sorts of photos of me being a child. So when you go into the house that they had there in California, there would be my two 6' tall blonde half sisters and then pictures of me as a baby growing up. In her mind, I was always there. I was always part of the family. The dear Lord does heal. But one of her best friends at the funeral turned to me and said: David, did Mary Lynn ever tell you the story of when we were in the car on the way to Tijuana to go get an abortion? As they got closer and closer to the border, she began to cry. Then they got closer, and she started to hyperventilate. Eventually, she became so crushed with fear and sadness and terror, the girls turned around and went back and talked to her mother. A few months later, I was born at that Holy Family Unwed Mothers Home. Now I am this age, and I have an adopted little girl, who is the third generation adopted in our family. For those of us who passionately care about life, I think it is important we also tell the stories of how grateful some of us are to be alive; the amazing life my little girl is having and how grateful I am to her birth mom for giving us the greatest gift my wife and I have ever had; and understanding that the ultimate definition of love is life. Maybe others out there can have the amazing experience I have had with meeting my birth family and my family and my siblings' birth families. It is just one amazing experience of joy of life. That needs to be what, I think, we focus on. There is good here if we just change our hearts and our minds.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, there are so many things we all want to talk about and share, and sometimes, as Members of Congress, we run in front of microphones and sort of do the shiny, loud object of the day because, let's face it, that gets us retweets and Facebook and those things, but they are often trite. So I have a handful of things I want to walk through, but there is going to be a constant theme here. I am not trying to be mean, but the thing is--and my facts will back me up--that the Democrat policies, if you look at particularly the last 12 months, have made life more miserable for Americans, have made the working class and the poor working class poorer and actually are crushing hope. I want to walk through a couple of economic things. I am blessed to be the senior Republican on the Joint Economic Committee. There is a handful of economists that work on our side, and there is a handful that work for left side. We have been digging and digging and digging, trying to understand the inflation data, the amount of cash chasing goods, and what is happening in productivity. I hope I am wrong, but I am starting to see numbers that look like we are on the cusp of a wage- price spiral. Let's sort of walk through our basic economics. You all remember your high school economics class, particularly those of us who are old enough to have been in high school at the end of the 1970s. Businesses raise prices because their costs are going up. Typically, just like we were doing right now in the new year, people are getting their wage hikes. Most of those wage hikes are nothing more than to keep up with inflation, so you end up with this spike. There was a handful of folks on the Democrat side that were saying to look at the December number; it wasn't spiking as much as the previous months. Wait till you see the January numbers when the wages come in, and then you end up with this world saying now businesses, organizations, government, others, have to keep raising their costs, raising their prices, raising their taxes, others, to keep up because they just had to raise wages, not for our brothers and sisters that are out there working to live better but basically just to be able to purchase the same things. Except at the end of 2021, Americans were poorer. The fact of the matter is, the average American fell about 2.7 to 3 percent poorer because inflation grew faster than their wages did. But there are lots of things in the economic literature--and I know I am geeking out a little bit--that you start to end up in this seesaw effect, what they call a wage-price spiral. Businesses keep having to raise their costs because now they have to raise the wages, and it becomes a very, very ugly circle. A bit of trivia. How many of you here would immediately say to go back to the 1980s, particularly the early 1980s? It was Paul Volcker jacking up interest rates to just extraordinary levels that squeezed out inflation. That is actually only part of the story. If you actually look at the math during that time, there were the Reagan tax cuts, the first round of them. They created a great spike in productivity. Because one of the things inflation is, is I have too much money chasing too few goods, so raising interest rates, making everything more expensive, still doesn't do anything to make sure you are making more goods, more services, to fill up that vacuum to remove that inflationary pressure. You actually even see some of that data after we did tax reform here at the very, very end of 2017, when you saw the spike in productivity. You saw a pretty impressive spike for 2 years of wages and actually falling inflation. Why was that? It is because expensing and other things we did in tax reform, repatriation, getting hundreds of billions of dollars from around the world coming back into the country, actually raised productivity and lowered prices. That is the holy grail. Right now, almost every policy that the administration and, I hate to say, this body is engaging in is counter to that. We are going to walk through a couple of things here, and our argument is really simple. Almost every major policy set being moved forward--and I don't think it is purposeful; I think it is a misunderstanding of the most basic economics--that my Democrat brothers and sisters are doing is actually making life more miserable. I don't think it is purposeful, but it is economics. Let's walk through the facts, just the actual math. I know this is always uncomfortable, but if you actually look at the data that came in, when you look at the expenditures--because I am using this slide. This is actually a 2019 slide, but it is important to set the base. Our brothers and sisters who are in the lowest quartiles--and I hate that term, but it is what we use in economics--dramatically more of their income goes to pay for housing, dramatically more goes to pay for their transportation and food. Those in the upper incomes, that is not where they live. Think about what has gone on in this last year. Most everyone who is in this room, probably most everyone who is watching this, we are the people who have savings. We have retirement accounts. We have 401(k)'s. Life has gotten more expensive for us, but how many of you have a home that has gone up dramatically in value? Think about those lower income quartiles, that working poor, that middle class, that lower middle class. Do they have a home? Are they renters? How much of their cost is their transportation or just trying to provide housing? What we have allowed to happen inflation-wise is just brutalizing them. When you actually start to understand what the policies from this last year have done--and I am going to show a number of these things, showing that the left's policies are actually crushing the poor, the working poor, and the middle class. The difference here, when you see this type of graph, is we are trying to sort of demonstrate that it is both the effects on populations where you are income-wise--if you are in this lower income, how much more the cost of your life is because of inflation. This is almost just a pure demonstration of who benefits and who doesn't benefit. If you are a homeowner, if you are someone with lots of assets and the stock market has been really good to you, you have come out ahead. If you are like most in the middle class and lower, your standard of living has gone down. There is this rule of thumb from the top line. What are the two things you do to make the working poor poorer? I have said this dozens of times behind this microphone. It is inflation, and it is opening up the border. There is this economic theory--and this is actually old literature. It is like 20 years old, and it actually had a number of left groups as part of the authors who basically said if you look at the working poor, a population who probably didn't finish high school, what they sell is their labor, their willingness to work, their willingness to sweat. What happens when you flood your society, functionally, in 1 year, with a couple of million people with similar skill sets? It is just basic math. You functionally have devalued the value of their labor. You have given them the double whammy. You have created inflation, which affects the poor and the middle class more dramatically. You saw from the first chart how much more of their resources go to pay for housing, to pay for transportation, and to pay for food. Now you make them compete against a couple of million people with similar skill sets. These aren't IT jobs. This isn't someone who is at the top of the wage scale and creates a multiplier of productivity in society because they are inventing some new app. This is the person who is hanging drywall, working their hearts out. It is a tough job. Their back is aching at the end of the night. Now they look out and there are a couple of million other people in society with similar skill sets. It is a level of misunderstanding. Some folks will come behind these microphones and pretend they are being compassionate, not understanding the cruelty of inflation and having an open border and how many working poor are getting crushed by this. I want to go a bit further. As you start to look at the inflation level, you have to understand--7 percent was sort of the national number, right? In markets like mine, in the Phoenix area, we were at 9.7 percent inflation in 2021. A lot of that is because I am from a growth area. Lots of people are abandoning California and Illinois and moving into my neighborhood, so much of my inflation is actually housing. We have already heard other people come behind the mikes, even today, and talk about the cost of housing. Well, congratulations. In other parts of the country, it is not 7 percent. In mine, it is 9.7 percent. When we look at the charts and the details, it really, really has hurt the working poor, and they are having trouble finding the most basic accommodations. Then we start to dig in more. The economists have made it very clear that what was allowed to go on in 2021--the economics warns of inflationary inequity. The details are pretty clear. For those who have assets, you are going to do okay. If you are part of half of America who doesn't have those few thousand dollars in the bank or owns a house or has other assets, you have become poorer. The policies are making you poorer. I know this is uncomfortable, but you can't keep campaigning and doing politics and saying, ``We care about the middle class, and we care about the working poor,'' and then keep adopting policies that make them poorer. At some point, the math always wins. Not the virtue signaling, not the rhetoric, it is the math. We are making half of our country poorer. One of the other projects we are working on in the Joint Economic Committee, and a couple of us on the Ways and Means Committee, is also trying to understand what other attributes there are. I can keep coming to the microphone and talking about the open border, and we have an administration that doesn't seem to give a darn because it is political. Their base has no trouble with a couple of million undocumented folks coming into the country. Inflation is really, really ugly because the math is brutal. Do you have any sense how high interest rates have to go to squeeze out this inflation? I think there is this fantasy that four marginal rate increases this year somehow are going to tap down inflation. I will make you a crazy--actually, it is not crazy; it is based on math. At the final quarter of this year, you may be seeing 10 percent inflation. I hope I am wrong. But I was in front of this mike a year ago saying I think we will be close to 7, and I actually underestimated it. Going back to my opening comments, I really, really, really see in the numbers that we are on the cusp of a wage-price spiral, and four marginal quarter-point increases in interest rates ain't going to cut it unless Congress dramatically starts to think about policies that spike productivity. Except you have a left that now has an article of faith that tax reform, that expensing, these things we did in the tax code to bring hundreds of billions of dollars back into the country to get organizations to invest in plants and equipment to make workers more productive so they could be paid more--well, we can't do that. Except even the liberal economists agree it worked. It turns out, you need to be doing things like that. The left's Build Back Better social spending bill, because it delinks money, transfer payments from work, every dataset basically says it will continue to spike inflation. At the end of 10 years--I came here with the paper. It makes it very clear. At the end of 10 years, the working poor are poorer because of the way the left has designed these transfer payments without an expectation of participation in society and work. I thought we learned this 25 years ago, but somehow math is heresy. So let's go. What are some of the other attributes that make our brothers and sisters in that lower middle class, working poor, in many of our neighborhoods, what else makes them poor? We have touched on inflation. We have touched on flooding society with millions of people with similar skill sets. When was the last time we had someone remind us about the concentration of crime? For most of the Members in this body, we don't live in neighborhoods that are going to be subject to crime. How many Members here live behind a gate? How many Members here have security? I did a ride-along for 4 hours on Monday through north central Phoenix in neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood. The officer I rode with had almost 28 years on the city of Phoenix police force, and the most disadvantaged neighborhoods had the most crime. Okay. There is an assault here. You see the person in that apartment, he is a drug dealer. You are realizing, it is the folks living in poverty who are in the core of the crime. And then the left takes a position of basically having verbal violence toward law enforcement. But we know the data says, if you look at the concentrations of poverty, one of the attributes that makes someone poor is when someone comes and steals their stuff. You are trying to work; someone steals your tools. You are trying to survive; someone breaks into your car or steals your automobile. It is another attribute that once again the left's policies are this constant economic violence on the poor. And then you start to go on another thing we are working on. This one is much more complex, but it is starting to prove the theory is true. How many of you have ever heard the discussion about health disparities? Urban poor, my Native American populations, even rural poor, there are health disparities, and it is absolutely true. Our brothers and sisters with renal failure, diabetes, these things, who are concentrated, we can almost draw data circles around them and say, look at the income inequality of this neighborhood to a neighborhood that might be just down the street. We have been trying to understand what the attributes are. Oddly enough, some of the attributes aren't race. They are health. They are crime. They are education. But the one that no one here has focused on is actually health. If you ever get a chance--and this is for anyone who is listening-- try to find the data of those who are suffering type 2 diabetes and the concentration. Go find a heat map. It becomes a really interesting discussion because what I am making as my fourth attribute is our brothers and sisters who are sicker. So the left's attitude is, well, it is good politics, we will just put up a bunch more clinics. We will help them manage their diabetes. Okay. That is an honorable thing. Wouldn't it be much more compassionate to cure, to disrupt? So we do know, because it came out a year ago, but it is as if no one actually read it. We actually have the paper that was put together, a working paper series from the Congressional Budget Office. It was functionally some of the data within the Democrats' H.R. 3. If you actually dig through the numbers within their working paper, it makes it clear that the Democrats--it is great politics--hey, we are going to lower drug prices. But the way they go about doing it a decade from now, so many cures don't come. And as the paper talks about, it is the very cures for things like potentially diabetes and other ailments that are concentrated in our poor population. So it is functionally the left's policy on something like H.R. 3-- because if you think about their pricing mechanism where if a drug costs more than this amount of money, you can't have it. It is once again policy that says, we are going to find a way for you to live with your misery, but we are going to make living with your misery a little cheaper. Then I think the thing that is loving and more compassionate is we are going to find a way to cure it. It really is a different mindset, and that isn't Republican or Democrat. It is just compassion. But it may not be great politics because the fact of the matter is, if you look at the mechanics within H.R. 3, the Democrats actually make Big Pharma more profitable and bigger and more powerful, and they wipe out the disrupters, the small biologics, the small pharma that is actual chewing away their book of business because they are curing the disease whereas Big Pharma over here is just maintaining it. It is the classic economic irony of this place acts like a protection racket. We give great speeches about how we are going to do this, and then--wink, wink, nod, nod--what actually is happening is you are locking in someone's oligopoly. Once again, if you go through the paper, it makes it really clear that the first couple of years there is not much difference because it is what is already in the disruptive pharmaceutical pipeline. And we have done presentations here of 100 new are-under-research and only a few actually succeed. But in about 5 or 6 years you start to see a collapse of those cures. Welcome to Democrat policy once again. We have come to the floor multiple times with H.R. 3. We have made a number of people very angry by referring to it as the Big Pharma protection act. But the math is the math. And now you still have additional CBO studies that make it clear we are telling the truth. It is what it is. We have actually made proposals to our brothers and sisters on the left saying, we both are enraged at the price of pharmaceuticals. Believe it or not there are other ways to get there, and one of the most magical things we could do for society are also some of the kickers to make sure there are capital stacks and these other things that are a little geeky, but ways that that investment goes into the cures. So when you have things like a single-shot cure for hemophilia--I did this presentation back in December. We have a proof of concept of a cure for type 1 diabetes. Starting out, these are going to be really expensive, they are going to be really difficult until we functionally turn it into a biofoundry, and you build the capital stack, the Tax Code, the incentives to do lots of that. But I can show you in chart after chart, it saves society, it saves taxpayers a fortune in the future. Remember, last year's CBO math said in 29 years we are $112 trillion in debt in publicly borrowed money in today's dollars. So that is inflation-adjusted dollars. And we know that number is going to spike once we get the math from this last fiscal year plugged in there. About 75 percent of that spending is just Medicare, that debt is Medicare. The other 25 percent is Social Security. The most powerful thing you can do for U.S. sovereign debt is disrupt the price of healthcare, and our argument is, the greatest elegance is actually doing it by making people healthier. There is one other thing I want to throw in my frustration of Democrat policy. My expertise is more Arizona and not the rest of the country. We have seen the debate around here, lots of flowery words, and almost no detail of the reality of what is underlying the piece of legislation. Our friends on the left will come behind the microphones and say it is a Voting Rights Act. Okay. How is giving a politician six to one--so you give me $200, and the Treasury is going to multiply it by six times--defending democracy? Or is that, once again, the left being so much smarter than Republicans are on how to try to stay in power? How about some of the other things that are in the Democrats' H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, their Federal election bill? My theory is a little different than other folks. It is just a blatant power grab. It is not a power grab for the Federal Government, which it is that, but it is much more than that. It is a power grab by a party that basically is trying to design the election code to fit their fund-raising model, their campaign model. It does other things. Like down here, my State for functionally 18 years has had voter ID laws. Every dataset out there says you can't find a differential of populations not being able to vote. Matter of fact, I think in my State some of the underlying data is African- American females have the highest participation. It is actually White males, particularly White rural males that have some of the lowest participation and some of my Native Americans. But that doesn't meet the folklore that we get from our brothers and sisters on the left. Think about this--and this is the circle I want folks who are paying attention to get their heads around--how it works. So the Democrats push a voting rights bill, but it is really about voting mechanics. And what they do is they say, Hey, we are going to have same-day, automatic registration, and then we are going to legalize, industrialize ballot harvesting, and then at the same time we are going to do this they also are allowed to have, if you give them money, they get six to one. So why would you do that? Well, first off, as in California, the Democrats have built a huge infrastructure. If you run for Congress, you actually take a substantial portion of your campaign money and hire firms that go knock on doors and harvest ballots. It is now a campaign mechanic. Well, what happens if you hire lots of people to go walk through that massive apartment building or this and that and knock on the door and say, Hey, I will register you right here, let's do your ballot. That is functionally what they are doing in this legislation. And the beauty of it, it will ultimately be taxpayers who will be financing it because the left, to their credit, has spent about the last 15, 20 years building an online contribution system. And here is the kicker. That online contribution system has trained contributors to the left, contributors to Democrats who say, don't give one person this much money, give 10 people this much. And it is as if it has always been laid out the same, and--wink, wink, nod, nod--one day we are going to set up a public funding system so your $25 contribution or $200 contribution gets multiplied six times. You have got to give the left, the Democrats credit for their, just, audacity. And then to call it a civil rights voting bill when, when you break through its mechanics, it is about power, it is about power and control. That is what this is. The other beauty is handing the bureaucracy here in Washington, D.C., the functionality of saying they can tell my State of Arizona what is allowed and what isn't allowed. We have a family saying that goes, money, power, vanity, but most of the time it is about the money. In this case, I have got to give the left credit. They hit all three in the same piece of legislation. It becomes about the money, it becomes about them keeping the power, but reality has almost nothing to do with fairness. It is about the fear that the public understands how much of the left's policies have been crappy to them, their families, this country. The mechanism they are going to try to keep in power is to functionally have us finance their elections and allow them to industrialize the very bad acts that so many of us worry about. Madam Speaker, I think I feel a little better getting some of that out of my system. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, it is always impressive to hear Whip Clyburn speak. Madam Speaker, I am going to try something. We talked about this over our Christmas break, that the first floor speech should be one that would be a bit more positive. As we started to work through the story, we wanted to tell and show some of the good things happening in the country, I came to a conclusion that I am going to have to, on a number of these, walk through how I believe the left's policies--maybe not intentionally--but are actually really causing harm to things that are really good for America, good for the world, good for everyone here. So one of the things I am going to do is sort of walk through some really neat technologies and things that accomplish much of the good we want, and then sort of talk through a little bit of the policies that are being adopted here or promoted here that were actually screwed up. Just before the Christmas break, we did a floor presentation because there was an article out that there substantially had been a cure--it was only one individual--but it was a proof-of-concept cure for type 1 diabetes. They basically took a stem cell, turned it into an islet cell, reinjected the islet--islet cells produce insulin--and it worked. Obviously, we have all had our hearts broken over the years when we think there is a medical breakthrough, but this one has been being worked on for a decade. I found another article, another research team, which actually took blood and then, using some hormones, took those blood cells and drove them back to functionally being a T cell, and then took the T cell being an islet cell--an insulin-producing cell. Why is this important? That first article we talked about, saying this is a miracle, we now know how to cure type 1 diabetes. The problem was that one was going to require anti-rejection drugs. This methodology doesn't. You can cure type 1 diabetes and the individual because you did it from their blood. This is wonderful. My reason for starting with this is if you dig through the paper and some of the comments and some of the smart people that fixate on this, they start to say this is also a path for many of our brothers and sisters who suffer from type 2 diabetes. Why do we care so much about ultimately curing type 2 diabetes? First off, this is actually a separation. I think it is more because no one has really presented this to my brothers and sisters on the left. We had the discussion in the Ways and Means Committee about how to help populations, the Tribal populations. Many Members here, they have urban minority populations that have overwhelmingly suffered with diabetes. There becomes this conversation that we are going to build more medical clinics. When you head in that direction, what you are basically selling is that you are going to help Americans live with their misery. What I am trying to drill into this place is let's move to cures because the cure is the most honorable, loving, caring, and also the most effective thing we can do. Remember--it is going to be in my last couple boards--in about 29 years, the CBO says we are going to have $112 trillion of borrowed money, and that was on last year's calculation, in current dollars publicly borrowed, $112 trillion of borrowing. About 75 percent of that borrowing was just the shortfall in Medicare. We know 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes. Cure diabetes and type 2--it is complex. You have to be willing to actually change incentives on what we eat, what we grow, what is produced in food, how we deliver nutritional support. Now that we actually have a way--or, it looks like we are going to have a way to help our brothers and sisters deal with their autoimmune rejection and go back to producing insulin again. It turns out, if it is true, that that path could be one of the most effective things ever in actually U.S. sovereign debt but also ending misery. We have a small problem, and we are going to get to that. I am going to show you as we walk through this where Democrat policies will actually stillborn many of these technologies that end this suffering and also have these amazing impacts of making people's lives better, healthier, and actually having a real effect on this crazy amount of borrowing. My calculation from last month is we are actually borrowing about $47,000 every second. As the next decade comes, that number goes up dramatically. If you care about people's retirement security, my little girl's economic future, that should be the fixation here. You can take it on by doing good things. It is not cutting and slashing programs. It is dealing with the drivers of that debt. It turns out healthcare costs are the primary driver of that debt. I did this slide just because, A, I thought it was cute, but it also helps us sort of think where we are technology-wise. Yes, that is a group of kittens in a Starlink dish because it was warm, and everybody likes pictures of kittens. More to the point, today I believe there was another Falcon 9 rocket sent up to space to distribute a bunch more of these low Earth-orbiting WiFi satellites--broadband satellites. If you take a step backward and look at the budget that the Democrats promulgated for broadband and then take a realization--hey, all of North America actually has broadband. The difference is it is not a wire; it is a satellite dish. Yes, the kittens are cute. So my Tribal communities in Arizona that may be in the middle of nowhere, you know, a chapter house up in the Navajo reservation, they have broadband. They have been waiting for that broadband for decades, and this place keeps promising that we are going to run a piece of fiber, a piece of wire out there. Forgive my language, screw that. Put up the satellite dish--the small satellite dishes that are just a little larger than some of the big dinner plates. They have broadband. It would cost a fraction of what we are spending. That would be actually having this place read about technology, encouraging our staff to pay attention to what is happening in the scientific world instead of this place sounding like we are debating from the 1990s. How much of what goes behind these microphones is functioning decades out of date, rhetorically, technology-wise? It is just very, very frustrating. So one of my personal fixations--and we are going to talk about things like the Democrats' H.R. 3 and their approach to healthcare. There is a revolution happening, and it is called personalized medicine. We are about to--not about to. It has happened. I beg people to sort of think about this conceptionally. Disease is about to become a software program. Stop and think about that. What we have learned on stem cells, messenger RNA, and some of the derivatives of messenger RNA, the fact of the matter is the cancer you have, the heart disease you have, the virus you have, even now the bacteria you may have in your bloodstream, by using the new technology, we are turning cures, but cures are functionally almost a software problem. We code it; we understand the DNA; we produce a cure. Yet, the vision of the legislation where the left says, well, we are going to control pharmaceutical prices, crushes the very innovation that is about to cure people. It turns out those cures are the thing that crashes the price of healthcare because 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions, chronic diseases, chronic ailments are the majority of our healthcare spending. What the left has proposed is great politics. It is brilliant politics. Hey, we are going to go and functionally nationalize the pricing mechanisms by referring to Europe, and that is how we are going to price drugs. Yes, the economists who do pharmaceutical research say all these new innovative drugs are going to disappear, and we basically make Big Pharma bigger. What you have done is you have crushed the capital for the innovative cures, and you take those that are the maintenance drugs, the things that maintain our misery, and you incentivize them just to make tweaks to maybe make them a little better and extend their patents. That is actually the outcome of the left's approach on healthcare. I don't think it is done maliciously. I think it is just one of those occasions that you are going to see multiple times on these boards. Good intentions aren't necessarily good outcome. Virtue signaling doesn't mean that it worked. It just means that the left gets judged on good intentions, not on the outcomes. Even in the new papers that are out in the last month or two talking about CAR-T, which is a derivative of functionally messenger RNA being used on heart disease--remember, heart disease is the number one killer as we get through this pandemic time. What happens if that back-to-healthcare disease is substantially a software problem? We actually have a way to have an incredible impact on the number one killer in our Nation. This is a wonderful thing. This is a really good thing. This does not happen quickly under the left's H.R. 3 mechanisms. They will stillborn much of this technology, the investment in it, and the ability to bring it to market. If the left and the right, if we actually give a darn, what we should be looking at here are the things that are disruptive that cure and what we do to get these technologies to our brothers and sisters as fast as possible. If it is true--and there now has been multiple research papers on this, and they are trying to now commercialize it, the ability for this to deal with the proteins that cause some of the heart damage, allowing the heart to heal, that it is really incredibly effective. This is wonderful because we did not have this a year ago, even conceptually, and it is here. What happens if I come to you and say: Well, we have just learned how to do editing of small snippets of genetic code. We can end sickle cell anemia. This is working. It is back to my constant of trying to pitch this concept of cure the disease, end the misery, don't do what is the rhetorical method around this place, saying it is great politics for me to offer more healthcare clinics because that way it looks like I just did something, and it helps my reelection. Yes, getting the actual cure to market might take a little bit longer. Do you remember at the beginning of the pandemic when we talked about getting a vaccine and this concept where we would get a vaccine in less than a year? The debates we were having here were that, oh, that is pie in the sky, that is a fantasy, but it happened. It took a bunch of money. It took unleashing a lot of resources and freaky smart people and pushing the bureaucracy to become more efficient. But it happened. Madam Speaker, could you imagine if we had that same type of passion to cure diseases? We know how to cure now sickle cell anemia. How do we get this to our brothers and sisters who are suffering instead of trying to come up with another way to just do the maintenance? My argument behind this microphone right now is that these are wonderful things that are happening. How do we keep the Democrats', the left's, policies from destroying this progress? This is a little board that basically talks about the Democrats' H.R. 3--wonderful rhetoric. Every voter, right and left, Republican and Democrat, is frustrated with pharmaceutical prices. Okay, but do they understand that the mechanism being proposed by the left--basically, the economists tell us that there are dozens and dozens of cures that are real expensive. Remember, many of these cures take billions and billions and billions of dollars of research just to get them to market, and a substantial number of them, a majority, fail. A lot of those costs are our fault. The bureaucratic mechanisms--and a couple of us have ideas on how to streamline that process and reduce that cost to get these revolutionary pharmaceuticals that cure to market. But this is really important. There is one other thing on this board that needs to be understood. The left's pharmaceutical pricing proposal does something called reference pricing. They reach over to Europe, take a handful of countries there that actually have what they--think of it as a formula that says quality life years. So if this drug costs more than a certain amount of money for an additional quality life year, they don't buy it. There are countries over there that have pricing like I think in Great Britain was equivalent to 38,000 USD, that if the drug costs more than that, you can't get it. That will reduce drug prices. It will also kill a whole bunch of people, and it will end the resources for the cures that come in the future. There are other ways to get there without crushing small pharma. That is basically the way that you make Big Pharma less big because you cure the very disease that the book of business over here makes money on by maintaining. This isn't hard economics. It is just math. And I accept this place is a math-free zone, but the math is the math. There are good things happening. We just have to stop much of the Democrats' policies, which are crushing these opportunities because, look, it is great politics. The rhetoric is great politics. It is crappy economics. I want to give you another simple example, Madam Speaker, and this one is more maybe closer to home, being from Arizona. A couple weeks ago, a big rig tractor-trailer--I believe it was on I-10 in Arizona-- drove a fairly substantial distance completely autonomously. No driver at all, completely autonomously. Well, think about that. Let's take a step. Didn't we hear President Biden--what was it, a few weeks ago?--talk about the supply chain: We don't have enough truck drivers. We are going to fix this. We are going to make it so goods can make it to the warehouses where they can be value added, the manufacturing, the store shelves. This was part of it because the United States, one of our greatest difficulties is our demographics. The reality is we are getting much older very fast. I mean, what is it? The mean truck driver is somewhere in the mid-fifties. This is part of the solution. Okay. This is wonderful. How much of this place is really fixated on the combination of resources, but it is also the regulatory, the litigation, and the liability standards to make this happen so it helps solve the transportation of goods here in the country? It is wonderful, except one small problem. The Democrats, in their infrastructure bill, slipped in a wonderful little section. Because, remember, this is a supply chain. So the container comes off the ship, goes to the stack, goes to the truck, the truck we just saw we now have the autonomous technology that is starting to work. So what did the Democrats slip into their infrastructure bill? Making it so you can't automate the port. So they, once again, sold out to the union because, well, that is who writes them checks. But you can't have it both ways. You can't have a President get behind the microphone and say: I am working on this; I am going to help solve the supply chain problem, wink, wink, nod, nod. I am going to hide it in the infrastructure legislation where the vast majority of the money did not go to actually infrastructure, and then put in things in there saying: But we are going to also make sure you can't automate the ports. This is special interest legislation because Congress has become a protection racket. You are this union. You come in. You have enough friends here. They will actually do something that protects that book of business against what was good for the entire country. So all of this technology that is about to help us deal with our worker shortage, our supply chain shortage, actually gets stymied because the left basically says the union is more important than the rest of the country. Let's make sure you make it so we can't make our ports more efficient. That is a classic example of good things were happening. And the technology isn't Republican or Democrat, but you have to make it so it comes together. The left constantly selling out to their special interests basically crushes the very things that create the productivity that we desperately need for the future of this country because, remember, growth is moral. Growth makes the poor a lot less poor. And then to do these backdoor little deals that actually crush the efficiencies and the productivity that make the society wealthier, it is a wink, wink, nod, nod. It may be great politics, but it is really crappy economics. So let's actually talk about another thing that is happening. How many speeches have we been giving about global warming here? A lot of our brothers and sisters care passionately about this. And then on the other side of the very beginning of the Biden administration with the help of many of my Democrat colleagues here, they basically trumped down on permitting, regulations, accessibility, pipelines, those things for natural gas, even though we know over the previous decade and a half natural gas was the substantial, by far, driver of the reduction of North America's greenhouse gases because it burned so much more efficiently. Because accessibility had become so available, the price of natural gas had come down so much that facility after facility that were generating electricity had switched to natural gas away from coal. So what did the Democrats do this last year? They made natural gas substantially more expensive. Well, what did they think was going to happen? Congratulations to my brothers and sisters on the left, which I believe they have increased coal usage by 23 percent last year over where the Trump administration was, which was accused of being too friendly to coal by the environmental left had, because of the productivity and accessibility to natural gas, natural gas prices fell, and use of coal went down dramatically. The left comes in and starts to do all sorts of regulations, permitting, restrictions, those things for natural gas, and natural gas prices go up. Those facilities converted back to coal. Congratulations. Twenty-three percent more coal got burnt. It is just, once again, a simple example of if you don't do basic math. It is great rhetoric: come behind the microphones, tell us about how much you care about the environment, and then screw up the economics so much that this Nation actually over the next few years, greenhouse gas-wise, is about to get dirtier. You have seen my slides I have brought to the floor before on how much of our baseload nuclear is about to come off line. There will be more baseload nuclear about to come off line than every bit of photovoltaic that has been put into this entire Nation. It is math. It is not hard. But we don't seem to reward facts around here. What we reward is brilliant virtue signaling, pretty words, and not the final outcome. Having had a conversation with a couple of my friends who are good people--they are on the left. They care passionately about greenhouse gases. I asked them about this natural gas. Why do you go so anti-natural gas even though it was responsible for the vast majority of the reduction of U.S. greenhouse gases? Well, I don't like methane. Okay, that is fair. May I suggest actually purchasing a scientific journal subscription or two and read because a couple of weeks ago some of these articles came out about a dramatically, dramatically less expensive way to capture methane? It is functionally clay with a slight alteration. I think it is called copper oxide, added. It is functionally kitty litter. Do you see a theme, Madam Speaker, kitties in the Starlink satellite? This is functionally an MIT paper saying: Hey, we found a really inexpensive way to capture the methane. So if you are worried about wellhead bleed-off or interconnection bleed-off or these things, apparently the model even works for ambient capture. So instead of going anti-natural gas and making everyone's life more miserable and more expensive and then pushing manufacturers of ions, electric generation, back to coal, get your head right. Learn the economics and say: There is technology out there that we can capture the thing you say you are worried about very inexpensively, put your resources, put the regulatory push behind a solution. It is a little harder to explain in front of your environmentalist townhall, but they are facts. There are wonderful things happening. There are solutions, and solutions that don't bankrupt the American people. It just requires this place stop sounding like it is the 1990s policywise. Understand, this is one of my biggest frustrations around here. We need a moment of honesty. The policies pushed by the administration and my brothers and sisters on the left here have made America poorer. They have made the working men and women poor and the working poor poorer. Here is the chart. The facts are the facts are the facts are the facts. Wages have gone up. They were also going up dramatically in 2018, 2019, and in the very beginning of 2020 with no inflation. Our problem right now is the classic problem between sort of the Keynesian, stimulus, consumption side of economics and those of us who are more on the supply side where you make more product and, by doing that, you raise wages because you become more efficient. You incentivize productivity, and that productivity makes it so you can pay people more. We did just the opposite: push cash after cash after cash in society, push up inflation, and Americans got poorer. You saw the inflation data the last couple days, Madam Speaker. So all the nice speeches around here about Republicans did this, Republicans did that, moment of clarity, honesty--and it is math--Democrat policies made the working poor poorer this last year. And it is math. What are the two things you do most that create the most economic violence to the working poor? I really wish I had someone here who was willing to answer that. It is real simple: Open up the border so you create a flood of individuals who have similar skill sets. My drywaller or my gardener or whoever these people are, they sell their labors. They sell their willingness to work their hearts out. When you flood the market with people with similar skill sets, then you crush their wages and then, at the same time, create inflation on top of that. From an economic standpoint, if you want to commit economic violence on the poor, do exactly what the left is doing right now: open up the borders and incentivize inflation. A tough part with both of these is that it is not a switch you can just turn off. The labor availability for those who sell their labor, they sell it because they didn't graduate high school and didn't have some of the benefits many of us did, but their wages were going up dramatically in 2018, 2019. In the beginning of 2020, a new regime comes in, the border is opened up, we are in the middle of a pandemic, there are lots of other things going on, and there are numbers out there that are really difficult because you have to adjust for the amount of cash that was pushed into society. But when you start to try to normalize that, I think when we look back there is going to be an understanding of just how brutal the policies of opening up the border and inflation were to the very people we talk about and claim we care about. My fear is that brutality economically looks like it is going to be with us for about a decade. It may take 10 years to squeeze out what we have done in our population dynamics and inflation. I hope this place is willing--and when I talk to some of my Democrat colleagues and I walk them through the numbers, they just stare at me angrily and say, well, we are going to just send them more money, not understanding that just sets off the cycle even more. I threw this one in because I think this is actually something, we should all just be hopeful. We now have, actually, an antiviral in the pandemic. We have the Pfizer pill. I believe Merck has one, but the Pfizer is remarkably effective. So if you have a home COVID test and can actually take an antiviral pill at home--you've got to take a number of them--should you still have a declaration of a pandemic? And my reason is, go back to the discussions we had when this began, when the pandemic was declared. This has been a miserable thing for everyone to go through. But it was always we are doing this because our emergency rooms are going to be full. We won't have enough ventilators. We don't have therapeutics. Well, now we have therapeutics where you can take it at home. You can identify the virus at home. Is it time for us to actually step in and say, this is something we are going to live with? We now have the tools to take care of it. If you happen to be in one of--where you have a compromised immune system, you have other sorts of co-morbidities--which I still hate that word-- yes, there are different protocols. For the vast majority of our Nation, this is what we had said a couple of years ago; when we get this, we don't need to have a declaration of a pandemic because you can test at home and take a pill at home--well, a number of pills--and it is an antiviral that is incredibly effective. Is it time we start having the conversation that the declaration of a pandemic has outlived its welcome, and we start now figuring out we have methods to help our brothers and sisters who are suffering take care of themselves and do it from home? They don't have to be in the urgent care centers. They don't have to be in our emergency rooms, our hospitals. This is hopeful, and it is here. Now, of course, you already saw an earlier debate, I believe, between our leaders discussing about the Biden administration's failure to properly pre-order and those things. I will let others who specialize in this have that debate. But that should be considered hopeful, and it is time, and we are already starting to see some movement with our brothers and sisters on the left starting to understand that this is something that we are going to live with. All right. This one is uncomfortable, but it is math. The University of Chicago, four Ph.D. economists were looking at parts of the Build Back Better, the social entitlement spending bill, and the childcare tax credit. And it turns out, because the left insists on de-linking the money from getting job training, from learning skills, from actually pursuing work, from taking work, economists basically say, once again, the left's great rhetoric of how they are going to help working men and women who have children, actually, the data says they are going to make them poorer. So what we have proposed over and over and over to the left is: Okay, if you intend to do this, could we put in a component that says we need you to gain skills? We want you to be part of the economy. We want you to be part of society. We would like you to work. And the reaction--we actually had testimony in the Joint Economic Committee from a leftist Democrat witness who basically said, why should people have to work? Even a couple of the Democrats on the dais, you know, their jaws are dropping saying, well, that is your witness. But then the economists turn to you and say, the way you are designing your legislation you are hurting working poor people. You have already done it with opening the border. You have already done it with inflation. Now you are going to make sure it sticks. These are just crappy economics. And they know better. It is just the politics of this craziness right now. So let's actually go on to something else that I am hoping will make some sense. I did this board specifically for someone who will probably never see this moment of the speech. So, last week, we sent out, you know, a postcard saying it is about to become a new year. Tell us what issues you care about. And someone on the left stuck one in my mailbox, and the first thing said, rich people need to pay more. Okay. It would have been nice if this individual had actually had the fortitude to actually give me their name or phone number so I could talk to them and walk them through the numbers. Because you hear the left's folklore all the time. Well, the tax reform, it was for rich people. No, it wasn't. Once again, the data makes it very clear, the wealthy, after tax reform, are paying a higher percentage of the Federal income tax. Understand, one more time. The tax code got more progressive after tax reform. So the math is the truth. How many times do you hear it? I remember last year, I did a presentation, Speaker Pelosi came in on it, and then Speaker Pelosi talks in the mike and says, 82 percent of the benefits went to the rich people. And even the Democrats who were on Ways and Means, their jaws are dropping, and they are looking down at the floor. But this place makes math up. It makes crap up because we are about virtue signaling, not the facts. The tax code we are under today is more progressive. The rich pay a higher percentage of the Federal income tax burden than before tax reform. But back to the rhetoric and that postcard that was in my mailbox saying rich people need to pay more taxes. Okay. Maybe the left should stop trying to subsidize them. In the left's Build Back Better, their social entitlement spending plan, the amount of tax cuts that are functionally designed into that, tax credits, money transfer--you do understand, two-thirds of millionaires get a tax cut under the Democrats Build Back Better. It is, once again, the rhetoric versus the math; the virtue signaling versus owning a calculator. The analysis says the Democrats are, once again--talk a great game. The wealthy need to pay their fair share. And then they turn around and do legislation that actually subsidizes the rich. A few months ago, we did a presentation here and said, if society, if government really needs another trillion dollars--okay, if that is the argument coming from the left, stop subsidizing the rich. We came here with a series of boards that showed almost $1.4 trillion over 10 years--and I am talking the really rich, you know, the subsidies that are built in. And you could just hear--what is the colloquialism--crickets. Because if you actually look at the wealthiest ZIP codes in the Nation, they are actually represented by people on the left. So just a couple more of these to sort of help walk us through. We all know the Democrats' passion for State and local tax deductions, and it goes up and down in their negotiations. But once again--and to Bernie Sanders' credit, he actually told the truth on this. It is a tax cut for the really, really, really rich, when the vast majority of the money goes to people making $1 million or more. But how many times have we read in the political press that a number of our Democrat brothers and sisters here won't let the legislation become law unless they get these tax cuts for their rich taxpayers? Okay. Then stop sticking a postcard in my mailbox without your name on it saying tax the rich more, and being part of, obviously, a political party that wants to either subsidize the rich, hand them tax credits, or hand them money. You can't--it is just fascinating. We work in a place that the words don't match the facts. And this was one of my favorite things. In Ways and Means, when we were grinding through the Democrats' Build Back Better bill, we actually did some simple math. Once again, we actually tried to read part of it. So you make $800,000 a year. Your family makes $800,000 a year. Built into that legislation was $118,000 of tax credits for a family making $800,000 a year. Buy the right Tesla; buy the battery wall; buy the right solar panels. That is their version of taxing the rich, getting the wealthy to pay their fair share? Or is it their version of, hey, we are going to subsidize the people that finance our campaigns. And, oh, by the way, these are their constituents. So back once again, what is the greatest threat to our Republic? Besides all the craziness here and the shiny objects and the debate of the day that will change tomorrow, the sense of indignation, people will walk behind these microphones--I am going to argue it is the next two boards. This year, 77 percent of all the spending is mandatory. It is functionally a formula. It is Social Security. It is Medicare. Ten percent is defense, 13 percent is everything else. When you and I go home, and if I am in front of a Republican audience, it is often, oh, you have got to get rid of waste and fraud. You have got to get rid of foreign aid. In front of a leftist audience, well, it is defense. But, no, it is demographics. The vast majority of this here is functionally demographics. Demographics, getting old, is not Republican or Democrat. But yet, even last night, you saw more legislation being pushed by the Democrats that expands these mandatory portions, and this is based on a CBO report from a year ago. But functioning 29 years, you have $112 trillion of publicly borrowed money, so that is not borrowing from trust funds, and it is on today's dollars. This isn't inflated dollars in the future. That is like 205 percent of projected GDP. The majority of it is the shortfalls in Medicare, then Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance. If you have made a commitment, you are an elected official here and you made a commitment that you are going to protect Social Security; you are going to protect Medicare; you are going to protect retirement security; start telling the truth about the math. And understand, those previous slides I showed, that there is a miracle of wonderful things that are going to cure misery, cure diseases. Why isn't that the fixation here, that we are going to actually fix the things that create this incredible amount of debt? Instead, we have a body that doesn't do math, and is rewarded for absolutely absurd virtue signaling. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The speed of debt accumulation, the unwillingness to deal with complex problems with complex solutions--because that is reality--is closing fast on us. And the number of Members who are like you, who are willing to come to the floor and say very difficult things that are truthful, they are becoming rare. I thank the gentleman for the colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Before I leave you, I am still hopeful. I think there is a path that saves us, but the window for that escape is getting very narrow.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The process is broken. It is why I come here almost every week--and you do, too--and we try to just focus on what is ahead of us. I just spent a half an hour sort of focusing on debt and deficit. That is not Republican or Democrat, it is what is ahead of us. You have been here a few years. How many actual real discussions-- other than theater of, We should do a study commission. We should write a strongly worded memo; the theater of this place--instead of doing what is really hard, and understand, you can't just do one thing. That is the great fraud now. We have gotten ourselves in such a difficult position, it has got to be everything. A couple years ago I came here, and we brought in 19 attributes that you had to do almost at the exact same time to maximize enough economic growth, enough technology disruption, all the things to make it work. You actually helped me on some of that. But my fear, those are really uncomfortable, and you will have an army of lobbyists really unhappy with you when you tell the truth about the math.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The gentleman knows in many quarters I am a bit of a heretic on this. I actually believe we are on the cusp of miracles, if it is true that we just found a cure for Type 1 diabetes. If the math is true, about one-third of all U.S. healthcare spending is just Type 2 diabetes--for my Native American populations, for my urban poor, for my rural Anglo poor--the amount of diabetes, the misery, the suffering, wouldn't it be one of the most elegant, noble things we can do is say, screw this noise we are doing, we are going to do our Operation Warp Speed. Now we see there is a stem cell to the islet-producing insulin. There is a path, but it requires intellectual discipline, telling the truth, and saying no to a lot of people who are going to be upset because a cure ends the misery. It also ends the manipulation.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Chip, you are a heretic.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Would the gentleman yield to allow me just a quick colloquy with him?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Brilliant question. And I cannot actually think of something that was substantive, where there was a collective idea from my brothers and sisters on the left or the right that there was actual intellectual battle here where we made something better. This place is functionally an intellectual dictatorship.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive me for taking a moment to sort of get organized. That is the hazard when you use far too many boards. I want to do a couple of things this evening. First, I am going to offer a solution because I believe particularly my brothers and sisters on the left and the administration are in a very bad place on one issue, and I think there is a genuine solution coming maybe within the next couple of weeks. Then we are going to spend some time talking about something that is often uncomfortable around here, and that is the debt ceiling and the reality of the math and why it is a sin that we are not going to actually engage in the stressor and use that stressor, which is the debt ceiling, to make a couple steps toward reality on what the math looks like. First off, a little of this is going to come across as a bit sarcastic because I mean it to. But what happened? A year and a half ago, 2 years ago, when COVID came to our shores, came to the world, we had discussions here, often on Zoom. We were going to do the science. We were going to follow the facts and also accept that what we know today will be different tomorrow. We were going to slow down the spread not because we thought we could avoid the virus but because we were worried about emergency rooms and others being overflowed with our brothers and sisters who were sick. Here we are, approaching almost 2 years later. We have multiple vaccines. We have antibodies. You saw the data, particularly on the Pfizer antiviral therapeutic pill. There is a pill coming--if the data is real, if what we read is real--that is about 89 percent effective. Now, it is a lot of pills you have to take over 5 days, but there is a therapeutic coming that you can take at home. And we have home test kits. If you will go back to our own rhetoric and the conversations with the scientists and experts, it was always: We don't have a therapeutic. If it is true, in about 3 weeks, we are going to have a protease inhibitor. If you read the science on it, it is really neat how it snips the protein, keeps it from attaching to the cell. It is remarkable science. It is also going to help us on all sorts of other future viruses. But the ultimate antiviral is almost here. If this is almost here, why isn't it time to have a simple policy discussion saying: Wasn't this the standard that we were all hoping and waiting for, the technology, the belief in science that would allow us to declare the pandemic over? By doing that, the dystopian sort of fight that is going on in our society, where the Senate yesterday said no vaccine mandates--what is it now? Five different Federal courts have said it is unconstitutional. Brother after brother, sister after sister, neighbor after neighbor, Republican v. Democrat, where now we have turned it into an article of faith. The left lives in a ball of fear over the disease, and the right lives in frustration and anger that they believe freedoms are being stripped away in the country. How about we embrace science? The fact of the matter is, go back a year and a half ago. This was the miracle we were waiting for. It is almost here. Why wouldn't we pass a simple piece of legislation that functionally says: Hey, when the FDA says that we have a successful therapeutic, an antiviral that is really effective, let's declare the pandemic over. Let's get ourselves away from this dystopian polarization that is not based on science anymore. We have turned it into a religion. I think we are better than this. The fact of the matter is, we dropped a piece of legislation weeks ago that basically said that. It basically said, when science is victorious, we will embrace the science, declare the pandemic over. Now, it doesn't mean the virus goes away. It doesn't mean some of our brothers and sisters aren't going to get sick. But the fact of the matter is, the math is the math. We have had more of our brothers and sisters die this year than we did last year. Do you remember the political rhetoric? Maybe I shouldn't go there. But maybe it really is the moment to consider this, to my brothers and sisters on the left. I am extending you a lifeline. I am giving you a chance to back away from a society of fear and hate to a society that says we conquered. Please, for anyone who is listening, for my brothers and sisters here in Congress, Mr. Speaker, yourself, give it consideration. Has science won? And if it has, let's embrace it. Let's declare this pandemic over because it stops the cascade effect of removing troops that want to serve to the chaos around here of, you know, we play this fake virtue- signaling game where there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of us sitting here for hours. We are wearing our little masks, but we are all sitting right next to each other talking, and then pulling our masks down to have a drink of water. Come on, it is theater. Let's get back to science. A few years ago, I remember being here on the floor, and the then Democrat leader got behind the microphone and basically called those of us, who made it very clear we would not vote for a clean debt ceiling, arsonists. And that has bothered me ever since. Because I think actually, in many ways, those of us who did not believe in a clean debt ceiling, raising the debt ceiling once again without some attempt to slow the chaos, slow the spending down, I actually think those of us who wanted to bend the debt curve, we weren't the arsonists. We were actually in some ways the fire prevention crew. We were trying to save the country, save the society. So first off, does everyone understand how bad the math is? We are functionally borrowing $47,000 every second. We borrow $2,841,000 a minute. Okay. I am going to speak for, what, a half an hour. $2,800,000 is $84 million in the half an hour I am going to speak will be borrowed. $84 million will be borrowed during the half an hour that I speak. But we are functionally borrowing over $4 billion every single day. And we are not heading towards ever paying this off. And the perverse thing is: Do you understand in a decade that number almost doubles? It almost doubles. And back to the rhetoric of arson, let's go back over our history over the last 50 years. The only times--well, except for one where, God bless them, in the eighties, they actually took on the shortfalls in Social Security--but you look at the different deals that have been made to bend the debt curve, almost every single one was associated with a debt ceiling. It was that one stressor. We have all heard over and over, Congress will not do something unless they feel the pressure, unless they feel there is a crisis, unless they are up against the wall. And the game that was played here saying, oh, let's just change the rules for the Senate. Let's make it so they can do it with 50 votes and that way we can just pass this. We won't have to deal with the reality of burying people's future retirements and destroying my little girl's future in debt. We can just avoid it and go home and have a nice Christmas. But the fact of the matter is, almost every agreement we have had has been associated with the stressor that was brought on by a debt ceiling. Gramm-Rudman, 1985 and functionally again in 1987. Debt limit increase associated with it. Deficit reduction and automatic spending and budget triggers. Paygo. I can't tell you how many times the Democrats here preach paygo to me, except for the fraud that paygo really is, where on the fifth year we will just pretend it no longer costs anything, therefore, it doesn't fall under the paygo rules. But the paygo rules functionally every time--four times was associated with changing the borrowing limits of the country, the debt ceiling. It was supposed to create deficit reduction, and it did create some. Spending increases must be offset, and that is the ultimate cultural change that paygo produced. But remember, it came about because of a debt ceiling fight, multiple debt ceiling fights. Budget Control Act. Do you remember how controversial this one was? We actually had a government shutdown and other things associated with this. But the Budget Control Act, the sequestration that came with that, if you look at it, it was the most successful in modern times of bending the spending curve. The problem is it is all on discretionary. And we all know the fraud around here is discretionary is now down to, what? 10 percent or so. Actually, no. Fifteen percent of what we actually spend, if you strip military out. Military is now 10 percent. The rest of discretionary is 15 percent. The other 70-plus percent is functionally on autopilot. But this is the truth. Democrats have control of this place. They control the White House. They control the Senate. They control the House. Okay. Bless their precious hearts. But we could have used this as a stressor, and there have been lots of, oh, my hair is on fire. The world is coming to an end. I am worried about the stock market, oh, wink, wink, nod, nod. And the stock market just goes on because they know we will fix something. But used it as an excuse, even if we have to tell our constituents why we are trying to do something tough. Because remember, the lobbyists here in this town aren't here to help us reduce spending. They are here with their hands out wanting more spending. This place is functionally, structurally designed to get everything you can, and hell be damned one day when we hit that failed bond auction. And you all saw today, it wasn't a big deal, but today's bond auction was slightly undersubscribed when U.S. sovereign debt was being sold. I am not saying it is a canary in a coal mine, but the canary did have a little cough. And so here is what we are going to do today. I think the Senate may be voting at this moment. We are just functionally going to do a debt increase, probably we come back on Tuesday, we still don't know what the number is going to be or maybe we do the fraud of just do it to a date. Will there be any deficit reduction? Any attempt, any anything to force some rational math of what is going on? No. Because it is uncomfortable because we have to tell the truth about the drivers of our debt. And what are the drivers of our debt? Okay. I have said this over and over, but we need to be honest. The left will say, oh, it is military, it is rich people not paying enough taxes. The right, we have our sins, too. We will say, oh, it is foreign aid, oh, it is waste and fraud. No, it is not. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is, we are getting old. It is demographics. And demographics aren't Republican or Democrat, it is math. And you have got to understand how sharp this curve is. We are functionally right here. So here is 2022. Functionally 17 percent of our population is over 65 today. You do see how fast we start getting up to close to 22 percent of our population being over 65. This is the driver of our debt. Remember the math. And I am going to do it a couple of times here. And I am sorry this upsets people because they don't want us to tell the truth. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is Medicare. Simply Medicare. And then Social Security. And the rest of the budget actually is in balance. So the next 30 years the rest of the budget is actually in balance. It is demographics. If you made a pledge when you ran for office around here that you were going to protect people's retirement, you were going to protect Social Security, you were going to protect Medicare, letting it be buried in debt, how is that protecting it? Tell the truth. And there are solutions. I have come behind this mike so many times and said: There is technology out there. There are things we can do to crash the price of healthcare. There are policies we can do to grow the economy. Everything should be fixated on what maximizes economic growth. And then the left moves something, Build Back Better, their social entitlement spending that the data says it slows down the economy. We will be poorer and smaller, and the working poor will be poorer at the end of the decade because of the way they designed their social entitlement spending legislation. We are doing everything half-assed backwards. If you lay out, sort of the holistic theory, sort of the integrated model, yes, you have to fix immigration, but you focus on immigration being about maximizing economic expansion, not importing poverty; adoption of technology that maximizes people being healthy, and cures. Remember last week, we came here and talked about the miracle from last week that we have cured someone of type 1 diabetes? Because remember, 31 percent of all our spending in Medicare is just on type 2 diabetes. What happens if you do cures and end people's misery? Oh, by the way, you get amazing benefits on our debt. The immediate reaction you will get from people on the left is, well, Schweikert got behind the mike and wanted to cut entitlements. No, I am trying to find a way to save them. But you save them by changing the cost curve. You save them by having a moment. Pretend you are at a 12-step group. Isn't the first step to admit you have a problem? This place can't make it to step one. So let's do a little math. And I am sorry, I do this over and over, but I continue to be just shocked at the number of staff around here who will grab me in the elevator and say, Is that number real? Is this real? And you say this is the single biggest issue policywise facing Washington, facing this country? And we will chase shiny objects because shiny objects don't make your brain hurt. We will have asinine discussions about, oh, there is a vaccine database, there is this, there is that, and you realize it is a con. That is part of the scam this place does is look at the shiny object. We chase that because this hurts. Reality. And this number is worse today. This is based on last year's math. $112 trillion inflation-adjusted public borrowing in 29 years. $112 trillion of borrowing will be our publicly held debt in 29 years, 77.7 of that is just Medicare, 34.8 is Social Security, the rest of the Federal budget is in balance. This is just demographics. The cure is economic growth and crashing the price of healthcare. This will drive every bit of public policy, and it is coming very fast. If you look at our borrowing curve, in a decade we go from what is projected these days where we are going to be borrowing a trillion dollars a year to a couple trillion dollars a year. The debt will and the borrowing will and the interest will drive all policy. And this place right now the policy is worrying about how to get reelected than saving the country and the future. Do you understand, a 2-point increase in interest rates from nominal interest rates that have been projected, if we go up just 2 percent-- and that is getting us actually closer to what the historic mean is--in 2051, 100 percent of revenues go just to pay interest. How come this isn't the number one discussion here? Now the left may have different ways to approach it than those of us on the right, but you would think this would be all we could talk about. And it is avoided around here like a virus, except we haven't figured out how to put a mask on it and give it social distancing, have we? And for my brothers and sisters on the left, the number of times I will try to sit down in working groups with my Democratic colleagues-- and I believe their heart may be in the right place, they don't own a calculator, their math isn't there, but we make public policy by our feelings in this place. We make public policy because it feels good, it has a great title. We get judged by our intentions, not by our outcomes. And that is incredibly dangerous. So think about some of the rhetoric. And I have done presentations here where I walk through every single revenue, the proper term is receipts generating proposal from the left. And if you did all of them and pretended they had no economic effects, no secondary effects--all of them--you still can't come close to raising enough revenues. Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget. You can take all the rich people's money and all the revenues from those small businesses that they own. You can take every dime. This is a percentage of the GDP number. When you get into these sorts of numbers, you start doing the percentage to GDP. We are heading towards 15 percent of GDP functionally being borrowing. And if you take every dime, you only get about 5 percent to GDP. We are screwed. And I am sorry, I know that is crass, but I just don't know how to get folks to want to pay attention to it. This is the single-most important thing going on here. If you care about education, if you care about health, if you care about science, if you care about space, if you care about equality, if you care about these things, when there is no more money, when every dime of resources goes, so we survive and do our best to avoid that failed bond auction--which God forbid, if it does and interest rates spike, do you have any idea how fragile we have made our society? And this isn't often the future. This is today. We will kiss up close to, what is it, $30 trillion in borrowing, probably in the next few months. These are unthinkable numbers, and it is here. And you have got to understand, these projections are based on this concept, a really simple one: There is going to be no more wars. There is not going to be another pandemic. There is not going to be an economic collapse. There is not going to be a mortgage collapse. We have done this to ourselves. And then the left comes here and we do things like the Build Back Better, the social spending bill, which ultimately--and we have different numbers because God knows what the Senate is going to do--but the simple scoring from CBO basically said at year 5 it has borrowed another $800 billion. Oh, by the way, wink wink, nod nod, after year 5, we will actually stop all these programs and we will start to raise revenues to pay it off. We are functionally going to add another $4 trillion-plus from borrowing. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the social spending bill, at the end of the decade, you realize the economy will have missed tremendous amounts of economic growth, some of the best models coming from the Tax Foundation. We are actually making ourselves poorer because of the design of the spending. When you tell people, I am going to send you a check but you don't have to work. When I am putting money into things that don't actually create productivity. Remember, what are the two ways you pay people more money? Inflation. Well, that doesn't get you anywhere. Or productivity. That was one of the miracles at the end of the 2017 tax reform, is the resources that went for companies to buy equipment to be more productive so they could pay their workers more. And you saw it. You saw a miracle of employment and wage growth. And then the cynicism that when two-thirds of millionaires get tax cuts under the Democrat's build back better plan. So you tell us the rich need to pay their fair share and then you design pieces of legislation that give hundreds of billions of dollars to rich people. And then you tell us, oh, by the way, we should put State and local back into it, but most of it goes to really rich people. You want revenues. We did a whole presentation here a few months ago that said we can show you over 10 years $1.4 trillion you can get. Stop subsidizing really really rich people. Instead, the left does a piece of legislation to subsidize them more. I guess my intense frustration is we are heading--it may not be the bubble where the economy blows up--but we are heading to a type of rot because so much of this Nation's resources will be used to survive the amount of debt we have piled up. And then we are adopting policies that don't create any type of escape philosophy of, we are curing diseases that drive the debt because most of the debt is driven by healthcare. We are doing investments in things that grow the economy. We are getting immigration codes and regulatory codes and other things. We are modernizing them so they maximize economic opportunity because we actually give a darn about poor people. We give a darn about the working poor. We give a darn about people who are heading toward retirement. We give a darn about young people having a future. And not one of those things is actually in the math; it is in the rhetoric. People spin some great stories here but it is not in the math. It is just not in the math. It is not in the economic analysis. The universities that have looked at what is going on right now tell us that at the end of the decade, the poor are going to be poorer. Come on. What type of economic violence is this place willing to subject the working poor, the middle class to? We are better than this. And there is a path. Mr. Speaker, you are not going to pay off the debt, but we could adopt enough policies to flatten the curve that my 6-year-old daughter actually has a future. And doesn't she deserve one. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, tonight we are going to try to do sort an of an extension of the last couple of times I have been behind this microphone and have a discussion about what is actually going on with the big fiscal picture of our country. I am going to be a little mean to some of the Democratic policies, but I am going to show factually how I think it actually hurts, but there is actually something that happened this last week that we should actually be almost giddy about if it ultimately proves out, a major breakthrough on one of the things that creates misery around the world, let alone our own country, but also has real fiscal impacts. So, let's actually sort of start with some of the basics. How much do you think we borrowed every single day last year? We were playing with the math a little while ago. We were borrowing about $3.8 billion every single day. Break that down, do that math, an it is $160 million an hour. I know every time I get behind this mic and start talking numbers, people just glaze over, but it is important because if you are someone who says I really care about investments in the environment, I really care about investments in healthcare, I really care about investments in education, where do you think the money is going to come from? If we continue policywise the avoidance of the drivers of our debt, we continue doing public policy by feelings. One of the things that enrages me around here is we have entire conversations, entire speeches behind these microphones, and then we make public policy by our emotions, by our feelings, but not by a calculator. And I know the calculator sounds cold, and as Republicans, we sound like accountants on steroids, but at some point the math is important. But also, what happens when I can show you that getting the math right means you don't hurt people? We saw in the Democrat social spending bill, their Build Back Better, multiple university papers coming out saying, Hey, we are looking at this and we believe the working poor will be poorer at the end of the decade. The disassociation of the value of your labors to money coming in, the other social policies that were driven in that piece of legislation, they may be great politics, and they are really crappy for the society, and they are really crappy for the very people that the left claims they care about. So let's pull it back and just deal with where we are at right now. Now, this board here is from math from a year ago. And once again, we are not going to talk about 1965, but I start with this over and over because I can't tell you how many people will come up to me at Costco, and they will walk up and say, David, if you would just cut back on that foreign aid. David, if you would just get rid of waste and fraud. Or if they are liberals, Hey, if you cut back on defense spending. Well, we have a reality problem. You see this red area? That is mandatory spending. That is functionally, Social Security, Medicare-- the primary drivers. The green area over here is what we get to vote on. The little blue area, that is defense. The green is all domestic. It is down to 13 percent of what we, as Members of Congress, vote on is the non-defense spending around here. And that is today. This gets dramatically worse. And you know what makes it worse? We are getting old as a society. Demographics. Demographics are actually what primarily drive the U.S. sovereign debt. And yet, how many times--for anyone that is crazy enough to watch C-SPAN, or even our fellow Members or staff--do we talk about where we are going to be in just a few years. And I thought I would also just sort of start with some of the folklore. You will hear the speeches here of: Rich people need to pay their fair share. They sure do. A couple months ago we made a whole presentation here on the floor begging our Democrat colleagues, saying instead of doing policy where you are going to go--say, we are going to raise taxes on small businesses. We are going to go raise taxes on individuals. How about just stop subsidizing them? We came in and showed almost $1.4 trillion over 10 years that the policies of this place subsidize the rich. And I am talking the really rich. So the Democrats did their build back better social spending bill. If you look at it, it now substantially subsidizes the really rich even more. The other perversity in that piece of legislation, if you get to year five, you do realize you have driven almost another $800 billion of borrowing. Then we play this pretend game around here and say, Oh, then we are going to make these programs disappear, and then we are going to keep the taxes going for the rest of the decade. And that is how we only end up with about $400 billion of borrowing. I mean, no wonder those in the public who pay attention to Congress in Washington, D.C., just realize we treat the public like fools. These are people who are just trying to survive. They are trying to take care of their kids. They are trying to get ready for retirement. And this place is basically getting ready to destroy the next couple decades. And the scale of debt is off the charts and it will drive every bit of policy around here, instead of the fraud that is going on so far this year where it looks more like trying to buy votes than save the future of this country. So let's take a quick look. Even 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families, if you took 100 percent of it, you can't get close to covering where we are spending-wise. It is just math. And I know this is a math-free zone, but at some point the math will always win. So take a look here. If you took every dime of people that make over $500,000, and with that, every dime of the small business earnings, you get about 5.5 percent of GDP. This is the most elegant way to do the math. But in 2030, just the borrowing will be 6.3 percent of GDP. And 29 years from now, it is 15.1. You don't get close to it. You can take every dime of $500,000 and up and every dime from small business, and where are we 29 years from now? You hit a third of the revenues necessary. We are living in just an absolute economic fraud. The share of Federal tax revenue spent on interest--and this is one of those that scares me to death. Let's see if I can try to explain this. What happens to a country when you have borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, and you put yourself right up against the edge. And then you have a new virus and all of a sudden you need to stabilize the economy. Or God forbid, there is a military conflict or some other tragedy in your country, you have made yourself very, very fragile as a country. It is the concept of, we all have this occasion where we live a little too close to the fire and that one time there is a traffic accident, that one time something happens and we miss our airplane. We understand the consequences of what they call fragility. We are doing that to this country. This board here is really simple. If we had a 2 percent increase in interest rates, by the time we get to that 29 years from now, 100 percent of all the tax revenues, 100 percent of the tax revenues go just to pay the interest payments. You start to think about that, hell, just a 1 percent rise in interest from the CBO's baseline is 70 percent of all tax revenues will be consumed just making our interest payments. Is this the future you plan for your children? I mean, is this the future this place plans for your own retirement? You think you are going to continue to still get all the benefits you have earned when your government, 100 percent of its income is going just to cover the borrowing interest? This is where we are at. And this is last year's math. This is before the huge amount of borrowing that has already happened this year. So now the most difficult part of when you get behind this conversation, for those who come behind these microphones, this is the part that my brothers and sisters around here on the left--and even a number on the right--don't want to have. What is the primary driver of the U.S. sovereign debt? Two things: Remember how I said demographics? It is the fact we are getting older. You have got to understand, 29 years from now--and this was actually, this math was done before the massive amount of spending this last year--we will be at $112 trillion of borrowed money in 29 years. And that is inflation-adjusted, so today's dollars, $112 trillion of borrowed money, most of it is Medicare. If you are like I am, and you believe Medicare is a societal promise we made, how do you plan to keep paying for it? Social Security is the rest of the balance. The rest of the budget is actually in balance. As a matter of fact, the latest math actually says the rest of the budget actually has a small positive balance in 29, 30 years. How many times today behind my Democratic microphones--or even the Republican microphones--did we tell the public the truth? That if we don't get our act together and find a way to disrupt the cost of healthcare, we have just--and it is a technical economic term for the future--we have screwed our kids and our own retirements. I am sorry to be crass, but I don't know how to get anyone here to listen. It is math. It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrats. Getting older is not Republican or Democrat. It is not partisan. It is math. And the solution so far this year is, Well, let's just spend a hell of a lot more money right now, let's pay for it with a bunch of fake accounting. And maybe it is enough spending where we can buy enough votes, we will survive another election, but the country will be in an incredible amount of trouble. So what is the solution? Well, let's first, what is the primary driver? You just saw the slide. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is Medicare. So let's break it down. Five percent of our Nation's population, our brothers and sisters who have really tough lives--they have chronic conditions, they have diabetes, they will have other comorbidities, as you have heard over and over during the pandemic--well, they are a majority of our healthcare spending. If you actually love and care for people, why not go and do your very best to help these poor people that are suffering? Oh, by the way, you also get an amazing economic value for it. Go help our brothers and sisters who are sick, who are suffering. It is not putting up a bunch more clinics. It is investing in the disruptive technologies that are around us right now that are curing people. I beg this place to think like disruptors. Because good politics are, Oh, we are going to go spend a bunch of money; we are going to put up a bunch more diabetes clinics in my district, and I will look like a hero. Yeah, maybe that is great politics, but you just functionally patched over the misery, the suffering. Go put the resources in a cure. I did a presentation back in March or April here, talking about a cure for Type 1 diabetes and how it also means part of that will translate to Type 2. I saved some of the really nasty emails I got saying, Oh, that isn't true; it can't happen. Wait until the last board here. Guess what? There are miracles happening around us. Do you remember a couple weeks here I did a little presentation on messenger RNA? We now have a vaccine. Now, it is not 100 percent effective. It is only mildly effective. It has to be used for malaria. It looks like we are about to have a vaccine for so many other diseases that plague us. Why aren't we putting our resources into something of that nature? Because if it is 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who are suffering, who are the majority of our healthcare spending--and healthcare spending is what is bankrupting the country--putting up a bunch more clinics doesn't solve the problem. Also the other absurdity, I will have liberal friends who will say, Well, we did the ACA, known as Obamacare. That was a financing bill. It basically just moved around who got subsidized and who had to pay. It didn't change the price of healthcare. And I hate to say, the Republican alternative did the same thing. We just moved around who got subsidized, who had to pay. I think we did some more things to create some creativity and competitiveness, but that bill died in the Senate. We did pass it out of the House. But then you will get some that say, Well, how about Medicare for all. Medicare for all doesn't save a dime. Model after model after model says it doesn't save a dime unless you begin rationing--and even then it really doesn't save much. So what do you do? What are the actual drivers? You remember that Medicare number that is the primary driver of our debt? Remember on that chart, it was $77 trillion over the next 29 years. And after this year's binge spending, God knows what the new numbers are. Thirty-one percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes, so almost a third of overall healthcare spending is just diabetes. Take a step and think about it. For someone like myself, who is terrified of that failed bond auction because we have built up so much more debt, and the public--and internationally--they just don't have an appetite for our debt anymore, that becomes the cascade of hell. If I came to you, and said, Why don't we focus on how to help people not have such misery, and also it would have incredible effects on our fiscal situation. Madam Speaker, 31 percent of just Medicare is diabetes. So why aren't we doing something like an operation warp speed on diabetes, instead of social spending where we can buy another election with taxpayers' money and then borrow and borrow and borrow, and then use absolute fraud as the pretense of how it is going to be paid for? Or we could do something where we end people's misery, and the future looks brighter and optimistic. This slide here, I think I brought to the floor in April, and I did a whole little thing about the concept of the technology being developed, and it is really impressive. They have worked on it for years, taking stem cells and adjusting the DNA there to make it--and forgive me if I mispronounce these things--an islet cell and their ability to produce insulin. I showed this slide--and I still have a few of those emails of folks saying, Stop making things up. This technology can't work. You can't cure diabetes. Well, a couple great articles this weekend--and this is where the optimism is. This is a place of optimism. We live in an amazing country. We have suffered and done great things, and yet we seem to roll in misery these days instead of the fact that we are on the cusp of ending so many individuals' misery, sickness, and maybe even changing the world. I only did this just so people could visualize. Imagine the concept of grabbing some stem cells. You can grab them now from skin--we have learned all sorts of things. The ability to program them, and then functionally you can teach them to grow into what you need. If we have that technology, just imagine the diseases, the illnesses, the misery--so you have messenger RNA that now we are about to know how to take on so many viruses, so many other types of diseases. We are now about to have the technology--we actually now do have the technology-- to actually take on other types of diseases where it is failures of certain organs. Now, I am going to give you one other one, just as part of the thought experiment, before we do the closing board that I am most excited about. If Congress wanted to have an impact on healthcare costs, what is something we could do in 1 year? What is something we could do-- Republicans and Democrats could do in 1 year? If I came to you right now, and said, In 1 year, you are not going to get all of it, but 16 percent of healthcare spending turns out to be people not taking their pharmaceuticals as they should. You realize that is well over a half a trillion dollars a year. A half a trillion dollars a year in spending because someone didn't take their high blood pressure pill and they have their stroke. They had trouble and they didn't take their insulin; they didn't do this and that. What if I came to you right now, and said, Instead of nationalizing healthcare and doing this and that, why don't we promote subsidized--make it part of CMS--the technology where the pill bottle cap beeps at grandma when she didn't take her meds? For someone like myself with high blood pressure--I take my pill religiously--but if I didn't, my phone would beep at me, and say: David, we don't want you to have a stroke. Please take your medicine because we know it works. We know the same thing. How many people do we know who have had clogged arteries, and if they had just taken their statins? Madam Speaker, 16 percent of all healthcare spending relates back to people not taking their meds. That is $528 billion a year. There are disruptions. If you take that and then put it into what we already know about the messenger RNA and the fact that there are so many illnesses and diseases--if you read anything, you have to have seen the articles that believe that we are close to a vaccine for HIV, close to a vaccine for herpes. Now you see the vaccine out there for malaria. There are so many amazing things happening, you saw it two boards back. When I came to this mike back last March and we talked about, Hey, there is maybe this stem cell therapy that is going to turn how to make islet cells that actually could be injected back into someone, and it could be at least the cure for type 1 diabetes. How many of you saw the articles this weekend? It was only one person; it was the first person they tried it on. Guess what? It works. They have successfully cured someone with type 1 diabetes. That is a million and a half of our brothers and sisters in this Nation. What are we willing to do to find a way to almost put that type of technology--let's have it be proofed. Are we willing to put it on a production line, just like we have done, messenger RNA on a production line? And now can we also make the really tough policy decisions, are we willing to change the farm bill, nutrition, some of the inputs into type 2 diabetes? And if we can fix those, the articles and papers are saying the same ability to fix the body's ability to make insulin again may be a path to cure type 2 diabetes. If that is true, think about it. You just saw, the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is healthcare costs, Medicare. Madam Speaker, 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes. Why wouldn't this place take on something that is that obvious, that is loving and compassionate, and also really makes a big difference to our future, both economically and just from a moral health standpoint of loving and caring for our brothers and sisters? The last thing I will throw out--we are working on a little project in my office and the math is really hard. If you care about things like income inequality and you look at the differentials of our brothers and sisters, like Tribal communities out West, other people that may have urban minority communities that are suffering from type 2 diabetes, we are trying to figure out what would the math look like if those populations had this disease cured? What would their economics be? Would we actually see so many others able to come back into society, back into the economy, back into trying to develop a life in the middle class? The crazy thing is our preliminary math--it may turn out that curing a big portion of our population where we see the huge income inequality and helping them get back into society and the economy may be one of the most powerful things, if not maybe the single largest thing, we could do to actually take on income inequality in this country. Who would have ever thought? It is the math. I want to make the argument that people here who want to make policy by their feelings are crushing individuals, crushing families, crushing the country. People are willing to see love and compassion through actual facts or how we do what is moral and do what is right and also do what makes this country as great as can be. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we are going to do a couple of things tonight. Most of it is going to be economic heavy. We are going to actually go over the Democrat's social spending bill and its economic effects. First, I wanted to touch on something that I am somewhat hopeful that the left and the right could embrace. I am thinking of what we have gone through for almost 2 years now, and that is the pandemic. If I came to you tomorrow and said: Okay. We have vaccinations, but we are about to have therapeutics. Think about this. You have all seen the news that we now have a second drug company. The Wall Street Journal today has an amazing, wonderful article on protease inhibitors and their effectiveness. The fact that Pfizer has publicly said their antiviral medication is up around 89 percent effective, it is a lot of pills that may need to be taken with a second pharmaceutical, but isn't this the holy grail? We have talked about this over and over, saying you now have home COVID tests. Now you can take your antiviral at home. And you start to understand the elegance of how this type of antiviral works in sort of snipping the proteins and making them so they don't grow or they can't attach to the cell walls. So if this exists technology-wise, and one of the antivirals is already in front of the FDA today. I think we saw a news clip this afternoon that the second one may be presented on Tuesday. The Pfizer pharmaceutical will be presented to the FDA, but it may take a month or so. If we are in a world now where we have multiple vaccines, we actually now have therapeutics and antiviral home testing kits--you can take the antiviral at home--it is time, once these are approved, to declare the pandemic over. Why is this really important? Think of the societal friction, the battles we have created by mask mandates, by vaccine mandates. We now see the data of how, in our labor supply, folks are saying: No, I believe in body autonomy. I am not taking the vaccine or doing this or doing that. The reality of it is, we have been so successful as a country, as a society, in believing in science. Remember, how many times did we hear that, believing in science? If the FDA approves, which we are hopeful maybe it happens in the next month, the antivirals--and the press releases from the pharmaceutical companies are that there will be a couple hundred thousand sets by the end of this year and apparently millions available starting in the new year--it is time to declare the pandemic over. Our office has put together a piece of legislation, and we are going to put it in circulation once we have sort of vetted it in the next couple of days. I would encourage any of my brothers and sisters on the left and the right that, if you believe in science and you really want a solution, it is time to embrace the fact of how far we have come and the solution is here. We are going to do a little bit of basic economics and try to tap some of the discussion that I think has been missed on the left's social spending bill. First, let's have an honest conversation on where we are economically right now and what our world looks like. If any of you are planning on having a retirement, if any of you have children or grandchildren and you actually give a darn about them, first understand how much trouble we are in immediately, right now, today. The CBO numbers, in 29 years, we are at $112 trillion of borrowed money. That is inflation adjusted, 112 trillion public dollars. This isn't borrowing where we take credit for borrowing from trust funds. This is publicly borrowed, inflation-adjusted. Functionally, in 29 budget years, we are at $112 trillion. That is the CBO estimate. If you are a young person--and you want to be honest with them--your economic future is about to be brutalized. The reality of it is, I have done this on the floor multiple times. It is fascinating how many on the left, and even the right, when you start to walk through what drives U.S. sovereign debt, it is a very uncomfortable conversation. The fact of the matter is, Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. Social Security is second. The rest of the budget is in balance. At the end of the 30-year model, right now, according to the CBO, the rest of the budget, if you strip Medicare and if you strip Social Security out, the budget actually has a positive balance. If you believe it is a moral obligation for us to keep our promises that Medicare will be there, that Social Security will be there, why isn't this what we work on every day instead of discussions about how we can spend a whole bunch more money, take over a whole bunch more of the economy, slow the economy down and make this Nation poorer? What we are going to show is the economic models that show the Democrats' spending bill actually crushes poor people. It actually makes the working poor poorer. It makes society poor. I don't believe that is the intention, but it is the economics. Sometimes, when you get your math wrong, it is a level of cruelty. A simple thought experiment: What are the two things that you do to crush the working poor? Inflation. Well, we are doing a great job on that, aren't we? The fact of the matter is, what inflation does to the working poor is economic cruelty. The second thing, you open your borders up, adding millions of individuals with similar skill sets. Say you are that individual that didn't finish high school, but you are out there hanging drywall. You have a family. You are getting good at your profession. You are trying to learn how to move up. Then you flood the market with people with similar skill sets. There are great peer-reviewed papers out there that talk about just what we have done at the border. A decade from now, you made the working poor poorer and now overlay what all this spending has done inflation-wise. If we, as Members of Congress, give a darn about the working poor, the economic violence that is being committed right now by the policies coming out of this Congress, it is time to step up and deal with the reality. The problem is, the working poor aren't our contributors. They are not the ones showing up here lobbying us. They are the individuals we have a moral obligation to do good things for, and that is not what is happening. We are going to walk through some of where we are today. You have to understand that the national debt right now is projected to leap to 200 percent in 2050, so, functionally, 29 budget cycles from now. If the Biden proposals--these are the ones that were proposed during the election, and I have to accept a bunch of that has been trimmed back in the debate, not as much as you might think. We are going to go over that. You go, functionally, from 200 percent of debt to GDP--meaning the borrowed money will be 200 times bigger than the GDP. If you add it all up, in 29 budget years, you are over 328 percent of debt to GDP. If any of you are thinking about having a retirement, if you are thinking about your kids, your grandkids, this is what wipes us out as a society. It is terrifying to talk about because it is hard. It requires lots of levers. You have to get immigration right. You have to get finance right. You have to get spending right. You have to get tax policy right. You have to do everything that maximizes economic expansion. Then the holy grail: You are going to have to crash the price of healthcare, not shift around who pays for it. Remember, the ACA, many of you know it as ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, Medicare for All, in many ways it is about who pays and who gets subsidized. It is not about what we pay. I cannot tell you how many times I have come to this floor and tried to drill that into the way we think. But instead, the scam here is we talk about: Well, you are going to get subsidized. But we did nothing to what we pay. The difference is we just borrow money--that is, the Federal Government--and pay for it that way. Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses, upper-class families--so a 100 percent tax rate and you are taking every single dollar, you can't even come close to balancing the budget and balancing it long term. The numbers are this ugly. When you take a look, it is not that hard. The 2050 number, if you take every dime even of folks who make $1 million or $500,000, if you take every dime, you don't get close. The numbers are this ugly. The share of Federal tax revenue spent on interest in the national debt is projected to surge. But here is the number that terrifies me: If we move up 2 points--2 points--functionally at the 2050, 2051 mark, 100 percent of revenues-- 100 percent of revenues--in that 30-year budget window, move up 2 points from where we are right now, our baseline, 100 percent of tax revenues will be just covering the interest costs. So is anyone familiar with a book that was called ``The Black Swan''? Okay, Taleb also wrote another book. And I understand, there are economists out there, Gilder and others, who disagree with parts of the model. But there was one concept of making yourself fragile. A simple example is you go to the airport 10 times; you know if you leave at exactly this moment you can get to the airport exactly as your flight is getting ready to board; and the first time there is a car accident, you miss your flight. We are doing that type of thing to our entire country, to my 6-year-old daughter, and to anyone else out there. We are living on a razor's edge. Madam Speaker, you saw that last slide, 2 points moving back to what would be closer to normality interest-rate wise. In the 30-year budget window, 100 percent of revenues, receipts if you want to use the technical term, will go just to cover the interest. Madam Speaker, do you understand how fragile we have made the economics of this country? And then the debate here is how to spend more money. I understand money gets you reelected, and promising things gets you reelected. It gets nice contributions, and it is absolutely perverse when you think about where we are at. So now let's talk about the budget gimmicks. Many of you are going to refer to this as the Build Back Better plan. In our office we are calling it the social spending plan because that is what it is. It is laced with gimmicks. It is going to be fascinating come Friday to see how CBO ultimately scores these. I'm a little disappointed on what we have seen from the Joint Committee on Taxation and some of the others. I don't think we are getting actual quality, dynamic scoring, but that is hard. It takes time. You have to lay it out, break it apart, and try to understand what the economic effects are. But you walk through the gimmicks, Madam Speaker, and a simple example is the White House has estimated $400 billion in some of the Joint Committee on Taxation scores from IRS collecting more money. But CBO came out and said: No, it is not $400 billion; it is 120. Then you start to realize, Madam Speaker, the debates you are hearing on the floor here are completely stacked with absolutely fraudulent numbers. I remember how hard--when we did tax reform--we had to work to justify dynamic scoring and make the math as honest as possible to work, and it was our brothers and sisters on the left who absolutely were insistent. Today they would never hold themselves to the same standard that they demanded from us just a couple of years ago. So let's walk through an example of one of the absolute frauds that the left is using. So President Trump had a drug rebate. This is a little geeky, but it is important to understand. Ultimately, the rebate was going to be to the consumer. So you are on Medicare, you are in line at the pharmacy, the rebate that would have gone into the backside of the provider, the acquirer, think of it as the wholesaler of the pharmaceutical, that rebate now comes to you at the counter. It means the consumer would get the value, but it would mean the costs of pharmaceuticals would go up for government because the government isn't ultimately getting that value. So here are sort of the steps of the Trump administration's rebate rule: it was estimated to cost about $150 billion over 10 years. Speaker Pelosi said: It will never happen. Democratic leadership here said: It will never happen. Democrat leadership in the Senate said: Unacceptable, it will never happen. This was never, ever, ever, ever going to happen. This was the whole system of how the consumer would have gotten the benefit of those rebates, but it would have cost the Federal Government $150 billion over 10 years, but it was never going to happen unless, of course, you are a Democrat looking for money to spend on their social entitlement bill, all of a sudden saying: Hey, this is never going to happen, but we can score it in, so we are going to use it. It is just another gimmick, it is a con, and it is a fraud. If we were doing this, we would be ashamed of ourselves and should be. But this is actually the scam that now is Democrat leadership. So you take a look at the budget gimmicks that are already built into here, Madam Speaker, and you start to realize the left's social spending bill is like a house of cards. Now, they may get some scoring. Like the last one I was just showing you, Madam Speaker, CBO will give them that $150 billion. There will be a nice little footnote saying that this was never really going to become policy but because it was a proposal and they are canceling the proposal, we are going to give them the 150 or maybe $145 billion worth of credit. But the public needs to understand those trillions and trillions and trillions--$112 trillion in the baseline as it is right now in 29 budget years--that is how you get there. The left will say: This is paid for. No. It is not. And they know that. They are not dumb. They are manipulative, but they are not dumb. When you start to look at just the games being done, Madam Speaker, and then the spending--and that is the other thing we are going to work through here is how much of this spending do they really plan to cancel in year 2? So, Madam Speaker, you are seeing some spending scoring saying that we estimate this is $1\3/4\ trillion, wink, wink, nod, nod, but when it becomes a 10-year instead of disappearing in the second year, you are 4\1/2\ plus trillion dollars of new obligations. Look up and down the different budget gimmicks. One of the reasons I did this slide is because it is a little more of an economically difficult concept. So you actually have in there an adjusted gross income surcharge on the top income earners. Madam Speaker, you know the Democrats' proposal is to do a very similar thing on corporations. The alternative minimum tax that is also being put on corporations; we are just now starting to model how much it actually will slow down the economy. Here is why: You have this thing we call expensing. It was one of the great economic drivers particularly in 2018 and 2019. Do you remember we far exceeded revenue projections, Madam Speaker, income inequality truly shrank, poverty shrank, and food insecurity shrank? The poor got dramatically less poor. They were 2 amazing years. It is a great model to demonstrate what supply-side economics really does. But a lot of the economic expansion was because of something called expensing. So you buy a piece of equipment, it makes your company more productive, and you are able to pay people more. It moves technology and moves business production forward into the next century. If you do a minimum alternative tax at a corporate level, then you no longer get the economic value of that expensing. I know this is really geeky, but it is really important to understand. We are just now starting to model this thing saying: Oh, heavens, so the Democrats are doing the wink, wink, nod, nod con of they are not taking away the expensing which is the primary driver that we saw in productivity from the last 2 years since tax reform, but by doing this alternative minimum tax calculation, you don't get the value of that depreciation. All of a sudden, the investment in capital products--capital goods and capital equipment--will disappear. It is another example of a really bad understanding of the most basic economics. I can understand why the left wants to do this. It is the number of new IRS agents, the number of agencies that will have potentially hundreds of thousands of new employees. Remember, one of the models was 80,000 new IRS employees. Well, okay, maybe it makes sense if I was on the Democrat side or I represented northern Virginia or areas like that where I have lots of unionized government-working constituents. But we need to be honest about that, the build back better, the social spending bill on the left, massively increases the bureaucracy. You start to look at the hundreds of millions that are being put in to expand the size of the national bureaucracy. It is not like we are doing the leap of technology saying that with the investment it is going to make society more productive. It is like our argument of air quality and environmental quality, using technology is the way to make us healthier. Instead, the left designs it in ways where there are new armies of public employees. I have to congratulate the left. Madam Speaker, you are going to see some slides here. We are going to be number one. Yes. The United States will be absolutely number one in the highest tax rates on income in the entire industrialized world. But we are starting to see if you are a resident of California, you are going to be about 64.7 percent for top income earners and high income earners. Fine. If you are in Arizona you are going to be at 55.9. New York gets the prize. They are going to be over 66 percent for top income earners when you do the Federal, the surcharges, State, and local taxes. Don't we have lots of data already in the economic literature of what happens when we start to hit these confiscatory levels of tax on income? What do people do? You start to realize saying, okay, I can work and get this tax rate, or I can take my resources and put them in other types of things-- municipal bonds, other types of things--and reap the rewards from that because if more than half of the upper income now goes to government, then we have just created an incentive not to invest and not to take risks but just take the money, put it in safe places, and don't play anymore. I am frustrated because I know the Tax Foundation has been trying to model the taxes but we don't have good data yet on what does this mean in future GDP growth. Back to the very first board we held up: our society is heading towards a debt cliff. The baseline as it is today from CBO in 29 budget years, we are at $112 trillion in borrowed money in today's dollars, and that is where policy is today. When you start to do this, and economic growth slows, then you functionally bring the financial apocalypse a lot sooner. So let's actually also talk through a couple other duplicities that are in the Democrats' build back better social spending bill. They sure do like rich people. Two-thirds of the millionaires get a tax cut under the build back better, and if we take the folks getting over $1 million, 66 percent of them actually benefit. And this is one of the things we have come to the floor now for almost a year talking about instead of raising taxes--and the rhetoric that we hear over and over from the left where the rich need to pay their fair share--maybe we should just stop subsidizing them. We have come to the floor over and over and shown that almost $1.4 trillion of subsidies go to the very top, top, top income earners. If you stop the subsidy, Madam Speaker, then you don't create the economic distortions. So this is the great scam: Democrats are saying, We are going to raise the taxes, these surcharges, but then we are going to turn around, and as long as these rich people do what we ask them to do-- they buy the right type of solar panels, the right type of electric car--then we are going to turn around and hand them cash. Now that is something that the vast majority of Americans will never be able to afford, but you will be happy to know that the Democrats' plan is to subsidize the rich. And it gets even darker. So now the Democrats are going to put in SALT, State and Local Tax deduction. And the great thing is, if you make $1 million a year, it looks like you are going to get the vast majority, you are going to get the highest amount of this money. But for the population that is $400,000 and up, they get the majority of the SALT. It is, once again, the Democrats subsidizing the rich and the really rich. And for everyone else who is functionally making $150,000 and less, you don't get anything. You don't get any value here. How can this be? I mean, am I living in a parallel universe where the rhetoric from the left is, tax rich people; wink, wink, nod, nod. Not only do we subsidize them when they buy the things we want them to buy; but then we are going to give them additional tax benefits. We are going to make additional things they spend money on deductible; and the rest of the population just be screwed. I grabbed this one, it substantially basically makes some other points. So think of this: In the Democrats' social spending bill, best as I can identify it, there is about $100 billion to finance amnesty. Okay. So it functionally gives a 5-year visa to millions of folks who are here undocumented illegally. But you remember our earlier discussion? What are the two things you do to create economic violence to the working poor? Inflation. Well, too many--remember our elementary school economics class? Too many dollars chasing too few goods. So the left put out lots and lots and lots of money to people's bank accounts because that is great politics; instead of using those resources to say we are going to make our society more efficient, more clean, more productive. And that productivity means you can pay people more, and you have a society that grows, and then maybe we can take on our debt problem. But we did it just backwards. So now you get to see what Keynesian economics looks like. And are you enjoying the inflation yet? Because it looks like it is going to continue to pop. And then, flooding society with lots of other low-skilled workers. Okay. Well, it will be interesting to see how long it is before the left actually has to come in here and say we need to do additional subsidies to the working poor because we stuck it to them. And look; if anyone has a question, we have multiple papers, university peer-reviewed papers talking about how the Democrats' plan actually will make the poor poorer by the end of the decade. University of Chicago, four Ph.D. economists published a paper a couple of weeks ago showing that the lowest quartile of income--and I despise the term quartiles, but that is what economists use--will be poorer at the end of the decade. Now, a lot of that is because of the Democrats' unwillingness to attach the benefits to learning job skills, to actually working. They have severed those. You would have thought we learned that during the Clinton years, when you rewarded work, rewarded going and gaining job skills--we are going back to the bad old days of saying, if you want to just not work, you will be happy. As long as you vote for the right party, we are going to send you a check. Does anyone see the cruelty here? Now, there are some things in this spending that look--endangered plants, okay, it is $4.9 million. Desert fish, okay, $4.9 million. Fresh water mussels, which are actually a real problem, but it is $19 million. And everyone understands the difference between $1 million and billions. So $100 billion for amnesty, but $19 million for functionally--we will call it invasive species and protecting others. It is like the drop of a bucket in an ocean wave. But it gives you a sense where--so the Democrats get a nice talking point, but the math is absolutely perverse. Ultimately, over the next decade, you have got to deal with this one way or the other. Either what the left is doing is when--you are going to see the scoring this Friday of how many programs saying, well, we are going to spend all this money on a transfer payment, European style transfer payment, but it is only for 2 years; wink, wink, nod, nod. A future Congress won't continue it. You all remember the fraud of the last time we had--Speaker Pelosi a decade ago--and there were multiple spending bills, where the way they fit into something called PAYGO is, we are going to spend this much, this much, but on the fifth year we are going to just pretend the program no longer spends any money. Well, this is now the more modern version of that fraud that was committed financially, budgetarily, is we are going to spend the money for a year or two, and then we are going to pretend it stops; and that way we hit certain budget boxes to meet the reconciliation; wink, wink, nod, nod. Will the voters be paying attention to it? But let's say they are honest. It is not likely, but let's say that honestly that is not the scam; that they fully intend to spend all this money, get themselves through the next election, and then stop the spending. Well, in that case, the taxes are permanent because the taxes don't expire, even though, what we can tell best from the revenues, they don't come close to covering all the spending. And if the spending is made permanent, the social entitlement transfers, over the 10 years, this is trillions and trillions of dollars out of balance. I understand--and, look, this is one of my great sins, and I think a lot of us on the conservative side, we sound like accountants on steroids. You know, we come and talk about GDP and workforce, labor force participation. But the fact of the matter is, if you care for people, if you believe growth, economic growth is moral; that it provides opportunities; that that is how you save for retirement; that is how you help your child go to college; that is how you have a better house, a better life; it is the opportunities that growth creates. So when you see someone like me come behind the microphone and talk about GDP and the benefits it brings, it is a number. It is classical economics. It is also that poor family that is trying to be less poor. And the tax foundation has done a bunch of modeling that makes it pretty darn clear that the left social spending bill is going to make our entire society poorer. When you start to look at these numbers over the decade, and at the end of decade, we won't have grown as much. We are going to be missing--I mean, in a decade, we are missing a half a trillion dollars of economic growth, of GDP. You remember our very first board? What is--for my little girl, for everyone else out there, this is what wipes us out as a society. This is the thing that this body is terrified to talk about. And this is already the baseline. The baseline from CBO already says, in 29 budget years, we are $112 trillion of borrowed money, and that is assuming really stable interest rates. That is assuming no more wars. It is assuming no more major recessions. We were doing one attempt to try to calculate these numbers. So the Penn Wharton model, that was published actually today, where they were trying to figure out how much more it would add to the debt. So the Penn Wharton model said, if the spending is continued, which is the obvious thing that is going to happen, it adds 24.4 percent to the debt. Okay. Now we didn't have enough time to break through all their tables, and we will work through that. But just off the top of your head, $112 trillion, if you added 24.4 percent on it, that is close to $140 trillion of borrowed money; 139 something. You have got to understand, this is what the left is leading us to, instead of coming in and saying, we are going to protect Medicare by investing in things that cure. Remember, this Medicare dollar? You know, $77 trillion plus of borrowing in the next 29 years, just to cover the Medicare portion shortfall? 31 percent of that is just diabetes. You could have a connection here between the left and the right saying, we are going to do an operation warp speed and go at diabetes because it turns out by curing the misery you also have a major effect on the debt. That is creativity, that is being rational. Instead of trying to buy your next election, and pretending to finance it with a whole bunch of gimmicks that don't really create revenues; that are going to create borrowed money. And it is not CBO, it is not me. It is the outside groups that play it straight. Tell Penn Wharton and others that they are lying, because they have done the--I think they underscore economic growth on some things. But the fact of the matter is, if the left is about to pass a piece of legislation at the end of this week that looks like it is likely to add another 24.4 percent to the debt, does anyone see the level of immorality in wiping out economic growth and the opportunity? And we had a couple of years there where it was working. The fact of the matter is 2018, 2019 were Goldilocks, and it was done because we invested in the things that create opportunity and growth, instead of the model right now, where the left is going to invest in things that functionally slow economic growth down; make individuals dependent on the Federal Government; disincentivize participating in the economy? And if any of you have ever read any of your textbooks from what the world looked like in the 70s, where the last time the left did something very similar to this, the societal breakdowns, the inflation, the misery. Once again, we are about to see the financing of misery instead of investing in the things that actually would create opportunity and growth. We are better than this. I know it would take someone on the Democrats' side. They would have to stand up to their base and explain basic economics. But there is a path that works. And if you give a darn about the poor, the working poor, the middle class, ultimately, the data says, at the end of the decade if the left passes their Build Back Better social entitlement spending bill, they are going to be poorer. That is what we are about to do to this country, and this place should be ashamed. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, as we get ourselves sort of organized, last Monday, I did an entire hour here on the floor--55 minutes--and we actually did a presentation up and down the budget. Not this budget cycle, but basically what does our country look like over the next 30 years? What is driving the projections of $112 trillion of debt 29 years from now? Look, it is one of those presentations that is rather uncomfortable for most of us because the punch line is demographics, and that is not what we typically do here. But the reality is, we have a real issue. We are getting old very fast as a society. Let's do a bit of a reminder here and actually look at the math. We are going to walk through a couple of these that are the same as last week, but the difference tonight is we are going to try to talk about a handful of solutions. There is a big package of solutions, and most of them are really hard and are really going to be cantankerous around here, but there are solutions to deal with. Let's actually first walk through where we are at today. Once again, I won't worry about 1965 in the mix. It is important that anyone watching this, fellow Members of Congress, understand. Today, 2021, 77 percent of all the spending that will come from Washington is mandatory. Only 10 percent is defense; 13 percent is functionally what we vote on. I think there is a huge misunderstanding in the public that we march off to Congress and are voting on these $4 trillion budgets. We are not. We are functionally voting on this little green wedge here that is discretionary spending. So if I came to you right now and said, okay, what is driving the debt over the next 30 years? I am going to show you a number of slides that are going to show the budget is in balance except for two things-- Social Security and Medicare. And it is mostly Medicare. Social Security is actually quite fixable. There is a number of levers. None of the levers will make anyone particularly excited or happy, but we once calculated we had 24, 26 different levers to make Social Security solvent and keep our promises. Remember, Social Security and Medicare are earned benefits. It is a societal contract. We have an obligation to be there. But Medicare is a really tough one, and we need to actually go back to having the honest conversation about what drives much of this debt. Well, if you see here, this is taxes paid in, benefits out for Social Security. You notice they are pretty much in balance. Social Security is a fairly square deal. You get a little bit of a SPIF, on average, for the average American. Where the numbers get really difficult is the average American couple is going to put in about $161,000 into the part A Medicare, which is only the trust fund for just the hospital portion. The pharmaceuticals, the other doctor visits, the other things are general fund. So when you are paying your FICA tax, you are paying this here. But that average couple is going to get $522,000 in benefits. So the differential from $161,000 to $522,000 is the driver of the vast majority of U.S. sovereign debt over the next 30 years. It is this differential here. It is not that complicated. One of the great frustrations here is my brothers and sisters on the left will come behind the microphone and say things like: Well, if we had Medicare for All, or we expanded the ACA, ObamaCare. That is not true. If anyone just takes a quick breath and steps back--and, look, Republicans are guilty on part of this, too. Those are financing bills. The ACA was financing it, who got subsidized and who has to pay. Medicare for All is just a change of who pays. None of that is about what we pay. And the Republican alternative was the same. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay. So what we are going to talk about are some of the revolutions in what we pay, changing the cost of healthcare. But we first need to understand the scale of these. Look, this is functionally the same size as we just had, but it is important to understand that for every dollar in, particularly on Medicare, we get $3 in benefits back. And now you start to do that with the demographics of the country. This is just a graphic. So you see the orange here. That is us just getting old. That is just simply us moving into our benefit years. The green is healthcare costs. We have known people were going to turn 65 for how many years in this country? And we are still avoiding the issue. But you start to see, when you start to get into the 2050s, this here, your country has $112 trillion of publicly borrowed debt, and 78 percent of that is just Medicare. This is one of the slides that I actually see in my dreams because, if you understand math, if you are willing to own a calculator, this slide should scare you to death. The purple is functionally the borrowing of Social Security and the interest on it. This is the spending of Medicare and the interest on that. You will notice in this board here $112 trillion of borrowing, and it is mostly the cost of Medicare and the financing of that. The rest of the budget, if you remove Social Security and Medicare, is actually in balance. Just a quick aside before the next board. How many times today behind these microphones did anyone come up and say that functionally the greatest threat to the stability of the country is the fact that we have waited so long? We are well into the baby boom moving into retirement, and you start to see the debt curve just explode on us. So take a look at this board. Now, if you remove the pandemic years here and just functionally look at this 10-year cycle, why this is important--I know there are a lot of numbers and a lot of colors here. This board is basically saying one very simple thing. The vast majority, matter of fact, almost the entire debt for this decade and the decade after that and the decade after that, but for this decade is driven solely by Social Security and Medicare. Think of that. In functionally 9 budget years, your country is scheduled to have functionally about $2.2 trillion of borrowing, just borrowing every year, and almost all of that just came from Social Security and Medicare. And look, dear Lord, please don't let interest rates move against us, but you start to actually see the Medicare outlays, the Medicare revenues, and then you get these arguments saying, well, if you would adjust defense. Well, defense is lying down here, and you start to realize--excuse me, the Medicare taxes and those are down here. You start to look at these gaps. This is where we are at. Sorry, I was skipping ahead a board. If you were to eliminate the entire defense budget--so let's just wipe out the defense budget--you realize it buys you a year or two, but that is about it because this is the projected defense line, and this is Social Security and Medicare where we are going. You would think, Members of Congress, if you actually cared about keeping our promises that we are going to protect Social Security, we are going to protect Medicare, how come every Member of Congress isn't walking behind this microphone holding up these boards and saying we are going to work on a solution to this? Instead, this is almost toxic around here. I can't tell you how many Members I run into who say, David, I want to talk about the debt and deficits, too, and the fact that as we grab all the capital stock of the country, and maybe the world, that we are going to slow down the economy, that we are going to be poorer. Poor people will be poorer; rich people will be poorer. The country's productivity will be crushed. Oh, but I can't actually talk about the drivers of the debt. I am going to actually say there are solutions. There is a way to actually start to take a step back and say, if we are willing to have an honest moment and say, okay, because the vast majority of Medicare is a general fund expenditure, what do we do? It is complicated. There are lots of parts of it. But let's first understand. There is a rule about healthcare, and this is not only Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and Indian Health Services, but everything. Five percent of the population is over 50 percent of the spending. So if you love and care about people, but you also care about spending and healthcare costs, we need to understand the 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who drive most of our spending but also are the folks often living in absolute misery. It turns out if you are willing to spend and invest to end people's misery, it ends up being a way you can actually also take on that debt and deficit. Look, Republicans often come behind these microphones, and we have all sorts of ideas. My suggestion is we do all of them, but we need to be realistic. Just as some of my Democratic colleagues will walk behind a microphone and say, well, if we had Medicare for All--back to the comment before, it is a financing bill. It doesn't actually change the cost of procedures. Unless they are willing to ratchet down and go into rationing, which they swear they won't, it is just an alternative way of paying for it. Then we have Republicans who will come here and say, well, price transparency, I love price transparency. But the best peer-reviewed academic studies out there, it is only 0.1 to 0.7 percent improvement on price for healthcare costs. Now, you still should do it, but if you really want to start thinking about things that drive healthcare costs, what would happen if I came to you and said--you saw in that previous board--what?--it was about $78 trillion of borrowing, just borrowing is Medicare over the next 29, 30 years. Thirty-one percent of Medicare is just diabetes. Thirty-one percent of Medicare cost is diabetes, and that is just Medicare. We haven't done the math for Medicaid, for Indian Health Services, for VA, for just the general populations. But it helps you start to think about, okay, we know chronic conditions, 5 percent is over 50 percent of spending. We know in Medicare 31 percent is just diabetes. Maybe we are starting to understand the drivers of what actually consumes our healthcare costs. My proposal to anyone that is willing to hear is let's actually do something fairly radical--the concept of stepping up and legalizing technology in healthcare but also investing in disruption. Right now, the left actually has some proposals that would functionally do some weird, quirky things such as, as soon as a drug comes off exclusivity, they are going to start to tax it, and hopefully that taxing actually starts now to move to create generics or force the one over here to become less expensive now because it is all functionally exclusivity off-patent, and I would like radically different thinking. How about investing in absolutely curative disrupting research in drugs but also technology? Let's actually walk through something that I find fascinating--and this board is a little hard because there is a lot of noise on it--but 16 percent of U.S. healthcare expenses is people not taking their drug appropriately. Think of that. That is like $550 billion a year. So over half a trillion dollars a year is when someone doesn't take their hypertension medicine and then they have a stroke. It turns out the fastest thing you can do tomorrow is the technology that actually helps people know that they should have taken their hypertension pill or their insulin at a certain time, the technology-- because this is 16 percent of all healthcare. If tomorrow you could remind grandma to take her medicines at the proper times during the day, someone with hypertension that they took their pills so they don't have a stroke, 16 percent of healthcare. And we have real simple technologies out there. We have the pill bottle cap that talks to you and reminds you that says, hey, you didn't open me today. For someone that may have multiple pills at certain times of the day, you actually now have--and there are apparently all sorts of versions of this now--that drop the pill in the bottle and send you a text message, sends your grandkids a text message also to know that the pills are there. The technology is here, and almost no one ever thinks about personal technology like this as a way to crash the price in healthcare. But it is 16 percent. It is $550 billion in a single year, not 10 years, in a single year. So over half a trillion dollars a year you can strip out of healthcare costs if you could just get our brothers and sisters to take their pharmaceuticals in a way that keeps them healthy. Now for some more radical proposals, so far this year, there are two papers out, one U.S.-based and actually one Taiwanese-based, but both from very prestigious universities. They appear to be peer-reviewed. We have been reading through them multiple times. We are trying to get other comments. They talk about, hey, there may be a cure for type 1 diabetes. There may be a cure, still has a long way to go, but there actually appears to be some in-lab breakthroughs on type 2 diabetes. Wouldn't you and I, the left, the right, stop some of the monkey business around here and say if we know 31 percent of Medicare cost-- and we know Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. It is time for an Operation Warp Speed for diabetes. You don't have to call it ``Operation Warp Speed'' because I know that triggers some folks on the left, but the fact of the matter is a concentration of bringing disruption to cure people to end misery because we have to stop this thought process here of saying the way we are going to end people's misery is we are going to build more clinics so you have more access to a doctor. My argument is to have the revolution because the revolution is here. Just think, a couple of years ago, we were dealing with the cost of liver transplants for hepatitis C, and then we came up with a cure. We can do this. Now you start to understand there are clinical trials out there for some new types of stem cell therapy. I read this paper multiple times because it was complicated and fascinating. Stem cell therapy, they worked through the rejection problem, and it appears--at least the early paper--to be a cure for type 1. There is a derivative paper that is out there actually from a Taiwanese university talking about their success in type 2. It is a different thought process. One of the greatest things we can do for U.S. sovereign debt and not collapsing this society and destroying my 6-year-old daughter's economic future, as well as anyone that is heading toward retirement, is actually how we invest our money today in things that end people's misery, and by ending that misery, all of society as well as those individuals' benefit. The amusing part is I have been on this floor for several years talking about messenger RNA. Back when we used to call it CAR-T and you heard the stories about taking someone who functionally their immune system, the cancer they had, doing functionally what we now know as mRNA. Well, it looks like the breakthroughs and the fact that we have now turned much of what are diseases into software problems, and this is hard for a lot of folks to think through, particularly in the time where we have those who are very virus and vaccine conscious, but there is incredible hope here. As you all know, right now going into the field is functionally a vaccine for malaria. Now, it is only about 30 percent, is the data, effective, but when teamed up with some other pharmaceutical, it is like 70 percent. It will change misery around the world. Well, it turns out, that same messenger RNA goes far beyond COVID. We actually now are starting to understand malaria, a whole bunch of cancers. Do you know one of the published papers from early this summer looks like they think they actually have a cure for HIV? Influenza, heart disease, it is fascinating. But helping the body, actually its immune system, work and rehab the heart. There are some amazing things. You saw the papers earlier this year about cystic fibrosis and thinking we are almost there for a cure. Remember, 5 percent is 50 percent of our healthcare spending. Maybe it is time to rethink about the world and the fact that we are going to invest in the disruption that is cures that end the misery instead of financing a country where we might actually lower drug costs, but the disruptions, the cures that could come in the future don't show up. We can show you, in lots of studies, there are multiples out there when we are looking at the Democrats' H.R. 3 that by the end of the decade you actually saw the curve actually go up in healthcare costs because the cures didn't show up. The other thing, and this is not a particularly great slide, and it is getting a little old, but we have a whole binder in the office of articles talking about algorithms and, in this case, AI being able now to detect cancers very early, and the fact of doing that with this type of technology and technology that you can have at home. You can actually almost have it wearable. You can have it in your own medicine cabinet. Using those types of technologies is also part of our path to crash the price of healthcare. Remember, we are not going to change the United States getting older fast, the graying of America. But where we can bend the curve, bend misery and also bend the threat of the incredible amount of debt we are building up every single day, it is saying we are all in. We are going to do wearables. We are going to legalize technology. We are going to actually invest. The fact of the matter is it is happening right now where we are actually seeing countries around the world realizing how big of a problem diabetes is. Now there are awards going out saying, wow, we actually now have lines of research that look like we can finally disrupt the disease. So, this was sort of the follow-up on last week where we did the whole slide chart of what is actually happening in U.S. sovereign debt and how much trouble we are really in and how fast it is building. You have to do a whole series of things. You have to grow the economy consistently. You have to manage tax policy. You have to manage regulatory policy in a way that is for maximizing economic expansion. You actually have to deal with immigration in a way that maximizes economic growth. Opening up your border, importing massive amounts of-- let's be brutal about this--poverty where that poverty and inflation are crushing the working poor in this country. The working poor will be substantially poorer at the end of this decade because of these policies. That is cruel. How about if we had growth? Because growth is moral. So you do these things of tax policy, regulatory policy, immigration policy, and then the financing and tax incentives and the encouragement to do things that disrupt because you could actually do it in both healthcare; you can do it in energy; you can do it in transportation where we can make the future actually pretty darn amazing and actually end a lot of suffering and turns out it is the path that actually bends that debt curve that wipes us out as a society if we don't actually start to tell the truth and deal with it. There is a path. There is optimism. Every day this place squanders working on the real problems and instead of the insanity of some of the policies that are being proposed today that the economists on both sides say will make the country poorer by the end of the decade, we are going the wrong direction. Madam Speaker, I hope at least someone out there hears the message that there is a path. It is just getting harder and harder to get there because every day we fall further in debt. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.