David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I know this is a lot of boards, but in some ways you need it to try to drill in. We hate talking about this around here. I can't tell you--I will start to do these presentations even with some of my conservative brothers and sisters, and they run away from me. But it is the math. The progressive programs overwhelmingly benefit the rich. This is one of my fixations here because I think this is something the left and those of us on the right could actually come to an agreement on. Let's stop subsidizing the rich. The things we provide to families with high incomes, and you actually walk through the amount--we actually brought a presentation to the floor a couple weeks ago and showed a trillion, a trillion-four-hundred-thousand dollars that goes to the very top quartile. That is the lunacy that is going on around here, we want to tax the rich, but we are going to turn around and hand it back to them. You know, if it is my fourth house and I happen to buy it on a beach, should I be getting subsidized flood insurance? The Biden budget proposals would add $8.8 trillion in debt over the next decade, and that is with the Biden tax hikes. How often are we talking about that around here? That is how CBO scores it. Even eliminating all defense spending doesn't get you close to actually making a difference in the long-term debt. Think of this. This is the defense line. And the baseline is basically projected to sit about now for the future decades at about 3\1/2\ to 4 percent of GDP. But you start taking a look and go out to that 2050 number, we are at almost 16 percent of GDP. The size of the economy will just be the spending on Social Security and Medicare. Does anyone sort of see a difference, hey, 4 to 16? This is the reality, but yet, we will get people who will come behind these microphones, Members, and say, if we would cut defense, if we would do this, we will balance it. No, you won't. That is not the math, and you know it is not the math. We need to stop misinforming--my wife would refer to it as lying--the public and start telling the truth and treat them like adults about what is going on. Remember, the problem ultimately isn't Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. We as a society have made lots of promises, and if we are going to keep them, we need to tell the truth about the math. It turns out the growth in the economy is crucial, even with my most optimistic math. When we have come here and said we can have a revolution in the cost of delivering healthcare, we can do all these things, the linchpin of it is you must have the economic growth. You actually take a look during when President Obama oversaw about half a trillion of new taxes, and we functionally lost $3.2 trillion of economic expansion. If we are going to raise taxes, you have got to think it through in a way that what is the economic growth effect at the end of the decade, the next decade, and the decade after that. Because if we don't keep growing the size of this economy, that ratio of borrowing--because the borrowing is exploding. If you aren't growing the economy as fast, there is a technical economic term for it. It is called ``We are screwed.'' Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget. Take everything. Take all the money from upper income. Take all the money from small businesses, and you still don't get close to balancing. We all know this. Why is this place so incapable of telling the truth? I mean, are we that addicted to the spending? Our constituents, our voters, our contributors, are they that addicted to us handing them checks? But this is the basic chart. It makes it very, very clear. You can't solve the long-term budget even if you go out and confiscate 100 percent of small businesses' wealth and the upper income's wealth. Here's where the reality should be terrifying you. National debt is projected to leap from 200 percent to 328 percent of GDP, depending on if those Biden proposals pass and if there are any interest rate changes. So you start taking a look at this. When you start to see $328 trillion of spending in 28 years, 29 years, you get this sort of number, if the Biden proposals pass and interest rates go up by 1 percent. You have got to understand how fragile we are. Is there anyone around here that is a fan of Taleb, the guy that wrote ``Black Swan?'' In ``Antifragile'', he talks about how you can see these things coming, do things not to make yourself--because there are going to be other economic black swans. We have made this country incredibly, economically fragile because these numbers are coming. Now, this one happens to come if the Biden administration and the Democrats here get their proposals. But even if they don't, you are still well over 200 percent of debt-to-GDP as the baseline. The share of Federal tax revenues spent on interest on the national debt is projected to surge. Okay. Here's a simple thought experiment. Today interest, with our incredibly low interest rates, is about 9 percent of GDP. If we get two points of an interest rate hike, in 2051, 100 percent of GDP is just interest. Doesn't this terrify anyone else? I can't be alone in looking at these numbers and just panicked for my society, for my country, my daughter. Since 1990, nondefense discretionary spending has grown four times faster than defense. This is important because we keep seeing people come behind these microphones talking about the skyrocketing cost of defense. Nondiscretionary is growing four times faster. Over the last 20 years, four times faster. And you saw it in the opening slide that basically said 70 percent of all of our spending is mandatory today, 10 percent is defense, and everything else is what we really get to vote on. Coronavirus legislation--and we are all guilty on this; Democrats substantially more guilty, but we are all guilty--pushed the 2020 and 2021 Federal spending past $50,000 per household. So if you are a household out there during this pandemic cycle, do you feel you got $50,000 worth of value? Because you are going to pay for it for the rest of your lives, the rest of your kids' lives, the rest of your grandkids' lives with lots of interest. Functionally, this spike you see here was $50,000 per household. That is what we did during the pandemic. And you have got to understand, we have had an incredible free ride the last couple years. The Federal Reserve has functionally financed our debt. And now we are financing our own inflation. I am sure some of you have been to a grocery store, filled up your gas tank. Welcome to what happens when you do Keynesian economics. Here's the reality: Do you see the little line down here? This is China. This is Japan. This is the rest of the world. This is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is functionally about five times more financing our debt than China and Japan together. We are playing a shell game ourselves. We are financing our own debt. And then you wonder why you have inflation. And we have all been in this body, and I know there is always angst when we get near the debt ceiling, but the fact of the matter is if you take a look at the last 40 years, almost the only times we have actually had any attempt to bend the spending curve, bend the borrowing curve, bend the debt curve have been out of negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. Budget deals, we have had a number of them. Remember the Budget Control Act and some of the others? Now, the problem is, we have had some of these where we set base lines and they were actually sort of working, and then this place all runs away from them. But there is a fraud in those, and that was they were always tied to discretionary spending, not the mandatory that is functionally driving the debt. Some of my brothers and sisters on the left have said, well, it was tax reform. That is just not true. If you actually look at the contributor debt, if everything from tax reform was extended permanently, it is a tiny fraction, and that is assuming without CBO-- remember CBO wasn't giving us the value for all the economic growth we particularly had in 2018 and 2019. But that is not the math. And the six major deficit reduction deals that we have had since 1983, if you take a look at them, almost all of it was under discretionary. It saved us some money in interest. We did raise some more taxes. We did a little bit in the early eighties under Ronald Reagan on mandatory Social Security, but you take a look at them, and they had a pretty darn impressive effect. Remember the surpluses in the late nineties? But today we have let it get away from us. And you take a look at what became of the $1.7 billion in promised-- remember 2013 until this year there was supposed to be about $1.7 trillion in functional reductions in spending? Do you remember the Budget Control Act? Except what happened? Well, time after time both Republicans and Democrats came here and whittled it away because we wanted to spend more money, and we lost much of the value. So we did gain about a trillion dollars of savings over those 10 years. It could have been double that if we hadn't whittled it away. The last thing, and I hope our brothers and sisters on the left will actually step up and help us on this one. The current number is actually substantially higher than this because this slide now is a couple months old, but we think we have identified over $200 billion in functionally missed and fraudulent claims and payments during the pandemic. You have seen some of the crazy stories of how much fraud there has been in unemployment in California. We need to tell the truth about the healthcare costs, Medicare driving our debt. But I believe in a holistic theory. You need to go after everything. You need to go after what we know is the fraud from the last 2 years. We also need to tell the truth about bending the curve on delivering healthcare. And there are ways to do it. This place just needs to stop being so fearful of telling the truth about the debt and deficits because if we don't grow up and take this head on it is going to take our head off. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to try something for the next hour, and it is going to be one of those presentations that is always a little on the difficult side because we are going to talk about things a lot of this place and a lot of the country doesn't want to hear, but we call it math. The first premise, I need to ask all of us, if I were to walk into a room of Democrats, people on the left, or people on the right, and say, ``What is the biggest threat over the next couple of decades that is facing your country?'' you would hear all sorts of things. You know, a couple of years ago, with the Democrats, it was Russia, Russia. Today, it may be this and that. I am going to argue it is demographics. And you go, huh? We are going to do almost 38 boards here, walking through the national debt, deficit spending, spending priorities, and the reality on where there are revenues, taxes, what we call receipts. Then you have to ask yourself, does the next generation, and the generation after that, and the generation after that, do they have the right to live in a country where there is some prosperity, or has Washington, D.C., decided to just destroy those who are heading toward retirement, those who are heading toward elementary school and their future? Let's actually sort of walk through some of the realities of the math. And I am not going to even bother with 1965 and what the mix was. You have to understand, in 2021, 77 percent of all the spending in this place, 77 percent of all the spending, was what we called mandatory, formula, Social Security, Medicare, formulas. Only 10 percent was defense, and 13 percent was everything else in government. If you like to think that, well, you have lots of prodefense Democrats and, obviously, prodefense Republicans, then mandatory is a formula that you don't even vote on here. You are electing Members of Congress to come and vote on 13 percent of the spending in this budget cycle. This is how out of whack it is. And we are going to walk through how much of this mandatory is demographics. Look, getting older is not Republican or Democrat, but it is math. It is going to happen. So let's actually walk through a couple of the realities here. I just threw this chart together. I know it is impossible to read on camera and those things. But the point is simple. Today, Social Security is 23 percent of all the spending; national defense is 15; Medicare is 14. In a couple of years, all those change. I could even show you some charts that, if interest rates tick up even a little bit, defense actually starts to fall to fourth very, very soon. To give you an idea, when you actually get up in front of audiences-- and for conservative audiences, the folklore a decade ago was, well, waste and fraud, foreign aid, and then you would pull out this chart and show that it is a fraction of a percent. Fine, maybe we should do something different in foreign aid. Yes, the spending from this year has massive fraud in it. But the long-term impact of those is nothing compared to the fact--and I am going to have to be honest and have a conversation about how we save, how we protect Medicare and Social Security, because what is going on around this place--you get politician after politician behind these microphones and saying, I am going to protect Medicare, and I am going to protect your Social Security, while they are driving it into the ground. So let's actually start to walk through how fast it is eroding. From 2019 to 2031--and 2031 is what? How many years from now? It is functionally nine budget cycles from now. We will have doubled debt. You have to understand how fast this is eroding from us. The more current numbers, because this slide was done about a year or two ago, it is actually much worse with the spending during the pandemic. So let's actually start to also walk through what we need to understand. Social Security, healthcare, entitlements, and interest costs drive 90 percent of the 2008 to 2031 spending hikes. Let's back that up. If you take a look at Social Security, Medicare, and then the interest attached to those, that is what drives the deficit. Remember our earlier comment: It is our demographics. And this place is unwilling to actually have honest conversations of how we are going to protect access to those earned benefits because the numbers are so big and so scary. What do you have? What do you have here even today? Member after Member running to the microphones talking about how we are going to functionally give away more. But if you are under 50, we are about to make your future--as a matter of fact, it is already baked into the cake. Your future is really dangerous right now. So let's actually walk a little bit more through what the slides look like. Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls drive nearly entire 2019 to 2031 nonpandemic--so this is before the pandemic--and you start to understand that this is before the pandemic calculations. We were heading towards about $2.2 trillion a year in borrowing before the pandemic. That is the baseline number. When you actually start to really understand that--this is the general revenues. And when you start to add up all the shortfalls, you are heading towards a time where functionally a 30-year government is living on borrowed money. So let's actually do a little bit more. You have all seen this slide. Lots of people like to use it. You know, the national debt is set to match the World War II peak within a decade. Well, guess what? We are pretty much there. We have pretty much now have hit what they call the percentage of GDP. Why do we use that? Because there is this theory that says the size of the economy is what allows you to borrow money, and as long as you don't borrow too much money where the interest costs start to burden the availability of what they call capital stock, for an economy to grow, the economy to have new investments. The fear is--remember, it wasn't that long ago we used to talk about, well, when we hit 100 percent of GDP, that means the borrowing, the publicly borrowed money will be the size of the economy. Guess what? We have already surpassed that. We have done it. You are going to see some boards here that should terrify you. Long-term baseline. Now, I have got to give credit where credit is due. Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl, basically what he does is take the CBO numbers, and I think some from Joint Tax, and tries to make them digestible. He also lays out what the short-term, which is 10- year, 20-year, and 30-year layouts are. You can go right now to that website and download these same charts for yourself. But the long-term baseline shows absolutely unsustainable debt; and this side has gotten worse since last year when we printed it, because it actually had in 2050. So functionally in less than 30 years, we were approaching up to 195 percent of debt, borrowed money, the size of the total economy, so functionally twice the size of the economy. That number has actually now gotten much worse because of what we have done in the pandemic financing and a whole bunch of the other promises that have come in and the other spending that has happened during unified government from the left. So once again, trying to actually demonstrate, it is not falling revenues. We have dozens of charts--and I only brought a couple of them--on the slide deck that make it very clear, when you look at--and this redline is what in Ways and Means we would call receipts. Most people think of it as tax revenues. It is basically where it has always been. If you actually go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was about 17.3 percent of GDP came in as revenues, as taxes. Now, we are actually heading towards a time where it is about 18.5 percent. So it is actually higher. But what is this line here? You see this? Okay, that is the pandemic. But then you get back to the trend line. Why is the trend line exploding in that direction with 31.8 percent more spending than revenues? It is demographics, healthcare costs. So let's actually do another one. Medicare part A and Social Security trust funds face bankruptcy. The Medicare trust fund is gone in about 6 years. Remember, post tax cuts and reform, you know, when we reformed the tax code, because the economy was growing so fast and so many people were working, we actually at that time went from 4 years left in the part A trust fund of Medicare--remember, only the hospital portion of Medicare has a trust fund. Everything else comes out of the general fund. We actually added a couple of years, because there were so many people working and, therefore, paying their FICA taxes. But does this concern anyone that the Social Security trust fund is gone? The Medicare, the hospital portion of the trust fund, is gone in functionally 5 years. Is anyone paying attention? Or, once again, will we try to manage this by crisis? But the scale of these numbers is just stunning, and then we live in this financial fantasy world in this place. Here is the slide. I have done a version of this slide for a decade now, and I have been booed in front of audiences for telling them the truth. There is something wrong in our psyche when we are so used to politicians lying to us that we almost want them to not tell us the truth; it hurts too much. Now, I have been on this floor dozens and dozens and dozens of time saying there is a path. The future doesn't have to be this dystopian, debt-laden financial collapse. There is a path. But you have to have a revolution in the cost of healthcare and economic growth. There is a series of things, and you have to do all of them together. The thing that terrifies me the most is how many times do you have anyone come behind these microphones and talk about the scale of the debt that is coming or solutions to it. The fact of the matter is, I don't know if our public votes on this. God knows, you don't raise money telling people the truth about what is going on. But I have a 6-year-old daughter. Doesn't she deserve to live in a prosperous country? Because this is going to crush prosperity for everyone, and it is going to wipe out lots of people in retirement. Once again, you have got to understand, this chart, this is Congressional Budget Office numbers, which say in about 29 years, we have $112 trillion of borrowing, debt. This is an inflation adjusted number, so this is in constant dollars. You are going to notice, the entire 30-year debt comes from Medicare and then Social Security. The rest of the budget is actually in balance. If this place isn't willing to have a revolution in the cost of delivering healthcare to our brothers and sisters and our seniors, our future is really ugly. You have got to understand. There is a fraud around here. You will get people from the left saying, well, we should do Medicare for all. Medicare for all is a financing bill. It does nothing to the cost of healthcare. ObamaCare, the ACA, was a financing bill. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. It was about who had to pay and who got subsidized. None of them are doing things that change the cost of healthcare. I didn't bring the slide here, because I did it just 2 weeks ago, that shows 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes. The single most powerful thing you could do to help the United States in its sovereign debt and to end misery in our minority communities and my Tribal communities out in Arizona is do an operation warp speed, go after type 2 diabetes. Isn't that something Republicans and Democrats could agree upon? And guess what? It has amazing economic impact. We are working on a math problem right now. We actually believe solving diabetes could be one of the single biggest things you could do to income inequality, because you take a look at some of our urban minority populations that suffer from diabetes and some of my Tribal communities out west, and if you normalize, saying, what would happen-- what would this population's income and prosperity look like if you cured diabetes, that income inequality number shrinks dramatically. It is not a bunch of transfer payments; it is solving people's misery. But it is a little hard campaigning on something that is complicated, isn't it? So this is the slide, out of everything I am going to show, that I actually see in my dreams. It really, really bothers me, because I don't have really elegant ways to explain how dystopian this number is. Projected 2051 budget deficits are entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare. But do you see this number here? It is basically saying almost 21 percent of the entire GDP will be outlays for Social Security and Medicare, but revenues will only be 6 percent. This gap here is solely living on borrowed money. This over here is the rest of the budget. Turns out that for the rest of the budget, revenues are outpacing the spending. That is all other government. That is defense, that is environment, that is everything, including education. But this gap right here is what brings us to that $112 trillion of borrowing in the next 29 years. You have got to get your head around this. That is assuming the CBO numbers, that there are no recessions, there are no economic slowdowns, there are no major terrorists attacks that slow down the economy, and there is not another pandemic. That is a baseline number. Do you understand how fragile we have made this economy because we are unwilling to tell the truth about these numbers? I had a political consultant once tell me: Schweikert, you can't tell the truth about the debt and financing, because it will get you unelected. I am incredibly blessed. I represent North Maricopa County, so Scottsdale, Carefree, Cave Creek, Paradise Valley, Fountain Hills. I represent a bunch of really smart people, and they are not happy when I show them this, but they understand it is math. I don't get my head around how this becomes partisan, because you are going to see, if you take a look at the pieces of legislation the left drops, they are trying to expand the programs at the same time they are collapsing. I mean, the lunacy. So let's take a look, do the same thing, trying to get our heads around this. Remember, this slide was done before the pandemic scale of borrowing, which we are going to be paying interest on that for decades and decades and decades, because we never pay it off. Social Security faces functionally a $35 trillion shortfall over the next 30 years. Now, it is 29 years. $32 trillion, if you include the trust fund balance. So functionally just Social Security has a $32 trillion shortfall over the next 29 years, okay? Oddly enough, we could sit down around the table, and that $32 trillion shortfall on Social Security, we can figure that out, because being a defined benefit system as it is, the math, you have about a dozen or two dozen levers where you can say we are going to stop subsidizing really, really, really rich people, we are going to do this, we are going to do that. There are to deal with that. The one that is just brutal, math-wise, is this one. So Social Security is $32 trillion short. Medicare is $78 trillion short. And this one is much more difficult. Yet, the solution around here is, well, we will just subsidize more people and borrow the money. There is a path, but you have got to be willing to functionally legalize technology and disrupt the cost of healthcare. And there are some amazingly good things happening. Actually, with the messenger RNA, there are so many diseases that, if we invest in, we could actually cure misery today and reap the benefits in the future. And I have only come to the floor dozens of times trying to share that math. So once again, let's take a look. This is also something that is disharmonious to what a lot of people believe. The typical retiring couple--and this is before the pandemic--will receive $3 in Medicare for every dollar they paid in. Now, Social Security, you functionally get really close to what you put into it. Social Security is a fairly square deal. Medicare, we have a problem. That typical retiring couple, 2 years ago, when Brian Riedl was doing this math, would put in about $161,000 in a lifetime, and they were taking out, or receiving benefits, of about $522,000. That gap right there is almost the sole primary driver of most of the U.S. sovereign debt over the next 30 years. If we are willing to actually have an honest conversation of what do we do to keep our brothers and sisters healthy, to provide access and resources, but do it in a modern way and could we bend this cost differential here? Because if we do that--remember, we were just talking a moment ago. Thirty-one percent of this is just diabetes in our seniors. If you took that on, that is the single greatest thing you could do to bending this curve and saving the economic future of this society. We also need to deal with a bit of the folklore. Now, this is folklore that comes from the left. You do realize the Tax Code has already been getting more progressive. You do realize the 2017 tax reform was more progressive than the Tax Code before 2017. And look, when you actually go back to the 1980s, 1990s, the top 20 percent at that time were all paying about 60 percent of all income taxes. Today, they are paying 70 percent. This is the top 20 percent. So it is folklore. Now, it is good political folklore. It is good campaign folklore. We are going to make the rich pay their fair share. Fine, stop subsidizing them. We have already done a demonstration here repeatedly that we come up with a trillion, a trillion-four over 10 years of direct subsidies to the really, really, really rich. So the absurdity that is in the current tax plan being offered by the Democrats is: Let's do this. Let's raise their taxes. Oh, by the way, wink, wink, nod, nod, you make $800,000 a year, we are going to give you tax credits of $118,000 if you buy what Democrats tell you to buy. Okay. Why not go further? Why not remove the trillion, trillion-four in direct subsidies that we give to the rich and then put that toward balancing some of these--well, actually slowing the erosion? Because you are not going to balance this. Any politician that gets up and says we are going to balance the budget; we are going to pay off the debt and deficits isn't being forthright. Our job is just to stabilize it at this point because the numbers are so large. If you get someone that comes behind these microphones and throws out the rhetoric of, well, it is foreign aid, it is waste and fraud. Well, we are going to balance the budget by doing this. Buy them batteries for their calculator because they obviously don't have them. This comes back to dealing with the reality. No defense cuts, taxing millionaires cannot finance current deficits. The progressive wish list. The proposals that the left has proposed this year functionally-- the free college, the job guarantees, the Medicare for all--you start to add that up, and if you start to wipe out everything else, you functionally have just blown up the deficit by another 34 percent. The math just doesn't work. So let's actually sort of walk through this. It is important. President Biden promised in his campaign $11 trillion of new spending over 10 years. $11 trillion in new spending. And look, they are all cited. They are either CBO or Committee for a Responsible Budget. But you start to look at it, this is just the campaign promises of $11 trillion of new spending on top of what is the $4-plus trillion baseline budget, plus the couple trillion additional we did over the last two years. Now you have, what was it, the original scoring of the Build Back Better plan was, what? They claimed $3\1/2\--but it really scored out to $5, $5\1/2\ trillion. This is the lunacy we are at. And, yet, if you come and add up every potential tax hike the left talks about--you know, get rid of any changes we did in tax reform that created the great growth--you actually start to take all income over $200,000 and just take 50 percent of it. Hey, you make $200,000, we take 50 percent of it. You do all the tax hikes that are on the entire list of the Democrats. Over a decade, you functionally raise $12 trillion. Okay. The deficit already projected before the pandemic was going to be over $13 trillion at that time. And that is not assuming you just blew up the economy, you slowed down growth. Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I promise I am not trying to go for the record of the most boring for half an hour, but if I make it, bless us all. Madam Speaker, over the next half hour, I am going to try to walk through--and a lot of this is just sort of the boiling frustration that we all go through around here. We are frustrated because I believe a lot of our brothers and sisters on the left mean well. They say warm, fuzzy things. They say things that actually should make you feel good. And then you actually deal with the reality of what is happening in our economy and around us. We are going to blast through a bunch of these and see if I can sort of explain our frustration as conservatives but also as Americans. So just one quick point. Do you remember all of the rhetoric from the last election from our Democrat colleagues about how they are going to actually do all of these things in regard to greenhouse gases, but we will still have a healthy economy? Well, this is the chart before President Biden took office, and you see GDP was truly growing and greenhouse gases had actually made quite a bend and change. But now, we actually also have some other little facts we are going to have to deal with. Think about this: The attacks that happened on President Trump, but in those 4 years, my understanding is use of coal actually fell 30 percent. Well, I have to congratulate the Democrats. It looks like this year's coal usage will go up 23 percent. One more time: Coal usage will now go up almost 23 percent this year because they have so screwed up the energy economy. When you block pipelines, when you block the movement of natural gas, when you block the much cleaner fuel and you need to produce ions, called electricity, where do you go? So, congratulations to the Democrats. They actually took a trend--where they said they wanted this--and have absolutely reversed it. It is sort of an amazing thought, isn't it, that the Biden administration and Democrats did more in the last 9 months for coal production than the previous President did in 4 years? It is a fascinating but good example when you don't own a calculator and don't do economics. Let's actually walk through a couple of other things. You have also seen the reports and the analysis of how many poor people are going to absolutely suffer this winter. Have you seen what energy prices look like? If your household that uses heating oil--I am sorry, for those of us in the desert, we don't know what heating oil is, but we are told it is getting really expensive. Have you seen the numbers of what is predicted to be paid in cold parts of this country? If you are angry about it, go talk to your Democrat Representative because they are the ones that basically, through their arrogance and not owning a calculator, not understanding basic economics, have just, in many areas of the country, will have doubled, doubled your heating bill this winter. But this is what crappy economics looks like. And you start to walk through it. How about if you are in one of those neighborhoods where crime is an issue? Well, you have to thank the Democrats once again. You can see that homicides are up 16 percent in the first 6 months of this year. We chose not to use it, but if you actually look at the concentration of where these homicides are, people of color are the victims here. You know, once again, we hear these beautiful speeches behind these microphones of how they are going to help and protect and do this, except they are killing them. At some point, the math is the math. This is sort of the Democrat destruction in just the first 9 months, 10 months of this year. And the math is the math. The facts are the facts. The air is getting dirtier; the power bills have gone up; you are less safe. But let's keep walking through more of the damage that is being done to our country, the society. In my State, we have a little problem. We are a border State. The number of adult males that are crossing our border has skyrocketed. If you actually start to walk through what that actually means--let's actually take a look. Oh, but what about the fentanyl and who is that killing? When you take a look at the pounds--tonnage, actually--of dangerous narcotics, particularly fentanyl, that is crossing my border in Arizona, thank you for the absurd policies that have been adopted by the Democrats and this President. Is it that you want to kill people? I can't believe that is in your hearts, but that is what you have allowed to happen. Let's actually talk about the other side, the economic side, of what the Democrats have done in regards to the border. Why some of this is important is I need you to double it up. We are going to come back to the inflation here in a second. What are the two things you do in a society if you want to destroy the working poor? You make the value of their labor less. And unlike 2018 and 2019, which we had records in this country, where if you are part of the working poor, you are someone that didn't finish high school and what you sell is your labor, you were getting dramatically less poor. We know income and equality, wages, were all going the right direction. Now, the Democrats take over, and you flood the society with--what was today's final number, 1.7 million, heading towards 2 million-- people of moderate to low skill, and do you understand the economic effects of what you just did to the working poor in this country? We have some data that we did a couple weeks ago on the floor that showed that by the end of the decade, you will have made the working poor poorer in this country, substantially, because of opening the border. Now, add in inflation. If you actually take a look at the real earnings, the real earnings, they are negative. People in this country, the working poor, the middle class, they are getting poorer. Do we care? Because it is the math. It is nice to give these beautiful speeches about how we care, but then when you so screw up the basic economics of society, when you have now devalued their labor by flooding the market with similar skill sets, and now you have so monetized the society that you have cash chasing products and goods, and then you screw up the incentives to work, what did you think was going to happen? You wonder where is the compassion around here? The working class, that middle class, and the working poor are getting poorer every day in this country because of Democrat policies. It is a level of cruelty. Can we stop the hemorrhaging? Can we stop the cruelty to these populations? It is not enough to give pretty speeches that you care. When you start to look at this, when you realize the skyrocketing inflation--yeah, it is the highest in 13 years. But if you do some of the core goods, that if you are on that--I hate the term--lower quartile, where substantial portions of your income go to transportation, food, and rent, it is even higher than this. Now, we understand from the economists, it is no longer considered transitory. This is Democrat policies at work. A couple weeks ago we tried to do a simple explanation of supply side, where you use resources, whether they be tax cuts or incentives or getting regulations right to encourage production, and by encouraging production, you make people's labor more valuable and they get paid more. But the society has more goods and products and services to buy, so you don't set off inflation. You are now living the Democrat stimulus Keynesian model of throw lots and lots and lots of cash at it, but you did nothing to stimulate production. We have lots of cash chasing goods now, but at the same time, all of that cash also encourages people, saying: Hey, maybe I don't really have to work right now. So you have a fall in labor force participation, you have lots of cash to go buy things, and then you wonder how the supply chains get screwed up. You wonder how you have inflation set off. We are reliving the 1970s. Did anyone actually buy a textbook? Seriously. If you actually loved and cared for the working class, for the working poor, you would have been embracing 2018 and 2019, which were miracles of no inflation and dramatic wage growth. Yes, the pandemic has been miserable, but much of this did not have to happen. But it is that arrogance, once again, of Democrat policies. And is it the darkness of, hey, if we send out lots and lots of money in checks, if we are--as the Democrats so-called Build Back Better plan, which is to take the majority of our society and put them on transfer payments--maybe it is great politics. Maybe that is how you become the majority party forever. It is really crappy economics. So if you start to take a look at just the last 6 months--you remember a couple months ago: This is transitory; it is going to stop? Not stopping, not stopping. Even the Federal Reserve now has updated their numbers. So the talking heads were saying, oh, it is transitory, give the administration a pass. Turns out, we have so structurally screwed up the labor markets, we have so structurally failed to provide the incentives to produce things in our own country and massive amounts of this liquidity are functionally now financing the rest of the world and particularly China. So congratulations once again. If you actually start to look--and we are going to put up all of these slides on our website so folks can actually have a chance to sort of dive into them--but how prices have changed in a year. When you start to understand--that is gasoline. This is your fuel oil, as we were just talking about; cars. But you start to go over the things that are sort of the bare necessities for so much of our community. We are just kicking them in the head. Then the arrogance coming out of the White House saying, well, these are sort of, what was it, high-class problems? Come on. Is that really where the heads of the left are? Their excuse is, well--because the basic economics are, if you are a person with assets, you have a house, you have retirement accounts, you own gold, you own other things, you are getting richer. Now, your purchasing power is eroding. But if you don't hold assets or you are a saver, someone trying to save for retirement, these policies are just destroying your economic future. So let's continue down the line of misery that the Democrats have brought us. If you actually take a look at where we were going after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act and you started to realize what had happened in wages, particularly for female participation, we had the highest female labor force participation in U.S. history. It was off the charts, and their wages had begun to skyrocket. Do we see anything in the Democrat proposals that will ever bring us back to that? Actually, no. It is actually just the opposite. The University of Chicago study now makes it look like they will incentivize those numbers to continue to go the other direction. Let's actually take a look--and we started to touch on this. If you are part of that working poor, and you start to understand that what happens on--if you start to break out the world by education level--and I know sometimes this is uncomfortable, because you sort of segment your society. But the reality of it is we actually saw amazing wage growth, just amazing wage growth in 2018, 2019--21-plus percent. And that is the very population that the pandemic smashed into a wall. Now the Democrat policies of inflation, opening up the borders, incentivizing people functionally not to participate in the labor market, they are going to destroy--as a matter of fact, they have already begun to destroy. Let's look also at the brilliance of the left's proposals of functionally: Let's throw lots and lots and lots of cash at the problem and then try to figure out why that cash functionally is on its way to China to buy things. It was not designed to create a robust manufacturing backbone in this country. You actually incentivize people, saying, well, go out and buy lots of things, engage in consumer--oh, by the way, we did nothing in those policies to have that become the new backbone of productivity and opportunity and jobs in our own country. The simple proof of this is--have you seen the pictures of the container ships lined up at the port of Long Beach? What do you think is in those? I mean, we are living it; we are looking at it. Yet the talking heads are incapable of trying something new around here, and that would be tell the truth. So let's do something that is even a little more uncomfortable to talk about. Remember when Vice President Biden was running for President, and repeatedly we were told how if we just had a Democrat Presidency and Democrat unified government, we would see the deaths-- and the deaths are miserable and horrible. I have had a couple friends die of COVID--but they would come to an end and the world would be better. So we have a new President. He is handed multiple vaccines. But how is it possible? How is it possible to have vaccines available to this administration, functionally financed and brought in policy-wise by the previous administration, and then there are more deaths this year than there were last year? Are the Democrats ready to stand up and say: We lied. We made crap up. And the results of not telling the truth and the way they have approached the American people about the vaccines? Are they going to take responsibility for the deaths? Because they sure beat the crap out of Republicans and the last President over this. Should they live by their own words? Let's talk about the Democrats' tax policy now. We need to tax the rich, right? We have done multiple presentations here on the floor saying maybe we should stop subsidizing the rich. We showed a couple months ago $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years of subsidies that go to the rich. In this case, Democrats actually have something brilliant, saying--this is a great scam--we are going to tax the wealthy, but wink, wink, nod, nod, we are going to actually hand it back to the wealthy in tax credits and subsidies. Here is a simple example of a family that makes $800,000 a year. The Democrats' tax bill, tax proposal, will hand them $118,000 in tax credits, if you just buy the right electric vehicle and the right solar panels and these things. This is absurd. You are taking the wealthy in society, you are actually blaming them for not paying their fair share, even though you already saw--I am sure if anyone is literate around here, you saw today's Wall Street Journal talk about you are not actually even getting to the super rich; you are actually attacking the high-income earning rich, because we tax income; we don't tax wealth. But in this case, we are going to build a tax bill saying we are going to raise your taxes, but wink, wink, nod, nod, we are going to hand it back to you in tax credits, as long as you buy what the Democrats tell you to buy. Yet, if you actually look at what the design of the Democrats' tax plan is, you must understand by the end of the decade, we are all poorer. The society is poorer. The working poor are poorer. The middle class is poorer. We now have multiple studies--and we are going to talk about these on a number of the slides--where the size of the economy actually shrinks. The number of people working actually shrinks. If you understand our debt problem, if we do not have an incredibly robust economic expansion, we are in real trouble. Yet, this is sort of the dystopian future the Democrats are planning for my 6-year-old daughter and for every American. You understand, when you add in the spending proposals, in less than 10 years, we are going to be running $2.6 trillion of borrowing every single year. So think of that. Nine years from now when we are working on the budget, just the borrowing package--so in 9 years, the borrowing package, just to finance the spending of baseline government, the entitlements, and the expansion of entitlements, we will be borrowing $2.6-plus trillion every single year. This is the healthy economy we were promised? So, understand what that means is, in less than 9 years, if the Democrats get their way, we are at 129 percent of debt to GDP, and that is publicly held debt. Now, you all understand why that number is so incredibly important. When you strip capital out of society, how does the small business get a loan? How does the entrepreneur here get a loan? How about the person who just has a dream and wants to start a business in their garage? They have to compete with government. Is there this bizarre fantasy that somehow we are going to monetize it? Maybe the fantasy of modern monetary theory, which, as you understand, has been tried many, many, many, many times over history, and it has always ended up very badly. Do you remember the inflation numbers a few boards ago? Welcome to the dystopian future that the left is bringing us. Look, the baseline number was already crappy. It was over 106 percent of GDP. With the Democrats' additional proposal, it goes from about 106 to 129 percent. This is a miserable future for this country, and this is being brought to you by Joe Biden and our beloved Democrat friends. I know they mean well; at least, I like to believe they do. But they have to see these same numbers. Most of these are based on CBO projections. You start to see other things happening in society because of Democrat policies that really, really are starting to take effect right now. We are seeing some numbers that we need to understand between now and the end of the year. There are some economic numbers from us on the Joint Economic Committee that are becoming incredibly uncomfortable. This is sort of an odd one that popped up the other day. It turns out, we are having this sudden huge spike of individuals dropping out of the labor force. But what happens when you have a substantial spike of folks who are just saying, ``I am going to retire''? One of the miracles of 2018, 2019 is we saw our brothers and sisters coming back into the labor force because wages were going up, and there were so many opportunities. How can there be a world right now where we say we have over 10 million open jobs, yet we are seeing huge dropouts of the labor market? This is a chart that basically says we had, what is it, 1\1/2\ million-plus older Americans decide, ``I am going to take early retirement.'' What is so dark about this number is a huge, huge, huge portion of those have almost no savings. They are taking early retirement, going to live on Social Security instead of what we were seeing in 2018, 2019 as the economy grew. We were actually seeing poverty of seniors falling because many of them had taken part-time or had taken some work. Now the reverse trend has happened. What has happened in the psyche of Americans, of our brothers and sisters out there? We are already seeing millions of Americans of traditional working age disappearing from the labor pool, so they are not counted in unemployment because they are not looking. But they are in that baseline number we call labor force participation. I know this is geeky, but it is really important. You cannot have a growing, healthy, prosperous society if you build so many disincentives in your public policy that not working or dropping out or retiring early is where your head is at. According to the University of Chicago, the Democrats' plan to expand the child tax credit would cause a million and a half workers to exit the labor force. On the conservative side, we have actually made multiple proposals of how to do some creative things with the earned income tax credit so you actually help the working poor and you make working more valuable, more attractive. But the Democrats' proposal is now to delink a monthly check from participating in society, participating in the economy, building skill sets, building an economic future for yourself, your retirement, for your children. And now we actually start to see the academic studies coming in that we are going to lose a million and a half workers just on this one line item. It truly is almost dystopian that the left can get behind the microphones, say these warm, fuzzy things, but the economists are sitting there shaking in their boots, saying we tried versions of this in the 1970s, and it did not work well. And now we are doing it in a time where our demographics are a real headwind and our debt load is crushing. We actually have some proof that also demonstrates that the President and the Democrats said a lot of things that just weren't true because the data now is in on the States that ended the early, we will call it the SPIF on unemployment. It turns out they represent a small portion of this country's population because I think there was only, what, 13 States that did it, and there are like 20, 23, whatever they are, a small percentage of the Nation's population, but they are over half the job growth. The data is absolutely clear. The States that actually ended the unemployment SPIF, the enhanced unemployment, had dramatically better economic growth, job growth. Once again, is having a job, is economic prosperity, is economic growth moral? Because if it is, then what the Democrats are doing is absolutely immoral. You start to see the Byzantine structure of all the tax hikes that the left is proposing, and we may do some of this next week. What is so crushing about this is to even get close to their spending requirements, it doesn't produce enough revenues. I keep getting asked over and over, and saying okay, the Democrats aren't dumb. There are probably a few of them that actually do own calculators. They have to understand that their spending proposal in this environment will be incredibly destructive to opportunity in society. We have lots of charts. You need to go through these other studies that basically show the transfer payment model the Democrats are pushing ends social mobility in this country. If you are poor, you are going to stay poor. If you are middle class, you stay middle class. In this country, do you really think our societal social fabric is going to hold when you have no opportunity to move upward and sometimes even downward, that we are going to basically become a European transfer payment, socialist society; that the class you are born into is where you stay, no matter how hard you work, the schooling you go to, because that stagnation is what every study says? The other part that is also perverse is the Democrats have to also understand the receipts, revenues, that would be produced by all these taxes don't come close to covering all their spending. It is obvious. They are setting up our country to actually have to do other layers of taxes. Are they going to sweep retirement accounts? Well, that is where a bunch of the cash is. Are we basically going to move to a VAT, a value-added tax, so each step of production we tax? Are you going to have to add some sort of tariff or border tax? Because right now, none of this works. None of the math works. The final slide here is a congratulations to President Biden and the Democrats' policies because they did something none of us thought was possible. Remember when we started this year in January, this was going to be one of the most robust economic growth years in history? There were discussions that we were going to be 6-plus percent GDP growth. As of yesterday, GDP growth from the Atlanta Fed calculator is 0.5. One-half of one percent is our economic GDP projection for this quarter, proving at some point policies really do matter, the people you elect really do matter, and the amount of pain this is going to cause to so many people because the opportunity, the growth in their wages has now been crushed by these policies. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Forgive me. I have had a lot of coffee today. I am a nondrinking Catholic, but I believe if you are not walking around with expresso, you are just not trying. Mr. Speaker, I am dead serious about this. It is more than just the debate you and I are willing to have on raising taxes over here and spending it over there, becoming more egalitarian in a society. This bill is truly designed to redesign society. So, Mr. Speaker, now you have the forced unionization of all government workers up and down the tree for the majority of States that are right-to-work States. Okay. Fine. Shouldn't you actually have told someone that instead of trying to hide it in the legislation? We keep coming up with more and more of these little backdoor things. So, Mr. Speaker, if you have union representation, you are going to get to deduct your union fee. But if I am a nonunion worker, I am in a State that provides either optionality or they don't recognize it in my State, but I do have some group over here who does collective bargaining or negotiations, if I'm a union member I get to deduct my fees. So we are using, once again, spending through the Tax Code to backdoor subsidized unions because unions write huge checks and donate stunning amounts of money to Democrat campaigns. But if, on the other side of the equation, I am not one of those union members, I don't get to deduct. Come on. Is this really where the left has gone that every policy, every design, and every little land mine that can be hidden in the language of the few thousand-page bill isn't necessarily to make the working poor less poor and isn't necessarily designed to make our society grow and provide opportunity? It is designed for power. We saw a number of things in that piece of legislation in the Ways and Means Committee when we started to lay it out. I have to admire the audacity of the left and what they are trying to do right now. I just have to genuflect at one level and say that the gall is so over the top it belongs almost being in a movie if someone actually cared about math. But the forced unionization, the level of transfer payments, and the level of basically making the majority of society, people up to--what was our math--$440,000 a year getting functionally child support payments and child tax credits--direct payments for them, then out the other side of the mouth saying: We are helping the working poor. No, you are not, Mr. Speaker. If you and I were helping the working poor, we would have done something dramatically different on the saver's credit and how we do earned income tax credits, those things, and we would actually have an honest conversation that the miracle of growth we had in 2018 and 2019 was one of the most egalitarian and successful in closing income inequality and in closing nutrition stress. Mr. Speaker, when you saw that nutrition stress shrank to its lowest level and poverty rates shrank to their lowest level--there is a model out there--put it under a Democrat label. I don't care. I know it irks people on the left to say: Well, regulatory and tax reform created a vibrant economy at a time when our demographics are moving against us. What makes some of those numbers so difficult--and everyone here knows it, and no one will talk about it--one of the greatest headwinds we have as a society is, we are getting old very fast. Our demographics are really, really tough. The only way we are ever going to make our debt obligations in a couple decades and the only way my 5-year-old is going to be able to live as well as I did, is not functionally turning the economy into a European-style transfer entitlement economy which is what the legislation does. It has got to be an economic velocity of takeoff, of adopting a disruptive technology, and of providing where investments are in productivity, so everyone is able to be paid more, make the wages, and make their labors much more valuable. We actually know how to do it now. For my last couple of moments here, I can't count the number of times I will see Democrats get up and spout about supply-side economics and then you talk to them, Mr. Speaker, and they have no idea what supply- side economics is. You are living in it, Mr. Speaker. When you see the shortages, when you see the ability to have supply chains work, and when you see the cost of everything going up around it, Mr. Speaker, then you have just seen the Democrat version of subsidized Keynesian, put money into consumption but don't build and put incentives into the production, because the production creates the wealth, creates the jobs, creates the productivity, and keeps the prices low. So even if you subsidize me, if I had to pay higher prices, then I didn't live any better. The fact of the matter is, you are living the ultimate experience right now, Mr. Speaker, and I truly wish the 1970s could have their economics back. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, to my friend Louie, it is always interesting listening to you. People know how freaky smart you are. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do something for the next half an hour, and I don't want to sound like a jerk when I do some of it. Some of it I am sincerely trying to find a way to talk about something that is of intense concern to me. But it is also going to be a pretty direct assault on a lot of the left's policy right now. I am hoping there will be some hearts that will listen to the concern and to the solutions. Mr. Speaker, if I came to you right now and said: What is the single most economically violent thing you could do to someone that is in the working poor, those brothers and sisters who didn't graduate high school, who basically the economic value they sell is their labor, their work talent? We are talking 25 million to 40 million Americans who functionally are in that category. They are hardworking, lower middle class. What we have allowed to happen so far this year, the brutality to their family's ability to survive, to economically exist--I want to walk through some of the math, and then I want to talk about why the left believes a series of transfer payments is the way to make their life better, unlike when we actually had the data from 2017, 2018, when we saw the working poor get dramatically less poor because their labor became more valuable. What is the number one thing you do, the first thing you do, to crush people in that lower end of the scale who are out there busting their backside trying to survive? You open up the border. We have really good data here, and we are going to talk about a couple of our slides, but there are lots of studies. The amusing thing, some of the older studies were actually promoted by liberal think tanks that actually thought that the exploitation of cheap labor coming across the border was actually a thing to crush the poor in the United States. We all forget, a decade, decade-and-a-half ago, it was the left who believed in securing the border to protect working men and women, and the right was the one that was accused of saying we want cheap labor for our business colleagues. It is amazing how the ideology has flipped. But we actually have a couple of studies that basically come back-- and these are tough because we are going to talk some pretty aggressive math. If you take a family that you and I would designate as the working poor today and you flood society with 1 million, 2 million in, functionally, a 12-month, 24-month period of time, you have just lowered their future earning power. In one of the studies, it is about 6.2 percent, which is a stunning amount to think that, at the end of a decade, their wages are going to be over 6 percent less. They didn't participate in the growth of the value of their labor going up. I will argue that we are missing one of the most critical parts of discussing what is happening in the southern border of our country. And being from Arizona, we are seeing it. If we love and care about the people that struggle in our country, then why would we allow a policy--and I hear on occasion, well, we are being compassionate. You damn well are not being compassionate to the people that are already here. We can demonstrate in study after study--and these aren't conservative studies; they are academic. Some of them when we went back, we went back 10 to 15 years and found some that talked about that they were going after President Bush's policy of immigration reform and what it was going to do to working men and women, particularly on, we will call it, the working poor categories. It just breaks my heart that, on occasion, we are going to have the immigration conversation of the chaos that is going on at the border. Could we actually demonstrate some love and caring for those working families, for those working individuals on the lower income end? Mr. Speaker, this isn't comfortable coming from someone that looks like me from Scottsdale. But if you actually see the stratification on the numbers, you take urban African Americans and we are kicking their head in economically, more than just over the next year, but over the next decade. I have a fixation that economic expansion, you know, economic growth, is moral. Particularly what we saw in 2018 and 2019, before COVID, we saw this amazing thing where income inequality was shrinking at the fastest ever in modern economic history, that the working poor were getting dramatically less poor. The rich were getting richer, but not as fast as the poor were getting less poor. That has to be the goal. What is the other thing you also do to absolutely crush the working poor? You open up the borders and devalue their labor, and then you allow an inflationary cycle right now. I have been there. I mean, God knows, I lived in a little, tiny room behind a garage for years just trying to economically survive. I got very lucky. But to someone that that is their life, when the rent goes up, when fuel goes up, when food goes up, all these things where, for someone that is in the working poor, the percentage of their wages, their income, maybe even their transfer payments gets chewed up by inflation. And at the same time, you are lowering the value of their wages. Why would we do this? Do my brothers and sisters on the left actually have any labor economists who are willing to tell the truth, that at the end of this year, the very population that both sides here claim we care about will be poorer? Their lives will be more miserable. We are better than this. I am frustrated because I understand the left's solution is, well, we are going to stack them up with transfer payments. Okay. We are going to talk about how that gives you a nice pop. By the end of the decade, you could have gone with the conservative model, which is economic vitality, growth, make the wages more valuable, those things, a supply-side model where things get cheaper because you have incentivized productivity and production, those things. Remember the rule of thumb. What are the two ways you pay someone more? Inflation, which means you raise their wages, but they didn't get anything more for it because it is just chasing the costs, or productivity where you are able to pay people more because we built a tax and regulatory code that encouraged investment in pieces of equipment, in training that made that worker more valuable, and, therefore, they get paid more without setting off inflation. We were living that just about a year and a half ago. That is what we were seeing in 2018 to 2019. Look, there is another study out there that just talks about the decrease in wages that is now happening. When you start to increase the labor supply--and believe it or not, this one shows 10 percent. But remember, it is 10 percent within that subcategory. If the border crossing numbers stay where they are, that is what we are going to hit for the next decade. That study says over 6 percent, and this one says almost immediately we are going to take the working poor and not see their wages go up. This study says they are going to go down 3 percent almost immediately because that is what happens when you raise the labor pool of people with similar skill sets. It is a type of cruelty. If I came to you and said that we both care about the working middle class, the hardworking middle class, and we both particularly care about the working poor in the country because we believe that by making their lives more economically viable and prosperous, our society, our country, gets better, healthier, and we don't tear at each other. The left talks a lot about income inequality, and I actually agree with that. I believe the stratification. But you don't do it by kicking one quartile in the head. You do it by lifting up the mass and making their labor much more valuable. But what happens when we start to actually say the way the left is going to do it is, we are going to do trillions of dollars of transfer payments. We will see childhood poverty. Families with children who are in poverty is unacceptable where it is at. There is a handful of things that we would all agree to do to help that population. But are you really going to do transfer payments for folks with kids up into the $400,000-a-year income? Because that is what the legislation says. Is that really helping children that are growing up in poverty households? I think one of the numbers is it caps out, for a couple with kids, mid-$400s. That is really the left's definition of struggling families? Or is it actually a level of, sort of, dark political gamesmanship, saying: We are not only going to take care of the population that we agree we must find a way to make them more prosperous, but we are going to take the rest, the most of our society, and we are going to make sure they are addicted to a monthly transfer payment because they will be beholden to one political party. If that is so, be honest about it. It is brilliant politics. It is devastatingly horrible economics. As you can start to see with this chart I am holding, by the end of the decade, we are going to be much poorer as a country, much poorer as a society. The size of our economy will actually be smaller because of the way we are doing this. I am going to have to do this on the floor next week because I wanted to make sure I got my math absolutely correct because it is a hard dataset. By the end of the decade, you can do the Democrat's transfer payment model or our model to help those who are most in need, and then an aggressive economic growth model. You would have a dramatically bigger, healthier economy in the Republican model. Wages would be at a point where you would actually have almost the same poverty statistic. The difference is the left's version of a transfer payment model to help the poor, and now the craziness of taking it up to people making $400,000-some on that child credit. You create a world, at the end of the decade, where these populations, their wages are worth less, their work opportunities are worth less, their ability to save for retirement is worth less. Their future prospects are basically beholden to the Democrats sending more money. With the Republican model, you don't get the same political credit, and you don't get the same political loyalty to your party, but they have an economic future. Their savings, their future wages, their ability to save for retirement are dramatically different. Yes, those people are free to actually go wherever they want, ideologically. But it is a better economic model for our society. We are seeing datasets after datasets. What the Democrats are about to do in their $3.5 trillion--no matter where it ultimately goes, they are going to make our society poorer. They are going to make those working people poorer. The Tax Foundation just published, and I have only done the first skim of it, but they are looking at a horizon. They are saying, look, revenues are only coming in at a fraction of what the Democrats are scoring over time because of the shrinkage of the size of the economy. They may get a trillion dollars of new revenues, but long-run GDP, wages, jobs are all smaller, and fairly dramatically smaller over time. There will be 300,000 of our brothers and sisters who no longer have job prospects. The size of the economy will be smaller. It is sort of a dark way for those who care a lot about prosperity in our society. How can you engage in a political plan, saying, well, we are going to do these types of redesigning the economy, redesigning our society, basically becoming a European transfer income socialist society, which that is the model, without admitting, oh, by the way, at the end of the decade, if you were to take away the transfer payments, the society is much poorer. With the transfer payments, the future of our society, the future of these workers, the future of the working poor, their prospects are much, much less. This is a pretty dark thing I believe the Democrats are doing. I think a lot of them have never had an economist sit down and walk them through the math, saying: You are going to get a nice little sugar high for a while, but by the end of the decade, you are going to have a fairly stagnant and almost no economic growth. And people are going to be getting poorer every single day. I refuse to be like some of my colleagues out there who believe that is actually a mission of the Democrats, to make more of the society addicted to their largesse. I believe that we both love and care about people, and we want them to prosper. I just need someone to buy my brothers and sisters on the left a calculator so they can see what they are about to do. This isn't all of them. We can actually keep finding more. This is just the list we have as of right now of all the tax hikes. There seems to be this scam going around here of, well, we are only going to tax the rich. Now, we all know that is a fraud, and I am going to show you how. If they really wanted to transfer wealth from very wealthy people, it is not about taxing them because when you do that, you distort economic decisions. Stop subsidizing them. You do understand--I actually came to the Ways and Means Committee and presented it multiple times here on the floor--we can come up with, in 10 years, $1.4 trillion that the Democrats subsidized the rich. So it is this amazing economic fraud. We are going to tax them this much money, and then they are going to turn around and subsidize those people, which is brilliant politically. You show up and lobby me, maybe write me campaign checks and those things on the tax side so I don't make that too burdensome. Then you come and lobby me and campaign and help me and write me checks, and I hand you subsidies. But when you start to read through all the tax hikes that are part of the Democrat legislation, it is not just the line saying we are going to raise taxes on really rich people. It is dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of different tax hikes, which will kick the middle class in the head because you just raised their costs. You have just shot up their inflation, and you have just made it expensive for them to live. But for a lot of folks here, they don't understand the basics of the number of excise taxes. I know the people who are probably watching this or listening, you are freaky smart. You understand the concept of a value-added tax like it is in Europe and parts of Asia, where, during the production cycle, you keep adding. That is essentially what an excise tax is. If you think about it, we tax it at the manufacturer; we tax it at the distributor; we tax again at the retailer. But there seems to be a misunderstanding that what you are doing to the base affects many products and commodities, and in that list are a number of excise taxes. The chart here is just trying to understand what you are doing to the prices of products. Then they have the gall to come behind these microphones and say: We are not going to raise the taxes on poor people. We are not going to raise taxes on the middle class. Come on. Buy a calculator. At least have some level of intellectual honesty. Say you believe a society that is addicted to transfer payments and entitlements is the Democrat vision and the right's vision is economic growth and prosperity. I am willing to have that debate. I believe the math on my calculator--for my 5-year-old daughter--that a model with a society from top to bottom is wealthier, more prosperous, is so much more egalitarian and so much more elegant, instead of a command and control where the party in power can dial up and dial down whom they want to punish and whom they want to reward according to how they participated for that party in the last election. That is how cynical this place has now become. So let's actually walk through a little bit of my argument that if the Democrats really gave a damn about getting revenues, then they would stop subsidizing the rich. Because you understand, Mr. Speaker, when you go and raise the taxes on capital gains and say: Oh, rich people are going to pay those, then you have just distorted their investments in things that make us more productive as a society and as an economy. Remember that earlier part of the conversation, productivity is what makes it so we can pay people more. But here is how dark the Democrats' bill is. Let's just use this as an example, Mr. Speaker. You have a family making $800,000 a year. Are they rich? I would say so. That is in the very top strata of income across this country. The Democrats' bill, as it was given to the Ways and Means Committee last week, when you add up all the tax credits and subsidies, Mr. Speaker, they intend to give that $800,000-a-year-family over $118,000 in credits. Not taxes--credits. Direct cash. Then they will come behind the microphone and say: But we are going to tax rich people to make them pay to help out society. I am willing to have that. I am someone who does believe in a progressive tax system. But it is pretty perverse when you say, I am going to raise the taxes and then not mention that you are turning around, Mr. Speaker, and handing over $100,000 to that very family that you are trying to claim you raised their taxes. Yes, you raised it, and then you gave them back more money after you raised it. This is the perversity that is going on here. It is never getting any press because it would require a calculator, and reporters don't own calculators. But there are land mines that are getting no press because, Mr. Speaker, you handed us thousands of pages of tax-and-spend policy in the Ways and Means Committee. The day before we were supposed to debate it, we offered 57 amendments--many of them were actually derivatives of Democratic amendments--but not one was accepted because the Ways and Means Committee did not write this legislation. It came from the Speaker's Office. Now, every single day we are discovering little land mines that are hidden in here. So think about this: My State does not recognize public employee unions. I am from Arizona. So my school district, my county, my city, and my State offer really good benefits: here is your pension, here is your health, here is your family medical leave. To be able to continue to offer that family medical leave in the State of Arizona, they have to recognize unions now. That is hidden. It was brilliantly written. A nonlawyer found it because the staff was just trying to deal with the perversities of what was going on in the way some of the tax definitions were written and where it seems to help certain groups and crush other groups. Think about this: If you want your electric vehicle, Mr. Speaker--so you are that $800,000 person and you are getting your electric vehicle--if you want the full tax credit, the car had to be made in a unionized plant. Mr. Speaker, can you tell me how many minutes are remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is one of those moments I am actually behind the microphone to say thank you. I was born in an unwed mother's home--so was my brother; so was my sister--and you have all met my little girl, as she is here, that came to us as a gift out of nowhere. But when I was 38 years old, through a series of accidents, I got the phone number from my birth mother, and I called her. The first words were just through the tears and this high-pitched almost--she was struggling; you could hear her almost hyperventilating. ``I pray for you every morning. Are you okay? Are you healthy? Are you happy?'' I am crying on my side, saying: ``I have a great life. Thank you for letting me live.'' Today in the Schweikert family and the Hoyle family, and all of our families together--my little girl is third-generation adopted now. Maybe we are doing something wrong in the family. We would get together with our birth moms and our moms. The amazing thing is my mom became best of friends with my birth mom. This is the American family of today. Let's love it and respect it.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is a moment where I am hoping our friends on the left will keep a certain promise that many of you have made, Madam Speaker, because we have a long list of the promises from the President to leadership and to others promising that this spending will be 100 percent paid for. You already know we are going to have probably a continuing resolution with the omnibus. There is a trillion dollars of structural debt there. Okay. And the $1.2 trillion so-called bipartisan-- bipartisan in the Senate. Okay, when we actually do the honest math, it is not a quarter trillion of borrowing; it is about $500 billion of borrowing because a bunch of the pay-fors are fake. When we start looking at what Senate Finance and others--where are you getting the other $1.7 trillion on your $3.5 trillion of spending? Look, I am just asking you to keep a promise because when you add up all the new revenues, all the new receipts, all the new tax hikes, the corporate tax hikes that unemployed some million Americans in 24 months, the capital gains tax that loses money, where are you going to get all this cash that you have promised will be 100 percent paid for?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma, I only got this in an alert just about 2 hours ago, and I will send her a copy of it. Apparently, we now have a whistleblower, a formal whistleblower complaint. They were there to help take care of these children, and they were instructed not to disclose how many of these people in the housing unit had COVID. If that is true, once again, we are back to the duplicity of what has been going on at the border. As we talk about just what this is doing, the impact to the country-- and I am going to talk a little bit about what it does to the working poor--that might be a really interesting thing, because you touched on it, this whistleblower complaint that may expose that they are being told not to disclose the level of COVID that is in this population crossing the border illegally.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, may I make a quick parliamentary inquiry?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is a great irony, isn't it?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, yes, it is one of those last names. I have family members that have trouble pronouncing it. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and wish her a great evening. Mr. Speaker, we are going to do a couple of things this evening, and I am going to try to tie it together. Hopefully, some of this makes sense. I am going to start off with just a one-off. Last week, I had a gentleman knock on my front door of my home. For all of us who are elected in this sort of time where things are a little anxious, you always stand up a bit when someone you don't know is at your front door. Turns out, it is a really smart gentleman. He has a Ph.D. in amphibians and lives down the street from me. He had something he wanted to share, and this was something I didn't expect. It was a complete one-off. He told me the story of what had happened just a couple of weeks earlier. He had this beloved dog. I am going to screw up the breed. I think it was some type of malamute, just this big, beautiful, fuzzy white dog. Apparently, the canine had gotten his wife's purse and chewed up some gum. I know this seems like a weird thing to do on the floor of the House, but it killed the dog. I think the more technical term is a sugar alcohol that is used. It is pronounced xylitol, which we see in certain gum products and candy products. It is an artificial sweetener. Apparently, it kills our canines. We have drafted a letter to the FDA and the appropriate agencies, asking if there is knowledge of this. If there is also knowledge of this, should there at least be some warning put on these packages? Because I had never heard of this. Then, when I went to the internet and looked, there was story after story after story after story of just heartbreak about people with their puppies getting some gum, getting one of these artificially sweetened candies, and dying. I guess it shuts down the liver incredibly aggressively. As almost a public service announcement, but also I am hoping that my colleagues on the left and right--if the FDA, if the bureaucracy doesn't really respond to us--would be willing to do a piece of legislation creating a directive that there needs to be some sort of warning on these products that if your puppy gets loose with this, it may lose its life. That is a little different than talking about economics, but the gentleman was just heartbroken because this dog was truly one of his best friends, a really important family member. To go from being out there playing to, several hours later, having him pass away, I think all of us would understand the impact of that. I had not heard about this. I think if we have gum with that sweetener sitting around our house--and I have a puppy coonhound that will munch on anything. We quickly got that in the shelves, away from the dog. For all of us, it is something that we are thinking. Hopefully, the FDA and others will do the right thing. Mr. Speaker, let's talk about what is going on in our Nation. We are going to touch a little bit--and it is going to be a little sarcastic and a little cranky. I am sorry about that, but I don't know another way to try to tell the story of just the absurdity of what is going on in some of our tax policy and economic policy. Mr. Speaker, the theme I really want to try to weave through today is not being understood, I don't think, by either Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives. So much of the public policy that is being pushed right now is just crushing to the working poor. We are going to do some really crappy things to the working poor, and it is not necessary. There is rational economic policy. You don't cater to certain of your activist constituencies as much, but it is much more effective to helping those we say we care about here in our society. I do this slide as often as I can. What is the greatest threat in this country right now to my 5-year-old daughter, to your retirement? The fact of the matter is our demographics. This slide is before all the crazy spending proposals that have been produced so far this year. This is where we are structurally. And the fact of the matter is, as a society, we are getting old really fast. So think of this in 30 years in today's dollars. So I will adjust for inflation. In today's dollars, we will be $101 trillion in publicly borrowed money. Only about $3 trillion of that is what you would think of as general spending. All the rest of it is purely Social Security and Medicare. Medicare is about $71 trillion of borrowed money. The spend is much, much, much, much larger than that, but that is how much we are going to have to borrow to finance the shortfall. Because, once again, for those who don't pay attention to this, Medicare is a promise. We have made that promise to American workers and American retirees. But only part A, which is the hospital portion, is actually the trust fund. And the trust fund is gone in 3 to 5 years, we wiped out that money. The rest of Medicare spending, when you see the doctor, when you get a pharmaceutical, those things come right out of the general fund. There is no trust fund for that spend. If we don't get serious about sort of the holistic theory of how you save this country, and it turns out really aggressive economic growth, you have got to embrace technologies and new methods to crash the price of healthcare, these sorts of things. If we don't have that type of vision, these numbers become what drives all policy. If you care about the environment, if you care about education, if you care about this, there will be no money because we will spend every dime we have just financing the retirement promise that we have made as a government, as a society to each other. But yet this isn't particularly sexy. It is really scary. It is really hard. It requires a calculator. And God knows, we all work in a place that doesn't own calculators. So let's walk through a little bit of the reality that part of the solution to what we are doing to the working poor, part of the solution to what we are doing to these massive, massive unfunded promises is economic growth. And one of my intense frustrations is the amount this place is willing to, what do you call it, oh, yeah, lie, about basic revenues. We call them receipts in Ways and Means, tax revenues, and these things. Remember, post tax reform a number of my brothers and sisters on the left got up behind these microphones and told stories: We are going to go into massive recession, the revenues are going to collapse, this is going to happen. Well, what ended up happening? Remember 2018--because remember we passed tax reform at the end of 2017--2018 and 2019 were the second and third highest, adjusted for inflation, so we are talking real math, receipts, tax collections in U.S. history. But what was more phenomenal about it is it created such an economic lift. So many of our brothers and sisters were working, particularly from the working poor. We saw things--and we are going to look at a couple of those boards--where the working poor became dramatically less poor. And because they are working, the trust funds we were just touching on, what we showed for Social Security and Medicare, their longevity revenues, because people were working, their lives got longer. This was actually, I thought, the Holy Grail for both those on the left and the right, we were going to try to find a way to mathematically make the numbers work so we can keep our promises. Well, it turns out, post tax reform, the receipts were incredibly robust, and they were the second and third highest in U.S. history. And the only reason they weren't number one, by a sliver, was in 2015 we had some really unusual, what they call, timing effects, when certain things happened just before the end of the fiscal year that were posted in a certain fiscal year. So I won't geek out too much on that. But often you will hear Members of the majority party here get behind the microphone, and say, well, the tax scam. It is really actually a pretty dark thing to say, because those couple of years before the pandemic were some of the most robust--actually, the most robust years in modern economic times for the poor in this country. The working poor became dramatically less poor. But there are those that will stand behind the microphone and call it a tax scam. And the willingness to keep lying--and I am sorry, I know that is a crappy word to use, but I am so frustrated because they can't seem to stop. A couple of Members, just this last week, once again, got behind these microphones, and said: Well, 83 percent goes to the top 1 percent. That is a lie. As a matter of fact, even the Washington Post--which is not really particularly friendly to those of us on the free market economic side-- has gotten so frustrated with Democrats getting behind microphones and lying. They are even now saying, the zombie claim that 2017 tax cuts gave 83 percent to the top 1 percent. Even the leftist newspapers are just bewildered with the left not telling the truth. I don't mind having policy arguments, but don't make crap up, over and over and over. We see now even the left-wing media is having to correct the Democrats, saying, no, it turns out post tax reform that 2018 and 2019 were sort of miracle years; incredible wage growth, incredible productivity growth, savings growth, and particularly for the populations that we claim we care about. Remember, they were the first 2 years in modern economic history where income inequality really shrank, and I thought that was the Holy Grail, that the wealthy got wealthier, but the poor got much less poor much faster, actually closing the income differential gaps and the wealth gaps. I always thought that that was the Holy Grail around here. And when it happened--but it didn't happen with social engineering, it didn't happen with big spending programs that you get to basically extort votes with. It happened by opening up the economy and creating investment in productivity that made it so you could pay people more. It gets vilified with misinformation. It is just real hard to make honest government public policy when one side won't actually own a calculator. So to beat this a little bit more, you take a look at what happened to, particularly, working, unmarried women. The wage growth was remarkable. Just remarkable. I think it was in 2019, we had African- American females, I think, who were having like a 7-8 percent growth in wages in a single year in a time with almost no inflation. Some of these numbers were remarkable. And if the goal here is to make the poor less poor, I actually believe those who were on the free market side have demonstrated there is a path where it works, and it is sustainable. And we are going to come back to that theme, because this year we will probably see income and equality shrink, but it is going to shrink in a way--because we have pumped so much cash out the door--it is not sustainable. As soon as that money goes away, we go back to the bad old days and the really crappy policies of the previous decade. So let's actually walk through something that we started to touch on when we opened this up. The violence--and I am going to use the term, economic violence--that we are committing to the working poor in this country seems to get no press. I mean, if you read some of the really geeky economic journals, they are shaking their heads trying to get their heads around why the left is doing what they are doing. But if I came to you tomorrow and said, tell me the number one policy sin that is going on right now that crushes the working poor. The classic definition of the working poor is they may not have finished high school. That is their labor is their value, it is what they sell. It turns out, when you open up the borders--we have some amazingly detailed studies, and these are studies from years ago, back when Democrats actually believed in locking down the borders to protect working men and women. Remember these days, it was only like a decade and a half ago, where Republicans were accused of being owned by the Chamber of Commerce and wanting cheap labor, and Democrats were going to protect working men and women? Until all of a sudden it seems to reverse. And I just desperately wish this place actually used basic economic theory to create policies instead of sort of having a meeting and saying, okay, this year you guys take that side, we will take this side. It is just absurd what is going on. We have a number of studies that talk about when you flood the market with folks with similar skill sets. So you basically--if you are part of the working poor, what do you sell? You sell your labor. And this is the right board, sorry. When you open up the border, we are actually looking at a reduction in wages by 6.2 percent. But why this is so harsh is some of the papers say it is going to last for a decade. What is going on at the U.S. border right now is, you are kicking the heads in of the working poor in this country for the next decade. I know that doesn't fit the talking heads' language that you see on cable television or the rhetoric around here, but you can't sort of give speeches and say you care and then engage in policies that crush the value of their labor because you make them compete against potentially millions of those with similar skill sets. And you start to take a look at what we did this last year, where there was peak unemployment for those skill sets. Now, if you happen to be a computer programmer this last crappy year, actually you did just fine. If you are someone who your skill set was you could work from home, you survived. If you happened to be part of the population that you had not finished high school, you were in the 21-plus-percent unemployment area. It turns out the very populations that were most crushed by the pandemic are the very ones we are turning around and kicking their heads in again by opening up the border. Is it compassionate? Is it truly loving? When I hear speeches from my friends on the left saying, well, we are opening up the borders to be compassionate. How about the millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters here who may not have had the opportunities that those in this body have had? And we are going to make them compete with similar skill sets and millions of new arrivals. And it turns out, if you actually look at the math, it is African Americans, particularly in urban areas, that you have just--that this body has just--by this President's policies, have crushed their future earning power, have made the value of their labor much less and it is not short term. If you read the studies, we have a whole decade now of loss from where we were in 2018 and 2019, we have just wiped out that progress and the previous several years of progress. You would think this place would actually care about things like that. No. Because what is going to happen is the left's economic policies aren't, hey, we need revenues for this spending, and being extra creative with where those revenues come from. Remember, I have come to this floor multiple times and said, if we need a trillion dollars for infrastructure, I can show you where you can cut a trillion dollars in spending, stop subsidizing the rich. Stop subsidizing the very top 1 percent. Stop subsidizing their flood insurance on their third home on the beach. Stop buying them subsidies for their Teslas, for their electric car, and for their solar panels. If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, this is one of the great perversities we have here in policy, is the left wants to raise taxes on the rich and then on the other hand, hand it back to them in subsidies for other things they buy. I assume this is purely political. This is, hey, I am giving you something, vote for me. Then you are able to tell your base, hey, look here, I went out and taxed the rich. But from an economic standpoint, this is an absurd thing to do. This is economically distorting, and this is almost a type of political exploitation. Why don't you just go straight, Mr. Speaker? Don't do the economic extortions. Stop subsidizing, and stop sending the money out the door. What is fascinating is I have done that speech now three times on the floor. I have sat down with a couple of my Ways and Means Democrat friends, walked them through the binder on all the things we do to subsidize the wealthy, and they just look at me, shrug, and say, Well, I don't know how we would sell that. It is crazy. But it shows you, Mr. Speaker, the perversity of policy here. So this becomes the policy being offered by the left: Let's raise corporate taxes. Okay. Well, besides the international tax that we seem to be signing onto that is going to make the United States one of the most uncompetitive nations in the world, we are also about to do something where raising the corporate tax in the first 24 months we lose 1 million jobs. So, Mr. Speaker, do you remember how we were talking about we need that robust economy and we need the robust labor market, but Democrats get their tax policies, just the corporate tax will unemploy in the first 24 months 1 million Americans. So we start to take a look at--and this is a little complex to try to show on a board, we are going to have to spend more time on it to try to explain. But this is a whole bunch of the revenue side that the Democrats are proposing, and this is the spending. The problem is much of the revenue here is a fraud. It is not real. So, Mr. Speaker, you start looking at the tax compliance. We can give you some proposals, and we have been trying for years, saying use data. You can cover much that of that tax gap by using data, not hiring 80,000--think of that, 80,000, that is twice as many as the entire Coast Guard--80,000 new unionized IRS employees to go out and chase people for the taxes when it turns out we have these supercomputers in your pocket, and there is data out there that would let you match instantly saying: Is this person telling us the truth? It would be dramatically less intrusive, because for this to work, the Democrats actually have a proposal where you are going to turn every bank account into an IRS employee. Mr. Speaker, you do understand, if you look at the Democrats' revenue proposal, my transactions, my bank balances, my ins and outs, go to the IRS. This march towards totalitarianism is on every one of these aspects. So it is not enough to just make up fake numbers of what the revenues are going to be. It is inherently intrusive, and it won't work. You will get lots of data, Mr. Speaker, that you can functionally use against the American people, but it is not the data that is actually going to get you the revenues, because for these who are really rich, tomorrow they will just move their money or their currency, they will do a crypto, they will do that type of token type of transaction, and it will be the rest of the American public that just gets crushed by this intrusion. So let's actually sort of dig a little bit more into this so it is understood. Lots and lots of the experts out there, many are just the columnists. If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, some of them who are actually on the left are making it very clear that the Democrats' revenue proposals are a fraud. They are making things up. These are just some snippets of many of the articles that are out there, and they are calling it bipartisan. But there was a promise. Do you remember? The big promise from the President and Speaker Pelosi is: We are going to pay for these things. No, they are not. Let me show you, Mr. Speaker, how devious this stuff is. So President Trump a couple years ago--and many of us weren't thrilled with the model--proposed a rebate back to the consumers. So you buy a pharmaceutical, the purchasing managers in the background who buy it from the manufacturer and get it to your pharmacy get a rebate. They take that rebate and use part of it to buy down the price of the drug. Then it is sold at the retail counter, and you get a lower price. President Trump's proposal was to take that and not buy down the price of the drug; therefore, it would actually raise the drug cost a little bit to Government, but the consumer would get that rebate at the retail counter. This is the simplest way to describe it. It is a little complex. This is the way it works over here. The Democrats said: Oh, no. We hate this. I have a whole list of quotes from Speaker Pelosi and the Biden team saying that this will never become policy and this will never become law. Well, if it was never going to become law, how can the Democrats turn around and tell us that they are going to use the money from that program as one of their pay-fors? It was like $180 billion. This is not law, and it is not policy. It was a proposal. But somehow if you look at the list of the pay-fors from the left, Mr. Speaker, they put $180 billion and say: Hey, we will just take this fake, magical money and use that to buy our friends. Is this the new and improved way? Mr. Speaker, you wonder why the American people when they start to understand the scam that are so many of these spending tax proposals why they are becoming so cynical. I put up this board, because I want to call it the cliff that it is. Here is one of the other great scams that is in the Democrats spending proposals, how they get the scores to work. Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, my question is, just because the Democrat leadership here changed the rules sometime last night, do I have to wear this thing while standing here alone during my 1-hour Special Order? May I take it off when I am at the mike?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. What do you think the likelihood is that the Democrat majority here, in their constitutional oversight responsibility, will take that whistleblower complaint seriously and look into the fact that, if it is true, we have been lied to?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the clarification. I know we are all trying to get our heads around it because things keep changing around here. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Oklahoma had a couple of things she wanted to share tonight. This is the first time she and I have had a chance to talk. She is really smart and incredibly charming. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma (Mrs. Bice).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am sorry if I sound a little cranky, but I have had a lot of coffee. As you know, Mr. Speaker, at a certain point when you start to stack this stuff up it just breaks your heart, because we are better than the games we are playing right now. Please trust me, if Republicans were doing this, I would be, and I have been, when we have tried doing these sorts of things I have been every bit as aggressive. So here is the scam so the public understands this: There are things like PAYGO where, hey, if a program goes more than 5 years, it has to be paid for. So, Mr. Speaker, what if you create a multi-multi-multibillion dollar program, and then on the fifth year you just pretend it comes to an end? Hey, we are just going to drop it. It doesn't really exist. Wink, wink, nod, nod. We know a future Congress will have to extend it, because it have will have a constituency, but that way when it is scored, it scores within--and we don't have to pretend that we just created another program that has no funding and, therefore, continues to explode that debt. This is actually what the Democrats are doing, and much of the spending is the creating games. So earlier this year we created things like the childcare tax credit extension. Republicans really want to work on this, because particularly if we can target it to help the working poor there is a much more uncomfortable conversation, but we need to have it because, as you know, Mr. Speaker, the United States has a collapsing fertility rate. We actually now functionally don't have enough children to cover our debts. Oddly enough, that has a huge impact on future economic robustness. How do we make it so you can afford to have a family? So the left has actually created a thing here where it costs functionally $100 billion this year. In the proposal, it would cost $1.3 trillion to do this the way the Democrats are spending money over the 10 years. So how do they make that score work? How do they not have to say: Well, just the childcare credit is $1.3 trillion of spending over 10 years. They just pretend it stops. They get a few years out, and then they just drop it. You are really going to take the populace of the United States, start sending them a check every month, and then pretend it is going to stop? That is the example. There are bunches of these examples. As a matter of fact, they did it with SCHIP years ago where on the sixth year the program was just supposed to disappear, and that is how they were so giddy they could get it to work with PAYGO. You wonder why the public realizes this place is almost operating like scam artists. If we allowed someone outside this building to do things like that, we would put them in jail. Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of other things here. There are ways to find revenues to cover the infrastructure spending. I believe those of us on the more conservative side, we can show you places to cut spending and, therefore, not create the distortions. You all saw the report, though I am sure my brothers and sisters on the left will avoid ever saying it out loud, that the actual capital gains tax hike on its own loses $33 billion in the 10 years, that it is not until you start to play games with something called bases. Well, Mr. Speaker, have you ever thought about what a capital gains tax actually is? Okay. We are going to tax you for the gain you have in your value, the profit you made. What happens when the house you have, the piece of real estate, the other things you own--it is not appreciation. It is called inflation. You do realize that is one of the great scams going on at this moment. As your house goes up in value, as other things go up in value, and we are going to get this much larger capital gains tax, then we are going to remove a bunch of what they call the bases. We are going to cap what you can subject to the lower tax rate. You do realize that we are going to tax Americans on the higher price from inflation, not the actual purchasing power of it getting more valuable. Let's do an example of your home. Now, you are a single person. You own a home, and it goes up by half a million dollars. You have just done incredibly well. That first $250,000 of gain--it is called once in a lifetime though you get to use it, I think, every 5 years--is exempt. But that other $250,000, you will have to pay capital gains tax on. How much of that gain is appreciation? You bought a house in the right neighborhood. You exploded in value. But the next house you are going to buy, didn't it also go up similar in value, similar in cost? Was it inflation? You will pay tax and now extraordinarily high tax rates, if the Democrats get their proposal, on that gain. It is a certain level of cruelty. The last thing I want to touch on is, if our body here really wants to have an honest discussion about infrastructure and its true needs in our society--I have not seen the details of the so-called bipartisan agreement in the Senate, but the devil is always in the details. I have a couple of examples here. If we are really going to do this, we need to sort of figure out if the Democrats really want infrastructure, particularly even green infrastructure. Do we really want it, or do we just want to put up a whole lot of cash that, ultimately, basically goes to environmental groups and that, ultimately, just goes to lawyers? Let me give you an example. For us out in the Southwest, there is this area of New Mexico--I guess the way it is phrased is that they have this tremendous wind asset. It is one of the greatest wind production areas in all of North America. Fifteen years ago, California said, hey, we really want some of that clean energy from that wind area in New Mexico. We will help invest in it. We will buy a forward on it. We will contract to buy this. We are at 15 years now, and the power line still isn't permitted because of all the environmental reviews, all the different jurisdictions. If you are really trying to decarbonize the power grid, are the Democrats willing to stop funding the lawyers and the environmental groups that make their living off the litigation and NEPA study after NEPA study? Those are environmental studies. We have a case here. It is referred to as SunZia power line. You can go online and look it up. It started in 2006, and some of the documents out there say they will finally get their permits in 2023 or 2025. This isn't unique. There are lots of occasions like this where an area where you want to build wind, solar, even some geothermal, you can't get it permitted. Don't you see the absurdity? We are going to put up all this money for infrastructure, particularly even from the Democrats, the green infrastructure, but we are not going to change the laws because the left is the beneficiaries of so much money from the environmental left and the trial lawyers and the lawyers that sue on this stuff. We need to put a clock on this. Look, I know this hits a little close to home for some of our East Coast folks. But when it becomes an upheaval over doing ocean-based windmills off part of the East Coast here--and a lot of the very, very wealthy leftists are the very ones who cry and complain, saying you can't put this in part of our view, which really isn't part the view if you actually looked at the data. We have to decide. Things like this Vineyard Wind project, which, I guess, is--actually, I am embarrassed to say that I have the map on my wall. I guess it is off the coast of Rhode Island. They have been fussing over that for a decade now. Do the Democrats truly want this clean energy? For us in the desert Southwest, in the afternoons, because of our photovoltaic inventory, we produce too much power. We are now having to have really creative discussions of, in the afternoon, when power rates crash to almost nothing, should we convert it into hydrogen and make that storage? You all saw the incredible article last week in The Wall Street Journal about the new iron to rust batteries. They are very, very heavy, so they don't work in vehicles but could be incredibly inexpensive, efficient storage. This is wonderful. But that is for those of us who live in the desert, where we have lots of sunshine and photovoltaic is pretty efficient. But if you want to transmit that power someplace, are the Democrats going to step up and help someone like myself, who is just trying to do a piece of legislation that would put this permitting on a clock for it to get capital, for you to raise money, for investors to participate, for you to plan the power grid? You can't have it where the power line for that wind farm you wanted takes 15 to 20 years to get the power. I guess my little passion here is I am incredibly skeptical on the pay-fors. Even if it passes, unless we are willing to change the bureaucratic bottlenecks that have been created, you are not seeing much of this change in the power grid for a couple of decades. Do we continue to tell the public the fantasy? Or do you step up and say: Hey, I am going to do the hard things. I am going to change these timelines. I am going to have to say no to some of my trial lawyer contributors. I am going to have to put this on a clock so everyone gets a chance to share their concerns for it to be properly environmentally reviewed. It doesn't take 20 years to do a line siting. If the left is willing to do that, then they will get some credibility that they really are serious. If they are not willing to do that, then you understand much of the talk about the green revolution and the energy base is a fraud. It is theater. It is pandering because we will say: Hey, look at all this money, but you can't move the generation. It is real, and we have example after example after example. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating a bit of my tirade tonight. As we often joke to whoever is in the chair, I used to get put in that chair when I made John Boehner mad, so I got to be in the chair a lot at night. But the things I shared tonight, they don't need to necessarily be partisan. They are math. They are process. They are the bottlenecks that keep many of the things we actually can agree upon from happening. But this place is so weaponized right now that if I say it is black, the other side has to say it is white. It has just become a dysfunctional body. If our goal is to make the working poor less poor, if it is to make our society much more prosperous, if it is to provide optionality in our energy, we know it has to be done, but we have to be willing, not to necessarily engage in the theater side but maybe actually engage in the proof we have of what has worked and what hasn't. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, so we can finish up some things, and for many of us who were very fond of Mr. Lewis, I am going to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock), my friend.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Nunes).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert) to give a closing good-bye to Mr. Lewis.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your patience. You look good up there. Maybe this is a harbinger of the future. Before I start--because there are some serious things here I want us to get our head around on what is happening financially, and some of the things I see that are--and I am going to be brutal--a bit dishonest in the math on some of the tax proposals--I need to share something that has just been eating at me for 2 days. This place has about a century-long tradition during the summer of us bringing our children here. John Boehner actually put it into policy that children 12 and under we could bring on the floor with us. We tried very hard in previous years to make this an institution that loved and embraced our families and our children because to be honest, this is a tough job on the family. And so, 2 days ago a handful of us showed up here--I brought my 5- year old daughter--and we wanted to bring our children on the floor. And instantly representatives of the Speaker--and I know they are doing their jobs, I mean, they were brutal about it, but they were doing their jobs. They said: You can't bring your children on the floor. Why? Well, it is against the rules. Okay. I will respect the rules. Show it to me in writing. And they ran off and came back 15 minutes later. Well, we can't find it in writing, but we don't want you to have children on the floor. Well, why?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I also apologize. I have had a stunning amount of coffee already today. Mr. Speaker, I am going to mix a couple metaphors. I am going to both talk about the cost, but I am also going to talk about the environmental impact. A lot of my brothers and sisters on the left are fixated on high- speed rail. Now, understand, rail is what, a 300-plus-year-old technology. So the infrastructure of the past is functionally what we are about to fund. We are not funding the infrastructure of the future. But you do realize, for one of those high-speed rails to work, you have got to be running about 10 million people on it a year for the environmental impact. I am not talking about the huge amount of debt, the fact that they never will collect anything close in the fare boxes. But just to do the environmental impact. Are you going to carry 10 million people a year? No. It turns out it is virtue-signaling once again where the math of the environmental impact doesn't actually match. But we have a bunch of our constituents, Oh, those choo-choos; I like it; fast ones. Oh, look at the Japanese ones. But as you also know, the Japanese high-speed rail system is also collapsing financially, too. If you really want to have an impact in the infrastructure bill, one of the most powerful things we can do is we can change the cost structures. How long it takes to get through NEPA. How long it takes to finance. How long it takes to get through all the litigation. This is almost unreadable--and we will try to put some of this up on our website. But we are right now over $500 million per kilometer just to lay new rail. We are up here in the very top tier. And you look at the countries that are ahead of us, they have great geographical distances or they are going through highly urbanized areas. We are not. Something is terribly, terribly wrong in our cost structure. And so how many times have we seen those who are promoting the infrastructure saying, But we are going to put a clock; we are going to make things more efficient so we can actually get this. And I will give you one of the great living examples: In New Mexico, they have this amazing wind asset. This place that produces tremendous amounts of wind energy. And California really needs that green energy to meet their rules. They are now going on 15 years just to get the permit to lay the power lines. And they are still not done. They are actually about to go through their NEPA again. One of the article says they are not going to get it by 2025. I talked to one of the consultants for it yesterday; he is optimistic they might get it by 2023. But they started in 2006 to move the power from this incredible wind area. If someone really says, I want green energy, but I am terrified of getting crosswise with my trial lawyers, who are making a fortune suing on this. I am terrified to get crosswise with my environmentalist, who sue and make money stopping the line sighting. I am terrified to have to deal with the military, my Tribal lands, my State lands, my Federal lands--all these others--where the power lines have to go. Stop pretending you really want green energy if you are not willing to change the clock on getting a permit to move it. It is just irrational what we are allowing. We actually have a piece of legislation that will actually just put the clock on these things so it would help pull substantially more money. Because you actually knew what the investment of that power line, for those things to move that green energy. But until my friends on the left start to adopt these NEPA reforms, it is a fraud. We are going to put all this money into new wind or geothermal, or this and that, but we are never going to allow the line sighting to move the power to the urban areas that actually need it. I have more of these types of samples where if the public policy here is my brothers and sisters on the left really want more revenues from the wealthy, my pitch to them is stop subsidizing the rich. Because what you are talking about doing in raising capital gains, raising this--you do realize that tax foundation number the other day said the capital gains tax hike actually loses $33 billion. It loses $33 billion over 10 years. The only thing that actually makes money is raising what they call the bases. It is how much you are able to put into the different tax rates. And with inflation right now, have my brothers and sisters on the left realize what they are about to do to people with homes? How many of our homes have gone up dramatically in value? How much of that is actually appreciation? How much of it is just inflation? How many of our kids or friends will ever be able to buy their first home anymore because what we have done in skyrocketing the prices? But how about the person that is going to retire or trying to sell the house because that is their nest egg, and we are now going to tax them on inflation. We are not going to tax them on appreciation, because the other house they have to buy is also inflated. This is one of the math realities. We don't tell the truth that much of the capital gains that my brothers and sisters on the left are so excited about getting isn't actually capital gains on--So I made all this money. It is just the fact that we have had a bunch of inflation and the values went up. Mr. Speaker, if you were to sell your house today, and run down the street and go buy something similar or even better, that other one you are buying is also just as expensive. You didn't really gain anything. But if the gain was over, what, $250,000 per person, you are going to pay taxes. You are going to pay capital gains on it. This is absurd the way we are approaching the financing of this. And I will argue, I think we have some proposals that would make the environmental impact of infrastructure greener, more sustainable, financeable, workable. But so much of the bill right now reads as financing cash flow for those people that write checks to the left. We are better than this. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your patience with me, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this evening, I am going to try to do something that is a little bit different, and parts of it are going to be incredibly annoying. I am going to hurt some feelings, but my theme is actually very simple. There are general solutions to so many of the things we consider problems, but we are going to have to deal with something, and it is a true problem around this place. And that is, I am going to use the word ``virtue signaling'' and sort of folklore. We sometimes know what we know, but the fact of the matter is that technology, science, all of what we were told was wrong, yet we can't get it out of our heads, or, as a society, we care more about the symbolism than actually curing the problem. And I really do believe if we could embrace that thing called a calculator, math, thinking, science, there are some amazingly good things we could do. But, first, we got to step up and admit that we have been making up a lot of crap. And that is me being slightly on the vulgar side. But it is a frustration I have where often I see our speeches behind these microphones, and we are virtue signaling because that is often what is expected from our voters. At least we think that is what is expected, but I bet you our voters would be elated if we would actually give them the truth and then show them the math. I am going to show a couple of things to first set up my argument, and then walk through a couple things that I think are incredibly optimistic for our future as a country, but maybe even the entire world. So, first off, let's just use this. I have done versions of this before, but it is important as a thought experiment. Do you care about plastic in the ocean? I think everyone in America cares about plastic in the ocean. Except we have a small problem. We do this virtue signaling of let's ban plastic straws. But the fact of the matter is, the data says that straws that come from North America don't end up in the ocean. We do actually an amazingly good job grabbing our waste and putting it in the landfills or incinerating or taking care of it. But if you actually look at the real math, 90 percent of the plastic in the world's oceans comes from 10 rivers: 8 in Asia, 2 in Africa. If you actually gave a darn about plastic in the ocean, what would you do? You would actually go to those 10 rivers--8 in Asia, 2 in Africa--and either add value, use our technical assistance, use our foreign aid, and go and deal with the plastic in the ocean. But, instead, we give speeches here, we award, we allot cities like D.C. that ban plastic straws. That is pure virtue signaling. It doesn't actually do anything, yet we parade around like we did something. Instead, this body could actually have an incredible impact on plastic in the ocean. Go to the 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic, and actually get our foreign aid, our technical aid, even some economic incentives to capture that plastic and stop sticking it into rivers that flow into the ocean. It is a simple example of the virtue signaling that actually warps real environmental policy. Here is one that is going to drive some people crazy. What would happen if I came to you and said the entire environmental impact of that cloth cotton bag you carry to the grocery store, you have to use 7,100 times to basically equal the plastic bags that are produced out of natural gas? Yet we walk around with our little plastic bags when we walk into the Trader Joe's and those things, you know, proudly showing, hey, I care about the environment. But the math--that is not the science. If we are going to make public policy, how does this body, and not only Congress, but our city councils, our county governments, our State legislatures, how do we stop making public policy that is virtue signaling, and the math is the math? We have this incredible report, detailed. It came out of, I think, Demark. It was looking at the environmental impact. It turns out those crappy little plastic bags that are banned in so many of our cities were less environmentally impactful than the cotton bags we are walking around with, because those cotton ones you have to use 7,100 times to actually have the same environmental impact. Another one that is going on around the country right now is let's ban natural gas for cook stoves and heating in homes. Except if you actually do the math of burning natural gas to make steam, to turn the turbine, to make electricity, it actually is environmentally substantially better to use natural gas in your home. And there are lots of really good studies and data on this. But, once again, it is sort of this urban folklore, it is virtue signaling to say my city council is going to ban natural gas from people being able to cook with. Aren't I doing something wonderful for the environment? But it turns out, no, you are not. We have got to stop doing this. So there is actually some other really interesting ones. So how many out there did we watch on the cable news shows after the function of the canceling of the Keystone pipeline? Now, as Republicans, we all talked about the jobs lost. On the left, they are talking about the environmental benefit of stopping that pipeline. Well, first, let's deal with the reality. Those hydrocarbons are going somewhere. They are going to be cracked somewhere, turned into distillates or fuels. And they are refined in southeast Asia or refined in Louisiana or Texas. They are going to be refined. So let's just do the math on the transportation. It turns out the Keystone pipeline has dramatically less carbon impact than sticking it in the rail, sticking it into the rail pipeline attachment, or sticking it in rail or pipeline and putting it on the coast and shipping it out to southeast Asia. Just the shipping part. If you actually cared about the actual math of the environmental impact of the Keystone pipeline, you would have supported the pipeline, but that wasn't the virtue signaling that came from the environmental community. And being someone who genuinely cares a lot about the actual math, you know, as those of us who try to do the math of what is the actual impacts in global warming, and what is actually the folklore, what is make-believe, what is real, we got to stop doing this. And I know we love the political wedges, saying, well, they supported this and we supported the union workers. How do you get some people around the table to use a calculator, and say, well, it turns out, whether you like hydrocarbons or not, the pipeline turns out to have a less environmental load than canceling it does because now we are going to stick it in railcars, now we are going to ship it to other parts of the world? And I haven't even done the math on other refineries from other parts of world that have dramatically less environmental standards when cracking carbon chains. So here is another one. This one actually is both hopeful, but we are going to have to start to think a little more creatively. So here is my setup. Half of the noncarbon-emitting electricity in the United States--actually, I think it is slightly more than half--comes from baseload nuclear. We have a massive amount of our baseload nuclear that is coming off line. If you actually do the math of the amount of nuclear that is coming off line, our renewable baseload cannot keep close to keeping up. So there are a lot of charts. And I have done this on the floor before, showing that as all this nuclear comes off line, carbon emissions in the United States on electrical generation is going up. Even though we have all this renewable, this wind, this photovoltaic, these things, geothermal hitting the market, it doesn't produce enough power to keep up with the nuclear coming off. And the argument for much of the nuclear is, well, think, they have to do uranium mines, think of this, think of that. Well, what if I came to you and said, baseload nuclear is absolutely critical to the reliability of the grid and all of those other things, and it is noncarbon-emitting, and we have the technology today? I have done a whole presentation on this in detail. Basically, we can extract uranium from sea water now. We do this. We have the technology. But it is even better than that. We have a Nobel Prize physicist who has been writing papers, articles, saying that, within a decade, they believe high-pulse lasers--and, look, I have done my best to read the scientific articles a couple times. Some of it is beyond even--you know, when you are having to read an article and have a dictionary close by to look up some of the technical. But his premise is we can use high-pulse lasers to break up and make inert spent nuclear fuels. So his theme is, say, in 30 minutes I could take something that would have lasted a million years, and in 30 minutes I can make it inert. If this is true, it is the virtuous cycle on nuclear energy. And you all know, because this place has actually helped fund it, the new compact nuclear reactor design that is dramatically safer, dramatically less intrusive, and much more efficient. So think of that. I can extract my uranium from rain water, the new nuclear reactor design, and now we have a way of instead of sticking it in Yucca Mountain, we can actually break up that spent nuclear fuel. This should be exciting. There should be people on the left and the right going, it is worth sticking some money into this type of technology. But it doesn't fit our political folklore around here of, well, we can't have nuclear because of this. But we claim we give a darn about science and technology, when we have some of our smartest people in our society saying, we think we have a solution. Why don't we actually invest in those solutions instead of investing in the things that we keep doing around here, where we are investing in technology that is already decades out of date? So part of my fixation is--the reason I bring this chart is there was a Member, I think, just last week that was on the floor, and she alluded--someone from the left--that the economic growth basically led to more greenhouse gases, more environmental impact. But that is not actually the math. We are still working on some of the data for 2019, but if you look at 2018 and what we are preliminarily seeing in 2019, you know, greenhouse gases, the environmental impact, went down, even though GDP went up dramatically. Why? Because what we did in the tax reform created this huge incentive to invest in the latest technology. Mr. Speaker, you can go buy that new technology, and you could 100 percent expense it. It turned out we were able to create a moment where economic growth took off, jobs took off, and the working poor got dramatically less poor. It was the first couple of years in modern economic times when income inequality shrank, and it shrank because there was opportunity. People's labor became valuable. And, oh, guess what? Our environment got cleaner while growing the economy. We have the proof. We have the data. Isn't this the Holy Grail that both the left and the right claim they care about? Except the difference is it didn't require a command-and- control economy. It just required really good technology and the incentive to invest in that technology, and it made a difference. The other argument we come to the microphone and talk about is that there are incredible technology disruptions on the cusp. If we could get our heads around them, then we could make some amazing things happen. If we don't get our heads around them, then it is going to create economic disruptions. It is going to hurt a lot of people. We need to understand these. Over the last couple of years, I have done some presentations on something called synthetic biology. The reality is it is incredibly hopeful for humanity. It also has some really scary stuff. Mark my words, we will know in about a decade whether I am right. I believe this piece of technology here will be the single most disruptive technology of our lifetimes. Here is one: What if I came to you tomorrow and said that we can take plants and make them from the mid-20s to 52 percent more efficient in their growth by tweaking? Now, I am not a plant biologist, but I have gone out of my way to read every article of the University of Illinois and those who are producing. Mr. Speaker, you remember your high school biology class? Let's see if I can get this right. You had a plant cell, and it really, really, really wants a carbon molecule to turn it into a sugar to grow. But a quirk of nature, it grabs an oxygen molecule. It now has to spend all this energy to purge that and then turn around and grab the carbon so it can grow. What happens if every time it grabs the right molecule to maximize its growth? Okay, it looks like we would now know how to tweak commodity crops and other crops to always grab that carbon molecule and grow. Now, I need the thought experiment. I need the people around here who all believe we are geniuses to think this through. What happens tomorrow to the value of farmland? What happens to our trade relationships with the world where it is our agriculture muscle as a country when other countries are now able to grow 40 percent more soybeans on the same land, same water, same fertilizer? Think about the value of agricultural land. What is the value of agricultural debt? This is coming. This technology is here. Are we preparing, thinking what it means? What type of opportunity does this mean? Because the world already produces more food than it needs. Our real problem is distribution. What happens if tomorrow much of the agriculture in the world could produce 40 percent more on the same piece of land? There is also a quirky piece of math to think about, and that is world agriculture is estimated to produce about 2.2 times more greenhouse gases than every car on Earth. Mr. Speaker, if you were an optimistic utopian, then this technology is functionally equal to removing every car off the face of the Earth. Yes, that is the positive. But you also have to be ready to deal with the disruption it means economically. And it is coming. But yet have we ever had a hearing? Have we ever had a discussion? Have we ever invited the scientists to think about and talk us through and have us start to plan economically about what it means? Or are we just going to do what this place does, which is to avoid difficult discussions until it kicks us in the head? Let's talk about healthcare a bit. Obviously, that is my fixation. I come here every week and try to talk about ways we can change. Before we do this, here is a simple thought experiment. Well, it is not a thought experiment. It is the facts. ObamaCare, the ACA, was a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized, who gets to pay. Our Republican alternative is a financing bill. It is who has to pay, who gets subsidized. Medicare for All is a financing bill. They don't actually change what the underlying cost of delivering healthcare is. They just shift around who gets to pay. This debate here has to become what we pay. What technology and what models are we going to adopt that change the cost of delivering healthcare? What happens if I come to you, Mr. Speaker, and say that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters have preexisting conditions, that they are suffering, and that they are also over half of the healthcare costs of this Nation? Wouldn't it be much smarter, much more caring, much more empathetic, and much more compassionate to fixate on that 5 percent who are suffering and say that we are going to do everything we can to push technologies, to push the caring, and to push disruption in biologics to cure or minimize the suffering of the 5 percent? We are living examples of this. Do you remember, Mr. Speaker, only a few years ago the cost curve we were all looking at in regard to hepatitis C? Do you remember, hep C, you carry the virus in you for sometimes decades and decades and decades, Mr. Speaker. Then, all of a sudden, Mr. Speaker, you need a liver transplant. We were looking at numbers that were going to essentially bankrupt the VA with all the liver transplant costs. Then what happened? A cure was delivered. It was really expensive at the beginning, but it was dramatically less expensive than somebody having a failed liver. We are living in the time of disruptions, and we should promote those as a Congress and help many of us who are panicked over the debt but also really care about eliminating suffering. It is one of the reasons I have an absolute fixation. If you really wanted to help people of color, Mr. Speaker, and my Tribal communities--I represent some of the populations with the highest diabetes in the world, some of my Native Americans--how about an Operation Warp Speed on diabetes? Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the next 30 years, in today's dollars, inflation-adjusted dollars, we have $121 trillion of debt coming at us. Sixty-seven percent of that is just Medicare. The single biggest thing you could actually do, Mr. Speaker, the single thing, the biggest thing to deal with future debt that buries and destroys the future for my 5-year-old daughter, believe it or not, is a cure for diabetes because 31 percent of the Medicare future is just diabetes. One of the most loving and compassionate things we could do as conservatives and liberals is say that we are going to do--call it whatever you want, Mr. Speaker. I want to call it operation warp speed because we are close to the cusp of major revolutionary treatments for type 1, the ability to do stem cells to the pancreas. There are some incredible journal articles out just in the last 6 weeks on that. Some of that can also be used for type 2. Type 2 is more complicated because it is both the autoimmune but also lifestyle and having a discussion of, as a people, as a society, are we going to continue to fund really unhealthy foods? Are we going to continue to do farm supports in a way where we grow only a handful of crops instead of being able to have a wide variety of different things? These are really disruptive concepts, and they would be really compassionate and loving for everyone if we took really, really, really seriously what diabetes means to this Nation. Mr. Speaker, if you really want to deal with the reality, don't come to these microphones and give a speech about how COVID affected certain populations much more dramatically and then, in the next breath, not talk about the fact that the curve is absolutely sympathetic with those same populations having diabetes. The math is the math. Mr. Speaker, if you really give a darn about people, let's solve that because it is the single biggest thing you and I could do to take on future sovereign debt. The other one that drives me insane, because this is the one you and I could have the most impact on in the shortest period of time, Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare costs, so about $528 billion every single year, is people not taking their pharmaceuticals properly. I forget to take my hypertension medicine, and I have a stroke. I don't take my statin for my cholesterol, and all of a sudden, I have to get a stent. Someone doesn't maintain use of technology and stay on their insulin properly. We have lots of data now. This is a really well-vetted number. Sixteen percent of U.S. healthcare is our not taking or taking improperly our pharmaceuticals. Well, it turns out there is a technology solution to that: the little pill cap that talks to you. How about for grandma, who has to take some pills in the morning and then in the evening, we have the technology that drops the pills and talks to her. It turns out this technology could save not $100 billion but a few hundred billion dollars every year. Mr. Speaker, you talk about wanting to have an impact on healthcare and make people healthier and deal with those 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions that are 50-plus percent of our healthcare. There are things you could do tomorrow that would have an impact on society before the year is over. We made a proposal last year or just before the pandemic of super- high-value pharmaceuticals. Why don't we put them in sterile blister- pack-type containers and make them recyclable? I had a number of Members here, particularly one who is my friend on the left, who came to me and said: Oh, that is yucky. But I remember 10 years ago, when my mother was in hospice care, and one of the nurses there--she was a family friend--took me in the back. We were talking, and she showed me this barrel. She said: You know, there is probably $10,000 to $20,000 of pharmaceuticals in there that I am throwing away from our patients who have passed away in the last few weeks. That got me thinking: Is this rational? Besides the fact that the small molecules end up in your water supply, Mr. Speaker, the biologics, but is that rational? These are just little, incremental, creative things. We know we have technology now--the thing you can blow into, Mr. Speaker, that instantly tells you that you have the flu that could bounce off your phone with its medical records and say that you are not allergic to this antiviral and instantly order that antiviral, and you would be healthier. But that process is illegal under the laws that we passed here. The Social Security Act says you are going to need a doctor, Mr. Speaker, the reimbursement from HHS, our State licensing rules. Are we ready to stop living in virtue signaling, stop living in folklore, and start looking at the actual math? Yes, we are going to get lobbied like crazy from groups that we are disrupting their business model. But wouldn't it be neat to say: This isn't Republican, and it is not Democrat. It is technology. Let's make a difference. It is doable, and it is here. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oh, I would love to yield.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I have actually been blessed to spend lots of time with Professor Laffer and, actually, a couple of other folks who also have Nobel Prizes in economics. They tolerate me. Gilder, I consider a personal friend, if you really want to geek out. First off, you have a conceptual problem and the left doesn't--we have got to work with them to first admit we tax income. Property taxes are really the only things we tax wealth. We tax your real estate wealth. So the leaked IRS data, which is a real problem if you want confidence in a tax system that, once again, the IRS is back to being weaponized. If you want to tax wealth, that is a different tax system, and there are all sorts of games you can play with that. You could take your wealth and say, all right, here is what I am going to do. I am not going to take an income. I am going to borrow from it. So how do you tax it? You have to conceptualize very, very different. We also--we actually have the math, even though it may not happen in the fiscal year you want it to. The ultrawealthy give away most of their wealth. That has been a tradition in this country, particularly for about a century and a half. A tax system to work--and the gentleman and I have actually had a side conversation about this. You have to find what is the most--or the least disruptive tax that maximizes revenue, but also maximizes economic expansion. So we are already seeing some data that the Democrats' proposal on capital gains tax, actually, without changing the basis, actually raises substantially less revenues. Now how is that possible? It is because you stop engaging in those economic activities. So somewhere there is a sweet spot that maximizes revenues, but also then maximizes economic activity. And I have an absolute fixation that 2018, 2019 were miracle years economically for the working poor in this country. It is 2 years where, actually, income inequality genuinely shrank; the broad based nature of the working poor getting dramatically less poor. That shouldn't be a partisan fight. It should be the bipartisan goal. And the rich got richer, but not as fast as the poor got less poor. And that is back to, in a weird way, a long answer to your question. We need to have an honest debate of what maximizes revenues while minimizing economic damage. And right now, just throwing out numbers, and then throwing out fake--and I am being a little brutal on that-- fake models from the administration saying we are going to raise $4 trillion, we are going to cover all of our new spending, when all of the other models--and very soon joint tax will score it and we will see what the reality is. But everyone it is scoring right now, the Dems are only getting about half the revenues. And we have already seen the first analysis of the corporate tax hike. It unemploys 1 million Americans in the first 24 months.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. That didn't lose their jobs. And the harder part of the scoring is--and this was one of the miracles of 2018 and 2019--the Democrats repeatedly attacked the tax reforms from the end of 2017 and the regulatory reforms. But there were so many people working, and there was such vitality in the economy that Medicare part A, the trust fund, grew in years. Social Security grew in years because there were so many people paying their payroll tax. They didn't really pay income tax because they were part of the population that had been removed from having to pay income tax because we changed--but it turns out, if you actually, truly believe we have a societal obligation to keep our promises, to keep Social Security, to keep Medicare vibrant, it turns out you need an incredibly vibrant economy for people to be working. You can do that also by a rational tax policy instead of a punishing one.