David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Gohmert for yielding to me. For anyone who is not particularly familiar, we have sort of mechanisms. Last night, we were running late, and once we hit 10 o'clock, we were shut off. And trying to do 21 boards in 8 minutes, I apologize to those who have to try to take our words down. But I wanted to just touch on a couple of things. One really quickly, we were just blessed to have Secretary Yellen in front of Ways and Means. I have tremendous respect for and have built a relationship with her when she was Federal Reserve Chair. I want us all to pay attention to a promise that the Secretary and the President have made, and that is the new spending initiatives will be covered by the new taxes, the new revenues. I assume that is an honorable way to do it. We will fight over what the spending priorities are, and none of these games where we are going to do 15 years of tax hikes to cover 10 years of spending because, let's be honest, that is a complete fraud on the American people. But the best math that is coming out from a number of groups right now is the tax hikes that are being proposed, the revenues, are only going to cover maybe, if you are being optimistic, Mr. Speaker, on the receipts, 50 percent of the new spending. Yesterday, I think it is Penn Wharton that put out their model, I guess last week, that the capital gains tax itself loses $33 billion over the first 10 years. So, it is not scored to 15 years; it is 10. But, Mr. Speaker, if you do what is called the basis, which is how much is subject to the capital gains tax even though the perversity of it is that a huge portion of that is actually inflation we are going to tax, it would raise, in their model, $133 billion. The administration, the Democrats, have said this will be 330. So, they are only hitting about one-third of the revenues that have been promised from the capital gains tax. I really want to help the Democrats keep their promise that their new $4 trillion proposed spending will be covered by their new receipts, their new revenues. They have a really interesting math problem. Either they are going to have to cut their spending substantially in half or dramatically raise taxes on the American people. We asked Secretary Yellen: Should we expect a value-added tax? Is a VAT in our future? The math is really ugly--we are going to talk about that in a second here--to cover all these new spending initiatives plus just the demographic curve that is already about to crush us, debtwise. The answer was an interesting one. It is: Well, that is not part of our current proposal. For everyone who is interested in tax policy--and I accept that maybe some of us are a little bit on the geek side--I am fascinated with the tax on Medicare financing. Keep an ear out because the only way I think the left is going to get these types of revenues is to actually go to completely new revenue-raising, new tax regimes. Let's talk about what I consider is the greatest fragility of our Nation's future. It turns out it is not Republican or Democrat policy. It is demographics. What is the fastest growing demographic in the United States? It is getting old. We are graying very, very fast. It is baby boomers. When you look at this chart--and we did this last night, but we did it sort of caffeinated, very fast--take the next 30 years. This is without all the new spending that has been proposed this year by the new administration. This is our baseline, $101 trillion of debt in 30 years at today's dollars. This is inflation-adjusted dollars, 67 percent. Functionally, $68 trillion of debt is just Medicare. Only about $3 trillion is the rest of government, so it is Medicare, then Social Security. If you believe, Mr. Speaker, like I do, that we have an absolute moral obligation to keep our promises to those folks who have paid into Social Security and Medicare, then what are we going to do to keep that promise? The reality of it is that this is what buries us as a country. It is our demographics and the promises that are dramatically unfunded. Remember, Mr. Speaker, it is only maybe 4 years or so that the Medicare trust fund--which is only part A, which is the hospital portion--that trust fund is gone. Part B is actually seeing a doctor. Part C is managed care. That has its own little, in some ways, financial benefits. And D is drugs. Parts B and D are 100 percent out of the general fund. They don't have trust funds. This is absolutely critical. This will drive all government policy. If you are someone who wants money for education, if you are someone who wants money for the environment or our military, then the fact of the matter is it is Medicare that consumes us. One of my great frustrations is when you look at the math of how much is spending, Mr. Speaker, and then the financing of that spending, you get a sense that, as Republicans, we have this bad habit. We will go and say: Well, we will balance the budget through waste and fraud. Democrats will go and say: Well, we are going to balance it by nationalizing healthcare, Medicare for All. None of those are real. We are not telling the truth. Let's walk through just a couple of things that are in my craw right now. This is just one portion of the left's bill called H.R. 3. From a conceptual standpoint, it is an honest debate of what are we going to do about prescription drug costs. The methodology, though, Mr. Speaker, if you actually read the research, in a decade, it is killing people and costing more because we are on the cusp of a time of miracles. This is really important to get our heads around. We have all heard about this concept of mRNA. We have talked about it for 20-plus years. Years ago, I used to come to this mike and talk about this concept of bio-foundry. Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is, we can take a snippet of your DNA and a snippet of your cancer, your disease, or your virus, and it would take weeks. And for the CAR-T therapy for cancer, it was $350,000 just to get you your shot, but it was curing people. We just moved up 10 years in technology. That is one of the amazing things Operation Warp Speed. It is actually one of the few positive things I can say that came out of this pandemic is it is here. Look up Tesla and mRNA, Mr. Speaker. You find out that all sorts of very disruptive companies are investing in these little bio-foundries. We are on the edge of curing HIV, sickle cell anemia. We now have a cure for hemophilia. And we are also going to cure all sorts of cancers. There are some amazing things happening. The problem is they are expensive, Mr. Speaker. But they cure you. H.R. 3 does something that I think is fairly dark and fairly sinister, and we need our brothers and sisters on the Democrat side to be honest with constituents, and that is something called reference pricing. If a quality year is bought through a drug, but it costs more than, in this case, $37,000 in Great Britain, Mr. Speaker, you don't get it. H.R. 3 does this where they take a basket of some of these countries and say that we are going to use their cap. So, you are prepared to turn to your constituent and say: Oh, that drug is $40,000. Yes, it gives you that quality year, but it is over our cap, so we are not going to provide you that pharmaceutical. By doing that, we just destroyed small, disruptive bio-foundry pharma that is curing people. We are going to subject our population to say that the misery you have today is the misery you are going to have tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, because we are going to shut down the disruption. We are going to protect--here is the sinister thing that healthcare economists talk about. The Democrats' H.R. 3 actually protects Big Pharma because the industry now becomes you just adjust your current patent, and that is how you make a living, Mr. Speaker. But the ones that nip their heels that cure things, it is like the hepatitis C we cure now. Those cures don't come because we have just wiped out the income stream. We need to rethink. If Republicans and Democrats have a common goal that we need to look at pharmaceutical costs, then destroying the pipeline that cures people and that ends the misery is really dark. Mr. Speaker, we Republicans have our sins. How many of us will get behind a microphone and talk about price transparency? Price transparency is a really good thing, but it has almost no real effect on the price of healthcare. The best academic studies we have been able to find in our office is 0.1 to 0.7 percent. My point is really simple here. The ACA, ObamaCare, was a financing bill. It was who got subsidized and who had to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill. It was who had to pay and who got subsidized. Medicare for All is a financing bill. When are we going to have the really tougher discussion of what we pay? Let's disrupt the price of healthcare through technology. How many of us went to Blockbuster Video last weekend? We don't because now we hit a button called Netflix and all sorts of other things. We allow disruption to happen in other parts of our healthcare, but we have built so many regulatory barriers and so many licensing barriers, crazy things that would disrupt healthcare. One of my grand proposals--and this one needs to be Republicans and Democrats coming together--that $68 trillion over the next 30 years in just Medicare spending, that is a substantial driver for U.S. sovereign debt. Thirty-one percent of it is just diabetes. It turns out, Mr. Speaker, if you and I can have a revolution in ending the misery of diabetes, it is also the single biggest initiative you can have to U.S. sovereign debt. It is time Republicans and Democrats come together and do an Operation Warp Speed on diabetes. Yes, there is really neat research that is on the cusp of almost curatives for type 1, the autoimmune pancreatic cells. But the political side is going to be really tough for all of us because we are going to have to talk about type 2, which has a substantial lifestyle component in it. It needs a discussion of what we do in nutrition support as a country and what we do in our farm bill as a country. Mr. Speaker, if we care about people, if we really are going to come here and give speeches about how minority communities and my Native American communities from Arizona had such horrible outcomes during COVID, are you willing to look at the comorbidities that were there before COVID? It is diabetes. And it turns out, spending money on this management curative--and I really want curative--turns out to be one of the most powerful things you and I could ever do for U.S. sovereign debt going forward. It is 31 percent of just Medicare spending, and the numbers we are still working on for Medicaid and other things. So part of my other proposal is there are things we could do almost overnight that have incredible impacts on the cost of healthcare in this country; and here is one that I beg of us to start getting in our lexicon. Sixteen percent of the healthcare spending this year, over half a trillion dollars, just this year, will be people not taking their meds or taking them incorrectly. You have hypertension, you don't take your meds, you have a stroke. You have high cholesterol, you don't take your meds--and those things are cheap and inexpensive. Grandma is forgetful, or we get busy in our lives. And it turns out there are things where the pill top talks to your phone. It talks to you. There are other ones where it dispenses the pharmaceuticals to you. It turns out the technology of getting people to take their pharmaceuticals properly, if we would understand its impact, that is 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is just not taking our pharmaceuticals properly. That is a half a trillion dollars. Think about what you could do with a half a trillion dollars a year-- not over 10, not over 15; a year--and how much less misery you would have in this country by people having strokes, getting sick. This is not a revolution of trying to crush pharma or go after drug prices. It is actually taking a look and using this crazy thing we call, oh, yeah, math, and a calculator, and also technology. And, yes, it doesn't work necessarily in our political lexicon. It is a little harder to campaign on, but it happens to be factual. The other thing I am going to beg of us--and Congressman Gohmert, I appreciate him yielding to me. So I promise I will only do one or two more boards. I need us to think revolutionary. Before the pandemic, a Democratic colleague, Mike Thompson, from California, a good guy, has worked with me on telemedicine. It was a piece of legislation that substantially was going to go nowhere because there were lots and lots and lots and lots of lobbyists who hated it because it disrupts the money. But when the pandemic hit, our telemedicine bill became law. It expires when they declare the pandemic over. The expansion of reimbursement and access to telemedicine goes away. We need to fix that. But we also now need to understand what is telemedicine. Telemedicine is the thing you can wear on your wrist; the thing you can wear on your chest; the thing you blow into. The technology is here to crash the price of healthcare. And all the skeptics who attacked telemedicine before the pandemic, oh Grandma's not going to be able to use; they don't know how to work FaceTime; no one is going to want to make a phone call to a doctor or a healthcare professional. Turns out they were wrong. We have the last 18 months of proof. The satisfaction rates are off the chart. A, we need to continue it, but we need to expand the definition. And then the other things the pandemic has brought us is things we never thought of. How about a little home kit? These are available today. Actually, you can get them sent to your house in a day. Blow into it. It tells you if you have COVID-19. Well, if that exists for COVID, what would happen if I turned to you and said, turns out we have the technology today where you can have a medical lab in your medicine cabinet. You blow into it, it tells you if you even have cancer cells or a virus or bacteria. It exists today. We, as a body, need to legalize the disruptive technologies that allow us to disrupt the price of healthcare if we are going to save Medicare, save the country from the crushing debt. And, yes, we are going to annoy a lot of incumbent investors and a lot of incumbent businesses, but it is the right and moral thing to do. We have a society that has become a country of oligopolies, and Congress has become a protection racket. We protect incumbents; not incumbent elected officials, incumbent business models. Yet the disruption of the technology that is here today crushes the misery of so many of our brothers and sisters out there who have chronic conditions, that get sick. We can crash the price of healthcare. We can make us healthier as a society. We can take on, in that same breath, the crushing debt that is here. And it is demographic. It is coming. No matter how many speeches we give pretending we have a way around it, the only way around it is we have got to change the actual price of healthcare. I beg of us, we need to think differently because this place, often our policy sets, sort of sounds like it is still the 1990s.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am sorry; it is a long answer, but it actually has----

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, okay. In that case, I am sorry, I am going to talk even faster. I am going to make an argument that there is a technology disruption here that can help us change what we pay. The single thing we could do immediately to have the most impact is if we could get our brothers and sisters to take their hypertension medicines, to take their pills. That is 16 percent of all healthcare costs. A half a trillion dollars a year is just from people misusing or not taking their pharmaceuticals. There is technology now on the pill cap, the dispenser, to help grandma, to help me, to help all of us take our pharmaceuticals when we need it. But the other thing, this can be in your medicine cabinet. We now have the technology that you blow into, that tells you if you have a virus; that tells you if you have a cancer; tells you what you have. It is time for the technology disruption, and it is time this body started to legalize that technology to help us disrupt the price of healthcare. We can do something. And the beauty of it is, by doing the right thing, it affects the debt crush that is coming to our society. But, also, we start helping our brothers and sisters not have to live with the misery. So an Operation Warp Speed for diabetes, Republicans, Democrats, we can get on that. There may be some who want to do it because of debt. Some want to just do it for a humanitarian cause. It is the right thing to do. And then let's legalize the technology that helps us change what we pay, instead of having the crazy debate we have here of how we pay. It is time for the revolution. Adopt the technology. Let's change the price of healthcare. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I know we are all up against the clock; as my wife would say, the tyranny of the clock. So I had all sorts of boards and information. I was going to drive the poor stenographer nuts because sometimes I talk a little fast. I will try to slow down. I apologize. I have had a lot of caffeine. But I have a simple thing I want to try to walk through. And that is that this place isn't dealing with the actual crisis that is about to crush this country, and it is debt. But it is also opportunity. It is opportunity for our underserved populations; those who have been crushed by COVID. And when you look at why, I think we have a solution, but we have to think differently in this place. So first let's do the global problem. The honest truth about what is about to crush us, as a people, is debt. Take a look at this chart next to me. Over the next 30 years--and this is in adjusted dollars, so this is in today's dollars--$101 trillion of debt in today's dollars. I don't think we ever get close to that, being able to finance that type of debt. But if you look at the chart, 67 percent of it is just Medicare. The rest here is Social Security. The little green part of that $101 trillion, only about $3 trillion of it is the rest of government. It is Medicare and Social Security. If you believe, like I do, that we have a moral obligation to keep our promises on Social Security and Medicare, we need to step up and deal with the reality of the math hiding it. So think about the debates that have been going on here. We are talking about $4 trillion here, $4 trillion for this. This is the Damocles sword hanging over our head. And the economic violence, the evil that we will do to seniors and this government when this blows up on us is terrifying. So I want to walk through some basics, and as I juggle these boards, a really interesting number here, and this one is really important. If you can take a look at this top line, this is what needs to bounce off here. Of that, functionally, I think it is $68 trillion of debt that is driven just by Medicare over the next 30 years, 31 percent of it is diabetes. If you look at the health outcomes from COVID, from my Tribal communities out in the Southwest, for urban populations that have lots of diabetes issues, take a look at what a crappy year they had, dying from COVID. If we don't change this policy of saying, well, we are going to spend money putting up more medical clinics and in doing this and doing that, we are going to spend money to help people live with their misery? Is that really what we are about? How about doing something bold? We are going to do an Operation Warp Speed to cure diabetes, and, yes, it is going to be hard. There is some incredible science coming on type 1 because type 1 is an autoimmune. Type 2, a lot tougher because a lot of it is lifestyle. And we are going to have to deal with government policy on how we do farm policy, on how we do nutrition support. But maybe we can come together here and say we are going to stop financing misery; the diabetes that is rampant through our society. Oh, by the way, at the same time, it is the single biggest impact you can have on the debt bomb that is hanging over our society. And we have got to work through some of the crazy policy proposals here that sound great, and you work through, and all they are going to do is bring more misery to our society. How many of you have actually read H.R. 3? That is the Democrats' bill on trying to deal with prescription drug costs. And I understand we need to something about prescription drug costs, but what it does is it uses reference pricing. Which means we are going to go to Great Britain here and take what they allow for a year--so a single quality year of life--and if the drug costs more than $37,000, you don't get it. So the new Alzheimer's drug that was finally approved last week, you don't get it because it doesn't give you--it costs more than $37,000. That is the price mechanism that makes H.R. 3 work. That is cruel. But on the conservative side, we have got to get our math right. We tell people, price transparency. Price transparency does a good thing. It makes a difference, but it only makes a fractional difference. The best research we have been able to find is it is .1 percent to .7 percent change in healthcare cost. So here is the point I am trying to get through. ObamaCare, the ACA, the Republican alternative, they were financing bills. It is who had to pay, who got subsidized. We need to start having a debate here on what we pay and how we crash the price of healthcare. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, before I start my presentation--and I am going to focus sort of on some of the economics, the debt and economic growth, particularly in some of the proposals that are hitting the House right now--I wanted to touch on something. We just heard a number of folks get up and talk about their love and caring for Israel, the Middle East, and the concerns of the conflict. I want to do something that is a little bit different. I have intense concern that our relationship with a fair and functioning republic in the Middle East never become a partisan issue. Maybe this will make sense. I have been here for a few years, and there has always been the ability for those on the left and the right to stand up and say: Look, we have a country that works. No country is perfect, but it works, and it respects human rights, and it is a functioning republic and a democracy in the Middle East. I was really sort of heartbroken last week. Just before I did one of these presentations, there was a presentation by not many Members, but some who said some pretty awful things. So I hope as we all want the country of Israel to prosper and do well--we want everyone in the region to prosper and do well--but we have to accept there are other bad actors particularly financing things coming through Iran to some very bad actors to do horrible, horrible things in the region. I wish we could sort of step back a few months and think of the joy that many of us felt with the Abraham Accords that good things were happening. The caring for Israel needs to be bipartisan, and my fear is we are seeing that start to slip where some on the hard left are moving away from supporting a fellow republic. This is not a good thing for all of us, and we need to sort of rethink that discussion, stand up for our friends, and tell our enemies that they can have a home in our hearts if they stop the bad acts. And maybe the Middle East, one day, really does have a future, as we saw with the vision that came from the Abraham Accords. Mr. Speaker, I get frustrated when I watch the floor. We all sit in committee, and so often what comes through these microphones are sort of trite talking points. So let's go back to the big picture: What are we doing to actually deal with it? I have a new chart. I am trying to find over and over and over how do we actually all come together and understand the reality? This is our future. This is my 5-year-old daughter's future. It is $101 trillion in debt adjusted in today's dollars. So this isn't 30 years of inflation. This is today's dollars. This is our future in 30 years. Many of us want to get behind the microphone and say: This is Democrat; this is Republican. It is demographics. We are getting older as a society. We are getting older as a people. And the reality of it is 67 percent of our 30-year debt is the unfunded portion of Medicare. Remember, Mr. Speaker, when you pay your FICA tax, you are paying the part A, the hospital portion. The part B and D, someone, a retiree contributes a little tiny sliver to. The rest comes out of the general fund. When you actually take a look at our population, Mr. Speaker, the cost of healthcare, those things, then you start to realize it is the core driver of our debt. The blue here is the unfunded liability with Social Security. So if you believe Americans have the right to these earned benefits--these are earned benefits--then why is it so hard to have an honest conversation about the unfunded liability? Because, Mr. Speaker, you will get behind these microphones and the handful around here who would tell the truth about the math, then this becomes an attack television commercial because you told the truth. I am passionate that during my time here I am going to make these programs survive and prosper, but you first have to understand the scale of the problem. Mr. Speaker, do you see the little green wedge over here? At the end of 30 years, the $101 trillion of debt in today's dollars, only $3 trillion of it is the rest to government. So when you get a politician who will say: Oh, it is the military; it is waste and fraud; it is foreign aid, then they are lying to you or they don't own a calculator. Once again, we have got to have this honest conversation: The unfunded liabilities in Medicare and Social Security drive U.S. sovereign debt. So why talk about this today? We have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of spending that has come up this year. I want to walk through what that does. I haven't even been able to do the math on the charts if we continue just what we have done this year, just in the few months what that actually means to the future. You would think we would be having this discussion: Hey, the economy is getting better. Our society is opening up. Let's get Americans to work, and let's get prosperity going. Because if we don't have actually amazing and robust economic growth, then dealing with that $101 trillion of unfunded liability becomes almost mathematically impossible. So just to try to put some things in context, we held a hearing today in the Ways and Means Committee on infrastructure. Now, most of the discussion ended up becoming about infrastructure financing. But I decided it was good to actually come up here and show what is actually roads and bridges. So, Mr. Speaker, do you see the orange right there? Mr. Speaker, $115 billion out of the--what is it--$2-something trillion is actually just roads and bridges. Much of the rest of the spending, if you want to be brutal about it, is other things that come shockingly close to paybacks for constituencies that help finance the left. But a lot of them are things that ultimately don't belong in the infrastructure: medical expansion and long-term care. It is something that is real we need to deal with. Does long-term care belong in an infrastructure bill? Republicans and Democrats can nail this. We can get this here. I will also give you another thing, Mr. Speaker. Many of us believe infrastructure is actually much more than our traditional idea of roads and bridges. If you start to think it through, how much of it is technology? If I came to you tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and said: What is the street down in your neighborhood going to look like a decade from now? Fifteen years from now? I am desperately hoping my 5-year-old never drives. I want her in an autonomous vehicle. If we actually have this technology coming, then what does traffic look like? What does a smart city look like? I have done presentations here on the floor before of what does the future of infrastructure look like in a world of interconnectivity, where cars can be traveling at pretty impressive speeds talking to each other, your carrying capacity on the existing roads today change. How much discussion have we had that the future of infrastructure has a huge technology base to it? The information coming to your vehicle tells you when there is a fire truck, when school is out, when there is a water main break to keep moving and flowing traffic. That is when my intense frustration is--much of the debate we have today is: Let's pay back our political constituencies. Let's put this much into roads and bridges. And, oh, let's completely be funding the infrastructure of past decades instead of being visionary about what the future looks like. I will give you a simple example of that just as a thought experiment. I have a fixation on the future of healthcare as a type of interconnectivity. Telemedicine becomes sort of a telehealth using sensors and those things--cars talking to each other, transportation, products, drones. Okay, you need broadband. Broadband in the future for areas like my State of Arizona that don't have it isn't running a copper line or a fiber-optic line out to the middle of nowhere. It is a satellite. This last weekend, I think we launched another 54, or whatever it is, low-Earth orbit satellites. But we have $100 billion of spending for moving broadband particularly out to rural America. Rural America, if we would understand technology of today instead of sounding like we are a decade behind, we have for my Tribal communities in the middle of nowhere broadband. We just now need to get our laws, our financing, our subsidies to this part of this century. That is part of the thought experiment. This is one I want to try to have a real, brutally honest conversation about because the President has gotten up multiple times and said his infrastructure package is paid for. Well, it is not. When you spend some time on it, the new taxes, a substantial number of them are fake. They are just fluff because when you look at the $265 trillion in spending that is the baseline in the bill, as best we can score it, $1.95 trillion is the revenue. It is not real. A big portion of it comes from, hey, we are going to get the entire world to do a corporate minimum tax inversion so the companies leaving the United States because we raised corporate taxes won't happen. For the Biden tax plan, for Nancy Pelosi's, for the Democrats' tax plan to actually work, there are components in here. You need the rest of the world to adopt a minimum tax so we don't go back to pre-2016 when companies were abandoning the United States and taking much of that tax revenue with them. Another thing, there is a substantial area there where we believe there are billions and billions--maybe a couple of hundred billion--and we are going to collect more taxes. We are going to get those tax cheats. Okay, let's say that is even real. How many years would it take to hire, train, and be able to collect? Some of the estimates you are talking about will take several years before that even becomes effective. There are a number of things like that on the revenue side that are fanciful. Also, no one has started to score the raise of corporate taxes that are in the Democrats' tax portion of the infrastructure plan. We did a presentation last week that showed about a million people will lose their jobs in the first 24 months. There will be a million less jobs because of the corporate tax, and that is just the corporate tax. That is not talking about the change of basis, the capital gains, the tax on the wealthy, all of those other things. We were trying to make an argument: If the hunger is for revenues for some of these, stop subsidizing the really, really ultrarich. When they buy their multimillion-dollar house on a beachfront, should we subsidize flood insurance? If someone is really wealthy, should you subsidize their electric vehicle, their solar panels, their power wall? It turns out, we were coming up with close to $1.4 trillion in the 10-year window that looks to be subsidies for the very well-off. If you do the ultra-well-off, it cuts that number down, but it is still a stunning amount of money. So, there is a path where you could cut spending instead of doing things that would distort economic growth because, as many of you know who may have watched some of these presentations, I have an absolute fixation on the working poor. The miracle we had in this country in 2018 and 2019, where we were starting to crush the separation of income and equality, it was working. We came up with something that I believe Democrats supported, but they just didn't support how we got there. We made working men and women's labor valuable. We made what talents they brought to the marketplace valuable. We tried to once again say: If you care and love the working poor, and you want them to become much less poor, you can't devalue their labor. But that is what we are doing right now. The number one thing you can do to do economic violence to the working poor is open up your borders. What happens when you import substantial numbers of people with similar skill sets? We have great data on this. You functionally have subjected that working-poor population in your country to a decade of misery where their wages don't flatline. They actually go down. The other thing you do is inflation. Inflation concentrates punishment on elderly who have saved and the working poor because now the ability to buy that house, now the ability to buy an asset becomes so much more difficult to get to. I am not sure the left has processed what is going on at this moment and how much economic violence is actually being done by the economic decisions that have happened the last few months here. So, let's take a quick look here. Do you remember a couple of years ago, you know, way, way back, maybe like 2019? We would engage in debates here on how we are spending too much money on the military, too much for this, and 4.7 percent of GDP that year was going to be in borrowing. People were really upset on the left, and many of us were upset with too much spending on the right. This year, we are over 20\1/2\ percent. If you want to understand inflation, if you want to understand what is happening to asset prices, if you are wanting to understand why that first-time homebuyer can't buy the home, why that working-poor family can't seem to dig themselves out, this is the beginning of what we are doing. We are pumping so much spending, and the Federal Reserve is having to finance it, to create functionally fake money, because here is what we are doing. We sell bonds. Right now, the Federal Reserve is buying our bonds like crazy--in many ways, just creating cash out of thin air. There is this old saying: What is inflation? Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods. Instead of financing production and productivity in our society like the tax reform did in 2017, where we saw incredible wage growth with no inflation, what we did now is we helicopter-dropped money. Now, we have lots of cash in our society, which has all been borrowed, chasing not enough production because we didn't incentivize production. We incentivized buying things. Great politics until you start to blow up people's lives with the cost of their goods. How dangerous is inflation? You hear a number of our friends from the Federal Reserve--I talked to one a couple of nights ago, one of the region presidents. She said: David, it is transitory. How many of you have watched a lot of the leading economists, even the leading economists on the left side, in the last 3 or 4 days? They are now sounding the alarm. This inflation rate is not what they call transitory. It is not just a blip for 90 days, and then it is going away. There are geeky things. I am the senior Republican on the House side for the Joint Economic Committee, and there are things we will look at, being able to buy a futures contract on a steel that you are doing a multiyear project on, things like that. You almost can't buy those right now. There are so many industries that say their inflation curve is already out beyond this year and into 2022. This is really dangerous, where we are at. Think of this. Last month, if you had annualized, we were at 4.2. But the important thing is, look at the explosion. Functionally, as soon as the administration started rolling out this functionally deficit financing, even though the President says, hey, I am paying for it--but you just saw, on giving credit for everything, there is still another $600 billion of borrowing in just the infrastructure proposal, not all the others. This is a problem. There is a canary in a mine. Some folks should be really starting to make a point on this. Mr. Speaker, how many minutes do I have remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Okay, I will talk faster. I know this is a little bit geeky, but this is important. Open borders, inflation, these are components that just crush the very people who we were having so much success with for a couple of years. We all talk a great game about caring about working men and women, but we are engaged in economic malfeasance right now. I understand it is complicated, but the numbers don't lie. When you start looking at these charts right now, when you start seeing just parts of the PPI hitting a 12 percent annualized in the commodity goods last month, we really, really, really need to start taking this seriously. Do you continue to float more debt to chase more helicopter money to go out and buy more constituents? You are going to see sort of a false economy for some of the calculations this year, where you may see a number that says: Hey, income inequality also shrunk this year because we gave out so much cash, but we also created economic violence because we created detachment from work. Remember, losing a year of work, losing a year of skills, losing a year of progress in your career path even for the working poor has a multiplier effect that if you look over the lifetime career, it is pretty devastating. You saw the decisions that were made to keep schools closed and the amount of economic violence to working women in our Nation. In 2019, there were more females in the labor market than men. Today, that just isn't true. The last one I will give, for those folks who fixate on monetary policies, you are in an unusual moment. Remember, there is a difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy. Monetary is Federal Reserve: Hey, we are going to shrink the money supply. We are going to increase the money supply. We are going to do this to protect the purchasing value of the dollar for overseas, for in the country. We are going to use interest rates. We are going to use bank reserves. We are going to use those things as tools. The fiscal side is: We spend money. We borrow money. What happens when we are borrowing, because we are spending so much, we are borrowing so much that we distort what they call monetary supply. All of a sudden, the Federal Reserve is having to step in and finance our chaos. It turns out Congress, because of its spending now, is distorting monetary supply. What this chart shows is--just take a look--this was the Federal Reserve balance sheet. Just before COVID, it was shrinking. The economy was doing so stunningly well. We had economic growth. The working poor were getting dramatically less poor. We had almost no inflation. Productivity was beginning to spike in the economy. Remember, how do you pay people more money? You pay them more because of inflation and productivity. Well, when you pay someone more for inflation, they don't get anything. When you pay them for productivity because there are new plants and equipment and these types of economic investments, that is the golden child. That is where you are paying people more because we have invested in them and in plants and equipment. That is also what is so devastating about the left's tax plan right now. When you raise capital gains the way they are talking about doing without incentivizing investments in productivity and investments in people through those organizations, they are going to be paid less money. When you raise corporate taxes, there will be less money for those things that make jobs more productive, and we have already seen the numbers. We are going to unemploy a million people if the current corporate tax model comes in. We are now spending so much money that we are just distorting the monetary supply for us in the world because the Federal Reserve needs to keep buying our bonds. They try to keep interest rates as level as possible for as long as possible because, God forbid, when you are floating the scale of debt we are floating today, could you imagine if the next set of refinancing, the next set of bonds, were at traditionally the interest rates we had a decade or two decades ago? So I want to sort of close on this. This over here is 2013 to 2016. This is 2016 to 2019. Most of this economic change was really 2018 and 2019. This is mean family income. If you take a look, the blue is the poorest quartiles in our society. 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, going back, they were getting their heads kicked in. Income inequality really was growing, but it was growing under the Obama's administration's policies. If you take a look at what happened after tax reform, income inequality shrank. The blue here is our lowest quartiles. I hate that number, but it is economics. Working men and women, particularly the working poor, saw almost a 10 percent increase in their wages in those couple years. The wealthy only saw about 2.9 percent. If anyone ever wants to really dive into it, the discussion between supply-side economics and Keynesian economics and the distortion that politics have turned to those things, if you actually care about where we are going--you remember the very first chart that showed $101 trillion of debt that is coming at us. We are making our society and our country incredibly fragile to an interest rate spike, a military conflict, or another pandemic. If we need infrastructure, let's build infrastructure. We can work out the financing mechanisms. But does long-term care really belong in the infrastructure bill? We need a revolution in what healthcare is, because you saw on the first chart, healthcare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. Once again, understand the ACA, Obamacare, the Republican alternative, Medicare for All, are not pieces of legislation that change the cost of healthcare. When you see them, the percent of GDP that goes to healthcare stays the same. They are financing bills. This is one of the thought processes here that has been so difficult to crack through our skulls. We keep having debates on this floor that are about who pays and who gets subsidized. We don't have conversations of what we can do to unleash creativity in technology, whether it be in environment, whether it be in infrastructure, whether it be in healthcare. Until this place starts to see this in a holistic sort of continuous circle of healthcare actually has something to do with infrastructure, but the way you keep debt financing it, the debt becomes our fragility, and the debt is what is going to crush our future and do true economic violence to the working poor, and even to my 5-year-old daughter's future. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight, I am going to actually try to do something that is a little tricky, but I am going to first sort of explain the theme, and then I am going to sort of walk through some of the backup material. We understand right now, our brothers and sisters on the left have, what, another $4\1/2\ trillion of spending--maybe it is 5--in the pipeline, a couple major multi-spending of that, let's call it that $4\1/2\ trillion over the next 10 years. They claim to have about $3 trillion in tax increases coming to pay for it. The reality--and hopefully I will be able to do this over the next couple of weeks as we try to get more details and work through it line by line--it also requires that you hit every mark on the revenue raised, that all sorts of programs expire, which is really unlikely around here, and also certain spending expires. It is just not real. So our top-of-the-napkin math right now is at best over the 10 years it is a couple trillion dollars in new revenues. Well, one of the sets of revenues that is being discussed is, well, let's tax the wealthy. Okay. Except when you walk through the math there, let's raise capital gains tax, let's raise basis, let's raise individuals' income tax, and also then you add in let's raise taxes on corporations, fine, but we are already starting to see the data coming in saying that just going to the 28 percent on the corporate tax rate is 1 million jobs over the next 24 months. Okay, so the Democratic Party wipes out 1 million jobs and takes, oh, I think it was a little less, like $119 billion or something off just the GDP from those 2 years, and you start to lay out--that is just the corporate income tax. Now start to do the capital gains which the beauty of capital gains is it is risk-taking. It is the type of investment that makes the working poor less poor. It is the type of investment that takes risks that makes us more productive, because, Mr. Speaker, you all remember your high school economics class. What are the two ways a worker gets paid more? Inflation, which means you got paid for more but it didn't get you anything, or productivity. Without that risk capital, Mr. Speaker, you lose that productivity investment. So, if the Democrats really intend to spend that much money and really intend to keep driving up the debt and deficits the way they are, then I want to make a modest proposal of where they can find some offsets. I am shocked this isn't discussed more around here. Instead of marching in and saying that we are going to tax rich people, even though much of that money actually goes to create jobs, investment, economic growth, and productivity growth for our brothers and sisters who are in the hardworking class, why don't we stop subsidizing the rich? I am going to show a number of boards here today on how this government takes some of the very, very, very wealthiest in this country and on one hand says: Pay the taxes and, oh, by the way, we are going to hand you back the cash. Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you one board where individuals with multi, multi, multi-million dollar houses on the beach then get dramatically subsidized flood insurance from the Federal general fund and over and over and over. If this is the path the Democrats intend to go, could they consider cutting spending? Because cutting that spending would be much less distortionary--that is an actual word---distorting the economy because the taxes being discussed right now are going to hurt the economy. They are going to hurt working people, and they are going to really hurt the working poor. So, if you need this much revenue--and our back-of-the-napkin math right now is about $1,400,000,000,000 over the 10 years in subsidies that could be cut for that very top fraction of income earners and wealth holders in the United States. So there is a place to get your revenue without creating the economic distortion being discussed right now. So let's first talk about the reality of where we are at as a people, as a society, and as a country. How many actually right now know the latest numbers from CBO on how much trouble we are in just on Medicare? The 30-year window right now on Medicare is a $71 trillion shortfall just in Medicare. Remember, in Medicare only, it has the A, B, C, D. But part A, which is the hospital portion, is the only part we collect as part of your FICA tax. Everything else, ultimately, comes out of the general fund. We always talk about part B and part D because part C is the managed care portion. But if you look at the actual outlays of the program and then look at the interest costs and remove part A, the hospital portion, it is $71 trillion, and it is just Medicare. I am just stunned more Members of Congress don't understand this or are willing to tell their constituents the truth. That Medicare number represents 67 percent of the deficit debt shortfall over that 30 years. Once again, the Medicare shortfall is 67 percent of the debt we are going to be in, in 30 years. So, we take that. Now, let's add in Social Security. Social Security is in better shape. It functionally has only about a $28 trillion shortfall over the next 30 years because you reach in and you take the portion of the trust fund. Here is the trust fund portion. You see the green sliver? Then, the rest are what we predict as incoming payroll taxes. Here are the programs' outlays, and then the interest on the shortfall. Work with me. If Medicare is $71 trillion, Social Security is $28 trillion, right there, you are at--what?--$99 trillion of the debt is driven by just Social Security and Medicare. Well, the good news is--if it is that--the rest of the budget over that 30-year window is only about $3 trillion short. So, in a perverse way, the rest of the budget is out of balance by only $3 trillion. It is pretty close to being in balance, in the type of numbers we are using here in Washington today. There should be just a fixation, if this body cared about retirement security, cared about the future, cared about everyone from my 5-year- old daughter, who is going to be paying these taxes, to, hopefully, myself, who will be receiving some of these benefits. If we actually cared, there should be an absolute fixation on these numbers. Instead, there is a fixation here on spending more money and spending money that we can show you is going to shrink the economy and unemploy a lot more Americans. I am trying to speak as an economist with some passion. If you look at post-tax reform, post-some of the regulatory rationalizations, and maybe with some good luck, if you look at 2018-2019, that should be the goal, to get back to what was happening in the economy in those years. Because if you take a look, after the tax reform, workers were receiving a substantially larger portion of the value of that tax reform. It was substantially a miracle. But I want to show you one of my favorite slides here. If you look at the number of Americans in 2018, 2019, who were in poverty, do you realize we had a couple of the lowest years--actually, the lowest years in history of our brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans, in poverty. You look at the lines for African Americans, Hispanics, Anglos, this is supposed to be the goal. You do understand we had a couple of years where income inequality dramatically shrank, and it didn't shrink because rich people were getting less rich. It shrank because poor people, particularly the working poor, were getting less poor, and fairly dramatically less poor. Here is maybe a perverse reason the left is fixated on wanting, on one hand, to raise the taxes on the wealthy and, on the other hand, hand them a bunch of subsidies. Well, there is also a very ugly political reason. When you hand people subsidies, maybe they help your campaign, maybe they pay attention to you. But if you take a look at 2013 to 2016, see the orange bar here? That was the gain of wealth of the wealthy. The blue was the poorest portion of Americans. The income inequality gap under those Obama years actually grew dramatically. The rich did get richer. The poor did get poorer. When Republicans provided tax reform, when we cleaned up much of the regulatory system, you know what happened? The value of working people's labor went up fairly dramatically. Our brothers and sisters who we refer to often as blue collar, the working poor, they got substantially wealthier. Their income--their labor became much more valuable. The rich didn't even keep close. It was like three times the differential. When someone tells you during the last administration, well, the rich were getting richer and the poorer were getting poorer, they are lying to you. They are just not looking at the math. It turns out tax reform--regulatory reform, actually--made the poor much less poor. It didn't shrink the pie. It actually made prosperity across the country. Then, we hit this damn virus. So, we look at the brilliance of what we have done in this last year, and you start to realize the economic violence we are committing on the poor. Actually, before we do this board, what are some of the things you can do to really crush the working poor in your country? Open up the borders, and make those who may not have finished high school--what they sell is their talents and their labor. They may not have high skill sets, and for so long, that skill set didn't have enough value in this economy. Then, in 2018 and 2019, we saw the working poor get dramatically less poor because their labor became much more valuable. When you open up the border, you flood the marketplace with those who compete with them with similar skill sets. We have lots of data. A couple of weeks ago, I showed some charts that showed one of the most vicious things, the economic violence you can commit on the working poor with having an open border. What is the number two thing? It is what we have been hearing about the last couple of days. When you see this type of inflation on gasoline, on commodity foods, on being able to put a roof over your head, the middle class, it hurts. The upper classes, they make money because they hold lots of assets. They are getting richer now. But if are you part of that working poor, that blue-collar working class that did so well in the previous couple of years, they are getting their heads kicked in right now because we have pumped in so many dollars chasing so few goods. We are kicking the poor in their heads, and it is the policies coming out of this place that are doing it to them. Yet, the third leg of how you make the poor less poor is work, that attachment to the value of their labor that businesses, concerns, others that need them, that help them raise their skill sets, that help them build their seniority. Yet, we have a system right now where, as you can see in this chart, in much of the country, we are paying people more money to stay home than take the employment. You do realize right now you may be a hero if you are a Member of Congress and you have been voting to do enhanced unemployment benefits. But in the future, when those things start to run out, and they have lost a year to 2 years of skills, of seniority, of moving up in the organization they are employed by, you explain to them why their lifetime wages have been crushed. Some of this is also driven by the teachers' unions playing games of not opening up. Do we understand the level of economic dislocation that these policies are going to give us, not this year, not next year, but maybe for the coming decade? Let's go back to my previous theme. We see that economic robustness, vitality, opportunity, economic growth is moral. If this place truly cares and claims they care about workers and the working poor--now, we are about to do the next round of economic kick-in-the-head. We are going to call it taxing the wealthy, but we are also going to remove the very capital out of the markets that go to the investments that make us more productive, that make it so we can hire and pay people. You already saw the one study--I have it right over here on the chair--that says that just the corporate tax hike will unemploy 1 million Americans in the first 24 months. Let's walk through and see how bold and economically literate the left is around here. Here is the National Flood Insurance Program. It turns out that if you look at the chart over here, where much of the subsidized spending is coming from the general fund, it is for the folks who are 165 percent of the mean income and up. We were trying to work out another chart that showed it was some of the top 1, 2, 3 percent of income earners and wealth holders in the entire country who were actually getting the substantial portion of the subsidized flood insurance. If you need more money to keep spending, maybe cut some of the spending where you are subsidizing the very people you are threatening to tax. It is a really creative, simple idea: Cut some spending. And you can cut the spending on the very people who you vilify so much. Look, a couple of these are uncomfortable, but it is still the math. If you look at some of the top wealth households in the Nation, and you take a look at how much money will go to those individuals in everything from Social Security, Medicare, other types of programs--you really need to understand. Does it make sense to play this shell game of saying Democrats are going to raise taxes on the rich? Okay, but we are going to turn around and hand you all these benefits and hand you all these subsidies through the other hand. It is an irrational sort of washing machine of the money. Another one I will give you is, you take a number of the subsidies that go to agriculture, and take the sliver who are the wealthiest holders of those agribusinesses. Guess where the substantial portion of the subsidies go? So, on one hand, you are saying we are going to tax you more, but we are going to turn around and hand you back the commodity subsidies. It is an irrational plan, once again, devoid of basic math and basic economics that the Democrats are proposing. Who knows, maybe it is great politics, saying we are going to tax the rich. I mean, we see the polling. Many in the Republican base aren't particularly thrilled. We know the Democrat base vilifies it, even though that is where much of the left actually gets their money. But it is just bad economics. Do we want to step back into the days when, for great politics, we did things that truly crushed the workers, the working poor, in this country by making the economy smaller than it should be, slowing down economic growth but slowing down also those investments that make us more productive, that make it so we can pay our brothers and sisters more? My challenge to the left is: We have been working up the numbers now for a couple of weeks. Brian Riedel, of the Manhattan Institute, has a great article that is about to be published walking through lots of these numbers. Take it for your consideration. Brian's number is about $1 trillion of subsidies that go to the rich. Our number is about $1.4 trillion over the 10 years that go to the rich. We have added in flood insurance and a couple of other programs that we have thought about. But the last part of this thought experiment, you are telling me it is absolutely ethical that saying, on one hand, I want to tax these folks more. But, oh, by the way, here is your subsidy to buy your electric car. Here is your subsidy to buy the solar panels. Here is your subsidy to have a multimillion-dollar house in a flood zone. Here is your subsidy. This is irrational economics. It is irrational policy. And the only reason a political party would continue to support it is they understand it is the shiny objects that get used for additional political support. That is a cynical, dark thing for our friends on the left to continue to do. So that is my thought experiment for this evening. We are going to try to add some more detail on these numbers over the coming weeks. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is going to be one of those evenings where you have a lot of things to share, but they are actually really about two subjects. And I am going to ask us to try to think about things a little bit differently. And as is my bad habit, I brought a number of charts to just try to get our heads around it. Some of what I am going to share tonight--I am going to try to dial back the sarcasm, but we have got to get our heads around facts and reality. One of the first things I want to go through is what we did employment-wise, who got hurt during this last year. Our brothers and sisters who have sort of less-than-a-high-school education, if you see this green chart right there, this is sort of talking about the unemployment levels for those who are lower on education. You have got to understand, this last year was absolutely crushing to our brothers and sisters who really either didn't graduate high school or barely graduated high school. Their value that they sell is their labor. And the numbers are still just really, really high. Look at the disproportion between those of us who have bachelor's degrees or graduate degrees. We had a blip, but not much of one. Individuals here who didn't graduate high school, they are getting their heads kicked in, and they still are. So we are going to talk about some of the policy going around us. And the next part is, it is beyond just unemployment. For those of us in the Joint Economic Committee, those on Ways and Means, those who actually pay attention to the numbers, the U-6, and all these things put out by the Labor Department, the real number we need to pay attention to is actually something called labor force participation. What does it mean when someone is not in the labor force with their skill sets, age? Their attachment to work gets broader and more difficult to reattach. Their ability to climb to a supervisor or watch their pay go up gets really damaged. And on this one, do you see this line down here? We are, right now, seeing some labor force participation by education levels. For those who didn't finish high school, half of them aren't in the labor force. Do you understand what is going on right now with what we would traditionally refer to as the working poor, except they are not working? Now, part of this is because of the absurd policies we have engaged in. What happens when you make public policy by your heart, by feelings, instead of math, instead of facts, instead of actual compassion that understands what makes someone's life better? We just financed keeping people out of the labor force. Do you understand? Do we understand? Do we understand? As a body, do we understand what we just did to the future earning powers of those individuals that we incentivized not to be in the labor force? And we are already seeing it. Was the goal here to make these individuals permanently poor? Because that is what we are accomplishing right now. So, obviously, because the rhetoric around here, particularly from the left, is that they care about the working poor, we would be seeing public policy that actually takes care and helps the working poor, makes the value of their labor more valuable. What is the single number one thing that crushes the labor value of the working poor? It turns out--and we were a little surprised, but we did a bunch of research--it is when you have an open border policy, because, all of a sudden, you have those who actually-- their value economically is selling their labor. You now have decided you are going to make them compete with those coming across the border. And, on occasion, we will be here on the floor and we will hear arguments about compassion for individuals from around the world who have presented themselves at our border in Arizona. And I just desperately wonder, Where the hell is the compassion for the working poor in our own country? Here is the math. I mean, you know, the peak pandemic unemployment rate was well over 20 percent for those who didn't finish high school, for those who basically--their economic value is their labor. But it is worse than that. When you have an open border policy, you have basically crushed their wages. Their future wages go negative. You know, I know we all just heard an hour of border policy and those things. Maybe I see too much of the world through sort of an economic lens, but I think that is also a fairer lens. It is not meant to be brutality right or left. It is a love and compassion for those in our society who were being left behind for so long. We are crushing them again. I mean, the best math we have come up with is if you didn't finish high school and you have a society that has moved to open borders, which functionally is the math you have added hundreds of thousands of new moderate- to low-skill workers. What is the value of the skills or lack of skills of a population who are already with you? On the chart, it goes down well over 6 percent. They are going to be paid less. We have just created more poverty not by those who have presented themselves at the border, but to our domestic population here. This is a type of economic cruelty. I mean, it may be a little rhetorically flamboyant, but it is a type of economic cruelty on the very population that so many of us here talk about we care, talk about we want to help. And what is going on right now to the working poor with the policy, particularly being promulgated by the left, is crushing. And this is just the open border side. Do we understand that what we have also done economically? Say I came to you tomorrow and said, Hey, here is what we are going to do. We are going to pump stunning amounts of money into the economy, and we are going to look the other way when we start to see inflation on commodity prices, on food prices, and on a lot of the basics. A lot of our constituents are going to shrug, and say, Okay, a little bit of inflation, fine. Has anyone also talked about what inflation does to the working poor? The fact of the matter is, when you start to look at the actual data--if you are in the top 10 percent of income, a little bit of inflation actually makes you wealthier because you own real estate, you own assets. They become more valuable. But if you are an individual where a substantial portion of your income just goes to pay your food bill--what we have engaged in in economic policy this last year is substantially malpractice. We are making their lives miserable. And the solution from the left is, well, we will just subsidize them more. So let's talk about that. Do we understand what you have just done? If I incentivize you by--we are going to send you a check, and then we are going to give you an additional monthly check, an enhanced unemployment benefit, and we will give you maybe some more money for this and that. None of those things incentivize you, saying, we know you need help, we are going to help you get reattached to work so you can gain skills, so you can move up in the organization, so your wages can go up so there is actually productivity in the society, so you are actually paying taxes into what is your Social Security and Medicare account, so you have, what is it, your 60 quarters, all of those things that are so important to raising the poor out of poverty. Instead, we have done just the opposite. We have financially incentivized millions of Americans not to be part of the labor pool. We have incentivized millions of Americans for a year to not gain the skill sets, the labor attachment. There are some of our economists we are talking to that say we are going to spend decades paying for this. And it is right in front of us. We all knew what we were doing. It was just easy, because creating policy says, hey, we are going to give you this to help you work through the devastation of this last year, but here is the incentive to get back in the labor pool and the market. So when we actually have our small employers complain to us that they can't hire anyone, yet at the same time--we go back to my previous slide about labor participation. We have millions and millions and millions of Americans who aren't working. Unemployment has been going down. It is because these folks have dropped out. They are not counted as unemployed. We will pay a devastating societal price for doing this to so many people. And why is this so important and why is it such a contrast to where we were in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020? Do you understand what a miracle we were living for a couple of years there? The fact of the matter is, if you look at income and equality, which used to be the harbinger of society fairness after tax reform, as to the regulatory reform, after making labor valuable for our working poor, they got dramatically less poor, and we have lost that. In this last year, we have basically wiped out one of the steepest curves of progress in economic history of the United States. You take a look at this chart and you start to think about the wage gains that Hispanics, African Americans, Asians were having. Their wage gains were going up much faster than Anglos. This is what we all claim we desire. This makes a much fairer, more egalitarian society. We made the value of our brothers' and sisters' talents, skills, labor, much more valuable. And then now we have adopted policies that crush them. We have done everything half-ass backwards. And you start to take a look at what happened after tax reform, regulatory reform, and many of the things we did before. It really was just stunning. One of the most interesting numbers was the value of female participation in the economy. Remember, before the pandemic, we actually had more females working than males. They had a dramatically faster wage gain. We had one of the year's--actually, I think if I do 2018, 2019, African-American females had double-digit wage gains, finally. The rhetoric in this place for decades: We need to think and care about the working poor. Suddenly, economic policy did something for the working poor. It just happened to be making tax policy and regulatory policy that invested in plants and equipment and technology that made those businesses more productive. Meaning--because you all remember your elementary economics class. What are the two common factors that change your wages? Inflation. Okay. That doesn't get you anywhere. Your wages go up just to catch up with buying the same thing with more dollars. Productivity. Wages go up with productivity. This was a productivity curve because of what was done in tax reform. And it was the beneficiaries--they weren't rich people. They were poor people, except it is heresy to tell the truth with the math around here. So what breaks my heart is we have come so far and we have lost it. We keep adopting policies, whether it is what is going on at the border, what we have done to subsidize people not to join the labor pool, what we have done to promote inflation. All these are things that will crush the working poor. Once again, if you take a look at just the employment groups of the population that had just amazing growth, Hispanic women, African- American women and men, White men, down here, White women. It was all the groups that my brothers and sisters on the left claim they care about. In 2018, 2019, these numbers are miraculous. They aren't little fractions. These are big deals. So why would this body on one hand be rhetorically--that this is the populations they care about, and then turn around and knife them with economic policy that will make the working poor poorer. Is it they don't know better? Is it they are just leading with their hearts and their feeling instead of some calculator math? I do this because there is a path. We can be compassionate, but we need to understand what makes poor people less poor. What actually drives income and equality. It is not trying to make rich people less rich. The idea is to make the multitudes of poor people less poor. And I can give you sort of a disruptive thought. In Ways and Means, we have had hearings and discussions of the healthcare outcome differential by populations from COVID. It is absolutely real. If you are a Native American, which I represent a couple of Tribal communities that are good friends; if you happen to be an urban minority, you have had much worse healthcare outcomes. But if you want to be honest about what you are seeing, is that racist? Well, the data says no. What it says is there were precursors in those communities of health presentations that were much worse. So if you take a look at the charts--and we are working on this chart now-- the early numbers are fascinating. Take a look at an urban minority population, my diabetes, my hypertension, the still use of tobacco products, and you line that up with the bad outcomes from COVID, they almost line up exactly. Madam Speaker, if you give a damn about poor people, minority populations--and my Native Americans who are suffering in remarkable numbers from diabetes, which actually turns out to be the key precursor for why they have had such horrible outcomes during COVID--then it is time to step up and say that we can basically do the typical vision of the left which will put in some more health clinics, because we are going to try to make your misery more tolerable, or we can do a disruption and end the misery. It is time for something like an Operation Warp Speed for diabetes. Instead of patching over the misery, let's find a way to cure it. I understand type 1 autoimmune, type 2 lifestyle, these are complicated and difficult. But if I came to you a couple years ago and said, mRNA vaccines, we are going to do it in just several months, you would have thought I was out of my mind, Madam Speaker. You see the discussions now that we just leaped 10 years in technology of using the mRNA. We are functioning, it is a software problem now. The ability to cure virus infections, a number of cancers, and a number of other diseases is now a software problem. We are on the edge of miracles. Is this going to be the continued policy of, well, we are going to just patch over people's miseries, or are we going to cure them? There are some brilliant examples in just the last couple years. Do you remember hepatitis C, the projections it was going to cost for the coming liver transplants and the number of people who had served in the military who were going to be dying miserable deaths waiting for that liver transplant? Then what did we do? We came up with a cure. The cure was really expensive at first-- dramatically less expensive than a liver transplant--and now with competition and technology we have crashed the price. We have a cure for hemophilia. Madam Speaker, you saw that with the mRNA technology, we may be on the cusp finally for a vaccine for HIV. As a body and as Members, we talk about how much we love and care about the minority populations we represent, and then we are not willing to think disruptively on what ends the misery. We seem to have our heads stuck somewhere decades ago that we are just going to make the misery more tolerable. My passion is let's make it go away. Madam Speaker, if you really care about healthcare differentials between ethnic populations, understand what caused it--we have that data--and go at it. Let's cure it. It turns out over the next 30 years--the best number I have come up with for the next 30 years of Medicare--Medicare will be the primary driver of U.S. debt. Ten years from now, we are at $42 trillion of debt and the curve steepens. It is demographics. It is just baby boomers are getting older, and we are going to consume a lot of resources. But it turns out 30 percent of that healthcare spending in Medicare, it actually turns out that over 30 percent is diabetes. If compassion and love for our brothers and sisters in curing something like diabetes isn't what drives you, Madam Speaker, how about just the debt? The single biggest impact we can have on the debt, it turns out, would be a cure for diabetes. So if you are a fiscal hawk, Madam Speaker, go at it. If you claim to be compassionate, go at it. If you want to keep people just having a nicer way to suffer, then leave the types of policies we are doing right now where we are going to do a patchwork quilt of a couple more healthcare centers. So, Madam Speaker, I am incredibly distressed that the Democrat policies adopted so far this year, when you lay them out--when our brothers and sisters who are on the sidelines, because they have been able to financially live--survive, if that is what you want to call it, and they are out of the workforce, what is their economic skill set a year from now when the rug is pulled out from underneath them when we go back to something semi more normal? What violence have we done to their futures? I hope someone out there is listening and thinking about this. One of the other things I want to walk through is: my understanding is, over the next couple weeks we will talk infrastructure, we will talk the environment, we will talk global warming, and we will talk greenhouse gasses. Can I beg of some of the folks around here to actually read? The amount of folklore that is spewed at these microphones is just intensely frustrating. Madam Speaker, can I give you a simple, simple example? I have used this one before, but it is sort of the hallmark of the thought experiment. Madam Speaker, if I came to you tomorrow and asked you: Do you care about plastic in the oceans? Yes. Should we get rid of plastic straws in Washington, D.C., in your community? Of course. How many plastic straws are in the ocean from North America? None. We do an amazingly good job in our waste management, so why is there so much plastic floating in the ocean? It doesn't come from the U.S. straws. There are 10 rivers in the world. Nine of them are in Asia and two are in Africa that account for 90 percent of the plastic in the oceans. Getting rid of your plastic straws is called virtue signaling. Hey, look at me, I care. Except that caring doesn't do anything. It may make you feel better, it may give you a selfie you can put up on your social media, but it didn't do anything. Madam Speaker, if you actually cared about plastic in the ocean--and we have dozens of variations of this type of thing where we have folklore around the environment. We need to start doing the math. Go to the 10 rivers--eight in Asia and two in Africa--and finance the collection of the plastic. Create the recycling. Yes, it is a type of foreign aid. Yes, it is the adoption of technology. But if you want to deal with 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean, then go to where the plastic in the ocean is coming from, and it is not straws in your community. That is theater. This place rewards theater. We get campaign contributions from theater. We get behind these microphones so we can do theater. If you actually give a darn, Madam Speaker, then do something where the math actually says it has an actual impact. One of the other proofs--and oddly enough, we relate this to tax policy. One of the really neat things that has been happening the last several years--and this goes back to the Obama administration and the last administration--do you see this line here, Madam Speaker? That is GDP growth. This curve coming down, particularly after tax reform where the curve dramatically steepens--we are still working on our 2019 numbers, we believe it steepens even more--this is greenhouse gases going into the environment. Do you notice something, Madam Speaker? We were growing as a society and economy, yet environmental pollutants were crashing. We believe some of this inflection had to do with tax reform, the expensing portion where a company can say, I get to deduct 100 percent of the new, cleaner, better, faster, cheaper and more environmentally sensitive equipment, and we saw massive capital expenditures where productivity went up and greenhouse gases came down. It is a demonstration that if you get the regulatory and the tax policy right, you can have economic growth. People can have those opportunities. It doesn't have to be a Malthusian world where you crush people. Some of this is new. If I came to you right now and said, hey, here is a ton of carbon, here is a ton of methane, the math is changed. So that is why a lot of the environmental calculations have changed the last couple years. My best guess is, from the latest things I am reading, methane has about a 9-1 ratio as a greenhouse effect. But also its half-life has been cut back dramatically in some of the formulas. If you wanted to have a remarkable impact on greenhouse gases, then stop the flaring and design a way to go collect the methane where we are producing natural gas. It turns out we now have the technology where you pull up a truck, it super chills, compresses it, takes it away, and it is useable fuel; and it has a remarkable calculus. We actually did a thought experiment--actually, it was more of a math experiment. I was blessed to have a Ph.D. of nuclear physics on staff, so his math was just remarkably good. We did a thought experiment. If I could run a major pipeline through west Texas capturing methane, did you know you basically come within a fraction of hitting the Paris accords, Madam Speaker? When I proposed that to a number of my Democrat colleagues who are my friends, they said, David, I love the math. This is exciting. But you have to understand, I can't support a pipeline, because pipelines are heresy on our side. I said, if we would basically find the tax regulatory policy to make a pipeline work like this that collects methane where you compress it and make it a usable fuel, it turns out you could get all the way to the Paris accord by a single major project. Yes, David, but you don't understand. It is actually not about hitting the numbers. It is about surviving politically. I am going to beg of us to start using actual math and science instead of worrying about our next campaign contribution or our feelings. The last one on this tirade--and when we come back, we have a stack of these. There is a revolutionary technology that is happening at this moment. Remember that curve we showed where we were having economic growth, GDP growth, yet greenhouse gases, particularly carbon, were going down for the United States? We can make that curve dramatically steeper. This is a facility that is about to be built by Occidental Petroleum in west Texas. There has also been a remarkable improvement in the technology. MIT, about a year ago, had a major breakthrough and almost doubled the capacity of taking ambient air and pulling carbon right out of it. It is almost carbon mining out of the air. This is a really big facility about to go in. They are going to take the carbon and shove it back into the ground. It is a negative calculator. We should be finding joy as conservatives and liberals that technology has brought us these types of opportunities. If we get the regulatory, if we get the Tax Code, and we update our thinking to this century, we can stop arguing about greenhouse gases and how much of the economy and how many people you want to unemploy or, you know, green jobs don't pay as much, and say: Let's just have the disruption in the economy like we always do. Let's promote the things that make our world cleaner, healthier, more prosperous. Then, if we do things like this, maybe we end the economic violence on the working poor. Maybe this could be a really amazing decade instead of what I see going on right now, where we are pandering to functional extremists in so many of the environmental and other types of communities. They may be passionate, but their math is really, really bad. Madam Speaker, I think I have had far too much caffeine today. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, the other thing I also want to talk about is why so many of us who actually own calculators are intensely concerned about the left's policy in the last couple of months. This is one of those things that I genuinely believe both sides here passionately care about and want society to do well, to have opportunity, the working poor to become less poor, the poor to become less poor, the middle class to be able to thrive; but we just see the basics of economics differently. I want to spend just a couple of moments and walk through what is fact, and we have the facts. Now, first off, how many times over, and over, and over do we hear, Hey, post-tax reform, the rich are getting richer; the poor are getting poorer? That is mathematically absolutely not true. It is a lie. It turns out, policies like we have been engaged in just recently make the wealthy wealthier. It is a simple thought. When you pump massive amounts of liquidity into a society, into an economy, those people who own assets get richer. Their stocks go up, their house values go up, and other assets they have go up. But if you are part of the poor or working poor, how many stocks do you own? How much real estate do you own? Yet the basic economic principles that you get to look at over and over, the $1.9 trillion spending bill violated almost all of the principles. So you say, okay, so we are going to deliver actual checks. Great. Okay. That will have an impact for several months. It will reduce poverty for several months, but it doesn't change the base. A year later, are you being paid more? Are there more job opportunities? Is your labor valuable? Because the remarkable thing that happened in 2018 and 2019 is the working poor, their labor became valuable. They became essential to the society, to economic growth. I sat through joint economic hearings in previous years and listened to the arrogance of the economists, the arrogance of the political class who said: Well, they didn't finish high school. They are going to be part of the permanent underclass. We will just find a way to subsidize them and write them off in society instead of making them valuable. And that is what we have gone back and done again. And the problem is that we have done it in a way where we think we have big hearts. We are going to send checks. But what about the year after? Did they make their labor, their skill sets, or their lack of skill sets, desirable in the economy? So a simple point--and if I actually even had better data, this would even be more dramatic--in 2013 to 2019, you can see the orange there, and that is actually pretty much the wealthy in our country. Under the previous administration, you can see--and when I say ``previous,'' I am talking Obama--the wealthy got substantially wealthier than the poor, and it is because the lack of understanding of what creates economic vitality. This here is almost solely 2018 and 2019. The poor got wealthier; not the rich, the poor. The working poor moved up dramatically faster than the rich. Why? Well, it turns out, tax reform moved lots of capital into making plants and equipment more efficient, meaning you pay people more. You all remember your basic economics class. What are the two things that raises someone's wages? Inflation--which means you paid more, but you didn't get anything more--and productivity. When you raise a business's, the society's, the community's productivity, people get paid more. That is what was happening here. We made the working poor less poor through tax; regulatory; and immigration policy, which is something I will touch on at the end because it is very uncomfortable for a lot of people to talk about. Immigration policy is complex from an economic standpoint, but if you love and care for those who are just struggling and trying to survive, they may not have had the opportunity to go to grad school or college. They may not have even graduated high school, but they are out there trying to provide for themselves and their families and the people they love and care for. Why do we adopt policies like this that don't make their labor valuable, and then we choose to flood the market with similar skill sets to devalue the labor? There is this weird duplicity that happens here, where we talk about helping those who need help, and then we engage in policies, whether it be immigration policy, regulatory policy, particularly tax and spending policy, that ends up crushing the very people we claim we are trying to help. I know charts are annoying, but the math is the math. If you look at this one, you start to see the percentage of American households that were in poverty. We had substantially plateaued. We weren't getting better as a society. And then all of a sudden over here, you see we started doing what was necessary to expand, create opportunity. And, yes, it meant getting businesses to have to compete with each other by putting money into more efficient equipment and doing things that lifted Americans and created value for labor, even the very low-skilled labor. You start to see in 2018 and 2019, America hitting its lowest poverty rates ever; income, food insecurity, the lowest ever. The working poor's labor became valuable. And if you actually want to go into the subsets--which I have chart after chart after chart--if you claim you care about African-American females or this subset or that subset, you see that some of those subsets have movement in the value of their talents and their labor, which was remarkable. We had, I think, a quarter in early 2019, or it was late 2018, where African-American women had almost a double-digit rise in wages in an entire year. It was like a 7.3 percent rise in wages. I know, as a Republican, we have this bad habit of sounding like accountants on steroids, but these numbers really do mean something. It is people. It is how they feed their family, how they save for retirement, how they have an opportunity. There were amazing things happening. We talk a lot about income inequality, which I actually have a personal fixation on this. And if you actually look at the first time we had major movement in the drop of income inequality in this society, it was 2018 and 2019. And it wasn't because rich people got less rich. It was because the poor, the working poor got dramatically less poor. We adopted policies that made their labor valuable. Then the pandemic hit and we had to rebuild. But are we rebuilding in a way that makes their labor valuable? I am going to make an argument that what we just did, we are going to get a nice little sugar high, but for a very short time. And then the next day, what are their job prospects? If you are someone who didn't finish high school, but you are willing to work your heart out, you are willing to learn, what opportunities did the last spending bill provide for that person? How many new jobs did it help create? How much economic expansion? How many capital expenditures to make their jobs more productive so they can be paid more? Instead, what we did is we said: Here is some money, and, oh, by the way, we are going to raise taxes over here coming later this year and those things, so your job prospects--it is a technical economic term-- you are screwed in the future. Do we think more than just the next election cycle? If we are going to make the poor less poor in this country, you need opportunity. We just spent $1.9 trillion and not a dime of it creates opportunity, creates what the future should look like. So we say we care. We both care. The problem is, I have the numbers that show what worked. The other side has decades of doing the same thing and income inequality and poverty didn't get better. They are blips. But those blips were from direct cash, unless the plan is just, hey, we are going to do direct cash forever and ever and ever, and that is really going to be great for society and the psyche of our society. Once again, I am sorry to do this, and I hate this term, but it is the only one the economists around here all use, which is ``quartiles.'' Here is the lowest income quartile. Take a look at 2019, if you are willing to embrace math. I always thought that would be the great Christmas gift around here, is to buy everyone a calculator. A family joke is: Daddy works in a math-free zone. It was a remarkable change in the value of those workers and what they were paid, and it is because their talent, their labor that they had to offer became more valuable. Look at what happened in 2019. That is what changes a society, because the idea is, you build a base, and then the next year you build on it, and then the next year you build on it, and the next year you build on it. That is one way to remove lots of your society out of poverty. The other is to do what the Democrats are doing right now and saying: We are going to send you a check. Okay. What happens the day the check is gone? Did you make society more prosperous? Did you take the working poor of our country and make it so the value of their labor that they offer is more valuable the next day, and the next day, and the next day? You didn't. The only way you basically have to backfill is you have got to send another check. It is just societal suicide and lunacy. I understand pandering and politics, but at some point you wish you had a quiet room with some economists to say: How do we have a revolution in our society that we have dramatically less poor and the working poor are dramatically less poor? And how do we get there? And how do we do this over the next decade? Because I will make you the argument that what was happening particularly in 2018 and 2019 were remarkable numbers. So let's go to the next quartile up. It turns out the same thing was happening. And when you actually look at the stratification of these quartiles-- I am sorry, it is geeky--the lowest quartile, a traditionally very, very low skill set. Second quartile, up some skill set. And you actually see remarkable--I mean, a $2,600 increase in the value of their labor for the second quartile, which is still poverty. It is working poor, but this quartile, if you look at that, that is remarkable. This is actually accounting for earning of tax credit and transfer payments, working through what was economic, and it was the value of their labor. Once again, for all of us that keep coming behind these microphones-- and, you know, particularly the darkness of this body right now, we see so much of the debate being about the pigment of someone's skin instead of the economic circumstances, the class, as Dr. Wright would often refer to, and what we do to create opportunity. And this chart here basically is just pure salary. What happened to the mean weekly, real earnings? Now, remember, these are inflationary adjusted. So I do my best to make sure the math is as honest as possible. And when you actually start to see the quartiles of African- American wages taking a huge spike up in 2018 and 2019--Anglos, Hispanics--really the growth rate in their wages was remarkable. And there are some other charts, which are really hard to read, that are a little geeky, that say, okay, here is the level of skill set, educational attainment, those things. It turns out, we had such a robust economy that those who are often at the tail end of educational attainment actually had the fastest growth in wages. So you go back to the earlier chart, saying, turns out the working poor got substantially less poor, the rich got richer, but nothing at the same percentages. And that is why the economic inequality shrank. That is the honest math. Yet, you don't hear it in the rhetoric here, because the rhetorical divide of our society is so much more powerful and desired, because it is about winning the next election than actually doing what is important to make society great. So right now--and this is a hard one to talk about, because we have so politicized it that trying to look at it through an economic lens is really hard. I will get folks--whenever I start to walk through these numbers, folks will send me crazy stuff. And I am trying to say this isn't about ethnicity; this is--I am doing labor economics. Janet Yellen is supposed to be a brilliant labor economist, yet when you hear her speeches recently--or now that she is Treasury Secretary-- it rips your heart out, saying, at least take a breath and compliment what happened in the previous couple of years, but that would mean saying something nice to free market economics. Right now, we estimate--and this is the best number I can get my hands on--that about 4\1/2\ percent of the labor force is undocumented. In a society right now where, if you actually really dive into labor force participation numbers, unemployment is probably double the number we post. You know, people who should be in the labor pool aren't there, the folks who were the miracle of, particularly, 2018 and 2019, the number of folks who came back into the labor force--remember, we actually had some quarters there with some weird numbers where unemployment actually sort of flatlined, but the number of workers in the United States exploded. How does that happen? It means you have such a robust economy that you are drawing people back in. The crisis we live in today is so many Americans, particularly female workers, are now out of the labor force, with almost no intention of coming back in. What is devastating about that is we just passed legislation here that will reinforce the incentive not to come back in. Because, instead of designing the Democrat's $1.9 trillion spending bill saying, We are going to incentivize; we are going to help you; you can keep some of this money; and we are going to incentivize an employer to hire you, building that type of economy. It is, Here is something; you can have it if you work; you can have it if you just choose to stay home. There is no incentive there to come back into the labor market. And why is this so darn important? Why do I fixate on this? Post-tax reform, if you actually looked at the changes in revenues-- remember, we had the second and third highest, adjusted for inflation, tax receipts in U.S. history post-tax reform, post the lower rates. It is because the economy, the pie, got so much bigger. But what was so special about that is the trust funds that so many of us had worked on, that--we were really worried how fast the Medicare trust fund was collapsing, the Social Security trust fund was collapsing. The actuarial life of them popped, it got longer. It is because we had so many more workers who were paying into it. Remember, we have a pay-as-you-go system. When you hear the words ``trust fund,'' there is really very little cash in those trust funds. If you care about protecting Social Security, if you care about protecting Medicare, if you care about society and these promises we have made, you would think the economics, the policy we are adopting here, are about maximizing opportunity employment, not trying to patch over pain that we are suffering right now in a way that makes the next day painful again. So the last thing--and it actually does tie in. I am going to personalize this a little bit. I am blessed to live in a community where my school is open. The greatest gift that has ever been given to me in my life, and my wife, is we have a little girl. Many know we struggled for years, and we were able to adopt a little girl. She is the greatest joy you can imagine. She is in higher education now. She is in kindergarten. And this summer, for her first month--this is back in August--she had to sit at home behind a little laptop doing Zoom class, as a kindergartner. At that time she was 4\3/4\. She tested in early. And she was miserable. I had a little girl--I didn't know this could happen, that a child that young could be depressed. She was miserable. ``Daddy, can I go to Washington with you?'' ``Daddy, can I go to work with you?'' ``Daddy, don't make me sit behind the computer.'' ``Daddy, I don't like this.'' And then after about 3\1/2\ weeks, the school district actually followed the science. Not the politics; they followed the science. Not the teachers' union; they followed the science. They started letting the little people into school. They took the proper precautions, and my little girl wears a mask and they sterilize their hands. They follow rational precautions. Within just days, it is like I had a different little girl. She was joyful. She was happy. She announced she had a boyfriend. Daddy is not happy about that. If that is my personal experience, what have we done to our society? What have we done to the next generation? I came here last week and did a series of presentations of what we have done to individual future earning power, particularly the categories we just talked about, the working poor, their future earnings, their future income. We have crushed them, because today's success builds on the next. What happens when you take an entire year away from so many people's career paths, from building their base? Now, this is international, but we came across this; it is a sense of well-being of young people and older people from around the world. We all saw that article from about a month ago about Las Vegas County and the number of suicides of children. And this one, when you look at it, it is our kids. We have devastated our kids. My fear is we are going to spend decades making up for the schools being closed, the access to nutrition, the access to counseling, and the access to just human relationships. Why would we ever allow our public policy to do this sort of violence to the health and well-being and psyche of the children that we claim we care about, because the teachers' union has a different agenda? I hope we, as Members, and I hope America remembers what happened here. I also hope the next time the left comes with a massive spending bill, they understand how much that money needs to go into repairing the damage we have done to our children, to the next generation, and being willing to recognize that we didn't follow the science; we followed the politics. Madam Speaker, I wish us all a fine time at home. I hope now that the world is getting healthier, we can spend time with our constituents. Maybe when we come back in a couple weeks, we can still be partisan, we can still duke it out, but we actually make policy by rational math instead of the wedge of politics. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to do a couple of things right now, and one of the first ones is a little conversation about someone we lost in my community who actually was a friend and a neighbor and had an impact in ways that are hard to describe. I desperately wish the Members of this body could have spent time with him and his wife. It is Rev. Dr. Professor C.T. Wright. What was so unique about him is that he was a big man, and he had a voice that carried. You would have conversations with him, Madam Speaker, and realize just how incredibly brilliant he was. He was born in Georgia. He struggled and worked his way up. He ended up with a Ph.D. in history from Boston College. He became a civil rights leader, yet when you would talk to him about that, Reverend Wright--Dr. Wright--actually often wouldn't refer to himself as a civil rights leader. He would say: I want to lead for humanity. He loved people. It was a different view. He took his struggles, his success, and his academic prowess and said: We are going to make people's lives better. Why would you dare focus on the color of their skin? I remember one of the most interesting conversations I had with him where he and I were in the back of the room and talked, and he saw many of--actually, almost an example of what we just saw on the floor--the discussions of politics and race, and said: David, it is class and opportunity that divides us. It is not our color; it is our opportunity. Dr. Wright was just a powerful and brilliant man. Madam Speaker, you see his wife there, Mary. They were married in 1974. Mary was the epitome of love. How many of us in our life have that one person? I am blessed to have a 5-year-old little girl. But even when she was younger, when she would see Mary, Mary would sort of scream, and the two of them would run over and hug each other. She was just the epitome of love. That made them incredibly powerful, as you felt good by just knowing Dr. Wright and Mary Wright in your community. The other thing that also made him unique was that he was a passionate conservative. He was a Republican elector. He was the chairman of our clemency board, and he was on my community school board. He was brilliant, and he cared about humanity. He ran charities and foundations to help all people. They helped people on the continent of Africa and even people all through our community. He was a powerful force for good because he was good, because he was passionate, and because he was caring. We lost both Mary and Dr. Wright last year. I am going to put in a much more detailed CV because his history goes on page after page, and we will put that in the Congressional Record. Individuals like them bring us together and also make us better. It breaks my heart that more will not get to spend time with him because, after a couple of minutes with him and Mary, you felt different. The last thing I will say is he loved to give the opening prayer at Republican meetings. What was always so fascinating, Madam Speaker, is you would watch the room, and the room ends up standing and clapping. I was waiting for an altar call. Now, I am Catholic, so I am not used to the concept of an altar call, but watching someone be able to have so much energy, vigor, enthusiasm, love for people, and love for believing that conservatism is how you free people, he made an impact. He made an impact on my life, my family's life, my community, and my State, and I believe he made an impact on this country. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the memory of Dr. C.T. Wright, a passionate, faithful, and devoted public servant and valued neighbor. C.T. will be remembered as a mentor and true leader throughout the education, criminal justice, and faith communities in Arizona. He devoted much of his life to civil rights and education, working for many of the country's historically black colleges and universities, where he then moved on to his passion to help with human rights. He founded the Light of Hope Institute, which promotes human rights around the world. He also served as a delegate for the Electoral College and met six presidents. C.T. frequently led prayers at campaign rallies and promoted faith. He proudly served as the Chairman of the Board of Executive Clemency. C.T. Wright had great passion for his family, education, faith, and freedom. Many will always remember and consider him as their brother. He leaves behind a great legacy that has reached out to communities across Arizona. He was a thoughtful, compassionate, and kind man who always cared for others while ensuring a good future for all. C.T. Wright served countless communities unselfishly and served and as a great leader. May we continue to honor his memory through our passion and service to our communities. Revisiting Net Neutrality

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I want to do a handful of other things because, with the craziness of our schedule, we haven't had a chance to sort of walk through a lot of policy thoughts. But there was one that has been bugging me. I have the hour, so I was going to share something that has just been in my craw for a while. Do we all remember a few years ago--ancient history; in politics, we seem to have, shall we say, the attention span of a gnat--one of the pop culture debates we on the right and left were having was something called net neutrality? The Democrats were all into net neutrality, even though, I will debate, most of this body had no idea what net neutrality was. I want to sort of argue that thank heaven and thank the internet gods that the Democrat net neutrality push only lasted 1 year or think about how miserable this last year would have been. We should be held accountable for our policy beliefs. This is an occasion where I have heard no one get up here and talk about what society would have looked like in the United States during the pandemic if the Democrats' net neutrality policy--remember, they did it for 1 year, through regulatory fiat. The only reason I show this chart is, do you see, Madam Speaker, the crash here in spending? It was scheduled to continue to crash in spending. That spending was the internet--the pipes, the robustness, the speed, and the carrying capacity of the internet--which crashed during the Democrat administration's FCC 1 year of functionally doing an administrative fiat of net neutrality. If that line had continued, how many of you were educating your kids on Zoom? How many of you were holding meetings on the internet? How many of you had to work from home? How many of us in this body were doing committee hearings over the internet? Yet, the internet in the United States in 2017, 2018, and 2019 actually got dramatically more robust and dramatically faster. In many communities--particularly on the East Coast, oddly enough--there are communities that doubled their speed and the robustness of the pipes. It happened because of the massive investment because, thank heaven, the crazy policy of what was net neutrality was taken away. We need to be honest. Sometimes one needs to be willing to walk up and admit, hey, that was a really stupid idea. The one reason this country was able to have this disruption and transfer to basically a knowledge-based, web-based, internet-based economy was because the crazy policies that came with net neutrality of having a robust internet only lasted 1 year. You can actually see that this is what happened. This is us. This is America trying to survive economically and educationally. When you see these charts, this was not possible. If that trend, regulatorily, and then therefore investment-wise that started in 2016, when the policy shift happened, if it had lasted more than a year, this year would have been a lot different. It is just an occasion where 4 years ago, 5 years ago, some of us would get up here and try to explain what it would mean to the efficiency, the robustness, the opportunity for even gamers being able to use the internet, and we would get great rhetorical comments back, often having nothing to actually do with how the internet worked. Thank heaven another bad policy only lasted a short time. Building a Robust Economy

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the memory of Dr. C.T. Wright, a passionate, faithful, and devoted public servant and valued neighbor. C.T. will be remembered as a mentor and true leader throughout the education, criminal justice, and faith communities in Arizona. He devoted much of his life to civil rights and education, working for many of the country's historically black colleges and universities, where he then moved on to his passion to help with human rights. He founded the Light of Hope Institute, which promotes human rights around the world. He also served as a delegate for the Electoral College and met six Presidents. C.T. frequently led prayers at campaign rallies and promoted faith. He proudly served as the Chairman of the Board of Executive Clemency. C.T. Wright had great passion for his family, education, faith, and freedom. Many will always remember and consider him as their brother. He leaves behind a great legacy that has reached out to communities across Arizona. He was a thoughtful, compassionate, and kind man who always cared for others while ensuring a good future for all. C.T. Wright served countless communities unselfishly and served as a great leader. May we continue to honor his memory through our passion and service to our communities.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Kustoff), my friend, who had someone that was very special in his life that he wanted to talk about. Honoring the Life and Legacy of Drew Daniel

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, when we have someone special in our districts like that, sometimes with the chaos around here, it is hard finding time. Mr. Speaker, one of the things I wanted to do this evening is to start to build on a theme that I have done in the past, and I hope to be able to do over the coming months. But it is a little difficult right now because, let's be honest, the House is spending money at a pace where it is really hard for the Joint Economic Committee and even my own staff to try to keep up. We are going to talk about what is going on, a couple of things I really want us to start to put in the Record, talk about, and get our heads around. I have an absolute fixation of a moral obligation to the working poor in this country and an understanding of what happened in 2018 and 2019 when the working poor, the value of their labor--and understand, for many of us who have graduate degrees and those things, who can work behind a computer, great. Our skill set is what we are selling. For much of the workforce, if you didn't finish high school or you have moderate skill sets, your labor is your value. What is going on here right now is almost a type of economic violence to that labor value. Yet, I am not sure my brothers and sisters on the other side even see it. So, let's first delve into a little bit of what is going on at the border. Do understand, one of the things we see in the math from 2018 and 2019, when the working poor got dramatically less poor, the first 2 years in modern times where income inequality shrank--not because rich people got less rich, but because poor people made money--the value of their labor increased because they weren't competing with armies of other unskilled labor. Mr. Speaker, if we are going to be honest around here and say we care about the poor, that we care about the working poor, don't you see the economic violence we are allowing to happen at the border, making our folks have to compete with floods of moderate- to low-skilled immigrants? I know it is an uncomfortable conversation, but we need to see it in the totality of the people we claim we care about. Then, the other day, I made a mistake on one of the hard-left-leaning cable television shows. They were trying to compare what we did in tax reform to the Democrats' $1.9 trillion spending bill and said: Well, they are both $1.9 trillion. But look here, this went to tax cuts, where this goes to spending. Isn't the spending so much more wonderful? Once again, I need my brothers and sisters on the left to go back to school and spend a moment paying attention in their economics class. The elegance of the tax reform was that it made the value of workers' labor more valuable because the economy grew. We specifically made it so businesses would take part of that tax reform and put it into things that made their businesses more productive, making it so you can pay people more. Remember, individuals' wages go up on two things, inflation and productivity. It is one of the reasons in 2018 and 2019 we had the fastest wage growth of workers, particularly the working poor in modern history. So what is the Democrat solution to help these populations? We are going to send them a check. And maybe part of that is good. There are people out there who are really suffering and hurting. But what do we do next year? The elegance of when you have someone's labor become more valuable is that value sets; and then the next year, it builds on it; and the next year, it builds on it; and after a little while, they are no longer in the working poor. We are going to do a patch that is going to load another $1.9 trillion of debt. And over the decade, the amount of interest we are going to pay on that is not $1.9 trillion, but it is probably $1.6 trillion. That is one of the things we are going to talk about just real quickly here. I cannot produce these boards fast enough to keep up with the Democrats' spending agenda right now. The CBO can't produce the data fast enough. The Joint Economic Committee can't produce the data fast enough to even get our heads around it. So this slide here is from September. Understand, the numbers are much uglier today. It was a simple point in functioning 8 budget years. In September, we were saying each family would have $230,000 of Federal debt applied to their household, the amount of debt. So that is every household. That is not tax-paying households; that is every household. Today, my back-of-the-napkin math is about a quarter of a million dollars in 8 years for every family in America. We are spending that fast. Being the father of a 5-year-old, I see the economic violence being done by the left here to her future, to the kids' futures. I am looking for the day I have to sit her down and apologize that she is not going to live as well as I have lived because of what we allowed to happen here today. Let's have a quick education. Let's walk through real quick where the money goes. Social Security, about $1 trillion. Remember, this is based on last year's numbers. Today, these numbers have ballooned again. Defense, 724. Medicare, right now, I believe this year has now surpassed defense. So my last bit of math was Medicare was now starting to pass defense in total spending. Health, that is ObamaCare, that is all the other entitlements. But if you actually look at the slide, Social Security, Medicare, the other health entitlements, income security, interest, veterans. It is the vast majority of spending. Yet you look at these tiny little slices, like, this little slice over here is foreign aid. Yet how often do the politicians get behind these microphones and say, well, if we would cut foreign aid? If this were a clock, I think foreign aid would cover about 14 minutes of spending in an entire day, in a 24-hour day. If we don't get our heads around the fact that the Medicare, the health entitlements, the net interest are the things now which will drive our debt, I am terrified of what is coming. Because, understand, it is really hard to say, but our demographics, we are getting older very quickly as a society. If you look at the 30-year curve, we are a country that doesn't make it. We are so buried in debt. And the economic violence the Democrats are committing tomorrow by adding another $1.9 trillion on top of the trillion that is already sitting in the bank and hasn't been expended, that we have done this last year, are we thinking about anything other than our next reelection? How about thinking about my 5-year-old daughter and what her economic future is. How about everyone else's economic future. I am going to try to do a couple of these quickly. We were trying to use CBO's numbers. The problem is, they haven't updated them yet on how fast we are spending. But what is so important here in functionally 8 budget years--now, this slide looks a little different than your typical debt slide because we calculate it on debt that is sold to the public, not internal debt. Remember, when you look at U.S. sovereign debts, there are, sort of, two pies. There is stuff where we reach into the Social Security fund, grab that money, and borrow it, and put IOUs in it. The other debt that is economically dangerous--because when interest rates move, it causes a problem--we are going to talk about that real quickly. This is debt sold to the public. It might be China; it might be Japan; it might be your grandma's pension. In about 8 years, debt held by the public will double from where we were last year. Understand how fast. Now, a lot of this, believe it or not, even though some of the crazy spending we are doing right now is the demographics, demographics aren't Republican and Democrat. It is just math that we don't like to talk about. But the fact of the matter is that we have made promises, and the money that we collected for those promises, we have already spent and we are going to have to borrow. So understand the fragility--I love that word, fragility--we have given ourselves. Interest rates in January were under 1 percent. They were actually at .91. Today, when the market closed, I think it was, 1.54, something in that nature. Most of us go, big deal, this still is historically really, really, really cheap. Except, think about it. Just that little movement in the last 2 months is about $600 billion over the next 10 years. Just that little movement, $600 billion of interest. What are we buying with that interest? Nothing. And there are a lot of economists out there who think, because we are spending at such a fast rate, we are going to start to chase our tail. Part of that may be because the economy actually is getting healthier. One of the great intense ironies is we are about to spend $1.9 trillion, pretend it is a stimulus--even though a bunch of that money doesn't get spent for a year, 2 years, a little bit, 3 years from now-- claim it is a stimulus, pile it on as debt that is going to cost $2.6 trillion with financing costs added to it. Only a sliver of it is actually economic stimulus. And because we are going to the markets to finance every dime of it, we are helping drive up our own interest rates. Meaning, we are going to chase our tail economically. Do you understand? Remember the pie chart from before, that interest right now. We expect, within about a decade, interest may be the second most expensive thing in our budget. You will be seeing Social Security, Medicare, and then interest right up there, and that is going to consume everything. There functionally will be no more money left. I know I am getting a little thick, but to try to drive this home, the changes in debt that happen from where the CBO was projecting back in January to some of the numbers we are seeing right now. So just for the fun of it--I know this is hard to read. We just did a calculation and said, hey--the CBO basically said, hey, interest rates are going to go up a quarter percent. Think of it as 25 basis points. But if we went up 100 basis points in interest, over the 10 years of financing that, we are basically looking at--what is that--another $3.5 trillion of financing costs. So, yes, you get to say we are spending that $1.9 trillion today, but do you understand the total cost of that? So it is not just the cost of the legislation. It is the cascade effect that you are creating to the economy; where that family who wants to buy their first home, you just raised their mortgage interest rates. But on a national basis, this year we will finance probably about $10 trillion. My quick estimate is about $7 trillion on just our bonds that are rolling off, that we have to refinance because we have no cash to pay for them. So they get reset at the new interest rates. Then we have our typical spending. So there goes another trillion dollars, plus the trillion we authorized back in December and last year, and now another couple trillion dollars. So another four on top of that seven, and you start to look at over $10 trillion of new issue or refinancing coming to market of U.S. sovereign debt. What did we just do to our interest rates, the world interest rates, the value of money? And this comes back to my earlier point. We talk about what is happening in income inequality, the working poor. Those of us who have stocks or have a house or have assets, when you do this type of monetization of debt, when it requires the Federal Reserve to keep pumping in--today, we have 20 percent more cash floating around in our economy than we had a year ago. People who are wealthy own things. They make a lot of money because their assets get more and more valuable. The working poor who don't own a house, they don't own stocks, they don't have a bond, they don't have a pension. What they have, they get crushed. That is what we are doing to the working poor here. Please, someone, buy an economic book for my Democrat brothers and sisters to understand. There is going to be a lot of singing and happy in a couple months when they get the check. And next year, when they realize they are being crushed, who will step up and actually take blame, saying, we could have done things that would have grown the economy, grown your future income, made so the working poor actually had a future? Instead, we are going to flood the market with competing labor. We are going to devalue any asset you have, and we are going to make it so you can never afford to get out of the quartile where you are trapped. And this is what leftist policies do to poor people. So, look, this is a theme. We are going to build on it and we are going to bring in more and more data and facts and see if we can turn around some of the heads here to say it is not enough to talk that we care. It is when you actually can stand up and say Republican policies in 2018 and 2019, before the virus, we actually made a difference. We are the party that actually closed income inequality. We are the party that actually made the working poor less poor. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, as we get ourselves sort of organized, one of the hazards of being someone that almost can't speak without a chart with them, I wanted to do a couple of things in this time this evening. Some of it is the continuation of the debate that happened on the floor earlier today. I will just try to add a little more meat, a little more detail on what some of us are seeing from the Joint Economic Committee and our economists there looking at the data, what is going on in our country; and also, the Ways and Means Committee and what we see and what we think we can do to truly help working men and women in this country, the working poor, and where the policy is going, and it is some of our angst as the legislation moved out of the House today on sort of a blank-check budget document. Here is $1.9 trillion in immediate funding, ultimately costing about a trillion and half in the 10-year window because of interest and those things because it is not paid for. And where does that money go? And is it designed to truly maximize helping our brothers and sisters around this country and their economic vitality, dealing with the shutdowns and the economic devastation that we have seen in so many of our communities? But some of the other side is where we have seen around the country, even with the headwinds of the pandemic, where are we seeing the economy moving in the right direction? Where are we seeing communities that have, we used to use the term, green shoots. That is sort of overused anymore. And there is also a substantial difference from what we see in some of the coastal economies to much of the rest of the Nation. I am blessed to represent the Scottsdale, Phoenix, Carefree, Cave Creek, Fountain Hills area, so Phoenix and some of its suburbs. And we have some folks that have just been crushed, whether they be in the hospitality business and tourism-related businesses, some of the restaurants. But yet, we have been shocked at also how healthy our economy has been because of the creativity of some of these very same people finding other ways to survive. And that is actually one of the secondary things we want to try to talk about this evening is, as the Democrats who run this place, they are in charge, will they actually be creative enough? Will they be forward-thinking enough to say, as we are looking at tax policy, where we are going to do stimulus policy, regulatory policy, are we building it for what the future of the economy looks like, for the future of opportunity, and will it be designed to actually help all Americans? So some simple examples, and I am going to then use some of the display boards. We know there is already $1 trillion sitting in bank accounts at the Treasury right now that are supposed to be helping schools, States, others who are in need right now. And instead, today, we spent all day debating $1.9 trillion of new spending over the next year. Instead of saying, hey, there is $1 trillion sitting in these accounts. What can we do to help the Biden administration get it out the door, get it to those schools, to healthcare workers, to the places that are already designated? That is part of the problem around this place is we engage sort of in the theatrics, but the really assisting and providing the resources for the management to actually get to where the need is, that is secondary because, in some ways, that doesn't give you the same television time opportunity. So a couple of things I wanted to walk through is, if I come to you and tell you there is $1 trillion already sitting in accounts right now--it turns out, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, just did some projections, and we want this better. But this is as if the additional $1.9 trillion of spending were not to happen; we would just stay where we are at with the dollars that are already appropriated, with the budget that is already sort of modeled out. If you actually look here, 2020, miserable fall in the size of our economy. But our projections are functionally, by the end of the year, we expect growth to actually be substantially positive. We are looking at a year with just under 4 percent GDP growth. That is terrific. I would like to see it more, and we could see it more if we would actually target some of the resources, instead of doing what is often referred to around here as a peanut butter spread, where we are going to spend lots of money so we make sure we don't annoy any constituent groups; or particularly let's put money where, you know, we made these public employee unions happy. We made this group happy. I think this needs to be less about making our politics happy and making this line go up even further. And that is actually what, if we would actually draft the legislation, I think you would see Republicans line up with Democrats and probably, not for $1.9 trillion because we know that is just almost absurd. But there are some real opportunities to make this GDP growth substantially, substantially better. As we sort of walk through some of the ideas that I am trying to promote, and I am trying to find some of my friends on the other side, particularly the Joint Economic Committee Democrats and some of the Ways and Means Democrats, there is something very special going on right now and we need to seize this as an opportunity. In a time that has been so difficult for so many small businesses in America, small entrepreneurs, microentrepreneurs, something has happened. Do you know this last year was the biggest year ever in this country for people starting new little businesses? Filing for new LLCs, just starting new businesses. And you can see it here in the chart. That is a pretty big spike when you consider 2019 was one of the greatest economic expansion years in modern history. 2018, 2019 were remarkable years economically, and yet, 2020, in the middle of such difficulties, we are seeing people becoming entrepreneurial, taking risks. If we are going to work on public policy, where we want to build a more egalitarian, a more robust economy next year, this year, future years, how about a conversation where we get the Democrats to actually talk to us as Republicans, instead of just run us over policy-wise. How do you provide access to capital to some of these microbusinesses, these businesses that are being started in people's back bedrooms? How do you actually provide them a cleaner path through the regulatory bodies, the licensing, the permitting? Are we willing to be creative enough that, if you are poor and you happen to be willing to start a microbusiness and you live in public housing, you are actually allowed to run that business in the public housing, instead of being threatened with losing your lease? If you actually care about people, this is the time we say there is something going on in our society and our economy; is this one of the great disruptions a lot of the economists have been talking about, that when we have gone through this upheaval of this last year, what the future is going to look like? And does Congress actually provide assistance in a way that makes this economic change happen in a positive way? Or do we do what we are seeing in today's budget document, which was functionally, $1.9 trillion, and most of it just going to fund either legacy economics, States and municipalities, where the numbers were stunningly out of whack? Or are we functionally funding the last decade's economy and not moving to the future economy? Now, I can try to explain this. If you will take a look at the bottom chart here--I put two charts on one board--you will actually see spending per government job lost. And the only point I am trying to make with this board is there is about $350 billion set aside in the Democrats' budget reconciliation bill. There have been about 350,000 jobs lost in the government sector. But let's first just do it by States. If that money were used for States, that is $1 million a job. If it is all of them, it is still $350,000 a job. This is actually how--if you actually say, here is the problem, here is the math of how much money is in that bill, you start to realize something is not lining up. And I desperately hope we can actually have an intellectually honest conversation saying, you want to help States and municipalities? We know from the Census Bureau--and it was as of the end of the third quarter because that is the last number we had-- State revenues were up. State and local revenues were up over 17 percent last year, which is remarkable to think about, because it is unlike everything we have been told. Yes, there are municipalities around this country where their revenues have been crushed. They are also the very municipalities that have been most aggressive in their shutdowns. Maybe those are places we need to look at and figure out how we help them. But the math is the math, and State and local revenues are up, if you take the entire country, they are up rather dramatically. The top part is part of the argument of targeting. If you are going to have impact in the country while spending lots of money, do you spend it in a way where you actually put the money in places that-- let's be honest--don't need it? Or do you put the money to those who are truly hurting? And we can actually tell, because we can see it just in the aggregate. This is actually about commercial bank deposits, and this is telling us big businesses that got access to capital, wealthier people that actually got certain types of stimulus; stunning, stunning, stunning rise of cash sitting in banks right now. Did the Democrats actually intend to hand these same people that much more money? So part of what we are arguing for is, please, could we actually take a step back and understand the data? It is not slowing things down. It is actually not sticking money into the very pockets that actually don't need it. The brutal political part is the folks that actually have these huge deposits, they are also the ones that often finance those campaigns. So let's actually walk through--and this one is a little tougher, and I probably will do more on the floor on it in the future because I want to go into some depth--$15 minimum wage. Okay. I am one of those who genuinely, desperately wants to find ways to help the working poor. Understand what was accomplished in 2018 and 2019. There seems to be this fear of actually acknowledging that there was an economic miracle going on. It was the fastest rise of wealth and income for the working poor in modern history. It was the first, not one, but 2 years in modern economic history where income inequality in this country actually shrank. If you say you end up with a society that becomes dangerously fractured as income inequality splits and splits and splits apart, there should have been joy in this body in 2018 and 2019 when that very income inequality shrank. The left can make whatever reason, excuse, but they need to at least acknowledge it happened. The working poor's wages went up dramatically. Nutrition, if you care about hunger, it was the first time in modern years where, what do they call it, food fragility, food stress, actually shrank. These are good things. Maybe we need to take a step back and say what did we do for 2018? What did we do, as a body, for 2019 that created such prosperity, where revenues--so tax receipts is the proper way to call it, ways and means, tax receipts actually went up? If you actually did inflation-adjusted dollars, I think we had the number two and number three best years in U.S. history post-tax reform. We need to have an honest dialogue, and I know this is really difficult for the left. There are things for us on the right that are really difficult. But the fact of the matter is; whether things have changed in regulation; whether it is the things that changed in our tax code, whether it was the adoption of technology, there were lots of things moving in those couple of years there. But the fact of the matter is, U.S. society got much healthier, and not at cost to the Treasury. If the truth here is that we care about where we are going economically, that we care about the economic stress, that we care about the working poor, a $1.9 trillion spending stimulus while ignoring the fact that we had a couple of years where we actually had success in shrinking income inequality, maybe we need to understand what we did there and do more of it. There is a reality here. If you want the working poor to have a better life, we can raise their wages to $15 an hour. But you also have to accept there is--I think one of these charts says it is like 3.2 million American workers in that working poor category who are going to become much poorer because they will lose their employment. We will spend some more time on a couple of these boards in the near future to try to understand: Do you do what happened in 2018 and 2019, where what we saw is wages, almost everywhere in the country, were substantially above the minimum wage because of the scarcity of labor? Labor became valuable. There is also another controversial subject we are going to have to have an honest discussion on: immigration issues in regard to the importation of low-skilled labor. It was somewhat restricted in that time. Competition for labor shrank; therefore, the value of that labor went up. There is a combination of a robust economy, a tax code that is working, earned income tax credit, and things of that nature being expanded, and also not flooding the market with others with similar skill sets. A couple of others we want to just sort of walk through. This one is sort of difficult to get our heads around, but it is the math: total monthly spending effects of first and second stimulus payments by household income. What you find is, when you get up into the higher income, almost none of the money was really getting spent. It functionally went to make people's bank accounts more robust. When you went down, you saw more of the money actually getting spent. All we are trying to argue here is, if you are going to do direct stimulus to individuals, great, but make sure it is not going into populations that aren't going to spend it because you don't get any multiplier in the economy. Lots of good data exist on this, and you saw it in a previous chart when you saw how much is just sitting in bank accounts right now. Back to trying to make a point. This indicates income by households. I want to make sure I say this the right way. If you take a look at what I often refer to as sort of the miracle of 2018 and 2019, you started seeing populations that were in the lower percentiles. All of a sudden, their curve was much steeper than those who had typically benefited. There are series of data like this that we will show you, if you care about the working poor, that mimic what the Republicans accomplished in the tax reform and in the regulatory reform. If you are on the left, put it under a different name. But the fact of the matter is, the data is the data. There were some really wonderful things happening for the poor and the working poor in this country. Instead of going through the next couple of boards, I will save those for when we do a concentrated conversation. Madam Speaker, in sort of building a closing here, it has been a crappy month for a lot of us here in Congress. We have gone through some things I really thought I would never see. But I always thought, even outside, when many of us are standing in front of microphones and being a bit hyperbolic, thinking that the only way voters will actually hear our words is when we tell stories because math is too difficult, there have always been those moments in the back--or the joy of being in the Ways and Means Committee where we share a common back room, unlike so many other committees where you go off separately. In this time of COVID, we don't have those conversations right now. We don't hear each other's arguments and, hopefully, build policy that is good for the country. What we saw on the floor earlier today, I think, is somewhat shameful, a $1.9 trillion budget box, which is designed basically to be able to run through the process, get through the Senate with 51 votes, so they don't have to negotiate with any Republicans. But what was also sort of heartbreaking is so many of the things that were said just weren't true. They weren't mathematically true. They weren't policy true. They weren't historically true. The Speaker got up and said, I think, 83 percent of the benefits of tax reform went to the top 1 percent. That just isn't true. We have lots of papers and other things that say it isn't. I am sure the smart people around her know it is not true. But around here, if you say something enough times, it becomes part of, sort of, congressional folklore. To be correct, it is 25 percent of the benefits went to the top 1 percent, but they pay just a stunning percentage of Federal income tax. How do we ever build policy, particularly for economic growth, for opportunity for everyone, and build a much more, shall we say, fair and egalitarian society when in the debates we have, so much of the discussion is make-believe? The math isn't true. Yet, if we say it enough times, you will hear it resaid over and over. I will argue that is where a lot of the crisis is around here. My family joke that Daddy works in a place that is a math-free zone was meant to be funny. It wasn't supposed to be true. The problem is, it is true. How do you make public policy in times of difficulty, when you want to have an economic future that is good for everyone, but when so much of the debate has so little to do with the truth? I double my commitment. Leading the Joint Economic Committee, our economists, our team, I know we have all committed to working with our Democrat colleagues on finding the things that look like they work and do more of it. I desperately hope we can find some Democrats who are less bathing in partisan rage, or whatever the proper term would be, and are willing to look at the math that would be good for all of us, good for the country, good for someone like myself who has a 5-year-old. I want her future to be amazing. I truly believe our society is at the moment of an economic disruption that, if we can get policy right, the next couple of years can be pretty darn amazing. The next decade could be just awesome. But right now, our regulatory policy and our reimbursement policies aren't there. How do we get the conversation to move back to things that will make this future amazing instead of just burying my 5-year-old daughter in more debt? Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, once again, back to facts over feelings: After the tax reform, what did we see in our society? It was the first 2 years that we actually saw income and equality shrink in modern economic times. I thought that was the Holy Grail. Did you see what happened to Hispanics, African Americans' incomes, working poor incomes? The fact of the matter is, if you tell the truth about the post-tax reform model--just maybe because I was in the room--the top 10 percent actually were paying more of the Federal income taxes than prior. Yet that somehow isn't the folklore that we so often hear from this floor. Mr. Speaker, there are couple other points I would like to make. And a couple of this is important because Chairman Beyer actually did a terrific job touching on some of this. And he was making a very powerful point. And, actually, I hate to say this, he was reading part of my script, which actually is a little creepy. The total deposits in commercial banks, if you take a look at this line, have gone up dramatically. It is because too much of the money that we have done bipartisan in the last year to help stimulate and save the economy ended up in pockets of those very, very wealthy, or even medium wealthy, and it ended up sitting in the bank and not circulating, rotating in the economy and helping the workers, helping the working poor, helping those who are just trying to survive. My fear is this budget reconciliation document is going to be just a lot more of this, if you actually look. The other thing is--this is a tough one, and this is one I am hoping that the placeholder in this document isn't what the Democrats really are heading towards because, if it is, you are going to hear those who are on our side scream that this is a payoff to, shall we say, a constituency that is very supportive of the Democrats. Mr. Speaker, not been a great year--the year 2000, about 350,000 State municipal workers lost their jobs. This budget reconciliation bill has about $350 billion in the line item for that population. You do realize that's $1 million a job. And if you do the total number, it is still $350,000 a job. Is that compassion? Or is that lunacy? Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I will tell you this: Mr. Green also can sing, and he is one of those I consider a friend. He and I have done a number of pieces of legislation, and he and I have a running discussion of what actually helps the working poor. We have different views, but we know we both have a passion of it. Mr. Speaker, let's actually take sort of the theme that has been offered here. I believe it is absolutely mathematically wrong, but an argument that, Hey, so much of this has helped the wealthy in tax reform and those things. Great. Mr. Speaker, if someone on the Democratic side can promise me that when I am looking at this budget resolution, this is not creating a policy box for the Committee on Ways and Means to turn around and re-implement policy where, functionally, the benefit goes mostly to the very, very wealthy. So when I see the box here that looks like it would allow for certain revenues to be raised, and then it goes to possibly a SALT--a State and local tax deduction, which we all know the top 1 percent gets 57 percent of the value of it, the bottom 80 percent of our society only gets 4 percent of the value--that would be, actually, a tax break. Actually, I think I have been quoted as saying, ``It is the most regressive tax break that you can think of in our society right now that is in play.'' I am just desperately hoping that isn't what I am reading in some of these pages as part of that setup. And I would love someone on the left to basically promise me that we are not seeing a setup here to, once again, subsidize the rich. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the comment of ``look at this budget and see a party's values,'' this may be a little ethereal, but have you all heard the term ``blank check company''? It is one of the rages on Wall Street right now. Take basically a shell, have a bunch of money put into it, and then they promise, saying, we are going to find something to spend the money on. This is essentially a blank check budget reconciliation with actually none of the very elegant and persuasive words said. There is also one other thing, and I want to say this as respectfully as possible, so I am going to read someone else's words. The well-worn and misleading talking points is 83 percent of the tax cuts go to the wealthiest 1 percent. Just not true. Since the day of tax reform until 2025, the wealthiest, and maybe it is too much, get 25 percent. At the very end of tax reform, when many of the different tax breaks and those things are expiring out, there is an anomaly in the year 2027. It is not 83 percent. Please, I beg of my friends on the left, I know we like our talking points, but there is a reason the public is so enraged with us. It is because we have this bad habit of getting behind these microphones and playing some real games with the facts, and the facts are the facts. Once again, the blank check company concept, this is now the blank check budget. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, there is one other thing I wanted to share. First, the Restaurants Act is a good piece of legislation. I think there are many of us on Ways and Means who look forward to it or something very, very close to it. Also, one other comment, Madam Speaker spoke earlier, I was actually somewhat enthused about her focus on kids in school. As Mr. Beyer teased me, I am 58, my wife is 58, and I have a 5 year old. That is the ultimate definition of being optimistic for the future. That is funny. But the fact of the matter is, I desperately hope that Madam Speaker will use her influence on the teachers' union to encourage getting these kids back to school. I have some charts--but I am not going to show them to everyone because I may save them for evening floor time-- on the devastation--and the Speaker actually just spoke about this, which is a great irony--of what we are doing to the future earning power of everyone from the parents to the children themselves. How many saw the story, I think in The New York Times, this last week about children suicides in Nevada? It rips your heart out. But I don't see it in this budget document. It is not in there. If that is where we are heading, great. As Republicans we are going to help make good things happen, getting these schools open, but we actually need the influence from the left, particularly with the teachers' union to make that a possibility. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Once again--and I am probably going to keep making this point over, and over, and over--I care deeply and am desperately concerned particularly for the poor and the working poor in this country. And this document, if we are going to be honest about it, does not target their suffering. I will show a couple of boards here where, once again, we are going to be sending stunning amounts of money to places that it is just going to sit in a bank account. It is going to go to places where it is not actually creating that velocity, that multiplier effect of helping those who are suffering. And do understand--this is important--there is still $172 billion sitting in the disaster loan accounts. There is another $172 billion still sitting in the unemployment insurance accounts from things we have already done together. In that case, it is not completely--I don't want to use the word ``disingenuous''--but some of the things we are saying here that, yes, there is a crisis out there, and, yes, there is actually money sitting in the accounts. Get that damn money out of those accounts to where the suffering is. And with that I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Pfluger).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that Congresswoman Beatty has a great mask. It is wonderfully sparkly. I did want to share one thing very, very quickly. This is our CBO projection of where we are at right now. With the moneys that have already been authorized right now, by the end of this year, we will be close to a 4 percent GDP growth. So last quarter wasn't anywhere where we wanted it. The quarter before that was miserable. But you have to understand that this is where we are at. We keep hearing our fellow Members make comments, saying the economists said, ``Go big.'' But if you actually listen to their second line, multiple economists said, ``Go big, but go targeted.'' This document isn't targeted. It is all over the board. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Estes).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, in many ways we are all saying the same thing. It is just, once again, trying to make the argument, if we do this smartly and well-targeted, we can do it for a dramatically more efficient cost and actually help more of the poor that we know are suffering, more of the people who have been crushed, more of the small businesses. And a simple example, Opportunity Insights has predicted that, with a $2,000 check to functionally every household that makes less than $46,000, only $420, functionally, of what they receive will get spent. The rest goes in the bank. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe that is the audience you want to target. But when you start doing the same thing to populations, and for some reason they use $78,000, only $105 gets spent. So think of that. Mr. Speaker, increase the check another $1,400, a population that makes $78,000 or more, they are only spending $105. The rest is going in the bank account. Maybe that is wonderful, but that is not what we are debating. We are trying to create a multiplier effect of some stimulus in our society to get the economy going so we see those GDP numbers go up; the unemployment go down; and we get back to the miracle we were at in 2018 and 2019, where income and equality actually shrank for the first time in 2 years, where food insecurity shrank for the first time in decades and decades and decades, where the working poor actually were doing better than they had in decades and decades and decades. How do we get back to, functionally, what was the miracle of 2018 and 2019? And my argument is, the model that we are reading in this resolution, isn't it. It doesn't get you there. If we truly have the same goal, I desperately hope our friends on the left and those of us on the right, who actually want to look at this almost like an economist of a laser beam, are saying: Let's find those who are hurting and find out how to get the resources that are already appropriated and get those to them, and then appropriate more where necessary. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, just a couple points. There is still $280 billion sitting in the payroll protection account. There is still $239 billion sitting in the health spending account. I am someone who, on a personal level--and I believe our Republican side of the Joint Economic Committee--believes we need to probably spend more, but it needs to be properly targeted so we get the impact. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Kim).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, first, because I don't get the chance to do this very often, this is the Joint Economic Committee. We are basically here to talk about the economic impact of this piece of legislation. I am joyful to have Mr. Beyer as my opposite. He is someone who I truly respect intellectually. If he suggests you read a book, grab it. But this is one of those occasions where, having sat through the Committee on the Budget's testimony discussion, I am both frustrated and a little heartbroken on the number of things that were said that actually weren't mathematically true or policy true or accurate. I am hoping that those of us on the Joint Economic Committee can actually raise the level of this argument and this discourse to being hyperfactual because we need to get this right. Do understand that a $1.9 trillion bill, if you do the interest, is $2.4 trillion to $2.5 trillion. So we need to start getting our understanding of the types of dollars we are talking about. Mr. Speaker, I don't intend to stand here and just do a bunch of responses, but here's the quarterly from the Census Bureau about State and local revenues and resources: A 17.7 percent increase in receipts. Now, your State might not be that, but 17.7 percent from the Census Bureau, their latest document. And if you have one of the municipalities that is hurting, that has a shortfall, there is still $58 billion sitting in the account that hasn't been spent, yet we are talking about adding another $1.9 trillion in spending. Until we also take a moment and understand the almost $1 trillion still sitting in the accounts that haven't been released or spent, part of this argument we are having today is absolutely absurd. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, maybe I am going to break protocol, but I am finding that this will be the second time I think I have complimented someone on the Democratic side. Triggers make a lot of sense in this type of mechanism when you have, functionally, $1 trillion still sitting in the accounts, and we are seeing projections from CBO saying, functionally, by the fourth quarter--I am sorry, I didn't have a chance to print this large--but by the fourth quarter, unemployment--look, I am one of those who believes full employment is always the ultimate goal--but unemployment will be back to where basically we were in 2015-2016. Can we do better? Absolutely. But to do better, it is going to require thoughtful, targeted, well-designed spending, of our resources, our statutes. And one of the reasons I talk about that is there is something very unique going on. And I hope our chairman of the Joint Economic Committee will actually think about this because we haven't figured out how to turn this one into being partisan yet. I am sure we will figure it out. But right now, this is the sort of thing we should be talking about. There is this crazy renaissance going on in this country of people starting new businesses, filing new LLCs, starting new concerns. Now, it may be because of the tragedy of the business they have right now which has been crushed by the shutdowns and the virus, but there are a remarkable number of new concerns beginning. Wouldn't it be both elegant, but also very powerful, as we watch unemployment, to find ways to access capital; access to streamlined permitting, licensing; crazy things like allowing someone to do a microbusiness out of public housing, things that actually have impact. And it turns out, those aren't the sort of things you find in a $1.9 trillion--functionally $2.5 trillion if you are going to be honest about the real cost--spending package. And I understand this is a piece of legislation that if you actually look at it, it is just line, after line, after line, after line of numbers. If this passes--which it probably will, you know, the Democrats are in the majority--the ethical, moral obligations we have heard from multiple speakers here that a budget is your values, is the value the fact you can spend stunning amounts of money even when there is $1 trillion still sitting in the bank unspent, or is the value that you are going to do it in a way where we impact the working poor; where we impact those who are truly suffering, and not crushing someone like my 5-year-old daughter who is the one who is ultimately going to be paying this back. So if we are going to make the moral argument, I hope we think about the whole, shall we say, continuum of what we do here, what is moral, what is right. I reserve the balance of my time.