David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I no longer have to speak because he just took care of the speech for me.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The classic problem of--you are a brilliant lawyer. I am sort of a walking accountant or walking calculator. We both serve different--and a lot of people in the public don't understand--we serve different committees and they take over our life. You sit on Judiciary. Are you also on Oversight?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oh, so your life is hell.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yeah. Your life is hell. I do Joint Economic Committee and Ways and Means. That is actually one of the elegance the Founding Fathers gave us is, we eventually end up where we are good. In some ways, I always loved the yin and yang thing here where you are doing the legal stuff and then I am going to actually sort of pound on the math.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, part of what we are going to do tonight is a little thick. Can you imagine that? Mr. Speaker, I want to walk through a handful of things. Even as Mr. Roy was just touching on it, I need us to understand what is going on in our math. Mr. Speaker, guess what. We had sort of a record today for not being in COVID or whatever disasters. Every day, I send out a text message. It is part of our Joint Economic Committee. I have a few thousand people who subscribe to this. Yes, it is a little geeky. What we are doing is we are capturing the numbers from the Treasury Department. We have built a whole system where we grab those and send those out. Mr. Speaker, you will be happy to know, over the last 12 months--and this will make sense in a moment--if you divide our borrowing, just our borrowing, we are now borrowing $83,720 per second. That is $83,720 per second. Functionally, when we do the 12-month math, that is a new record. Yet, we have flattened out discretionary spending. The things my colleagues and I get to vote on, that is flat, but we only get to vote on about 25 percent of the spending. This is why it is so hard to actually have this conversation here. The majority of our debt--I am going to show some of this, and then I am going to show where we have some of the waste and fraud. I have to get to the alignment. Then, I am going to get to something that I think is actually optimistic. We have to understand that we have a shortage of children. We have functionally the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago and double the number of 65 and up. We have known this was going to happen for a very long time. It is almost like, is it because we are fearful of getting reelected? The White House gets cranky when we talk about these things? It is Republicans and Democrats. We come here and talk about shiny objects, but we have a math problem. In 33 months, over half the spending from the government here in Washington, D.C., will go to those 65 and up. Somewhere here, my 3-year-old is actually running around here. Yes, I am insane. I have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. We have some math. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate, you need 104 percent of my 3-year-old's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions. That is Social Security, Medicare, military, and Federal. It is partially because we have so few children and so many baby boomers. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just math. Mr. Speaker, we are going to do what? Once more, the two primary drivers of our borrowing today, that $83,000 per second, what are the two drivers? It is interest and healthcare costs. Interest is a function of: We have $38.7 trillion of borrowing out there, and that has to go to the markets. The market is going to set a price. When we hear the discussions about the Federal Reserve, that is the short-term portion. When we start getting over 5 years, 7 years, 10 years, or 30 years, that is a market. We look at U.S. sovereign debt. What do we want to pay? Mr. Speaker, think about this at the moment. Greece can sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States today. Does that set off any alarm bells? Is that just annoying because the hallways are full of people who want nothing more than more money spent? We get two types of folks that come lobby us and walk in our office. Don't always think they are lobbyists. There are often constituents from home who walk in and say, We want more money, or, We want you to control and regulate our competition. Mr. Speaker, I am hoping somewhere here we can convince our brothers and sisters on the Republican side, the conservative side, that we believe in free markets. We believe creative destruction is a rebirth of an economy, and it should be happening constantly. I know some of the populists don't like that. The fact of the matter is, if we don't get remarkable productivity improvements, I don't know how we get wage growth. Remember, unless we can do something crazy in supplies--so, supply- side economics--we are not going to make prices go down. What we do is we make them more affordable by wage growth. Wage growth happens by two things. The first is by inflation. Well, that is just treading water. It also happens by productivity. We do it better, faster, and cheaper through technology, through other systems, and through redesign. That is how we raise wages. What happens in a world where the estimated share of outlays that we are going to spend in government--we have an obligation. Society made promises. When we turn 65, we get our Medicare. When we turn 62 to 70 or 72, we can actually take Social Security. We made promises. If a person works for the Federal Government or if a person works for the military, they have pensions. Right now, my demographics, ``Estimated Share of Outlays by Group,'' what does this government spend on populations? If a person is under 18, right now we spend 7 percent. In 2036, it goes down to 6 percent. Here is the punch line right here. This is my 65-and-up population. In the next few years, over half of our Federal spending will be to those--look, I am only a year away now--65 and up. Are we supposed to talk about this? Those are obligations. We owe them. Do my colleagues see this down here? In 2036, we are down to 12 percent of Federal spending. Mr. Speaker, 12 percent of Federal spending is defense, and 52 percent will be to pensions and healthcare. Do my colleagues see the scale? Remember, today, Social Security is the biggest spend. It is $1.6 trillion. What is the number two? What is the number two spend in the Federal Government? It is not defense. It is interest. Then, it is Medicare. Then, it is Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies, ACA subsidies. Number five is actually defense. As Chip Roy was just saying, I have been coming behind this microphone for over a decade. I am wondering, where are people's intellect? Is it you need the satiation of being angry instead of thinking through the scale? What takes down a republic? I would argue debt and deficits and this financing are what will take us down. The bond market is now almost in the place where it will run this country. Let's actually walk through a couple more of these and see if we can sort of make the argument so it makes sense. The second half of this chart is, in my personal opinion, garbage, but it is a projection. I want us just to look right here, from this point here, 2025 to 2036. This is actually the population of 18-year-olds coming down because we can actually sort of calculate that right now. You have to understand--ignore this stuff. By 2036, we have only 4 million 18-year- olds. The fact of the matter is: You tell me how I keep growth in an economy when I have shortages of young people entering the workforce, entering the economy? I have done presentation after presentation. You are going to have to accept technology. You are going to have to accept synthetic biology. You are going to have to accept robots and labor substitution. If you want wages to go up in America and make things more affordable--one of the reasons President Trump has talked about this in many different ways at the White House and others, we had a population problem. The math right now says that the United States is fairly close to zero population growth. Do you remember your high school economics class where they taught you that GDP growth is a combination of step-ups in productivity and population growth. What happens when we don't have the population growth? No, you are not magically going to create an army of new little babies. Bless them, but this is not just the United States. It is all over the industrialized world. Oddly enough, the United States is still much better off than many, many countries. France actually has a higher fertility rate than the United States, even when you adjust for their immigrant population. We have been trying to promote what we call a unified theory that says that the adoption of technology, the legalization of healthcare disruptions that will make us healthier, better; move to a truly talent-based immigration system; move away from the family sponsorship system, and President Trump has talked about this. Remember that he says that it is insane that we educate someone and send them home to compete with us. There are about a dozen things on our unified theory, and you have to do them all at once. It is one of the reasons that I am not running again. I had an agreement that we were going to do a second reconciliation. Part of that reconciliation, we were going to do all of these ideas that saved money but didn't take away services. We were going to get rid of the waste and fraud and the misalignment and the way some of the things are scammed, and that became too hard. You do realize that $83,000 a second is $7.4 billion a day. If you want something that is uncomfortable--maybe I shouldn't talk about this, so that means I am going to--DOGE. I absolutely loved DOGE's mission, but once again, you have to be able to execute it. You need Members of Congress who are tough SOBs to execute it. When we started DOGE, it was going to be $2 trillion. Excuse me. When the White House started DOGE, it was going to be $2 trillion. Then it fell to $1 trillion. You can go to doge.gov right now. It will be $200 billion-plus of identified savings. What have we actually executed? What have we helped them actually execute? It was about $7 billion. We borrowed more than that just today. Does anyone see a math problem? Let's take a look at this one. Contributions by outlays alone to the 2025, 1.75--I also need to--we all fuss about this in our office. Last year's sort of official borrowing was $1.750 trillion. Understand there was a one-time kickback of student loans. If not, it would have been closer to $2 trillion, but, hey, math is math. I need you to think about this. Mr. Speaker, 17 percent of our contributions to that debt came from interest and 16 percent were the increases in national defense, the one thing that is in the Constitution here. When you start to actually take a look at the biggest spend, 29 percent was our benefits to those who are age 65 and up. Then you actually get over here, 54 to 64, that is 10 percent. When you get to our kids, those who are under 18, we spent about 8 percent. When I say ``spent,'' these were things that drove borrowing. I am trying to create an understanding that, if we don't get our act together, we have really ugly things happening. In 6.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In 6.5 years from now, the Medicare trust fund is empty. This is a 24 percent cut to your Social Security check, and this is an 11 percent cut to hospital reimbursement. That is 6.5 years from now, and the scale on it is monstrous. When I get idiots who will say to just raise taxes, I think the first year, which will be 2033, it would be, if you add them together, $638 billion. The scale of this is monstrous. How often do you see us stepping up and saying that we are going to start working on this today because it is going to take us a couple of years to figure out how we are going to finance this? Are we just going to pretend? We double the poverty of seniors in 7 years. We have a math set that says that we will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street 7 years from now. Does anyone have morality around here and want to just do the right thing? The idiocy from some of my Democratic colleagues who will say that we will just raise the cap on this and that, if you actually do sort of the cap, the calculations, you get a nice spike for a little while, but it only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall. This is not easy. Then many of us come up and say that we also have another math problem. Being on the Ways and Means Committee, we are supposed to actually manage the revenues into this Federal Government. What happens when we have really good GDP growth but a lot of that isn't coming from labor but it is coming from capital expenditures? Mr. Speaker, as you already know, we have an income tax-based tax system. We tax your capital gains. We tax your wages. We then have FICA taxes, which are your Social Security, your Medicare, your unemployment. What happens when much of our economic growth is coming from capital expenditures and not the taxes on wages? We are actually sort of seeing we are forced to have a discussion of how do we finance the future of this government? Are we allowed to do that? It is reality. So here is a question for anyone who is crazy enough to be watching. I always find this interesting. We will get some folks who, tomorrow, when this thing goes up on YouTube, who will fuss and say that the Chamber is empty. It is just the way it is at night, but we are on approximately a thousand televisions around the campus, and, hopefully, there is some poor intern who is stuck having to watch this. Yet, we are probably on several hundred thousand, maybe a million television screens around the country if people are either freaky smart or have no life and are trying to find a way to fall asleep and are watching C-SPAN right now and some guy trying to do a semi-economics and debt and deficit lecture. For those of you who do care, you start to walk through this math and say: How do you actually deal with the fact that these trust funds go empty in the next couple of years and our mix is changing and, yet, the groups that make their money trying to--all right. Let's do the question: Is borrowing a tax? Mr. Speaker, it is a simple question. Is borrowing a tax? It is money we owe, and we have to pay interest on it. It is a tax paid for by a future generation, just as inflation is a tax on your savings. But we can hand out things--so last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.43. Now, this year, it is better with what President Trump did, what we did here. We pushed down some of the spending. We made our first adjustments in Medicaid. Even then, the spending still goes up. It just goes up slower. Our guess is that this year, for every dollar of taxation we collect, we are going to spend about $1.33 or $1.34. My math is closer to $1.36. But you can't do that very long. Let's actually walk through some of the things we have been analyzing as the Joint Economic Committee. I also chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have come here and done detailed presentations from the MedPAC report and other things on something called Medicare part C. It is Medicare Advantage. It is now 55 percent of the population. I really want to defend Medicare Advantage. I just want it to be more efficient. We have a math problem. There is something in there where we have identified--and this is also from the MedPAC reports. We call it excess premiums for Medicare Advantage. This last year, we think it came in at about $13-plus billion. What is funky about this is part of that exposure ends up on Medicare part B and Medicare Advantage, or traditional Medicare. This one is the traditional Medicare, and this one is the MA. What that means is you are paying it. If you are on Medicare, particularly if you are on traditional Medicare, you are picking up a whole bunch of other costs. The Federal Government is picking up about 9.9 percent, and the States are having to pick up some of the burden also because of dual-eligible populations. Dual-eligible populations where you are poor enough that if you are on traditional Medicare, Medicaid picks up part of your copays. But this is, once again, a mistake in the design of Medicare Advantage. We are transferring costs to other populations in Medicare. The punch line here--we had a fight in my office whether I should walk everyone through the whole formula, and I think I would have had no one watching on C-SPAN because it is complicated. You need to understand that over a couple years, if you are on traditional Medicare, you are basically paying $2,589 more because of this misalignment here, where these costs are being shifted to the Medicare part B portion. We have a way to fix this. We have offered a piece of legislation that basically takes Medicare Advantage and puts it back to its tradition where you don't try to make more money by the risk scores or the star ratings. You put it into the initial bid, and, yes, you are going to have to do longer enrollments and those things so the insurance company invests in making you healthier. What we see is a healthier Medicare Advantage population uses less, and the companies can make a bigger profit. It is good for society. It is a good win-win, but now you have to make a decision--and I am speaking more to the Medicare Advantage lobbyists right now, if there is anyone out there watching--functioning zero is the proposal right now coming from the administration. Instead of redesigning the program and getting rid of-- let's just call it--I won't call it waste and fraud. We will call it the misalignment that has been identified in the MedPAC reports, whether they be 20 percent more than fee-for-service or a future one that may come down to 17 percent, but that is still, over 10 years, like $2 trillion of additional spending; or you can actually get crammed down here, which is what is coming; or work with offices like ours that want to take the program back to its original design where these insurers make money by helping their populations be healthier; or you can basically start to just get undercompensated over and over and over. Once again, let's come back to the basics. If you go back to the MedPAC report, this is just the overpayment portion. This is not some of the other things that are in the MedPAC report that drive us insane. That was $84 billion last year. We will sit here on the floor and fight for hours over a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that because this is hard to talk about. It is complex, and there is an army of lobbyists to stop us from doing it. Maybe we should learn to do the complex things because, once again, we borrowed $7.4 billion today. Let's do some happy talk. Last Saturday, in Scottsdale, we actually did a Joint Economic hearing, a field hearing. We brought in some incredibly creative companies in the healthcare space. We had one there that has actually come up with a type of multicancer detection. I am still having a little trouble on their technology. They think they can do it with a handful of drops of your blood that you could actually extract at home, and they put it on a plate, and they are looking for a type of peptide--it is not the ones you do when you are bodybuilding--a type of peptide that would help identify different types of cancer. They think they can get this product down to about $150. You would do a multicancer test multiple times a year. We had the gentleman sitting over next to me over here, he is from Doctor AI. If anyone is watching and you are interested, go look. Utah has just done a sandbox with them, so the State of Utah where the AI is doing renewals of your prescriptions. Why aren't we all doing that? There are ideas here where you had a revolution to crash the cost of healthcare. WHOOP was there, and they were talking about some of the things that are coming in the future where you can be basically wearing your medical lab on your body. It can talk to the Doctor AI, and then the healthcare provider there knows whether you need to come in or whether it can be prescribed to you just automatically. Mr. Speaker, my point is if we could get our act together and start being creative and doing the hard things and stop making the technology disruptions, because they are functioning illegal today, you know, allowing AI to prescribe, allowing the wearables. Remember, the newest version of Apple Watch is an FDA-approved medical device for the heart, just a thought experiment within its scope of what has been approved by the FDA should be allowed to prescribe. Are we ready to start doing things like that? If we don't start telling the truth about the math, the next few years are going to be hell around here. I won't be here for it, but you will. Is winning the next election that much more important than telling the truth? I am in a 50/50 District. I get up into entire meetings on how to save Social Security, how to save Medicare, how to save these things, and I have been rewarded over and over and over. I think I am one of the most expensive races and losses for the Democrats in all of America. You can win. Treat your voters with respect. Treat them as having an intellect and treat them that it doesn't have to be a dystopian darkness if you are willing to innovate. But if you are not willing, it gets ugly. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had a piece of legislation--we all go through this--where you have your friends on the opposite side who say things, and you think, wow, I can't find that in this piece of legislation. I guess we are all sometimes in the pandering business. About a year ago, in my community, we had a woman who came running out of her house holding a knife. She was having some sort of horrible mental health issue, and she was charging a police officer with a knife. Before this type of technology, she would have lost her life because a traditional firearm would have been used. They used a nonlethal. The reason it doesn't say ``taser'' in the language is because who knows what next year's innovation is going to be. That is the whole point: Can you have a society where, through the use of technology, people don't die? Why do the bill? Why do this portion of the bill for those of us on the Committee on Ways and Means? Let's go back about 100 years ago. On excise tax, you have 11 percent on the cartridge, and you have 10 percent on the unit itself. You collect the excise tax. Then you have to go back to the tax-exempt government agency, have them fill out their paperwork, submit it over, and then turn back to refund it. We are just trying to clean up the bureaucracies that are 100 years out of date. It is not that hard. Make up your mind. Do you want broader adoption of nonlethal technology so our brothers and sisters don't die? Think of some of the crappy things that have happened in our society over the last 10, 20 years because of the discharge of a firearm in law enforcement. It does not need to be that way. This is actually the second or third rewrite of this bill as we try to make the anti-firearm groups happy. It turns out we would meet their requests, and then they would change their standard. The problem or the disagreement kept changing. I don't know what the motivation is for playing games, but we bring this to the floor with honest hearts. We want our brothers and sisters not to die in this moment of violence. I would think there would be this almost giddy optimism that technology is bringing us here. Instead, it continues to be the moving excuse of why to oppose the bill. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record three letters. Congress of the United States, House of Representatives, Washington, DC, December 10, 2025. Hon. Pam Bondi, Attorney General, Department of Justice, Washington, DC. Hon. Dan Driscoll, Acting Director, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Washington, DC. Hon. Robert Leider, Chief Counsel, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Washington, DC. Hon. Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC. Hon. Robert Cekada, Deputy Director, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Washington, DC. Hon. Mary G. Ryan, Administrator, Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Washington, DC. Dear Attorney General Bondi, Secretary Bessent, Director Driscoll, Deputy Director Cekada, and Chief Counsel Leider, and Administrator Ryan: As former law enforcement officers, we write to share our concerns regarding the outdated federal classification of modern less-than-lethal technologies and provide an update on the strong legislative progress of H.R. 2189, the Law Enforcement Innovate to De-Escalate Act, and H.R. 4242, the Innovate Less Lethal to De-Escalate Tax Modernization Act. H.R. 2189 has received significant bipartisan support and was marked up and approved by the House Judiciary Committee with favorable guidance on November 18, 2025. H.R. 2189 addresses a serious and growing challenge: outdated statutory language within the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA) that unintentionally classifies certain non-lethal devices as firearms. As technology has advanced, this decades-old framework has failed to keep pace, creating regulatory outcomes that run counter to modern policing needs and Congress's original intent. A clear example is the TASER T10. Although engineered expressly for less-than-lethal use, it has been classified as a firearm solely because its propulsion system uses a small primer charge to expel its non-lethal projectiles. Older TASER models also contain a primer, but because those devices utilize compressed air released from a punctured gas cylinder to expel the projectile, they fall outside the GCA definition. The T10's updated, gas-less propulsion system triggers firearm classification under the statute, even though the device is no more dangerous and, in many respects, safer than previous models that remain unregulated under the

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, 90 seconds is the shortest I have ever spoken. Mr. Speaker, if someone is actually listening to our discussion, the Democrats have made it clear: Hey, lots of law enforcement have this product. Wonderful. We are trying to explain that this is a segment of the tax code we are trying to make easier and more efficient. Once again, just read the bill. It is remarkably simple. Mr. Speaker, you have an excise tax. You have to go through all these steps to collect it then to refund it. So my friend from California--he is a good guy. We have done a number of bills together over the years--made my argument. This is actually in wide distribution across the country, and there is another generation of technology, hopefully, coming and another one coming. It is more than just the taser in the hand. It may be the thing on the wall that protects my synagogue or my school or those things. There is a revolution of nonlethal coming so that people don't have to die. I thank the gentleman for explaining that it is in wide distribution. Now let's deal with the things in the tax code that add bureaucracy and costs. If we both support the fact that these should be in the hands of people protecting our public, then let's remove some of the bureaucracy that makes it more expensive.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, give me a moment here to get set up. Sometimes, we are just scrambling because we had a whole speech lined up. We were going to do something just simple and pleasant for everyone. We were going to walk through Medicare financing for a while, and they wouldn't give me 3 hours or 4 hours to do it, so you are stuck with me for a half an hour. Then, earlier today, CBO actually did their update. Okay. Let's see if I can make this make sense. When I come behind these microphones, I am trying to explain sort of a unified theory that, so often, the political class behind these microphones say: We can do this. Okay. That may be wonderful, but you have to understand that it all works together: our demographics, our tax system, the fact of the matter is this incentive for this to grow, this incentive here, and the adoption of technology. I need people to start thinking about the interaction that there is not a simple solution to a country that, right now, is functionally borrowing about $74,000 every second so far this fiscal year. Sorry. Let me rephrase. Over the last 12 months. If you do just fiscal year, it is higher. A few hours ago, the CBO put out a report. Look, the report is actually like this. I just cheated. I just grabbed the executive summary because I didn't need the whole binder out here. It is going to take me 3 days or 4 days to read through everything, but I have some of the highlights for you--this is important--and then it is going to tie into what we are spending. Your country is an insurance company with an army. That is both funny and it happens to be mathematically true. In about 33 months, over half of the Federal spending will go to those who are 65 and up. Actually, in 33 months, I will be one of them. It is demographics. We have gone about 30 years or 40 years with dramatically fewer children than we expected. I have done a series of presentations here on the floor where I have shown that we actually have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, but double the number of those who are 65 and up. Is that Republican or Democrat? Look, there is policies that have been engaged in by Democrats that helped to create this, but the fact of the matter is that these are people. It is our reality. We have our obligations on Medicare, on Social Security, and some that will be dual eligible because they are poor and retired, and we have some things that are terrifying. In 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. Your hospital will take an 11 percent cut. Medicare Advantage programs will actually take something much larger. It is just the way the Medicare part A trust fund works. In 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. No one stole your money. We just don't have enough workers. It was a Pay-As- You-Go system. It is math. The fact of the matter is that, yes, the money has been loaned to the Treasury. Treasury actually pays interest on that money, so that twice a year, there is actually a fairly large dividend given to the trust fund. It is demographics. We had the baby boomers. In 6\1/2\ years, if we followed the law, there is a 24 percent cut coming to Social Security recipients, which will double the poverty of seniors in America. Our math is that it will double the number of baby boomers who are homeless. It is absolutely immoral, but we are not allowed to talk about it except for idiots like me who get up and say week after week: Please, my brothers and sisters here, there are things that we can do. The Democrats say that we will just tax rich people. Then you show that the math is nothing like that. It doesn't work. Here is the CBO report. In here, it makes it absolutely clear, and I have been telling you for 1 year, but the scorekeepers have finally caught up with my Joint Economic Committee economists. Remember, I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I chair Oversight Subcommittee in the Ways and Means Committee, so I am blessed. I have a freaky smart staff. In 2032, the trust funds are empty. In 2033, the first year where they are completely empty, if you said that we are just going to pay for everything out of the general fund, okay, we can do that. My estimates come in at about $638 billion in 2033 just to make up the shortfall of the Social Security trust fund being gone and the Medicare trust fund being gone. That is, what, 60 percent of today's defense budget. Why is math such an anathema to this place? Let's walk through a couple of other things here. I have only had time to produce a couple of boards from the new CBO report, and then we will try to tie these into what else is going on. This year, we are basically going to spend 3.3 percent of the entire economy on interest--interest. Once again, this interest number is just the interest to publicly sold debt. Remember how I was just talking about the debt? That we borrow the Social Security money, and then the trust fund gets IOUs from the Treasury, and we pay it interest? Then when the Social Security needs money--which they do every month--because the tax receipts come in from your FICA taxes and there is a shortfall, so they cash that in every month? If you add up all of the money and interest paid from the trust funds, I think this year is going to look more like $1.2 trillion in interest. Why that is important: What is the number one spend in America? The number one spend of your Federal Government is Social Security. It is going to come in at about $1.6 trillion this year. Interest is your number two. It is going to come in at about $1.2 trillion. Medicare is going to come in at about $1.1 trillion this year, maybe a little more. Medicaid and ACA, ObamaCare subsidies, are going to come in at $900 billion. Those are your top four. Number five is the defense. The thing that is actually in the United States Constitution is actually number five in hierarchy of spending. One of the things that CBO was trying to point out is that their estimate is for 9 budget years--so 9 budget years is 2036 from now-- that we will go from $1 trillion of interest to $2.1 trillion of interest. In 2036, so 9 budget years from now, the annual deficit will be about $3.1 trillion. Structural deficit is $1 trillion, and $2.1 trillion will just be interest. The majority of future deficits are actually interest. Interest and healthcare are the primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt. Will the bond market continue to finance this? What happens when one of your greatest solutions is: Can we actually have honest conversations about healthcare costs? Are we willing to legalize the very technologies and the methodologies of helping our brothers and sisters stay healthier and, therefore, use dramatically less healthcare? I have been coming behind this mike for over a decade with presentation after presentation of technologies, new pharmaceuticals, and new methodologies to crash the price of healthcare. I get the crap kicked out of me because armies of lobbyists don't like it when we talk about changing their business model. Remember, several months ago, I came here to the floor and showed that we came up with a math experiment of, in America, how many duplicative MRI scans, ultrasounds, X-rays, and CTs are there? The top end was looking like $36 billion in a single year. Why wouldn't you do something crazy? You get an MRI, attach it to this crazy supercomputer that you put in your pocket, and then when you go to your next doctor, you put it up, and it is up on their screens, and you don't get another one. Now it turns out that you get some folks who make money on the duplicative scans. They get very angry, but $35 billion over 10 years, $350 billion, and that is just one of dozens of things. Why is it so hard? Are we that afraid of the lobbyists? Are we that afraid of trying to explain to the folks at home that we don't have a choice? In 6\1/2\ years--let's say it again--the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you want to extend the life of the trust fund, let's have a revolution on the actual cost of delivering healthcare. There are a couple of other things that are highlights in the CBO report. They estimate that in 10 years, we will have 5.3 million fewer people in America. That is mostly from reduction in immigration and the fact that our fertility rates continue to fall, but think of this. That missing 5.3 million people is $500 billion over that timeframe in lost tax receipts. When I use the term ``demographics'' on our debt, it is a function. Our debt is a function of the fact that our society has gotten older. We have substantially fewer children. We are going to have fewer workers, and there are actually whole charts I have here that actually talk about it. Look, they are hard charts. This one is absolutely inappropriately designed to use on the floor, but it is trying to explain what happens in a society when we have substantially fewer young workers in our society and substantially more of those who are now 65 and older. It is just life, but we have to be prepared for what it means when the majority of Federal spending will be going to those 65 and up in just a couple of years. Are we prepared for this? Of course, we are not. So many folks still have a mind frame that is decades out of date with what we are demographically. This is happening over the entire industrialized world, but in our society here, if I can raise wages and productivity of those who are in the workforce, I have resources to cover the promised benefits, because we made a deal. We have a societal deal that we are going to cover Medicare and Social Security. Something I want to touch on--and I didn't bring the chart on this. There are a lot of folks who think that Medicare itself is paid for by your payroll tax. It is actually about 38 percent of that. As a medical enrollee, you pay--the total cost, depending if you are in Medicare Advantage, which is--what?--55 percent of the population. The others are maybe in part A, part A and part B. Fifteen percent is sort of paid by the enrollee. Thirty-eight-some percent is paid by the FICA tax, so today's workers paying for today's retirees. The rest is borrowed out of the general fund. You have to understand that a huge portion of our debt is actually paying for the healthcare. Sorry. My 3-year-old is trying to call me. Yes, I have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old, so you know I am optimistic. When we talk about Medicare financing, most folks don't understand it is one of the key drivers of our debt. Let's actually walk through something. Several months ago, we gathered all the MedPAC reports, all the other reports on Medicare Advantage. It is Medicare part C. I love a capitated model. A properly designed capitated model, which is Medicare Advantage, is designed so you have sort of a gatekeeper. That may be the insurance company or that may be the group of doctors. Their mission needs to be helping you be healthier. We do this in my State's Medicaid system. We call it AHCCCS in Arizona. I actually, at one point, did the budgets for that. The concept behind this is to align the incentives. The incentives aren't to keep trying to find the highest reimbursement to charge things to the healthcare system. It is the incentive that we are going to help our brothers and sisters be healthier. If you are the insurer, you make a profit because you lower utilization because you had your enrollees, your patients, your members, get healthier. That is not what has been happening in Medicare Advantage if you read the actual auditing reports. We actually did a piece of legislation several months ago that said instead of having this world where there is the risk scoring and--if you see, there are actually now criminal investigations going on at the Department of Justice because of people being scored as being much sicker, needing much more, and they are actually not sick. There are multiple criminal investigations going on at the Department of Justice. I keep approaching the Medicare Advantage companies, saying to work with us. Could we get rid of the way we do risk scoring, the way we do these star ratings, where you use those things to pump up your compensation, and actually do it from enrolling? Let's get the actual models right. We will build a shock absorber if someone gets really sick. We will share the risk. Then, the incentive is to help the population get healthier and healthier because we have technology. We have wearables. We have GLP-1. We have other things you can do to help our brothers and sisters get healthier. We have lots of data right now, when we are starting to see math showing, in 2025, almost $84 billion of new risk model implementation basically saying this is excess spending. If you look at the MedPAC report, it is almost coming in at a couple of hundred billion dollars a year. We run around here saying waste and fraud, but this technically might not be fraud because it is the design of the system. When ObamaCare was passed 18 years ago, it actually had a series of things in there that created many of these incentives to game the system. Now, the administration is talking about saying we are just going to do a cap. I want to try to sell this concept, saying why don't we align the incentives, both the government incentives as the payer and the patient incentives to the doctor, so we are all doing the same thing. We are lowering the expense by creating a healthier population. The fact of the matter is, if you look at the MedPAC reports--and I know they get mocked, but no one else seems to produce the actual data--it is almost $2 trillion a year. Remember, the MedPAC report comes in and says, Medicare Advantage, when you do the risk adjustment, it comes in at 120 percent of fee-for-service. That is a 25 percent gap. In the original design, in 2005, the Medicare part C was supposed to come in at 95 percent. I know it is geeky, but this is a stunning amount of money. We will spend hours here arguing about millions of dollars. These are billions and billions, and over 10 years, it is in the trillions. Why is it so hard for this place to want to take on the things that actually would affect the crushing debt that CBO just told you is coming screaming at you? Remember, the CBO report here basically says in this 9-year budget window, 10-year budget window, your country goes over 120 percent debt to GDP, surpassing World War II. Are we going to fix it by little incremental things, or are we going to do it by a major reconciliation bill that actually takes on big issues, complex issues, real math? Or will we just continue to pander and not tell the truth about the scale of what is coming at us? Medicare Advantage overpayments, we believe, this last year, just the overpayment portion, was $84 billion. You start to see a chart like this. Add it up, I actually have a trillion dollars here for you. Align the incentives, and I can get you another few hundred billion dollars of alignment incentives by changing utilization, by helping our brothers and sisters be healthier. Turns out that is real money. I have lots of charts here, but I want to actually go--I am going to skip around a little bit--to contributions to the proposed Medicare Advantage payment update. If there happens to be a lobbyist out there representing Medicare Advantage, come talk to me. This is what I think CMS is actually proposing to you, saying we are going to change the compensation. We are going to change your risk scoring. You are basically getting zero movement. This is what you get by not working with us in aligning the incentives, where you can make a profit by fixing the incentives within the system or you can basically get a cramdown. Which one do you want to do? Do you want to prove that you are a free market manager, that a free market system actually can deliver healthcare and do it better, faster, more efficiently, and more morally because you give a darn about your patients? Or we can basically say we are just going to pay you less, and then you figure out how you are going to put that through the system. This is the proposal coming at you. You didn't want to talk to me about trying to fix the incentives in Medicare Advantage, so now you are going to get this. I will argue, come talk to us about our piece of legislation. It has been out there for several months. You have had chances. We have had multiple Ph.D. economists score it. We have a preliminary score from CBO, saying it is probably about $1.84 trillion in savings over 10 years, making it the single largest savings bill in U.S. history. I am in a 50/50 district, and I am doing bills like this because I can do math. Mr. Speaker, instead of me walking through all this, did you see the job growth numbers today? They are actually pretty good. Did you see the punch line in the job growth numbers? The U.S. economy added approximately 140,000 jobs; the market added 181,000. It is absolutely terrific. A dominance of the new jobs that were created are in healthcare. The majority of spending in healthcare comes through government. Does anyone see the circular problem of what we are talking about? If my growth in the employment base is healthcare, and over here those jobs are financed through government spending, and that government spending is substantially borrowed, that is not a virtuous cycle. We have a structural problem. Remember, today your government is going to borrow 6 to $7 billion. This was supposed to be a year with the tariff receipts and with everything else we were supposed to really start to pay down the deficit. The problem is interest, healthcare costs have exceeded our models. We are still probably heading to a 1.9, $2 trillion borrow. It turns out now CBO is catching up with the numbers I have been bringing behind this microphone for the last year. If we do not start to take this seriously, Mr. Speaker, we will have made the decision that the bond market, not as in Congress, not the White House, will run this country. Remember, we have to bring about 10 to $11 trillion of debt to market this year for refinancing, and we are going to issue probably $2 trillion of new debt. When the United States sells a 10-year bond and Greece sells a 10- year bond today, Greece has a lower interest rate than the United States. When the debt markets think Greece is more creditworthy than the United States--I don't know how to make it more simple. Why is it so hard to tell the truth about the math? Mr. Speaker, there is a way to stabilize this. We are not going to pay it off. The demographic headwinds make that almost impossible, but you can stabilize the debt. You just have to do complex big boy things to do it. One of the reasons I am leaving Congress is I am tired of smashing my head over and over here on blunt objects as people just stare back at you and say, David, I would have to try to explain that. David, you are not allowed to use the words ``Social Security'' and ``Medicare.'' It will upset people. What will upset people is when these trust funds run out and they are seeing their benefits cut because we were too intellectually vacuous to step up and tell the truth even though we have known this for decades. Mr. Speaker, I am actually going to drink more coffee and do more reading. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to consolidate some of this for some efficiency. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), and then we will finish up.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is an incredible leader and passionate on this, and it is absurd that something that America desperately wants has been this difficult for the Democrats, particularly in the Senate. How many Democrats, when we passed it out of the House before, voted with us? Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purpose of a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Let's save America. Let's protect our elections. I will give you one last concept, being someone from Arizona. How do you protect a republic if your citizens don't trust the institutions and don't trust elections? So even if you are uncomfortable with the legislation, which I have no idea why you would be, defend the institution by passing a piece of legislation that actually raises the level of faith and trust in our elections. How can it not be amazingly good for this Republic?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Thanks, Chip. I know you have to get out of here.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to do this somewhat quickly because they are a couple of fairly simple concepts. Almost every week when we are in session, for a decade, I have come behind this microphone and tried to help people understand the fiscal situation in the United States. Some of the math is both hopeful and incredibly frustrating. So think about this: Our tax collections are up almost 10 percent--almost 10 percent. Tax collections are up in the last 12 months. Yet, over the last 12 months, we have borrowed $2.34 trillion. We are borrowing right now, if you take over the last 12 months, $74,000 every second. You go: But how can that possibly be? Tax receipts are up. Our problem is fairly simple. Refinancing the debt, we have to bring about $10 trillion to $11 trillion to market over this 12-month period, and much of that is debt that was sold a few years ago, when interest rates were very, very low. So it is getting refinanced at today's rates. The other thing that I talk about constantly, because it is my intense frustration around here, is the Democrats and--I am sorry--many of my Republican colleagues have turned healthcare into financial engineering instead of: What does it cost to provide services? What does it cost to help our brothers and sisters be healthy? We are actually seeing that we had some projections from CBO and others of about a 5 percent growth in spending on healthcare. I am going to show you some of this. We are seeing some numbers coming in that are closer to 8 percent or 9 percent growth in that spending, so interest and healthcare. Mr. Speaker, much of it is demographics. Remember, in less than approximately 3 years, over half of the Federal spending will go to those who are 65 and up. It is substantial because of a couple of things. We got older as a population. We have gone 30 to 40 years with falling fertility rates. Remember, we are well below replacement rates in the number of children we have. There is math that, last year and this year, there was pretty much flat population growth. Then there is this. I'm trying to help folks understand the reality of what your Federal Government is. Do you see the blue area? This is defense and nondefense. In a couple of days, we are actually going to get an update, and my team actually thinks that this number will go from 26 percent of being, what we call, discretionary to maybe down to 25 percent. That is one quarter. Every dime of this is borrowed, and that is all Members of Congress actually vote on. The rest of this, whether it be interest, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or other mandatory spending, all of that red is on autopilot. It is a formula. If you add this up, basically it is under $2 trillion. I just told you we have borrowed over $2.3 trillion in the last 12 months, meaning every dime of this is borrowed, and a chunk of mandatory is borrowed. That is our reality. Your government is basically an insurance company with an army paying out a lot of annuities. It is demographics. Yet much of the craziness you hear behind these microphones is anything they can say to keep you from focusing on the fiscal reality of what is going on in our country. We have been trying to figure out how to express some of this, so I am going to do it in a couple of different ways. Over the last 12 months, receipts have grown 10 percent. Spending is up 4 percent. You say: Shouldn't we be closing the gap? Except the problem is the spending last year was over $7 trillion, where tax receipts were $5 trillion. Do the 4 percent growth over here on spending, the 10 percent growth on taxes, you still have--closing the gap--maybe $250 billion. That is wonderful. If you are heading toward $7.4 trillion spending, that is less than 1 month of borrowing. You have got to understand. We just finished the fourth month of this new fiscal year, and we have already borrowed--we have borrowed since October 1 $926,724,000. Meaning in the next couple of weeks, depending on how much cash the Treasury decides to keep on the balance sheets, we are going to hit a trillion dollars. This was supposed to be a year where we would start seeing the debt starting to go down. I blessed. I chair the Joint Economic Committee, I am number four on Ways and Means, and I chair the Oversight there. My job is to get the math right. We always said we thought this would be a $2 trillion borrow year. Tax receipts are up, but spending is up substantially, once again, because of the financing of $38.5 trillion of U.S. sovereigns, $10 trillion of it having to be refinanced this year, $2 trillion virgin, meaning it is new borrowing, and healthcare costs. When we bring these charts in, it is one of the classic problems of when you do this thing, look at this. Tax receipts are way up; but the tax receipts and spending are upside down. One is based on $7-plus trillion, the other is based on $5 trillion, meaning that gap is not nearly as tight as you think it is. I am going to pass through some of these. Part of the great battle is--and Chip was basically teasing for the 14 people that watch C-SPAN. Sometimes I am worried there is not even 14--if you ever have a curiosity, if you really care about saving the Republic, I would argue what takes us down is potentially the bond market. If we keep borrowing like this, the bond market is going to start running this country. Go to the Joint Economic Committee Republicans' website. We put out some amazing data, and we are trying to make it easier to absorb. We are doing better with charts and graphs, but another thing we do is every workday we send out a text message. We call it the Daily Debt, Schweikert's Daily Debt, and it basically does this math for you. It tells you here is what we borrowed over the last 12 months, and here is what we have borrowed this fiscal year. The beauty of this is you can say: Over the last 12 months, we are borrowing $74,400 every second. So far this fiscal year, so 4 months in, we are borrowing $85,000 every second. Start telling the truth about the math and understand so often the theatrics you see here in Congress are so we can give you a dopamine hit, but we don't have to deal with these numbers because these numbers are difficult, complex, and really hard to explain. The armies of lobbyists and people in our hallways here, Mr. Speaker, what do they do when they get to our office? They don't walk in the door and say: We really want you to save the future generation. Spend less money. Everyone is at our door either wanting money or wanting us to regulate their competition. That is bureaucracies. That is businesses. That is private groups, charities. Give us more money, or create a barrier to entry so I don't have to compete with someone else with better, faster, cheaper technology. That is particularly true in healthcare. We have done presentation after presentation here showing how you could crash the price of healthcare legalizing technology. Even today, I had a little bit of a verbal kerfuffle--love that word--with a Member who is a doctor, and he is my friend. He despised the concept, but I was showing him part of the paper that says if you have this sort of data coming off your body, whether this be the Oura ring, whether the WHOOP, the Apple Watch, the things you can wear, the data from it using the latest AI packages is statistically more accurate than a human. Why wouldn't you legalize that to help people keep healthy? Well, it turns out when you tell a medical professional that, they get a little cranky at you because it is always about the money here. This chart you can find on the Joint Economic Committee website, but I am trying to actually show what is happening. As we are refinancing our debt, we are having to spend a lot more money. We calculate that just interest this year, Mr. Speaker, will be probably about $1.2 trillion. Think about this hierarchy. Let's do this together: Social Security, $1.5 trillion; interest, $1.2 trillion; Medicare, maybe $1.1 trillion; Medicaid and Obama subsidies, almost another $900 billion. Defense is actually the fifth in our hierarchy of spending. The thing that is actually in the Constitution now is number five. When you get these folks that walk in the door saying: Just stop spending money, balance the budget tomorrow. I can do it, except you would have to get rid of every bit of government, every bit of defense, and then you tell me about the $600 billion you want me to remove from Medicare, Social Security, military pensions. What do you want to do? That is the reality. Just interest this year will be 3 percent, maybe even higher, of GDP. When you see us talk about we want to get the debt down to just 3 percent of GDP, that just covers our interest carry. I have a couple of these other charts I sort of want to walk through. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Excellent. If I do this quickly--and I apologize for talking so fast. I have had a lot of coffee today. I am trying to detox. Something almost no one around here pays attention to, but it is my job on Ways and Means and my job with the Joint Economic Committee to talk about the financing. How do you have a country that if we are going to burn $2-plus trillion this year, that means you are bringing at least a quarter trillion dollars to market every month. Yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, we had to borrow about $7.3 billion that day; $7 billion a day, that is so far this fiscal year. If you do it over the last 12 months, it is almost $6.5 billion a day is what we borrow. You don't need to actually pay real detailed attention to this, but what I am trying to show is the average maturities on our bonds and that they have to be refinanced. Every quarter, this is what is coming to market and the fact that we are moving away from much lower interest rates to much higher interest rates, but there are other things going on. Do you remember how often--and, Mr. Speaker, you have probably had this experience. You are at a townhall, and someone says: How much do foreigners own of our debt? And now you try to explain that China is actually, I think, down from $1.2 trillion down to $700 billion and is maybe now third. Japan is number one, but there were certain things that happened. When Central Banks were buying U.S. debt, there was a level of stability that came with it. This is an interesting concept, and some of the bond market folks are starting to write about this. They held it because they needed an offset for the currency. They needed it for trade. They wanted just stability. As foreign governments and foreign central banks are getting rid of U.S. debt, bond markets, hedge funds, and others are the ones buying it. Okay. Wonderful. We have people buying our debt. But do you see the problem? These are traders. If there is a carry trade, if there is an opportunity to make a spread, if there is an arbitrage, they sell it. You are starting to see, if you actually look--there is actually a thing called a bond VIX, a volatility index. We are starting to see much more volatility in U.S. debt. That actually scares me. You want stability. You want the markets to believe in us. You want the markets to understand we are going to get our act together, that we are creditworthy. Yet Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. I can think of 12, 13 countries that today, if they offer a 10-year bond, that 10-year bond goes at a lower interest rates than the United States. Does that bother anyone? Does that tell anyone anything? Is anyone listening? Look, I have chart after chart after chart. There are ways we can communicate to the bond markets that we are taking our debt seriously. There are ways we can protect Medicare and Social Security, but we have got to tell the truth about them. Right now, the Social Security trust fund is empty in 6.5 years. That means 7 years from now, if you are on Social Security, if we follow the law as it is today and Congress continues to fail to act, you get a 24 percent cut. Our model says we double senior poverty in 7 years. We will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street. In 6.5 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty, and your hospital, others, get an 11 percent cut. That is our model right now. You start to say: How do we preserve these programs? Well, maybe we can actually take on the things we know are going on. Next week, Mr. Speaker, I am going to try something that is probably politically crazy, but we are going to walk through the financing of Medicare next week. I am going to walk through how it actually works, because some people think the magic trust fund pays for everything. The general fund, which is all borrowed here, pays for about 40 percent of it. In conversations, even with my brothers and sisters here, and even with some of the staff, they are not understanding the complexity. Once again, the Social Security trust fund is empty in 6.5 years, and the Medicare trust fund is empty in 6.5 years. We go from $1 trillion last year in Medicare spending to $2 trillion in 7 years. It is demographics. It is baby boomers. Hell, I am one of them. I am just on the younger side. Look, I am crazy. I am 63, my wife is 63, and we have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old we have adopted. That is being optimistic about the future. We need a society to get this to work. We have a paper in our office that was written by a bunch of freaky smart economists out of Cambridge and Boston saying if you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- and I said this last week, but I am trying to get it to burn into people's psyches--for a baby born today, you need 104 percent of that child's lifetime income just to pay government pensions--Federal Government, not State, just Federal Government. Does anyone see the immorality, the craziness that is going on? We are all terrified to tell the truth about this because we make our voters mad because partially the political class has lied to the voters for so many years about our finances. We are going to come back and start to walk through the math of--you have seen of some of the proposals on Medicare Advantage. The White House is coming back and saying they are going to just cap the growth. You saw many of these Medicare Advantage companies' stocks just crater. We believe we have a much more elegant solution, and actually may come in at a much bigger savings, is to realign the incentives. I love the Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, 55 percent of our brothers and sisters who are on Medicare use Medicare Advantage. But the incentive for the insurance company that is managing it should be not trying to constantly build risk models to raise the cost to get in more cash. How about we do this: Get rid of the risk adjustment, get rid of the star rating, and just do something very simple: Give us a bid, and you make money by helping those you are insuring be healthier. It is a crazy concept, but the basic concept of a capitated model was, hey, these insurers will profit by doing their job well. You have got to put in protections so it is not denial of services and not denial of access to pharmaceuticals. But if you fix those things, there are models around the country that have worked amazingly well. Sometimes you have to have discussions that--it may have to be more than 1 year; you may have to have 3 years with opt-outs if you don't like your insurer--so they will invest in you to be healthier, maybe even buy you the technology, buy you the things to do that, and make a profit. We are right now going to have to make a decision as a body. Are we going into the command and control and try to starve the beast, or are we going to build a model that incentivizes doing it better, faster, cheaper, and in this case, much, much healthier. We are looking at right now over $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years of just Medicare being financed with debt, just debt. Now, add in what is left in the trust fund, add in what is coming out of your payroll taxes--I know it is political suicide around here to tell the truth about programs like this. But if you want it to survive, we just get the math right. I can make it work. It is not going to make some people completely happy. We can make the math work, but you first have to accept the fact that there is a problem. We have got a big problem. Next week, Mr. Speaker, I am going to come back, and we are just going to walk through the opportunity of how we preserve these programs using a calculator. I know Congress is often a math-free zone, but let's give it a try. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, shall we have some fun with math and economics? It is something we just don't hear a lot of here on the floor of the House. Remember, this is my therapy because I often sit in the back of the room and stew when I hear people say things when it is obvious they didn't pull their calculator out. I am going to try two things tonight, and if you are actually interested in budgets and economics, have fun with me. If you are not, go watch Netflix. We are going to actually try a couple concepts, where the money is going and within that, the scale of our debt and deficits. The fact of the matter is, we are at what is called interest fragility that--think about what happened over the last couple days in the discussions coming from the White House, from us. The bond market actually bounced up about 30 basis points. We were just playing on the back of napkins, the math, and if that had held for an entire year, just those 30 basis points would have been $33 billion of additional interest. I will try to actually explain that and then actually talk about something that is really interesting. The economy from a GDP calculation standpoint, and this is just the economists looking at the vitality in the economy, is remarkably good. We are running over a 5 percent GDP, which if you go back and look at the economic projections, it is double what many of our smartest economists in the country thought we would be at a year ago, but our spending--because of interest and healthcare and the reality that we are going to have to deal with is debt, deficits, and demographics. Once again, remember, we functionally have the same number of 18 year olds today as we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of 65 and up. It is just what we are. Don't get mad. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just demographics and understanding when our brothers and sisters move into their earned benefit years, what it costs. The fact of the matter is, this Congress refuses to do the hard things because in 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty and you get a 24 percent cut in your check and we double senior poverty. We double the number of baby boomers who will live on the street. In 6\1/2\, 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty and your hospital gets an 11 percent cut and much of the financing things like Medicare Advantage and those actually just become, let's just say, difficult. Let's walk through some of this. I pulled up this chart because I haven't used it in a few months and I am realizing there are not enough folks, particularly the staff--remember, I often do these because I am talking to a thousand televisions around the campus. The room looks empty, but we are on televisions. Hopefully, there are some staffers who are working on policy who will understand how important these numbers are. Do you see the blue portion of that chart, Mr. Speaker? That is discretionary. That is all you and I get to vote on. As Members of Congress, we only vote on the discretionary portion, and this was a 2025 chart. Today, it is probably only 25 percent, not 26 percent, of the total spending. Every dime of that is borrowed. Mr. Speaker, the math for last year, for every dollar we took in, in tax receipts, we spent $1.43. We were just in the back. I was talking with one of my Joint Economic economists. We think it is lower this year but we are still not-- because we are having to make the adjustments on the student loans and those sorts of things, it could be down to $1.37 or $1.40 this year. Think about that. Last year, for every dollar that came in, we spent $1.43. Realize all this in the red is on autopilot, and a portion of it is actually on borrowed money. If you just do the hierarchy, every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime of nondefense discretionary is borrowed. That is only about $2 trillion. A wedge of the mandatory also ends up being borrowed. There is one other thing I want to point out in the chart. If you actually take a look at the hierarchy of spending, Social Security is number one. It is $1.5 trillion. Guess what is number two if you do the total interest paid. It is interest. Here is interest to the public who bought our bonds, whether it be your pension plan as an individual or another country, or the interest we have to pay back to the trust funds when we reach into the Social Security trust fund, the Medicare trust fund, the railroad retirement trust fund, and those things. We borrow the money. We owe them interest. Total interest last year was about $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in this government. Medicare is number three. Medicaid and healthcare subsidies are number four. Defense is actually number five. I always love it--I often have these conversations back home when I have a Democrat who says: Well, if you cut defense. Then they look at me in horror when I ask them if they realize that in the hierarchy of spending, defense is actually the fifth biggest expenditure in Government. This one is actually good news of some of what is happening. This is actually one of my favorite charts because it actually demonstrates here is our tax receipts as a percentage of the economy. We were basically getting about 17.1 percent of the economy. We have some new math right now. It says we are probably peaking over 18 percent, maybe even higher, of the economy coming in, in tax receipts. That is wonderful except for one really yucky thing. Remember last year, when we were up, getting 17.1 percent of the economy in taxes, we functionally were spending 23.4 percent. That delta is the deficit. What happens when your tax receipts are going up as a percentage of the size of the economy and the economy is growing but healthcare and interest are going up faster? Are we going to tell the truth about that? Here are basic factoids. I did this last week, but I want to say it again because it doesn't seem to be sinking in. In about 33 or 36 months, half of every dime that the Federal Government spends, 50 percent of all of our spending will go to those 65 and up. Moody's Analytics has in 2035--what is that--8 or 9 budget years from now--30 percent of all tax receipts going just to interest. There was an interesting economic paper. It was actually an economic paper demonstrating that Italy actually was more fiscally sound in the long term than the United States. When you see that headline, you sit down and read it, within there was a factoid. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate, which is reasonable--it could be slightly high--for a child born today, you need 104 percent of their lifetime earnings just to pay Federal pension obligations. Those are Social Security, Medicare, military, and Federal requirement. Mr. Speaker, think of that. For a child born today, you need every dime they will ever make in their entire life, plus another 4 percent, to pay pension obligations. Does anyone see the immorality going on? But we can't talk about that because that would be hard. I believe the American people are a hell of a lot smarter than we are. They are ready for us to tell them the truth about math. One of the first things we as the political class have to do is stop lying about math. Let's actually walk through some of this, and I will blast through these because I am trying to make a point. Also, before I go much further, if someone actually wants to bathe in the truth in math and what the future looks like and how we can fix it, go to the Joint Economic Committee Republicans. We publish some amazing things. Every weekday, we do a text message to a few thousand people we call the Daily Debt. It shows how much came in and how much we spent. We give you a 12-month window so it fixes ups and downs. We will also give you the fiscal year as it sits. Mr. Speaker, I just got my Daily Debt text message. We are borrowing over $71,000 every second. That is the 12-month calculation. It makes up all the highs and lows and averages out. You have got to understand that this ain't a game because that $71,000 a second, we need to have buyers of our bonds. We make our buyers of our bonds cranky. It gets really expensive. This chart here is just trying to make a point of what is going on in our debt and deficits. Remember that discretionary spending, the blue on the pie chart I just showed you, is flat. It is not growing. Yes, there is waste and fraud in it. We need to eliminate that. We actually believe technology would eliminate that, except I can't believe how the bureaucracies are terrified of the technology that can find the waste and fraud. Our growth is in the mandatory spending. It is the promises we have made that we have got to keep but we have got to figure out a way to finance it. What this chart is showing is we see this slightly darker color here. That is the primary deficit. That is actually programs that we are spending more money than we have coming in. All of this lighter purple is the interest we owe. The point we are making is this. If we have a $2 trillion deficit this year but interest is $1.2 trillion, interest now is the primary driver. Number two is healthcare costs. We just have this problem of telling the truth about healthcare costs are out of control. In many States, the government is the primary--is the majority of money spent in healthcare. Let's have some fun here. I know we are all interested in bonds and how they refinance. Remember, if you have $38.5 trillion of debt out there, over $30 trillion of that is sold. That is what they call publicly held debt. About one-third of that--and I was going to show the charts of all the papers and the notes and the bonds. I realized no one cares. About one-third of that--let's call it $10 billion--has to be refinanced this year. Much of that is coming off of lower bond prices from a couple of years ago. On average, we are picking up one point of interest, 1.5 points, some 2. There is your problem. The chart here--I am just trying to show you--is we have to constantly refinance. We are refinancing at higher interest rates because we are making the markets cranky. We are not telling the bond markets that we are serious about taking on our debt and deficit. Mr. Speaker, have you ever heard the term ``bond vigilantes''? It happened to the United States in the 1990s where, suddenly, we were making the bond markets cranky. They were starting to demand premiums. Our debt was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what it is today. We are on the cusp of putting the bond market in charge of this country, not us. It is a really dangerous game we are playing. One of the ways we mitigate that is we tell the bond market: We are adults. We are being serious. We understand we have a demographic. We have a healthcare spending problem. We are going to take it on. We are going to adopt technologies. We are going to adopt other ways to make our brothers and sisters healthy. We are going to telegraph to the markets we are stable. We are America. We are the incredible investment. If you think I am engaging in hyperbole, look at the price of gold. If the price of gold isn't telegraphing something to you, go back to your basic economics class. There is something really wrong out there. We are making markets nervous. It is estimated that, from fiscal year 2025 to fiscal year 2026, we are going to have to borrow--this is what we call virgin borrowing; it is new issuances--about $470 billion a quarter. That is less than $2 trillion, but it is pretty darn close. That is on top of what we have to refinance. When you start to get a sense of what we are bringing to the bond markets, it is more than just the borrowing. It is the refinance. We are subject to the interest rates. We need to be understanding. Convince the people who are loaning us money, whether it be your personal pension, your savings account, Japan, whoever is buying our debt, that we are stable, that we are adults, and that we understand. We have a demographic problem, but we are going to engage in adult-like technology and borrowing policy, things to manage our debt, and minimize it. Mr. Speaker, this chart is substantially unreadable, but I wanted to actually just show it for the fun of it. This is one of the things that we use in our economic shop, where we try to actually say: Okay, here is 1 year. If it went up \1/2\ percent, that 1 year costs $206 billion over 10 years. It is basically a table that says that if interest rates pop up this much, and it only lasts for 1 year or 2 years, here is what it will cost us over the 10-year window. The whole point of this chart is to start to demonstrate so many of the things we talked about here. We are going to save $1 billion. That is a lot of money. We believe, annualized, we are going to borrow over $6 billion a day. In the first quarter of the fiscal year, we are borrowing over $8 billion a day. The arguments here and the debates we will have here, often to save money, which are wonderful, we will have borrowed more money during the debate than whatever the item being debated would have ever saved, because: How do you talk about the drivers of debt? The other thing we also have to deal with is when we get our policies wrong, when we make the bond markets nervous, when they don't see that we are fixated on debt management, fiscal reality, and interest rates go up on U.S. sovereigns. They raise everything. It is more than just the money we spend. Mr. Speaker, we had months last year when we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. That is partially because the tax collection cycle goes up and down, but we raise your credit card. We raise your car. We raise everything. When we screw up U.S. sovereigns, we make bond markets nervous. They go up 30 basis points. You have to understand that just raised every cost for borrowing up and down through the economy. It is more than just when I sit here and spout about saying that we are going to pay this much in interest. Think about what we did to the American families, businesses, small businesses, and farmers. We somehow seem detached from the reality of the math. Let's actually talk about where some of the money is going and why we have to do such borrowing. CBO, 2025, Medicare accuracy, they actually did okay, but okay when talking $1 trillion is, hey, they only missed it by around 7 percent. That turns out to be around $70 billion of spending. Medicare, 2025 outlays increased by $77 billion, 8 percent. CBO was projecting only $51 billion. From this scale of accounting, it is pretty accurate, but you have to understand that we are looking at an environment right now where we expect Medicare spending to double, to go from $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next 7 years. So far, every healthcare chart I have where we are looking at what the closing numbers for the 2025 fiscal year, they are all in excess of what we projected. If you start to have a world where you are sitting at 7 percent medical inflation, even if you have tax receipts going up 3 percent or 4 percent, we are borrowing more money. Let's actually take another look at one of these. Major healthcare programs were up $150 billion over the previous year, and the major healthcare programs came in at a 9-percent increase from the previous years. Does anyone see a math problem? You have an economy right now that is growing at 5 percent. It is amazing. Yet, our spending, when you tack in the interest rates, the healthcare spending--if healthcare spending is over 9 percent, you have a math problem. Then, the argument we have from our Democrats is: But we need to subsidize more. We have turned healthcare into financial engineering instead of helping our brothers and sisters be healthier. Legalize the technology. Legalize the processes. Do you realize that so many things where you could crash the price of healthcare, this body actually keeps illegal? We are going to do a number of healthcare bills. Every single one of them is wonderful, except for one small problem: There are rounding errors. I love, love, love price transparency. I don't believe you can have functioning markets without price transparency. Every academic paper I have in my office says it is only about \1/2\ percent of price improvement. Yet, major healthcare programs, there is a 9-percent increase in spending. You get \1/2\ percent, and in a single year, I have 9-percent growth in spending. Does anyone see a mismatch? Great policy, great rhetoric, sounds great on the campaign trail, and it doesn't save us. Now, for those folks who know--how do I say this nicely? I like Medicare Advantage. It is called Medicare part C if you are geeky. The majority of our brothers and sisters on Medicare actually are on Medicare Advantage. It is functionally supposed to be a managed care optionality for your healthcare. So, you get a network. You know what your benefits are. We have a problem. We have these things called MedPAC reports. I have a stack of them on my desk. On my desk, if you open them up, which I am sure every Member of Congress opens them up and goes through them, it will tell you that Medicare Advantage right now is costing 120 percent of fee-for-service. Medicare Advantage, which came into effect in 2005, is supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for-service. That is a 25 percent delta. We have been looking at charts and data and trying to say: Hey, we want to protect Medicare Advantage. That is what seniors have chosen. They like it. Can we actually get rid of the risk scoring and some of the games being played with the star ratings, where they are milking the system, because think of that? MedPAC reports basically say that there is almost $2 trillion of misalignment and fraud over 10 years. That is actually the biggest in government. I know some people have problems with the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. A trillion is really big. Look at this chart here: Overpayment Per MA Beneficiary. This is done by the MedPAC report, so this wasn't even done by my economists. This is done by a room full of people who just specialize in Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, in 2025, 14--actually, I think that comes out to $1.25 trillion, but this also comes to $200 billion, I believe, of misspending. Am I reading that correctly? Yes. When you see $1.4 trillion, and over $200 billion is in the MedPAC report as being bad payments, misalignments, abuse, taking advantage of the system, waste and fraud, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to do a second reconciliation, I would propose that one of the most moral and rational economic things that we can do is let's just fix Medicare Advantage and put it back to how it is supposed to work. I know we have armies of lobbyists in our hallways here trying to stop us. Can you imagine why? If there is a couple of hundred billion dollars in play, they are going to absolutely knife us to stop us from doing the reforms. Are we tough enough to do what is right for the American people for the next generation? Think of this, Mr. Speaker: I have a 3-year-old. Yes, my wife is my age. We adopted a little boy--same birth mom as our little girl. When my 3-year-old is about 23 years old, every tax in the United States has to be doubled just to maintain baseline spending. Is that moral? Mr. Speaker, you have kids. Is this the America where the next generation always gets to prosper more? That is not the model now. The next generation is going to be poorer, and it doesn't have to be. We are on the cusp of amazing technologies--synthetic biology, cures for diseases, things we can do that can make this another American century. We just need to tell the truth about the math and policy instead of the theatrics that go on in this place. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the six or seven people who have been willing to listen to me. There is a way to make this work. It just turns out that it is really hard. Are we ready to do hard things for the country and then go home to try to explain it to our voters that we are doing the right thing for them? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, as a mercy to the poor staff here, I am not going to use the whole half an hour. I am just going to try to run through a couple of concepts. I did a little tripping up of some details last week, where we were trying to explain some of the things we see going on in the math. I want to walk through a concept. We actually, right now, as a country, are remarkably blessed. The GDP growth, the economic growth, is actually well beyond almost any of what even my economists were predicting over the last year. We are seeing some data right now--if you actually look at the Atlanta Fed, GDPNow, nowcasts, some of these--we could hit a five- handle this quarter, which is remarkable. Looking at some of the data from the third quarter of 2025, it looks like the number of a 4.3 percent GDP growth is going to hold up. These numbers are actually remarkable, and I want to make a point here for the annualized 2025 GDP number. I know this is geeky. There is a point I am going to come to, and that is the irony that tax collections don't look as robust as the economy. We are going to try to explain what is going on. This is why getting policy right is going to become so critical. The first quarter of last year, so 1 year ago this quarter, we actually had negative GDP. The first quarter, when the Trump administration started, when our new Congress started, we actually had to go through 3 months of slower growth. Then, it wasn't until the second quarter, third quarter, and now we believe the fourth quarter-- we don't have that final number in yet--we finally hit the acceleration pedal. What is going on out there? We had this irony happening where we have really actually stable and much broader economic growth than we expected. We are actually seeing some odd things. Actually, the labor force participation is pretty flat. We had a small tick up in some of the last unemployment data. Also, if you look at this chart here, we are trying to explain the difference. Here is the number of folks who are entering the labor force. They are working. Here is the number of folks who are available for work. When we start to get to 4 percent or 4.6 percent unemployment, we are actually, if we look at our historic average, even the last 25 years, that is almost full employment. Do you see this curve here? It is basically starting to demonstrate the demographics of America. It is also sort of the demographics of the entire industrialized world. You have a situation where today we functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago. Today, we also have almost double the number of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up than 25 years ago. That is creating an interesting irony. We actually take a look here at what we call tax receipts. Most people like to call them tax collections. If you are on Ways and Means, they are tax receipts. Look at this interesting spike here. That is actually tax receipts. That is good. Almost every dime we see on this chart of the real growth is actually capital gains. It is those who have had assets. It is those who have sold real estate. It is those who have sold stocks. The tax receipts really coming in from labor are good. They are stable, but they are not growing nearly in sympathy--if you can play economist words--in sympathy to the GDP growth. This is an important part of what I wanted to share. I am trying--I hate this term--to socialize the concept. What happens when you are producing growth because we have a lot of growth policies that are right? Last summer, earlier in the year, where investment is going into plant, equipment, data centers, AI, and all of these things are happening, wage growth is actually okay. It is actually outpacing inflation now, finally, thank Heaven. Yet the real GDP growth is coming from that capital spend and not from wage and new employment and the demand for labor. Understand why this is a problem. We are an income-tax-base country. There are income taxes on businesses, but mostly the income tax base is on working--and also FICA, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, and unemployment tax; those are taxed on your wages. We are starting to see this irony where we are actually doing some data where we ask what happens when you hit this type of GDP growth and, at the same time, the amount of borrowing and debt in the country is still going to stay remarkably high. We still have a model that we think will be a bit less, but we could still be approaching $2 trillion of borrowing this year. I hope we are wrong, but you have to understand that the first quarter of this fiscal year, I think we were borrowing about $90,000 a second. So far this fiscal year--so we are, what, 3 months and 10 or 11 days into it--I think we have now borrowed $800 billion. Sometime. Maybe before this month is over, we are going to have borrowed another $1 trillion. This time, it wasn't 3 months. It might be coming in at 4 months. We shouldn't be seeing those types of borrowing with this type of economic growth. The point I am going to make is: Why is the borrowing going up? Look at the spending data. I didn't bring all of those charts because they are exhausting, but if you take a look at interest, remember that we have to refinance $10 trillion or maybe $11 trillion this year. That means that the bonds that were sold in the past have to come back to market, refinance, and they are being refinanced, for many of them, at much higher interest rates. The other thing is healthcare, but it is healthcare, Medicare. We have a model that says that now, in less than 6\1/2\ to 7 years, Medicare will go from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Also, in 7 years, Medicare is gone. Excuse me. Let me rephrase that. The Medicare trust fund is gone, and that will result in around an 11 percent cut, particularly to hospitals. It is demographics. Baby boomers are moving into their peak utilization years of these benefits. We are functioning, I think in the last 3 years or 4 years of baby boomers moving into the age of 65 and getting their earned benefits, so you see the shift in the labor market. What happens if the formulas that I had come behind these microphones for years and said: That if we could grow another point of GDP, it is this many hundreds of billions of dollars of tax receipts, and now it isn't. I know this is geeky, but it is really, really important because it means many of the budget documents that the brain trust around here talk about, we may be getting wrong--many of the solutions we have had for taking on debt and deficits. There is a piece of legislation. I am absolutely elated. I am trying to get on it. It basically says: Look, let's do a debt and deficit commission, like we did BRAC many, many years ago to close excess military bases, and let's go for 3 percent of GDP growth. Madam Speaker, there is a problem with that number. Just our interest coverage is over 3 percent of our economy. So we are going to take spending and get it down to 3 percent. Great. So we are going to stop borrowing so much, except just the interest we pay is bigger than that. Does anyone see the math problem? So this is actually the punch line I have been trying to head toward. This is a chart that sort of shows labor as a percentage of income. I am sorry, but this is actually really important when you are trying to design how you finance your government. We are hitting a time way down here. This is 2024 because that is the last sort of good data point that I have. We actually believe it has actually fallen further. For years, 64 percent, and there may have been times when we crossed over to 66 percent of our income basically came from labor that financed the government. Today, we are down to touching--actually, we may be as low as 53 percent. That is a huge difference, and it is going to force us--those who care about the economics, those of us on the Ways and Means Committee who actually have to do tax policy, those who actually are paying attention to our bonds and our promise to pay back $30 trillion- plus of publicly sold debt, and another $8.5 trillion that we have borrowed internally. How do we pay it back? We are going to have to start thinking about the taxation on labor. It is going to become a problem. I want to bounce around a little bit because, a couple of days ago, we got some of the inflation data, but with that also came some of the State and localized inflation data. I thought this one was interesting. I am going to be a little caustic on it, but I haven't had as much coffee today, so I am not wound up as tight, so at least I am not speaking like a machine gun. We thought this was interesting. Increase in monthly costs in Arizona, and we thought we would do a snapshot. I am blessed that I represent the Phoenix, Scottsdale area. So between January 2021 to September 2021, so we are actually doing the same snapshot of time, if you lived in the Phoenix area, you functionally lost $1,597 to inflation. That is for the average family. Now we come here to 2025. It is still not as good as we demand that we get it to, but it is now $944, a $653 savings. That is 1 year of the success of Republicans lowering inflation. We have to get it further, but we actually see how bad it was before because this was the inflation that was handed to this country during Biden's first year, and then we start to take a look at the progress. We are making progress. It is not as good as I want, but understand this is the reality of the math. Madam Speaker, I have a fixation that we tell the truth and sort of get an understanding of some of the math. One of the most difficult things is that we have been trying to figure out how do we make sure we preserve our promises. We owe a promise for Medicare. We owe a promise for Social Security. We have to deal with the reality that, in less than 3 years, over half of everything that this Congress will spend--so over half of everything that the Federal Government will spend--will go to people who are 65 and up. Why that is just an amazing thing to think about. In the 1970s, for every dollar that went to those who were 65 and up, there were $6 to $7 spent for those who were 18 and younger. Today, that is flipped. It is just demographics. It is not some evil plot. It is a combination of the baby boomers, a big population bubble, and healthcare got dramatically more expensive. Last week, I did a presentation here and basically showed where Democrats are turning healthcare into financial engineering instead of the incentives to do it better, faster, and cheaper. We have turned healthcare into--remember the whole debate here on subsidies on top of subsidies? When you turn healthcare into financing instead of helping people be healthier, you have screwed up the economics and the incentives, and we start to look at charts like this. Now, this is Medicare Advantage. I am actually a big fan of what you call Medicare part C, Medicare Advantage. The chart is a little bit distorted because it doesn't really give you the population statistics, but we believe that this year, 55 percent of the population of this country that are in Medicare is going to choose a Medicare Advantage plan. Okay. But we aren't telling the truth about the math. There is this thing that is called the MedPAC reports. They are big orange reports like this, hundreds and hundreds of pages. If we go through them, there will be this section in there that says that it turns out Medicare Advantage is coming in, according to the MedPAC report--and this is the roomful of people that specialize in this and, I hate to say, my own joint economic economist, the CMS data and HHS data, and The Wall Street Journal, everyone else looks into this--it is coming in at 120 percent of fee for service. Why this is a big deal is when Medicare Advantage was designed--it really came into effect in 2005--Senator Frist, who is a doctor--they put together a plan with this idea that we are going to do managed care. The insurance companies, which are going to be basically the gatekeeper, are going to make profit by helping our brothers and sisters on the program be healthier. The model was it was going to come in at 95 percent of fee for service. Today, it comes in at 120 percent of fee for service. That 25 percent, Madam Speaker, over 10 years is $2 trillion. When we show a chart like this of the transition that has been happening for traditional fee for service Medicare to now Medicare Advantage, fine, but we are going to have to have the honest discussion of how do we get the incentives lined up. I saw what Senator Grassley published yesterday--and I was going to bring the report out here and use it as a prop and show it to you, but it is like this. It basically talks about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. Look, the report, I am only a third through it, but it is example after example of Medicare Advantage insurers signing either having companies or their own folks go out and knock on grandma's door and score them as sicker and, therefore, getting bonuses for having a sicker population. The Wall Street Journal almost 2 years ago did a major expose on a person. I think they were in Sun City, Arizona, and the insurance company had scored them I think as having HIV, except the problem is this person didn't have that. They had never been tested for it. However, the insurance company was getting a bonus for that. It is called risk scoring. We are going to have to consider moving to a model that says we are not going to let you go and score people differently. We want to create a model where it is put in the initial pricing of the program, and then you make money by helping the senior population be healthier. There are so many miracles right now, the technology can be worn, the ways you can keep track, the ways of telehealth, digital health, all these other things. We want a system that incentivizes investing in people's health instead of profiting from claiming they are sicker. People have got to understand, there is actually a piece of legislation to do this. Preliminary scores, $1.84 trillion of savings. We are going to fight, knife fight, complain, cry, and fuss at each other over things that are absolutely tiny. We have been told this piece of legislation actually is the biggest savings bill in U.S. history. I beg of anyone that actually cares about these subjects of taking on debt and deficits, help us. Help us explain it to our brothers and sisters. Help us take on what will be, let's be honest, a barrage of hate from the brokers, from the insurance companies that don't want a system that lines up the incentives properly. These were the incentives of the original design of Medicare Advantage, and it got perverse by ObamaCare. They changed parts of the quality ratings that created another bonus system that could be manipulated. Congress can fix things like this, but are we allowed to actually say: We are going to fix something on Medicare. So often, that sets off fear. Did I mention in the beginning here, you have got less than 7 years and the Medicare trust fund is gone. If we are going to preserve these earned entitlements--these are earned programs. You worked for years. You earned this. This was part of the societal contract. People like me here, we have got to figure out how to finance this, keep it going. Yet it is almost a sin around here to talk about the problems, the fact we are hemorrhaging cash, we are borrowing. This year, for every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we are going to spend $1.43. The Moody's model says in 8 years interest will consume 30 percent of all of our tax receipts. This isn't a game. We have got to stop the juvenile discussions we have around here and start facing the really big, difficult things ahead of us. This is us. It may look like a chart with a handful of different blues on it, but this is actually us as a people. What this chart is telling us is that in less than 3 years, over half of all of our spending in this government will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. If that is the societal deal we made, we made it; but we have an obligation as Members of Congress to make it work. If we know there is hundreds of billions of dollars--let's not use the word ``fraud''-- being misallocated--let's get fancy on the language, we will call it misallocated--why wouldn't everyone line up with us? I would argue the army of lobbyists outside our doors here who lose their mind every time I talk about this, who scare the crap out of us, we have still got to do the right thing. Someone running for the United States Senate today, in your first term--if you are blessed enough to win--you are going to have to deal with the fact the Social Security trust fund is gone, the Medicare trust fund is gone. Our preliminary math says in 2033, the first year that those trust funds are gone, it is $638 billion just to make up that shortfall. This isn't a game. These are numbers that should terrify you. Yet for anyone who is crazy enough to be watching C-SPAN, how many times have you seen this week, last week, the week before that Members come behind these mikes and talk to you about the real issues that will change this Republic, or have we just decided we are going to let the bond market basically run this country, and we are going to just keep pretending we can keep spending like this? Much of that spending is not Democrat policy, Republican policy. Look, I think much of the Democrat policy is absolutely absurd, but much of it is demographics. In the early 1990s, and even going back further, we have had dramatically fewer children. Remember, Madam Speaker pro tempore, we model--the United States will be close to almost zero population growth this year. If you have a Pay- As-You-Go system, it is really hard to make that math work. Do you still let the scams, the misalignments, the taking advantage of these systems, the fraud go on? It means we are going to have to talk about it. We are going to have to dive into it. We are going to have to take on an army of lobbyists. They are probably going to run nasty ads against all of us because it is so much money. Let's step up and do the hard things. Let's step up and do the right things. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I was actually going to come here and do some things on demographics and some things that are optimistic, but I actually think we should first jump into the fact that we work in a math-free zone. If you listen to the people coming behind the microphones, particularly today, it is as if they have read none of the CBO reports, none of the HHS reports, or the other things, particularly in regard to the ACA, which are subsidies. They are subsidies on top of subsidies to insurance companies. Did you read the reports? Last year, 41 percent of those subsidies on subsidies of the people that had the enhanced subsidies paid no premium, so they had no skin in the game, which is not what we were promised when ObamaCare came into existence a dozen years ago. We actually showed an economic report. I did entire floor speeches on it showing that only a third of that $35 billion, $40 billion a year subsidy on top of the subsidies actually goes to healthcare. We also showed that a third of the folks never made a claim because now we are finding rampant fraud of people who were signed up because if they don't have a premium to pay, they had brokers signing them up, and they had no idea they had coverage. Where is the passion to actually deal with the fact that particularly the left--and I have got to blame my brothers and sisters on the Republican side, we have done the same. We have turned healthcare into financial engineering, instead of having it be about the cost, access, and delivery of having our brothers and sisters get healthier. Is it you have sold your soul to the insurance companies? Remember, the ACA model is an insurance company model. You promised them rates of return, you promised them a market, so this is 7 percent of the healthcare market, and 94 percent of that 7 percent gets a subsidy. Let's actually do math because you have been listening to--oh, yeah, there has been actually no math today as people talked about subsidies on top of subsidies. The CBO report that updated yesterday--and I can do this off the top of my head--basically said the 3 years cost $80 billion. The reason it is lower than my $105 billion is because they made an assumption that this year, if the Senate were to pass these, that there will be a delayed sign-up, so there will be half a year or so where people--but if they did a claw back, the actual number on these subsidies is about $105 billion. Okay. Even if you do the CBO's number of $80 billion for 3 years of subsidies on top of subsidies, and then you put in the 10 years of interest, you know, because of the interest window, this costs $111 billion. Understand what the left is telling you. They are basically saying they don't give a damn about healthcare. It is financing. If we wanted to change the price of healthcare, we would actually be looking at the innovations that are going on and start to legalize them, but there are too many damn lobbyists walking up and down our hallways here trying to stop us. Look, here is an article from 2 days ago. Bless the State of Utah. If you are like me--I have hypertension. Can you imagine that? I have had it since I was a teenager. I take a calcium inhibitor. It lowers my blood pressure. Hopefully, I don't pop an aneurysm, but every 90 days, I have to pick up the phone to renew a doctor's prescription or go visit the doctor, even though it is the same prescription I have had for decades. Utah just created AI that will take my data and renew my prescription. It will save a fortune for the people of Utah--cost, access, not subsidies. Stanford medical reviewed basically being able to use certain wearables. Their new AI model predicts disease risk as you sleep from over 100 health conditions. They take some data as you are sleeping off your wearables, and boom, basically you are wearing a medical lab. Except the problem is, it is not allowed to prescribe. That would be illegal because that would require us to actually do things, modernize access to healthcare, use the technology to crash--oh, we can't use technology to crash the price. It would really annoy a whole bunch of the lobbyists. People are lined up at our doors. People would show up at our fundraisers. OpenAI chat health to connect data from health apps medical records-- there is a revolution coming where we as people of America can stay dramatically healthier. Why aren't we doing the discussion of what to do to lower the price of healthcare instead of having debates of another $100 billion that goes on the very credit cards of the people who get--the insurance companies that get the subsidy that only as--our model is 38 percent of that subsidy actually ends up going into healthcare. We are still trying to figure out where the hell the rest of the money went. Have we lost our minds? Why is it so much easier to just keep borrowing money and borrowing money and borrowing money and say: I am giving you something, but I am putting it on your credit card. It is like we are engaging in a level of financial lunacy here. Now, let's actually go on to the even more difficult part of this discussion. I am doing this because I want us to start to have a benchmark. If there is anyone out there listening that has ever had to tolerate--because I have been doing these for a decade, and I am just exhausted. I am frustrated. I am angry. My brothers and sisters here, Democrat and Republican, I like most of these people, and I am crushed. I am just absolutely intellectually, emotionally, even physically crushed at the inability to tell the truth. We don't want to tell the truth because our constituents get pissed off at us when we walk them through the math. The constituents look back and say, so you have been lying or the politicians have been lying to us for decades. The answer is yes, but it is not Democratic. It is not Republican. Much of the crisis that we are facing is demographic. I am not going to explain all of this chart, but I am basically going to tell you, if you look at the financial lines on this chart, Mr. Speaker, it basically says, in 3 years, over half the money this Federal Government spends will go to those 65 and up. In 3 years, half the money we spend will go to those 65 and up. Now, I need you to work through something with me. I have already presented the Moody's Analytics report that is saying, in 8 years from now, 30 percent of our spending, 30 percent of tax collections, will go just to interest. You are now seeing, in 3 years, the majority of our spending will actually go to benefits here. We have a math problem. Today, we have fewer 18 year olds than we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of 65 year olds. We can sit here and blame each other, but it is just demographics. It is happening over the entire industrialized world, but we are not allowed to actually have an honest discussion about it because the moment you say something, the other side is writing political commercials to rip your face off because you told the truth about math and demographics. It is real simple. Mr. Speaker, you are going to run for U.S. Senate. In your next term, the Medicare trust fund is empty. The Social Security trust fund is empty. It takes that first year, 2033, to just cover that shortfall that is over $638 billion. If you don't fix it, you double senior poverty. You double the number of baby boomers who will live on the street, and everyone's Social Security check has a 24 percent cut. How many people have you heard this week get behind the microphones and say maybe we should actually start to adopt technology, modernization, deal with the reality of our fiscal cliff that is coming? Instead, I watch a parade of my brothers and sisters here say: I have an idea. It costs more money, but it is a really good idea. Let's just put it on the credit card. It is out of order, but I will get to it. I am going to say it a couple of times because I did a presentation of a report from I think it is the Massachusetts or Boston economic council, freaky smart professors. If you use a 6 percent discount rate, which you can argue something lower, but sometimes you have to talk about math. A child born today, you need 104 percent of that child's lifetime income, so more money than they make in their entire lifetime, just to cover Federal pension benefits, Social Security, Medicare, military, Federal employees, and railroad retirement. Does anyone care? Does anyone care? What is wrong with this place? The immorality that the next generation will be poorer than us--but we are not allowed to say that because, let's be honest, people want more stuff. If we keep giving them more stuff, they vote for us. They might even contribute. Look, let's just continue to do some of the basic demographics. From 2004 to 2024, you see this one line here, those are 18-year-olds. Somewhat similar, but now you start to get to 2035 and start to understand, without immigration, you have a world where you functionally have more 65-year-olds than you have 18-year-olds. We are having debates right now. There is a report out that--now, it is not adjusted for self-deports--saying that the United States had about 400,000 as a first snapshot growth in 2025. We have another report that says the United States had zero population growth last year. We have another report that says the United States will have zero population growth this year. Mr. Speaker, are we going to tell the truth about math? You want our Social Security. You earned it. You deserve it. You want our Medicare. You earned it. You deserve it. In 7 years, both of those trust funds are empty. What are we going to do? The argument is we will just borrow more money because, God forbid, we have any conversation about the cost of delivering healthcare. That will upset someone's business model or bureaucracy's model. It is hard to read. The basic point was trying to show we are having terrific economic growth. I will show some slides here. With our GDP growth, some of the tax policies and some of the regulatory policies adopted in the last year are working. Our problems are spending. Almost all the spending growth is interest because we are refinancing. We have $30 trillion out there we have to bring to market over the next few years. I think this year refinance was going to be about $11 trillion. That is bonds, notes, and paper that come due, plus another $2 trillion probably in virgin. That is new issuances. They are subject to the higher interest rates today than we had 5 years ago. That is why our interest coverage costs have gotten so much more expensive. That is why if we do total interest from last year--the interest we also pay back to the trust funds from the money we borrowed from the trust funds--we spent $1.2 trillion on interest last year. Interest was the second biggest expense in this government last year, and it is getting worse. What happens when we produce economic growth? We see this in red here. Our debt projections are actually every bit as bad as last year. That means for every dollar we take in, in tax receipts--remember that our tax as a percentage of GDP is basically back to the mean that it has been for decades. For every dollar we take in, we will spend $1.43. That is $1 in and $1.43 out. How long can we carry that on, Mr. Speaker? Yet, you start looking at where we are demographically. What frustrates me is this is just what we are. There is not a magic: Well, we will suddenly have more children. Really? This is happening all over the industrialized world. We have countries that buy you a house on your third or fourth child, and it didn't increase fertility rates. Yet our pension systems were designed on four or five workers. Remember that Social Security and Medicare are pay as you go. We had a benefit of building reserves when the baby boomers were in the labor force. They ultimately were designed as pay as you go. I have been in a 50-50 district for years. The political consultants lose their minds. They tell me I am not allowed to talk about the truth in math, but no one here wants to go near it, not even the people in 20-point or 30-point partisan districts. Will anyone here help us plan for the future? This future is coming fast. We have economists now say we have functionally 3 years before we get in the interest cycle back and forth. I will try to explain that one of these days. You have to understand when we hit in--what was that? In 2020, we had 2.7 workers per Social Security retiree. We are actually getting to the point over here where we think we are down to 2.3. In the coming decades, it is even less. So you and your spouse, you and your partner, functionally have your own retired person. It is just to understand the basic economics of the math. Then we have the brain trusts who say we will just borrow the money each year. Did they hear the math? In 2033, the year the trust funds are empty, it is well over $600 billion. You are going to borrow basically half. That is 40 percent equal to what is the--well, actually almost 60 percent equal to today's defense budget. We will just throw that on the credit card. The next year it is bigger, and the next year it is bigger. There are good things happening. The GDP numbers, which means the baseline economic growth numbers, are remarkably healthy. There is huge investment going on right now in technology that could actually boost productivity. Therefore, it will boost wages. Where is the unified theory here? We are going to do another reconciliation where we are going to tell the markets that we will start limiting the spending so we get lower interest rates and so we can have more market growth. People can afford houses, all the input. Instead, you have a government that for every dollar we spend, we have to borrow another 43 cents. This is insane. I was going to try to walk through some things I consider really hopeful. These are the contributions to GDP growth. Many of these contributions in the GDP growth, if we can get our policies and our regulatory designed properly, we can get some pops and productivity. Pops and productivity means pops in people's wages and pops in tax collections. We have to get all the stars aligned at the right time. I just don't see us doing that because somehow it is not part of our lexicon. I will do presentations. We have too many people, particularly even on my side, who say things that aren't mathematically true. We hear something, and we repeat it. The customs duties, tariffs, are helpful. It is not as much money as so many people think. Mr. Speaker, I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on Ways and Means. I chair the Oversight Committee. I am the guy running a bunch of committees and am responsible for a number of these really uncomfortable investigations. I am blessed to have a staff that is a hell of a lot smarter than I would ever have hoped to have been at their age. We start to work out charts like this. I am going to make some people mad. As a matter of fact, I am not even going to bother with that one. I will walk us through the straight number. We are still vetting the number because we are doing predictions. All of this could mean nothing if the Supreme Court tomorrow changes its rules on the President's authority to do the enhanced tariffs--let's just call them that--and whatever authorities the President may have to supplement those tariffs. We have to understand our latest articles that we are looking at saying, for 2026, $215 billion of what we call customs receipts-- tariffs--the baseline, if there had been no changes, it would have been $84 billion. Mr. Speaker, is everyone working with me on this? That means there was $131 billion of new tariff money coming into the budget this fiscal year. If we pull out our calculator, so far in the first quarter of this fiscal year, we have been borrowing $8 billion a day. We are hoping it actually comes back to the mean of being about $6 billion. Let's do $131 billion divided by 8. We functionally are covering 2 weeks of borrowing. It is helpful. It is not a solution. Yet I will do the speech. I ask anyone who is watching if they have some suggestions of how I can actually start to break through because I am exhausted. Then I will watch someone come up. I am sitting in my office, and I am watching the floor. On occasion, I will pull out my calculator. I am just enraged because of the mathematical lying that goes on behind these microphones over and over. This is the survival of our Republic. Let's actually do something that is semi-optimistic here. Let's look at waste and fraud. I had a meeting with a wonderful woman the other day. She actually is involved in our county party. She is really smart and absolutely lovely. I hope I misheard her. She seemed to believe that if we just didn't have that fraud in Minnesota, we could have covered a whole bunch of our national debt. She was genuinely concerned. It sounds like she was trying to quote what she actually thought she heard on cable news. Mr. Speaker, I had to walk her through saying, okay, here is the best projection. Remember, some of this fraud may have happened over a decade. We are still getting all the numbers. There have already been a number of prosecutions, ``Minneapolis woman pleads guilty in $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.'' She stole $250 million. There are a number of these articles that I have here, but you still have to do the math. The fraud, just to give you an idea of the scale of our Nation's borrowing, is only a couple of days of borrowing. How do I help people understand the perspective of the scale and the fact that everything that we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed? If you told me today that I have to balance the budget, I can do it. Every part of government has to be shut down--no Park Service, no Congress, no EPA, no FDA. Everything that is discretionary is gone. Today, my math is that several hundred billion dollars of mandatory spending have to be gone. We are borrowing so damned much money now that we have to borrow money just to cover our Medicare obligations. Do we understand? What if I came to you tomorrow and said that I can end most of the fraud in the IRS and the government and the SNAPs and all of these subsidies, like welfare and nutrition support programs? We have actually had a bill for 6 or 7 years to use AI to audit the Pentagon. The Pentagon, I think, last year was its ninth audit. It failed. It could not pass an audit. The same technology that we wanted to use to audit the Pentagon, it turns out that all of these programs, you just put that in the back end. Instead of doing the pay-and-chase model that, for some reason, the left seems to embrace, why let the fraud money ever go out the door? I want to give you a simple example. How many of you have a credit card? How many of you have ever gone to a place where you have never purchased from before, and you stick your credit card in because I am going to buy some fishing tackle or whatever the hell you are buying, and suddenly, you get this text message saying: Is this you? Can you put in your PIN? Can you put in your code? That technology has been around for a decade. If the credit card companies now have even more advanced AI to know that someone isn't you, that it is fraud, and that the data on your application and other things are fraud, you are telling me that we put billions and billions at risk trying to help our brothers and sisters, only to later find out that we have been financing scammers. I have a passion for dealing with the long-run debt of this country. How do I convince the American people that we are going to have to do hard things when they are able to point and say that you haven't taken care of the filth and the stealing from our society, from our taxpayers? How do I get them to trust me when I still have scam artists robbing them? Mr. Speaker, we have proposal after proposal to use technology to stop the scamming. Will it ever get a hearing here? There almost seems to be a war to stop us from using technology because--I actually can't give you an honest answer. We know that, for years, I have been trying to fix technology at the IRS, and the IRS union loses its mind thinking: You are trying to get rid of us. When we have been doing the audit at the Pentagon, the unionized auditors come and want to have meetings with me. They are concerned that we are trying to get rid of their jobs. I am just trying to protect the American taxpayers, but the technology already exists in the private sector. It is time we adopt it. On healthcare, I just want to give this as an example. Utah, a couple of days ago, announced that they are going to allow AI as a pilot program in Utah to prescribe. It is for the renewal of your prescriptions. As I was talking about before, my calcium inhibitor, my hypertension medicine, the same one I have had for decades, I could plug in my data to the AI, and it would order my prescription, and it would be sent to me. It functionally has almost no cost. We have dozens of examples that I have brought to the floor here over the last--actually, dozens and dozens of examples that I have brought to the floor here over the years, showing how we could crash the price of healthcare instead of doing the scam of let's just keep subsidizing the subsidy and the insurance companies. How about we change the accessibility and use technology to make it less expensive? We are actually working on a thought experiment--and this will be the end--a crazy thought experiment. President Trump and the White House actually get a lot of credit, though we worked on this for years. Glutides, GLP-1s, I believe by the end of this month, one of the tablet versions will be available for $149 a month. If obesity is responsible for 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending, according to the Milken study, what would happen in our society, particularly where we have States where technically over half of their populations are considered obese? What would happen if access to the drug and, hopefully, nutrition and all the other things that need to go with it--but just do this thought experiment with me. The lobbyists weren't able to stop access to the glutides. You might be on the cusp of a revolution of people who are morbidly obese, who have multiple chronic conditions, and who are losing their feet are about to get healthier. Let's actually start accepting the technology, thinking creatively. With that, Mr. Speaker, we might be able to do some amazing things out there. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I promise you at least this one. I think I have the half an hour. I am going to try not to use all of it, and I will try to slow down some of the speaking. Madam Speaker, I had a couple of odds and ends and then some basic optimism on one or two things. First off, let's do some cleanup. Last week, I actually walked through a little bit of an economic report. We got a preview of it. I think it will be published fairly soon. It is ``Measuring What Matters,'' and the title is: ``Why Italy May Be in Better Fiscal Shape than the U.S.'' This is done by some of the super economic geeks out of Boston and Cambridge, but what terrified me because I am actually doing my best to read these sorts of documents is the little sentence I have highlighted here. I tried to point this out last week. This is for supergeeks. If you use a 6 percent discount rate, you need 104 percent of a child's lifetime income who is born next year and this year just to cover the pension and healthcare benefits in our country. You need more than they are ever going to earn in their entire life just to cover those promises. Now, if you take it down to a 2 percent discount rate, which is a way you sort of say that here is where inflation and these things are going to be, you still need a 22 percent increase on their lifetime taxes just to cover pension benefits. This is actually based on some numbers where I think they may have too high a fertility rate. The reason I point that out is we are not having the really difficult conversation here. What happens in a country this year when my economists on the Joint Economic Committee are saying that we may have zero population growth in the United States this year and the fact that we have fewer 18-year-olds today than we had 20 years ago but almost double those who are 65 and older? Madam Speaker, I keep coming here week after week after week and showing charts about the debt and the unfunded liabilities. Now I am seeing some stories today saying that net interest will be over $1 trillion this year if you add in the paying back because we have to pay interest back to the Social Security trust fund and all of those when we borrow the money. It could be $1.25 trillion of interest. What you should understand there is--let's walk through some of the hierarchy. Social Security is number one. We are going to spend $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion this year on Social Security. Guess what the number two expense in our country is now? It is interest. If you do the total interest load, interest. The next is Medicare. Number four turns out to be the ObamaCare, or the ACA subsidies and Medicaid. That is number four. Guess what is number five now in our spending? It is defense. So often, I will talk to my liberal brothers and sisters, and they will turn to you and say that we should cut defense. That way, we can give out more money. It is now number five. Look, it breaks my heart because we keep having these discussions, and I have come behind this microphone for over a decade now and feel like sometimes I am doing a junior economics lecture. The point is trying to say: Here is the scale of the problem, but there are actually solutions if we can be bold, if we can be creative, and if we can take on the entrenched incumbency of the bureaucracy and business models. Let's actually do a couple of things here and see if I can make this make sense. Let's march along--this is sort of important--and see if I can make this make sense. This is last year. The red is spending. The blue is tax receipts. That gap is debt. You will notice, actually, that our projection for the fiscal year 2026 is our tax receipts--so tax collections are actually up. They are actually up almost 17.8 percent, which is wonderful. Most of it is capital gains. You know, the stock market is doing well. Oddly enough, our spending is actually slightly down, but we still have this massive gap. Our best guess is that we are still running a $2 trillion deficit this year. Depending on what the Supreme Court does in regard to the enhanced tariffs, we may pick up some other liability that we are going to have to find out a way to work out with the White House. Madam Speaker, this is an improvement, but the scale is still terrifying. It is still a couple trillion dollars. I know there are some products that have come out of the White House, CBO, and others saying that debt may only be $1.6 trillion or $1.8 trillion. It is not what we are tracking because so far, the first quarter of this year--we still have a couple more weeks on it--for every dollar in tax receipts, we are spending about $1.62. We think this will even out to being about $1 of taxes in, and we are going to spend about $1.43. Guess what? Most of that debt--that growth and that debt is interest because we have been refinancing a lot of our debt that was sold a few years ago when interest rates were very, very low, and healthcare costs. A point I want to make--and I am going to come back to this a couple of times here--a couple hours ago, we had the Joint Economic Committee over in the Senate. It is one of my blessings. I get to chair it. We did something, and both sides were pretty good. Some Democrats took some pokes at us, but the theme of this Joint Economic Committee hearing was healthcare. We, as a body--we, as Congress--we, as a society, have turned into financial engineering. The ACA, ObamaCare, is a financing bill. It is who pays and who gets subsidized? The Republican alternative had much better--well, somewhat better actuarial distribution, but it was still a financing bill. It is who got to pay, and who got subsidized? Medicare for all is almost completely a financing bill. How about if we held a hearing where we talked about not the financing of healthcare but things that could disrupt the cost of healthcare? We had one gentleman from one of the biggest life insurance companies in America come in and talk about it saying that here are the things we do to keep our insured population alive and healthier. We do things. We reward them for doing these data rings, or putting things on their wrists, or how they eat, or we gamify some exercise, and talk about how much healthier the population is. For them, it is a profit model. Turns out, if you sell life insurance, the longer someone keeps making their premium payments, the more money you make. They were incentivized. We had one of the lead medical officers from a healthcare system in Arizona called Banner talking about how they are trying to align a system that actually they get rewarded for helping populations be healthier and the technology they are using to do it. The fact of the matter is that we are finally trying to drag the conversation around this place from being financial engineering is the future of healthcare, ``Let's subsidize more populations,'' even though I am going to show you a couple of boards here of how much of that subsidy, your tax money, is just disappearing. Maybe the crazy conversation here is what happens with the combination of the use of technology, of cures, of availability. If it is true that semaglutides, you think of the GLP-1s, one of the deals the President made is the tablet version is going to go to $149 sometime next year. We know from the Milken study a few years ago that obesity is 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. Wouldn't it help if we could help our brothers and sisters get healthier? Yes, obesity is complex. Diabetes is complex, autoimmune. There are all sorts of things that go on. I accept the complexity. The morality of what happens in a society if you could, over a couple of years, help your brothers and sisters get healthier, it turns out you could have these remarkable changes in costs. How many times have you heard the saying in healthcare that 5 percent of the population is over 50 percent of the spend? It turns out that much of that 50 percent of spending is on people who have multichronic conditions. A substantial portion of that is because of obesity. Let's not be afraid to talk about it. Let's do the moral thing of helping ourselves, helping our brothers and sisters. It actually helps the debt and deficit. We published a major report 2 years ago now, showing that obesity will be responsible for $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending over 10 years, making it the single most expensive thing in our country. Yet, how much work have you seen behind these microphones, saying maybe we shouldn't always talk about the subsidization of healthcare and start talking about what we all pay. For a decade, I have come behind these microphones with technology and ideas. We are going to walk through just a little bit on the ACA because I can't stop myself after what I heard a couple of our Democrat colleagues say. This is from the audits and the Joint Economic research, and it is a very simple thing. This is on the ACA, the ObamaCare subsidies, and then the enhanced subsidies, so it is the subsidies on top of the subsidies. We actually get to the point where it appears only 33 percent of the money actually goes to you as a consumer for your healthcare, for your getting well. We have 27 percent of what I call deadweight. It just disappears. It is someone who is insured who has never made a claim, even though they may have been 100 percent subsidized. Now, we are finding out huge portions of that appear to be fraud. Last year, over 41 percent of the ACA population, which is 7 percent of healthcare, so ACA, the ObamaCare population, 41 percent paid no premiums. If you are not paying premiums, you see how easy it would be to sign someone up, take the commissions, and no one ever has to know because you are not getting a bill. We are discovering stunning amounts of fraud. The other thing, which was just fascinating, is that in the study, we have almost 38 percent of these dollars disappearing, functioning insurance. You go, but they can only hold 6, 7 percent of it. That is not actually what happens. We published an entire paper on this 2 weeks ago in the Joint Economic Committee. Go to the website, Joint Economic Committee Republicans, and you will see our methodology and where the math is. We are back to, once again, arguing: Is this how you want your taxpayer dollars to disappear? We want our brothers and sisters to have the most affordable healthcare possible in America, but to do it, do you want us to funnel your cash, your tax dollars, into this level of fraud? We have to walk through this. Why the fixation, particularly for my Joint Economic Committee and myself, on changing the actual costs of healthcare is you look at the long-run charts, the national healthcare expenditures, we have the substantial gap--and I know these types of charts are almost impossible to read, but what I am trying to help you understand here is here is the gross domestic product. We are growing as a country, but the cost of healthcare is growing substantially faster. A factoid, I beg of you, whether you be on the left side, or the right side, or confused somewhere in between, in 7 years, the $1 trillion we spend this year on Medicare becomes $2 trillion. We double the spend on Medicare in the next 7 years, and in 7 years, the trust fund is gone, meaning if you are a hospital or a doctor and part of your revenues that you receive on Medicare patients is from the Medicare Part A trust fund, it is gone. It is gone in 7 years. Let alone, the Social Security trust fund is also gone in 7 years, and we will double senior poverty. We are not allowed to talk about that. I will get an angry text message this evening saying: David, you can't talk about that, as the Democrat political consultants are saying, oh, good, more attacks. The immorality of this place to not want to tell the truth about our demographics and the complete barrier we have built legally on innovation--I have a couple of really geeky things here, but I am going to skip them and go to something that is a little crazy. Every week when I do these, I try to come here with something that is optimistic. A few years ago, I got behind this microphone and talked about a University of Houston drug that basically takes fentanyl in your system--and I am sure I am describing it partially wrong, but I am doing my best--and attaches a protein to it, and, therefore, the drug can't pass the blood-brain barrier. It lasts for 6 months to a year. What would happen if I came to you and showed you some of the economic studies we have done in the Joint Economic Committee by reading the literature? Some of our data, we are a few years out of date, but in 2020, we were approaching $1.5 trillion for the cost of fentanyl in America in 2020. Do you realize that is more than the defense budget? That is almost what we are going to spend this year in Social Security, the cost to society from fentanyl. What happens if someone like me comes to you and says, hey, and anyone that is interested, look it up because WIRED Magazine last week actually did an amazingly detailed article--it is a long article; it is a long read--on the labs around the country. They featured the University of Houston and a couple of the private companies that are trying to bring these things to market. They call it a fentanyl vaccine. It is technically not a vaccine. What would happen in our society if someone who has used a synthetic opioid, it has rewired their brain, and it is one of the ways we help them get through rehab? How about if you are the police officer who doesn't have to worry about having Narcan close by? The other challenge I will give you is to go look up a couple of the articles that are about Philadelphia and some of the animal tranquilizers, and this is beyond the xylazine and--I think that is spelled with an x. It is a whole other category that makes it almost impossible to detox because the cravings are so violent. Once it starts on the East Coast, it is coming across the country. I beg of everyone here to start to think about what happens if our ability to help bring a solution, a drug solution to help our brothers and sisters and protect our first responders--because so far, the data on--let's call it a fentanyl vaccine--is that it is 92 to 98 percent effective. What if this were worth a few hundred billion dollars in economic savings to our society in a single year? Repeatedly, I come here and I talk about helping our brothers and sisters with obesity, the technology, that you can walk around and have a medical lab attached to your body. Here are some of the others that I talk about, with biology and synthetic biology and other solutions. They are out there. But how do I get the brain trust around here to come together and say: We are going to take all of these ideas and build a unified theory, and this unified theory is how we crash the price of healthcare, instead of spending a couple more years arguing back and forth on how much more money we should borrow to hand out as subsidies, particularly to insurance companies. That is my simple theory I am trying to sell. There are solutions. They are complex. You have actually got to read a lot of long articles to try and understand what is going on. You have got to stop being afraid, and you have got to stop protecting incumbent business models that are terrified of having cures, solutions, better and faster ways to do it, and the use of technology. If we get rid of that fear and start doing what is moral and economically rational around here, we are in the time of miracles. Mr. Speaker, I am going to let you go back to your lives. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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