David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, this has been actually a reasonable conversation. I desperately hope we are going to have more of this. But back to some of the principal points from the Republican side we are trying to share about this budget resolution is the SBA paycheck protection. There is still $280 billion sitting in the account that hasn't gone out the door; healthcare spending, still has $239 billion sitting in the account that hasn't gone out the door; economic injury disaster loans, $172 billion still sitting in the account that hasn't gone out the door; unemployment insurance expansion, another $172 billion still sitting in the account; education funding, $59 billion sitting in the account; assistance to State and local, $58 billion; stimulus checks, there is still $52 billion sitting in there; food stamps, there is still $33 billion; childcare and development block grants, there is $10 billion sitting in that account; agriculture assistance, there is still $29 billion sitting in the account. That is $1 trillion. Is there a need for more help in our society? Absolutely. Does this document actually target it to those who are hurting, to the working poor, and to those who actually haven't gained great wealth with the stock market? Are other dollars in their accounts? I just don't see it in there. And functionally, this is $2.5 trillion of spending. When we authorize $1.9 trillion and then do the interest on it, I think that is a fair interest calculation. I beg of us that as this moves forward and we actually get to put some policy behind these incredibly broad numbers, will those of us who actually care about math--because the running joke in our family is that Daddy works in a math-free zone. Somehow, I thought it would get a laugh. I desperately ask all of us, this is a stunning amount of money. I understand the need for the administration and the Democrat majority to act like individuals of action. But what happens when that action is theater? On the conservative side we want to help, but $1.9 trillion isn't the help. It is figuring out where the needs are and getting it to them. Instead--and I'll show some of the charts--some of the dollar amounts that are in this document are absurd and still don't get us what we know we need in our society. So as part of my closing here, we have $1 trillion already still sitting in the accounts that haven't gone out the door. What are we doing to get those resources to those who need it? Because this is something that we could do instantly. The cash is already sitting there. It is already authorized. But also, what could we do as those of us in the Joint Economic Committee try to work on math saying: Here is how we get the maximum amount of stimulus to help those who are hurting? How do we get back to--forgive my cheat sheet--how do we get back to an environment where, once again, like we had in 2018 and 2019, income inequality actually shrank for the first time? How do we get back to where food insecurity was shrinking and where the working poor were getting substantially less poor? I know there is a great difficulty for my brothers and sisters on the left to extend tax reform and regulatory reform any credit. Then don't give it credit. But do at least accept we had some amazing things happening there for a couple of years for the very populations we come behind these microphones and say that we care about. Is there a way that on this left budget document--which is functionally a blank check company--being authorized to drop $1.9 trillion in immediate cash with an ultimate cost of about $2.5 trillion, could we actually take a look at what was working in our society before the pandemic and figure out how to do more of what was working and take a look at what was done in the previous years where we spent lots of money and we had almost no multiplier effect, none of the folks we were trying to help were getting help, and do less of this? Because this document reads very much like we are going back to the bad old days of spend lots of money, do some great virtue signaling, and, ultimately, the very people we talk about are no better off. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Lipinski, being someone from the other side, you really are one of the good guys. I have had a handful of great conversations with you over the years. Even though I am a conservative from the desert, you have always been very kind to me, and your concern and love for your community have always shone through, so it is appreciated. Mr. Speaker, this is one of those opportunities where you have the feeling you are going to be doing this a lot over this next year. Mr. Speaker, I want to make an argument that growth is moral, and I want to go a bit further than that. One of the things that spurred me to come here is I listened to Janet Yellen just a couple of days ago, who may be becoming Secretary of the Treasury, give a speech. In that speech, there were wonderful words about caring about working men and women, helping the working poor, but there was a complete failure in that discussion to talk about where we have had success. Look, so many people in this body run around saying, well, you are conservative, you are liberal, but we care about the hardworking taxpayers of America. We want to see our brothers and sisters in the country, particularly those who--and I hate this term, and it is one of the hazards as a Republican. We often sound like accountants on steroids. You know, we will go and say, well, our brothers and sisters who are in the lower income quartiles--and no one knows what a quartile is. But the point, we claim we care. We claim we want to do things. I want to claim we have the proof that, in 2018 and 2019, there was a miracle happening in this country. For the first time in modern economic history of the United States, the thing particularly the left used to scream at Republicans, because they cared so much about income inequality, I am going to make the argument we delivered policy, that, for the first time, income inequality began to shrink, 2 years where it worked. As the demagoguery, which is the modern political scene, as we hear people like the Janet Yellens of the world, who I have had a great working relationship with over the years, read their script and don't take a moment to say what worked in just the last couple of years, what worked to help so many of our American citizens have opportunity, to see a light at the end of the tunnel, to stop seeing the purchasing power of their lives, their ability to plan for retirement, the ability to take care of their families and their kids. Even outside the political rage that drives this body so often, could we take a moment and understand America was doing something it had not been able to do for decades and decades and decades, where the income inequality, the movement of wages, the value of someone's labor, had been being crushed decade after decade? In 2018 and 2019, the data is absolutely solid and clear: There was an economic miracle happening in this country. If you care about the working poor, take a look at what happened, and let's do more of it. Those things that weren't working in the previous years, let's do less of it. The problem is, in this environment, that becomes partisan. Let's walk through some of the facts. This is my moment to get a little snarky at my colleagues from the other side and some of their comments they have made. Those of us on our side are looking for our apology because they didn't tell the truth. They projected the future. This is when Speaker Pelosi then was the minority leader. She, basically, when we did the tax reform, after calling it a scam and then, in her quote, saying making the rich richer, except that is not what happened. The math is the math is the math. I know it doesn't fit the political rhetoric of this place, but the math is the math. If you take a look at the highest income quartiles, their percentage of the income, the wealth actually went down in 2018 and 2019, something that had not happened in modern economic history. You would have thought the Democrats would say, hey, we got it wrong, but we really care a lot about this, because they claim they care a lot about it. So why don't we look at some of the other reality. My colleagues on the Ways and Means Committee on the other side, the House Democrats, kept doing speeches. I just snipped one of the quotes: You know, the one-time bonuses are nice, but what American workers really deserve are permanent wage increases. The true beneficiaries of the Republican tax bills are shareholders and top corporate executives, not the middle class. It turns out they were absolutely wrong. And the math is the math is the math. The facts are the facts. If you look at the population--and we even broke this down--you could see wage increases for African Americans were the fastest movement growth in modern times. When I say modern times, I mean like the last 50 years. Hispanics outpaced Anglo workers rather dramatically. Do you think those of us on the Republican side are ever going to get an apology for them making up things? Why don't we go on and just make it for gender? It turns out that 2018 and 2019, movement in wage growth was miraculous. There should have been joy in this body if you care about the working poor. It turns out that wage growth for females, particularly females who didn't have a high school education, was remarkable. I believe in the ending part of 2018, when they did the calculation here, it was over 7 percent wage growth because their labor had value. We lived in a society that actually had more jobs than people. I will argue that has to be all of our goal. People's work, their labor, became valuable. I desperately hope we start to focus on how we get back to that. I know some of these charts are hard to read. We will put them up on our website. And I want to compliment the team over at the Joint Economic Committee for helping me do this. But this one and the next one are important because it is a simple fact that the rhetoric after tax reform from the left, they made things up. By doing that, they hurt so many Americans. If we had been honest about the facts--it would be intellectually honest if my colleagues on the other side would step up and say, okay, yeah, it is really, really helping the working poor. It is really helping the working Americans. But we think we can do it better. That would be honest. God bless them, that would be honest. But to say it was hurting them was a lie. Here is a simple example. 2017, before tax reform, if we--we always compare and talk about the top quartile, the top 1 percent of income earners. They were controlling, I think, slightly over 20 percent, 21 percent, of all the income in the country, and they were paying about 38.5 percent of all the Federal income taxes. What happened after tax reform? How many times did we hear from the left, from the leftwing echo chamber, from the media, that, well, this was tax cuts for the rich? Well, a year later, when there was tax reform, 2018, the top 1 percent were no longer paying 38.5 percent of the Federal income taxes. Now, they are paying over 40 percent of the Federal income taxes, but yet their control of the wage, of the wealth, income wealth, actually went down. But what was more important--and this is my failing--we don't talk enough about it. We will call it the bottom 50 percent of our brothers and sisters that we claim we represent, that we claim, when we get behind these microphones, we care about. There, the bottom 50 percent, their tax burden actually decreased, but the percentage of the wages went up. This is only 2018. The 2019 numbers haven't been vetted because they are still not all in yet. Our understanding is, preliminarily, the curve even steepens. The fact of the matter is, there was an economic miracle happening in 2018 and 2019. If you care about people, we need to figure out what we were doing right and go back and do more of it. Another way to basically say the same thing, this is--and forgive me if I mispronounce the name. Is it Ms. Tanden who may become the OMB Director? She is the potential OMB nominee. She said some incredibly partisan things that were wrong. The lift-out quote here is: Because they practice class warfare against us. Well, actually, no. It is just the opposite. If you look at the math, the top 10 percent under the old tax system were paying less of the Federal tax burden than they did after tax reform. Our brothers and sisters, the other 90 percent of the income-earners in this country, were paying less of the Federal tax burden after tax reform. The math is the math. But the rhetoric is toxic and didn't tell the truth. Once again, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: Widening the income inequality gap. Except the fact is, the Republican tax reform along with some of the other policies that came about in 2018 and 2019 were the first time in modern economic history where income inequality actually shrank. I always thought that was the holy grail here, that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer--except after tax reform, except after some of the regulatory reform. If you care about working men and women in this country, if you care about the working poor, you have a template that is only a year in the past where it was working. Let's figure out what we were doing right, and, Mr. Speaker, let's go back and do more of it. The one thing I will beg of this body, as the Democrats look like they will continue to be in the majority, and they have spent a couple of years demagoguing our previous work as Republicans when we did the tax reform, when we did, the economic opportunity that it brought: Stop making up the numbers. Tell the truth. Let's hold hands--well, in the COVID world, we will talk at an appropriate 6-foot distance. If our rhetoric is we care, we have delivered tax reform in a fashion where it worked. It created an economic, in many ways, to quote Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve, a Goldilocks economy. I hope it is every Member of Congress' goal here. Let's get back to that Goldilocks economy that was helping so many of our poor, so many of our working poor, so many of our working class, and actually, as you can see in the data, was closing income inequality. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I rise today to commemorate my Chief of Staff, Ms. Katherina Dimenstein as she departs from my office. Katherina has devoted the past eight years of her life and career to the people of Arizona. Iwant to thank Katherina for her dedication and service to Arizona's 6th District. She did an outstanding job for our office, especially her excellent work to promote strong trade relationships for Arizona and help modernize our tax code through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. She is committed to being both a voice and a resource for the people. Congress is an institution devoted to serving the people, and Katherina has exemplified this every day by not only meeting with Arizonans, veterans, and advocacy groups, but by managing all my Washington, D.C. office operations and legislative priorities on the Ways and Means Committee. We look to Katherina as an incredibly valued member of our team, and we will greatly miss her.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, with all the chaos and the activity going on around us, as we all know, we are all organizing our conferences. I wanted to touch on a couple of pieces of legislation that are out there right now that I am hoping, if we do some packages between now and the end of the year, we will all consider. And I love using the little boards because I think it sort of helps concentrate. One of the things, if there is any positive of what we have gone through in the pandemic, is the skepticism that was this body about telemedicine I hope is over, if you see the adoption rate of what has happened with, particularly, our seniors in embracing, having positive experiences, and actually even demanding telemedicine services. My understanding is now that there is open enrollment in Medicare part D, that is actually now one of the common requests: What type of telemedicine services do you provide and offer? If we understand, as a body, that the access for our seniors to use telemedicine functionally--the expansion of the reimbursements, the rules--expires when the pandemic is declared over, I am desperately hoping that our brothers and sisters around here on the right and the left hear that and understand if the community has embraced the price efficiency, the additional access to healthcare--that is, the telemedicine--let's make sure we don't let it expire when the vaccine and those come onto the market, are widely adopted, and we start to see the declaration that the pandemic is over. So, this is just sort of the benchmark of starting. Now, if I am making the argument that telemedicine has expanded access, and we are seeing the opportunity for some real cost efficiency--because, as we know, it is always hard to talk about, but Medicare is one of the greatest drivers of U.S. debt. As a matter of fact, it is the greatest driver of U.S. debt. It is demographics. Our brothers and sisters who are 65 years and older--and I am going to be there soon--earn this benefit. But the fact of the matter is, the unfunded liabilities, the substantial portion of it, come out of the general fund. It is a major driver. We should be excited that we had a proof of concept during this sort of miserable several months, that it expanded access. We are seeing the price efficiency. And the skepticism that seniors were going to have discomfort on using FaceTime and other things on their electronic devices, the arrogance of this place was wrong. We underestimated our fellow Americans in their ability to use the technology. Now, the next wave of what else we can be doing to actually expand, we have something that we have introduced called the Safe Testing at Residence Telehealth, because we had to come up with a title that would create the word ``START,'' as we often do around here. As you all saw, about 2 months ago, there were some home COVID tests that received approval. If we would tie those home COVID tests with telemedicine, those who are vulnerable in our communities could actually not have to risk getting in their cars, being part of the vulnerable population going to a clinic or the drive-through, or other things where there is testing. They can do it at home with these home test kits that are approved. We think that is part of the concept of the expansion of what is telemedicine. If we like this, I can expand the thought experiment: Americans who want to do their COVID tests at home and then use telemedicine as part of the experience, should that be allowed? Of course, it should. Why wouldn't you also go a little bit further? I don't have a board on this next one, but we have talked about it here, the ability to use technology also to help us be part of that expansion of telemedicine. This could be everything from the oxygen patch to the portable EKG. My understanding is that there is an American company coming up with a smartwatch that is going to do your oxygen, your temperature, your pulse rate, even your blood pressure. It turns out those things, put into an algorithm, can do some pretty amazing things to help you manage your healthcare. That is, in many ways, the future of telemedicine. It is not just talking to a healthcare professional. It is the ability to use technology to watch yourself, to keep yourself healthy, to diagnose if you are catching something, and then use that information with your healthcare professional. These are pieces of legislation that have demonstrated they are here. Adoption, particularly with seniors, I am hoping that the body thinks about it. If we do any type of stimulus or COVID package between now and the end of the year, that we think about telemedicine and keeping it permanently with us, the expansion. Let's walk through a couple of other things. Another piece of legislation we have is, if many of us have seen the economic, emotional, you know, future income, the damage we did by shutting down so much of our society, economically, in trying to slow down the spread of COVID, how do we help businesses stay operating, keep their doors open, but also know they are providing a safe workplace? We have a tax credit that would help those businesses provide testing but also get that partial reimbursement, that partial credit, quickly. We came up with a quirky idea. Every couple of weeks or every month, most businesses have to contribute on the payroll tax. Put the credit there so the cash comes back in very, very quickly, or the credit comes in very quickly. We have a workplace testing tax credit piece of legislation. If we are going to move forward with a package, something like that should be there because if we are trying to keep our communities open but keep them healthy, we need that testing at the small business level. This makes it affordable. Another thing I would like us to think about, and this is more global, the White House, the administration, those of us in this body, the resources we put forward months ago, and then the management of Operation Warp Speed, other than the stock market, I thought we would see more collective joy on how quickly we are moving to a vaccine. If it is true that there is a vaccine out there that was--what?--94.5 percent effective in its first statistical abstract, this is wonderful. We have done something that has never been done before, bringing this type of vaccine and heading toward approval and emergency authorization. If this is our benchmark, that we know we have light at the end of this tunnel, then we need to also now step up and do the things that spur the economic expansion once again. Americans deserve to live in a healthy, prosperous country. If the vaccine, Operation Warp Speed, is working, which now we know we have multiple vaccines that are on the cusp of being here with amazing efficacy, it is time to do some other things that make the economy grow. The first one I want to give is just a simple thought. When we did tax reform, we stopped something that was part of the ObamaCare financing. The ACA had a mechanism where your ability to deduct your healthcare expenses was going to go up. You didn't get to deduct anything until your healthcare expenses were over 10 percent of your income. That was one of the mechanisms that kicked a lot of seniors, particularly, in the teeth, and that was part of the ACA financing. When we did tax reform at the end of 2017, we held it for a couple more years at 7.5 percent. If you had $100 of income and $7.50, the next portion of that, you get to deduct. If you are under that, you don't get to take it off your taxes, if that helps explain it. We have a piece of legislation that for the next 2 years would make it that you only have to hit 5 percent. Then every incremental dollar above that, you could deduct. Considering how many folks in the United States this year, and potentially into next year, are going to have some unusual healthcare expenses, why wouldn't we do this as part of the package? The other part is: Then, let's hold it at the 7.5 percent for perpetuity. Let's make that permanent. I know that it will offend some folks who wanted to raise it because that was one of the financing mechanisms of the ACA, ObamaCare, to raise those functionally--take away that tax benefit to folks who had high medical expenses. But I think that we could all agree, with what we have been through, this would be a healthy thing, particularly for those who have had some difficulty this year and into next year. The last one I want to give you is--in some ways, it is a little bit of a quirky idea, but I want to beg of the body to think about what we can do to spur economic expansion, to spur the animal spirits, the investment in our society, in our country, and into our communities but without piling on the debt. We all know a number of the things we did this year were necessary. These were unprecedented times. But we are going to have to start paying for this. The amount of interest costs, the Federal Reserve creating liquidity, eventually, that does dial back. We will have to, in the future, pay for these times. So, what do you do to spur the economy? We have a quirky idea that would say: If you would be willing to buy an asset, make investments in plant and equipment, do those sorts of things that, in today's world, I am buying this hoping I get traditional capital gains in the future--but the problem with capital gains tax holidays, from a conceptual standpoint, is you are often being given a discounted tax rate on gains you have already produced. How about you get those people who are willing to invest around the country to invest money in the hope that what they buy today will go up in value in the future? It is not guaranteed. The idea is if we are seeing with the Federal Reserve and the Beige Book, and many of these other things, that there are stunning amounts of cash sitting in bank accounts all around this country that we need circulating, that we need that velocity back into our society and our communities, something that might be a fun incentive is saying: If you will buy assets, if you will invest in plant and equipment, if you will take a risk today, we don't know, we can't guarantee it, but a couple of years from now, if that value goes up and you sell, you will get a discounted capital gains tax rate because you invested during this window when we needed to functionally goose the economy along. We wanted to make sure that the curve that we are seeing, where our brothers and sisters have work opportunities, and the number of small businesses that disappeared permanently, that those small business owners who now have lost their businesses have access to investors who are willing to give them another chance. The beauty of this is it doesn't require a large check from the Treasury today. We are sort of saying: Take a risk on the American people. Take a risk on our economy today. A couple of years from now, if it worked, you get a benefit. We need to be looking more for ideas, I believe, like this that we can demonstrate a stimulus into our society and our communities without immediately putting ourselves more into debt. So these are just a handful of ideas that, if the body--and being in the minority, you know, sometimes we have to sort of persuade by hopefully having good ideas and just getting here on the floor and telling everyone about them. But there are ideas like this, whether it is the permanency of telemedicine, expanding the definition of such, providing individuals that ability to do testing at home, ideas like this or the previous one, and ideas of allowing small businesses to be able to get a tax credit for providing testing to their employees to keep them healthy. But I think this one is sort of how a reverse capital gains tax holiday actually works. It is creative, and we can put in some turning rules so someone doesn't take an asset and sell it and then immediately buy it again. Those things actually already exist in the IRS Code. But these are ideas that I am hoping the body will step up, move forward, and say we can get this economy roaring again, we can get back to the economic miracle that 2018 and 2019 were, using creativity like this. And that is my pitch for this evening. Madam Speaker, I thank the Chair for allowing me to tell our story, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I thank Ms. Sewell and Dr. Wenstrup for taking this on. My reason for being here behind the microphone is more than Arizona grows an amazingly high-quality cotton and this is one of our markets. I think, actually, it is part of a vision a number of us have, and I thank Chairman Blumenauer for hopefully sharing this vision, and that is thinking of the world post the change of NAFTA, USMCA. How do we start to become more hemispheric-centric? Our neighbors, particularly our neighbors who do truly still have overwhelming poverty, how do we engage in pieces of legislation that make it so we can trade with our neighbors, trade with those who are right around us? That is what is so powerful about what is being done here. Being someone who has spent, not a lot of time but a little time in Haiti, you see things that are optimistic, hopeful, and heartbreaking at the same time. But these are parts of the building blocks of how we build an economic circle of virtue in our region. So I am hopeful that we move this forward and the Senate takes it up quickly, but I am also hopeful that we start to see this in a more holistic vision of we now have a change in our trade agreement with Mexico, Canada. Now, if we can update our trade agreements with the Caribbean Basin, what else can we do to make our region economically prosperous, economically fair, economically something that the rest of the world will look forward to and say: This is what trade, when it is done properly, can bring to people who have actually had really rough times, when you think of earthquakes and of hurricanes in the region. These are some of the good things, as a country, we can do to our brothers and sisters who are our neighbors.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to do something this evening in light of the angst which is election time. You hear somewhat sort of the hyperbolic language. I am actually hearing many of our friends on the left almost sound like it was 5 years ago, talking about preexisting conditions, ObamaCare. We have all come to a consensus, I believe, as a political body and as a Nation, we are covering preexisting conditions. So one of the things I want to share and I am going to tie this in to what we are going through in the pandemic and an opportunity to go beyond what is the debate of the Republican alternative from a couple years ago on healthcare or the ACA and how I believe we have changed it. Remember, the ACA was a financing mechanism. It functionally said who got subsidized, who had to pay. Our Republican alternative, functionally, was a financing mechanism. It was who had to pay and who got subsidized. What I am begging us all around here to think about is what we pay. Why isn't this body coming together and moving creative, technology- driven ideas to change the price of healthcare? Because when we are doing the financing mechanisms, we are not saving our country. Remember, the single greatest driver of U.S. debt over the next 30 years--and it is really difficult politically to talk about--is Medicare. Well, if you are like I am, where you believe we have a moral obligation to protect Medicare and Social Security, we have a moral, ethical obligation, we also need to be honest about the debt. And I have spent the previous couple of years coming here and showing the charts of what was going on. And it was like silence from my brothers and sisters here because it is so uncomfortable to talk about. So what I am coming to the floor tonight to do is, I just want to start the inkling of there are solutions. They are not perfect. They are going to have glitches, but they start to head us in a direction where we can change the price of healthcare and by doing that, you save Medicare. But you also save the country from the crushing debt that is coming. So this is a moment of optimism. I am going to grab this board, and this is just part of the thought experiment I want to engage with. This one we picked up today. This is brand new. We understand the next generation of Apple Watch is coming with an oxygen sensor. Why is that part of the disruption that helps save the country? I need you to think creatively with me. It turns out that there is a study going on that basically looks at the concept of if we can know your oxygen, your blood oxygen calculations, we can see your heart rhythm, and those things. But also, your body temperature, we can calculate if you have a virus, if you are getting sick. Now, obviously, the statisticians--the experts--need to build the model and prove it, but what would happen if the thing you have on your wrist is functionally a traveling medical lab with you, monitoring your health all the time, producing the data, using the algorithm and telling you, Hey, guess what? We believe you have this because we are monitoring these things. Is that hopeful? Is that futuristic? Is it here? Because this watch, I guess, is out in the next few months. But it turns out that type of data coming off the technology we are able to have on our bodies, this body has not stepped up and gotten laws, the rules, the regulations, the reimbursements to the point where technology can help us change the price of healthcare. So can we stop having just the darn stupid debates around here where we debate for hours on who is going to get subsidized and who has to pay? Can we start having honest conversations of what to pay? What can we as a body do to promote the technology, to promote optionality, to promote convenience? So part of my argument here is, we are actually living part of the disruption right now. A handful of Democrats, and a number of us on the Republican side, I have had--we have had--some telemedicine bills around here for years. And no one would hear them. We would do lip service. We would talk about, well, we are going to allow some telemedicine, maybe with the VA, but the concept that we were going to have CMS for Medicare/Medicaid patients--particularly Medicare--allowed the use of telemedicine. We know we have an army of lobbyists around here that were very uncomfortable. If I had one more staffer, lobbyist, even brothers and sisters who are Members of Congress look at me and say, ``David, we need to do this slowly. We need to do it incrementally.'' Well, what happened a few months ago? The pandemic. And we grabbed some of the language that we have had now for years and put it into one of the first coronavirus packages. And now telemedicine is reimbursable to our seniors. And what's happened? We have had--and this one goes back to April--it's my understanding the numbers have gotten dramatically more, but we haven't been able to vet it--the use of telemedicine with seniors has skyrocketed. Satisfaction is off the charts. They are happy. The doctors we have been meeting with and talking to are actually happy and actually will tell you they are spending more time with their patients, being able to have a conversation, that patients are willing to share more. We have the living example of the disruption happening right now. And all those who kept saying, ``David, let's go slow, let's do it incrementally,'' it didn't happen that way. We dove in, and it is working. We need to make it better. We need to make it permanent. Because a lot of folks don't understand, when the pandemic is declared over, so does this telemedicine. It's over. The reimbursements, the access, the availability we have given to our seniors--who we are telling to stay home, to stay healthy--to rural America, so you don't have to drive, it goes away. We need to make it permanent. But I am asking us to now think even broader. Instead of just doing what I am hoping--we have legislation to do this--to extend telemedicine, as we have made it available during this time of the pandemic. Why don't we do that? Let's extend it but let's actually think broader. What can we do to make healthcare more accessible? I mean, how many speeches have happened on this floor talking about accessibility for healthcare, for our poor, for those trapped in certain urban islands, those trapped in rural America, those trapped at home. I want us to get comfortable with the fact that the disruption is here, the technology is here. There are items like this where it is functionally a doctor's visit in your medicine cabinet. And it has the potential for changing the cost of healthcare. Mr. Speaker, let's go through some of these. We want to protect the access to telemedicine, so our first piece of legislation is--I am asking every Member of Congress to think this through. Talk to your constituents, talk to your medical experts. What has their experience been like? And are you prepared to take this away from every senior and American who has had this optionality? Are you ready to take this away the day the pandemic is declared over? And then when you have the discussion, the debate with people like me that actually believe in that technology, we can actually expand the definition of telemedicine. So it is more than just talking to a doctor on your phone or doing FaceTime with that medical professional, but it is also the sensors and the data. You saw the very first board where we talked about a future watch that is actually coming in a few months that will be an oxygen sensor, a pulse rate sensor, a temperature sensor that you will have on your wrist that can actually do linear conversions because it will have multiple samples from you. And the algorithm can help tell you if something is happening to your body. But also, we need to move pieces of legislation so we can keep this, keep the reimbursement, keep it legal, keep it with us. Let's actually take this to what we are experiencing right now. How many Americans are seniors? We have asked them to stay home. We have asked them to limit their contacts. We have asked them to be careful. We have given them telemedicine, but we need to take it to the next level. There are now products that are on the market, that are out there today--we need to start reimbursing them and taking care of them--where you can actually do your COVID test at home. You can get on that telemedicine, that phone call, talk to the medical professional, do the COVID test right there with him on the phone--there are multiple providers of this--and get your results in a couple of days. This is instead of asking my father, who is in his mid-eighties, to get in the car and go wait in line at one of the drive-through testing sites, or someone else to go wait at a doctor's office or an urgent care office, or wherever they're doing this; this exists today. Why aren't we reimbursing them? Why aren't we making this available today? If we say we love and care for our most vulnerable populations, why aren't we thinking of the future? Why aren't we thinking of the convenience? Why aren't we thinking of the technology? We need to do things like this and not be afraid of it. Yes, it is a disruption for a lot of business models out there that wants the person coming in to test, to come into their center. But this is the future. And if we do this right, we can expand access. We can expand availability, and we can actually change the price curve. We can make access to healthcare less expensive. And is this a Republican goal or Democrat goal? I think it just needs to be an American goal. So as we move forward, the impact--and there is a lot of--it is hard to read this slide, but I guess what I am trying to say here is: As you look at this, we went from basically only about--oh, excuse me. I had it wrong. In 2019, only about 11 percent used any type of telemedicine option. You called the medical professional, you told them your symptoms, you got some sort of diagnosis. We have had an explosion since then. In 2020, now, our numbers, we think, are already old because we wrote this slide about a month-and-a-half ago on the data we had then. It went from 11 percent to 46 percent. We are hearing stories that it is substantially higher than that today. For those that were arguing for the incremental adoption of the technology, we hit a pandemic, we got to bathe in the fire, and it worked. Yeah, there are glitches, but it has worked. Asking people not to get in their car, not to actually go wait in the waiting room, not sit--it is here. How do we expand it? How do we make it even more accessible? And how do we broaden the definition of what is telemedicine? And my argument in many ways here is more than just the simple adoption of technology. Moving away from the skepticism that, Oh, seniors aren't going to know how to use it or like to use it. We have already removed that. We have demonstrated seniors figured it out very quickly. That sort of cynicism that was out there. But can we, as a Congress--when we get beyond this election cycle, where we are busy knifing each other for things that we know are just rhetorically stale--start giving a damn about the future of this country, about the availability of healthcare and what we are going to do to actually do something elegant, where we change the cost curve and we raise the accessibility? I would think this would make both sides giddy. We just have to make it legal. And why I explained that is, a few months ago I was on the floor--and I have done this multiple times--we were showing some of the technology that is coming. And one was something that looked like a big kazoo. You blow into it and it would almost instantly tell you you had the flu. And the professor who had been working on this, in some of her writings, she talked about it saying, Then the algorithm could bang off your medical records, right off your phone, encrypted so it is nice and safe, and order your antivirals. Would that make society healthier? Would it increase accessibility? Would it lower the price of healthcare? Of course, it would. Anyone else know the problem with this technology? It is functionally illegal today. The way we reimburse, the way we allow prescriptions to be written, it is a tough discussion because there are lots of special interest groups that we need to work with and respect their talents. But if we know the greatest fragility of future debt in our society is actually healthcare costs, why wouldn't we embrace something that at least we haven't completely made partisan yet? That is healthcare technology and the access and availability it brings to us. So, my discussion tonight is a very simple one. We have just lived the experience of COVID, of having so much of our population trapped at home, fearful to go out. As part of our legislation, we allowed access and reimbursement to telemedicine. It has been adopted broadly. Is this one of those moments we are going to take the success we have had and keep it permanent by not forcing it to expire when the pandemic is declared over? Are we going to actually be a little bit of futurists in saying we saw this experiment work for our society--for our country, for our communities, for our seniors? Could we take the positive part of this experience and go further? That going further, what would happen if we do it the right way where it actually starts to help lower the cost of healthcare and increase accessibility? It is before us. So many of us have been heartbroken with what we have gone through the last few months. We have ached when we have seen people lose their jobs, hearing of family members who have lost their lives. Are we going to find some things positive that we have learned over these last few very difficult months and carry those things forward? I am going to beg of the body to think this through, that is, the adoption of technology as part of individual access to healthcare. Maybe we have to change the name because when we say telemedicine, we instantly think of looking at my phone and doing FaceTime and not realizing it also can be the data coming off your watch, the oxygen patch. Well, now we are about to have an oxygen sensor in the phone. But how do we make it that telemedicine is the use of technology to keep us healthy and also to find a financial benefit of lowering the cost and increasing the accessibility? This is going to be one of my passions over the next few months and, if I am blessed to be reelected, over the coming couple of years. We need to make it permanent. We need to open up the definition. Things like the home testing, I really am begging the body to think about that if we do move another COVID bill, that we turn this into being reimbursable because this is a combination of home COVID tests that you tie into your telemedicine appointment, and you can get a result in, I think, one of them, within 48 hours. This is good stuff. They are out there today. There is a debate about whether they can be reimbursed. We need to fix this because we all get behind these microphones, and we wax eloquently of what we think, but it turns out there are actual solutions around us. So, that is my pitch. It is not a particularly complicated one. But with a couple of pieces of legislation that I am blessed to be sponsoring, and with some of our friends here--and I have some Democrats who are sponsoring with us, too--I think we are seeing a vision. We can actually deliver solutions instead of just political rhetoric. Mr. Speaker, I think I was supposed to have a friend from Louisiana coming in. We were going to talk a little bit about the environment of what was about to just happen in Louisiana. Until he gets here, I did want to do one story, and let's see if I can tell this without setting too many people on fire. I am blessed to be the dad of a little girl that is not even 5 years old yet. She will be in a couple of weeks. She started kindergarten, but the starting of her kindergarten was sitting behind a Chromebook laptop completely isolated, whether it be at home for the first week or two, and then the second week or two sitting in an empty gym separated from anyone. I mean, the picture will rip your heart out. She is sitting behind a laptop with cardboard walls on the side of her. She would come home and say: Daddy, please don't make me go. Daddy, I don't like this. Daddy, please let me go with you. It was ripping my little girl apart. Then, this last week, my school district allowed children to be in the classroom with their teacher. They have taken lots of safety precautions. I am blessed that, in my area, the statistics have all fallen within the protocols, the numbers, that it was safe. We only want schools to open if it is safe. Overnight, it was as if I have a different little girl. She was happy. She was joyful. ``Daddy, I have friends.'' The second day, I am a little disturbed. ``Daddy, I have a boyfriend.'' As the father of a soon-to-be 5-year-old, that was stressing. I am wondering how many other Americans have seen this with their kids, their grandkids? How many young people have we done such violence to not only their education but their emotional well-being, their ability to get services? I desperately ask everyone--because I know in so many school districts and the country, and even in my community, the issue of opening schools has become political. It is not science. It is political. We see some of the protests from our teachers unions in some spots. Now, we have protests from our parents. We all said we were going to try to address this using math, using science. But beyond that math and science--that is your benchmark-- please, we need part of the consideration to be the emotional well- being of our kids. It also needs to be the well-being of their scholastics. Another project we are doing in the Joint Economic Committee--and I am going to geek out for a second-- we are starting to do some math that says we may be damaging millions of Americans in their future earning power. We are setting them back. We may be damaging millions of Americans in their retirement. Because if you come to the tables, these actuarial tables that we have, and say: What happens if I lost earning power or I lost growth in my Social Security, in my pension, and even my career path for several months, for a year? Have we taken a step backward and understood what other things are happening in our communities? It turns out one of the linchpins for the next part of the spiking of employment coming back, people getting back into society and our communities, is a barrier called daycare and schools. How many parents are doing their darndest to work from home, but the difficulty is doing it when your child is in the next room sitting behind a laptop completely depressed, trying to do teleschool. We really need to have a tough conversation and be honest with the numbers and strip the crazy partisan debate over: Is opening schools partisan? It is insanity. We have loved and cared for our kids. Let's love on them. Let's do the right thing. I am sorry to personalize the story, but I saw it through the lens of a 5-year-old. I can only imagine what so many others have gone through with their children. I mean, I am hearing stories of adolescents--we had another one in my community just last week--who have taken their lives. Now, I don't know if that is tied to not being able to socialize or not being able to get counseling services or just the human relations of being at school. I don't know. But you do have to take a step backward and think about it. Are we willing to engage in this type of cruelty to our children, to those who are trying to build their careers so they can have a healthy retirement, take care of their family for future investments, for just the ability to be part of the American Dream? Because we have some well-organized groups out there that see a political advantage. That is the definition of cruelty. Let's take a step backward, go back to our earlier promises that we were going to do this through science. It is as much as the COVID statistics in your community and your school district as the human element of let's take care of our kids, let's actually also take care of those parents. Let's do the right thing here. I am so disappointed in so many of my brothers and sisters who are in the world of politics who are just blinded with a level of rage, that the need to win the election--well, I have sort of said it. Let's move away from this sort of cruelty and move back to solutions. Whether it be my hope that we found a way to make healthcare more accessible and more affordable to what we are going to do for our families to allow them to safely go back to school. My friend from Louisiana is here. I want to share my time with him, but I also want to understand what is about to happen with the hurricane. Didn't you get blasted just a couple of weeks ago with very, very heavy rains?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Look, I have a soft spot. My mother was from Baton Rouge. It is one of the reasons I love the food. And every time I hear your accent, I think of my extended family. But I wanted to give you some time. Tell us what is happening in your community, and let us know, beyond thoughts and prayers, what is needed. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Higgins).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we will come back next week and do the Invest Act, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we know we are in an election year. We know passions are running high. We know we have an environment where our country is incredibly hurting right now. If you saw the unemployment numbers this morning, the GDP numbers, how vibrant the economy was last quarter, you can almost have your heart ache. We have millions and millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters outside these walls who are hurting. And I guess for many of us in the minority, there is that frustration of ``we care, but we want something that actually works.'' And so one of my reasons for taking some time tonight is I wanted to do one or two things. Originally, I was going to bring in all this data of what we have learned about who gets sick and who doesn't get sick, and those things. And I realized, maybe that is not what we should do. So I was going to do just a couple data points and then actually talk about pieces of legislation that should be easy for us, that actually would help our brothers and sisters out there in dealing with the coronavirus, in dealing with the economic devastation it has brought to us, and providing some of the basic mechanisms. None of them are panaceas, but it is good policy. Let me start with one thing, just so we have this: If we look at our fellow Americans that we have lost since the pandemic--family members, mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas who passed away--45 percent of them were actually in a nursing home or hospice-type care and their death certificates make it clear that there was COVID as part of it. So if you actually had that as a data point, I am hoping we can sort of think through who are the most vulnerable in our society, and do we continue to sell, tell, share the message that if you are in some of these vulnerable groups, if you are in the nursing home, it is risky. There is a concentration where resources should go and what we can do. And that is an interesting baseline for those who actually have great interest in the numbers. For myself in Maricopa County, Arizona, our nursing home fatality rate is at 39 percent of the fatalities. There are other places where it is over 50 percent. Using that actually is a benchmark. If the national number is 45 percent of the fatalities from COVID come from nursing homes and those types of facilities, if you are above that, you really need to think about how you are treating that population, how you are working with that care delivery network. If you are below it, maybe you have a sense you are going in the right direction. But these are the types of things we need to be sharing with people around the country, to understand that if you are 25 years old, the chance of you losing your life--and we don't want anyone getting sick-- but you are well under 1 percent. And this is something called--I do a lot of presentations here on the floor, and I didn't bring all the charts because I just didn't want to overwhelm the conversation--allocation of resources. If your community, when you pull up your ZIP Code map--and in Arizona, we are doing a really good job of using this heat map, where you can see where we are having outbreaks--how do we actually share? Because we have provided resources--maybe we need to provide more technology or other things--but if you see on the heat map that this neighborhood, this part of your community is having an outbreak, why don't we have outreach into that community? Why don't we have people knocking on the doors saying, Do you have a mask? Do you understand all the little rules? Do you understand the Sunday barbecue in the backyard with everyone in the neighborhood probably isn't a brilliant idea? I really want us to communicate the idea where the devastation is but also, how do we be proactive? How do we get out there? Instead of doing some of the craziness of everything shuts down, whether you are in communities where we can't find efficacy of transmissions to where we see some pretty tough numbers. So that is actually one of the things we have been trying to communicate to the professionals in Arizona, is sort of, how do we reach out to where we see the problems? In Arizona recently, we had the Federal Government provide testing in some of the hardest hit areas, and we hoped actually some of those numbers helped. There are other economic numbers that are really tough because some of it is getting on the cusp of being partisan. And I am going to beg for my brothers and sisters on the left, and those of us on the right, to back away from it and actually sort of think it through. We actually have built a number of charts, and we are trying to build more data of what is actually going to happen if schools aren't able to find a safe way to open up. Do you actually know what happens to long-term incomes of females in the country? These are things people don't necessarily think about, but we can show you--we are working on it because we are trying to make sure we are getting our math right--that by not having the daycare facilities and our schools open, it turns out the moms and dads--but, particularly the moms that work--that may now have lost several months of being in the workplace, it actually has an effect on their entire future working careers, income potential, if not their Social Security and other things. We need to understand the totality of the decisions we are making. And this was just a chart I grabbed because I thought the information was interesting, but the compound effects of when we are not able to come up with a safe method to open up our schools, you actually start to see that for, particularly moms, it looks like by the numbers they lose about half their working time. But we can even find another set of numbers that 19 percent of those who are actually healthcare workers can't be there providing those services. We don't seem to stop and take a step backwards. And on one hand, we are talking about how desperately we need healthcare workers and facilities in places that are having a tough time. Oh, by the way, we are not going to come up with a safe way for education, for daycare to open up. You do realize that actually just reduced your healthcare workers by 19 percent? We haven't been taking a step backwards and thinking about this holistically. And that is why I am going to walk through a couple of the pieces of legislation we have introduced in the last couple of weeks. We are trying to come up with ways to try to help. In the future, we are going to talk more about this on the effects on the children. I have a little girl that is about to turn 5. She passed her test to get early enrollment into kindergarten. When I go home, you can just see almost how desperate she is to be with other little kids. I mean, she loves mommy and daddy, but, apparently, we don't play the same way as other 4-and-a-half-year-olds, five-year-olds. What would be the long-term effect in her ability to socialize? What is the effect? We came across--and we haven't been able to vet it yet, so I am going to say it, but understand, we haven't vetted the numbers--of high-school age kids that will pass away from the coronavirus compared to the increase of high-school aged suicides. And not being able to have services, not being able to have counseling, not be able to have social relationships. And I know these are sometimes really uncomfortable numbers to, one, get accurate, but even talk about. We have got to find a way to understand decisions we are making over here. Are we ultimately doing more damage to the people in our country? And this is more than the economy. It is people's mental health, their economic future, their future earnings power, and just societal cohesion. Let's actually talk about some things I think that are both optimistic and opportunities. One of the things that happened when we started to do some of the emergency legislation on the pandemic, for some of the staff that have been here, you know, there are a handful of us who have been pounding the doors around here for years about expanding telemedicine. Oddly enough--I know this sounds crazy right now--but telemedicine in the past has been a controversial subject here because it disrupts some of the medical delivery business model. We have lots of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., that really don't like telemedicine because it is another avenue of competition. But we did it. We took a piece of legislation that Mr. Thompson and I had passed, grabbed some of the language, and that is actually the law right now--except for one catch: When the pandemic is declared over, that expanded authorization of telemedicine goes away. But we are getting a living test right now. What is fascinating is, if you and I go back to 2019, only about 11 percent of healthcare consumers--you and I--11 percent in 2019--use telemedicine. In the last few months, we are actually seeing it around 46 percent of folks that need some type of medical advice or doctor visit are actually using telemedicine. We have just proven it works. And there is actually some amazing data coming in about the ability to make it very cost-effective, and the ability to find out the satisfaction levels. Turns out that people are more satisfied with many of their telemedicine visits than when they go visit the doctor's office. And it turns out, also, that the actual face-time with that medical professional actually is longer in telemedicine than when you have actually gone to the doctor's office. So we need to understand these things, because when we get beyond this pandemic, will we understand that telemedicine isn't scary. We need to find a way to extend it, make it permanent, and actually expand what the definition is. Look, we have some great data that is coming in that this is working. This is one of the things we did, bipartisan, on something that we couldn't get done for years. It is happening right now. So we have introduced a piece of legislation that will just make it so when the pandemic is declared over, telemedicine isn't ended in its new reimbursements, in its efficacy, in its availability. Now, I want to go further. I actually believe the future of telemedicine is more than just picking up your phone and talking to a medical professional or face-time. I also think it is the body sensors you can put on that produce data from your body, that the algorithm can be calculating, that finds if there is something wrong, the medical professional can call you. So we are going to try to see if we can expand that definition to even the technology out there, because this is one of our arguments that we have been making here, that as Republicans and Democrats, we have been having the wrong debate about healthcare. We keep debating on who should pay, who should get subsidized, and we are not having enough of the debate on technology. What are the things we can do that would actually change the price? Changing the price is what makes healthcare much more available, not a constant debate on who should end up paying and who should be subsidizing. This piece of legislation has been dropped, and I am very grateful. Thank you for those who are helping us cosponsor it. We want to see more. Another thing we are having that discussion of: How do you start to open up society? How do you open up your community? How do you open up the little businesses in your neighborhood? Many of them need to be able to put up that plastic shield. They are going to need to be able to buy protective equipment or ways to sterilize those things. We have come up with a tax credit idea for those businesses. It is 50 percent of their cost, particularly for testing. If you want to test your employees, a tax credit--but it is not the tax credit that at the end of the year, next year you might get some money. We do it as a tax credit off your payroll. And the benefit of that is certain businesses, every couple weeks, every month, they are turning in their FICA, you know, their payroll tax, they can get the credit right there. So the cash flow is available to go pay for testing, pay for things that make their businesses safe. So as they start to invite their teams, their employees back, it is a way to make sure they are staying safe. The other one--and this is a big deal, and this one I think actually both Republicans and Democrats will embrace--and we are going to geek out just a tiny bit. When the ACA passed--most folks know it as ObamaCare--one of the mechanisms in there was the ability to deduct your medical expenses was going to go up over time to 10 percent of your adjusted gross income. And for a lot of seniors, that was going to be pretty tough. When we did tax reform, we actually extended the 7\1/2\ percent of your adjusted gross income when you hit that level the next dollar you could start to deduct off your taxes for a couple of years. But the fact of the matter is, it is scheduled to go up to 10 percent of your adjusted gross income, your medical expenses, before you can start to deduct them. In a time like this, in a time when we all talk about healthcare and the financial stresses and impacts that puts on our family, let's do this: For the next 2 years, let's make it 5 percent. So if you had medical expenses that you are paying for, you hit the 5 percent, you can actually take it. And after that, we will keep it at the 7\1/2\ percent.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, 2 minutes is almost impossible to actually have an honest and detailed debate/discussion in here. But do understand--and I believe this is a sin of both sides--we are playing this game where we are moving around who pays. We are doing almost nothing to actually reduce the underlying cost of healthcare. Your bill is doing it; ours has done it. But this bill actually has a very cynical mechanism in it. This board is being recycled from H.R. 3. We are all familiar with the mechanism of reference pricing. We have debated it around here for years. So, if you are in Great Britain and there is a new drug that gives you a year of healthy life and it costs more than $37,000, it is not purchased. That pricing, that scarcity mechanism, is what the Democrats' bill is importing. So its savings are actually very cynical, because it is going to take away pharmaceuticals that make people healthy. How could we be doing this, even allow this mechanism, in a time of a pandemic? You are about to crush all of the little biopharma companies that we are hoping desperately produce miracle cures, and, in a perverse way, for large pharma. You have just given them the market, because you have taken away those who are nipping at their heels. I beg of you, think about what you are actually doing, because this type of financing mechanism will kill people. It will end lives, because it will create a dearth, a shortage, of the next generation of cures. Let's not engage in that cruelty. There are better ways to get there. And we have proposed many of them. It would just be nice to get heard, because there are solutions, and this is a really dark one.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, how many of us have had the phone calls over the last couple of weeks where we are talking to that small businessperson, and you can almost hear the tears on the other side of the call? You can hear the stress, almost panic that they are about to hurt the very people that they work with, because their business is failing, because they are desperate for what we made a promise to do, that payroll protection money that functionally ran out a couple of weeks ago. We knew the math, and we engaged in a type of cruelty around here because we sat here and engaged in partisan--we are better than this. We knew what we had to do. Let's never do this again. For Arizona, what we are about to vote on is 202,000 jobs. And the fact of the matter is, they should have had those two weeks ago. Let's make this happen.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, think of this: Doesn't it feel like it was just yesterday the Federal Reserve Chairman was telling us we were in the Goldilocks economy? The wage growth for the working poor was the best in modern economic times. I will argue we need to find a path back to that. That economic growth was moral. It was an amazing thing. Good things were happening. And then we hit this black swan. This is ripping my heart out because there are things in this bill that just don't belong there. I consider them--well, I can't say that word in front of a microphone. We all have these moments in our political lives where we walk up in front of this microphone and we are going to say: I am going to have to vote for something that has things in it that break my heart. But we must do the right thing. We must get back to that economic growth. We must get back to that prosperity that was enveloping this country. And, hopefully, we will look back, do a great postmortem, understand the things we did wrong, and fix them in the future.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we try to come here every week to do sort of a combination of economic reports and what we believe is a solution to long-term debt. Often, we sort of get a little, shall we say, technical, if not a bit geeky. But, tonight, I am going to try to do a little bit of that but also try to put it in context to where I think we are. We in the Joint Economic Committee, and also even some of the staff from the Ways and Means Committee--and bless their souls for tolerating my questions. They have been very helpful, but there is still a lot of things we don't know. But I want to start off with encouragement. About 20 minutes ago, I got off the phone with my father. My father is in his mid-eighties, still doing pretty darn well but still has some health issues. How do you turn to a family member like that--he is blessed to live in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is just a beautiful, beautiful place--and say, ``Father, for the next few weeks, you may want to not go to the different activities,'' which I know he loves, the art shows, the art walks, and all of these other things that are activities in our community. For the next few weeks, because of the things we are learning about the coronavirus, the populations that appear to be most at risk are those with a series of health issues. Do you have heart issues? Do you have diabetes? Do you have lung issues? Particularly, are you in your seventies or, in my father's case, mid-eighties? Sort of the moral outreach I am going to ask everyone to think about is my call to him: ``Hey, we have family in the neighborhood. If we can convince you to maybe spend a little bit more time around the house and avoid crowds and some of your activities, we will be happy to make sure food and things are dropped off at the house. If you need your pharmaceuticals picked up, we will be happy to go out and do that. We will try to be good family and be supportive.'' Why don't we take that same concept, as both Democrats and Republicans, and say to the VFW, the Legion, my Knights of Columbus club, or some of the other things in our community: Are you reaching out to the seniors in your community? Are you reaching out to those who may have certain health issues? If they are making the decision to follow what our county and State health departments are suggesting, what the CDC, HHS, and the others are suggesting, that, if you are in those more statistically vulnerable populations, you are going to stay home, avoid the crowds, those things, at least for a few weeks, what do we as a community do? What do those organizations do to reach out to their friends and their members and let them know they are loved and let them know we care, but also provide a little bit of that human contact, even if it is through the phone, even if it is through FaceTime. We were having the conversation of putting my little daughter a little more so he could FaceTime and have that contact with his granddaughter, but also picking up the food, the pharmaceuticals, and other things so that we don't create a situation where we take a vulnerable population and make them isolated from everyone else; so just a little moment of kindness, a little moment of thought. If it is our grandparents or the friend from over at the VFW and they happen to be in those age brackets, they have what they call morbidity, comorbidities--and I always mispronounce that, so forgive me--what do we as a community do to try to actually reach out and be supportive and be helpful? These are the sorts of things that those of us who are Members of Congress go to, all these briefings. We hear all the statistics. We are moving money around. We are trying to get the manufacturing and testing of all these things where they need to go. And a lot of good things are happening. We know there are a lot of really smart people going as fast as they can, but now is the moment also for a lot of us in our communities to reach out and say: Look, the experts are saying, at least for the next few weeks, maybe the best thing is, if you are in that defined vulnerable population, stay home. How do we, as their friends and neighbors, make sure that they are not feeling locked away and isolated, that they are still loved and they are still part of our community? It is also our moral obligation to reach out and help our neighbors, bringing things to their doorstep. So, actually, what I am calling for--that is not Republican or Democrat; it is actually being human--is that idea of let's make that happen. This evening I am going to do a telephone townhall in our district. That is actually going to be one of the themes. We have already been on the phone reaching out to a number of the veterans service organizations because we know, in a lot of their organizations, their mean ages are much, much older. So how do we get the younger veterans now to actually be that contact with the world for those older veterans who may be choosing to isolate for a little bit? Madam Speaker, math is math. We see the data that so many who are young seem to be doing just great. Someone like myself, I am a fairly severe asthmatic. I worry a little bit. But we are washing our hands, and we are taking the basic precautions you would take during any severe flu season. We actually now have a little timer in our office, and every couple of hours, we are washing the doorknobs and doing things like that. It is a little compulsive, but it is the right thing to do. So I just ask all of us, don't be macabre, don't be looking down. This is just part of life. But let's treat it like adults. Let's respect the professionals and their talents and the information they are providing us and let's work through this. Let's do the right things. But also, let's not isolate those populations we are being told are vulnerable. On one hand, we are saying: You really should stay out of crowds, stay out of these things for a few weeks. We have the moral obligation to make them know they are still loved and cared for. All right. A couple of things I do want to go through because we are trying to get our head around what is happening economically. The fact of the matter is we just don't know yet. We don't have enough inbound data. I can give you some great data where we were a week ago. Has that changed? I promise you it has changed. But how much? The good news is we went into this March actually surprisingly economically healthy. Do you remember last Friday, the jobs report number? Now, remember, that jobs report number is looking back over the last month and working out particularly over the last week and the hires. But when you are gaining over 273,000 new jobs, Madam Speaker, that is pretty amazing, particularly where we were in the cycle. Forgive me for reaching back here. I hope I am not breaking a protocol, but I actually subscribe to an app called GDP Now. It is the Atlanta Fed's calculator. On March 6--that is the last update--they were at 3.1 percent GDP for this quarter. That is wonderful. Do I think we are going to end up there? Probably not. But it at least lets you know there was something really, really positive happening in the economy. When you start seeing numbers like this where we were hitting 3.5 percent unemployment--and I am going to touch on that just because I am fascinated with labor force participation and what that means to economic growth, but also what it means to the numbers of people in our community who are choosing to come back into the labor force, come back to work. These are people who quit. There are fancy economic terms of the marginally detached, but from a societal standpoint and from an economic standpoint, when those who are not looking all of a sudden start popping up in the data as coming back into the labor force, these are wonderful things. We were clicking along pretty darn well. When you start looking at this February jobs report, we, as all Americans, should have been really happy with the economic robustness and stability. I am also going to show another board and demonstrate how we are also the engine that is basically saving the rest of the world economically. We are pulling the rest of the world along where, just a few years ago, 3 years ago, the rest of the world was actually moving up and they were sort of pulling us along. Now that is somewhat reversed. You always have to put that in context, Madam Speaker, because it gives you a sense of how strong the last couple years have been economically, particularly for labor markets. I have been behind this mike a dozen times showing the wage charts and the miracle that has really happened the last couple years for the working poor. It is a certain societal cruelty we have had for the last couple decades of our brothers and sisters who didn't have particular skills or may not have finished high school, the really smart economists were functionally writing them off. They were going to be part of the permanent underclass. In many ways, if you sort of step back, there is a level of cruelty in just taking any American and saying: You don't have certain things we think the economy is going to look for. We are writing you off. One of the great miracles we have had in the last couple years is that population, that bottom 10 percent of income earners--we refer to them as the working poor because they often have very moderate to low to none in the way of skills--their wages have actually been going up the fastest, double the mean of everyone else. So part of our theme is also growth is moral. You can see it in society in how many people who have had a pretty rough decade seem to have come back the last couple of years. But now we are going to have to face the issues of what do the next couple months look like with the coronavirus, what sort of disruption, what do we do as a body to maximize economic stability, also be rational, and then get back to the pattern that actually was helping so many Americans start to have these opportunities. Madam Speaker, hopefully, that doesn't become partisan. Hopefully, that is just math and smart people coming up with ways, because those policies actually affect people's lives. That is the decision whether you can buy that new vehicle or buy a house or some of these other opportunities out there. This slide is one we have been working on as a concept. It is a little noisy, and these are really hard types of charts to read and look at, but it is really important. We had lots of smart people a couple years ago basically saying that, as we are getting older as a society, we are never getting back to those days of the mid-1960s and labor force participation. It is just not going to happen. Then we started to break apart some of the numbers, and we found this really interesting thing out there: We have, functionally, millions of Americans who were not looking--they basically had quit in previous years--who suddenly are coming back into the labor force. So this is a slide of the share of newly employed from outside the labor force. So these are folks we don't consider traditionally as, well, they are part of our unemployment statistics or they are part of the rolling--they are getting unemployment benefits, or they have been looking, or even outside the marginally attached population. These are, functionally, folks who were not even looking. What is stunning is you can see the wild ride we have had. Post the 2008 recession, this population had just sort of detached. They were in the mid-fifties of looking at working, coming into the labor force. Today, this population is starting to approach the mid-seventies, and it has substantially happened in just the last couple of years. I want to argue that is a combination of lots of complex things, and it is something we don't talk about enough. Because there has been wage growth, the value of their labor has gone up. You may actually get some things that are uncomfortable to talk about, Madam Speaker, and the numbers are difficult, so it is still theoretical. Some things have happened with immigration that have also made their labor, possibly, more valuable. The other thing also is that work has changed, where, if you or I went back 10 or 15 years ago for parts of this population, they are not picking up bags of concrete. Now their work has changed. Is that part of it? We have these fancy economists who come in and walk through all these different reasons, and we are trying to get our head around it, but the one thing we know is that there is something good happening in our society. How do we as policymakers, those of us on the more conservative side, our brothers and sisters who might be on the more liberal side, and some of the people in the middle who call themselves moderate, how do we actually come up with ways to keep these good things happening? How do you do that in a society right now where our politics are often so polarizing? I want to argue we actually have a moral obligation to figure out things that are working, figure out what is making them work, and do more of it. This is a slide I am just putting up because it rounds out a discussion we were having a couple of weeks ago about what is happening in the world. If you see the blue, Madam Speaker, that is the G-7. That actually has the United States in it. If you look at the orange, that is actually the G-7 without the United States. So call it the G-6, I guess. The green is the United States. If we go back to the numbers that were coming out in 2017, you see the rest of the world through economic growth was very similar to the United States. They were helping us; we were helping them. But you can also see the last couple years the United States' economic growth has dramatically surpassed the rest of the industrialized world, the big economies. There is this push-pull concept in economic growth. In the last couple years, we are basically--if you look at the last two sections of the graph, you start to understand that we are the engine that functionally has been keeping much of the rest of the world afloat. You can also see the incredible spike in growth and the continued growth post-tax reform. The fact of the matter is what we did in the U.S. tax reform and the economic growth that it brought did things for the entire world. It is in the charts. It is in the data. The other thing I want to put up, and I try to put this up about once a month just because it is that continuing conversation that we often get lost in our rhetoric and we get a piece of rhetoric in our head, we get behind microphones, we say it over and over and then, later on, find out that the math actually doesn't match the rhetoric. This is actually what we call tax receipts. Many of you will think of it as revenues, but the proper term from the IRS and those of us on the Ways and Means Committee is ``receipts.'' These are revenues as they are booked into Treasury. It is just really, really important to get your head around this. In 2017, `18, and `19, even though we are post-tax reform and we had lots of really smart people--Members of Congress and economists--who were saying that this chart was going to crash this way, it didn't. As a matter of fact, if you look at this chart, those are the highest receipts in U.S. history. So I beg of us--at some point those folks who will spend their time attacking the tax reform--I understand it is an election year--attempt to tell the truth about the math. And the ultimate test is: Are we getting the revenues in or not? Now, the mix of the revenues has changed. Corporate taxes are down. Individual taxes are way up, particularly payroll, because more Americans are working. But that was the idea. And it wasn't just a Republican idea. If you actually go back during the Obama years, President Obama's economic team actually recommended much of the same thing in corporate taxes. The difference is, it happened over here, so, therefore, it must be vilified, even though that is truly unfair. This has been an economic concept for years. We finally got it delivered, and it is working. This is the chart that I will often get the most phone calls about, and it is getting a little dated. We need to update it. The chart is not adjusted with constant dollars. That means over the next 30 years-- this is a 30-year chart--you would probably reduce the numbers by a third, and that just means adjusting the purchasing power of today's dollar for an inflated dollar in the future. The chart is very, very simple, though. And it is one where I am trying to communicate the future debt--and it is overwhelming--that is coming is demographics. It is those of us who are baby boomers; we are getting older. We have earned benefits. We have earned Social Security. We have earned Medicare. We just have a small problem. We didn't set aside the actual cash. So here is a simple thought experiment with this chart: This is Social Security. This is Medicare. If we would pull those out, 30 years from now--actually now, it is like 28 years--we would have $23 trillion in the bank. But if we roll Social Security and Medicare back in, Social Security and Medicare's shortfall is $103 trillion at the end of that 30 years, meaning when you add these two together, you are functionally at an $80 trillion debt. And what is really hard for this body to talk about is saying we have made promises, we are going to have to find a way to keep them. So every week we try to come here and say, ``there is a way to do that.'' But you have to be willing to engage in something that sometimes is disharmonious around here, and sometimes just a little complicated. Because let's face it, as a body, we have difficulty doing one major concept, and our argument is you need to do dozens of things, and we almost need to do all of them immediately. And what is so frustrating and heartbreaking is almost all of these turn partisan. And the ones that are technology we will find a way to make partisan and they are all absolutely necessary to create the economic growth, to create the price disruption in healthcare. As you just saw, most of that $80 trillion debt at the end of that 30 years is Medicare. I use this slide over and over, but we are trying to make an argument. A tax code, a regulatory code, an immigration code that maximizes economic expansion, incentives to be in the labor force. And think about that. We right now still have a problem with millennial males coming into the labor force. We have had a miracle in the last 20 months of millennial females coming back in. They are coming in like crazy. We still have a problem with millennial men. How about people who are older? Can you design incentives in the Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits to stay or come back into the labor force with their talents? The other one is: Are we willing to actually unleash technology? And these are the presentations I have enjoyed the most. Just last week, I was here on the floor showing things, technology-wise, that could crash the price of healthcare. We actually brought in a slide a couple of weeks ago saying there was a major success in being able to put in T- cells that grew pancreatic cells, and those pancreatic cells in a mouse looked like they were growing insulin. Now, when you go from a mouse experiment to humans, it is a decade. But the previous slide, you saw the math for Medicare--and Medicare is the key driver of U.S. debt in the future--30 percent of Medicare's debt is just diabetes. As a body, let's make sure the resources, the talents, the mechanisms, the encouragement, all the things we can do to create those disruptions is not a cure for something like diabetes because it is good policy. It is the moral, ethical thing to do, and it is also an amazing change in U.S. debt if you just cured diabetes. Now diabetes, it turns out, is complicated. There are autoimmune issues. There are lifestyle issues. There is 1 and 2. It is complicated. But that is the way we need to be thinking around here if we are going to have an impact. Well, it turns out in that same discussion of technology, a couple of years ago, I became fascinated with the concept of a universal flu vaccine. And the Gates Foundation, I believe, has moved $60 million there. I believe Congress, a couple of years ago, we started to move some lines of research money into that concept. Now, we are told it is complicated, but we may be a couple of years away from actually having a universal flu vaccine. So think about the societal economic disruption we believe we are stepping into right now. Now, it is not going to last forever, but it will last for a little while. Just that technology of something like a universal flu vaccine may become the solution that this type of viral-- this economic disruption, societal health disruption, never happens again. My argument is, I think, fairly elegant. We need to do all these growth and cost and technology disruptions. And if we do them, I believe we can make an argument that the ability to keep promises--our promises for Social Security, our promises for Medicare--there is a path. It is just uncomfortable to talk about these things, because when you use the word ``disruption,'' that often means someone's business model, someone's current technology. We have used the example dozens of time here on the floor: ``How many of you went to Blockbuster Video last weekend?'' Of course not. The technology changed. Now, you hit a button at home and you stream your entertainment. We need to make sure that those types of disruptions are now happening in environment and healthcare technology, and who knows what else. We also see some of them even now coming in energy generation. So there is a path. We don't have to be dour as we think about the future of the United States. It is actually incredibly optimistic. But to make the optimism a reality, this body needs to stop being dysfunctional. We cannot spend another year of our lives like we did last year, functionally accomplishing nothing of value. We are better than that. We know there is a path. We actually know the math. Now, let's just get our act together.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually try to touch on 3 or 4 different things this evening, and I am going to try to make it all sort of connect together. On a personal level, I was very pleased as we were doing the supplemental and the mechanism in regard to the coronavirus, a little widget of that was actually the telemedicine piece of legislation that I believe Mr. Thompson from the Ways and Means Committee and myself have offered. It is always nice to see some of these ideas you have been working on getting lifted up and moved forward. But this evening I actually want to sort of continue to talk about science, and the fact of the matter is, the impact it can have if we actually think forward on functionally our debt, our deficits, and our ability to keep our promises. You know, I have been behind this mic dozens and dozens of times with my little boards, trying to demonstrate that over the next 30 years, functioning Social Security and Medicare, these are earned benefits, but they also are the primary drivers of U.S. debt. It is almost all of it. And a lot of it is just demographics, we are getting older as a society, and most of it is actually Medicare, it is healthcare costs. And it turns out that there are opportunities that, if we can embrace technology to actually disrupt some of those healthcare costs--and at the end, we always sort of talk about we need to grow the economy, we need tax policy, we need immigration policy, we need regulatory policy, we need incentives for labor force participation, there are all these things that make the economy grow so we have the resources, the receipts, revenues, tax revenues, and other things, to actually keep our promises. But one of the other things we could do is also disrupt the price of healthcare. So just as a thought experiment, except it is actually based in the living math--this slide is a little hard to deal with--but think of this, over the next 30 years--and this isn't adjusted for inflation-- but over the next 30 years, if you were to remove Social Security and Medicare, you would have $23 trillion in the bank. If you roll Social Security and Medicare back, you are $103 trillion in debt, and it is mostly Medicare, it is mostly healthcare costs. Well, 30 percent of that healthcare cost is just diabetes--and that is what this slide is sort of walking through--diagnosed, the individuals we know about, those we are expecting to come in the future years, and the cost curve. The fact of the matter is, our investments, our ability to build policy that gets us to solutions for diabetes--and diabetes is complicated, you know, there are autoimmune issues, there are lifestyle issues, some are just some genetic issues. It is complicated. But understand just curing diabetes would be 30 percent of the Medicare costs we are projecting over the next 30 years. It is a demonstration, when we can get the incentives here correct, to push science for these little labs, for these really smart universities that actually will break off something and go set up and raise capital and do these high-risk experiments to produce disruptions, cures, how important that is actually to our society today but also into the future. Because if those little biologic labs can produce a cure, can produce new therapeutics, and change this cost curve, they also change the projection of U.S. economics, U.S. debt. I am trying to build an understanding here. So think about what we just did on the floor. We just moved eight-billion-something dollars working through the coronavirus, making sure there are supplementals and all these other things, and we also have had briefings, even earlier today, of some of the small labs and Big Pharma and little pharma that are desperately working to produce vaccines to also new therapeutics, antivirals. Yet, this same body in December moved a piece of legislation through here that would functionally crush, would functionally put those small biologic innovators out of business. It would destroy what is often called the ``capital stack,'' the ability to raise money for high-risk therapeutics that most of the time fail. If we care about drug prices, which both the Republican side and the Democrat side all focus on, can we make sure that, if you are going to move a bill like they did, H.R. 3, that--functionally you are going to get some price efficiency here, but you are going to wipe out the very innovation and the very biologics and small pharmas that we are relying on right now to produce some of the very disruptions for what is going on in the world right now. Understand, we have to be so careful that we don't satiate our current political desire--and it is a real one, to deal with the cost of pharmaceuticals--and end up destroying future innovation that will save lives, but also make sure we have the infrastructure for when we take on something like we are right now with the virus around the world. It turns out one of our greatest debt drivers is diabetes. It is 30 percent of the cost of Medicare over the next 30 years. So why show this board? Just a couple days ago, I came across a series of articles talking about another example of a miracle that science is bringing us. This is a mouse experiment. And traditionally when you see a mouse experiment, we are still a decade away from the therapeutic. But this should be stunningly hopeful. They functionally found a way to put in living cells that associate as a pancreatic cell--and this just comes from reading three or four articles in some of the science journals-- that produced insulin in this mouse experiment. Is this the beginning of a therapeutic that is either a cure for part of the diabetic population, or a substantial portion of it, that also happens to have the economic benefit of dramatically changing the cost curve of healthcare, dramatically changing the cost curve of Medicare and Medicaid and so many other things? As we sit here and talk about everything from conversations around the coronavirus to debt and deficits, understand if the primary driver of our deficits are functioning healthcare costs--and really it is actually our demographics; we have 74 million of us who are baby boomers, and we are moving into our benefit years--how do we build policy around here that says this is potentially a miracle? If we can make this miracle work for our brothers and sisters across the country, how do we incentivize investment in this type of technology that not only may partially or substantially cure diabetes, but it also solves one of our greatest debt problems in the future? This is actually the sort of thing Republicans and Democrats should be embracing and the policy and ideas to move capital, to move incentives to make this work. If this body is going to even have a discussion saying, hey, the world economics are going to slow down for a little while because of what is going on and we want to do some stimuli; talk about doing stimuli that actually isn't just a momentary change, but actually would change our future debt curve because it provides cures for our brothers and sisters with diabetes, a chronic condition that is 30 percent of just Medicare's future spending. I am asking us to think not only strategically and creatively, but also incentivize the very science that actually helps change our future. And it is here. This is really exciting stuff. You know, you hope and pray that the continuation of the experiments and the science continue to go in this direction, this is a big deal. And it is not only a big deal from a science standpoint for our brothers and sisters with diabetes, but even from debt and deficits. It turns out you really can actually have that holistic circle come together if we can get our policies right around here. So another thing we spend a lot of time on is talking about energy policy. How do you deal with everything from the issues of greenhouse gases and how dysfunctional our actual policies are here? And I don't mean to get snarky, but on one hand people get behind these microphones, and we give these beautiful speeches about how much we care. And then we look the other way when the actual things are going on in our economy are actually making things worse. And let me give my example. Part of the thought experiment is to understand--do you see this multicolored layer? That is nuclear generation that is coming off-line. This is a 2017 slide. If you could see the slide--which it is very colorful--you would notice it is substantially taller than the yellow side. The yellow side is photovoltaic. I am from Arizona. I love solar. It is wonderful. But I also realize nuclear power provides this amazing baseload that is really clean. And we have actually been here and shown that. There is a gentleman with a Nobel Prize that wrote an article a few months ago thinking that in about 10 years they will actually have a way to break down nuclear waste with a type of pulse laser. The physics on that are a little beyond me, but this is sort of the point. So we get our policy wrong on trying to keep our nuclear generation up and running, and then we run around giddy that we have had so much photovoltaic hit the market, but you do realize what the slide is telling you? We actually went backwards, because that differential had to be made up by other types of power generation. We fell backwards because we didn't find ways to keep this nuclear power in production. If we are going to talk about things, I just desperately wish we would get our math right. Another thing, this one is optimistic, and this one actually is touching on a piece of legislation from Ways and Means. It is a bipartisan number of Republicans and Democrats trying to push an all- of-the-above-type of model. For those of us in the desert southwest in the afternoons we produce a lot of photovoltaic power, solar power. And then the Sun goes down and we are still running our air conditioners. We actually have incentives for solar, for wind. Why wouldn't you actually design something that is a little more egalitarian in understanding the technology? And this charge is about batteries. And what is really amazing here is--see if I can bend over and read this line--battery prices have had an 85 percent fall in price per density in the last decade. When you see that curve going down, those little black lines, that is actually the falling price of battery storage. Well, if you are going to have in the tax code an incentive for wind generation and solar generation, why wouldn't you have it, also, for battery storage? Why wouldn't you have it for a type of technology that we haven't even thought of that some freaky smart person is working on in their basement or their garage or in a fancy lab right now that they may be about to bring out? So I am going to encourage Members to think about that as we are working on some of these packages, and it is often referred to as extenders and those issues. Why don't we get this right and incentivize those things that actually are the next disruption? Because for us in the desert southwest, incentivizing that power storage actually creates the mechanisms of photovoltaic and other types of generation and smooths it out so it actually works for us. So, please, for anyone that is listening, let's pay attention to that tax legislation. The other one I want to touch on is another piece of legislation I am sponsoring and working on. A couple years ago, we passed something called Q45. No one knows what Q45 is, but it is actually really important. It was everything in the tax reform data spot. It is the concept of a tax credit for capturing carbon. And then the other part of it for sequestering it or using it in other fashions. Wonderful. We have a piece of legislation to take that and make it permanent because, as we have learned, the capital expenditures for the technology to be on top of a smokestack or even the ambient air capture where it is on top of a building and it is just pulling carbon right out of the air, those sometimes are very large capital expenditures. They need a longer time to amortize out their costs. Well, it also turns out there are disruptions in that technology. This is a clip from an article back, oh, let's say, last October, and anyone that is tracking this just basically grab your phone, go to your search engine, and search ``MIT ambient carbon capture.'' They actually even have a little video to show you how it works. What the researchers say on this technology is overnight they may have just cut the cost in half. Cut the cost in half for functioning, just pulling carbon right out of the air, let alone on top of a smokestack. So it turns out that the technology of carbon capture and then the ability--if we could fix some of what we call that Q45, that tax credit that is already on the books, we are just trying to work out its timing--for sequestering that carbon in concrete or using it for enhanced oil recovery or--a couple researchers have been in our office and talked about--they can take that pure carbon with a little bit of a chemical treatment and turn it back into a clean burning hydrocarbon fuel. The technology is here. How do you ever take a body like this, where you have a lot of smart people, but we have lots of different specialties, and keep up to date with the fact that we live in a time of miracles? And if you are one of the people who truly cares about greenhouse gases, carbon in the atmosphere, then you also have the obligation to keep track of the disruption in technology because I will make you the argument, if the underlying math in the article behind this MIT carbon capture is true, it is a miracle, they may have cut the costs of capturing in half. So another one, and this has just been a project of mine for almost 5 years here. I can walk through the concept, and I actually even have a YouTube video. I think if you search ``Schweikert environmental crowdsourcing,'' I have a 90-second YouTube video trying to explain this concept. We all walk around with these super computers in our pockets. We call them a smartphone. What would happen in your community if you had a couple thousand people in your community that had these new little sensors that have hit the market? They are here, they are now. And you can be driving around, it could be your Uber driver, your Lyft driver, your UPS driver, the person driving the kids to soccer practice and every few minutes it is taking a sample as you go through the neighborhoods. You would actually have crowdsourced environmental data. Because today, what we do is we put up these towers, and those towers cost about a million dollars a year just to maintain, but they lack so much of the community information you actually need. And I will get to my punchline here where this makes sense. How do you know that the business over here is a good camper, but the folks down the street are painting cars in their backyard? Well, the fixed tower never tells you that. If you actually have a crowdsourced model of collecting air quality samples, you know the business is a good actor over here, but you have clowns over here breaking the law. Capture them. It turns out if you built an air quality crowdsourcing model in your community--the world we have today, where you fill out lots of paperwork, then shove it in file cabinets, do the papers and file cabinets actually make the air quality cleaner in your neighborhood? Of course not. It is a 1938 regulatory model. We document things, and then when someone screws up, we know who to sue. I will make you the argument that if you could crowdsource air quality samples in your neighborhood, you don't need the businesses or the others who are licensed today to fill out paperwork every quarter, every 6 months, every year, because if they screw up, you capture them immediately. Think about it. You could crash the bureaucracy. You could crash filling out paperwork to shove in file cabinets and keep the air quality much, much healthier because you capture when there is a bad actor or when something has gone wrong. And you capture it instantly. That community science, that citizen science, that crowdsourcing is here. It turns out that lots of smart people around the country are now producing products that will let you do this. I am ordering a couple different ones, but this is one version we pulled off the internet just the other day. What they are trying to point to here is that this is how we do it today. We put up a single tower. It costs a million dollars a year. The technology is great. It has great sensitivity, but it doesn't tell you where the bad actor is. In a crowdsource model, you instantly find out where the bad actor is. In my State, in my county, Maricopa County Air Quality, instead of them being collectors of paperwork, they would have the data come in. They could see it on the heat map and immediately know where to go take a look to see if there is something wrong happening. I am trying to make the argument--do you remember what I was saying earlier?--that we have to grow the economy rather vigorously to be able to have the resources to keep our promises. One of the things on that list, besides a tax policy that works and an immigration policy, was a regulatory policy. I have never been thrilled when people walk around and use the term: ``Oh, we are going to deregulate.'' I beg of you to think about ``smart regulations.'' This requires a dramatically smaller bureaucracy, dramatically less burden on those who are creating productive capacity in our communities, yet it would keep us healthier and would show us where the bad actors are. I beg of this body, think forward. We keep designing pieces of legislation around here that might have been brilliant if it was still the 1980s or early 1990s. How do we push the way we think of everything, from the environment to environmental protection all the way down to creating the next generation of pharmaceuticals that cure us? I truly believe we live in a time of miracles. I also believe that our inability to be forward-thinking in this body is one of the biggest problems we have in these sorts of technologies reaching our communities. We always start with this slide, because, one more time: What is the greatest fragility, long term, to this country? I am going to argue it is debt, but that debt is driven by our demographics. Our birth rates have collapsed over the last couple of decades, particularly these last few years. There is a large number of us who are baby boomers; we have our earned benefits coming to us. If you look at the debt accumulation that is about to happen, it is stunning. How do we build a path that makes it so that we can keep our promises and still have a growing economy so that my 4-year-old daughter has the same opportunities I have had? My brothers and sisters on the left will often come up with: ``Well, we will tax rich people.'' My brothers and sisters on the right will often say: ``Well, we are going to find waste and fraud.'' You do realize that is mathematical lunacy? None of that works mathematically. You have to grow the economy. You have to have a disruption in healthcare prices. You have to have a disruption of how you incentivize people to stay in the labor force. That is why we put up this slide, because we believe there are these five pillars that if we get the economic growth; the labor force participation; the adoption of disruptive technology; the population stability of encouraging family formation; and if you are going to change the immigration system, you actually incentivize more of a talent-based immigration system, because you need the economic velocity. Now, a lot of this is really politically uncomfortable. I mean, some of these things, when you go talk about it, people get really mad because they are not comfortable with it. But it is almost the only way, at least in our little office, that we have been able to build a model that we can have enough economic growth, enough tax revenues, enough change in the price of what our promises are that we end up having a pretty amazing future as a country. How do you ever get a body like this, where you have lots of smart people, to act when a lot of what we know is long since out of date and when the math is really, really uncomfortable to deal with and talk about? When you show up in front of an audience at home and say, ``You do understand the biggest driver of debt is Medicare?'' you will get booed, hissed at. But you need to understand, if you don't talk about it, how do you save it? Remember, the Medicare trust fund, which is the part A, has only a few years left, and then it is gone. We need to step up, both Democrats and Republicans, and start telling the truth about the math, maybe invest in that crazy thing called a calculator and start to build a model of how we disrupt the prices, how we grow the economy, how we create the velocity that makes this work and provides hope and opportunity. My thesis is very, very simple: It is here. There is a way to do it. And the biggest barrier to it happening is this body here. We need to change the way we look at the disruption of technology. The last one I will give you is just this simple example. I have come to the floor multiple times and sort of done a thought experiment: the technology of something that looks like a large kazoo that you can blow into and instantly tells you that you have the flu, that instantly can bounce off your medical records on your phone, that knows you are not allergic to a certain antiviral, and that orders your antivirals. Isn't that wonderful? Think about just the cost disruption that technology would have, particularly with what is going on right now. It turns out that technology exists, yet the professor who was working on it had incredible difficulties raising capital, being able to get investors to move it forward. You know why? Because it is functionally illegal. It would save lots of money, but the algorithm for being allowed to write a prescription is functionally illegal. It is illegal under State licensing laws, the Social Security Act, the way we reimburse. We need to become much more forward-thinking because it is the way we save ourselves. If we stay the way we are, we do nothing but bathe in debt and stagnation. But there is a path. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, due to travel complications, I was unable to be present for votes on Monday, March 2. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 79, H.R. 5003 and YEA on Roll Call No. 80, H.R. 5932.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, as I get set up, in past years, when I used to have to sit up there, it was because the Speaker was annoyed with me. I am sure that would never happen in your case. You don't have to say anything. Madam Speaker, I try to come to the floor every week and sort of talk about what we see actually happening in the economy, what is happening in jobs, and those things. But it is more of a global discussion. And part of that discussion is we see the stories, we know the facts; we are about to be buried in a debt tsunami. And it is not Republicans and Democrats. It is demographics. There are 74 million of us who are baby boomers; 74 million. We are halfway through turning 65, moving into our earned benefits. And it is such a difficult subject around here because, the fact of the matter is, as soon as you use the word Medicare or Social Security in any type of discussion, even when you are passionately trying to protect those programs, in our modern politics of rage, you just wrote an attack ad saying, well, he talked about Medicare; he must be meaning to do something. That is absurd. If we are not talking about it, we are not going to save them. Here is the thought experiment. Next 5 years, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements, but mostly Medicare, just the growth, equals the entire Defense Department. Last week, I was here with some boards walking you through, showing that almost all the 30-year debt, almost every dime of it, is just Social Security and Medicare. It is demographics. And my passion is, I believe there is a way we keep our promises, by using a calculator, by using, actually, economic modeling, using the tools we have around us. The problem is, in this body, it is complex. Our ability to do simple things the last year has been just incredibly heartbreaking because everything is right now about political gamesmanship, one-upmanship, trying to get the lead, instead of dealing with the reality. It is complex. So I put up this slide almost every time I come speak, trying to make the point that if you can grow the economy through tax policy, through trade policy, through smart regulations, population stability, getting the immigration system correct, family formation, the adoption of disruptive technology in healthcare--and we are going to talk about that a little bit today--incentives to stay in the labor force. We are having a miracle right now, mathematically, of the number of our brothers and sisters who are in the labor force and moving into the labor force. Last Friday, the number of folks who moved from not even looking that entered the labor force was stunning. I know that is geeky, but it is really, really, really important. I have sat on the Joint Economic Committee now for years, and it was only 3 or 4 years ago we would have these really smart economists come and tell us that labor force participation was going to crash; this type of full employment economy was impossible. It is here. These types of wage gains, as you know, we just had to recalculate. The productivity numbers turned out to be much higher in 2019 than we thought they were. How do we take what is working right now, expand those concepts so we hit a level of economic stability and growth that gives us a fighting chance not to be buried in debt? And how does that become partisan rage around here? I accept my brothers and sisters on the left live in an economic folklore of, well, we will tax rich people, and that will take care of it. And my brothers and sisters with me on the Republican side, we often will get behind microphones and say things like, well, it is waste and fraud. None of those are true. Let's just, for once, try to tell the truth about the math. The math is stunningly ugly. Simple concepts. And even last week, I think I brought this board here. If you take the next 30 years, and you pull Social Security and Medicare out, that next 30 years--and I have a 4-year old; I would really like her to have the same type of future I got to experience in my life. But if I strip Social Security and Medicare out of the next 30 years, we have $23 trillion in the bank. We are $23 trillion positive. Not inflation adjusted; that is the raw number. If I pull Social Security and Medicare back into that 30-year window, we are $103 trillion in debt. And if you want to do constant dollars removed, then drop the number by a third. You cannot be intellectually credible, honest walking behind these microphones saying you are going to protect Social Security, you are going to protect Medicare, and then not be willing to talk about the actual math. Because I think there is a way that we keep our promises; it just means we have to do everything. So one of the first things I want to walk through today is a concept, and I am desperately trying to sell and have this sort of become intellectually sort of socialized. The ACA, ObamaCare, if you really strip it down, what was it? It was a financing bill. Take it down to its most basic. This is hard for a lot of us to accept, but it was who got subsidized and who had to pay. Our Republican alternative, if you really strip it down, what was it? It was a financing bill. It is who got to pay and who got subsidized. We almost never have an honest argument around here of what to do to crash the price of healthcare. We have lots of discussions of little incremental changes, and all those incremental changes are important, whether it be HSAs, whether it be disclosures of cost and these things. Wonderful. But they are dishonest when you start to understand the scale--the scale--of what is coming at us. Back to that 5 years; make it 10 years. Just the growth of Social Security, mostly Medicare, healthcare entitlements, equals the entire discretionary budget. Just the growth portion. So what do you do to disrupt the cost of healthcare? And my argument is we need to legalize technology. I am not going to show it today, but in the past, I have come here and shown that we now have the technology; it is in its final stages of hopefully being perfected. It looks like a big kazoo. You blow into it and it instantly tells you you have the flu. It instantly could bang off your medical records on your phone, instantly order your antivirals. The algorithm we know right now is incredibly accurate, except that technology is illegal in today's conscript. Think of that. So how do you disrupt healthcare prices? Well, one, I am going to take us to something a little bit different. Did you know that almost a half a trillion a year--actually, over half a trillion a year, 16 percent of our entire healthcare cost, is just people not following the rules for their pharmaceuticals. They don't take their hypertension medicine. They take too much of this. They don't take this. That is an adherence problem. Sixteen percent of our entire healthcare cost is the failure to follow your pharmaceutical protocols. That is not drug pricing; that is not prescription pricing; that is not a PBM; that is not a benefit. That is just you and I, as Americans, we are not following the rules for the pharmaceuticals we have. Well, it turns out the fastest thing you and I could do to actually have an immediate pop-down on the price of healthcare is actually change pharmaceutical adherence. Well, it turns out we have technology for that, and here is the thought experiment. We have pill bottle tops that tell you when you open it up or if you didn't open it up, and it will ping you. So we know right now the adherence of taking your hypertension medicine is one of the most powerful things we can do to actually crash the price of healthcare, but you have got to take it. How many of us forget? Well, the fact of the matter is, for a few dollars, we could issue that pill bottle with a cap that starts pinging your phone, pinging your family, pinging whoever the hell you want to ping that you didn't follow the rules. We have actually brought the display here before. It looks like a little dome. It actually distributes pharmaceuticals into a cup. So, if you are my grandmother, rest her soul, and you have a couple pills you take in the morning, one for digestion at lunch, and a couple before you go to bed, it actually will distribute those at the proper time, in the proper amounts, and then tell you, reminds you, reminds the family if that little cup with the pharmaceuticals hasn't been touched. It turns out it is a technology solution, and it is a half-a- trillion-a-year issue. Yeah, it is a little hard to explain, but 16 percent of our healthcare cost is just not taking our pharmaceuticals properly. Is this Republican or Democrat? It is just what we are. And the fact of the matter is a bunch of really creative entrepreneurs, these small, disruptive tech companies, are coming up with a solution. How do we make that part of what we are trying to move forward? How do you make it reimbursable? How do you actually take Medicare part D and say, instead of the rules right now where someone is supposed to be trying to call, actually, widen up that definition so they could also be providing the technology to make sure someone is taking those pharmaceuticals in the proper fashion? I am begging this place to open up our minds and think a bit more creatively about what do we do to disrupt the price of healthcare, because, remember, that 30-year debt curve, it is mostly healthcare. And, guess what. Technology is about to help us disrupt it if we could just make that technology legal, reimbursable, part of our plan. We can do some amazing things. And, actually, in this hyperpartisan environment, this technology hasn't been made Republican or Democrat yet. I am sure we will find a way. What will happen is one of the corporate executives will write someone a check, and we will decide they are all left and right, and we will beat the crap out of each other, but right now, this is an actual solution. There are other really amazing disruptions coming, and I think this one may have been shown at the consumer electronics show. I am not even sure I understand all the things it does, but this, in many ways, is a doctor visit in your pocket. It does about a dozen different things where it can actually do a number of different tests, and it is in your medicine cabinet. How do we encourage this type of technology? Because, day after day, we will have individuals coming to us and saying: We have a crisis in the United States. We don't have enough primary care physicians. They are absolutely right. So, how do we help those primary care professionals? By saying we can have some technology where it is the type of thing where you can blow into it, you can prick your finger, or it can do this, this, this, this, and it is incredibly accurate. And it is available to you instantly because it is in your own home medicine cabinet. Let me give you one. What would happen if you could have a major, highly accurate disease detention technology, and it doesn't have to be in your medicine cabinet, but it could be at your local CVS Pharmacy? It turns out this technology looks like it has been perfected. Your lungs throw off--forgive me, I am going to try to get my technology right. Your lungs actually become part of your body that your blood circulates completely through, I think, every couple minutes. Your breath actually has thrown off proteins and other things that can be detected. I showed this a couple months ago. Some researchers, I think, are actually working on it, an extension of that flu kazoo that can pick up 20 different types of dead cancer proteins and let you know you have them. Well, it turns out this technology, actually, now exists today, and the ability of it to actually look for dozens of different types of ailments, a number of different types of cancers. What you do is you just breathe into it for a couple minutes. Why aren't we running as fast as we can to make this part of our community? We talk about access to care. The fact of the matter is that supercomputer you hold in your pocket you call your phone, its algorithm, tied in with these types of sensors, whether it be the oxygen sensor I played with last year--I am a severe asthmatic, and we just played with it, and it was helping me dial up and, for the most part, dial down my inhaled steroids. Now, technically, it was illegal because it is prescribing to me, and it hadn't been approved. From that flu kazoo I just described to you that is unreimbursable and, ultimately, illegal because the algorithm is writing a prescription to something like this that can do a stunning number of diagnostics if you are just willing to breathe into it for 10 minutes, the miracle is here. Is this Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is the future. But, in so many ways, Congress has become the barrier, stopping, holding back the technology disruptions that actually could help us crash the price. And, instead, we seem so much more comfortable having debates about, ``Well, who should get subsidized?'' ``Who should we finance?'' ``Who should be regulated?'' ``Who should be controlled?'' instead of, ``Let's set people free.'' We have technology that can help you manage yourself, know what is going on, detect blood cancers through breathing. Why aren't we running as fast as we can to get these things to market to disrupt the price of healthcare? And, look, it is not a complex premise. We can make the economy grow like crazy. We have seen the expansive effects of the tax reform and some of the regulatory reforms. We have to get the immigration system correct, moving more to a talent-based system. We have to do the incentives for labor force participation. There is a whole bunch of things we need to do, and we just know the economics there. The hardest part is, as a society, none of that is going to matter unless we have a disruption in the price curve of healthcare delivery. And I am going to argue there is a path, and it is here. Can I give you sort of a thought experiment? Should Congress have slowed down the internet a decade ago to protect Blockbuster Video? Think about it. If Blockbuster Video had gone out and hired an army of lobbyists walking around the hallways here, Congress is somewhat in the protection bracket, should we have slowed down the internet to keep that Netflix from putting them out of business? Of course not. That is absurd, isn't it? Yet Congress does that with all sorts of rules, whether it be reimbursement, the cynicism toward algorithmic health and sensors and these things that can help our medical community, because we will often get certain lobby groups and others who will come in the door and say: This will be really disruptive to our business model. Can you slow it down? And every day we slow these things down, you are crushing my little girl's future, but you are also crushing the rest of this country because the debt curve is crashing down on us if you actually look at the debt that is going to come out this year. There was a 4-month report from Treasury yesterday that basically said, hey, receipts--and I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee--receipts. We don't call them, actually, revenues, but receipts and tax are really healthy. Last year, we grew over 4 percent, but we spent over 8 percent, and then we will beat up each other, saying: ``Well, you wanted to expand this program,'' or, ``You wanted to expand that program.'' The fact of the matter is the expansion defense, the expansion of other programs is a fraction of that growth. Almost all that growth in spending is demographics. It is the reality. Those of us who are baby boomers are moving into our earned benefits and we never set aside the money for it, so, if you can keep the promises. Are you willing to do the combination of things--and you have got to do them all because, it turns out, if you do the labor participation incentives to enter and stay and get involved in the labor force, to do that well, you actually need to be doing things over here in technology that make it available for those who may have certain barriers. Over here, for certain people with barriers, you have to have regulations that actually work rationally with our brothers and sisters who may have those barriers. It all has to come together. Can Congress do something that is complex, because it turns out there is no simple solution. There is a complex one, and there is a path. And the scary part--understand, when we do the math, and this is something I have been doing for a couple years, we still think we hit about 95 percent of debt to GDP. My goal is just to hold us there and not blow through that. It is possible. Can Congress become creative? So the next one I want to go through, and this is actually sort of fun for me. This is actually one of my older displays. It is from a year or so ago, because I have this fascination with something they call carbon capture. So a couple years ago, they finally built an electric facility outside Texas, La Porte, Texas, wherever that is. I am sure it is a lovely place. But imagine--and there are two of them. There is a natural gas and a coal-fired power plant, and they don't have smokestacks. On the natural gas one, they came up with this crazy idea. I think it is called the Allam cycle. You blow up the natural gas, and you actually use the carbon, the burnt, and slam that through the turbines, and then at the other side, you cool it and capture it. You go, oh, God, we haven't been doing that? We, last year, in the Ways and Means Committee, perfected, and now we are going to try to do it more, something they call 45Q, which is the incentive to capture and then, over here, to sequester that CO2. Great. You get some of those who are cynical saying, well, it can't work, or it is going to be too expensive. We are going to have a little fun with the ``too expensive.'' The best technology we had last year was a facility, I believe, that is going up in Canada. The Gates Foundation and others are investing in it. Their best number was about $100 a ton. It is $100 a ton for substantially pure carbon. Everybody who geeks out on carbon change and those things, you know you can do lots of things with it. You can, through a chemical process, turn it back into clean-burning fuel. You can do what they do in Texas and other places, which is to pump it in the ground and use it for enhanced oil recovery. But $100 a ton was sort of our best bet. I beg of you, if you are someone who is interested in the technology of carbon capture, I want you to go grab your phone and look up the news stories from last October. I want you to put this into your search engine: MIT ambient carbon capture. Some researchers at MIT last year had just this wonderfully elegant breakthrough. They have a really nice video, if you are not particularly technical, sort of showing how they did nanotubes and electric plates, where they can power them up, power them down, power them up, power them down. They can do this in an ambient environment, so on the roof of your home or on top of a smokestack. In part of the articles, if I am reading it properly, it wasn't $100 or $150 a ton. It is down to $50 a ton. Their model says it is down to $50 a ton. You do realize that is almost the market price today? It turns out, if you are someone who cares about the issue of CO2 in the environment, we have just had a major breakthrough. And how much discussion does it get? This has been since October. How much joy have you seen in newspapers and articles, talking about a revolutionary breakthrough? And we can be doing mining, because we have to deal with this reality. The United States has gotten dramatically cleaner in the last 15 years. Good. But a whole bunch of the rest of the world hasn't. Unless we are arrogant enough that we think we are going to turn around carbon-use policies in a bunch of the rest of the world, we are out of our minds. It turns out we can grow our economy; we can continue to use hydrocarbons; and we have a technology that not only would mine our own CO2 but would help us on everything else that is being generated in other places in the world. I am going to digress for just a second. This isn't that same sort of theme. I have come here behind the microphone before and talked about plastic in the ocean. Before I got this crazy job, I used to love to scuba dive, and we talk all the time about plastic in the ocean. Here in Washington, D.C., we do lots of virtue signaling. We made paper straws. Of course, how much U.S. and North American plastic actually ends up in the ocean? Substantially none. Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, 8 in Asia, 2 in Africa. If you cared about plastic in the ocean, you would go to the 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic--8 in Asia, 2 in Africa--and you would do something. You would create a value for the plastic. As Republicans, we are trying to do that. But it blows up some of the folklore around here of, well, if we do paper straws in Washington, D.C., we make an effect. Come on. Look, I understand we live in a world where everything is political, and the virtue signaling makes us feel better. Wouldn't you really prefer to do something that makes a difference? Back to this concept, a major breakthrough in how you capture carbon, you can do it right out of the air. Now, that is one of the amazing things in this article. It works in ambient air. It doesn't have to be on top of a smokestack. A couple of days ago, there is an article--one of my personal fascinations, as those of you who claim to pay attention to this know, is the math on methane. As you all know, a couple of years ago, we had to recalculate methane's half-life, so a lot of the old formulas were all wrong. Now, we think methane is about 9 years. But the accepted ratio right now is 1 ton of methane equals 84 tons of carbon. Okay, so the picture alongside me, because it was the best picture I had, is a flare in remote Texas. They are doing their best to burn off that methane. Someone just came up with the idea: Why don't we just back up a truck, chill it, super-chill it like we do with liquefied gas? We get a valuable commodity, and we capture all of it. And remember the ratio 84-to-1? Well, we incentivize this. We are already doing the 45Q to create a tax incentive to capture carbon and sequester it or use it in some other things. Wouldn't it make sense to do that same sort of model with methane? We came behind these mikes a year or 2 ago and showed just the math possibility that a major pipeline to capture methane from oil country, just that single pipeline functioning, it got you just to the Paris accords, slightly below. The blowback I got was crazy. ``Oh, I don't like pipelines.'' You are saying: ``But did you see the math that just this one thing actually had this huge''--``but I don't like pipelines.'' We need to stop dealing in absurdity. It turns out, we may be able to do it without the pipeline. Now it is a truck, backing up, chilling it, capturing it. We need to understand things like this. If a portable LNG truck capturing the methane is a solution, is that Republican or Democrat? Well, in this environment right now, maybe it is Republican, because some of my brothers and sisters on the left hate these technologies. Sorry, that is unfair. A number of them are skeptical of technologies that allow us to keep using hydrocarbons. My argument is, embrace, love the science, love the technology. It will set you free. Because these things make a difference. We live in the time of miracles, whether it be healthcare technology or whether it be the single-shot cure for hemophilia. You all saw the article a couple of days ago that we think we might also have a cure for hemophilia, not only A, but B also. The cures, whether it be for curing people in the chronic population, technology for our environment, or technology to crash the price of healthcare, they are here. You know, one of the biggest barriers to the disruption that could help us continue to grow the economy, could help us have enough robustness in that economy so we can keep our promises and at the same time get a cleaner environment and healthier economy is this body and its inability to stop the arrogance and thinking that we are so smart, that we think we know what tomorrow's technology is. When I first got elected, we had a family joke. ``When are the two times in life you think you know everything?'' ``When you are 13 years old and the day after you get elected to Congress.'' And the family would laugh and then make fun of me. Now that I have been here a few years, I worry. We have lots of good people, lots of really smart people. And all day long, we are pounded by folks who are trying to protect their business models or their bureaucracy models. I am begging us, we need to understand the tsunami of debt that is on the horizon, and it turns out, technology is about to provide us solutions that don't bankrupt us and actually provide the solution and don't put government in charge of every aspect of our lives. This should be a story of incredible hope and excitement. But can we break through the politics of arrogance that we have around here and start being willing to push the envelope of the actual solutions? Madam Speaker, thank you for tolerating me. I appreciate it. 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, my family accuses me of being incapable of speaking without moving my hands or without displays, so we are going to see if we can do a little bit of both that we are good at. Mr. Speaker, about every week, I try to take a block of time and come here to walk through both what I see happening math-wise and what I see happening demographic-wise. I know as soon as I use those words, most anyone who is watching this is now falling asleep. But the math is important. I put this board up because I am a believer that there is a way to save the country from being buried in debt. There is a way that the next 30, 40 years can be incredibly prosperous, but we need to invest in this magic device, which is called a calculator, because much of what we do here is rhetorical. We do policy by feelings, and we engage in just absolute absurdity in our unwillingness to talk about the reality of what is going on. So, first, a bit of premise, and then we will do a little bit of what happened in today's job report to demonstrate there is a path, but that path doesn't exist until we start to be honest with each other. So just a top-line understanding, the next 5 years, just the growth in Social Security and Medicare--it is mostly Medicare--and healthcare entitlements, just the growth equals the entire Defense Department. Mr. Speaker, you have to understand what is happening. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. There are 74 million of us who are baby boomers, and we are moving into our retirement years. We have earned benefits, and there is no money in the bank. It is all going to be borrowed. So think of that: Over the next 10 years, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements is the entire discretionary budget. Everything else is on autopilot. Yet how many of our brothers and sisters who are elected, and who have this incredible opportunity and responsibility to come tell the truth, are comfortable coming behind this microphone and saying: Hey, it turns out that we are getting old very fast as a society. We have stunning numbers of promises that we have an obligation to keep. And we are unwilling to have the honesty of the discussion of what we are about to do to our kids in crushing them. I have a 4-year-old daughter. Doesn't she deserve to have the same opportunities we all have had? It turns out there is a path, but we need to stop delusional thinking. Forgive me when my brothers and sisters on the Republican side say, ``Well, if we just got rid of waste and fraud,'' it is a rounding error. It is important, and we need to do it. ``We just have to tax rich people more.'' It is delusional. It is fractions of a percent, and you could take all their wealth, Mr. Speaker. We don't seem to have our heads around the scale of this math and the number of zeros that go with it. Let's sort of walk through this. In the last couple of years, we have been trying to pitch a concept. You can't just do one thing, Mr. Speaker. You can't just change entitlements and think you are going to accomplish anything. You can't just tax people more and think you are going to get anywhere. You have to do everything. It is sort of the wholistic--I prefer the term ``unified''--theory that we have to get the economics working. We have to maximize economic growth, and we have to maximize labor force participation. We need to adopt revolutionary and disruptive technology to crash the price of healthcare because, as I was just sharing with you, Mr. Speaker, healthcare is what drives the deficit. I was here last week, and I was showing slides that 90 percent of the future debt is substantially Social Security but mostly Medicare, yet the only calls I get when I show that slide is I get people angry: Stop telling us that. That doesn't fit the folklore I bathe in. But the fact of the matter is, there are technology disruptions coming right now that could crash the price of healthcare and be amazing in changing our debt curve. The problem is a bunch of that technology is actually illegal because it uses algorithms, sensors, and things that our current legal framework and reimbursement framework isn't ready for. We need to modernize. Employment, we are going to talk about some of the remarkable things that came out in today's unemployment numbers that should be incredibly hopeful to both those on the left and the right of what is happening, where our brothers and sisters--what we refer to as marginally detached--are coming back into the labor force. This is a good thing. It makes remarkable differences. You are going to start to see: Do we add incentives in the earned and even unearned benefits? Remember, in our society, the vast majority of our spending, 70-plus percent, is on autopilot. It is what we call entitlements. You earned your Social Security. You earned your Medicare. You earned your VA. You earned these things. There are other benefits you get because you fell below a certain income. You are part of a certain Tribal population--those things. These are treaty obligations. They are societal obligations we have made decisions on. Are there things we can do to add a spiff? Saying: Yes, you may be 70 years old, you have your earned entitlement, but could we give you a little spiff? Are you healthy? Do you want to continue to work? Do you want to stay in the labor force? Because it turns out to be really good for society. It turns out to be really important. We still have a problem with millennial men, which is a different speech, and one day, we will figure out why they are underparticipating. Population stability, a really uncomfortable part of the conversation to have, but the math is the math. Our birthrates have collapsed. We are looking at data right now that says half of millennials, more than 50 percent of millennials, will never marry. It doesn't mean they won't be in long-term committed relationships, but are there incentives we can produce as a government, as a society, that those stable relationships bring another generation? Because it is an honest math problem. We are collapsing population-wise. Immigration, how do you design an immigration system that is open, welcoming, but is talent-based? Because the reality of it is, we are about to hit such a demographic headwind if we do not have brothers and sisters becoming Americans who have certain skill sets. In many ways, it is a more elegant system. I don't care about your race, your religion, who you cuddle with, all of these things. I do care that you add velocity to our society, to our economy. Then, there are other things: tax policies, regulatory policy, smart technology, things we can do to maximize economic growth. Look, our pitch is: If we can make these things work--and you can't do one or two of them; you have to do all of them--we have a model that says, at the peak of the baby boom, so about 15 years from now, or less than that, we kiss up to 95 percent of debt-to-GDP, but we can hold it. Then, it fades back to something normal. If we don't do this, there are charts out there that show a couple hundred percent of debt-to-GDP. We blow up the society. We basically become anemic, slow-growth. We raise taxes like crazy on young people to make them pay our benefits. We become a country that has crushed any excitement and hope. Let's talk about the good things, because there is starting to be some proof that when you get tax policy correct, regulatory policy correct, some of these incentives, good things happen. I know in today's rage-based politics, we sit there and attack everything, but there are good things happening. How do we figure out what makes them happen and do more of it? And the things that aren't working, let's do less of them. It is not that complicated. Look, today, we got the jobs report. The jobs report we get about January is really important because they also give us a sense--it is not the final number but the sense of what was happening in 2019 and those last 4 months. Every smart economist we work with--I am the senior Republican on the House side on something called the Joint Economic Committee. It is basically for all the kids in your high school who were president of your math club. If you love the data--and I happen to be blessed to have a couple of economists who work for me in that capacity--we were all expecting revisions and some ugly numbers. Turns out, a few hours ago, we found out that there were 55,000 added in November and December, the ending parts of last year. The economy turns out to have been healthier. The employment opportunities were healthier. You all saw the number for January, 225,000 jobs, far beyond even the most optimistic predictions. There should have been joy in this room. Those are people who are working, who are coming back in the labor force, who are changing their lives. But this place is incapable of joy anymore. These are really, really good things. But there is something even more remarkable underlying in that data, and it is important. I know it is not exciting, but it is really important if you care about people. First, we work on the premise that growth is moral. You are going to see some numbers here where our brothers and sisters who had basically quit, they had stopped trying to find employment. They had dropped out. We called them the marginally detached. Those people who might have a small part-time job, but they are unhappy. They are basically the working poor. All of a sudden, we are seeing, in the last 24 months, remarkable movement in their wages and even more remarkable movement in their job opportunities. There is something working out there. Remember, the first slide we were talking about how we have a healthy enough economy, a healthy enough economics in our society so we can keep our promises. This is one of the charts that is really important. If you all remember your high school economics class, what are the two components that make wages go up, the two things we focus on? Well, one is productivity, and the other is inflation. When your wages go up, well, inflation is up, so we are going to pay you more, even though you have no improvement in your purchasing power. And inflation-driven wage growth, you are typically falling behind. The other side--and that is what this chart talks about--is productivity. The company invested in a new piece of equipment, new software, new methodologies, or new supply chains, but it requires capital investments. But we have gotten more productive, meaning we can pay our workers more. We were panic-stricken, functionally, at the end of 2016. Productivity had collapsed. Lots of the smart people were saying: Well, you have had the tax reform. People did their investing, this and that. It is going away. Turns out, they were absolutely wrong. Look at the last bar. That is 2019. We have had a spike. Now, I still don't think it is enough, but we are up to what we call 1.7 productivity growth. For an economy our size, that is remarkable. We can do better, but it is going the right way. If we are going to pay our brothers and sisters more, if the working poor are going to have an opportunity, this is crucial. Can we fixate on the things that are working in our economy? Because there is something working now, so how do we do more of it? This next chart is impossible to read, but it is really important. You have three layers in here. These are for wages, so those folks who are at the low end of the scale, middle end of the scale, and those folks who are making lots of money. The remarkable thing that has happened since tax reform--I know this is really hard to see. It turns out, it is the working poor, that lowest quartile, that is having the most growth in their wages, that bottom 10 percent of our brothers and sisters that we were writing off as a society. I have been on the Joint Economic Committee now for years, and just 3 or 4 years ago, we brought in these fancy, very well-credentialed, really smart economists who basically said that Americans who didn't finish high school, Americans with moderate skills, they are part of the permanent underclass. Start thinking of ways to provide them subsidies, welfare, housing, because they are going to stay there. The velocity, the concept that you can start out poor today, learn a skill, work hard, and move up, they basically said was over. They are wrong. And this isn't Republican or Democrat. This is hope. This is what America is supposed to be about, that those folks come back. You may not have had the opportunity to have great skill training. Maybe something horrible happened in your life, you dropped out of high school. Three years ago, we were writing you off. Today, you have double, more than double, the wage growth of everyone else and the mean in this society. I know this is geeky, but it is really important. These numbers are millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters out there who had a really crappy decade. All of a sudden, something is happening out there where their wages are growing. The job stability, the value of their labor, it may be the most elegant way to say it--and some of this is complex. And this is an uncomfortable part of the conversation. Forgive me if I am not as eloquent on this as I would like to be. For low-skilled populations, it is a combination of a robust enough economy to have a need for those skills or lack of skills. But there is a need for that labor. The other side is, you are not flooding your society with a type of immigration that puts so much low-skilled population in the society that you crush the working poor. So think of a little bit of a seesaw. You have to do both to get the value of that working poor population, to make their labor valuable. It is happening. That should be joyful. Now, we should figure out how to do more of it, how to keep this going, because it is working. Now, here is the one where I may take us a little bit to a level of complexity in the thinking, but it is really important. When we did tax reform a couple of years ago, the Joint Committee on Taxation folks-- they are all freaky smart. There is like 50 of them. A number have Ph.D.'s in econometrics and all these things. They came to us and said: David, there are two fragilities in tax reform for the economy to grow. It is capital stock, available cash to be lent for businesses, for organizations, for things to grow, to buy that new piece of equipment for that labor productivity. The other thing was labor itself. We are getting old very fast as a society. There are some charts out there that say, within the decade, we functionally have two workers for one person in retirement. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is those of us who are baby boomers. It is what it is. Something has started to happen in the last 2 years, and we saw a pop of it in this January data. Think about this. This over here is sort of that 2008, 2009, and we were at 67 percent labor force participation. Now, labor force participation basically means everyone in society less those people who are under 16. So those who are eligible to work, up and to, I believe, being much older. Now, this number was always supposed to crash because we are getting older as a society. But it was supposed to continue to just dive down because we are only halfway through the retirement of the baby boomers. All a sudden, in the last couple years, we have broken the trendline. All of a sudden, today, we saw we are up to 63.4 percent labor force participation. Most people glaze over and go: What the hell does that mean? Well, it means it is a number that those smart economists a couple years ago were telling us we would never get to, but somehow it has happened. We are functionally living in a time when we are going to be rewriting textbooks. But what is also remarkable--and you are going to see this in one of the other charts here--is those who are coming back, they are starting to look for unemployment. So how do you have this weird number today? There are 225,000 people who moved into the labor force, or took jobs in January, but unemployment actually ticked up one-tenth of a point. But the labor force participation, the number in the labor force, also goes up two- tenths of a point. That is actually wonderful. What it means is that people who had given up, who weren't looking, hadn't looked in the last 4 weeks, in the last year, they had functionally given up, almost a couple hundred thousand, maybe 170,000 or so, came back and started looking, coming back into our society's labor force. This is really important because there is just that societal concept of you are less likely to be using bad things if you are working. You are more likely to be able to start having a functioning family, maybe even family formation, if you are working. Your future, your optimism, your health are better if you are working. All of a sudden, we are starting to see populations that those fancy economists were writing off just a couple years ago. They are coming back. This is moral, but it is also really good. Why does it become partisan, saying: Well, it is not as good as it should be? It is a remarkable break of every trend line we had. You would think we would have this honorable conversation, saying: Let's understand what is working and do more of it because, if we can do this for a few more years, another decade, that economic trend line starts to change remarkably. And I will try to make that make sense. So last August, CBO did debt projections. We just got another one last week. Did anyone come behind these microphones--well, I did--and say: Hey, did anyone notice that the 10-year window of debt actually went down $705 billion? It turns out, if you dive into that, some of that was payrolls. There are a lot more people working. They are paying a lot more payroll tax. That is wonderful. There is another thing that is actually a little more complex to get your head around: interest rates. We expect the cost of financing the deficits of the U.S. Government to also came down about $400 billion. But there is an argument that the tax reform--remember how we said what were the two fragilities, labor and capital stock? It turns out that thing called capital stock is remarkably better than anyone had modeled. We did something in the tax reform to stop businesses from moving their domiciles overseas, taking their profits and booking them overseas, keeping that capital overseas. We changed that. We have had a remarkable amount of that, billions and billions, I mean, a few hundred billion dollars come crashing back to the United States, where they have to pay some taxes here on it, but that cash is now in our society. It turns out also savings rates have turned out to be much better than we modeled. So just that and the fact that more people are working is about a $705 billion reduction in the deficit. In that one period between August and last week when we got the CBO report--and remember, the cost of tax reform we thought would be about $1.4 trillion. We just covered about half of it. So it is just an interesting thought on what is going on. This is the remarkable chart. This is the one we need to get our heads around. So think about this. It is January 2009, January 2010. How many of you remember people getting behind microphones and talking about the real unemployment rate? Do you remember the real unemployment rate? It is not these people who are out looking. It is all the people. It is the worn-out workers. Those people have quit. We had numbers where it was approaching 17.6, 17.5 percent of our Nation was part of the real unemployment. Take a look at what has happened. This is remarkable. We are now starting to see numbers that were 6.7 percent of the--this is people who are looking, not looking, who have worn out, who have given up. It has been cut substantially, more than half. And we are at this point where we have been having this amazing academic debate, conversation: What is real unemployment? Not only that, what is full employment? How much--and I was told never to use this word behind the microphone--but this concept of elasticity. How many of our brothers and sisters are actually available to come back into the labor force? It turns out there is a miracle happening out there. Every month, we will tell you: Oh, 150,000 or, in this case, 225,000 took jobs, because it is not part of the way they calculate. We are not telling you: Hey, there may have been another couple hundred thousand who moved back into the labor force who weren't even looking, so we don't count them. They deserve to be counted, and they are counted in this data here. They are what they call the U-6 unemployment. If we could keep this going for a few more years, we are already breaking the rules in almost every textbook, but this becomes remarkably important. For my brothers and sisters on the left, my brothers and sisters on the right, we get elected to do our best to make people's lives better and protect the Constitution, defend the Constitution. If you don't see this as making Americans' lives better, you don't understand, you don't own a calculator, or you don't have a heart. I get behind here and I talk about the math, but this math is people. It is families. It is folks who are being crushed in the last decade who now actually have hope. Why isn't there some joy? Why do we have to live in a time where rage is the commodity of politics and not joy for the success we are having for so many people who are part of the working poor that now have hope, now have futures? It is working. And the other thing that is also somewhat joyful, you see the red bar, that is real GDP. You have got to understand, if we were going back to around `16, even when we calculated the year `17, how much of our GDP was also being dragged along, helped, assisted by the rest of the world? Now, when you look at what is going on, we have had a remarkable level of stability, but we are dragging the rest of the world with us because the rest of the world is basically an anemic mess right now. And, yes, next month I expect some ugly things in some of the numbers because of the virus and what it has done to trade. There may be an upside in an odd way where many manufacturers, businesses, will consider moving their supply chains, making them less fragile, less concentrated, which will be great for us as a country because we have just now had USMCA, the NAFTA replacement, pass, so now, all of a sudden will you think about moving part of your manufacturing back to North America. But this is actually a really interesting chart to understand. Even in a time where the rest of the world's economic growth has been collapsing, we are still doing remarkably well. And I was going to come up here and show you the formulas of, hey, a point of GDP in the EU means this much to us. But just understand, we had some help 3 or 4 years ago. Now we are the ones helping the rest of the world. Now, back to that being remarkable, and this is sort of the closing on the concept that growth is moral. But there also should be joy. Those who come behind these microphones and say, ``We care about people,'' ``We care about the workers,'' ``We care about the working poor,'' ``We want society to continue to expand and be healthy,'' take a look at the chart on my side. If you see blue, it is the previous 8 years. If you see the red, it is a function of the last 3 years. Do you know which bar is the highest and has the biggest separation? Who has had the biggest growth in earnings on this chart? Turns out it is the bottom workers in our country. If you care about our brothers and sisters who have been struggling for so many years, this should be joyful, because something amazing is happening out there. Now everyone is doing better--well, except high-wage managers. They are basically static. If you come over here and actually look at the top income, they are doing fine, but the bottom is the remarkable change. This is really important, because for so many years, I would listen to my friends on the left come behind these microphones and talk about income inequality. It is a real thing. But what happens when you have made more progress, particularly in the last 12 months, of closing that gap of income inequality not because you have crushed those with high skills, those with high wages, but because you have brought up so much of our society, you have grown their wages remarkably? This needs to be our goal. Our goal as a society must be to lift everyone up, not figure out that one quartile you have identified as the enemy and go out and decide you are going to crush them. That is what our modern politics has become. Back to the first slide again. Over the next 30 years, if you look at the math of what is coming at us, if you actually strip Social Security and Medicare out of the next 30 years and say, ``What do we look like 30 years from now?''--so my little girl, when she is 34 years old, what does the Federal budget look like as we see it today? It is about $23 trillion. If we don't add Social Security and Medicare into the number, it is about $23 trillion cash in the bank. Now, that is not inflation adjusted, but $23 trillion cash in the bank. If we put Social Security and Medicare back into that 30-year window, my little girl and every other young person, every other person who thinks they are still going to be around in 30 years, we are $103 trillion in debt. It doesn't have to be that way, but we have got to crush the price of healthcare with technology. We have got to have people in the economy who are helping it grow. We need the productivity. We can have a remarkable future. But the intellectual capacity of the debates we are having around here, we have functionally gone a year and done nothing, nothing that actually helps America, but we have done some great messaging bills and great politics and great grandstanding and pretty good speeches. We can do better, and there is a path. Mr. Speaker, thank you for your patience. 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, I am going to come down to the lower microphone because we are going to be using a number of slides, and I want to apologize right now, this one is going to be a little thick. We are actually going to do some information in regard to what CBO put out this week and some other economic data and try to put it in perspective. So let me come on down. I get teased all the time about the charts and the fact that I can't even get my wife to now watch me do these because she says I am boring, but it is important. Madam Speaker, what I am going to try to do today--and let's see if I can do it as well as possible. I want to walk through what is a little bit of sort of the political folklore that we engage in here about the math when we talk about the deficits and the debt and the economic future and when you hear people say things like the debt as compared to the size of the economy and what is driving it, because, if we don't actually sort of get our act together here and start to become honest about just the math and what is driving it, we can't put together policy. I am incredibly optimistic that there is a path where we can digest the realities of these costs that happen from our demographics, because we are a society that is getting old really fast, but we do politics now. The other day, I am home and I am watching a little bit of one of the Presidential forums. It is a candidate on the Democrat side running for President from the Midwest, and his first comment was: These deficits, this trillion-dollar deficit we are going to have next year, that is because of tax reform. It just breaks your heart because you know these individuals are smart, and have we hit this world where, as Republicans--and please understand, I beat up both sides--as Republicans, we had this history of saying: Well, the debt and deficit comes from waste and fraud. The left often said: We don't tax rich people enough. All that is lunacy, and the investment in a calculator here would really go a long way. First, I brought a number of boards because, heaven knows, I am incapable of speaking without my charts. This, right here, is the change in receipts to the Federal Government. Revenues are up, and they are up fairly substantially since tax reform. Do you understand last fiscal year revenues were up over 4 percent? With the size of our economy, that is actually a big deal. Our problem is we increased spending just shy of 8 percent. Does anyone see a small math problem there? Our projection is we will take in over $3.6 trillion in the fiscal year we are in right now. Last year, revenues were about $3.462 trillion. That is a fairly substantial increase in these revenues, but how can we keep running these massive deficits? Well, it turns out it is spending, but it is spending on what we call the mandatory side, the formulas that we don't get to vote on and we are terrified as elected officials to talk about. I am going to walk us through part of this math. First, let's do some of the positive stuff, and then let's get to the really difficult policy issues. So, revenues are up, and they are going up fairly substantially. A lot of this economic growth and receipts is payroll taxes. It is because we are having a remarkable period here of employment. When you look at what we call the U-6 data put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of our brothers and sisters who weren't even looking for work that are moving into the labor force and all the sudden now are paying payroll taxes, Social Security, Medicare, these things, is remarkable. We should actually, as a society, be joyful, both those on the left and those on the right. We should be joyful because, if I had come into this room 3 years ago and said we are living in a time where we have more jobs than people, we are going to live in a time where it actually turns out to be our brothers and sisters who are functionally defined as the working poor have the fastest growing wages, double what the mean is--this has been our goal around here for years, and it is not a Democratic goal or a Republican goal. It just should be a goal of lifting people up, and it is happening. So let's take some joy in that. And it turns out it is also helping the receipts here to the Federal Government. There are other things that we should be joyful about. When you actually look at this enhanced period of economic stability, what happens when what we call the real net worth--the value of your homes, the value of your savings, the value of your investments, the value of things you hold--well, it turns out the bottom 50 percent, their real net worth has gone up fairly substantially, over 15 percent in these last 3 years. That is a big deal. But then I will get folks who will just make up stuff. Well, the rich are the ones. Well, it turns out that is not true. The top 1 percent aren't having most of that growth in their personal wealth. It is the bottom 50 percent is where most of the growth is. Can we take some joy in that? This is one of the most unique economic cycles because it has been so stable for so long. You also have the GDP numbers that came out today basically saying: Hey, looks like we are just going to be in a steady, healthy environment. We really need this because you get really positive math when you hit this type of economic stability. All right, last one on this. When you look at what we call real wage growth, who are seeing their incomes go up? I know this is thick, but the politics--and I accept that we are in an election year, but we have to stop--what do you call that? Oh, yeah--lying. The fact of the matter is it isn't the top income earners who are seeing the most actual movement in their wages. Take a look at this red line. That is what is really going on right now. The blue is what we thought was going to happen. You see that inflection point. I have been on the Joint Economic Committee for years now, and it was only about 3 years ago we were having some of the smartest economists, the experts, coming in and saying: Well, you have to understand, Joint Economic Committee, those who don't have a high school education, those who have moderate skill sets, you need to prepare, because they will be part of the permanently poor, the permanent underclass of your country forever. Then, all of a sudden, something has happened the last couple of years where their labor now has some of the most value in this economy. Look at the wage growth for our brothers and sisters who didn't graduate high school, who have moderate skill sets. That is where the substantial, almost double the growth of the mean is. We should be joyful about this because all of those fancy economists who were in front of us just a couple of years ago said that it couldn't happen, that we should be planning for this to be a population that will have to live in a subsidized world for the rest of their lives. It turns out they were wrong. We have sort of a family saying: Figure out what you do right and do more of it; figure out what you have done wrong and do less of it. Maybe we should stop inviting those particular economists to come to testify in front of us. Where is the trillion-dollar deficit coming from? Well, it is a combination of a bunch of things. This is one of the things that will frustrate you, particularly about Congress. We seem incapable of dealing with complexity because the solution to this is also really complex. We will sort of close on that. This chart, it is almost impossible to read this chart, so I stole some notes from myself. The point I am trying to make here is this is 2017, before tax reform, and where we are at today. The top one is net interest. It looks like our projection of what we are going to spend in interest costs has gone down and gone down fairly substantially. The argument here is one of the things that happened in tax reform that we didn't expect is that savings rates are much better than we expected and what they call repatriation, cash that has been coming in from overseas--remember, we had that cycle for almost 20 years where businesses would move their headquarters out of the country and then keep their profits there because if they brought them in, they were substantially taxed in the United States. We made a deal with sort of the world and those businesses saying: Here will be the new tax rates. Bring your money in. That money, I think, in our reports we had last summer, we were seeing about $400 billion more than we had modeled for. I have not seen a more recent number, but there is an argument that we are afloat with cash in North America, in the United States, and that drives interest rates down. Is that a first- or second-degree effect? Let's not geek out too much on that. But take a look here. Let's use, like, 72 percent of the budget, of our spending here. It is what we call mandatory. It is on autopilot. The other portion is what we call discretionary. About half of that is defense, and about half of that is everything else you think of as government, from the Park Service to the FDA to this and that. That is the other, let's call it 14, 15 percent of government. That is what we vote on, the discretionary side. Take a look at this. Where you see that little orange bar, you see that big piece of growth. Those are things we have voted on in just the last 2 years, and it is up substantially. We have some other charts I am going to show you that if you look at the growth in deficit--not debt, the deficits from this year, even the next couple of years--a big driver of it is our own votes. It is the discretionary side. This here is the growth in mandatory, and there is something wonderful about this. Do you notice that it is getting smaller? I know these look like tiny, little increments, but when you are talking about a trillion dollars, that is a lot of money. It turns out, because of the economic expansion, we are seeing a reduction in some of the demands for entitlements. We always have to be careful when we talk about this because this is sort of the--what is the term?--third rail for a lot of us who are elected officials to explain this. There are earned entitlements. You earned your Social Security; you earned your Medicare; you earned your military pension. Those are earned entitlements. You paid for those. You earned them with your service and your contributions. There are other types of entitlements that are part of this mandatory formula. It is a treaty obligation. You are part of a certain Native American population, other things. They are obligations we took on. Or you fell under a certain income. You know, you are having really rough times in your life, so there is certain income support or access to certain healthcare or housing allowances and those things. We haven't done all the analysis yet, but we think that is where part of this drop all of a sudden in mandatory spending has come from. As the economy is growing and we are seeing our brothers and sisters who were--the term is often marginally detached or detached from the workforce--are coming back in, all of a sudden, they are leaving certain programs. So that is another benefit we are seeing mathematically and budgetarily in the growth of the economy. Is that a first-degree effect or second-degree effect from tax reform? Okay, fine. Other spending, these are other types of programs that may have their own individual trust funds or those things, and you will take a look and notice that their spending is up just a little bit. Here is where, when we talk about the tax reform, we see lower corporate taxes; we see substantially higher payroll taxes because people are working; and we see lower individual taxes. When you have someone walk up behind one of these microphones and say, ``Well, it was the tax reform. That is why we are''--no, it is not. Tax reform is part of it. I mean, we always modeled that tax reform was going to cost about $1.4 trillion over 10 years. If we could get the economic expansion and employment statistics, that number would come down. You all saw now--because I know everyone immediately grabbed their CBO update report--that from August to the report this week, there is a $705 billion reduction in the deficit projection over the 10 years. A lot of that, I think, are these first- and second-degree effects. Some of that was interest rates are lower, like you see up here in this top line, because people are saving more, and payroll taxes, which you see down over here, because more people are working. I don't want to sound whiny up here and frustrated, but these numbers are complex. I will go through this three or four times with a highlighter to get my head around the numbers, and then I will turn to the freaky smart staff of the Joint Economic Committee and others to make sure we are understanding it correctly. But I beg of my brothers and sisters who are elected or policymakers, stop spouting off in political terms, because if we can start to get an honest understanding of the math, maybe we can come up with some honest approaches on how to deal with the crushing level of debt that is coming at us. Let's start walking through what is driving the deficits and the debt. One of the comments I heard the other day from an economist on I think it was CNBC--now, it was ideological. It was a politically liberal economist from a university: Well, if we could have some substantial cuts in defense, we would see all these changes in these deficits. That is lunacy. Look, the model on defense is pretty flat and stable. Here is a number I am going to give you two or three times, and I beg of you, I know a number of people don't want to hear this, but it is math: Just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements over the next 5 years equals the entire Defense Department. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is demographics. There are--what?--74 million of us who are baby boomers. We are about halfway moving into our retirement cycle, turning 65, qualifying for certain benefits. It is like Congress only just recently discovered there were baby boomers. But when you hear someone start to say something like, ``Well, if we would just cut defense, all of a sudden the numbers are better,'' it is lunacy. You could get rid of all of defense tomorrow, and it only gives you 5 years of the growth in Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements. Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Here is another one. This is sort of building a chart right out of CBO, Congressional Budget Office. CBO projects budget deficit rise is entirely--this is CBO--driven by soaring Social Security and Medicare shortfalls. I know it is the third rail. I know we are not supposed to talk about it. But if you believe like I do, I believe it is a moral obligation to protect Social Security and Medicare. How can you step up to that ethical obligation and then not tell the truth about the math? You know, you can't fix a problem unless you are willing to accept it. Look, the chart is the chart is the chart. This is from the nonpartisan arbiters of what is going on. It is demographics. And the sizes of these numbers are just devastatingly large. Let's take a look at another one. There is a bunch of the tax reform that expires in the next couple of years, and we go back to other sort of tax rates and those things, but this one, we just pretend everything is permanent, that those revenue gains that are coming in a couple of years don't happen, assuming they would create multipliers in the economy, which they won't. They probably won't pay for themselves, but that is a completely different chart and models. This also misses a bunch of the expanded spending that happened late last year when we lifted some of the budgetary restriction caps. But once again, 90 percent of the budgetary shortfall is Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements, but mostly Medicare, yet this body is terrified to talk about that. It is the math. One more on this, just to sort of get our head around it because I am frustrated, because for those of us who do believe there is a policy set, and I have been behind this microphone--and the poor folks who have to try to keep up with me. Tell me if I am starting to speak too quickly. I have had a lot of coffee today. There is a way to get there. Now, when I say ``get there,'' that means to sort of stay about 95 percent of debt to GDP and hold it as we wait for those of us who are baby boomers to meet our reward and go back to more normal population demographic numbers. This is hard, but it is the reality. Then we put this together. And, I am sorry, we don't typically try to do something that is this blatant, but it is. This is one of the things that comes into our office, saying: ``Well, if you would tax rich people more, you would be fine.'' It is lunacy. It only covers about 4.7 percent of--8.3 percent of GDP. It doesn't even cover close to half of the total shortfall when you put everything together. The entire defense budget, if you get rid of that, we have already talked about that, it only covers 5 years of the growth in spending. We actually have an entire chart list if anyone ever wants it. You are welcome to call our office where we actually have been laying out all of these proposals. If we tax this bunch more, or Republicans, if we do this in waste and fraud, or this and that, and you start to see, we are talking about slivers that functionally have almost no impact. Because if you do them solo and not tie it in with lots of other economic growth dynamics, you don't get anywhere. The last column is just things that are being proposed in the Presidential race. So we are talking about trillion-dollar deficits, and then you look at that last bar on this chart and those trillion- dollar deficits don't even have these things in it. That is about another 25.6 percent of GDP going to debt. You can't get there. The fact of the matter is, the economy blows up a long time before that. So, can we move back a little bit from the lunacy and actually sort of say: Okay, how do you get there? Schweikert, you keep coming to the microphone. You keep begging your Democrat colleagues and Republican colleagues to open up their minds and think more creatively--think with a calculator--actually, in some way optimistically. We joke in my office that I am 57 with a 4-year old. I am optimistic. But first off, you have to grow. We have to grow like crazy. You do tax policy that maximizes economic growth. And we saw that in some of the earlier boards here when you see what is happening in the labor force participation and payroll taxes. You will have to fix the immigration system. The economic modelers keep coming to us saying: A talent-based immigration system will give you much more economic lift. We are going to have to also come up with policies that encourage family formation. Birth rates are collapsing in our country. And it turns out that that has a really devastating effect over the coming decades in what happens in economic growth and we just need to be honest about that. But there are other things. So that is population stability. There are other things you can do in economic growth. I am not happy with the term ``deregulating.'' I argue that you need to move to a type of smart regulation. We all walk around with these super computers in our pocket, and we don't stop for a second to think what would happen if we actually started to use technology as part of our regulations. There are arguments, like in financial markets, the ability to use technology to find bad actors, instead of the lunacy of the model used today, which is almost like a 1938 model where people fill out pieces of paper. They may email them in, but they are still filling out pieces of paper instead of using technology to watch the markets. It turns out you could crowdsource data for water, for air, and so many of these things, and have instantaneous information if there is a bad actor in your environment. And it turns out it is dramatically less expensive because you don't have to be crushing each little business with regulations. If one of them screws up, you catch them immediately because you are using technology. There are lots of ideas like this. They are not Republican. They are not Democrat. They are technology. But, yet, you have to be willing to take on the bureaucracy. And as a lot of us are learning around here, it is the bureaucracy now that basically runs Washington, D.C. Technology disruptions. We need to have an honest discussion. You saw in the charts; Medicare is the primary driver of our debt. You have to be honest with it. How do you have a disruption in healthcare prices? And there are lots and lots of ideas that you are going to have to put together. We had a meeting in our office earlier today. We were walking through the math on pharmaceuticals. Did you know the misuse or lack of use-- which is misuse--of pharmaceuticals is over half a trillion dollars a year? Sixteen percent of all healthcare spending is because of the fact that people didn't take, or took too much, or screwed up taking their hypertension medicine, or other things. But there is a simple technology solution. It turns out it is not in the pharmaceutical pricing. It is actually in the cap of the pharmaceutical bottle that says: ``Hey, Bob, we calculate you did not take your hypertension medicine,'' and you ping the phone. You can do that for a couple of dollars. Or the thing that distributes pills to grandma who has to take two in the morning and one in the afternoon-- this and that--and when she screws up, she ends up in the hospital. It is efficacy of when you take your pharmaceuticals. What would happen if I could walk up and say, just changing this technology platform is 16 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending? We have to be willing to think creatively and disruptively. There is the thing you can blow into. It looks like a large kazoo and instantly tells you you have the flu; instantly can bang off your medical records; and instantly order your antivirals. Would that make us healthier, more productive, less time getting sick? Of course, it would. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just technology, except it is illegal. That type of technology today, the way our laws are set up, is illegal. How do we actually drag in the willingness to engage in those disruptions? It is one of my running arguments. Should we have protected Blockbuster Video from Netflix? We love it when it comes into our home and makes our lives easier. But what happens when it makes many of our constituencies that are filling up the halls here lobbying us really nervous? There are technology disruptions out there that could crash the price of healthcare and raise productivity and raise GDP. We know what they are. But the arrogance of this place often thinks we know what the future is, and we keep getting it wrong. So we need to legalize technology. Employment. We still have a problem with millennial men. We have lots and lots of people who have gotten older who want to stay in the workforce. What do you do in programs to incentivize as many people as possible to be in the labor force? It turns out to be simple ideas that I can't believe we can't come to an agreement on and we have been working on it for years; things like Social Security disability. Should someone say: ``Oh, I got a job,'' boom, they hit the cliff and their benefits, and that sort of safety net goes away. How do you actually smooth the off-ramp on these programs so it incentivizes people getting attached into the labor force? Because labor force attachment is one of the most powerful things you can ever do for someone's future and for the economy. That is true for lots of programs, even the earned entitlement. Should we give you a spiff on Social Security and Medicare if you will stay in the labor force? Because as it turns out, you lower our costs. You lower society's costs. So we really, really need to think about that. And that ties into the earned and unearned benefits of how do you build incentives in there to be part of the labor force to actually use the technologies that make your healthcare much less expensive but keep you healthier. How do we do those things? We know the policy, but this place seems to think about them in silos of: ``Well, I have this piece of legislation that does this,'' instead of understanding it will be dozens of pieces of legislation that are complex. They are politically difficult and have to be put together. And the reason those are so important--I have been working on this model now for years saying, if we do everything here and do it right, the future is actually really bright. If we don't do it, we are crushing my little girl. We are crushing our country to just a time of anemic growth and crushing debt. At some point, Members of Congress and the armies of lobbyists in these hallways will have to step up and admit that we squandered the opportunity when we were in this time of just almost a miracle Goldilocks economy where things are stable. If we are going to do this, this is the time to step up and make it work. But, yet, this has been a couple of years that I have come behind this microphone, and I will get one or two offices that will reach out and want some of the slides and some of the backup information. I will have--probably next week--certain associations, lobbyists come marching into my office and saying: ``David, you can't talk about technology that way. Don't you understand, you are going to screw up our business model?'' We have got to get honest. We know the math. We know how devastating it gets. And just to make a point, before tax reform, CBO was still predicting in these next couple of years we are going to have trillion- dollar deficits. We have known this is coming. The game here is to find someone or something to blame. How about actually starting to expect us to start offering solutions? That is why I am behind this microphone. There is a path. It will be hard. It will be complex, but there is a path where it works. Let's try it. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hollingsworth). Honoring the Life of Lorilee Ward

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, to our stenographer, if I start talking too fast, just give me that horrible look because my staff was telling me last week that I was sounding like a machine gun. Madam Speaker, this is something I try to do at least half an hour every week. It is basically to have a little bit of honesty about math and a little optimism about what policy can do to make things work. Once again, I have a couple of my old slides here. I am sorry that I haven't been able to update them because there are some new numbers, but it is a really simple concept. Let's walk through it. How many times do you hear Members from both the right and the left get on television and talk about things? Why does no one talk about the debt and deficits? I can tell you why we don't talk about the debt and deficits, because to tell the truth of what is driving the debt and deficits is really uncomfortable. We are going to try to do a little bit of that math honesty because it is demographics. It turns out, demographics are not Republican or Democratic. It is just math. We continue to exist in this pretend world, saying: Well, if we would tax rich people more, if we get rid of waste and fraud--none of those. I have brought these charts here before. There are fractions of fractions of variance. Why is it so hard for us to tell the truth? Why is it so hard for us to own calculators? We basically are a math-free zone. This slide is a few months old, and I am sorry about that because there is optimism on the tax cuts in the revenues. As you all know, last fiscal year, we broke over 4 percent revenue growth in a time with lower rates, which none of us modeled. The economy is doing really well there. Demands on social services have fallen fairly dramatically because of the incredibly robust labor environment. Discretionary spending, turns out the caps that that line is about, the benefits we were getting from the caps, when we did the budgetary deal functionally in September and October, we blew up the caps. So this line is bigger; this line is smaller. But the punch line here is really, really simple: 90 percent of rising debt deficits between 2019, so last fiscal year, and 2029--90 percent Social Security and Medicare. Now, those are earned entitlements. We have a societal obligation to keep our promises. But it is mostly Medicare. So we can't have an honest conversation here about debt unless you are willing to actually have an honest conversation about medical costs, healthcare costs. We are going to pull some slides here that I am just incredibly optimistic that we could actually have a revolution in healthcare costs, but the only way that happens is this place has to grow up intellectually and join this century of technology and opportunities because, once again, let's go back a decade. The ACA, ObamaCare, what was it really? It was a financing mechanism. It was who got subsidized and who had to pay. What did we, as Republicans, do? I still think ours was much better. It wasn't who got subsidized and who had to pay; it was who had to pay and who got subsidized. We basically debate about healthcare financing. We do not have honest conversations about how to crash the price, because it is a really uncomfortable conversation because the things that would crash the price often actually make us have to have very uncomfortable conversations with our constituencies. The different groups that are wandering the hallways right across the street right now lobbying us for this or that, they believe in their causes. They are wonderful people. But there is a disruption of technology. So let's sort of walk through the math once again so we understand that we could have this amazing future if we could just focus on the facts. This is a slide I have been showing almost for a year. If you and I remove Social Security and Medicare out of the 30-year projection, we have $23 trillion in the bank. If we pull Social Security and Medicare--and this chart is not inflation adjusted, so you could remove about a third of it if you want to do constant dollars and you will see the difference of what is actual spending and then the financing costs, the interest on those. But if you pull Social Security and Medicare back into that number, we are $103 trillion in debt. So think about that difference: 23 cash positive, $103 trillion in debt. For those of you who care about your Medicare, you care about Social Security, you actually want these to exist, we must be honest about the math, because if we don't get our act together, we are going to get squeezed and there are no more dollars. It is math. It is not Republican math; it is not Democratic math; it is demographics. We have 73 million of us who are baby boomers. We are about halfway through retirement. That is what is driving the future debt. So the next time you hear someone walk behind a microphone and say, ``I am very concerned about the excess spending; I am very concerned about debt and deficits,'' if their next sentence isn't, ``And I am going to work on a revolution to change the costs of healthcare and the things we provide,'' they are not being honest about how we save this society or how we save this country. So, one more time, just to get our heads around the scale of the problem, and then we are going to actually talk about solutions. This is a 2024 chart, so it is only what? Now, that is 3 fiscal years from now. Nondefense, this is discretionary. This is what we get to vote on. This is defense. Everything you see in a blue shade there is on autopilot. Do you notice something? The vast majority of spending is on autopilot. We don't vote on it. We don't do policy on it, and it is consuming everything. So get our heads around something. Just the growth, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and the healthcare entitlements, over the next 5 years, just the growth portion equals one of these wedges. It functionally equals the entire Defense Department spending. So, if you are someone who walks in the door and says, ``Well, we spend too much money on defense; get rid of it,'' do you realize you just took care of only 5 years of the growth? What do you want to do with everything else? Over 10 years, it equals all the discretionary spending. Once again, it is demographics. Why is this place so uncomfortable to talk about that? Because it violates the pitches we go home and tell our voters. But it is math and it is honest, and if we keep avoiding the subject, the future becomes incredibly ugly. If we take it on, there is a path where things work. So every week I come behind this microphone and I say, here is where the problem is, but here are solutions. And the very last slide is the one we do all the time, where we believe we have a formula where you grow the economy very aggressively. You do things from tax policy to immigration policy to trade policy that maximize economic velocity, and you are seeing some of that right now. If I had come to this room a couple of years ago and said we are going to live in a time where we have more jobs than available workers, where the bottom 10 percent, the working poor in our society, have had the fastest growing wages in modern times, basically double what the mean is--it is working. We should be, actually, as Republicans and Democrats, trying to figure out what is working, particularly for those quartiles--and I hate that term--those quartiles in our population that we were writing off a couple of years ago: You don't have a high school degree, you don't have skills, we are writing you off. You are part of the permanent underclass. That was brutal. It was arrogant. It was vicious. It was wrong. We know, right now, over the last couple of years, the movement of wages for those very people we were writing off 3 years ago, it is working. How do we keep that going? If you love and care about people, we need to keep this going, because, in my lifetime, there has never been a period of this type of economic growth and stability. Let's keep it going. But let's not pretend that our future isn't buried in debt. Once again, if we take a look at it, it is substantially the growth of Medicare. I intend that this Congress is going to keep its promises, but, mathematically, we are not going to keep our promises unless we actually deal with the reality. So when we have come in here, we have tried to show that there is a path, but beyond the economic growth issues. We have labor force participation. You can't grow the economy unless our brothers and sisters are working, and those are folks who are both older, but we still have a problem with millennial men. We had a miracle begin a year ago, December, where millennial females started entering the labor force in droves. The math right now says there are more females in the labor market than there are males. Those are good things, because when we did tax reform, the joint tax folks, you know, the 50 of them who are all freaky smart, said your two problems of continuing the economic expansion will be capital stock-- and I know I am getting a little geeky, and I am sorry--but capital stock, available capital for lending, for borrowing, for the growth, and people, available labor. It turns out they were completely wrong on the capital stock. We have had hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars more in what we call repatriation come back into the country than we had originally modeled. People are saving much more of their tax savings from tax reform than we ever modeled. So the United States now is flush with cash. This is working over here. We have great capital stock, and you see it in our interest rates. Our biggest fragility right now for continued economic expansion is actually labor participation. Now, there are miracles there. Sure, because we are all really geeky, we all ran and looked at the U-6 unemployment numbers last Friday--not the top line, not where we stayed at 3.5, but the actual, what we used to talk about for years, ``What is the real unemployment?'' and you saw now we are in the sixes. We broke below 7 percent of real unemployment. These are the folks who had become and we wrote off as discouraged workers, not participating; their skill sets are outdated. All of a sudden, they are entering the labor force. We need public policy that continues to encourage that. How do you do that? How do you take someone who says, ``I am older, but I am still a skilled worker; yeah, I might need an employer that is willing to make some accommodations for me,'' how do we create policies that incentivize that? For our millennial males, how do we create policies that incentivize them? Because if we don't have that labor participation, we can't grow the economy. The other things that also get uncomfortable, and we are going to talk about those today, is: How do you have a disruption, a disruption in the cost of healthcare? I want to argue and I am going to make you an argument that we are living on the cusp of miracles. On one hand, we have technology. Many of you are carrying it in your pocket. That cell phone, that supercomputer, and the new sensors and other things, the ability to stay healthy, the ability to know when you have a problem. Then, on the other side, the miracle cures, the single-shot cure for hemophilia that will be here this year, the experiment that is going on that cures sickle cell anemia. We are in the time of miracles. Why this side is so important on my little upside-down bell curve is 5 percent of our population is the majority of our healthcare spending. It is our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions. What happens if we could get our act together and, through a series of financing and policy and licensing, these new biologic drugs, these new small-molecule drugs, these new things we are learning, get them to market and we are curing people who are part of that 5 percent of chronic conditions? Even if we can cure parts of their struggles, it is wonderful for society, and it is also really good for the cost of healthcare. So we are going to touch base on just some things that I find fun, because it is part of the--and I know I overuse this term--thought experiment of what is coming. So we now have almost complete miracles of technology. This is something that was just shown last week at the Consumer Electronics Show. This is a defibrillator you can carry in your purse. You can almost carry it in your pocket. It is just handheld. This type of technology, as you now know, with the new types of pacemakers, the new abilities to help someone manage everything from hypertension to arrhythmia to now actually being able to restart a heart, this is at the Consumer Electronics Show. We need to think about these types of disruptions. Here is one. It turns out, if you were to take a look at how many Americans will lose their life to heart disease, to a heart attack, we now have the ability to monitor, with just almost a single pod like this in your home, just a single patch you put on, talking to your phone. These concepts crash the price of that disease if we could get them adopted. It means we, as policymakers, have to figure out everything from the elegance of the licensing mechanisms--which the FDA does get some credit. They have been trying to create some kind of a third rail. If you wear one of the Apple watches, you realize parts of that are coming on a new third rail of: Is it technology? Is it a health device? These things are coming, and we are building models now that show they can help crash the price of keeping people healthy. One of the slides I did not bring today but we have talked to the professor, the thing that looks like a big kazoo. I am sorry. This is the best way we have to describe it. You blow into it, and it instantly knows if you have the flu, instantly can bounce off your medical records if you are carrying them on your phone and instantly can order your antivirals. So this could be in your medicine cabinet at home. You blow into it. They think the future version will be able to pick up bacterial infections, and the one a couple of years in the future will pick up as many as 20 different cancer proteins. And it is a kazoo. You blow into it. We call it a flu kazoo in our office. People laugh at me for that, but they remember it. Do you know that technology is illegal? Think about that. The thing you would blow into that instantly knows you have the flu, that instantly can ping your medical records, knows that you are not allergic or are allergic to this particular antiviral, orders that antiviral and that Lyft or Uber or somehow gets it to your door an hour later, that process right now is illegal under many of our State laws under the way we reimburse under the Social Security Act because an algorithm is writing the prescription. Should Congress, a few years ago, have slowed down the internet to protect Blockbuster video from Netflix? You have got to understand, we have these disruptions in our society; we live with them all the time; but we sometimes need to step back and say: Okay. I like going home and hitting a button on my television and seeing all those movies instead of going and getting the little silver disc. Apparently, Blockbuster Video didn't have armies of lobbyists walking up and down the hallways here in Washington, D.C. trying to protect their portion of the business model. The technology is here that could crash the price of healthcare. Is that Republican or Democrat? I am going to argue it is just necessary. We do not have a choice. Do you remember the earlier boards? They were about if we don't have a revolution in healthcare costs. So part of that same thought experiment, over that next 30 years you saw the majority of the debt and deficits are driven by Medicare. Thirty percent of that spending is just diabetes. What happens if--and I accept diabetes I and II are incredibly complex, there are autoimmune issues, there are lifestyle issues, it is complex, but just as part of the thought experiment--the single biggest impact you could have on future deficit spending is a cure for diabetes. Does that help sort of put it into perspective? Let's actually walk through a couple of these. It turns out, remember how I said I think it is sort of an upside-down cure? On this side is the use of technology to keep us healthy to be able to manage our health issues, if you need a pharmaceutical get it quickly, get it through use of technology; over here is the curative. It turns out we are now coming across some studies that are talking about some of the new gene therapies that are crazy expensive, except the model is because of the cures they are producing, it will save billions of dollars in the future because you are cured. The miracles are coming. Have you seen what we are able to do now in what we call CAR T? That is where we find out the type of cancer you have, we see what types of proteins it is producing, what T cells would properly attack it, and we set your body's immune system to attack. Some of the companies that are producing this technology actually give you a guarantee that if it doesn't work, you don't pay. We just had a breakthrough a couple weeks ago, it turns out that we may be able to not only grow these in a petri dish, but we may be able to grow parts of those first immune responses to these types of diseases in an agnostic fashion before it is customized to you, so the price is about to crash. What is the value of curing your cancer instead of trying to find a way where you live with it for decades? This place needs to think through the benefits of: How do we finance the cures? And this is where it gets a little political. I am sorry I am going to hurt some people's feelings, but there is a bill that has moved through this House called H.R. 3. It was a drug pricing bill. If you will be honest and sit and read it in detail, it is basically the keep Big Pharma protected bill because what it does is it wipes out all the small biologic, small molecule companies that are the disrupters. These are the ones, you know, the product clearance is really simple. The drug that cures hemophilia is here. It is going to be like a million-and-a-half bucks a shot, but in many parts of the country hemophilia A may be a half a million dollars a year for the clotting factor and everything that goes with that. A million-and-a-half dollars a shot is a great investment. You are back in the money after 3 or 4 years. Our discussion should be financing that and getting those rolled out into society really fast. But if H.R. 3 had existed when they were starting to research that drug, that drug would not be here. In a perverse way, the incentives are, without that drug, the ways of pharma and the infrastructure around that disease, they don't have a disruption. They are not put out of business by a cure. H.R. 3, I know some of my brothers and sisters on the Democratic side, we have worked on it, we have talked about it, they mean well. There are actually some good things in the bill. But the basic reference pricing mechanisms that come with it, importing the European model, which in Great Britain a year of healthy life is worth, I think $38,000. So if the drug costs more than $38,000, even though it gives you a year of healthy life, they don't buy it. And that is what this bill does, it imports that pricing mechanism into our market. It is absurd because we should be looking at both pricing mechanisms that crash the price where we can, but cure. How do we cure our brothers and sisters who are part of that 5 percent who have chronic conditions that are the drivers? We just passed a bill through this body that basically protects Big Pharma's current monopolies and wipes out the disrupters that were going to take their market share. They did it with glee because I think the hatred of Big Pharma blinded from understanding who actually won and who gets to just change their business model a little bit and stay protected and who you just wiped out, because that would wipe out those miracles that are coming. I know that is partisan, and I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, but it is the math of the legislation. So these are important. Another thought, if you want to have a real disruption that you could do before the end of this year, half the pharmaceuticals that will be picked up today at pharmacies will not be used or will not be used properly. Our model says it is a half a trillion dollars a year from not using your pharmaceuticals properly. The person that doesn't take their hypertension pills and ends up having an aneurism, the person over here that takes too many, or the person over here gets confused. Half a trillion dollars a year for noncompliance with pharmaceutical regimes, and half the pharmaceuticals that will be picked up today will not be used or will not be used properly. The thought experiment is really simple. Go look in your own medicine cabinet. Take a look, and what is sitting in there? What is the value of what is sitting in there? Let's be honest. Almost all of us, if we go, yes, I probably do have hundreds of dollars of value sitting there. Let's just go after one small portion, the efficacy, the person who, if they really take their hypertension pill every morning, and there is a miracle, we think there might be a one- or two-shot-a-year system about to come that may actually intervene instead of having to take the daily pill--but I don't mean to take us down that side. How about a pill bottle that pings you and says, Hey, Bob, you didn't take your hypertension pill this morning. Don't forget, this is really important. It turns out, just that $20 piece of technology would save billions of dollars of healthcare costs and stop many tragedies in our families. I have actually brought the board here that is actually for seniors that looks a little bit like a dome that drops the pills into a little cup and then notifies you, because some people have regimes where they need to take this one in the morning, this one during lunch, these three before going to bed to stay stable. And how many of us have ever had that moment saying, Now did I take it? Did I remember? This technology exists. We need to think about making those as part of our formulary, so we are reimbursed. Because it turns out in those cases it is not the price of the pharmaceutical, it is our efficacy of how we take them. Half a trillion dollars a year, because we don't stay on our regimes of our pharmaceutical prescriptions properly. If you wanted to have a disruption in healthcare costs tomorrow, make high-value pharmaceuticals, put them in a double blister pack, put them in a cartridge so they stay sterile, and make them returnable. Use technology like this so we take our pharmaceuticals as we are supposed to. Make it so it could also talk to family members or even the physicians' assistants to call in and say, Betty, we are getting a notice that you haven't been opening your pill bottle. The technology is here. Why do we fight it? Here is also a level of disruption that was being shown at the consumer electronics show, but I need to put this a little more in context. In the Phoenix area we have an experiment going on. I am blessed, I represent, I truly believe, the greatest congressional district you could ever imagine. I have north Phoenix and Scottsdale, and I have a lot of freaky-smart people in our community and moving into our community. And there is this one business, a couple autonomous automobile engineers got together and said, Hey, we have made a lot of money, we want to take on the biggest issue in our society, which is the cost of healthcare. Let's try an experiment. Let's see if we can create autonomous healthcare clinics. Think of this, you walk into a Safeway grocery store--it is a little unfortunate, they are in former Theranos spots, but you all get that joke--but you walk in the door, you pick up the iPad, you sign in. You take a picture of your driver's license, a picture of your insurance card. You walk into a booth alone. The instructions pop up on the screen. You put your arm in this, you hold this up, you follow an avatar, you shine this in your mouth, your nose, your ears, you do this, you look into this, and it turns out the algorithm is stunningly accurate. And I believe they have had a couple of their algorithms now certified by the FDA. And there are a dozen clinics now or they have a dozen clinics in a dozen grocery stores. Are we willing to make that technology legal? Because at the end they have to bring a doctor on the screen to meet the laws. Well, what would happen if that autonomous--what they call in some of the literature, they now refer to them as sensor clinics or sensor healthcare, but we need to think about this. This is here. It is coming very fast. It turns out at the electronics show last week they were showing one that is a micro size that you could have in your medicine cabinet that does many of those very same types of tests and the algorithm apparently is freaky accurate and can do all sorts of diagnostics. Are we ready for this? Last year I came and showed a box--that actually is sort of what Theranos had promised, but it actually now exists--it is from an Israeli company, it is certified in the EU, that does all sorts of blood tests. The technology now exists. It is not being offered here because it is too hard to hit our market at this point. Go back to the beginning slides. The debt and deficit are functionally being driven by our demographics. The cost of those demographics is our healthcare. Are we going to continue to have the absurd debate around here of financing options, which may have effects? There are parts of it that are good, but they don't have a disruption. Are we going to find a way to promote, legalize the next-generation technology that can crash the price of healthcare and make us healthier and cure many of the diseases that crush our brothers and sisters? So back again--the slide we either start with or end with--we believe to take on the debt-ridden future and keep us from breaking through that 95 percent debt-to-GDP it is not a single solution. Today we just did healthcare technology disruption. But it is everything. It turns out it is economic policies that grow because if we don't grow the math, you can't get anywhere. Population stability, how do we incentivize family formations? How do you build an immigration system that is much more talent-based, because--let's be brutally honest--since 1971, the United States has been below replacement rate in our birth rates. The last few years we have actually had fairly stable economic times, the last 2 years, great economic times, and our birth rates are still falling. There is a paper I have in my office that says, in about 8, 9, 10 years, two workers, one retiree. The math doesn't work. So what do you do to encourage family formation? For some Republicans we are going to have to really step up and think about that. But also for immigration, you need to move to a talent-based system. The elegance of that is you don't care about someone's religion, their race, who they cuddle with, or where they come from. But what you do care about is what they bring to our society to maximize economic expansion. In many ways it is a much more honest and elegant system than this carve-out system that we have today. Changing the way or creating benefits incentives within the benefits of Social Security and Medicare to stay in the labor force or to come back into the labor force or become a part-time entrepreneur, we need to fix the way we tax certain benefits, the way we crush people if they are still saving when they are older. We need to deal with the reality of how much longer baby boomers are going to be living. And we have got to get our labor force participation numbers up. It turns out all these things tie together. You can't do one without doing the others to get the economic benefits of it. And that is what terrifies me about our place here: Are we capable of doing complex policy, when over here I am doing immigration issues, and over here I am doing tax reform issues, and over here I am doing trade issues, and over here I am doing healthcare technology issues; and understanding they are all sympathetic to each other, they all tie together to create the economic philosophy and the changes in our cost structure together? When what we have here is a place where we fight over the naming of a post office. I understand we are living in a time of political rage, and that is how so many people raise money, how they hold office. I have a 4-year-old daughter. I am 57 with a 4-year-old daughter. My wife, the same. You know I am pathologically optimistic, but I am optimistic because I get to get behind this microphone and advocate for what I believe is an actual path that saves us from a debt-ridden future. I have been doing this now for a year, saying here is the problem, but also offering the steps of a solution. I will go back to my office now, and the phones won't ring. There won't be any text messages or emails from even fellow Members, let alone the world, saying: Hey, David, can you tell me about this technology? Can you tell me about this? How do we help? If we don't have that revolution, I am terrified. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purposes of a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I wish he would tell that story more.