David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, look, in some ways, telling the truth is like soaking yourself in kerosene and running around with a lighter. Congress has functionally become a protection racket. The armies in our hallways, both with Democrats and Republicans, say, ``We like this technology, but,'' and the ``but'' always happens to be, ``you are going to blow up my business model.'' How do we as policymakers stop having the arrogance of thinking we know what the future is and, instead, design the rules, reimbursements, licensing, and mechanisms that all go with that so the best technology is constantly winning and today's winner, it turns out, gets crushed tomorrow because a better one comes along? Today the way we do it is we build walls of protection that say, ``This is good. Yeah, there is something incredibly good over here, but.'' That is why I use that Blockbuster video example. We all sort of accepted that, hey, we used to go get the little silver disk and shove it in the machine. The creepy guy would give us movie recommendations. He was creepy, but his movie recommendations were really good. Today, we go home and hit a button. We just lived through that, and the world didn't come to an end. When it comes to healthcare technology particularly--and I do a similar presentation on environmental technology. There is stunning stuff that could revolutionize those issues. If you are concerned with global warming or greenhouse gases, the technology is here, yet we don't talk about it because we know what we know. The problem is, much of what I and others know is a decade out of date.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we have to be a little careful because I find there are certain insurance companies that are ready to offer a technology, sensor-based healthcare, but it is illegal. There are hospitals I have worked with that desperately want to do an outreach in the community, where they are using data and algorithms to keep people healthy and to know when there is an issue coming. It is not only us as Members of Congress and what we know and don't know, and the arrogance of how we often do pieces of legislation where we don't future-proof it to use it, and also the incentives that are built in to surviving election, raising money, everything there, I will also argue our bureaucracies have become calcified. The bureaucracies now have become incredible barriers when they say: ``Well, we don't see that in the rules; therefore, you can't do it. Yes, it would help society. Yes, it would make us healthier. Yes, it would.''

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Exactly, Madam Speaker. States are going to be a real issue, and then different lobbying organizations and different constituencies. Guess what? We don't have a choice. The single biggest threat to our Nation is the massive wave of debt that is here. One of our charts, in just a decade or two, we are running $2\1/2\ trillion, almost approaching $3 trillion, deficits. It is almost all solely driven by our demographics. We have gotten older.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I enjoyed it. Madam Speaker, there is a path. Will we step up and understand that the path turns out to be complicated? We are going to make some of our constituencies just elated with the opportunity to change. We are also going to terrify some of our constituencies. There is a way to get there, and believe it or not, it is technology. It is not Republican technology. It is not Democratic technology. It turns out it is math, and the math will always win. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I will cover two or three different subjects today, a little different than we typically come and we walk through some of the economic data and the concept of I believe the greatest threat to our society is not telling the truth about the scale of the unfunded liabilities, the promises we have made and the fact of the matter that there is no mathematical way we keep those promises. I have the blessing of being here in Congress. I have been here 9 years, and I have grown to just this intense frustration that we do math through a partisan lens. We have a family saying: The math always wins; the math always eventually wins. So why is it so hard in this place to actually tell the truth, to own a calculator and say: Here is what is going to happen; here are our demographics, but here are also the good things that are working? Another thing I actually got from my father years ago is: Figure out what works, and do more of that; figure out what doesn't work, and do less of that. So think about this. Over the Christmas break, I did lots and lots of reading and was absolutely just furious and frustrated with a number of columns that I came across talking about the 2-year anniversary of tax reform where we rewrote much of the tax code to grow the U.S. economy, and we had some of the, I will call them, the smartest--at least, the most well-known-- economist commentators on the left side trashing the tax reform. Except, you will notice, if any of you pull up those articles--if you are willing to--go back and look at the fact they use almost no math in them. There are no numbers: We just didn't like this. We thought they should have done this. Having the blessing of being on the Committee on Ways and Means, having the blessing of having worked on the tax reform, I do understand much of what the corporate portion of tax reform was based on: the Obama administration's recommendations and modeling to make us competitive in the world again. But, once again, we work in a place where, if I walk into the room and I am a conservative and I say the sky is blue, instantly, there is this knee-jerk reaction from my brothers and sisters on the other side--and, please, understand, we are sinners, too--who say, no, it is not. The math is the math. So just for the fun of it, I pulled up a number of the headlines from 2 years ago when we were working on tax reform, when we had just finished tax reform. Liberal columnist after liberal columnist basically spoke of Armageddon, spoke that the world is going to fall apart, said this is going to crush and hurt people. Mr. Speaker, understand, the last 2 years have been some of the most remarkable progress in modern U.S. history for the working poor. We come behind these microphones and we pretend we care about the poor, particularly the working poor. Do you understand what is happening in the math? Because the math will always win, and the math is the truth. When we did tax reform a couple years ago, did you think we would live in a country with more jobs than workers, where the bottom 10 percent of workers, income-wise--what we refer to as the working poor-- would have wages growing more than two times the mean and, in some quarters, almost four times the mean in wages? I know the math gets a little confusing, but it is important. You can't walk around here and say you care about the poor, particularly the working poor, and then not have some little joy in your heart about what has gone on the last 2 years, particularly this last year. Remember, last year, a woman with no partner in the house had a 7.6 percent growth in wages. We are seeing remarkable growth in wages for the very folks who have been most dispossessed over the previous decade. And, yes, I will have a chart that actually shows that. Why is the truth off your calculator seen through partisan lenses? Why can't we just take a breath and say, hey, something really is working. Was it tax reform? Was it some of the things done regulatory- wise? Because, remember, if you go back just a couple years ago--and I have sat on the Joint Economic Committee now for a few years--we were being told, with the headwinds of our demographics, we were in for stagnation. Do you remember 4 years ago? 5 years ago? 3 years ago? That was the new normal. Do we get an apology from the folks who wrote these headlines that had been so dramatically wrong? Let's just walk through some of the tax reform data so we are actually living in the reality of the math, and there is a simple point I want to make. 2017 fiscal year, so the end of the fiscal year, and then during that time we were working on tax reform, do you know what the growth and receipts were for this country? They were 1 percent. They were 1 percent--functionally, not even at inflation. We were falling behind. And this is under the old tax code that the writers of those headlines were functionally defending. Do you know what tax receipts--we don't call it revenues; we call it receipts--were at the end of last fiscal year, the one we ended at the end of September? We grew slightly more than 4 percent in our receipts. Now, we still have a spending problem around here. We have a tremendous demographics problem. That is one of the other things we never tell the truth about is the substantial portion of our spending is actually driven by our demographics, which isn't Republican or Democratic. We are getting older very quickly as a society. But, once again, are we able to get up in front of our groups at home or fellow Members of Congress and not see the math through partisan lenses, because the math is the math. Our birthrates have collapsed as a society. Remember, we had only 12 States last year, in really good economic times, that actually had growth in their birthrates, and some of those were just by a couple hundred. We need to tell the truth about the math. And I have been coming behind this microphone almost every week we are here saying there is a unified theory of, if you do the things that are necessary in tax reform, as we are talking about right now, and do the things necessary in immigration, do the things in labor force participation, encouragement, if you do the things in adoption of technology that crashes the price of healthcare, if you do these things and bring them all together, we can make the math work where we do not get crushed, as a nation, by our debt. But we can't even do simple things by agreeing upon it. We can't even agree when the math actually says it worked. We still have to spin it through partisan lenses. So the chart next to me is just very, very, very simple. It is `17, `18, `19 receipts--not revenues, receipts. Do you notice something? Remember, the columnists before, the economists, my brothers and sisters on the left were telling us revenues are going to crash, it is the Armageddon, this is the Apocalypse--except for one small problem: We have had some of the fastest growing revenues we have had in modern times. The math is the math. And, look, I have been there. I have been one of those who believe something. You get the data, and you have to swallow and say: I was wrong. Except this place is incapable of stepping up and saying: Hey, something is working. Maybe we should figure out what is working and find a way to do more of it. Because, once again, this has been some of the most remarkable wage growth for our brothers and sisters, particularly in the lower quartiles. I hate that terminology, but if you want to designate the working poor, we have had more movement. And there are a couple modelers out there--I don't know if the numbers will be real--looking at the 2019 fiscal year and saying that might be the first year where wage and equality actually stayed flat or didn't grow or maybe even shrank because those at the lower income spectrum have had the fastest growing wage movement. Why can't we take some joy in that and work on it? The fact of the matter is the math is the math. So a simple point: 2017. One more time, 2017, the fiscal year before tax reform, 1 percent growth in revenues, receipts; last fiscal year, over 4 percent growth under the new tax code. How is that possible? It turns out it is, and it was possible in a really joyous way because people were working. If you take a step back and think of so many of the programs we have as the safety net to help our brothers and sisters when they are in hard times, there should have been dramatically less demand on those programs because so many people were working. If you look at the BLS numbers, Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, the numbers that have moved back into the labor force were now--what?-- over 63 percent labor force participation. I can show you an economic paper from 3 or 4 years ago saying we were never going to get close to that again until we get through the baby boomers. Something is working. We are seeing numbers where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are coming back into the labor force who were not even looking. Why isn't this joyful? Look, let me relay a simple experience. The Phoenix area, we have a homeless campus. I have been, on and off, involved with it for many, many years. I believe we do something very, very well. We do a concentration of services with many churches and charities: Over here, dental work; over here, you get your ID; over here, there is like 24-hour-a-day AA meetings and here are some bunk beds for those; over here, St. Joseph the Worker that will help individuals get work, the Catholic charity. And they have a situation where they have a stack of job opportunities because there is such a labor shortage in the Phoenix market. I am very pleased we just worked out a deal, or they worked out a deal, with Lyft to help deal with the transition barrier of getting these individuals to work. But shouldn't there be joy in this body and our society that there is such a labor shortage that businesses and organizations are taking chances on the folks we used to just completely write off? Remember, it was only a couple of years ago, we would give speeches around here; if you hadn't finished high school, if you hadn't developed certain skills you were going to be part of the permanent underclass. We were writing you off. We were walking away from you as a society. And guess what happened? Something happened, whether it be the Tax Code or other things that we have done that there is such a demand for their labor, for their work, and their wages are going up faster than any other quartile. You can't come behind these microphones and give speeches about how you care, and then not actually take a step back and say, something is working. How do we do more of it? So let's actually take a look at the reality of the math of the last couple of decades. The red line are the high-income earners. The blue line are those in the 25 percent or lower quartile. So let's call it the bottom-25-percent quartile. And I know this geeks out, but let's go to about 2010 and over. And you see through 2010, 2015, about 2016, higher-income earners were winning the battle. Huge separation. They were making money, while that lower population that we were walking away from, that didn't have the high school education, didn't have the higher skill set, their wages were crashing. And then something happened over here. That's about the time of tax reform. Do you notice the separation? It turns out their labor became valuable, became something in demand, became something that employers had to pay more for. Isn't that what we were trying to accomplish? It is in the math. So it frustrates me that you will come across these articles that completely demagogue tax reform; refuse to actually use the math; and then not embrace the fact that it has been one of the most remarkable couple of years in modern history in the United States of the working poor starting to see their wages move forward, move up, their labor having value in our society again. Look, for many of us, we truly believe economic growth is moral. It helps families; it helps individuals; it helps self-worth. It produces opportunity. Yet, we seem to completely turn the discussion of the things that create that economic growth into a partisan battle, a partisan malaise. And it breaks my heart, because the chart I just put up, this is the greatest threat not only to my 4-year-old daughter, but I believe to every American. Do you understand what is coming at us? This is a 30-year chart. It is not inflation-adjusted. But the math is true and honest because it is done by an outside group that is nonpartisan. If I strip Social Security and Medicare out of the 30-year number--we have $23 trillion in the bank. If you pull Social Security and mostly, it is mostly Medicare, back in, the promise, these are earned promises that we have a moral obligation to keep, we are $103 trillion in debt. This is over the next 30 years. Isn't that an incredible moral obligation for this body to tell the truth on? Because these sorts of numbers, you can take every dime of the rich and you don't get anywhere near it. You can cut the benefits, and you still don't get--you cannot deal with these numbers and not crash the U.S. economy and crash the world economy by doing so. Our office, and a handful of others, we have been trying to make the argument: tax reform, grow the economy. Incentives to be in the labor force, grow the economy. Legalize technology that can crash the price of healthcare because so much of this Medicare here, that is the massive driver of the debt. We can have disruptions. Do you realize almost 30 percent of that Medicare spending is just going to be diabetes? So investment in diabetes research is a smart investment. But also, so are other technologies. The thing you can blow into that instantly tells you you have the flu, and allowing it, that technology, to be part of how you keep yourself healthy. But the reality here is, there is no magic bullet. You have got to grow the economy. And we have demonstrated the growth in these 24 months since we did tax reform it is working. One of the pillars is working. How do we build off of it? Because you don't try to make major policy changes in a time of economic stress. Do it in a time when you actually have economic stability and build off of it, because this is the greatest threat to our society. It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is baby boomers. There are 74 million of us who were born in an 18-year period. We earned our benefits. The problem is--what is it? For the Medicare spending, we will put in, what? $150,000. We are going to take out close to $500,000. Now multiply that difference by 74 million. These are the issues that should be driving every bit of policy. The simple way is to give this a thought experiment: the next 5 years, just the growth--next 5 years, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and the other healthcare entitlements, just the growth, equals the entire Defense Department spending. So if you start to do that math, you could functionally get rid of every portion of discretionary spending except defense, and you buy yourself 5 years. I know this is uncomfortable. It is very hard to go home and talk to constituents that, on the Republican side, we can take care of waste and fraud. On the Democrat side, we can tax rich people more. That math is completely fraudulent. Why is it so hard to pull out a calculator? I accept we work substantially in a math-free zone, but when we do math, don't see it through the lenses of partisanship. It is math. So, look, I wanted to do a little cheerleading for my home. I am blessed to be from Arizona. We have worked really hard to be friendly to those who are willing to come to our state and open up new businesses. We have worked really hard to limit the bureaucracy. We have worked really hard to make it easy, as a State, for you to file paperwork online, to do these things efficiently, and our State has benefited. We are functioning at the very top of economic growth, population growth. There have actually even been quarters in the last couple of years where we have also had the fastest wage growth. But it is a demonstration that many, many Americans are making economic decisions, packing up their lives in a lot of parts of the country and moving to places like Arizona. I think we are number three in total growth. And when you consider we are only a State of about 7.25 million people, when you add, you know, when you do the per population growth, we are at the very top. Arizona, we should be very, very proud. We have been very disciplined. We have built good infrastructure. We have managed our water supplies. Power, electrical power is abundant. And we have been friendly to those willing to bring businesses because they create jobs, they create opportunities. They create growth in wages. Now, it looks like the rest of the country is starting to see the headlines. So a community I grew up around, Scottsdale, I believe, just got rated number one for being able to find a job. Much of the rest of the community, incredibly well. But think of some of the--I am trying to build an argument here that if economic growth is moral, then you see headlines like this, where when we do surveys about food insecurity, food insecurity is the lowest in a decade because of that economic growth, because of those folks that we were writing off just a couple of years ago who now, their labor is in demand, their wages are up, and we start to see headlines like ``Food Insecurity At a Decade Low in Arizona.'' Why is it so hard to understand doing smart tax policy, doing so many other smart economic policies truly are the path to helping our brothers and sisters who have less? We always start and end with this chart. If we care about what is actually going on, if Congress intends to keep the promises to Americans for their Social Security and Medicare, if we believe it is a moral obligation of our society to keep that promise, then you need to deal with the reality that the unfunded liabilities are monstrous. There is a path, but it is not a path of paying off the debt. It is basically a path of, I believe, in our model in our office, staying about 95 percent debt to GDP, so we don't blow up and get through the demographic bubble that is those of us who are baby boomers. But we have to do everything. You have to have that and legalize technology that crashes the price of so many things, makes the environment cleaner, makes healthcare much more affordable and available. Employment, we have to do everything for those who are older, to encourage them to participate in the labor force. Add some ``spiffs,'' add some benefits. How do we get millennial men that are still dramatically underperforming in showing up in the labor force? About a year ago, we had an amazing breakthrough, mathematically- wise, millennial females entering the workforce. Every policy that moves through here we should test; does this benefit economic growth? When we work on immigration policy, are we doing a talent-based immigration system, where we don't care about your religion, your gender, or who you cuddle with or anything like that? We care about the economic vitality you bring to our society. How do we encourage family formation? Think of that. This one article here talks about only 12 States actually had positive birth rates over the previous year. I know we get caught up in today's shiny object; you know, whether it is the we hate the President side of this room, or we feel we are stuck defending. And we are completely missing what is going to end up driving all public policy in the next couple of years, and that is the fact that we are going to be crushed by our debt. There is a path. My fear is this current Congress, are we actually capable of doing complex policy, lots of complex policy on every issue, and seeing it as a unified theory to maximize economic vitality so we actually have the receipts, so we keep the promises that we go home and tell our constituents we are working for? But, yet, then we come here and we deny basic math. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I know we all had the points we want to walk through, but can I actually take a step sideways and do more a unified theory reason why I think getting this done is so incredibly important. We talk about our issues with trade with China. We are living in a time right now where supply chains are choosing where to move around the world. The fact of the matter is that we are going to move North America into a stable, much more robust trading bloc where we know what the rules are. It gives us a chance to try to draw much more of the world's supply chains--manufacturing, trade, and commerce--as we get to be one of the key hubs in the world. The rancor, the fragility, the disagreements--hopefully that is behind us now. Being from the State of Arizona, we also accomplished a number of things in this trade agreement that are really important. The de minimis rules, where small businesses, internet-based businesses, now have a fighting chance to engage in commerce back and forth across the border, and some of the other rules of protections of IP and data, we truly have modernized much of this agreement. Will this help the United States? I sure hope so because you see a number of predictions that this draws almost a half a percent of GDP in growth. That is wonderful. I wish we could have done this a year ago, but we are finally getting it done. We are living almost in a miracle of economic growth and economic stability. This just adds one more leg so we can keep this going. We got the tax policy right. We also have the international part of the tax policy right. Now, hopefully, we are getting part of the trade right. Can we continue to live this economic expansion miracle longer? I will make the argument that getting this USMCA done is incredibly important to this success.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, to my friends here, I wasn't going to come up here and try to do firebrand or the theater, but we do have a little moment of intellectual inconsistency. Let's try a quick thought experiment. We, as a body, my brothers and sisters on the left, you support a progressive tax system, right? Well, Madam Speaker, if you support a progressive tax system, then the fact of the matter is, if you have a high-income earning State community, you pay more taxes. It is just a little line of intellectual consistency. So, you support the wealthier paying more. What happens when you have a deduction that you want to put back? I am sorry, but you know me and charts; it is a problem. I am working on a 12-step group to deal with it. The fact of the matter is, the top 5 percent of income earners get 77 percent of the benefit. You can't intellectually have it both ways. I mean, aren't your brains just exploding, saying: Well, on the one hand, we want you to give rich people these deductions, but on the other hand, we want to tax rich people more, except for this bill where we want to give the really, really rich people the benefit. You are going to get a chance. We are going to have an MTR. At least, this way, you can take it away from the really, really, really, really, really rich people who make $100 million or more, saying they don't get to take the SALT deduction. We will see what level of super-rich people we are defending in this debate. I understand, from a political standpoint, you are doing the right thing. You are doing the work from your district. But at least we could be intellectually honest about the math. If you represent a district that has high taxes, whether it be the income taxes or property taxes, coming and defending SALT is fine. It makes sense. But be honest about what the math means. If you are a donor State, it is because you have high incomes. If you want this, it is because you are defending your wealthy. It is just math, and the math, Madam Speaker, always wins.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, this is one of those, the tyranny of the clock as we have talked about, 3 minutes. There are so many things here we agree upon about the rage we feel when we see the pricing mechanisms and those things. But there are so many things also being said here that are absolutely wrong, from what is happening in Big Pharma to the new biologics that are coming from the small research companies, that I believe, actually, H.R. 3 is going to do incredible violence to our society. Madam Chair, you have to understand. We are living in the time of miracles. There are cures coming that would not happen under H.R. 3. The single shot that cures hemophilia, one of most expensive diseases in our chronic population, that single shot is going to be outrageously expensive; but it is actually dramatically cheaper than just 3 or 4 years of living with the disease. Madam Chair, here is actually one of my incredible concerns. You do understand the pricing efficiency you are importing. This is a reference pricing bill. Madam Chair, what is a year of your life worth? Madam Chair, what is a year of your life worth if you are healthy? One year of healthy life, what is it worth to you, Madam Chair? Because, Madam Chair, if you are in Great Britain, it is $37,000. If the drug comes in at $37,001, it is not purchased. That is the efficiency you are about to import into our country. You are going to do this. There are countries here where, if a pharmaceutical breakthrough is $19,000 and it would give you 1 year of healthy life, they don't buy it. That is what you are importing. You are importing this type of cruelty. You get to look at someone's face and say: Look, we imported that European model that basically said that your life is not worth that to us for you to be healthy for another year. We are better than this. We can do better. We both passionately agree the pricing mechanisms are crappy. The way capital is moved around is unfair. But H.R. 3 is going to do so much more damage. And I think I can build you a financial model that says that you will lower some people's drug prices and you will raise the cost of, functionally, healthcare in our country because the cures that are coming don't come anymore. Madam Chair, do you really want to import that type of cruelty into our society?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for letting me come and engage in this discussion, and I may want to ask a couple questions. And we had my doctor friend from Kansas here a couple minutes ago. A quick thought experiment: What is the greatest economic threat to our society? It is actually our inability to have enough resources to pay for the promises. So we have made promises in Social Security. But Medicare, if you actually look at the 30-year window--and, look, I'm on Ways and Means--thanks for letting me intrude--but we have made the promises in Medicare really, really difficult. We are talking potentially $103 trillion of deficit, if you add in Social Security and Medicare, but it is mostly healthcare costs. Well, it turns out, you can reduce the unfunded liabilities in Medicare by 30 percent by just a cure, just a cure for diabetes. I will argue the mechanisms in this H.R. 3, this sort of Democrat takeover of the pricing mechanisms and the capitalization of the next generation of healthcare, does incredible violence to the future. Madam Speaker, I don't know if Congressman Carter saw this, but remember, this is a reference pricing bill. The underlying secret is the efficiencies that are actually being claimed in this bill, they are hiding behind something that is really dark, and I don't think they have explained it. So let's say you are in Great Britain. And what is a year of your life worth? It turns out in Great Britain, the way they would price a new pharmaceutical that gives you a year of quality life, it is a quality- year adjusted formula, and it is $37,000. So you show up with a new drug that is going to give you a year of quality life, but it is $37,000. They do not buy it. What is your life worth? What is a quality year of your life worth for a year? Because this is what the left is about to import into your country. And understand, there are countries out there that it is down to $19,000. If a drug costs more than $19,000, but gives you a year of quality life, they don't buy it. That is the rationing mechanism that the left is about to import here. In many ways, just the stunning cruelty of such a thing--and they haven't told the truth that this is actually where much of their savings actually come from--is denying you the things that keep you healthy. And this is the mechanism--and I know it is a confusing chart--but functionally, if that outlay crosses these numbers, you do not get that pharmaceutical. Yet, there are crazy things you and I could be doing, just actually taking your prescriptions, things we could build into a model. That is half a trillion dollars a year we could be saving on our healthcare costs just by stepping up and changing the way we do our public policy around pharmaceuticals. And the left has completely cut us out on the Committee on Ways and Means, Republican ideas, on saying there is a whole bunch of things we actually agree upon. Stop being so crazy dogmatic with your hate and start thinking about people's lives and giving them a future, because if we can cure parts of that 5 percent of the chronic condition that is a majority of our healthcare spending, we can have a revolution in crashing the price of healthcare in this country.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, what we are going to do today is actually sort of a little follow-up with a couple of other things sprinkled in here. I want to walk through, once again, some of the numbers and some of the good things that have happened. I want to talk also about H.R. 3, which is a reference pricing bill that has gone through Ways and Means in regard to pharmaceuticals that actually I don't think anybody understands what the underlying mechanisms are on how Europe and those actually do set drug pricing and to understand the rationing that will be coming with that. But, first off, what is the greatest threat to our society? I am going to argue it is actually the coming mountain of debt. It is not Republican or Democrat, it is called demographics. There are 74 million of us who are baby boomers. 74 million baby boomers were born in an 18-year period, we have our earned entitlements coming, and we functionally have no cash in the bank for them. So this board is really, really important, and I can't believe I don't see it in everyone's office here. This is a 30-year window. Let's actually just pull out Social Security and Medicare. Madam Speaker, you do realize that if you look at the Social Security and Medicare from the numbers, we have $23 trillion in the bank. Now, this one is not inflation adjusted, so these are raw numbers, but $23.1 trillion, if you want to be accurate, in the bank, but when we roll Social Security and Medicare in and their financing costs--the money has to be borrowed to keep the promises--we are functioning at $103 trillion in debt. It is math. It is not Republican or Democratic. It is demographics. We are getting older as a society. Since 1971, our birthrates have been below replacement rates. We need to deal with the reality of math, but as this place now proceeds, we will make math partisan. But the math will always win. It breaks my heart because there are things we can do policy-wise that make it work, that keep us under or right about that 95 percent debt-to-GDP, and we survive our demographic bubble. But we have people around here that say crazy things that have no basis in economics, no basis in the math, no basis in our demographics. The cruelty they are bringing down on our society and my 4-year-old daughter, destroying her future, is because of the unwillingness to own a calculator. So, one more time, if we pull Social Security and Medicare out of our 30-year window, we have $23 trillion in the bank. If we put them back in, we are $103 trillion in debt in that 30-year window. Remember, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements, just the growth every 5 years equals the entire Defense Department. When you hear some of our brothers and sisters on the left come behind the microphone and say, ``Well, if we would just reduce defense spending,'' you can wipe out all of defense spending, and in 5 years, you are back where you began. That is the reality of our demographics. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones in the last year, other than myself and maybe one or two others who work on these things? It is silent because it is really hard to talk about. It is really difficult. It is scary. It is the single thing that destroys our economic vitality for the future. But once again, it would require owning a calculator. It is lots of people's fault, but it is Congress' fault, but it is decades old. Here is where most of that comes from. If you take some of the math for a couple that retires today--it is not their fault; this is just the math--they will have put about $161,000 into Medicare. They are going to receive just shy of $500,000 out. Take that, functionally, $300,000-plus difference, multiply it by 74 million, and now you understand the driver of our debt. You will hear people come behind the microphone and say, ``Well, it is waste and fraud,'' or, ``We don't tax rich people enough.'' Those are all absurd. The percentage of tax revenues as the percentage of GDP is within the margin. Waste and fraud, yes, we need to deal with it, but it would be a fraction of these numbers. Remember, we are about to come up on the 2-year anniversary of tax reform. This last fiscal year, unlike every economist that the left brought to us out of the crazy--and I know that is mean, but it is true. Things that were being said on this floor when we debated tax reform, reforming our system: ``Oh, revenues are going to crash.'' ``The world is coming to an end.'' ``It is Armageddon.'' We went up over 4 percent in what they call receipts growth last year. Our problem is that we spent dramatically more than that. I think our spending was approaching almost 7 percent growth because we had so many things added to spending. About half of that 7 percent is just, once again, demographics. But we grew revenues even with the tax reform slightly over 4 percent. There should have been joy around here, if you think about where we are economically. You all saw the applications for unemployment today, 10,000 down from what the projection was. Once again, we are demonstrating the labor markets are a miracle. They are remarkable. I don't think there is anyone living today who has lived in a time that is this economically stable, when you look at our labor markets, when you look at wage growth, the lack of inflation. There should be joy on this floor, talking about the miracle of our brothers and sisters who were being written off just a couple years ago because they didn't have a high school education, didn't have a certain skill, were going to be part of the permanent underclass. It turns out those folks who were willing to write off those brothers and sisters, those Americans, were wrong. That population--and I hate this term, but we use it--those lower quartiles of economics-- education, skill sets--who were being written off, they have had the fastest movement of income. You saw the number, if anyone cares about these things. Last year, a single woman, no partner in the house: 7.6 percent growth in wages. These are numbers that I can tell you from being on the Joint Economic Committee for years that every economist we would bring in would look at us like we were out of our minds if we predicted numbers like that. Where is the joy? The fact of the matter is there has been more progress in the last 24 months for our brothers and sisters who have physical issues, have had substance abuse issues, have had criminal records, these sorts of things, coming back into the labor force. There is this thing called U-6 data, U-4 data, all these things. When you see the unemployment rate and all this information of workers who might be--we use the term ``marginally attached'' and haven't been looking, who quit looking, the number of those who are moving into the labor force that we barely give any credit for when we see the top-line number because the top-line number is those who are looking. There is an economic miracle happening right now when you see the robustness, the stability of our labor markets. Shouldn't the debate on this floor be: It is working for our brothers and sisters who we have always said were poor or that we were writing off. Something is working for them. How do we keep doing more? How do we keep adopting the policies that are working and avoid the crazy policies of just a couple years ago that didn't work, that punished these populations? These are the folks who had just a really crappy decade. They fell further behind every single year. There is some math out there, and it is not all put together. I am being maybe a little pathologically optimistic here, but there are some preliminary numbers that last fiscal year could be the very first year in modern times where income inequality did not grow and potentially shrank. It is not because wealthy people didn't make more money. It is because poor people made more money than they had before. Where is the joy? Where is the discussion of how we do more of this? It turns out, for all those out there who are busting their backsides, working, paying into programs like Social Security and Medicare, why aren't we being honest with them that the scale of the unfunded nature is devastating? If you are a young person today, do understand that when you hit your peak earning years, your tax rate will have to be double today's just to maintain these basic earned benefits. There is a path, but that path requires a whole bunch of things. It is going to be my very last board that I am going to put up because you have to have incredible economic robustness, and you have to have a tax system that maximizes economic vitality, an immigration system that maximizes economic vitality, a regulatory system that uses smart technologies to maximize labor force incentives, family formation incentives, technology adoption incentives, all these things. And there is a path to deal with this. Then what happens this week is the discussion of H.R. 3, which is the drug reference pricing model. Almost no one has read it or understood the actual mechanisms it is offering. Why do I bring this up as part of an economic discussion? Part of the miracle we are about to live is that we are about to live in a time where technology, if we legalize it, is about to crash the price of healthcare. Technology is something that looks like a big kazoo that you blow into that instantly tells you that you have the flu, instantly can update your medical records on your phone. If we make it legal, it can instantly order your antivirals. When I talk about healthcare technology, it is a whole string of things that will keep us healthy. But the other side is that we are about to live in the time of miracles. The single-shot care for hemophilia, it is here. It is going to be really expensive, but hemophilia is also really expensive. We should be talking about ways to have more of these disruptive pharmaceuticals that take care of hemophilia, ALS, Crohn's, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia. We are on the cusp of having the pharmaceuticals that either stabilize or cure these. They are incredibly expensive. These are small populations, but remember, 5 percent of the population with chronic diseases is the majority of our healthcare spending. If we go back to the slide here, the majority of what is about to hit us over the next 30 years is Medicare. It is healthcare spending. What happens if you crash the price of healthcare? Well, one of the ways you do that is you cure people. The Democrats are pushing a piece of legislation that sounds at first really good. ``Hey, we are going to lower new drug prices by reaching out to a handful of European countries and getting their prices. Then you can't go more than that, or we are going to give you a 95 percent tax,'' which if you reverse it is a 1,950 percent tax. Except, you have to understand, and I know this board is really hard to read, we are going to use the Great Britain model. What is a year of you being healthy worth? It is an honest question because that is what is about to be imported into the country. For you, your family, your child, what are you willing to believe is the value of a year of health? If you are in Great Britain, their model, their formula, is $38,000. If this breakthrough pharmaceutical would make you healthy for 1 more year and costs more than $38,000, it is not purchased. It is not part of the formulary. That is what the Democrats are saying we need to import into this country. So understand that the Democrats are about to say a year of you being healthy is not worth $38,001. I don't think they know that. I don't think anyone who has read it understood how this handful of European countries builds their pricing mechanisms, but they do it by scarcity. They basically say, ``Hey, I know this would cure you for the next year, but you are out of luck. It is over $38,000 here in Great Britain, so you are on your own.'' At a certain level, this is just incredibly cruel. How could you look someone in the eyes and say: ``I value your life at $38,000 for a year of you being healthy.'' But that is the cruelty that is being discussed. At first, it sounds really wonderful: ``Hey, we are going to lower drug prices by using reference pricing.'' But the fact of the matter is, how do you tell Americans that what this means is not only are you not going to be able to have these things that keep you healthy anymore because they are going to be outside the price window, but the other thing is there was a major report put together early this week that also said a substantial number of the drugs, like 100-plus, that are in the pipeline, that are about to cure our brothers and sisters who are part of that 5 percent of the chronic conditions that is the majority of our healthcare spending, those cures are going to stop because they are really expensive, really risky, really hard to put together? The vast majority of them fail, so they sort of roll the dice and say: ``If we succeed, we get a fairly decent payday, but it is going to pay for a whole lot of failed drug trials.'' We are about to make a policy decision as a country: ``We are not going to cure you. You get to suffer.'' The pharmaceutical industry, for all the frustrations, they will go back to what they were doing a couple of decades ago, saying they are just going to do a derivative on an existing drug, so, therefore, they have very little research costs. They already know what their profit margin is. It is nice and safe to do. The things the Republicans did in this Congress, where we did the CURES Act a few years ago, where we created a pipeline to cure people, that pipeline is about to get crushed. You have to understand the cruelty of this. This is just math. This is what other countries do on their formula. If you really wanted to crash the price of pharmaceuticals, it turns out, yes, there is a whole list of things that are bipartisan: the way you deal with the capital that is used for the investments, the way you do the patents, the way you allow competing types of biologics and others come to market. But there is another crazy thought experiment here that almost no one has ever talked about. Do you realize that half the pharmaceuticals that will be picked up today, so half the pharmaceuticals someone is going through a drive-through for or walking into their pharmacy for right now, half of them will not be used or will not be used properly? Just part of the thought experiment. They will not be used or will not be used properly. That is going to cost the country about half a trillion dollars this year. It is 16 percent of the total U.S. healthcare expenditures because people don't take their prescribed pharmaceuticals properly, and they get sick and die. It turns out we have all sorts of things we could do today, but it requires being creative. Let's face it, this is an absolute creativity- free as well as a math-free zone. The little bottle that has the top that tells you when grandma has opened it so that you know she is taking her pharmaceuticals that keep her alive, we have that technology. It is not very expensive. It changes drug efficacy usage because you know when you took it. How many of you know someone that has multiple pharmaceuticals they take, and they have to take them at certain parts of the day? We now have little distribution devices. There are several of them on the market that drop the pills, tell you the time, let you know if you don't pick them up. It rings your phone, rings the family's phone, if they are not picked up. It turns out there are technology things that could actually change almost a half a trillion dollars of expenses a year. This is dramatically bigger than blowing up the cures that are coming, but it requires some creativity to understand that half of the pharmaceuticals that are being picked up today will not be taken or will not be taken properly. Another proposal--and do it more as a thought experiment: For really high-value pharmaceuticals, go look in your own personal medicine cabinet right now. How many of them are still sitting in there? They are just getting old. You did not take them. They are just sitting there. Why don't we package those high-value ones in a double-layer blister pack or in a pod that keeps them sterile and allow you to return them? Maybe there are folks in our society who those really expensive pharmaceuticals, if they were returned and could be redistributed, they would still be sterile. There are creative ideas where you could have this massive disruption in the price that we as Americans put out in our drug costs. But it requires some creativity instead of the arrogance of we are basically going to blow up your future. Because that is what is being proposed to us. But this number is stunning, if I came to you and said, if you could change the way pharmaceuticals are used and have the efficacy of proper use, it is 16 percent of all the healthcare expenditures of this country. I threw this slide in as more back to: Remember how we were just talking about Medicare and, functionally, that is the ultimate driver of our future debt and, unless we have a disruption in healthcare costs--not debates about how we finance, but disruption in the cost. Let me give you a single example of what the investment in cures means. I know this chart is almost impossible to read, but the simple point is about 30 percent of Medicare spending is going to be diabetes. A single cure--now, diabetes is complex. We know it is more than the production of insulin. There are autoimmune responses. There is 1 and 2. It is complex, but do the thought experiment with me. If you cured diabetes tomorrow, almost 30 percent of that unfunded liability of Medicare goes away. That is why it is so incredibly important we are investing in these cures that H.R. 3 is about to destroy. We always either start or end with this slide. We are trying to make a simple point that, if we can get the policy correct here, we can have an amazing future. The United States can have an amazing future. But we have spent almost the year here--2019, we have, functionally, done nothing. Do you remember all the promises of we are going to work bipartisan because we have a Republican Senate and then, obviously, the left, the Democrats, control the House here? We are going to work together. We are going to do all these creative things together. And we have done none of it. We have spent lots of time on impeachment. We have pushed out a handful of bills that were just almost crazy in their policy sets to satiate the radicalized face of the Democrats. I am sorry. I know that is mean, but it is true. So let's take a step backwards and pull out our calculators and understand, once again, that 30-year window, $103 trillion of debt--if you actually normalize it to inflation adjusted. Okay. So it is, at today's discount rate--I am not sure. It would probably be somewhere in the $83 trillion of debt, inflation adjusted. So here is our argument: Get the things that grow the economy right. We have demonstrated getting the Tax Code right has produced a miracle of economic growth in the way of labor participation. Our brothers and sisters, people, are working. And it turns out those have cascade effects in everything from health to there will be falls in substance abuse use. We see great things happening. But with economic growth, we have to get immigration correct. We have to get trade correct. We have to get the way we regulate, using technology. Instead of a 1938 model of fill out lots of paperwork and shove it in a file cabinet, and when you screw up, we pull out the file cabinet so we can sue you, using crowdsource technology where we know, if you screw up, we catch you instantly and we can fix it right then. There are amazing changes right here. Population stability: How do you encourage families? How do you build an immigration system that actually is more talent-based so you maximize economic growth so we can keep our economic promises? How do you encourage people to be in the labor force? One of the very odd things we see in the data is that December, a year ago, suddenly we saw in the data statistics millennial females moving into the labor force at substantial numbers but millennial males still substantially underperforming. Why? Is this the opioid crisis? Are there other factors? We need to know those sorts of things because, it turns out, when we have entire quartiles of our population who are underperforming in the labor market, it has really bad societal cascade effects. So let's work on policies that get as many folks who are interested. Whether you be retirement age or that millennial male, what do we have to do as a society to encourage, to prod, to push for you to be in the labor force? Because that is important not only to you as an individual, but it is really important to the country's economic stability. Technology disruption: We just talked about the curative drugs that are coming. We also can talk about the sensors and the other things that are going to allow us to stay healthy. How do we update the laws so that thing like that flu kazoo isn't illegal? There is a reason you didn't go to Blockbuster Video last weekend. Technology changes. We need to make sure our law sets are sympathetic to the changes that can reduce our prices in healthcare, to protect the environment and so many other things. Yet we are decades behind in the way we write laws here and understanding how to future-proof those laws so, when we have disruptive technologies--and anyone who is really interested in this, pull out your phone. Go to a search engine, and go look up ``MIT ambient air capture'' and look at the miracle they have. If what they have published is correct on, now, their price per ton-- they believe they can pull CO2 right out of the air or do it right over a smokestack. If those numbers are correct, we now have a major change in CO2 emissions in the world because of our ability now, at amazing prices, to be able to pull it almost right out of the air. These technologies are here. Why aren't we here talking about them on the floor, and how to encourage more of it and how to get it rolled out in society, not only here, but across the world? Because, if you actually care about global warming--or climate change or whatever the current pop term is--it turns out there are amazing technology disruptions that are here. The only problem is they don't allow you to control other people's lives; they just solve the problem. And are we about solving the problem or just the control freaks who are often the Members of this body? And then other things: The earned entitlements. You have earned your Social Security. You have earned your Medicare. Are there things we can do in those benefits to encourage you to stay healthier; to, if you feel like it, work; to actually, instead of taking your benefits, say how long would you like--if we gave you a spiff, would you wait? There is tinkering you can do here that actually makes the programs more sound. And if you do it all together, we believe we have a model that provides an economic future where we are not destroyed by the growing debt. But there is no single answer. It is going to have to be almost a holistic approach of lots of types of policies woven together, and every single one of them needs to be about the reality of our demographics. And now the experiment I will ask you all to engage in: Watch the floor this week and see how many people will ever come behind these microphones and talk about the economic growth and survival of this country because of what is about to happen, the debt that is about to crush us and the fact that we are not talking about it. Instead, we are busy, basically, doing levels of absurdity around here. The cruelty you have just also subjected my 4-year-old daughter to-- and her economic future--you should all be ashamed of yourselves, ourselves, myself, because there is a path. The problem is this path doesn't ideologically satiate those who have just gone so extreme. But the math is real, the math works, and the math, Madam Speaker, always wins. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, my wife accuses me of not being able to speak without a chart, so now, when I am home, I walk around with a chart for my 4-year-old, trying to explain what being a good girl is. So far, it is not working. We try to do this every week, but tonight, I am going to try to put some more details into last week's presentation. The reason I have this first board up is, once again, to show the math on the single biggest threat, I believe, to our country and to our society and the absurdity that this body isn't dealing with it. If you look at this chart, this is from the Manhattan Institute. It is now several months old. It is the 30-year window. I am going to try to make this all make sense. If you remove Social Security and Medicare, we have $23 trillion in the bank 30 years from now. If you pull Social Security and Medicare into the numbers, you see up on the top line, you are $103 trillion in debt. If you, then, normalize it for, I believe, inflation-adjusted dollars, constant dollars, it is like $83 trillion in debt. You are a couple hundred percent of debt to GDP. You have blown up the society. Why can't we just have an honest conversation that our debt driver is demographics? It is the healthcare portion of the demographics. How do we have a revolution here around the cost, the availability of healthcare, instead of the absurd conversation we have around this place all the time where it is about the financing? Once again, let's be honest, the ACA, what many know as ObamaCare, was substantially a financing mechanism, who got subsidized, who had to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing mechanism. It was about who had to pay and who got subsidized instead of what to pay. The what- to-pay discussion is so difficult because you really do challenge a lot of our vested interests, a lot of our friends, a lot of preconceptions. Just as a quick thought experiment to have this make sense, I think Republicans and Democrats both sort of like the idea of telemedicine. Okay, great. But most of us end up thinking of telemedicine as I am going to grab my phone and talk to a nurse or a doctor. You haven't thought it through that, the fact of the matter is, where the technology is at today, you should have one or two body sensors on, and you should be talking to an avatar that is reading your body sensors that is doing an algorithm that can give you incredibly accurate information. That would crash the price of that telemedicine. But that is hard because that isn't the model that we all think of. We don't future-proof our thinking of understanding where the technology is today. If we don't do that, we don't hit the cost breakthroughs. As you look at the math here, you will start to see about two- thirds--actually, in some ways, it becomes three-quarters if you work through some of the math--of the next 30 years is Medicare. It is the unfunded liabilities in Medicare of what we are going to spend and what it would cost to finance it. Remember, the next 5 years, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements equals the entire Defense Department. Every 10 years--that is two full Defense Departments--is just the growth. The next 10 years, 91 percent of our spending growth will be Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements. Is that Republican or Democratic? It is just demographics. It is one of my great heartbreaks: The Ways and Means Committee, about 3 weeks ago, moved a piece of legislation called H.R. 3--and I am going to try to tie this in on why the mechanism in that bill is so bad for the future disruption in healthcare to crash the price and make us all healthier. The advertised headline is: H.R. 3 is about reference pricing U.S. pharmaceuticals to the five key European countries, and we will adopt their pricing mechanism. Do understand the revolution we are on the cusp of. A few years ago, this body, with a Democratic President and a Republican Congress, passed something called the Cures Act. We created new channels and other ways to finance some speedier approvals for the drugs that are often referred to as biologics. We have the cure for hemophilia here. We are going to talk about cystic fibrosis and other miracles that are here. Remember, 5 percent of our brothers and sisters, the chronic population--that 5 percent--is the majority of our healthcare spending. If you want to have a revolution in healthcare costs, do the two things I keep proposing over and over: adopt and legalize technology that allows us to be healthier. Legalize the data, the ability for the thing you blow into that tells you that you have the flu. Legalize it so it can order your antivirals. The technology disruption is there to keep us healthy. The other side is the revolution is here to cure our just horrible, debilitating diseases, but they are really expensive because we are dealing with very small populations and incredibly expensive research. The miracles are here, and God forbid if H.R. 3 were to become the law, the model itself. As you dig in and dig in and dig in, you understand that many of the things that would help us crash the future price of healthcare get ripped away from us because those curative, revolutionary biologics, small molecules, even some of the synthetic genome type pharmaceuticals, don't happen. The logic is very simple, and we have seen this before in U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing. If there is not the big reward for the really big risks, you remove the really big risks and just basically take today's pharmaceutical, make small improvements, small adjustments, and that is what you market. That is where we were 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. The disruption really has happened just in the last few years because of what we did here in this body by getting the policy right and, also, technology. Part of the thought experiment to understand what those who support H.R. 3--you have to understand what you are voting for or what you are pursuing. Over the weekend, I was reading some of the mechanisms that are used in Great Britain. There is a formula. Let's say you had a new pharmaceutical. It is being presented to the folks who do the pricing in the National Health Service in Great Britain. How do they price it? One of the key aspects of their formula is very simple. It says if this were to extend someone 1 year of healthy life, what is that worth? In Great Britain, it is $38,000. If this pharmaceutical costs $40,000 but were to give you 1 more year of healthy life, it doesn't get purchased. We are going to import that formula? Look, we need to do something with pharmaceutical prices, but there are things we can do on the financing side, on the incentives of the capital that goes in, the healthcare bond that I have come over and over to this floor and talked about as the way to finance the really, really expensive disruptive pharmaceuticals. When we are doing a reference pricing in this pharmaceutical, if it is in Great Britain, it can be sold only if it is under that $38,000 for being healthy for a year. Is that really the reference pricing mechanism we are all ready to go for? It sounds great until you start to understand what is underneath it. Let's walk through my incredible optimism of the technology cusp we are on the side of but, also, how this body is going to have to figure out how we make these cures available. You all saw the news, and I just put up this board because it is something I care a lot about, cystic fibrosis--only about 30,000 Americans. Some of the best efficacy drugs we have right now only take care of about 6, maybe up to 20 percent of the population. We have a breakthrough. We have a huge breakthrough, but it is going to be, at least the current model right now--and it is a combination of different drugs functionally built on decades of research. But it is going to be about $311,000 a year. If you suffer with this disease, does our society have a moral obligation to you for you to have another healthy year where we have functionally found a discovery that helps basically stabilize a disease where you functionally drown in your own lungs? What is the moral obligation? Are you going to test that up against $38,000 for 1 more year of good life? Because that is functionally what you are being asked to put into the formula. Instead, shouldn't we be pushing for the next revolution of saying how we permanently cure these diseases so that 5 percent of our population, which is the majority of our healthcare spending, we start to cure our brothers and sisters? One of the other very hopeful things from last year is a pharmaceutical combination that looks like it stabilizes ALS. The drug looks like it is going to be expensive. You may need one, two, or three shots a year, but it stabilizes you. The drug may be $100,000 for that shot. It turns out that is dramatically less expensive than someone regressing with their ALS. I mean, if you have to put it on a calculator, it turns out this is a good investment. Do we intend to deny this drug? How about the research that is going on in Arizona right now? Arizona State University, the biggest university in the country and my alma mater, has a major project going on right now. I will do my best to try to describe this the way a couple of the researchers and professors have described it to me. We have all heard the CAR T therapy right now, where you can take a cancer you have and sort of see what titers--how your body is reacting to it. We figured out, with the CAR T process, let's give your body the immunotherapy. Let's grow those cells and go attack that cancer. We figured out that we can cure lots of types of cancer. There was even a great article out a couple of weeks ago on heart scar tissue. It turns out it is more than cancer. We can do other things. This is wonderful. But someone really smart a few years ago said, well, hold it. If we can build an immunotherapy--forgive me if I am mispronouncing it; I have had a lot of coffee today--that goes after a cancer, why wouldn't we figure out lots of different types of cancers, look at human body reaction, what the T cells say, and build a vaccine that says, hey, it turns out these 16, 17 immune responses to all of these different types of cancer, we could turn your body on, educate your body like a vaccine does, that if one of those cancer types popped up in your body, you already have your body's reaction ready to go and attack it. It is brilliant because we know it is over here. We know we can do it on the individual cancers. Why not now turn it into a vaccine that covers dozens of different types? They are working on it. This is incredibly expensive, incredibly high risk. The odds are it will not work. But if it does, what does it do to the health costs of this country? Do we have a moral obligation to at least not rip this opportunity away? My fear is that bills like H.R. 3 do incredible violence to that future that is incredibly optimistic. This slide is almost impossible to read, but this slide is about diabetes and the Medicare population. You remember how the first slide we were talking about that Medicare, in many ways, its cost--remember, when you pay your FICA tax, all we are collecting in that, all your government is collecting in that, is really the part A, the hospital portion. The other parts are general fund spending. Turns out that 30-year projection, we found some data that was saying 30 percent of that looks like it is going to be diabetes costs. Could you imagine a cure for diabetes? Now, you have 1 and 2. We need to deal with obesity. We also need to finish the research that would allow pancreatic cells to start producing insulin, some way to reactivate the human body to basically make its own insulin. That revolution we actually think we have going in a lab right now. It is incredibly expensive research, and multiple, multiple, multiple lines of this research have failed. But that single cure of diabetes would have the single greatest fiscal impact on this country's future. Think about it. If I come to you and say: Hey, take a look. Just Medicare and Social Security over the next 30 years, it is like $103 trillion of debt, of borrowing and interest costs. If adjusted for current dollars, maybe it is around $83 trillion. Three-quarters of that, two-thirds of that, is just Medicare. If you cure diabetes, you reduce that by a third. That is an example of are we about to destroy our own future for great political theater today on a formula that can't work, and there are dozens of ways to cheat, which I won't even go into today because I did that once before on the floor, walked through all the different ways you can cheat on H.R. 3. This isn't Republican; this isn't Democrat. It is just science. It is demographics. It is math. Why can't we come together, as a body, and say we need the disruption of technology over here to keep us healthy, and the disruption of technology over here to cure--we need to work out financing mechanisms and incentives to keep this going. And over here, we need to change a lot of laws, because a lot of this technology over here is actually illegal. One of the reasons I come to this floor every week is we are trying to convince our fellow Members and anyone who is willing to listen: There is a path that our country does not have to fall off the debt cliff. There is a path our country does not have to wake up one day and have a debt crisis. We have offered pieces of legislation, everything from how to manage parts of the debt, everything from long-term bonds to something called trills, which is like an equity interest in debt as a way to provide some stability, some robustness in the capital markets, all the way to actually building a layered policy that has everything from tax, regulatory, immigration, trade policies that maximize economic growth to incentives for individuals to be in the labor force--we have done lots of presentations on the floor of those--incentives to change the rules around technology, and that is partially what we are talking about today, incentives for older workers to not instantly lose benefits or not have their benefits decline where there is a disincentive not to work. We need our brothers and sisters in the labor force because this next chart is really, really important. Remember, this is only 1998 to 2028, and it is a little hard at this angle. But understand, if you and I were here, 1998--it doesn't feel like it is that long ago. If you were to look at the youngest quartiles, let's say the 16 to 24s, it was 15.9 percent of our population. In 8 years, 9 years, it is only 11\1/2\ percent of our population. Understand the demographic winds we are driving into. And this is why so many of the economists, before we did the tax reform, came to us and said: David, we know we need to fix the corporate Tax Code. President Obama has talked about this his whole time here. But you can't grow that much. You can't produce healthy labor markets because you are getting too old as a society. Well, it turns out that is wrong. It turns out we are breaking almost all the rules of all the economic textbooks I grew up with. But this chart is critical to understand. So, if you take a look at the top quartile here, which is 55 years and older--1998, it is not that long ago. That was 12.4 percent of the population. In 8 years, it is 25.2 percent of the population. Do you see a trend here? Because I swear to you, it feels like Congress didn't know there were baby boomers that were going to start turning 65. I swear to you, if you think about this place and the crazy debates we have, the childish math that is brought here, where people just make stuff up--I am sorry. It is one of our running jokes in our family that I went to Congress, a place that doesn't own a calculator. This drives all our policy. This is what drives the costs in Social Security, Medicare. This is what drives our debt. There are things we can do to grow the economy and provide, if we intend to keep our promises, but my fear is the immediate satiation of rage and politics in this body blinds us to the thing that is most important for all of us. So, once again, when we did tax reform, we were told the two fragilities that were going to keep it from actually working. One was capital stock. Well, it turns out all the economists got that wrong. Turns out capital stock, Americans saved a lot more of the tax reform dollars than we ever modeled for. Turns out that the repatriation--you saw the report, and this is from, I think, a full quarter ago--$140 billion more came in than we ever modeled. And also, because we have such a healthy economy, capital is coming in from all over the world. It turns out the United States is awash in capital. We broke the formula on capital stocks, so there is investable capital to invest in people and their ideas and the growth. But the other fragility we ran into that all the fancy economists were telling us is labor availability: David, you can't get, really, over 61 percent labor force participation next year. As a matter of fact, our model predicts we are going to start to fall under 60. You have got to understand, we are getting so old, and there are so many problems with millennials and millennial males. And let's face it, we have to deal with the realities of opioid and other types of addiction in our society. And they were right, except they were wrong on the actual numbers. We now have blown through 63--what was it?--63.3 percent labor force participation in the last report. I know this is geeky, but it is a big deal. It is a demonstration that, if we can grow, if we can encourage our brothers and sisters to be in the labor force--and it does mean this body needs to change many of the rules to make it easier and not a fiscal cliff on someone's benefits to go into the labor force. We are going to have to adopt the technology that scares and creates disruption. And the simple thought experiment I will give you, Madam Speaker: Did you go to Blockbuster Video last weekend? Of course not. It is sort of silly, but it is the same thing. Doesn't it feel like we all woke up one night and, instead of going and getting the little silver disk, we go home and hit a button and we watch Netflix or HBO Go, now Disney. The fact of the matter is, in that world, we allowed the disruptive technologies to become part of our lives. We need to do that same thing. We need to change many of the incentives for older workers to be in the labor force. And then the Holy Grail, which will be very difficult, is: Do we need to change some of the incentives within the benefits themselves? Remember, these are earned benefits. We have a societal contract with those who have become older. Are there incentives and things we can design into that to actually help on the demographic actuarial curve? There are, and we have actually talked about those on this floor. So this chart here is just a very simple one to talk about labor force participation, and you have got to understand there is a math miracle here. Is it possible to have 164,000 people enter a labor market when you are already down to 3.6 percent unemployment? I will tell you, lots of the economists would have said no. At that point, you have hit full employment. There are not even that many available workers. What we are seeing is workers who are not looking, so they are not in that unemployment number, coming back into the labor force. That actually tells you we have this thing called elasticity. It also means the growth curve is still ahead of us. If we can hit that curve and keep rising, we can do amazing things. And so, to the tie-in slide, I am trying to make the point--I know this slide is getting a little beaten on. I am trying to make the point for anyone who will listen, there is a path, but it is not a path where you get to do one or two shiny objects. We have to do all the policies together because they interlink. What we do in tax reform has things to do with labor participation. Labor participation will have effects on your immigration needs and moving to a talent-based immigration system. Well, it turns out those will actually have effects on family formation. It all ties together. And this body, we are now in our 11th month, and we have done nothing. We have functionally done nothing of value for this country. We should be ashamed. I have a 4-year-old daughter. The reason I ran again, the reason I am going to run again is I am going to find some way that her future will be better than mine. I will find some way to have our brothers and sisters understand the basic math, that there is a path. But doing crazy, doing rage, doing anger, doing just theater doesn't get us anywhere. There is a path, and it turns out this stuff isn't Republican or Democrat. It is just good policy. So, Madam Speaker, thank you for tolerating me, and, Dear Lord, I hope we are starting to make some progress here. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is something we try to do every couple of weeks is come here and actually, typically, our opening board here is we are talking about what are the headwinds to our society, what are the headwinds to our country, particularly over the next 30 years. The reality of it is--and we will get to that. We have it on some of the boards that come a little bit later. They talk about our economic promises: Social Security, Medicare, certain healthcare entitlements. The fact of the matter is they consume every incremental dollar. We will get to that. But one of the reasons I am actually starting with this board here is, this week, I believe the Democrats actually held what they call a Member Day with the global warming or environmental change committee. Forgive me for getting the name wrong. We weren't able to be there because we had Jay Powell and other people here this week. But we wanted to come here and actually start to share with our brothers and sisters in this body some of the amazing technology that is here that I don't know how to get individuals in this body who care about the environment to start to understand. We are living in the time of miracles. We all saw last week, MIT had a major breakthrough in ambient carbon capture; right? Okay. So the frustration is that I will hear people get behind these microphones and talk about how much they care about global warming, how much they care about greenhouse gases, how much they care, and then they don't spend time reading miracles that are happening in the technology. This is technology that just came out in a paper from MIT. They crashed the cost of yanking carbon directly out of the air. It is negative carbon capture. It is ambient. It is basically, if you have a generation source, let's say you are a concrete plant, a power generation--this and that--you could actually be using this. It uses shockingly little electricity. They basically came up with this concept of: Let's run these plates. Let's actually put nanotubes on it. We will run a certain low voltage through these plates, and it will catch the carbon in the air. And it doesn't matter. The technology doesn't care whether you are at 1 part per 400 million or heavy carbon. It is just an example of how technology is about to provide us a revolution on how we protect our environment. And it is here. How do we actually, as policymakers, incentivize these technology breakthroughs to happen, and how do we get these technology breakthroughs to become part of our society? It is not enough to come up here and virtue signal, coming up behind these microphones, telling us all how much you care and then not to understand. The revolution of technology is here, that if you actually care about carbon in the environment and its effects on global warming, guess what? You have just had a major, major breakthrough, because can the U.S. stop China from building its--what?--33 coal-fired plants that are going up right now that basically have no carbon capture? This type of technology becomes part of the solution. I wish I could get our brothers and sisters here to stop being sort of, shall we say, antiscience and be willing to keep up with the incredible progress we are making in environmental science. So this is a big deal for anyone who is watching, anyone who is listening, anyone who actually cares. Please, grab your phone. Let's Google ``MIT ambient carbon capture.'' Look at the graphics. They have a great little video of how it works, a simple explanation of how it works. This is a big deal. What a lot of folks here don't remember is, a year ago, the Republicans actually did something we call the Q45 tax credit. And we have been waiting for the Treasury Department to finish all the rules and the regs, but the concept was: You are an energy producer. If you would capture your carbon, we will give you a tax credit. If you take that carbon and then sequester it someplace or turned it into other uses, we will give you another credit. Now, all of a sudden, we have the cost breakthrough of capturing that carbon. It is from a pure math standpoint. This isn't Republican or Democrat. This should be hope and optimism that, once again, sort of the Malthusians in this place who thought the only way we could ever accomplish these things is crashing, just crashing our economy, the end of use of hydrocarbons. They are wrong. We are going to walk through some more of this, and you will see how this will ultimately tie together, at least, I hope you will. So this is an example of the facility in the current state of technology. This is a facility that I believe is going up in Canada right now. I believe the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others are investing in it. This is sort of an active type of carbon capture. They thought they could get down to $100 a ton, and we were all giddy about this. The previous board may cut this price in half. This is a big deal, when we just had not an incremental improvement, but a major, major, major improvement in what you call ambient air capture. It is functionally mining the air and pulling carbon out of it. So let's actually now think about facilities like this. This facility is up and running outside Houston. It is a natural gas power plant, and it doesn't have a smokestack. They created something--and I always screw this up. I believe it is the Allam cycle. This engineer had this idea for, apparently, decades, this concept saying: Okay. We burn the natural gas; we heat steam; we take the steam; we turn the turbines. Why not just blow up the natural gas, send the carbon from that, smash it into the turbines, spin the turbines, and then capture the CO2 on the other side? It works. It is up and running today, and, apparently, it is incredibly efficient. They are raising money. I think they are going to dramatically increase the size, but it is natural gas generation--no smokestack--and it works. And guess what happens? On the other end, they capture all the CO2, and they use it for enhanced oil recovery. They can sequester it in concrete and other places or just stick it back into the ground. But we know how to do this because it is not a theory. It is running today. How much discussion, how much praise, how much interest do we get on this from our brothers and sisters here who claim to care about the environment, the fact that we have had the engineering breakthrough? Because it doesn't sort of fit the commanding control craziness that has become our environmental discussion here that we must shut down any uses of these fossil fuels, of these hydrocarbons. Many of us are just trying to say: I need you to open up your hearts and your minds to science and the math. We can demonstrate we can actually use our energy and do it in a way where we capture the very thing you were most concerned about. It is here. It is not theory. It is here. Let's have just a little moment of joy that science, once again, ran faster than at least we thought it would. So the other thing, also, to walk through, and I do this one just because I am fascinated--and I have the microphone. Earlier this year, we had a major breakthrough in, I believe, technically, it is referred to as synthetic biology. Does everyone remember their high school biology class where we basically learned, hey, you are a plant cell? And since time immemorial, plant cells actually have an inherent inefficiency. They really, really want that carbon molecule so they can grow a sugar, and the plant can grow. And then sometimes the plant cell, though, doesn't end up getting that carbon molecule. It ends up grabbing an oxygen. And now it has to spend all this time and energy purging that. I believe it is the University of Illinois and a couple Federal agencies that have been playing with this for awhile. Because the original thought was: Could we do some tweaking of plant biology so it would create a greater carbon synch? Somewhere in that research, they hit the holy grail, and that holy grail is they can now make that plant always grab the carbon molecule, so the plant grows 40 percent more efficiently. Well, think about, first, what does that mean to society? What does that mean to the world? Well, it means we will probably feed the world for the next couple hundred years. It also means you need 40 percent less land, 40 percent less water, 40 percent less food, 40 percent less fertilizer. It also means it is going to be disruptive to the value of farmland; it is going to be disruptive to agricultural pricing; it is probably going to be disruptive to agricultural credit. But it is here. It is technology. It is coming. It also means, all of a sudden, if you are someone who particularly likes biofuels, with this type of synthetic biology, did you just change the pricing structures? This is coming. The technology has already succeeded in tobacco crops. We use tobacco because that was the first one we knew the genome of, and I believe now they are experimenting in a number of row crops. But, once again, there is an incredible disruption coming to the world brought by U.S. scientists that actually change everything. And now I need you to think more creatively. First, just the thought experiment. World agriculture is said to produce 2.2 times the greenhouse gases of every car on Earth. Okay. If you are using crops that had this technology associated with it so they grew 40 percent more efficient, using these crops would equal removing every car off the face of the Earth and its greenhouse gases. You just have to be willing to eat something that technically is a GMO, but the math equals removing every car off the face of the Earth. So, once again, the science is here. We have had this amazing breakthrough. It is the United States leading the way. But also, this technology can be used for growing forests, changing the grass in your ball fields, these other things. It is here. We did it. And yet I see no one else coming behind these microphones to talk about the optimism. If you care about the environment, embrace, learn, listen, read, study, understand the scientific breakthroughs that are here that make a difference. I do this one just as a continuation of the thought experiment: How many of you live in a community? How many of those of us here in D.C. live in a community where you are not allowed to have a plastic straw? How many plastic straws are in the ocean from North America? Functionally, none. It is virtue signaling. It is theater. We do this to feel better that we care. But if you actually cared, it turns out the math will set you free. The math says 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers: 8 in Asia, 2 in Africa. If you actually care about plastic in the ocean, stop the virtue signaling about straws that are in D.C., that are never going to actually be in the ocean, and start caring about the 90 percent of the plastic that comes from 10 rivers. And we know where they are. Change foreign policy. Change our environmental age. Change our technical assistance. Go to those 10 rivers. Change it, and then remove 90 percent of the plastic from the ocean instead of just talking about it or having this charity group or this NGO or raising money off the issues and having no actual effect. If you actually care, do something. Don't engage in the political theater that makes you puff up your chest and sound like you actually care. Help us. Those of us on the Republican side, we are working on trying to change those foreign aids, the technical aids, the technical assistance to do this. Help us do it. This shouldn't be Republican. It shouldn't be Democrat. It is technology. We know where the plastic in the ocean comes from. We have ideas on how to add a value to this plastic so it is collected, so it never ends up in those rivers. Go to the source where the problem is. Stop the crazy virtue signaling about straws in your community and help us go where 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from. And I know I may be sounding a bit sarcastic, but I am frustrated. We have been actually sort of demonstrating this one for a year, and I still can't get many of my brothers and sisters on the left to say: Oh, God, that is right. It is math. We know where it is. Let's go get it. It makes no sense to me. Is it we are going to take away a talking point, a theatrical point? Help us actually make--I love scuba diving. Before I got this job, I used to actually get to spend some time doing it. Help us. Take credit for it. We just want the right thing to happen, but it is not virtue signaling. It is actually going to where the problem actually is. So let's actually make a circle and see if I can tie this in to what it means to our future. This is one of the things I have come to this floor on for years, because we are having the wrong discussion here. We as a country are buried in debt, and the debt is going to get dramatically bigger. First, we need to pull out our calculators--for those who actually own calculators here on Capitol Hill--and have a moment of honesty. The debt is substantially driven by our demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat; it is just what we are. We have 74 million of us who are baby boomers. Congress did not pay attention that there were 74 million of us who were going to turn 65 one day and step into our earned entitlements. So if you look at this chart right now, 1965, you see the red area, it is 34 percent. That is what mandatory spending was. That was everything from entitlements you get, you earned. You earned your Social Security. You earned your Medicare. You earned your veterans benefits. There are some you get because you are part of a Tribal group or some you get because you fell under a certain income. Today, it is now crossing over 70 percent of all of our spending is on formula. When we stand on this floor and vote for appropriations, we don't even vote on that red portion, that 70-plus percent of our spending. We don't even vote on it. It is a formula. And then what is remaining? Half of it is defense. You see that little blue area over there? That is the defense. You see there the green? That is all we really have. And if you actually look at what we call discretionary, nondefense discretionary, it has been substantially flat for the last 10 years. It is just math. So if I come to you and say Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements, just the growth from those over the next 5 years, just the growth will equal the spending of the Defense Department. Let's double it. Hey, every 10 years, we will add two full Defense Departments. And that is just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements. We know where the problem is, but it is terrifying for elected officials to speak about it, talk about it, even think about it, because you have to explain something. It is hard, but it is manageable if we do everything. And the very last board I am going to show is, once again, our sort of holistic approach of, if we pull all the levers, we have done the math, we think we can keep it at 95 percent of debt to GDP, this isn't the absurd untruthful conversations that we are going to pay off the debt, because every day 10,300 of us turn 65. We need to deal with the truth about the math. And the math isn't Republican or Democrat. It is math. So, first off, the number one pillar we have to engage in--because it makes everything else possible--is a robust, a powerful, strong economic growth, the robustness of the economy, the participation in the labor force. We must do everything possible, whether it be changes in the Tax Code, whether it be changes in trade, whether it be changes in going to smart, crowd-sourced type of technology-based regulation. We must grow. Growth is moral. Because, if we don't grow, you can't make any of the other math work. And this is the reality. So, how many of my brothers and sisters came behind these microphones when we did tax reform and told us the world was coming to an end-- except for the fact that we, just last month, got the revenues. Excuse me. They are called receipts. Total receipts into the Federal Government: turns out to be the highest ever. We grew over 5 percent in our receipts in a post tax reform world. We had a parade of economists from the left come and tell us this could not happen, but it happened. How about that parade of economists from the left who came to us and told us we were going to force ourselves into a recession? It didn't happen. How about those who said, hey, you guys can never get back into the 60-plus, 61, 62, 63 percent labor force participation, but it has happened. You could never have a society with more jobs than available workers, but it has happened. You could never possibly see, like we did in 2018, unmarried women with no partner at home having a 7.6 percent rise in their incomes, but it happened. You could never cut the poverty rate a full half a percent in a single year, but we did it. You would think things like that would bring joy in this body, joy across the country. We have an economy that is working. We had Jay Powell here yesterday, the Federal Reserve chairman, talking about we are in a sweet spot. It is working. The most stable economy in modern times. The healthiest labor market in modern times. The best employment situation in modern times. The debates we should be having behind these microphones should be about how not to screw it up, how to understand what is working and do more of it. Because, you remember the previous slide that talked about the growth of debt, where our allocations go? If we grow the economy, it gives us a fighting chance. Now, we still have to do a bunch of other things. And this is back to the ultimate point. I have been trying to argue now for multiple years: There is a path where we don't have to be buried in a financial collapse as a society because we built up stunning amounts of debt. And I know some don't want to hear it, but it is the math. We believe we have built the math that we could kiss up against 95 percent of debt to GDP and hold it through the baby boomers. I have a 4-year-old little girl. She deserves to live in an America that works, that grows, that provides opportunities. Remember, we are in a world right now where, if we can keep up this level of growth, about every 30, 35 years the standard of living doubles. Or we go back to the bad old days of just a couple of years ago where the GDP growth was so slow and so fat, the standard of living was only going to double about every 70 years. So, how do we do this? I just walked through, first, our financial levers that are solely responsible for us in this room. We own the levers. We own the levers of tax policy that grow the economy. We own the levers of immigration policy that goes to a talent-based system, that maximizes economic growth. We own the levers with the administration on smart regulations. We own the levers, ultimately, on trade agreements that are fair and grow our economy. But we have to do other things. We have to change many of our social entitlement structures to incentivize work. If you are on Social Security disability, don't create a cliff; create a glide path so you are incentivized to be in the labor force. Because, think about it. When the models were done after we did tax reform, the fragility--the smart economists kept coming to us saying: Our capital stock. Will there be enough money to finance the growth? It turns out, there is. We did it. Americans are saving. Some of that is demographics. Some of it is substantially because of tax reform. It turns out, repatriation, we had--what was the report?--$140 billion more come back than we expected. And it turns out, because we have a healthy economy, capital is coming in from all over the world. So we have the capital to invest and grow. But the other fragility was labor, available workers. What a great problem to have, but we need to think of every lever we have in society, everything from dealing with the opioid crisis to incentives to participate in the labor force. Come to Phoenix, Arizona. We have a homeless shelter. There is an organization there called St. Joseph The Worker. It is a 100-year-old- plus Catholic charity. You walk in the door, and they will show you-- they have a stack of job opportunities for the most disaffected of our society, people who are trying to get on their program, trying to deal with mental health demons and substance abuse demons and those things. But they are there. There should be joy that there is such a labor shortage that our brothers and sisters in the business community are willing to take a risk on our brothers and sisters who are living in a homeless shelter. That part, we have proven, works. How do we expand participation in the labor force? How do we also, now, incentivize the other end? If you are healthy, if you are fit, if you are sharp, if you just want to, do we actually start to say: Well, you are 72 years old. You want to work. We are going to start adding certain levels of taxes. We are going to start taking away parts of your Social Security. We are going to tax these benefits because you are out there working. Just the opposite. We want as much of our society to stay in the labor force. And if you want to and you are older, let's redesign some of these incentives to stay in the labor force. Our millennial males that we still have a math problem entering the labor force and the other end of the age curve--let's fix it. Those are policies. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just rational policy to keep the economy growing. The other one that I come to the floor constantly and speak about is the disruption of technology that is about to crash the price of healthcare. And this is one of those moments I seem to succeed in offending everyone, so maybe it is the right thing. The ACA, ObamaCare--let's have a moment of truth and reality about it. It was substantially a finance mechanism. It was about who got subsidized, who had to pay. Our Republican alternative, well-meaning, had a number of kickers, a number of incentives in it, but it wasn't about who got subsidized and who had to pay; it was substantially about who had to pay and who got subsidized. This body needs to stop having the absurd conversation about the financing part of healthcare and start thinking about what we do to crash the actual delivery price. It turns out there is a revolution of technology out there, the thing you can blow into that can actually tell you you have the flu. It can bounce off your phone, check your medical records, and then order antivirals. Except for, the problem is, that technology is illegal under the way our laws are written today. There is a revolution coming. The other side of the spectrum is drugs like the single-shot cure for hemophilia. You saw that we think we now have the cure for sickle cell anemia. On cystic fibrosis, it looks like we think we may have the drug that stabilizes it. We know we have the drug that stabilizes ALS. They are all going to be really expensive. These are miracles in the biologic pharmaceutical world. We need to now work on a financing mechanism for the distribution of these pharmaceuticals that cure our brothers and sisters with chronic conditions. Because, remember, 5 percent of our population with chronic conditions is the majority of our healthcare spending. And we are about to start curing a number of them, because a few years ago the Republicans in this body, we passed the Cures Act, and it is working. And my terror is the left is moving a bill called H.R. 3. It made it through the Ways and Means Committee, and it breaks my heart because they are about to screw up the very incentives that have created these miracles, that are about to start curing individuals with these chronic conditions. Understand, if we could get our act together, if we could actually start to understand the technology disruption that is here, we can start to crash the price of healthcare, instead of having the absurd debate of who should get subsidized and who should have to pay. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just technology. But when you work in an environment where rage is the actual commodity of exchange, how do you ever actually get to solutions? And then the last one, which will be the most difficult one, is we have to have an honest conversation of what to do in the actual incentives, are there things we could do in the incentives of staying healthy, of how you deliver Medicare and Medicare part A and B and D, the incentives there. Could we actually create some incentives for Social Security that, if you wanted to work longer, you get spiffs and those things? But, if we do those five things, we can make the math work that we as a society, we as a country do not have to fall off the debt cliff. And it is the hardest thing you can imagine for a body that is completely calcified in its inability to actually do anything of value. Because it would require owning a calculator; it would require thinking; it would require some creativity; and it would require doing everything at one time to make the math work. You can't just do one of these things, walk away, and pretend you did something. It all has a synergistic feed because the labor force participation needs the strong economy; the strong economy needs the investments for the technology; the technology disruption needs the strong labor force to grab those who may have been rotated in the economy. It all has to work together. My heartbreak as I come behind this microphone and the reason I am here is to save this country and save it from that huge monster that is our debt, because I have the world's greatest little 4-year-old girl, and I am going to find a way to fix this for my country, but also for my daughter. I have been coming behind this microphone now with this for over a year. We have meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting on the fact that there is a path. It requires being willing to accept disruption in technology. It requires being able to actually drop some of the crazy ideology and actually use a calculator on the math on the things that actually grow the economy. And the ideology of rage has blinded us from, I think, in many ways, doing the right thing for working men and women, for my little girl, for this country. And I don't care if you are on the right or the left; you should be having your soul ripped out because we are now--we have been here, what, 10-plus months, and we have squandered almost every day we have been here because we know the path we have to go down, yet, in many ways, all we have done is make it worse. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is one of those moments where, in listening to my friend, Mr. Green, we are friends. We, I think, always voted against each other on most everything, but we were always civil to each other. That is sometimes hard to communicate with a lot of our brothers and sisters, our folks at home, that you can sometimes have very contentious issues that we absolutely disagree on, but it doesn't mean that we have to be jerks to each other. We have a family motto--I don't know if it works for someone on the left--``conservative but not a jerk about it.'' And we try very hard. Let's see if we can actually do something that actually is interesting and real on the math. Because our other saying is: It is about the math, and the math always, ultimately, wins. The reason we often start these presentations with this board up is if you look at our future, instead of the chaos that this place seems to be bathing in so far this year, and care about what is happening to the country, care about people like my little 4-year-old daughter, who turned 4 last week, best little girl ever--what is her future going to be like? When you look at the CBO data, there are some really important data points that are not Republican, not Democratic. They are math. In the next 5 years, just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements, just the growth, every 5 years, equals the Defense Department spending. That means, every 10 years, two full Defense Departments is just the spending growth. We expect, over the next 10 years, 91 percent of the spending growth for your Federal Government will be Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements. Over the next 30 years, if you remove Social Security and Medicare, we have $23 trillion in the bank. If you roll Social Security and Medicare back in, we are $83 trillion in debt. That is not inflation- adjusted. If you inflation adjust it, it is somewhere in the 50s. The point I am making is: Could this body ever engage, in this environment, on the real headwind that is up against our society and against all of us? We have a moral obligation to keep our commitments on those earned benefits, those earned entitlements, whatever you want to call it. But how do you build a robust enough economy, a vibrant enough economy, to keep our promises? That is why we put up this slide. We have been working on this for years. We try to make an argument that if you do certain economic policies--tax policies, trade policies, immigration policies, regulatory policies--the adoption of fairly aggressive changes in technology to crash the price of healthcare--incentives for labor force participation, incentives for someone who is older--if they are healthy and choose to stay in the labor force, there are all sorts of things to do here, even down to being honest about the demographics of the country on how fast we are getting older, the fact our birthrates have, in many ways, collapsed. Now you have incentives for family formation and population stability. It is complex. It seems to offend everyone when you start saying: ``We have a complex problem.'' Guess what? There is not a simple, trite solution. It is complex. Let's talk a little bit about the good news, the proof that tax policy, particularly, can have pretty substantial effects on the society. Last Friday, the Treasury posted up its numbers. You don't call them revenues; you call them receipts. I was corrected on my first day on the Ways and Means Committee. Guess what happened post-tax reform? Do you remember the apocalypse that was coming? Right here, at this microphone over here, we were told of the apocalypse that was going to happen financially to the country with the tax reform. The highest revenues in U.S. history, we had 4 percent growth in true revenues, true receipts. Inflation-adjusted, it is the second highest in U.S. history. We had a really interesting year in 2015. There was a number of anomalies, but a very high spike in revenues. It is the second highest, inflation-adjusted, in U.S. history, 4 percent growth in receipts. The problem is that we had about a 7-plus percent growth in spending, and you do that gap year after year after year. Now, to be honest, of that growth in spending, I believe over half of it was on autopilot. It was the population growth of our brothers and sisters who are baby boomers, the 74 million of us who started to move into our benefit years. Back to my first comments, it is happening. It is just demographics. The other part was spending decisions here where one side wanted to fix underinvestment in the military. Well, for every dollar there, you had to do certain types of social entitlement spending. But what is interesting is if you look at the growth of the economy, particularly in 2018, almost every social program, whether it be Social Security disability, which has some other complications, and there were some policy changes, to TANF, food stamps, they are all down, which should be almost joyous. But, once again, the chart I am showing here, I don't know why there is not more talking about this because just a couple years ago when we did tax reform, we were told this couldn't happen. We had lots of experts come and testify, lots of folks writing apocalyptic articles, and lots of testimony and debate here on the floor. So for those of us who took a beating over our math--which turned out to be right--do we ever get an apology? Or is it just another occasion where the lunacy is allowed to engage in the rage machine and yet when we actually see the math, feelings are more valuable than the truth? It breaks my heart, because how do you do good things for society if you are not allowed to have honest conversation about the math? So, once again, let's go back to the basics. Do you see the red? The first pie chart is 1960, and you see about 34 percent of our spending is what you would call being on autopilot. Today, actually now, over 70 percent of our spending is functionally formulaic. So we come to the floor, and we vote on appropriations bills. But we actually don't vote on that red, because those are benefits you get, Madam Speaker, when you turn a certain age, when you fall under a certain income, things that are automated. But yet look at what is happening. Take a look. If you remove Defense, think about that, so if you remove the 15 percent that is Defense, and you start to realize that mandatory spending, the 15 percent of the budget is Defense, there is only another 15 percent that is all the rest of government: health research, the FBI, the CIA, the agencies, the Forest Service, and everything else, are actually only about 15 percent of our spending. Your government is functionally an insurance company with an army. I know that sounds a little trite, but it is sort of a little bit funny and actually quite true. So how do you deal with the reality? Well, the reality of it is back to that very first board. There is a path. It will require Democrats and Republicans to actually understand a calculator, understand the benefits of growth, and growth being moral, but growth also doing stunningly good things for Americans, and also that growth gives us a fighting chance not to break the 95 percent debt-to-GDP ratio that we are heading towards very, very soon, so understanding where this debt is coming from. Now, why this is important is, all day long Members of Congress come behind these microphones, and we talk about all the things we want to do. But what happens when you can't do the things because the current promises are consuming everything? So remember our earlier comment, if you remove Social Security, remove Medicare, and look at the 30-year window, you will have about $23 trillion in the bank. When you move Social Security and Medicare back in, then you start to see where we are at, Madam Speaker. The goal here is to keep our promises, produce enough economic expansion, and engage in a number of technology and healthcare disruptions to make the math work. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is actually what is really good for our society. But it is the reality. So let's actually touch on just a couple of these things. I am sorry, this is the best slide I have on this subject area. It is a little noisy, but a Democrat Member and I have been working on this, trying to actually promote continued investment in things like diabetes. It turns out that if you can follow this noisy chart, we are modeling that the projected costs of Medicare, about 30 percent of it is diabetes. What would happen if we could actually have either a technology breakthrough on everything, helping our brothers and sisters with obesity issues to being able to grow pancreatic cells and reactivate somebody's pancreas so it is producing insulin? Those investments are worthwhile because they have such a dramatic multiplier effect. We are actually right now in our office trying to do the research of Alzheimer's. What would happen if we had a successful treatment for even some of the categories of dementia or even the postponement of Alzheimer's and what it actually means? So these are occasions where trying to build a formula, saying, okay, we already know tax policy is working in expanding the economy--and at the end we are going to talk about all the good things happening there--we already know that these trade deals, like USMCA, our model right now says it is half a point of GDP growth. You would think this body would just be giddy to get that passed, because growth is moral, Madam Speaker. It also really helps us have the resources to keep our promises. How about many of the other things we work on, where if you are going to build an immigration system, do you design an immigration system that maximizes economic expansion for our society? That is why there are so many economic modelers who are talking about moving, like the rest of the world is, toward talent-based immigration systems. The beauty of it is, obviously, you don't care about somebody's religion or color or whom they cuddle with or all these other things, you care about the talents they bring to our society to help us grow, because we have trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of promises. We need the economic expansion to keep our promises. Do you see, Madam Speaker, it is a broken record that needs to play over and over, because we live in a world of distractions and almost rage around here right now, and yet these are the types of issues that are critical. These are the types of issues we should all run on. So that is an example there. So let's actually talk about a little bit of creativity. Last week we had something called H.R. 3 in the Ways and Means Committee. It is referred to by some people in the vernacular as reference pricing. Take a handful of European countries, find their statistical mean, give it a variance of from 100 to 130, and you have to price within there. If you price outside that range, then you get a 95 percent tax, if you are the pharmaceutical manufacturer or seller. Okay, Madam Speaker, except within just a couple moments, a number of smart people in the room were laying out saying, okay, you could scam it this way, you could actually do a rebate over here, you could actually backdoor--so raise the price on these pharmaceuticals, lower the price on these, so the country of France, when they are buying, their mean cost is the same. And there was no willingness in the room by the majority Democrats to have a conversation of, this doesn't actually accomplish what you want, and CBO has already come and modeled to us that there will be a substantial falloff in new drugs that are the disruption that we are trying to get. Madam Speaker, do you remember how in the previous slide we were just talking about the miracle, if you had a cure for diabetes? What would happen if you had Alzheimer's? What about some of the ones we know are here already? There is the single-shot cure that cures hemophilia, one of the most expensive for an individual medical condition in our society. It can be up to around $600,000 a year, a single-shot cure is here. We should actually have been having a discussion of how you finance it, so every one of the 8,600--that is the best number I have right now--of our brothers and sisters who have hemophilia A, we can cure them, not over years, but over months. It turns out for our brothers and sisters who are in the chronic population--5 percent of the population is the majority of our healthcare spending. So what about the concept of a disruption like we were talking, a healthcare disruption, where you start curing individuals who have these chronic conditions and they are no longer part of the chronic population that is the majority of our healthcare spending? Instead of having the absurd debate we have had in this body for 10 years, the Democrats' version, the ACA, on who should get subsidized and who should have to pay. And then, of course, the Republican alternative, which was not on who gets subsidized and who should have to pay, but who should pay and who should get subsidized. We have been debating the financing of healthcare, not the disruption of things we can do technology-wise and incentive-wise to crash the price. You have already seen the charts. Medicare is three-quarters of the unfunded liabilities. I just showed you that almost 30 percent of it is just diabetes coverage. How do you get this body to focus on the reality of the math and move toward solutions that actually solve these problems? So if you are going to try to be creative around here, what you find out is by the time you make your first sentence of: Here is an idea, you already have folks on the other side shutting it down saying: I am not comfortable with that. So I am just going to put up another board, just as a simple thought experiment. So work with me here. Fifty percent of the pharmaceuticals that will be picked up at pharmacies today, the experts tell us, will not be used or will not be used properly. One more time. Half the pharmaceuticals that will be picked up today will not be used or will not be used properly. Think of that. If we could actually have some impact on that, if you want to do something on drug prices, Madam Speaker, that is one. Do we argue about that? We don't argue on that fact. It just doesn't fit into the narrative. So we have the technology today where we know when the pill bottle is opened. We actually have the machines that if your mom or your grandmom needs this pill at 8 a.m. and this pill at 12 noon, there is a little machine that does, not only dispense it, but will talk to her and actually also do a cellphone notification, and if the little cup holding the pill isn't moved, it will actually even send you a text message as a family member. Think about that. That is a technology over here that has almost nothing to do with actually being part of pharma, but actually would help us on that portion of that 50 percent that is not being used properly. How about the other portion of that 50 percent that just isn't used at all? We have actually been trying to do the math, saying: How about for high-value pharmaceuticals, put them in sterile packaging. Put them in single-use packaging and let them be returnable for the high-value ones. Because on one hand, we will get testimony of folks who are outraged that these small molecule pharmaceuticals are ending up in the water supply and in other places being flushed down the toilets. Just this weekend we had prescription drug take-back day in so many of our communities. But the fact of the matter is, how many pharmaceuticals that are perfectly good, that if they had been packaged properly, could have been returned? So as a body we support recycling for everything else, but I had a Democrat Member come up to me and say: Oh, I am just not comfortable with that. How about if it had a genuine, substantial price index? How about if it became a way to help our brothers and sisters who don't have access to some of these pharmaceuticals, a price-efficient way to get them? How about if it was just good for the environment? It turns out the technology exists. There are a number of organizations out there that are already experimenting with cartridges that stay absolutely sterile, so that those that are unused are returnable. It is a type of multilayer blister pack that stays absolutely sterile that makes them returnable; liquid type of pharmaceuticals that are in single-shot doses, meaning, the other ones are returnable. It is a thought experiment. But because it didn't fit the narrative of let's beat the crap out of the pharmaceutical companies--and, look, I am not saying they are saints--but it didn't fit the narrative to have something that was creative. It was like talking to a blank wall. That is a problem around here. I am willing to listen. Can I get my brothers and sisters who claim we want to do good things for society? ``We want to lower pharmaceutical prices. We are going to put every creative idea on the table, except for the ones that aren't theirs.'' It doesn't work that way. So last bit, in the previous couple of weeks, we have come to the floor here--and we chose not to bring all the boards--but it is something that I personally struggle with. If I had come to this body a couple of years ago and said--and I hate this term, but it is the proper term--our brothers and sisters in the quartiles where they didn't finish high school, or a single individual without a college education, we would have meetings in the Joint Economic Committee where they were doing modeling, and we were functionally writing them off in society, saying these populations are going to be part of--I don't have a better term--the permanent underclass. What has happened the last 2 years? It turns out those lowest quartiles, those three or four lowest quartiles, are the fastest-rising incomes in our society--single women, no partner at home, 2018, a 7.6 percent growth in income. If I had stood behind this microphone a couple of years ago and said this is what is going to be happening in our society, I would have gotten crazy calls saying I had lost my mind. But it happened. For those who live in Arizona, I believe, in the last five quarters, we have had a couple of quarters where we have had the fastest-growing income in the entire country, and it is not the folks at the top. What happens when you have a country that has more jobs than available workers? For those who follow numbers, if I had come to this room a couple of years ago and said we are going to blast beyond 63 percent labor force participation when all the models said we would be a couple of points below that and continue to fall--there are amazing things happening out there. You would think there would be a little joy for a body that claims we care about working men and women, for a body that claims we care about those who have had a really rough previous decade. You would think there would be joy in this body. Look at the math. Look at the fascinating things when--okay, we will get the unemployment numbers--what?--this coming Friday. Look at something that is called the U-6 data, and then start to see these fascinating numbers out there, when you get some of the really broad data on how many of our friends and neighbors who have developmental issues, handicaps that have been barriers for them to participate in the workforce. They are moving into the workforce because businesses are so desperate for workers that they are making accommodations. You would think that creates a little bit of joy. Is that Republican or Democratic? It is American. We should be joyful. When we see the numbers of Hispanics, African Americans, women, these other populations, all of these subgroups that we love to break up our math into, all of them are record highs, tied for record highs. Why isn't there joy? When you look at what has happened to wages, why isn't there joy? The reality is that the economic expansion that is helping so many of the working men and women in this country also means your government has had the highest receipts--income--in U.S. history, blowing the wheels off of all the predictions, proving the sort of Malthusian, malcontents were wrong. Something is working out there. Why isn't this body fixated on figuring out what is working and doing more of it? Instead, Congress has now become a place where we do public policy by feelings instead of a calculator. As my father used to say--and I am terrified I am quoting my father-- my father used to say, ``The math always wins.'' Madam Speaker, the math always wins. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is going to be one of those evenings where I am going to try to actually go through sort of complex numbers, but a lot of it is incredibly optimistic. I am going to do two things tonight: Part of this is just some frustration on numbers that I keep seeing out there that aren't being discussed here in this body that are incredibly optimistic in the economy. And the second thing is: I want to talk about, remember last week the theme was global warming, climate change, the environment, and I had my issue of The Economist on what is called the climate issue? I want to talk about some really amazing technologies that I can't believe weren't discussed last week that are actually about to create stunning breakthroughs. So, let's first actually talk through this. I have this intense frustration that my brothers and sisters on the left, and even a number of us on the right, don't talk enough or at all about the amazing good things happening to the American worker, to people out there who had a pretty rough previous decade. The math is the math. So the premise I want to give right now is economic growth is moral because it uplifts, it makes work valuable, it improves your future, your retirement, and your ability to take care of your kids. Economic growth is moral. The reason I have this particular board up--and we try to do this every week--is what are some of the greatest threats to our society? I actually believe it is the stunning size of our unfunded liabilities. Once again--and I say this almost every week when I am behind this microphone--the next 30 years, if you take Social Security and Medicare and remove it from the 30-year window, this country, the Federal Government, the CBO projection, $23 trillion in the bank, if we pull Social Security and Medicare into that number, then we are $103 trillion in debt--negative. That is not Republican or Democrat math, it is just demographics. There are 74 million of us who are baby boomers. We are moving into our earned benefits, and the honest truth is, the resources that were required to meet these earned benefits were never set aside. So how do we keep our commitments? We are actually proposing over and over and over that it is a combination. There is no magic bullet. It is a combination. Madam Speaker, you have got to grow the economy like crazy. So tax policy that grows and expands, trade policy that grows and expands, immigration policy that grows and expands, regulatory policy that grows and expands, and incentives to be in the labor force that grow and expand the economy. The adoption of disruptive technology to change the price of healthcare is absolutely necessary. We need incentives for Americans who are older and who feel they are healthy and still want to work, to stay in the labor force. We go over these details over and over and over again. There is a way to make the math survivable without some of the lunacy of functionally almost buying constituencies with outlandish promises, just managing the reality of our demographics and our current promises. Once again, every 5 years, just the growth in Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements--just the growth--will equal the Defense Department. That means every 10 years two Defense Departments is just the growth. CBO projects that in the next 10 years, 91 percent of the growth will be in spending on Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements. Much of that is calculated with actually a new much, much lower medical inflation. It is demographics. It is population shifts moving into those benefits. You would think, Madam Speaker, if those who come behind these microphones actually loved and cared for their brothers and sisters, they would actually try something new, and that would be invest in a calculator, tell the truth about the math, come together, and make it work. We believe there is a way to make it work. Part of the reason I am behind the microphone tonight is I want to talk about some of the amazing things that are happening, proving the first part of that discussion, that you can change the economic cycle. I have been on the Joint Economic Committee now for years. And these freaky smart professors, demographers, and economists would come and sit in front of us and say: David, it looks like your future is a 1.8, maybe a 1.9 GDP growth. We are going to have a labor force that is going to fall somewhere into the mid-50s as people retire, because remember 10,300 Americans turn 65 every single day. That was our future, Madam Speaker, and you couldn't make this math work at all. So how many times did you hear the term a fiscal cliff is coming? Then this crazy thing has happened the last couple of years where we changed our tax law and we updated our regulatory environment. We are still negotiating, trying to update our trade environment. But just those couple of levers changed the economic life for so many Americans. Yet this place is so incredibly sour, I don't know why there is not joy. I want to walk through some of these numbers. Look, these are just some of the headlines. Associated Press said that U.S. household income finally matches 1990 peak, while poverty rate hits its lowest since 2001. That is what they call inflation-adjusted dollars. We had a lost decade. We had a couple of lost decades. We are back. For the first time, most new working-age hires in the U.S. are people of color. It turns out, when we would sit in the Joint Economic Committee a couple years ago, we would hear that those who didn't have graduate degrees, those who didn't finish high school and who didn't have these particular skill sets were going to be consigned to the permanent underclasses. Besides just the common cruelty of accepting that, the darkness of accepting that, it turns out it wasn't true. Why isn't there joy? This is an editorial from The Wall Street Journal from the editorial board on the 20th, and there are some numbers in here we have been tracking. They did a fine job sort of lumping it together. But we all saw it here on this floor in some of those 1-minute comments a couple weeks ago, a number of our brothers and sisters on the left were just outraged that in 2018, Medicaid rolls declined. Do you know why they declined? It turns out they declined because workers' earnings increased by 3.4 percent while the poverty rate decreased by another half a percent. So now the poverty rate is at 11.8. It is still unacceptably high. It is also the lowest since 2001, and some of the fastest reduction of poverty in U.S. history was just last year. If you say you care about those who don't have many of the same opportunities or haven't had them in life, Madam Speaker, shouldn't there be just a little recognition there is something pretty amazing happening out there in the economy for these folks who were being written off as being part of the permanent underclass? Yet they have the fastest growing wages in those lower quartiles. I am sorry. I know I get behind this microphone and often sound like an accountant on steroids. I struggle with a way to make this sort of a powerful story, a powerful narrative. So many of our brothers and sisters around here get behind this microphone and are great at telling stories. But understanding this math--I don't care if you are Democrat or Republican, Madam Speaker, you should be joyful that something is working out there, and you would think policy-wise we would have a discussion of how we keep it going. Some more from this editorial: Full-Time, year-round workers increased by 2.3 million in 2018. Employment gains were the biggest among minorities, female-led households. The share of workers in female-led households who worked full-time year-round increased by 4.2 percent, and among Hispanics 3.6 percent. It is the next paragraph that caught my eye when I was reading this on the airplane, and I can't believe it wasn't headlined around this country, because we all talk about how we care about those who have had a really rough decade, those who have been poor, and those who are fighting and struggling to feed their families and move up. As a result, real median earnings--and let's stop for a moment. When you hear the words ``real median earnings,'' Madam Speaker, what does that mean? It is something we call inflation-adjusted dollars. So, if we tell you your income went up 2 percent, but last year inflation was 1 percent, you only went up 1 percent. So when you hear the term real dollars or constant dollars or adjusted dollars, it means we have made up for inflation, so your purchasing power is held constant. As a result, real median earnings for female households with no spouse present jumped 7.6 last year. How many speeches have been given on this floor over the last decade about that population and the crushing burden of poverty? More happened last year than had happened in the previous few years in moving that population out of poverty. I am sure our brothers and sisters on the left when they hear the actual math will be joyful because they care about these folks, right? The poverty rate among female households declined 2.7 percent for African Americans--Blacks--4 percent for Hispanics, and 7.1 percent for their children. Those are amazing numbers. It is part of my point that I keep trying to make over and over. Economic growth is moral. But what was more important, because the irony of this editorial, the real cure for inequality, it turns out that the share of households making less than $35,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars has fallen 1.2 percent, because they were making more. But when you actually look at the amount where the income growth was, it wasn't at the upper quartiles of income. It looks like the growth in income with what they say in the lower quartiles. Meaning, as this editorial--and we still don't have the math yet, but we are tracking it, we are probably not going to have it for another year when we look back at 2019--but preliminarily, 2019 may be the year, the first year in modern times, where income inequality actually shrinks. It is not because the wealthy didn't get wealthier. It is because those in the lower income finally were receiving pay raises, because they are finally working in a world where there are more jobs than there is available labor, so their labor is more valuable. Isn't that exciting? Shouldn't we all get together, Republicans and Democrats, and figure out how to do more of this? The editorial touches on this, but I want to give an explanation. As 10,300 Americans retire every day, those are often individuals who are near the peak of their earning cycle, their lifetime earnings. The economists for years and years had said they expected to see certain mean income fall because high-skilled workers, because of their time in the workforce, they were retiring and their salary was going to come out. Younger workers weren't being paid as much. It turns out, some of our youngest workers have had some of the biggest pops in income. Mean incomes increased in households between the ages of 15 to 24 and 25 to 34 by 9.1 percent and 5 percent, respectively. It turns out our young workers had some of the most aggressive, positive pay raises in all of society. How much have we heard that on our media? How about our financial press? How much here on the floor? How much from those who care about social policies? Look, the reality of it is that something pretty amazing is happening out there in our economy. When you saw the August unemployment numbers of how many Americans who were not even looking came back into the labor force, because, back to our previous point, labor force participation, a growing economy, is moral. It is something that I hope everyone here, no matter what your ideology, is joyful about. That economic expansion, we are starting to see it in the early data from CBO, and soon, hopefully, the Social Security actuaries. The dates of running out of money in our earned entitlement programs are getting pushed off because of the amount of payroll taxes that are coming in. As you look at these numbers, try to absorb how stunning. Earnings for single female households in just 2018--we are not talking multiple years--just 2018 of 7.6 percent. If I had shown up here a couple of years ago and said that is what 2018 was going to produce, you would have laughed me out of the place, but it happened. Poverty rates for female households are down 2.7 percent; for Hispanic, down 4 percent. The 2.7 is African American. Hasn't this also been the goal around here? We were going to find policies that created a level, egalitarian sort of equity in participating in the American Dream, the economic expansion. It is happening. I am sure when my brothers and sisters on the left see these numbers, they will soon be coming to these microphones overjoyed, joyful, excited that the policies from the Republicans over the last couple of years have brought economic numbers that a lot of those really smart professors, economists, and demographers who sat in front of us over the last decade said were impossible. We need to rethink. If you claim you care, maybe we should engage in policies that really do work. Just as the Wall Street editorial makes very, very clear, we have seen distribution not lift people out of poverty. In many ways, the math has kept them in poverty. But the economic expansion, the economic miracle from the last couple of years, is working. Maybe we should consider doing more of it. So, look, that is just an intense frustration I have. I want to start with this slide, sort of as the thought experiment. I am someone who cares a lot about the environment, but I also care about telling the truth about the math. Virtue signaling does not make the environment healthier and cleaner. It may get you reelected. It may get you some nice comments on Twitter or a blog. It doesn't make the environment better. So every once in a while I will bring this slide up. D.C. is one of the communities that has banned straws. Bless them. How many U.S. straws end up in the ocean? Oh, pretty much none. Madam Speaker, 90 percent of the ocean plastic--and I am someone, before I got this job--look, I am blessed to represent one of the greatest districts you can imagine, lots of smart people, lots of people who care. Lots of people have chosen to move their lives, their existence, their prosperity, and work hard in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. But when you are in the desert, you used to love to go to the ocean and go scuba diving. So plastic in the ocean was always one those things you talked about, you cared about. Madam Speaker, 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia, two of them in Africa. If you cared about plastic in the ocean, you would do something that is simple and logical: Go to the 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and do something. A number of us on the Republican side are trying to find ways to adjust parts of our foreign policy, our environmental aid, some of our engineering skills, and those things to these locations of these 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean. It is absolutely fascinating the reaction I have had from some of our brothers and sisters who just stare at me because--well, that pretty much ends the virtue signaling of: We are going to get rid of straws, even though 90 percent of the problem is these 10 rivers, eight in Asia, two in Africa. If you claim you care, learn the actual facts, because virtue signaling does not make this world cleaner. Let's talk about this last week and optimism. Amazing article, a company called TerraPower, and apparently, Bill Gates is a substantial investor in it. It is a new, dramatically more efficient type of nuclear power. There were some numbers in the article that I thought were important for the continuation of the thought experiment. About 20 percent of America's electric power comes from nuclear. Seventeen percent comes from renewables. Nuclear still is more than renewables. About 63 percent is from fossil fuels. Here is the problem with that: If you take a look, the column over here on my right--if you are watching this, your left--are different nuclear power generation that has been shut down or is being shut down. This goes back to 2016. That was some of the newest data I could find. The other side is photovoltaic. Do you notice something? The two lines are almost identical. If you are someone that is giddy--and look, I am from Arizona. We love our photovoltaic, but we also have the largest nuclear power plant, which is run by Arizona Public Service, in the country at amazing uptime. They do an amazing job running that facility. But this is nuclear power coming offline. That is photovoltaic going online. You will notice there is no net positive. If you are someone that cares about CO2, greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere, unless you are stabilizing nuclear power, instead of taking it offline, you didn't get anywhere. But we reward virtue signaling around here and not actual math. Let's talk some more about the good news and some of the technology breakthroughs that are happening around us. This one is one of my favorites because something the Committee on Ways and Means did last year--and we did it bipartisan, demonstrating you can do these things-- is we updated what we call the carbon sequestration tax credit. This is a facility that is up and running--what is it?--outside the Houston area, in Texas. I hope I don't butcher the technology, but it is a natural gas-fired power plant with no smokestack. They figured out how to take the natural gas, explode it, slam it through the turbines, spin the turbines, produce electricity, and on the other end, capture all the CO2. Then they sell it, recycle it. Now we are learning they can take that CO2, and through a process--I think you have to put it to like 150 bars of pressure and those things--it turns out it becomes an incredibly clean-burning fuel because it is really pure carbon. This facility, I think--if I remember the article--they are trying now to find funding to go up to around 300 megawatts. But they have proven you can burn a hydrocarbon, produce baseload electrical power, and not have a smokestack. The technology is up and running today and, apparently, a few miles away, there is another plant that is doing the same experiment with coal and no smokestack. This is a big deal, but there are many of us who also think of the greenhouse gas issue as global. When you have countries like China and its Belt and Road Initiative, it is bringing on 32, 33 coal-fired power plants with functionally almost no greenhouse gas mitigation, carbon capture. They are not using the newest technology. What happens to a world where someone like myself says that we need the economic growth, that we don't have the economic growth, that we can never keep our economic promises that we have made to our seniors? Retirement security is crucial to economic expansion, but we want a clean environment. The lunacy of some of the proposals, I beg of them, please, come by our office. We have binders of the disruptive technology that is coming out. This is one that I think we have to be joyful about. How many of you have ever heard the discussion of negative carbon emissions? We have discussed this concept for 100 years. You can pull CO2 out of the air. It turns out this facility is up and running in its pilot project. Bill Gates is also a funder of this. It is in Canada. I wish it was in Arizona. They are claiming right now that their facility can pull carbon out of the air for about $100 to $150 a ton, capture that carbon, package it, and make a clean-burning fuel out of it. If the rest of the world continues to go the way it is going, the concept that we now have the technology to yank carbon out of the air, and if it is really heading toward $100 a ton, it is at the threshold where it is economical because, it turns out, the dollar values--some of the sequestration tax credits we do, but also the ability to convert it back into a fuel, it is almost in the money. This is exciting. How many did you hear talk about this technology over the last 10 days? It is here. My beloved university, Arizona State University, the biggest university in the United States, has an entire center devoted to this concept of technology that is a negative carbon sink. Functionally, it pulls carbon right out of the air. Their technology is passive, where the other one is active. The professor working on this--I have met with him--freaky smart. He has a joyful view that basically says let's let the technology compete. Whoever does it the best will win. This one is more a distributive model of this passive collection where you can put it in lots of locations. Part of it is the cover for your bus stop, but it is also pulling carbon out of the air. The technology is here, so the Malthusians of this place--and if you don't know what that means, please go look it up--somehow think we need to go back and live in the dark ages, basically, or that man has demonstrated over and over technology is a disruption. Look, when I was growing up, I remember having a teacher read us the Population Bomb, scaring me to death that by the late 1970s, we were all going to be starving. How many of our kids out there today hear the propaganda on some of the reactionaries, the folklore about what is happening out there, that they are going to be in a planet that is burning up in their late teenage years? The issues are real, but so are the technology solutions. It turns out solutions often aren't as elegant as a great speech with lots of virtue signaling. I am very proud of the things that are happening out there. A final bit of this thought experiment is, years ago, we were blessed--we had a Ph.D. of physics. I think he is now--well, he is at one of those special agencies that does really complex stuff right now. But he did a math experiment for us. Methane, in our formula, was considered 84 times more greenhouse-causing in its first year than carbon. So, okay, you get 84-to-1. He came to me with this math experiment saying, if you could build a substantial pipeline or multiple pipelines in west Texas and a couple other large hydrocarbon-producing areas and it was designed to capture methane and take that methane and pull it in in enough density to actually convert it to a fuel, and then he had that and a couple other things, you hit the Paris accord numbers. Isn't that exciting? How many of our brothers and sisters here are already saying we need to be building a bunch more pipelines to go collect that methane so we can capture it, compress it, make sure it doesn't go into the air--except pipelines are, functionally, part of the religious process here and need to be opposed. If anyone is watching, listening, go look this up: photosynthesis, 40 percent. I actually believe this may be the single most disruptive bit of technology in our lifetimes. It looks like the inherent problem of plants. You remember all of your high school biology class where we were told plant cells have had, for millions of years, a small flaw. Sometimes they really, really want that carbon molecule so they can make a sugar out of it and, instead, they grab an oxygen molecule. Apparently, through synthetic biology, they figured out how to rearrange that plant cell so it always grabs the carbon. It grows the sugar, and the plants grow 40 percent more efficient. Think about that. What would happen if that technology was part of our commodity crops, our fresh produce, the things we eat. The world would feed itself for another 250 years. It would mean 40 percent less land, 40 percent less water, 40 percent less fertilizer. It turns out, world agriculture produces 2.2 times the greenhouse gases of every car on Earth. Do you know, if you had this type of technology as the crops for around the world, it would be equal to removing every car off the face of the Earth? And, yes, it is a GMO, because the fix was done through a type of synthetic biology. But it would equal removing every car off the face of the Earth. These are joyful thought experiments, but the technology is real, and it is here. We have to figure out, as a body, how we adopt these things that it proves we can grow as a society, we can grow economically as a world. My soon-to-be 4-year-old little girl can have an amazing future. We don't have to be terrified about the debt cliff that is going to crush us because we grew. And we can have the amazing clean environment and deal with the issues of greenhouse gases. Are we ready to pull our heads out and actually do that crazy thing of reading and math and understand the technology disruption is in front of us? Madam Speaker, are we ready to adopt, embrace the technology disruption that allows us to grow, prosper, and meet so many of our goals? Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted nay on rollcall No. 543.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, don't you love that, when we take a few minutes getting organized because sometimes we walk around with so many moving parts? This is sort of the continuing conversation that we have been doing on a theme for well over a year now, in the last Congress and now into this one. It is a combination of a couple things: One, our office works very hard on actually looking at solutions, but first you have got to understand some of the problems. And I want to say this very nicely--and maybe in the next couple weeks we will come back and do it again, we have already done it a half a dozen times here on the floor--and that is: The miracles of technology are about to do amazing things in environmental protection. So to our brothers and sisters on the left who were sharing their heartfelt concerns over global warming and greenhouse gases, well, what is so disappointing is the lack of optimism in the incredible technology breakthroughs that have happened. Think of this: Outside Houston, they are burning coal, they are burning natural gas. And there is no smokestack. They are capturing every bit of this ACO2. There is just a litany of these types of technologies that--sort of the old Malthusian view of the way you save the planet is we live much poorer. Well, that has been wrong now for centuries. And once again, we are going to prove that the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted that the world was going to starve by the late 1970s has been wrong over and over and over. We, as policymakers, have an obligation to make sure we are moving those technologies forward, just like the Ways and Means Committee last year actually updated the tax credit for carbon sequestration. And if you follow the literature, there are amazing things that have happened just in that 1 year with that technology and now efficient, good things are happening. But that is not my reason for being behind this microphone tonight. We are going to continue the theme and I will fulfill my obligation from last week when I said I would bring in the new revenue numbers for the first 11 months of the year on what is actually happening in the economy; what is the greatest threat to our future. Let's start with the threat and then let's talk a little bit about the good things and the solutions. Almost every Member at some point has walked behind these microphones and shown this slide. But this is so important to understand what the actual conversation is that drives almost every policy on this floor. It is called demographics. It is the reality of the math. You see this red? That is 1965. I accept that is--what?--55 years ago. But 34 percent of the government spending was what we called mandatory, earned and unearned benefits. Social Security, you earn it. Medicare--this is prior to Medicare--but you earn those things. Today, it is no longer 34 percent of our spending. Today, it has actually crossed over 70 percent of our spending we don't even vote for on this floor. It is a formula: You turn a certain age, you get a benefit. You fall under a certain income, you get a benefit. You are part of a certain group, you get a benefit. The blue, 15 percent of our spending, that is defense. The green here, 15 percent is what we call the other part of discretionary. And that is what we sit here and debate. And that number is going to continue to shrink because we have 74 million of our brothers and sisters who are baby boomers who are moving into retirement. Madam Speaker, 10,300 Americans every single day turn 65. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is math. But as I have joked many times--even though it is a little bit of a dark humor--welcome to a math-free zone. So let's actually continue to talk about what is the greatest threat to our society and also the fact that we have some amazing opportunities to actually deal with it. Here is the math. Take a look at the chart behind me. If I could sit in front of you and say the next 30 years--we are going to remove Social Security, we are going to remove Medicare from the conversation--your government, your Federal Government has, $23 trillion in the bank. But if we roll Social Security and Medicare back into the math, we are $103 trillion upside down--$103 trillion negative--so we are a couple 100 percent of GDP. And that is the 30- year window. Because remember the math, every 5 years, just the growth in Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements, just the growth, equal the Defense Department--every 5 years. So every 10 years it is as if we added two Defense Departments, just the growth of Social Security and Medicare. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is demographics. Somehow, this place completely forgot there was a baby boom 50 years ago-plus--60 years ago over an 18-year period of time, and we have 74 million of us who are baby boomers moving into our earned retirement and we have not set aside a fraction of the resources necessary. So this is the great fragility for my little soon to be 4-year-old little girl. This is a threat to her economic life, her economic future. But I will argue the future of our country, and actually the economic vitality of the entire world, because when the United States runs into crushing headwinds, the rest of the world also suffers. And once again, look at the chart. The reality of it is--Social Security is huge--but it is an easier fix. It is Medicare. Medicare is what our great fragility is. So let's actually talk about some of the positives because--and it is my very last slide that we typically start with. We come here and talk about, hey, there is sort of five pillars, economic expansion, Tax Code, trade, regulatory that you do those policies to maximize economic growth, incentives to join the labor force. As you know, we still have a math problem. Millennial men into the labor force--even though the August numbers were stunning--now we have broken over--what is it?--63.2 percent labor force participation. I know that is geeky, but when tax reform was done, the modelers all said, Well, we are fearful that capital stock and labor will be the headwinds that keep us from being able to grow. Well, it turns out, that thing they call capital stock has worked in our favor. It is working great. The amount of resources coming back in--we call repatriation, that was part of the Tax Code--have exceeded the models. Americans saving have exceeded the models, and now that we are, in many ways, still the healthiest economy in the world, the amount of resources that are flowing into our economy from around the world have exceeded what any one modeled. Capital stock is in great shape. Look at our interest rates. It turns out labor is our fragility. But think about this: If I had come to people in this room, Republicans, Democrats, and said, Hey, 3 years ago--we are having this conversation 3 years ago--you are going to live in a country in 2019 with substantially more jobs than available workers, that in the last--like we saw in the August data, in the last 3 months for--we will call it our brothers and sisters--and I hate this term, but there is not a better way to talk about it--who are in some of the lower income quartiles, they will be having wages growing faster than 4 percent. You would have thought I was out of my mind. Yet, it is happening. You would think there would be just joy from our friends on the left and a little more talking about how wonderful that economic growth being moral, because it helps so many of our brothers and sisters who have had some really rough decades. The math is still early, and it is going to be hard to do, but there are a couple modelers out there that I had these conversations with that are saying this may be the year, that because of income growth in those--our brothers and sisters who didn't finish high school, who had those types of equivalent of moderate-to-lower-skilled jobs, but their wages are growing so fast, this may be the first year where income inequality actually shrinks a bit. And our friends on the left say that is one of the biggest moral imperatives in their vision. Guess what? Something we are doing is working in the economy. Look at our brothers and sisters, the Hispanic population, African American population, handicap population--all these different subcategories we do to do our U6 math--either at or bypassing some of the best employment numbers in modern history. You would think there would almost be joy. And you would think actually the debates around here would be, how do we keep it going? Instead of who we intend to punish next. So part of the amusement I have had so far this year, particularly-- and it is sometimes hard, but never do it, come up here behind the microphone, and we have this whole binder of some of the crazy things that were said a couple years ago when we were doing tax reform: Revenues are going to collapse. The economy is going to be thrown into a recession; all of this sort of darkness. And it was wrong. So think about this: The chart behind me is the yellow--I think that is yellow--is the, what we call receipts for the first 11 months of this fiscal year. Remember, your Federal Government's fiscal year begins October 1. The blue is 18; the green is 17. Receipts for the first 11 months of 2019 in hard dollars, in inflation-adjusted dollars, are the largest revenue receipts in U.S. history. And I was doing the math off the top of my head. I need to grab it and sit in front of a calculator, but off the top of my head, I believe that is a 4 percent growth rate in revenues. Yet, the argument around here is the tax cuts are these horrible--and they are going to crack--they are wrong. And the math is here. Do you think we are going to get an apology? That number is also--if I inflation-adjust it so I do constant dollars over the last few decades, it is the second-highest revenue in U.S. history. And think about what is happening in our economy. How many of our brothers and sisters are working? How many of our brothers and sisters are seeing the value of their homes, the value of their paychecks--the best they have been in decades. I don't know how we come here to the floor, we claim we care about working men and women in the country, and then don't take joy in the fact that the math is actually stunningly positive, and how we don't engage in a debate and discussion on how we keep it going. But politics, as you know, in D.C., have become absolutely perverse, where the weaponization of everything--the rage is now a business plan of certain media outlets to, God forbid, you say something positive about the economy, because you will lose viewership. But the math is the math. So let's even take it a bit farther: Because we live in a society that is so honest about what is actually happening in the economy, you all saw industrial production numbers a couple days ago. I know I am geeking out a bit, but, remember, wasn't it on this very floor just a couple months ago we were all talking--well, one side was talking about we are going into recession, things are crashing, you know, the sugar high is over. Except for the fact that industrial production last month had a .6, which is a nice, big spike and revision of previous months. It is working. The United States is working. Our economy is working, and compare it to the rest of the world. Where is the joy? Where is the excitement? If you say you care about people, these are people not only working, but why do we fixate on industrial production? What are the two factors that allow a business concern to pay their workers more? Well, it is traditionally inflation, which doesn't mean a bigger paycheck buys you anything more. It is productivity. When productivity goes up, people get paid more. And the purchasing power is more. Industrial production is linked to productivity. It means this is part of the reason our brothers and sisters out there, who are out there working their hearts out, are getting paid more, and their purchasing power is better. I know this is geeky. I know I come behind this microphone and sometimes sound like an accountant on steroids, but these things are important because it is real. It is not some emotional blaring of, you know, we hate this person, we like this person. We made the math work. And we are seeing the results of good things for hardworking Americans. Growth is moral. And where I want to take that is my experience in Phoenix of visiting the homeless campus, and St. Joseph the Worker there having jobs because we are so desperate for workers in our market that employers are trying to recruit workers from the homeless campus. And we actually brought someone last year to testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee. We are so desperate for carpenters and plumbers and electricians, they brought a young man to come testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee who wasn't like our typical witness. He wasn't wearing a suit. He had a number of facial tattoos. As a matter of fact, he had a number of facial piercings. He opened up his testimony to the Ways and Means Committee saying: I am a three-time convicted felon. I am an addict. But because of a private group that was so desperate for workers, they took a chance. They were doing training--in his case, electrical training--in the prison before he got probation, and they guaranteed him a job when he got out. It didn't mean they were going to keep him. He had Republicans and Democrats and everyone in the room, as well as the staff, crying because he told the story: I am a three-time convicted felon. He was an addict, and he was saying he had not touched drugs or alcohol for a year. He gets to see his family again. He gets to see his child again. And he is now up to $22 an hour, and he is so busy working that he hasn't had the chance to relapse. It is stories like that that need to be part of our lexicon. It is part of the joy that economic growth is moral because it helps and solves so many problems, and particularly in our earlier slides where I had this absolute fixation on retirement security and our discussion of growing the economy and labor force participation and technology and incentives, bringing that package all together so we keep our promises around Social Security and Medicare. But we have the first pillar that we are living in right now, and that is a proof that policy--policy--can work, whether it be the tax policy we did a couple of years ago or whether it be some of the regulatory changes we have embraced. Madam Speaker, could you imagine if we could actually get that extra half a point of GDP growth by finishing the NAFTA replacement, the USMCA? How many of our brothers and sisters in this place will drop their politics or their terror of giving this White House a victory and actually do what is good for the workers in this country--actually, the workers for all of North America, because, as supply chains are moving away from China, wouldn't we like to have them here in our hemisphere? Or do politics blind people to the point that basic economics in math and opportunity don't count? So, back to one of the other things, and I put up this slide. Partially, it is one of my Democrat friends here who brought this to my attention, because we have been working on this concept that there is a disruptive revolution coming in healthcare. We have done the presentations here on the floor many times of the thing you can blow into and it instantly tells you you have the flu, and the algorithm, if we could just legalize it, could actually order your antivirals, except for the fact that that technology is illegal under current law. But, also, the concept of, in just a few months, there is going to be a drug that cures hemophilia. It is going to be really expensive, but, for our brothers and sisters who have one of the most expensive diseases in our society, they are cured. So what would happen to those numbers I was showing you on Medicare if I came to you and said: Hey, there is one disease group that is 30 percent of Medicare spending in the model for the next three decades? It turns out it is diabetes. It is one of the reasons this body has been investing in things like the Cures Act and other miracles that are now happening in what we call synthetic biology, in the new types of biological drugs--you have all seen the stories, and it is still a bit of optimism--that we may be able to start growing pancreatic cells again. Could you imagine if we cured just diabetes? It is not only the noble thing of curing a disease that is part of our chronic population; we often don't think about what is the economic cascade that it has to, actually, retirement security. It turns out, if 30 percent of Medicare future costs are just somehow related to first-degree or second-degree or third-degree effects of diabetes, it is part of the reason so many of us in this body have worked so hard to say: Put the money in. Let's invest in the disruptions. Because I do believe, if we could buy a calculator for our Members here and help them understand the technology disruptions that are going to make the environment and healthcare and so many other things just amazing--and, then, if we could legalize many of the technologies that, oddly enough, are illegal under our reimbursements and under our rules today, there are some really amazing things. These next few decades could be just amazing, particularly for my little 4-year-old girl. But these amazing things don't happen when everything is political and everything is weaponized and, if it is not a melodrama, we don't do it. So we typically start with this, but I am going to close with it this time. We have been trying to help our brothers and sisters in here understand, the old discussions of, well, we can do this little bit of entitlement reform or raise taxes over here or do this and that fixes the fragility that is the future of, particularly, Medicare, but those days are over. We lost that mathematical opportunity a decade and a half ago. But there is a way to survive the debt bomb that is coming at us if we do the things that are necessary for economic expansion, do the things that are necessary to encourage our brothers and sisters to be in the labor force, actually embrace the disruptive technologies instead of being fearful of them and being fearful of sort of telling many of our incumbent business models that they are going to have to adopt. And we are going to have to tell the truth that, within the benefits, we need incentives for you to think about, if you are healthy and can do it, staying in the labor force. And the other thing is we are going to have to actually talk about, just as Mr. Yoho before me, things we do in immigration and population stability, of an immigration system that maximizes economic vitality, sort of the talent-based system the President talks about. But, even in a country where our birthrates have collapsed, how we encourage family formation, if you mix all these things together and with a couple good lucks, like with the technology we are talking about that cures diabetes, we can make the math work that the $103 trillion of debt that we expect over the next 30 years, substantially because of our demographics, does not have to destroy this country, because we can cut that in half. If we do that, we have some amazing decades ahead of us. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Kansas who represents my wife's family. Hopefully, I won't take a couple of minutes, but there were a couple of things as we were doing some economic numbers before. The modeling right now says if USMCA passes, it is another half a point on GDP growth. In a $21 trillion economy, that is real money, but it is also hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs. But there is even another complexity that I am going to ask for folks to think about. Think of the issues we have, particularly with China. So many of us would love to have a healthy relationship with China, but we don't believe they are playing by the WTO rules. They are breaking the rules. So we are seeing a world right now where lots of manufacturers are thinking about moving parts of their supply chain. Wouldn't it be an amazing thing that we do our job here, we get this trade agreement passed, and those components, those issues, parts of those supply chains are back here in North America? Our ability to say our continent, our trading block, our ability to not only have robust economies for ourselves, but these labor provisions. And this is the last thing I really wanted to hit on. The gentleman and I are on the whip team for passing this. We have had a number of visits with our brothers and sisters on the left. With a lot of them, I will get this: Well, David, I am concerned about the enforcement of the new labor standards that the Mexican Government has passed. Remember, their legislature has passed this. Their President has signed it. There are dramatic changes in their labor rules. I will bring them a copy and say: But you don't understand, it is not the 1940s and 1950s anymore. You don't send in a team of union representatives to go inspect one of the 70,000-some facilities and inspect and then write up a report saying we don't think you are--in today's world, we have that thing called the internet. The law the Mexican Congress passed actually has provisions in there for privacy and secrecy and the ability to use technology that if you believe your labor rights are being abused in a Mexican factory, you can actually document it. You can actually put it on a blog and those things. So how do we drag our brothers and sisters from the left to actually walk away from the excuse of the labor improvement enforcement, and get them to understand that it is not the 1950s anymore; that now we are going to use technology and the ability to have these new labor standards in Mexico which can be enforced on a very large scale using technology? This is incredibly important to our economic growth, and our entire regions. Let's get this done.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Maloney for telling the story. You know, it is not just New Yorkers, I can't imagine there is an American who doesn't remember exactly where they were in that horrific moment. And it's a moment yet where those of us in the West and all over the country ached to see what happened to your community.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I yield to the gentlewoman from New York.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Maloney. We always have to be careful when we are friends not to go around calling each other by our first names. But I was not here at the time of 9/11, I did not come for another decade. And yet today, even with the young people we have in our office that were just children, I mean young children, and you can still feel that sort of somber tone. It is a powerful example and something that is devastating. And we can come together. I desperately wish there were more opportunities where we remember, not the horror, but the fact that there was unity. And how do we deal in a world right now where so much of our politics is toxic and in not allowing that broken sort of political system to ever sort of be more powerful than those moments where we must come together and both heal, deal with the heartbreak and then also make sure it never ever happens again. So my reason for being on the floor this evening is I wanted to spend a moment and just touch on 9/11 and how that just affects so many of us. I am told now in Arizona we have 30 or 40 of those first responders or others who were affected who are receiving their healthcare in our community. I know of only one or two Arizonans, I believe, who lost their lives, so we always sort of pull back to our communities and personalize it. The Math Doesn't Work

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I rise today to commemorate Ernestina Borquez-Smith on her birthday, September 6th. Ernestina has devoted the past 29 years of her life and career to the people of Arizona. She began her career as a staffer managing casework for Representative Bob Stump of Arizona in 1990, and went on to work for both Democratic and Republican Representatives as the Director of Constituent Services. She is a prime example of a public servant that wants to serve, regardless of party politics, but strives to make a positive impact in the lives of her fellow citizens. I have known Ernestina since 2011 when I was first elected to Congress, and she has proved to be an exemplary member of my team. Congress is an institution devoted to serving the people, and Ernestina has exemplified this every day by meeting with veterans, immigrants, and Arizonans of all walks of life, committed to being both a voice and a resource for the people. We look to Ernestina as a devoted public servant, and it has been an honor to know her.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Reed) for yielding. Madam Speaker, the reason I am behind the microphone is because, in the committee, we actually asked the question of staff and others who were testifying that this look-back to be able to file for the marriage deduction and benefits would not create a new avenue of audit, would not create a new channel for opening up someone's tax records for a new line of investigation. The feedback we received as a committee was saying, no, this was very specifically just to this benefit. Did the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal) hear the same thing?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.