David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I just thought it is important for all of us to hear it on the Record that we are not opening up a new avenue of investigation because I need to be brutally honest that the language of the legislation, I don't think, is crisp enough on that point. Let's make sure it is cleanly in at least the Record we have produced here today.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Brady) for yielding. I may come to the microphone with a slightly different message, having been on the bipartisan multiemployer pension commission, having hundreds of staff-hours into digging into the numbers and desperately trying to come up with an honest, holistic, complete solution. I fear we are about to do a level of violence here financially that we don't mean to. A previous Democrat speaker in the previous testimony actually spoke about we need to do a lifeboat. If you do the math here, we are not doing a lifeboat. We are putting a little life preserver out when we need a big lifeboat. And the math-- let's be honest about the math. If we actually come here, and I know this chart is too small to read, but I brought it up because we have all seen the actuarial report that makes it very clear. If we actually use anything even close to what a union worker for a single employer plan--the protection, the rate of return, the net present value calculations they get--if we do that to these multiemployers, the vast majority of the multiemployer plans are in the red. And we are, right now, about to fix an offer--whether you want to call it a bailout, whether you want to call it a subsidy, it is really expensive, and we are only taking care of a small portion of the problem. What are we about to do to all the others, saying: Well, you were close to the cutoff; you are on your own? Is that the type of cruelty you are actually about to pass, telling everyone we took care of the problem when the vast majority of the workers in these plans are on the other side of the cliff? I beg of you, come back. We were so close in the commission work, and it was painful. Everyone was going to be mad at us, and it got a little too politically difficult. But there is a mathematical way to get there. And for once, can we use our calculators to actually solve the problem and be honest rather than the political rhetoric that is absolutely vacuous on the scale of this problem.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight is a continuation of a series I have been doing on the floor every other week, depending on the chaos of the floor schedule. I take about a half an hour and walk through things I see in the numbers and, in many ways, express my intense frustration at both the Democrats and many of my brothers and sisters on the Republican side for not taking a step backward from the daily chaos that has become the House of Representatives to realize that the single biggest threat to the cohesion of our society is demographics. I am going to walk through what that means. The reason I always put up this particular board is that we have developed, in our office, a five-prong attack on what society does financially to be able to keep the promises of Social Security and Medicare. The demographics I was speaking of are those of us who are baby boomers. There are 74 million of us born, functionally, in an 18-year period, with 10,300 of us retiring or turning 65 every single day. The math is devastatingly ugly. My instinct is maybe that is why it is avoided in conversation around here, because the math is difficult. It is uncomfortable. It is also real. Something I don't often do, but I want to read a simple paragraph from a June 11, 2019, analysis from the Manhattan Institute that was analyzing the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. They are talking, right now, about just Social Security and Medicare. ``Over the next decade, 91 percent of the projected increase in budget deficits, which are set to approach $2 trillion, comes from the increased cost'' of Social Security, Medicare, and the associated interest. Think of that. In the next decade, when we talk about the growth of the debt and deficit, 91 percent of that is just, functionally, the demographic growth for Social Security and Medicare. Another way to think about that is, every 5 years, just the growth in Social Security and Medicare equals the entire Defense Department. If we are going to keep our promises as a society--these are earned benefits. We made a promise as a society, avoiding the reality of the math. Think about this part of this paragraph. ``Over the next 30 years, Social Security and Medicare are projected to run a $100 trillion cash shortfall, including resulting interest costs, while the rest of the budget is projected to run a $16 trillion surplus.'' Think about that one more time--over the next 30 years. I have a 3\1/2\-year-old little girl. Doesn't she deserve to live in an America that continues to be prosperous? With these sorts of numbers, it is impossible. Functionally, our debt deficits, the attempt to try to keep some of our promises, is going to consume everything around us. In previous times on the floor, and I know I am going to be doing it again, we brought in a series of what the left often says: ``Well, we will tax the rich more. We will do this and this.'' They only cover tiny portions. The scale of this doesn't work in our modern rhetoric. Think about that last sentence again. If you remove Social Security and Medicare, over the next 30 years, the budget has a $16 trillion surplus. One of our boards has a higher number because the board is a bit out-of-date. But the budget is what we call a cash surplus. The associated revenues exceed the associated expenses. If you add in Social Security and Medicare, it is a $100 trillion deficit, with its associated interest costs. What are we going to do? We believe we have a fighting chance. There was a time, a decade ago, if you did certain senior options and those things in Medicare, gave some pricing power and options, you could see where you could flatten out some of that debt-to-GDP curve and make the baby boomers survivable, economically. We have waited too long. We have missed that window. Now our argument is that we have to do everything. We have to do things that grow the economy, a Tax Code that maximizes economic expansion, trade that maximizes economic expansion, regulations, smart regulations, using technology that maximizes economic expansion. Labor force participation, what do you do to encourage workforce entry? We are doing remarkably well right now. We still have a problem with millennial men. We still need to find ways to create some spiffs within the Tax Code, within the retirement parts of the code, to encourage seniors who are healthy, wish to do it, and are prepared to do it, to stay in the labor force. We have to do things to encourage family formation and to move to an immigration system that is talent- based, so it maximizes economic vitality. We are going to have to look at the earned entitlement and things we can do to put spiffs and incentives within there to change the cost of healthcare, to encourage staying in the labor force, smart decisionmaking. One of these is really important to me. I have spent a lot of time on the floor--aggressive adoption of disruptive technology, particularly in healthcare. In this body, we have a running debate. The Republicans say our healthcare reform is who should get subsidized, who shouldn't, and we will add some market forces. The Democrat side is: Well, we won't add market forces. We will do a collectivization, but we will see who pays and who gets subsidized. We are having an argument about the money, on who gets to pay, not what to pay. There is technology, and we have done this over and over on the floor, that is about to crash the price of healthcare. If this body is prepared to have that Blockbuster moment--and when I say, ``Blockbuster moment,'' I mean Blockbuster video moment, where technology changes things. We no longer go down to the neighborhood shopping center and get a little silver disk to shove into our player at home. Instead, we go home and hit a button. It turns out, in healthcare, you have two sides. You have technology, everything from something you can blow into that tells you if you have the flu, to the thing you wear on your body that helps diagnose you, to the autonomous healthcare clinics that are going up around Phoenix, to the other side, the single-shot cure for hemophilia, things that actually cure disease. If we can get our heads straight and say we need to crash the price of healthcare--it will be hard. That type of economic technology disruption is going to scare a lot of our friends, whether those in certain medical practices or those who offer certain services. But we don't have a choice. I want to walk through some. First, some of the good news and the reality on the math because this place is substantially a math-free zone. Last week, I had floor time scheduled, but the floor ran long because, well, the chaos on the floor. I ran into one of my friends, a Democrat from the Midwest, and we were talking about the speech I was about to give. His immediate reaction was: Well, David, you had that tax reform a couple of years ago, and that is the real reason. You look and say, no. If you think about what has happened in labor, in tax revenues, in the dramatically fewer people who actually need social services, it has been incredibly positive for the economy. So I put this board up for him. Take a look. If you actually take a look at these years, the middle bar chart, that is 2018. The blue is 2017. The gray is 2019 fiscal year. This is the first 9 months of what we call receipts. For those of us on the Ways and Means Committee, this is substantially our responsibility is these receipts. Highest revenue first 9 months in U.S. history. Adjusted for constant dollars, the second highest in U.S. history. The doom and gloom and the crazy things that were said about tax reform aren't true, and the math says so. We don't have a choice. If we do not substantially grow this economy, dramatically grow this economy over the next couple decades--not the next couple years, but next couple decades--you can't mathematically cover the promises we have made on Social Security and Medicare. And I don't know why it is so terrifying for elected Members to actually be honest about the math. The chart is there. If you don't believe me, go onto the Treasury's website, look at the receipts that have come in--highest in history; adjusted for inflation, constant dollar, second highest in history. It is working. It is working. There are other things that are also really optimistic. We are getting one of those--do you remember our five points? Getting the economy to grow long term with stability, you all saw the June labor force report, jobs report--incredibly good numbers, far beyond our expectation. But what was also really optimistic for those of us who are trying to build these models is the number of the population who were coming back into the labor force. And I know this is geeking out, but when you actually see more job postings than you have available workers, amazing. If I told you that a couple years ago, you would have laughed at me, but it has happened. But the other thing we also start to look for is, even if you see little ticks up in the unemployment, the number going up, if it is not because of the falling available jobs but because those reentering are choosing to enter the labor force, that is really powerful because that labor force participation number has a sense of the productivity of our society. We have already seen some pretty impressive productivity step-ups. We have actually seen a constant wage gain, particularly for our brothers and sisters who were at, the technical term, the lower quartiles, which I always thought would bring joy across the body. But it almost now seems this body is incapable of embracing good, optimistic, joyous numbers of how many of our brothers and sisters out there who had a pretty crappy previous decade are actually doing well now. There should be optimism about this. There should be joy about this, but would that be giving one party kudos against the other? How about for a moment you just drop the party labels and understand the math? There are pretty impressive numbers coming out of this economy right now. What do we do as policymakers to keep it going as long as possible? So let's go back to that other leg. How many of our brothers and sisters are actually in the labor force? I can show you some papers from just a few years ago that, as the baby boomers are starting to move into retirement, labor force participation numbers were supposed to collapse, and you actually see a little bit of that. If you look at the 10-year labor force participation and then overlay our demographics as we are getting older as a society, you see those numbers fall. But take a look at this chart, and this is just the last couple years. We are back up kissing up against a 63 percent labor force participation. I know this is geeky, but I can show you papers from a few years ago. It said we were never getting back close to this number again, at least not for decades and decades and decades. Well, we are there. This is really important to the economic vitality of the society. And it is not just tax revenues. When you have a population that is working, you have more of your Americans who are receiving employer- based healthcare. They are not receiving certain social welfare benefits. They may not be prospering as you might turn on television and look at the dreams of people who win lotteries, but there are things working. You can drive through some of the neighborhoods in parts of my district and you just look around at the number of people who are remodeling their homes or putting a new roof on. There are good things happening out there in society, and you see it in the data. So why do I come to the microphone almost every week with this sort of chagrined look, terrified we are not having the difficult conversation of what do we do to deal with the reality of the promises we as a society have made to our seniors, that retirement security, to keep those promises? Well, let's actually walk through some of the really difficult math, because this is what drives that $100 trillion, and that is inflation- adjusted dollars, $100 trillion shortfall that comes from Social Security and Medicare in the next 30 years. This board right here is the number one driver. If you need to understand something, just understand this board. This is basically someone who moves into retirement today, they will have paid about $161,000 in Medicare taxes. That is a lot of money. But that senior who has paid in $161,000 in Medicare taxes, they will be taking out, and this is the average, $498,000. So take that differential, multiply it times 74 million baby boomers, and that is the math. That is substantially the driver of a completely unsustainable math that blows up everything in our lives. Yet we are terrified to talk about this. We all know it. We all walk around with these reports here, though I wonder how many people ever open them up and read them. But that is the math. We can manage this, but we have to do it with a level of creativity and understanding that it is not one solution; it is dozens of policies coming together to make it work. So let's see what that shortfall actually does. This board now is maybe a year out of date, so I need some updating on it, but it functionally shows the shortfall in Social Security. Total Social Security shortfall over the 30 years is about $31 trillion. What you see in the blue is interest. What you see in the purple is just what we call the cash balance shortfall. But the real difficulty, the honest difficulty is Medicare. Medicare produces about a $72 trillion cash shortfall over the next 30 years, where, if you look at the last bar, it is actually green. It is in the positive. The rest of the budget is positive. This isn't Republican or Democrat math. It is just demographics. It is what we are as a society. But yet we will weaponize this. So if the Democrats do certain things, we are going to attack them on it. If we do certain things, they are going to attack us. Yet this is the fragility of our society, and it is almost impossible around here to talk about because there is folklore around here. I can't tell you how many public events I have done over the years where you will get someone to come up to you and say, ``Hey, if you just take care of waste and fraud,'' ``if you just take care of this,'' ``if you take care of that''; anyone who says that today, particularly if they are an elected Member of Congress and they come behind a microphone and say, ``If I take care of waste and fraud, that deals with the debt and deficits that are coming,'' they are not telling you the truth. That is not what the calculator says. It is a rounding error. But that is not part of our political folklore in this culture. So back to analyzing these numbers. Projected 2049 deficit, solely Social Security and Medicare. If you actually see the dedicated revenues, this one is purely on GDP, the percentage of the GDP in 30 years that is going to have to be dedicated just to covering Social Security and Medicare. We will be taking in about 5.8 percent of taxes equal to GDP, that is dedicated to Social Security and Medicare, but we are going to be spending 17.9. Remember, if we are going to tell the truth, for many of us, it is now a battle to keep the ratio of our Nation's debt to the size of our economy from blowing through that 100 percent. Can we find a way to stabilize it in that 90, 95 percent area? It is my goal, it is my dream to come behind this microphone and say we have balanced the budget, we are paying off the debt. But demographically, that math is almost impossible. So our job is to balance it, so, as we are getting older as a society, we don't blow through that debt-to-GDP ratio which all the sudden blows up our interest costs, which consumes every next incremental dollar. And you start to see, when you look at charts like this, it helps you understand the growth and the amount of our entire society's economic productivity that is just going to go to cover these promises. They are earned benefits, but it is going to consume a huge portion of our entire economy's vitality just to cover those benefits. So my friends on the left will often come and say, well, raise tax rates. Except you have a classic problem. We actually have decades and decades and decades and decades of data. So you see the black line here? It is when we have had very high marginal tax rates. It is when we have had low marginal tax rates. It is when we have taxed capital gains aggressively, when we haven't taxed capital gains aggressively. The reality of it is, or somehow it may be a law of nature or maybe a law of economics or a law of taxation, taxes always fall back into a certain range of the amount of GDP, the size of the economy. And this has been under liberal Congresses, conservative Congresses, liberal Presidents, conservative Presidents. If you look at that black line, it has always fallen back into, sort of, a certain range of a percentage of the size of our economy comes in as Federal taxes: payroll taxes, the FICA we are talking about, and income taxes over here. It is just history. And there has been all types of tax schemes attempted. So from a public policy standpoint, adopt those policies that grow, that grow the size of the economy, because if you are always going to come back and get a certain percentage of the size of the economy, how do you get more revenue? You grow the size of the economy. Mr. Speaker, may I request the amount of time remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I have come up this year, this may be the two dozenth time, walking through both the math, the reality. Some of the times I am behind the mike I am much more optimistic because there is a technology disruption, there is economic growth, there are things happening around us that give us a fighting chance. But some nights I will sit down and I sit here and highlight the different reports, and I am terrified for my little girl and what her future will be like because, right now, the math says her marginal tax rates have to be more than double what I pay today just to maintain, just to keep the wheels on. The economic growth crashes in our society. The opportunity is taken away. And then we have crazy around here where we are getting proposals from the majority that offer another $40 trillion-plus of spending in the next 30 years. Help us find our calculators. Help us find some compassion, some soul that we can make this society work. But you can't do it by living in a fantasy world. The math is the math, and pretending it isn't dooms our future. I truly believe we are at a moment of inflection where if we do the right things, we actually could have a couple of great decades ahead of us, my three-and-a-half-year-old can have an amazing future, every other child can have an amazing future, every retiree will know they are secure. But if we don't take care of these things, how do we deal with the other wave that is coming at us: the multiemployer pension crisis, the municipal pension crisis, the State pension crisis, the amount of our brothers and sisters heading towards retirement that actually have almost no capital set aside for their retirement other than that Social Security and those medical benefits that are Medicare? If you love and care about people, learn the math, tell the truth about it, and work with those of us who are passionate on working to a solution, instead of chasing the shiny object of the daily chaos that is the House of Representatives right now, on what gets you the most clicks on your social media, what might get you a television hit tonight. This is not particularly sexy, this is not exciting, this is not what a lot of our constituents want to hear, because it is painful. It is also the single most important thing any elected Member of this Congress can do, is fixing the greatest threat to our society, and that is $100 trillion of promises over the next 30 years to our seniors that there is no mathematical way to cover. Let's go do the right thing. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, just so staff knows, this will probably be a bit abbreviated because of all the chaos we have going on around us. There is something I wanted to start with. Typically, we come to the floor to spend time talking about what is happening in the country economically and demographically and what we must do to keep our promises. I sit on the Ways and Means Committee, and I do trade and tax policy. Before we put that up, I need to touch on something that is incredibly frustrating. Being from Arizona, obviously, we have a border issue. We talk about it; we do nothing. How many have seen the news in the last couple of days that we have gun battles going on just south of Douglas, Arizona? We may have 9 or 10 people who have lost their lives. We had a teenager get hit by a stray bullet. We have had a couple of folks--apparently, one crawled to the border and is now in an Arizona hospital. A couple are in Arizona hospitals. Where is the press? Where is the discussion of what is going on? Apparently, we have a war going on in Agua Prieta, just south of Douglas, between these cartels that not only move drugs, but they also exploit human beings. These are the very cartels that are taking humans, smuggling them and trafficking them up to the border. They are using assault weapons and killing each other. Of course, we would care about that, wouldn't we? Except it doesn't get any news here because it doesn't fit the narrative. If you love and care for people, could we at least have an honest discussion of what the President has asked for, with some money for humanitarian aid to take care of those who have presented themselves at the border for refugee status? Understand the violence that is spilling over into my State of Arizona and what is going on. I guess I come to this microphone just frustrated that this story broke yesterday in Arizona. Where is the national outcry? Where is the national understanding of the chaos that is happening along our southern border and the lives that are being lost? Do we or do we not care about people? There were two things I wanted to do, and I know we are up against a very tight time, so I am just going to do one of them. We have this theory that basically says, if you look at U.S. demographics, in 8.5 years, it is two workers, one retiree. In 8.5 years, 50 percent of the budget from this body, less interest, will be to those 65 and older. Demographics aren't Republican. They are not Democratic. They are math. We must do a number of things to keep the economic vitality of this society going if we are going to keep our promises. One of those things in our five points is the way we deal with regulations. We have this one area we talk about, whether it be tax policy, trade policy, or regulatory policy. Just in a couple of minutes here, I wanted to explain what smart regulation is. So often when hearing the rhetoric, we will have: Well, we need to deregulate. We need to reregulate. That is wrong. We all walk around with these supercomputers in our pockets. It turns out, technology is the rational place where regulation should go. Here is my thought experiment. Let's use our own neighborhoods. We are the businesses in those neighborhoods. We need to get air quality permits for manufacturing. Does filling out a bunch of paper and shoving it in file cabinets make air quality cleaner in our neighborhoods? Do file cabinets full of paperwork at the local, county, State, wherever our regulators are, does that make the air quality in our communities better? Of course not. It just creates a lot of documents so that we have someone to sue for the trial lawyers and those things. I want to propose the concept of crowdsourcing environmental information, particularly for air quality. It turns out, we are living in a time where there are now sensors we can attach to our phones that are highly accurate that will do PM10, hydrocarbons, and volatile organics. What would happen in our communities if we were willing to take this tradeoff? We are not going to make everyone fill out lots of paperwork. We are going to promote businesses, let them grow. But here is the trick: If they screw up, we catch them instantly. Also, the clowns painting cars behind everyone's houses in their backyards, we are going to catch them, too. This thought is very simple. We have a YouTube cartoon that is about 1.5 minutes that walks through this concept of crowdsourcing environmental data. It shows that it is time to use this type of technology. Think of the economic growth tradeoff. We are not going to fill up file cabinets full of paperwork. Because we are going to be crowdsourcing environmental data, when there is a bad actor, or someone's scrubbers are out of compliance, or there are clowns painting cars in backyards, we will catch them instantly. Wouldn't that be a lot more powerful, where environmental regulators of communities, States, and counties are now a quick reaction force that goes to where the bad acts are happening instead of basically being paperwork domiciles? That is an example of smart regulation. It makes communities healthier. It makes air quality better. It still has businesses growing because they are not buried under consultants and mounds of paper. That is an example of smart regulation. How do we drag this institution into understanding the incredible opportunities that technology is bringing in crashing the price of healthcare and making the environment healthier? In the coming weeks, I am going to come back to dive into this much deeper, but let me salt the mine a little bit for a thought experiment. What would happen if we had technology that could protect houses of worship, schools, this body, and public buildings? It turns out that it exists today. I want to propose that this body put together an XPRIZE for nonlethal protection of our buildings and our houses of worship. We already know there are experiments out there with pods that go on the wall, so if someone comes in and is engaged in a bad act or discharges a firearm, instantly, just like the Taser darts, it lays them down. Yes, innocent people will get hit with them, but they don't die. It turns out that there are technology solutions that will make us safer. How do we drag the conversations around this place to understand there are really great, exciting opportunities for all of us out there, whether it be in smart regulation, whether it be the end of killing using technology, whether it be the fact we are about to get dramatically healthier, and that the cures that are about to come on the market for diseases that have been with us for so long, we are in a time of amazing disruption? How do we future-proof our policies, and how do we get this body to stop thinking everything is either Democrat or Republican, but understand there are actual solutions, you just have to be forward- thinking with technology? With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman does realize how many people are creeping out at this moment that we are friendly to each other.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am happy to yield.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I would say of the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi), it is always fun listening to him, because, look, we are friends. We are ideologically separated by about, let's call it a small ocean, but I think there is this passion of we can do things in our society that are good. Mr. Speaker, I have really appreciated Mr. Garamendi sort of embracing in some of our personal conversations my sort of techno- utopianism that the problems the gentleman sees, the problems I see, that there may be technology that is about to disrupt society in an incredibly positive way.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we really need to talk about Mr. Garamendi's idea of entertainment. Mr. Speaker, look, this is actually a point I wish more of our constituents would actually see. We are actually quite friendly to each other, even those of us who may have, you know, what is pictured as an ideological chasm. Oddly enough, we all see many of the same problems, and we are trying to find a way to get there. So tonight I wanted to do just one or two things, because I have picked up a couple of articles in the news over this last week that I actually find greatly optimistic. So let's actually sort of start with our five pillars. And I do this over and over, because, one more time, what do many of us, the economists, the staff, the really smart people that are here, and then those of us who are regular Members who were just elected, what is in many ways the greatest threat to our society? We have made lots and lots of promises, and we don't have the resources to keep those promises to those who have earned benefits. We actually have a demographic curve. As a country, we are getting older very, very fast. In about eight and a half years: two workers, one retiree. In about eight and a half years, 50 percent of the spending in this body will be, less interest, to those 65 and older. Are we as a government, are we as a society going to keep our promises? Mathematically, this has been a passion of mine for a few years now, trying to find a pro-growth, optimistic way we keep our promises so my little 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter has the same opportunities I have had. So the five pillars we have been working on is how do I start with--I am going to start with the very top--technology disruption. Tonight I am going to talk about a couple of really optimistic things that are happening in healthcare technology that will keep us healthier and potentially crash the price of healthcare. I am going to talk about some things that are happening in environmental technology that are going to lower the costs, make energy available so the economy can keep growing and yet the environment is cleaner and healthier. We are going to talk about employment. How do we actually have more of our brothers and sisters out there enter the workforce, stay in the workforce? There is this concept of labor force participation. And the economists for years now have said as the baby boomers are moving into retirement, labor force participation is going to crash mathematically. We have also had this fragility, this difficulty of millennial males--oddly enough, about 6, 7 months ago, millennial females really started to enter the workforce in droves. We still have a problem with millennial males. There is also some really interesting data popping up that the number of Americans, by choice, who are over 70 years old, but they are happy, and they are healthy, are choosing to stay in the labor force. We have had almost, I think it was like--the article was talking about a 50 percent rise in seniors staying in the labor force just as a choice by lifestyle, some because they need the money, many because they are healthy, and they want to be productive. And that is actually really good for society. We are actually going to touch on having to deal with earned benefits and how we should design those earned benefits. Could we make some offers within those, saying, if you are willing to stay in the labor force, if you are healthy and you can do that, should we give you some spiffs in your benefits. If you are able to stay on your private insurance for a while, could we do some things. It is sort of entitlement reform in a very positive fashion. It has to do with, how do we maximize economic expansion and choice for those who are seniors? Population stability. Birth rates have collapsed in our country. We just have to deal with the reality of the math. How do we incentivize family formation in an effective way? This one has been really difficult. We have had an ongoing sort of research project in our office for a couple of years now looking at things being done in Canada and Scandinavia and other parts of the world, even Hungary, and how ineffective so many programs have been in encouraging family formation. We are going to have to come up with sort of an American version of what works there. Let's face it. Having a little person, they are expensive. It is the greatest joy of our lives, my wife and I, but we are going to have to talk about how we help in family formation. Then also the other side of that concept of population stability is, what do we do in immigration? How do we design immigration to maximize economic vitality? This is going to be a little off subject, but close; I was sort of heartbroken about a vote we had here 3 hours ago. H.R. 6, it was dealing with the DACA populations. What happens when the body here engages in votes that become theatrical, become about exciting your base, and have no chance of becoming law? If the majority here had been serious and really wanted a solution for the young people in DACA, there would have been this opportunity to come over, talk with Republicans, because many of us have voted for immigration reform that actually had modules that solved much of the DACA issue, but they had to come together, because that piece of legislation will not move through the Senate, will not get the President's signature. In some ways, it is actually sort of cruel to exploit a population with promises and a piece of legislation that we know is never going to move, and that there was an opportunity to do something that could have, if we had actually worked together. I don't know if the fear is doing something that would be seen as bipartisan with this White House, whether the issue is too powerful, but it breaks my heart when there are actually paths that, if we had done border security, if we had done some rationalization of the dysfunctional mechanisms we have right now on those asking for asylum, we could have packaged that with a solution for much of the DACA population and it could have actually moved through the Senate, it could have gotten the President's signature. Instead, we just did theatrics. Sorry to go off sort of the script here. So population stability. Then the last one here, economic growth. What do we do as a government, as a legislative body to maximize economic expansion? My theory here is economic expansion is moral. Think about it. Whether it be the Tax Code, whether it be doing smart things modernizing regulation, whether it be doing smart things with trade, it is moral when we have economic growth. How many of our brothers and sisters--that if you read the economists' papers a couple years ago--who hadn't finished high school, they were being written off as the permanent underclass in our society. And today that very population is the population that has the fastest growing wages and almost full employment. That is a moral thing. If you actually will come to downtown Phoenix, we have this homeless campus in downtown Phoenix. There is an organization called St. Joseph the Worker. My understanding is they have been around for a hundred- some years, and their job is to get populations that have had some of the most horrible experiences in life and find them jobs. You walk in the door and they have a stack of job offers on top of the desk saying: We just need someone to come to our restaurant and help us. We just need someone to come to our little warehouse and help us stock shelves. What does it mean in a society where you have more jobs than you have available workers? I will argue that that is incredibly moral, and there should almost be joy in our society right now if we could pull away the sort of rage partisan blinders right now and say: Isn't this a neat thing? How do we do more of it? It turns out that economic growth is crucial if we are going to keep our promises, if we intend to keep our promises on Medicare, if we intend to keep our promises on Social Security. Unless you do all five of these things and do all five of those well and very soon, mathematically, it is almost impossible to keep our promises. It is not Republican or Democrat; it is demographics. I want to talk about some of the positive things that technology, that some of these things are bringing, and that is one of our key points here. This is the week we call sort of Member Week, where Members come to different committees of jurisdiction and sort of pitch their ideas. So two or three times today in the Ways and Means Committee, we had Members come and talk about their passion for dealing with different types of cancers: colorectal screening, lung cancer, these other things, and then the current mechanism. My pitch to everyone who cares about those issues is: You are absolutely right. We need to protect our brothers and sisters in this country by having those types of screenings to find those cancers as early as possible and deal with them, but we need to write the legislation in a fashion where it is future proofed. I am sure everyone saw these articles that have popped up just in the last couple of weeks. It turns out there is a breakthrough in blood tests. Where, in the old days, we would do a blood test, you would look for a certain titer, know your body had had an immune reaction to something, what happens when you can do a blood test that looks for the cascade--we will call it the throwing off the dead parts of a cancer cell--and finds that and says: Hey, we just found this little piece of this DNA; we know that is a cancer DNA; we know what type of cancer it is; and because of that marker, we can even know where it is? It turns out this is in trials right now, and it is having tremendous success. We need to future proof our legislation around here that it is not enough to care about our brothers and sisters and that we are going to make sure our society is providing cancer screenings, but that it is future proofed that when a blood test is the least invasive, most efficient, cost efficient, easiest to provide, and actually will crash parts of the price of healthcare in finding these cancers early, but also being available as a methodology, when we do this in large scale, being dramatically less expensive than what we use today. So part of my pitch here and the reason I do this every week or two is: Understand this disruption of these technologies are here. We need to future proof what we do legislatively because this is a big deal. Think of a blood test where you can find several types of cancer if you have it and you can find it within a couple of hours. This is a big deal. So this is exciting. The next one I have talked about two or three times here, but it is the simplest example of another thing we need to do here. As we are talking about economic growth, it is also, what do we do to disrupt the price of healthcare? Remember the stupid conversation we have had in this place for years now in regards to healthcare hasn't been about the cost, it has been about who pays and who gets subsidized. My passion is we need to think differently. I have come here and done multiple presentations on the new wearable technologies: the pill bottle that tells you when you have opened it, the things where you can blow into it and it will diagnose whether you have a viral infection, and the algorithm can bounce off your phone's medical records and instantly order your antivirals. That is a disruption. That lowers the price of healthcare. You got healthier, and you didn't infect everyone else in your family and your business. We need to promote these technologies, but there is the other side that is coming. Well over 50 percent of our healthcare spending is to those with chronic conditions. So 5 percent of our population has those chronic conditions, but they are well over 50 percent of our spending. What happens if we started to invest in curing them, curing our brothers and sisters of chronic conditions? Well, guess what Congress did a few years ago? The Cures Act and some of these other things, we put lots of money into researching cures. And now, with some of the new technology and now the next generation of CRISPR and all these other things that are coming, we are going to have pharmaceuticals like this. I think they are often referred to as biologicals. My hope is it is November, but sometime within the next 12 months, we expect to have a single shot cure for hemophilia. I use this as an example because, apparently, there are a number of drugs in this sort of category that are coming: a single shot cure for the 8,000-plus of our brothers and sisters in the country who have hemophilia A. Now, maybe a million and a half dollars a shot. So over here we have talked about the technology that keeps us healthy. Over here, I want us to talk about and start to get our heads around: How do we finance really expensive but miracle cures? How do we build a healthcare bond, a mechanism where, hey, we are going to have all these savings in the future. Can we pull some of that forward or commit that savings to actually finance a bond so, when a pharmaceutical like this is available, you cure the 8,000 Americans who have hemophilia? Back to our 5 percent of our population who have chronic conditions. What happens if we can cure just a couple percent of that? It is a big deal. It would change the cost curve of healthcare. This is a radically different way of thinking about healthcare. So what happens when stories like this actually prove out to be true that those who are suffering with ALS, that sometime in the next year or two, we are going to have a pharmaceutical, it does not cure at this point, but it stabilizes the horrible regression of one's life and abilities that are chewed up by ALS? Stop. You may have to have this injection a couple times a year, maybe four times a year. It may be $100,000 per injection. How do we come up with a methodology that finances such a thing because the cost of the progression of this disease is stunningly expensive, and it is just the right thing to do? It turns out the debate we have had in this place for years of who pays and who subsidizes now can be a discussion of: How do we use technology to disrupt the price of healthcare? How do we get healthier and personal control of our healthcare instead of a collectivist vision? And how do we finance these incredible disruptive pharmaceuticals that are coming that either stabilize or cure that portion of our society who have chronic conditions, who are suffering, but are also much of our healthcare cost? This is good news. These are exciting. There should be joy in this place that we are part of a time that can have this type of curative approach to healthcare and make these sorts of differences. So, look, those are a couple of the happy things. If we do our job well, if we get the financing right, we can have this type of disruption and see it in the cost curve of healthcare. So now I want to sort of jump to some of the other discussions that have been around this body, particularly today, a little bit yesterday, on greenhouse gases, on climate change, on those things. My frustration with this is great rhetoric, really bad math. So let's actually talk about a couple of things that have been going on and why the rhetoric doesn't match reality. I believe, actually, technology and those on the more conservative side actually have solutions that grow the economy, provide opportunities for our family, provide the opportunities. Remember our five points that, if we don't have the economic expansion, we can't keep our promises. So just as a point of reference, I brought these two slides again. This one is from 2015. The yellow over there is all the photovoltaic in the country that was added in 2015. It was a miraculous year, over 38 gigawatts of new generation, power generation, solar. Isn't that wonderful? Except we took 33 gigawatts of power generation out of nuclear. We really didn't gain that much in clean noncarbon-producing or nongreenhouse-producing energy. You can't have one without the other. You can't run around and say: Didn't we do great? Look, we added all the solar, how much cleaner the world got. Oh, by the way, we shut down all this nuclear, so actually our baseload didn't really go anywhere. Well, it turns out that math was pretty much the exact same the next year. Once again, the yellow is the photovoltaic that was added. The multicolor here is the amount of nuclear that came offline. It turns out more nuclear came offline, in a weird way, because of the loss of all that nuclear baseload generation. The photovoltaic that came to the market, which is wonderful--I am from Arizona. I love it. But we didn't get any better on power generation that doesn't produce greenhouse gases. So once again, around here, we need to open our minds and understand just sort of basic math that you can't be joyful about one and not be supportive of the other and actually be making mathematical progress. It is just math. So back to a thought experiment. I did this on the floor the other day, and I am going to do it again just because it did create some really interesting phone calls. I am going to believe this one here might end up being the single biggest disruption in my life. And forgive me if I don't get everything perfect here, but about 4 or 5 months ago, reading some strange journal--that is what happens when you are on a plane 10 hours a week; you read a lot of stuff--there was this article. We have vetted it repeatedly, and it appears it is real. U.S. labs from universities have sort of broken the Holy Grail in regards to plant biology. Bear with me. This is a big deal. What would happen tomorrow if the next generation of agriculture was 40 percent more productive? It would be a miracle. You would feed the world for the next 250 years. Think about if you had a 40 percent improvement in agriculture, how much less water, fuel, what does it do to land prices? Well, it turns out if you really care about the environment and greenhouse gases, here is your thought experiment I want you to struggle through. World agriculture produces about 2.2 times more greenhouse gases than every car on Earth. So if you had a 40 percent improvement in agriculture productivity, it would be as if you removed every car off the face of the Earth. You just have to be willing to eat seed stock that functionally, actually, is a type of GMO. Now, all they did is change some of the cell biology so it grabs the carbon molecule every time instead of accidentally grabbing the oxygen molecule and then spending lots of energy trying to purge the oxygen, which apparently is just one of the inherent faults in nature. They fixed it. They did it with tobacco plants. We always use tobacco plants because that is a genome we have known. I guess that is the first one we broke. But now they are moving into other types of agricultural stock. Be prepared. Watch for this. This technology may be one of the biggest disruptions. But as a body, when we talk about global warming, when we talk about this, how much of this body is ready to understand there is technology coming? Are Members willing to embrace the technology instead of the sort of Malthusian view that we need to shrink as an economy, that we need to be controlled, that we need to be managed? Or do Members allow these market forces to be incredibly disruptive? I didn't bring the slides this time, but in that same stock, think about some of the other things going on. Apparently, there has been a huge breakthrough in the technology of pulling carbon right out of the air, being able to take that carbon, mix it with some other chemicals, and turn it back into a fuel stock--negative carbon emission, economically done. I am looking forward to the joy coming from my environmental friends who understand. We have already proven that carbon sequestration works. We have proven that we can generate power with coal, with natural gas, without a smokestack, and capture every bit of carbon and then reuse it, sequester it, if we choose. But now we are going to negative carbon mining. Why that is really important is, how many people believe that China with the 30-plus new coal plants that are going up as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, that they are going to have lots of great scrubbers on them? Once again, if the goal is to punish the United States, great, the rhetoric is brilliant. If the goal is to grow as a society but still be cleaner, go with pro-economic expansion embracing of technology and let us have jobs. Let us have economic expansion so we can keep our promises. The last thought experiment I am going to give tonight, remember how a little while ago I mentioned this is sort of Member week? We call it pitch week, where a Member will come pitch their priorities, pitch their ideas in the different committees of jurisdiction. We are hoping that Members we are already working with will go to the committees that do certain types of foreign aid. How many out there care about plastic in the ocean? How many think banning straws in communities is going to do anything about plastic in the ocean? If a Member believes that, they have been conned. It is great virtue signaling, ``Hey, I am banning straws,'' but it is absurd. Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia, two in Africa. Let's do something that actually works. If we are going to have foreign aid and some of the environmental programs and these things that are out in the world, let's go to those 10 rivers and start removing the plastic. Let's add value. Let's do those things. If 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean is coming from 10 rivers--eight in Asia, two in Africa--we know where it is coming from. It may not provide the virtue signaling opportunity that we enjoy around here, but it would make the oceans cleaner. For once, could we drop some of the political theater? Just like the vote we had earlier today, where it is great politics, gins up the base, gives us something to rally around, but it doesn't accomplish anything. Mr. Speaker, please, to my Democratic friends, to my Republican friends, are we here to do good? My pitch to Members is that we know the problems, and we know the math--let's be honest about that math--so let's actually do things. In the next week or two, when we are starting to put together our appropriations, our policy sets, is there anyone out there on the other side who will help me say, for the 10 rivers in the world that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean, can we adjust that bilateral aid, the foreign aid, the environmental guidance, the other things we do, go to those 10 rivers and start to do something? We might lose the political issue and make the environment better. Or will we just stick around here and say that we don't need to solve the problem because we want to be able to talk about it? Sorry for the sarcasm, but I am frustrated that we are living in a time of amazing opportunity, of technology disruption, where if Members really care about healthcare, we are on the cusp of a crash of its price, but yet its quality and its cures are here. Can we break down some of the barriers that are stopping us from getting there? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, to the committee chairman and, in my world, the chairman for life, you have done great. It has been an interesting experience being in the minority, but we are blessed. We have freaky-smart people on the committee. It works. Even when we disagree, at least the debate and the discussion is fairly highbrow. I, too, am concerned on the 529, more so because of the flexibility and, being the daddy of a 3\1/2\-year-old, not completely knowing if there are going to be any special needs coming, that choice. We should love and embrace the concept of that flexibility to take care of our little people. I am very encouraged that there is movement towards incentivizing it and making it easier, particularly for smaller businesses, to offer access into retirement accounts. We need to have the conversation--and it is uncomfortable for all of us--go a bit further. The amount of our society that is now in independent-contractor relationships, should we be allowed to use technology so that population also starts to have more and more savings for the future? We just need to deal with it. That is where much of the economy, in a demand economy, is going. My last caveat--and I am voting for the bill. We have come a long ways. I do worry a little bit about the special agreement on newspapers, only because if we are truly worried about protecting workers into their retirement years, do we want to create more even special, special, special small cutouts where we are allowing the underfunding of a pension system? We just need to think that through a little more from an ethical standpoint. Do we keep creating carve-out after carve-out after carve- out that creates a fragility for that retired population? Even though we think we are helping the businesses survive, we actually hurt the future chances of those retirees getting their checks. We need to be careful on that.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is actually something we try to do about once a week, come in here and actually sort of talk about our unified theory in our office: What do we do to, basically, keep our promises? Here is a thought experiment. Social Security and Medicare are two of the greatest fragilities we have in our society because we are getting older very fast. Remember, we have talked about this over and over and over. In about 8\1/2\ years, 50 percent of the spending in this body, less interest, will be to those 65 and up. How do you make the math work? And in an intellectual, lazier time, you would get some that would say: Well, we could raise taxes here or we can do entitlement reform here. Well, it turns out that math really actually doesn't work anymore. Now, we actually have to do everything to make the math work. So we have been trying to actually sell this concept that it is economic growth, and within economic growth it is how we design our tax system, how we design trade, how we design our regulatory environment, how we actually do population stability--and this one actually gets complicated. You saw the article in The Wall Street Journal today about what has happened to U.S. birth rates. How do you encourage family formation, but also how do you deal with the immigration system that maximizes a talent-based immigration system to maximize that economic velocity? Remember, this is about us having a vibrant enough economy so we can keep our promises, but within that, we also have some other issues. How do you do what we call labor force participation? Countries like Japan and some in Western Europe are dealing with how they get those who are older, and if they are healthy and want to, how they create incentives to actually say: Are you willing to stay in or come back into the labor force? We actually have this quirky math here in our country of millennial males. In December, we started to see this breakthrough of millennial females entering the workforce. We still actually have a whole bunch of millennial males who are missing in the workforce who should be there. How do we build a society that encourages participation in that labor force? It turns out, if you actually look at a lot of our economic data, from the Joint Economic Committee to the Joint Committee on Taxation, when they talk about what are the barriers for us to be able to keep growing and continue this actually incredibly robust cycle we are having right now, it is capital stock. Well, actually, the numbers since tax reform have been dramatically healthier than we modeled for, with folks having savings, and that savings actually becoming lendable capital. You actually can see that in just nationwide interest rates. The second fragility that was being written about was labor force participation, and we now live in a society where we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs and no workers. So who would have ever thought a couple years ago you would live in a society with more job openings than available workers? This is a wonderful problem, but it actually does genuinely become a barrier to economic growth, and it is something we have to find a way to deal with. Part of this is actually really optimistic, though, as we started to see in the data over the last several months the number of business organizations and others who are taking a chance on people, hiring right out of correctional facilities, making accommodations for our brothers and sisters who may have a personal impairment, a personal handicap; and we actually see that in some of the Social Security disability numbers of individuals actually moving into the labor force. So, look, this is just our unified theory. Today, we are actually going to start to talk about technology, which is one of our five pillars, and how aggressive I believe the adoption of technology has to be to keep the economic growth going. We have done lots of floor time over the last couple months on the healthcare technology, the revolution that I believe, our office believes, some of the people we work with believe, that is about to happen and the ability for you to take care of yourself, the wearables--the kazoo you blow into that instantly tells you if you have the flu, to the other side of the spectrum, the single shot cure for hemophilia--and how do we finance those types of disruptions. Wouldn't it be amazing if this body were no longer having the, actually, in some ways, insane debate we have had for decades about who gets subsidized, who gets to pay in healthcare, and started actually talking about what we pay and how we are going to cure our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions? We all know, the 5 percent of Americans with those chronic conditions are well over half of our healthcare spending. So what happens when we actually bring cures to market? And then our obligation: How do we finance them so we roll them out as fast as possible? But today, we are going to talk about another fixation of mine, and that is environment issues. I wish I had a more delicate way to talk about this. Often, the discussion around here is almost Malthusian, saying the pie is only so big. If you care about global warming, if you care about greenhouse gases, we must shrink the economy; we must get individuals to drive less; we must generate less power; we must do these types of things. And a decade or so ago, maybe that was a legitimate view, but they have missed an entire technology revolution that is going on around us, and there should be optimism in this body that, if you are someone who cares about greenhouse gases in our national and world environment, the revolution is here, and it is a technology one. How does this body start to remove the barriers that have slowed down the adoption of this clean generation, these alternative generations that are in our marketplace? A simple thought: solar generation. I hope I get this story, which is coming out of New Mexico, correct. They wanted to run a power line to Arizona. They have been working on the power transmission lines for a dozen years. We have seen the discussion in the upper Midwest. I believe it is Iowa, with wind generation, finally figuring it out and saying maybe we can run the power lines in the railroad right-of-way because we want this power to make it to Illinois. That is where the demand is, and over here is where the clean generation is. These are things we often don't think about. It is not enough to have the technology. How do you get the power to where it needs to be consumed? We have never fixed the bureaucratic barriers to moving that power. It is like some of the discussions we have had in our office. A couple of years ago, we did a math experiment. A pipeline in west Texas, a pipeline loop that would capture methane so you didn't have to flare it off, had a really impressive calculation in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but it requires permitting a pipeline. I need us to remove some of our ideological blinders and think of pro-growth, pro-environment, pro-effectiveness. We have to be willing to change the permitting system and so much of the litigation and bureaucracy that slows these things down. We are going to walk through a couple of these boards, just because I think there is incredible optimism out there. This one I am sort of thrilled with. This is a chart that talks about battery efficiency. For those of you that geek out on this stuff with me, you probably all saw the article--I think it was April 1--on some new solid-state battery technology. It looks like they finally have a major breakthrough on what we call power density. This chart here, do you see that coming down? That is the cost of battery storage. It is a remarkable reduction. In Arizona, we have our largest and best utility, Arizona Public Service. When you read some of the articles that are going on right now with them, the amount of solar that is now in their portfolio, they have baseline nuclear and now the holy grail. What happens when you live in the desert Southwest as I do? I am blessed to live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. We produce lots of solar. Into the peak of the afternoon, California now produces so much alternative solar generation that they can't use it all. On some days, they paid Arizona to buy it off them. What happens when a company like APS gets really creative and says: How do we have solar power at night when, if you live in the Phoenix area, you are still running your air-conditioner into the evening? It turns out the battery investment is about to bring solar generation into the hours it is dark because they will store it. If you design that type of battery storage that holds for about 4 hours, you get us through the peak. It is referred to as the duck curve. If you see the back of a duck, we have all this production, and then it collapses. Yet, we still have all this demand. How do you cover that gap? In the past, we used peaking power plants, fire them up to cover those few hours. Now, with what is happening with battery storage, it is here. Our privately owned utility in Arizona, APS, recently did an RFP or RFQ. The numbers that came back were remarkably competitive. It is happening. When on this floor we discuss global warming, greenhouse gases, and what we are going to do in alternative generation, it is here. We just need to understand what is happening right around us. How do you keep curves like this line continuing? When we are reading that there is a breakthrough in battery technology, how do we remove barriers so that technology rolls out and becomes part of what we do here in the United States and around the world? Here is something else. I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. Last year, we updated a tax credit mechanism for carbon sequestration. It turns out that we have multiple facilities now that were an experiment, but they are growing. They are about to go to large-scale commercial where they capture all the carbon. This first one, I believe this is the NET Power facility outside Houston. It is a natural gas-fired facility, so they are using a hydrocarbon and they have no smokestack. They capture not only the manmade CO2, but they even capture any other gas throw-off. The remarkable design is that they throw a little oxygen. They heat it up, and heat it really, really hot. They use that to spin the turbines. Then they cool it down and pull out the CO2 and then use that to sell for other purposes. They don't have a smokestack. This technology is up and running today. The proof of concept is done. Now we are heading toward, I believe, a fairly substantial expansion in the scale of the facility. This was research that has been going on for years. Those of us here in this body, a year ago, we updated the carbon sequestration tax credits. It is paying off. The next one is another facility that is also in Texas. This one was really an interesting experiment because, in many ways, it broke through a bit of folklore. It sits right next to an existing coal-fired generation facility. It is a coal-fired carbon capture plant. They are spinning the turbines, burning coal, and they capture the carbon. It was only 2 or 3 years ago when we had witnesses around here saying this sort of technology would not work. It is up and running today. There should be joy and optimism around this place because the ability to basically say, for the hydrocarbons we have, what happens if we can use them to help us through this transition of time and we are capturing the CO2? This is wonderful. Let's go even further. If we are going to continue the thought experiment, you have already seen the United States do some pretty remarkable reductions. Most of it has come from natural gas, but there have been some pretty remarkable reductions in our CO2 production. A lot of the rest of the world hasn't even come close. For the number of new coal-fired plants moving in Southeast Asia, part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, they are not going to have the types of capture technology we have here in the United States. We have to have a worldwide strategy. I am one of those who has been really excited because I have been following a facility that is going up in Canada. It looks like they have succeeded in the breakthrough of mining the air to pull CO2 out of it. Mathematically, we had lots of smart people saying this is absurd, that you are not going to be able to do it. We had a very smart professor in Arizona at Arizona State University who had been working on sort of a carbon capture artificial tree. This technology is rolling out. It is under production right now, and they are moving up to industrial scale. The amazing thing is, they think they can do it for about $100 a ton, which is remarkable if you have actually played the math game. This is for the new facility. What happens if they start to break that curve? If you understand that carbon that has been captured, to have the ability to refine it and do other things, even make another fuel source out of it? The other thing is, think about the article we hopefully all saw last week about what the Dutch are doing. The Dutch are basically about to take a depleted oil field and take carbon that they have captured and shove it back in the ground and sequester it. All of a sudden, it is a negative calculation. In this place, in a lot of the debate, for a lot of the witnesses we have had in previous years, the concept of mining and having negative emissions was considered absurd. It is here. The technology is here. This is a facility that has, apparently, really smart, really wealthy people investing in it because they are so excited about the technology. We need to understand that there is optimism out here. How do we get ourselves up to date on the cutting-edge technology? How do we move it forward and promote it? We also need to understand that the theater that we engage in here often is not good math. I wish I had a more recent date, but the latest we could find is 2015 on this. Do you see the yellow bar on the side? That is all the photovoltaic solar that rolled out in 2015. It was an impressive year. There were fairly aggressive subsidies, State, local, and Federal. Do you see the other bar chart next to it? That was all the nuclear that went offline that year. The reality of it is, in 2015, if you were thinking about power generation in the United States that did not produce CO2 and you were joyful that this much solar hit the grid, understand that almost the equal amount of nuclear came off the grid. We were peddling in place. We need to be honest about the math, and we need to be honest about that baseload nuclear being really, really important if you care about this issue. There are a couple of quirky things I wanted to throw out here. This one is just fun. It is sort of an odd thought experiment. In the desert Southwest and mountain Southwest, uranium mining has always been a dodgy issue. We need it. We know we need it. We need it for everything from our X-rays to refining and refining and refining for a nuclear power plant. In previous decades, we have been able to take very high grades and step it down, but that was some of the excess that was out there after the Cold War. That stock has been substantially used up. So what are we going to do? There is a technology breakthrough of mining seawater for uranium. We should be joyful and pushing these technologies. They solve some of the moving problem of wanting nuclear generation but where are we going to get the uranium? How are we going to step it up? It turns out, even on that, the technology has moved forward. Look at other little thought experiments. How many of us in high school with Popular Science magazine used to get excited about how you generate power from ocean waves? It turns out that a new design is rolling out. It is sort of a bobbing power generation. It exists now, and it works. It is much more robust than anything that has ever been designed. We should be joyful and trying to promote more of this type of technology, but we have to deal with how you bring the power in from the shore. All of a sudden, you have a whole other layer of regs, rules, and permitting. You want clean power. We all want it, but we have to deal with the bureaucratic malaise, mess, and blocks that stop us from being able to pull this type of new power generation into our communities and our country. What is exciting about that is that is a type of power generation that, if we make it work, it can be all over the world. Being someone who, as a younger man, trekked Indonesia, Vietnam, lots of India, and Sri Lanka, think about most of the world's population living near coastal communities. Wouldn't that be exciting? Why aren't we promoting these types of technologies? We need to get rid of this Malthusian mindset that the pie is only so big, that we can cut it only so many ways, that once you cut it those ways, there is never an opportunity for it to grow. There are still people who believe that the 1968 book ``The Population Bomb'' was real. The only thing they got accurate was the author's name. We need to understand there is a technology breakthrough happening around us, in particularly power generation. But if you want to have a revolution--and I am sort of banking on being one of the first people to talk about this because this one is really disruptive, but it is worth the thought experiment. For anyone who might be watching or having an interest in this Google, ``photosynthesis 40 percent''. Read the complete articles that have been written. Madam Speaker, you remember your high school biology class talking about plants and plant cells having a certain inherent inefficiency, where there is a flaw that has been there for millions and millions of years where it reaches out and grabs the oxygen molecule when it should have grabbed the carbon molecule. Through some synthetic biology they fixed the inefficiency. It now will reach over and grab the carbon molecule every time. All of a sudden it means a 40 percent efficiency in growth. So, what happens tomorrow when crops require 40 percent less water, 40 percent less land, and 40 percent less fuel? What does it mean to the world? Thought experiment: I need you to take it a step further. World agriculture represents 2.2 times the total greenhouse gases of every automobile on Earth. Just adopting this plant technology in our agriculture equals removing every car off the face of the Earth. As this rolls out, how fast would it take to change the seed stock around the world? There are solutions, and they are not always a linear thought. They sometimes require some creativity. Let's face it. We work in a math- free zone that also lacks creativity. This exists. This is rolling out. It is a revolution. Yes, it is going to be incredibly disruptive to agriculture around the world. It is going to be incredibly disruptive. At the same time, what happens when you want to plant trees and you can grow them 40 percent more efficiently, and they are just little carbon capture machines? This is here. We should be excited about it. The last one is just more of the thought experiment of trying to say, if we really care, we need to stop the theater that seems to be what happens behind these microphones and actually understand the problem, understand the math, and then focus on that solution. Because often around here I believe a solution is a problem for us because the very thing that we got elected on, that we love coming and complaining about, oh, dear heaven, what happens if we solve it? So let's actually talk about something that is part of our pop culture right now, but it is a real issue. For someone like myself, I grew up scuba diving. I love scuba diving, and I have been blessed to do it in a lot of really neat places. Ninety percent of the plastic in the world's oceans come from 10 rivers. Eight of these rivers are in Asia, and two of those rivers are in Africa. Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers. If you give a darn about plastic in the ocean, banning straws in your community is theater. It is absurd math. It may make you feel better and get you in the local newspaper, but you didn't do anything. This body here immediately should figure out what aid programs we have, what research, what we can do to go to those 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and help, instead of complaining about it and instead of doing a nice video of going out and saying, I am going to pick up plastic off a beach. No. If you care, it is 10 rivers, we know where the problem is. If you really want to have an impact, go where it is coming from. This is a simple example of we talk, talk, talk, talk, and talk around this place, but if we solve it, then we don't get to actually talk about it. But solving is the most ethical thing we can do as a body. Policy that is made with math and policy that is made with facts can do amazing things for our country, my 3-year-old little girl, and for this world. Policy around here that is done by folklore, by an anecdote, and by feelings, time and time again, when we look back, it may have been well-intended, but ultimately it hurts people. If we get our math right, if we actually understand the underlying basis of a problem, figure out an honest solution that continues to grow our economy and continues to provide opportunities instead of this sort of constant Malthusian echo around here that says that we can't grow anymore, we can't do this--they are wrong, and the folks who embrace that philosophy have been wrong for centuries now. There are technology breakthroughs happening all around us. You actually saw the latest one on this. Finally, we have broken the code on a plastic that truly breaks down. Let's incentivize that. There are solutions. This body is an honorable body, but it needs to become one about solutions instead of theatrics. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one of the things we are going to do tonight is touch on some of the numbers that have substantially come out since last Thursday and Friday, and then even more numbers that came out yesterday and today. This is sort of the continuation of the theme that we have been doing since the very beginning of the year, a theme of what do we as a society have to do to keep our promises. The number of times--and I don't want to be too snarky--that we will have Members come behind these microphones or in our committees and want to do policy by anecdote--because telling stories is great. They make people happy. It is easy to understand. But it is not math. It is not public policy. We have to stop trying to make public policy by feelings, by impressions, by stories, and start doing it by the numbers because the numbers ultimately make our lives better when we get it right. The greatest fragility in our society right now, if you look, is the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. We have a moral obligation to keep our promises, but the only way mathematically we keep our promises is to do a handful of things. It turns out, by doing this handful of things, my 3\1/2\-year-old little girl has a great future, and the person who is a baby boomer who has moved into retirement also has a stable future. We have been doing this every week, our five elements of economic growth of things that would provide population stability, dealing with the benefits and incentives to stay in the workforce, technology disruptions, how there is a revolution coming in healthcare through technology and these drugs that are curative, how we are going to finance those and bring those into society, so that we stop having the debate on who pays in healthcare but what we pay. We have this ability to have this disruption. Then the other thing is what we do to continue the employment cycle, keeping people in the labor force, encouraging others to enter it. We are going to walk through some of those different numbers. The crazy thing is this stuff shouldn't be Republican or Democrat. This should be society's goal, that growth is moral because it provides opportunity. I want to walk through a couple of things that have happened in the last few days. Think about the data we received last Friday. If you love and care about people, if you go back and look at some of the economists' writings from just a couple of years ago about our brothers and sisters who didn't graduate high school, who didn't have any particular technical skill sets, we had written them off as being part of the permanent underclass in our communities and our society. Yet that is the very quartile that right now is having the fastest movement in their wages. How do we keep that going? How do we keep that going as long as possible? The jobs report, the unemployment reports we received, was amazing. We are hitting a trend where we are basically breaking all the rules. Those of us who grew up reading this stuff, the textbooks have to now be rewritten. This is moral. This is something both someone on the liberal side and conservative side should have joy about the fact of the matter is that populations we had thought were going to be functionally part of the permanent underclass in our society are now seeing opportunity. If this body was doing its actual work, we would be fixated on how we keep it going and keep it going for as long as possible. Let's walk through some of the things this economic growth is providing. I will openly admit that this slide is out of scale because of the margin on it, but what is important is the first 6 months of 2017--and that is the fiscal year, so October on is the beginning of the fiscal year--the first 6 months of 2017 and then the first 6 months of this fiscal year, prior to tax reform, after tax reform. One of these days, I keep being told by my staff it would be far too snarky to bring up here and just read the quotes that were said about what would happen to the economy with tax reform, to read the quotes of what would happen with employment and tax reform, what would happen to Federal receipts with tax reform. Guess what has happened? The first 6 months of this fiscal year, the first 6 months of 2017--the reason we do 2017 is the first 6 months of the 2018 fiscal year straddled part with tax reform, part without-- revenues were up. They are not up a lot. It is about $10 billion. But the technical term is receipts are actually up. Do we get an apology from all those folks who basically got it wrong or just a recognition that something amazing is happening right now and we should be joyful? So what is happening? Why revenue shortfalls compared to our spending? If you want to dig in, a year ago, spending on defense--but also, we have to deal with the reality that, from 2008 to 2028, 91 percent of the spending increase is going to be interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlements. In 8.5 years, two workers, one retiree. In 8.5 years, 50 percent of the spending coming through this body less interest will be to those 65 and older. Demographics are not a partisan issue. They are just math. The fastest growing population in our society is those of us getting older, and somehow this body is trying to turn it into something partisan. The fact of the matter is, if you go back to the end of 2017, the modeling said a 0.4 percent growth in GDP over those 10 years. It would pay for itself. Yet the base, the size of the overall economy, would be dramatically larger, meaning more of our brothers and sisters having jobs, opportunities, and economic vitality. Guess what has happened so far? The chart is a little hard to read, but if you look at the green, which is 2019, and you start to see where our mean GDP growth is, you start to understand how far we have come on that 0.4 percent economic expansion in GDP growth with the tax reform. We are only 1.5 years into it. A year and a half isn't a complete sample size of a 10-year tax policy, but at some point, where is the joy? If you claim you care about the working men and women of the country, and you care about people's economic vitality, and you care about their economic futures, where is the joy? Let's start to do a couple of things that should be joyful. Being from the State of Arizona, where I have a fairly substantial Latino population: lowest unemployment in modern history ever in our numbers. There is the chart. Where is the joy? The fact of the matter is that something is working in our society right now. If you claim you love and care about people, we should be trying to figure out what we are doing right and doing more of it. It is working. A lot of the really smart people who used to come lecture us and testify to us even a couple of years ago, they got it wrong. They are the same people we are going to invite to come testify in front of us next week, and we will never get around to asking them why they got their math so wrong. What is the fragility? If you read the joint tax documents when tax reform was being put together, or you think about what the headwinds are, we have known our demographics, one of the biggest headwinds for our society. Within that, if you remember our five points, one of those points is population stability. That means we are going to have to deal with ways to encourage family formation and deal with immigration in a way that brings that population vitality to our society. The two things that if you go back to the joint tax reports saying the headwinds for economic vitality to work were capital stock, money that was saved that could be loaned out to buy the capital equipment, and those things that were being incentivized, it turns out if you look at the savings rates the last 2 years after tax reform, savings rates are substantially better than anyone modeled. It is a combination of a lot of things. It is a combination of the population getting older and getting ready for retirement, a population that we just misestimated, the number of businesses that were going to set aside cash. But remember, when those savings are set aside, they become a multiplier effect in the economy because they become lending capital. As a simple example, take a look at interest rates. Take a look at our interest rates today compared to what was being predicted. This is one of the most unique times in modern history, where we have, functionally, a full employment economy. You all fixated on the numbers that happened today. Let me pull it up. U.S. job openings rebounded sharply in March with 364,000, seasonally adjusted, additional job openings posted up in March. Functionally, we have a society right now with more jobs available than labor. If I had come and told you that was going to happen a couple of years ago, what would you have thought? What this chart is basically talking about is labor force participation. As a society, how do we deal with some of that fragility? Because capital stock is working, and the numbers are working, but we are bouncing up against a fragility. That is that we have more jobs than we have available labor. How do we encourage people to enter the labor force? Should we create certain incentives and things for those who are older to stay in the labor force? This is one of my last slides here. We started seeing some really interesting numbers if you really break down the data. It started in December. Millennial females have started to substantially move into the workforce. Wonderful. Why do we have such a lagging effect with millennial males? It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just that there is something we need to try to understand in how we get these populations into the labor force. Because if we are going to keep our promises--and if you are like I am, where you believe growth is ultimately moral because it provides opportunities, stability, and the ability to plan for our future, we need this growth to continue. What can we do to help our brothers and sisters out there that, for some barrier, are not entering the labor force? The other thing we also saw beginning in December, which should make you joyful, is some interesting data of those who would be considered to have a type of handicap moving into the labor force, which was letting us know that businesses were finally making accommodations to draw in that population. That is wonderful. You could see some of that about 10 days ago, 2 weeks ago. The Medicare-Social Security actuaries did one of their reports. We have a problem, but you also saw Social Security gained an entire year. That means someone out there is paying FICA revenues. But did you see the number for those of our brothers and sisters on Social Security disability? Some of that is that we changed some rules. We tightened up some of the mechanisms. But a big chunk of that was those who have life challenges were finding opportunities to work. These are good things. We should, once again, be joyful and figure out, in the partisan divide of this place, not to try to find excuses of, well, this belongs to so-and-so or someone gets credit, but to figure out how to do more of it. Let's do more of it. Then, during the election cycle, we will figure out who gets to take credit for it. We will all take credit for it. But let's do more of the good things. As we start to look at some of the labor force participation, one of the other things we are also fixated on in our office is that we are trying to really drill down to try to understand some of the demographics. I am personally fixated with the fact that demographics often have much more impact on what happens in a society's vitality than the policy we make around here. The fact of the matter is that we have 74 million of our brothers and sisters who are baby boomers. They were born in an 18-year period. Remember, in 8.5 years, they are all 65 and older. That bubble is the single biggest challenge to this body. How often do you have anyone get behind these microphones and talk about: What are we going to do to create as much economic vitality so we actually have the revenues, the resources, the opportunity, and the adoption of technology to keep our commitments there for those who are still vital and want to stay in the workforce--there are opportunities--and, at the same time, reaching the other direction, as we have seen this unusual number with millennial males, helping them find a path into the labor force? I know this is a little geeky, but come back to the principle. If we as a society are going to keep our promises on Medicare and we as a society are going to keep our promises on Social Security, it turns out that economic growth--and it is one of only five things, but we are going to have to dramatically change the cost of healthcare. I believe there is technology coming that is going to be the disruption. As I was saying before, think about the ACA. Most folks know it as ObamaCare, those of us who worked on the Republican alternative. They were debates about who got subsidized and who paid; they were about the financing. We haven't had a debate about what we as a body are going to do to encourage the technologies and the revolution that is coming to crash the price, and here is the thought experiment. I have already done multiple presentations here on the floor of the technology that is coming, the thing that looks like a kazoo that you can blow into and instantly tell you if you have the flu. If we will make it legal, it can bounce off the data on your phone, which is your medical records, to make sure you are not allergic to a particular antiviral and could order your antiviral that could be delivered to your house a couple of hours later. How much healthier did we make society? The other side is that 5 percent of our population is well over 50 percent of all of our healthcare spending. How do we help that 5 percent with chronic conditions live the type of life they deserve? When you understand that--and I am hopeful it still stays on time-- something like the concept of a single-shot cure for hemophilia, which may be available this November. Now, the shot is going to be really expensive, but a hemophiliac may be about a quarter million dollars a year in their clotting factor and other ancillary costs. But what sort of revolution is in our society when you start to think about these biological drugs that are cures, what happens to that 5 percent of our society that have chronic conditions and we as a body start to say: Let's stop arguing about the financing side of healthcare and start having this discussion of how we are going to finance the cures that are really expensive but are revolutions to our society and our community? We have a whole proposal we have been working on on the idea of selling a healthcare bond and then using the future savings to pay for it, but we are going to have to come up with some sort of pricing mechanism because, in many of these pharmaceuticals, it is a one and done. Even The Wall Street Journal, today, has a discussion about a potential biological drug; $2 million is the discussion price, but it is for this tiny population of very, very young children who have this disease that wastes their body away, and they die within 2 years. It is a moral imperative we find a way to make that drug available. But what is the economic value of curing such a thing, even though it may be a population of only a few hundred of these children in our society? These are optimistic, joyful, and powerful opportunities, and this body needs to wake up and stop having the same debate we have been having for 20 or 30 years here because it is now the wrong debate. It turns out technology has passed us, and so have our demographics. So what do we do to incentive participation in the economy, particularly when you have an economy with dramatically more jobs than we have available workers? Here is this last slide. My hat is off to millennial females. They have begun entering the workforce in terrific numbers. If any of them happen to know a millennial male, could you please grab him by the hand and drag him into the workforce. My wife blames video games. I still haven't seen actual data on this yet. So my reason for taking some of this time tonight, I actually think there should be some joy out there. For those of us who get behind these microphones and we claim we care about people, there are really good things happening. How do we make more of it happen? How do we make this last as long as possible? Because we as a body, Democrats and Republicans, are in uncharted territory, and we have got to be brutally honest about this. We are in uncharted territory. If you actually read some of the financial, economic articles over this weekend, lots of really smart economists and businesspeople are talking about having this type of economy with functionally full employment, with populations moving into the labor force at the same time our available workforce is starting to bend pretty dramatically because of baby boomers turning 65, and yet, functionally, no core inflation--if there was ever a time for us to functionally go after a number of societal ills with this type of opportunity to work. And the last anecdote I am going to give after making fun of anecdotes--well, it is more than an anecdote; it is an observation. A few months ago, I visited the homeless shelter in Phoenix. It is actually a fairly impressive facility. Over here is St. Joseph the Worker; over here is the dental clinic; over here is where we help you get ID; here is the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week 12-step meeting. You walked in and saw St. Joseph the Worker. It is a Catholic charity. I believe it has been around 100-plus years. Their job is to help the most disaffected of our population, of our world find work. There was a stack of job posts, notes, on top of the desk. Their greatest difficulty was how do they get someone from the homeless campus to that dishwashing job or to the stocking job or these things to get them back into the labor force in our society to begin that nobility of work but also as becoming part of their rehab programs. We came up with this idea of, well, if transportation is a fragility--we all walk around with these in our pockets, and there are these buttons that you hit and a ride sharing comes up, and many of those very companies will actually provide the service at a fraction of the cost as a societal good. We need to start thinking through the types of technology that we all use in our lives. How do we make it so that the mother who might be on a Medicaid system can get to her prenatal appointment? the person who has just gone through Goodwill's job training actually can get to their job interview? the person at the homeless campus actually can get to that job? If you are from Phoenix, Arizona, asking someone to stand out and wait for the bus when it is 110 degrees, you start to understand that maybe we need to come up with a better solution. I make the argument that we already know the solution. We already use it for ourselves and our children. We now need to start thinking about, if labor force participation is one of our great fragilities for future economic growth and that economic growth helps us take care of our promises, how do we get the most marginalized of our society and make sure they have the same opportunities? So this is one of those moments. I know I have covered a lot of things, but I get to come behind the microphone. Even with all the sourness that happens around this place, I think there should be some joy because we are seeing our brothers and sisters who had a really tough decade back with some optimism and some options and some hope. Our ethical obligation, I think, is: How do we do more of it? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I am probably going to be a little different than some of the folks you are going to have come speak from our side. I actually, though, like the goal that we agreed to, or the President agreed to in 2015. I believe it is an abdication, though, of our responsibility to actually build what the plan is--we will call it the smorgasbord of options out there--because, if you think about it, once again, it is Congress passing the buck saying, well, here's the goal; let someone else take the blows of it. So if we are going to have an honest conversation, let's say I am a State that uses heating oil. Heating oil is functionally filthy. Okay. Are you willing to encourage that community, that State, to allow more natural gas extraction, more pipelines so we can actually hit the numbers? Or is it easier passing it on to the White House to let them take the slings and arrows of what it takes policy-wise? If you actually look at the reality, 2015, the year that President Obama agreed to this, that year, every functioning benefit from all of the solar that was adopted in 2015 was removed because of the amount of nuclear that went offline that year. Are we ready here to step up and say, hey, if we want baseload, clean, non-CO, non-greenhouse emitting, we are going to step up and get this nuclear back online, because it is a type--just that 1 year of the number of nuclear facilities that closed equaled every solar panel in the country that was added. Are we willing to continue to do as we did in Ways and Means last year, moving forward with carbon sequestration tax credits? Turns out there is some new amazing technology of mining CO2 right out of the air. There is a utility scale, industrial scale facility going up in Canada now that has broken the Holy Grail on the code on how to do it. These are pro-growth policies that we, as this body, should be adopting, not passing it off to the bureaucracy and the administration to make the hard choices. Understand, we did some math a couple of years ago that, if we would do a pipeline loop in West Texas to capture methane flare-off, capture that gas and make it--utilize it, it had a huge effect in getting us, like right now, that last 13 points of gap that we have to get in the next 7 years. How many of my brothers and sisters on the other side are ready to stand up and promote more natural gas, more pipelines, more tax credit mechanisms for carbon sequestration? Those are policy decisions. That is our job here in the House.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, let me take a quick moment and sort of get adjusted here. We are going to spend a couple of minutes walking through some things that I think are exciting, hopeful, and worth getting our heads around. Every week, I try to come to this microphone when we are here to talk about what I believe makes the future really bright for all of us, everyone from my 3-year-old--or 3\1/2\-year-old, as she corrects me-- little girl to someone who is moving into their retirement years. Once again, what is the greatest fragility in our society? This is one that is hard for us to get our heads around or even talk about. It is our demographics. Whether we like it or not, baby boomers are retiring, and we have 74 million baby boomers. The last baby boomer will hit 65 in about 8\1/2\ years. In 8\1/2\ years, two workers, one retiree. In 8\1/2\ years, 50 percent of our spending from this body, less interest, will be to those 65 and up. It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. At the same time, we have a substantial collapse, fall, in our birthrates. As you know, our birthrates now are well below the replacement rates. What do you do as a society? What do you do as a government? What do we do as a body here that is making public policy to make the future bright? We keep coming to the floor and talking about that we believe there are, functionally, five elements. It is the adoption of technology. It is the adoption of economic policies that maximize economic growth through tax policy that creates investment in new technology for productivity; immigration policy that maximizes new Americans having talents that help us grow the economy; regulatory policy that uses technology and information to regulate instead of bureaucratic filing in file cabinets, functionally; incentives to stay in the workforce and incentives to enter the workforce. As we have seen recently, millennial females are moving into the workforce. We still have a problem with millennial males. How about someone who is older? Can we do certain incentives in Social Security, Medicare, and other earned benefits to encourage staying in the workforce or even creating a second career? We are going to have to redesign a bit of those incentives that are in the current earned benefits. Can you create some incentives on Social Security, saying, ``If you will continue to work, we are going to do these things?'' Because that labor force participation is so important. We have worked through these. Now we try to come in and show what we see working in our society. Then, I want to talk a little bit about one of these things, and that is the adoption of technology. This week, the majority, the Democrats, will have a resolution on the floor about the Paris climate accords. I want to walk a bit through how technology, pro-growth technology, is the solution. I am going to show you some of the really optimistic things happening out there. Let's start swapping a couple of these boards. First, I apologize for the first slide. The scale is a little off, but it is basically to make a simple point. I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. We had the debate in December 2017. Over here, I was hearing how the world was coming to an end, how revenues were going to collapse. It turns out that now we at least have a good, comparable dataset. What is the term? ``Ceteris paribus,'' where you can equal to equal. In 2017, before there was tax reform, the first 6 months, and now we have the 2019 first 6 months. Guess what? Revenues are up, even though we are already in the tax reform environment. I was waved off by some much more sensitive staffers. We had a list of quotes from the majority, things they said, their predictions, what their economists said. I am not going to read them. But do understand, think about some of the crazy things we heard about what tax reform was going to do to the revenues of the country, what it was going to do to the economy, what it was going to do to employment, what it was going to do to labor force participation. They were all wrong. It is working. Take a look at our economic growth. Take a look at unemployment. If I had come to you a couple of years ago before tax reform and said our society is going to have more jobs than we have available workers, what would you have said? But it is reality. It is happening. We are seeing data within what they call the U-6, the underlying parts of the unemployment statistics of our brothers and sisters who have handicaps, who have been long-term unemployed, who have other life difficulties, moving into the labor force. There should be joy in this body and also joy for the fact that all the predictions were wrong, that revenues are--or ``receipts'' is the proper term. Receipts are up. These 6 months with tax reform compared to the 6 months where we didn't have tax reform, we are taking in more money. Will we ever get an apology from all those who predicted doom and gloom? Of course not. But could we just have a little bit of joy that they were wrong, that the math is good, that good things are happening in this society? We need to do more of it because, without the growth, there is no way we will keep our promises on Social Security and Medicare and so many other things. We must have economic growth. This slide right here I am going to leave here for just a second, this slide here, 2017. We don't use, really, the 2018 fiscal year because the first 6 months had part of it within tax reform, without tax reform. But then the gray you see up here is the 2019 first 6 months. That is what that is. I know I get teased a lot about the slides, but at some point, if you are talking about math--and substantially, for all of us who are Members here, we work in a math-free zone. It is a sin of both parties because we often try to make public policy by our feelings instead of by our facts. When we do public policy by feelings, I will make the argument that we hurt people because we intended good stuff, but we just got our facts wrong. Could you imagine if we did more like this where we looked at the real math and the real facts? This is a month-to-month comparison. It shows you some months it has been a little more, some months it has been a little less. But, overall, $10 billion over 2017. The first 6 months, when you compare them, it is working. It is working. When you start to look at the revenues that are coming in, in what we call FICA taxes--Social Security, unemployment, Medicare--good things are happening. You saw it 10 days ago when the Social Security actuaries put out their report. You saw things like Social Security disability go from being incredibly fragile, within just a couple of years of running out of money, to gaining 20 years of actuarial life. Some of that was public policy. Some of that is the fact that people are working. You see other parts of the program gaining a year's worth of life. That is a big deal when you consider the types of numbers we are talking about. It is working. The growth is providing us, as a body, an opportunity to do positive things for our community, for our country, for our States. Instead, we just seem to banter around here, doing crazy. Let's walk around a couple of other things. Do you remember the predictions? This was the long-term, freaky-smart economists, particularly on the left but even some of ours on the right, who were predicting before tax reform that the baseline economic growth on the horizon was about 1.9, 1.8. That is where we were going to grow. Also, the math that, over the 10 years, if you wanted to pay for tax reform, we only needed a 0.4 percent growth. Well, guess what? If you look at this chart and realize, since tax reform, what has happened in the GDP expansion, we are blowing through those numbers. Now, it is too early to ever make a prediction like, well, the additional productivity, the additional number of folks working, the less demand on social entitlements because there is work, the number of Americans who now have healthcare because they are working and all these good things that are happening in our society. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at this chart and look at the growth in the size of our economy--and this is a big economy, so when it grows 3 percent, it is a tremendous amount of economic expansion--we are seeing numbers that, once again, these really smart economists were telling us we could not hit. Where is the joy around here? Whether you are on the left or the right, if you care about people, if you claim you truly love and care about people, the fact is that so many of them have work now and their wages are going up, particularly for our brothers and sisters who are-- sorry to use the geeky term--at the lowest quartiles. Do you remember the discussions only a couple of years ago that, if someone hadn't finished high school, they were destined to spend their lives on the edge of poverty? What have we seen in the last dozen months? That that is the quartile having the fastest movement in their wages. There should be joy that something is breaking out, that something is happening out there when you see another 400,000 manufacturing jobs coming back to the United States. Remember ``manufacturing is dead''? Except it isn't. We did tax policy that encouraged investment in plants and equipment to raise productivity. Why is that so important? When someone gets a wage increase, when you pay an American more money, what is the classic economic formula? It is inflation plus an improvement in productivity. Wages go up according to inflation and productivity. What happens when American businesses, particularly in the manufacturing side, across the country are buying new plants and equipment because of the incentives in tax reform? All of a sudden, we are starting to see it is working. Spiking of productivity is happening. We have a labor shortage. Wages are going up. Shouldn't there be joy that the brothers and sisters out there who were being written off by the really smart economists just a couple of years ago are back and good things are happening? To be a little bit gratuitous, I know these are hard to read, but if you just look at the trend lines on the employment chart and think about some of the other different quartiles, when we geek out on the Joint Economic Committee, and those of our brothers and sisters who are Hispanic or African American or females or other quartiles, where we try to break down and see what is happening in employment statistics, we are hitting numbers that we have never hit before in our society. Something is working. How much happy talk have you heard around here? In many ways, is it just the nature of this institution is just the rage-based politics that we bathe in today? There are good things happening. We should be working on public policy to make more of this happen and more of this so this continues, so we are a society of opportunity. So this one is just sort of looking at--I want to double-check myself. This one I put up just because it was a fascinating breakout, and this was actually more from last December and then looking at what is happening. We had actually been having something called a labor force participation issue. It is sort of a geeky way of saying, for a society to grow, you often need two components. You need capital stock. You need money that people can borrow to invest and to plant in equipment. Well, it turns out the predictions that were happening about tax reform, that capital stock was going to dry up, that everyone was going to go out and spend the money and this and that, it turns out savings, we have plenty of capital. Savings rates went up. The second part was labor supply, and that one we have; we have a real issue. What do you do to encourage Americans who are not in the labor pool to enter it? Then last December, we had this unusual thing. All of a sudden, the numbers within what we call millennials, millennial females started entering the labor force, and all of a sudden, we went over the 60-- what? We had 62 or, I think, 62.3 percent labor force participation--I am doing it from memory--a number that lots of those smart economists just a couple years ago told us we were not going to see again for another 30 years. It has happened. Maybe it is time we as a body have an honest conversation that a lot of the economists who have been advising us are wrong, and the spirit of entrepreneurism, of capitalism, those things are actually working in our society and providing real benefits. Look, as a guy coming to the microphone with lots of charts, but the math is the math. Even though we work in a math-free zone on occasion, there are really good numbers in this. So I want to actually sort of touch on something else as we look at our pillars of the future of economic growth in our society. You have heard discussions of the Green New Deal or environmental protection as almost a Malthusian concept that the economy must shrink to meet these numbers. We want to argue that is absolutely wrong. The basic math set: Why has the United States done so phenomenally well in removing ACO2, a man-made CO2, from the environment? It is because of our migration to natural gas. We have gotten dramatically more clean, efficient in our energy production in the last decade, decade and a half because of natural gas. Well, in that case we should produce more natural gas, right? It is working. But there are actually other disruptions of technology, and we are just going to throw a couple of them up just for the thought experiment, to understand. If this were, once again, a couple years ago, the concept of pulling CO2 out of the air was almost considered absurd--except for the fact it is happening. It is actually in Canada, but there is actually a facility that is going to be going online to almost, say, what you would call an industrial scale that will pull CO2 out of the air incredibly efficiently. It is a crazy concept, just crazy, except it works. The technology is out there. How many of us, as we are debating meeting the Paris accord numbers, are saying here are actually things we can do to get us to the Paris accord commitments, which we are going to come really close. If we would adopt certain technologies, we get there. I am going to ask you to reverse some of those slides so we actually talk about the nuclear power first. No, that is carbon capture. Yes. Sorry. We were running late, so we ran up here with the boards. This is just a quick thought experiment for folks to understand for clean power generation, and this is a couple years old. I think this slide is based on 2015 numbers. Do you see the yellow side? That is all the solar that was new generation capacity in the entire country in 2015. The other side, the multicolored over here, was the amount of absolutely clean nuclear power generation that went off-line. So even though 2015 was a remarkable year of new, clean solar generation, we actually didn't really gain that much because clean nuclear power generation went off-line. So this is the occasion of it is great to be joyful about one, but you need to make sure you have your math understanding what is going on. Now, for us in Arizona, there is often this debate, the discussion of uranium. I don't want to geek out too much, but over the last 15 years or so, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and world energy markets on the nuclear side, there was high-grade uranium, almost weapons- grade, that was being stepped down to go into reactors. Most of that now has been used up. So, actually, that slide. This is carbon capture. So what would happen to you if I came to you today and said it looks like our national labs have actually had a technology breakthrough that is stunning? So, instead of us who are not too far from the Grand Canyon where we do the drilling to pull uranium out of the ground, which is always controversial because you worry about water supplies, but we need the uranium for all sorts of things in our society, what happens if there is never another land uranium mine again? Because we worked out the technology to pull uranium out of seawater. It has happened. It has happened. Where is the joy around this place that technology is breaking through and providing us this sort of clean energy future in things that were just sort of academic fantasies just a few years ago and the technology is breaking through? This is wonderful. It is exciting, and there should be joy on all sides. So let's actually go to this next one, and I am sorry for bouncing you back and forth. Outside Houston is an experimental natural gas generation facility. It doesn't have a smokestack. It basically actually uses the CO2 to spin the turbines. No smokestack. They capture every bit of the CO2, and they are actually apparently going to go from, I think it is--forgive me if I got my math wrong--30 megawatts to 300. They are going to go to an industrial- or utility-grade scale. But the fact of the matter is they are generating power without a smokestack, and they capture every bit of the CO2 and can sell it, convert it into other products. We have the technology. It is up and running right now. They worked it out. This should be joyful. If you want to actually have a bright powered future that provides the energy for the economy so the economy grows so we can keep our financial commitments but we want to protect the environment, we need to be talking about how we are going to bring more of this type of technology into our communities instead of sort of the Malthusian craziness of things that are in things like the Green New Deal, where we are going shut down this, shut down that, shut down this. There is a progrowth way to get there. Those of us on the Ways and Means Committee even a year ago, Republicans and Democrats, we actually passed some more tax credit incentives for when you produce the CO2, where do you put it? Well, you actually can get a little bit of credit if you put it in plastic or cement or put it in the curb that is being put into your neighborhood or actually put it into the ground to do recovery to bring up more hydrocarbons. It is actually just really exciting, and the technology is working. We need to be talking about technology and its future and the disruption it is bringing and the bright, cleaner future environment it brings with it. I brought this slide up because it is part of the thought experiment on this theme. Who here is concerned about plastic in the ocean? I mean, look, the Speaker is a good guy. He understands. I was a big scuba diver before I got this job. Now there is never time. Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, 8 of them in Southeast Asia, 2 in Africa. It is not the straw that you are going to not be allowed to use here in D.C. It is not the plastics in the United States. It is that 10 rivers bring 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean. If we actually cared about plastic in the ocean, wouldn't we actually take our foreign aid, our environmental aid, our technology aid and say: ``We know where the plastic in the ocean is coming from. Let's go help those 10 rivers, 8 of them in Asia, 2 in Africa. Let's help them get cleaner''? That is Republican, Democrat, we want clean oceans. If you care about the plastic issue, doing crazy things like: ``Well, I am going to actually affirm that I am a good person and I care by banning straws in my community even though it will have absolutely zero effect of making the oceans cleaner''--because, in the United States, our plastic substantially does not end up in the ocean. Let's stop the theater and do things that actually provide solutions. This one just drives me insane because I care a lot about it. And it could be from the Foreign Affairs Committee to Natural Resources to Energy and Commerce, they should all say: ``Hey, what do we do to help other countries not pump plastic into our oceans from those 10 rivers?'' And if you did that, instantly, you just stopped 90 percent of the plastic waste going into the ocean. That is a solution, but that is actually using--what is that crazy thing? Oh, yes--math to do public policy instead of feelings. But instead, around here, we get rewarded for doing theatrics. Now, the next board we are going to put up is the great thought experiment, and this one actually is the ultimate disruption that I think may even happen in my lifetime, and I may lack some of the elegance or eloquence--excuse me--on how to describe it. You all remember your high school or college botany biology class. You know, a plant cell from a couple million years ago, it has a certain issue of it wants to grow and it grabs an oxygen cell when it meant to grab a carbon molecule. Sorry. And then it spends lots of energy purging that one because ``I don't want the oxygen molecule; I want the carbon molecule to grow.'' Okay. I don't mean to geek out, but it is a big deal. It is an inherent inefficiency in our plants that is a couple million years old. It turns out, United States Government and a couple of university labs may have broken the code on the Holy Grail of plant biology, and with a tweak in the genetic code, a 40 percent improvement in growth. Do the thought experiment with me. What happens tomorrow if, on the same piece of land you are growing soybeans or corn or cotton or grass in your yard, you have a 40 percent improvement in efficiency? How much less water are you using? How much less fertilizer are you using? How much less fuel? How much less land? It also means, mathematically, you also feed the world for the next couple hundred years. World agriculture, if you wanted to do part of the thought experiment, world agriculture produces 2.2 times the amount of greenhouse gasses as every car on Earth. Think about that. So world agriculture, the math is you produce about 2.2 times more greenhouse gasses than every car on Earth. The adoption of this genetic change in our agriculture around the world would be as if you removed every single car off the face of the Earth. That is a disruption. Now, it is going to also have implications on what agricultural land is worth. I mean, it will have a huge disruption across the world. But if you truly claim you care about the environment, and someone like me who does taxes and financial and economic growth as their specialty here in Congress reads articles like this and sees the disruption in the future for the environment, why isn't this the discussion here? If this is real, and we all know in seed stock, you can roll it out in just a few years. What would happen if in just a few years, it would be like you removed every single car off the face of the Earth? That is what something like this equals. We should be joyful here. We live in a time where technology is moving so fast it is presenting us solutions, and we need to stop the debates around this place that sound like we are all still in the 1990s. The solutions are all around us, they are rolling out of our labs, they are rolling out of actually people's garages. Smart people all around us and around the world are producing the solutions. We need to embrace and move those forward, or we can do what we are doing here so far this year, and that is engage in the political theater of rage and completely avoid the optimism of the solutions that are at our doorstep. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman said another one from Arizona. Mr. Speaker, I want to sort of echo what you have heard, and that is a certain happiness that we were all able to move this forward together. I appreciate the chairman, but I also want to be someone who adds a little bit of a caveat that we understand the work isn't done, particularly for those of us in Arizona. I hate to admit how old I am, but in the early nineties, I was one of those who worked on what we called our groundwater recharge district in Maricopa County. When we had excess water, particularly from the Central Arizona Project in those years, we stored it. As we look back, now 25-some years, that was somewhat revolutionary and visionary. We will have to do things like that to meet our requirements that are part of this legislation. This legislation does not lay out every last step that those of us in Arizona must do. We are going to have to step up and meet our obligations. I think it is important that we understand there is still much more work to be done. As that moves forward, I am going to ask that all of us, particularly those who are supporting this drought contingency plan, think creatively. Are there technologies, and are there encouragements of farming techniques, as we are doing urban construction and types of plants in our communities? We need to now go to the next step and think what this brings our communities, particularly for those of us in the Phoenix metropolitan area who live in the desert Southwest. I hope we get a resounding vote of approval a little while from now, and I also hope that this is the right direction. We have to keep focused. Just because we have had a big hydrological year doesn't mean that we are not going to be back having this conversation a year or 2 years from now.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, look, those are always hard to do, particularly, you know, when you want to reach out to the families in your community and deal with those really difficult moments. So I appreciate the gentleman, and I am always happy to yield. He has always been very kind to me here. All right. Back on to trying to help do our theme here. And I know it is a little sarcastic, but it is sort of meant to have a little impact. We often joke that we are operating in a math-free zone, and it is a great frustration. One of the neat things that has happened over these first couple of months as we have been doing this sort of unified theory pitch--and we keep trying to say it is not Republican or Democrat. It is math. A number of my friends from the left have actually started to stop by the office, particularly on the technology, which I am very excited, because there is a revolution happening around us. So let's actually sort of move on to one or two more boards just to make sure that we have built the argument. On this particular board--and I have shown this; I am going to keep showing it--2008 to 2028, 91 percent of the increased spending--so when you see that curve going up between that 2008 and 2028, 91 percent, Social Security, healthcare entitlements, and interest. Social Security, the healthcare entitlements, and interest--91 percent of the growth in spending for those 20 years. So when we get here behind these microphones and we are often talking about this or that, understand the vast majority of what is driving our spending are our demographics. Our demographics are what drives Social Security, Medicare, and the borrowing within those drives a tremendous amount of the percentage of the debt. So how do you build a robust enough economy and then enough optionality in that growth with technology to also bend the cost on healthcare? So this particular slide is really important for us to get our heads around, and this is the other side. In the previous couple of weeks, we have done a series of presentations here on the floor about the technology that is coming on everything from wearables to autonomous healthcare to being able to instantly have your flu diagnosed, and can we build a system, if we would take down some of the legal barriers, where almost instantly your antivirals can be delivered to you. Think about blowing into something that looks like a flu kazoo. It diagnoses you. It pings off your personal medical records and instantly can order those antivirals. How much healthier, how much more time do you have for your life, for your family? These are the types of disruptions we as a body--and it is not Republican or Democrat. It is where technology is leading us, to make our lives more convenient. That precious commodity of time is given back to you, and we become healthier as a society while bending our healthcare costs. Well, this particular slide makes it very clear that we actually believe about 75 percent of all of our spending--and we get this, I believe, from the Centers for Disease Control. Seventy-five percent of our healthcare spending is for chronic conditions. Okay. So we actually know where our spending concentration is. So how do we start to have a disruption in that? And if you actually look at the growth of healthcare, this is basically our spending in 2001 to 2017. But you see that line just growing and growing and growing. Well, a lot of that, we will immediately get people who say: Well, that is pharmaceutical prices. Well, that is this. That is this. It is substantially our demographics and then the procedures that come along with that aging in society. We will actually, in the future, if there is a request for it, we will bring some of those boards and actually do more breakdown. But it is just understanding we cannot survive if this line continues to grow in that fashion. Additionally, and just understanding these categories--and I am going to push this back just a little bit because this particular board may be unreadable from a distance, but it is really important. What we are trying to explain here is, the green bars, the small bars, think of these as chronic conditions that have never been diagnosed; the blue are where they have been diagnosed; and the total cost in our society. When you look at this, what would happen if I could come to you and say, for a number of these, there are ways to manage hypertension. There are ways for someone like myself that is a pretty severe asthmatic to manage my asthma. There may be cures on the very short horizon coming for many of the diseases we consider chronic conditions. Part of what I want to talk about tonight is the second half: How do we finance the miracles that this body in previous years, when we did the CURES Act, when we actually did the specialty, the financing, the research resources for orphan diseases--it is starting to pay off. Many of the policies, actually, the Republican Members here did in previous years with the previous President are starting to pay off. So think about this--and I may have my date wrong; I am desperately hoping it is by the end of this year--a single-shot cure for hemophilia A. So our brothers and sisters, and there are only about 8,000 in the United States who have hemophilia, but it is a population that is very expensive for the blood clotting factor, for the other medical maintenance for that population, for our brothers and sisters. How about a single shot that cures? What would we, as a society, be willing to pay for that curative? How do we finance it? What if it is a $1.5 million a shot? Let's just sort of theorize here. But in about a 5-, 6-year period of time, it has actually more than paid for itself. Just, you know, the tyranny of basic accounting: How do we say today we want a system where we can finance these disruptive pharmaceuticals so we can start to change parts of these chronic populations so we do something that is curative? One of the discussions we have been working on in our office for almost 2 or 3 years now is the concept of, we will call it a healthcare bond that says we are going to reach out, do a census of the populations of, hey, these many individuals with this particular disease that this pharmaceutical would cure or dramatically improve their lives--some are on Medicare; some are on Medicaid; some are on private insurance; some are at the VA. We need to do that census and then do sort of an assessment over time to have what would have been their normal cost pay back that bond. The trickier policy set here--let's go back to our hemophilia example: 8,000 population, a single shot cures the disease. How do you price it? This is going to be an intellectually robust discussion we are going to have to have. We have other things in our society we price. A baseball player who is phenomenal, you would do certain types of arbitration. We could actually take a look at everything from the research costs, to the future benefits, to the incentives to continue this type of research, to the health benefits of having that population cured. There has got to be a formula we can come up with as a society where we continue to encourage these incredible miracle disruptions that are on the horizon. We need more of them because they start to solve this chart's problem. Remember the previous one, the pie chart. Seventy-five percent of our spending, functionally, is within those chronic conditions. What happens if we start to cure them, or at least a portion of them? It is time this body stops having the crazy debate we have had here for the last 10 years, which is the ACA. It is even our Republican alternative, which I believe had some great things in it. But we have been having this debate about who gets to pay. We have not been having the discussion, the intellectually honest discussion of what do we do to pay less and provide more? That is my goal here. If these miracle biologicals, if these miracle genetic treatments, are coming, how do we get them adopted into our society as fast as possible? In many ways, as we saw in the first phase of the hep C cure--what was the drug, Sovaldi? In that first year, year and a half, it cost $84,000, I believe, but it cured hepatitis C, meaning you did not need a liver transplant. But what happened? We had a number of our State Medicaid systems that were on the verge of going bankrupt. The difference in that sort of pharmaceutical is you had time before someone became symptomatic where liver transplant was indicated. And then we knew there was a second pharmaceutical with some of the same efficacy coming. What happens when there is not going to be a second drug, because it is a small population or it had such stunning research costs? We need to think through how we finance disruptions of those pharmaceuticals and how we also get a fair pricing so the research continues. We incentivize that, but also a fair pricing to society, which is willing to put on debt for a quick adoption and then use the future savings. So understand, what is neat about this, if you actually look at these diagnoses with serious chronic conditions, a number of them can be partially benefited by technology. Once again, I am a pretty severe asthmatic. We have played with a couple of contraptions that help me manage my blood oxygen. What happens if that contraption can talk to my phone and say: ``Hey, David, this morning, you really need to take two puffs of your inhaled steroid.'' ``Hey, David, we are doing some calculations. Today, you don't.'' As you have already seen, you may even have family members who are now reading off their phones about their diabetes, because they have a port that is reading their blood glucose. Technology can help us manage a number of these chronic conditions to make them so they don't crash, so they are not catastrophic for the individual and not expensive for society. If you have hypertension, how many of you may have an arrhythmia that you now have a watch that will help you manage? Those are on the technology side. On some of these, it is the curative that I really wanted to get into our understanding, the other half of the miracle disruption that is coming in healthcare. We need, as policymakers, to understand these are the benefits we are now yielding because of a lot of really good policy decisions this body made over the last few years. Let's move on to a couple more boards to try to help this argument become a little more robust. This was the best one I had, but let's go back to the hemophilia discussion. Can we use this example that is on our immediate horizon? I believe they are already well in or through their phase III. They have had, apparently, just from even the latest article I pulled up a couple days ago, amazing efficacy. It is curative for the vast majority of the population, something we never really thought of. Are we ready as a society to say: Can we build the box of how we finance these disruptions? Let's walk through a couple others. How many of you have heard of some of the gene therapies where we can turn on your immune system, but we turn it on in such a way--well, the medical researchers, by understanding the type of cancer you have, looking at that cancer and saying, hey, here are the receptors that your immune system would do the most efficient--how do I describe it?-- the most efficient method of killing those cancers. What if that costs $250,000, $500,000, but it cures? How about in some of these cases? Now we are looking at this particular one. This is from earlier in the year or late last year, a pharmaceutical biological that changes a genetic form of blindness. You are born with this blindness on your DNA, and it recodes your DNA and brings back a substantial portion of your sight. What is the value of that? There are some unique things. I believe it may be within this gene editing. Actually, it is really expensive. I think it may have been $400,000 or $500,000 for a certain number of the patients. It was almost you only paid if we hit a certain level of returning your sight. What happens when we are able to do more of this, that it is more than just a disease you have developed, and we are actually recoding parts of your own personal genome to deal with a genetic blindness that you were born with? How much does this help society? How much, as a society, are we willing to pay? When we pay it, is there a way we can have a financing mechanism that the adoption of such miracles happen quickly, and we can reap the benefits in future time? That is the concept for the healthcare bond. Let's take one that actually is near and dear to me. I am from the desert Southwest. I am from the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. I live in a little community called Fountain Hills, a wonderful part of the country. I am incredibly blessed for the community I get to represent and live in. But from the desert areas of California through Maricopa County, Phoenix, Pinal, all the way down to the Tucson area, we have fungi in the soil. We call it Valley Fever. We believe one out of three people who go to a hospital believing they have pneumonia actually have the fungi, have Valley Fever in their lungs. For a small fraction of the population, they don't just feel like they have pneumonia for a week or 2 or 3. They get something, I believe the term is ``undifferentiated,'' where it breaks out and ends up in your bones. I have a neighbor, a former Vietnam helicopter pilot, one of the greatest human beings you can ever meet. His hands have been carved up from when they have had to go in and remove the fungi that is growing in his bones. Leader McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, because of the community he represents, and myself in the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, a few years ago, we started a Valley Fever Caucus for those of us who live in the desert Southwest. We have had some amazing success. We have been able to move some resources. We have gotten the folks back East here to understand this very unique regional disease we have. We were able to move some money, and all of a sudden, we now are hearing that we may be 3 years from a vaccine for animals. This particular disease killed my dog, Charlie, a few years ago. But after the vaccine for our canines and our pets, it is only a short time after that, maybe just a handful of years, that we will collect enough data that we will have fungi vaccine for something called Valley Fever for those of us who live in the desert Southwest. These are examples. We believe a disease like that ultimately costs billions in our communities for hospital visits, for sick days, for all the things that go with that. What is the value of a vaccine that is being developed for an orphan disease like that that most folks back East have never even heard of? We have succeeded at moving the resources around here in Congress over the last few years to start these miracles of the genomic and the other types of research that are bringing these miracles here. Back to our primary conversation. As we age as a society, our biggest cost driver, particularly over the next 30 years, is healthcare. We have done presentations here the last few weeks on the technology miracles that are coming, where you can manage your own health. You don't have to be part of the collective. You can manage your own health and have incredible data. But we are going to have to break down some of the old silos, some of the old legislative barriers, some of the barriers to entry. The other half of that is how we continue to encourage these disruptive biologicals, these disruptive genomics, these disruptive drugs that are curative. The one that was in our office a couple weeks ago, talking about ALS, it is probably going to be a couple shots a year, but it will freeze. You will hold steady. So it is not curative, but it stops the regression and the progression of the disease. What is the value to that in our society? These are big deals. As I reach out to my Republican brothers and sisters and my Democrats, help those of us who understand these cures are not Republican or Democrat. We as a society must come up with the mechanisms that bring them out, finance them, and then understand the debate here must be about what we are doing to change the price curve of healthcare at the same time our demographics are getting much older very, very, very fast. We can do that. It is a much more elegant discussion than the absolutely ridiculous discussion that continues to go on here because it works in our partisan format where everything here has been weaponized now politically of let's have a fine debate on who gets to pay, how much government subsidy should you receive. Let's do something really creative. Let's start lowering the price by bringing technology, by bringing other channels of exciting new pharmaceuticals, and even down to things that are affecting the folks in my neighborhood, a disease like Valley Fever, where I now get to go home and say we worked on it a few years ago. We were not optimistic, but we kept working and we kept working and we kept working. There are brilliant people down at the University of Arizona Center for Excellence on Valley Fever. There are researchers at NAU. There are researchers in California who are now almost there. There should be joy in this body when you start to think about the cusp we are on. Will Congress be looked at by someone 10, 20 years from now, saying they did policy that actually made these things happen faster? Or will we continue to exist in a world where the way we reimburse, the way we finance, the way we regulate, the barriers to entry of the technology, we slowed down the disruption that could have helped us lower healthcare costs? These are the things we are fixated on, because remember our five points: We must have the robust economic growth. We must have the labor force participation. We must do the incentives to, if someone wishes to stay in the labor force and delay parts of their retirement, how do we reward that? We must do these others, but we also must push these technologies, because our biggest fragility is the healthcare costs. I think there are some great things about to happen. Look, that is a portion of the presentation. Hopefully, in a couple weeks, we are going to come back and we are going to do something much more technical--I am sorry; I know that is really exciting--on some of those incentives to stay in the workforce. But we need to understand, if you have a complicated problem and someone walks up to you and gives you a really simple solution, it is absolutely wrong, because complicated problems require complicated solutions. That is where we are headed. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I promise not to go 60 minutes. Continuing the series we have been trying to do on a much more, shall we call it, wholistic policy of how to get a sort of unified theory of what will make America's economy, opportunity, our ability to pay for our promises, particularly over the next 30-some years, when our baby boomers are in their retirement years. This is, actually, sort of just another module on trying to help sell, educate, convince, cajole, on that idea. We always start with this particular poster now that our belief is you sort of have five pillars on what we must do almost immediately to have the economic growth and the mechanics to be able to keep our promises. Remember, basic math: We have 74 million baby boomers. We are now about halfway through that 18-year cycle turning 65. In 8\1/2\ years is the final portion of the baby boom turning 65. In 8\1/2\ years, half the spending, less interest, coming out of this body, so 50 percent of the spending will be to those 65 and older. In 8\1/2\ years, there will be two workers for every one person in retirement. Understand what this means: If we don't have substantial economic growth, substantial incentives to stay in the workplace, and also a really disruptive cost curve in parts of healthcare, I defy you to make the math work. So we have actually sort of laid out five principles of policy, and within those policies, there are lots of moving parts. We are going to talk a little bit more of sort of the technology disruption, but we are going to talk the other half of it from what we did 2 weeks ago. But economic growth: What do you do in a tax system? What do you do with trade? What do you do with smart regulations? I have done presentations here about crowdsourcing data as a much more elegant way to regulate; using block chain to collect data in financial markets so you could actually have a much more rational, much more reactive, much faster regulatory environment. We also have on here, I use the term, ``population stability.'' Remember what has happened to the United States birth rates and where we are going and where we are predicted to go. In the last 10 years, there are 4 million children that we expected who are not here. That is functionally 4 full years of immigration in 10. Are we willing to actually say it is time to go to a talent-based immigration system with some flexibility in there to maximize population stability? And on the other end, are we willing to also adopt public policy that encourages family formation? It is math, and it is math about the economic robustness of this society. Earned benefits: We are going to have to find ways that, as we keep our promises on Social Security, if we keep our promises on Medicare, are there inducements, incentives we can produce to say: Are you willing to stay in the workforce longer, part-time? If you are healthy, happy, capable, we want you. It makes a difference. Are we able to give you certain incentives to postpone taking benefits to actually help yourself, but also help the programs as they function? And then the last one under our five pillars is employment. How do we maximize, as a society, participation in the workforce? You know, we still have some data issues on millennial males. What can we do to help them get into the workforce? As you know, last December, we finally had a real breakthrough in some of the data--we call it the U-6--employment data on millennial females moving into the workforce. That is part of it. We also want to encourage older Americans to stay in the workforce if that is their choice. But we also are starting to see something that is really exciting in the labor statistics--I am sorry I am geeking out, and I know I am sounding like an accountant on steroids, but these things are really important--is our handicapped brothers and sisters. People who have actually had substance abuse and other types of issues are actually moving back into the workforce. Behind this microphone I have talked about even the things going on in Arizona right now, where we actually have private, paid-for job training in our prisons because there is such a labor shortage, there is such a skilled labor shortage in our community. That is actually wonderful. I mean, if you care about people, where we are at right now, our ability to draw our brothers and sisters into the labor force for that honor of work is an amazing thing. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Stivers). Honoring the Life and Service of United States Army Sergeant Joseph P. Collette

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I was absent from the House floor during today's rollcall vote on H. Con. Res. 24. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 125.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Or an earthquake.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Coming from Arizona we have sort of this utopian view that one day Arizona may become a coastal State.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I knew you were going to say virtue signaling. This is a little bit sarcastic, and I mean it to be slightly on the humor side, one of the first things every Member of Congress should put into their budgets is the ownership of a calculator, because we functionally work in a math-free zone where our feelings become public policy instead of the baseline data where we can actually have an impact of making our society and the world healthier and more economically prosperous. If you actually, genuinely cared about plastic in the ocean, we have 10 rivers, 90 percent of the plastic, we know exactly where they are; focus there, instead of the absurdity of the straw at your local whatever.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. That is actually a brilliant way to phrase it. My continuing thought experiment, and this is a little beyond where we were going, but it makes the point, visit Washington, D.C., or a bunch of other locations now. They are not going to give you a straw or they are going to give you a paper straw. The math is--and this actually, I believe, comes from the United Nations--90 percent of all the plastic in the ocean--and, look, it is a big deal. I am looking at my data here, roughly 8 million tons a year of plastic goes in to the ocean. The gentleman is from a coastal State--comes from 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia, two of them in Africa. If you actually really cared about plastic in the ocean, that 8 million tons, we would actually take our environmental policy, our trade policy, and our foreign aid policy and say that we are going to actually help these 10 rivers that are responsible for 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and work on those. But instead we do these feel-good, absurd, theatrical things of ``my community isn't going to do straws, don't we feel better that we did something for plastic in the ocean?'' It had nothing to do with plastic in the ocean. It is these 10 rivers. Let's grow up and stop the political theater.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. But the beauty of it is that model has said that we have actually already created a value on this carbon, and if you don't put it into the environment but actually use it for other things as a filler in plastics, as a filler in concrete, in putting it back in to the ground to enhance recovery, we are already doing it. This technology isn't utopianism, it exists. It is already running. How many times around here have we talked about that we can actually have a hydrocarbon generation without a smokestack? The technology exists. If we are going to talk about a green agenda, then we actually all need to sit down and actually meet with the really smart researchers and scientists and actually understand the math and science. That science is way ahead of where our heads are. The gentleman from Florida has some amazing technologies coming out of his State right now on everything from biogeneration to the ways to manage the environment.