David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Indiana (Mr. Hollingsworth). Costly and Burdensome Regulations

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons for taking this time--and it was only about 3 weeks ago we actually took the leadership hour and we did a series of presentations on what was happening in debt and the excessive spending in the Federal Government, what was driving it and what was happening with mandatory spending. Then the very next morning, CBO issued an update. Have you ever had one of those moments in your life where you just spent almost an hour on the floor walking through the numbers, and you get a document and you start digging into it, and you find out a number of the things you presented just 14 hours earlier were wrong? But, sadly, they were wrong in the wrong direction, if there is such a way to phrase it. Think of this: From January's Congressional Budget Office number until June's number, the U.S. debt deficit this year, the U.S. deficit this year, grew by $134 billion as our projection for the end of the year. So, functionally, the deficit for 2017, the fiscal year we are in, we will come very close to $700 billion this year. It is going to be 693 is the projection. And if anyone saw--I think it was yesterday or the day before--Mick Mulvaney over at OMB, was projecting, from the White House's calculations, that the deficit this year was going to be about $704 billion. So we put together this slide next to me just to make it clear how much that is, to just sort of understand what is going on and trying to put this in perspective. Okay. So we are going to use the CBO number because, you know, it is the Congressional Budget Office. So $693 billion is going to be borrowed for 2017, the year we are in right now. Well, think about that. That is $1.89 billion every single day. That is $79 million every hour; $1.3 million every minute. And, what, $1,900 every second? And that is what we are borrowing. So if I take up an hour here, you all get to make a decision if my hour here was worth $79 million of borrowing. Why is this sort of devastating in the numbers when you really start to dig into this CBO report? Well, first let me give you one of the things that bothered me the most. This is a big deal when, from January to June, our excessive spending and borrowing number actually increases by 25 percent and it got almost zero press. We are living in a society right now where, if there is a shiny object, a tweet, another story, the press, even a lot of the Members of this body, run talk about that. And I will make you the argument that the greatest systemic threat to this society are these numbers because the fact we are going to borrow $134 billion more than we were already projecting, it is worse than that. If you were to step back 1 year ago, 1 year ago we thought this year's deficit was going to be about $450 billion. I mean, it is still outrageous. In a year's time that number now is kissing up to $700 billion this year. To understand the scale of that, we are going to actually do some of our slides. And the first one we are going to put up is the slide from 3 weeks ago, and the punch line on it is the numbers are worse than this. I just wasn't going to use up a whole bunch of ink and print a new one. But this is important to understand. So this is where we think we are going. This is what is in the CBO report. But do you see actually the blue areas? That is sort of spending that is on autopilot. When we say autopilot, it is by formula. You reach a certain age, you get certain benefits. You fall below a certain income, you get certain benefits. We borrow money, we pay back the interest. You have served honorably in the military, you qualify for certain benefits. But this is 2026, so this is functionally 9 budget years from now. Understand where we will be. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, other things that are formula driven, you fall below a certain income, you get interest on the debt. And you start to realize only 22 percent of all spending in 9 years will be things that functionally get voted on here. Everything else will be by formula. Your government is very quickly becoming a health insurer with an army, an insurance company with an army. What is fascinating is--think about this--this year we are going to kiss up close to $700 billion in borrowing. That is more than all discretionary spending on nonmilitary discretionary spending. So think about that. If you came to me and said, ``David, I want you to only spend exactly what you are taking in right now,'' you get to help me make a decision. If I am not allowed to touch mandatory spending, the entitlements, do you remove the entire military, or do you remove everything else you think of as government, the Park Service, the FDA, the FBI? Everything else is government because all of that is living on borrowed money. And somehow we desperately must find a way for the American public to understand the scale and how quickly these numbers are moving away from us. In 5 years, so those folks who are 60 years old today, they are at the peak of what we call the ``Baby Boom.'' So in 5 years from now, we actually hit the peak of our brothers and sisters who will receive their retirement benefits, if they take them at 65. And you start to look at the numbers. And we are going to--let's switch to the next slide. And you will actually start to see that curve steepening. We are going to show a slide in a couple of boards from here that starts to show you at what point we are running these trillion-dollar deficits. The next point I also wanted to make that was here in the CBO report is, when we borrow an additional $134 billion on top of what we already projected--so close to $700 billion this year--that is now part of the rolling debt. That is part of--now we are going to be paying interest on that for generations because our inflection point to pay down the debt is moving farther away from us every day because--you saw the previous slide--every day we are borrowing pretty close to $1.9 billion every single day. So why this slide is important is--just understand--in 9 budget years, if you said, ``David, I want you to deal with the debt. I don't want you to do it today because I don't want to lose any benefits. I don't want to talk about the complications of what happens if we had to deal with the reality of trying to make the combination of making the economy grow and having to deal with entitlement reform,'' but in 9 years, only 11 percent of the budget would be nondefense, non- entitlement. And the amazing thing is, that number will stay almost identical for the next 10 years. So almost all the growth, a trillion-plus dollars of growth in those 9 years is coming almost solely from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, but mostly Medicare. It is really difficult to talk about, but if you actually look in the CBO numbers, you understand, we have a couple of our key trust funds that start to run out of money within the 10-year window. So let's actually switch slides and try to--and a couple of these are going to be repetitive for a point, so it starts to become more absorbable of what is actually really going on in these underlying numbers. So we put this one together just to sort of have a sense of what has happened. What happened from when we were estimating in 2016, the Congressional Budget Office gave us a number, so this is a year ago. We were building our budgets. We were building our projections. We were building our cost analysis on how much interest financing, these things. This is a year ago. We thought we were going to borrow $544 billion, still an outrageous amount of money. Here we are a year later and we are going to come close to $700 billion. Then in January, from a year ago--so this last January--it moved up to, hey, we are going to borrow $559 billion. Not a lot of movement. And then 6 months later, it blows off the charts. And now all of a sudden, we know from the CBO number, it is $693 billion of borrowing this year. The OMB number, I know the chart over here I think is saying 702. I could swear I saw 704, but let's just call it $700 billion. This is an intense frustration because, if you actually listen to many of us as we get behind these mikes, we will argue and fight and fuss often on things that, when you actually add them up, are pretty small, sometimes bordering on petty, that don't really have a multiplier effect into the future. Yet, how much discussion have you heard behind these microphones in the last 3 weeks, since the CBO report came out, the update came out that, hey, from January to June, somehow the number just grew by 25 percent; we just added another $134 billion of borrowing this year? This isn't way off into the future. It is this year. And guess what. We are going to be financing that for as long as anyone who is probably watching this or listening to this in this room is alive. Can we go to the next slide. We are heading toward a time where the growth of this debt, the growth in mandatory spending is moving to crushing everything else we care about. So if you happen to be someone who is a Member of this body and you care passionately about education, you must understand that the mandatory spending is going to crush it. If you care about the environment and other programs, the finding resources to pay for those things is gone. If you care desperately about defense, defense is going to be competing for scarcer and scarcer dollars because those dollars are promised in our mandatory spending, our entitlements. So the only reason I threw this one up was just getting a sense that just the movement from January to June--the chart may not look like a big deal, but we are dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars here. You see that little separation between the red line and the blue line? That separation is 6 months. This isn't a game. It shouldn't be partisan. The numbers are the numbers, and Congress cannot continue to exist in a math-free zone. So--and I am sorry. This is actually--I have toned down my charts because I was getting made fun of by making too many of them, and, actually, I was. I think I killed one of the big printers here on Capitol Hill, but that is another discussion. So let's actually sort of look at this one. This is functionally 2017 to 2027. So the 10-year window, which we use constantly around here. Just understand what this constant growth of the debt does in the mix of our priorities that we are able to pay for. Where is the money? Where does it ultimately come from? Where does it go? So if we are here right now, the first bar is spending. The second bar is revenues or pay-fors or mechanics. You know, some of it is borrowing, some of it is payroll taxes, and other things. Then the same thing for 2027. So let's first take a look at where we are at right now, and this is by gross domestic product. So they tell me this is a much more elegant way to sort of understand how much of our society's economy is going into finance government--is going into finance government's debt. And none of these numbers have State and local. This is just us at the Federal Government level. So take a look. This year, hey, about 1.4 percent of our GDP, of the economic muscle of our society is going into financing our excessive spending, our debt. In 10 years, it is 2.9 percent. So it is the entire economy, close to 3 percent of it is going to be grabbed just to pay for debt. But when you also start to look at--you see that black portion on the top? In 2017, the excessive spending here, without revenue--so it is borrowing--is 3.6 percent of our entire GDP went to borrowing. In 10 years, it is 5.2, and it keeps growing, and it really starts to take off. Remember we had the comment ``in 5 years, we hit the peak of the Baby Boom moving into retirement.'' And if you see the curve, it steepens and, over the next couple of decades, it blows off the charts. So you actually start to look at the mix of: What are our resources? What do we have? Well, let's just go to the 2027. So that is this. So, functionally, 6 percent of our entire economy will be going to Social Security; 6.9 percent of our GDP will be going to healthcare programs. Another 2.5 percent of our society's GDP will be going to other mandatory programs. Only 5.4 will be going to everything we call discretionary, and part of that is also defense. So about half of that will be defense and half of that will be other discretionary programs. This is where we are moving prioritywise. The growth of these programs consume everything in their path. One of the things we actually talked about 3 weeks ago when we were behind this microphone--look, there are demographic changes, but when I was a kid, $4 were spent for young people for every dollar that was spent for our, what we will call, seniors. Today, that is reversed. Today, we will spend $4 for seniors for every dollar spent for young people, and that curve continues to move away from us. So just understand, that is the decision this body, this society, has made as our priorities. Now, why this slide is so incredibly important to understand, if you see the blue there--and, look, I am blessed to be on the Social Security Committee in Ways and Means. We just had the actuary report, and Social Security has problems, but it is not a crisis. It is fixable. As a matter of fact, any well meaning people, a handful of them could get in a room and in a day fix the unfunded liabilities, which I think is 22, $24 trillion over the 75-year window for Social Security. What should terrify you are the numbers I am about to point out that are actually within Medicare. Let's actually just sort of reach over here, and forgive me for leaning over. Let's say you are 50 years old today. We are going to use 65 as the benchmark for retirement. You are going to be retiring in 2030. You see the gray here? Over your career, over your work life, the average person who will be retiring in 2030 will have put in $179,000 into Medicare. But do you see this side? They are going to receive $621,000 in benefits. The person who is 60 years old today, in the average, and these are means, the person who is 60 today, retiring in 5 years, will have paid $179,000 in part of their FICA tax going to Medicare. Over their years of retirement, because of longevity, because of healthcare costs, because of a series of different things, they are going to take out $621,000. Now, I need you to start to multiply those types of differentials where we put in this, we are taking this out, and multiply it times 76 million of our brothers and sisters who we define as baby boomers. Do you see the math problem? This slide isn't from some conservative group. I believe it is from the Urban Institute. This is just reality. Let's say you happen to be my most liberal constituent, and you care desperately about the preservation of these entitlements and of Medicare. You should be the first one lining up with me and others around here from both sides of the aisle saying: We must do two key things. We must adopt policies that maximize economic growth, because whether it be tax reform, whether it be regulatory reform, whether it be immigration reform, all these things, but primarily tax reform, we must do those policies that drive economic growth, because a growing economy solves a lot of problems, but it doesn't come close to dealing with these types of shortfalls. So the second thing that must be done, and it is going to take fair- minded people on both sides of the aisle, we are going to have to do entitlement reform. It is just the math. When someone gets behind one of these microphones or is running for office and they say, ``Well, if we just get rid of waste and fraud, or if we just get rid of foreign aid, or if we just get rid of this,'' I am sorry, they need to go out and invest in a calculator. That is not what the underlying numbers say. And to try to double down on a couple of these points, to understand how fast these numbers are moving away from us, in 2022--it sounds like a long time from now, but, look, we are working on the 2018 budget right now. So, what, four budget years from now? Every year, we are going to be running a $1 trillion deficit, and it grows and grows. That $1 trillion of borrowing in 2022 has to be financed. We are working on this chart. It is a little more complicated, so you are not going to see it for another month or so. As you are borrowing more money and interest rates go up, you do understand it is not just the money we are borrowing this year. When we move up the interest rates because we are out there in the markets sucking up the capital, pulling the capital in, when we raise interest rates, there are about $2.5 trillion of our $14-plus trillion of publicly held debt that is refinanced every year. So it is not just the interest we pay on new borrowing. Like, right now, almost $1.9 billion had to be borrowed today. It is not just the interest we are going to pay on that, but it is the effect on everything that is refinanced every year, every day, every month, every quarter, because as those interest rates move up, we have to change the financing. Just understand, when you look at this chart just how fast--and this is just the borrowing number--how it explodes away from us. So in 2027, 10 years from now, annual deficit, $1.463 trillion of just borrowing. That is 9 budget years from now. You realize, if you add that up, I believe that is more than all military and all other discretionary spending we are spending today. Please understand how fast these numbers are moving away from us and start demanding that we, as Members of Congress, toughen up and do those things that are really difficult, really hard, and the willingness to tell the truth of what is driving these debts and deficits. My primary reason for putting up this chart is that I am a huge fan that we have to do sort of this holistic approach, that it is now incumbent upon us as policymakers to do everything and do everything at once. You can't just have us say we need to do healthcare reform because almost no one in the country who is outside that world is paying attention to what it is doing to the debt and deficit, blowing them off the charts. Then we have those of us who are focused right now on doing tax reform. We talk about our book of specialty, and people who care about immigration, care about this, care about that. The reality is we have to do it all. We have to do it all at the same time to maximize economic growth. The GDP indicator today from the Atlanta Fed, we call it GDPNow--it is a wonderful website. It is a great app--I think has us at 2.5 percent GDP. Okay. That is better than we have been. The new CBO baseline built into this next 10-year projection is saying 1.9 percent GDP growth. That is unacceptable because these numbers continue to remain incredibly ugly if we grow at that speed. But if we were to be at 3, 3.5, the numbers get much easier to deal with. But this chart is really important and a little tough to absorb, but it basically demonstrates, even with additional growth, we are still going to have to do entitlement reform, and it is going to have to be on a fairly large scale. Growth makes it just a lot easier and makes it so we can do a much longer onramp for our brothers and sisters who are right now planning for retirement or other benefit programs that are out there. So in this next slide, I wanted to show it because I wanted to actually use it to talk about--I know right now there is a lot of consternation of what is happening over in the Senate in regards to healthcare, and I think constantly there is a lot of misinformation about the healthcare bill we did here in the House, what I have read of what has been worked on in the Senate. So let's first get a couple things very clear. If you hear a commentator, if you are someone behind one of these mics, talk about, ``Well, it is one-sixth of the economy and that is what is in this bill,'' they didn't read the bill. The ACA replacement is almost exclusively about the small portion of our society that is in the individual market. They don't get their healthcare from an employer. They don't get their healthcare from Medicare. They don't get their healthcare from the VA. They don't get their healthcare from Indian Health Service or TRICARE or all these other ways. They are the plumber. They are my wife and I when we were running our own business. In my congressional district, it is only 2 percent of my population. In my State, it is only 4 percent of my population. That was the population that was having great difficulties if they held a preexisting condition. Well, this society now, we have all come to terms, we are a guaranteed-issue society. That was in our bill when it passed. But that is still a tiny portion of the society that is in that individual market. In a State like mine, Arizona, you have a single choice, huge price hikes, and none of that was what was promised. When you start to look at the math on the deductibles and then the price, so many of our brothers and sisters out there who should be in that individual market are basically saying: I would rather pay the fine; let them try to catch me. Because we have already talked about them. We did a whole presentation, I think, about 6 weeks ago, 2 months ago, that were in this ratcheting problem. Half of our population who should be in that individual market, let's just call them the healthy, 50 percent of that population who only use about 3 percent of the healthcare dollars, they basically said: It is too expensive; I am not buying. But every time someone who is a part of that healthy portion of the curve says ``Yeah, you have mandatory purchase, but I am still not going to buy'' and doesn't purchase, you end up in this ratcheting effect. And the ratcheting effect, it gets more expensive, so more drop out; gets more expensive, more drop out. And that has been the crisis that is the ACA. Most people know it as ObamaCare, but to be respectful, let's call it the ACA. It has an actuarial, structural death spiral. So our attempt was: Could you do a series of things that would lower the premiums enough for that 50 percent of the population who only uses 3 percent of the healthcare dollars to get them to actually buy? Mandatory. Hasn't worked. Maybe really well-priced coverage would work, because when they participate, the curve flattens out. Because right now, it looks like a hockey stick, and we know there is functionally a tiny percent of our population, I think it is like 5 percent of the population, equals almost 50 percent of all the spending. So the reason this chart is up here, we were trying to find an elegant way to try to say those of us who, like myself, I have fairly severe asthma, but folks with chronic conditions, diabetes, particularly if it is not managed, other things, that is actually 84 percent of all healthcare costs. When we did the risk-sharing amendment for the ACA replacement bill, we were trying to fixate on that continuity of care. How do you finance that continuity of care for our brothers and sisters, particularly those who have those chronic conditions, to make sure that is continuity of care between themselves, their doctors, their healthcare institution, the insurer? I thought we did a fairly elegant job of drafting that and then putting real resources behind it. But this is important to understand, the outlier of our brothers and sisters out there, those of us who have preexisting conditions or who have chronic conditions, end up being the cost drivers in our healthcare. So our ability to be creative, our ability to say: If you have one of those in your pocket, can this actually be part of your healthcare management? Are we going to accept the reality that someone with a chronic condition should be allowed to pick up their phone and use FaceTime to talk to their doctor? Should a poor person be allowed to use their phone to consult their doctor? Should they be allowed to wear sensors and other things? There are some incredibly creative things rolling onto the market there to help our brothers and sisters with chronic illness. This body needs to be prepared to adopt them, because here is the punch line: whether it had been the ACA, whether it had been a replacement, had almost nothing actually to do with healthcare. It had to do with who pays. This was about the money: who pays, who gets the money. Because remember, it was in 1986--31 years ago--a piece of legislation was passed basically saying you cannot deny someone medical services. You show up to the emergency room, you show up in the hospital, you are getting your medical services, and you can actually see this in the data. For the last 30 years, the number of procedures, particularly the stuff it costs, has been laid much the same. So when you have people saying, ``Oh, you are not going to be able to get healthcare,'' we have been a society for 30-plus years that has sort of a guarantee of delivery of health services. The great battle is who pays. Do you remember a few years ago when we had the great consternation of dispro share, uncompensated care. I worked on those issues. And now all of these years later, we are basically trying to make an argument of who pays, how do we pay, how do we get more healthy--that is 20-, 30-, 40-year-olds who are healthy, how do we get more of them, particularly in the individual markets, to participate? Then the second half is Medicaid. This is a strange city because it is one of those cities, when you actually look at the dollars, even though the dollars are going to continue to grow and grow and grow, so many people define that as a cut. But remember, we were looking at the exploding deficit debt numbers. We have to deal with the reality. We are in real trouble, and we are going to have to step up and start being honest with each other about what is happening in the underlying math here. So I know this is a little diversion from what was in the CBO report, but once again, you saw on the charts that the healthcare and healthcare entitlement numbers were substantially driving the deficits. Now you actually sort of see what is in the underlying part of that population. We will go back to the beginning again. Hopefully, I haven't spoken for a whole hour, for your sake and mine. But one more time: this year, according to CBO, 3 weeks ago--and you have heard lots of talk about it, right? That was me being sarcastic--$193 billion of borrowing this year. We are going to borrow almost $1.9 billion every day, $79 million every hour. I have been here an hour. Has this been worth $79 million to you? But think about it--and I know I misspoke earlier, so that is one of the reasons I wanted to put this board up. It is $21,900, $21,900 every second of borrowing. I have a 21-month-old. It is the greatest gift the good Lord has ever given my wife and me. I pray for the birth mother every night, saying, ``Thank you.'' But if you look at the charts, when she hits her peak earning years, her tax rates are going to be double, maybe even more, of what I would pay today. The economic growth is probably crushed by the amount of debt; and a lot of the calculations, if we step out 30 years, the computers can't even model them anymore. Because, understand, there are some amazing numbers in here that functionally, in 9 budget years, we are at 91 percent debt to GDP on publicly held debt. That is not the money we borrowed from the trust funds. So the question I ask--I love my little girl. How many of you love your kids? How many of you love your grandkids? How many of you love this country? How many of you want this country to have an amazing future, because it can. This is all fixable. Just every single day we wait, we make it so much more difficult. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), who has always treated me very kindly. NAFTA Negotiations

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is one of those things I partially do, I think, as therapy. About once every other month, I ask for a block of time to try to take a bunch of very complex numbers and try to find ways to put them on boards and demonstrate them. I am going to take a little divergence just for a moment or two, in response to some of the things I have heard today. We are actually going to focus on debt and deficit and what is actually demographically driving them, what is really happening in this country, and what is going to drive all public policy in our life. You have had a handful of things said about the ACA--many people know it as ObamaCare--and our replacement. I know some of the things that the Senate is working on. There is a math problem--and it is very simple--in the individual market. So if you hear someone turn to you and say, This is about healthcare for everyone or this is employer-based, or Medicare, it is not. In my congressional district, less than 2 percent of my population actually purchased in the individual market. So you have to start putting this in perspective. Here is your math problem. Because the prices kept moving up and the deductibles kept becoming larger and larger, half of our population-- that 50 percent that only uses 3 percent of healthcare dollars--stopped buying. I came across a number earlier this week--I haven't had a chance to vet it, but it was in a publication--saying that, of the 18- to 30- year-old population that would be in the individual purchasing market, only about 17 percent of them were actually buying the insurance. So those of you who do math, you start to understand what happens in a world where half the population that really uses very little healthcare services doesn't buy a product and those who are purchasing it are those who are the high users of it. Remember, 50 percent of all healthcare dollars are used by 5 percent of the population. So you start to see it is this hockey stick curve that shoots up. That is the math problem that is trying to be fixed. In the last 3 years, if you are from Arizona, you have had a 190 percent price hike in the mean plan and you have a single choice. So if we are going to be intellectually honest, should we hold our brothers and sisters around here to their own words and their own promises? You remember the promises a few years ago about keep your doctor, $2,500 discount, lots of choices, lots of options, well, in Arizona, your prices have skyrocketed, you didn't get to keep your doctor, and you now have a single choice. That is the reality of the math. Sometimes it is just so hard sitting here when you hear people just pulling things out of the air, and then you go to the bill and say: But I can't find that. And you get these weird logic trains that if this happened and a meteor hit here and this and that. At some point we need to be honest with the American people saying it is a math problem. This is not about removing costs from the healthcare system. It is actually moving around, how you fairly distribute the cost of it. This summer now we are starting to work on it, just like we voted on about an hour ago a piece of legislation that starts to remove cost out of the system. It is these future pieces of legislation, like the tort liability bill that was just passed out of the House here, that will actually start to drive down costs. Remember a really important conceptual idea: in 1986, there was a law passed here, signed by President Reagan, that said you cannot deny an American health services if they show up at the emergency room, if they show up at the hospital. So if you actually look at the number of procedures in society in the last 30, 31 years, pre-ACA, after the ACA came into effect, what we see in the future, we haven't removed procedures and costs. We have just moved the money around. All right. So what is happening in our country? Do you remember when the President introduced his budget, what, about 6 weeks ago, 2 months ago, and the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and the crying? We have a math problem, and it is based on demographics. We are going to see this multiple times in these slides. I am one of them. I am at the very tail end. I am a baby boomer. There are 76 million of us who are baby boomers, who are heading towards retirement. That demographic curve is changing the cost structure of government. On the slide you see next to me, this is 9 years from now. Remember, we are working on, what, the 2018 budget? So actually less than that. This is what the world will look like in 2026. Do you see the Social Security being 24 percent of all spending? Do you see Medicare being 19 percent of all spending? Do you see interest on the debt? If you start to add up everything, you have to understand the world we are in is we are heading toward a time where three-quarters of spending--actually, even more than that are what we call mandatory. They are formulas. You get this benefit because you turned a certain age. You get this benefit because you fell under a certain income. You get this benefit because you served in the military. But what so many of us talk about as being government is becoming tiny. In 2026, which is not that long from now, 11 percent of the budget is going to be defense; 11 percent of the budget will be nondefense. So that is your parks, that is your medical research, that is your education. That is this branch of government. That is all the branches of government. So 22 percent will be what we call discretionary. It is what I get to come down here and vote on because everything else is run by a formula. So if you are someone who comes to me and says: I really think we should be going to Mars. I really think we should be doing this type of healthcare research. I really think we need this money in education. Okay. I agree they are all incredibly important in our society. Are you going to help me find a way to reform what we call mandatory spending, entitlements? Entitlements--because of the aging of our population--is the primary driver, are consuming every incremental dollar. In a decade, this government will be spending $1 trillion more, and every dime of that will functionally have gone into entitlements. We will have gone 10 years where what we call discretionary spending--you know, these little two parts here--has stayed flat for a decade. This huge growth in government is actually in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Certain other entitlements are things you get because you fell below a certain income, and interest on the debt. Until we are actually honest about this--because it is so dangerous for a political person to even say the words ``Medicare''--we have to look at the numbers and understand the trust funds are bleeding. If you really want to protect our brothers and sisters and protect retirees, some of these are things we should have done a decade ago. And we keep avoiding them because so often Washington cares more about the political up side of attacking each side from even mentioning what is going on demographically and in these numbers. We are going to try to run through a bunch of these slides. Some of them, I apologize, when you blow them up on the big printer, they are going to get a little fuzzy, but we are going to just try to walk through these numbers. Hopefully, they will make some sense. Why is this slide up? This one is really important. When you get down to the very last bar chart, do you happen to notice something? You notice how they basically touch each other. That is 2027. How many years from now--how many budget years from now? So about 9 budget years from now. Do you see the lighter blue? Okay. That is Social Security. The gray is the Medicare. Then the Medicaid. Then you get up to net interest. Then you see the green at the very top, and that is other mandatory. Oh, heaven. Do you understand what that slide is telling you? That is saying, in 9 years, just the mandatory spending consumes all revenues, meaning defense will be on borrowed money, meaning almost everything you think of as government--once again, the Park Service, medical research, education--will be on borrowed money. At that point we are going to be borrowing probably a little over $1 trillion a year every year, and it gets worse and worse. I am incredibly blessed. I have a 20-month-old, and since the blessing of her coming into my life and my wife's life, I think constantly: In the time I am spending here in Congress, what am I handing to her? Because right now the game is we spend it today, we consume it today, and we are going to let our kids and our grandkids pay it back. How does this become ethical? Yet if you listen to the speeches that happened on this floor today, it was speech after speech of: We want more money for something. At the same time--this is important--do you know how much we are going to borrow today? We are going to borrow over $1.6 billion today. I have 1 hour to speak here to you. Hopefully, if we are all blessed, I won't go that long. Okay. So $1.6 billion divided by 24. Sixty-six million dollars an hour. Start to divide that and just think about that is just the borrowing side of spending, because we are going to spend about $11 billion today on a $4 trillion-plus budget. So just understand that this is where we are going. This is already baked into the cake. This is the math. It is time for almost revolutionary thoughts on we need to look at the budget holistically. That means no longer having this little silo over here of this is discretionary, this is mandatory; and if you even talk about mandatory, you lose your political office. In many ways, this one is sort of doing the same thing but letting you see what is happening on the debt side. Now, why is the debt side so incredibly important to also focus on? We have to pay interest on it. We are borrowing money from your retirement, from the Union retirement, from the State retirement, but we are also borrowing money from a thrifty family in China, and we owe interest on it. We also make ourselves, as a nation, much more fragile to the world markets. We have been incredibly lucky the last few years of these stunningly low interest rates. How many of you actually believe the interest rates when you look at a 10-year instrument today that I think was at 2.2 and believe that is normal? If we actually just moved back to nominal interest rates, our interest would grow very quickly in the next couple of years to be greater than our entire defense budget. As you look at this slide, look out to 2026, many years from now, except it is not that long from now. Do you see the green bar up there? That is total debt. That total debt is starting to crash in on $30 trillion. A bit of trivia. You often hear the differential people say: Well, there is public debt and there is publicly issued debt, and then there is debt where we borrow from the trust funds. Okay. And many of the economists really only score debt that is sold in the open markets. Okay. Fine. I understand that is the practice, but there is something that is intellectually lazy, because we still owe the money back to the Medicare trust fund, to the Social Security trust fund. It has been a while since I checked this, but I think last year I checked, and we were paying a 3.1 percent interest spiff. So we pay a higher interest rate for borrowing those moneys out of those trust funds. Do we have an obligation to pay that back? Of course we do. But for the intellectually lazy, it is just so much more comforting to say: Well, let's just not look at that because, if we look at that, we are already over 100 percent of debt-to-GDP when we put in those dollars we have loaned to the general fund. Let's just call it that. Let's move on to the next one. If you look at this slide, you notice there is starting to be a theme here. I am trying desperately to get my brothers and sisters in this body to understand the greatest threat to our society is the money we are spending that we actually don't have a way to pay for. If you actually look at demographics and where this debt curves, it just blows off the charts. This is an interesting little slide. This is a CBO slide for 2027. When you actually look at it saying: Okay. What does the world look like if mandatory-- Okay. Do you see the blue? That is mandatory and defense spending. Because many people say: Look, we are going to spend on defense. We will be down to only--11 percent of this budget will be things you think of as government. Everything else will be entitlements or defense. Just as a perspective, we did this slide just so you could sort of see. I hear candidates running for office say: We are going to take care of waste and fraud, and that will balance the budget. Really? When only 11 percent of the budget in just a few years will be everything that isn't mandatory or isn't defense? You have got to understand the scale. This one is a little hard to read. I am going to reach over to it and play with my pen. When you actually look at this, what I am begging of you also to understand is--I think this is the 2016 year--we spent actually a bit over $3.9 trillion, but we only took in $3.3 trillion. You see the nature of the differential? And when you start to look at, first off, the beige there in the upper, we have been really blessed with incredibly low interest rates. So at a time where we should have actually been having an interest bill that would have been approaching a few hundred billion, we had less than $250 billion. Now, the dear Lord and the interest markets have been very, very kind to us. When you actually look at the curve, so much of the spending, once again, is what we call mandatory. But if you actually look at--we will call it the rust over there, something most people don't understand. I am going to reach over and point to what is the individual income tax portion. What most people don't understand is the individual income tax is the majority of the income to this country that is not intended for one of the trust funds. If you actually look at the corporate income tax, it has been going up, but it is still a fairly small sliver. Now, why did that change? And so often I will get people that bring me charts and say: ``David, 25, 30 years ago, the corporations paid so much more.'' Well, also, 25, 30 years ago, there was this new concept of pass-throughs: LLCs and partnerships. So what happened is many things that used to be corporations in the fifties, sixties, seventies, up and through the eighties, at the end of the eighties there was this revolution where States all over said: Hey, why don't we create these pass-through entities; they're more tax efficient. How many of you actually have had an LLC? Well, that is a pass- through entity. But that is where you actually see the shift of corporate taxes going down and individual taxes going up. It is not that corporations all of a sudden start escaping taxes. It is their taxes now were actually booked as individual income. Just to understand, so when you see those charts, you have got to be able to sort of process and think that through. This is sort of important to understand where the taxes are. But, do you see that circle there, that 40 percent of the entire curve? That is payroll taxes. That is the income that goes into your unemployment, your Social Security disability, your Social Security, your Medicare. Those are revenues that are specifically for either your retirement future, if you have a break in your employment, or, God forbid, you become permanently or temporarily disabled, with Social Security disability having its definition of what temporarily disabled is. Just to understand, those are our revenue sources. Then you will see the little slivers on the bottom, and some of that is tariffs and some of the other fees that come in, partially through trade. I know, sometimes these slides are a little hard to see, so we actually blew a couple of them up. The idea here was just so you could actually see the total revenues. Now, this is for 2017, so this is our projection of what is going on this year. And my wife, right about now is when she would typically start texting me and saying I am putting everybody to sleep. But I am married to an accountant, so that could explain why we have no friends. That is the payroll taxes. Do you see the far side? Let's call it turquoise. That is the individual income tax. That is why those of us on the Ways and Means Committee, when we are actually working on tax reform, many of us believe we have to sort of do an organic, a unified budget or a tax reform proposal that actually does everything from what you see here, corporate, which actually is much of our job engine, over to the individual, which is also now a huge portion of our job engine. Do not let someone just talk about lowering rates and not also understand that what you see on the individual side may be what you pay as a worker, but also, if you are an employer but you are organized as an LLC or partnership or pass-through, you are also on that side, just to know it is out there. Now we get to some of the more fun stuff. You were just looking at some of our revenues. We already know that this year, if you use the President's budget--or Office of Budget and Management--we are about $600 billion short. If we use that of the Congressional Budget Office, we are, let's just call it, $550 billion short, meaning we are spending that much more money than we are taking in. But, once again, let's actually just look at where we are spending the money. So the turquoise, Social Security, Medicare, and other health programs, so Medicare and Medicaid. National defense is this. Then come over here. This is everything else, and this is interest. So, last year, we spent about $245 billion in interest. This year, we are still blessed with incredibly low interest rates. We are only expecting about $266 billion in interest. Still stunning amounts of money. But the little white area is what most people will think of as government. So if you look at last year--and the nice thing about using this one is it is booked. We know what it is. We took in $3.3 trillion; we spent $3.9 trillion. You already start to see the structural difference. So, if you actually start to come over here, now this is much better than it was a few years ago. The problem is, in this fairly strong economy, it is closed, and now, demographically, it is about to start to move away from us. This is the line you always have to constantly think about. If that is my revenues and I drop my line down, you have to start understanding that everything beyond that line is borrowed money. Just visually, I have always found this easiest when you actually start to show different groups saying: ``Look, this is just where we are at.'' And then you will stand up and say: ``Hey, why don't we do this? Tell me what I can cut because you want a balanced budget this year.'' All right. Understand the math. If we are going to borrow $600 billion, that is most of defense. Okay. How about the other side, everything else we call discretionary? We could actually eliminate all of it and, believe it or not, you still don't have enough money to cover the borrowing. So, if you are borrowing $600 billion this year, I believe that is greater than all of the nondefense spending in the government this year. So let's actually start going through a little bit more where we are at and what is actually about to happen. The frustrating thing here is we have a number of charts that we have worked on about why we have been so off on our economic growth projections. If you go back a couple of years ago, we had these fairly rosy pictures where we were going to be, yet the country has not grown nearly fast enough. We are hoping this year, with the new administration, you are actually starting to see economic growth that will take care of a lot of these sins. I think GDP now, as of a couple of days ago, the Atlanta Fed's calculator was at about 2.9 percent of GDP. You would like to be substantially higher, but if we could hold 2.9 through the rest of the year, we will take it because it is so much healthier than where we have been the last few years. Why this is important is, I just want to show, the Congressional Budget Office's baseline for 2017, $559 billion more spending than we are taking in. But I am going to reach way over here and say, hey, what does the world look like 10 years from now? Ten years from now it is saying the annual shortfall, the annual borrowing, will be 1.4-- actually, let's be accurate--$1.408 trillion. So just the borrowing in 9 budget years will be greater than all of the discretionary spending of this year. And it is growth in entitlements; it is growth in mandatory spending. Why isn't that what you hear behind these microphones all day long? I have to believe that those of us who get behind those microphones, we love our kids and we love our grandkids, but this is absolute decimation of the future. And do not blame the parts of the government that we vote for, the discretionary, because the math doesn't show that. When you actually take a look at this, you see the darker and the lighter. The darker is defense, the lighter is nondefense. One more time, I know this is sort of geeky. But if you actually look from 1996 to 2001, yes, we have had certain economic upheavals; we have had an attack on our country. But if you actually look at the percentages of gross domestic product, which is how so many economists sort of look at our spending and say, ``Hey, you are spending 3 percent over here of your GDP on defense,'' it is pretty much identical where we were last year as to where we were 10 years or 20 years earlier. So, once again, what is exploding on us? Well, if you want to break it down, if you actually look at the different categories--and we are only going to do this slide for a second--the different categories will have stayed almost flat in the discretionary area for 10 years. So what is happening in our society? We are getting older. Something I thought was just fascinating because I have a great interest in the reality: We knew people were going to be turning 65. We knew baby boomers were going to be turning 65 for how many years? This body knew we had 76 million of our brothers and sisters who were born in an 18- year period that would be moving into their time with their earned benefits, and we did what to prepare for it? So we are now about our fifth year into the baby boomers retiring, and we are now beyond the inflection point. If you went to school many years ago and you sat in a demographics class, they talked about, oh, in the 2000s, there is going to be this time where you are coming up against this inflection where the spending is going to explode. You are going to see a couple of slides in a moment where I am going to show you what has happened now where, when I was a child, for every $4 spent for children, $1 was spent for seniors. Today, that is reversed. There is some math difference in there and there is some population difference, but that is where we are at. This is an interesting slide. You do understand, as a nation, we functionally have zero population growth without immigration. In about 25 or 30 years, the country of Nigeria will have more population than the United States. So when you hear someone talk, saying, ``Well, I am uncomfortable with trade,'' they have got to understand, if we need consumers for our products, we need to be finding these countries that are going to have lots of young people, and they are our future markets. We in the United States are moving down. I think our average age this year is 37.2, and that will continue to go up for about the next 25 years. I just put this up because it is fascinating seeing where the young people are going to be in the world, and we need to start thinking about, if we are getting older as a society, how do we still use our intellectual prowess, our creativity, our manufacturing prowess to make things that are desirable to growing populations, and let's make sure we have built a world and environment here where we can sell things to them. Because if we don't, we don't have the market ourselves. We are not going to have enough young consumers. So you have got to take that into reality. Once again, this one is a tough chart. It is on here just basically to understand what is happening in the world. What is incredibly fascinating is many Americans see China as our primary competitor, and in many products they are. On high-value products, countries like Germany, actually, are more of a competitor. But do you see this line here, this collapse? That is the Chinese demographics. If you understand that line, you understand a lot of things that China is doing around the world in trying to buy assets that produce income so they will actually have an income stream to start paying for their senior population. The United States is this dark here, and you will see--here is where we are at. We are sliding. But look at how many of our trading partners also are in the same demographic curve. It is just worth understanding that when you see many of us who lean towards being free traders, we are looking for where there are populations in the world that we can go sell things to. I am an American; I want to sell you something. Now, within the Nation, just fascination, if year 2000 the average age in the United States was 35.3, 16 years later, we are 37.9, that is a huge shift. I know that may not seem like a big difference when you start talking about two-and-a-half some points. That is a big shift in 16 years on average age. But also what is fascinating is for those of us out in the West, we will actually be somewhat younger than the middle of the country and back East. I am blessed to be from Maricopa County, Arizona, the fastest growing county in the country. Come visit us. But it is also to understand that this aging of America also is going to require different societal needs, and different States are going to have very different approaches. If you actually look at a State like Utah, it remains fairly young. Some of our States back East actually get quite old and are going to actually have very different societal needs. This is the mandatory spending chart. I actually wanted to spend just a moment over here on some of the percentages. This one I know is really hard to read, but if you actually start to look at the second part over here, ``discretionary,'' do you see all of those little tiny percentages? This is where a lot of our discussions get very disingenuous around here. We will have people coming behind these microphones almost acting like their hair is on fire because some dollars have been removed from this agency, or dollars are going to be removed from this spending program, and the unwillingness to understand the scale that we are talking about. It is just real simple. If that is every dollar of discretionary spending plus defense, and every dollar of mandatory, the mandatory is what, two-and-a-half times bigger? So if you are going to have a discussion of spending priorities, are we going to be a mature enough group to actually deal with the reality where the dollars are at? I promise, we are down to the last couple of these. So the share of the budget outlays, and this one is more--I am not being judgemental on this. It is just more of a thought experiment. This is actually from the Urban Institute, which it is always interesting to see a Republican using charts from the Urban Institute. This is a couple of years old, and the chart now is actually more aggressive. I just couldn't get the newest one printed. Do you see this little edge right here? This is sort of the Federal spending. Ten percent is going to children. Forty-one percent of the spending goes to seniors. It is just a thought experiment. We want to honor and keep our commitments to the earned entitlements, but the reality of the demographics keep moving up, and as we keep those commitments, the pressure on everything else is going to get much more cantankerous, much more cranky, much more difficult. We have a saying in our office: It is always about the money. Some of the disharmony you hear around here is going to get louder because, as you have already seen, the trillion-dollar engine over the next few years that consumes the next trillion dollars is all mandatory spending, is all demographics. So that is just another thought experiment. Every once in while we will get the people who come to us and say: Hey, David, why don't you remove this program or that program? One more time, we are borrowing--so much for my writing--$1.6 billion every single day. And that is just the borrowing side, and we are spending close to $11 billion every single day. So on occasion, you will get a group that comes in and says: David, we want you to get rid of all foreign aid, but we want to make sure you still protect Israel, and we still want to help the countries that are trying to help us deal with narcotics. And you start to get down and say: Okay, so you want us to cut half of the foreign aid budget? Okay, great. Well, that would be about 14 days of borrowing--not spending, borrowing. Because remember, we are borrowing $1.6 billion every day. And there becomes the intellectual problem where you will get an individual who comes in and says: David, just take care of the waste and fraud. And there is waste and fraud out there, and we are going to have to do it. And we are going to have to be much more disciplined in the adoption and the use of technology. But a lot of that language is gimmickry until you have someone who is willing to step up and actually just talk about the demographics that are our Nation. So think about this: I will have stood behind this microphone--let's just pretend it is an hour. Do you feel like you got $66 million worth of speechifying? Because we are borrowing $66 million a minute, $1.6 billion a day, and it is just not that. One of the reasons this is such a powerful chart--and this is from a private organization that does the U.S. debt clock. You do realize, the majority of debt in this country is borrowed. There was an article in Politico a couple of years ago that did this brilliant job. If you actually think about this, all of the student loans, all of the mortgages that have Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, SBA, all of these things, it was somewhere around 63 or 64 percent of all debt in the United States, you and I as taxpayers guarantee. The unfunded liabilities in Medicare itself over the 75 years, many actuaries have over $100 trillion. So when you see us fussing with each other down here, it is almost always about the money. And until we are willing to start talking about these numbers that are spinning out of control, the fussing is just going to get more and more angry until we step up and deal with the reality of what is driving our future, and that is demographics. Mr. Speaker, with that I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of the graduating class of the 2017 Dodie Londen Excellence in Public Service Series. Brandy Wells, Cindy Casaus, Debbie Vandenboom, Farhana Ahmed, Jeni White, Kristen Desmangles, Lauren Pemberton, Lisa Godzich, Dr. Shadow Asgari, Simone Hall, ViciLee Jacobs, and Yvonne Cahill have all distinguished themselves as impactful leaders in our community.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, as President Trump prepares to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi next week, there is much to celebrate in our country's relationship with India, the world's largest democracy, and in the enormous contributions that Indian Americans make in our country. There are four million Indian-Americans in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau. In 2010, Pew reported that 87.2 percent of adult Indian Americans were foreign-born and that Indian Americans are highly educated and highly successful. U.S. relations with India are critical to both countries. Our annual bilateral trade in goods and services could reach $500 billion by 2024, a five-fold increase since 2013, according to the Congressional Research Service. The role of Indian Americans in government is profound. In recent months, former Governor Nikki Haley was confirmed as Ambassador to the United Nations; Ajit Pai was made chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; Seema Verma was named Administrator of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services; four Indian Americans took their seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and one in the Senate; and countless more serve in state legislatures, local governments, the judicial branch and beyond. Indian Americans have deeply enriched our nation's arts and culture, and Indian media in the U.S. is surging to meet demand. Cable, satellite and radio offer a growing array of Hindu and Indian content. Global Hindi programmer ZEE TV's U.S. programming is viewed in nearly a million households. Politically and militarily, our two countries are united in a commitment to fight terrorism and promote world peace. Last year, the U.S. and India signed a historic defense agreement that paves the way for greater strategic and regional cooperation. Please join me in acknowledging the immense contribution Indian Americans make to the United States, and in recognizing the importance of continuing to strengthen ties between our two nations.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we have a whole hour here, and we may actually use the whole hour. This is an opportunity to actually walk through three areas that I care an awful lot about. One, I actually want to walk through something called math, and math in regards to health care. Some of this is actually to deal with--and I don't want to be mean, because I am going to try to do this in as nonpartisan a way as possible, but some of the things that we have just heard moments ago that lack just sort of basic roots in math and facts. Let me move this easel back just a little bit so we can get this. We are going to do a little bit of show-and-tell here to sort of help. First off, a conceptual problem, since, I believe, it is 1986, we in the United States have had statutes that say, if a sick person walks into a hospital and they have cancer, they are bleeding, they are going to get health services. This is a really important concept for us all to get our heads around. There is no such thing as not receiving care in this country. It may not be the care you want at the place you want, but it is the law. It has been the law for 30 years. If we are going to be brutally honest, much of the debate and discussion we are having here, whether it be the ACA or prior to the ACA where it was uncompensated care, where it was disproportionate share within our hospitals, or our reform legislation, it is not whether someone gets coverage or doesn't get coverage; it is who and how it is paid for and where is it paid for. Remember, these costs are already in the system. Does it go as a loss on a hospital balance sheet? Does it get pushed over to other populations within an insurance pool? That is the math we are actually working on. A couple of moments ago, you had a handful of Members come up and talk about preexisting conditions. If you hear someone use the term ``preexisting conditions,'' they basically are years out of date. There functionally is no such thing anymore. There is guaranteed issuance of insurance. We are going to go through this in more depth. Someone like myself, I am a severe asthmatic. I walk around with an inhaler in my pocket. I can grab any insurance today and I get guaranteed issue. Whether it be in the current ACA--ObamaCare, as many know it--there are variations in what we refer to as community rating. There are age levels. If you are a smoker, you get a different pricing. Some of those same mechanics we are doing in our reform bill. We are going to walk through why the way we are doing it we think actually will ultimately lower prices. We are trying to get that efficiency of the young and healthy to participate in the insurance pool, because they are not participating today. We are going to keep this board close by because this is important for everyone to understand conceptually. I know the chart is hard to see, but 5 percent of the population is 50 percent of the healthcare cost. Think about this. Of our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions, they are 50 percent of the healthcare costs, even though they are only 5 percent of the population. That is why we did the risk- sharing model that is being attached to our legislation. We are going to walk more through that. If you start to think about this curve--for those who want to do some math--it looks like a hockey stick. The healthiest 50 percent only use 3 percent of healthcare dollars. So 50 percent of the population only use 3 percent of the healthcare dollars. Then it comes along and explodes up like a hockey stick. The top part of this hockey stick, this 3 percent of the population up here, whether it be because they are hemophiliacs or uncontrolled diabetics or have other types of great difficulties, that population is 50 percent of the entire cost. What happened in the current ACA is, let's face it, the model did not work. You remember the whole discussion: keep your doctor; $2,500 savings; fewer visits to emergency rooms, which, actually, emergency room visits have skyrocketed or gone up substantially. Their model did not work, and mathematically it is imploding. We are going to go through some data, particularly from my home State of Arizona, on how much trouble we are in. One of the reasons it has not worked is less than half the population of those buying in that individual market are buying. Particularly, if you look at our healthy 20-year-olds, our 30-year-olds, that 50 percent of the population that only uses 3 percent of health care, they are not participating in the insurance pool. Well, how do you spread risk when you have millions and millions and millions and millions of Americans who are choosing not to purchase because it is too darned expensive or, because the contribution before you receive health care is so expensive and the number of waivers, it is just cheaper to pay the penalty? So what happens when you are trying to do the math and you have your brothers and sisters here in this body on the other side who either make up facts or just say, ``Well, just keep it as it is''? I am going to make the argument that the cruelty of that is just stunning. We are going to start to walk through a little bit more of these so we can actually help folks sort of understand this is the underlying math, this is why we must have a substantial change. Let's go back prerecession, just before the recession. Let's go back here to 2007. We had about 14.6 percent of our population going uninsured. That is unacceptable. Today after having spent almost--as some data says, as much as $1 trillion, but we will stick with a half trillion because that I can absolutely document--$500 billion of subsidies, losses, if you actually add up the losses insurance companies have had, if you add up the copays individuals had, if you actually add up the money that has been spent through the bureaucracies, we have dropped, say, a half-trillion dollars, today we are at 10.9 percent. If you are on the left, this is the grand success of ObamaCare. The grand success of the ACA is that you have gone from 14.6 percent of the population is uninsured, and today it is 10.9? Where is some of the intellectual credibility around this place to at least tell the truth of the math? If you start to divide up how much we have spent--and we were just doing this on the back of a napkin a little while ago. If you add up the population that has now gained insurance through the exchanges that did not have insurance or access to insurance before, some of the math comes to around only 6 million people. If you divide that by a half-trillion dollars, that is $84,000 per life for 3 years of coverage. We could have bought them their health insurance and a really nice car. You understand how absurd the current model is. I am not questioning the good intentions of wanting to help our brothers and sisters have access to health coverage. Great. Now let's make the math actually work. This chart is really important. This is actually not coming from me. This one, I think, is from Gallup. Most of the other data we are going to get is going to come from Kaiser or the Congressional Budget Office. I want you to understand I am going to be Arizona-centric because that is my home State. I am blessed to represent the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. But let's take a look at my little State down here. We are going to burn through these fairly quickly. I have about 6.7 million residents in Arizona. Okay. There are 6.7 million residents in Arizona. This is from Kaiser. Let's switch to the next board. Of that 6.7 million residents in Arizona, my citizens, how many buy their health care on that individual market? That is what we are talking about. When you keep hearing the grandiose ``the world is coming to an end,'' how many of my brothers and sisters buy on the individual market? About 278,000 people. That is a lot of people. But if you divide it by our population, it is 4 percent of my population. In my congressional district, it is somewhere around 2 percent of my population. The elegance of actually being honest about that piece of math is that it helps you understand we can fix this. This is the individual purchasing market. Let's take one step backwards. The majority of Americans receive our health care from our employers. Then we come over here: Medicare, VA, Indian Health Service, TRICARE, a number of these things. What we are talking about in the ACA and our replacement is that sliver of our population that is in the individual market and how to reform Medicaid. That is all. But often when something is complicated, it comes ripe for political hyperbolic language, acting like the world is on fire, instead of being honest and making the math work so we can serve our brothers and sisters with the health coverage we want. Remember, we have just come back here to Arizona. Only 4 percent of my population is in the individual market. In my congressional district, it is only 2 percent of the population. Now, you need to understand that when you hear many of us get behind these microphones and we talk about the system, the current ACA-- ObamaCare, as it is known; but I think that is unfair, so let's just call it the ACA--is imploding. For my State, it is. We are going to show you how few choices happen in my State. This is only between 2016 and 2017. Do you see this blue right here? If you were in that county, if you were in that individual market, you would have three or more choices. Do remember that, when this law went into effect, we were promised dozen of choices. Should we hold the left to their own promises? It hasn't happened. What is happening now, if you take a look all over the country, when you see this chart, county after county after county now has one choice. I want you to see what has happened in my home State. First off, statewide in my State, if you were buying the mean exchange plan, that Silver plan, statewide, last year, a 116 percent price hike. That is if you are in Maricopa County and you are buying the mean Silver plan. Maricopa County is the fourth most populated county in the United States, so it is not just a little outlier. It is the fourth most populated county. It is 64 percent of my State's population in one county. If there were ever an example of a county that should have had health care efficiency and pricing, it is Maricopa County. It is a large population. If you were in that mean Silver plan, you had a 145 percent price hike last year. How can I see people get behind these microphones and act like this system is working? Do you understand the crushing you are doing to people in my State, hardworking people who just want to say: I am the neighborhood plumber; I would like to buy health care? Either the deductibles have gotten so huge or the underlying price has gone up so high, we are actually seeing something fascinating in the uninsured curve. The uninsured population has now moved into our hardworking middle class because of the number of them that work for themselves that can no longer afford to participate. We will just say it was one of the unintended consequences of the current ACA. But it is one of those occasions we all see the data, and yet how many people get behind these microphones and tell the truth about how many people we are crushing from these deductibles to the current pricing? You saw the previous chart. We have gone from 14.6 percent of our population uninsured before the ACA to, now, 10.9 percent. We dropped about a half-trillion dollars. That is $500 billion. That is not counting Medicaid expansion. That is just the numbers over here. We have had testimony in the Ways and Means Committee that we believe only about 6 million Americans were newly insured, newly covered for that half-trillion dollars. Look, it is great they have coverage, but the math doesn't make sense. We could have done this so much more elegantly. So let's actually take a look at Arizona. This is 2014. If you go before that, it was even bigger, but take a look at my county. See all those little squares? Those were health insurance providers that were available to you in 2014. If you go a couple years before that, we had counties that had 15, 18 different possible insurance choices, companies who would provide; today, 2017, you see one little blue square. We are being told that we are going to have entire counties in my State--and Arizona is unique in that we have only 15 counties in the entire State. We are going to have entire counties with no insurance provider to that individual market. This is a system that is working? Take a look at my State. This is one of the reasons we have been working so hard, why we did the risk-sharing model. This is reality. This is Arizona. This is my home. My folks have had these massive, triple-digit price hikes. Now they have a single choice, and they are being told next year they may have no choice. This is the reality we are at. So let's actually talk about solutions. How do you deal with this? How do you actually help our brothers and sisters be able to afford insurance? How do you encourage providers to come in and actually participate in providing coverage to that individual market so there are options, there is competition, there is choice? If you actually think about what drives that price, so why the explosion in price? Well, the current ACA, because of the way it has these three tiers within, we will call it, the community rating--that is where you take all the people in your community who are participating in this insurance population, and say: You don't all get the same price. There are certain adjustments, and some of the adjustments were for age. So the ACA, ObamaCare, the current law, had three adjustments plus adjustments for smoking and a couple other externalities, and it made the concentration of cost and risk so expensive that--remember our 50 percent of the population who only use 3 percent of health care--they have chosen not to buy, which, in some ways, is a perfectly economically logical reaction to the current cost, to a world where it is so expensive it is cheaper to pay the penalty, so we have to find a way to drive down that cost for that population so they participate. When you were in school and you would hear the story in your economics class of there are occasions where by lowering the price you make more profit because you sell more units? The concept is pretty much the same here in insurance. If we can lower the price for our healthy population, more participate; we spread the risk over a larger, healthier population; we lower the price for that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who are in that chronic category; plus we are going to overlay a couple other things to help mitigate that cost to get the price efficiency for everyone. It is important. I know some of these slides are a little hard to get our heads around, but we have put together something called an invisible risk pool. If you are that American who has bought, who is participating in this individual market but has a chronic condition, you never do a traditional risk pool today because what we learned from the data over the last 30, 40 years of risk pools, there have been a couple successes, but most risk pools, hey, the cost goes up, you hit that sort of threshold, and you dump that person, saying: Hey, you are now the risk pool's problem, or you are the State's problem. We wanted a continuity of care. We wanted the sick person to receive services where the medical provider, the insurer, and the patient themselves all have skin in the game. They all have a need to participate, to manage, whether it be the individual's diabetes or some other ailments. That is the beauty of sort of this risk-sharing model, that for the population that is our sickest brothers and sisters, as their cost graduates up, there will be participation from this risk- sharing pool. Why is this absolutely fair? Remember how we talked about how most Americans receive their health care in the employer market? Well, your employer gets a fairly substantial tax deduction for providing that health care. They get to take it off their taxes. Well, we don't do that for when you are in that individual market. When you are in that individual market, for you to be able to take it off your taxes, so we have tried to come up with this methodology to make it fair, so we have come up with this tax credit. But we want you to have the money to help purchase your policy in the beginning, so there is this whole term, sort of this made-up new language that says a prefundable tax credit so you can buy your health insurance in that individual market. So that is on the front end. On the back end, to make sure the premiums, what we call premium efficiency, have stayed low and affordable, we are actually doing this risk sharing up here to help mitigate that spiking of cost so we can lower the prices for everyone so we maximize participation. There is some elegance in the math, and I think actually there is a great love for our brothers and sisters who have preexisting conditions up here because it is an invisible risk pool. They never know whether their cost is being subsidized by this pool, nor should they. We made a societal decision 30 years ago that someone walks into an emergency room, someone walks into a hospital with a condition, they get services, so the cost is already in the population. What we have been debating now for years is how do we pay, how do we move the chairs around? But if we are going to get efficiency in lowering premiums for everyone, remember, we need our healthy population over here to participate in this, and then there is a couple other things we are going to talk about. So functionally what we have done with the risk sharing, it actually accomplishes a couple really great things. One is the obvious part, if you are the insurer, and let's say you are the actuary at the insurer, and you are doing your math, you actually know what your risk exposure is on each life. Why that is important is you don't have to build what is often referred to as a shock absorber in your rates, saying: Dear heaven, what happens if tomorrow I get a handful of folks with a very difficult chronic condition that blows the cost off the charts? I have to build cushion into my rates. Well, with the risk-sharing model, they no longer have to have the rates padded for that externality that might happen. It becomes this multiplier effect where if I don't have to put that in the rates, I have lower costs over here. If I have lower costs over here, the model says I get a lot more participation in the health care pool, and everyone benefits. That is what we are trying here. So what do you actually do, if the argument I am making, whether it be the ACA, whether it be our replacement, in many ways what we are discussing is how to pay for the health care that is already in our society. Remember, as we have been talking, there is no such thing, if you are going to be completely honest, as a preexisting condition denying you coverage. There are some cost stratas, but that is in the current ObamaCare ACA, just as in our replacement, but some of that is by age or if you smoke or other things. How do you actually lower costs? Some of that comes in the next piece of legislation because, as you all know, in the bill we are trying to move now, we have to deal with the rules of we have no one on the left in the Senate who is going to work with us. We are on our own. So we have to find a way to do this with 52 votes in the Senate. We don't have eight Democrats who are going to work with us. That means we have to do it through reconciliation. Probably those of you who are interested in this stuff, you have read how reconciliation limits the things we can put into a piece of legislation. If you would like us to have more things, go find us eight votes on the Democratic side in the U.S. Senate. So what do you do to lower costs? We all know information. How many of you can grab your supercomputer you carry in your pocket right now, log into the hospital surgery center--your doctor--and immediately hit a button and say, Hey, the retina detachment, the cataract, the kidney problems I have, here is my cost for the services, here is my cost for the procedure? We need information. That is going to come, I believe, later this year. The next thing is, with that information, you create competition. That is incredibly important. Competition in health care comes as much from the price as it does the quality. We have done some great things in collecting quality data. With quality data and price information, we are hoping there becomes now this incentive to actually compare and move around. But what is the next revolution? I am going to make you the argument--and this is one of the elegant things I believe that is also now happening on the Medicaid side of our piece of legislation, and that is to allow creativity at our State levels. Arizona may have one of the most creative Medicaid systems, we call it AHCCCS in Arizona. We buy functionally capitated HMO policies for our indigent population. But every time we want to make a change, every time we want to try something new to service our brothers and sisters in Arizona, we have to march over to the Federal Government and get a waiver. We have to get permission from the Federal Government. Well, here is my question to you: Does a poor person--as a matter of fact, anyone, if you are in the individual market, if you are on Medicare, Medicaid, do you have the right to talk to your primary care physician on this? Of course you do. Do you have the right to wear the sensor on your body that helps you manage your high blood pressure? How about this contact lens that is going to be out probably next year that will actually sit in your eye and manage your blood glucose? No more punching a hole in your finger and doing a blood test to check for your blood sugars, your blood glucose. It will be constant, talking to your phone, talking to your pump. If that keeps some of our brothers and sisters with diabetes from crashing, it is great for all of us. It is great for society. It is great for them. It is great for healthcare costs. There is a revolution coming technologywise. One of the things I found fascinating is they actually have a little thing now where you can put your fingers on it and it does a full EKG. There is disruptive technology that is now available and is rolling out. How many of us now wear a Fitbit that helps you manage parts of your health care? This right here is about to bring a revolution in health care. A simple example, just a thought experiment for anyone who actually cares about these things: In Arizona, the majority of babies are born in our Medicaid system. Even my little girl who we adopted a year and a half ago, I believe she was born in my State's Medicaid system. Most perfect little girl ever. We know we have a problem in this country and in Arizona, a substantial number of the moms don't show up for their prenatal visits. When we have surveyed them, we get information back that says: It is hard waiting for the bus. It is hot out. Dial-a-Ride makes me wait. Why wouldn't you allow that poor person to hit a button on their phone and have ridesharing pick them up? There are solutions. If we could get our brothers and sisters on the right and the left here to actually talk to each other about solutions, but instead right now health care is such a potent political issue, I can show you article after article after article where the facts that are being disseminated to the American public are completely wrong. We heard some of that just minutes ago behind these microphones where the facts are absolutely made up. It is just incredibly cruel. Let me explain the cruelty. A couple weeks ago, we were doing just coffees with residents. A group of my constituents who are on the left brought a woman, and she has tears running down her face. She is standing in front of me wanting to know why we are about to take the health care away from her husband who is across the street in the hospital. How cruel does the left have to be to lie, to say something like that to someone because none of that was true. Our bill, their bill, that just can't happen in the language that if you are already in the hospital, if you have a preexisting condition, these things are covered, whether it be from the right or the left's language. But to manipulate someone who is already suffering like that, what sort of cruelty is in someone's soul to get a political advantage to manipulate a wonderful woman who is already suffering with the difficulties of her husband in the hospital? I beg of you, whether you be on the right or the left, actually read the amendments, actually read the language, understand what reality is, understand we live in a society now where all preexisting conditions have coverage. We already live under a law that has age brackets, if you smoke, variances, but very small variances. Even in the latest amendments, the discussion is, if your State wanted to do a statewide prenatal program, or my State where we have a disproportionate share of our population with diabetes, particularly with my Native-American population, if my State wanted to get everyone together, whether it be Indian Health Service, the VA, private insurers, our Medicare, Medicaid system wanted to try to put together a statewide program to reach out to our brothers and sisters with diabetes, that would be--if the actuaries and the math works--maybe wonderful. That would be an occasion where my State would reach over to the HHS Director and say: Can we have a waiver? We no longer need to have this type of coverage mandated in these individual policies because we are going to do it at the statewide level. I beg of you, think creatively. How do we cover our brothers and sisters? How do we deal with the reality that a huge number of our population right now is choosing not to buy because of price or have been able to receive waivers substantially because of price? And if we succeed here at driving the price down by our actuarial efficiency, the risk sharing up here, and spreading out, a couple of years from now, we are going to be standing behind these microphones and saying math won out over hyperbolic rhetoric. So can we talk about a couple of other things that are really, really important? I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. So why is tax reform so incredibly important to all of us? Understand, those of you who want to see Medicare, those of you who want to see Social Security stay solvent, do you understand what is happening with economic growth and the pressures right now and what is going on? So this little pie chart up here is functioning 9 years from now. You have got to understand, in 9 years, only 22 percent of the spending will be what we call discretionary, stuff I really get to vote on, stuff that is not in the formula. Eleven percent will be nondefense. Everything you sort of think of as government--the Park Service, FDA, Education--those things where moneys come to the Federal Government that go to these things is only going to be 11 percent of our spending. Another 11 percent will be defense. Everything else is either Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, or some of the other unearned entitlement programs. This is substantial because we are graying. You all heard of baby boomers. But the reality of it is, in less than 9 years, every dime of Federal revenues--and we are going to be taking in $1 trillion more. We are going to go from $4 trillion to $5 trillion of revenue. Every dime of Federal revenue will be consumed by what we call mandatory spending, entitlements. Military and every other part of government is going to exist on borrowed money. So if you are someone who really likes education, if you are someone who really thinks drug research is important, if you are someone who thinks NASA is important, if you are someone who thinks the parks are important, you should care about this. The reality of it is the math curve, even with a substantial growth in the economy, we are going to have to look at entitlement reform. And I know that sets people off because they are fearful, but it is a lot better than hiding from it. The thing that makes it less painful is a growing economy. Tax reform, we know, is the single greatest engine, the single greatest lever we have here as Members of Congress to get the economy growing. Fixing the healthcare issue will go a long way to help. Dealing with regulatory, dealing with immigration, dealing with embracing technology into our society and government can all be very powerful for economic growth, because our future does not have to be one buried in debt. But without a revolution in the way we think around here and a willingness to do tough things--and tax reform is going to be hard, but without it, you are basically sentencing my little 18-month-old girl to a future buried in debt, buried in slow growth. For those of you who may be my age, who are hoping to receive Medicare and Social Security, you are putting those programs at financial risk, and it doesn't need to happen. We can fix this, but you have got to move it away from the hyperbolic politics and actually start to be willing to own a calculator and start looking at the math. Why this is so important, right here on this chart, is start to understand, as you get down here--remember, 2027 is functioning 9 years from now, and, actually, only 8 budget years from now. One more time, every dime is consumed by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and the other handful of mandatory, what we call, entitlements. This is your future. It happens in less than a decade. It is here. Please, big, bold, dynamic tax reform is the first thing we can do this year, and then we are going to have to continue to move on to technology and everything else to sort of do whatever is necessary to get this economy growing. This one is a little more difficult, but we wanted to actually hold it up just so that there is an understanding of how fast we move from right now. Today, in 2017, about 7 percent of our total spending is interest. In a couple of decades, we start getting up to where it is 20 percent, a quarter of all of our spending. And this chart, think of this. In 9 years, interest is 19 percent of the budget. Okay. In 9 years, Medicare is 22 percent of our budget, of all of our spending; Social Security is 29. Just add that up. Think of that. Interest, Medicare, Social Security, the three of those start to consume the majority of this institution's spending. And then you add in what we call mandatory spending, other entitlements, and you start to see, in 9 years, it consumes every dollar of tax revenues. That is really, really important to understand why we need to have this two-phase approach. Right now we do everything that we can to maximize economic growth and opportunity. And when we talk about economic growth, this isn't just for the top line, big corporations. We need that economic growth of those people that pay the FICA tax. Our brothers and sisters that pay Social Security, our brothers and sisters that pay the unemployment tax, our brothers and sisters that pay into Medicare, we need their jobs to pay more. We need more of them. We need them to have more options in the workplace. So this is a tax design of how you maximize economic growth not just for big corporations, but for everyone. That concept of: Remember when we were all in school, that sort of velocity of economic opportunity, that mobility? We have been stagnant for a decade. We must, must, must bring it back. And why these numbers become so difficult--and this chart is a little hard to understand at first. These are the predictions of what economic growth was going to be this year, to understand how much trouble we are really in. In 2013, the brilliant--excuse me. Yes, let's just make fun of them. The economists around this town were saying: Hey, it is 2013; but by the time you hit 2017, all this stimulus, all this spending, all this debt, you are going to get a 4 percent GDP growth. You all saw what we had last quarter. What was it, 0.7? Now, honestly, first quarters the last couple of years have had a distortion, I think, in the seasonally adjusted numbers. But do you think we are going to hit 4 percent GDP this year? Because that is actually what a lot of the budgets were projected on. So sometimes we will be here in a debate with my brothers and sisters on the left, and they are holding up these charts saying: Well, it is 2013; we are going to be just fine over the next 10 years. And you get into those next 10 years, and you start to realize we are going to be lucky to hit 2 percent. So much of what we have shared with the American people in the previous decade, the numbers were blatantly wrong, and not to the good side, to a much more difficult side. So when we start to look at this chart--and, once again, 2026 isn't that long from now--you start to realize we are going to be approaching $30 trillion of debt. Why this becomes incredibly important, once again, for all my Keynesian economists out there who think we should just go more into debt, spend and we will get stimulus, now we have built up so much debt that the ratcheting effect you get if you start to raise interest rates and half your debt needs to be refinanced within a 5-year period--they call it a weighted daily average--all of a sudden any new revenues you may be getting from that Keynesian stimulus are being consumed by interest. Every day we wait to deal with this we lose options on how we can protect Medicare, on how we can protect Social Security, and on how we can protect our economic future. The sooner we do what is necessary in tax reform and all the other reforms and stop some of the crazy squabbling--I am sorry the left lost; well, actually, I am not, but I am sorry it hurt their feelings so much--and maybe come to the table and prove to the American people you actually care about them in a fashion where you are being honest with the math, hold up a calculator and demonstrate that we actually are going to do what is right. Back to the last part. We are going to do this slide over again because this is really important. Remember, we said part of this is just math. The economic growth. The part of our society that uses 50 percent of the healthcare dollars is 5 percent of our population. It is all fixable. So there are two themes here on the first parts of this. In health care, the expense, the cost is already in the system. Whether it be our reform, whether it be the ACA, whether it be before the ACA, the total cost is already there. What we have been working on are two things. How do you move the cost around so that we can actually lower the cost for that 50 percent that only uses 3 percent so they will actually participate in the insurance market, lowering everyone's rate, instead of what is happening today where they just don't participate? Remember, you saw the slide. 10.9 percent of the population is not buying health insurance today. They don't have coverage. They are uninsured. Some of that is because of the cost; some of that is because of the waivers. The only way you get them in is that thing we call premium efficiency. We have got to drive down that cost. But if we do that, I am actually pretty optimistic good things are going to happen. Now, I want to actually take you to something that there really are bipartisan solutions. I am going to make you this argument that technology is the great optionality around this, it is the great unifying thing. I am going to walk you through something, and later I want you to tell me whether this is Republican, Democratic, right, or left. I am going to make the argument it is data. I live in Maricopa County, the fourth most populous county in the United States. It is what we call a nonattainment county. It means certain types of pollutants are in excess, and on occasion it spikes up. In the past, we would get a phone call from EPA saying: Hey, one of our monitors shut off. We think we are going to shut down your building permits. Well, remember how we were just talking about we live in a society where we must have economic growth if we are going to be able to finance and pay for our promises? So I came to you and said there is a much more elegant way to keep the air clean and actually have economic growth: reward those who are following the rules and catch those who are breaking the rules when it comes to polluting our air quality. And it is data. So right now, here is how we regulate. You want to open a business. Let's say you want to do a powder coating business in Phoenix. You have to go out and get a bunch of permits from the county, from the State DEQ. You also submit to the EPA. Depending on the types of volatile organics and other things you are using, you may have to file reports every quarter. You have to do a major audit every year. Does filling up file cabinets full of paper make the air quality cleaner in your community? Seriously, because this is our regulatory model. We basically have a 1938 regulatory model where we make people fill out lots and lots of pieces of paper. We send them in. We hire lawyers and auditors, and we hire consultants to help us fill out this paper, and we shove it in file cabinets down at the air quality regulator or environmental quality regulator. Do full file cabinets make the air quality cleaner in your community? It is an absurd model when we are all walking around with supercomputers in our pocket. There is now technology coming on the market where you, through Bluetooth, through an actual plug-in, you can actually be walking around with your own air quality monitoring system. Well, think about my community. If I could have a couple thousand people driving around, traveling around, walking around, hiking around my community getting air quality samples every 5 minutes, at the end of the week I have a couple hundred thousand data points. You put it up on a GIS map, and you catch those who are sinning. Think about it. It basically is a combination of crowdsourcing citizen science. And the tradeoff is don't make that company fill out lots and lots of pieces of paper or that organization over here fill out lots and lots of pieces of paper and fill up a file cabinet, because if I have enough monitors and sensors moving around the community, if they screw up, you catch them instantly. It is not like today's world where a couple of years later maybe an auditor catches them; you go to the file cabinet and use the file cabinet as a tool to sue them, but yet you have had 2 years of pollutants in your air. Let's catch the bad guys immediately and leave the good guys alone. We can do that by this sort of crowdsource data model, the idea that the entire community gets to participate in the collecting of the data. You get to look on the GIS map. The air quality regulator gets to look and say: Hey, we have a hot point over here. Let's go find out what it is. Hey, we found some clowns painting cars in the back of a lot. Are those clowns out there getting air quality permits to do it? The folks down the street that are using the filters and are in the booth, if they are following the rules, they get left alone, but you catch the ones that have been escaping. It is a use of crowdsource data. We actually have a whole video of this on our website. We now have introduced a piece of legislation that is over at Energy and Commerce. This should be a bipartisan piece of legislation because that Republican or Democrat--it uses data to let you know what is happening in the air quality in your community. It uses data to catch bad actors, and it uses data to let you know you can leave good actors alone so they can grow their businesses, so they can pay people more, so there are more job opportunities, instead of spending the money filling up file cabinets and hiring consultants. It is an elegant solution. Is that Republican or Democrat? I will make the argument it is data. There are solutions that both sides around here can use. So the next time you have someone getting behind these microphones and saying, well, we are deregulating this--no. It is time for a revolution in the way we think. We are all walking around with these. With the new sensors, you can manage your health care, you can test your water, you can test your soil, you can check the ambient sound, but you can also do the air quality in your community. I am going to make you an argument there are actually solutions moving around here, and if I can get beyond the hyperbolic rhetoric, maybe we can start to move some of these solutions forward. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to celebrate the life of a great friend to Arizona, Mrs. Sharon Giese, who passed away on April 19, 2017. Sharon distinguished herself in our community as a thoughtful leader and respected advocate. Sharon Giese served with distinction as Arizona's Republican National Committeewoman from 2002 until her retirement in 2016. She was President of the Arizona Federation of Republican Women (AZFRW) from 1992 to 1993; she was a supporter of and parliamentarian for the AFRW and National Federal of Republican Women for many decades; she served several years as the official professional parliamentarian for the Chairman of The Republican National Committee as well as the Arizona Republican Party Chair at various meetings and conventions for over a decade; she was a delegate to Republican National Conventions in 2008, 2012 and 2016, held multiple positions in the Arizona Republican Party, supported Republican Teens, was an elected precinct committeewoman, member for many years on AZGOP central committee and a Presidential Elector in 2016. I am proud to honor the life and legacy of Mrs. Sharon Giese for her tireless and devoted service to our country. I extend my condolences to all of her friends, family, and loved ones.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had that deja vu all over again? Haven't we been doing this one since, what, 2013, 2014? I accept I have been off the committee now for 4 years; yet we are talking past each other. I hear the gentlewoman and some of the others say things. It is a 12-page bill. It hasn't changed that much in the last couple Congresses. How many of us would like to go back to the 2013 inspector general report that basically suggested going this direction because of the conflicts in these advisory committees? If you really, once again--and this is sort of similar to yesterday's discussion--if you really care about the environment, then you really care about the data and the information and sort of the ethics and honesty of those who are both reviewing the data and giving you advice. So what happens when the inspector general of the EPA hands you a report and says: These committees, these advisory councils are rife with conflicts? People who are on these advisory boards are making money. Now, accept much of what we do here in Washington, D.C., if not almost all of it, is about the cash, and it is one of the ugly secrets that is not a secret, but we all pretend. It is always about the money. Let's try something novel. Let's actually--this was an inspector general's report under the Obama administration. Why wouldn't we step up and respect it? It was very simple. Hey, we need some more diversity on these advisory boards. And wouldn't it be wonderful if we had people advising us on air quality policy in non-attainment areas, or in regional interests that also weren't selling products, selling reports, making money off data with the EPA? I mean, if it was reversed, if it was some other agency, if this same set of ethical lapses was reversed, I believe the left would be apoplectic. But the fact of the matter is that so many of these individual organizations that are represented on these advisory boards, that are making money from the EPA, even though they are advising in their own behalf, happen to be friends of the left. That makes it okay. The ethical standards are the ethical standards. I have no concept how the left can oppose the concept of structured diversity. Why shouldn't those of us from the Southwest, where substantial portions of my State are Native American, have a voice? Why should we allow people on these advisory committees who, once again, are selling products, selling data, making a living, making money, one step away from the very work they are advising on? It is a 12-page bill. It is not that complicated. I will make the argument that it makes our air, our water, the things around us safer, better, healthier, and it makes the way we get there sounder and more ethical, and we remove conflicts that right now taint the very decisions that are coming out of these advisory boards.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I don't really know the gentleman from Virginia, but you can hear in the tone of his voice he is truly well- meaning and cares about his State and his population. If you actually read this motion to recommit, things in here, such as best available science, are obvious. If you actually read the three pages of the legislation, that is the obvious part. For many of us--and being sort of the original previous generation author of the bill--that was our goal. But does anyone see sort of the intellectual duplicity when, on one hand, you say proprietary science, and then--the best available science, but other science can't test, stress, analyze, bounce, conflate, model the proprietary science, because it is proprietary, with the best available and other datasets? You can't have both. If you are going to try to make public policy in a world with functionally secret, proprietary science data that is sold--actually, let's be brutally honest here for a moment. This stuff is sold to the EPA. One of the reasons some of the groups that have been listed off oppose this legislation is they make money selling the data, and then they make it so you can't actually look at the datasets underneath and test it. How does that lead us to knowing that we are taking care of our brothers and sisters out there? How does that lead us to actually knowing we are doing it the best possible, most rational way and that our rules, our mechanics are correct? On your motion to recommit, I am a severe asthmatic. I have had it since I was an infant. I am one of those people who wakes up every day and takes a hit of my inhaler to make sure my lungs are okay. In the back room, I have an emergency inhaler. I know what it is like to live with asthma. I care tremendously about the science, but I also want there to be vigorous debate. I want there to be all sorts of research. I want there to be this sort of crowd-sourced world where science and data are competing with each other and being modeled together; and living in a world where we trust the bureaucracy, where we trust proprietary, secret information to make our rule sets. I don't know how anyone, intellectually, can get to the point of thinking that is making our society healthier and that we are actually doing it in the most efficient manner possible. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, look, I miss the Science Committee, and I know I have been banned, and I have had a lot of coffee today. I was going to come up to the microphone and sort of do the blast away, but let me back away. A number of things I have heard in this debate from the left and even a couple of the things from my side, okay, you are conflating all sorts of things that this bill doesn't do. This bill is three pages. So can I ask a question? If I came to you right now and said, ``Tell me that the EPA actually has the right rule sets for hydrocarbons, if it has the right rule set for PM10, it has the right rule sets for ozone,'' you would say, ``Well, I have a peer-reviewed study that says this.'' I want to make the argument, in today's technology, why shouldn't your university, why shouldn't the really smart person who has the computer system in their basement, why shouldn't the new statistical packages that are on these things be allowed to take the data the taxpayers have paid for and work it and model it and bounce it off other types of datasets and ask is the way we model and regulate rational? This bill doesn't reduce regulations. In many ways, it allows us all to participate in the citizen science to understand whether we are doing it the right way. Why is the left so scared of citizen scientists, of university scientists, of people who are just darned interested in the matching of different types of datasets? You and I might find out we are doing things the wrong way. You and I might find out we are not doing enough. You and I may find out we are doing far too much. But stop being afraid of people having access to the information. If society is going to live under a regulatory environment, then society deserves access to the information that creates those regulations. Public information for public policy, why is that so feared? Why is there so much trust in the bureaucracy instead of science and information? I want to argue with you that, in today's world, when we are on the cusp, where sensors are going to be attached to this, taking thousands of readings in our communities, that that information is just as noble as something that is locked up in the cabinet where none of us can actually see the base datasets.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the following proclamation: Whereas, Anika and Priam Zela, twin sister and brother, will be honored by their parents, nona, family and friends on the occasion of their 1st Birthday on March 18th, 2017; and Whereas, Anika and Priam Zela were born in Phoenix, Arizona on March 16th, 2016, at 12:45 p.m. and 12:36 p.m., respectively, blessing their parents and their family, and have been residents of Scottsdale, Arizona since then; and Whereas, March has been a blessed month for Anika and Priam, as their parents first met on March 3rd, 2007, the wedding of their parents was held on March 20th, 2011 and they came to this life on March 16th, 2016; whereas March marks the beginning of Spring, where the grips of winter are just beginning to lose their hold as a new season of life begins too; whereas March was the beginning of a New Year and is still celebrated as such in many cultures and religions; whereas March marks the Vernal Equinox where northern and southern hemispheres are equally illuminated and day and night are of equal duration all over the earth symbolizing a twin approach; whereas March marks the International Day of Happiness exactly to the day their parents wedded and Equinox happens, as well as marks the World Mathematics Day; whereas March's birthstones are aquamarine and bloodstone that both symbolize courage; whereas March is named after Mars, the god of war, fertility and agriculture who oversaw the new growth of Spring, and encouraged the continuation of life; whereas the personality of March (and Mars) is charging, unrelinquishing and brutally assertive as, at this point in the year, there is no stopping the burgeoning birth of new life; whereas March (and Mars) is a high-speed locomotive on a single-focused monorail with only one objective: Explosive Expression; whereas March meaning embodies the reigniting of the hearts and consciousness of humankind, a time when we feel the initial kicks of Spring from the deepest womb of the Mother Earth; and, like our ancestors, we are quickened, our soul-palettes are whetted for new conquest and bold assertion and we set a course for forward-momentum; and Whereas 2016 (MMXVI) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2016th year of the Common Era; and Whereas 2016 was a very eventful year, designated as the International Year of Global Understanding, where ESA and Roscosmos launched the joint ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on a mission to Mars; where Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world's longest and deepest railway tunnel, was opened; where NASA's Juno spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter and NASA launched OSIRIS-REx, its first asteroid sample return mission; where the final videocassette recorder was manufactured by the Japanese company Funai; where the Solar Impulse 2 became the first solar-powered aircraft to circumnavigate the Earth, and where Summer Olympics were held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Whereas, March 16 is the 75th day of the year (76th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar and there are 290 days remaining until the end of the year; and Whereas, March 16 is the birthday of James Madison, Jr., the Founding Father and fourth President of the United States and who is hailed as the Father of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as well as is the birthday of Georg Ohm, one the most famous physicists and mathematicians; and Whereas, their parents, family and society expect them to live long and productive lives and be a force for good, justice and progress for those around them, the country and the world; and Now, Therefore, it is hereby deemed a pleasure to extend this Certificate of Recognition to Anika & Priam Zela on the occasion of their 1st Birthday, with sincere congratulations and best wishes for a long, happy and successful life, wishing them that, with courage, knowledge, love and a spirit of discovery, there would be no limit to the heights they can reach, keeping their eyes on the stars, and their feet on the ground.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am here to speak about one of the ideas in this package that I have, shall we say, 5 or 6 years in; and the interesting thing, it was a conversation back and forth with a number of Democrats on the other side. It was one of those--it started as sort of a philosophical debate. Often you hear us fussing at each other here on the floor, and we will get into these debates of, well, the concentration of wealth in the country; you know, the number of folks who now hold so much wealth. Yet, if you take a step backwards and look at the way we have our laws set up in this country, we don't decide that you get to invest in certain types of activities because of your talent. We don't decide you get to invest in certain activities because you are an expert in the technology or the business model. We actually have a series of rules that, if you have $1 million, you and your wife have a certain income, then you are allowed to invest. You think about that. So if I came to you right now and said, I am going to judge you by the size of your bank account and not by your competence, that would be pretty outrageous. I guess for years and years, none of us had really sort of talked about it, thought about it in that way, that the arbitrary rules that the SEC and we had allowed to continue were a world where we judged people by their wealth and then gave them additional opportunities instead of handing those same opportunities to people because of their expertise in investing or the technology, their expertise in understanding the risk profile of such technology. I am hoping that is where we are heading. There was a number of compromises to make both sides feel comfortable, and that is actually one of the reasons we had such a bipartisan vote; and to that, I also thank my friend, Chairman Garrett. I am going to miss you because you have worked hard to shepherd many of these concepts through for years now. I think this is a great start because we are going to start judging our brothers and sisters by their talents and not necessarily their bank account size, and that is why I am so happy on this one.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Huizenga for the couple minutes. This is one of those moments, has anyone actually read the four pages on the bill? Great. In that case, we should all know this isn't about selling jets. It is about using the American financial system to finance them. That is what the language of the bill is. Think about this. We have now spent the last 6 years around this body talking over and over and over how we are going to keep the American financial system safe, how we are going to not do things that concentrate debt within our capital markets. If Iran wants to buy jets, let them go find bilateral agreements in other countries. Let them show up with the cash. Let them go find someone else to put up the surety bonds. Let someone else go put up the coverage on the lost pieces on the ladder of the financing. This piece of legislation coming through the Committee on Financial Services is about protecting our financial system, first, from what many of us on the committee believe is going to turn into bad debt and functionally become toxic within our financial markets; but then, secondly, do you really want the United States financial system providing liquidity and financing for the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world? That is a pretty powerful ethical question when you consider what we have been through in cleaning up our own financial system over the last few years.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask that the 50th birthday of a dear friend, Mr. Eric Johnson, be recognized on October 14th. A great patriot and Arizonan, my wife Joyce and I wish Mr. Johnson another 50 years of good health and happiness. Happy Birthday, Eric.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, Beijing's concentrated effort to isolate Taiwan from the global community, coupled with Taiwan's ambiguous sovereignty status has contributed to its exclusion from many international organizations and agreements. This is despite Taiwan's willingness and capability to be a major actor on the international stage. This past year, the world witnessed Taiwan's third peaceful transition to power as the first woman was elected in Taiwan. The 23 million people on the island of Formosa represent the only democracy in the Chinese speaking world. While Taiwan might be separated by oceans and different cultures, we are united in our respect for democracy and human rights. As an economic partner and vital ally, the United States should aid Taiwan in ensuring its meaningful participation in international organizations and bodies that it has expressed interest in participating. It is of vital importance for Taiwan's inclusion in the International Civil Aviation Organization. Taiwan occupies a critical geographical location and handles large cargo and passenger volumes. More than 47 foreign airlines operate flights from Taipei to over 100 international destinations. For the sake of passenger safety and international security, it is crucial Taiwan be brought into the ICAO fold. Any exclusion from the International Civil Aviation Organization is unnecessary and unconstructive. On this noteworthy day Congress and the United States are provided the opportunity to evaluate our relationship with Taiwan. As such, the United States should work with Taiwan and our allies to ensure Taiwan is fully included in the international community, including the ICAO.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, many of us have sat on the terrorism finance committee, and I appreciate Chairman Hensarling for allowing me to sit there. But the more you learn, the more you understand the levels of complication. We have this habit around here, when we get behind the microphones, we make things direct and simple in a sound bite. It is complex, and there are tremendous amounts of money and bad things happening here. Why would a simple piece of legislation--one of the beautiful things in here is it gives me more openness so we understand what the bad actors are doing.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, can I bring a slightly different discussion and weave it back into the things that have been said here? Mechanically, we often have this conversation that if we had a more holistic understanding of the money that was going to bad actors around the world-- I am holding parts of the report here talking about 18 tons of cocaine being moved through north Africa and then, ultimately, through Lebanon, through the handlers of Hezbollah and a billion-plus dollars of cash. As you and I know, we have all sat through the terrorism financing testimony and others that Hezbollah doesn't move, ultimately, without their puppet masters in Iran instructing them on what to do. So take a step backwards. If I came to you and said I care about terrorism, I care about bad actors, I care about drug resources moving through the world, and I have the country of Iran whose proxies are functionally, today, the leading money launderers not only in the region, but probably the world, and then we look at what the administration has done--I understand many people support it for the nuclear arms side. I am fine. I am enraged that the openness and the misrepresentation and lying--just plain lying--to Congress on the timing, what happened, and how it was delivered--was it in cash, or was it in wires? So a piece of legislation like this, why would we fear another layer of just openness and disclosure saying that this is woven into many evil, bad actors in the world that are moving billions of dollars of illicit money and illicit narcotics, people--human smuggling--why wouldn't we want to sort of have the view of what is Iran's hand in it, what is their proxy's hand in it we call Hezbollah?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I thank the gentleman from Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I actually wanted to touch on something that is a little bit different. Look, we have all seen the documents. We have all heard the argument, even this evening, on the bad acts. Now I want to walk you through why we must do this. And I understand for a lot of our brothers and sisters in this body, this is uncomfortable. This is something that hasn't been done in a very long time. So let me walk through sort of a line of logic, because you can't be a Member of Congress and go home and do townhalls and talk to reporters and say, ``I am going to defend the Constitution,'' ``I am going to defend our Article I authority,'' and then not stand up and defend it. So let's actually do sort of a linear line of logic here. If tomorrow one of you became a CEO, 15 years ago this body passed something called Sarbanes-Oxley, which basically said, if you are in the leadership and someone commits bad acts in your organization, you accept the responsibility because you accepted that position of leadership. These are the things we require from the real world outside this body. Has anyone here ever been a real estate broker, had a securities license, other types? If bad acts happen underneath your license, what happens? You lose your license. You are removed from that position. But somehow these rules, this concept of responsibility that this very body has put out on the rest of the country, the rest of the private sector, is not willing--or is uncomfortable--to demand the very same status of responsibility, the very same status of ethics that we require from a real estate broker, from corporate executives. We are not going to require it from the head of one of the most powerful bureaucracies in this Nation? And this is to all my brothers and sisters in the body. I accept it is uncomfortable doing something you have not done before. That does not mean it isn't the right thing to do. You have heard the argument made. The facts are crisp and clear. Now it is time to make that decision. Are you willing to defend the Article I position that this body holds in the Constitution? Are you willing to defend the Constitution? Or are you willing to let our representation of the American people continue to be trampled on by this administration? Mr. Jordan, thank you for letting me have the mike.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, to our friends on the other side, I will let you know, I am going to move to withdraw the amendment, but I do want to share a little bit of an explanation of why I am taking this approach. I am blessed to represent much of the Phoenix area, the epicenter of where the calendar, where the scheduling system was manipulated. For those of us who are in this body who have had the opportunity to sit across from a widow who cannot stop crying because she is telling you that, in everything she believes, the VA took the life of her husband by the delays, after the delays, after functionally being lied to and the delays. I accept in this body I may be bordering on being sort of a techno- utopian, but I have a belief that there is technology out there that is already widely adopted in the rest of the world. I mean, there are countries that the entire nation's database system is run this way, something called a distributive ledger, a blockchain. The beauty of what we were trying to weave into this is the concept of, hey, they are already working on a scheduling software. If you enable it across the server network, no one can manipulate it. You can't sit there and slip in and change the dates and the times without it being date-stamped. That is the beauty of a distributive ledger model, and you don't have to custom design the software to do this. Basically, you are already using the capital you have already spent on the series of servers you have, and then it distributes it across it. This is today's technology--in a world where we step up and say we are going to custom-design a software solution for scheduling, that is brilliant if it were still the 1990s; it is not--our ability to use a type of technology where the veteran can log in through secure passwords, see their own records, see their history, see their schedules, and know that it is bulletproof, that no one can manipulate it; and if there was a change, they can see when and who did it, and they get to participate in the scheduling of their own health care. This will work on apps. It will work on a home computer. It will work on the servers at the VA. I have to reach out and say thank you to the chairman and to his staff because I know some of this is new technology, and rolling it out in a very specific fashion is sort of disharmonious when you are moving forward with a reform bill of this nature, but I am hopeful that many of us are going to sell you the idea that there is little technological improvements that can be woven in and actually solve many of the structural problems, crises, concerns that all of us have had to face at the VA over the last few years. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment enumerated as No. 8.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, Kent Obert, 18 years old, died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2003. One night during his sophomore year of high school, Kent called his mother to say that he was out with some friends and wasn't coming home that night. He was calling because he didn't want to worry his mother, but when they hung up she knew something was wrong. Kent's mother waited for him when he came home at 6:00 AM. Life changed for the Obert family that morning. Kent went to the doctor and tested positive for substances. His family restricted Kent's computer time and monitored his activities. They made a lot of changes that next year and Kent adjusted fairly well. He transferred schools and graduated with ease. Kent got a job he loved and spent time with his friends and family. His family thought they had dodged the bullet-- Kent didn't want to be addicted to drugs so they mistakenly thought they were out of the woods. It seemed that all was well, but Kent's family didn't know any better. Before Kent turned 18, he was scheduled to have his wisdom teeth removed. His mother filled the prescription before his surgery and as she was looking at the bottles, she noticed that one of them had fewer pills in it than the other. When she confronted Kent about it he admitted to having taken some. She asked Kent why and his answer was chilling. He asked his mother to think about a time in her life when she had felt ``Great''--``The Best.'' When she nodded Kent said, ``The first time you get high, it's better than that. It feels so good that you want to feel that way again--only it's physically, chemically impossible.'' He explained how the drugs alter your brain chemistry and why people take more and increase their frequency of use in an attempt to get back to the feeling of that first high. On a Monday in September, 2003, there was a knock on the Obert family's door and soon they heard the words: ``Your son has died.'' Kent and two other kids crushed some Oxycontin and washed them down with beer. Kent got sleepy and the other two left. As Kent slept, the drug slowed his respiratory system down until it stopped completely. His roommate found him the next day--already gone.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. In some ways it breaks my heart, and I wish we could get over this game we play around here where it is a Republican piece of legislation, and a couple of my friends on the left feel obligated to stand up and oppose it, even though you and I know when we had the conversations of building parts of this just 4 years ago, 5 years ago, these were the very things we talked about we were agreeing to. We desperately need economic expansion if we are going to keep the social entitlement promises of this society, and to stand in front of even the small attempts to expand the economy--we need to get on the same page here.