David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 145.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Ellzey). Then, we are going to actually do some actual math and facts. Honoring Commander Bruce ``Puppy'' Fecht

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas. He always has some amazing stories. Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a little tricky because I am going to try and weave three major subjects together. Some of it is going to be really technical. Some of it will be slightly sarcastic, but the math here is really important. I am going to do it backwards from how I originally thought because I want to hit a couple of things that are remarkably important. I have come behind this microphone, heaven knows how many times and shown the charts. We are borrowing $72,000 a second. We could borrow as much as $2.3 trillion this year. I am going to show some other things in here such as Moody's, and why they downgraded us, and show some of the things that are going on. On occasion I get this: What are your solutions? Then we always try to come in and say: Here is the technology chute where you can disrupt the cost of healthcare. Here is the technology where you could change the price of delivering government services. We started almost a year ago in my capacity on the Ways and Means Committee, chairing the Oversight Subcommittee. I now chair the Joint Economic Committee, and I thank Mr. Speaker because he helped me actually have the capacity of hiring a Ph.D. in healthcare economics. We have dropped last week--that is a term where we put in something called a ``hopper.'' That is actually where you file your piece of legislation--two pieces of legislation where the preliminary scores are almost $2 trillion in savings over 10 years. As we are having this discussion of debt and deficits, can you extend the tax policy? Can you do other things? It is not going to come from traditional austerity. The fact of the matter is that math doesn't work. You are going to do it through policy. You are going to fix policy, and people just stare at you like you are an idiot when you try to explain these things. Let's walk through our big one. This is an occasion where I promise you that there is so much money involved. There is a reason other Members of Congress have been unwilling to do what we knew was a problem. A few weeks ago, I came here with the MedPAC reports. I don't know if anyone ever bothers to read them, but you go through there, and it should light your hair on fire. For the last year, The Wall Street Journal has done a series of articles basically showing hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, misallocation, just misalignment incentives in something we call Medicare Advantage. Walk with me through. In the early 2000s, there was this concept of managed care that if we could help our brothers and sisters with their earned benefit in Medicare, saying that we have fee-for-service, but you have to pay all of these copays. What would happen if you could align the incentives saying that we want insurers to manage a portfolio of access to healthcare, but within that, those insurers will actually make their money by helping you be healthier? The model, which started in 2005--many of you know it as Medicare Advantage. You see the ads, and that is actually part of the problem-- was supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for-service because this was a system where you were going to get better quality care, get taken care of, and the insurers would make their profit by helping their population become healthier. Mr. Speaker, it turns out that if you actually read those MedPAC reports--these are the auditors who do the modeling, and we are talking something that is almost a trillion dollars in spending last year, so we are talking about something that is stunning amounts of money--last year, Medicare Advantage came in at 120 percent of fee-for-service. Mr. Speaker, just that delta, 120 percent to the 95 percent that it was envisioned to be, that right there is $100 billion a year. The fact of the matter is if you have been following the series of articles--I think ProPublica--The Wall Street Journal has spent tremendous resources doing it--it will curl your hair. Then you have been seeing the most recent stories about the potential criminal acts. I think last Thursday, a story broke of actual criminal--not civil; criminal--coming. Is it time for us as Members of Congress to talk about something which is often dangerous because when you are taking on a system that has trillions of dollars flowing through it, you have to understand that there will be ads in my district that are going to beat the ever- living crap out of me. It is the job. You have to tell the truth, know the math, and come with actual solutions. Mr. Speaker, we went back and said: How do you design a system where you make sure the benefits, the promises, are there for seniors because it is an earned benefit? How do you make sure that you are doing nothing--nothing--to cut that access to healthcare, to cut that access to quality healthcare, but you align the incentives to go back to the original vision where it is about helping those seniors who are on Medicare Advantage become healthier, and the morality of that. We had to do a number of things in design, so we introduced legislation. This was the preliminary score from the Joint Economic Committee economists: $1.76 trillion of savings over the 10 years. Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is it is only about 10 percent of the cost of the program over those 10 years, so you start to understand the scale of the cost of this. We believe--understand, this is only conversation between economists, and I was not on the call--that the preliminary score right now is $1.84 trillion coming from the people that will score the legislation. That would make it probably, from everything we can guess, the single biggest reduction in spending in a single bill in probably U.S. history. Does that give you a sense? When you have people talking about waste and fraud and misalignment and bad acts, this is the ginormous granddaddy of it all. It is not that big of a bill. It is a little complex. It is really scary because, as you know around here, we are not ever supposed to talk about these things, particularly Medicare, but this is not Medicare as you think about it. This is the insurers who are paid to actually manage your care and help you be healthier. Yet, you have this series of stories saying how they have been taking advantage of the system. There is a way to make this work. Even the MedPAC report says that we support Medicare Advantage and want it to stay, but we are going to have to fix these misalignments. The economists have been modeling the savings. Mr. Speaker, what happens if you have a moment here where these sorts of dollars in savings--and this is going to tie in, Mr. Speaker, to talking about what Moody's did last week, talking about how this and our talent-based immigration bill, those two bills together, probably score at $2 trillion of savings, and they would be good for the economy. They would be good for healthcare. They would be good for people to be healthier. They would help grow the economy. This is an example of getting policy right to actually take on a small sliver of the debt because, remember, our baseline debt for the next 10 years, we are going to borrow another $22 trillion. Even though this number is massive, it is still just a fraction of what is coming at us. Mr. Speaker, I am trying to make the point again. Our legislation, which we call Better Medicare, has been introduced. It is in the process of being scored. Yet, when you start to see these sorts of dollars--and, yes, it would change the current spending projection by about 10 percent to 10.7 percent according to the Joint Economic Committee economists. Yet, you already had the MedPAC saying it is already 25 percent more expensive than was the original model. It gives you a sense of we are making reforms, but we are just trying to align the incentives. We have done some things to actually help the insurers be able to have sort of automatic enrollment, but you can choose to opt out for a longer period of time so that the investment for that senior who chooses that Medicare Advantage plan to be given the services to be healthier. Yet, also with that healthier, the provider benefits by having a healthier population. We have been trying to just think like economists instead of so often what you hear behind these microphones because something I have teased about--I actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago--in Nature Human Behaviour, there was an academic article. This is one of those geeky ones that is peer reviewed, all of those things: ``Computational analysis of U.S. congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition.'' They basically took 240 years of House floor speeches, ran AI across them, and said: Guess what has happened? These speeches around here no longer talk about facts, about data, or about math. We now tell our feelings. The problem is, if you have complex problems, your feelings aren't going to help us fix complex problems. It turns out that math does. This is what we have been trying to do on this reform of Medicare Advantage. We want the system to work, but we can't allow $1.76 trillion over 10 years of fraud and bad acts. If you don't believe me, get in front of your computer right now and look up some of the articles of the potential indictments, the criminal activities that are coming. Also, look up The Wall Street Journal series that actually talks about people being scored as sicker, and they don't have the diseases. They don't receive services. They are not on those medications. Yet, you and I as taxpayers are paying for it, and we are borrowing the money to do it. Please, if you are a staffer watching this, if you are an American that actually cares about us getting our act together and doing things better, if you are a Member of Congress, I know doing big things around here is terrifying. We don't have a choice anymore. If anyone actually read the Moody's report that was put out last Thursday, they make a couple points that should scare the crap out of us. In 9 budget years, they believe about 9 percent of the entire economy in that year will be borrowed by the Federal Government. That $3.8 trillion will be the borrowing amount in 2035, and that is just a baseline. The reason we often don't tell the truth, the reason we avoid it is because almost all this growth of this borrowing is interest and Medicare. It turns out it is really not Republican or Democrat; it is demographics. We are so busy trying to get elected next time, we need something to blame them, and they want to blame us. If you stand up here and try to actually fix problems, you will get the crap kicked out of you, but at least you are trying to do the right thing. This is what you are hired to do on this job. It is not pander to your voters, but tell them the truth and try to fix things. I can't tell you how many speeches I hear behind these microphones where people will tell you the problem over and over. They will never spend a year writing a bill, putting about 100 hours in to it with academics, with Ph.D.'s, and healthcare. Experts from the industry put together a bill that says: This will work. This will make things better. Mr. Speaker, here is a philosophical thought I want everyone to think about. The United States just got downgraded by the third major credit rating agency. Did you know there are 18 States that have a higher credit rating than the United States Government right now? Eighteen States have a higher credit rating, yet every dime a Member of Congress will vote on, every dime of discretionary, nondefense discretionary, as we call it, is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed money. About $400 billion, I believe, last year of what we call mandatory spending, the formulaic earned benefits, things of that nature, is borrowed money. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39, and much of that money we are sending to States. My State of Arizona, we do some things actually really well. Our Medicaid system called AHCCCS is actually remarkably well run, except for some of the fraud. I am going to touch on that. We haven't built the models to catch it faster because we are not actually incentivized. Now, we also play incredible games where we use a provider tax. We actually make money for the general fund more than is actually spent on healthcare. One of the great scams we are trying to fix right now is what happens when the washing machine is actually where you are padding State budgets instead of taking care of healthcare, but that will get protests. Eighteen States have higher credit ratings than we do. It is just an interesting thought experiment. How about if I told you that, I think it is as of yesterday, either 12 or 13 countries can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. If any of you are paying attention, remember there is this concept of interest fragility. One of our greatest threats to this country is our ability to finance this debt. Today, both the 20-year and 30-year bond went over a touch 5 percent. We showed actually a couple months ago that a single point of interest on U.S. debt over 10 years came in at like $3.3 trillion of additional interest. Just a small movement of interest rate is bigger than everything we are debating here, but we are not going to tell you that. A, because it would require math; B, it would require facts; and C, it might actually mean someone has to do something. There is an economist at Bloomberg, Anna Wong, who is truly freaky smart. I have had the opportunity and the honor. She came and spent part of a day with my Joint Economic Committee economists. She has been at the Federal Reserve. She has been at the White House. She is one of those people that is just intimidating on how she is able to calculate the world. She actually was looking at our reconciliation budget. She says that if we will do just a couple policy things, it is neutral in cost. It balances out. That is the point I am standing here for. We cannot allow the taxes to go up on working people in this country. Well, right there that is $3.1 trillion. How are we going to offset it? It turns out if you take a look at--and this is just from Anna Wong's analysis. If you are a really geeky, you can get this on your Bloomberg terminal, all six people in Washington that have a Bloomberg terminal. They are really expensive, but I actually need it for what we do. If the tariffs what they are producing, some of the DOGE offsets, it turns out if we will incorporate some of this policy, we can make this budget neutral. That is actually often part of my request for the leadership, for the committee chairs, for those of us in Ways and Means, we need to start actually pulling out our calculators and thinking this through. How do we do these things so we can stabilize the economy, maximize economic growth, but not be adding to the debt? There is math that does it. Will anyone actually read the documents? We actually start to walk through this. We are actually trying to build models right now on trying to see what is coming in in custom duties. That is the tariffs. What is that offsetting? You will see me over the coming weeks with a couple of charts and start saying: Okay, here is what we have to plug into our models. For everyone who has been whining around here, here is your math problem. I wish they would start the whining with telling the truth on math and facts before telling anecdotes and stories. Remember, I just pointed out to you the 140 years analysts of the speeches here in Congress, how they have become now about feelings instead of facts because we can manipulate you with telling anecdotal stories. This simple chart here--see the nice coins? We stole this from someone else. Baseline is we are going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. All we are talking about trying to save is $2 trillion out of that $86 trillion. Are you telling me we can't get $2 trillion out of $86 trillion over 10 years? This is what is causing the emotional meltdown here because this place only cares about one thing, and that is the money. Spend it, spend it, spend it, and basically screw over people's retirement and my kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year-old and 9-year-old. When my 2\1/2\-year- old--yes, I know. My wife and I adopted some kids. It is the greatest thing we ever did. When my 2\1/2\-year-old is basically 23, 24, every single tax in America has to be doubled to maintain baseline spending. I have done presentation after presentation where I have come here with the actual charts using Democrat economists showing that every tax hike the Democrats have proposed on the wealthy--capital gains, income--the entire plethora produces about 1.5 percent of GDP. All the austerity, the cuts on our side, accounts for 1 percent of GDP. That is a big 2.5 percent. Mr. Speaker, we are going to borrow about 7.3 percent of the economy this year. I showed you a chart a little while ago that Moody's has us in 9 budget years borrowing 9 percent of the economy. Does anyone see a math problem? The rhetoric here, the moving of the mouth, doesn't match what is on the calculator. We make crap up. This is the baseline fact. Baseline, we are set to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years, and all we are trying to do is reduce $2 trillion. I think we should reduce dramatically more, but I think you can do it through policy, the adoption of technology, and the alignment of incentives, and we can make the delivery of government services work. When only 31 percent of the phone calls at the IRS get answered, are we doing our job? You do realize there is technology that would fix that, but that would anger the union of the government employees there. There are these barriers where you have armies of lobbyists walking up and down these hallways, and the inefficiency, that waste and fraud, is their profit model. Mr. Speaker, 80 percent of the spending growth--we are not supposed to tell people this, but it is the math. You can't do policy unless you are willing to tell the truth about the math. Eighty percent of the spending growth over the next decade is Social Security, Medicare, and interest. The interest is now scaring the crap out of us because there is this concept called term premium. As the Ray Dalios and these people who are the billionaire experts are saying: China is in the market. Germany is in the market. The United States is bingeing on debt. There is almost not enough savings in the world to finance the scale of borrowing, and much of that borrowing is driven because of demographics. The entire industrialized world got old. We have a shortage of young people. I think the math is, in 9 budget years, 23 percent of America is 65 and up. Are we doing the things to maximize automation and growth so we can have productivity and continue to afford and provide the very services we promised? No, that would require math, thinking, and policy. It is not good storytelling, is it, Mr. Speaker? Look, it is also one of the reasons I was so enraged about the intellectual laziness, I thought, of the Senate. Look, this is where I am being a bit sarcastic, if not mean. The House is not perfect. There are a number of things I am unhappy with. Leadership still doesn't have my vote on it until I get some agreements that we are able to move policy to start changing some of these numbers, but I have shown up with the policy. I am not just moving my mouth. We put it on paper, and we introduced them as bills. Now, look at the charts of the Senate's unwillingness to actually put policy into their budget reconciliation. The reason we have to demonstrate a level of fiscal discipline--if you care about poor people, if you care about economic growth, if you care about my kids, if you care about your retirement, and if you care about what this government provides to society--we have to figure out how to pay for it. CBO says that when we finish this fiscal year, U.S. debt will be at $37.2 trillion. We have to take to market this year in just refinancing--and I am not counting the short roll on the short end of the curve if you want to geek out. I think we are going to bring $9 trillion to market. We are probably going to bring another $2 trillion, $2.3 trillion of new issuances, and will start to see where the United States is interest rate-wise. We start seeing Greece and other countries having substantially lower interest rates than us. That should set off an alarm. Do you want the money to go to the world's bond markets? You do realize that convincing the world debt markets that we are creditworthy, that we are being disciplined, that we are doing things--just that differential is more money than everything that is being debated here. When just 1 point of interest, 1 point differential here, is over $3 trillion, that would solve a lot of this debate, wouldn't it? We can actually get those types of bond rates if we demonstrate to the world that we are creditworthy, disciplined, sensible, seeing long term, and actually understanding the honesty of our demographics. Instead, a bunch of the brain trusts here in Washington spend their time attacking Moody's for downgrading us and telling the truth. The problem is, if you actually read their document, it is the truth. For everyone out there who thinks balancing the budget and doing those things is simple, if you actually listen to folks from the last administration, this administration, the fantasy goal is to get to 3 percent of debt to GDP, not 7, not, heaven forbid, in 9 budget years being at 9 percent. If you have 3 percent, you are more sustainable. You have to stop the fantasy of saying that we are going to cut it all with nondefense discretionary. Nondefense discretionary is 12 percent of our spending. Almost everything you think of as government-- the Park Service, the FBI, the White House, our salaries here--that is in this 12 percent. Interest on the debt is every bit as big as all the nondefense discretionary. Actually, real interest on the debt, if you add up everything, is about $1.2 trillion this year. Remember, when we borrow money from the trust funds, we have to pay interest and pay it back. For those who are willing to run around here and are interested in having discussions on Medicaid--remember, Medicaid is the program that was designed for indigent populations, for women, children, infants. Yet, you hear almost protests from the left. Here is a $2.5 billion fraud in Medicaid in Arizona, where they exploited Tribal members, abused them, recruited them from our Tribal communities, put them in sober living homes, and bled the system for money. It took years because in a system that has the incentive where you are doing provider taxes and more of that money, raising the cost, it ends up in the general fund of your State. We should be ashamed that these types of scams were allowed to bleed money that should have been going to people who needed the help. Look, if we don't get an alignment of policy, the cost, and how these things can actually work, Mr. Speaker, I think we are going to continue to live in this world where our debates mean nothing here. They are just based on feelings, exploitation of our voters, telling them things that are actually mathematically not true. It is great politics, and right now, this place seems to care so much more about winning the next election than the survival of this Republic and its economy, people, and prosperity. Is prosperity moral? There is a path where we can meet our obligations, help our brothers and sisters who need the help, and not scare the hell out of the very people who we turn to every single day because this government borrows $9 billion a day, $72,000 a second. Next year, it is going to be close to $82,000 a second. In 9 years, it is approaching $100,000 a second. Often, the discussion behind these microphones are things that set off your anger and the mathematical fantasies. If I get one more person who says: I saw on cable news this, so why don't you fix it? I say that I would be happy to fix it, but realize that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting--I think that calculated to paying for 2 hours, 15 minutes of borrowing in an entire year. Mr. Speaker, it is the lack of understanding of the scale of this math. There is hope. There is a way you can make this work but not until the calculators are pulled out. The morality and the prosperity are the goals, and it is the moral thing to do. Mr. Speaker, I apologize to anyone if I hurt their feelings. Send me a note. I will write you an apology note. I seem to write a lot of apology notes. I continue to be mad at both parties and almost everyone around here because we are not willing to do the math. There is a way we can make this work. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I could almost hear the joy from my staff saying: Hey, it is only 30 minutes this time, not an hour. Mr. Speaker, I want to do just a handful of things. One of these days we are going to have not enough noise about the facts, the numbers, the data, the debt, those things that we can come in and sort of do our boards, our charts, on things that actually reduce spending and modernize. I do want to sort of start with this. We have spent time since last summer working on pieces of legislation. The Wall Street Journal series and the ProPublica series came out about the scale of bad acts that were happening in what we call Medicare part C, which is Medicare Advantage for most of us, which is now I think about 55 percent of the Medicare population. We have been working on that to sort of modernize it, and so for all the lobbyists who are making money trying to beat us up for trying to actually fix it, I will warn you that the legislation is almost done. We now have to work with the economists and others to score it. We have been stunned though that it continues. Even last Thursday, I think, there was another whole set of investigations or indictments announced. Let's get on to some of the math here. Mr. Speaker, I have come behind the microphone many times and talked about the scale of debt. We borrow about $72,000 per second. Our math next year, that goes up to about $82,000 borrowing per second. If you are a country that needs to borrow about $6 billion a day, we borrow about $6 billion a day, what happens in a world where you actually--the liquidity of the debt markets. I grabbed an article that was in one of my--I think it was in one of my bond publications because I have some weird reading habits. ``Japan prepared to use its role as America's largest creditor as leverage in Trump's trade talks.'' The point I want to make by reading that headline to everyone is: Japan now is our largest individual creditor country. When you have a country that has $900 billion, maybe a trillion dollars of U.S. sovereign debt, and you walk in the door and say: We want to renegotiate some of our trade pact with you or we want to build an actual trade pact with you, they look at you and say: But we right now take those dollars that you send us because you have been buying our stuff, and we are buying your debt. The fact of the matter is if you are a country that is borrowing $6 billion a day, does anyone understand the fragility, and I am going use that fancy word a couple of times, because also interest--we are actually seeing some indications that when we get out of extraordinary measures--for everyone who doesn't understand, we hit the debt ceiling a couple months ago. Right now, the Treasury every day for that $6 billion shortfall is juggling money internally and borrowing it out of the military retirement accounts or our thrift savings accounts, the cash accounts, and those things. We are doing internal borrowing. All that has to be paid back, and it all has to be paid back with interest. We are still working on the rough calculation. Treasury put out a number, but I don't like their number because I don't think it was real, and we had all the visibility. We worked on the dataset saying: When we finally raise the debt ceiling, let's say a month or two from now, Treasury is going to need to pay back those dollars plus the interest. They are going to come to market with $400 billion, $500 billion, $600 billion of borrowing. Just be prepared for what is really going on in the interest rate markets, the debt markets, and will we be beyond some of the discussions of trade where countries like Japan aren't leaking stories that they are going to use our debt as leverage against us. I used this board a couple of times now, but I want it to make sense. This is the estimate for net interest as a share of revenues in 2035, so that is 9 budget years from now. The chart here and the bar here I want people to pay attention to is Moody's, who has this whole thing where they do analytics on debt and spending. Mr. Speaker, their estimate is in 9 years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections, that is everything, corporate, individual, estate, the tariffs, everything, they estimate in 9 years, 30 percent of all those tax receipts that come into the Federal Government will just pay interest. This is based on sort of today's interest rate projections. I showed some charts a couple weeks ago that showed an estimate that if U.S. debt went up 1 percent in interest--selling our bonds, if interest rates went up 1 percent on us, in that 9 budget years, it is not 30 percent of tax receipts that go to just interest, it is 45 percent. Are you prepared to have a world where here is $1 of taxes I am paying, and 30 cents of that just pays interest; or God forbid, interest rates go up, and 45 cents of that dollar just pays interest on the bonds? There is also a chart where we actually went back to the early 2000s when we were kissing up against 6 percent, and it was just like devastating, the amount of tax collections that get consumed by interest. Remember, when we finish this fiscal year, the CBO estimate is U.S. sovereign debt, all of it, the gross debt, will be at $37.2 trillion. The thing we are not supposed to tell people because it hurts their feelings, gets them upset, but it is called math, is over the next 10 years, the vast majority of debt is interest and healthcare costs, mostly Medicare. Unless you are willing to have honest conversations about debt deficits and demographics, the demographics is the driver of U.S. sovereign debt. We have a shortage of young people in America. We have foreigners come and get educated here, and we send them home because we are so brilliant. Healthcare costs: We do all this game playing around here where our healthcare discussions are about healthcare finance, not about changing the cost of healthcare. The thing about this, the ACA, many of you know it as ObamaCare, it is a financing bill. It is a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. Medicare for All is a financing bill. We don't have the discussion of how to revolutionize this either through technology, a healthier society, taking on obesity, the things that drive the cost of healthcare--how about this concept of we build a healthier society, and we use technology. I am wearing one of these Oura rings. We are doing experiments in our office with other wearables trying to build data. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just data. I don't know why we haven't been able to build a love connection here or a policy connection or whatever the hell we are supposed to call it between the left and right saying: What would happen if we engage in policies that change the price of healthcare? Instead, we do these debates because everything in Washington is about the money. The people marching up and down our hallways here are not coming to our office to say: David, adopt technology. Lower the price of living. Lower the price of healthcare. It is: We want more money, or we want you to build a barrier to entry to our competition. We call it rent-seeking, if you remember your high school economics class. Let's take a look here. I need you to understand how rough our position is in the world right now. Global 10-year borrowing rates. I brought the charts before. We have been bouncing between the 13th position--I think we fell to the 12th position, then the 14th position--where other countries are able to sell their bonds cheaper. Yet, the one that just enrages me, here is Greece. Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today. When you run around thinking that the United States is the gold standard, we are also screwing up our extraordinary privilege of having the world reserve currency, and the dollar is coming back to us because you start to see some slowdown in buying U.S. sovereign debt. Mr. Speaker, we don't know the real numbers because we are in extraordinary measures. We are not coming to market with new debt. Yet, think about this. Here are the countries that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States: Italy, Greece, France, Canada, Germany, China, and Japan all can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States with lower interest rates. Does that make anyone concerned? I think I have a chart that shows that the United States will consume 30 to 40 percent of all of the world capital that is going to sovereign debt in the next decade. Yet, we are not supposed to talk about that. Then, the absurdity from the left: Well, we tax rich people more. Okay, at best, you might get 1 percent, 1.5 percent of GDP. For all of the things we talk about cutting, we get about 1 percent. So the 2.5 percent--Mr. Speaker, this year, we are on pace to borrow 7.3 percent of the entire economy. That is just this year. One of our charts--and I think this one comes straight from CBO--says that with that little change in interest rates, in 2035, we may be well over 9 percent of the entire economy that year in borrowed money. It doesn't have to be this way. We are doing these reconciliation negotiations, all of those things, and the inability of groups that come into the office and demand more money to come in with an idea, saying: Maybe we shouldn't be spending billions and billions of dollars on duplicative MRI scans or the things we just waste money on because it turns out that that waste--some people who come behind these microphones call it fraud--turns out to be the profit model of many of the bureaucracies and many of the business models. It doesn't have to be this way. Start to take a look at the actual data. Last year, the gross interest--that is what we sold publicly and had to pay interest out internally. When we borrow money from the Social Security trust fund or these other things, which all that money has already been borrowed, we have to pay interest back. When Social Security redeems its bonds, we pay them back the money they need for that next month's checks to come out because, remember, Social Security is running about a little less than a structural 25 percent shortfall from tax collections to checks out the door. We also pay them interest. Last year, we spent $1.133 trillion in interest. Our best estimate right now is your government will spend just a little shy probably of about $1.3 trillion in interest this year. Why that is important: Realize that is more than defense. Let's take a look at this. Think about that. Starting at about 2022, our interest became more than the Department of Defense budget. How many of the public understand that interest, if you actually calculate the gross interest, is now the second biggest spend in the United States? Social Security comes in at about $1.480 trillion. Interest this year will probably come in at, what, $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion? Interest now is No. 2. Defense right now is actually coming in around No. 4--Social Security, interest, Medicare, defense. How many times do you hear people come behind these microphones who actually at least know their basic math or want to tell the truth to the voters? Once again, is this Republican or Democrat? It is just math. It is an obligation that we have to pay. We are going to do what about it? We are going to squeeze out our ability to do the things that we believe are important for protecting the Constitution and the society because, God forbid--the bond markets forbid--that we all of a sudden start to have a spike in interest rates. You start to understand that many of our brothers and sisters who come behind these microphones--I show the chart all the time saying: Here is the pie chart of all of our spending. Today, about 75 percent is on autopilot. Mr. Speaker, you and I get to vote on 25 percent of the spending. About half of that is defense; about half of that is nondiscretionary. Every dime that a Member of Congress votes on today is borrowed. Think about that. Other than when you are in reconciliation where Members actually get to have a vote or try to work on mandatory spending, which is formulaic, all defense and all nondefense discretionary is borrowed. My colleagues have heard a number of Members come behind the microphone and talk about how much nondefense discretionary has gone up, and it has. We have lied repeatedly when we did sequestration. Paygo, how many times--paygo, I actually think was a Democratic proposal from years ago that, if we are going to add new spending beyond the 5-year window, there needs to be an offset. Members saw a number of bills that expired just before the fifth year so that they don't set off the paygo, or like we did back in January when we owed approximately $1.2 trillion in cuts to meet the paygo--pay as you go-- rules. Now we just waive it, just like we have done with sequestration and all these other things. We tell people that we are going to be fiscally disciplined. As soon as it is uncomfortable, then we will just waive it. Why this is important is we will say that there is a 45 percent increase in discretionary spending since 2019, and it is. Yet, when my colleagues actually look at it, it is a lot of money. Did I mention that we are borrowing $6 billion a day? We went from $662 billion--this is nondefense discretionary, this is the Park Service, this is the IRS, this is the State Department, all of the things we think of as the government--it went up to $960 billion. Yet, why this is important to understand--I would vote to roll that back to the 2019 budget. Yet, if you see it as a percentage of GDP, the size of the economy, we are spending, which is the proper way to do big-boy math on budgets. In 2019, nondefense discretionary was 3.1 percent of the economy. Last year, it was 3.3 percent of the economy. It went up, but the economy got bigger. It turns out that, if you are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year, you could get rid of all of what you think of as government, nondefense discretionary, and you could get rid of all of defense, and my math on the top of my head--I probably should have calculated this before coming behind the microphone--you would still need about another $400 billion to cover borrowing that covers Medicare. Think about that. There are those who say: David, balance the budget today. I can do it. Of course, you are not going to have a military, you are not going to have what you think of as government, and I need to find $400 billion in the mandatory space. There is this lack of understanding of the scale. Getting old, when it is healthcare and interest, that is the primary driver. No one wants to hear that. That doesn't set off the dopamine receptors. It doesn't make people mad. It doesn't get you on television. If you tell the truth about the drivers of U.S. sovereign debt, you will never end up on MSNBC or FOX News or any of those because no one wants to hear the actual math. We want things that anger people. It turns out that good accounting isn't really that exciting, but it is math. Mr. Speaker, here is the punch line which worries me and why I beg my brothers and sisters: For those of us in the House, we have a reconciliation budget. We are trying not to let the expiring provisions raise people's taxes. We have a reconciliation budget in the House that, if we do everything right, we get a couple trillion dollars of savings over 10 years. We are going to spend over $68 trillion in the next 10 years. How many Members of Congress have had protesters outside of their offices saying that they can't cut things. We are talking about a total of $2 billion or $2 trillion in savings over 10 years when we are spending $68 billion. Have we lost our minds? Yet, if we were to do the Senate's reconciliation budget, which has almost no cuts in spending in it, we will borrow approximately--I am conflating publicly sold debt with the debt we would create in the next 10 years. What took us 240 years to build, we will double in 10 years, or come close to doubling in 10 years. Does this body, the lobbyists in the hallways, the groups in the hallways demanding more spending, or any of the staffers who might not have a life so they are watching this really think that the bond markets aren't going to go: They are doubling U.S. debt, maybe we should ask for a little premium, which is called term premium, on U.S. sovereign debt, but I just showed you and told you what happens if we go up 1 percent. Just that 1 percentage point is $3 trillion of additional interest. It is more than everything we are talking about trying to cut. Here is your balance: How do you communicate to the people we borrow money from that we are a good credit risk? We are going to pay you back. We are going to pay you back appropriately. We are not going to say crazy things: Maybe we should force you to go longer on the bonds, or maybe we should ask you to do this or that. You can't do that. You don't screw with your bankers. Just as in the article, we are already up against the leverage of Japan in this one, but I don't know why it is not about other countries using the fact that we have used them and we have needed them to finance our debt. Then we intend to leverage them? Okay. They need trade with us. Let's use that leverage, but let's also be respectful of the fact that they are one of our bankers. Understand the fact, Mr. Speaker, that if we don't get our act together, the United States is on track to double its borrowing over the next 10 years. If that becomes the perception in the world debt markets, we are going to pay a penalty for it, and that penalty is really expensive. Mr. Speaker, I am going to go back to the office and have more coffee. I appreciate the Speaker's tolerance, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, as always, I apologize to the bored staff, and I will try not to speak like a machine gun. Mr. Speaker, we are going to do basically three things. I am going to make fun of us. I am going to actually walk through some debt and deficit numbers, interest, those things that are scaring my economists, myself half to death; and then I am going to touch on some of the--and it is a technical economics term--bedwetting in regard to the reconciliation budget and how people are making things up. Let's have at it. Due to the fact that I sit in an airplane 10 hours a week, and I have some weird reading habits, I actually came across a paper written last year, published just recently. It is in Nature Human Behaviour. It is one of those quirky--excuse me, those academic, but actually what they did is they went back to the late 1800s, and they took all of our congressional speeches up until 2022, and they ran a data set on them. They ran AI, and can you believe it, Mr. Speaker, they figured out that our congressional speeches have become less and less and less based in facts. I know this is hard for us to believe, but apparently the quality of idiots--I mean, people like me--getting up in front of these mikes and doing presentations and walking through our job has crashed in quality, in facts. As a matter of fact, they used the word intuition. I basically say we make public policy now by our feelings because, God forbid, we go to our voters and tell them the truth about the math. It made me feel better because I have mocked us for years on how much of public policy we now make on feelings. It is great television. It gets you followers on social media. You get a hit on cable television tonight if you are willing to make crap up, but do it with passion and feelings, but if you actually want to talk about the math of what is going on in this country, it turns out it is how we are rewarded now as elected officials. Now, what was interesting is they had the curve actually starting to fall in 1970, and it has just gotten steeper. Part of it and part of my conclusion is television, then moving to cable news, and then moving to social media, we have crashed the diet of robust facts in our speeches. Now that we are going to make fun of ourselves, let's go on to the next thing. Mr. Speaker, for anyone who asks, we have been running the current data on how much we are borrowing. What would you guess we borrow per second right now? Right now, it looks like we are burning $72,000 every second. We are borrowing $72,000 every second. My best guess right now is we will borrow 7.37 percent of the entire economy this year. Try to keep that number in your head because we are going to come back to that in some charts and explain why that is so devastating. Mr. Speaker, it is like we don't care about people's retirement, our kids, the next generation, and how the hell they will actually cover any of the scale of debt. Then we lie about what drives the debt. Mr. Speaker, our best guess is we go from that $72,000 a second this year to maybe about $82,000 a second next year. This is hard for people to accept, but it is the math. Over the next 10 years, the baseline borrowing was about $22 trillion. We are trying to figure out how to extend the expiring tax provisions. We have the requests from the White House. We have other disasters and things we are trying to cover. We are basically looking at--and I am going to show this multiple times--the United States, the day we were elected, Mr. Speaker, how much debt. We will double it. We will double 240 years of borrowing in this 10-year period. The majority of that borrowing over the next 10 years is interest and Medicare. God forbid we are not allowed to tell people the truth. Most of the debts, deficits, and demographics is the fact we got old. We stopped having children. We have a shortage of young people in this country. We are terrified to tell our brothers and sisters the truth about the math. Let's have at it. For anyone out there paying any attention--and this number, actually probably right now is a little bit worse. We now think about 75 percent of Federal spending is on autopilot. Mr. Speaker, when you become a Member of Congress, everything you get to vote on is borrowed. When you vote on nondiscretionary, when you vote on defense, every dime of that is borrowed and about $400 billion of what is mandatory spending, which means formulaic. When we work so many quarters, we get our benefits. When we serve in the military, we get our benefits. For those who are part of a Tribal group or part of our treaty obligations, certain things are coming to them. Then there are the things we vote on and the things we try to balance the budget over. We need more money for defense, and we have threats in the world. We get down to where we are trying to balance the budget on about 13 percent of our spending because we are terrified to talk about everything else. We can't touch interest. I am going to show a slide here in a moment. This one should scare the crap out of people. I know my language is becoming more and more inflammatory, but I can't seem to break through. This is from something called Moody's Analytics. It is one of those fancy subscription services. They have a bunch of economists and they collect data. They have us in nine budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections will go just to interest. Mr. Speaker, you pay your dollar in taxes, and 30 cents of that in 2035 goes just to interest. Does it not scare anyone? When the interest growth is bigger than everything we are talking about in trying to say--by multiples, by multiples--we calculate this fiscal year, the one we are living in right this second, we could spend $1.1 trillion to $1.2 trillion in just interest. There is a dataset that if we do some of the things that we were going to do, the Senate's reconciliation budget, with almost no money to pay for it, in 10 years, interest could be a couple of trillion dollars a year. The annual deficit will be three-plus trillion a year. It will probably be $2.3 trillion this year. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax collections, take a guess. What did we actually spend? We took a dollar in tax collections last year. What did we spend? We spent $1.39. We take in $1. We spend $1.39. This year was supposed to be better. We were only supposed to spend $1.36. We have a small problem. With some of the GDP growth numbers, just that adjustment, we may have lost $200 billion in tax receipts in this fiscal year, the end of September, between now and then. It just shows how fragile we are with small movements of interest when we have to refinance $9 trillion. Think about this. A single point of interest on U.S. debt--and it takes years for it to roll in because of how much we have to refinance. So we will take about $9 trillion to market this year and refinance, we will issue a couple of trillion new this year. A single point of interest over 10 years costs $3 trillion. Why does this not scare the crap out of people? Why do we not have people coming behind these microphones? But we are better off getting behind these microphones and telling passionate stories, anecdotes, and those things, because that is what gets us on social media. That is what gets people's dopamine hitting. But at some point the math is going to win. We have the really smart analytic firms saying they are scared about U.S. sovereign debt. We see things happening around the world that makes me very nervous. There is an appetite for going on the long end of the curve. The United States sells very short-term debt. Then we have 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, and 30 years. We are having real trouble selling the debt on the long end of the curve. Do not pay attention to some of the debt markets over the last month or two. Mr. Speaker, do you want to know why? We are in extraordinary measures. We are up against the debt ceiling. We are not issuing new debt. We are only issuing refinance and what comes due within the cap. What happens a couple of months from now when we all raise the debt ceiling? I love the brain trust that says don't raise the debt ceiling. Did I mention last year for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.39? Tell me what 39 percent of the Federal spending we should stop doing. When we don't raise the debt ceiling, we have to end all of that. More than a third of all our spending is functionally borrowed. I am happy to do it. Tell me which third we should stop financing. Those are the very people filling up these hallways, demanding we give them more money. What happens when we raise that debt ceiling, Mr. Speaker, and we have to come to market--Treasury has to come to market--with $500 billion to $600 billion functionally to catch up and refund all the accounts we have been borrowing from? That is what is done in extraordinary measures. We grab every account and use that cash, now we have to refund it, and you take that much to market. We have one analyst who is saying we will see a pop in U.S. interest rates, maybe on the 10 year, hitting five, just, boom. Because suddenly we are grabbing so much of the world's capital to finance what we have been borrowing internally and now we have to pay it back. Be prepared. These aren't surprises. We all know it, but no one reads the damn documents. It is math, and it turns out telling the truth-- remember our story here that fact-based discussions on the floor no longer get us elected. No one listens to them. No one cares about them. We make things up because feelings is now how we make legislation. This board is almost a year old, but it is to try to make a point to our brothers and sisters, particularly on the left, that keep coming to us and saying: Let's just tax rich people more. We show them--we are going to show the slide here. I am probably going to have to say it two or three times so it sinks in. We have a detailed report that sort of walks through every tax hike the left has proposed. We are guilty on our side of every cut we have actually proposed. We take every tax hike and then do the economic data on it and get about 1.5 percent of GDP. Our cuts come out to about 1 percent of GDP. If I can do that math, that is 2\1/2\ percent. Mr. Speaker, do you remember at the beginning of this? We are borrowing 7.3. The next time a politician says raise taxes on rich people. And then they are shown that it is a fraction of a fraction of what we even borrow every single day, that is a great rhetorical use of language. It is horrible math; completely fraudulent math. Remember demographics but we are not allowed to tell people that because it means we as a society have to do hard things. I have this chart here. I was just trying to make a point how Washington finances 366 days of spending in 2024. The top 20 percent of earners covered 201 days. For the next core tile down, the next 20 percent covered 41 days. The middle earners, the middle 20 percent, paid for 17 days of government spending. The bottom 40 percent pay for 4 days of government spending. Then 103 days we finance by just borrowing it. I think we are tied for the most progressive income tax system in the industrialized world. When we modernized the tax code in 2017, the United States income tax system actually became more progressive. Yet how many times have we heard Members say: Well, they gave money to the rich? The rich, after 2017, were paying more of the Federal income taxes. At some point we are going to have to have this really uncomfortable discussion. Is it on the tax side or the spending side? I have done entire presentations here on the floor where I have shown my colleagues--go back to the last 65 to 75 years. Here is a time of very high marginal tax rates. We take in about mid-17 percent of the economy in tax collection. Very low marginal tax rates, we take in about mid-17 percent of Federal taxes. When we go up, the actual economy slows down. This is what is taken in. The secret is: How do we adopt regulations and modernize it? How do we adopt tax policy that incentivizes productivity? How do we do the whole thing and get them to interact? We maximize economic growth, and that growth becomes tax collection stability and gets us to the top of the total dollar amount, but we will probably still constantly fall back into that mean of the percentage of the economy. So have a bigger economy. It is not that complicated. Upper-income taxpayers overwhelmingly finance the Federal Government. I know this isn't good politics. People like me are supposed to say: Yeah, the rich need to pay their fair share. The top 20 percent of earners pay 25.2 percent. The next core tile pays 15.8 percent. The middle covers 11 percent. The fourth core tile down, the next one down, covers 5.5. We send the bottom 20 percent of income earners money. Remember that we have sort of this negative tax income system, earned income tax credits, and those things. If someone is in the 20 percent of the bottom core tile, we send them money. Mr. Speaker, as a matter of fact, we have data--I didn't bring the chart--that shows functionally in America, if you are in the bottom half of the income earners, post-inflation, your life is miserable because wages haven't gone up as fast as inflation did. That inflation was substantially created by stupid policies from the previous White House and the Democrats who spent like crazy. When we finance and dump that much cash into the society, you set off inflation. Mr. Speaker, it is your high school economics class, and here we are a couple of years later. The poor are still poor because we still haven't gotten wages growing faster yet. What scares the crap out of me is I am now seeing some data saying that we may have a year where inflation could be hovering around 4 percent by the end of the year. We have to do policies to get those wages growing. I have a chart that will show you, Mr. Speaker, that the bottom 50 percent pay about 4 percent of the income tax, but the bottom one-third actually get money. In some ways, that is just being compassionate, but we have the data from post-2017, when we did tax reform, when we had the miracle of income inequality starting to really shrink. We had 3 years there where the poor were getting dramatically less poor. Why isn't that moral? Good regulatory policy and tax policy maximizes that velocity. Let's really annoy some of our leftist brothers and sisters. This is an article in the Manhattan Institute written by, I believe, Jessica Riedl. It is now about 1 or 1\1/2\ years old. What they did is they went through basically all the proposals the left has on raising taxes and, step by step, here is the tax raise, the economic effects, and what we actually take in. Remember, Mr. Speaker, our rules about the size of the economy, 17.1 or mid-17 percent of the GDP. Individual income tax, investment tax, raising the corporate taxes, and raising the State taxes, when you got to the end, Mr. Speaker, you functionally were getting about 1.5 percent of new tax receipts for the economy. I look forward to the Democrats actually proposing this and being willing to vote on it. That is because they throw these things out and get them scored. They controlled everything here 1 year ago, a couple of years ago. You notice they never did them, Mr. Speaker. They pretend this solves the problem. You get 1.5 percent, Mr. Speaker, and you will have stagnated the economy. Mr. Speaker, you have already heard the discussions of how close you are to stagflation, which is partially driven because of the economics. Remember, Mr. Speaker, at the end of the decade or within 9 years or so, 22 or 23 percent of the population is 65 and up. We have a demographic issue for productivity. The point of showing this chart is the solutions you will hear, Mr. Speaker, if, God forbid, you go on leftwing cable television, sometimes even rightwing. They are mathematical lies. We are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Are we willing to engage in a revolution of using technology and modernization? How many businesses still run themselves as if it is still the 1990s? Government does. I had someone bring me, just the other day, a piece of healthcare paperwork. I think it might have been from the Indian Health Service. It was a three-part NCR paper for a purchase order for a healthcare procedure that you fill out and, I think, faxed it in. Have we lost our minds? Yet, we get protesters from the left saying: Don't use technology. You have seen article after article of the five major databases the United States has, Mr. Speaker. None of them talk to each other. If you are willing to actually read, then you saw the stories of the Small Business Administration having--what was it?--3,300 people who had taken out loans. Except the small problem was that all of them were 114 years old and up, meaning they were on to their rewards. They weren't with us anymore. It turns out $300 million in loans, no one had paid a dime back, but the Small Business Administration didn't have the ability to bounce off the Social Security mortality or death file. We have designed these walls to functionally--it is as if the fraudsters designed our data systems here in the Federal Government. Let's go fill out things, go get money, and steal the taxpayers' money, but we are going to make sure that there is no way to check the data that is being filled out because we want to protect their privacy. Some of that is not privacy. They are asking for a government-insured loan over here, and we can't check the death file? What idiots allowed this to happen? Yet, we get protesters in front of our congressional offices saying: Don't let DOGE and those actually make the system work. I am sorry they are scared of change. Did I mention that we borrow $72,000 a second? How do we convince our brothers and sisters across the country that we, as Members of Congress, the administration, and the bureaucracy, are taking it seriously if we are not even willing to make the data talk to each other? Back to one of the things that has just annoyed the crap out of me--I used this board a handful of times for some of my leftwing protesters the last couple of weeks, and to their credit, some of them were actually shockingly intellectually honest saying: Oh, that is not part of our talking notes. No one told them the truth. Mr. Speaker, it is on the internet. Trust me, I am not that bright. I just looked it up. It is there. You can find it. The next 10 years, the Federal Government baseline was spending $86 trillion over the next 10 years--$86 trillion. All we are talking about in trying to modernize and change spending in this reconciliation budget, if we did the high end, so the House, full, all in, high end-- which, please God, let us get there. The high end is $2 trillion. $86 trillion, we are trying to get 2, that is 2.3 percent, and that is creating the bedwetting. Do they really love their money, this spending? Remember, Mr. Speaker, if you don't want tax hikes--I don't want tax hikes. Borrowing is a tax hike. It is just paid for in the future with interest. Stop thinking borrowing is free. My wife and I have adopted a couple of kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year- old. We are incredibly blessed. It looks like he is going to be fine. He is going to be normal. He is absolutely a joy. When he is 22 or so, just to maintain baseline spending in the United States, we have to double every single tax. That is the morality of this place. For the lobbyists and the groups that are walking our Halls saying, ``We want more spending. Don't do this horrible, devastating 2 percent cut in spending over the next 10 years,'' I say: Thank you for screwing over my 2-year-old. You are absent in morality. If you are going to walk into our office and demand more spending, then tell us where you think we can modernize and change the cost of government. We have come here and done presentations that the single biggest expense we have in government, it turns out, is obesity. We did a whole model for the last couple of years, huge amounts. Remember, Mr. Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I have five Ph.D. economists. We did the data: $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs. It turns out the morality if we would help our brothers be healthier--but we have to do it through the farm bill. We have to do it through nutrition support. We have to decide we are going to have access to glutides and other things. Are we going to use technology, the wearables and the other things? I have one of those data rings on. What would happen if one of the most powerful things we can do for U.S. sovereign debt stabilization is a healthier society? Somehow, that becomes a fringe conversation around here because people make money off of our brothers and sisters being sick. It is absolutely perverse. Mr. Speaker, if you actually go--I think it was 1 year or so ago. I think Goldman Sachs did this huge report on GLP-1 glutides, and somewhere in one of the footnotes that was sent to me, it had this line, a couple of lines, saying that if there was wide adoption and the United States actually became much healthier with much less morbid obesity, there would be healthcare systems that would go bankrupt because they wouldn't have enough multi-chronic sick people to pay their bonds. Think about that. Everything is about the money here, not about the morality of having a society that is growing and prospering. Prosperity, I would argue, Mr. Speaker, is moral. How much of the crap we do here is not just satiating today's Twittersphere screaming at us or something that is completely made up but actually building a plan saying: Here is the prosperity we are going to build for the future. I probably have already had too much coffee today. This is just to make a point, and this is more to mock the Senate. I was talking to one of the Senators last night, who is also concerned, as I am. Maybe they hear our voices. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, these are just the base numbers when they are first scored. This number actually came in one-half of that. No interest is attached to it. We stole this from someone else, but it was to make a point. Democrats complained about that. In the CARES Act, we complained about the excess of spending. In the American Rescue Plan, we complained about that. Then you add in the bipartisan infrastructure act--it wasn't bipartisan. I think they had a handful of Republicans who wanted projects in their district. If you add it all up, Mr. Speaker, all the things we have fretted over over the last decade don't even add up to the amount of borrowing that is in the Senate reconciliation budget because it is so much easier here just to spend and borrow it. There is this attitude here of: Give it to me now. You guys will figure out something in the future. We have worked with some of the DOGE folks because I have the economists, but go on their official website right now. They think, next year, 2026 fiscal year, we can save $160 billion. That is real money. If we borrow $6 billion a day, that is 24, 23 days of borrowing. That is everything we have gotten. There is this inability for Members of Congress, our staff, and the public to understand the scale of what we are up against. This basically just reiterates what I am going to show a couple of times here because I need it to sink in. If we do the Senate reconciliation budget with our baseline, we double U.S. debt in 10 years. I am going to say it a couple of times so it sinks in. Debt held by the public--and they are using 2034. We prefer to use 2035 because that is more of an honest budget window. We start to look at what the Senate resolution--this was baseline debt. They add another 32.7 percent to the debt. If we do what the Senate put out in their budget reconciliation, we functionally double publicly held debt in the United States. What took us 240 years to do, bless us, we can do in 10 because we are good at borrowing money, handing things out, telling people there are no consequences, and making crap up, saying it is healthcare for illegals. Okay, we shouldn't do that, but it is only a couple of days of borrowing over 1 year. We have to do lots and lots of difficult things. We have done entire presentations where we have shown we could revolutionize the cost of healthcare. We have actually looked at one dataset. We have been studying this now for months. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, and said, just in Medicare, duplicative MRI scans, PET scans, X-rays, and ultrasounds could be as much as $25 billion a year, duplicative scans. Mr. Speaker, what if you have your knee scanned and attached it to this thing so it is portable with you? That is one-quarter trillion dollars over 10 years. Is that a cut? No. It is just a simple use of almost a free technology that is out there where you can load them on this and it is portable with you, Mr. Speaker. We get lobbyists who don't like that idea because, apparently, they make money on the duplications. The inefficiencies and the frauds, those things are a business model now. Government controls functionally one-quarter of all the spending in the United States, of all the GDP. A big chunk of that is functionally waste, fraud, misallocation, or bad design. Give it whatever title you want, Mr. Speaker. Many of the lobbyists who are walking these Hallways are here to stop us from modernizing the system and bringing us into this century. Just use the technology. We walk around with a supercomputer in our pocket. This could crash the price of healthcare, make you healthier, give you access, all these things, and there is an army of people trying to stop us. Remember, telehealth here was an absolute war. There were millions being spent to stop it because it screwed up people's business models. I am going to do this a couple more times, and then we are going to do one more example. If we do what is being planned right now, we finish the next decade, 10 years from now, with either $73.7 trillion of debt--our other chart actually gets it up to $74 trillion of debt. You will hear a Member on the Democrat side or Republican side running for office: I care about the debt, but I am more afraid of telling you the truth of what drives the debt. The fact of the matter is, the people walking the hallways here, often our own constituents, are screaming at us for more spending. Don't they have kids? Don't they even care about their own retirements? It is the absolute vacuousness of immortality. I grabbed this from The Wall Street Journal. I can't imagine anyone here has had protesters and people showing up in their office about Medicaid, which is supposed to be our safety net for indigents and the poor. I have some old experience with that. For a short time, I actually chaired the Healthcare Committee in the Arizona State Legislature when I was a child. For a while I actually worked on the AHCCCS budget, which is the Arizona Medicaid system. We do something unique. We actually buy managed care HMO policies for our poor people. It is actually shockingly efficient. As a matter of fact, if you took the rest of the country and adopted the Arizona model, you could save hundreds of billions of dollars over those 10 years. The Wall Street Journal did us a favor. They actually took the Arizona system, which actually has a shockingly high satisfaction rate and good outcomes. We can make it much better. The punch line here is they are showing something called a provider tax. This was a scam--a scheme. I have to openly admit, on part of it, which was the disproportionate share--this is geeky stuff--I was actually part of managing that many years ago. I was county treasurer, I managed money, and we were part of the swath. Part of the scam out there is to raise the cost of healthcare, create a tax, capture that tax, and because you raise the price, you also capture more money from the Federal Government in their percentage match. What The Wall Street Journal did was brilliant. They just produced this chart that says: Do you know the Arizona government--and this is most State governments--actually use this provider tax washing machine and they make money. They actually take in more money. They are not meeting their obligation of--it was supposed to be a partnership. It was supposed to be a match. Is this a cut? It is just saying there was a deal made in the late sixties that we were going to share some of the risks and some of the costs with our poor by providing healthcare. Then when Obama came in, they did this expansion and 90/10 percent, even though it was going to people who were still work eligible and those things. Then States--we all knew this was going on, but it was supposed to be temporary. It was supposed to be when coming out of a major recession. We were going to go back to normality. Instead, it is padding for State budgets. That cash isn't going into healthcare; it is financing other things and raising the U.S. debt. This is borrowed money. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purposes of a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, most of this was designed in the late sixties. I have this weird history. I was a child--in my early twenties. I was a temporary page at the State legislature. Arizona was the last State to enter Medicaid. It was bankrupting our counties because up to that point in the early eighties, the counties were actually the provider of healthcare. We entered this, but we created a really crazy system saying we are going to do managed care to drive the price down.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The actual language was for indigents. It was mostly for women and children.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. In the early days, it was like a 50/50, not 100 percent coming from the Federal Government.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yeah. It blends out closer to the 70. Now, talking about the expansion population. That is where--

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, it goes further. Have you had the occasion yet, Mr. Speaker, where a group comes into your office--somehow, they were put on a plane, put in a hotel, those things here, they have no understanding of the math, the mechanics, but somehow there were Medicaid providers in your State that had plenty of cash lying around to fly people out to come lobby. So we did this, we pulled open another Wall Street Journal article from a week or two ago talking about how many people in the Medicaid systems in the United States are enrolled in multiple States. You actually have billions and billions and billions of dollars here that are enrolled in multiple States. Even for the discussion of could we just match data, you actually get objections to this because the fraud is part of the profit model. I am on Ways and Means. This is something Energy and Commerce has in their primary jurisdiction. They are working through it. If you just stack up the cheating, the misuse--the vacuousness, the absence of data to try to deal with the multiple enrollment population, if you actually start to stack these things up, how dare you call those cuts. How dare you. Why don't you care about the future of this government and the future of this society? We cannot handle the stacking of debt. Did I mention the $72,000 we borrow every second? It only goes up. We have a model that says in the 10-year window, we are up somewhere in the mid-nineties per second in borrowing. We are terrified to tell the truth. Mr. Roy may not want to be in the room for this one, because this is the stuff that gets you attacked at home. But it is the math, it is the truth, and they are the CBO numbers. Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls nearly drive the entire 2019 to 2033 deficit. This board is a couple of years old, but the facts are the facts. We are terrified to tell the public the truth. The primary driver of debt is demographics. This board is actually today. We are waiting for the update, but we have done some back-of-the-board math. The math is much uglier because interest rates are up substantially from when we calculated this 2 years ago. You functionally have a country that--this one is from 2 years ago-- the 30-year debt, we were going to borrow $124 trillion. If you remove Social Security and its finance costs, Medicare and its finance costs, the rest of the Federal Government actually grew slower than tax receipts. We will probably have the update on this from CBO in the next couple months with the higher interest rates and the higher running debt. We have models now that say over the 30 years, we are going to be at 200 percent of debt-to-GDP, that that number is no longer $124 trillion; it may be $170 trillion of borrowing. I don't know how many of you plan to still be alive over the next 30 years. Do you really think the world's financial markets are going to finance our debt? We have Ray Dalio, the multibillionaire hedge fund manager, who is now retired, has actually been coming here to Congress saying: Warning, warning. The entire world's capital markets--because China is borrowing, Japan is borrowing, and now Germany is going back into the debt markets--there is not enough capital in the world. When the United States is consuming 30 to 40 percent of all the money that goes to sovereigns, to governments--what happens when there is a shortage of savings in the world to finance? We can print money. Of course, that will set off inflation, so your life just becomes more miserable. Since so many of our benefits are inflation-indexed, you can't inflate yourself away from them because they go up. Or we can just pay the higher interest rates. Now, you already saw the beginning chart, that Moody says in 9 budget years, 30 percent of our tax collections is interest. We have a model that shows a 1 percent increase rolled into our refinancing. In 10 years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections, all of it, is interest. Yet, Mr. Speaker, you have Members here running around here saying: I need more money for SALT. I want actually more money for this program. I want more money for this. Okay. Bring us ideas on how we modernize spending, how we can reduce costs by technology, by better systems, by a healthier society. Stop showing up at my door demanding more spending. There is no more money.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, he actually just stopped me from cursing, so he did good.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes, if you add in internally financed.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The CBO says we will end this year at about 37.2. My number is 37.3, so yes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes, 12 zeroes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We distort.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Roy, we use the term ``socialize.'' How do I get it to part of our folklore, our use of language? Borrowing money is a tax hike.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You have to understand. Okay. You are not going to raise taxes. I despise raising taxes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I want as much velocity in the economy. I am a classic free-market economist.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. But borrowing money is a tax hike, and it is a tax hike with interest on it.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is just to be paid at a future date. Yet, because the curve is now steepening--remember that I just showed you some charts that says we may double U.S. debt this decade. The curve is like this. You don't think we are not going to reach in and take some of your retirement? This is no longer about your grandkids. It is no longer about your kids. It is you, Mr. Speaker. Yet, I believe the political classes lied their backsides off for so long, or we play this game. You will see some people on social media: You could save a million dollars doing this. Okay. You borrow $250 million an hour.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The borrow is $250 million every hour. Watch out for the scam artists who play the game. They give you something that is outrageous. Okay. Get rid of it. Yet, sometimes the things that we will debate for hours here are minutes or sometimes seconds of borrowing.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yet, the big stuff, since there are so many lobbyists and constituencies who live off of that money, you are not allowed to talk about that. Mr. Roy, I am blessed. I have Phoenix and Scottsdale. I have one of the best educated districts in America. I have been fairly prosperous. They tolerate me. They sometimes are not happy with what I say.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yet, at least they know that my math is good.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. That is a better name.