David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We can't do it.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. Just understand, in reconciliation, which is the one time where we are allowed to talk about mandatory spending, the majority of mandatory spending, we are not allowed to touch--

Mr. SCHWEIKERT.--because, between Social Security and interest, that is probably 54 or 55 percent of all mandatory. Sorry. It is a weird way I remember numbers. Well, let's risk our political careers. How many of you have read--

Mr. SCHWEIKERT.--The Wall Street Journal articles from the last year? I think they have done five or six major, major exposes on something we called Medicare part C. It is the Medicare Advantage. It was the sort of managed care version within Medicare option that was developed by Republicans in 2005. One of their articles basically says that they identified about $63 billion of waste, fraud, and misalignment a year.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. A year.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. A year.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The MedPAC report, since I am the only idiot who came here to the floor with the MedPAC, but that is partially my responsibility being on the Committee on Ways and Means. The MedPAC report was all highlighted, and we showed the MedPAC report says: Medicare Advantage, part C, is coming in at 120 percent of fee for service. Just that delta from where it was supposed to be at 95 percent--I know that is a lot of numbers--when we designed Medicare Advantage, long before you and I got here, it was supposed to come at 95 percent of fee for service. That 25 percent delta is $100 billion a year. If you do the curve because of the growth of the program that is expected, that is $1.5 trillion over 10 years just putting it back to what it was supposed to be. It is equal to everything we are talking about trying to reform in our reconciliation packages. How many conversations have we been willing to have saying: You do realize we could modernize Medicare Advantage so that the incentive for the providers is to have populations be healthier than running around and scoring them as sicker? Just align the incentives. I just found you $1 trillion. Why can't we have conversations like this where we are trying to preserve the programs and the future at the same time?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. You don't have to answer that because, the moment you answer, there will be an army of paid lobbyists, people running ads in your district, probably now beating the crap out of me on social media--

Mr. SCHWEIKERT.--because, when it is that sort of money, you know they are going to-- You also saw the articles 3 weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal. There is criminal investigations now going on. Justice Department now is diving into these folks, so there is more going on here. I will argue, Mr. Roy--and some of our friends who are fiscal conservatives but also want to modernize the delivery of services, help me. We have spent almost a year diving into the data. What would happen if fixing these misalignments, the waste and fraud--actually, it doesn't get us where we need to be, but it starts moving us in the right direction.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Roy, I think I am actually against my time, so I am going to do that moment. I am going to first apologize to the folks who had to try to take our words down for talking too fast, for the poor Speaker who had to sit here and listen to this, and to my staff who is now going to have to write lots of apology letters for all the people who I have just hurt their feelings. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, let's have some fun with math and the reality of what is going on in the world. First, let me get something off my chest. I hate it when I make a mistake. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had that moment when you say something as you are walking down to your next meeting and you go: oh, damn it? Last week, I was walking through a series of different numbers, and one of them was a proposal, or a discussion coming out of the White House. It was about taking the top tax rate and just letting it expire. I think I said it was $32.7 billion. That is for a single year. Just multiply it by 10. That is what the actual math would be. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am sort of stressed out of my mind right now is more than the chaos we see in some of the financial markets and trying to understand the tariff issues and our leverage on other countries and their leverage and what is going on there. I don't think we are spending enough time talking about our own work. Last Friday--actually, it may have been Saturday morning--the Senate passed their version of a reconciliation budget. It was a completely unserious document. I am going to show over and over here how they took a pass on doing what was difficult. If this is a negotiation between the House and the Senate, for example, Mr. Speaker, if you have ever bought a car or been in a negotiation, when one side gives a completely unserious offer, the other side often has to walk away until they get serious. There are real things going on in the world. Here is an article from the other day. I have a small stack of these. It is talking about bond markets and debt markets and others starting to unload U.S. debt. Mr. Speaker, today, if you are a geek and are watching the 10-year bond--I was watching it over a period of an hour or so. I saw the 10- year bond move by about 20 basis points. Now, in geek speak, that is a big deal. Apparently, it has been 5 years. Think about some of the crazy things that were going on 5 years ago to see that sort of movement. We are stressing the crap out of the markets. Why that is important is this country borrows about $60,000 to $70,000 every second. That becomes $250 million every hour. Last year, for every dollar we took in, in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. The reality of it is you borrow 39 cents out of every dollar. For the $5 trillion we are going to take in, in tax receipts and we are going to spend $7.1 trillion or $7.2 trillion. Maybe we don't screw with the bankers. Mr. Speaker, the reality of it is your savings, this government's bond fund, the family on the other side of the world that has savings, that is the money that buys our debt. Ray Dalio, the Bridgewater founder, has written these articles that say we have a problem. The basis of the problem is there is not enough capital in the world to deal with the bingeing of debt coming from the United States and coming from China. Now it is starting to come from Europe. In Germany, it looks like they are going to be lifting their debt cap. When we borrow, we are also competing with other countries in the world. The United States, I think, is now maybe 13, maybe number 12 on the credit stack. Think of this. I believe Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. That is worth thinking about. Let's actually walk through what is going on right now with the reconciliation budget. Let's sort of explain. Why do we do the reconciliation budget? The Budget Control Act of 1974 created this mechanism that if we are going to cut spending--and it gives us one of the few times in life where we can actually work on mandatory spending, the things that are on autopilot. For most Members of Congress in their entire career, everything they vote on is borrowed money. When we vote on defense, when we vote on nondefense discretionary, the things we do get to vote on, every dime of it is all borrowed. Last year, about $300 billion or $400 billion of mandatory, earned benefits, those things were on borrowed money. Mr. Speaker, start to understand. Here is what is going on. You have heard we are doing these reconciliation budgets, because that is a whole mechanism to be able to move something through the Senate, where only 51 votes are needed so it doesn't hit that 60-vote filibuster. That is the real reason we do this whole dance. Remember how many people are so upset. David, you are going to cut spending over the next 10 years. This is the baseline money. We are scheduled to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. At best, the House resolution adds $2 trillion of spending reductions and modernization over 10 years. $86 trillion is the baseline spending. We are talking about trying to trim $2 trillion out of the $86 trillion. This causes people to lose their minds. Have we lost our sanity in this country? We can't find--that is what--2.3 percent? Forgive my math. I am trying to do it quickly. That is Armageddon? Does that give us a sense of just how addicted the bureaucracies, the society, and the business models out there are to U.S. borrowing? There was another thing that happened last week that really should have taken people's breath away. This is sort of behind the paywall. We have found other articles that write about it. Moody's Analytics, the people who study what is going on in economics and businesses, put out a paper that in 9 budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections are going to go to just pay interest. So, Mr. Speaker, you pay your $100 in income taxes, 30 percent of it just went to interest, and this is before the Senate or what we are trying to do in the budget reconciliation. Remember, Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you the Senate document is completely unserious. It piles on stunning amounts of debt. Mr. Speaker, does this scare anyone that in 9 budget years, 30 percent of your taxes you pay go to just cover interest? Am I just an idiot for coming behind this mike every week and trying to show the math? I get my brothers and sisters around here: That was interesting, David. I am still going to vote for piling on more debt because, well, let's be honest, my voters want stuff, and I will be out of here by the time this blows up. It probably doesn't blow up. What happens is you hit a moment where the money required to finance the debt like this consumes everything. You hit a moment. I showed a chart a couple of months ago, 1 month ago, that showed if we went back to a six handle, so it is 6 percent interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt, which we were right up against in, what, the mid-, early 2000s, 2005 and 2006. We went to a 6 percent interest rate. About 45-plus percent of all U.S. taxes went just to cover interest. If we go to 9 percent, it is the majority of U.S. taxes go to cover just interest. Part of that is because right now we are sitting what, $29, $30 trillion of publicly sold debt, so the actual debt is about 36.6 or something like that. We are in extraordinary measures so the actual debt number is a little distorted right now because we are borrowing internally and we have got to pay that all back. So watch interest rates pop when we finally raise the debt ceiling, and now we have to refund all that money back to the accounts plus the interest that they missed. Mr. Speaker, you start to think about we have to refinance--and some of this gets refinanced two, three, four, or five times in a year because you are borrowing 30 days, 6 months, so we will refinance about $9 trillion, and we are going to issue about two, $2.2 trillion new debt. Tiny movements of interest rates are really stressful. The Federal Reserve, what was it, 1 week or so ago, lowered their economic growth projections for the United States for the next 3 years. Just that lowering, I think they lowered us from like 2.1 to 1.7 percent this year, that is almost $200 billion of tax receipts in a single year. Just that movement of lowering down economic growth projections is more than we are talking about trying to reduce spending if you take it over 10 years. It is like this place is incapable of understanding the scale of the trouble we are in. I have tried to show this a couple of times. I am not beating up anyone. I am just asking people. I desperately want to extend the 2017 tax reform. I was on the committee. I am one of only four or five people still on Ways and Means who actually helped to write the 2017 tax reform, and those portions expire at the end of this year. I believe it is the absolute right thing to extend them. We should just pay for it, because when we don't pay for it--our base number, now you are going to see two differences here. We are using the next 10 years, so that takes us to 2035. The Senate budget, they did a gimmick. They used 2034. We couldn't figure out why we couldn't get the numbers to match up. They played a game. They only used 9 budget years. We are scheduled to borrow over $22 trillion over the next 10 years. If we do all the tax reform but don't do pay-fors, but add interest on it, that is another 6.8. If you basically add then a number of the President's additional priorities but don't pay for them, don't try to find a way, then you end up at $74 trillion of borrowing in functionally 9 budget years, 10 years. I am going to show you a couple of boards here, Mr. Speaker. If you actually add it up, we are functionally talking about almost doubling what took us 240 years in debt to build up, we are talking about doubling it, well, close to doubling it, in the next 9 years. Have we lost our minds? This is what you heard a number of us fussing about, Mr. Speaker. We can't figure out what the Senate was thinking. Were they just in avoidance of we don't want to tell anyone, we are going to try to do something that should not even be that hard. Remember $86 trillion in spending, the House was just trying to do 2, and I thought 2 was absolutely anemic. We should have covered all 4, $4.5 trillion. One of the hardest votes I made in my decade-plus here was standing right there and swallowing saying: I am going to vote for this, but I am really unhappy because we are capable of doing more. And if we don't start to telegraph to the bond markets we are going to do something serious, at what moment does the bond market say: Screw these people. They are just not serious. They are consuming the world's capital. Let's charge them more. Mr. Speaker, do you really think the United States with our exorbitant privilege of having the world's reserve currency and being the country that people want to come and do their business in, move to put their capital in, do you think that is our birthright? Remember, Mr. Speaker, up until World War II it was Great Britain that had the world's reserve currency. We are squandering our place in the world. People run around saying: Well, we need to push down the value of the dollar. You have trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars around the world that are held by people, and you are going to push down the value of their holdings. Just understand every time someone says something like that, Mr. Speaker, you can actually start to see the full faith in the United States start to taper away. We are about to squander this extraordinary privilege we have because the world trades in our currency. They need to buy our debt because they need to hold our currency because that is what they dot nominate in, that is what they trade in, and that is their peg. If you look at this chart, Mr. Speaker, new Senate budget resolution, that is functionally another $8.5 trillion in deficits. Here is extending the tax cuts in 2017, and then they made a margin there for additional spending, either it be some of the other priorities, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, those things, and then we have another $520 billion in additional spending. Can you see this line here, Mr. Speaker? You can't really see it. It is $3 billion of cuts. That is what they put on to their budget resolution. If we borrow $6 billion a day and their budget resolution is 3, actually our borrowing is actually a little more than $6 billion, it is 10, 12 hours of borrowing for an entire year, and this is for a 10-year budget. That is what they gave us. Oh, but, David, when negotiations start, it will actually get filled in. Except we are negotiating--we put $1.5 trillion of savings with the hope of getting to 2, and they give us $3 billion. Remember, 1 trillion is 1,000 billion. Mr. Speaker, you wonder why some of us are cranky when our colleagues down the Hall give us basically crap to work with. Let's actually start to walk through what this actually means to us as a body. When we finished the last budget year, we were $28 trillion of publicly held debt. That is the debt we have to sell. When you hear someone say $37 trillion in debt, remember, Mr. Speaker, there is a portion of that we borrow internally. We reach in debt trust funds and other things. We borrow the money there. We pay interest on it. People say: Oh, you borrowed my Social Security money. Yes, and they got actually a pretty good interest rate back. Here is the baseline. Remember, Mr. Speaker, why is this not $22 trillion? It is because they were using a 2034 number. We caught them playing a game there. Then they added another $6.9 trillion on top of that, and what do you get, Mr. Speaker? Here is what you get: Functionally when we all got elected this last November, the United States sovereign debt was around $28 trillion. When we finish this 10-year cycle, we are going to add another $28 trillion if we do what the Senate sent us. What took us 240 years to build up, we are going to double in the next 9 budget years, next 10 calendar years. Go team. That is the morality of this place. People say: It is hard, David, to explain to people that we need to modernize, we need to change the way we deliver services, we need to use technology, and some programs we should just stop because they have been outdated for decades. This is important here. This is without any of the disaster aid, this is without the economic potential slowdown, so tax receipts are coming down, and this is without a war. I mean just using actually what were optimistic numbers of the next 10 years' tax receipts, and what we are talking about doing right now is over the next 10 years doubling what took us 240 years to build up in debt. Does anyone care about your retirement? Does anyone have kids? Think of this: It may be insane--my wife is my age--but I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 2\1/2\-year-old little boy we have adopted. Yes, they are brother and sister, so that explains it. When my little boy is 24, 25 years old, every tax in the United States, every tax, has to double just to maintain baseline services. We are raising kids that would be part of the first generation to be structurally poorer than their parents because when you borrow money, it is a tax. It just means you are going to let someone else pay it with interest. It is not free money. It is a tax. Sometimes taking on a certain amount of debt is what you have to do because the thing that Republicans and Democrats are terrified to tell our voters is, in the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and Medicare. It is demographics. We got old. Mr. Speaker, one of the things going on in the entire Western world and also here in the United States, we don't have enough young people. If you look at our demographics--when you hear people talk about that, as soon as I say ``demographics,'' I know people turn the channel. There is a very good chance that, in the last 12 months, we had more deaths than births. It wasn't supposed to happen for 7.5 years, according to the Census Bureau, but there are a couple of datasets out there saying we may be up against already having more deaths than births. Understand the way we deliver and finance the earned entitlements, the earned benefits. Today's worker pays for today's retirees. Last week, I showed a number of charts that, those numbers in 10, 20 years, it is you and your partner, you and your spouse and a little bit more, you have your own retired person you are paying for. That is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. In 2033, so 7.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. The law says you cut benefits. That would be a 21 percent cut, meaning in 8 years, we double senior poverty in America. Yet, if you talk about how you want to try to save Social Security and all the steps you have to do, all the inputs, because it turns out it is complicated, that side over there is going to run attack ads beating the crap out of you because you mentioned the words ``Social Security'' even though you are trying not to double senior poverty. That is how immoral this place is. Remember, our math from last year is the first full year with the Social Security trust fund gone. Just the shortfall is over $600 billion. The scale of what we are talking about is brutal. Mr. Speaker, you intend to be here for another decade, so you are going to get to deal with it. Every day we wait, that math gets more and more difficult. Let's go back to the Senate's reconciliation budget. Here is what they gave us. They are using a 2024 gross debt number of $21 trillion. It is really $22 trillion, but we will let them because they made up some numbers in their budget. Remember, they played some games on growth projections. Functionally, 32.7 percent of the next decade they gave us is additional borrowing. They basically decided that, over the next decade, let's add another third of debt. What are we going to do? For those of us in the House who give these beautiful speeches that it is immoral to do this to our kids and crush people's future retirements, what are we going to do? Are we going to step up and say: Look, Republicans, we have priorities. The White House has priorities. We just have to find ways to finance them. Are we that terrified to tell the truth? A couple more of these, and hopefully, I won't have bored everyone to death. The Senate budget provides for $5-plus trillion in new deficits over the next 10 years. Then, you add in the additional spending. You start to go over. Even our budget reconciliation, I thought, was unacceptable. It was one of the hardest votes I made, and I can't make up my mind how much I regret it. Sometimes, I really regret it. Some moments, I am hoping that the leadership team that said they would work with me-- because I believe we can find a trillion dollars in savings in just modernization. Remember, those inefficiencies are the people's business models, so you already see the hallways full of lobbyists trying to stop them. Take a look here. Here is the debt we were going to add. Here is the additional debt the Senate adds. They made it functionally even double what we were talking about. Increasing the deficit results in higher interest costs. This is one of the things. We forget to tell people the truth. There is a model out there--CBO actually ran it for me--saying if interest rates went up 1 percent on this policy baseline, and I am tired of talking about it, in the 30-year window, you broke the Congressional Budget Office's model. Let me say that again. We broke the CBO's model. It went over 250 percent. The problem is their computer only goes to 250 percent. It just hit it. We are now pushing levels of debt so high we are breaking our budget models. Go team. Even with what the Senate just gave us over that 10- year period of time, stack on another $1.1 trillion of interest. We didn't buy anything. It is just interest. The House proposed trying to get to $2 trillion in spending reductions. Dear heaven, I hope we can be tough enough and disciplined enough to get there. I have produced all sorts of documents. I am not one of those people giving speeches. I am showing up with binders of ways you can get there. Much of it isn't cuts. It is just using technology to change the way we deliver services. The Senate, remember, a billion dollars and a trillion dollars are very, very different things. They functionally gave us $4 billion in spending reductions. That is what they thought we were worth. Mr. Speaker, I know I am being a bit redundant on these boards, but I am trying to make a point. We sure give a lot of great speeches around here of the greatest threat to our Republic. It turns out to be the scale and the speed we are burying this society in debt. Then, we hit moments like this, and we are going to happy talk our way through it. We are going to lie about things. Oh, we are going to make up a pretend growth rate, and that is going to produce $2.6 trillion. Our own reconciliation budget, there is going to be $1.7 trillion of additional cuts in discretionary, but you can't really do that in a reconciliation budget. It is completely unenforceable. We should be ashamed of ourselves. Look at something like this. Understand the scale of what the Senate--you know, the 2017 tax reform, in its full score of debt, it turns out to have come in at less than half that. Take a look at the CARES Act, the American Rescue Plan, and all these things that we as Republicans railed against because of the data produced. This is the Senate reconciliation budget. Do you see why I am angry or disappointed or just bewildered? These are tax cut extensions without trying to make any attempt to pay for it. Remember how a moment ago I was telling you we start to break the budget models? The driver of our debt ultimately is our demographics. The left will say: No, Republicans need to tax people more. Okay. Yet, we have shown the studies over and over that every Democratic tax that has actually been proposed and scored produces about 1.5 percent of GDP. The cuts we have talked about are about 1 percent of GDP. You have a big 2.5 percent there if we both did everything. Mr. Speaker, we are scheduled to borrow about 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem? Why is it so hard around here to tell the truth? We say things that are just not mathematically true. My family used to have a saying: At some point, the math is going to win, and it always does. Mr. Speaker, thank you for tolerating a bit of my rant, but it is my way of just saying how disappointed I am with even my friends. I have a couple of really good friends who are over in the Senate, and they were just desperate to avoid doing what was difficult, so they threw it in our lap. Mr. Speaker, we as House Members get to make a decision: Are we going to do what is right and moral and what actually sets up the future for economic growth? Very last point. Almost 2 months ago, the Congressional Budget Office did a model that says, if you want to maximize growth over the next decade, pay for as much of the tax extensions as you can. Do them because that will maintain consumption. You don't get a lot of growth from it. Where you really get the growth is the expensing side and continuing some of the business tax, the passthrough tax portions. Yet, if you pay for it, you don't screw up the capital stack, the money that you borrow for your small business, for your home, or for your car. It looks like we are going to screw it all up. Let's not let that happen, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, 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, forgive me as we get ourselves organized here. Our friends on the other side ended a little faster than we expected. Mr. Speaker, I am going to do something a little dangerous. Have you heard the saying you should never go to bed mad? I think there should be another rule. You probably shouldn't come behind these microphones cranky, but let's have at it. Mr. Speaker, I have been walking through numbers after numbers. For a decade now, I have come behind this microphone trying to walk through the scale of our borrowing, the scale of what is going on. The fact that most of it is driven by our demographics is giving a little bit of an excuse. Saying that makes it so it is not Democratic or Republican; it is just math. At Home, I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. I am trying to figure out what is going on in our brothers and sisters on the left's heads. I get it. They are cranky. As a former Senator that I sat next to from my State was sharing with me, one of the great frustrations of Democrats in my area is, for 15 years, they raised money and ran on marriage equality. Well, that is pretty much settled. They ran on the right to terminate pregnancies. Well, now that is in my State constitution. What do they run on now? They run on rage, apparently. I want to get this out of my head before I start to walk through some of the math. You have a country that is borrowing about $6 billion a day, about $70,000 a second. In a decade, there is data saying 30 percent of our tax receipts will go just to pay interest. The wheels are coming off, and, instead, the brain trust of some of these folks--okay, I accept the tonal quality of some of the folks out of the White House isn't warm and cuddly, but do you go around neighborhoods, offices, and stick Nazi signs on their cars? My wife drives a Tesla. We bought it a couple years ago. It is funny, at that time she got teased a bit: Oh, now you are driving an electric car. I thought you guys were really conservative. Is this where your heads are at? Sticking Nazi things on people's windshields? There is no way they knew it was my wife's car. She just has a little BASIS sticker, which is a charter school my kids go to. This is really the quality of conversation discourse of communication that is going on with the leftwing activists in my community. It is not: Hey, David, we are concerned about Medicaid. Here are ideas how you can deal with the debt and deficit so we have the resources. No, because it is this really highbrow, intellectual discussion with our brothers and sisters on the other side, stick Nazi things on people's cars. This is what you have come down to? This is what is going on? Come on, people. Look, I almost always start with this chart. You see what is in blue? It is defense and nondefense discretionary. It is--we expect it to be 26, 25 percent of spending. Last year, for every dollar this country took in in tax collections, we spent $1.39, but everything we vote on is 26 percent of the budget. Does anyone see a math problem? We are going to get behind the microphones and have honest discussions of how we are going to save the country. If it is about programs the left cares about, help us figure out how to pay for it. Yet, when you actually look at some of the spending and debt--I think I have the chart. We actually did some of the math. The crazy thing, one of my Democratic neighbors who makes a lot of money, he has a beautiful home: David, is it true that the President is even talking about going back to the 2017 tax rate for high-income earners? Well, apparently the President said something like that on Friday. Well, David, do you think that is fair? This is a guy I know is a Democrat because he has Democratic signs even of my opponents in his front yard. We did the basic math. If you actually were saying, let's just go back to the tax rate for the top earners back to 2017, it is $32.7 billion over 10 years. Okay, we can all divide that by 10, so let's call it $3.2 billion a year. We borrow $6 billion a day. If that is $3.2 billion, you functionally bought yourself 12\1/2\, 13 hours' worth of borrowing for the entire year, and there is the mental breakdown. The left runs around and says: Raise taxes. Okay. We are going to borrow 7.3 percent of GDP, which is my latest number. Some of the other economists are around 7.2 percent of GDP. Either way, you can go to the Manhattan Institute and read the articles. It is from Democratic literature that if you take every tax they have that they have scored: Raise tax on capital gains, raise tax on income, raise tax on businesses, raise tax here. I am sorry for talking so fast. Believe it or not, I live on coffee, and I need to apparently deal with my issue with a 12-step group for coffee. However, the point I am going to, read the article. All those taxes when you do the economic adjustment is about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. This place lies. Excuse me, we make up math because it is really hard to tell people the truth. Almost every cut we talk about as Republicans is about 1 percent or so of GDP. I am enraged right now because I am hearing down the hallway the Senate, they are talking about doing their reconciliation budget and setting a floor, saying: We are not going to allow the Senate to pass budget cuts of less than $3 billion. Huh? I am upset that ours is so anemic at like $1\1/2\ trillion, but if they do $3 billion, it is functionally a half a day of borrowing. This is, yea, go team. Look, at some point, the math is the reality. Why is it so hard to tell the truth? One of the other points I sort of want to make--and I stole this graphic from another group, thank you. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline law, not baseline policy. The law. I will explain that later. Over the next 10 years, we are going to spend $86 trillion. We are talking about, at best, on the House budget resolution cutting $2 trillion over those 10 years. That is 2.3 percent. Oh, God, dear Heaven, you are butchering government. It is 2.3 percent. You are telling me that if we didn't grind through government, look at our programs, look at all the reports the GAO and others have given of the waste and fraud and just programs that haven't been authorized in decades, you couldn't find 2.3 percent, but it is easier to go stick this sort of crap on my wife's windshield than it is to do the intellectual work of saying, hey, we think we have more elegant ideas on how to reform spending in government, modernize it, make it better, faster, cheaper for the American people. No, we would rather burn things down. Are we all proud of ourselves? The fact of the matter is $86 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, and at best our budget reconciliation is 2.3 percent of that spending. This is the one I get complaints from everyone, so please understand, I am trying to offend everyone with facts and math. If you do all this--because we have a number of Senators over there saying: Don't cut any spending. They are Republicans. When you hear someone say: We should do baseline policy, not the law. What they are basically saying is they don't want to have to deal with telling the truth of the math. Let's take a look here. We finished this fiscal year $37.2 trillion in debt as a country. Baseline, we add $22 trillion of additional borrowing over the next 10 years. If we were to do the tax extensions, which we really need to protect the middle class and others by not raising their taxes, but if we were to do it without any offsets and then you add in the interest, that is about another $6.8 trillion of borrowing. Then if we were to take care of the President's requests, that is another $8 trillion, functionally saying we will borrow more in this 10-year period than we did in the previous 240 years. On the day we are elected we are going to double 240 years of borrowing. Are we proud of ourselves? This is how we are going to save the Republic? We are going to continue to just bury it in debt because it is hard to tell people the truth about the math? I have a caveat on this board. We don't have a subscription to Moody's Analytics. It is expensive. Congressional Research Service doesn't have one, but we found four or five articles talking about Moody's saying their model says in 2035, nine budget years from now, 10 years from now, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts--so you pay a dollar in taxes, 30 cents of it just paid interest. Think about that. In 10 years, 30 percent. This year, it is 18 percent. Dear Heaven, there is a model out there that actually shows that if interest rates were to go up 1 percent in that nine budget years, it is like 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go just to interest. We are playing a very dangerous game here, but at least we can stick things on Teslas and protest and be angry because God forbid we talk about actual math. In 7\1/2\, 8 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. The law says you cut benefits. That is a 21 percent cut. We double senior poverty in America. How many people do you think come behind these microphones are willing to have a conversation of how we are going to save it? The first year, my math, actually the Joint Economic economists' math, the first year--so if the trust fund is gone in 2033, in 2034 it is over $600 billion just to make up that shortfall. That makes what we are talking about here in the budget resolution tiny. Those are only like $200 billion a year. We are talking $600 billion a year, and it grows just to cover the Social Security trust fund being gone. That is 7\1/2\, 8 years from now. Are we going to talk about that, though? No, because they are going to run television ads beating the crap out of us because we tried to figure out a way to save it. The perversity of this place. They don't give a damn about someone's future, their poverty. It is about winning the next election and raising money on it. We have got to tell the truth also what is going on in our country. You all saw the updates from the Census Bureau basically saying after next year if you zero out immigration, our number of prime-age workers starts to fall. As a matter of fact, there is a dataset. Now, we have been using 8 years from now because that was the official Census Bureau number. There are a couple demographers out there who wrote articles a week ago saying, we may have already hit more deaths than births in America. I need you to process what that means. You have a system where Social Security, the financing of Medicare, financing of so many of our pensions relies on a growth of the working population, particularly those prime-age workers. If we are now entering a time of a shortage of young people--in 2027, not that long from now, we actually go negative of prime-age workers. Maybe our committees should maybe invite in a demographer and talk about saying, is this Republican or Democrat? Starting in 1990, we started to roll over the number of children we had. Now we are paying the price for it. Now make these long-run programs, which are pay-as- you-go math, make them work. This should be scaring the hell out of this place. Oh, no, David, we can't tell our voters that. It is harder to raise money when you tell them the truth of how hard the future is. It is fixable. I have done presentation after presentation of adoption of technology, redesigning some of the programs where you don't cut anything, but you do really hard stuff. The problem is our hallways are crowded with people. Here it is all about the money. Understand, Congress is really about one thing: Money. The inefficiencies, the design failures for these bureaucracies, for the business models that make their living off government, that is their profit. They actually like the inefficiencies. We came and showed some charts I think a week or two ago just our calculations that there could be $25 billion a year in duplicative MRIs, X-rays, ultrasound scans in Medicare. Does a duplicative scan when it is not necessary make someone healthier? On the other hand, you could actually do something crazy, take the scan, attach it to one of these things, the little supercomputer in your pocket, and carry it around with you. There it is. Did that cut anyone's service? Mr. Speaker, $25 billion this year times 10? It is a quarter trillion dollars with one little reform. The perversity of this place when I do that piece of legislation is that I will get attacks saying I am trying to cut benefits. No, I am trying to save the programs. I guess it would cause the difficulty of math, having to design and put something on paper, and getting some of the economists to work through it, but that is our job. We are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, the biggest entity in the world. We are going to spend over $7 trillion this year. Of course, we are only going to take in $2 trillion in taxes, meaning we may borrow about $2.1 trillion, $2.3 trillion this year to keep the wheels on. The scale of this should be scaring the hell out of people. Look, the demographic curve, when we start to think right now, in 2024, we have 2.9 people working for every person receiving their benefits. A decade from now, that is going to fall to 2.7, 2.6. Then, it really starts to crash. When we start to look at the 30-year window, we are down to about 2.4. That may not mean much to you, but trying to make these numbers work, it can be done. It is just hard. You are going to hear people come behind these microphones, give these beautiful speeches of how they want to save the Republic, how we care about the future, how we care about our kids, how we care about your retirement, and then we will do nothing that is actually hard. It is just immoral. It is just absolutely immoral. I try over and over. When I am doing these, I am trying to do a better job of bringing examples of where we can save. I am going to admit DOGE and those, I am fascinated with the data mining and those things. I know the quality of the gentleness or gentility of the communications. They have a hard, rough edge. The fact of the matter is a lot of the craziness actually wasn't coming from them. It was coming from people in the bureaucracy trying to throw out stuff to make it more difficult and just really anger people. Then, the government unions have to try to light things on fire, so disharmony. We have five major databases in the Federal Government. Is it Republican or Democrat to just build a world where those databases would talk to each other? If there is potential of $100 billion a year in misallocations and fraud and these things, and you could fix it by just having the databases talk to each other and know this is a fraudster, this person isn't with us anymore, they have gone on to their reward, but somehow they are out here asking for an SBA loan, is that Republican or Democrat? It is just technology. Yet you have protesters out there saying we can't allow the databases to talk to each other. Have we lost our minds? I want to do this just as an example because this one just burns me. Between Christmas and New Year's, I went up and spent 3 or 4 days up in the Navajo Nation. I took my little 9-year-old daughter. Yes, I have a 9-year-old and a 2\1/2\-year-old. That is the definition of pathologically optimistic when you are 63 and have a 2\1/2\-year-old. It is both funny and true. Guess what? We have spent $42.5 billion for broadband equity. Remember, we always like to add that word ``equity,'' except no one has gotten broadband. The Tribal president of the Navajo Nation and a number of the communities called chapter houses basically said screw this. I am not willing to wait another 20 years. You know what they did, something just crazy? Instead of being patient and waiting for us to spend billions of more dollars and run a piece of wire, they went out and stuck up a satellite dish. Forty-eight hours later, for several hundred dollars, they had broadband for the whole neighborhood, for the whole what we call chapter house. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just the adoption of technology, except the lobbyists who run around here wanting billions of subsidies for something they are never going to connect get really upset every time I do this board. Do we care? Does this place care enough to do the hard things, to actually do the math, the creativity. Last week, I came here with the MedPAC report. It is like this. I have no idea how many Members have actually bothered to read it. Yes, I understand there are some anomalies, but they are rounding errors compared to this. I think it had that $84 billion was spent last year in the differential between Medicare part D and Medicare part A. That is Medicare Fee-for-Service and Medicare Advantage. It was supposed to be at 95 percent. If anyone wants to go back and do their history, in 2005, when they started Medicare Advantage, if you do that basic math, that is $104 billion a year. How about if Republicans and Democrats got together and said we are going to fix this, that we are going to get the capitation program to actually work the way it is supposed to, that we are going to have the providers of services actually make money because they help our brothers and sisters who are in their retirement years earning their healthcare benefits, helping them be healthier? They get rewarded by having their population be healthier, not by running around scoring with sicker. Yay, everyone wins. What would happen with that several hundred billion dollars over a decade? That is not a cut. It is actually lining up incentives. Instead, it is just easier to run around and scream stories that they are going to cut things. Let's pay people, so I have hospitals and other groups paying people to fly out here, tell stories, and they have no idea what they are talking about because we make crap up, once again, because everything is about the money. The last board and the one that always seems to upset people because they don't want to know the truth, the Congressional Budget Office-- this one is a year out of date. The numbers are actually apparently worse, but we haven't had the update yet. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 30 years our country borrows $124 trillion. Now, I have to tell you, this number when we get our updates could be much worse. If you look at their data, they actually have discretionary, the part we vote on, growing slower than tax receipts. That has a $9 trillion positive over the 30 years, but Medicare is $87.2 trillion in the hole. Social Security is $36.8 trillion in the hole over those 30 years. It turns out, even the next decade, almost 100 percent of the U.S. sovereign debt growth is interest and Medicare. There is nothing we can do about interest. We can do some things to incentivize going out on the curve so we are not as fragile to communicate to the bond markets because the bond markets are basically about to run this country. If you have to sell $6 billion a day, $60,000, $70,000 every second, maybe you need to pay attention to your bankers who you are having to sell your debt to, to communicate to those debt markets we are serious and looking at ways to use technology, better models when obesity is the single biggest expense in our society. Yes, we are not supposed to say that. Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone. Last year, the Joint Economic economists calculated $9.1 trillion additional of healthcare spending. Is it moral with what we do in food policy, nutritional support, how we deliver healthcare? Maybe the concept of helping our brothers and sisters live healthier when 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes--33 percent of all healthcare overall is just diabetes. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just trying to get your policy alignment to the fact we are buried in debt and getting older as a society. I think in a decade, 23 percent of our population is 65 and up. We now know that we are having this remarkable shortage of young people. We are already potentially on the cusp of having more deaths than births in our country. In a couple of weeks, we are trying to roll out a STEM-based, talent- based immigration bill because for the economy to grow and stabilize, we don't have a choice. People say, David, you are not allowed to talk about immigration. People won't understand it. Well, they understand the economic survival of you still getting your benefits when you are a senior. We can make this work. Mr. Speaker, we are now starting to run into articles saying that we are putting the extraordinary privilege. What are the two extraordinary privileges America has? Our currency--the world borrows in our currency, meaning the fact of the matter is when we sell debt, there is a demand to hold U.S. dollars denominated. Then, the second thing is people want to live here. They want to invest here. They want to be educated here. They want to be entrepreneurs here. Mr. Speaker, we are now running into multiple articles saying some of the things we are doing, particularly our debt stack which is putting our extraordinary privilege of the country at risk. It doesn't have to be this way. A couple of smart economists say we have 3 or 4 more years. At that point the debt gets so hard to manage. The Federal Reserve last week took us from a 2.1 GDP down to 1.7. Just that movement is almost $200 billion a year in tax collection. Just that GDP reduction the Federal Reserve calculated for the next 3 years, taking that out to 10, that is more money than everything in our budget reconciliation. The lack of understanding of the inner dynamics of our debt, the interest, and these dollars terrifies me because there is a path. There is a path for this to work, Mr. Speaker, but we are living on a razor's edge because we are not doing the hard work. Mr. Speaker, 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, this one is going to be a little thick, so put on your economics hat, and let's have a ride here. On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office responded to a request I made in my capacity as chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. I was trying to get an answer to whether the economists' projections from the Joint Economic Committee are correct. You have to understand that there is actually a weird little battle going on here between the Senate and those of us in the House and those of us on Ways and Means. A number of our brothers and sisters over in the house of lords have decided that we have current tax policy from the 2017 TCJA, the tax reform, which I was on the committee and was one of the people who helped author that, but they expire at the end of this year. They want to play this game and say that we are just going to pretend that there is no cost, that the law is not the law, that the policy is the law. This is when you hear people say, current policy baseline, just do it. We have been trying to do the math. The Congressional Budget Office, a couple of months ago, actually did a projection saying that if we want to maximize economic growth over the next 10 years, what you do is extend those tax cuts but pay for them. The basic idea is that by paying for them, you don't have government gobbling up the capital stack that is used to finance growth, to finance business, to finance when you want to buy a truck or a new home or your business wants to expand. We got an updated letter from the Congressional Budget Office. Apparently, it didn't make me particularly popular with a few people, which actually provides me a perverse joy. If you read it, in the 30- year window, it looks like if we do all this without an attempt to pay for, if we drive up interest rates by 1 percent, in the 30-year window, it looks like you break CBO's budgetary model because you hit 250 percent of debt to GDP. If I am reading one of the paragraphs here correctly, they are basically saying our computer model doesn't go beyond 250 percent. The point is, you have a government that--here is our baseline. Let's see if I can make this make sense. At the end of this fiscal year, $37.2 trillion is going to be the country's debt. Over the next 10 years, we are expected to borrow an additional $22 trillion. On top of that, if you play with these folks that say we don't really need to pay for things, just keep it going, that is about another $5 trillion, $5.5 trillion, another $1.3 trillion in interest. Then, if we were to be able to make the President's wish list without finding offsets or modernizations--and I am going to walk through a whole series of things where it is not cuts. It is modernization, legalizing the technology that disrupts the costs that makes our society better, happier, more efficient. If you were to do all those things without an attempt to pay for them, without an attempt to adopt policy to modernize the way we deliver services, in the previous 240 years, we borrowed about $28 trillion from the public. That is from investors around the world, from your pension system, from everything. It would mean, over the next 10 years, it pretty much would double. We are going to double it or come close to doubling it in the next 10 years. That is the perversity of what you have going on around here, yet the people coming behind these microphones keep having a wish list and want more stuff and more stuff. The people walking through our hallways here are in our offices demanding more stuff. They want more carve-outs in the tax code, barriers to entry to their competition, or just another check. I am going to walk through just how dangerous the game we are playing right now is because when you look at these charts--this is online. Just go on CBO from last Friday and read it for yourself. It is not a hard read. Why are my brothers and sisters so terrified to tell the truth to the public? You have a country--I am going to show the charts--that in about 7.5 years, we have more deaths than births. You have a country that when we get out of the extraordinary measures--remember, right now, we are borrowing from our different funds because we are up against the debt ceiling. We may be borrowing almost $70,000 every second of every day. For those of you who turn to me and say, ``David, I demand you balance the budget,'' I can do it tomorrow. Let's see, if I use the 2024 numbers, for every dollar we took in tax collections, we spent $1.39. Tell me the 39 cents of the government you want me to cut. The problem with that math is, when you look at the charts, do you see what is in blue? That is everything a Member of Congress gets to vote on, defense and nondefense. Your only problem is that it is 26 percent of the spending. If you ask a Member of Congress right now to balance the budget, we can do it. We can do it. You have to get rid of all defense, all nondefense discretionary. That is basically the Park Service, the EPA, all the agencies, and then tell me what portion--because you have to pay your interest or you blow up the world economy--tell me what portion of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other things you want to hack away at. The reality of it is, in this fiscal year, our projection is up till the recent--now, we are starting to downgrade our growth. For every dollar we take in tax collections, we are going to spend, functionally, $1.36. Do you understand how screwed--actually, that is a technical, economic term--we are when we don't tell the truth about the math? It is not fixable, but it is possible to stabilize. We can stabilize this. We just have to think and do things that are hard. So often around here, the thinking part is complex, and it is hard when we have to go home and tell our constituents the truth about math. Remember, the math will win. How many of you have heard about people out protesting? They are terrified there are going to be cuts. Okay, let's actually have a moment of truth about math. This was baseline. Over the next 10 years, we were going to spend $86 trillion. Next 10 years, CBO baseline, we are going to spend $86 trillion. The reconciliation budget had--what?--$1.3 trillion in cuts, and if we got lucky and did everything, you might get to $2 trillion. So, we are talking about $2 trillion in cuts over 10 years on $86 trillion of spending. That is what the left over here is losing their minds over because they need something. They have lost the working middle class. They have lost so many American voters because they no longer trust them because they have spent decades not telling them the truth about the math. It is not hard, except the problem is 30 percent of that is borrowed. People are losing their minds that we are trying to cut $2 trillion on $86 trillion of spending. That is what this place has become. This place has become a clown show of math. Once again, I need to disclose I have had a stunning amount of coffee today, so forgive me if I am a bit cranky. We were trying to do projections of what our interest coverage would be this year. Let's see if I can make this make sense. How many of you saw on Thursday or Friday that the Federal Reserve actually lowered economic growth for this year and, functionally, for the next 3 years? They lowered us down to 1.7, I think. Just that lowering, if you do the math on the back of an envelope, it is not that hard. It is just a little less than $200 billion of loss of tax receipts. If you plug that into our committed spending, it basically means what we are going to have to borrow--you may have interest this year of $1.1 trillion and a borrow this year when the economy is fairly good of $2.2 trillion. One of my folks has a number that it is up to 2.3, but let's stick with the $2.2 trillion of borrowing in a year when the economy is good. Think about this. We are functionally going to spend about $7 trillion this fiscal year. We are going to take in about $5 trillion, and this is in a time when the economy is good. We are not in a pandemic. We are not in a war. We are not in a recession. Understand that when you take some of these charts of interest exposure into the future--there is one of my charts that shows, in 9 budget years, interest, just interest, is over $2 trillion a year. Why aren't we running around terrified here? I mean, if you care about your retirement--or someone that is crazy, like my wife and me, we are older parents. I have a 2\1/2\ year old and a 9-year-old. You do realize for my 2\1/2\ year old, when he turns 23, 24, or 25, every tax in the United States has to have been doubled just to maintain baseline services. This is the morality of this place. Look, the last slide I am going to pound on, it is called interest fragility. We had Ray Dalio in one of our offices. Those of you who don't know him, please look him up. He is the Bridgewater CEO, founder. I think he has now stepped down from that. It is the biggest hedge fund in America. He happens to have 50 years of being one of the hyper- experts on interest rate markets and debt markets. He was saying: You guys are screwed. You guys have a really interesting problem. The United States and other countries are borrowing, bingeing on debt. The United States borrows about 40 percent of all the world capital that goes into sovereign loans. His argument is: Our problem is, there are not enough savings in the world. We are consuming more money; it is us, China, Europe. Now Germany is going into the debt markets as they are raising their spending caps. What happens in the world when there is a shortage of borrowable money? Remember, every day when we borrow at $6 billion a day that debt has to be sold. Most of it is actually financed domestically, it is in this pension, it is in this bank. And then there are the foreigners, except the foreigners have been lowering their U.S. debt because they are having to finance their own governments. You start to look at our interest payments, and there is this concept called a term premium. When we make the bond markets nervous, we pay higher interest rates. So the clown show will go around and say: Well, let's just not pay our debts. Hey, we are up against the debt ceiling. Let's just not raise it. Okay. Fine. I mean, enjoy your decade of world depression because when you collapse the U.S. currency, you also collapse the world. Stability is our goal. Stability is how you minimize interest rates. If you are financing $37 trillion and another $22 trillion, plus whatever else we are going to stack on top of that over the next decade, you really want the debt markets to think we are acting like adults. In many ways, when you look at these charts and you see our interest coverage and how fragile we are, the bond market basically may be the greatest influence on this government. However, how many people have you seen come behind these microphones and talk about debt? Yet, the one thing we are not allowed to tell our voters, our public, our staff, each other, is the truth about what drives debt. Over the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. sovereign debt issued will be to cover interest and Medicare. In 7\1/2\, let's call it 8 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. That first year we have to make a decision, are we going to let the poverty of seniors double when they get a 21 percent cut in their checks? Or how much are we going to raise taxes? Are we actually going to do something complex to fix the system and make all the adjustments and those things? Except the moment you actually talk about saving Social Security, they have a consultant on the Democratic side writing an attack ad because they care so much more about winning the next election than the morality of not doubling senior poverty. The brain trust runs around and says: Oh, just raise the cap. Okay. Except you just covered 38 percent of the shortfall. What do you want to do with the rest? Mr. Speaker, 38 percent of the shortfall is our math, meaning that first year--so if the trust fund of Social Security is empty in 2033, 2034 the full year, I think $608 billion was our estimate on that first year. Think about that. Think about that scale. Then you hold up a chart like this. This is CBO's number for the next 30 years. Nondefense and defense discretionary actually have a positive balance, meaning they grow slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security create $124 trillion of debt during those 30 years. It is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is just demographics. We have a saying in our office: debt, deficits, and demographics. Deal with the facts. Deal with the math. Tell the truth. This place has been so busy spinning stories, though. We were listening to the Democrats a few minutes ago tell stories: There is an enemy out there. No, these things, we can fix them. We can stabilize it. However, so many care so much more about winning the next election. The point I am trying to make is: You look at the next 10 years, okay, there is growth. Mr. Speaker, 24 percent of the growth in spending over the next 10 years is interest, 31 percent of the growth in spending over the next 10 years is Social Security and disability, 28 percent of the growth in spending over the next 10 years is Medicare, other mandatory and discretionary grows about 13 percent, but a portion of that is actually, I think, defense and other things in that. The fact of the matter is your government is an insurance company with an army. Now, here is the other part that makes doing the math so incredibly difficult. Every year there are fewer workers, fewer working-aged people to support our older population. This really seems to upset people, but understand, look at our fertility, look at our demographic charts. Go back to 1990, the year we started to roll over. There is a dataset out there--I don't believe it yet; I haven't had the chance to try to prove it--saying even last year we may have had more deaths than births. Okay. You want us to finance pay-as-you-go systems, which is Social Security and Medicare, at a time when we have a shortage of young people. There is a way to make it work. Are you going to allow people like me, people who are here willing to think to be able to refine the process, to modernize? Look, we will try to touch on this if I have time. Here is the MedPAC report from last week. A whole bunch of apparently really smart people examined Medicare and walked up and down through the growth in spending and what we could do to modernize it and use technology to stabilize the prices. On some things, particularly on Medicare Advantage, they have hundreds of billions of dollars in here that wouldn't require cutting any service, any access to healthcare. It is just using technology and modernizing. You have got to understand, when we start to look at a chart like this, we are functionally here. Let's call it 2024. We have 2.9 in the population--there is another chart that is going to scare you even more--for every one person receiving benefits. Then you see, it gets down to 2 people in society. I am going to bounce around just a little bit on some of these. When you actually look at the Social Security trustees' data, something is happening out there where some of these numbers may be much worse than we expected because it turns out people actually are taking retirement earlier than we expected, meaning the participation in the labor force is actually starting to get soft on the high-skill populations, higher income population. Actually we had a debate on this one about how upset this would make people. Here we are, we are going to start the 2026 budget year. We are actually supposed to be working on that budget. Without immigration, working-aged people will start to disappear from the labor force. You go: Huh? Huh? Basically, 2026 is the last year where the age population is functionally stable. Then the next year you start to actually fall in your numbers of working-aged people in the population. It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat, it is just math. One more chart of this, and then I am going to give you the one that scares me the most. This is Social Security and disability benefits. Here we functionally are, and let's get about to where we are. Right now if you add both those programs together, you have 2.67 workers for every beneficiary. At one point, it gets all the way down to just a little over two people working for every beneficiary. If you actually do the big chart, which is how many people are actually in the labor force compared to how many people are receiving benefits. Remember, I am not talking about changing people's benefits. I am talking about dealing with the reality of our demographics and ways we can deal with it, particularly when we start talking about healthcare. Let's take a look at 2023. Functionally, for every 100 people we had working in America, we probably had 36, 37 people receiving benefits. Remember, the whole concept of labor force participation. I have done presentations here about, functionally, the 7 million--that was my old number--of prime-age males that are missing from the labor force. What do we do as a society to make it possible to encourage our brothers and sisters who are not working to actually get into the labor force? Yet, my colleagues on the left say: Oh, you are going to have work requirements. You can't do that. If you don't do it, tell me how I make these numbers actually work. That is some of the miserable stuff. Let's actually sort of walk through how I make it work. Okay? I have come here and done a presentation showing that if this is our demographics, we are going to have to be willing to have a brutally honest conversation. Let me walk through a concept. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, what was the world conflict? It was for hydrocarbons, oil. The previous decade, much of the world conflicts were for rare earth materials. I will argue, we are in a decade right now where the conflict is for smart people, people with skill sets. Yet the United States has barely shown up for the battle. When you hear President Trump talk about the insanity that we educate people and then send them home to compete with us, the President is absolutely right. We have a whole presentation we have done here showing a talent- based, a STEM-based immigration system that turns out to be remarkably beneficial for tax receipts, for economic growth, and for prosperity. It turns out you need that as one of an entire unified theory of things to do. I want to walk through just a handful of quirky things. When you hear people talk about DOGE and how upset they are, one of the primary things that is being discussed is that the United States has a handful of huge databases. The problem is, they don't talk to each other. You saw the story last week of, hey, we just looked at some of the Social Security death files. The oldest person in America is, what, 114 years old? We took people over 114 years old and then wondered how they were getting loans at the Small Business Administration. Forgive my math. I am doing this from memory from last week. There were like 3,300 people who were over 114 years old who got SBA loans. Mr. Speaker, $300 million in loans. Can you believe not a dollar has been paid back? What would happen if there was a way to eliminate waste and fraud without an army of auditors, without an army of bureaucrats? It turns out it is technology. You actually have to start having your data talk to each other. Is it really that scary? The government already has the data. Why can't they bounce against each other saying, hey, this person is on the death file. Maybe they are not actually applying for a Small Business Administration loan. Mr. Speaker, some of our Democrat colleagues remark that, oh, waste and fraud doesn't really exist except for the billions of dollars we are identifying. Let's walk through a couple of other frustrating things. We provided $42.5 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Stick with me on this one. We have spent over $42.5 billion to get broadband to communities. Not a single community, not a single house has been connected to that broadband; but we spent $42 billion doing it. Between Christmas and the new year, I took my little girl out on the Navajo Reservation. For those of my colleagues who are not from the Southwest, the Navajo Reservation is immense. It is bigger than many States. We chased around, and we met with a number of people who said they were tired of waiting. They weren't going to wait another decade to get that wire or that fiber, whatever it was, to their chapter or to their community so they could get broadband. They were doing something crazy. They ordered a satellite dish, and 48 hours later they had broadband. They were sharing it with WiFi repeaters. For a few hundred dollars, they were fixing something that was going to take another decade and how many hundreds of millions of dollars. Think about adopting technology. Is the morality that we want to spend lots of money to actually subsidize these people who should be running wire; or do we actually want these communities to have telehealth, tele-schools, and tele-monitoring of their lives to help them? Adopt the technology. Make it so it is actually useable. Instead of saying we will never get that wire out to our rural communities, put up a satellite dish. Why does this scare people? It is because there is no good lobbyist running around here saying: Have ever thought about doing this? What we do is archaic. Another example is millions of taxpayers call the IRS for help. Two- thirds don't reach anyone. Think of this. The auditors of the IRS last year put out a report that only 31 percent of phone calls were getting answered at the IRS. Folks are trying to fill out a tax form and give the government money. They call and call and can't get the phone answered. There was a little pilot program done. It was an experiment. Let's actually do a chat, like a ChatGPT, that picks up the phone 24 hours a day, will stay on the phone as long as the caller needs, will help them fill out the tax forms, will actually email or text the PDF of the form, and maybe even send the YouTube video on how to fill out the form. Why does this scare the hell out of the IRS? It is because the IRS is the second most unionized bureaucracy in the Federal Government. It turns out the union loses its mind when we start talking about technology to take care of the American people. Wouldn't we like to pick up the phone and call, whether it be the Social Security Administration or the IRS, and get the phone answered? How do I get my brothers and sisters here to help us adopt this technology? I have a handful of articles here using AI to functionally crash parts of the cost of delivering healthcare. Here is one about actually making the environment much cleaner, much faster, much cheaper, and actually identifying bad acts with almost no bureaucracy. Here we have ability to fix our logistics. We live in a time of miracles. When we start to say just our baseline, just a couple of the pieces of legislation we have, we think we can get $100 billion a year just using technology and healthcare. How about another $100 billion to $150 billion to actually step into supply chains and these others? With the adoption of technology, we can crash parts of the price of this government. Is that a cut? Is that a chain saw? It is just doing things that aren't scary. Mr. Chairman, the last one I will talk about is in the MedPAC report. The majority of Medicare recipients in America now use Medicare Advantage. For those of us in the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, we actually have a much higher penetration. According to the report and even with the adjustment of the portion of the population that only takes the Medicare part A, which is the hospital portion, the trust fund, and which also runs out in 12 or 13 years, it is 20 percent more expensive than fee-for-service. If we take it back to the fact that when Medicare Advantage was designed and it was supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for- service, do that delta. That is approaching $100 billion a year. Mr. Speaker, what if we got together--and we have been working on this for months and months--and we said we need to align the incentives with the insurance providers, with the healthcare providers, and with the person receiving the benefits. How about if we make the profit by helping the population be healthier? A capitated model or something of that nature, which actually I think a capitated model makes the most sense, is here is our cost; and we make more money by helping our population be healthier than what is happening today, according to this report, saying we sign the public up and then we spend lots of time and resources to score them as sicker and sicker because we get spiffs the sicker we score them. Is that a cut? In today's world, when we know diabetes is 31 percent of all Medicare spending, let's get the incentives aligned so it cuts the cost, cuts the debt, but we end up with a healthier country. There are solutions here. The problem is it requires doing difficult things and thinking. I beg my brothers and sisters. Let's go do the hard stuff. If you have ideas, bring them to us. We are working our hearts out right now on everything from technology to auditing the Pentagon because we had our eighth or ninth year where the Pentagon was not auditable. We are trying to design a talent-based immigration system that maximizes economic growth from tax receipts for the country. How about saving Medicare Advantage for everyone who loves it but in a way where it also will provide hundreds of billions of dollars of savings? We can do this. We can do this. We just have to do hard things. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Fischbach). Congratulating Moorhead Spuds Boys' Hockey Team

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try something this evening. The thesis I am going to try to sell tonight is that data is substantially a solution for us. What? I am going to walk through a number of things that just came out in the new Med Pack report. I have only just started reading it, but there are a couple of interesting things. I am going to try to walk through the reality of what drives debt and deficits like I do every week. I am going to try to walk folks through some of the actual math instead of some of the hysteria that is modern politics where we make crap up because we don't tell the total details, and let's see if we can actually make any progress here on sort of the intellectual capital of this place. So just off the top of my head, Mr. Speaker, you have seen the stories of the butchering of Federal employees. Okay, let's walk through just some of the math. You have got 3 million Federal employees. If 77,000 have decided to take the early retirement offer, let's see, that is, dear heaven, I should have calculated this before, is 3 percent, 3 percent of the Federal population. I have a chart we are working on, it did not make my stack, to show the growth in the number of Federal employees in the last decade. It is a little rich how many folks run around here and they want more spending for their projects, so they don't want this or they don't want that, but at the same time, they are lined up at our doors and want more spending. Mr. Speaker, if I could come to you and say: Guys, we are going to try to find a way to make the way we deliver services much more efficient and much more rational. So let's actually sort of walk through a couple of the boards. This is one we start with a lot. The number now is a bit more dour. This board is 1 year out of date, but I didn't want to spend the money to reprint it. Mr. Speaker, do you see the blue portion? This fiscal year, about 25 percent of all the spending is in the blue. That is what we get to vote on. That is military. That is what we call nondefense discretionary. We borrow about, let's see, last year for every dollar we took in in taxes, we borrowed or we spent $1.39. So functionally, 39 cents this year, it will be a little better, we think it will only be about 36 cents for every dollar we take in in taxes. So what that basically means is everything you and I as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed. However, we have this reconciliation budget. It is one of the few times where we actually get to talk a little bit about what is in the red, but we don't get to touch net interest. Interest is interest, and some of the math coming in right now says that interest this year, this fiscal year, could be about 1.1 to 1.2. I actually am a bit more dour, $1 trillion, making interest functionally the second highest expense in the Federal Government. Until this reconciliation budget makes it through, defense is like number four on spending, so Social Security, interest, Medicare, Defense. Take a look at what we are even allowed to talk about, Mr. Speaker, in a reconciliation budget. You know why we do the reconciliation budget, it is so we can get around the 60-vote rule in the Senate. So we are doing all this dancing and stuff because of the Senate rules, but we can't touch net interest and we are not allowed to go near Social Security. So think about that, Mr. Speaker. That area on that last chart I just showed you that was red, the majority of it we are not even allowed to talk about it. We can't touch it, and we can't do anything about it. So when you see the authorization, Mr. Speaker, that is actually why committees like Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce have such a lift. So what happens if I come to you, Mr. Speaker, and start to say: You have this country that is binging on debt. We are in extraordinary measures right now, so some of the daily debt calculations are a little screwed up, but before we went through extraordinary measures, we were in the 60, $70,000 per second, every day, every second. If my math is correct and we come in about $2.2 trillion, maybe $2.3 trillion of borrowing this year, then we have to start thinking about that. So we take in about $5 trillion in tax receipts, we are going to spend about $7 trillion, meaning about 7.25 percent of the entire economy is borrowed this year, and if we don't get our act together, in 9 budget years it could be 9.2 percent of the entire economy is borrowed. I just wanted to make the point because I have come here in the past, interest rates have fallen dramatically in the last couple of weeks which, remember the seesaw, we have talked about the seesaw, when the economy is really strong or there is a shortage of capital to borrow, interest rates go up meaning United States pays a lot more in debt servicing. When interest rates go down, it typically means the expectations of the economy are slowing down meaning our tax receipts fall. So the middle of the seesaw stays the same. I saw some people getting giddy: Look, interest rates are down. It also means actually some of our modeling in the future quarters of tax receipts also are starting to fall now. So there is no free option anymore. However, Mr. Speaker, you have seen some of the discussions. Ray Dalio has been out there talking about the heart attack of debt and what happens to other countries and the history of that going back, I think in his book he is going back a couple thousand years. Here is functionally the world borrowing. China is borrowing about 17 percent of what we call the available capital for sovereign borrowing. Japan is borrowing about 10 percent. We are borrowing 40 percent. We are about 25 percent of the world's GDP, but we are borrowing 40 percent of the money that goes to sovereigns. Mr. Speaker, you have to understand the scale, the binging on debt. Mr. Speaker, when I get to the very last board, I am going to show again the chart that just seems to upset people, but it is math. Over from today through the next 30 years, discretionary spending, according to the CBO's 30-year model, actually ends up with a growth slower than tax receipts, but it is Social Security and Medicare. It is demographics. It is not Republican, and it is not Democrat, it is demographics. Where it becomes partisan is where it is the unwillingness to tell the truth about the math and then actually the creativity of how we disrupt the cost. How do you actually find some of these things? This chart is a little awkward. I would have designed it a little differently, but sometimes you are running around. The point we are trying to make is here was the effective interest in 2014 to the United States. Now all of a sudden we are up here, and the actual market rate we expect in the future to actually continue to consume, meaning interest is our great fragility in this country. I have told the comment many times that at our current rate of borrowing, we have almost put the bond market in charge of this country because, Mr. Speaker, if you have to bring hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to market every month, you screw with your banker. In many ways that bond market now is our banker. For my brothers and sisters on the left who often want to attack the tax reform of 2017, attack tax receipts, I have done presentation after presentation behind this microphone using the stuff from the Manhattan Institute that basically shows if we do all the Democrats' tax hikes and then do the economic adjustments, often from Democrat groups, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP in new tax receipts. Okay, maybe we are going to be pushed against the wall and have to do that, but we are borrowing over 7 percent of GDP. So it is like on Social Security, it is common that the refrain is we will just raise the cap. Okay, in 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Our brothers and sisters on Social Security will take a 17 to 20 percent cut. We double senior poverty in America. When someone says: Well, just raise the cap, our model is in that next year, 2034, raising the cap only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall, Mr. Speaker, and you have wiped out the cash and other things you actually need to also save Medicare, which actually that trust fund runs out 3 years later. So one of the reasons for this chart is trying to demonstrate something very simple that back when before TCJA, the 2017 tax reform, the actual projection of what tax receipts would be, so before the tax changes, we are right on track. Do you see the weird blip there, Mr. Speaker? That was a remarkable amount of spending that happened during the pandemic. We actually just went back to nominal. So what happens here? What happens when there is this intense hunger to play this weird blame game instead of being willing to tell our voters the truth? The vast majority of debt this decade will be interest and healthcare costs, mostly Medicare. So one more contribution to the increase in spending from 2024 to 2035, interest, so remember why this chart is important. Let's put it in perspective. Baseline, this is actually with the taxes going up at the end of this year, just baseline. So sort of following current law, not the clowns who actually run around and say: Let's just avoid the law and let's just pretend what we spend we spend. The law says we are going to borrow $22 trillion over the next 10 years. That is baseline. Here is the mix of that borrowing: 24 percent of that will be interest of the additional borrowing; old-age, survivors, Social Security will be 31 percent; discretionary 13; other mandatory 4 percent; and Medicare 28 percent. Now, the fact of the matter is old-age, survivors, and Medicare have their own trust funds except for the fact that within that 10-year window, at least, this trust fund is now empty. Are we allowed to talk about it? Are we allowed to do the moral thing here and maybe stop the doubling of senior poverty? Yet, the fact of the matter is maybe I am an idiot for getting behind the microphone and actually mentioning the word Social Security because there is someone writing an attack ad on me right now for trying to save it. It is just the sickness of this place. So let's actually walk through a little bit. I saw a number of folks who actually have been attacking DOGE and the attempts to use data. Understand, Mr. Speaker, that some of the communication skills are haphazard, but if I came to you today and said: Let's strip any partisanship, we need to find waste, fraud, and abuse modeling issues where we are doing things the wrong way, where we have models that are sometimes decades and decades out of date, would you hire an army of auditors, an army of lawyers, or would you hire data scientists, Mr. Speaker? It turns out several years ago Congress started requiring agencies that send out payments that cover healthcare costs, that send out checks, these things, start telling us your error reports. Okay, so for 2023, the reports come back at $236 billion of improper payments. Okay, that is a stunning amount of money, but that doesn't mean there is $236 billion of improper payments that have been stolen. There is a bunch of it that has been, but it is more complex. An army of auditors it would take years to grind through this. That is why actually the miracle of technology right now--hire some data scientists. They are really expensive. Most of them actually I have met recently are bathing, that is both funny and shockingly true. I met one who is an MIT dropout. Apparently MIT wasn't hard enough for him, but that is actually what he does. The failure to access data information, well, it turns out a whole bunch of what we label as improper payments we lacked data on understanding. So what happens when it is the data scientists who will help us grind through? I just grabbed this one because Treasury itself, not just CMS and all the other agencies, Treasury itself has $21 billion of improper payments. When you walk through what those were, Mr. Speaker, and why they are improper, they didn't verify household size, they didn't verify the qualifications. They didn't verify these things that is basically data. So let's actually have a little more fun here. Types of improper payments. Okay, we actually estimate of that $236 billion--and actually this was for 2024, the other chart was for 2023--$135 billion are overpayments. Now, understand for a lot of those that maybe come through CMS, a Medicare reimbursement. CMS has the ability months and months, a year later, to try to recapture those moneys. We are trying to get the data scientists to build us models to understand, okay, if there is $135 billion of overpayments, how much of that comes back to us and how much is we will call it leakage, even those leakage is with a b. Then we have 12 billion unknown payments, we know payments went out but there wasn't enough data telling us what they were. We had almost $8 billion of underpayments, where we underpaid people. Mr. Speaker, what I am trying to provide here is that we know that we have a problem. We have known that we have had this problem for decades. For the last decade, we have been tracking the problem, and it has only been the last couple of months where we are beginning to tackle the problem and try to use technology to dive into what these categories are and to understand. Mr. Speaker, some of this, you will notice the huge spike in improper payment amounts. That is actually mostly from the pandemic when we were pushing money and shoveling money out of this place like crazy, but we have been tracking this since 2014. It has taken until now to find the technology and to find the talent to start diving into this math. Why is this just so important? If you are someone like me, who believes that there are trillions of dollars over the next 10 years that we can save by just modernizing the way we deliver services, you first have to identify the outliers and identify what is going on. Why is this so incredibly important? You have to understand what we are up against. Outlays of the largest mandatory programs are projected to massively increase. A moment of brutal honesty: This is 2025. This is 2034, so functionally 9 budget years. Social Security will have a 61 percent increase in spending. These are our demographics. I am going to try to explain these numbers a little bit more. Medicare will have almost a 78 percent increase in spending over those next 9 budget years. There is a little more for this because this has none of the offsets, so I will try to provide a level of brutal honesty. Remember, on Medicare, on some things, you have a portion of copay, those things. Yet, it is still a 75 percent increase, but it goes from $2 trillion of spending. In 9 budget years, Medicare itself will be a couple trillion dollars, just the spending on that. If you do the offset, the payments that the senior makes, that is about $400 billion. That is still a 75 percent increase in spending. What would happen if I could come to you and say: If we would use technology, if we would modernize--here is the MedPAC report that came out in the last couple of days. I haven't read the whole thing. I read part of it. Here is last year's MedPAC report. We read all of it, highlighted it, and we actually make our staff read it. Well, it turns out, around here, actually reading the actual math and the concepts--if I came to you right now and said: In here, there is a whole paragraph that is saying there is something wrong in Medicare Advantage data. Mr. Speaker, the MedPAC report says that Medicare Advantage is a really important program. We need to keep it, but we are going to have to dive in on how to modernize how it works. They made the adjustments for coding intensity, but it basically translates into a projected $84 billion, or 17 percent, of total payments. Meaning, Medicare Advantage is coming in at $84 billion this year. That is more than fee for service. That is with the adjustments for renal failure and other things. I am already starting to have the MedPAC report fall apart, so if any of you talk to the MedPAC folks, ask them for better binding on their reports. What would happen if I came to you right now and said: By changing the incentives, we can do things to fix these outliers and costs and never cut a service? Instead of the incentives that the MedPAC report talks about of scoring people as sicker and sicker and taking that additional spiff, spending, how about a system that says: Why don't we incentivize the providers in this program to help our brothers and sisters who are seniors be healthier? And that helping your population be healthier is actually your profit. Is that heresy? I would argue that it is just good design. We don't have a choice because, last week, the Joint Economic Committee published a report. I chair the Joint Economic Committee, and I appreciate that we have remarkably hardworking economists. We are trying very hard, but we are willing to go to places that are politically dangerous but mathematically honest, which is something that rarely happens around here. Yet, we tried to touch on things like how fragile is U.S. debt to higher interest rates? The fact of the matter is I did a chart a couple of weeks ago that showed if the United States went back to a 6 percent handle on U.S. sovereign debt--you would say that is a lot higher than we are at today. Yeah, but go back to the early 2000s, we were right up against 6 percent. We have to realize, in 9 budget years, if we are at 6 percent, it would mean that 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections go just to interest. We do a chapter here on the effects of obesity on our society, on spending, on longevity, and on family formation. Last year's report came in over $9 trillion. This year, we even define it more to understand what happens when the single biggest spend in our society could actually be mitigated by helping our brothers and sisters in the country be healthier. Are we allowed to talk about that, or is that just heresy? Once again, I have to tell the truth. Over the next 30 years, Social Security and Medicare represent all of the borrowing. It is about $116 trillion of borrowing. Discretionary, which we talk about a lot because that is where you find some of the really stupid spending, the shiny objects, is projected to grow slower than tax receipts. My point is, for everyone out there who wants to be enraged by the White House, enraged by those of us who are trying to find solutions, bring us ideas. Bring us actual math. Stop making crap up. However, if you are going to give us ideas, actually maybe read your subject area first. You would be amazed how many things we get where, if we just didn't have foreign aid, and then we show the chart that it is a week of borrowing. Understand that you have a country where our baseline is going to be borrowing about $6 billion a day. How long do you think we can do that? First, if we can find ways to do it better, faster, and cheaper, read the actual reports that we have been given for a decade that actually have ideas for this and be willing now to do the hard work of just using technology and data and modernizing. Mr. Speaker, one of the insane things around here, when you meet many of the folks who are in our hallways and demanding more spending, demanding more regulations, demanding more barriers to entry to protect their business model or their bureaucracy, they actually hate the discussion of modernizing. You are a medical professional. You know what you are doing. The fact of the matter is that there is hope. I don't think there are a lot more years that we can wait. There are ways to do this. How do we get this body, both our brothers and sisters on the Democratic side--if they would be willing to work with us--saying let's modernize, let's embrace the technology, let's do the things we know that, if we were actually caring--it may not be great politics, but it is really good economics and really good for the future of this country. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had the time here where you basically are having to take on two things that push against each other, that create a real math problem, and that telling the truth about it--how do you say it?--oh, yeah, gets the crap kicked out of you? Let's have at it, though. President Trump stood there just a couple days ago, and within his speech, when you talk about some of the policy to help our brothers and sisters in this country, there was the discussion of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, these things, and the pushing to get us in Congress, the Senate included, to move the extension of the 2017 tax cuts. I am going to show you why that is so important. However, at the same time, within almost the same breath, the President looked out at us and said he also wants a balanced budget. Okay. Now we need to deal with the reality of how hard that math is, but there is a way to do it. I just don't know if intellectually, when you think about the things you heard behind these microphones this last week, how many of our brothers and sisters here, how many of the public, how many of the armies of lobbyists that are in the hallways here lined up saying they want more spending, more money, more regulation on their competition understand this. Let's go through some of the basic math facts, and then let's have a brutally honest conversation of how we stabilize and how far we can actually go. All right. An oldie but a goodie, and the numbers are actually worse, but I didn't want to print another chart, so we have been using the same one from last year. Do you see all the red in the chart? That is what we call mandatory. It is automatic. It is earned benefits. It is, you served in the military, your pensions, those things. Interest is automatic. You have to pay it. Do you see the blue? That is military and what we call nondefense discretionary. A Member of Congress, other than in a reconciliation opportunity--we are going to come back to why it is so important--only votes on this blue. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on, other than that moment of reconciliation, is borrowed. It is all borrowed money. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we borrowed $1.39. Look, the number of times I have come before these mikes, and I have done the charts and shown, in times when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we take in about 17, 18 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we take in about 17, 18 percent of GDP. It is the seesaw of lower marginal tax rates, the economy grows; higher marginal tax rates, the economy shrinks. We are getting basically the same percentage of the economy in tax receipts. There is an article on the Manhattan Institute's website that does an aggregation of a lot of studies, many of them from leftwing groups, showing that if you raised every tax that functionally the Dems have offered that has gotten scored, and then you adjust it for its economic effects, you get about a 1.5 percent of GDP in taxes, additional taxes. The cuts we had been talking about were now actually getting much broader, but let's go back to that point and a half. We are going to borrow 7.25 percent of the entire U.S. economy this year, so when the President turned to us and said he really wants a balanced budget, that is a tough one. Now, his Treasury Secretary has talked about if we could get down to 3 percent stability. Ray Dalio, who is talking about a book he is giving away, talks about his incredible fear of the squeeze that is happening around the world because the countries in the world are bingeing on debt and that there may be a shortage of borrowable capital, which will cause us, as he says, a heart attack. He says it would be good if we could get back to 3 percent of the size of the economy. Okay, maybe that should be our goal, but, once again, remember your government is functionally an insurance company with an army because the vast majority of our spending, the vast majority are things like Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits you get either because you hit a certain age, you worked a certain number of quarters, you fell below a certain income, or you are part of a certain Tribal group, but they are automatic. The one time we get an honest opportunity to really look at them is when there is this reconciliation. You are able to open up and look at the formula spendings. Let's actually walk through this for someone like myself, who basically is intellectually whipsawing, just beating the crap out of myself. Mr. Speaker, I do not want and believe it would be a horrible thing to allow taxes to go up at the end of this year, particularly on small businesses and the working population. This is the average. Understand that I represent the Phoenix and Scottsdale area. For my folks, our math is $3,300, almost $3,400 a year for my average family in tax hikes. For the country, it is $2,850. That is the tax hike that is already in the law. That is already what is coming at us. That is what the Democrats have been arguing, saying we shouldn't extend these tax cuts, and then they give these beautiful speeches about defending the working class. This is coming to us. This is part of the battle. Understand those tax hikes aren't just going on rich people. Mr. Speaker, 62 percent of the tax-paying population actually see their taxes go up. I am going to show some distributional charts later. After 2017, remember we actually made the tax code in the United States more progressive, meaning with a higher income, we are paying a higher percentage of the Federal income tax. What we also did was we functionally took half of our brothers and sisters who make much more moderate wages and pulled them off the tax system. They are still paying payroll tax, which is Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and disability, paying into those as sort of a retirement account. Think of it that way. They pay almost no income tax. We are going to focus on these charts about the income tax side. Once again, remember this is coming at us at the end of the year. This is what the budget reconciliation ultimately is about. For some of us, we are stressing about: How do I not let the taxes go up? How do I not play the scam of, ``Here, we are going to extend the tax cuts,'' and, ``Here, give me a credit card so I can charge it to you''? That is the scam. Mr. Speaker, is it really economically honest? We have a great set of data that shows if we borrow the money at the end of the decade, it actually costs those working families more because we have slowed down the economy and raised interest rates, those things, instead of saying I extended your tax cuts but because I charged it to you, your retirement account, your kids' future--understand that borrowing money is a tax. It is just not collected right now. It is collected in the future with interest on it. Let's actually walk through a chart that has upset a number of my fellow Republicans, but the math is honest. The day we were elected this November, we publicly borrowed--let's do a quick explanation. When we hear someone say our total debt is $37 trillion or 36-point whatever, a portion of that we borrow internally. We reach into the Social Security trust fund and borrow that money. We pay interest. The Treasury gives them special T bills. We pay interest on it. In some years, the interest we were paying to the different trust funds we have borrowed money from was actually a pretty good interest rate. That is internal borrowing. Then, there is the public borrowing. These are the options. This is the note, T bill, or bond that is in a retirement account. Another country may buy it to hold in their version of their Federal Reserve. Remember, China is not our number one buyer of our debt. As a matter of fact, China has been rolling off its debt for years, the holdings of U.S. sovereigns. They are actually somewhere under $900 billion now. It should make us a little nervous that certain foreign governments are no longer bingeing on U.S. debt because we would love to get their money. Most of the debt we sell to the retirement, to the business, to the bank, and other things. The day we were elected, publicly borrowed debt was about $28 trillion. Let's do a math experiment. Baseline borrowing for the next 10 years is $22 trillion. If we were to do the tax extensions--and this is going to make sense. When we hear people running around here saying let's just use current policy, let's just pretend our spending stays the same, our tax policy all stays the same, and we don't have to pay attention to the actual law, that would be $5.5 trillion plus another $1.3 trillion on top of that in interest. Then, let's add in some of the President's priorities: no tax on tips; no tax on overtime if we could find the mechanics, which is a little harder because we can't actually do it in reconciliation; no tax on Social Security. If we add those all up, it would mean, at the end of 2035, the amount of debt that has been borrowed from the public--one of the reasons the public number is higher is, in 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. We don't get to reach over there and keep using that as a piggy bank, even though we pay it back every month because the tax receipts from FICA taxes don't match the checks going out the door. Here is the punch line. It took us 240 years to get to that $28 trillion. We are basically talking about doubling it in 10 years. The publicly held debt is not exact, but it is close. It is math I can do in my head. We are talking about almost doubling the publicly held debt in the next 10 years. When we hear those coming behind the microphone and saying DOGE is horrible and evil. Really? Federal spending this year will be about $7 trillion, but we are only going to take in $5 trillion, so we are going to borrow about $2 trillion or $2.3 trillion. If I came to a business and said they are bleeding, for every dollar of revenue they are taking in, they are spending $1.36, $1.39, wouldn't that business turn around and try to find some ways to reduce spending and to modernize on how they do business? Think of this, if we are going to spend 7, could we find 15 percent savings? Maybe. It would be really hard. People would complain. It will screw up some people's business models. Some of the public employee unions will be cranky. If we can find 15 percent, that would be $1 trillion a year. It still doesn't get us to 3 percent of the GDP borrowing because, remember, again, 7\1/4\ percent of the entire economy will be consumed by this government in borrowing this year. When idiots like me hold up charts like this and I get complaints that I am hurting people's feelings, the fact of the matter is this is why we have to thread this needle and do really hard things. How do we extend the tax cuts, the tax reforms, the tax benefits, and the baseline economic growth of what we accomplished in 2017 but find ways to offset as much of it as we possibly can? Once again, even CBO and some of the outside studies made it very clear: If we offset the spending so that money stays in the economy, instead of being borrowed by government here, by it staying in the economy, we maximize economic growth because it gets lent to this business, lent to this new construction project. When we take it out of the economy--remember, our baseline, we are already borrowing $22 trillion over the next 10 years. How many more trillions should we stack on top of that? If we don't find offsets, it means we doubled U.S. publicly held debt in 10 years. It took us 240 years, and then we double it again in 10. This is how insane the chart looks from the people running around this place and saying just use current policy because it is easy and so I don't have to say no to the army of people sitting in my office and wanting money for whatever their cause is. Mr. Speaker, you do realize when you start looking at this stuff, you are talking about 140, 150-plus percent of debt to GDP. It goes from a 100 today to almost a 50 percent increase in the next 10 years. It is uncomfortable. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and healthcare costs. The people who run around here and just want to pretend the law doesn't exist and that if we were already doing it, we should just pretend and look the other way and just keep doing it. If we do that, that means in 9 budget years, just the interest--and this was assuming the interest rates from last December--we spend over $2 trillion a year in interest. When we hear members from the different committees around here talk about how hard this is, how difficult it is, when the Democrats are saying how dare we talk about these benefits, help us. Where is the creativity? Where is the modernization? Where is the use of technology to disrupt the cost but make it better, faster, and cheaper? Help us. That doesn't give us the dopamine hits and the hope to win back the next election to take the majority because winning around here is more important than doing what is moral, right, and economically rational. This is important. Are we ready as a country? My math for this year is we are going to spend about $1.2 trillion in interest. Dear Lord, please don't let interest rates move against us. Also, just an economic concept I need everyone to process is to think of a seesaw. When we see interest rates going down, yay, except the problem is that it typically means the economy is slowing down. There is less demand for debt in the markets, and the economy is slowing down. What happens, Mr. Speaker? What happens to the U.S. Treasury? It means tax receipts are going down. They may not go down immediately. We often don't see the lag for three quarters, sometimes a year. We can see it in the growth calculations that interest rates are falling, the economy is slowing down, and we are going to take in less tax receipts. Oh, good, the economy is growing. Interest rates go up. We are now paying it because this year or in the next 12 months we have to refinance $9 trillion of U.S. sovereign debt, plus probably add another couple trillion on top of that of what we call new issuances. We are going to take in higher tax receipts because the economy is doing well, but it all gets consumed by the higher interest rates. The center of this seesaw--it is a technical economic term--we are screwed. There is no free option anymore. When we walk around with $37 trillion of debt, when our baseline adds another 22, and that is with none of these policy discussions, why aren't more people around here just terrified? Is it that our constituents are so desperate for more money from the Federal Government that explaining that we are not giving them something free, that we are putting it on their credit card, that they will pay this back in some fashion will deflate the value of the dollar so their savings crashes and raise the cost of goods, or that, at some point, we are going to brutalize their kids, their grandkids, and their retirement? It doesn't have to be that way. God knows that, over the last couple of years, I have showed how we can crash the price of healthcare by using technology. Then, the lobbyists are in our offices, saying that would mean they have to change their business model. Yesterday, on CNBC, Eric Cantor was, in many ways, almost mocking us. He is a former majority leader here. Now, he is on Wall Street. He said: Do we really think the bond market isn't going to notice if we just do this pretend thing and say let's call this thing current policy, so we will keep the current tax regime. Yes, it means financing another $5.5 trillion, plus another $1.3 trillion of interest on top of it, and the bond market won't even notice that. We have the greatest fragility right now to this country. We are on the cusp of putting the bond market in charge of this country, not President Trump, not Congress. If we borrow about $60,000 or $70,000 a second every day, what happens when we pull up the next bond option and not enough people show up for it? It would create chaos around the world. It is a dangerous, dangerous game we are playing around here, but we go home and talk to voters. They want things. They need our help. Please understand this is a dangerous, dangerous game we are playing. I was just trying to make the point that if we do all these things without financing, we are basically over 150 percent of debt to the GDP. Let's actually do something difficult. The Treasury Secretary, Ray Dalio, these other people who are sort of economic experts--they are a lot smarter than I am or anyone else here--keep saying if we get to 3 percent of debt every year, it is actually somewhat equivalent to the growth of tax receipts. To get to 3 percent, it functionally requires a couple of trillion dollars of reduction in spending every year--think about that, with where we are going growth-wise. How many of you see Members of Congress come behind these microphones and say that we should work on this, let's get to $2 trillion a year. That is actually how screwed up these numbers are. When you get into the out-years, when you get to 2034, it is not $2 trillion you would have to move to. It is over $3 trillion. The current policy budget deficit is in the billions. If you want to be at 3 percent, you have got to cut 2 this year, 2 the next year, and it grows and grows and grows. I don't think there is an understanding. This is a sequitur. These tie together. The United States in 7\1/2\ years now will have more deaths than births. We have a shortage of young people. Yet, you want to live in a fantasy world of, oh, we are going to grow at 3 percent. Great. Tell me how, unless you are willing to do talent-based immigration, adoption of AI, or promotion of synthetic biology to do things better, faster, cheaper. There are ways I can get you there. I am blessed. I am chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. We have a handful of Ph.D. economists, freaky smart. We have a model to do it. What is my chance, Mr. Speaker, of getting this body to say--the President talked about doing talent-based immigration 2 nights ago, talked about modernizing, using technology. When you call the IRS--their own auditor says only 31 percent of the phone calls get answered. Why wouldn't you jump up immediately and say we are going to use the latest version of an AI chat that sounds like a person, that knows everything about the tax code, will stay on the phone with you, will help you fill out your forms, maybe even send you a YouTube video of how to fill out the form, maybe a PDF of the form, and it will stay on the phone with you all night long and will always pick up the phone. You get the union that goes: No, you can't use technology. That is part of the discussion going on here. Do you want to keep living and existing in a model that is decades out of date and isn't working and is burying your future in debt? Actually you're currently in debt. Functionally, we are borrowing about $6 billion a day. I was doing a little math standing in the back, off the top of my head. If you had 70,000 Federal employees accept early retirement, and they make $135,000 with benefits, you are cutting less than 2 days of borrowing. You need to do it. Do not take that comment and say: Oh, you see, it isn't enough. Just the opposite. It is just the beginning. The lack of understanding of how much trouble we are in is the problem. Stop pretending and saying these little things aren't big enough. That is why you have got to do dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them. But it might affect my business model; it might affect my--look, do you care about the future? I have a 2\1/2\ year old we have adopted. My wife is my age. When my little boy becomes--I think my math was 24 years old--so 22 years from now, every tax in the United States has to have doubled just to maintain baseline services because that is our burn rate. This place is absolutely immoral. Let's actually add to it. In 8 years, so 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Yet, I will see my Democrat colleagues come behind saying we should expand the benefit. Great. Tell me how to finance it. If the first year where the Social Security trust fund is completely empty--our rough math is it is over a $600 billion a year shortfall. I think that is the entire corporate income tax. There is this lack of understanding of the scale. We are in trouble. What is wrong with this place? Is it so much easier to go home and just lie? On cable television tonight, how many of them are going to do-- whether it be the left or the right cable--hold up charts and say: Here is the reality of the demographics and math and how much trouble we are in? For those folks who come up here and say, I care about poor people; I care about this, do you have any idea how much danger you are putting our future in? I personally believe prosperity is moral. Design a tax code, design a regulatory code, design the adoption of technology to maximize prosperity. Somehow, I am the idiot who keeps getting up behind this microphone and trying to get people--saying let's try to do things hard, maybe think about how we deliver healthcare services. We are doing modeling with our economists on silly things. How many billions and billions and billions do we spend every year in just Medicare with duplicative MRI scans, x-ray scans, and ultrasounds? If you take that scan and attach it to someone's phone, then it becomes portable. Now, our original number--I am having trouble believing it because it needs more vetting--was like $20 billion to $25 billion a year. What if it is a quarter trillion over 10 years? Is that a cut in services, or is that using technology to make it more modern, portable, faster to use, easier to use, more accessible? There will be lobbyists in my office tomorrow because I said this, saying: David, you don't understand. Those duplicate scans are our profit model. Help us. If you are on the left, or even a couple of my Republicans, and you don't like the discussions of we are trying to do reforms, then bring us ideas. There are freaky smart people in this country. You have a supercomputer in your pocket right now. The concept of what this thing can do--15 years ago, did you think you would have the world's knowledge and AI on it? Save us. Save yourself. Save your retirement. Save your kids. Save your grandkids. You have got to do it by thinking. The idiots I get--sorry, Mr. Speaker. I want to retract that. I will get people who say if we just didn't have foreign aid--and you send them the charts saying it is 5 days of borrowing. This isn't easy, but it is math. For my friends on the left that keep saying: Make the tax code more progressive. Okay. You have already seen your own studies from the progressive groups that say you might get another 1\1/2\ percent if you blow up everything, you maximize every tax policy you have ever promoted. You are borrowing 7\1/4\ this year. Remember, today, half the taxpayers--97 percent of the Federal income tax is paid by the top half, meaning the bottom half of those who are out there working their hearts out but don't make a great income pay almost no Federal income tax. They may pay FICA tax, Social Security, Medicare, those things. Taxes now have become incredibly progressive. Maybe you need to make it more progressive, but don't pretend it actually makes that much difference in the debt model. It doesn't produce nearly the revenues. I am going to bang through some of these real quick. The Federal tax code remains incredibly progressive. It is more progressive today than it was prior to the 2017 tax reform. Today, right now, if you actually take a look at the top earners, they are still paying the vast majority. What happens when your top 20 percent of income-earners are paying, I think a little shy of 70, 80 percent of all Federal income taxes? Instead of an idiot standing here giving you percentages of GDP and numbers, I thought we would do it as time. Let's use it as a calendar. For some people, it is easier to see. How Washington finances 366 days of spending in 2024. Remember, it was a leap year. There was an extra day. The top 20 percent of earners covered 201 days of Federal spending. The next 20 percent covered 41 days. The middle earners covered 17 days of government spending. The bottom 40 percent altogether covered 4 days. If you take the folks below the 40 percent, we spent 103 days. We sent them money. We didn't tax them. We sent them money on the Federal income tax side. Yet, when the intellectual vacuists say to just raise taxes, tell me how to get beyond the 17 percent GDP conundrum. The only model that really does, which is why much of the rest of the world uses it, is a value-added tax, where every separate production, you stack a tax on. Fine. Maybe that is what we are going to have to do in 10 years. Understand, that crushes the poor and crushes the middle class because their consumption is so much higher than those at the higher income. Upper-income taxpayers overwhelmingly finance the Federal Government. Yay. The punch line here, get to the bottom 20 percent, we actually pay them. Take the bottom 40 percent, it is actually less than 5\1/2\ percent of the total Federal income tax. I don't know how much more progressive you can make the tax system. If you want to do a super progressivity, great. When the people keep lying about the budget resolution--please, understand. I do not believe there was enough spending offsets in it. I want to make that perfectly clear. I actually felt incredibly let down. We spent months and months and months and months running around here trying to show people how you can modernize the delivery of services and lower the price of government. That scared too many people. So we got a budget resolution where functionally the baseline is $1.2 trillion in cuts and another half trillion in shock absorbers. Yet, it is a $4.5 trillion authorization. Meaning you would end up borrowing 3.3--$1.7 trillion is discretionary, completely unenforceable, and another $2.6 trillion of income is magic, thinking that somehow the GDP is going to grow 40 percent over baseline because we are so good looking. In that sentence I just gave you, I just made a whole bunch of people angry, but it is math. Find me a credible economist that is a truth teller and say somehow magically in a time where the United States has a shortage of young people--remember, in 7\1/2\ years, we have more deaths than births--and somehow magically we are going to start growing at this freakishly incredible rate while pulling stimulus out of the economy, which we have to do. There is a way to make this work, but unless you are willing to do hard things--and then an army of people will show up and say: David, I really want to balance the budget, but I need more spending because that is how I get elected. I bring the bacon home. That bacon is put on your own credit cards. The highest-earning 20 percent of taxpayers pay 90 percent of all Federal income taxes. Let's try it one more time. The highest-earning 20 percent of taxpayers pay 90 percent of all Federal income taxes. It is math. It is not comfortable. It doesn't fit almost any of the speeches you hear from the left behind the microphone. That is a tax cut for billionaires and rich people. That is not what the math says. Because when it comes to math, we are able to lie about it all the time because it is big and it is hard. A trillion, 12 zeros, no one can see that, so you just make crap up around here. Let's actually go to, one more time, the chart that gets me the most complaints, it upsets the most people, and yet it happens to be absolutely truthful. The next 30 years, this is the CBO using current law, not make- believe of let's just continue to pretend we can extend policy, and it has no cost because the bond markets aren't going to pay any attention when we are bringing trillions and trillions of dollars to the bond market. The world is happy to just keep giving us all of their capital. One more time, 100 percent of the next 30 years of borrowing is Medicare and its financing costs, and Social Security, because, remember, 8 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. We doubled senior poverty. Good job, guys. We doubled senior poverty in 8 years because the average recipient is getting something like a 20 percent cut. How many people speechifying around here have been talking about how to stabilize Social Security? It is hard. They will run television ads saying mean things about you because you mentioned the word ``Social Security''--the absolute immorality of modern politics and how little the public understands. Well, they stole the money. No, no one stole the money. The average family with their 40 quarters actually gets about a $72,000 spiff out of Social Security. It is a crap rate of return. It is a horrible rate of return. Many of you are the ones that went to war 25 years ago when President Bush said: Could we take a little tiny piece and put it into the markets? Today, you would have dramatically greater wealth. That decision was made. The public spoke--actually, the leftist unions spoke and scared the crap out of people. The real battle is that we are almost to the point of, for every dollar you put into Medicare and that payroll tax, you are almost taking out, well, $7. That right there is the primary driver of U.S. debt. Do you cut things? No. My argument is modernize, change it. My little example of the duplicative MRIs and scans and those things, why are we so terrified to modernize how we deliver Medicare? How many of you went to Blockbuster Video last night? The fact of the matter is technology changed because you now go home and hit a button, there are all your movies. Oh, well, that made my life more convenient. You are telling me that the thing you can blow into, the thing you can wear on your body, the technology on this, you couldn't also use it to keep yourself healthy when obesity is the single biggest expenditure in this government. Think about that. We modeled last year that obesity will add another $9 trillion of additional spending, $9.1 trillion on the top end of spending over the next 10 years. Maybe the revolution is the way you stabilize U.S. debt is to stop being fearful of technology, be willing to actually modernize and cut spending where it is not working for the American people, and help our brothers and sisters get healthier. That means taking on farm bills, nutrition policy, how we deliver healthcare. Maybe things like Medicare Advantage and these things should be rewarded for making their populations healthier instead of running around scoring them as sicker. There are solutions here. We have known this chart for decades, that this is coming. Why the hell can't this place have an honest conversation? ``Oh, David, that is hard.'' The President stood there just a couple of days ago, gave us a list of things he wanted to help the middle class. He also asked us to find a way to balance the budget. I am not sure I can make that happen, but I think I can get us to 3 percent, which is what the Treasury Secretary asked for. Mr. Speaker, my question is, who is willing to join us? I handed out my binders with research for months and months. I footnote everything, and you guys just beat the crap out of me for trying to tell the truth and trying to save us. Screw me. I am an idiot who runs for this job. You have kids. How many of you have grandkids? How many of you would like your retirement? How many of you are prepared for a 20 percent cut in your Social Security in 8 years? Help us. This Republic is worth saving. Maybe we should actually buy calculators. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, my best guess is I will use about 6 or 7 minutes of it. Mr. Speaker, do you remember the hair on fire comments that people said that mathematically had no basis? They are not actually in the budget documents. Let's understand the size of these committees are vastly different, but the one people were focusing on, E&C, the Energy and Commerce Committee, still has 96 percent of its spending authority within its jurisdiction. That is going to continue. This little wedge here is what they are being asked to work on. I will promise you if I am given the chance, if my economic team is given the chance, and if leadership in Ways and Means and E&C will work with us, I can get every dollar of that by just modernization of delivery of services. Remember, at one time, I worked on my State's Medicaid budgets. It has been a long time. I actually chaired for a little while my State's health committee, so I have some experience on Arizona, which has a very unique Medicaid system. We buy basically managed care policies for our indigent population. It is remarkably good. It is remarkably efficient. It may have the highest satisfaction rate in the entire Nation. It is something worth thinking about. Let's get down to the brass tacks here on a couple of last bits. Look at the next decade of spending. We don't get to touch interest. We don't get to touch old age survivor fund. That is your Social Security. Matter of fact, what we should be doing is having really interesting conversations, mathematically honest ones, not in front of the microphone, but probably in a back room with actuaries, on how we are going to save it considering the fact that Social Security's own actuary report says now, I think, in mid-2033, the trust fund is empty. For my Democrat friends who keep saying what we need to do is just do a bunch more taxes and enhance the benefit, you do realize you just chewed up every dime of your seed corn, if that is a colloquialism, for everything else. We have a chart we have brought here multiple times showing the proposals saying to take everyone over $400,000 and just raise the cap, so every billionaire pays their full Social Security, both the employer's side and the individual's side. I think our math says that it only took care of 38 percent of the shortfall, helping folks to understand the scale and also the rhetorical solutions that are so often thrown out are not mathematically honest. Then you come over here to discretionary. We can take a run at that. Do you know what discretionary is? It is defense. It is everything you really think of as government. Other mandatory and then Medicare and Medicaid basically sit in this area. What would happen if our brothers and sisters on the left would actually, instead of defending the inefficiencies, the distortions--I despise using ``waste and fraud'' because I think everyone is against waste and fraud. Even if you read the articles, the ProPublica and The Wall Street Journal on the extortion of bad acts, if that is a way to phrase it, that are going on in these programs and the willingness to fix that, should that be Republican or Democrat, or should it just be our attempt to do good governance? Remember, we are the board of directors for the biggest concern in the world. It is malfeasance the way we run this place. Our rhetoric is often completely intellectually vacuous. There are solutions. For any of you who have staff, do you have a nice highlighted copy of the MedPAC report from top to bottom where they walk you through lots and lots of solutions? I will send you over the stack of The Wall Street Journal articles. I will even send you the ProPublica on durable medical equipment fraud and how there are ways the doc and I could simply fix that with about a three-paragraph bill. People would have better access and better health, and we would save potentially a hundred-plus billions just on that one line item over the 10 years. I believe, Mr. Speaker, that is the opportunity we may have just unlocked. I also think sometimes I might be delusionally optimistic and hopeful. I am 62 with a 2-year-old. That is actually funny, but I don't think we have a lot more time to play this treadmill game. For my brothers and sisters in the majority, we are going to have to carry this. We are going to have to do the hard things because the left has decided they want to burn us down. That is fine. I wish I could be honest and say we didn't try to do the same when they were in the majority, but we are at a moment when the morality of protecting the society, protecting this country, and protecting the American Dream is growth moral. It is also the next generation not being, as the economists keep telling me, the first generation to live poorer than their parents because that is what is coming. Let's use this opportunity to do hard things. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. To the chairman and the minority, I first want to apologize to everyone. I have one of my crappy lung infections, so at some point, I am going to start coughing and doing an inhaler. Just ignore me. Somehow, I thought that would be funnier. Mr. Chairman and my good friend, Mr. Beyer, I think this is somewhat of a unique opportunity. Those of us from the Joint Economic Committee actually take math seriously. We don't always see things alike, but the fact of the matter is the Joint Economic Committee I think started in 1956. It has this remarkable history of some of the world's greatest economists coming and speaking before walking us through it. That is why, at this moment, we are going to try to do something that is special. Instead of just sort of sharing feelings, I am going to ask us to share math. Within that, we are going to walk through what is actually in the budget resolution. This is a reconciliation budget. It is not a regular budget. This is a budget that opens up the ability, because of the insanity we go through, of moving something through the Senate and its 60 votes. With the 1974 Budget Control Act, this is the dance we go through. The other thing I am going to try to walk through is where the actual math lays in the box that has been given to us by the Budget Committee, and then the part I am going to do, the Schweikert little bit of hope, is: Is this the moment? Is this the moment of policy that actually forces us, both the left and the right, that if there are cuts, modernization, changes, updates in methodology on how we deliver services, is this the stressor that makes us do something that is hard but also do something that is truthful. I am also going to try repeatedly to make the point, Mr. Chairman, and show why we are primarily doing this. We have a bunch of provisions of the 2017 tax reform that begin to expire. Most of those provisions actually are to the benefit of small businesses and the working class. I will show that over and over and the distributional effects. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I have to figure out, do I sit here and just spend my time correcting things that are mathematically not true or not in the design of what is actually here or just over and over say how much I like working with Mr. Beyer because one day he will be the chair, and I will be in his position. Let's actually walk through some basic math together. What will our spending be this year? It will be $7 trillion. What is actually in the cuts--remember the horrible draconian cuts--is $120 billion in a year. So, $7 trillion--a trillion is a thousand billion, for those of you who are math dysfunctional--let's walk through it, and $120 billion is the Armageddon. I am probably going to end up using these a couple of times here because I think they make a point. The way a reconciliation budget is laid out is it creates a series of boxes. Here are all of these authorizing committees. We need you to find savings. We need you to find those savings through modernization and waste and fraud. We are going to spend a little time actually talking about some great documents even the Biden administration produced on waste and fraud, and I am sure every Member here has actually read them. We have some other articles from The Wall Street Journal on Medicare Advantage and all these others. Many of them, when all added up, are a trillion-plus dollars. Are we capable of actually being intellectually honest and walking through? One of the charts--we are going to come back to this again--you have been hearing the Armageddon being said, that it is Medicaid. I used to do my State's Medicaid budgets. Arizona has a somewhat unique system. We actually buy managed care capitated policies for our indigent population. It is remarkably effective, and we deliver remarkably effective healthcare cheaper than almost every other State in the country, demonstrating that planned design, managed design, can both be much healthier for our society and save money. You don't start to have those revolutionary conversations in Congress until you have moments of stress like this. Once again, I want to add, in the document, 96 percent of the budget authority within Energy and Commerce is not touched. We are talking 4 percent of their budget authority, and that is spread over a decade. If we can't find 4 percent of modernization in these programs, we are actually in much more trouble than even just the brain trust here as we tell our stories. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I love public policy by storytelling, but this being the Joint Economic Committee, let's actually go back to math. Madam Chair, I would say to Mr. Beyer that I want to make sure I am communicating right, but at least we are down to, instead of the Armageddon, his number was, well, if you cut $2 trillion over 10 years, that is $200 billion. He is right, but that is actually not what is in the document here. It is functionally 1.2 with a shock absorber. Once again, I will give you the shock absorber, depending on what Ways and Means ultimately does. I thank the gentleman again. It shows we actually are fairly close on math. Another thing, and this is just someone who actually had worked on the tax reform in 2017 and the storytelling that has existed, particularly with my brothers and sisters on the left--Madam Chair, how would you feel if I could document to you that the post-2017 tax reform was more progressive? They were lower rates, but the top portion of income earners actually were paying a higher percentage of Federal income tax. When you start looking at this, remember, this is the distributional problem that I was going to try to walk through. I believe when you do the math here, 5 percent of the population are people making stunning amounts of money. If we want to have a discussion about whether they should pay more--guess what?--this opens up that discussion because there are no rates locked in to this. It just creates the capacity to now have the discussion. The fact of the matter is that the top 5 percent pay 38 percent of all Federal income taxes. Functionally, half of the workers in the United States pay less than 1 percent. I will take a correction if someone knows the actual number, but I think the bottom 25 percent receives more because of the earned income tax credit, which is the old negative income tax model. Look, we have a distributional problem. If you want to have a discussion of wealth and income equality, I have some great charts to show you what inflation did, what the previous functionally 3\1/2\ years of inflation did to wealth and the working class. When you inflate up people who have assets and crush those who are trying to survive, congratulations. Remember, before the pandemic under the TCJA, the tax reforms of 2017, it was the fastest closure of income inequality in American history. What is being discussed here is whether you allow those very tax benefits for small businesses, for individuals, to expire. We don't get a huge economic pop from continuing them. You maintain consumption. We know if you don't do them, that loss of consumption in those populations actually really hurts us economically. I am going to reserve in a moment, and then, we are going to come back and talk about some of the other provisions that are just, once again, Madam Chair, trying to create the capacity so we can actually have the more elegant debate of what should the distributional effects be and where do we get the most economic growth from? The next time I come back, let's actually do a bit of where the economic growth can come from, and we will walk through the model of expensing and those things. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I actually made a board for what the gentleman's point was, showing, within this reconciliation budget document, how much additional tax cuts are there for C corporations. There is your board. I am being a little sarcastic, but that is sort of a personality trait. The fact of the matter is, once again, the talking points don't match up with the reality here. Everyone in this room, your taxes go up at the end of this year. If you run a small business, a passthrough, not a C corporation, a passthrough, your taxes go up. If you are part of an employee-owned company, so you have come together and you are managing yourselves almost like an employee co-op, your taxes go up. Also, I hope but don't know if the capacity that this creates will allow us to do it, but I sure hope so. We have some great data, and I won't make you live through my charts that show expensing, research and development expensing and expensing. It has a cost in the 10-year window. Hopefully, everyone has listened to my dozens and dozens of speeches walking through what expensing is. Expensing is nothing more than depreciation. Do you take the expense in 1 year or, let's pretend, 7 years? You still get the exact same amount of reduction on your taxes. It is a timing effect. The difference is if you can't take it in the first year and you do it over 7 years, you have to finance it. We have great economic modeling that shows when you do expense research and development, when you do expensing, you get a virtuous cycle of: We bought the piece of equipment, so we do it better, faster, and cheaper. Our competitors just did it, so the next year, we have to do it again. That was one of the reasons, particularly prepandemic, we had that sudden spike of capital expenditures and productivity. The punch line on that is that does not exist now. It is our fading out for those C corporations, which had their rates already locked in, but also for all those other small businesses to make those capital expenditures. Why is this really important? Well, there is a lot of data that shows that part of the tax code actually does, from an economic growth standpoint, create incredible vitality. It is a timing effect. It is the tyranny of living within a 10-year window in our models. I just hope that starts to elevate a little bit of the economics discussion instead of the storytelling. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, the average family would save $2,853. That is your crumbs. I would argue, for the average family that has been crushed by the previous 3 or 4 years in inflation, if you don't make 27 percent more money in my district, you are poorer today than you were 4 years ago. They were having their taxes go up $2,853, and that is the average. I promise you, Madam Chair, I think in my district it was closer to 3,300. I am blessed to have a more prosperous district. That is not crumbs, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, may I inquire as to how much time remains.