David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chairwoman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chairwoman, can you believe this? We broke our printer. However, thank heaven we didn't break the markers. So I thought actually just because we are trying to do fact-based, the average family's taxes are going up at the end of this year $2,853, and 62 percent of taxpayers will see hikes. I am sorry, we just didn't have time to make a much prettier chart for everyone. Remember that after 2017 we actually moved up, some of that were some of the deductions and things that were added, we moved up the threshold, so almost one-half of our taxpaying population actually didn't pay income tax. They still had payroll taxes and FICA and those things. A bunch of that population that has not paid taxes in years and years and years will be getting tax bills with the opposition to this. Madam Chair, we are going to come back and go over more. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, once again, here is the budget document. Here are spreadsheets. I keep hearing: You are giving away to billionaires. Where is that? Where is it? Madam Chair, it doesn't exist because this is a box that allows us-- and understand, Madam Chair, I am passionately concerned about debt and deficits, but this may be, for an idiot like myself, the first opportunity where members of leadership and those are ready to allow people like me to come in and walk through how we can improve and change the costs of how we deliver services, and we need this type of document to do it. Madam Chair, you deal with the reality of what we are allowed to touch. You do realize the majority of mandatory spending we are not even allowed to touch in a budget reconciliation because it is interest and Medicare is the majority. Every day we wait to modernize, we are in that much more trouble. The last thing before I do a yield here. We are going to spend $86 trillion, and I am partially doing this off the top of my head, over the next decade. This budget reconciliation we are hoping to get, let's say we are blessed and we get $2 trillion in offsets, so that creates a couple trillion dollars in additional borrowing, we are talking a fraction, a couple percent of the spending, Madam Chair. I would argue this is the moment for us where it is not about cuts. If any of us has ever just even bothered to look at the MedPAC reports, and this was done by the Biden administration, we have potentially over a decade hundreds of billions of dollars in here that aren't going to services. They aren't going to make our brothers and sisters healthier. Help us. Help us engage the morality of doing this better, faster, and cheaper. Madam Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Valadao).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chairwoman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chairwoman, economic literature and, actually, I think even the board here demonstrated that, if we go back to the original TCJA, over 70 percent of those corporate tax cuts show up in wages. That is one of the reasons there was such remarkable wage growth without inflation. If workers are cared for, tax policy becomes correct. Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, let me have just a couple of moments of joy here. A reconciliation budget that only touches individuals and passthrough businesses, so there are no shareholders who are getting-- that is actually already locked in. That is one of the reasons we are doing this is because you want to see distortions in the economy, have a world where small businesses, passthroughs, employee-owned, their taxes shoot up, but the C corporations are down here. What distortion did you just create in the world? I am a C corporation. I am buying everyone else. You want to see the big get bigger? It is one of the reasons you have to do this. Also, I beg my brothers and sisters, have a different view but actually just try to get the most basic facts correct here. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Chair, apparently, the Democratic position is the $2,000 you get per child, which was the doubling of the child tax credit in 2017, should go away and go back to the $1,000? Wow. I think that is what I just heard. Those of us who have adopted kids, those who have children, congratulations, your child tax credit is going to get cut in half. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I would inquire once again on how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chair, just as some of my Democratic colleagues have done, I was just thumbing through the actual document. I know this is crazy, and literacy being sort of a lost art, but I am trying to find where this heresy, these cuts are. There is a discussion here that basically says we need not to just purely stick this on the debt and deficit. Okay. In the Energy and Commerce instruction, I think it is 4 percent of the area of authorization, you are telling me after the hundreds of hours idiots like me have come behind this microphone and done presentations showing the distortions, the waste and fraud, the misallocations, the lack of use of technology, the duplications, you can't produce 4 percent? Why is the left so terrified of the moment where maybe a document that forces us in some ways to listen to each other, to maybe say: How do we do this better, faster, cheaper? I am going to say this three or four more times. Does the left really want to raise taxes on the average American family by $2,853? Is that the plan here? This says that 63 percent of those who are tax filers will see their taxes go up. Is that the plan here? Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, just because I want to help out-- because I know this is heresy around here. Truly one of my favorite Members to work with, even though we are on different sides of the aisle, he may want to retract the words ``Social Security,'' which he just said, because he knows Social Security cannot be allowed in any of this package.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oh, no. Who else has been working for a decade now to save it? Remember, in 2033, about halfway through the year, the trust fund is gone. Is that a Republican or a Democratic problem? I would say it is a morality problem. We will be doubling senior poverty in America in 8 years. How often are we allowed to come talk about it? Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I am prepared to close, but I would like to inquire on how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time to close. I know it is painful to listen to an idiot like me for 5 minutes, but let's have some fun here. First, I want to say to everyone who has spoken, I love the passion and I love the caring. I just, once again, have to come back. This is a reconciliation budget. It basically builds boxes. This box here is for your authorization. You can go more, but you can't go less. Okay. I am on the other side. I actually believe there should be more cuts in spending because I think we can achieve that by modernization, changing processes, and the adoption of technology. Last week, I believe I was behind this very microphone, and we were showing charts of, hey, this is Medicare, how many billions and billions do we spend every year on duplicative MRIs, ultrasounds, x- rays? Does that make someone healthier? Does that make them better? No. It is basically waste and fraud. We have the ability to use technology to get rid of that. If we all agreed to do something like that, then we are going to get rid of these duplicative services. We are going to get rid of some of the--we like to say waste and fraud, but the fact of the matter is there are design problems in the model. You didn't cut a single service. You didn't take anything away from someone, but what you gave is my kids a chance to survive. Look, part of this I don't like. I am going to be brutally honest. I wish there were more cuts. I don't like the amount of borrowing here, but if this is the moment that opens up a chance for someone like myself, who has spent a decade here passionately trying to say it doesn't have to be cuts. It is actually the adoption of technology. I am going to go slightly off track, then I want to get back into the distribution. If I turn to my brothers and sisters and anyone willing to listen right now, what is the single biggest cost in our society? This is where Schweikert soaks himself in kerosene and plays with matches, Mr. Chair. It turns out it is obesity. For our brothers and sisters, we calculate there will be over $9 trillion in additional healthcare costs over the next decade. What would happen if the left and the right actually said we are going to fixate on the way we deliver healthcare, the way we deliver nutrition support, the way we do agriculture policy, that we are going to help our brothers and sisters be healthier, and, by the way, family formation, the use of healthcare, the ability to have a life. Maybe it is moments like this where we go to battle in the committees. We have really smart people, but armies of lobbyists outside these hallways look at us and stress out when we start saying it is time to modernize, time to find a better, faster, more elegant way to deliver services and slow down the piling of debt because the math still comes back to 63 percent of our tax-paying brothers and sisters will see their taxes go up. Now, for the comments you have heard over and over here about the distributional effects. Okay. Mr. Beyer and I are both on Ways and Means and battle in the committee. Remember, there is no bill coming out of the committee yet. What is it going to look like? Do we actually have to make elegant changes? Are there things we can agree on as a body that will maximize economic growth? At some point you have got to look--and I am sorry I have beaten up this chart, but we have been trying to model what happens to the economy if we allow these tax hikes to come in automatically. It turns out the economy is also benefited if we maximize how much we pay for at the end of 10 years. I know changing spending policy is hard, but if we were to maximize both, at the end of the decade we are more prosperous. Mr. Chairman, at some point that is the ultimate question here: Is prosperity moral? Is there a way we can actually do our work here where we maximize the prosperity for my 2\1/2\-year-old but also the person heading to retirement, to our brothers and sisters who are out there working their hearts out? There is a way. The hardest part is we are going to have to do things differently than we have done in the past. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, first, is there a chance to get the amount of time that we are splitting so we have a sense of the run time here?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. If we are all blessed, I won't use it all. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had a moment where the first words in your head are: I am damned if I do and damned if I don't, but is there a chance? For a decade, I have been coming behind this very microphone and walking through demographics, debt, and the deficit and trying to explain something that the left doesn't like and the right doesn't like, that almost 100 percent of the growth of the deficit for the next three decades is demographics. We don't like saying that because it is harder to play the politics of blaming each other. There have been dozens of things said. That is just the nature of it in regards to the reconciliation budget resolution that was just passed. I managed part of the Joint Economic Committee time, and my job there as the chair of the Joint Economic Committee is I represent the committee, and now I get to represent myself. I worry, but the opportunity is having basically authorizing committees do what is necessary to save our future. Mr. Speaker, a little while ago you saw a beautiful little baby here. Last week, when we were here, I had my 2\1/2\-year-old that we have adopted with me. Here are some basic pieces of math. For my 2\1/2\-year-old, when he is 24, 25 years old, every U.S. tax rate has to have been doubled, all of them, just to maintain baseline services. The whole presentation of walking through what happens when you get a moment to actually disrupt policy and do things that are better, faster, and cheaper--because I will argue the army of lobbyists, basically the rent seekers, if you remember your high school economics, who are around us all, despise the concept of reform. They despise the concept of modernization. That is actually some of the basic things I want to go over tonight, and I will try to do it efficiently. First off, I know I used this board a little while ago, and I am sorry it is handwritten. I broke the printer. It is just simply making a point that for the average American at the end of this year, if we don't fix the expiring provisions, their taxes go up $2,853, and functionally 62 percent of all taxpayers will be subject to higher taxes. Now, we actually have our friends on the left basically saying: You are going to give away to the millionaires and billionaires. It is not the distributional effect of 2017. As a matter of fact, one of the great trivia points--and I actually had some fun with this one because it comes from my progressive analysis from a few years ago--is that after the 2017 tax reform, the U.S. tax regime actually became more progressive. There were lower rates, but it meant the top-tier of taxpayers were paying more of the Federal budget. You walk through saying: Okay. Can I show you? Well, you gave money to corporations. Yes, but we can show you that the vast majority of that actually went to wages. People forget many of the things we did to force the repatriation back of capital, intellectual property, expensing, and R&D expensing. As a Republican, don't ever tell anyone this: A bunch of that was in the Obama budget. They were in many ways bipartisan ideas from back then because we were bleeding out productive capacity in this country. We were transferring productive capacity and our assets overseas because of our tax regime and the ability to compete. Now, it looks like the reality of sounding like an idiot economist around here doesn't buy you a lot of friends, Mr. Speaker. Yet, the fact of the matter is the budget box that was just offered is an opportunity to--Mr. Speaker, forgive me, my asthma and my lung infection are going a little nuts right now--it is an opportunity to stop our taxes from going up. What I am actually more interested in is what I believe are solemn promises I got from the leadership about many of the things I have come behind this microphone for a decade talking about as to how we can adopt technology and how we can adopt models to lower costs and yet cover our brothers and sisters and give them more access and more opportunity to be healthier, because the way we deliver services as a government is archaic. Right now, Mr. Speaker, if you were designing a system, you wouldn't do it this way. We are all terrified of whether it be the bureaucracy and their lobbyists and their unions, you know, something the left has to deal with. Many of the businesspeople that have learned how to make money off these programs are a problem. They come marching into our offices all upset because we are going to change their business model and make them compete. Guess what, Mr. Speaker. That might be what we just accomplished in this vote, which is less about fixing the expiring tax provisions, which we are going to do, but maybe it will also give us that window where we can change and improve the way we deliver these services. I can't figure out why this place is so intellectually calcified that they are terrified of changing it. Mr. Speaker, let's once again walk through some of our basic math. This is just a pie chart--yes, it is a pie chart--yay, we love pie charts--for the estimates for this fiscal year. Basically, I want to take a look at it. It is a little less than 75 percent, but it is close. Actually, it looks like that may be. What is seen in red is mandatory spending. Well, guess what. The blue is all I get to vote on as a Member of Congress, and every dime of the blue is borrowed. What happens if I come and say: Well, net interest? Well, we don't get to vote on the interest. My personal math is closer to almost $1.2 trillion in interest coming in this year, but I have been doing a running calculation of a higher interest rate. We don't get to touch Social Security. Social Security has its own trust fund, which is gone in 8 years. Then, all of a sudden, we have to figure out--what is it, the first full year of Social Security trust fund being empty is $600 billion or $609 billion, something of that nature. It depends on workforce participation at the time that is done. That makes the dollars we were talking about today tiny. Well, we have Medicare, Medicaid, and some other mandatory programs, so why am I showing this? What is so difficult here? I know this is geeky stuff, but this is why there is such a fraud in the debates that happen around this place, is we don't treat the voters like they have an IQ. Stop talking down to America. I will argue that many of them are a hell of a lot smarter than people like me. We don't get to actually put net interest into our reconciliation budget. As a matter of fact, there is nothing we get to do about it. There is some things we could have if we could actually work together on the way we sell debt, or maybe the types of interest. Professor Shiller of Yale wrote an article 10 years ago about trills, which is an equity interest in tax receipts, and other things--there is ways to break up the concentration on debt, making society less fragile--are subject to possibly bond vigilantes. Social Security, it is illegal. It is part of the 1974 Budget Control Act. It can't be touched. Yet, I saw half a dozen Members on the other side go behind the microphone and say: Whoa, Social Security. What is a good word for an absolute untruth? Oh, okay. I will work on that. What we have is less than half of the red portion that we can even work on in a reconciliation budget. This is an incredibly important moment. Will the standing committees, which have gone years and years and not been able to actually provide improvements, redesigns, and modernization, be able to look at things like The Wall Street Journal's five-article series and also the ones this weekend on Medicare Advantage? Mr. Speaker, one of their headlines said--I think it was actually more than a single-year period, but $50 billion of fraud. Are we allowed to work on that? Is that Republican or Democrat, or is it just time to find a better way to actually think about these things? That is maybe what we just opened up, assuming that my own leadership and my own committee chairman are ready to do hard work, really difficult things that, just like that baby, just like my 2\1/2\-year- old, maybe we could save their future. Maybe I could save their retirement without ever cutting a service. There have been a number of Members who have come up behind the microphone and said that we are cutting Medicaid, and we are cutting this. Really, find me that word in here. It doesn't mean it is easy. For the Energy and Commerce Committee, they have to find 4 percent of their entire committee's authorization over 10 years. Are Members telling me they can't find 4 percent of improvements in this place? Yet, the sound of Armageddon, that is why this slice is so incredibly frustrating. We are trying to save the future. I am not bouncing around. There is a linear thought here. Mr. Speaker, believe it or not--promise me you won't ever tell anyone this--I was reading an article from The New Yorker that just came out. Don't tell anyone that, as a conservative, I actually look on occasion at The New Yorker: ``The End of Children.'' Realize that the Census Bureau of the United States says that in about 7\1/2\ years this country has more deaths than births. Tell me as a junior actuary, or someone who wishes he was smart enough to be one, how I make the math of the future work in a society that has a shortage of young people. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just demographics, but we are not allowed to actually do difficult things here because, Mr. Speaker, it would require math, and then the harder part is it would require us to tell truth. So many people, like this very moment, there will be someone on cable television on the left and the right doing their talking, getting people's dopamine to hit, but it is not honest math. The math is really hard. It is really complex. There is a way to make it work, but we have only a couple more years, I believe, to provide the stability. Maybe that is what we just did a few minutes ago. Once again, this is the single board that gets me the most hate mail. It also is the truth. This is the 30-year projection. If my colleagues look at the 30-year projection from the Congressional Budget Office--I didn't produce this. They did, and we believe it is already way out of date because of the change in interest rates--Social Security and Medicare and their interest carry are responsible for almost functionally every dime of debt from today through the next 30 years. It is $116-some trillion of debt. The rest of the budget actually has about a $9 trillion positive balance because its growth is slower than the growth of tax receipts according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is the thing the left, in my particular case, loves to run hate television commercials: He dared to talk about saving Social Security, saving Medicare, reforming how we deliver services so they are stable and so people have a future. If Members want to understand why this place is so damned toxic, those of us who are actually trying to fix things also write the attack commercials for the other side. It is a sickness, but the math is the math, and the math will eventually win. Mr. Speaker, understanding what will happen if we don't modernize how we deliver services and, through that, start to stabilize everything-- it is not just the benefits, but it is the growth of debt, convincing the bond markets we are going to be stable so they don't raise our interest rates. A couple of weeks ago, we showed a chart that, if this place does stupid things and we make the bond markets nervous and we were to get a one-point increase in U.S. interest rates, we showed that, in 9 budget years, the additional interest is bigger than everything we talked about today. My colleagues have to start processing how fragile we have made our future, and Members will start to actually look that, if we don't start to actually use this opportunity to say that we are going to use the reconciliation to open debate, we are going to not raise people's taxes, but we will get to have a robust debate, discussion, and ideas with the left, the right, particularly those of us on Ways and Means Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee, those things, saying: Here is what the mix should look like. Maybe we don't extend everything. Maybe we mix them up. Maybe we find where there is leakage. Maybe we find where there is economic growth opportunities. Bring proposals. Bring economics. Bring statisticians. The debate is on, and now we get to actually have an honest debate based in statistics and math and maybe a future because we so rarely do that around here. We are going to publish a couple more versions of this in more detail. I am blessed to also chair the Joint Economic Committee, so I have people who are much smarter than I am. My colleagues will be happy to know that all of our economists now bathe. It is a running joke, particularly if Members know economists. We work through the math that said what would happen if you did both things and paid for as much of this reconciliation budget, the spending, the extension of the tax cuts as possible, and you do it. That is how you get your maximization of growth. Turns out, if you don't do it, you actually get probably a small retraction, maybe a small recession, because people's taxes go up rather dramatically. Remember, for the average family, didn't I just show you--$2,853. In a district like mine, it is somewhere in the $3,000 range. I have a higher income district. You also had the other thing. The most we can do to try to find ways to pay for that. Turns out, there is this concept of capital stack. The United States Government is not the only one bingeing on debt. Look at China and other countries, this and that. As the demographics of the industrialized world start to functionally get really ugly, and we are having to provide services, the amount of savings is starting to be chewed up. One of the benefits we had in the previous decade and the decade before that is there was fairly substantial savings stacks that went into U.S. sovereigns and other things. We expect, in the next few years, we will actually start to see that roll over. Then, you get the concepts of term premiums and those things. I know it is geeky, but the fact of the matter is, if you don't have a substantial modernization of government, you can't make this math work. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Moore).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I have a handful of things we need to do. A little while ago, we had an Oversight Subcommittee hearing--I chair the Oversight Subcommittee on Ways and Means. Some of the things that get said around here, we just shake our heads. Think about some of the things we hear from the press, from the Democrats, they are just panic-stricken. I need to actually walk the American people and our own staff through a little bit of the facts and a little bit of the truth. We have done multiple presentations here, saying if we want to find waste and fraud, if we want to find programs that are mis-designed, and other things that are going on, don't hire a bunch of lawyers. Don't actually hire a bunch of investigators. Hire data scientists. It turns out the truth is in the math. The math can tell us. What is amusing is listening to some of the Democrats talk about how we don't want people seeing our data. Maybe they should actually pay attention to the current law. When we hear certain leftist groups--and most of these are actually fairly left--saying we did an analysis of U.S. taxpayer data and blank, blank, blank is getting this, actually understand--the IRS is one of the things I oversee. For decades, apparently, they have data-sharing models for researchers. Not to give out the names but Harvard, University of Sydney, so they are not even domestic; some are out of the country. Yes, there are some rules. The fact of the matter is, with this sort of hyperventilation going on around here, has anyone wondered if it is because the ability to mine data is how we find bad acts? Look what The Wall Street Journal did over the last year in looking at Medicare. It wasn't about people's benefits. It was about people being defrauded on durable medical equipment. Other groups out there also did data-sharing, modeling, and research agreements with CMS and they found bad acts. A simple question is: Why has the left become terrified of data? Aren't they the ones who preached to us in the previous years about science? Why don't we believe in science? Guess what? Now science is being used to protect the U.S. taxpayers and Americans' future. Instead of being used to research things to write papers to support a leftist cause, maybe it is actually now being used to actually find out how the American people are being cheated. When we hear them hyperventilating and reading the talking points from the Public Employees Union, maybe take a step backward. Let's deal with the fact that much of what is being put out is clickbait, and understand these research agreements have been going on for years and years. What is going on now is these folks are designated as special Federal employees with an even higher level of standard fiduciary responsibility. This is just part of the things around here that when we get something we don't like or when we start to expose decades worth of bad acts, fight like hell because the Public Employees Union functionally supports one side here. We are trying to find out what is going on. One of the things I want to also accomplish in today's floor speech is--and I am sorry. I know I am a broken record, but I am trying to break through. Let's actually deal with a couple of things here. Before I go to the boards, I made the mistake of looking at some of the comments from last week's speech. Notice there are almost no people here. That is how it is supposed to be. If this room is full of people listening to an idiot like me give another speech, they are not working. They belong in their committees, in their working groups, in their offices, meeting with either constituents or their staff or other people. This is where we come to actually have our final debate and vote. The vast majority of work done in Congress isn't done in this room. It is done in the dozens of committee rooms and offices all over this campus. When we see the room, stop falling for the clickbait. Why is the room empty? It is supposed to be. One of the reasons we get behind this microphone is we are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus and here in D.C. and around the country. This is our chance to talk to those staffers and help them understand how dire the math is and how intense the battle ahead of us is. How do we communicate with Members who are maybe new to Congress and get them to realize much of what they are being told may not be mathematically honest or true? Let's actually, once again, set the baseline. This one is about a year or so old. The numbers are actually slightly uglier. The blue is nondefense and defense. That is all a Member of Congress gets to vote on. A Member of Congress doesn't actually vote on the interest payments, the Social Security, the Medicare, Medicaid, or other mandatory because those are formulas now. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Last year, every dime we voted on was borrowed money and maybe $300 billion or $400 billion of what we didn't vote on was borrowed money because we actually borrowed more than every dime on what we call discretionary. Defense is discretionary. Remember that in today's world Social Security is the number one spend. It is about 1.4, 1.5. Interest is number two. Medicare is number three. Defense is actually number four. The next time we have some brain trust saying, if we just cut defense--I am sure there are efficiencies that we may find in defense. I have been pushing for--this my third Congress in a row, trying to get an AI audit because the Pentagon has failed their audits for 8 years. It is unauditable is the report we get back. So use AI at least to go through and stack the asset list because we can't audit it if we don't know where the trucks are and other things. In the security areas, do human auditing of those. Help us because it has finally actually risen to the surface of people saying maybe technology can help us save our science and our future and our economy. When we take a look at what really goes on here in Congress, we have to understand: Our government is functionally an insurance company with an army. Almost 100 percent of the next 10 years of borrowing is interest and Medicare. Yet, we are terrified to tell the public the truth. It is math. The math will win, but we have to stop being fearful. I am going to show you some of these. Stop saying crazy stuff. If your mission in life is to fill out comments or put out things on X and this and that and say things because your life's mission is to be clickbait, don't you care enough about this Republic to tell the truth of the scale? It is debt, deficit, and demographics. We have a country that in 8 years, less than 8 years now, will have more deaths than births. We have a shortage of young people, and it really screws up the long- run math and ability to be productive, the ability to actually raise wages, all those things. There are ways to make this work. We just have to do hard things. You see how difficult it is just to have an honest conversation about the math around here. Look, I showed this last week. I am only going to do it for a second. This is for those people that run around this campus saying: Let's just use current policy because that way I don't have to deal with actually telling someone no. Baseline, by the end of this fiscal year, CBO says we will be at $37.2 trillion in borrowed money. Then CBO tells us over the next 9 budget years, 10 calendar years, we are going to borrow another $22 trillion. That is $37 trillion, another $22 trillion, and then if we were actually going to do the expiring tax provisions, without finding a way to pay for them, that is $5 trillion to $5.5 trillion. Then there is another $1.3 trillion of interest on top of that. Then many of the President's priorities are another $8 trillion when you add in the interest. You are functionally at $74 trillion of borrowing in the next 9 budget years. You basically have doubled U.S. debt. Is that really what is going on here? It took 240 years to get where we are at. Once again, for the people who are listening, those are the gross numbers because we borrow from the trust funds. The other problem you actually have, if you really want to geek out, is by the end of this budget window, so the next 8 years, 9 years, the trust funds are almost empty. One of our models basically says in mid-2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. It is not because someone stole your money. It was demographics. We haven't had enough young workers, and Social Security was always designed as a pay-as-you-go system. The money that comes out of the Social Security trust fund and is loaned to Treasury. Treasury pays in interest. In the past, it has actually been a little above even some of the market interest you would have gotten. The problem is, every single month, Treasury gets a little note from Social Security saying: We got our FICA tax collections. It is not enough for all the checks going out the door. Treasury, we want some cash; so they cash in what we call special T bills. Since the brain trust in this place decided in lame duck that we were going to extend some additional Social Security benefits without paying for them, we actually shortened the life of the Social Security trust fund. Some of the math, in 2033, looks like the trust fund will be gone. If we don't fix it, we double senior poverty in America. This is the morality of this place. The Democrats right now are writing an ad to attack an idiot like me for telling the truth because they care so much more about winning the next election than doubling senior poverty in America. They are going to try to scare the hell out of you instead of stepping up and saying: Here is how you do it. Understand, in 2034 or 2035, when you have a full year and the trust fund and Social Security are gone, we calculate that it is like $600 billion a year. Think about what we are fighting over here, it may be $400 billion a year to extend the tax policy so people's taxes don't go up, but by the end of this window, you have got another $600 billion a year to deal with. It gets worse every single year, and that is not even dealing with the fact that a couple years outside the budget window, the Medicare part A trust fund is also empty. Is this place capable of dealing with difficulties? For everyone out there, when your reaction is: Well, just raise taxes. I have done it a half a dozen times on the floor. The staff is telling me the six people that watch this are bored with it. Go on the Manhattan Institute's website. I think it's Riedl has a great article from a year ago who took all of the tax-hiking policies that have been offered by the Democrats and scored them and said: Here is the economic effects. Here is what you get if you tax the rich, everyone over $400,000. At the end, the calculation came out to you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. Yea. We are going to borrow close to 7 percent of the entire economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem? When your default is: We are going to tax rich people more. It doesn't get you close to where you have to be. That chart I just showed you a moment ago, if we were to do these things without offsets, in 9 budget years we are no longer borrowing about 7 percent of the entire economy; we are borrowing close to 9.2 percent of the entire economy. It is not popular because the folks out there want their feelings satiated and don't own calculators. I am sorry. I know I am being a bit of a jerk. I am just tired of dealing with lunacy. The primary driver of debt is demographics. What happens if we can clean up ourselves? What happens if we are able to squeeze waste and fraud and find more modern ways that are more compassionate, more efficient to actually deliver the benefits to our brothers and sisters? This is just a thought experiment. We have been working on list after list after list after list of things you could modernize, reduce spending, and never cut someone's benefits, never cut their services. We have one project we are doing in our office. In Medicare and Medicaid, Indian Health Services, DOD, and VA, how many duplicate scans are there? How many people go get an MRI, an x-ray, an ultrasound? What if you take that and then immediately attach it to someone's phone so that the scan is mobile with them? We are seeing numbers where it is billions and billions and billions of dollars being spent in duplicative scans. Is that cutting someone's services? Of course it isn't. The lobbyists get upset because they make money on how many times--or at least their clients do. I need you to think about how you modernize to do it better, faster, cheaper, and more compassionately. We have done entire presentations here on the floor over the years trying to demonstrate that maybe the most moral thing we can do as a government is actually help people to be healthier. If we are seeing data that says 5 percent of the population with multiple chronic conditions are over half of all healthcare spent, what would happen if we focused on them being cured? If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending, should we actually think about that? If it is over $600 billion, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare by people crashing, having a stroke because they didn't take their calcium inhibitors, things of that nature, are there things we can do to help our brothers and sisters be healthier? It turns out a year ago, the Joint Economic economists actually did a study that obesity in America may be an additional $9.1 trillion in healthcare over the next 10 years. Turns out that becomes the number one spend in the U.S. Government. How do we make our brothers and sisters healthier so they can participate in the economy? Maybe they can actually have families. There is suddenly this awakening in America. It is not Republican or Democrat. I would argue it is just moral. We want our brothers and sisters to not only live longer but more vibrantly. Are we willing to do very difficult things in farm policy, in nutrition policy, in how we deliver health services? It is worth thinking about. Being in this stupid town, instantly, the partisan rage is: Oh, how is that going to get me elected? How am I going to use it as a wedge to beat the crap out of other side? Maybe the morality is helping our brothers and sisters and not having this country be crushed in debt when the bond market is the most influential group in America today, not Members of Congress. Let's actually take a quick look. I am trying to find the nicest way to say this. If we were just to do this TCJA extension--which we believe we need to do. We are not going to raise taxes on working people, but we need to find a way to pay for it. It is not only the $5.5 trillion that CBO is now scoring if you did it to 2035. It is the $1.3 trillion financing cost of doing that. That is the interest. How about no tax on overtime pay? It is a passion of the President. We need to come up with $3 trillion to cover that cost over 10 years. If we don't do that, it adds another $700 billion of interest cost. If we do no tax on Social Security, that functionally comes out to almost $1.8 trillion. Almost all of that money goes to Social Security and Medicare. We have got to find a way to cover that if we are not going to have tax on Social Security. How about SALT for the folks in California and New York who are saying they will not vote to extend the tax policy unless they get something for their areas. That could actually be another $1.2 trillion over 10 years and another $300 billion in interest if we don't pay for that. No tax on tips, actually turns out that one is fairly easy. It may be $600 billion over 10 years. Our math is a little higher, but that is the number we have been given. You have to understand, everyone has these wish lists. The President, Members of Congress, our constituents, everyone wants something. We need to look at the fact of how does it help the society grow economically. Prosperity is moral. How do we pay for it in a way-- because if we keep pushing up the U.S. debt--I showed a couple weeks ago that if we were to make the bond and the debt markets nervous, a single point of interest over the next 10 years costs the average American family $30,000. You would have a higher car loan, higher home loan, higher credit cards, higher student loans, everything else around you. You have got to think about it. There is no free option here. You need to do the data to find out where there are bad acts and things we can make more efficient. Then we are going to have to make hard decisions saying: That policy is 20 to 30 years out of date. We need to end that program or we need to modernize it. If you don't, if we just do the expiring tax provisions and don't pay for them, understand that in 9 budget years, interest alone is over $2 trillion a year, and that is on today's interest rates. Mr. Speaker, if you are one of the people like me who believe if we make the debt markets nervous and they start raising our interest rates, you are walking right into that thing they call a debt spiral. This is current policy if we just do it without paying for it. That is assuming interest rates don't go up on us. I have shown in the past a chart that basically says if U.S. interest rates--I said this last week, and I need to drill it in so maybe someone hears it. If U.S. interest rates went up to a 6 handle, which we have been close to before, in 9 budget years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections go just to interest. This isn't a game. This isn't a wish list of: I don't want to do difficult things. Do difficult things today, because if you blow this up in the near future, it gets almost impossible to deal with. The dystopian crap you would have to do to the American people will make today's tough decisions look like a walk in the park. I am going to breeze through this, just because I find some of this fun. Did you know a penny actually costs like 3 cents to make? Okay. Great. Get rid of them. I don't care. A nickel actually costs almost 9 cents. You'll be happy to know that we make money on dimes and quarters and half-dollars. These are tiny. I am going to make an argument, as I walk through these boards. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of little things that really don't add up to much, and you should absolutely do them. However, if you are the politician, if you are the press, if you are the staff, if you are the talking head on cable television, you are saying: Well, if we just got rid of pennies, we are going to balance the U.S. budget. Stop saying insanity. One of the problems is people like us, we go home and we talk to our voters, and they have heard these things, they are saying: If you just got rid of the Department of Education, we would be fine. Then you show them the math and they look at you like: Well, I heard it on television. Please, I beg of you, take this seriously. There is a way to make this work. We just have to do really hard things. Let's take a look at this one. This is one of my favorites. This is as of last Friday. I think there were 45,000 folks, according to The Wall Street Journal, who said they would take the early retirement. The reality of it, with the technology we have today, you could have a revolution in the Federal workforce. You could dramatically change the number of people. How many law firms today actually have a fraction of the people they had 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, because of the use of technology? Why wouldn't you accept the same thing for your Federal Government? Remember, you are paying for this. You have got to understand the real math. If 40,000 Federal workers-- and I am not actually talking about the buyouts, it's just the base salary, the average salary is $106,000. Then we added in wages and benefits; multiply it times 40,000, that is one day of borrowing. On average right now, we are burning about $6 billion a day. If 40,000 Federal employees are gone, we covered one day of borrowing. You absolutely are going to need to do things like that, but don't act like you just solved the U.S. debt problem. It is dozens and dozens of these things you have to stack up. I am trying to tone down the sarcasm, because we have got to do these things. Let's get rid of foreign aid. You just covered one week of borrowing. Can't tell you how many times I am at home and people say: If we just didn't have foreign aid, we could balance the budget. It is a week of borrowing. The U.S. will waste billions of dollars on the United Nations. We get rid of the United Nations. That is 2 days of borrowing. Let's take a look here. The U.S. spends too much on the Smithsonian and national parks. If we are borrowing $6 billion a day and the Smithsonian cost $1 billion a year, you have basically covered what, 4 hours? Maybe you don't want the museums. Maybe you want to create entrance fees or you want to do something else. Don't act like you just balanced the budget by doing something like that. Let's do another one. Cutting congressional salaries would solve the deficit. Look, we are probably overpaid for the quality of our work, but if you are borrowing $6 billion a day and you do that, if you got rid of congressional salaries, I think it is 20 minutes for an entire year. Take an entire year of borrowing, you just covered 20 minutes. Stop saying crazy stuff. These are serious problems. Maybe we need serious people to start actually thinking about these things. Let's take a look at another one. The government spends billions on unused Federal office buildings. Absolutely, we need to clean this up, and it would be about, oh, let's see, 6 hours, maybe 7 hours of borrowing. Close them up. Get rid of all the unused office space, which we should do. We absolutely need to do that, but it is like 6 or 7 hours' worth of borrowing because we are burning over $6 billion every single day. Am I making the point? Are you starting to understand the scale of what Members of Congress have to take on? These trite little sound bites don't get us anywhere. Cutting funding to NPR, PBS, and the National Endowment for the Arts would save billions of dollars. It would cover 4 hours of borrowing. Maybe we should. Maybe we should actually turn those into public trusts and let the public pay rather than taxpayers and have a fundraiser. That is fine, but don't act like we just solved the national debt problem. It is 4 hours of borrowing. Let's do one or two more to get this off my chest. Presidential travel, one of the Democrats was going after President Trump. All the Presidential travel is like $350 billion, so you have 1.4 hours--yes, about 1.4 hours. That is less than 2 hours for an entire year's worth of borrowing. Let's have one or two more for fun just because I have them done. Department of Education salaries, let's just get rid of the Department of Education salaries. Yay, but we covered 9 hours of borrowing. Emergency services for undocumented--these are people here illegally. They walk into hospitals and get a Federal subsidy. Let's make it so it just becomes uncompensated care of a hospital. Fine. That covers 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year. The reality of it is that it is not these crazy, little trite things. Yes, they are problems, and there may be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars out there that we need to crush and get rid of. We are going to borrow about $2.3 trillion this year, and in 10 years, that number is up dramatically. It is demographics. If you look at the 30-year data, everything that is in the Federal budget, except Medicare and Social Security, actually is designed to grow slower than tax receipts. We modeled that, in 30 years, we will have about a $9 trillion surplus, as we have counted. It grows slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security, my math is actually much more dour, but this board is about 1\1/2\ or 2 years old. It is probably about $116 trillion in spend and interest. We can make this work. We can do this without cutting our brothers' and sisters' benefits, but we have to be willing to think disruptively. We have to be willing to think creatively. We have to be willing to think morally. We have to be willing to think how we modernize the world around us. What would happen if we could change the cost of delivering services to our brothers and sisters by getting rid of the archaic designs of many of these programs? My 2-year-old is somewhere in the back. Yes, I have a 2-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. We adopted a little girl years ago, and the same birth mom, the phone rang--so I have a little person. I have said this repeatedly, and I am trying to have it break through: Is there anyone out there who thinks morally? When my 2-year-old is basically 22, 23 years old, every U.S. tax has to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. The math is very clear. It is left math, and it is right math. Mr. Speaker, every economist who is honest basically says that my kids, your kids, and your grandkids are going to be part of the first generation to actually be poorer than their parents and grandparents. That is not America. This was the country of aspiration. We were the ones who always knew we were leaving the next generation an opportunity to be more prosperous. It can be that way, but it can only be that way if this place stops acting like intellectual children, the bedwetting--I am sorry; I take that back, Mr. Speaker-- the fear, just the fear of going home and explaining to our constituents the truth. Mr. Speaker, you see how the Democrats are acting right now just by data scientists digging through and looking for perversities in the datasets. You would think there would have been joy because those aren't cutting services. Those are finding people who are exploiting us and taking advantage of our country, but because it is being done by President Trump, it must be opposed. How do we fix things? How do we save Social Security? How do we save Medicare? How do we save the future when it is not a loyal opposition anymore? It is basically anything to burn the place down to take power. For anyone who really doesn't have a life and is watching this presentation, I beg of you, get good at the math and stop making crap up because if you get good at the math, then it provides us the opportunity to have the building blocks to actually produce a solution. There is hope. There are ways that work. We also have some economic data that basically says if we don't do it within about the next 4 years and interest rates start to move against us, then we are in for a long, slow rest of the century. That is worth thinking about because the debt starts piling and piling. Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the previous year, I think we had 3 months when we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. For every dime we will take in in tax collections this year, we are going to spend I think it is $1.36, which is an improvement. Last year, it was $1.39. It doesn't have to be this way. We just have to start telling the truth about the math, telling the truth to each other, and toughening up. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.