David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive us, as we are getting ourselves organized. The gentleman from Texas ended a couple minutes sooner than we expected. Mr. Speaker, for anyone listening, whether it be staff, another Member, anyone that actually gives a darn, give me your first 4 minutes because in the first 4 minutes, I need to explain why we have been joking about it, in a dark way, that we are in the budget wars. It is about reconciliation. Why is there such angst by some of us-- Mr. Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I am the idiot with all the economists. I am number four on Ways and Means. I am not good at many things in life. I am okay at math. What is going on that is stressing us? Last night, I could barely sleep because I had read report after report after report and the math was devastating. This is what we need to understand. Here is our reality. Forgive us, we have been going as fast as we can in our office to find some way to explain what the hell is going on. At the end of this budget year, September 30, the United States debt by Congressional Budget Office is projected to be $37.2 trillion. They are projecting over the next 10 years, we will add another $20 trillion. The debate that has been going on is, we have these provisions of the 2017 tax reform that are expiring at the end of this year. If you go take it to 2035 because that is sort of the 10-year window, in 9 budget years, it is another $5.5 trillion. Then you add on to that the interest because it turns out if you were to finance it, not pay for any of it, that is another $1.3 trillion on top of that. Then if you were to come in here and then take the President's requests--we have a couple Members here that say, just do everything. Make everyone happy. Screw my retirement and the next generation. America will be fine. If you add it all up, by 2035 you have over $74 trillion in debt. You are somewhere in the 155 percent or so of the entire economy is borrowed. Today, we are a little less than a 100. The point I am trying to make here is, even if you do the calculation of publicly sold debt because, as I have tried to explain, you have the Social Security trust fund, which is gone in 8 years. We borrow the money out of that and we do pay interest on it, but if you take everything where we sell bonds to the world, to each other, to our retirement accounts, to pensions, the day we got elected, Mr. Speaker, a long time ago in November, U.S. sovereign debt that was held by the public was around $28 trillion. These numbers right now say that number that took 240 years of publicly held debt, we intend to double in 9 years. In 9 years, we are going to functionally add another $28 trillion of publicly held debt. Actually, it will be a little more if we finance them and don't try to pay for them. This is my 4-minute spiel. When you see some of us stressing out, when you see some of us--he is being disharmonious, maybe it is because I own a damn calculator. If these numbers don't make you pucker up and scare the crap out of you, you don't understand. Yet the hallways around here are full of people demanding we give them more money or they want more barriers to entry or they don't want to change their business model. They want to do it in archaic fashion because it might make them have to compete. This is no longer the next generation. This is your own retirement. Look, I accept that I traditionally tease behind this microphone that I am pathologically optimistic. My wife and I are both 62 years old, and we have a 2\1/2\-year-old we have adopted. We also have a 9-year-old. When my little boy is 24 years old, the math says every single tax in America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. The wheels are coming off. Do you really think the bond market will say, ``Oh, we want to keep buying U.S. sovereign debt even though you have gone and doubled it in 9 years''? We did a math problem a couple of weeks ago on this floor and showed that if we stress the bond markets, if we got up to a 6 percent handle--and it wasn't that many decades ago U.S. sovereign debt was kissing up around 6 percent--in 9 years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts went to interest. Do you think this is a game? The bond market is on the edge of running this country, not us. If you are a Member of Congress and claim that you care about debt, deficits, the next generation, working people, and people's retirement, and you don't have this poster up somewhere in your office, how do you understand the math? The wheels are coming off. I am going to show in a bunch of these slides that there is a path. We can produce some level of stabilization. It means doing really hard things, which you know how good we are at doing hard things because, once again, there will be an army of people outside the door all upset with us because we are trying to do hard things. You have known this has been coming for decades. When I was an idiot kid in the 1980s, I remember my statistics professor basically did a chart in, like, 1983, saying: Okay, here are baby boomers. This is going to happen. There is this huge bubble. The thing we weren't prepared for is that U.S. fertility rates started to collapse in 1990. We don't have enough young people. I am going to show some charts of how hard it is to keep up productivity and growth, and it is not just in the United States. It is all across the world. There is a shortage of young people, but we are going to pretend that we can just grow our way out of things. That is a complete untruth. If we do what a handful of our Members are asking and just look the other way, just give everything to everyone without paying for it--and, look, I think it is outrageous there is a discussion. It would be immoral, I believe, to allow the tax rates to go up on working people, but it is also immoral not to find a way to pay for it. Are you ready to condemn this country in 9 budget years, 10 calendar years to functionally a financial Armageddon? This is actually in the 10-year window now. This is not some theoretical number years and years and decades from now. It is here. If interest rates were to move against us, it is functionally almost Armageddon. I am going to bounce around a little bit. Think about this: Why are some of us trying so hard to get as much in the way of modernization, cost changes, those things, so we have $5\1/ 2\ trillion, if you do 2035, of expiring provisions that would raise taxes on our brothers and sisters in this country. We need that not to happen. Understand its actual cost. It is not only the $5\1/2\ trillion. If you just did it, if you just pass it, it is another $1.3 trillion of interest over those 10 years. That means, in 2035, the interest handle for America is $2 trillion a year. Just interest will be $2 trillion a year in 9 budget years if we don't find ways to do offsets. How can this not terrify people? Are there people in the White House who have calculators? Our brothers and sisters here, do they really think the debt markets want to buy that much more U.S. sovereign money? Look, there is a funny--an interesting fact. It is not necessarily funny. The world today has the highest ratio of debt since the Napoleonic wars. If you remember your history, after that, there were years and years of misery as governments tried to figure out how to unwind and go to war with each other and those things because of the depressions that it caused. We are not the only country bingeing on debt. I will say this a couple of times, and it is the one thing that gets me really hateful emails and text messages: Almost 100 percent of the next 10 years of debt is interest and demographics. Almost all of it is Medicare. Our brothers and sisters, people like me, baby boomers, gray hair, we are moving into our earned benefits. We didn't set aside enough money, and we have been unwilling to modernize how we deliver services because it annoys the lobbyists and the people at home. People get uncomfortable. ``Oh, David, you want to use technology.'' You don't have a choice. You just don't have a choice. It is not my feelings. It is math. You start to look at this, if you look at the data right now, if we were to do the expiring tax provisions within the budget window, the United States would pay $2- plus trillion a year just in interest. That is at today's interest rates. That is without even a calculation of interest rates going up. I have been trying to figure out how to explain it. I can say this one easier. We are going to come close to spending 7 percent of the entire economy this year in borrowed money. If we do these things without paying for them, in 10 years, we are not going to be borrowing 7 percent of the economy. We are going to be borrowing up around 9.2 percent of the economy. This is not a game. Let's walk through one or two more of these to try to get our heads around what is actually going on. You have to understand--do you see the blue here? Okay, dark purple, if that is purple. This is interest. That is our debt we are at, and here is our problem. What happens this year, if we borrow a couple trillion dollars this year, realize half of that is interest. Half of it is now interest. Interest now is the second biggest expense in the United States Government. Defense is actually number four. I always love it when I am having a conversation with one of my friends on the left. ``Well, if we just cut defense.'' Defense is now number four on the spend stack. Interest is number two. There are a couple of models that if we keep borrowing and interest rates move against us, in a decade or so, interest could be the number one expense in the United States Government. I have done presentation after presentation of this concept called interest fragility. I think I am probably the only one who listened to it. Sometimes I wonder if I even listen to myself. This isn't a game. There is a reason the British Government collapsed this summer. Remember Liz Truss? Yeah, we are a hell of a lot bigger economy. Do we really think because we have the two great, extraordinary privileges of the reserve currency and being a country that people want to do business in, live in, prosper in, do you think we keep those things if we keep this sort of clown show going? Let's actually walk through a couple more of these, and then I am going to try to have a little fun mocking some of the suggestions that keep coming in. Debt held by the public under alternative conditions, trying to make--increase in primary deficits--I need to explain. This is going to be a little tricky. In 2033, because of what was done in this body in lameduck, where we functionally took another couple hundred billion dollars out of Social Security and paid it out without replacing the money, now it looks like, in mid-2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Now, the law for Social Security says you cut seniors' benefits. The math is about 20 percent. So, we will double senior poverty the following year, but that is not how CBO is forced, under the law, to do the math. There is an actual law that says you are not allowed to show a zero balance. That is why we are doing this. That means, in 2034, there is $600 billion of borrowing that is shoved in that is actually to make up the shortfall in Social Security. The next year it is more. If you add up 2023, 2024, 2025, there is like another $1.7 trillion because Social Security is empty. You don't want to double senior poverty, but we are also far too fearful to actually tell our voters the truth. The fact of the matter is, every time one of us idiots--excuse me, me--gets up and tries to find a way to stabilize the Social Security trust fund, that side starts running attack ads on you because they care more about winning the next election than they do doubling senior poverty in America. The math, you start to look at what is going on here. If we are really heading toward a time where just the primary deficit that is publicly sold without the other requests from the President, we are at $55-plus trillion. We are playing a very dangerous game here. My sense of frustration is off the charts. Look, this one is very simple. Within the budget window, publicly held debt--not also the borrowing from the trust funds--publicly held debt, if we were to do the expiring tax provisions without paying for them, we are at 149 percent of debt to GDP. We will functionally have raised U.S. debt by 50 percent in 9 budget years. How many Members here ran on a promise that we are going to save America, save our retirements, save our kids, save the future, and we are going to pretend math doesn't exist? This is what is going on. Let's walk through some of the ideas that have been coming into our office. When I do this, yes, there is going to be a little tone of sarcasm, but it is more for my own personal amusement. I am trying to help people understand how big 12 zeros is and how difficult this math is because if I watch one more idiot on cable television saying, ``All we have to do is this,'' ``Look how wonderful that is,'' that is not the math. Let's actually have a little fun here. The Wall Street Journal yesterday said, hey, there are 40,000 Federal employees who have said they will take a retirement package. Okay. I am ignoring, hey, if they took the package today, we pay them through the rest of the year. I am just ignoring that math. What is 40,000 Federal employees times an average salary? I think we used $106,000, which we got from one of the reports, and just multiply that. Understand, this is the conservative number. We are borrowing about $6 billion a day. The 40,000 Federal employees leaving is a single day of borrowing. For an entire year, all those folks leaving is a single day of borrowing. You have 24 hours of borrowing by 40,000 Federal employees leaving. Yet, I watched someone on television last night saying, wow, look, we are going to make a huge dent in the U.S. deficit with these 40,000 taking early retirement. It is 1 day of borrowing. That is not spending--borrowing. Remember, by the end of the decade, that borrowing is up per day dramatically. Take this in. This is one of the grand solutions. Now, the point I want to make is, we probably have to do it. You have to do all of them. It is going to be dozens and dozens of things all stacked up just to provide some stability because can we, as a country, get back to just borrowing about 3 percent of our economy a year instead of 7 or, God forbid, a decade from now over 9. You have to stop lying to each other. Our staffs have to stop lying to us. The press has to stop making crap up. We have to help the public understand the scale of what the hell is going on. With 40,000 employees taking early retirement, the salary savings is 1 day of borrowing. Let's have a little more fun. Yesterday, someone said: Okay, let's get rid of the Federal subsidy on tax exempt bonds for stadiums. Okay, great. We calculate that is about 6 or 7 seconds of borrowing for a year. Mr. Speaker, 7 seconds, but this is worthy? Yeah, I am going to throw it in the stack, but is this really your debate line? We are not going to subsidize tax exempt interest for billionaire sports team owners? Great, okay. Fine, but it is 7 seconds. Let's do a couple of the really popular ones. Absolutely, we are going to have to do some of these things. The Department of Education salaries: If we get rid of the Department of Education salaries--I think this is all of them--is about 2.75 billion. Remember, we still have got to transfer the loan portfolios and all of those things, but we just got rid of the employees. That just covered 9 hours of borrowing. Am I starting to make a point on the scale of what we actually have to tell the truth and deal with? Let's have a little more fun here. One of my favorite ones. I had this the other day. Let's get rid of healthcare for those who are here illegally. Most of the math we did here is Obamacare subsidies for DACA recipients. Sorry, this is emergency services for the undocumented. We calculate that to be about 2.1 billion a year. This is the emergency healthcare on undocumented. That will give us another 9 hours. Let's actually go to something a little bigger. Let's get rid of the foreign aid. Foreign aid is gone. We get ourselves a week. How many times have I heard--those of us on the right, I have been in debate with another Republican--if we just didn't have foreign aid, we would be fine. We have got to deal with the reality of what that does to our military, our footprint in the world, protecting the reserve currency. Why are we the reserve currency? We are the reserve currency because we have a footprint, we protect the trade routes. We should know that from our history. If it was just wiped it out, a week of borrowing is covered. Am I starting to make a point here? This is why it is hard. Close the carried interest loophole. My math is not 12; it is 13 billion over 10 years. It is 13 billion over 10, so I get 1.3 billion. I am going to talk around the chart. Mr. Speaker, 1.3 billion in a year. We borrow about 6 billion a day. We get an hour, a couple hours, but it is a great talking point. We should get rid of that carried interest for those rich people. Fine, but don't act like it actually solves something. Back to interest fragility, Mr. Speaker. This discussion is a little geeky, but it is really, really sort of important. About half of our debt is in what we call notes. Look, there is bills, notes, bonds. It is the hierarchy to this. A bill is very short-term. It can be under a couple years. The notes are in the middle term. Right now, half of our debt--actually, more than half of our debt--actually, about 72 percent of it is really short-term. I was doing this calculation in my head. We are going to borrow about 2 trillion virgin this year, and we are probably going to have to refinance 9 or 10 this year. That is not the roll. We have a lot of roll where it goes 30 days, 90 days, 6 months. If interest rates move against us, it moves into U.S. debt calculations. Within a year or 2, it is all in there. That is why we keep having this discussion of: Could we go out further? If you want to know what others are, those are the inflation adjusted bonds. That is why you talk about interest fragility. If suddenly the world goes a little haywire on us, our inflation ticks up and interest rates go up. It pounds the United States because the previous administration and the one before that and Heaven forbid back into the Obama administration, they stayed very short on the curve because it was a little bit cheaper. The danger of that is if interest rates move against us, it is a technical economic turn. We are absolutely screwed. Back to the point on all the notes. They are all the way down around 2.8. The actual cost of a 10-year is 4, 4\1/2\. All this is going to move into being dramatically more expensive. They say: Who cares? By the end of this year when you have close to $30 trillion that has to be borrowed from capital markets from people around the world, this is a big deal. I showed a little while ago if we were to just finance the 5\1/2\ trillion of expiring tax provisions over the 10 years, that is just 1.3 trillion just financing that. Imagine the movement on everything else. You will be happy to know, actually I think a little while ago, the U.K.'s 10-year bond moved cheaper, less expensive, lower interest rate, than United States. I think we are back to being the 14th best bet of substantial countries in the world. Meaning, there is 13 other countries with better credit ratings. Their 10-year bond sells cheaper than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a full point cheaper than the United States. Doesn't that set off an alarm in anyone's head? Am I the only idiot--sorry. I don't mean to be going there. I am trying to find some way to say this. I will get these criticisms. David, you talked about math. I don't like math. You may not like it, but the math will always win. Back to a couple more points. The famous pie chart. Everything a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed money. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed money. I think last fiscal year $300, $400 billion of earned benefits. Look, what we call the mandatory, the red, most of it is earned benefits. It is your Social Security. It is your Medicare. It is your VA pensions, and those sorts of things. There is a portion that you get because you are part of a Tribal population, part of a treaty obligation, or you fell below a certain income, Medicaid, or those things. You are basically now in a world 75/25, but the numbers are actually better now. In fiscal year 2024, for every dollar the United States took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. Mr. Speaker, $1 in, $1.39 out. It is better now. Tax receipts are actually up, so for every $1 we get in, we spend a $1.36. How do we go home and tell our folks the scale, that the simple solutions are absolutely wrong? They are not truthful. It turns out we have a brutally complex problem. It is going to require a complex solution, and it is going to require doing hard things. We have people who will say: I will only vote for it if I get this. Those are the very people who I promise you aren't watching this presentation. This isn't a game. These numbers keep getting uglier and uglier. Let's go back to the thing that gets me screamed at. This board is getting old, and the numbers are actually worse. Over the next 30 years, we believe the total debt number over the next 30 years is now substantially higher, but this is the one I have. Your country spends about $124 trillion in deficit, but the things we vote on actually grow slower than tax receipts. Here is the crazy thing: The defense and discretionary, if we had actually followed the sequestration--which we will bust those caps. As a matter a fact, that is part of the discussion we are having right now is it makes some of our folks unhappy, so we are going to bust caps--but if we followed the actual wall, in 30 years, defense and nondefense discretionary actually have what we would call a $9 trillion positive. They grew slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security together actually produce about $115, $116 trillion in deficit. It is just those two programs, and they are interest. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. Telling the truth about demographics isn't great politics. Our job is to blame the other side and them blame us, and then we will go back and forth and have these incredibly petty, childish, mathematically void debates. Debt deficit and demographics, it is what we are. The difference is, I believe, those of us on the right, those of us who are Republicans, have the absolute moral obligation--we are supposed to be the math people--to fix it. Let the other side lie about it. We campaigned. We won. The American people gave us the House, they gave us the Senate, they gave us the Presidency. Suddenly, the obligation--you know, we did all this moralizing, and now we have run away from the difficulty. This is other thing where I am going to start to really make a couple of my brothers and sisters annoyed around here. The United States, according to the Census Bureau from last month, will have more deaths than births in 8 years. Not a single country in the world--and this is not just the United States, it is basically all the industrialized countries, and much of the world is way ahead of us in this almost dystopian collapse of there being young people--no other country has been actually able to change natalist, fertility rates, whatever pop culture word you want to use. There are countries out there that will buy you a house after delivering your third child. And all they did is move fertility forward and, boom, a couple years later they just move back to the mean. Why is this a big deal? When you start to understand total fertility rates and what it means to being able to grow an economy--I am begging you, give this a chance. If you are watching this, you are obviously unusual. You are smart. If you have a shortage of young people in your country, how do you grow? How do you reach productivity? There becomes--we can do it by policy. You are not going to have more children, but are you willing to make it easier to adopt technology? Are you going to be fearful of AI, machine learning? Are you going to allow synthetic biology to cure diseases? Are you going to promote automation everywhere you can because you are going to have a shortage of workers? Mr. Speaker, are we going to remove the regulatory barriers and financing barriers to basically have a much more productive society? If we don't, there is absolutely no way we can make the math work. This is the reality. A couple of weeks ago, I did a whole series of charts showing if the United States would take on the rest of the world--because we have to understand, besides the tax arbitrage the world uses by refunding their value-added tax--yet when we send them something, they put it on. There is already this tax arbitrage the world uses on us. The other stupidity we engage in, in this country is we educate people in our fine universities, and we send them home to compete with us. The Wall Street Journal today actually has an article on drug discovery and drug research and how fast China is basically competing with us now in new biologics and those things. The basic premise is that we educated the very people who are competing with us because we sent them home because we are idiots. Yet, I will get folks who are pounding out texts, saying they don't want foreigners in here. Do they want us to pay their Medicare bills if we don't get the growth? What are the two extraordinary privileges of the United States? It is our currency. The world borrows and trades and denominates in U.S. currency. The economists will tell us what is worth even more than being the reserve currency of the world is that people want to do their business and investments, and bring their intellect, their passions, and their entrepreneurialism, to the United States. In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the world was nice to each other for hydrocarbons and oil. In the last decade, we competed, whether we know it, for rare earths. The rest of the world figured this out 10 years ago when Australia, Great Britain, and Canada all moved to a talent-based and STEM-based system of saying they want smart people to continue to grow. I think the United States is the only major country still doing a familial-based immigration system. This upsets people when I say this. ``I want to be able to sponsor my grandma.'' That is great. I am sure she is lovely. From an economist standpoint, if we are going to survive as an economy and particularly if we are about to put together a package on how we are going to cover the $5.5 trillion of expiring provisions by saying here are the cuts and we are going to build growth in, are we willing to do the things required to hit that growth number? It turns out that, yes, modernizing regulations is great. It turns out an economist can't hit the number without a talent-based and STEM- based immigration system. We just can't. Here is the problem. We have built the model. If we are going to extend expensing for research and development so we are doing things better, faster, and cheaper, what happens when the very companies that are doing that and the research labs that are doing it continue to show up in my office and say, ``We can't get enough people. We are being squeezed. We will have to do part of the research on the other side of the world. Have we lost our minds?'' ``Oh, but, David, you can't say that. That will upset someone.'' The chaos created at the border the last 4 years crushed the working poor because the working poor sells their talents and their willingness to show up. Now, we have millions and millions of other entries. There are a number of great articles out there that basically talk about the working poor's wage growth, which will probably be flat for the next decade. Part of that same report says we are getting close--I think it was $900 billion. It is almost a trillion dollars over 10 years of new tax receipts if we move to a STEM-based, talent-based immigration system. In the next decade, it is parabolic. It just explodes because that way we are integrated in the economy. Mr. Speaker, are we allowed to have that conversation saying that we are going to do this? We are going to tell ourselves we are going to start growing at these great rates. Are we going to do the very tools that allow us to grow, that allow us to prosper, to allow us to raise the productivity? I know this chart is almost impossible to read. Its punch line is very simple. Unless we have this productivity spike, we are going to get poorer. We see it around the world that productivity and the ability to have that productivity growth is how we keep up standards of living. We have had a great pop the last couple of years with the investments in AI and those things. Are we going to keep it up? Are we basically going to give our competitive advantage to the rest of the world because we are going to educate the very talent that is bringing them to us and send them home? Mr. Speaker, I hope I accomplish three things here. One is to give everyone a sense of how absolutely brutal the math is and why it is absolutely necessary we do the moral thing of reducing the spending, modernize the way we deliver services, make the tax code actually grow. Then, we deal with the reality of what drives our debt and deficits and then deal with the reality of how we maximize growth, productivity, and wealth. Prosperity is moral. I actually believe it is the American ethos. My kids, our kids, deserve to be more prosperous than the generation before them. Every data point we hold says our kids will be poorer than our generation. Is that the morality we have decided to bathe in? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a little thick, so I apologize to everyone, but we are going to actually try something a little bit broader. We are going to actually play economist. I am going to try actually to walk through three or four themes here of why what we must do is so difficult, why it absolutely has to happen, and the truth about the math. Let's have some fun here. Since I know everyone around here is a genius and we spend lots of time reading difficult things, I am sure every Member of Congress got their hand on the latest McKinsey report that came out a few days ago that actually walked through in beautiful detail what is happening in the industrialized world with the lack of young people. Okay. Let's walk through this. Idiots like me have been coming behind this microphone for almost a decade talking about the morality of prosperity. I don't care if you are on the left or right, but having a society that grows and becomes prosperous and becomes more and more productive and can provide better things is moral, but, also, why is it so hard? Look, this was done by our own CBO, taking updates from the data from the Census Bureau. In 8 years, the United States has more deaths than births. Last year, we had 17 States that had more deaths than births. Okay. If Members read through, the term now has become ``absence of young people.'' There is lots of crazy discussions. There are entire books. I have all these things on my shelves about natalist policies and how many countries have tried to encourage higher fertility rates, and all failed. There really is no success in the entire world. They have been able to move forward some of the fertility rates spiking up, and then they go back and fall back to the mean. It is the nature of wealth. It is the nature of modern societies, but then my colleagues come to me and say: David, you are on Ways and Means, chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so all of these economists work for you. Show me how we are going to have 3 percent GDP growth every year. I can show Members how to do it. I just need my colleagues to understand that the United States is better off than so many countries, but the fact of the matter is we are having fewer children than countries like France. In 8 years, we have more deaths than births. Remember the first year of economics class where they walked through the formula and said, well, population growth, then capital expenditures for plant and equipment that are more productive, then spikes in technology. That is how the wealth of a nation is built. We are losing one of the things. When people like me walk behind these microphones, my colleagues need to hear coming out of their mouths: I am willing to actually deal with the reality of how do we make capital investments in equipment that makes us more productive? How do we encourage the synthetic biology that makes us not only live longer, but able to survive and do well and enjoy life? How do we actually deal with not being fearful of AI and artificial intelligence, but use that to make this another American century? I can't make the math work without the adoption of labor substitutes. I am going to actually show something here that seems to make people mad when I get to it. Let's wait, I am going to actually make a pitch that what are the two extraordinary privileges of this country? Okay. Members are going to hear monetarists come behind the microphone all the time and say that people want to use the U.S. dollar and that people must use the U.S. dollar to borrow, to trade in, and to hold assets. As an economist, what is actually more valuable than having the world reserve currency is that smart people, entrepreneurs, and people with wealth want to invest their lives, their time, and their talents in the United States. We hold the two greatest extraordinary privileges from a worldwide economist. We have to start understanding the math and what we are up against because it is not us. Start to take a look at what is going on. I know some of these charts are almost impossible to read, but the basic point of many of these is we have all talked about, in a couple of years, all of the baby boomers are 65 and up, and we have this huge population bubble. We hate to say this because we get booed at our townhalls when we say this: The fact of the matter is, in the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. debt is interest and the growth of the cost of Medicare. How many years have we known that baby boomers were going to turn 65? It has been 65 years, but we didn't plan for it. We didn't set it aside. One thing we weren't ready for as a society is, in 1990, fertility rates started to roll over. As the McKinsey report goes up and down, it is the absence of young people. Now make an economy grow. Some of the points I am going to try to make here is this one. I need people to think. There was the kerfuffle last week when Elon Musk and some of the others got into the H-1B visas, bringing talent into the country. I am actually not even sure I liked the H-1 process. I would like to move maybe to a talent-based system. The entire industrialized world is going through things very similar to us. China's numbers look--it is the craziest charts you are ever going to see. It is like a boom. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world competed for hydrocarbons, oil. We remember the oil. The last decade, we sort of battled for where we could have supplies of rare earths. Some of the smartest economists who actually do demographics are now saying that the industrialized world is going to knife each other for smart people. Now, maybe a smart person is the great carpenter or the synthetic biologist, but we need to start being honest with each other that my colleagues want us, particularly my economic team, to say: Build us ideas. Build us a plan. As we get ready to do reconciliation, do the things that provide us the growth so we can still be Americans, that sort of beacon of prosperity. Mr. Speaker, you have to understand that, in 8 years, there will be more deaths than births. Are we going to be willing to do very difficult things and move to a talent-based immigration system that doesn't care about your race, your gender, who you cuddle with, or anything else? It cares about the talent. I have actually done entire presentations here where I have shown that what happened at the border over the last 4 years will make the working poor poorer in this country. It is math. It is not my opinion. I am not demagoguing. It is math. In part of our society, we have what is called the quartiles. I sort of despise that term. It is people who didn't graduate high school, so what they do economically is sell their willingness to work. They go out and hang drywall. They bust their backsides, and then, tomorrow, they are competing against millions of other people with the same skill set. Look at how our economy works and the fact that, let's be brutal, populations under a certain income will receive services from our society because we are a compassionate society. When you start to see a talent-based immigration system, you have people here because of the productivity they bring to society. It turns out that when you look at their career, they pay a boatload of taxes and actually help us grow. We need to deal with the math, and the fact of the matter is, we look over and over at these things. I am just using Japan because it is easy. Japan has almost 300 percent debt-to-GDP, but it is a unique society because their corporations, their individuals, actually finance almost their entire debt, where the United States is chewing up much of our capital stock now. We are borrowing somewhere between maybe, if you actually just take this fiscal year, as high as $80,000 every second. We borrow $6 billion, $7 billion every single day. I have done the chart before, but think about this. We click off an additional trillion dollars of borrowing about every 125 days. Do you think it is going to go on forever? I am going to show you, in the second part of this, a number of the biggest bond traders in the world, and Larry Fink and Ray Dalio are basically saying you guys got a problem, and it is coming fast. They are actually taking billions of dollars and starting to hedge even the U.S. bonds and saying we think you are going to 5 percent, 6 percent. Please understand that if the United States ever went back to what was normal before the Great Recession of 2008, if we went back to a 6 percent handle on U.S. debt, in 9 years, 45 percent of all tax collections are interest. Why doesn't that scare the crap out of people? Then, we are going to engage in policies where we are doing our best to scare to death the very people we are turning to, saying to please buy our bonds. How do we do what is necessary, particularly in reconciliation, to not hurt working people by having their taxes go up because of the expiring provisions of TCJA, and then also, at the same time, deal with the math. If we finance everything, because we are already scheduled to borrow about $22 trillion additional between now and, I think, 2034, is the intent to stack another $5 trillion on top of that? You don't think the bond markets aren't going to punish us? Little bits of interest just crush not only the U.S. Government but also working people. How many people can afford a mortgage right now when it is over 7 percent? How many can afford a car loan? We just went through, functionally, 3, 4 years of inflation where, in my community, if you don't make 27 percent more, you are poorer today. Isn't the employment rate great? It is, but it is wage growth, and wage growth goes up by two things: inflation, which means you are not getting ahead and are just treading water, or productivity. When you are lacking population growth, how do you get productivity? Regulatory policy, good trade policy, great tax policy that makes it so you are investing in plants, equipment, and research and development to do it better, faster, cheaper. That is how you make people less poor. This one is a little tricky, but it is fascinating. If you actually dig into the article, if you are out of your mind or geeky or you just don't have a life or you don't have a Netflix subscription, you sort of dig into what level of productivity growth you actually need just to sustain your lifestyle. It is all sorts of different countries, and for the United States, you need almost about 2 percent where we are looking at the different years. Do you see the pink line? We calculate if you are not having at least a 1.8 percent productivity gain, which is a lot, you are functionally poorer. You become poorer. For all the people who complain about, well, don't do tax cuts for business. Okay. Don't do regulatory change for business. Okay. Now, go read the literature. We know that, in 2017, when we did the change in the corporate tax rates, getting companies to move their money back here, getting them to invest in productivity, those things, we calculate from 60 to 70 percent of every dime they got went into wages because, once again, the primary way people make more money is productivity. This is the chart I am sure will show up in an election ad beating the crap out of me, but you see this spike? That was the years of the open border. We go back to normality where the immigration system-- except we are the last country really on Earth that uses a familial system. In a familial system, you sponsor someone because your grandma was here. Your grandma sponsors her sister, and they sponsor theirs. That is a familial immigration system. My argument is, as part of when we are starting to deal with productivity for the society, we actually have to start thinking about it from top to bottom. It is not just great AI policy, great synthetic biology policy, great regulatory policy, great tax policy. It is also going to have to be immigration. Now, on to sort of the reality of where we are at. We actually got, I am going to call it, better news. CBO actually did some calculations and said we expect tax receipts to be up in this fiscal year. I have come here repeatedly and shown my chart that says, for every $1 the United States takes in in all sorts of tax receipts--remember, most of those tax receipts are going to Social Security, Medicare, those sorts of things, but for every $1 we take in, $1.39 is spent. Guess what? The good news is that now it is no longer $1.39 of spending for every $1 we take in. Now it is $1.36. It got better, but it is still terrifyingly bad. This is the improvement that so many people are running around being giddy about. Let's actually sort of walk through some of these numbers as quickly as we can. This chart says Federal spending as the share of total tax revenue. The reason I am showing you this is to give you an idea of the scale we are up against. If you actually take all of our tax receipts, every dime, and say here is what we call mandatory spending--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, and interest because you have to pay your interest--we are the ones who basically binge on debt. It consumes every dollar of tax receipts plus some. We actually don't collect enough taxes to pay for our mandatory spending and our interest. That is our basic problem. If you do net interest and mandatory spending, it consumes everything. Mr. Speaker, the point from this chart is very simple: Everything you and I vote on, everything a Member of Congress votes on, is on borrowed money. That is every dime of defense and every dime of nondefense discretionary. We are going to do theatrical things like go on our local talk radio show, go on cable television, sometimes stand behind these mikes and say things that may be great policy, but we act like it actually will make a difference to these sorts of numbers. It doesn't. I have heard my brothers and sisters here say things like, okay, ObamaCare subsidies for those who are here illegally. I am fine with that. Go ahead and get rid of them, but it is 9\1/2\ hours for an entire year's worth of borrowing. In an entire year, you just covered 9\1/2\ hours. Don't act like it is a solution. It is one of a thousand things you have to do. Here is the classic problem on the way this place thinks. It turns out that fixing things is complex, and we live in a society with these things where we want something that is simple, flashy, short. It turns out that complexity often requires a complex solution. It is hard. We will have the armies of the lobbyists in the hallways mad at us. They don't like it when we tell the truth, Heaven forbid. Have you ever gone home and talked to your voters and they think if you just got rid of foreign aid--and then you show them the chart. It is about a week of borrowing, and they just stare at you with daggers, like, how can that be? It is not their fault. I believe the political class, the commentary class, and the partisan media class have just made up crap for years. I challenge my brothers and sisters on the left and the right to know your math and start telling the truth. If you look at charts like this where this right here is breakeven, this is where the dollar is. Even this year, every dime of discretionary and a little sliver of mandatory are on borrowed money, once again. The only reason I threw this chart in the way it is, where we did '24, '25--you see this. That was with the CBO's calculations that the law says next year they get to take in some $400 billion additional taxes because Americans' taxes go up. We don't want that to happen. We want to protect hardworking people. The very last board I am going to show here is the way you protect American people is you offset as much of that as you can because you give it to hardworking folks and then take it away from them in higher interest costs and higher financing costs. You smile at them and hand them a dollar in their face while you are grabbing their wallet from behind and stealing it from them. That moment of telling the truth about math is really important. I brought a lot of the boards just trying to explain that, for the last couple of years, for every $1 we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. This year, we will spend $1.36, which means all that differential. This is a little complex, but this will make it super simple, as best I can. You are going to hear particularly Democrats and others say the tax reform caused this or that. You have to work through the incredible craziness of the pandemic, but if you look at the charts and actually take a look at the matching of TCJA and what we expected to be inflation-adjusted tax receipts--I am not playing the scam of looking at how much more money we are getting, even though we have had 25 percent inflation. For an honest number, when you actually calculate it and normalize it, guess what? Tax receipts are pretty much right on track. We have a couple of these to give you sort of a sense. When you take a look at annual revenues match pre-TCJA projections, this one is important, and we often don't actually talk about it. Go back to the baseline numbers of CBO and Joint Tax before we did tax reform in 2017. Then, step up to where we are today and take a look where baseline is. If you adjust for inflation, it is normal. The math is normal. When someone says, well, it is because you did this tax reform and you helped the economy, I am not standing in front of you and saying tax cuts pay for themselves. What I am saying is that the scale of the economy actually today is right on track to what the projections were before tax reform. It is a complex calculation of everything from technology adoptions to new ways we do things to productivity gains, but the baseline number is the baseline number. Now, back to trying to make the point. What is the issue with the United States bingeing on debt? Is it that we don't collect enough taxes, or is it that we spend too much money? I have done entire presentations here where I have shown high marginal tax rates, low marginal tax rates, and we seem to hold about 17 percent of the size of the economy in taxes. You will often hear 17 percent of GDP. It is historic. Somehow when you raise up the marginal tax rates, you are getting 17 percent of the economy. Part of that is an offset because the economy slows down. When you have done low marginal tax rates, the economy grows, so you are getting 17 percent of the economy because the economy has expanded. In trying to make the point that growth is moral, it is also great economics. How do you grow, grow, grow? I just showed you, in the beginning portion of this, we have an issue. In 8 years, we will have more deaths than births. We have a demographic issue--debt demographics. Demographics are your destiny. I am just trying to point out on this, over the last 4 years, we functionally have borrowed $7.8 trillion in deficits. That borrowing functionally is a current stimulus effect, but you are going to pay for it. It is coming out of your retirement, whether you know it or not. It is coming from your kids. I am 62, and my wife is 62. I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 2\1/ 2\-year-old son. They both have the same birth mom. We have adopted them. My little boy, when he is 24, to keep baseline services, just to keep things even--what was that fancy word? Ceteris paribus--the United States, in about 22 years, would have to double every single tax. The math basically says my kids will be part of the first generation in America that will be poorer. That is the morality of this place. They will say, David, adopting modernization and cutting spending is really hard, and we are going to get someone who is going to say mean things about us. Instead, you are willing to screw over your kids? That is the morality of this place. How is that Republican or Democratic? Then, once again, to my friends on the left over here, I have done a whole presentation on it. Go to the Manhattan Institute right now. Look up Riedl's analysis. Every tax hike--and there is a dozen of them--on those $400,000 and up, when you do all the economic effects, produces about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. For those of us on the right, here are all the things we are willing to cut. It is about 1 percent of GDP. If my math is right, that is--what?--2\1/2\ percent. Mr. Speaker, we are going to borrow about 7 percent of the entire economy this year. Does anyone get the fraud? ``Here are the tax hikes. It is rich people,'' or, ``We are going to do these cuts.'' We are not willing to do the hard things of modernizing how we deliver services to our brothers and sisters in this country because we are going to make some bureaucracy, some union, some company out there that lives off delivering the services the way they were doing it 30 years ago modernize. Once again, over the last 4 years, we have gone from--what is it?--4 years ago, the debt was $1.52 trillion. Last year, it was $1.9 trillion. Now, you have to understand that that number also is a bit of a fraud. The United States is one of the only countries that doesn't actually put in its internal borrowing. We borrow money from the Social Security trust fund, from the veterans trust fund, from all these things. Are we not going to pay it back? You know we pay interest to those. That is why the real number for this year is going to be closer to $2.3 trillion because there is about another $300 billion out there that we borrow internally that we also have to pay back and also have to pay interest. Budget deficits are headed to--I have to make the point. If there is any staffer who actually writes memos for their boss, this is the one I want them to memorize. If we do the tax hikes that are coming and don't offset them--we don't pay for them--in 9 years, we are no longer at 7 percent of the economy in borrowed money. We are at, I think it is, 9.2 percent of the economy in borrowed money. When the smart people are starting to tell us that small changes in interest rates--are we really dead set on trying to freak out our bankers, the people we turn to, and say: Please buy U.S. bonds. Help us finance the fact that we can't stop spending. Let's say this again. If we went to a six handle on U.S. debt, so 6 percent, which I think, before 2008, we were at 5\1/2\, 6 percent, somewhere in there, in 9 years, 45 percent of all tax receipts would be just interest. We are playing with live ammunition here, and we seem terrified to own a calculator. You are going to tell our brothers and sisters, the hardworking people of this country, that we are not going to let your taxes be raised. Absolutely. But we don't want to do things that are hard and get yelled at by a lobbyist or some group back home, so we are just going to borrow the money. We are going to give it to you, and then a few years from now, you will find out that productivity in the country has slowed down because the capital stack, another $4 trillion we have sucked out of the economy, doesn't get lent to your business, to you buying a house, to the new piece of equipment. The economists have already done the calculations basically saying--I am sorry, it got crumpled as I was marching over here--you want to maximize the economic growth and the wealth of this country. There is a CBO report that has been vetted by my economists on Joint Economic. You want to maximize prosperity and the curve. You offset the spending because you are screwing up the available capital. The reason really smart bond houses are now writing articles is the bingeing on debt that is going on in this country but also China and so many other places. Why do you think Great Britain this summer took down their government? Their bonds exploded; they lost their government. What the hell do you think is going on in France? What do you think is going on in Germany? What do you think happened in South Korea? What do you think was happening in Canada? All these countries, even Germany, are just trying to deal with the financing costs of their pensions. The United States is much better off than many of these countries, but it is coming fast for us. Do hard things today. Maximize prosperity tomorrow for every working person but also for my kids and maybe for your pension, your retirement. Mr. Speaker, getting older isn't Republican or Democratic. It is math. Go to CBO's data and tell the truth: 100 percent of the debt for the next 30 years is Social Security and Medicare. The rest of the government actually grows slower than tax receipts. It is like $124 trillion of borrowing, but everything is basically what we call discretionary. Military is actually squeezed to grow slower than the tax receipts. It actually has what they calculate as a positive balance. This isn't mean because, the fact of the matter is, we have demonstrated here over and over that you could modernize how we deliver so many of these things to our brothers and sisters who have earned their benefits. You just have to be willing to tell the bureaucracy and the deliverers of those services, saying: We expect you to modernize. Those of us with a fixation on watching the bond futures, the debt markets, today's interest rates are almost a full point higher than they were December 1. If that 1 percent works its way into U.S. bonds over the next 10 years, it is almost $3 trillion of additional spending. It is almost everything we are talking about trying to cut. Grow up. Figure out how to actually act like we are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, understand math, and start being fiscally disciplined. It doesn't mean cruel. It is not cutting and slashing. If you don't communicate to the world, who we ask for money, they raise our interest rates, and those interest rates are much more cruel than anything we could possibly do. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I think we are going to try to do a bit of a continuation of what we were doing last week. If you don't like math or economics, please turn off C-SPAN. There are a couple of things that we have to walk through. Last Thursday, I think I took 38 minutes here, and the two concepts I was trying to walk through were, one, the demographics of the United States being the primary driver of U.S. debt--it is not that complicated, but it seems to really bother people--and the second thing was this concept called interest fragility. That is a big word. What it basically means is that when you have $36 trillion in debt, $28 trillion to $29 trillion publicly financed, and when, over a year, you are going to refinance almost $10 trillion, bring maybe $2 trillion to $2.3 trillion new issuances to market, that little movement in interest rates could be a boatload of cash. What happened last Friday? We got a knockout jobs report. Here is the irony that people need to understand: The United States and a few other governments, such as China, are bingeing on so much debt that they have a ravenous appetite to grab people's savings and borrow it around the world. When the bond markets see that the U.S. economy is actually doing okay, which means more individuals and more businesses will be in the market to consume debt, we are going to raise interest rates. The United States gets its head kicked in when our interest rates go up. I think I was trying to show a chart the other day. It doesn't completely work this way because you have to refinance into it, but if we went to a 5 percent handle on U.S. sovereigns--that means, from the short term to the 30 years, you had a 5 percent interest rate that was our mean interest rate on U.S. debt--it is almost $9 trillion of additional borrowing, spending, and interest over that next 10 years. Functionally, going to 5 percent is double everything we are pretty much talking about in the extension of the tax reform. There is this lack of understanding. We are on the cusp of the bond market, the debt markets, actually being the number one influencer on U.S. policy, not Congress. When you borrow $70,000 a second--and I have charts, which I didn't bring this time, but I have done it in the past. Where we are in 9 years, it is no longer $70,000 a second, but it is almost doubled. How many of you understand we borrow $70,000 a second? The math will tell you almost 100 percent of that borrowing from today through the next decade is interest and healthcare, but we don't want to tell people that. Of the $2.3 trillion that my math says we are going to borrow this year--and CBO is going to publish something in the next day or so, and we will see how close my math got to what their prediction is--half of it is interest. Even when we do all sorts of things to reduce spending, to modernize on how we deliver services, to change the costs, we have this interest monster because we have $36 trillion and, basically every 125 days, Madam Speaker, we click off another trillion dollars. To the poor Clerk staff, I am so sorry. You have to be so tired of hearing idiots like me--well, me--getting up and saying some of these things over and over, but it doesn't seem to sink in around here. Look, one of the reasons I am here today is I am trying to sell a concept. This is a chart and it is almost unreadable. I accept that, but what it was saying is, we are up against a series of tax expirations at the end of this year. $3.7 trillion of it is individual. Your individual taxes are going up at the end of this year, but then we have estate taxes and passthroughs and LLCs and partnerships, all those other things. I think the Treasury Department a couple days ago scored it not at 4.6; they scored it at 5.5, which is a timing effect because it is a different year and higher interest rates. There was an economic study done by CBO and a couple outside groups saying, if Congress can find a way to offset it--and that is hard. You are talking $400 billion a year we would have to find in modernization and changing spending. If Congress could step up and pay for it, you not only maintain current tax policies so our brothers and sisters, all of our taxes don't go up but you get additional growth in the economy because you didn't just pull that much more money out of the economy and then have interest pile up on it. I think it was a year or so ago or 2 years ago, we had, I think, 3 months where we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. When we go home and talk to our voters, how many of them will look back at us and understand the scale? You get these responses, well, if you just cut this or that--I am going to show a couple of those charts again, and they are rounding errors. Sometimes they are just a few hours of borrowing from an entire year, but that is what we speechify because it is easy to understand, it is a great sound bite on talk radio, and it is crap math. Once again, the basic premise of this chart--and it was reconfirmed by the Joint Economic Committee and the baseline math was also done by CBO. It said, if you want to maximize economic prosperity in the United States, extend current tax policy, fix depreciation--we call it spensing; research and development expensing because that is actually where you get the productivity curve because God knows you will hear the Democrats come behind the mike and talk about look how good the job market is. Many Americans are actually poorer today than they were 4 years ago. They may be employed, but they are poorer, and that is because inflation went up faster than their wages. I represent a district in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area that had, I believe, 27 percent inflation over the last 4 years. So unless your wages are up 27 percent, you are poorer today. How do you raise wages? How do you raise purchasing power? Two things: Wages go up with inflation. That just means you are treading water. Productivity. There are things we could do in the tax policy that is coming to fix the things that create the productivity boost, the things we can do in regulatory reform, in modernization, the adoption of technology as a regulator. You get people here that go around saying, oh, we are going to deregulate. Fine, but how about doing smart regulation. We are all walking around with these supercomputers in our pockets. The idea is that you could crowdsource certain data, crash the size of the bureaucracy, make them less intrusive, and yet air quality, water quality, and all these other things can be much safer. It costs a fraction of what we do today, but you just have to be willing to think like a scientist, a data person, and deal with the army of lobbyists that are outside in the hallway who are upset that you are making them change their business model or their unionized bureaucracies, they show up here angry at you saying, what do you mean you want to use technology at the IRS? Remember, Madam Speaker, the IRS is the second largest unionized workforce in the Federal Government. I believe the VA is the first one. Every time we try to add modernization to do it better, faster, cheaper, and fairer, can you believe they get cranky? The math is the math. If you want to maximize economic vitality for this country, do your very best to offset as much as you can of the tax policy extension. The other thing I have to give you that is going to make me sound a little cranky is when you hear a Member of Congress, particularly a couple of our Senators, running around here and saying, we are just extending baseline. Huh? It is a whole made up term now. The law is the law. The law says the tax cuts for individuals, passthroughs, estate, and alternative minimum tax, all those things, expire at the end of 2025. We have made up a term around here saying we are just going to extend current policy. I heard someone this morning say we are going to extend current law. Current law says it expires. Take a look at all your CBO and your debt projections. It has the expirations in there. You take it away, fine. Be honest about what it means. It is another few trillion dollars of debt over the next 10 years that we have to pay interest on. Here is the fragility, and we are going to do this on a chart or two here. When you do that, you are going to go home and tell your voters, I extended your tax cuts. Great. I don't want to raise taxes on anyone, but if you do it without paying for it, when the interest rates go up and that family's credit cards, car debt, mortgage, and everything else gets more expensive, when the economy slows down because interest rates are up, it is because you have made the bond market nervous. Oh, but David, that would require thinking like an economist. I am going to get re-elected by telling people I just extended their tax benefits from the 2017 TCJA. Great. How do we explain to people that there are no free options anymore? We have the moral obligation to not make the world debt markets nervous. You have got to understand--and I need to double check my math because Great Britain, you saw what they did. They were doing all sorts of tax policy this summer and the pound crashed and their interest rates exploded, but most of the industrialized world actually has lower interest on their 10-year bond than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a full percentage point cheaper than the United States. Let me repeat that: Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a full percentage point cheaper than the United States. Does anyone understand there is a risk premium? If you screw around with this stuff, there is a thing called a term premium. It is a fancy way of saying, we actually want a little higher interest for the risk. One of my predictions for 2025 is Moody's, which is the last of the three big rating services. I think we are going to get downgraded if we do this stuff without even an attempt to pay for some of it, offset some of it, modernize our costs in how we deliver services. If we do that, we are going to get downgraded by all three rating services. The other two have already downgraded us. Does anyone here care, or do we just want to do happy talk and sugar highs? We just want a good dopamine hit on social media, but don't give a damn about the math. The fact of the matter is most of the industrialized world today has a better credit rating. You see it not by the credit rating services but by the way they can sell their debt cheaper than the United States. When you hear people talk about the extraordinary privilege the United States has, there are actually two of them. The fact that the world uses the U.S. dollar as the ultimate arbiter of exchange. Great. Let's not screw that up. The other one we often never talk about it, and I am going to do it in a future presentation, it is actually from an economist's standpoint and may be bigger than the fact that we get to buy and sell in our own currency. This second extraordinary privilege is that smart people from around the world, entrepreneurs from around the world, investors from around the world want to do it here. They want to live here, go to school here, produce their products here, invest here. From an economist's standpoint, the United States has two remarkable, extraordinary privileges: our currency and people want to be with us. In a couple of moments, I am going to show you why that is so important, but back to a baseline. If you are one of our new Members, please, you have got to memorize this. You see the blue on the chart that is upside down so I look like an idiot. Let's get this right. That is discretionary. All defense we consider is discretionary. Everything most people think is government: the FBI, the Park Service, the foreign service, those things. That is blue. We call that nondefense discretionary. Everything a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. If I do the math off the top of my head, it may be $400 billion of what is in the red, which is mostly earned benefits. That is your Social Security, your Medicare, your veterans benefits, your Federal pensions, those things. Functionally, I think this year it is like 75-25, 75 percent of all spending is on autopilot. We don't vote on it. I shouldn't be yelling. I have had a lot of caffeine. What we do vote on, what we give speeches on, which we screw around with all the time, is discretionary and in the scale of what we can reduce, it is almost--a lot of what we debate here is rounding errors. We have actually had debates on the floor here where the amount of money that we are trying to save, we borrowed more money during the time of the debate than it would save that year because we don't understand if you are clicking off $70,000 of borrowing every second--I wonder what this speech is costing. If I go a full hour, you start to see the idea. So far this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. I think it will come in at $6 billion, $7 billion a day once we get tax receipts in April. I am trying to explain the fragility. Here is the point I was just trying to make a couple of moments ago. If we went back to a 5 percent interest rate, it is just shy of $9 trillion over 10 years. Just the interest rate move is double everything we are talking about. How many times do you hear idiots--I mean, excuse me--elected officials like me get behind these microphones and talk through--it is not only having good fiscal policy but we are also going to be disciplined because how are we going to communicate to the bond markets that we are worthy of future investments? Where this gets really dangerous is--remember how I was just criticizing people walking around here saying, let's just ignore everything. Let's just keep doing what we are doing, don't have any offsets. If we do that, in 9 years, 9.2 percent of the entire economy is borrowed. This year, my math is, we are going to kiss up, around 7 percent of the entire economy is going to be borrowed money. What happens if we have some large disasters? Can you imagine that happening? What happens if we have another pandemic? What happens if we have a war? Do you understand how fragile you are making the greatest country on Earth because we are not willing to tell the truth about the fiscal situation? For my friends on the left who go, well, let's just raise taxes. I can bring my charts over and over, as I have in the past when we have had high marginal tax rates, we get about 17 percent of GDP. When we have had low marginal tax rates, we get about 17 percent of GDP. I think we have 75, 80 years of history of that showing it always falls back down to that margin. The secret is grow. The other side should stop lying about growing. One percent of GDP--and I am going to do this and double check myself in my head--1 percent of GDP is $300 billion. If you get 17 percent of that, that is about $48 billion. If you are borrowing $7 billion a day and you did all these things to get another point of GDP, you have covered yourself for a week. You get these folks who want to say, happy talk, we are going to grow our way out. To cover this year's debt, you would need almost a 50 percent GDP growth. Come on. Join reality world with us. Put batteries in your calculator. We can do this. We can do this together. One point I wanted to make for our brothers and sisters on the left, I have done multiple presentations here showing that if you do all their tax hikes for $400,000 and up, you get about a point and a half of GDP. If we do all of our spending cuts in the nondefense discretionary, which is what most of us have talked about for the last couple years, you get about 1 percent of GDP, so you have a big 2\1/2\ percent. We are borrowing 7 percent of the entire economy this year, so all of the left's solutions and the things we as conservatives often talk about don't get you actually anything close to what is necessary. It is terrifying. Madam Speaker, I am having a sort of personal crisis of confidence because I do this every week. My math is good. We do our best. We make mistakes on occasion, but we try to double, triple check it. No one seems to care. Is it really that terrifying to tell the truth to our voters? The press around here has no interest in telling the truth on the math. I have a couple Bloomberg reporters, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and, on occasion, believe it or not, a public television reporter seem to be the only ones who ever want to look at these charts. Everyone else, they basically want to write a gossip story. Yet, these things decide if my 2\1/2\ year old has a future. It also decides if your retirement becomes a miserable disaster. I hear a little person up in the balcony. If that little person is 2 years old today, when that little person is 22, his or her taxes have to be double what they are today, a 100 percent increase. When my 2-year-old is hopefully finishing up his university and going into grad school before he does his post-doctorate doctorate, I have high ambitions for him. We actually are trying to put into the family rules he is not allowed to run for office. The same thing with my 9- year-old daughter. That is both funny and actually true. Think of this: A child born today, when they are about 22, 23, the United States has to double every single U.S. tax--tariffs, income, corporate, everything--just to maintain baseline services. The math says a child born today will be part of the first generation in U.S. history who will be poorer than their parents and grandparents. Great morality around here. Let alone our inability--we are not allowed to talk about Social Security even though the Social Security actuaries, the CBO, the outside groups, the left groups, the right groups, all say, hey, 9--now 8\1/2\ because we just gave away a couple hundred billion dollars out of it--9 years or so, we double senior poverty in America because when the trust fund is empty, and you all get a 20 percent cut in Social Security, we double senior poverty. How many people do you see coming behind these microphones and saying, we need to fix it? It is immoral where it is going. If you do that, the left now has a political consultant writing attack ads on you because they care so much more about winning the next election than saving the society and not doubling senior poverty. We already have the trouble after the inflation cycle how many baby boomers are now living on the street because they can't afford their rent. The math is the math, and the math will win. If we continue current policy and not follow the law, in 9 years, 9.2 percent of the economy will be borrowed in U.S. debt. This chart doesn't even factor in the new higher interest rates because we are up a full point from early December. Great job, guys. Look, I have done this chart the last couple weeks because it seems to have an impact. For every dollar we take in in tax collections, we spend $1.39. Huh? Take in a dollar, spend $1.39. By 2034, if we went back to a 6 percent interest rate. I know that is a couple points higher than we are at right now, but 6 percent, I think that is sort of what we were paying in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s up to the Great Recession. If we go to 6 percent, think of this, in 9 budget years, 45 percent of all tax collections go just to interest. Does anyone care? No, because we would have to tell people the truth. This is a new chart, and I am trying to actually sort of explain. Our brothers and sisters on the left who want basically a socialized, planned economy, industrial policy, they did on the CHIPS Act and then their version of I guess they call it the Inflation Reduction Act, there is some good economic data now that says if you want to do something much less expensive, created much broader economic growth, and created much more productivity, you should not do what the Democrats did, which is let's thank some of our favorite industrial entities. Their executives, their investors will write us political checks. However, if you had done something like research and development expensing, and expensing when a company buys a piece of equipment to be better, faster, cheaper, it is dramatically less expensive, and it actually has more economic value, more economic growth, and it is spread throughout the economy. The problem with the Democrats' industrial policy, we are going to give all this money to certain green technologies, we are going to do CHIPS Act, is you often are writing checks, so you get rent-seeking, writing checks for last-generation technology. There is a little part of that I would have voted for, for primary research and development to do it better, faster, cheaper. It is like the old joke, what is the fastest way to make every computer in America worthless? Have someone invent a quantum computer, and suddenly that leap. It is like when all of a sudden you have a new photovoltaic panel, if it goes up 20 percent--there are experiments in the lab right now--all the other ones now are out of the money and don't make economic sense anymore. That is the concept. Creative destruction is one of the hallmarks of a society that becomes more productive. The way you get that is not the arrogance. When I first got here, I think I stole this joke from my wife--she looked at me, what is the two times in life, Mr. Speaker, you think you know everything? When you are 13 years old, and the day after you get elected to Congress. Oh, come on, guys, that is funny stuff. The fact of the matter is, when you see these sort of policies coming from Democrats where they are so smart, they get to choose the industries that get the corporate handouts, the cash handouts, and you can't imagine that there were strings attached. Yet, if we had just done an egalitarian tax policy, say we want to maximize productivity across the society because we are smart enough to know what the breakthrough is tomorrow. That breakthrough tomorrow is the thing that raises all boats, I guess that is the saying, and makes us productive. What do you get in a society that is more productive? Wages go up. All right. I just want to make a point, and I did a little bit of this last week. We held a little bit of a contest, I think back in December, where we asked, give us your ideas of how you would modernize or improve or reduce spending, these things. So far this budget year, if you got rid of foreign aid, this is for the 2025 fiscal year, all foreign aid, get rid of it, it is one week of borrowing. Get rid of all the salaries at the Department of Education. Okay, I am fine with that, but you have got to understand, it basically comes out to 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year, and that is not spending. That is borrowing. You have these people like me who get behind these microphones and speechify: If we get rid of the Department of Education, we are going to balance the budget. No, all the salaries just covered 9 hours of borrowing. There is a scale problem. I know seeing 12 zeroes, when you start talking a trillion, is hard. It is also our job. It is our job to understand the complexities here. One of the complexities that we are terrified to talk about is, if anyone is interested in what we are really up against, go online, grab Congressional Budget Office's report from yesterday. Every year they do an estimate on population, fertility, growth in the society. We were using the Census Bureau's data. I have come here behind the microphone and said, hey, our quick look at the Census Bureau data was in 11 years the United States was going to start to have more deaths than births. CBO came back yesterday and said, no, the way they are calculating where fertility rates are in the United States, in 8 years the United States will have more deaths than births. Demographics is destiny. You want people like me to figure out the financing of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, which were all designed systems for population growth. Remember, today's worker pays for today's beneficiary. Even when we do the adjustments for net immigration, you pick up a couple more decades. Think about that, living in a society with more deaths than births in 8 years. Matter of fact, I believe there were 17 States that last year had more deaths than births. This goes back to my productivity argument. If you want a society and a country that still economically grows, that can still defend itself, that still is the envy of the world, that has the extraordinary privileges, are we going to adopt regulatory tax policies that maximize economic growth? It turns out, you are going to have to do things that maximize productivity, maximize labor substitution, use that technology, use the supercomputer in your pocket. It is shocking how many people freak out every time I start to talk about using AI and these things. You don't have a choice. If we are going to keep growing, we have got to thread a needle here while jogging. We have got to manage the debt. We have got to convince the debt markets we are serious, so don't raise our interest rate because if interest rates go up a bunch, it is almost too late because we are carrying so much, our demographics are against us. We have to have this productivity spike, and it is going to come through functionally two things--AI and synthetic biology--but I will save that for another speech. However, there is a way it can work. There is hope. There is only hope if this place sharpens its intellect. You can't keep saying the same things you were saying in the 1990s or a decade ago. The world is different. I hope the staff, the voters, others start to really think this through and start demanding, saying, I need intellectual robustness, if that is a word. Learn your math. Learn the opportunity, but also learn to think like an economist. Let's put up the one chart that gets me the most hate, and it is more than a year, year-and-a-half out of date. The numbers are worse today, but it is the truth. For anyone crazy enough to watch, how many Members of Congress are willing to show this to you? This is directly from CBO, numbers from about a year-and-a-half ago. They update it every year. CBO projects $115 trillion debt over 2024- 2054. Social Security and Medicare account for $124 trillion of deficit. The rest of the budget has a $9 trillion surplus. Let me walk that through. It basically means everything when we talk about nondefense discretionary, defense discretionary, all those are projected to grow slower than tax receipts, but Medicare, Social Security, and the interest that goes on top of their deficit financing produce about $124 trillion of borrowing. How many of you think the world is going to lend us $124 trillion over the next 30 years? This is based on current interest rates. Actually, it is sort of based on last year's interest rates. I was playing with a calculator a couple days ago. With my math, I have this going to $135 trillion, not $124 trillion. It is not Republican. It is not Democratic. It is demographics. The fact of the matter is that you could substantially change much of Medicare's costs and make services better, faster, and cheaper. Just join this century of technology in taking care of people. The ring I am wearing that does my vitals or the technologies to incentivize things, do we pay a Medicare provider to help people be healthier instead of making more money when someone is sicker? We did a whole presentation multiple times last year showing obesity in America is an additional $9.1 trillion of spending over the next 10 years. Maybe as a society, we should consider changing the farm bill nutrition support to help our brothers and sisters because it is both moral and great economics. Suddenly, people can come back into the labor force. They can form families. They can do all these other things. We have States where more than half of the population is technically obese, and we are paying for it. It is government policy in many ways that is doing it to these people. It is immoral. I am going to get hate texts saying: You can't talk about that. Screw you. Let's do what is right for our brothers and sisters in this country. We are Americans. Don't hide from the math. Embrace it, and fix it. This one is the last. If you saw my staff, they were slipping me this because we were sort of speed doing the math. Let me explain. We are trying to do this more often. We will get these questions that come in on the comments. Someone asked this, and they actually did it as a legitimate question: Foreign aid over 4 years is $198 billion. Think of that. Every dime of foreign aid, if you said for the last 4 years and took 4 years of borrowing, it would cover 8 days, 8.2 days of debt. Those of you who get up in front of these mikes and say that if we got rid of foreign aid, we will balance the budget, even when I do the average of the last 4 years, it is just a little over 8 days of borrowing. It is hard when you get up in front of an audience at home and tell them the truth when it is not the same thing they heard 10 minutes earlier on a talk radio show or on a cable television show. This isn't about ratings. This isn't about today's dopamine hit of you being angry because you saw something on the Drudge Report. This is about saving this Republic. If you are like I am, you believe this Republic was divinely inspired. If you believe like I do, do you not have a moral obligation to save this country? How about being a dad? My wife is my age. We were blessed. We got to adopt a couple of kids. Should they be part of the first generation that is poor? They don't have to be. There is a way the math works. It just turns out, Mr. Speaker, that it is hard. We have to do complex things. We are going to have to tell lobbyists and people from home that you have to modernize, join this century, and change your business models. They are going to be mean to us. They might not even contribute to us, but there is a way to make the math save our future. I am going to argue that in the next 6 weeks around here. We are going to make some decisions. Are we going to modernize the delivery of government? Are we going to find a way to offset? Are we going to convince the bond markets that we are serious about the future? For everyone out there, watch us. We all give these beautiful speeches about the morality of what an amazing country we have and our place in the world and our place in history. Mr. Speaker, these are the weeks we are going to make that history or have to live with the sins of what we do. 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, for the gentleman from Pennsylvania, a bit of reference, in the old days when we were put in the chair, particularly when we were freshman, it is because we had been annoying to the Speaker. I don't know if anyone remembers that. I love the clerk staff, I appreciate them, and I am sorry to say we are about to do a whole bunch of math and a lot of numbers really fast, but it is where we are at. Mr. Speaker, one of the things I am going to try to do today is basically sell two ideas. One is--and I want to be honest and careful in this because my goal is not to be sarcastic, not to be a jerk, but walk through the scale--just the scale--of the borrowing, the debt problem of our demographics, what is really going on. Mr. Speaker, I am going to walk through just a couple of examples of solutions we get from our wonderful, brilliant constituents and sort of explain there are probably things we should do, but they are tiny rounding errors. People don't understand. Annually, I think we expect to borrow about $7 billion a day. I think, so far this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. The second thing is incredibly important. If there is a staffer out there or a freshman Member of Congress, burn what we are going to talk about into their consciousness. In the United States, what is the greatest at least economic threat I think we have for this government, in many ways, for the country? Interest. We are what is called interest fragile. I am going to show you some charts where tiny movements on U.S. sovereign debt become trillions and trillions of dollars. Our model basically says we are going to refinance almost $10 trillion this year and add another--what?--$2 trillion, $2-1/3 trillion of virgin or new borrowing, small bits of interest. When you hear someone talk about things like the debt ceiling, you have to understand that you are weaving a needle while jogging because you have to deal with it in a way where you communicate and do actual policy that communicates to the world's debt markets that the United States is taking its debt seriously and understands the scale of the problem and then also while extending that debt ceiling in a way that also doesn't blow you up. Some of my brothers and sisters will go: Just don't raise it. Okay, great. Do you think you are ever getting a mortgage again? Do you ever think you are getting a car loan again? Do you understand what would happen to the world economy going boom and interest rates exploding when all of a sudden the United States is no longer credit worthy? That is what it means. Remember one of my predictions for this year. There are three big rating agencies, S&P, Fitch, and Moody's. Moody's is the only one that has not downgraded U.S. debt yet. I predict to you that, before this year is over, Moody's or all three will have downgraded U.S. sovereign debt. My other prediction is, before the spring is over, the United States will cross over to 5 percent interest. If it holds there, I am going to show you how devastating that math absolutely is. The clown show has to come to an end. People need to understand that if you are a Member of Congress, you are the board of the biggest economy in the world. You have to start learning your math because, at the end of the day, the math will always win. Let's do some basic things. The reason I am doing this is because I want to make the moral argument of doing the really hard thing in reconciliation. It is also the best economics. If you give a darn about your retirement, my 2\1/2\-year-old boy's economic future, the country, you have to do the hard thing. CBO and then my Joint Economic Committee economists actually worked through some math saying what would happen because we have all these expiring provisions of TCJA, the 2017 tax reform. If you extend them all--the individual, the passthroughs, the small businesses, the subchapter S's, the partnerships--if you extend those tax provisions over 10 years, it is about $4.6 trillion of revenue that would have come in because of the increased taxes because of the expired provisions. What is this body able to do to find policies to offset that spending? It turns out CBO, and I know this chart is a little hard to read, but the punch line on it is, if you functionally extend the tax policy but you pay for it, through the decade, you actually get more economic growth. The economy actually grows. People say, oh, but you reached in and pulled money out to pay for the offset. The idea is, by doing that, you haven't deficit-financed it where you are paying interest, where you are making the debt markets more fragile, and you are also pulling $4.6 trillion additional capital out of the debt markets that could have gone into you buying a new car or the business buying new plants and equipment. This is hard because, around here, talking about modernizing how we deliver healthcare, modernizing public agencies, reduce spending by doing it better, faster, and cheaper, there is an army of lobbyists outside in the hallway here who are paid to protect their current business models. How many folks do we meet from the agencies and the public employee unions that get all upset, particularly at me when I am doing these presentations of, here, we can use technology, we can use AI, these other things to reduce the size and cost and make government much more responsive? Then, they send nasty letters and those things into your district and complain about you. We don't have a choice. Let's walk through. The facts are on our side. Those folks that run around here and say we need to extend tax policy, protect the border, actually do all these things, you can't create an additional fiscal rathole and expect you are going to throw this back onto the world debt markets. The reason I want you to think about this is I am going to show you a couple of charts in a little while where interest rates were on U.S. sovereigns way back when. Let's go back to December, a few weeks ago. Yesterday, the 20-year U.S. bond actually crossed over 5 percent for a while. If 5 percent--anyone with gray hair, you understand 5 percent is actually lower than the historical average of the previous few decades. If we would just go to 5 percent, you are going to see that is almost just shy of an additional $9 trillion in debt, double of everything we are talking about doing in reconciliation. Just do this and communicate to the debt markets that we are serious about what is going on because the uncomfortable truth is that--and I am going to show it again, and it seems to hurt people's feelings-- almost 100 percent of the debt for the next 10 years is interest and Medicare. We got older. Baby boomers are moving into their earned benefits. We didn't have enough children to backfill. Starting in 1990, fertility rates started to roll over. Healthcare got much more expensive. We are almost terrified to basically say almost every dime of debt from today through the next 30 years is interest and demographics. The political class, the press, the dopamine hits on cable television, this and that, telling true math doesn't make you popular. It does make you honest. Let's walk through a couple of examples. Once again, I have to be careful. These are not meant to be snarky. They are basically a thought experiment of what you hear Members walking behind these microphones and saying that things are great, wonderful, maybe we should do them, but they have tiny effects on the survival of this Republic. Let's walk through and explain what I am talking about. Let's walk through the impact of borrowing where we are using this fiscal year, what we have been borrowing per day, per hour, per minute, per second. We are going to walk through, and I am using the clock thing. These are 12-hour clocks. You have to picture two clock faces. I am trying to make some way where you make things with lots of zeros understandable. This is one of my favorite ones. Back in December, we did send out some things, and we got members of our communities to throw back ideas. One of the favorite ones was to get rid of congressional salaries. Okay. In my heart of heart, I think we are overpaid for the quality of our work product. Maybe that is what we should do. Get rid of every congressional salary--that is, the Senate and here. Just get rid of all of it. Over a fiscal year, it is about $1.9 billion. That is a lot of money. For an entire year's borrowing, for the entire year, it would cover 6.4 hours. Yay, we made a big impact. We covered 6.4 hours of an entire year's worth of borrowing. That is sort of silly, but that is one of the key responses we got. I think it may say more about what they think about me. Let's do another one that came back to us from our constituent survey. Emergency services for undocumented migrants, this is basically ObamaCare subsidies, healthcare spending for those who are here undocumented. They are illegal. Most of this turns out, we believe, to be ObamaCare subsidies. You will hear Member after Member and people on television, the talking hosts, on conservative talk radio, if we just didn't spend that money. Okay, we actually did this thing called research where we looked up the actual facts of the math. It is about $2.7 billion for the entire year. We get rid of it, and we probably should, but it is 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year. Yet, how many times will you hear people say this in front of microphones? Stopping healthcare subsidies for those who are here undocumented, here illegally, is 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year. There is our problem. We have people doing theater over honest math. Let's do another one, one of my particular favorites. Let's get rid of the Department of Education. Actually, I am a big fan because if you believe in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, why is this here at the Federal Government? A big portion of their 4,500 employees is actually debt management, but that can be done by other agencies we have that have high-skilled folks to manage receivables and those things. If you got rid of all those 4,500 employees from the Department of Education, great. It turns out to be about $2.75 billion over an entire year you just covered. Functionally, that is 9 hours of borrowing. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones or on conservative talk radio or other things that are saying that we are going to get rid of the Department of Education? Great. Then, the conversation moves on to something else because they act like they have covered the debt. There is this lack of understanding. We are borrowing about $70,000 a second. Let's go on and do another one we can get rid of. Let's get rid of the U.N. I have done this a couple of times. When I did it before, the total spend on the United Nations was $18.1 billion, but that was in the 2023 fiscal year, but that had a bunch of the new construction. For the 2024 fiscal year, which has ended already, we spent $12.9 billion on the U.N., or maybe it is in this fiscal year that is what we have appropriated. $12.9 billion is a lot of money. Let's just get rid of it. I am not going to even give you the other chart that shows you how much all of these foreign diplomats and stuff pay into taxes, into the things they buy, the rent, those things in New York City. Who cares? That $12.9 billion gets me 43 hours, so basically a day and three- quarters of borrowing. My point, as I am trying to walk through, is that we are probably going to have to do lots and lots of these things. Start demanding from the people who are standing up in front of you saying, ``Here is what I care about, and we are going to take on the debt and deficits,'' have them understand their math. How about Ukraine aid? I think this is for this fiscal year. The appropriation lineup is $21.8 billion. That gets us 3 days of borrowing. You hear these crazy numbers being thrown out. It turns out now this is both humanitarian and, I think, actually the other term--it is things that provide equipment. Often, it is equipment we depreciated out and we are going to get rid of it. We send it on to them. This is both categories in that number of the 21.8, but it is 3 days. Let's actually even add a little bit. Let's go grander. Let's go much more bigly. I think that is a pop culture term these days. Let's just get rid of all foreign aid. I cannot tell you how many times I run into folks back home who say: ``David, I am so concerned about the debt and deficit. We can balance everything if we just get rid of foreign aid.'' Okay. Interesting math. We did the math. Here is the 57.25 that is going to foreign aid. It is a week of borrowing. Does anyone see the point I am trying to make? You start to add up all of these, and I think in all of those, we have got ourselves to what, a week and a half? We added up all the ideas that came into our office, and I think we got up to 3 weeks of borrowing. There seems to be this lack of understanding. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed, every dime of nondefense discretionary, and this year--I am doing this off the top of my head, which is always dangerous--I think it is $400 billion of what we call earned benefits, mandatory spending, is borrowed money. I am trying to just demonstrate--there is this term we do called ``on-budget receipts.'' You get your paycheck. You look at your paycheck. Here is what went to FICA. That is the Social Security contribution, a little bit of your Medicare part A contribution, maybe a little bit of unemployment disability. That is sort of considered off-budget tax contributions. That is coming from your FICA tax. The other part is your income tax, capital gains tax, all the other things. That is this blue here. To give you an idea, this is the net interest this fiscal year, the interest we pay back to the people who have been kind enough to buy our bonds. Remember, China is not the number one owner of bonds. I think now it is Japan. China has been actually rolling off its bonds for 3 or 4 years. I think they are somewhere now in the $900 billion range of the $36 trillion in debt we have. Remember, about $28 trillion, $29 trillion of that is what we sell off to the market. The other we borrow internally. We borrow from the Social Security trust fund, and we borrow other moneys internally, but we still have to pay interest. Remember, we are one of the only countries in the world that engages in this scam of saying it is only the publicly borrowed money. No. You are not going to pay your interest back to Social Security? Of course you are. The point of this chart is trying to say accounting accounts for 24 percent of all those tax receipts we take in that aren't Social Security, aren't part of those payroll taxes, 24 percent, is just going to pay interest, and that is this year. The crazy thing is that these numbers were scored when we thought the mean interest on U.S. sovereign debt was going to be somewhere around 3 to 3.25 percent. Have you seen what has happened in the last 3 weeks? Did I mention a moment ago that the 20-year bond yesterday went over 5 percent? This number is about to explode on us. It is called interest fragility. Yet, how many idiots like me have come behind the microphone and said: Do you understand how dangerous it is if we make the debt markets nervous because we are incompetent? Let's do one more of these just to make the point. This is tax receipts for fiscal year 2024. It is a fixed number. That is the last fiscal year. The red here, that is the Social Security taxes, Medicare part A, et cetera. This was everything else. Even in that case, it is still basically 24 percent of all--it is still 24 here. I just did this chart so you can see, when you hear someone talk about total tax receipts, this is obligated to earned benefits. Oddly enough, this number isn't big enough to cover the earned benefits. That is why every month Social Security has to present its special T bills to Treasury, cash in. Remember, Social Security does not add to the debt. Cashing in their special T bills and the Treasury having to finance it and give the money back to Social Security does add to the debt. Remember, there are two steps in there. Back to the oldie but goodie. Everything in red, that is on autopilot. If you remember, Congress doesn't vote on it. What is in blue, nondefense and defense, is all borrowed along with a whole wedge of this over here. You have to understand the scale. It is hard to see 12 zeros in your head, but it is just a trillion. We are probably going to borrow $2-\1/ 3\ trillion this year. We have these debates and discussions about we are going to have reconciliation. Yes, of course we are. We still don't have 60 votes in the Senate. If we are going to move policy, of course we are. Understand the fiscal implications. If we don't do it right, do the debt markets demand a premium? Because you see what is going on around the world. What happened in Great Britain this summer? What did they do to the gilt? What happened in France a couple weeks ago? What is happening in Germany right now? What is happening in Canada? What happened in South Korea? All over the world, you see governments falling. One of the primary reasons they are falling is they actually tried to engage in some fiscal constraint. Are we going to be elegant enough to do it in a way where we can explain to the American people that if we do something smart today, we do not get crushed tomorrow? Small movements in interest rates start to consume everything in this government. Here is an example. I told you the 20-year yesterday went over 5 percent. If anyone is a real geek, if you take a look at the futures market on the 10-year sovereign, some of the futures market between now and through spring actually expect a 5 percent interest rate. Remember, that is still a point, point and a quarter lower than the historic average when you get rid of the previous decade, which was sort of fake interest rates. If we were to go to 5 percent of U.S. debt, that is actually fairly normal and that gets built in. Remember, we bring about $10 trillion to refinance. Let's look at 5 percent. We go from a $13 trillion, almost $14 trillion debt expectation at current interest rates over the next 10 years to $22.7. It is almost $9 trillion additional from where interest rates were in December to where it looks like interest rates are going to be this spring. You just added $9 trillion in additional interest. That is called interest rate fragility. That is double. Just the interest rate exposure going back to even something that is below a historic norm is double everything we are talking about doing in tax reform, of extending the TCJA 2017 tax policy. It is double. This should be scaring the crap out of people around here. Why am I the only idiot running around with charts saying: Are you paying attention to this? Are you watching what is happening in world debt markets right now? Does this make anybody nervous? Some of the articles are basically saying bond markets around the world are getting nervous loaning to sovereigns because they keep borrowing like crazy. What is going on in China where they are borrowing like crazy? We are borrowing like crazy. There is only so much borrowable money in the world, and we are chewing it up. The point of this one was if we were to ignore the law and just extend our spending policies we have today, in functionally 9 budget years, 9.2 percent of the entire economy is just interest. We expect almost 7 percent of this year to be borrowing, but the concept of just--let me rephrase it, because I just screwed that up. 9.2 percent of the entire economy will be debt, not interest. It will be debt. A couple of our economists basically say we are going to borrow about 7 percent of the entire economy this year. If we don't start to stabilize that and roll it down, you hit this interest spiral into the ground. I am going to show you a couple of charts here, that should scare the crap out of you, of how much of the taxes we take in from hardworking people is just paying interest. Let's make that a little more understandable. Mr. Speaker, some of us with gray hair remember--as Mr. Green laughs at me. There is this thing called the seventies, eighties, nineties, even the 2000s before the Great Recession, and the mean interest rate on U.S. debt was about 6. This is just an example of what it means when you are carrying $36 trillion in debt. Understand, we are adding another trillion of debt about every 125 days. Let me say that again. Every 125 days, we basically tack on another trillion dollars of borrowing. If we went to a historic average of 6 percent, it would be 11 percent of GDP in a decade. What if we went up to 9 percent, which we had back in the seventies and eighties? You are at 18 percent. We are playing really dangerous games here. We have almost made the decision to make the world debt markets the ones in charge of America. Every second, we are borrowing about $70,000. Do you not think the retired couple, the foreign government, the big business, the rich people who are buying U.S. savings bonds--are you pretending they don't actually care about what we do here and that we are going to make sure they get their money back, or is it all just magic money? Understand what that 6 percent--this is sort of the punch line of what I am trying to communicate here. By 2034, 9 budget years from now, debt servicing at 6 percent, so back even below the historic average rates, interest would consume 45 percent of all tax receipts. Let's do that again. Imagine a world where 45 percent of all tax receipts that come into the government are just for paying interest. Take this seriously. I have a 9-year-old. And my wife and I, who is exactly my age, we also adopted another little boy from the same birth mom. He is 2\1/2\ years old and the cutest kid you ever met. Our little girl is brilliant and very loud. The math basically says my kids and your kids will be part of the first generation of Americans to actually be poor. To give you an idea how that math works, when little Matthew, who is 2\1/2\ right now, is 23 or 24, if you wanted to maintain baseline services in America as they are today, every U.S. tax rate, tariff, corporate, individual, everything, has to double, a 100 percent increase. It is not pretend. It is called math. These are little things. You punch it, and you can put batteries in them. Hell, Mr. Speaker, you probably have one in your phone. It is math, but we are terrified to tell our voters the truth because people raise their eyebrows and get upset when you say: Look, we got old as a society. We didn't have as many children, we made lots of promises, and we never set aside enough money for them. However, we can disrupt the cost if we are willing to adopt modernization. You can cut stunning amounts of money from delivery of healthcare not by cutting services but by adopting technology. Except, once again, the lobbyists are in the hallway to stop you from doing that because it would make them change their bureaucracies and the business models. A number like this should make us all pucker, that if we just went back to normal interest rates, in 9 years, 45 percent of all of our tax receipts go into just interest. That is called interest fragility. The single thing that scares me the most in the society is that we are no longer in charge. We basically made the decision that the debt markets are. So let's actually get a little more dystopian, and part of this is to make an impact. What if we went to 9 percent interest? It has happened. What would happen? Mr. Speaker, can anyone read this number? Eighty-three percent of all tax receipts would go just to interest. Here is the reality of today: For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. Yet, what we call discretionary, military has been substantially flat, all other nondefense discretionary is basically flat, almost all the growth is two things: in healthcare and in interest. We can't do anything about interest. The deal is the deal is the deal when we sell a bond. As far as healthcare, once again, there is an army of lobbyists, once again, outside these walls, who will beat the absolutely living blank out of us when we ask them to modernize and actually use technology. Even our brothers and sisters here are often defending not the last decade, but the business models from the decade before that within healthcare. We don't have a choice. Open up your brain, Mr. Speaker, hire a computer brain. Hire some kid who is a data analyst scientist and start walking through the facts of what is going on. Then we have to do hard things. We will have to do a revolution. Have you seen the numbers coming out of Medicare Advantage? Has anyone taken a look at those Wall Street Journal articles from last year of the billions and billions and billions that they are documenting that are functionally fraud and abuse? Are we going to be honest about it? There are ways elegantly to fix it without beating the crap out of everyone. We just need to recognize our own problems. Once again, for every dollar the United States takes in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. Right now, I need to go back to an oldie but a goodie. I have done entire floor presentations repeatedly on this. You take all the tax hike proposals of our brothers and sisters on the left, Mr. Speaker, and score them for their economic specs, it will produce about 1\1/2\ points of GDP of new tax receipts. You take for our side, Mr. Speaker, all the cuts we have talked about, almost all of them being in nondefense discretionary, it is about one point of GDP. Add those two together and that is what, 2\1/2\. Congratulations. So everything the talking heads do behind these microphones is 2\1/2\ percent. We are borrowing 7 percent this year of the entire economy, and here is your crisis: The solutions sound really good in a television commercial and maybe an interview on cable television, and they are crap math. They don't get us anywhere close to what is necessary because it turns out the actual scale of the math is so far beyond just raising people's taxes and just slash and burn this. You need a revolution on how we deliver on our commitments. Why is that harder? I still can't get my head around why that is harder. Once again, the single chart that makes people most angry, and it is already 1 year out of date, the numbers right now are much worse, CBO predicts that deficits of $115 trillion over 2024 to 2054, Social Security, Medicare, $124 trillion deficit, the rest of the budget has a $9 trillion surplus. Do you see, Mr. Speaker? The spending and the interest covered, the spending and the interest covered, remember, Mr. Speaker, Social Security has about 9 more years and the trust fund is empty. Are we going to fix it? Are we allowed to talk about it? If we talk about it, then the Democrats will run nasty ads about you. So somehow, they are comfortable with the immorality that in 9 years we are going to double senior poverty in America, because that is what is happening. However, Mr. Speaker, you are not allowed to talk about it because they will attack you. They spent about a couple of a million dollars beating the crap out of me because I care about saving Social Security, and I care about not doubling senior poverty. Somehow lying about it is the political tactic of this place? They care so much more about power than saving our brothers and sisters? We already have a crisis right now of baby boomers, inflation pushing them out of their housing. I think it was last year I saw the statistic on baby boomers' doubling of homelessness, because they are being priced out of their homes because of inflation. That is the morality of this place because we do crap economics. It is because we make public policy by our feelings instead of math. The reality of it, Mr. Speaker, if you look at the CBO projection, now this is 1 year, 1\1/2\ years ago, so inflation has trimmed off a bit from their numbers, interest rates are substantially higher, these numbers are going to pop when they redo them because of the higher interest rates. I was trying to do it, it is dangerous when I try to do these things off the top of my head, but I was coming in about $133, $136 trillion of borrowing over 30 years because of the higher interest rates, and it could be substantially higher if we are actually truly at a five or six. The point is, debate after debate after debate after debate, we stand here and we argue about the nondefense discretionary, which is like 13 percent of the spending, and even in this projection it actually grows slower than tax receipts. So we are going to head towards doing reconciliation. We are going to try to do policy. We have a new President coming in who has a vision of growth for the country. Are we, as the board of directors, as the Founding Fathers designed it, going to step up and do our job and actually save the future? Are we going to avoid the hardest thing we do, and that is telling the truth to our voters, and maybe even telling the truth to each other? There is still hope. One of our economists actually has this chart he has been working on and he has been saying you may only have 3 or 4 more years if interest rates keep moving up where it is almost too late. You can't work yourself out of the higher interest rate cycle because the additional debt, the interest rate, the additional debt, the interest rate--and I think it was 1 year ago when we actually had a couple of months, 3 or 4 months, where we had to borrow money to cover our borrowing. Mr. Speaker, there is hope. There is a way to make the math work. There is a way to do it in a moral fashion. It has been said that when you have a complex problem, it turns out the solutions are complex. Is the modern Congress capable of doing complexity? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, for those of us from the Valley of the Sun, the Phoenix, Arizona, area, there is an excitement around us. Our college team, Arizona State University, which was predicted to be last in its first year in the Big 12, has made the college playoffs. As a matter of fact, they won the Big 12 and they get a bye in their first playoff game. For the community, the excitement, the joy, and having one of the youngest coaches in America, I can only be thankful to the team. Being predicted to be last and coming out where they are, you have provided hope, joy, and excitement to our community. I thank Arizona State University football.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we have half an hour, so consider that a mercy for everyone who has had to deal with some of these presentations. The original goal tonight was actually to do some things that were a bit more optimistic, some things that we have identified where you could actually modernize and cut the cost of this government and actually do the job that we are supposed to do here, but I need to clear up a couple of things. First, I owe everyone--because apparently last week when I was speaking, I was speaking so fast that I didn't explain this particular chart, so I am making up for myself last week. The point I was trying to make is, in the last fiscal year, our borrowing represented about 6.4 percent of the entire economy. When you have individuals around here saying we have these parts of our 2017 tax reform that expire at the end of next year, if we just extend those and don't pay for them, that is what drives us to almost 9.2 percent of the entire economy 9 budget years from now. If we actually find a way to pay for them and still extend those tax reforms, we actually get some economic growth. If you just let everyone's taxes go up, you end up in about 9 years a little under 7 percent of the entire economy borrowed. It is a little geeky, but the passion I have tried to show here is, I believe the moral thing to do is we don't let the portions on the middle class, their taxes, go up next year, but we also step up and find a way to pay for it. The CBO and the joint economic economists last week--and it is going to be one of the boards here--actually showed if you paid for the tax extensions at the end of the decade, the economy has gotten bigger and it will make sense. You haven't taken, functionally, what would be $4.6 trillion out of the economy and used it for borrowing, you have left it there so the small business, the big business, your family, there is money that you can borrow to grow and at the same time your taxes haven't gone up. It is just hard for us to do because if we do modernization, if we find things to cut, there is an army of lobbyists just outside this door coming to scream at us. Some of those lobbyists aren't the types of people walking around with Guccis, they are the people they fly in from our home districts saying, David, we want that spending and then you explain to them: Every dime--I will say this three or four times because for some reason, I can't get this to burn in. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. Every dime of Defense is borrowed. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed. When you hear us all talk about the mandatory spending, and that is like three- quarters of all spending, believe it or not, there may be $300 billion or $400 billion of that that is borrowed money also. I will apologize to everyone. When I was showing the 9.2 percent of GDP in 9 budget years, that is if we basically take these tax expirations and just ignore them and just continue current policy, we blow ourselves up. There are a couple of other things I want to walk through. Apparently, yesterday, the President got up and was trying to tell everyone that this is the best economy ever. That is an interesting statement. The economy is actually not bad. Now, there is some argument to be made about the amount of cash the Democrats did in their Inflation Reduction Act and other things that they have been, functionally, subsidizing and then borrowing. Here is the reality: If the President is looking at you in the camera and telling you it is the best economy ever, well, that is not factual, but why don't you feel it? It is because much of America is poorer today than the day President Biden took office. If you live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, my home, if you don't make almost 27 percent more today than the day President Biden took office, you are poorer. So having someone tell you the economy is great, yet you are having trouble paying for things--the reason we made this board is, functionally, for you to maintain your purchasing power, are you making, if you are an average person in average America--in my district, these numbers are substantially higher because I am from a district with some of the highest inflation in America, but if you are not making $1,115 more a month because that is what you would have to be having from 4 years ago, your purchasing power, you are poorer. I actually think that is the reason that voters turned and said, I see these Democrats running lots of ads, saying crazy things, but yet it turns out the voters are actually really smart. They would look at their checking account, they would look at the cost of their kids' clothes, they would look at the grocery store and try to figure out why in the last week of the month they were losing their minds under stress. There are a lot of folks here that say things that, just from an economist standpoint, are insane. But your wages, policies that we engage in that don't make you wealthier--because prosperity is moral. It is moral for the poor person to be less poor. It is moral for the working person to be less stressed. To not understand the average American in 4-some years, unless you are making about $13,000 more, you are poorer. In my district, I think that number is closer to $18,000, $19,000 because I have one of the higher income districts in America, but also one with the highest inflation, and I think that is the disconnect. I think that understanding of, it's not enough to run around and tell people the economy is great, look at all the money we have handed out to big businesses, aren't you happy how much we subsidized of the economy, while so many Americans are just trying to survive. Apparently, I did a horrible job trying to explain--and somewhere here in early January, I will do a whole presentation on this--one of the fixations of the left is, we need to tax corporations more. Do you remember your elementary school economics class? I am being sarcastic. Do you remember your high school economics class? A corporation taxes you. Who pays it? Seriously, you don't think that doesn't pop up in the wages you pay your workers and the prices you pay as a consumer. In many ways, corporations are nothing more than pass-through entities. When we did the tax reform at the end of 2017, there was data that was coming out in the next couple of years that showed about 67 percent of those corporate tax cuts actually worked their way into wages. Remember, before the pandemic we had some of the most robust growth of wages in American history where the poorer got less poor. The wealthy did well. Now, there is a whole discussion of--one day I am going to do a whole thing of what this government, the Federal Reserve did to inflate assets and that is actually where much of the wealth came from was monetary policy, not tax policy, but for the folks around here that don't do economics that is a different discussion. What happens in a world where you can show we lowered taxes? It actually turns out we did something more complicated than that. You do realize what we call the TCJA, in 2017, there was $7 trillion over 10 years of tax cuts. You know there was like $5 trillion, $5.5 trillion of tax hikes. Because the idea was to modernize. It had been 30-some years since the United States had updated its tax code, and much of the rest of the world was kicking our heads in. Do you remember the stories that President Obama said over and over and over, he talked about these companies are leaving America? They are moving their intellectual property to Ireland and these things. We fixed that. We made it so you wanted to be domiciled in the United States. That is why we had the miracle of job growth, but also the wage growth. Before the pandemic, we had the fastest closure of income inequality in modern history in America. I would argue that is moral. When you get economic policy, when you get tax policy, when you get regulatory policy right, it is moral. People are less poor. Yet, so often I watch these people come behind these microphones and they say things that aren't true. I was trying to point out in last week's presentation, just if you look at expenditures on growth and growing businesses and investments, when we did TCJA, you can actually see--the G7, without the United States in it, they were growing about the same. They were investing about the same. We exploded in growth. So back to your high school economics class. What are the two ways you pay people more? Your wages go up. So you are out there in the private sector, not government because we are a distortion. What are the two ways your wages go up? Come on. You all showed up for your high school economics class. With inflation, your wages go up. But that just means you are treading water. You got paid more because everything costs more. It is productivity. Things in the tax code, in the regulatory code that get a business to buy the new piece of equipment that is better, faster, cheaper. Those investments in capital equipment, you are able to make more of whatever you do. Your employer is able to pay you more. It is how you create wage growth. Some of the idiot class here say we are just going to tax businesses more. You do realize every economic model says when I raise corporate taxes, it is the workers that ultimately pay for it because your wage growth flattens out, but it is great politics. It is crap economics. I did this earlier in the year. I brought all these charts trying to show that much of the wealth of this country, thank heaven, before the insanity of the pandemic, we had had the tax reform, the regulatory reform, and a robust economic growth. Could you imagine if this country was at an anemic growth rate when that happened, what our lives would have been like? It is also one of the reasons we exploded out and we spent too damn much money. There was too much fear, a number of stupid policies that, hopefully, we will put into the history books that no one else will repeat. The fact that we had modernized the tax code is what has given us a fight. When President Biden, yesterday was taking credit for a great economy, I sure hope he looked in the camera and said, thank you Republicans, for modernizing our tax code so we maximized economic expansion and had corporate stability. Because much of the wealth that this country, much of the opportunity, much of the employment base, and the way we can afford that is because we have a competitive tax code now where the rest of the world stops stealing our jobs. One other thing I want to help people try to understand--because every time I go near this subject I get people--because their brains are sort of caught--I don't mean to say this in a mean way. I am not trying to be mean. All right, let me walk through a concept. Mr. Speaker, you are from a State that produces hydrocarbons, oil, things of that nature. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, do you remember the posters, ``No war for oil''? The world competed with each other for hydrocarbons. I had a professor back when I was a younger student who was famous for writing these papers about peak oil, the world is going to run out of hydrocarbons. Well, it turns out that was completely wrong because he didn't understand the ingenuity that God gave us as humans and how we found technology to get to those hydrocarbons that in a previous decade were impossible. The point where I am going on this rambling, in the 1970s, 1980s, the world basically fought for hydrocarbons. Last decade, in many ways, we positioned ourselves for rare earths because that was the future economic of the world economy. Really, really smart economists right now are saying this decade, the next decade, and the decade after that, do you know what the world is going to compete over? Smart people. The entire industrialized world is starting to, if not collapse, dramatically fall. You see the things going on in South Korea, Taiwan, and much of Europe. The numbers are happening all around us. The United States, if you look at some of the Census Bureau data--and I said this last week-- it could be as early as 11 years from now the United States will start having more deaths than births. What would happen to you if I came to you and said, let's have an honest conversation--which is almost impossible around here--about the border and immigration, but we are going to talk about it like economists? Not our hearts, not our passions, not our anger. Economists. What President Biden has allowed at the border, when you bring millions of people into the country with very moderate skill sets, what did you do to your domestic working poor? I have done a whole presentation here showing that that family, that young man, that young woman, they dropped out of high school. They sell their willingness to work. They are out hanging drywall; they are out doing this. What happens to their wage growth? You remember a moment ago we were talking about wage growth. What happens to their wage growth in a society when you have added millions and millions and millions of people with similar skill sets? You crush the working poor. This is actually why, if you look a couple decades ago, it was the Democrats, back when they gave a darn about working people, that actually cared about locking down the border, about taking on low- skilled immigration. Those of us from border States, you see the chaos we have had to deal with. It drives us insane. A bus showed up in New York or Chicago, and they lose their minds, and you look at some of the Members of Congress from those States, you look at them and you say, you have been doing this to us for years, and now you figured out what we go through every single day? But back to the economists. The morality of when you flood a country with a certain level of skill set, you just made your working poor poorer. There is an economic model out there that says it will be 10 years before the domestic working poor in America start to really see their wages go up outside inflation, and it is just because of population dynamics: How many other people are willing to sell their labor cheaper than they are willing? Flip side--and President Trump actually hit this and hit this brilliantly--we are insane. We bring in smart people from all over the world to our universities, and we educate them. We teach them our engineering, we teach them our biology, we teach them things, and then we send them home to compete against us. In a time where you need the society to become more productive-- remember, back to our high school education. As society becomes more productive, our wages go up. When wages go up, we actually take in more tax receipts, but that is a side benefit. Wages go up in a productive society, and then there is a cascade event. You may not be the person with the Ph.D. in synthetic biology, but your wages go up when that person down the street is making a hell of a lot of money and changing the society and the economy for the future and the better. It turns out this last summer we unleashed some of my Joint Economic economists to just try to do some of the math. Here is what I was talking about with low-skilled immigration. Asylum seekers, those, they consume hundreds of thousands of dollars of social services. That is the nature of our country. If you can't afford it, you get healthcare. If you can't afford it, you get these other type of benefits. If you can't afford it, we will get you housing. Our education system is based off the tax system. High skill, we actually make millions--well, in this case $800,000, $900,000--in the tax receipts and those things over a full career. Now, the fact of the matter is, I have some much fancier graphs that also show the age spectrum. You have got to say a young worker compared to an older worker, the number of years they are able to participate in the economy at a higher wage level. Bingo. That is actually why Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, the rest of the world we compete with have all gone to a point talent- based system. We are functionally the last country, last industrial country in the world that does a familial system. I promise you, I will get some very angry things coming into my office, but I am being honest. Our immigration system is essentially based on who your family is: My cousin moved in, they are sponsoring me. It is a family chain migration system. The rest of the world has figured out that as birth rates have collapsed around the world, people, we are desperate for people. I am going to show you some charts coming where, as a country, that our birthrate started to roll over in 1990. We need people. Part of my job with the Joint Economic Committee, part of my job on Ways and Means is how do I finance all the things that people show up here wanting? I know it is not something you hear a lot of Republicans talk about because so many people don't understand the demographics of our country. We are going to have to have an honest discussion that one of the most powerful things we can do for economic growth is actually modernizing our immigration system, not sending home people that we educate to compete with us. There are models out there that say it would make our entire society more prosperous. It is worth thinking about. Actually, can I give you just a thought experiment? I was trying to explain this to a reporter earlier today. One of the things that is expiring from our 2017 tax reform is research and development expensing. You go, huh? If you are a business and you are researching a new way to make something, a new piece of technology, a new type of biology, a new cure for a disease, in 2017 what we did was we made it so you could expense it right then. In today's tax code, you basically depreciate it. It says, okay, you spend a million dollars trying to build a new tool, and you get to amortize that research over the next 7 years. Think about this. If I expense it in one day or do it over 7 years, the government basically gets the same money, right? It is just the timing. If you have the ability to say, I spent the money, I expensed it immediately, what happens? You get this virtual cycle of, oh, I have a new tool that is better, faster, cheaper, and then you jump onto the next one, and jump onto the next one, and you get that productivity curve. You get back to productivity again. How do you pay people more money? One of the complaints we were getting after 2017 is that all this money was going into research and development to make a society more prosperous, more modern--you know, better, faster ways to cure people-- and we had a shortage of people with skill sets. One of our economists is trying to model what would happen if you said we are going to do expensing of research and development, because we know that pops economic growth, but you also did talent-based immigration at the same time. You may get a multiplier effect. This is thinking like an economist. This is what we have to do to get ourselves out of this hole. Remember, functionally, the first 2 months of what we call this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. If you do the whole 12 months and be a little more honest about what you are doing, because here is the April tax cycle, we are still borrowing about $74,000, $75,000 a second. It just gets worse, and it gets worse because of demographics. I am going to show this twice, but I have to say it again. Close to 100 percent of the debt for the next 10 years is interest and healthcare. It is people like me. It is baby boomers. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is math, except it is also the type of math we are not allowed to really talk about here. Look, I am going to race through a couple of these boards just to make a point. For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. Does that give you a sense--when I have someone who comes to me and says, David, there is a continuing resolution coming. Now, we actually, probably as Republicans, would want to move that continuing resolution when we have President Trump so we have unified Republican government so maybe we could do some of the policy changes, but how about the debt ceiling? We are also going to do a slide here on talking about, do you understand when you say: David, I don't want you to borrow a dime. Great. I take in a dollar, I spend $1.39, but all I get to vote on is about 25 percent of the spending. How much of Medicare, how much Social Security, how much pension benefits, how much of VA benefits do you want us to cut? I have done these entire presentations at home where you show the chart, and people raise their hand. I get these suggestions. I will give you an example, I had one last night, a good friend sends me a thing: David, if you would stop funding the U.N., that would take care of our problems. Okay, we spend about $18 billion on the U.N. The economic effect, it is believed, it probably brings in about $9 billion a year, but let's just use the entire $18 billion. If we are borrowing close to $7 billion a day, getting rid of all the U.N. covers 2\2/3\ of a day worth of borrowing. There is the problem. People don't understand the scale. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on--all defense, all nondefense discretionary--is on borrowed money plus a chunk of mandatory. You have got to see. When we do that presentation in our home district and you have people give their suggestions, we get up to maybe 3 weeks of cuts. Then you start to say: Okay, are you ready to get rid of all the Defense Department? Are you ready to get rid of the State Department? Are you ready to get rid of the FBI? Are you ready to get rid of this, ready to get rid of that? You just see the eyes on people because they really do believe, if we get rid of foreign aid we can balance the budget. Then you show them that all foreign aid is about 9 days of borrowing. I beg of the public, the way you influence Members of Congress is know your math and know the scale of how upside down we are. Just trying to make that point once again, here is another chart. If we are spending $1.39 for every $1 we take in, this little dot line is the break-even point. That basically means every dime of discretionary--that is defense, too, and you have got to pay interest. If you don't pay your interest, you blow up the world and you blow us up because we have the bonds out there, so functionally we are so upside down, even part of what we call entitlements, mandatory, earned benefits is on borrowed money. Mr. Speaker, may I ask how many minutes I have remaining?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. All right, I am going to talk faster. Sorry about that. Oh, the poor people who try to take our words down. It is a punishment, I am sorry. I have some other boards here, so I am just going to try to do two more boards in this 2 minutes. Tax policy, you go back to functionally 1950, when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts. The fact of the matter is, for some reason, the American economy for the last 75 years, we fall back into this mean, so you have Democrats running around here saying, we need much higher marginal tax rates. However, when we have done that, we still just get the same percentage of the economy. The secret, once again, is that productivity, have a bigger economy. Our structural crisis now is if we are getting 17, 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts, we are spending about 24 percent of the economy year after year. Back to the point, this is the pie chart. Every dime of nondefense is borrowed. Every dime of defense is borrowed. You have to pay your interest. Remember, interest is now our second-biggest expense in government. It is number two now. Part of this red here is also on borrowed money. There are ways to make the math work--the willingness to modernize this government, the willingness to use technology to crash the price of this government, crash the price of healthcare, but make us a healthier society. There is a way. I sometimes just feel like an idiot. I come behind this microphone every week. I do charts. I show these things, here are the ways. Last week, I showed I think $100 billion, $200 billion of savings we could have in government by just modernization. There is hope, but I only think we have maybe 3 or 4 more years to start to understand how upside-down we are. Mr. Speaker, I know I am out of time. I thank you for your patience. There is hope, but there is only hope if the American people start to hear these words and start to push those of us in Congress to do the right thing. 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, a couple things. First, I committed a sin last week. How many of us have always learned when you do one of these floor speeches, like I did a couple weeks ago--and I never ever ever read the comments, except over Thanksgiving. First, I have to find a way to say thank you. You have a few hundred people who watch some idiot here try to sound like an economist and walk through what they see happening in the debt, deficits, growth opportunities, and the demographics. Remarkable. A lot of folks have really smart ideas, then about half of them are probably Russian trolls. They really do need to work on their English, because they pop up saying--no, no English person would speak that way. The other thing that is frustrating is you get the folks you can tell who are intellectually trapped about two decades out of date. My favorite one is, well, you can save Social Security by just raising the cap. I did entire floor speeches earlier in the year showing the economics and the numbers that take people making over $400,000, $500,000, remove the cap, it was only covering 36 or 38 percent of all shortfalls, and now you have chewed up your seed corn. You have functionally no additional places to go to cover those other margins. I appreciate everyone who is willing to comment. I appreciate the ideas, but here is an idea I would like to share for anyone on this campus and the Members of Congress. If you go to our Schweikert website, our official website, there is a place there you can sign up for what we call the daily debt. Every day, we send you a text message. That text message--we built this whole system to reach into the Treasury's statements and tell you, hey, here is what we borrowed today. Here is what we borrowed this month. Here is what we borrowed every second. Yesterday, we were, I think, at $74,500 a second over the last 12 months. Get that. Sign up for it. You are going to get a text message from us every working day. Those people who do not understand the gravity of the growth of the debt--we now have, I think, a few thousand people that get the daily debt text message from our office, and I think it is starting to change the culture around here to deal with reality. I can give you example. Just before we went on Thanksgiving a couple weeks ago, I held up this board and said, hey, we are going to hit $36 trillion of borrowing in the next day or so. I stand here with the same board from functionally 2, 2\1/2\ weeks ago. It is no longer $36 trillion. As of yesterday, it is $36.176 trillion. Meaning, in those 2\1/2\ weeks since we were last here, we added another $170 billion of borrowing. At that current rate, we are clicking off functionally a $1 trillion every 105 days. In all the people you heard come to the microphone this week, how many of them came up behind the microphone and said: We are going to borrow, every hundred some days, another $1 trillion? There is the crisis. We have people walking up and down the hallways--I just had someone out here grabbing me, begging me, saying: Now don't cut any of our things that the Democrats gave us a couple years ago. Yeah. I know. Every dime of it is borrowed money. Remember--and I need to--let's see if I can make this make sense. For every dollar of tax receipts we take in--last year, when we borrow $1.00, we spend $1.39. We take in $1.00, we spend $1.39. That $1.39 is borrowed, and these numbers just get worse. This is the thing that makes people so angry. Every dollar of borrowing over the next decade is not some fancy this or that. It is interest and healthcare costs. I think we are in a moment where baby boomer retirements this year will be about 13,000 people a day. They are moving into their earned benefits. Remember, we have a societal deal. You work so many quarters, you get Social Security. You do this, you pay in your FICA taxes, those things, you get Medicare. Okay. This place is unwilling to have conversations of how to modernize the way we deliver healthcare to change the price, so every day this government is going to borrow $6 billion or $7 billion. It is the math. Think of that. I added on here, even if I remove the interest we have to pay every day, for every dollar we take in, we spend $1.21. The interest this year will be about a trillion dollars. A decade from now that almost doubles. It is our reality. Let's actually try to make a point here once again. I am sorry for anyone who has been crazy enough to watch one of these presentations, but for some reason, I can't get this to sink in. Take a look. This is 2024, so we have already gone through this-- mandatory 24 percent. What we get to vote on is about 26 percent of spending. What that means is you see here in the blue ``nondefense'' and ``defense,'' every dime a Member of Congress votes on here is borrowed. Every dime in defense is borrowed. Every dime in discretionary is borrowed. Remember the previous slide I showed you. For every dollar we take in, we spend $1.39. Do you know what that means? That is a chunk of what is mandatory. People ask me: What is mandatory, David? It is those earned benefits. It is borrowed money. I need to explain this real quick because, back to the comments on last week's speech, Social Security does not add to the debt. Paying back the borrowed money from the Social Security trust fund does add to the debt. Let's walk through this once again. Here is Social Security. They built up a trust fund of trillions of dollars, but today, the tax receipts that come in from your payroll tax--that 12.4 percent for Social Security, half paid typically by your employer, half paid by you; unless you are self-employed, then you pay for the whole thing-- those taxes don't cover the benefits. This month all those taxes come in, and Treasury, Social Security calculates it. Oh, we are short this much. They reach over, call Treasury, and say--we have these special Treasury bills that we pay interest on, and they actually get a fairly decent rate of interest on--we need to cash in this Treasury. Treasury goes and borrows money to give money back to pay back the money they have borrowed from Social Security. No one stole your money. Social Security doesn't add to the debt. Paying back the trust fund of Social Security does because the money is borrowed. I hope I said that in the simplest fashion, but the point I am trying to make here is we are on the cusp of being able maybe to try to do very hard things, but the army of bureaucrats, the army of people who want stuff--and there is spending, here is our check, but there is also spending to the tax code. Look, I am on Ways and Means. Give us this special carve-out. That is technically spending. Everyone needs to get their head around this. Every dime we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed money. All right, let's actually have a little something even more dystopian. It depends on how you like to calculate it. Most people are going to tell you that last fiscal year, which ended October 1, so in the 2024 fiscal year, the United States Federal Government borrowed 6.4 percent of the economy. If you put in the interest paid back to the trust funds, it may be like 6.8. Think of that. The entire economy, you are borrowing that 6.4 percent of the entire economy that year. Why this chart is important, the baseline of law--and this is where I am going to make some people angry in a moment, so hang on--the baseline says in 9 budget years, we are not borrowing that 6, 6.5, 6.8, whatever it actually is. We are going to be borrowing 9.2 percent of the entire U.S. economy, that year's debt. The next year is bigger, and the next year is bigger, and the next year is even bigger. It is demographics. It is debt, deficits, and demographics. Debt is driven by us. We got older as a population. A couple of weeks ago, I showed some of the--if you go to the Census Bureau dataset, you can see, if you do some of the math, it is somewhere between 11 and 16 years the United States has more deaths than births. Process that. What are you willing to do policywise to deal with the reality that all across America, over the next decade, you are going to see schools closing because there are fewer kids? Sorry to hear that. Look, I am 62, and my wife is 62. I have a 2\1/2\-year-old and a 9- year-old because we are pathologically optimistic. When you look at this chart--I always think that joke is funny, but maybe it is a little too dark. This chart makes it clear. The baseline, in 9 years, we are borrowing 9.2 percent of the economy. If you read the political Washington press this week, we all know we have a huge tax issue we have to deal with. Parts of the 2017 tax reform that I was part of from Ways and Means expire, meaning working people, LLCs, small businesses, partnerships, those things all have your taxes go back to the tax rates prior to 2017. The first year, in 2026, it is about $400 billion. Over the 10 years, as we often talk about things here, it is--what?--let's use $4.6 trillion. Okay, we have a number of Members, more in the Senate, saying don't pay for it, creating sort of this language saying, well, we are going to say it is policy baseline. No, the law is the taxes are going up. We should find a way to pay for it. If we do policy baseline, this is at the end of the decade. We are not borrowing 9.2 percent of the economy. You have to add about another point on that. You are somewhere in 10 percent of the entire economy will be borrowed every year. I need you to think through for people who are interested who watch world markets and debt and what is going on in the world--how many of you remember last summer what happened in Great Britain? Remember, they were going to lower taxes? I love lower taxes. What happened to the British pound? What happened to British interest rates? Remember the bond vigilantes showed up? What happened in France just 2 days ago? Remember, they were trying to do an austerity budget just trying to get back to where they are mandated under the European Union on their amount of debt they are borrowing, and the government collapsed. What happened in South Korea? Remember, part of that battle was trying to do a budget because South Korea's population is collapsing. Maybe we should actually have some introspection here of what is going on with us and the world. Do you think the people that we sell our debt to are going to keep looking the other way and just keep buying it? Are they going to want premiums? Or are we going to have taken so much capital out of the economy that there is almost no growth? You actually have both models out there. You have where debt markets have charged very high interest rates because of the debt, and you also have the Japanese model. They had huge savings, but they also went almost two decades with almost no economic growth because the capital didn't go to new plant equipment to become more productive; it went to finance the country's debt. Both are miserable because both create the same amount of tax receipts. You have very high interest rates. I have to finance that, so here are my spendable dollars. You have very low growth, lower tax receipts. They both cause the same crisis. If you are someone who likes to have the intellectual exercise, go read some academic papers. It is great, but the effect to our society is the same. This is the baseline. This is without the games and the gimmicks. Let's one more time do one of the most difficult boards here-- actually, no. I am going to skip one. Let's finish this thought. Both CBO and one of my joint economic Ph.D.'s, basically, we are working on modernizing or updating the data that CBO put out a couple of days ago on what would happen if, that portion of the expiring tax provisions, we continue it. We continue the tax. This is for working people and small business people, but we find a way to pay for it. It turns out, and this chart is a little hard to read because we printed it at the last second, but if you can see up here, what happens is if you pay for it, you actually get positive growth. You get to do the extension of the current tax policy, but if you pay for it, the size of the economy actually grows. Tax receipts actually go up. If you just throw it on the debt bucket, you actually slow down the economy. You have stripped so much more capital. Remember, I just told you--what?--$4.6 trillion over the 10 years? You have just sucked that much out of available capital for you to be able to get a loan to buy that plant equipment, to become a more productive business, to invest in your workers so you can pay them more. This is the battle that you are going to see around here for the next few months of: Do we look the other way and say, oh, let's just do what is easy, stick it on our kids, stick it on your retirement? Yes, we will pay all sorts of interest. Yes, the bond markets will punish us. Maybe at some point we will have the fun of a failed bond option because the bond market will realize we have no sense here of how fragile we are making the U.S. economy by the piling on of U.S. debt. The economists said, Congress, Senate, if you are listening, try to do the moral work of let's extend those tax cuts. These are for hardworking people, small businesses. Extend them. Do the hard work and find a way to pay for it. That is how you get the morality of the benefit of additional economic growth and also communicate to those debt markets that the United States is actually serious about starting to provide some stability. Remember, and it has actually been 6, 7 weeks since I last actually did this chart, but at that time, United States was number 14 on the credit stack. That means Greece could sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. You want us to still have the exorbitant privilege of the U.S. dollar being the dollar that denominates the world for trade, those things. Do you think we get to continue to hold that extraordinary privilege when we are crushing the debt markets with more debt, flooding the world with more of our bonds? This isn't a game. I know it is hard to go home and talk to your voters and say, hey, we borrow $74,500 a second. Our expectation is, by the end of the year, that number may be somewhere in the mid-eighties, maybe approaching $90,000 a second. What is the driver? This is the CBO number, and this chart is actually a little out of date. Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of the debt for the next 30 years is the very thing that Members of Congress like me aren't allowed to come behind these microphones and tell you. Interest--that is the interest in blue, but it is Medicare. In 9 years from now, when the Social Security trust fund is empty, do you double senior poverty in America, or do you find some way to backfill that? Do you reach into the general fund and say we are going to supplement it, or do we actually have any people here--the problem is you are not allowed to actually talk about Social Security because the Democrats over there are going to run attack ads on you, making it absolutely toxic to have the morality of how you fix Social Security. It is math. The trust fund will go empty. So, $124 trillion deficit, but guess what has $9 trillion of, we will call it, positive because the spending grew slower, grew slower than the economy. It is actually what we call defense-nondefense discretionary. Ultimately, it becomes $115 trillion of debt 30 years from now. It is 100 percent interest Medicare, interest Social Security. Those are our demographics, and if someone around here goes: Well, they stole my money. No, they didn't steal your money. The average couple on Social Security gets a crap rate of return, but you get all the money you put into Social Security in like a $72,000 spiff. It is Medicare that that average couple puts in, oh, forgive me, I don't have my chart, but it was like $280,000 over their work life, and they get like $600,000, $700,000 back. It is that that is the primary driver of U.S. debt. My argument is: Don't talk about going in and cutting benefits. Let's talk about modernizing. Mr. Speaker, do you not think the technology around us, the ability to make people healthier, when we have actually done whole presentations that obesity over the next 10 years is over $9 trillion in additional healthcare spending, wouldn't the morality of making people healthier, helping them be healthier be incredibly moral and really good for Federal debt? That is part of the argument I use when I come here over and over and over. I am going to show some charts on that, modernize, modernize, modernize. There are binary folks around here who say: tax more, cut more. I have a whole presentation I have done here multiple times. All the taxes the Democrats want to do we have scored. It is about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP when you do the economic effect. Almost every cut proposal that has been done on our side is about 1 percent of GDP. So you have 2\1/2\ percent. I just showed you in 9 years we are over 9.2 percent of the economy, 2\1/2\. Last year, we borrowed what, 6.4, 6.8, it depends on what you want to score. Does anyone see a problem? All of the discussions where people come behind these microphones and say: We are going to tax more. It is just a fraction of the problem. We are going to cut our way. It is a fraction of the problem. Until you modernize and have that modern revolution in how we deliver services, what we think of as government, and how we do it. You can't change the spending enough. The problem is that requires thinking and reading, and it also requires our staff. For any staff who are watching this, read things that you normally wouldn't. One of the things I am just incredibly hopeful about is when you have someone like Elon Musk and the conversations we had yesterday. You could tell, Mr. Speaker, he was saying: How do I deliver the service and use technology to do it better, faster, cheaper, and dramatically more? That is the morality of not destroying the United States economy. That is because regarding this economy, when we hiccup, the rest of the world gets a cold. God forbid if we had a debt crisis, how much of the world goes into mass starvation and poverty? We don't think about the morality of our place in the world. Let's actually do some things that are a little more difficult math wise. The U.S. will spend $1.39 for every dollar of revenue. Fine. I am trying to point out in the budget year we are walking into now, Mr. Speaker. Do you see the little black line? That is the break even. So those are our tax receipts. Mr. Speaker, do you notice a problem? Now, every dime of the gray, which is what I get to vote on, is borrowed money, but now it is actually going into things that are mandatory. The blue is interest that we have to pay. So think of this all here as mandatory. Last year and this coming year--and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger into the future--every dime of tax receipts is not enough to even cover the things that are on autopilot. Yet I will get some of the folks around here who will go: Well, you guys did tax reform in 2017. Do you remember what was happening, Mr. Speaker? Do you remember how many U.S. businesses were abandoning the United States? Do you remember what growth rates were and what productivity investments were? At some point here I know we will have to deal with the falsehoods, particularly as the left and the press walk through, it was tax cuts for rich people. Except it is more progressive than the old tax system, meaning the wealthy now pay a higher percentage of U.S. income tax spending than they did before. We just threw this chart together just trying to point out: There is where we did tax reform. Mr. Speaker, do you notice that in the entire world, industrialized world, what is the country that actually had investment in productivity and growth? We are it. Right today we actually have a pretty darn good economy. GDP now, I think, yesterday was projecting, we are sitting at about 3.2 percent GDP. That didn't just magically happen. We can also see some of the giveaway money that the Democrats did in the inflation reduction, which has had almost no true economic productivity impact. It turns out it was the allocations of the tax reform at the end of 2017. The problem is those provisions that got us that productivity are expiring. Some have already substantially expired. Mr. Speaker, how do you deal with the concept of we have no money but we need to fix things in the tax code because we need the growth but we need wage growth because we just finished an inflation cycle? In my community, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, unless you make about 27 percent more today than you did the day Joe Biden took office, then you are poor. Think of that. Do you want to know why so many Americans are cranky? It is because they are poorer. It is not enough to take credit for the economy being good. That is great. However, if your wages haven't kept up with inflation, then you are poorer. This is just a point because there was a Democrat Member earlier today behind one of these microphones saying: giveaways to rich people. All righty. Mr. Speaker, I would love to be one of the top 1 percent. Yay. They represent about 22 percent of all income, which is stunning. I believe we need dramatically more wealth income growth in let's call it the lower quartiles. Great. You get that through productivity and productivity investment. That 22 percent of income pays 40 percent of all U.S. income taxes. One more time: Today's tax code is more progressive than before the Republicans' tax reform. How many times have you heard Democrats come behind these microphones and tell the truth about that math? Mr. Speaker, I think there was something on here saying if you actually did--the top 50 percent of income pay like 85 or something. Let me see if I can find it on here, as I am just standing here staring. I think it is on one of my next charts. We have a remarkably progressive tax system. That is on income taxes. Often when you hear people talk about taxes, they conflate things. Here is your payroll tax, but you are getting it back. That is actually to fund those retirement benefits. How do you think you get your Social Security? How do you think you get your Medicaid? How do you think you get your unemployment? However, the portion of income tax, is actually remarkably progressive. The top 1 percent share of income taxes has increased over time. So this is sort of--let's see if I can make this work. So last year, and excuse me, in 2021, 45 percent of all income taxes were paid by that top 1 percent. Now, Mr. Speaker, we may have the reality of having to deal with all these tax brackets. Yet it is so hard to make public policy when you have people polluting the minds of the American public with things that are fake. Mr. Speaker, I think there was a Senator from New York that used to say: You are welcome to your own opinion, but you are not welcome to your own facts. The facts are the facts are the facts. If you are going to do hard things and hard math, then can we at least agree? This one came from Tax Foundation. That is a nonpartisan group. Mr. Speaker, let's actually walk through ideas. We are going to have to fix the expirations on the tax code. We have an incoming President who has ambitions of how do we help particularly the working middle class. You have people like me who are terrified of the speed and the growth of debt for my own retirement let alone my kids. Remember, my 2\1/2\-year-old, the math says he will now be part of the first generation that will be poorer than his parents. The math says today when he is 23 years old, 24 years old, all U.S. taxes, from tariffs down to income taxes, everything, will have to have doubled just to maintain baseline spending. It is demographics. We are getting older as a society and starting in 1990 the number of children we had started falling. It is math. If I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said: All right, let's think like economists. Let's do the morality that we believe growth is moral. It is also the American birthright. One of the tax issues we need to work on is the two things that had some of the greatest impact in growing the U.S. economy, one was expensing. You are a company, you are going to buy a new piece of equipment so you can make things better, faster, cheaper. How do you pay people more money? Inflation won't get you anything. You do it by productivity. You pay your workers more because they are more productive and investments in plant and equipment mean you are more productive. We showed in all sorts of charts that the ability to buy that piece of equipment and expense it. That is not a tax cut; it is a timing effect. You can depreciate it over 7 years or take it right now. If you do the long run, the Treasury still gets the same money, they actually get more by expensing because your investment cycle in becoming more productive is faster. Great. There is a second half of that, and that was expensing for research and development. You are going to spend money trying to come up with a new pharmaceutical or a new piece of technology or a new, better, faster way to do something. It is expensive because often they fail. Nevertheless, that is how you stay ahead of the world and you keep the United States as an innovation leader. We are doing some math right now saying: What happens if you are to come back and reinstate that expensing for research and development? However, now we are being told we don't really have enough people with the advanced STEM degrees to actually do some of that hard science. What would happen if you said: We are going to do this as tax policy, but we need the other policy of we need to go to a talent-based immigration system. As President Trump said: We are insane. We educate people, and then we send them home. That is the point. We did some math over this summer, and we are going to actually do a whole presentation on it. This makes people mad, but it is math. It is good math, and it is well-documented. Mr. Speaker, when you have inbound populations into the United States--I am not going to categorize whether they came in as asylum seekers or they crossed border illegally or they are on some sort of visa, whatever it is--but those with less than high school, our model and the literature says they actually cost maybe $360,000 to society because of the benefits we give. Over here, the green, this is what happens if you bring people in who have advanced degrees. It turns out society takes in well over $800,000 in tax receipts over their time. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, and said: We need the vibrance of economic growth, we need to be innovators, and we need their money because we have to have a way to keep paying for the benefits we have promised. What happens is, we start to do our tax reform and we say: Hey, we are going to do things that fix that depreciation of research and development so we can be an innovative leader and we are also going to do a talent-based immigration and attach that to it so we actually have the talent so we maximize the growth. It is just sort of a unified theory. They work together. That is what I am trying to pitch here. Please think. This place often is, I use the term binary, it is do this or do that. It is more complex. Sometimes it is four or five pieces of legislation that have to interact with each other, then some regulation, then some other policies that all come together to maximize the benefit of the idea. To our brothers and sisters in the staff, start thinking like economists. The hole we have dug for this Nation is remarkably massive. If you think there are simple solutions to the complexity of the debt problem we have, you are absolutely wrong. It turns out the solution is going to be complex. It is doable. Time is just running out. Let's do some ideas. Hey, Schweikert, you always get behind the microphone. I am just going to race through some ideas. Some of them I have done before, but there is one I want to do backwards. Let's see, I skipped it last week. Over the last 6 years, we have had 390,000 Americans die of fentanyl. We have had 390,000 of our brothers and sisters die. Some were accidental. Some were addicts. I don't think society was ever prepared for a synthetic drug that almost instantly rewires the brain. Do this thought experiment with me. If I came to you and said: There is going to be what we'll call a vaccine--it is technically not a vaccine--a vaccine for fentanyl that actually does a protein attachment, meaning it can't break the brain-blood barrier, and it lasts 6 months to 1 year. With just that, we think we gain over $11 billion, and we haven't even worked in the cost estimates of what happens when you have 390,000 of your brothers and sisters dead over 6 years. Start to think like a revolutionary. Instead of dumping more money into rehab, why don't we do the rehab and say: There is a chance here we can make it so the person addicted to fentanyl or the law enforcement or firefighter doesn't die from the exposure to it. Guess what. The idea is great economics. This is an example of thinking differently. What happens instead of spending the money to maintain people's misery? Money could be spent to end the misery. We have done a number of different bills, from diabetes to other things, saying we need to help our brothers and sisters have affordable insulin. Wouldn't it be more moral if we could actually take on that 33 percent of U.S. healthcare spending that is just diabetes and dramatically reduce the number of our brothers and sisters who have the disease? That is moral. The other is just maintenance of misery. Let's just run through a couple of other ones that we have been trying to model, such as the Medicare Transaction Fraud Prevention Act. It turns out there is a couple of great articles out there. If you dive into them, what is the most powerful thing that can be done to deal with Medicare fraud? It is not a bunch of lawyers. It is not a bunch of investigators. It is a data scientist. The problem is data scientists are really expensive right now, and CMS is having trouble working out their pay schedule to hire them. This is the person who sits down and builds the model and says: Okay, this doesn't make sense. Go look at that. This doesn't make sense. We believe there is $60 billion annually--not over 10 years--every single year in Medicare fraud, and you can find it using data scientists. Remember how I was telling you before how we need to find $4 trillion or so to cover an extension of the tax cut? That is $400 billion a year. This is $60 billion from doing the right thing. There are ideas here. There is the use of technology that, hey, here is my doctors' notes and here is my insurance contract. Do you have a bunch of billers fight with each other over months and months and months trying to collect between the insurance company and the insurance company is saying you didn't document things right? Well, there is this concept of clean claims, where the AI says: Here is the doctors' notes. It matches the contract. Automatically pay it. We think that saves $31 billion every year. Well, heaven, I am getting close to $100 billion just on those two things using technology. We have already dropped a piece of legislation--this one is over 10 years--that just cleans up some of the fraud and sets some timelines on the employee retention tax credit. Well, that is almost $80 billion. These are just a handful of ideas that we have actually had scored. How do I get the brothers and sisters around here, the Members who are elected, their staff, the press, the public to see there are solutions where you don't have to keep piling onto debt, but it is a revolutionary use of technology to make government better, faster, and cheaper. There is hope. There really is hope. Why the hell is this place so terrified of doing anything different? So many of the solutions you hear around here sound like it is the 1990s. We are all walking around with a supercomputer in the palm of our hand. Use that technology to make this another American century. Mr. Speaker, I am losing my voice, and I think I actually made the point. Thank you for tolerating my diatribe, and I also know the Speaker has an appointment to keep. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one of the magic things about Debbie Lesko is she has proven you can be conservative and not be angry about it. You can actually be joyful and kind and sweet and just a decent human being. I have learned more things about urban chickens from her, because I have a 9-year-old that really wants daddy to build a chicken coop. Don't laugh. She really does. Just an observation, because we sit on this airplane every week, flying back, and I often sit next to Debbie. Other Members, you see them on their computers, watching movies. Debbie has a stack of things because she doesn't use her computer. She has a stack of papers. You know, they do make these things called laptops. She is there with her highlighter for hours on the airplane. That is the sort of thing you notice. You can be kind. You can be loving. You can be joyful. Debbie, I think you are going to have an amazing experience with the leadership of Maricopa County. Remember, Maricopa County is right now the fourth most populous county in America. I actually still believe it is going to cross over Harris County's population. If there weren't so many hurricanes in the area, we probably would have already. I used to be the county treasurer, and trust me, after some years around here, I miss those days when you could actually do things. I am going to miss you. I am going to miss the times when you were my guiding light. When I am just mad, because I seem to be mad a lot, you just sort of smile and say, well, that is sort of how it is. I think you are going to do amazing things for the people of the West Valley as their supervisor. We are going to make some very tough decisions here in the next couple of years where we are going to need the leadership at our State and local levels because we don't have a lot of dollars to send. So we are going to send a lot of our problems to you soon. We love you, Debbie.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, first, I am going to ask everyone's--let me extend an apology. I have fairly severe asthma and just got off an attack, so I am pumping down some inhaled steroids, just routine. Also, last weekend, I lost my voice. Should I be worried that my wife said it was the best weekend of our marriage and that staff was thrilled and upset I got my voice back? Here we go. This is like my therapy hour, because I have some things I think we need to share. One of the number one things I want to accomplish tonight is please let there be some of our incoming Members' future staff and the Members themselves listening. I know there is no one in the room. That is the way it is supposed to be. People are supposed to be in their meetings and reading and trying to understand what is going on. Don't fuss at people for not sitting here. We are on probably a thousand televisions around the Capitol campus. One of my frustrations is--we just got off election season. Would you believe during elections, people--what is the term? Oh, yeah--make crap up. We need to have an honest discussion about something called math. Let's actually have some fun. Have you ever had someone say that we are going to grow ourselves out of the debt and deficit? Let's actually do some math off the top of our heads. This year's debt is going to be $2 trillion. How much does the economy have to grow to produce enough tax receipts to cover $2 trillion? It is actually fairly simple math. Mr. Speaker, 1 point of GDP is about $300 billion, so you get about 17, 18 percent of GDP in tax receipts. So let's see if $300 billion, 17 percent is $48 billion, so if 1 percent of GDP growth only gets me $48 billion, you do realize that means you, in a single year, have to have 40, 41, 42 percent GDP growth to cover the debt and deficit of this year. It is absurd. I beg of people: Learn your math. Mr. Speaker, don't let the political consultants make crap up and then put it on our brochures and then tell you to go out and say it. It is now time to do adult-like math and the understanding--and I am going to do this three or four times tonight--every dime of deficits from today through the next 30 years is the very thing we are not supposed to talk about. It is demographics. We got older as a society. Our brothers and sisters who worked their 40 quarters and who paid into the system now start to get their benefits. Mr. Speaker, if you actually look at the inputs of debt the last decade, but particularly what we expect the next three decades, healthcare, Medicare, interest--then, 9 years from now, do we backfill Social Security or do we double senior poverty when the trust fund is empty? We are not supposed to talk about those things. Actually, I need to share something. I believe the Democrats engage in something--I won't call it evil, but it is absolutely dystopian and cruel when they basically attacked members of the Republican Party for actually talking about ways to save Social Security. Even mentioning it and having the conversation, they do an attack ad on you, and then you wonder why they come back and say that we need bipartisanship, that we are going to work together--except you are not allowed to actually say anything that actually has a basis in a calculator. It is perverse. Mr. Speaker, is the left actually okay, in 9 years, doubling poverty of seniors in America? We already have reports right now of baby boomers who have retired and are becoming homeless because of the inflationary cycle we just went through not being able to pay their rent. It is just this level of cruelty. The solution isn't spending more and more money because we don't have it. Let's actually walk through a couple of the other bits of math here. I was talking to some constituents this week. Actually, I was listening to them because I had almost no voice. One of them was talking about some things they saw in the press: What would happen if we got rid of this department or this department? I did the math for them. For the entire civilian nonuniform workforce in America, last year's salary cost was about $213 billion. Think about that, Mr. Speaker. If we are borrowing $2 trillion, if you fired every nonuniform person in the Federal Government, every one, they are all gone, you just covered 10 percent of the shortfall this year. There is a lack of understanding of the scale, so we are going to actually do a little bit of that. First, I thought tonight I would come to the floor and say that we just crossed $36 trillion. We are close. We are very close. It looks like the Treasury may have reached into a little bit of their cash supply. Remember, Mr. Speaker, Treasury sometimes keeps from $400 billion to $800 billion of cash. $500 billion is more normal, but we will hit this before the week is over. Think of that, Mr. Speaker. We clicked off another $1 trillion, from $35 trillion to $36 trillion, and we did it in about 113 days. The projection is that we will go from this $36 trillion to $37 trillion in about 100 days. Think of that, Mr. Speaker. We are functionally borrowing about $70,000-plus a second. Walk through this math. Let's actually try to get a sense of what is going on. This chart is a little hard to read, but I want to make a point. I have done entire floor presentations here of showing here are all the tax hikes that the Democrats have proposed and have been scored, and then you do the economic adjustment and functionally get about 1.5 percent of GDP. The things we want to cut, if you go to nondefense discretionary, Mr. Speaker, and cut almost one-third of nondefense discretionary, it is about 1 percent of GDP. You have our 1 percent, their 2.5, you add that together--excuse me, 1.5, our 1 percent, you have 2.5 percent. We borrowed just a little under 7 percent of the economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem when the left's tax hike solutions and our cut solutions get you 2.5, and we are borrowing close to 6? The reason I have this chart here, functionally, in 9 budget years, we go from a little under 6 percent of the entire economy being borrowed money by the Federal Government to 9.2. That basically means, in about 9 budget years, we are borrowing close to $4 trillion a year, and that is on the baseline right now. That is with all of our taxes going up after next year. That is with none of the new programs and none of the new spending. That is just where we are at today. That is current law. Does anyone see a math problem? At what point does the bond market come in here and say that you guys are, by the end of the decade, approaching 9-plus percent of the entire economy in borrowed money, so maybe we need a higher interest rate? Has anyone paid attention to the bond market the last 3 weeks? Mr. Speaker, have you noticed that even though the Fed started to lower interest rates, we are still sitting 4.4 or 4.5 on a 10? Does anyone understand that is almost a full point higher than we expected at this point in the cycle? Mr. Speaker, do you understand what 1 point of interest means? Today, interest is the second biggest expense in the Federal Government. Last fiscal year, 14.1 percent of all of our spending was just interest. We have an economist as part of the Joint Economic Committee, and we are trying to model at what point does interest and the obligation to pay it start to consume so much of our future. Then, you get yourself in the debt spiral where interest rates keep going up because you are considered riskier, and you are in this interest trap. You almost don't have enough to cut. We are going to show that to actually deal with the interest trap. A point of reference, think of this, Mr. Speaker, the United States is number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 other countries that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. When Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States, when Greece today is actually paying down its debt from the last decade, and we are borrowing $71,000 a second, does anyone see a problem? How many people have you seen come behind these mics and how many people on the election trail stood up in front of you, Mr. Speaker, and said that we have a problem? I can stand here and promise you all sorts of stuff, buy your vote, that we have actually no money to pay for so we are going to just put it on your retirement or your kids' credit cards because that is what we are doing. Understand, Mr. Speaker, we have almost made a decision that, in the next couple of years, Congress isn't going to run this government and the President isn't going to run this government. The bond market is. Last year, we had to bring in almost $10 trillion to market, $2 trillion new issuances, and everything else was refinanced. If anyone is a finance or bond geek, the bonds we are issuing, we have been staying very short in the curb, meaning we refinance and refinance. It means you become very fragile to little hiccups in interest. God forbid the bond vigilantes figure out there is some way to start to screw with U.S. sovereigns. This is important. This is just the baseline math. In 9 budget years, 9.2 percent of this economy will just be what we borrow in debt, and this is a calculation with no wars, no pandemics, and no recessions. Mr. Speaker, do you really think we are going to go the next decade without a moment when the wheels are coming off? We are living on the edge, yet do our brothers and sisters and does our new incoming freshman class understand how dangerous and fragile we are about to make the greatest republic in human history? Remember, Mr. Speaker, the world, not only the United States, but the world needs the United States to be prosperous. Prosperity is moral, and we are squandering it. Let's actually just work through some basic math. Here is one of my great, intense frustrations. Here is basically fiscal year 2024 to date. We shouldn't have done to date. We should have just done the whole date, but we didn't want to reprint the board. The ratio I want to point out is that everything you see here in the red, Mr. Speaker, is individual income taxes. We are a country that lives on individual income taxes. Do you see this big blue there? That is functionally Social Security, but we don't touch Social Security. Social Security functionally goes to Social Security. A bit of it is unemployment, and a little bit of Medicare, but we don't get to touch the FICA tax. The fact of the matter is every month what we collect in payroll taxes for Social Security actually isn't enough money for the checks that go out that month. Every single month, we collect the payroll taxes from your labor. It comes into the Treasury, actually, and then it is sent over to Social Security. Then, Social Security sends a little note over to Treasury saying: Hey, I am holding a couple trillion of your bonds. I need you to cash in $50 billion, $60 billion--whatever they are short--and send us the money so we can get our checks out the door. That is why the trust fund continues to shrink. They are cashing in every month because payroll taxes don't cover all the benefits going out the door, so you don't get to touch that. Over here in the powder blue or whatever color that is, it will be in about $450 billion when it is all done. This is corporate income tax. What I want you to understand, Mr. Speaker, is if you take a look at all of these tax revenues, when you strip out Social Security, and then you realize that almost all that revenue barely covers our baseline spending, meaning every dime a Member of Congress votes on this year, every dime in defense and every dime of nondefense discretionary, will be borrowed money. So you have a Member of Congress here, a brand-new Member of Congress: I get to go vote. Every dime is borrowed. The way structurally we are, we are also going to have to borrow probably $300 billion of what goes into earned benefits. Does that sound screwed up to people? Have you had other Members explain this to you, Mr. Speaker? Think of that. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. If you come to me and start to say, let's do this exercise--look, these charts are going to be unreadable, but I want to point out that I am trying to make a point. This is actually a bunch of the outlays. Go through all the outlays, and we are going to basically do it chart by chart. Then, the next outlay, what would happen if I came and said that we are going to cut, but we can't cut Social Security, Medicare, and mandatory spending? Those are earned benefits, but we are going to get rid of all defense. All right, defense is gone. Then, we will go to our next chart. We will get rid of defense, and let's just get rid of a whole bunch of the discretionary budget. We go through and get rid of foreign aid, not just Ukraine, all foreign aid is gone. Let's close the IRS. Let's close all these programs. Go through and basically wipe out--can't touch Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt. Remember, interest on the debt last year was almost 14.1 percent of all our spending, but you have to pay your bills. You continue to just get rid of all government. At what moment are you in balance? It turns out--and I know these are unreadable, but trust me on the point--you can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of discretionary spending, and if you keep your promises of paying back your bonds, keep your promises to Social Security and Medicare and a couple of the other mandatory programs, so you just got rid of all government, got rid of all the military, Mr. Speaker, you still would have to borrow money. When you get the brain trust that goes: If we just got rid of foreign aid, we would be fine, and you do the math and show them it is like a week, 1\1/2\ weeks of borrowing, and they just look at you with these daggers because they saw it on some brilliant Russian-sponsored X or Twitter saying that if you just got rid of this, you would be fine. Learn the math. You will hear the Democrats say: Well, we are going to cover it with a tax gap. We will give $80 billion to the IRS, and we will just raise more. We came here a couple of months ago, and we have done that for 2 years now. It looked like we had spent $13 billion or so, so far, in trying to do tax collections of people over $400,000, and they collected $1 billion. They had raised a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, what they were able to get the Joint Tax and CBO to score. One of the first things we have to do when we start is we have to go back and rescore all of the frauds because it turns out there may be a tax gap out there. However, you are not going to do it with an army of people you can't hire; you are going to do it with technology. I am going to show you the board that I get the most complaints about because almost no one wants to hear this, but how do you fix things if you are not willing to tell the truth? Think about what a crap place this was last week. We had people come to the floor here and spend $200 billion without offsetting it, and they go: But I had constituents that wanted this money. Great. Find a way to pay for it. In our own, we added earmarks again. We chose not to prioritize the Debt and Deficit Commission because those things would be hard. You get up in front of a room and say: Every dime of debt for the next 30 years is demographics. As soon as I say it, you can actually see people running for the exits because, if you don't know it, you don't have to go tell the truth to your constituents. It is math. It is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is demographics. This is Medicare. This is Social Security in 9 years when the trust fund is gone, but this is the rest of government. This is the CBO's score on baseline right now, where the taxes are going up next year, where there are no wars, no recessions, no pandemics. This is the baseline. They still functionally have us at $115 trillion of debt. Do any of you have kids? Do any of you have grandkids? Do you like them? Is it moral? I have a 2\1/2\-year-old. Yes, I think that is moral. It is the greatest thing that has ever happened. I have a 9-year-old also, same birth mother. My wife and I, it is the greatest thing that ever happened to us, to be able to adopt these kids. How do I explain to that 2-year-old that, when he hits 21, 22 years old, baseline says United States has to double every single tax--every excise tax, every corporate tax, everything--just to hold current services, and that our kids will be the first generation in American history to be poor? This is the morality of this place, and it doesn't have to be that way. There are incredible solutions to disrupt the cost of government. For a bunch of the Members here, it almost seems easier for them to go cut something or raise a tax than actually pass pieces of legislation saying: We are going to adopt technology to crash the price of government. Even though it would be moral, you could make people healthier, you could make the air quality cleaner, and you just change the current bureaucratic model. We all walk around with these supercomputers. You do realize this is part of the solution? If anyone is listening, the four or five people who may give a damn enough to watch this, environmental crowdsourcing--YouTube Schweikert, I have a little YouTube video that is 90 seconds that I did 7 or 8 years ago. I have been trying to do that as a piece of legislation that says: Why don't we just crowdsource air quality? You could wipe out the bureaucracy like this. You could have a building permit, but if you screw up, we catch you instantly. It would be really good for the environment and really pro- growth and it would wipe out the absurdity that shoving paper in file cabinets makes the air look cleaner. It is basically documentation for the trial lawyers. Do you think I could ever get a hearing here? It is creative, it is disruptive, and the air quality engineers are going to come lobby against it. How about the ginormous drone that flies the pipeline path? We all have had this conversation over and over. We need permitting reform. Great. Let's do permitting reform. You have to change the inputs on how you do your NEPA, your environmental study. What happens if you could have that ginormous drone, put ground- penetrating LiDAR under it, and it runs back and forth over the pipeline path, the power line path, and it does your archeologicals, it does your soil, and it does your plant inventory? With technology, you could get much of your NEPA report written in 6 days by AI. That is thinking disruptively. I am incredibly hopeful that our incoming President really will follow through with the brains of people like Elon Musk and others who are willing to think, saying: Is there a better, faster, and cheaper way where it is moral, our world gets better, healthier, but we crash the costs and crash the size of government? When you show charts like this, the Democratic solution always turns out being: Well, the way we will take care of healthcare is we are going to subsidize it more. How about if we embrace the technology that made it less expensive? The thing you blow into that tells you, you have a virus, that orders your antivirals. Do you know that technology exists? It is just illegal because we are allowing an algorithm to write a prescription. We can crash the price of healthcare. Remember, the ACA, ObamaCare, was a finance bill: Who gets subsidized, and who has to pay? The Republican alternative was better. Actuarially, it was better, but it was still a finance bill. The Medicare for All Act is a finance bill. They are not discussions of what it takes to lower the cost of healthcare. My Joint Economic economists did something we thought was really risky, and it was shocking. We even had Democrats and Republicans who said: Yeah, you are going the right way. Last March, we did a study. What do you think obesity will cost in America over the next 10 years? It turns out we calculated it could be $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs, plus the fact that our brothers and sisters are dying. This may be the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger. The concept of making America healthier, it may mean having to do things that are hard. It may mean reexamining the farm bill, what we do in nutrition support, how we help our brothers and sisters, but our brothers and sisters are dying. Also, it would be great fiscal policy because it turns out obesity is the single biggest cost in government. It is moral. Is that Republican, or Democrat? I am sure we will make it partisan because someone will contribute to one side or the other and then we will go to war over it. The fact of the matter is there are actual solutions that are not hacking apart government or raising everyone's taxes, but it is changing how we do things. Right now, when 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes, why do we do this to ourselves? Why is it so hard to think disruptively, to think morally, to challenge the armies of lobbyists who are walking up and down our hallways--remember, those lobbyists aren't always corporates. They are good government groups. They are societies that just want to be subsidized. They are bureaucrats--and basically looking at all of them and saying: What is more moral: Making people healthier, or sticking more cash into the maintenance of your misery because the model right now is we spend a fortune maintaining your misery? Put the money in things that produce cures. We are going to talk a little bit about that. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about how serious we are on this. We have been trying to do simple things. If you read some of the stories, The Wall Street Journal gets amazing credit. Over the last few months, they have done amazing stories on Medicare fraud. We have pieces of legislation that functionally would use AI because it is data science. The fastest way you find fraud in government, particularly in things like Medicare and Medicaid, is data, not an army of lawyers. It is data scientists. We think we can get you $60 billion a year just on that. Clean claims. What would happen if, just by using technology, the constant battle between the doctor and the insurance company and the healthcare provider, we just say: Look, we are going to use technology that meets the doctor's notes, meets the insurance contract. Pay it. We think we can get you $31 billion a year just doing that. It is technology. We have looked at other things. This is already a piece of legislation, just wiping out some of the fraud in some of the employee retention. We can still pay the people that we owe the money to, we wipe out the fraud, and we think we just got you $79 billion a year. Those are just a couple of the bills we already have. You add that up. Didn't I just show you almost $150 billion? We need $400 billion a year to cover the tax hikes that are coming. My point is: The way that you cut the price of government, yes, there are a whole bunch of programs we need to get rid of, but you have to understand that some of the discussions are much tougher. If you take a look at the $800-and-some billion that is in the nondefense discretionary, you realize about 38, 40 percent of that is money we take, we borrow, and we send it to entities around the country--your city, your town, your State--that have their own taxing authority. They are programs we love, such as justice grants, other things. They are good programs, but we are doing it with borrowed money, and we are giving it to entities that have their own taxing authority. That is a tough conversation. Mr. Speaker, when we get back in December, I am going to do a much more detailed presentation on this because this is one of those topics that most idiots like me that are in public office are terrified to talk about. We actually spent part of our summer really digging into the math of immigration and illegal border crossing and what it does and affects because you are seeing these articles, particularly in the leftwing press: Hey, these several million undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers, look at the economic growth we are getting. Then we overlaid it with: What is the cost? The social services, the populations, and where you are in the tax--it is not personal. It is just math. Well, it turns out, when we dug into it, let's say you did a talent- based immigration system in America, like Great Britain, like New Zealand, like Australia, like Canada, basically the rest of the world. Okay. Let's make a point. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world fought for hydrocarbons. Remember, no war for oil. In the last decade, it was rare earths. The literature makes it very clear that, from today through probably the next 20, 30 years, nations are going to battle for smart people. Remember, there is math out there. If you go look at the data on the Census Bureau's own website, it could be from 11 years to about 16, 18 years where the United States will start having more deaths than births. We are a dying society. If we don't fix things, we are a dying society. Think of that. The shortest on the numbers is 11 years, more deaths than births. What if I came to you and said we are going to move to a talent-based immigration system because it turns out people with advanced degrees pay a boatload of taxes, they grow the economy, and they expand GDP? Our brothers and sisters, they may be wonderful people, but it turns out the economic effects of those without a lot of skills when they come into the United States, they actually squeeze out and lower the labor value of your domestic population that is often in those lowest quartiles. You are the couple that didn't finish high school, but you are out hanging drywall and you are working your heart out. All of a sudden, you bring in how many people with a similar skill set. What happened to your labor rates? That is the cruelty. What this administration did on the border was incredibly cruel to the working poor. What if I tell you, if we do some things right in the tax code fixes, like we want expensing on research and development so we are always innovating; well, it turns out, for that to really take off and grow the economy, we need a lot more smart people. Is it sane to be a country that invites people from around the world to come do your graduate degree, get your college degree, and then say: Congratulations. You learned the American technology, the American ethos. Oh, you have got to get the hell out of here; send them back home? We are out of our minds, but we are the last country functionally on Earth that still has a familial immigration system, where you come to America because of who your family is. I know that seems compassionate, but, right now, I am trying to figure out how to pay for the promises we have made. Ideas like we need to move to a talent-based immigration system while doing other things because it is a unified theory. I need this to make this work so they both raise money for the government so we grow. Mr. Speaker, thank you for being patient with me losing my voice. The point I will make is, there is hope. There is a way you can make the math work, but you can't continue to live in this fantasy world of, oh, don't worry about debt and deficits, that it is somehow magically just going to disappear. It is magically going to do this. It is magically going to do that. There is a way to make the math work and this becomes another American century, but we can't keep doing public policy by our feelings. We actually have to do it by a calculator and good quality economics. It is how we will stay a free people because do you understand the dystopian life our world will be when we smash up against the debt crisis? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we have 30 minutes here, and I am trying to do sort of a wrap-up. As folks know, the House actually passed a continuing resolution. I personally wish we had battled it out and stayed and just tried to see if we could get the Senate to do some of the work. I have been trying to find ways to get this place and the U.S. Senate, but also voters and, Heaven knows, the Presidential candidates to take seriously the demographics and what is going on in our country but also the world. We are not the only one. I am going to bring, as I often do, the boards, but let's try to put this in a type of perspective. This article says that the world has now surpassed its record of debt. Believe it or not, it was during the Napoleonic wars that the amount of debt in the world actually skyrocketed. Congratulations. Right now, I think world governments are $312 trillion in debt. Why is that important? Well, the burn rate of the United States, we are burning right now-- remember, this is a fairly decent economy, and we are borrowing about $70,000 a second, every day, $70,000 a second. I am going to show you some boards to sort of walk through this. Do you think there is this ocean of capital in the United States and around the world that is really excited to keep buying U.S. bonds and just keep buying them and keep buying them and keep buying them? When you read the stories about how many Americans are struggling right now and struggling with their own debt, how much liquidity is there to keep consuming our bonds? One of my pitches I keep trying to sell here is if we keep up what is going on right now, where we are borrowing in a good year a couple trillion dollars--we will borrow a couple trillion dollars this year-- Congress has made the decision that those who will really run this government, those who really run this country will be called the bond market. If you need to refinance, like we did this year, you are subject to the fragility of the bond market. This fiscal year we have refinanced about $8 trillion and bring to market an additional 2, so you are basically sitting on $10 trillion. That is not even counting the short term where it was a 30 day and 6 months, and those things that had to be rolled. Refinancing makes you subject to the fragility of the bond market and what interest rate and how much liquidity and how many idiots like me come behind these microphones and try to explain the world debt markets to you. Take it seriously. It is not a game. The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack. That means there are 13 other countries today that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than us. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Think about that. I am starting to pick up the first warnings in some of the financial press. Now, this is sort of the deep bond articles and those things. When Moody's is starting to allow their people to leak out information saying, yes, last November we actually put the United States on a negative watch. Remember, we are still an AAA negative watch. That is what they did to us a year ago. Stories are starting to circulate, if the United States doesn't look and act like we are taking our debt seriously, we are going to get a downgrade. Now, you go, well, who cares? You are the reserve currency. Guess what? There are 13 other countries with better credit ratings than the United States. If you get the downgrade, if two of the three major rating agencies were to downgrade the United States and no longer it is all AAA, you know actually in our own statutes and a number of State statutes, they wouldn't be allowed to buy U.S. sovereign debt. Are you ready for the interest rate? The Federal Reserve starts lowering our interest rates. Actually have you noticed? Has anyone been paying attention? Just go on the bond market. Have you noticed that U.S. sovereigns aren't going down the way--I mean, the yield curve is starting to look normal again, semi-normal. Why aren't they going down? I am going to argue our voracious appetite for debt and consumption because this place won't tell you the truth. Once again, I am going to do this a little bit backwards. For every dollar this year we take in, how much do we spend? Come on. Let's make this a play-at-home game. Figure in your own head: When we take in a dollar, what is spent? If you said $1.39 for every dollar of tax receipts we take in, you would be right. You have got to understand, this will get dramatically worse in a decade because the Social Security trust fund will be depleted. Medicare part A covers, what, 38 or 40 percent of Medicare? The rest is really coming out of the general fund, which will be depleted. In 10 years, we will have 22, 23 percent of Americans 65 and up ready for their earned benefits, and we have got to figure out a way to finance it. Let's sort of make a point here. I typically used to start with this board, trying to say: Do you see the blue area? This is defense. This is nondefense. That is what you, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on. Every dime you as a Member of Congress get to vote on is borrowed. Understand, the borrowing is actually bigger than the blue here because that is 1.8 trillion. This year we are going to borrow $2 trillion. If you want to put in the interest and money we are paying back to the trust fund, it is, what, 1.2 trillion, 1.3 trillion--$2.3 trillion. What that means is every dime of defense is borrowed, every dime of nondefense discretionary is borrowed, and let's call it $400 billion of your favorite earned benefit. Let's call it Medicare because that is easy. I know this place loves to come behind these mikes and speechify--I am going to cut so-and-so's salary because they are a crap administrator. Great. You just took an hour of our time that if we are borrowing $70,000 a second, did you help us? We seem incapable of doing things that are serious. Hell, we are incapable of telling voters the truth. This weekend, I had a wonderful woman come, if we would just get rid of foreign aid, we would be fine. Then you show her that every dime of foreign aid, where the money actually goes, is a week, a week and a half of borrowing at most, and that is every dime. Most of it is extra money that comes back because they buy our stuff. A week of borrowing. She just looked at me with these daggers because she had a text message from someone she never knew basically telling her if you got rid of foreign aid, you could balance the budget. No, it is about a week. Get rid of congressional salaries. I did this math. It is like six seconds of borrowing every day. Please stop bathing in the clown show. This is for Members and staff and the public. We need to be educated. You need a well-educated electorate to pay attention because we are going to have to do some very difficult and complicated things. If you think there is a simple solution--when every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, if you think that is a simple solution, it turns out you have got to revolutionize the cost of healthcare. You can disrupt it with technology, with other processes. You can adopt technology to crash the price of government. You are going to have a discussion about talent-based immigration. Remember, in 15 years, the United States has more deaths than births. I believe we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger. In the last six years, 390,000 Americans have died of fentanyl. It turns out next year, we might have a fentanyl vaccine. You go, oh, I don't like that. In 6 years, 390,000 people have died. You are not willing to deal with the moral imperative of saving our brothers and sisters? We need to think differently. The fact of the matter is, you are living in a time of miracles. We can cure hepatitis C. We can cure hemophilia. There are things that are coming out, there is the Vertex experiments that look like they are about to cure type 1 diabetes. If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending, what is the morality but what is also the amazing economics if we would fixate in the farm bill, nutrition support in the way we deliver healthcare to get our brothers and sisters healthier? It turns out the single biggest thing you can do for stabilizing U.S. debt is making America healthier. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones in the last year be willing to say that? You upset the lobbyists walking up and down the hallways that need people who are sick. Look, we will do better, we are working hard on this chart. I swear if there was someone out there, if someone out there knows where I can find it, call my office, but we are trying to actually build a chart that shows all the outlays because I keep getting people saying, well, if you just cut this, cut that, and I am trying to show you, oh, that is great, you just got rid of 3 days of borrowing, 2 days of borrowing. We actually did a little contest earlier in the year and we added up everything, and it was about 3 weeks. We published that. ``Oh, it can't be,'' I was told that it is just waste and fraud or, as Democrats say, we don't tax rich people enough. Once again, I have done multiple presentations on this. I have actually brought the boards and did all that. Every tax that has truly been proposed--so it is written out--where you tax income, you tax capital gains all up and down for people $400,000 and up, when you did the economic effects, you got 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. If all discretionary is like $860 billion, could you get rid of a quarter of it? Could you get rid of a third of it? Okay, let's pretend you can get $300 billion of it. All the things we have truly talked about cutting, all the Democrats' tax hikes, all of our cuts, you get 2\1/2\ percent of GDP. We are going to borrow in a good economic year. The reality is that tax receipts are pretty good this year. We are still going to borrow almost just a little less than 7 percent of GDP. Think of that. What the hell? Excuse me. What happens if there is another pandemic? If there is a war? If there is a recession? We would barely have the capacity now to cover our current spending. Part of the reason for a chart like this--and I know it is unreadable from a distance--but we have been trying to put in that the Department of Agriculture is 1 point, this energy program is 0.12, trying to basically explain that the theatrics of this place don't come close to adding up. Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of borrowing from today through the next 30 years--this doesn't mean that you don't revolutionize government every way you can, but the big number says every dime of borrowing today through the next 30 years, 75 percent of it is healthcare, mostly Medicare. We got older. In 9, 10 years, when the Social Security trust fund has been depleted, are we going to reach into the general fund and backfill it? How are we going to cover that? Are we going to allow the doubling of poverty of seniors in America? We already have a crisis right now of the number of senior baby boomers that are ending up on the street. This is really screwed up. Yet, this place, when you say we engage in this theater--``Well, I am going to cut this program. I just got rid of 15 seconds of borrowing.'' Okay, maybe we should do that, but don't think you actually accomplished something because, in the time of that debate, we have often borrowed more than the debate would have saved. Now for a couple of the punch lines. I am going to do this three or four ways because I am trying to get it to burn in. Remember I was telling you for every $1 we receive in taxation in the Federal Government, we spend $1.39? Here is one of the punch lines you need to have burned into your consciousness: About 18 cents of that $1.39 borrowing is just interest. What did the interest buy? Look, there are some economists that say you put on interest, someone got a rate of return, so they are going to spend it, but in many ways, it is not money that went to build a healthier military, dealt with poverty. It is going to continue to grow and continue to grow. You try to help folks understand if we are borrowing $1.39 for every $1 we receive and then try to show a little dotted line here is basically--let's call it the break-even line. If you are in the orange, that is mandatory spending. We don't get to vote on it. It is a formula, and many of those formulas haven't been looked at in decades. Do you see the blue? That is interest. That is a huge part of the growth, interest and that healthcare. See the gray up here? That is all discretionary. All we actually debate around here is a fraction of this gray. You look at it and you get over here so even when you get away from the pandemic and start to look into the future--now, I don't know if you notice the tiny improvement right here in 2025. That is where we are still banking on no recession, no slowdown. In `26, it will get also a tiny bit better because working people are going to pay about $400 billion in additional taxes. Remember, a whole portion of the 2017 tax reform expires and some of my friends who are running for office on the other side and made it clear they do not support anything from that tax reform in 2017. Just be prepared. I have a higher income and very well-educated district. Look, I am blessed. We calculate it is an almost $3,000 per family tax hike if we don't fix this next year. This isn't a game. Can you imagine what the economic impacts are going to be if you do that to working people? Yet, you continue to show chart after chart. I want to make a point. I have done presentations here where you show, here is years--75 years, here is years where we had very high marginal tax rates. We get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in taxes. Here is where we have had low marginal tax rates. We get about 17, 18 percent of the economy. Your solution, if you actually wanted facts in economics and not political rhetoric, is adopt regulatory policies, tax policies, trade policies that maximize economic growth. Do you want more tax receipts? If you actually care about the debt, stop living in this fantasy that we are just going to tax rich people and that takes care of everything. If you look at some of these proposals, they have already spent the money three or four times. I keep trying to present over and over that when you start to realize the amount of our spending, and by the end of the decade--think of this, 10 years from now, if you add in the debt, we will owe to the trust funds or what is left of them--we are at $56 trillion. What happens if interest rates move against us? Remember, interest today is the second biggest expenditure in this government--Social Security and then behind that is interest, then Medicare, then defense. Defense is now the fourth expenditure of this government. Social Security and then behind that is interest. You try over and over. So you see right here 2024, `25, you see the little, tiny movement we get in `26 and a couple years after that? Boom. This here is because the tax hikes that are coming--they are already in statute. They are coming. It is not a vote. We are not going to take a vote and say we are going to raise these taxes. It is called tax expirations. It is already coming. It is math. After 3, 4 years, you are back and the curve is back in. We don't want to tell the truth. It is demographics. Starting in 1990, we started having fewer children. Why can't we start to tell the truth that here is what we are going to do in our regulatory code, our tax code, to promote investments and things that make us more productive? We are going to do things that actually close income inequality. Turns out, we have datasets that say the key driver to income inequality in America is actually health. Then think what we do in our nutrition policy, ag policy, other things. I mean, we are killing ourselves. Mr. Speaker pro tempore, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, for everyone's sanity, I promise to use only a couple minutes of it. Mr. Speaker, this is 2024. We functionally are going to take in $4,898,000,000,000. We are going to spend $6,880,000,000,000. Anyone see the math problem? Then, if you want to tell the truth about actual debt and actual budgets, where you actually say, okay, here is the interest we have to pay back to the Social Security trust fund, here is the Medicaid trust fund, the other things, you are functionally looking at a $2 trillion, $2.2 trillion deficit in a year that things are good. The other point back to this board, how many Members of Congress will stand in front of you and say: Do you understand every dime--so like my friend, Mr. Green, and I get to vote on--every dime we vote on is borrowed. When 14.1 percent of all Federal spending is just interest, it turns out the most powerful thing you and I can do to stabilize borrowing--I have done hours on this floor trying to present it. Am I just an idiot for trying? Showing debt can't come from tax hikes--okay. Fine. Do that, but it is marginal. Many of the things we want to cut--I actually believe government is dramatically too big and too intrusive. Cut them. Unless you tell the truth about the primary drivers of U.S. debt, which is demographics, healthcare. Are we going to change the rules so technology, so cures are moral? Fixate on those things. Turns out, those are what you do to bend the debt curve. Yet, I will give this speech over and over, and maybe it just doesn't satiate the dopamine hits. Maybe it is just not trite and easy enough because it turns out doing some of this will be really hard, but it is doable. There is a path. My 2-year-old is running around here somewhere. Yes, I have a 2-year- old and an 8-year-old, and my wife is exactly my age. Yes, I am pathologically optimistic. I always think that is funny. My little boy, when he turns 21, 22, every tax in the United States has to be doubled. Every tax has to be doubled just to maintain baseline spending. Absolutely immoral what we are doing. We have set up the first generation in U.S. history to be poorer than their parents. Doesn't have to be that way, but this place needs revolution in the way it thinks because you can't keep being absolute dumb--you can't keep doing it the way we are doing it. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I think I heard applause and happiness that I am only allowed to go for 13 minutes. For anyone that is paying attention, it is because of the lateness of the hour. My brothers and sisters on the Democrat side, we have to split the remaining time. That is what is about to happen, so I am going to talk faster than normal. I apologize to those trying to take our words down. Let's see if I can make the point. I actually edited my boards down because I wanted to go through, once again, the actual mathematical facts and my intense frustration that our brothers and sisters around the country running for office are promising things that there is no mathematical way to make them work and a complete void of an honest conversation of demographics and debt and the reality of what is going on. Let's actually race through this because I think I now have 12 minutes. Please understand this. For every dollar of tax collection this year that your Federal Government takes in, we spend $1.39. Now, work with me. I used to come behind this microphone just a little while ago and say: We borrow 30 cents out of everything--no, we borrow 39 cents. If you remove interest, for every dollar we take in, we spend $1.21. I need you to process this. Please process this. For every dollar of tax collection the United States takes in, and that is this year, in a time when the economy has actually been pretty good. GDP growth has been pretty good. Tax collections have actually been pretty good, and we spend, meaning we are functionally borrowing, 39 cents for every dollar we take in. Here is the point. How many of you, as Members of Congress--and if someone's watching, if you don't see people in the room, that is the way it is supposed to be. People are supposed to be back in their offices or other places actually doing their work. One of the reasons you do these presentations is you are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus, and hopefully there are still some minds that are open to math. Do you see this chart? Do you see the blue? We call that defense and nondefense. That is all I, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on. It is 26, 25 percent of spending. Back to this board. For every dollar of tax collection, we have to borrow an additional 39 cents on top of it. Does someone see a math problem? If what I get to vote on is 26 percent of the budget, it means every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed as well as a big chunk of what we call mandatory spending. How many people are willing to tell that story, whether it be on the left or the right? The hallways in this place are full of people begging us for more spending. It is an investment, David. We need the money. I have done chart after chart after chart over the last few years, coming in here and showing when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in taxes. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy. Will this place start to take it seriously? You have to adopt tax policies, regulatory policies, and code policies that dramatically do growth. Understand, what is the biggest change that has happened the last couple of years? What is the thing that has moved these numbers so dramatically? I am going to play with this just a little bit. Interest. The fact of the matter is, Social Security, $1.460--480 billion. Total interest, because remember you have to pay the interest back to Social Security, the pension plans, all those things, and then interest to those who bought our bonds. Remember, the vast majority of our bonds are actually bought by Americans. Interest now is the second biggest expenditure in the Federal Government. It is going to come in total gross interest maybe $1.140-- 160 billion. Then the next biggest, the third biggest expenditure is now Medicare, and number four is actually defense. The thing that is in the Constitution now is number four. One of the points I want to make here is I was just showing you a chart that about 25 percent of what we get to vote on is defense and nondefense, and we are over 14 percent is just interest now. Understand, in about 10 years that a little less than $1.2 trillion is going to be approaching $2 trillion a year. Tell me how many things we got to buy with that interest when for every dollar of tax collection we take in, $1.39, so 39 cents on top of it is borrowed. That is the mathematical reality. This is the thing that I get booed at, I get people online saying: Oh, that hurts my feelings. One hundred percent of the debt for this country from today through the next 30 years--go look at CBO's reports, Medicare--sorry, I don't mean to get so agitated, Medicare and the interest. In 9 or so years when the Social Security trust fund has been depleted, do we reach in the general fund and backfill it? The insanity is, you hear the debates here: We will just tax rich people. Even documents from the left say, well, if you do every tax that has been proposed on those over $400,000, and you adjust for the economics, you get about a point and a half of GDP. A point and a half of the size of the economy. For those of us who want to cut spending, add up everything we have talked about cutting, it is about one point of GDP. You have got a big 2\1/2\ percent there, 2\1/2\ percent for every policy on the other side, every policy on our side. We are borrowing just a little less than 7 percent of the entire economy this year, and the economy is healthy. Dear Heaven, what happens if there is a war? What happens if there is another pandemic? What happens if parts of the economic clouds come and we have a recession? This is the time when things are good. We should be paying things back. You look at the math. I know some of these charts are impossible to read from a distance. I am trying just to make the point that interest is our fragility. I have said it here multiple times. Do you want to know who really is about to run your country? It is not the Democrats; it is not the Republicans. It is not rich people; it is not the unions. It is the bond market. If you are borrowing seventy, eighty thousand dollars per second every day and you have got to go to the market, remember, this year, this fiscal year we will bring $10 trillion to market. About eight of that is refinancing of the bonds that roll over. It is actually a little more than that. If you look at the short end of the curve, they have to roll over a lot. Then there are a couple trillion of new issuances. If the world, if the bond vigilantes say, well, we don't want those things, we want a premium, you look at the charts, and this is actually assuming everything is wonderful. When you see the CBO projection, and they talk about debt coming into the future, this is no pandemic, no war, no recession, yet if you listen to these microphones, it is person after person after person coming up with new brilliant ideas to spend money. Many of them you love. They are moral, they are helpful, and we have no damn way to finance them. This delusion that we will just tax rich people, I have already shown chart after chart after chart, you confiscate all the wealth of those designated rich, you run the country for a few months. You crash every market, there is no retirement accounts, but you wipe out everything. It is just sort of a mathematical delusion. There are ways to make this work, but are we going to legalize technology? Last week, I actually did a presentation, and I was trying to show that all these projections of: We are going to take in this much money in additional enforcement at the IRS, and we have only hit like a fraction, a fraction of what was promised. Remember, we are 2 years in. Remember, we originally appropriated 80, then it went down to 57. According to CBO, we were supposed to be up around 10, 11 billion of additional tax collections coming in from the rich. We have hit 1, so we have hit basically 10 percent of the promises. That is story after story after story, we are not coming anything close to our fantasies. Remember, the Inflation Reduction Act was going to pay for itself, and then we realized, hey, the subsidies, the planned economy, the new managed industrial policy that is America now, it is turning out to cost dramatically more. The tax collections didn't come anywhere close. We are really bad at math here. We are really good at making public policy by feelings, but just try to say, let's have thought experiments. What would happen if the IRS used Chat and other things to answer the phone, customer service, so the vast majority of people who call the IRS could actually have their phone answered? I remember one person online said: Well, that would lose jobs. I tried to show all that money we set aside for the IRS; it went down. Their auditors went down by 8 percent. We gave them billions of dollars, and it turns out we have a demographic issue. Remember, starting in 1990, birth rates in the United States started to roll over. It turns out a lot of people don't want to work for the IRS. There are ways to use technology to crash the price of healthcare, to make the environment healthier, cleaner, to move transportation, to actually do tax collections in an honest, fair, moral fashion. This place is a protection racket. It is a protection of incumbent bureaucracies, incumbent business models. The hallways are full of lobbyists right now trying to stop us from disrupting and making our brothers and sisters healthier. Diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare. It is immoral what we allow to happen. We can make our brothers and sisters healthier. We can do amazing things for the debt and deficit. We just have to be willing to do things differently. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I may have a slightly different experience. Bill was my senior Democrat for my subcommittee. You actually could not stop yourself from at least liking him because he was just brutally honest with you. He would say: David, I really think that is stupid, or on occasion, which was actually joyful: David, we can make that work. Why this is important is so, often particularly in the Ways and Means Committee, which I still believe is culturally a unique committee--you know, we are tough on each other, but I think actually we are sort of intellectually fair. A number of the oversight hearings we have had even this year, they weren't adversarial. Something that is important that I want to make sure I say before I ramble on too much, Bill's staff really should get some special kudos because even when you could tell he wasn't feeling well, when he was sort of in angst, his staff did a remarkable job of keeping an eye out on him, keeping him ready to go because you always knew, no matter what you said, he had an answer to it. It was really a neat experience, as this is the first time I have chaired something in Ways and Means, to have my counterpart be someone with that history who was tough as nails on me. When he thought I was doing something fair for working men and women, he was all in with me. He wanted to move forward. When he wasn't happy with it, yes, he would beat the crap out of you. Actually, in a weird way he epitomized what, in my mind, was the classic defender of working-class Americans. He is the image I have in my head because that is what he was.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to try to do something a little backward tonight from what I have typically done. One of my great frustrations here is sitting on Ways and Means, having the Joint Economic Committee economists as part of my team, and the number of times this place makes promises that the experts around us say: You know, they are complete fraud. Then, somehow magically, we never sort of come back a couple years later and say: Hey, here is what you were promised when the Democrats did their Inflation Reduction Act. Here are the actual outcomes. Should we hold people to their own language? There are a couple of things I wanted to do here. I am going to walk through a few boards and try to give some examples of how this place engages in theater that is mathematically void, and what is the term? Oh, yeah, we lie to you. So how many remember a couple of years ago: We are going to put $80 billion into the IRS. Yay. And we are going to collect money on those people making $400,000 and up, and there were Members of this body, of the White House, and others saying crazy things. The press--excuse me--the scribes who basically, in many ways, should have to file with the Federal Elections Commission because many of the press around here act more like a PR department for the Democratic Party, says: Better tax enforcement could raise $700 billion over the decade. The White House in 2021. Some of the others: Some Members of Congress think you can get $1 trillion from finding and taxing delinquent rich people. Okay. Wouldn't that be neat? Wouldn't that make our job so much easier in a Congress that is borrowing close to $80,000 every second? Remember, this was what you were told. How come no one ever comes by on these microphones 2 years later and says: Okay, do we hold you to your language? You built budget documents. You built things on these numbers. Even when I go back to the CBO--and these are the updated numbers. Remember, CBO, the one we keep relying on, says: Hey, high of $851 billion over the 10 years, and additional collections on those $400,000-and-up rich people, and the low: $390 billion. This was one of the excuses the Democrats had for the trillion-plus-- depending on how you look at some of the other CBO numbers, so you can see how accurate it is--almost $1.9 trillion in the Inflation Reduction Act, basically how much of it was giveaways to big businesses, environmental groups, other things. Okay. You told us this. Well, it turns out we are 2 years in now. We are 2 years in, so let's hold them to, okay, you are going to get their average sort of number that became refined as late as this February. We are going to get $400 billion. So, for the fun of it, because I am a pack rat, I saved some of the articles. Here is a fine scribe--I mean, excuse me, reporter: IRS says its hiring surge and funding boost could generate $560 billion more than it thought, $560 billion over the 10 years from their Inflation Reduction Act. Then, 30 days later, the same reporter--that first one is February. This one is March--applications for revenue-generating IRS jobs are far below agency goals. Then, if anyone actually reads this stuff, oh, it turns out they had fewer revenue agents, tax collectors at the IRS than they did before because apparently, if you have a good accounting background and you are a tax lawyer and those things, IRS is really where you want to work. The fact of the matter is that the beauty here is actually, in the very article, they actually went down--let's see if I could find the percentage. They had several or 8 percent fewer. This is after billions and billions of additional money was being given to the IRS. Now, it started with 80. Remember, we used parts of the IRS money as pay-fors last year, so I think they are still sitting on about $57 billion additional on top of their baseline budget for customer service and tax collections. I saved these articles. Well, what would happen if, annually, the Treasury has to update: What are the real numbers? How are they doing? Well, Madam Speaker, you might get a kick out of this. It turns out, over the 2 years, they have brought in an extra $1.3 billion. That is a lot of money. Now, we are still trying to figure out how much of that money would have just organically, eventually come in. It might have come in slower, so they moved some of it forward. If I take $1.3 billion over 2 years and then divide that in half, multiply it by 10, what happened to the $400 billion or the trillion dollars or the $700 billion that the Democrats from those microphones were telling us they were going to get by going after the $400,000-and-up rich people? My point here is so often this place, because it is mathematically vacuous, builds these promises that are complete fraud. Now, do I think people who have high incomes should pay their fair share? Absolutely. Actually, it is not even their fair share. They should pay what the law tells them they have to pay. Okay, that is fair. It turns out there were lots of articles that had been coming up saying it was a fraud, but no one around here was willing to pay attention to it, saying: The Department of the Treasury, IRS announces 1.3 recovery, high income. It is not anything close. Treasury raised nowhere near what Democrats expected from tax enforcement. One of the reasons I am doing this sort of backward is I come behind this microphone week after week sort of showing, saying: Here is the scale of the debt. Here are the drivers of the debt. The drivers of the debt from today through the next 30 years are demographics. I get screamed at when I am home saying: David, stop telling us the truth. From today through the next 30 years, about 75 percent of all the debt--remember, we are expecting, in 30 years, to be about 116, $120 trillion in debt, and 75 percent of that will be functionally Medicare, and in 9 or 10 years, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we backfill that and have to use the general fund for it? That is math, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can't fix things if this place keeps making crap up. The other thing I found--and I am just adding some irony to parts of this discussion because this is way back, June 26, so not that long ago. It turns out only 31 percent who called the IRS could get someone to answer the phone. We gave them billions and billions and billions to do this. Is it time to stop attacking people like me who say that it is time for a revolution using technology? The fact of the matter is, you could actually adopt the very technology, saying if I need some information, I am going to call--and, yes, I am talking to a ChatGPT, but it can stay on the phone with me. It can help me fill out my forms. It doesn't want to hang up on me. It can text me the video I need to help fill it out. The fact of the matter is, the IRS is the second most unionized agency in the Federal Government. They don't like the fact that technology could really improve customer service. It turns out that technology could actually be fairer, more accurate. You don't run into the Lois Lerner problem. That is way back. If you don't know the name, Google it. You can audit an algorithm. You can audit AI. You can audit those things and see if it is being bias and chaste. I can't audit a leftist IRS employee who is going after certain conservative groups. You want a fair tax system. You want an efficient tax system. They are sitting on $57 billion 2 years in, and it is still not working. I chaired the Oversight in Ways and Means. I meet with some of the IRS officials. They actually have some competent people over there, but I can't figure out what is going on when these things just aren't happening. I want us to understand that I can't fix the math if we are going to keep lying about it. Here is another article I just grabbed from Politico, and I think it was from yesterday. As part of the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act, which is a completely Orwellian named bill because you have all seen the articles. It did just the opposite to the economy. It extended the inflationary period. ``How politics hung up a $42 billion Biden internet buildout.'' Here is the thought experiment, and, once again, when I am done saying this, tomorrow there will be lobbyists in my office angry that I actually talked about this. Remember, everything in Washington, DC, is actually about the money. It is. Let's be brutally honest about it. Here is $42 billion that was supposed to help bring broadband to rural America. Come with me some time to my Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, which is bigger than some of the States back here in the East Coast. I have chapter houses and communities out there that have been waiting decades to get a broadband line. Yet, if you take a look, there have been millions and millions and millions and millions spent, in this case, billions were appropriated. If I came to you and said, if we really want to have telehealth, if we want to have digital health, if we want to have the living classrooms where the greatest science teacher is available to the entire country because you are doing it through the internet, broadband is moral. Is it moral waiting decades? Is it moral subsidizing and subsidizing and subsidizing and somehow that bit of fiber, that wire, never gets there. Hopefully, everyone around here is smart and said: We can't keep doing this. What would you do? Here is a crazy idea: Go out to the middle of nowhere and put this little satellite dish and then a couple repeaters around that provide WiFi, and guess what? Forty-eight hours later, boom, you have broadband at a fraction of the fraction of the fraction of the fraction of the cost. Welcome to this century. Oh, we hadn't thought about that. Well, I have proposed it. It is never going to move forward because the other side makes lots of contributions, lobbies around here. It is another example of trying to burn into this place to join this century of technology. Unless it is better off to keep subsidizing, subsidizing, subsidizing, and then waiting a couple more decades so you can get broadband to your rural community, or you could have it this week at a fraction of the cost to the U.S. taxpayers. I have a whole presentation. Some of you have seen it before where one of the things the Democrats did 2 years ago is, we are going to lower insulin prices. You know what they actually did is, they functionally took $16 billion, handed it to Big Pharma, the very pharma they attack all the time, and said, wink-wink, nod-nod, we are going to attack you--you give us contributions, of course. Wink-wink, nod-nod, here is $16 billion to buy down the price of insulin. They didn't actually lower it. What they did is, once again, the Democrat theory is everything is up for subsidization. Subsidize your way because it makes the receivers of that cash beholden. They are rent seekers. All of a sudden, you notice that all these folks that are receiving these subsidies happen to keep showing up supporting the left. What was immoral about that is 75 miles from here, there is something called Civica RX. Anyone who is crazy enough to watch something like this, look it up. There are three types of generic insulin. It is a co-op. It is a co-op with, I believe, the California Medicaid system, some private insurance companies, some healthcare providers, some hospitals, and they are selling those three generic insulins cheaper than the $16 billion subsidized. Why wouldn't this place have done something saying, these things are off-patent. We can actually incentivize groups that want to come together and make them cheaper, better, faster, more available. What a crazy idea to want to lower drug prices, create competition, but make everyone compete against each other. Make those companies that want the cash subsidies say screw you, we are going to actually encourage the co-ops to make it. I have made these proposals. I get stared at and told, no, David. You don't understand. We are Democrats. We do subsidization. They don't actually want competition. They don't actually want lower prices. They want people beholden to them. Then they could take part of that cash, part of that $16 billion and go--I will give you a company name, but I believe there is multiple firms doing that. It is Vertex. Read the articles of what they are doing for type 1 diabetes. They apparently have a number of folks who have actually been cured of type 1. Isn't the cure the morality? Instead, this place is fixated on maintaining your misery. It is immoral, but that is not what this place does. I believe the intellects around here somehow need your misery. They need you to be attached to the system. If 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare is diabetes, why isn't literally every other speaker behind these microphones talking about how we are going to save our brothers and sisters? I accept there is type 2, type 1, autoimmune, but the concept and the discussions if you actually read the academic papers, what would happen if just a fraction of that cash went into actually pursuing a cure. The cure is the morality. Let's actually walk through a bit more of my rage. Please forgive me, Madam Speaker. In some ways, this is my therapy because I get so angry all day long listening to crazy and folks that are a decade out of date and what they think they know, and I am just saying, but there is a solution. ``Economy could be $29.5 billion larger if all opioid deaths since 2018''--that is functionally 6 years--``were avoided.'' Anyone that is following me right now, if you are the opposition researcher for the Democrats who want to just beat the crap out of me, if you think it is moral, go look up fentanyl vaccine. I think it is going into 2A trials very shortly. Apparently, it is a protein attacher. It makes it so it can't go through the brain-blood barrier. In the last 6 years, 390,000 of our brothers and sisters have died of fentanyl. I think one of my boards here is going to say 345,000 prime age Americans died of fentanyl. That is the morality of this place. Let's give some more money to doing the same things we have been doing over and over. Think of it as everything from border security policy to the firefighter who is just trying to save someone who gets exposed. In my county, I had someone tell me that, at least in my city of Phoenix, there may be two or three dead people every single day from fentanyl. What would happen if I came to you tomorrow and said they think they actually have--it would be once or twice a year. It is not a traditional vaccine. That is just the language if you look it up. It basically has your body attach to the protein so it can't pass the brain-blood barrier. For a number of narcotics, apparently, this type of technology appears to be working. Take a little bit of that money and help bring it to market. We could save people's lives. We live in a country where we may be about to have the fifth year in a row where prime age males are dying younger. In 14 or 15 years, America has more deaths than births. Six years, 390,000 of our brothers and sisters are dead. How many times have you seen someone come behind this microphone and even talk about it? If you want to think like an economist, just think about what you can do to grow the economy. You see the theme I am trying to sell here. You are going to have the Democrats come behind these microphones and say--maybe even in the debate tonight--we need rich people to pay their fair share, those people over $400,000. This was a factoid I got from Virginia Foxx a little while ago and it screamed in my head. If I came to you and said: The student loan forgiveness that the administration is desperately pushing because they desperately need the votes--remember, it is vote buying. It is functionally pay-for-play. Here, now vote for us. Madam Speaker, 750,000 of those individuals make over $312,000, yet every dime of this is borrowed money. You are going to take working-class people, many of them that did not have the blessing like I have had and others in this body to go to school, to university, to go to grad school, things like that, you are going to ask working people who don't make anything close to 300-plus thousand dollars to subsidize. This is the morality of this place, but it is great vote buying. Now we are going to do some of the financial. Over 14 percent--the actual real number is 14.48 or something like that. Over 14 percent of the entire Federal Government's spending this year is interest on the U.S. debt. Once again, this is important. Social Security, number one spend. It is self-funding at least for a little while. Remember, when we say self-funding, most of it comes in as the FICA tax, the 12.4 we all pay. The employer typically pays half, you pay half, and then a little portion where the Treasury has to go sell debt to pay back the money they have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund. In 9 years or so, that money that the Treasury has borrowed is all gone and now we have got to figure out how we are going to keep our Americans from having a 17-plus percent cut, doubling senior poverty. Madam Speaker, 14.5 percent of all of our spending today is just interest. Social Security, number one. This year, I believe, it is $1.460--80 billion in interest. If you do total interest, interest we owe to the trust funds, interest we owe to anyone that bought one of our bonds, whether it is your union pension fund, our nice family on the other side of the world, that is actually the number two expenditure in this government. Interest is number two. Medicare is number three. Defense is actually number four. The next time you are with your liberal relatives and they say to just cut defense, remind them the thing that is in the Constitution is now number four. In some of the projections over the next 10 years, that number almost doubles on interest because we have this insatiable appetite, and I need to keep showing some of these numbers so they make sense. This one seems to hit home. Think of this. In 2024, the fiscal year we are in right now, gross interest comes in at $1.14 trillion. Madam Speaker, 45.68 percent of every income tax dollar--so when you pay your income taxes, almost half of it, a little less than half of it, is just paying interest. Think about that. When you are out working your heart out, and you see that income tax bill you have on your paycheck. A little over 45 percent of that is just paying the interest of this government. How many times have you seen people come behind these microphones and talk about this? Remember, interest is the fragility. If the bond market gets cranky because we do something stupid and interest rates spike up, I can make you an argument that, over the next few years, you want to know who really runs this government? It is not us. It will be the bond market because you want things. I need to show the next board. This is this year's budget. Madam Speaker, 26 percent, the blue, I get to vote on, yet we are borrowing 30 percent. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. Medicare or anything in the red is on autopilot. That is what we call mandatory. It is earned benefits. Some benefits you get because you are part of a certain Tribal group, you fall below a certain income, but this is on autopilot. This isn't voted on. Remember, I showed a board a second ago that over 14 percent is just interest? Well, think about that. If 26 percent is what we call discretionary and defense spending, next time you are at home talking to your voters and they say: I want to you balance the budget today, okay. I can do it, but are you ready to get rid of all the defense of this country? It is a constitutional obligation, but we will just get rid of it. How about all of nondefense discretionary? That is the Park Service. That is the State Department. That is the FBI. It is all gone. Tell me what part of mandatory spending you want us to get rid of. There seems to be this lack of understanding of the reality, both on where is the spending and the danger, the fragility, this country has from the debt. Tonight, I had only half an hour, and I have a stack of these things where particularly the 2 years the Democrats ran this place, they didn't tell the truth. They made up fake numbers. We haven't hit anything close to that, and CBO seems to be sometimes months, if not years, behind on telling us the truth on how we make the numbers work. There are ways you can make this another American century, but you have to do it through a calculator. You have to stop trying to legislate around here by people's feelings. Yet, if you want to be on television tonight, say something theatrical, say something over the top, say something that is a great dopamine hit. If you want to save the country, learn the damn math. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Michael Bernardino for his extraordinary dedication and service as a high school chemistry teacher for 30 years. Mr. Bernardino, a proud Arizonan, has not only imparted knowledge, but he also has encouraged countless students to pursue their passions. Beginning his career 30 years ago at Apollo High School and ending his career at North Canyon High School, Mr. Bernardino has been a beacon of excellence and a pillar of his community. His direct, honest, and charismatic style helped him connect with students and often inspired them to be better people and not letting themselves or him down. Because of his innovative and fun teaching methods along with his unwavering commitment to student success, Mr. Bernardino cultivated students into productive citizens, one of whom worked for me for the last few years. In his own words Mr. Bernardino shared: ``It has been fun, rewarding, exhausting, and sometimes heartbreaking. In short, it has been a career that mimics everyday life in repeating 60-minute blocks.'' Mr. Bernardino spent roughly 5,400 days teaching young students, molding minds to be independent thinkers and cultivating good people. Today, we honor Mr. Bernardino for a remarkable career and express our deepest gratitude for what he did for the community.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Alford).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, sometimes I come behind these microphones and often what I share, what I need to share--it is my therapy--is a bit dour, and it is sometimes fun to listen to someone who actually is happy and joyous. Now that the uplifting portion of this program is over, let's get to the facts. The number, $35 trillion, guess when we hit it. We should be very excited and proud of ourselves. We did something that so many economists said we would never get to this quickly. My math says, this coming Friday, 3 p.m., the United States gross debt will cross over $35 trillion. Now, understand that is not the way Europeans calculate our debt. They calculate our debt dramatically higher because of our obligated unfunded liabilities, but watch the Treasury, Friday, about 3 p.m., post up a number, $35 trillion. We did it. Congratulations. How many people have you heard come find the microphone today or this week understanding and wanting to talk about that? What we have gotten is people coming behind the microphone and not telling the truth. We all want to protect Social Security. The way you protect Social Security is you know the math and how it actually works. We are on track in a decade to double senior poverty. God forbid if any of us tell the truth about math because the truth gets you unelected and a bunch of really angry ads at home, so this place runs around and avoids telling the truth. Let's walk through another little factoid. My math basically says this year 45.68 percent of all the income tax collections, receipts your government takes in, just cover the cost of interest. I have been coming from behind the microphone and saying interest in 2024, this fiscal year, would be somewhere around a little less than $1.2 trillion. I apparently have that wrong. It is probably going to come in at about $1.140 to $1.160 trillion. Either way, I am off a fraction, but 45.68 percent of every dime we are collecting in your income tax now just pays interest. I have tried to say it over and over and over at home and other places and you get people that just stare at you and go, huh? Who really runs this government? Seriously, it is an honest question. I need you to think like adults, maybe those who actually went to a finance class. Who actually now runs this government? I am going to argue the debt markets, the bond markets from around the world. If you have to bring almost $10 trillion to market this fiscal year--2, 2.25 trillion virgin new issues because we are borrowing--that is like $75,000 to $80,000 a second right now. The economy is good. The actual baseline data on GDP is good, and you are still burning almost $80,000 a second in borrowing. What happens the second you have a U.S. debt auction that is undersubscribed or there are not enough people there? What happens to U.S. interest rates? How much of the world goes into depression? Are we going to talk about that? Oh, God, no. No, because that would require math. That would require being serious. We passed a bill here earlier today. I voted no on it. They worked hard on it. They lowered the top-line spending, but you have got to deal with a really uncomfortable discussion: every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. Let's process that. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed and, depending on some of the projections, about a quarter of Medicare. Social Security has its own trust fund. It runs out in like 9, 10 years, and then we have got to figure out what is going to happen there. We will continue to get Democrats coming behind the microphone lying about it, which makes it almost impossible to actually lay out the math and try to fix it. Remember, raising the cap, doing the Democrats' plan of $400,000 and up and just raising the cap, only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall. You had the President in that debate last month saying if we just tax rich people 1 percent more--and I have a chart in here that will show it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the shortfall. Remember, if you take $400,000 and up, the Democrats' definition of rich, and you tax them at 12.4 percent, you will only cover 38 percent of the shortfall. This is the nature of our discussion. When every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, is it moral to borrow money here to send it to entities around the country, even though there are many programs I love? I think they are the right thing. I just think the way we finance it isn't. Is it right to send cash to that city, to that State, to that county, and they have their own taxing authority? They may have more cash in the bank than we do as a percentage. Do you borrow money? That is what we are doing today; we are borrowing money. The crazy thing is when you do the adjustment for the ability for interest to be tax exempt from municipal debt, we have municipalities in this country that have a better credit rating than the United States. Remember, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today. We are number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 other countries that can sell 10-year bonds cheaper than the United States. If you read the instruments, if you read the Moody's, the S&Ps, their documents and their reps and warranties and their analysis on U.S. debt, they don't trust this place. They do not believe Congress. We are supposed to be the adults in the room. We make policy. The White House carries it out. Remember that little thing, the Constitution. Maybe someone should try reading it. They don't trust us, and they have no reason to trust us. How much discussion have you heard, anyone that has been listening to these microphones this week, heard people like me--which maybe I am just an idiot for actually giving a damn--get behind these microphones and actually walk through the math and explain there is a way we keep our promises. There is a way we meet our obligation from the earned benefits. There is a way to make this work. You don't have a lot more time to keep screwing around, but if you do it in the next 3, 4 years, this is another American century. I have my 8-year-old sitting over here. I also have a 2-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. Yes, I am pathologically optimistic. The math says her generation will be the first generation to live poorer than her parents. Great morality, Madam Speaker. I am very proud of us. Madam Speaker, I thank anyone that listens to my diatribes here. I think this is almost like my therapy session because I get angry all week long listening to the absurdity and people saying things that mathematically have no basis in fact. One hundred percent of the debt--and this makes everyone angry, and it is factual--100 percent of the U.S. debt from today through the next 30 years is demographics. Huh? What are demographics? This is your country's leadership. It is demographics. We got old as a society and we didn't set aside the resources to keep our promises. Since 1990, U.S. fertility has been falling. I won't use the word collapsing, but last year, we estimate, 2023, 1.63 percent, maybe 1.62 percent fertility. Meaning, the United States now has fewer children than much of Europe. Now, tell me how I build a pay-as-you-go system to keep our promises to those who paid into Social Security, to those who paid into Medicare? Remember, the Medicare taxes you pay only cover about 38, 40 percent. Why don't we do this right now? Social Security does not add to the U.S. debt technically but paying back the money that was borrowed from the Social Security trust fund does. There is some $3 trillion that has been borrowed out, and for the last few years, every month, there are not enough tax collections coming in on the FICA tax, that 12.4 percent, to make the payments to Social Security recipients. I want you just to visualize this. Every month, Social Security says: Hey, Treasury, I am holding a bunch of your bonds. You owe us some money and they cash them in, then Treasury goes and borrows money and pays interest for that borrowed money. Social Security doesn't create the debt, but Treasury does because the Treasury has to go out and borrow money to pay back the money they have taken out of the Social Security trust fund. If you add it all up, plus interest--forgive me, I am partially doing this off the top of my head. I calculate maybe $6 trillion, 3-plus in principal, then over time the interest paid back is probably another 3. How many times have you had anyone just try to be honest about it? It is not Republican math. It is not Democrat math. It is just math to be avoided because we are terrified to tell our voters the truth because we have lied to them for so long. How many times have you had a Democrat go around here and say, what if we just tax rich people more? I have done entire presentations here and for those of us on the Republican side, if we just cut discretionary spending, damn it, I can come up with about $300 billion in discretionary that can be cut down. They will be screaming, but that is still 1 percent of GDP. For the Democrats, every tax hike they genuinely propose that could be executed, when adjusted for its economic effects, that would be about 1.5 percent of GDP. You have 1\1/2\ there on tax hikes, you got 1 percent in cuts over here. It is a big 2\1/2\ percent, right? Right? It is 2\1/2\ percent. We are borrowing 7 percent of the entire economy this year. Madam Speaker, we are doing a great job. I guess part of my anger is, I love some of the people I work with here. They are smart. They care, but they run away from me when they see me coming because I want to talk about this stuff. This chart is the pie chart of America's spending. Do you see this number? Seventy-four percent is in the red. The red doesn't get a vote from a Member of Congress. That is on autopilot. It is called mandatory. It is earned benefits. Some of the benefits you get because you are part of a certain Tribal group or you fall below a certain income, but this is earned. Do you see the blue? It is defense and nondefense. Every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime of what we call nondefense discretionary is borrowed and a wedge of this over here is borrowed. When we say net interest, I have tried to explain the difference between net interest and gross interest. Net interest this year will be $892 billion. That is interest we pay to people out in the world: your pension fund, a nice family on the other side of the world, the union retirement fund over here. They buy U.S. debt. The other debt is what we owe to the trust funds. We have borrowed the money from the trust funds, but we still have to pay it back. We still have to pay interest. It is one of the great cons we do in our budgeting here. Well, gross interest is only $890 billion, Schweikert; why do you keep going around saying $1.2 trillion? Interest just this year is because of that other chunk of interest we have got to pay, and we are going to have to pay back the principal. The same as I just explained on how Social Security works. Once again, if you are a Member of Congress and you are doing a townhall or putting out something and you are not showing this chart, you are not helping our brothers and sisters across the country understand how serious this election is, how serious putting people in office that will stop pandering to your need for a dopamine hit in your brain, but maybe own a calculator. Once again, I can make this math work. You can't pretend that we can tax rich people, and we can just cut our way there. You may have to do a bit of both of those, but it is policy. I have done presentation after presentation after presentation on how you could crash healthcare, how you could adopt artificial intelligence to reduce the size of this government dramatically and still have better customer service. How the mechanics of talent-based immigration could actually grow the economy but shutting down the border--stop importing competition to our working poor, making our working poor poorer. You have got to think like an economist. The folks here want to talk down to you. They talk to you like you are a child and say, well, if we just did this, we would be fine. It doesn't work that way. We are now so upside down debt-wise that unless you do something that is holistic with lots of moving parts, none of the math works. We are uncomfortable telling that truth. Let's actually walk through a board I don't think I have ever shown before. Fiscal year 2024, here is where we are at to date. We have taken in $3.755 trillion. Do you see the red here? The red is the individual income tax. Your country is an income tax-based economic system where other countries may rely more on a value added tax, which is a really regressive tax and crushes the middle class. The blue over here, when you start to look at that, we call it social insurance and retirement programs. It is Social Security. That is actually going out the door immediately, and we have to borrow some to cover it. The blue over here is actually corporate income taxes. Remember, the United States, back in about the late eighties, early nineties, changed much of the corporate tax structure when we started having passthroughs. Do you remember LLCs, subchapter S, partnerships, those things? Much of what is corporate activity in the United States flows through to that individual tax line. When you get the brain trust here that says we are going to raise corporate taxes, great, okay. Is that going to solve something? We are trying to vet the paper I got the math from, but we have a paper from about a year or year and a half ago that said, in the 2017 tax reform we did, 67 percent of the corporate tax rate reduction went to wages. When you have someone from the left who runs around here saying we are going to raise corporate taxes, what they are doing is basically screwing over the working men and women of the country. That is how it works. When your wages go up, the old saying used to be it is inflation-- that doesn't get you anything--or it is productivity because you built a tax code that said we can afford to buy the next better piece of equipment, build better processes, build better supply chains, become more productive, and workers get part of that. Part of that productivity also is a tax system that maximizes economic vitality. Economic growth is moral. If we want to have fewer poor people in society, if we want to close income inequality, don't do it through transfer payments. We have data over data that many of the transfer payments, at the end of the decade, make people poorer because you dissociate their lives from being part of the society, part of work. The secret is having an economy that grows, that needs them. Getting economics right is moral. This is the reality. Do you see these tiny little wedges there? That is excise taxes. Some will think of it as tariffs, when you actually see some miscellaneous. Society is functionally financed by income tax. This is FICA, and this is corporate. Mark my words--and I will probably be long gone from this place-- because of what the Democrats are doing policy-wise and, honestly, the Republicans' unwillingness to actually do tough things, at the end of this decade, we are all going to be having a discussion of having a national VAT, a value-added tax, just like the rest of the world. All of the crap discussion that it is not progressive enough, that it is regressive and hurts working men and women, working men and women are going to get their heads kicked in because it is the only way to start to confiscate enough resources from people. Let's actually talk through and knock down some of the craziness that keeps being said around here. This is a brand-new chart for me: U.S. fiscal dynamics, now and then. We are going to go way back. Let's actually do from 1984 to 2023 and then current. Our tax revenues are up. We are taking in more receipts. Technically, they are not revenues. Revenues are what you earn. Receipts are what you confiscate. That is just a little bit of tax lingo there. You see tax receipts are up, but our spending is way up. When you see the white line over here, deficits, it is just basically the derivative of tax receipts are up, but we are spending faster than those receipts are going up. Therefore, you get a deficit. If someone says those 2017 tax cuts--no, tax receipts are up. I have another chart I am going to show. Corporate tax rates, corporate tax collections--don't think about the rate; it is about what you take in-- are actually above the mean. How much of this spending is the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act? The Democrats lost their mind when we did 2017 tax reform. Remember, it was actually a few trillion dollars--$5 trillion, $5.5 trillion--but functionally $4 trillion of it was also covered, direct taxes. We just moved things around to maximize productivity. It was about getting companies to move back to the United States, move their organizations, their intellectual property, the things they were making money on, getting them back to the United States. We had to become competitive in the world again. The other $1.5 trillion, the Democrats say that is the driver of the debt. No, it is not. It turns out it wasn't $1.5 trillion. The latest data is almost $900 billion of that has been covered by economic growth. Yet when the Democrats controlled this place in the last session, they dropped $2 trillion in subsidies, handouts, to big business. All of that is borrowed money. When was the last time that a reporter actually covered this fairly? When was the last time you met a reporter who owned a calculator? The public has no understanding of what is going on out there. I keep trying to provide this chart over and over. This is U.S. Government revenues. The sign should say ``receipts.'' This is mislabeled. Green is individual income taxes. Remember, we are mostly an individual income tax country. When you see spikes like this, this is the dot-com bubble of 1999, 2000, 2001, the dot-coms. That is capital gains. This spike here is actually people were getting lots of COVID money, so it was direct spend from the Federal Government. We borrowed it, gave it to them, and they had to pay taxes on it. This line here, the blue, is FICA taxes. That is your Social Security and Medicare--very stable. Down here, this is corporate taxes. Do you see the line? Remember, this is the regime of the new corporate tax rate since 2017. Tax receipts, the actual tax dollars, are up. It is above the mean of the last couple of decades. We need vitality, dynamism. There are lots of things we can do policy-wise. The United States is becoming a bit more of an oligopoly. Many of our businesses are becoming far too big and far too protectionist. That is government. Government likes big organizations because they are easier to manipulate to get them to do what they want. Here is a subsidy, wink, wink, nod, nod. Engage in our social policy, engage in our political policy, and we are going to hand you billions. Instead, what you do is tax reform for everyone. Knife fight, battle it out, the best product, the most dynamic company, the one who moves the fastest and most innovative wins. That is the way a market economy is supposed to work. Instead, now our brothers and sisters on the left here go behind these microphones and use: Our industrial policy is this. Our planned economy is this. I keep waiting for them to build a 5-year plan and hold up little red cards. If you don't get that reference, go look it up. This is the driver of the debt. Remember, I showed tax receipts are up, but our spending is up more. Where is that spending? It is in what we call mandatory. In many ways, this isn't Republican or Democratic. It is what we are as a society. We calculate in about 10 years, 22 to 23 percent of our population will be 65 and up. The politics will weaponize that very sentence I just gave, but it is math. It is what we are. It is demographics. We are having and have had, for the last couple of decades, dramatically fewer children. We got older. If we tell the truth about that, we can look at what the cost driver is. Then, folks come in and say: Well? Almost all the cost driver is interest and healthcare costs. A decade from now, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we backfill it? The brain trust here will say: Let's do this. We will do the ACA, ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, or Medicare for All. Those are financing bills. Once again, if our body here would tell the truth, that is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. They don't change what we pay. Technology, cures, disruptions are better ways to do it, but we keep much of the technology that could crash the price of healthcare here illegal because there are armies of lobbyists in our hallways who don't want to compete against your ability to use technology to keep yourself and your family healthier. I have been able to attach a handful of AI and algorithm bills to provide customer service at the IRS, the VA, or other things, and then we have gotten hate from the government employees unions. The fact of the matter is, it is moral. It would be better customer service for our constituents. It would be faster, better, and cheaper. The fact of the matter is, there is no pension with it. There are solutions that are not tax or cut and burn. It is a policy. This place won't engage in the policy because we are afraid. We are protectionists. We are protectionists of the government bureaucracies and incumbent business models. Is that Republican or Democratic? It is math. Not going to bother you with that. Madam Speaker, may I ask how much time is remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, for those trying to take down my words, I am sorry for talking so fast. Tax revenues are projected to be billions of dollars. Once again, I want to make the point that individual income taxes are projected to be up dramatically. Payroll taxes are up fairly substantially. Corporate income taxes are fairly healthy. Other types of receipts are also up. Where I really want to get back to is trying to make this point, and then we are going to do some actual tax history. This is from the CBO, Congressional Budget Office. This is not Republican or Democratic. It is math. One hundred percent of the next 30 years of debt is healthcare and interest, and then, in 10 years, if we backfill Social Security. The rest of the budget is calculated to have an almost $9 trillion positive balance. When was the last time this place actually was willing to have one of the most difficult discussions? About a month, month and a half ago, the Joint Economic economists on the Republican side took the leap and told the truth. We wrote a detailed report about demographics, tax policy, maximizing economic growth. Then we talked about health. This is where I get the crap kicked out of me for telling the truth. Obesity in the detailed line item--and we spent months and months working on these numbers and vetting them--could be as high as $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare costs over the 10 years. Having a society where we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger, is that moral? Having a society where we calculate, in 3 to 4 years, 50 percent of America will be obese, is that moral? What we do in the farm bill, what we do in nutrition support, and what we do in trying to have a healthier society, is that Republican or Democratic? I often accuse my Democratic friends of wanting to engage in policy to maintain people's misery, where others, at least myself, want to cure the misery. I want to end the misery, cure diseases, move the types of investment but also the policies so the FDA can use technology to bring cures to market faster. We have a whole portfolio of these ideas. Not one of those was a tax. Not one of those was a major cut. We calculate that 16 percent of all U.S. healthcare, $600 billion, is people not staying on their statin or taking their insulin improperly or their calcium inhibitors so they are having a stroke. There is a 99-cent pill bottle cap that beeps at you, and I can't get a damn hearing on that for years. These are simple ideas that could crash the price of healthcare. Our society is dying. In 15 years, we calculate that we have more deaths than births. Oh, but that doesn't work in the next election. That is not what I am going to use in my propaganda. The attack ads that are going to come at you, Schweikert, well, we are going to say you mentioned the words Social Security and Medicare, but we are going to lie that you are one of the few idiots here trying to find a mathematical way to save it. This place is absolutely immoral. I have done this before; I have tried to walk through the actual cost to the poor on what we are doing at our border. I will do this quickly. You are the individual or the couple who didn't finish high school. What you sell is your talents. You are willing to go out and hang drywall, you work yourself off as hard as you can, and then you get a White House that engages in border policy where millions of people with the same skill set as you have come in, and they consume the housing stock. You want to know why the lowest tiers, the least expensive housing has had some of the highest inflation, why they can't find a place to live, and now their wages are going down because you are competing against millions of people with the same skill set. The cruelty of the current border policy crushes the working poor. Can we have a discussion like economists instead of ``Well, you are immoral, you want to . . . `' No. Then on the flip side, we have entire charts that talk about how talent-based immigration--and talent could be a skilled carpenter or synthetic biologist--grows the economy. I will argue a number of the economic policies I propose I cannot make work math wise unless we actually--because in the 1970s, 1980s the world fought for hydrocarbons. Last decade we fought for rare earths. I can build you the math model that says this decade and the next three decades, we are going to fight for smart people, the entire world. We educate people here, and then we send them away. Are we out of our minds? Madam Speaker, I am going to skip a bunch of the boards and just try to close this out with just a couple more. This is 2023. Total outlays, total spending, $6.1 trillion; total receipts, $4.4 trillion. What is that? $1.7 trillion borrowed. This year, borrowing is going to be about two-and-a-quarter, and this is a time when the economy is doing remarkably well. Now, it is subsidized, so it is basically a sugar high, but it is still doing well. Now, our problem is, in 2023, gross interest was about $700 billion. This year, we are heading toward $1.14 trillion, $1.16 trillion, but this differential here, almost every dime of that $1.7 trillion borrowing, the growth on it--now, much of it is Inflation Reduction Act, the shortfall from tax reform, but we have never been given the run to show how it is growing tax receipts. I am showing you even corporate tax receipts where the different rates are up. It turns out it is healthcare and interest now. As we are moving back to more normalized interest--How many of you live in a fantasy world where you think interest rates are going back to 0? You realize the current interest rates on 10-year notes still aren't at historic norms when you take away the years of suppression on the rate. For my brothers and sisters on the left, who like to say, well, you gave away to rich people, today, the rich, as defined by you, pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes than they did before. The Republican tax reform was more progressive than the previous Tax Code. When we get to some of the other charts, here is my chart showing that President Biden in the debate said something insane about covering Social Security. Let me see if I can find one. In 10 years, gross debt will be $56.8 trillion. However, here is one of the points I desperately want to make. Historically, when we have had very high marginal rates, we get 17.6, 18, 18.2 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had very low marginal rates, we get 17.6, 18.2 percent of the economy in taxes because the economy changes in growth. When you look at it, the black line is receipts, revenue. The line above it is interest and healthcare. When our friends keep saying, well, we are going to tax the rich more. Great, but I have already shown you if every tax worked absolutely to its maximum efficiency, you get a point and a half, a percent of GDP, and we are borrowing 7 this year. We will make this the last one. Until we are actually willing to first have the same definitions of here is the drivers of debt, here is the innovations we are willing to bring into our society, this is our future, our future is just absolutely crushing, and it is percentages of GDP. We expect Social Security and Medicare outlays, as we start to head to the 30-year budget, 17.6 percent of the entire economy, where revenues are 6.3. Okay, no one has any idea what you are talking about. My basic point is, today through the next 30 years, it is demographics. It is mostly healthcare, and then the cost of financing that shortfall. Helping people live longer, live healthier, live freer of disease is moral. It isn't Republican moral, Democrat moral, it is just moral, and yet every piece of legislation I have brought here over the last few years can't get a hearing or gets shot down because the bureaucracy despises it. The interest groups care more about their money than they care about my 8-year-old's future. There is a path where the math can be made to work, but for everyone around here, you think there is a simple solution. My father used to have this great saying, for every complex problem, there is a simple solution. That is absolutely wrong. We will have to do complexity to save our future, save my retirement, save my children. We have put it on paper. We have done economic modeling; we have had multiple Ph.D. economists do the math. There is a way it works. Will this place step up and buy a calculator and put batteries in it and then sit down with those of us who want to save our future and make this another American century? Instead, we run around terrified from doing what is hard. Madam Speaker, thank you for the therapy session of letting me vent. I am going to bite my tongue from saying what I have to say, but I am going to throw one last thing. There are a number of people who watch these presentations on YouTube. Half the comments are bots, they are fake, they are Russian troll farms. Half the remaining half are people who care more about saying ideological insanity, but there is about a quarter of them that help, that actually have sometimes brilliant ideas, are engaged in saying, what if you did this, what if you looked at that? We are diving into ideas on things of consolidation, things that are mandatory. Those ideas actually came from the population that has been willing to watch these presentations over the years. One of my last great hopes is when I would do these economic presentations 5 years ago, 12 people would watch them. Today, I will have several hundred thousand. Maybe, just maybe, Democrats, Republicans, the people who are Independents are tired of being treated like children, and they are ready for us to start talking to them like honest brokers of policy. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney).

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Carl). Honoring Baldwin County Sheriff Huey ``Hoss'' Mack

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do something a little tricky this evening. You are going to see the continuing theme of, hey, here is where we are borrowing and here is where the borrowing is coming from. Then I am going to hit on some of the things that--what is the next one--drive me almost insane on the questions I get here, the things I get on this stupid thing. I have come to this conclusion: We live in a world where the propaganda, the fake information, and the distortion fields around us actually do not want America to succeed. That is a pretty dark thing to say, but let's actually walk through my theory. I am going to make the point. On some of these presentations, I have been blessed. If you go on YouTube, I had one a couple months ago, I think there is, like, 1.3 million views. Go look at the comments section. I will argue about half those comments are bots. They are fake. You see things like: Well, if you just didn't give any money to Israel, we could balance the budget. You start to realize that there is a world out there that takes advantage of our open society, that comes at us with things that are lies, and the poor person out there who is just trying to take care of their family, on occasion, grabs their phone, tries to read little bits of news, maybe reads a comment or two, and they don't realize the information coming at them is absolute crap. Then the other problem that I am going to show here is when I have my own President get behind a microphone, look at the American people, and say things that are absolutely not true. Then an idiot like myself tries to come up and say: I have a path. There is a path. If I can get my brothers and sisters on the left to work with us on the right, there is a path to save this country. It is really hard when the State of the Union goes on that podium right there and says things that are absolutely not true. Does that mean they are also a deliverer of fake information because math is hard? Math is uncomfortable. Telling the truth is hard. Maybe this place has lied for so many decades that the public says: Look, we are just going to believe whatever is comfortable. Let's actually walk through, first, a little bit of reality here. I will start with this chart because it sort of lays out where we are at today. Do you see the red? That red area is 74 percent of the spending, and 74 percent of the spending in this place is on auto pilot. We don't get to vote on it. Do you see the blue? That is what I get to vote on. That is defense and nondefense discretionary. I get to vote on that. Every dime of it is borrowed. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Also, guess what--we are in so much trouble--I have net interest on this, which I think is unfair because there is this thing called net. That is the publicly borrowed. That is where the Treasury sells bonds. I think, this week, we are selling $111 billion--maybe it is $112 billion or $113 billion--in three different auctions this week just to finance our insatiable spending because, remember--this is one of the things I find is uncomfortable even at home--100 percent of the borrowing from today through the next 30 years, according to CBO, is interest, Medicare, and if we backfill Social Security in a decade from now. It is demographics. Yet, how do you make policy? There are ways to fix it with policy. When the leader of the free world looks into a camera and says things that are just insane when it comes to being on a calculator. Take a look one more time. Nondefense discretionary, defense, all of that is borrowed, and a wedge--I should do a chart that shows you how much is borrowed money. I originally thought we might be at $2.5 trillion borrowing this year. Some of the tax receipts are a little bit better. Some of the spiking growth that we had in the first part of the fiscal year on healthcare costs have flattened ever so slightly, so we are probably going to end up borrowing around $2.3 trillion this year. What that means is even part of the mandatory spending, Medicare, because remember, Medicare isn't all on the trust fund. The trust fund only covers 38, 40 percent. The rest comes out of the general fund. Once again, look at this chart and understand your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. That is meant to be sarcastic, but it is meant to sink in. Let's actually walk through. I am going to walk through a couple of these just to sort of lay out where we are actually at. CBO predicts by 2054, so 30 years from now, budget deficits are entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare shortfalls. We are not allowed to say that, are we? Does anyone remember the State of the Union? There was a handful of us, Democrats and Republicans, who had been quietly working for a year trying to put together a plan to save Social Security in the long run. The President gets there and says: Promise me you won't talk about Social Security or Medicare. People look terrified and go: Okay. Yes, good campaign issue. They care more about winning the next election than protecting seniors. It is the great lie around here. You talk about it saying: I want to find a way to modernize and save, and you will get the crap kicked out of you. You also told the truth. You have to look at the data, the charts. Remember, the SSA, the Social Security Administration's actuary numbers are actually substantially more optimistic than the Congressional Budget Office, so we are going to use the more optimistic numbers. When you start to realize and when the outlays are, over the next 30 years, starting to hit 17 percent of the entire economy and revenues don't come anywhere close to that, there is your crisis. We can just pretend because getting through the next election is more important. Look, you have all seen this chart over and over and over and over and over and over that interest continues to grow, and we think actually the interest calculation--this is important. Let's do this right now. The hierarchy right now, today, Social Security will, this year, be $1.480 trillion. The total gross interest because, remember, just a couple days ago, I think we sent $36 billion to Social Security because we borrowed the money. Treasury had borrowed the money from the trust fund. We pay it back with interest. Total interest to the United States will approach $1.2 trillion this year. Then you have Medicare, and then you have defense. Defense is functionally sitting as No. 4. How do you have a society that runs around thinking, well, if we just cut some defense? I showed you the chart before. You can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of nondefense discretionary. That is the Park Service. That is the FBI. That is the Foreign Service. That is us. If you get rid of everything, you still have to borrow money. You look at the charts over and over, and when we have had high marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had low marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP. You have a long history--and I have done floor presentation after floor presentation--that when you lowered the rates, you grew the economy, you got about the same percentage of GDP. When you raised the tax rates, the economy shrunk a bit or slowed down, and you got the same percent of GDP. The idea is grow the economy as much as possible, and then cut spending everywhere you can. I have some charts, and I don't know if I should do them again--actually, maybe I will just jump to them in a moment--where you lay out almost every tax hike that are the dreams of the left: Let's tax rich people who are over $400,000. Let's do this tax and that tax. I come here with the academic papers and showed you, when you maximize all those tax rates, capital gains, income tax, estate tax, just do it all, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP. For us on a cut side, it is brutal, but I can come up with almost $300 billion in nondefense discretionary. That is 1 percent of GDP. So, hey, together, we came up with 2.5 percent. We are borrowing 6 or 7 percent of the entire economy, and we have used up everything. I mean, understand what is going on here. Just another chart that basically gives you a sense: Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls driven entirely or nearly the entire 2019 to 2034 deficit hikes. That means, in a 10-year window, almost all the growth of the debt and deficit during that time period, interest, Medicare, and then at the end of the decade, Social Security trust fund is gone. Right now, you will get a Democrat saying: Well, Social Security doesn't add anything to the deficit. They are absolutely correct until the trust fund is gone. There is the part that enraged me the other night. If any of you were able to watch the Presidential debate the other night, my phone lit up at one point by a bunch of reporters who wanted to double check a number. The President was asked about Social Security. I begin to make the wealthy--okay. I begin--and this is his actual quote, so it is disjointed, but this is what he said: `` . . . I begin to make the wealthy begin to pay their fair share, by increasing from 1 percent beyond, to be able to guarantee the program for life.'' He is talking about Social Security, so 1 percent. Then he went on to say: ``Well, that one enough will keep it solvent.'' The left's definition of wealthy is over $400,000 income, right? The President just told the American people 1 percent. I will fix Social Security by taxing them 1 percent. We have a math problem. The problem here is, the blue you see here, that is not 1 percent. I had to make it 2 percent because the 1 percent was so small we figured you couldn't even see it. I doubled what the President said. This is the shortfall. Half of this is what the President told you would work. I am enraged by all the fake crap that comes into my phone in my office, our phones, our publications, all the things that you see on Twitter, or X, or whatever we are supposed to call it today, that are just made up by bots particularly and foreigners. What happens now when my own President does it? How do I show up here? How do I get my brothers and sisters here to actually make policy? How do you make policy when the leader of the free world says things that are mathematically just insane? The immorality here, functionally 9\1/2\ years, we double senior poverty in America. If we don't fix this, we double senior poverty. The Democrats will weaponize it because they care more about winning the next election. We have a President who could have just looked in the camera and said: Look, we haven't had the number of children, therefore, the number of workers. We started the rollovers in 1990. It is just math. It is not Republican or Democrat. Demographics are what we are. Last year, the United States had 1.62 children fertility rate, meaning, functionally, now our math is, in about 15 years, the United States will have more deaths than births. I say that over and over trying to get people to think. If your brain is trapped somewhere in the 1990s' policy sets, none of that math is real anymore. It hasn't been real in 30 years. This place is absolutely immoral. I brought charts here over and over and over, the Democrat solution saying: Instead of the President's 1 percent proposal, if you do the--what is it--the 14-point-whatever percent, 14.4 or 12.4 total Social Security tax, not the Medicare, not the unemployment, those things, and you put it on all income over $400,000--I have shown a number of charts--if you use the CBO math, it covers about 38 percent of the shortfall. That is using over 12 points, both the employer and the employee's portion. I have a President who looks in the camera and says 1 percent. Now, let's come together at a townhall or a meeting here and say: Hey, guys, let's have an honest conversation because every day we wait, the on-ramp is harder to save Social Security. Oh, David, the President already told us we are doing 1 percent on rich people. I can show you with the 12.4 you are covering only about 38 percent. Why is this place so absolutely immoral? Do they really care that much more about winning the next election? After the President said that, I started to dig through the stories other people had sent me. I had this woman text me weeks ago saying, did you know that with the money in Ukraine that the First Lady of Ukraine bought almost a million-dollar Bugatti, or however you pronounce that car. Well, the BBC did a very long article about how much is absolutely fake coming into the U.S. marketplace of ideas. There are bot farms. There are troll farms. They created fake photos, which turns out that is what actually helped BBC identify that this is all fake stuff. How do you make policy in a world where we are awash in things coming in from our enemies, from the countries that want us at each other's throats, make it impossible to do basic policy to save the Republic, and then my own President is making crap up? Article after article of disinformation that is crashing in, the things I have that come into my office about Israel that are coming in from bot farms. We have article after article that Microsoft did an analysis of how much was coming in from Chinese bot farms, Chinese servers. Apparently, we just had a major disruption by stopping 968 Twitter accounts that were completely fake and they were all coming from a bot farm in Russia. That happened this week. The State Department just identified that bot farm and got it shut down. Mr. Speaker, I say now to my Democrat colleagues that we have actually had a couple stories come out that have some real fun stuff. It turns out a number of the Democrat activists are actually setting up fake newspapers. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, one of these articles in there actually has a section talking about that in American small town newspapers as many as half process this, as many as half are actually fake. My wife pointed out to me that there was a newspaper from southern Kansas, where she grew up, that went out of business decades ago that somehow popped up in her news feed and it had this crazy stuff in it. Turns out, that was on the list of the ones that had been spoofed. A spoofed URL that looks like it is from Russia. Think that about. In America, about half the small town online newspapers you see are actually fake. How many of our constituents know that? It looks like the Democrats actually have decided, hey, this is a great business model. Let's make up fake newspapers online, have it laced with leftwing propaganda, and we will do it under a newspaper masthead. How is this not a violation? Once again, the left proves they are a hell of a lot smarter than we are when it comes to being mercenary on campaigns. They figured out a way to get around the campaign finance laws. Spend money, but it is free speech. It is fake, but it is free speech. Then idiots like me get here and try to walk through the math. Look, this is the MedPAC report. It is not that hard to read. You have quotes in here that in 2022, 13 percent of all personal and corporate income taxes collected by the Federal Government were transferred to the Medicare trust fund. By 2030--so that is how many years? 5 budget years? 4 budget years?-- 22 percent of all tax receipts from corporate and individual income tax, 22 percent will just go to Medicare. Functionally in a decade, you have gone from 13 to 22 percent of all tax receipts. It is demographics. Why isn't this what we talk about around this place, how are we going to save these programs? Oh, you can't do that because you are going to have a President who is going to knife you by saying crazy things. The Joint Economic Report we published a couple weeks ago, we tried to provide brutally honest math, brutal detail with actual solutions. Will anyone actually read it? This one my staff was particularly fond of. It turns out that one of the new spoofings out there that are coming into young people's phones are celebrities with quotes that the celebrities have never said. Are you all ready for this election cycle where you have AI memes looking like a Member of Congress, looking like a President, looking like a Senator, looking like a celebrity, saying things that are completely fake? Now come here and try to do difficult policy where you are going to have to take on some bureaucracies, take on certain business models, adopt technology to crash the price of healthcare. Are you going to get hit by an army of bots, an army of fake videos, an army of fake postings, saying they can't do that, because some group has figured out that winning the election is stopping us from saving the country from its debt spiral? I am trying to explain it is bad enough having to take on the bureaucracy, it is bad enough having to take on the calcified intellect, of particularly some of my friends here, that say we can just fix everything by taxing people more. What happens when our voters have to face millions of absolutely fake information videos that are crashing at them? I can't wait to see the bots and the comments they put in the video below this posting. Take a look here: ``Not touching Social Security means large benefit cuts.'' When you start to actually take a look--and I think we did this before. Remember, the number goes up and down depending on employment, but we were working on one the other day from last year's CBO number that basically showed the average couple would take about a $17,400 cut in their Social Security a decade from now when the trust fund is gone. This is immoral. Shouldn't this actually be a place where we actually work on these things? Then you start to actually look at the lies-- excuse me--the misinformation that our brothers and sisters on the left keep saying. Oh, when we did tax reform, it was a gift to the rich. Okay. You got a math problem. The higher income, the top 20 percent today pay 69 percent of all income taxes. It is more progressive today than the tax code has ever been. The wealthy pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes today than ever before. The lower quartiles today pay the lowest Federal income tax rates since income taxes, 16th amendment. How often do you hear this? But that doesn't fit the narrative. Then you have the jerks actually say things like this: Well, you guys had $1.7 trillion spending. Yes. We got $900 billion more revenue than expected, but that was horrible. We are going to spend about $2 trillion in grants and gifts and those things to big business because they do clean energy stuff. It is like they don't look at themselves in the mirror. Once again, I have done entire presentations here going through every leftwing tax idea trying to add it up. Even when you don't do economic effects--if you do economic effects, these numbers--and then try to say, hey, you guys are only getting about a point and a half or so of GDP out of these numbers, you are not getting anywhere close. You got to do it through policy. Then the fragility that no one was prepared for--well, some of us were prepared for--are interest rates. How many of you think interest rates are going back down, particularly in the long end of the curve? Remember, what the Federal Reserve does is on the short end of the curve, meaning shorter term bonds. When you start to look at 10-year debt and up, some of the best bond traders and economists right now are saying it is not going down. You might get a little bit of a tick. The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack, meaning Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. You read the notes on the S&P's and the Moody's, it is not--we have one of the healthiest economies in the industrialized world, but one of the things that is going on is they don't trust us. Will our governance be disciplined enough to actually take on the spending and the debt? The fact of the matter is, we are paying a premium now. The United States now pays a premium on our debt. This week, I told you we are borrowing about--there are three auctions this week--$111 billion, and we are going to pay a premium on that debt. Sometimes this place doesn't look like we are serious about taking the debt on and managing our fiscal affairs. First off, we are having great difficulties selling long-term bonds. Do you remember a few months ago we had sort of a bond tantrum? Why do you think Treasury moved things down to sell short-term, short-term, short-term? A lot of investors out there don't even trust this government enough to say, I am going to buy a 30-year U.S. savings bond and I am going to be safe. Once again, even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget in this country. Stop thinking you are going do it with tax hikes or even for those of us who want to cut the size of government, you need to have revolutionized the cost of this government. Stop being afraid of technology. Stop being afraid of the things where we could change the cost of this government because it might affect your business model. Look, I was going to try to put up one or two slides last for happy talk, until I realized one of the slides I wanted to show you was, once again, another concept of why the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act is the most Orwellian named piece of legislation in modern history. They are very proud, saying we are subsidizing electric cars. My wife has an electric car. She loves it, but the data basically said--when they passed that, I came here to the floor and showed, hey, here is the survey data. Almost everyone that is going to buy an electric car is buying them with the subsidy, without the subsidy. It is a lifestyle. It is almost a status symbol, but let's give away billions and billions of dollars. Now you actually have breakthroughs. Could you imagine if just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that resource had gone more into primary research? Looks like there has been a breakthrough on solar cells, an additional 25.7 percent efficiency, except the problem is it was developed in China. The very people who preach at us to subsidize all this stuff, but let's subsidize less generations or maybe even the generation before that's technology. You want me to put solar panels on my house, you want us to drive electric cars, make it so economically sensible and make it so economically affordable that it is the disruption. Why did you stop going to Blockbuster Video? Because you had this button you could hit at home and stream videos right to your home. Was that subsidized by the government? The fact of the matter is that there are technology disruptions. Why didn't we fixate on that? Well, it turns out that maybe the disruptions don't write checks to your campaign. The Democrats' planned economy, the control of the marketplace, the arrogance that somehow they think they know what the future looks like instead of building a tax system or regulatory system that is competitive, that is disruptive. Some are winning; some are losing. That is the way the American economy is supposed to work. In many ways, we have now built a society of oligopolies, thanks to Dodd-Frank and Democratic policies. They have made the big bigger, the big really powerful, and the really big and powerful now your constituency. It turns out now that if you look at who votes for Republicans, it is entrepreneurs, working people, and those who are being crushed by those they have to compete with who now get subsidies from their political allies. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, Congressman Al Green and I are almost oceans apart, as a traditional Democrat and a conservative Republican. Yet, since the day I have been here, he has always been remarkably kind to me. He is one of my little girl's favorite people because he is sweet to her. I think it is a demonstration that we may see lots of the world differently--and he knows I am passionately trying to convince him that the morality of making people healthier is the most powerful thing we can do on income inequality and some of the afflictions that exist in our society today. One day, I am going to close that deal. I thank the gentleman for being so kind to my family and me. Madam Speaker, this one is going to be a little thick. I apologize right now to the person who has to try to take these words down. Last Friday, we issued the Joint Economic Report. The Joint Economic Committee has a really neat history. In 1956, I think, it was chartered. Right now, I am finishing up the autobiography of Milton Friedman, and he talks about the number of times he came in front of the committee and presented ideas. It is a unique committee. It is Senate and House, and we rotate the chairmanship back and forth between the Senate and House. So, this year, Mr. Heinrich in the Senate has the chairmanship. I have the vice chairmanship. If we are blessed to remain in the majority and the Speaker so chooses to let me keep the chairmanship, it comes back to me. As Republicans, we tried to do something last year and this year, which was, instead of just taking shots at the President's economic reports, the President's budget, we not only pointed out where they were wrong mathematically, but we also pointed out solutions. The hardest part here is trying to get the heads around this place, the thinking around this place, the intellectual calcification that is this place, and get them to understand the baseline math and how incredibly difficult it is. I am going to say this three or four times as we are going through this. I know we are in the time of election year math, so like last night's debate, there were a couple of moments when I had to shut the television off because I am bouncing off the ceiling, saying that is my President, like what he said about Social Security, that if we tax rich people by like 1 percent or so, we are fine. I have done presentation after presentation after presentation here with five Ph.D. economists showing, hey, raise the cap for everyone over $400,000, you cover about 38 percent of the shortfall. Mr. President, learn your math because when you say that in front of a national audience, you steal away the seriousness of how we have a discussion, a debate, a mechanism to fix the real problem because now you have millions and millions of people saying that the President said it, so it must be true. You make our job so hard, trying to make a calculator do its job, because, at some point, the math is going to win. Your feelings are not. Let's start to do some basic education on what is in the Joint Economic Report. I am going to walk through the scale that has moved against us, some of the things in the report that we find very concerning, and then we are going to walk through some of our solutions. The point we have made over and over is the left's tax policy that they are going to tax people over $400,000, maximize their income tax, their estate tax, their capital gains tax, all these things. You can only get about 1.5 percent of the GDP of the economy. For us on the conservative side, we want to cut, but if you limit your cuts to only nondefense discretionary, you can only get about 1 percent of GDP. Add those two together, every tax, every cut, and you have 2\1/2\ percent of GDP. This year, we are borrowing--what?--8, almost 9 percent of GDP. Does anyone see a math problem? It turns out what is great rhetoric, great campaign slogans, is crap math. Let's do some real math. First off, for all of my brothers and sisters who--and if you are upset watching at home and see that the Chamber is empty, that is because we are on 1,000 televisions on the campus, and part of this presentation is not only to Members of Congress but to their staff because often the staff are the ones who are young. We are talking about their future, and maybe they will help their Members understand actual math. We are now at 74 percent of all U.S. spending. Seventy-four percent is now on autopilot. Meaning, 74 percent is mandatory spending, so the next time you have someone from the political class say that if we just get rid of foreign aid, we will be fine, you can point out to them that it just covered maybe a week, a week and a half of borrowing. If you are burning through $8 billion to $9 billion a day, you have to understand--stop lying to the voters. Stop making crap up because, at some point, the bond market will be the ones in charge of this country. When you are borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every day, when you have to bring almost $120 trillion to market this year, both in virgin and refinance, when the bond market gets cranky, it gets really expensive for us. Here is a point on this chart. Seventy-four percent is in mandatory spending. Madam Speaker, you and I don't get to vote on any of that. We have done it as a formula. Every dime a Member of Congress now votes on is borrowed and a sliver of Medicare. A sliver of even the mandatory now has to be borrowed money. When we go home and talk to our constituents about balancing the budget, if I get rid of every dime of defense, we still have to borrow. If we get rid of every dime of nondefense discretionary, that is the State Department, the Park Service, the FBI, all of those, you just get rid of all of government and no military, those add up to $900 billion and $800 billion, so $1.8 trillion, to just make the math simple. We are going to borrow $2.3, maybe $2.5 trillion this year. Now, find me the half a trillion dollars in Medicare or other mandatory spending you want gone. The next time you have someone say just balance the budget, that is not how the math works. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on today is borrowed, and a big sliver of mandatory spending now is on borrowed money. It is math. The math will win, but this place is unwilling to bathe in the facts. We updated this chart. I don't know about the colors. This number got slightly better. I think there is a mistake in it because it is basically calculated that there are no recessions, no wars, no pandemics, nothing else in here. From today through the next 30 years, the CBO update from last week basically says, over 30 years, you are going to borrow about $115 trillion, $116 trillion. One hundred percent of the borrowing over that 30 years is demographics. How many times do you hear anyone around here say that? It is healthcare, almost all Medicare, and a decade from now, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we just borrow, use general fund receipts to make up that shortfall, or will this place have the guts and a President who stops making crap up and gives us the opportunity to have Republicans, Democrats, the White House, maybe some actual econometricians, and people who have calculators come up with a solution to fix it. Social Security and Medicare run a $124 trillion deficit over the next 30 years, but the rest of the Federal Government has about a $9 trillion surplus because their growth rate is expected to run slower than the growth of tax receipts. How do I get people to understand here that if you want to save the Republic, legalize the technology and bathe in the ways to crash the price of healthcare? We have done how many presentations here to say, here are cures, the cures are moral, and here is technology that would free you, give you more time, make you healthier, so can we legalize it? As I have said over and over, this place has become a protection racket. It is a protection of incumbency, not incumbent Members of Congress but incumbent bureaucracies and often people's business models. This board is really important. You can go to CBO and look it up yourself, or I think even Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has tried to put out an updated deck of slides to make it easier to read. Let's walk through a couple other things here. We worked through part of this in our Joint Economic Report, but this was basically straight out of CBO. CBO projects that net interest and mandatory program spending will exceed revenues--it really should say receipts because revenue is something you earn; receipts are something you confiscate-- will exceed revenues by $1.689 trillion over the next 10 years. It is simply saying that if you put in the mandatory programs and the interest we owe, it consumes every dollar of tax receipts. If you come and say, David, tomorrow I need you to balance the budget, I can do it, but you have to be prepared to have no more military, to have no more government. We are just going to do the entitlements, the earned entitlements, earned benefits, and then pay the interest back to our bondholders. That is reality. It is called math. What else was in both the Joint Economic Report and then also backed up by the Congressional Budget Office this last week? In 9 budget years, net borrowing--we are going to talk about the difference between net borrowing and gross borrowing--is $50.6 trillion. When we say net, this is the stuff we have to sell to the public, to the nice family in China that takes their savings and is willing to buy a U.S. savings bond, your retirement that goes out and buys a U.S. savings bond. We are about to continue to consume--right now, China and the United States are basically consuming much of the world's savings, investment capital. We are just chewing it up. In 9 budget years, we are over $50 trillion in publicly borrowed money, but where I think that number is a bit of a fraud is because we also take things like the money in Social Security, U.S. Railroad Retirement, and all these others and borrow that. Now, we do pay interest back, which is something that is a bit of a controversy for us on the economic side because we will show it as a benefit. ``Look, we have this money,'' but we often don't show the interest we are paying back, but we owe interest. If you add in the internal borrowing, the gross borrowing in 9 budget years is $56 trillion. Why isn't there a sense of panic around here? Didn't anyone bother to grab the Joint Economic Report or the CBO report? We went out of our way to write our chapters so they are readable. Yeah, it is a funky-looking book. It looks like the type of thing where there will be 12 people that will read it, and it will sit on a shelf with dust on it. If you actually give a damn, learn the math because we talk in there about ways to help stabilize U.S. debt. If I come to you right now and say: In 9 budget years, you are crossing $50 trillion in borrowing, why wasn't everyone who came behind these microphones this week talking about this? Am I just an idiot for coming behind this mike week after week, year after year? I get people saying: Well, I am going to save a million dollars on this amendment, and you start to say: Great. I am proud of you. Thank you for doing it. Do you realize we borrowed more during the debate than the amendment saves because we are not willing to talk about the actual drivers of debt? It is healthcare costs. It is our demographics. Now it is in the interest we have to pay because the United States is now No. 14 on the credit stack. That means Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today. I need you to process that. One of the reasons the United States bond rates are so high is, if you read the S&P, read the Moody's, since I am told a bunch of people here are literate, in there, it says: We don't trust the United States Congress' governance. We pay a risk premium because we don't look serious about our debt. Think of that. There are 13 other countries that get to sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States, and we are the reserve currency. There will be some troll on some fake internet site saying: Well, if we just didn't give money to this, we would be fine. Grow up. Just grow up. Deal with the reality. I am sorry. I have had a stunning amount of caffeine, and I am unwilling to cut back. If someone can start a 12-step program for coffee, I am going to be your first member, but I want to hold the meetings in a Starbucks. Actually, I have been backed off of Starbucks. Let's do Black Rock Coffee or something else. Interest and mandatory program spending will exceed revenues for fiscal year 2024. Guess what fiscal year we are in right now. This isn't some projection for the future. This is today. All discretionary spending is borrowed. I just tried to create another chart to make the point. Everything you think of as government today is borrowed. Also, in this, we actually think there are a couple of problems on those total receipts. It is a little quirky. We give ourselves credit for interest received but when we don't actually charge ourselves for the credit paid, that sort of stuff. Basically, the point is: Everything you think of as government is borrowed. When I would talk about that a few years ago, I would have Members here saying: David, you have to stop making up stuff. You are scaring my voters. Ta-dah, it happened. It is real. This chart is a little tougher, but I am trying to point out what the majority of income tax pays for. If you actually take every dime of income tax and you add it up, this year, 36.9 percent of all income tax will go just toward Medicare. Then you add in another 36.5 percent. That is net interest. If you want to be honest, you will do the gross interest, which is closer to 40 percent. Start to think about that. In this year, almost all of the income tax is consumed by interest and Medicare. When we go out in time, it starts being beyond that. In 9 budget years, you will start having 43.1 percent of all income tax that will go toward Medicare. Another 42.3 percent will just go toward interest. If you, once again, plug in all net interest, it is closer to 45. That means, in 9 years--remember, we are an income tax-based tax system here and the majority of U.S. receipts come from income tax--we can't cover our interest and Medicare. We actually cross this threshold, I think, in, like, 5 years, meaning every dime of tax you pay will basically just be covering Medicare and covering interest. Getting older, turning 65, and your earned benefits, is that Democrat? Is it Republican? It is just demographics. I am going to spend some time here talking about what has happened in the world since 1990. We spent a lot of time in the Joint Economic Report talking about this. We slowed down having children in 1990. I am going to actually walk through a couple of things here in some of the updated reports. There is a very good chance the data is now looking like, last year, the entire world actually decreased in population. If any of you have your economics degree or actually read, you have to start to understand what happens to a world's growth, economic vitality, GDP growth, productivity, when the entire world may be starting to shrink populationwise. Let's walk through a few more of these. Deficit reduction from granting permanent residency to legal immigrants with advanced STEM degrees. We are going to start to walk through some of the things. We say: We have to understand what is going on around us. If I come to you and say: The population in the United States has just flattened out-- and forgive the little Post-its here, but even our own charts were wrong--last year, the best data says the United States fell to 1.62 children fertility rate, basically meaning the United States population has flattened out. I am going to show you one right here. Let's see if I can make this make sense. We are calculating that, in 15 years, United States will have more deaths than births. The United States, in 15 years, will have more deaths than births. We are a dying society. We need to grow up and accept it and realize the morality. We can fix it. There is no society in the entire world that has been able to change its fertility rates. It is beyond me. Is it cultural? Is it economic? Is it technology? All I can tell you is country after country after country, they call it natalist policies. It hasn't worked, so maybe we should start to prepare for the morality of is it moral to live in a country where you are having your fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger? We are going to talk about why. Be prepared. We are now looking at numbers that we were not supposed to see for a decade, and they are already here. Go to Mass. Go to your mall. Go to this. And realize when you look around that we are all gray hairs. I accept. My wife and I, we are both 62, and I have a 2-year-old, who turned 2 this week, and an 8-year-old. We adopted. It took us 10 years to do that. Yes, I have the old dad problem, but maybe once you have the hug of that child, you start to say: Maybe I have a moral obligation because the math says my children, when they enter the workforce, will be poorer. It will be the first generation in U.S. history which will be poorer than their parents. Is that moral because that is what we have done? Remember the charts I was showing you before of how much we are going to borrow to maintain the benefits? Remember, in 9 budget years, between 9 and 10 years, 23 percent of this society will be 65 and older. It is coming. It is not a black swan. It is not going to sneak up and bite us. It is a white swan. We see it. We are just going to live in avoidance because we have people like last night, my own President, say things that were mathematically absurd instead of using the moral opportunity to basically say: We need to take this seriously. Those children and this senior have the right to live in a society where they can prosper. There are things we can do policywise, but we are terrified to actually think because it requires thinking. You don't need to see that one. It is basically a chart showing the collapse of populations. Let's actually walk through solutions. We spent months with economists--many of these staff are much smarter than I am--saying: We already have things like the MedPAC report that was put out 1 month or 2 months ago that actually tells us that, by 2030, so just 5-some years from now, 22 percent of all income tax revenues are expected to be transferred to just Medicare. It is here. I mean, if any of you act surprised a few years from now, it is your own fault. It has been being handed to us week after week by the economists who were warning us. If I came to you tomorrow and said: All right, Schweikert. We are going to do things. We are actually going to find ways to actually deal with our population flattening out and the incredibly high interest because, in fact, we are just moving back to normal, interest coverage and costs. By the way, we have a population that is getting older very, very fast, and they have their earned benefits. We made a deal. You earned your benefits. You worked your 40 quarters. You get your Social Security. You worked a certain amount. You get your Medicare. It is our societal contract. How do we pay for it? If someone says: We are just going to grow our way out. Back to the math we already did. All the taxes at about 1.5 percent of GDP and all of our cuts, which we should do, about 1 percent of GDP, the baseline is borrowing about 6 to 7 percent of GDP. This year, we are just a couple of points above that baseline. You have a massive math gap there. Our rhetoric doesn't actually match reality. Let's actually walk through one. One of the things we have talked about is, if this data is true, that the entire world last year may have had zero population growth, which is crazy to think about. Think about all the things. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you had that book, ``The Population Bomb.'' The only thing that the author actually got right was the spelling of his own name. It was wrong. The Malthusians have been with us for centuries, and they continue to be wrong. We are Americans. God gave us incredible talents and gifts to solve problems. Why don't we think about that? I want to make an economic argument. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world fought for hydrocarbons. In the last decade, we fought for rare earths. In the future, we are going to fight for smart people. Why don't we start to fix our policies? President Trump, to his credit, actually said last week: You know, if you had come to the United States and gotten a university degree and you can contribute to society, maybe we should keep you. That is from President Trump. We have actually found the economic baselines that are saying you can grow by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars the size of the economy. Just keep the people who have talent. My argument is that talent can be a skilled carpenter or a synthetic biologist. If you are going to grow with society at the same time the number of children--remember, we are closing schools all over this country, except we don't like to talk about it because we don't have enough children. Maybe actually keeping those who pay taxes, grow the economy, make your life better, and maybe make you healthier, we should fix our immigration system. You lock down the border. You don't import poverty. All right. This is a non sequitur, but let's do it. The immorality of the open border and the cruelty, you are the family whose mom and dad didn't graduate high school. You basically sell your talents. You tell your willingness to work. You hang drywall. What happens when, tomorrow, I add 4, 5, 6, 7 million people with similar skill sets? What happened to your income? The data is showing that what the President did on the border has made poor people poorer. We are working on a paper right now to also show that, when you add several million people with a limited housing stock, particularly the least expensive types of housing, much of the reason that inflation and that pricing went up: border policy. If you want to understand why you can't afford an apartment and you are working your heart out, it is border policy. It is economics. It is just math. Oh, David, you are not allowed to talk about that. Screw that. Tell the truth. Let's walk through a few other things here. If I came to you and said, interest in healthcare costs are the primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt. Why don't we find the most moral approach to help our brothers and sisters who are sick? There is an entire chapter in here that walks through the math, and it has a point in here that drives people insane, but the math is good: Obesity may add $9.1 trillion of additional costs to the United States. It turns out that the most powerful thing you can do to stabilize U.S. borrowing and the morality of letting people live longer is take on obesity. Is this place ready to have a conversation about changing the farm bill and nutrition support? Is it moral or nutritional support to hand somebody an EBT card to go buy onion rings? What are we going to do on the healthcare front? The technology is out there. We have learned that obesity is not just about willpower. Our brains are all wired differently. That is absolutely certified now. We need to help our brothers and sisters. The sidecar to that is, we have known for decades that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are over half of our healthcare spending. The dataset for this 5 percent majority is obese. Help them. Don't mock them. Don't shame them. Help them. Once again, when you are having your fifth year of prime-age males dying younger, we think it is drugs. No. We have looked at the data. Turns out, drugs are way up there. Just above drugs is obesity, actually. I would argue this place is absolutely immoral because of its unwillingness to tell the truth. If I come to you and say, the Joint Economic report spent years putting together the data and refining the data to demonstrate that the excess healthcare costs of obesity to this country over the next 10 years is $9.1 trillion. Why isn't this an alarm bell? We have gotten some very nice editorials: It is neat that Mr. Schweikert is willing to tell the truth about where the real driver of debt and deficits are and things we could actually fix. Yet the brain trust around here just says, let's raise taxes, let's just cut things. It doesn't get you even close. We need to change policy. Changing policy would require thinking and we would have rooms full of lobbyists that don't want us to change their business model. We need to have bureaucracies that will think differently. I am going to show you in a couple other slides that you can replace much of the bureaucratics with AI, which is another thing we need to do. I did a whole presentation a year ago which said in the United States, 33 percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes, mostly type 2. I showed you that Medicare is now the primary driver of U.S. debt, along with interest. Thirty-one percent of Medicare is now diabetes. If we could actually help our brothers and sisters, why don't we do it? Because we have an industry around us that needs sick people. It is about the money; it is not about solving their misery. Instead of me being a complete jerk over here, if you look at the differences in how we approach policy, my brothers and sisters on the left want to build more clinics so we can help people manage their misery. On our side we keep saying we are seeing research that there is a cure. Move the money and cure people. Ending someone's misery is much better than helping them maintain it. They are radically different views in the morality of cures. When I come to you and say: If you took this number on, it would be one of the single biggest things you could do to save Medicare and its future and end a hell of a lot of misery for our brothers and sisters who are older. Let's actually walk through actual solutions. If I came to you right now and asked: What is the single biggest thing you could do to disrupt spending? I am going to give you 6 months to do it. I need you to do a revolution today. I need you to actually think like a utopian economist, and you could execute it. Sixteen percent of all U.S. healthcare is calculated to be people not taking their statins, their calcium inhibitor. Can you believe I have hypertension, Madam Speaker? Can you believe I am wound a little tight? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, apparently, I won't stroke out. The pill is just a few pennies. It turns out we could help our brothers and sisters with a little $0.99 pill-bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning, saying, hey, you really should take your drugs, so you stay healthy. We calculate this to be almost $600 billion this year. Sixteen percent of healthcare is about $600 billion. How about just the technology of having this stupid thing beep at you in the morning, saying, hey, did you check your insulin? Did you take your calcium inhibitor? Did you take your statin? We have the pill- bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning. This stuff all exists. It is incredibly cheap. We could do it. Yet we have lobbyists here who oppose trying to get people healthy. It is just absurd. Let's actually walk through a couple of other technology solutions. Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to my time remaining.