David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, what would happen if I came to you tomorrow and said: Hey, you know that thing you can wear on your wrist, the FDA about 3 weeks ago said it was for your heart, it is a medical device. Apple got its watch certified as a medical device because the next generation is so at good managing hearts. What if there is a Dexcom or something else you can put on your arm that is over the counter that helps you manage your blood glucose? What if there is something you can blow into that tells you you have a virus? We are going to order your antivirals. Those technologies actually exist, and this place lays layer after layer after layer of bureaucratic crap down to make it unable to write you a script. My understanding is that the AMA is going to oppose me in my election because I am trying to cut the price of healthcare and make your life healthier and better. Unlike the Democrats who play these stupid games of we are going to help people get their insulin less expensive, let's give Big Pharma $16 billion and we will buy down the price. How about doing things to actually make it so the co-ops, like Civica RX down the street that makes insulin cheaper, why would we have promoted crashing the price instead of subsidizing Big Pharma? It is actually insane. The left basically wants industrial policy to control you. We want markets to crash the price and make people healthier. Let's legalize the technology. It is moral. People have the right to take care of themselves. They have the right to be healthy. They have the right to use this technology, and this place substantially keeps it illegal. Let's do some other things. What would happen if I could adopt artificial intelligence to make your life of having to deal with government better, faster, cheaper, and a lot more accurate? We are working on an experiment with the IRS, and it is still crap. There was a report that came out just a couple days ago saying only about 80 percent of the calls are getting answered, which is dramatically better than 4 or 5 years ago when it was 5 percent of the calls. We have a level of AI chat--because you build a stack and it is just an expert on this; it is not terminator; it is not a generative AI-- that says, I just need help on this form. How do I fill it out? If you use technology, the voice will stay on the phone with you. It will help you fill out your form. It will even email or text you the form you need. Maybe even send you the video so you know how to do it. You could crash the cost of government by adopting technology. The IRS has already hired 6,000 more people to answer the phone. What is the pension cost on that? I am not being mean, but at some point I have got to figure out how to finance these things when technology would have been faster, better, more accurate, and you could have called in the middle of the night. I have gotten some of this. To my brothers and sisters here, they have actually helped me. For the VA, for the IRS, for the Pentagon, we have actually been able to get a number of our AI amendments to do things like this. We actually got attached to the NDAA something called the AUDIT Act. Turns out, I think we are in our eighth year where the audit of the Pentagon has been incapable of knowing the assets. The audit of the Pentagon is a failure. They can't audit it. It is unauditable. Turns out, we were able to get the amendments attached saying just use technology. Let the technology crawl through the data: Every invoice, every receipt, every this, every that, and find where all the assets are. We think there is $4 trillion of assets we can't identify in the Pentagon. It is absurd, and a technology package solves that. I have offered this for years. All I've heard is: David, we can't do that. Turns out, this year--maybe I am making some progress because this got attached. We are finally going in the right direction. Let's actually walk through a couple of other things. AI's integration could add trillions of dollars to the global economy. There is a point out there that in the high end if we allowed technology to make governments more efficient, society more efficient, you could add a few trillion dollars in global expansion. Remember before how I was talking about what happens if the world is flat population growthwise? Where do you get the productivity? Remember your high school economics class? What are the two ways you are paid more? Inflation; well, that is crap because you basically tread water. The other is productivity. Your salary goes up because of productivity. Help the productivity enter our country and the world and let's have a more prosperous country. How many of you hear complaints over and over from patients, from doctors, from hospitals, from clinics, from insurance companies, everyone is mad at each other. They don't pay my claim. They don't do the claim right. We have a piece of legislation called Clean Claims. Just use technology to do it. We estimate for many medical clinics and doctors, we can cut their costs in half. What would happen to your price of getting healthcare if the doctor, the clinic, the surgery center you go to its overall cost is half? You want to change the price of healthcare. Do you do it by just changing the financing? That is all ObamaCare was. Remember, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It moved from who pays here to who gets subsidized. It just moved it to these folks get subsidized, so these people get to pay. In reality we just borrow the money now. Those are financing bills; they don't change what we pay. The technology changes what we pay. We have had multiple amendments we put together to actually study how we can do things better, faster, cheaper, and healthier. Instead of just putting a roomful of people together, it turns out AI can do the study in days and tell us how we can help our veterans have better, healthier outcomes and crash the price. We were able to get this attached. We are starting to make some progress. We did the same thing in other parts. We were able to move a million dollars around to actually administer veterans' benefits better, faster, cheaper, and you don't need an army of people to do it. Madam Speaker, in a moment, I will yield to the gentleman from Texas because he needed a couple minutes to share some things. I will make the point that the Joint Economic Committee Republicans didn't just do the typical sniping at the Democrats or the President. We worked through the math and the scale of the actual problems ahead of us, and then we actually laid out ways we could make it a better, healthier, more productive, more prosperous society. Is this body actually capable of reading a couple chapters, working with us, and saying, okay, maybe we could adopt some policies that crash borrowing, grow the economy, and make everyone's lives better? There is a path. The other dystopian part, though, is I think we only have 3 to 5 years, and then at that part, the bond market runs your country because everything we do will be to keep the bond market from ever getting nervous. As we calculate this year a single basis point--one point of interest is 100 basis points. A single basis point is $800 million, meaning sometimes when the clowns show up--excuse me. The Members of Congress here do dumb things. We can actually see the market stressing out. Sometimes just because someone here says something outrageous, the next day, it costs you a few billion dollars in additional interest. Remember, we are still borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every day. To those of us who are baby boomers, do I have a moral obligation to keep your retirement solid but also not destroy the future of the younger generation? We can do it. You are just going to have to sort of realize the solution is complex. There is a way to get there. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, every week I come behind this microphone, and I walk through the demographics and the debt and try to demonstrate that the primary driver of debt is our demographics and our health. I have brought lots and lots of charts here over the last couple years sort of demonstrating the death spiral the country is heading towards. Total interest this year is going to be maybe just a little shy of $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in this government. Social Security will be about $1.480 trillion; interest $1.2 trillion, and then, believe it or not, Defense and Medicare are fighting for who is going to be third and fourth. I thought it would actually be more honorable to come behind this mike and say, all right, we have defined the problem over and over and over and over. I don't seem to be making much progress with my brothers and sisters being willing to accept the actual math because our friends from the left say tax rich people more and that will take care of the problem. Then we show them the economic papers that make it clear that you can maximize people's taxes for those over $400,000 on their income tax, their estate tax, the whole list of taxes, and when you do economic effects, you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. For us on the right, we have all sorts of things we want to cut, but if we are limited to only nondefense discretionary, we come up with about 1 percent of GDP. The problem is this year we are borrowing close to--I think our run rate in the last 365 days is like 8 percent of GDP. The long run is 6, 7, 8 percent over the years. Does anyone see the math problem? When the left's solutions and the right's solutions are combined, you get 2\1/2\ percent, and you are borrowing 6, 7, 8 percent of GDP, the size of the economy, maybe we need to have a brutally honest conversation of what is the driver of debt and the things that provide a solution that also have a chance of passing here. Here is the board that gets the most complaints to my office, so let's do it again. From today through the next 30 years--and this is in the President's math, this is in the CBO's math, this is in the outside group's math-- 100 percent of the debt from today through the next 30 years is interest and healthcare, and if in a decade from now the decision is, hey, the Social Security trust fund is gone, and we are not going to let people take a 21 to 25 percent cut and double senior poverty and we backfill Social Security. So right here, the new number isn't 116. This is my older board. I think it is somewhere now in the 120, $130 trillion in 30 years. The rest of the budget is flat. It pretty much grows with the growth of the economy. It is healthcare. If you want to disrupt debt, make this society healthier or adopt technology that makes government smaller. Let's sort of actually walk through some of these things. I brought this board again just to reemphasize what I was just saying. The new number on Social Security for this coming year is $1.480 trillion. My math actually has the interest being a little bit higher, and then you see Defense and Medicare. Think of that. When you think Defense and Medicare are now down here third and fourth, and Medicare--I think Medicare is spending maybe upwards as much as 10 percent so far this year. Let's see, if I came to you and said, all right, here is the stack of solutions, in previous years I would come here with all sorts of charts, and I would show sort of my holistic unified theory, saying you had to do things in immigration, you had to do things in fixing the tax code to maximize investment in growth. Over here you had to legalize adoption of technology to crash the price of healthcare. Over here you had to do things to make the society much more competitive and less oligopolies in our economy; you know, big players. I kept trying to show--and we had like 20, 21 things you had to do almost at the same time. I felt like I was making no progress. The reality of it is, we are in real trouble. A couple weeks ago I came here and did the demographics, and I knew everyone was right on the edge of their seats wanting to understand the demographics, except demographics is your destiny. In 15 years, we model this country has more deaths than births. Understand what is going on. Yet, you have your Medicare system, your Social Security that are sort of a pay-as-you-go system, but the number of children, the number of young people, the number of future workers we are going to have in this society--we are in trouble. You are going to have to do things like technology substitution. What the hell does that mean? We are going to walk through some of that. I have a stack of articles, some boards, and we are going to walk through one of those pillars that we talk about. The two biggest changes I expect in society, in the economy, and in the world over the next decade or two will be synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. Let's talk about one of the things on our list of like 21 disruptions of what we could fixate on policy-wise to make government smaller, more efficient, and more moral, and maybe your retirement doesn't have to implode on you, and maybe my little kids--yes, I have young kids--have a future because the math says right now that child that is young today will be poorer than their parents. It is the first time in U.S. history when the expectation is, the math says, this young generation is going to be poorer. Does anyone see just the apocalyptic immorality in that? So what is going on here? Why are we so terrified to tell the truth? Mr. Speaker, I will tell you one of the reasons you should tell the truth. You come here and walk people through the actual math of Social Security and Medicare, how we are going to save it, what we have to do, and you will get attack ads because, God forbid, you told the truth. This side particularly over there cares much more about winning the next election than saving this country, saving your retirement, the morality of you receiving the earned benefits you worked for. It is because the politics are so much more important. Winning the next election is so much more important than doing what is right. Let's actually sort of walk through some ideas here. First off, I am going to do this in the next couple of weeks. There are now starting to be economic models and discussions talking about how the debt is going to make us all poorer and how it is starting to do that. The fact is, as far as your taxes, I have shown things here where every dime a Member of Congress votes on today is on borrowed money. So far this fiscal year, every dime of discretionary, every dime of defense, and, actually, one-quarter of Medicare are on borrowed money. The fact is that this year, you are going to spend about $1.2 trillion of your tax receipts in interest. Remember, Mr. Speaker, over the last 12 months, I think we have had 1 or 2 months, maybe 3 months, where we actually had to borrow money to pay for our borrowed money to pay the interest. Think about that, Mr. Speaker. The fact of the matter is that now we are starting to see the economists do articles explaining we are all going to be poorer because of the financing costs now on this debt and deficit. Let's actually walk through what you would do if I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said that you live in a time of miracles. We are curing diseases, and we are going to cure more diseases. We don't have to live with misery. We are on the cusp of having major disruptions in diabetes and other diseases. We could make government more efficient and smaller. Let's actually just talk about artificial intelligence tonight. There is an article from Stars and Stripes talking about the Pentagon being substantially unauditable. We do not know where almost $4 trillion in assets are. There are parts of this article and parts of other articles here talking about the Pentagon buying things because they don't know if they have it in inventory. There are other articles saying that we could actually use technology to crawl through government, and it would be the ultimate whistleblower. Some of us have been trying, saying: Why don't we do something creative? Mr. Speaker, I need you to think, if you watch too much cable television over here, AI is going to destroy the world. There is generative artificial intelligence that crawls through and can write its code. Over here is a stack that just wants accounting data, that just is looking for assets, inventories, liabilities, and those things. That is what we are talking about at this moment. How about if we did something creative? If you have just had I think the eighth year where the Pentagon has functionally come back as unauditable because we cannot do the asset list, how about allowing an artificial intelligence crawler, an artificial intelligence accounting package, to go up and down those assets lists and identify what we own, what we don't own, what we think we have, what we don't think we have, and what we really own so you don't get crazy articles like this one from Stars and Stripes basically saying: This was not surprising. Pentagon again failed its audit, and $3.8 trillion in military assets, we are not sure where the hell they are. We are going to offer this as an amendment in the next day or so on the national defense authorization bill. We will see if our brothers and sisters here are willing to say maybe some technology is better than building after building full of people looking at accounting lists unable to figure out what the hell it says. Maybe we should actually protect the American taxpayer but also protect our national defense by knowing what we own and what we don't own. It is a simple solution. It is also the adoption and the future of what could we do in this government if we would allow artificial intelligence crawlers to go up and down inventories, assets, where there is misallocation, where there is proper allocation, and where there are people who may be playing games with resources. Why wouldn't we do that? The Government Accountability Office can only do so much, but the crowdsourcing of the data, the constant crawling, this exists today. Let's do it. It is just, once again, the concept of: Can we use technology to make government smaller? Of course, we can. Mr. Speaker, I have to be brutally honest. Here is an article that was talking about using artificial intelligence in certain parts of healthcare. It was a crash and burn, but if you actually get into the academic article, they were using ChatGPT. May I suggest you don't try to use chat as your diagnostician? However, it turns out I have four or five times more articles talking about when they use specific artificial intelligence designed to look at cancer and other things. It was remarkable. Let's actually sort of go on through the changing of government. What would happen if you have had the experience of trying to call the IRS and sit on hold, and then you get to someone and talk to someone who may not have the specialty, may not understand what you are asking. There is an experiment. I have to give the IRS credit on this one. It is a small experiment. They did it last tax season and this tax season: For a small portion, when you called, you were actually talking to a chat AI. Think about the experiment that they agreed to do and where this may take us. Imagine if you called the IRS, Mr. Speaker, and it stays on the phone with you because it picks up the phone because it has ultimate capacity because you are actually talking to a plain language computer that sounds every bit like a person. It stays on the phone with you, listens to you, and walks you through how to fill out your form. If you need the form, it can email it to you. It can text it to you. It can even walk you through other forms you might need because of what you are doing. That is morality, and it would make government less expensive. It would shrink the size of government. This is heresy and brutal, but the fact of the matter is that people are really expensive in government. One of the ways you can start cutting budgets, yet you still want efficiency and the morality of accessibility for the public, Mr. Speaker, is to start thinking about many government agencies because they are always marching in here complaining that they can't hire anyone. Well, let's replace those slots with technology that will give you the answers you are looking for because it has the full information set in front of it. This is the moral way to do it. Let's walk through some of this more. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, right now and said: What is the most powerful thing you could do if I only gave you several months and you had to come up with some way to disrupt the cost of healthcare? We estimate and have multiple academic articles that say that about 16 percent of all healthcare spending is people failing to stay on their pharmaceutical regime. They have hypertension. They don't take their calcium inhibitor. They have cholesterol that is clogging their arteries. They don't take their statin. They don't adhere. It turns out you could do things just like this where is it really artificial intelligence or just using basic technology where the pill bottle cap beeps at you and says: Hey, you haven't opened me today, and it is really important because this pill only costs 7 cents, but if you stroke out, it could be $1 million. It turns out on my next board I think there is a math problem here. This one basically says that the estimate for people not taking their prescriptions is $528 billion per year. My math was closer to $600 billion. I think my math is right, because if it is 16, 17 percent of all healthcare spent, this is simple. It is moral. It is not really artificial intelligence, but it is use of technology to crash the price of delivering healthcare. We have had pieces of legislation in this place for years saying: Why don't we just start drug adherence so people stay healthier? David, we can't run a bill like that. We would have to explain it. Mr. Speaker, here is an article I grabbed just 2 days ago about the largest ever antibiotic discovery by artificial intelligence. We just discovered a whole new category of antibiotics. Mr. Speaker, do you remember the panic over the previous couple of years that so many of our antibiotics were becoming inefficient and superbugs? Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Artificial intelligence may have just discovered new ones to actually work through it. This is an Apple Watch on here, but about 3 weeks ago, Apple just got its next generation of watch approved by the FDA for monitoring your heart. Now, the heart portion of it is a medical device. Mr. Speaker, I want you to think about the morality. We keep talking about how we keep our brothers and sisters healthier, yet we are heading toward a world--and I am going to show some more boards in this concept--where you can have it on your wrist, the thing you are able to blow into, the thing you lick, the sort of personal medical lab you can have in your home medicine cabinet or on your body. I met with some folks a week ago. Forgive me if I mispronounce this, sepsis. You had surgery, and once the doctors, nurses, and medical professionals see it, it is often really dangerous, but using AI and a couple sensors on your body, they can see the tiny movements in temperature and the tiny changes in respiration and know there is something going on and know there is something that has to be dealt with. How much healthier would we be by just adopting that bit of technology? It is here. It is here already, and now we are living in a world where you can actually have a medical lab attached to you. Why don't we actually legalize some of this technology? The thing you can blow into that has an incredibly high level of accuracy can tell you that you have a virus, can bang off your phone your medical records and know you are not allergic to a certain antiviral and order your antivirals. You know that is essentially illegal in this country. Your ability to have that breath biopsy, that flu kazoo, is functionally illegal, but it would help crash the price of healthcare, and you would be healthier. There is an army of people in these hallways around here demanding that we need to subsidize more people because we don't have enough medical professionals because we are getting older. Yes, we have been talking about that for years. Maybe we could do some substitution effects with technology and the morality of having a healthier society. Mr. Speaker, we are about to see a revolution in cures. One of our arguments is that the most moral thing this Congress can do is not help you maintain your misery. It is one of my great angers at our Democrat colleagues. You realize they passed legislation that functionally hands $16 billion of your tax money to Big Pharma. Yes, I am using their language, not mine, their language, Big Pharma. We are going to give $16 billion to buy down the price of insulin. At the same time, 75 miles from here, there is a co-op making three types of generic insulin. Go look them up, Civic RX. Three types are cheaper than the subsidized price, but the Democrats have an ability to basically have it both ways: Big Pharma is evil. Here is some cash. Here is $16 billion. Their idea of morality is that they are going to functionally finance your misery. Over on our side, I have been passionately trying to get this place to fixate on some of the cures. We think we are getting close to a cure for type 1. There are some miracles happening on type 2. Actually, in a week, this Friday, we are going to publish a report in the Joint Economic Committee that I am going to get crap for, but you are going to see a top line number that, over the next 10 years, obesity will cost this country as high as $9.1 trillion over the next 10 years, the single biggest spend in this government. Our brothers and sisters are dying. I think we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger. Think of that. You have a country where people's life expectancy is falling. We are going to pass a farm bill, nutrition support, and not actually think about should it actually be nutrition support, or is it calorie support? This government fights against itself. We actually give you an EBT card to go buy onion rings, and on this side we are going to cover your healthcare costs when you are sick. Have we lost our--yes, we have lost our minds, but we are actually seeing all sorts of data, and I have some of the articles here. AI tool finds variant for heart disease. AI figured out there are 17 genes to look at that will actually give us an indicator if you are going to have certain types of heart disease. AI traces mysterious metastatic cancer to its source. This is one of the most fascinating, and I actually have almost a binder just on this one. How Google's new AI could revolutionize medicine, but if you go on there because I know all of you are really smart and you read this crazy stuff--I mean, you have all read about the Google Fold, folding of protein over certain things so it can be actually delivered and actually withstand in your body and actually start to help cure you. You live in the time of miracles, and this place here is one of the biggest barriers to those miracles coming to market. It is absolutely immoral. FDA does some amazing things, but it was designed decades and decades and decades ago. We have these things called supercomputers today. We have AI that can grind through data and look at article after article and population statistics and these things. There is actually lots of data right now saying we can cut the time down in half bringing cures and miracles to market. I would argue this is our obligation. This is people's lives. Besides the fact of the morality, it is also really good economics and would be great for the borrowing. Remember, we are hovering between sort of $80,000 and $100,000 a second in borrowing. The majority of that growth in borrowing is interest and healthcare costs. Crash the price of healthcare. Incorporating AI creates cost savings. We actually had some success in this idea last week. We were able to get two AI amendments attached to the VA bill, just to actually start with the claims side, the bureaucracy side, to actually move some of that faster. The vast majority of our brothers and sisters here, it started to pass. Even though maybe the union didn't like it, but this is the right thing to do. We started. We actually got another one passed. This is just for the VA, but toward studying how we streamline and mitigate the financing mechanisms to make the VA more efficient and much more nimble and actually reduce the cost. These are just inch by inch by inch. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oh, heaven forbid. I don't know if I could actually talk any faster. I'm so sorry. Sometimes I start to talk like a machine gun. Mr. Speaker, another piece of legislation we have is you talk to doctors' offices, you talk to surgery centers, you talk to clinics, and they will tell you half their cost is just administrative, the people having to do the back paperwork, the people in the front office. Just walk through a concept because this actually exists today. You walk up to the counter in your surgery center or your doctor's office. You talk to a screen, and it writes down. You don't actually have to fill out the little thing on the pad. You say: Hi, I am David, and here is my number. Here is this. Here is that. In the back office, they use technology, not a room full of clerks doing paperwork to fight back and forth with the insurance company. You could crash the price of a healthcare clinic in half. We already have some companies starting to do this. Mr. Speaker, we have another one that starts to actually help the concept of telehealth. Why isn't it digital health, the ability to use technology to help you take care of yourself? Then, article after article that we live in the time of miracles. How do I get my brothers and sisters here to help us realize if we would just change some of the incentives in this place? There is another generation of miracle drugs coming. There is actually the ability of another generation of things that cure people. I keep trying to argue here. You want to crash the debt and deficits? You want to crash spending? Cure diseases. Make people's lives less miserable. There will be armies of lobbyists in our hallways because these disrupt their business models. I am going to ask our brothers and sisters here to do the right thing. Don't be afraid of the technology. The disruption is the morality, is the future, and is one of the ways and just one of the levers that we save ourselves from this crashing and crushing debt. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I thank the Chairmen, and one of my favorite ranking members. Mr. Chairman, part of what we are trying to accomplish here--we are going to have two amendments basically in different categories doing this--is if we look over some of the GAO reports from the last couple of years, some of the issues we have had in claims payment processing, if we actually look at the last GAO line items, long-term services support, GAO thought there was about $38 billion in questionable issues. If we come down on even some of the pension processing, there is about $10 billion in questions. We are in the age of sort of a miracle of technology. We also know, when we read over some of the reports coming out of the VA, there are issues on trying to hire staff, trying to hire staff that is qualified, to handle the amount of claims and data and those things that come in. All we are trying to do here is sort of push in the direction of using the technology that is now amongst us. Many of us will refer to AI, but, in some ways, it is bigger than that. It is an algorithm. It is AI, but it is the ability to use data to mine through to see that this is where things aren't working the way they should, here is where we are missing, and here is where there is fraud. The first amendment is on expediting claims. If you have claims and they are fitting certain formats, the fact of the matter is you should be able to go through them at an incredibly rapid rate with an incredibly high level of accuracy if you adopt the technology. Our argument is that getting the technology right is moral. It is also fiscally really sensible. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) for the purpose of a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You have a much higher degree of expertise. Both of you do in regard to VA issues. I do taxes and Medicare financing. One of the reasons we were hopeful about this is because it is sort of a closed ecosystem. It gives us the chance, as we have learned with a number of pilot programs, to use this because we know the rules here, and we are saying: Here is a chance to do a test, a pilot program, and if it works with the VA, then, hopefully, our future is being able to move it into other parts of the government. Am I being unrealistic?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentlewoman being willing to tolerate me and engage in that. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, this is sort of a derivative of the previous amendment. The previous amendment was to speed up and expedite claims. This one is actually now to crawl through, and if my colleagues geek out like I do on how the artificial intelligence crawls through data stacks and can identify outliers or patterns, this one actually utilizes that same sort of data to streamline oversight, to reduce fraud, to basically identify where you have areas that are saying: This doesn't look right. Why is there a difference between different parts of the VA or different parts of the country? The amendment is specifically focused on financial management. Where one is moving claims and helping veterans be able to see what their benefits are and moving it faster, this one actually looks at the books because we have to have a moment of honesty. If Members basically take the number of veterans that use the VA and divide it by the spending, you are somewhere around $38,000 per veteran that use the facilities. That is an outlier in any category of healthcare. Could this help us understand what we are doing well, but also where there are outliers? In some ways, this was a way to help me deal with my discomfort with the costs per delivery. I couldn't identify what was wrong. This should help GAO and other experts simply identify that the VA is doing this great, but we have an issue here. I am hoping this technology brings that to the surface. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, to the Members here: I appreciate the kind words. Mr. Chairman, we are on the edge of a revolution of being able to understand these massive data sets. If we do this well, maybe the constant conversation we have here between the left and the right of government, the spending and lack of money issues--are we about to step up and start to embrace the technology that may make what we do, what we are responsible for, better, faster, cheaper, and maybe in some ways because of that efficiency, more moral? Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Medicare spending, when I checked about 6 weeks ago, was already up 10 percent in spending this fiscal year.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purposes of a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Part of that is demographics.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Correct. You and I don't get to vote on it.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You pay your obligations.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Forgive me, Madam Speaker, as we get our boards all lined up. Madam Speaker, I am going to try something a little different than starting with the debt pie. We are going to actually sort of walk through some of the chaos that is coming next year. For those of you who always hear the saying, hey, the next election is the most important election ever, what I am going to walk you through is going to show, yeah, it probably is, but let's walk through why. How many of you understand that in December 2017 there was a tax reform bill? It was the first time in 30-plus years that the United States had updated its tax code. Now, within that, one of the basic principles is what could you do to maximize economic growth and what could you do to make the United States competitive again? Do you remember before 2017 the number of organizations, corporations that were chartered in the United States that were saying, bye, we are going to Ireland, we are going to other parts of the world because the way we taxed international business and those things. We found a way to make ourselves competitive, and I believe since then we haven't had a major organization, major corporation leave the United States. Could you imagine having gone into the pandemic if we hadn't done the tax reform in December 2017? Also, I have tried in previous presentations to come here and talk about the morality of 2018, 2019, even 2020. We had the biggest movement of closing income inequality in America. It was actually some of the fastest in modern history of wages going up without inflation. If you love and care for people, particularly working people, particularly those who, as is common, have the lowest quartiles of income, go back to 2018, go back to 2019, go back to the beginning of 2020, and understand the morality of having a revised tax code work. Here we are. There is something coming next year we need to understand. Parts of the tax code changes will expire. The reason is the way the tax reform had to be done because our brothers and sisters on the left were not going to help us, and you had this 1974 Budget Control Act that said, hey, you can go around the Senate 60-vote rule if it reduces spending within a certain set of rules. It is called reconciliation. It is a little bit geeky. Even people here, we all have to sit down with the Parliamentarians and work out the rules. What that meant is there was a budget box built in 2017, and we filled into that box, but to make that box work, because it is a 10- year number, we had some things that would expire. Guess what happens next year? A whole number of those provisions begin to expire. Let's actually start to work on what is actually coming for us next year. These are the expiring tax provisions next year. This is going to make sense in a little bit. Let's say right now you make $20,550 to $83,000, today your current income tax rate--not your social security, not your FICA tax, those things, your current tax rate is 12 percent of your income. It is going up to 15 percent. The next bracket goes from 22 percent to 25 percent, then 24 percent to 28 percent, 32 percent to 33 percent. We are going back to the personal income tax rates from 2017 and earlier. The crazy thing is these rates actually are less progressive than the current updated tax reform. Most people don't realize, when the Republicans did tax reform, we lowered rates, we broadened the base, we did all these sorts of things, but it actually was slightly more progressive than the old tax code-- which our Democrat friends, it drives them insane when you mention that, so I always enjoy doing that. This is coming. This is current law. This isn't a proposal. This isn't some sort of magic bait-and-switch discussion. This is the current law. This is going to be part of the great battle next year doing policy here. I am going to show you three or four boards of what is changing in the tax code for all of us next year. Understand, that math over 10 years is about 4.2 trillion. The first year it is, like, 380 billion. Let's just call it $400 billion because that makes the math easy to do in our head. Let's walk through some other things that are changing next year. Expiring 2025 tax provisions. The child tax credit. Yes. In 2017, Republicans, without a single Democrat vote, doubled the child tax credit to $2,000. In 2026 when you get ready to pay your taxes, that provision will have expired. Instead of getting $2,000 per child, it goes back to $1,000. Here is one of the big differences when you can think about the inflation we have had since President Biden took office. If you live in the Scottsdale/Phoenix area that I represent, if you don't make more than 26 percent more today than you did the day Biden became President, you are poorer. Think about that. These provisions aren't adjusted for that inflation. Right now, it phases out at 400,000. You lose this child tax credit doubling. Next year, when this starts to expire, if you make over $110,000, it begins to expire and phase out on you. Just be prepared. The other thing is under current law, you get a $500 deduction per dependent. Next year, when you pay your 2026 taxes, it is gone. Understand these are taxes on working people. This is already the current law. This is coming at you. Let's do a little more here. Expiring 2025 tax provisions. Current status. If you are single, you get a standard deduction. One of the ways the tax code works, the way you create sort of this progressivity is you say, hey, the first block of your income functionally has no tax, and then the rates go up as you get higher in the income bracket. Right now, if you are single, the first $14,600, you functionally have almost no tax. If you are single when the provisions expire, that number gets functionally cut in half. It becomes $8,300. If you are married today, it is $29,200. This is the standard deduction. It will go back down to $16,600 so no inflation adjustments. Your taxes are going up next year. Understand, this is the law. Understand, what we are starting to discuss here is what does Congress look like next year? What does the Presidency look like next year? What is the need of the economy? What is the need of the debt and deficits? This actually becomes really interesting debate at the same time you are borrowing. We are going to walk through, actually in a little bit, some good news on the economy, some stabilizing news in the debt and deficits, but for a lot of Americans, they are already just stressed out of their mind. Once again, there has been 26 percent inflation for my community in functionally the last 3, 3\1/2\ years. What happens in that same environment when your taxes go up? Let's walk through a little bit more here. I know talking about tax provisions is so exciting, but when you pay them, you understand why we wanted to get ahead of the curve and explain to our brothers and sisters in America this is the current law. This isn't a proposal. This is the law as it is. Another 2025 expiring tax provision. Currently, 100 percent of first- year bonus depreciation. Now, this has been starting to phase down. You have a small business. You buy a piece of equipment. I have done entire presentations on this. When we talk about research and development or expensing, you buy that piece of equipment so you can be better, faster, cheaper, and become more productive. What are the two ways you pay workers more in America? Actually, in all economics? Inflation? I raise your salary because of inflation. That bought you what? Nothing. Productivity. You are making more stuff better, faster, cheaper. Your wages go up. That is real gain. The idea behind the depreciation on both research and development and expensing was if I can get that business to buy a piece of equipment where they are more productive, they can pay their workers more. In the coming weeks, I am going to come here and show some of the tax cuts that were given to businesses after 2017, the vast majority of that actually went to wages. It was wage growth. When you raise those taxes, you have to accept you will flatten out wage growth over the coming decade. This is one of our biggest frustrations right now because this has been phasing down 20 percent each year for 5 years. What is depreciation? You bought that piece of equipment. The government gets what in tax receipts? If you depreciate it over 7 years, 5 years, you get to depreciate it off your taxes, right? If you depreciate it in 1 year, you get to depreciate it off your taxes. It is a timing effect. The government still gets functionally the same taxes. The difference is when you have to do it over time. You, the businessowner, had to find a way to finance that piece of equipment over those years until you got the tax benefit, and you could use that tax benefit. That is one of the reasons productivity has become stale in America. It is because this isn't really a tax cut. I would argue it is timing. There is also some really interesting economic data that the expensing and the research and development expensing may have represented almost half of the economic growth after the tax reform. Think about that, because it created a productivity capital cycle. In a world right now where we are 7 years later after TCJA, the tax reform, where you now have AI, now you have robotics, other things, there is an argument that that productivity cycle by being able to invest in capital equipment could even be steeper, meaning your wages go up. We actually passed a short-term, couple-year extension of this. We got it through the House. It was even bipartisan. It has been sitting in the Senate for months. It shows you how perverse this thing is around here when even the things that grow the economy and grow your wages and functionally have almost no cost to tax receipts we can't even get through here. Let's actually walk through what these tax provisions expiring mean to the people of my community. Let's do some math. Here is the first one. Sorry. Some of the phrasing over here is a little awkward. It should almost reverse. Expiring tax provisions in 2025. Right now, per child, when you get the tax credit per child, that is about $753. That is going away. Remember, it is getting cut in half, so you are going to lose that. Let's do the next one. Expiring 2025 tax provisions. What does this mean to someone that lives in my Congressional District? Before we do this, I think I need to have a moment of honesty. I represent a fairly prosperous district. I represent an incredibly well- educated district. I represent Phoenix, Scottsdale, Fountain Hills, Carefree, Cave Creek, town of Paradise Valley, north central Phoenix. If you live in my district, you likely have a college degree or you work your heart out. It is an aspirational district. I have to accept I am going to have higher numbers than a lot of the other districts in the Southwest. Think about this, just the income tax provision. We are not talking about all the other credits that are expiring, just the income tax increase for the average family, and, typically, we model this as a family of four. Your taxes are going up $2,541. If you live in the Phoenix/Scottsdale Congressional District 1 in Arizona, are you ready for $2,541? The punch line even gets uglier. That is just on the income tax portion, not the tax credit portion. We added it up and figured out if we remove all the tax credits and everything else that are expiring in the 2025 year, here is our grand total. The average tax increase in Arizona's Congressional District 1--once again, I need to admit mine may be almost double some districts around the United States because it is a more prosperous district--is $5,921. Congratulations. This is what is coming at you next year. Top this on the 26 percent inflation that has been in my community. You are getting your head kicked in next year. Start thinking about that is what this election is just in prosperity, just in opportunity, just in your ability to save for your retirement. Someone like myself, I have young kids. Don't laugh at me. My wife is the same age as I am. We are incredibly blessed, and we have done okay in life. We freak out on just trying to figure out how we set aside money for my retirement and their education. This isn't going to help. This is the current law. This is what is coming at you. Understand what is at stake. I need you to see here is almost $400 billion just after the expirations in new taxes coming in, over $4.2 trillion over the 10 years. In the same time, I have a society that is getting older very fast. I have a government that is basically buying love from what the Democrats did here in the first 2 years of the Biden administration where they bought and were subsidizing businesses and all those things to a couple trillion dollars. You stack that on top of each other, and you start to understand: How do we do this? What do we have to do policy wise so your taxes do not go up? You keep the economy growing, and you don't grow the debt anymore. You see the puzzle that I am throwing at you? We are going to make an argument, and I have been doing this slowly on the floor, trying to roll out this concept. If you are going to think about the tax cut expirations, if you are going to think about it as binary, just think, well, just extend them. Well, that is about a $400 billion hit on projected borrowing. Come over here. Do you raise corporate taxes, because C corporations, their tax cuts are locked into the code. Well, you just slowed down the economy. How about we do some other things? Instead of making it sort of binary about the tax code, why not change government? Why not make government dramatically less expensive? We have done multiple presentations. I am going to do more in the coming weeks on revolutions you could have by adopting technology to reduce the cost of healthcare. In the Joint Economic Committee, our economists on the Republican side are going to issue a report in the next couple weeks. I am probably going to get my head kicked in, but we are going to walk through a series of things you can do to dramatically reduce the cost of healthcare. Be prepared to see a number. We are not done with the final vetting on it. These are the things that are uncomfortable to talk about. If diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spend and 31 percent of all Medicare spend, we have a country where our brothers and sisters are dying. This may be the fifth year in a row where prime age males have a shorter life. Maybe the solution here is not only looking at the tax code but changing government, adopting technology so that government is smaller, changing healthcare where healthcare becomes about being healthy and dramatically reducing its cost substantially by legalizing technology. Then think about the tax code in a much more productive way. How do you design a tax code? Do we have to do base broadening? Do we have to lower certain rates? Do we have to spread it out so you maximize economic growth? It is sort of the old Laffer Curve concept, but I need you to think about it on a grand scale. Instead of this just being binary about taxes, I want you to demand that the Members of Congress think about this in a fashion of what policies are you willing to do to lower the cost of government, so we have the ability to extend these tax cuts without raising the debt and deficits. That is the great puzzle that is coming. You have got to decide when you go vote how your vote is going to manage that. Let's actually talk through some things that are worrisome right now. You have these tax expirations already coming. It is the law. Remember how the Biden administration has been touting: Look at this great economy. We spent all this money. We bought prosperity. They basically bought corporate America by handing out cash. Let's be honest. It turns out we got the math wrong. It turns out when you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we got another revision. I think it was yesterday or the day before. Turns out that real GDP growth for Nowcast wasn't 3 percent. It is down to 1.8. We are seeing a crashing back to where our expectation was of 1.8, 1.7 GDP growth. You have got to understand that when the debt grows dramatically faster than the growth of your economy, that ratio of debt to the size of the economy starts to spread and it makes buying U.S. debt riskier, meaning we have to pay a premium. The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 countries that have better credit. When they go sell a 10-year bond, their bonds are sold cheaper than ours. Greece today has a better credit stack than the United States. Part of that is governance. Part of it is all the other things that go into how the Moody's and the S&P's and those do. Understand, until we can also demonstrate to the bond markets--you ask: Why is he talking about the bond markets? I think we borrowed like $57 billion last week. There is some good news. Our estimate that we would borrow $2.8 trillion this fiscal year may be down to $2.5 trillion. That is still almost double what we were predicting a year ago or a year-and-a-half ago. Now, when you see the size of the economy starting to flatten out, is anyone other than myself getting nervous? Let's dive into this. I would suggest to anyone who wants to geek out with me, there is an app. Go grab your phone. The Atlanta Fed has something called GDPNow. Others have Nowcast. They all model it differently. One looks at expected; one looks at actual data. This is from the Atlanta Fed. I want you to notice something. The Atlanta Fed was way up here at 4 percent. You had the White House and you had the Democrats saying: Keynesian economics works. You can buy prosperity by borrowing stunning amounts of money. Boom. That number is falling off the cliff. It turns out, at a certain point, the sugar high of spending--this is just because I care about this, even if no one wants to hear it. There is sort of this allocation theory. This is one of the splits between Republicans and Democrats. Every once in a while, you will hear Democrats say: Well, they believe in supply side. Understand what that means. If you give someone a tax break, the benefits of that go to where it gets the highest yield, the most productivity. If you engage in the arrogance of saying: We are really smart. We are going to choose businesses which we are going to invest in, so we are going to invest in this solar technology even though 3 weeks later there is another breakthrough that doesn't get financed. The arrogance--oh, by the way, because we hand out checks, these people become friends with us politically. They even show up at the White House for nice cocktail parties and fundraisers. This is what the Democrats did. They had the arrogance of deciding who would get the money on their Inflation Reduction Act, the most Orwellian-named bill in modern history, to things like the CHIPS and Science Act. It was sort of a designation of where the cash goes. If you wake up the next day and there is a technology breakthrough, with that allocation theory--if you had done some of those same dollars in tax reform, the money goes to where it maximizes productivity, wage growth, and it becomes part of the base of the economy where it is the new cornerstone of the next generation of economic growth. This one buys you lots of political power. This one actually buys you the morality of prosperity. You are starting to see it. Mark my word, watch the data coming in on GDP and the size of the economy. I am not terrified yet. I am not that worried yet, but the fact of the matter is, when you start to see numbers predicting--we went from 4 to almost 1.8 in a matter of weeks. Something's wrong out there. What happens to that debt and deficit when we roll over economically? What would happen if we hit even a short-term recession? This is one of the other great frauds around here. In my time here, I have never seen revisions in the economic data like we have been seeing these last several months, revisions where you get this great headline and everybody applauds: Keynesian economics managed the economy. Industrial planning, it works, you see here. Then they don't mention that 6 weeks later those numbers are being revised way down because you have got your political pop already. Some of the revisions of the fourth-quarter wage and salaries, we had to revise down again another $73 billion. Some of this is from sampling errors, actually some there were complications. This isn't a conspiracy. It just turns out the economy is different today than it was before the pandemic, a number of people work at home, this and that, the way we sample. We have to modernize our data. It turns out, this may explain why tax receipts aren't where the size of the economy should be. At the same time, we are trying to figure out the growth of the debt and deficits when we keep being told how great the economy is. Now that it starts to roll over on us, we start to understand. Just a couple of other geeky things. Over the past four quarters, the total public debt has grown by more than twice the growth of GDP. This is a weird slide. Let me explain. Do not get it in your head that you can borrow at the rate of the growth of your economy. It doesn't work that way. If the economy grew $1, you only get about 17 to 18 cents in tax receipts. This is historic. When we have had high marginal tax rates or low marginal tax rates, the United States gets about 17 to 18 percent of the economy. The secret is to grow the economy, grow the economy, grow the economy. What happens when you know you are only going to get about 17 to 18 percent of that GDP growth in tax receipts when the debt grows twice as fast as size of the economy? You hear the discussions of what happens when you are at 100 percent of debt to GDP. Understand, the way the Europeans do their calculations, it is all debt. The United States, if you do our gross debt, the borrowing from our trust funds, which we have to pay interest on and we have to pay it back, we are over 120 percent of debt to GDP. In one calculation, we are at 140 percent of debt to GDP. If you do just borrowing from the public, which subjects you to the bond market being in charge of your government, we are just shy of 100 percent of debt to GDP. This number tells you it is moving away from us fast. A bit of trivia. Mr. Perry, you want to play? You can just yell from there. I know it is a break of decorum, but we will have some fun. If I came to you and said: What is the second biggest spend in government, what is it? The second biggest spend this fiscal year? Mr. Perry said the military. He is a general. Of course he is going to say that. Turns out it is interest. Remember, it is unfair to use Social Security, because Social Security operates on its own trust fund. It has its own tax stream and trust fund. As we saw in the Social Security actuary report, in about 9 or 10 years, the trust fund is empty and everyone gets a 21 percent cut, depending on if the economy is good or maybe larger. Now, they have interest at $1.144 trillion this fiscal year. My math is a little higher. I come in just around $1.2 trillion. Defense and Medicare are moving back and forth between who gets to be number three and who gets to be number four. My friend from Texas, tell me you like this number. Isn't this terrifying?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Texas is my buddy. In some ways he is much more elegant with language. He has the misfortune of being a lawyer. I show up at townhalls and things like that and they say it is defense spending. Then they don't believe you when you say, no, defense is either third or fourth. Actually, defense spending is what is in the Constitution. We have to deal with the reality. This coming fiscal year, I calculate Social Security will be at $1.480 trillion. The shortfall, just this fiscal year, is about $340 billion in the Social Security tax that comes in and the spending is out the door. That is why you see them every month having to cash in their special Social Security Treasury bills. Let's just call it that. Now, they get paid interest. Believe it or not, about 6 percent of the Social Security budget is actually interest paid by the general fund. In some ways, over here we are borrowing money to pay back the interest on the borrowed money. You have got to see this weird washing machine that is going on.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purposes of a colloquy.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. No. Now, it is a little more complicated than that because Social Security is on the FICA side. Interest is general fund. Defense is general fund. Medicare is a little tricky, because it is about--I have a chart here I wasn't going to use. Most people think Medicare is off the FICA tax. Only about a third of it is. That is the Medicare part A. That is the hospital portion. The other part comes out of some fees, and then the majority of it is right out of the general fund.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You said this, and I actually stole it from you months ago, Mr. Roy. Every dime we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed money. Every dime we vote on is borrowed money, and if you actually sort of work it out on the annual, all defense is borrowed, all nondefense discretionary is borrowed, and about one-third of Medicare is on borrowed money. Most people can't get their heads around the fact that everything we vote on is borrowed money, and over here, it is on autopilot. I have been trying to make the moral argument of what is doable. I believe we could crash the price of healthcare. I believe we could dramatically shrink government. We had a hearing on artificial intelligence over in the Senate with the Joint Economic Committee. We had a couple of experts saying: You realize you could get rid of all these employees and do all this stuff with crowdsourcing and this and that. You could revolutionize the size and cost of this government tomorrow if we would legalize the technology and use it. You have to deal with the army of lobbyists and the army of people from bureaucracies who will knife us for just actually saying that.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. No, no, no. Don't use a word like that. Just morally. Morally.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The running joke in our office, and this is one of our tests for the interns--you are going to be tested on this later: What is your government? In one sentence, describe it. It is an insurance company with an army.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It really is the vast majority of the money. Now, it is earned benefits. You earned it. We just don't have the money for it. I am going to light myself on fire. I am going to go out of order.