David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I wish I had the magic ability to find the powerful words to try to explain the difficulty of the finances, the reality of the math, and the threat to the Republic, but we are going to try again. How do I get my fellow Members, the public, the administration, and the people around me to basically look each other in the eyes and say: Here is the reality of what is going on. Think of this: In the last 5 years, U.S. debt has gone up by one- third. As of, I think it is the last day or so, the 30-year bond is at the highest interest rate in 25 years. We will borrow $1 trillion every 130 days. So every 130 days, we are clicking off another $1 trillion. Mr. Speaker, think about this: This coming January, we are going to hit the debt ceiling again. It was only a couple of years ago that we actually raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and we have already almost burned through it. I think as of yesterday, we were borrowing $89,980 every second. We are going to walk through some of the charts and some of the math, and I beg of anyone who is crazy enough to watch this, is detailed enough, is actually caring enough to watch this, I need you to open up your mind and bathe in the math with me, not the folklore. Let's actually start to walk through some of this. I have used this chart over and over to sort of open up the discussion. The numbers are actually already out of date because we are this far into the 2026 fiscal year, and the math is actually uglier than we expected it to be, but the reason you should see this: See the blue area here? That is all your Member of Congress gets to vote on unless we have a reconciliation budget. We have been using the reconciliation budgets, functionally, to spend more money because of the dysfunction in the U.S. Senate. When you start to look over here, Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, other things that are in the formulas, and interest, I need everyone to understand something: Social Security is the number one spend in our government and probably will come in about $1.6 trillion. Interest may come in as high as $1.3 trillion this year, becoming the second biggest expenditure in our government. Medicare will be about $1.1 trillion. Medicaid will come in at about $1 trillion, Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies. Defense, the thing that is in the Constitution, will come in at number five. Your government is an insurance company with an army. I beg of you to think about the math. If you are one of the people saying that it is all waste and fraud, yes, there is a bunch of that, but it is a fraction of this total. The primary driver, if you just listen to those numbers, when interest will be $1.3 trillion this year--and I am going to show you a couple of charts--in a decade, 9 budget years, interest will be the majority of the borrowing. We will be borrowing money to have enough cash to pay the interest. I have done speech after speech behind these microphones talking about interest fragility, and it seems no one knows what the hell I am talking about. Have you paid attention to what is happening in the bond markets over the last couple of weeks? It is happening all over the industrialized world because we are all on a borrowing binge. Interest rates are starting to move up to points where it is absolutely uncomfortable. About 1\1/2\ months ago, I did a presentation here and showed you how you want to deal with affordability on housing, and I showed you the academic paper that basically said that interest rates are a full percent higher in the United States than they need to be because of the borrowing from the Federal Government. If we don't figure out a way to start to convince the bond market--I am going to say this multiple times. If we don't start to convince the bond market that we are going to start being fiscally responsible, the future starts to look really ugly. Let's actually walk through a couple of these things. Have you ever heard someone start to talk about the death spiral? Look, it is not that hard. You borrow lots of money. You basically have to refinance it, so you are constantly subject to whatever the new interest rates are, and I am going to show you some charts that show much of the refinancing--because we have to refinance $10 trillion to $11 trillion this year, and a lot of that was originally borrowed at much lower interest rates. It is not only the borrowing of today. You are going to borrow $2.2 trillion to $2.3 trillion publicly to raise some $100 billion internally. That is where you borrow money from the trust fund, Social Security, Medicare, which those trust funds are gone, functionally, in 6 years. The $10 trillion that has to be refinanced is now subject to the higher interest rates of today. That is interest fragility because you start hitting an expectation where those interest rates drive you up, so you have to borrow more money and borrow more money. You basically end up in the death spiral because now you are borrowing money, and this even happened last year. We had a couple of months where we had to borrow money to have enough cash to pay for our borrowing. Does anyone care? Are we actually allowed to talk about it? Is it just because around the hallways around this place, there are armies of lobbyists, armies of people showing up in our offices, and they functionally want one of two things: Give me more money or regulate, control, push my competition so I have sort of no one to compete with. Washington, D.C., is a protection racket. It is a protection racket for business models and bureaucracies that don't want to reform, don't want to compete, don't want to deal with that economic model we all learned in high school, creative destruction, where someone does something better. Do you remember Blockbuster Video? If they had shown up here, maybe if they had hired enough lobbyists, we would have slowed down the internet so that Netflix wouldn't have put them out of business. That is how perverse this place has become. Where are my free market brothers and sisters? Look, some of these are going to be really thick, but it is important to understand. The interest rate movements, do you see these spikes out here? These are all the different countries--U.S., this one is Germany, Japan, U.K. Understand that the industrialized countries, we all have a demographic problem. We don't have enough young people, and we have borrowed stunning amounts of money to maintain the benefits. All over the world--and the reason I am showing this chart is that if one of these countries, like Japan, was having trouble a couple of weeks ago and starts to hit a cascade event--I know there is probably no one out there who actually paid attention and remembers things like the Tequila Crisis of the 1990s. Cascade events start to shoot up those interest rates, and when you are carrying a total of $40 trillion in debt, $32 trillion to $33 trillion of that we have sold, $10 trillion of it we have to refinance every year, do you understand the danger you have put this country in? We come behind these microphones all day long. We talk about the things we are angry about, worried about, this and that, what is really good politically, you know, set off some dopamine hits. I know this isn't what we like to talk about in our elections. It is also the thing that will bring this Republic down if we don't get our act together. Let's actually have some real fun here. An increase in dependency on the market-based--the reason I am showing you this chart is one of the things that is happening around the world and been happening to U.S. debt for the last couple of years is a lot of the Federal Reserve banks of different countries have been sort of holding their amount of U.S. debt steady as we are still borrowing more money, meaning more and more of our debt is being purchased by bond houses, trading houses. If you actually are someone who is crazy enough to watch bond futures and how many basis points they move, this is one of the things that should scare you. The debt is being purchased by those who trade it, pledge it, buy options on it, sell it. There is an argument that we have much more fragility. When the central Bank of Japan or Germany or someone else buys U.S. debt, they are holding it basically as an offset to their own currency, and it is stable. We don't have to worry about them throwing it into the market. A whole portion of our debt today is in play, so those of you who used to say: I don't want other countries buying our debt--I can show you chart after chart. We buy their stuff. If they are willing to buy our debt, it pushes down our interest rates, and if it is their central banks buying it, it actually makes our debt more stable. Let's actually start to understand how dangerous what is going on is. U.S. 10-year yields are among the highest in the G10. I will tell you, today Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Start to understand this: The only country right now in our 10-year bond as a peak of the G10 is Great Britain. They pay a higher interest rate. We hit 4.8 today. We are the red chart here. When you start to realize Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan--but Spain and Greece also are selling 10-year bonds cheaper than the United States. I believe we are like 13 or 14 in the debt stack of industrialized countries. Meaning, the market has decided they are more creditworthy than the United States even though we are the reserve currency of the world. Doesn't that set off some alarm bells to anyone with an intellect? So, more charts. Let's see if I am making a point yet. U.S. 10-year yields are among the highest in the G10. You start to take a look at what is going on, and we are up here. You must understand it is not only the bonds we can sell, but the interest rates carry. There is a risk premium. In the bond market we call it a term premium on U.S. debt. Shouldn't this actually drive us crazy? If you actually look at the compounding piling of new debt being sold--remember, in the United States this year--and we have a fairly decent economy--for every dollar we are taking in in tax collection, we are spending $1.40. It is actually better than last year. Last year for every $1 we took in, we spent $1.43. Mr. Speaker, $1 in, $1.40 out? Come on, people. Yet, I see polling. None of this is an election issue because we have a public that wants things. I am sorry. I have done all these budget presentations in my own State. I love my State. I represent one of the greatest districts on Earth, but I have even done some in other places around the country. The number of times I will spend 45 minutes with these slides showing what is going on, showing data that a child born today--so I have a 4-year-old we have adopted. It is the greatest joy. My wife and I, I cannot express how blessed we are. My little boy who just turned 4 about 3 weeks ago, we need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government. Is that moral? Is that what our country has become is basically screw the next generation? I want every dime I can get my hands on? This is the morality of what this country is. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of things we could be doing, but this game of sitting here and saying, well, I am going to save a million dollars here, because I am going to be speaking here for almost an hour. During that hour we are going to borrow about $320 million. We will often have debates here where during the time of the debate we will have borrowed substantially more than everything we debated trying to save. We are borrowing about $7.5 billion a day--$7.5 billion a day. We have had some days where we are borrowing $8 billion. Some days we are borrowing $7 billion. It is close to $90,000 every second. And yet, time after time after time when I do those presentations around the country, the first hand that goes up is someone that says: I want more money. I want more benefits; I want more this. A few years ago I did a presentation on the debt and deficit and demographics. Remember, the primary driver of our debt is our demographics. I would love to blame the Democrats. The things they did in the Inflation Reduction Act now we are still paying the price for because there was a report a couple days ago about what is happening in Medicare part D and the explosion of some of the costs there. It is great. And we have done things also. But it is demographics. We as a country basically, and the entire industrialized world, we haven't had enough children. We have functionally gone 30, 40 years without having enough children. So think of this: In the next year or two we will have fewer people under 18 than we had 20, 25 years ago but double the number of people 65 and up. God knows, I will be one of them. In some of the reports, I think--one I got from Manhattan Institute a couple years ago--was basically saying for every dollar I will have put into Medicare I am going to get about $6, $7 back in spending. And most of Medicare is borrowed--excuse me, most of Medicare comes from the general fund. This is the reality. Are we allowed to tell the truth about math or at this moment is there someone on a blog saying: I am going make crap up about math because it hurts my feelings. It is not about feelings. It is what comes off of a calculator. So let's actually walk through a little bit more there. Estimated annualized cost of refinancing. This is something that is really important. If you can't convince the debt markets that we are creditworthy, that we belong having lower interest rates--all this has to be refinanced, and we are refinancing it now at higher interest rates. This is what we were borrowing before. Remember back in 2021 during parts of COVID or even a bit after the 2008 financial debacle, interest rates stayed very low and we spent and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. Guess what. We have to refinance it now. Now, often we are refinancing things that were coming in at half of a percent, 1 percent, and now we are coming in at 5 percent, 4.5 percent. Remember, today's 10-year bond hit 4.8 today. The bond futures, if you actually go and look at it right now, are predicted to be over 5 percent by the end of the year, on the 10-year. You do realize what that means? That means over 7 percent mortgage rates on a 30-year debt. Does anyone care? I know these types of charts are almost impossible to read and impossible to see, so come back over here. Do you see the light purple compared to the darker purple? All I am trying to show you there is that most of the future financing is driven by interest, not the actual debt. The CBO number for 2036, 9 budget years from now--and I am going to show you the number that CBO gave us back in February is wrong because of interest rates moving up. But back then in February, the number was, in 2036, 9 budget years from now, you will have a $3.1 trillion debt. Mr. Speaker, $2.1 trillion of it was just interest. Mr. Speaker, $1 trillion was actual structural deficit. What happens in a world where the primary driver of your debt is actually paying the interest on previous spending? The moral question I want you to think about is: Is borrowing a tax hike? I am serious. We have spent money. We are obligated now to pay interest on it. We are pulling that cash out of the economy so it doesn't go into the investment of you buying a house or a new business or those things. Is it a tax hike? I would argue it is a tax hike with interest. Now back to reality. The primary driver of U.S. debt and the debt from the entire industrialized world is our demographics. Here is where the numbers need to start sinking in of how difficult this math actually is. At current interest rates, the deficit grows to $3.8 trillion in 9 years. Remember a moment ago, I told you the CBO from February said 3.1 in 2036, which is 9 budget years from now? Now it is 3.8. David, where did $700 billion come from? It came from just the changes in interest rates. Do you somehow think magically the interest rates are about to go down? It is not in the futures market. It is not happening in any of the other countries. Look at what is happening in Japan. I believe Japan today hit interest rates they hadn't seen in decades and decades and decades. Maybe the entire world is tired of giving those who are bingeing on debt a free ride. Understand, these numbers should scare the hell out of you because you are looking at a world where, in 2036--so 9 budget years--we take in $8.3 trillion. Hey, yea. However, we spend $12.17 trillion, and that is based on today's models. Will there be a war? Will there be another pandemic? Will there be another disaster? Think about what is going on at this moment. I was in the Grand Canyon this last weekend and watched the floods. Is the super El Nino going to require spending? The last big one like this, we spent $1 trillion around the world in damage. Are we going to ever have anything like that? Are we going to have another earthquake? Are we going to have any fires? There is this concept of fragility both in interest rates and when you run, pretending that everything is going to be fine--we are just going to follow the law as it is. When you see CBO numbers, remember, Congressional Budget Office is required to follow certain rules. That is one of the great scams here. Do you follow what we expect to happen or do we say, hey, remember the paygo? The rule is: Hey, if the spending stops in 5 years, you don't have to count it against future deficits, so we do that with things. Hey, we are going to just do this, and then, boom, it is going to go away. You notice that it never happens. Please, I have one or two more boards here that I want you to memorize if you care. If you actually look at current interest rates, debt to GDP grows to 162 percent in 10 years. If you do total debt-- remember, this is total debt--so you are over 100 percent of debt to GDP. Remember, the U.S. economy is basically estimated to be about $32 to $33 trillion. Right now, we are close to $33 trillion in publicly sold debt. That is when we sell it to your pension plans, sell it to your retirement account, sell it to a nice family on the other side of the world, sell it to another sovereign reserve bank. However, if you do also the internal borrowing--when we borrow money from the trust funds, we have to pay it back with interest. The rest of the world actually calculates their debt that way. When you hear us say, well, we are only at 101 or 102 percent of debt, that is publicly sold debt, not debt we owe. We are at 127 percent right now. In 9 budget years, we will be at 162 percent. Now, here is why that should set off alarm bells. I am going to give this to you in two ways. Understand, when you pay your taxes on your income, here is what we call the FICA tax, this is your payroll tax, this is the Social Security tax, this is your Medicare tax, this is the unemployment tax, this is disability. Those are designated for certain uses. The other part of your income tax, the corporate income tax, tariffs, excise taxes, those things are over here. If I say I segregate the things that are going functionally to your retirement and your unemployment, segregate those, of the other types of taxes this year, 29 percent will just pay interest. This year. In 9 budget years, 10 years from now, 2036, almost half of nonpayroll taxes--once again, your Social Security, your Medicare, unemployment, those things--almost half of the taxes this country will collect will be just interest. Is anyone starting to see the problem? This is what you call interest fragility. This is where you start to burn down. This is where you are chasing your tail, where you are actually having to raise taxes or dramatically cut spending just to be able to cover your bonded indebtedness. How many care? Well, the bond market finally has woken up and is starting to care. Let's actually walk through--this next one, if this doesn't scare you half to death, you aren't listening. We took a look. AEI did a model, Columbia, University of Minnesota, the Penn Wharton Budget Model basically built models saying, hey, when you hit this level of debt to the size of your economy, the interest you are producing makes it so you hit a death spiral. Basically, their models crash. We have models crashing at 154 percent. Do you remember the last chart I just showed you? It was maybe two charts ago. It said in 9 budget years, in 2036, you actually have over 160 percent of debt to GDP. You already have models saying we have crashed, the economy no longer works. I hope it is wrong, but I need you to understand, this isn't decades from now. This isn't your great-grandkids who are going to figure out how you screwed--excuse me--what you handed them. This is now. This is in the next decade. What the hell is wrong with us? Let's save that here because this is the point I am trying to make. This is here safe, we basically have enough cash flow to cover our interest and our obligations and still be a decent credit risk. However, when you start to hit 2035, you have enough models--how long is 2035 from now? In 2035, you are basically walking into what is technically referred to as a crisis zone. That is when any damn thing, something goes wrong on the other side of the world--we have a hurricane, we have an earthquake, this and that, the credit markets, the debt markets start to get nervous, start to raise our costs. Remember that joke you have heard over and over? How did you go bankrupt? Slowly at first, and then suddenly very fast. Understand how bad these numbers are. In 2050, we are basically what we refer to as the default zone. You have such a debt and interest obligation that you have functionally no capacity. This number isn't even 2036, it is 2035 the models say we start to step into the danger zone. This is somewhat assuming that today's interest rates don't continue to go up on us. Those of us who are children of the 1970s and 1980s, today's interest rates are still low compared to that. My first house, I had a 12 percent mortgage on it. Yet, I try and try and try to do things. Let's have a deficit commission, let's deal with it. David, we can't talk about that, voters will get cranky. The voters want free stuff. Really? You are willing to burn down the Republic? Does anyone do math? For my liberal friends here who say: Why don't we just raise taxes? Go onto the internet, there is this amazing thing called the internet. Go look up the Manhattan Institute. Look up Riedl, an economist, who did a great paper about a year and a half ago, basically took every tax hike that the Bernie Sanders and the Warrens of the world and shows it basically will raise about 1.5 to 1.78 percent of GDP. I am going to say this multiple times, Mr. Speaker. Just to cover the deficit, you need 7.7 percent of GDP. If you don't have a 7.7 percent growth in GDP right now, you cannot keep up with how fast the debt is growing. Interest this year, interest this year just will be 3.2, maybe 3.3 percent of the entire economy, so that interest is growing faster than this economy is. However, Mr. Speaker, we are really not supposed to tell people the truth about that, so I beg of you, everyone who just heard that, please wipe it out of your memory. Mr. Speaker, if this doesn't terrify you, then you are not paying attention or you don't do basic math. I beg of you, Mr. Speaker, net interest is a share of revenue and GDP in 2056. Now, why is Schweikert saying: Hey, that is 30 years from now? I would love to sell bonds that are long into the curve. Mr. Speaker, you buy a 30-year bond today, did you notice over the last couple weeks we have had a little bit of a problem? We have had the Treasury basically offering to do a twist. Twist is where you borrow short term and spend it over here by buying longer term bonds to try to create a shortage there so the interest rate goes down. When there is demand for a bond, then the price goes down. When there is not enough demand, Mr. Speaker, then you have to pay a higher interest rate. In 2056, that is 30 years from now, the calculations from the Treasury itself, so the Treasury is trying to sell you a 30-year bond, the Treasury itself says that we are over 250 percent of debt to GDP. I am going to go out and buy a 30-year bond today because I trust this place that we are going to get our fiscal act together. When we get down to the last couple of boards here, we are going to start to talk about what fiscal consolidation is. That is because people keep throwing out these fancy words and don't explain what it means. I beg of you, Mr. Speaker, take a look at this chart. In 30 years, my 4-year-old son will be how old? Thirty-four. It is not hard math. Hopefully, he will just really be getting his life and his economics going. Hopefully, starting to consider having a family, the things that I dream of for him. Mr. Speaker, 11.3 percent of the entire economy will be just interest from the Federal Government. Noninterest will be another 22 percent of Federal spending. Add that up in your head, Mr. Speaker. We are basically saying: Hey, we are going to have to have 35-some percent of the entire economy, 34 percent of the entire economy will just be Federal spending. However, every model we have basically says that we are only going to be about 18, 19 percent of the entire economy taking in taxes. Does anyone see a math problem? Time after time after time I have been here, and we play tough. We negotiate for a deal. In 2011, we were going to actually do sequestration. Then the very next day, I cannot tell you how many Senators said: David, we need to break the sequestration. I need more spending on something. I want a new aircraft carrier. I want this. I want that. Take a look at the number of times we have done debt deals, Mr. Speaker. Do you notice the curve still goes up? It is because spending is an addiction, and it buys us votes. It buys us love, and we screw our kids and our own retirement. Remember, how I showed you a little while ago, Mr. Speaker, how some of this is now hitting in the next 10 years? How many of you intend to still be alive and maybe in your own retirement in the next 10 years? This isn't generations away from now. This is us. There was a comment the other day that, well, we are just going to start taking the general account. That is basically, right now the Treasury is holding almost $1 trillion in cash. I assume they are building up cash from everything, from having to pay tariff refunds to the fact that this coming January we are back up against the debt ceiling. If we don't raise the debt ceiling, we will do what is called extraordinary measures where you basically are spending some of your cash reserves and reaching into all sorts of other accounts and spending them. And you do owe that money back. I was told: David, we are going to just cover things off of the general fund accounts. Mr. Speaker, you need 41 of them. Really? We say things and we hear things like this. They are told this on cable television, on the internet. We will get people who will call us and say: David, if you just took care of waste and fraud, then we would be fine. Then you send them the paper saying: Hey, there may be a couple hundred billion dollars of waste and fraud. Let's talk about that for a moment. We are borrowing about $2.5 trillion this year. Understand, Mr. Speaker, when we say waste and fraud, fraud over here is criminal. Waste is much more uncomfortable to talk about. I can show you paper after paper after paper, Mr. Speaker. Let's talk about Medicaid. It is the Federal-State program with which we are supposed to be helping indigents and poor people. It is perverse to say this, Mr. Speaker, but do you know States actually have an economic incentive to look the other way with things that you and I would consider almost criminal or waste? That is because it is Federal cash coming into their State stimulating their economy. So when they do things like a bed tax, which is basically a three-legged stool on a disproportionate share where you will actually look the other way. But David, it is cash coming into our State. But we are borrowing it. My State of Arizona, 45 percent of the entire State's budget--when you look at the total spend, Mr. Speaker, not what is appropriated from the legislature, total spend--45 percent comes from the Federal Government. We borrow most of that money. We are borrowing money over here. You don't see a problem, Mr. Speaker? Now let's talk about the fancy term that is being thrown around: We need to do fiscal consolidation. Yay. How many of you know what the hell that is? We have countries like, I think I actually put a couple of them on my charts, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, but there have been others that did what is called fiscal consolidation. Basically they cleaned up their finances. Greece has been doing it now for one decade, and remember, once again, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States because its future creditworthiness is better than ours. The average of these countries is about 85/15, that means 15 percent new taxes, 85 percent cuts in spending. What we learned is we always have to do the cuts in spending first. That is because when we think about our President George H. Bush, he made a deal saying: All right. We are going to do some fiscal consolidation. We will allow these taxes here to go up, but we are going to cut all this spending. They did the taxes. They never got a dime of the cuts. Mr. Speaker, you always have to do the cuts first. The cuts don't have to--there is so much of our government we could revolutionize: The cost of healthcare, if we legalized technology, if we do things better, faster, and cheaper. Yet here today we had some of my brothers and sisters here introduce a piece of legislation that basically made adopting technology to reduce the price of healthcare illegal, because that is what the lobbyists want. Why don't they care about the future? Do they not see the math? Every single workday I have been texting out something we call the daily debt. I have been doing this for years. I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on Ways and Means. I have been doing the investigations of the fraud. We send this out. I have had more Members of Congress cancel it than subscribe to it. The excuse is: I don't want the negativity, David. It is not negativity. It is called math. My reason--and this is almost hard to understand--is these different countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that did fiscal consolidations, the underlying message in here is they cut spending. Once they had met those goals, they did changes in their tax system to get rid of leakage, but they did the cuts first. Debt reduction in the United States has been and will be possible with fiscal consolidation. We can do it. There are ways to do it, but you have to see what is happening over here. That spike in spending and borrowing isn't a new bridge or new military spending. It is demographics. Our brothers and sisters have earned benefits. We owe them, and we are not willing to do the things to do it better, faster, and cheaper. I have done presentation after presentation over the years of the unified theory: How do you maximize economic growth? How do you maximize fairness? How do you maximize the future to be stable? There are a lot of inputs. You have to have really uncomfortable conversations, Mr. Speaker, talent-based immigration, the adoption of technology, the redesign of smart regulations, instead of bureaucratic regulations. Stop the leakage where States basically are scamming parts of our expense sharing. We have laid out all these steps as a unified theory because it turns out one of them doesn't get you well. We introduced a piece of legislation over 1 year ago: MedPAC. It is this big binder that is on every Congressman's--actually it is probably in their trash can. We get it a couple of times a year. This was the organization that was designed to keep an eye on Medicare, particularly Medicare Advantage. These are the experts. We pay them. They will tell you there is a trillion to almost $2 trillion of leakage just from Medicare Advantage. I like Medicare Advantage. I have some simple suggestions: Stop the risk scoring and make it a true capitated model; get rid of the ObamaCare-type of star ratings, where you basically make it a true capitated model where you are paid to help people stay healthier. What if it is a trillion dollars over 10 years? What if it is $1.5 trillion? We had a preliminary score on a piece of legislation. We came in at $1.84 trillion, making it the single biggest savings bill in U.S. history, and I can't get another Member of Congress to sponsor the bill because you have to get your head kicked in by the lobbyists from the insurance companies. I would argue it is free market. When we use the term ``waste and fraud,'' you have to understand the waste is how we design programs. I guess we would rather borrow $90,000 a second, put your retirement at risk, and basically live in a world where every dataset says our children will be the first American children to be poorer than their parents. Yes, you have technology, AI, synthetic biology, all the things, automation, but remember, you also have a country that is at basically zero population growth. We can make the math work, but once again, unless you are ready to deal with the reality of the math, just to cover the current growth of debt, you need a GDP that grows 7.7--not 3--7.7 percent a year. How do I get our brothers and sisters who are in positions of power-- whether it be us here in Congress, the administration, the think tanks, the groups out there that just want more money--to bathe in the truth? I guess for many of them, saving this Republic isn't worth it. I am going to go down fighting for this. This is an amazing country. We have done more good for the world than any country in human history. If we don't get our act together, we are going to bring down the world economy with us. Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, let's try something I have never done before, but I also need to sort of lock something down. Mr. Speaker, if there is anyone from your staff watching--and we said we would make it public-- my team and myself were made a promise today that when we get back we are going to sit down with a couple of the committee chairs and some of my joint economic economists because we have been sitting on pieces of legislation for over a year to cut spending and borrowing, without removing services. There will be lobbyists who will yell and scream. There will be activists who make their money. Mr. Speaker pro tempore, over and over and over around here, we spent the last few months--as a matter of fact, I came behind this microphone probably half a dozen times talking about waste and fraud and walking through all the things we found. How many bills have we moved through here that actually take those things on? Turns out it is harder than you think because the fraud, as it turns out, it is fairly easy to identify. It is a little hard to stop. Often, it is money that has already gone out the door, so we have to hunt someone down, try to collect the money, and put someone in jail. When you hear the term ``waste,'' it is often our fault. We designed a program that has leakage, or certain companies have found ways to take advantage of it, certain bureaucracies. I will give you a simple example. This is going to make sense in a moment. In New York City, in the last 5 years the number one job creator turns out to be a Medicaid program for home visiting. Think of that. The number one job creator for half a decade in New York City is a Medicaid program. Even when the leftist Democrat Governor of New York says, yeah, it is fraud, maybe we could do something together. We have worked over and over and over to try to write bills. Many of them are very uncomfortable because they are complex. They require changing things in what we call entitlements. They are moral, and they are necessary. I hope I am not a fool. One year ago, when we actually did part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Family Tax Cut Act, yes, we had an obligation to extend the tax policy and do some of the pro-growth things. When we came back, many of us thought we had negotiated an agreement that when we did the second reconciliation bill, we were going to start to save the future of this country, save the future of the economy, convince the bond market we weren't going to continue to borrow ourselves into oblivion. It turns out--and this isn't solely the Speaker's fault--it was really hard to convince a lot of our Members how difficult it is to go home and tell the truth about math. Mr. Speaker, if your staff is out there listening, I expect you and this institution to keep your promise to our team, that we are going to take these bills seriously, we are going to bring in the leadership from the committees, and we are going to pound it out how we move them forward. There is a reason--I am sorry, I don't mean to sound like a melodramatic jerk. How many of you get our daily debt? The Joint Economic Committee actually built a system where every single day, every workday, we reach into the Treasury's management system where they have these charts and graphs, and we capture what was borrowed today, what was brought to market today, and what was sold today. Who in this room, the handful of us who are here and hopefully the thousand televisions we are on, understand over the last 12 months--if I do the last 12 months average, $93,763 is what we are borrowing every second. Every second, we are borrowing over $93,000. I understand some of these numbers bounce up and down because we also had some refunding issues after the last debt ceiling issue a year ago, but in the last 12 months, we, as a government, have borrowed $2.948 trillion if you just want to do this fiscal year. Here is the publicly sold debt, and over here is the money we borrow from the trust funds, which we do pay interest back. We have to intellectually be honest: It is borrowing. Often we quote what we borrowed from the public because that is in the public bond market, but when we borrow from the trust funds--Social Security, Medicare, railroad, retirement, everything else. We pay an interest. We owe it back. We are now at $2.022 trillion in borrowing this fiscal year. This total year, the original projections were $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion. We are heading to borrowing $2.3 trillion. I know it is hard to see 12 zeros. I know no one cares, but just understand, this is really crappy. Maybe we all understand this number. At the current rate of total borrowing--remember, net borrowing is borrowing from the public. Gross borrowing is borrowing from the public and from the trust funds. Anyone want to take a guess how many days it takes us to borrow another trillion dollars? It is 123 days. Every 123 days, we are ticking off another trillion dollars. Total U.S. debt as of today is $39.660 trillion. By the end of this summer work period, whatever we want to call it, we are going to be at $40 trillion. Doesn't this make anyone pucker up, or is the joke that is often said here, never near a microphone because we would be an idiot to say in front of a microphone, no one ever gets unelected by spending too much money because the public wants it. In 6 years, when you are on Social Security and you are getting a 22 to 24 percent cut in your check, and we double poverty of seniors, 7 years from now when we double the number of baby boomers who live on the street, maybe some of this will make sense, that we should have done something much sooner, but math is math. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am a little exercised this week-- and you have been in conference with those things. I accept I have been a bit of a jerk. I am just trying to find some way to be heard. I have been doing the same damn thing behind this microphone for 15 years, and it has only gotten worse. Something is wrong when--I am number four in Ways and Means. I chair Oversight in Ways and Means. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. We have a handful of Ph.D. economists who are just smart, yet I walk into a room of my brothers and sisters, Democrats, even Republicans, with my charts and almost get booed because we don't want to hear it. We are going to bring down this Republic, and it is not going to be some mob coming over the border. It is going to be our own fiscal insanity. Remember, in about 25, 26 months, the majority of our spending, not tax collection, spending, will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. We are functionally an insurance company with an Army. Last year, for every dollar we took in taxes, we spent $1.43. If you do the basic math, and forgive me, I did this off the top of my head. If I make a mistake, send me an angry text like everyone else. I think right now, so far this fiscal year, for every dollar we are taking in, we are spending $1.47. I am sorry the staff has to sit here and hear an idiot like me constantly coming back up behind this microphone and saying the same thing week after week, but what do we do to cut through? I am going to show a couple boards here. If you are the public and run into a Member of Congress or someone running for Congress, look at them and don't say, what more are you going to give me? I want more money. Ask them, how are you going to save the country? Because about a week ago, our team met with, I think it was the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and the paperwork and the discussion I had with them after, I walked out of the room and my stomach hurt. They had numbers where in 14 years we hit a wall. They had numbers saying 12 to 14 years--I am going to show you that I have it even sooner on some of our data--interest is the number one expense of this government. It surpasses Social Security. There was a discussion if we go with current policy--and we are going to talk about that, current policy, not current law, because this is the scam we keep doing here. We keep extending our spending and extending these things. The current policy in 14 years, the United States actually can't sell any more bonds. We have hit the wall. We hit a debt spiral. I have been here 16 years. All right. Let's do this. Let's run through these boards. Everyone has seen this over and over because, traditionally, I start with this one. This is just the pie chart. If you see what is in blue, that is what I, as a Member of Congress, typically get to vote on. Do you see the red? That is actually on autopilot. I need you to understand Social Security is the number one spend. Interest is the number two spend. Medicare is the number three spend. Medicaid and the ObamaCare subsidies are the number four spend. Defense is number five. How many times do we get liberals saying if we just cut defense, we will balance everything? No. Interest will be bigger than all of defense this year. It is not that hard. When we talk about these reconciliation bills, and now we are talking about possibly doing a fourth one, and that is what I am banking my sanity on is most of this red--now, you don't get to do anything on interest. Interest we owe. Remember, this is net interest. Gross interest is actually closer to like--sorry. We will be close to $1.280 trillion because we owe the interest back to the trust funds. The other parts here are what we call mandatory. We owe Medicare. We made a deal. We owe Social Security. We made a deal. Does that mean we can't do things to revolutionize the cost of healthcare and Medicare and make it more accessible, more efficient, more price effective? When we think, we actually will spend $350 billion over the next 10 years in duplicative MRI scans, X-rays, ultrasounds, CTs. How about this crazy idea of: Hey, I got a scan. Put it on your phone so when you go to your next doctor, they hit the button and it is there on the screen. There will be an army of lobbyists who work for companies that make money on the duplicative scans, and they will fight us and embarrass us. Maybe they will hire social media stars. I tried do a reform and a fix on some of the things we saw from the MedPAC report where it was costing us hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, not fraud. The Department of Justice may actually have an opinion on this one. It was on Medicare part C. We call it Medicare Advantage. The next day, some marketing firm defending one of the insurance companies was hiring social media stars to beat the crap out of me for talking about trying to fix the bleeding of Medicare Advantage. That is one of the reasons we get so cowed around here. We are trying to explain why we are trying to save these systems, and there is so much money in that waste. Part of that money goes to beat the crap out of us to stop us from reforming government. Let's actually walk through something, just a simple concept. A week or two ago, I did a presentation here showing you the academic literature and the things that our economists have worked on showing that government borrowing has made your mortgage one point higher. Today, when you go out and try to get a new 30-year loan and it is, what, 6.7 today, it would be 5.7 if we weren't grabbing so damn much money out of the marketplace. We are partially responsible, if not substantially responsible, for affordability in America. But when we go home and do a townhall or meetings, it is person after person that wants more money from us. Maybe Congress is just basically representing the interests of the public. They don't care about the bankruptcy, the stress, those things. Technically, governments don't go bankrupt, but basically what we are going to have to do is monetize this debt. Don't laugh at me. My wife and I are the same age. We have a 4-year- old boy. He was here a couple of weeks ago, cute as can be, just turned 4. For his fourth birthday, he wanted to go to work with Daddy. We need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings, every dime he will ever make in his life, plus another 4 percent, just to pay for Federal Government pensions: Social Security, Medicare, military. That is 104 percent. This is what we have done to our kids. Now, part of it is because we have so few children and so many of us that have gray hair. It is called baby boomers. It is just math. So I'm trying to explain a simple concept. We do more borrowing and spending, but we also have this thing called leakage. That is where we have misdesigned programs, and outsiders, businesses, insurance companies, bureaucracies have figured out how to bleed those programs because we screwed up on their design and haven't been willing to go back and turn around and fix them. We end up having to borrow more money. When we borrow more money, we push up interest rates. When we push up interest rates, we have just made everything less affordable. We have created this doom loop. The only way to break it is to convince those markets we are not just going to keep borrowing like crazy. Then we have these charts, and I keep trying to explain this. There is this concept--it is a big word--interest fragility. Interest goes up, and it beats the ever living crap out of us. Think about what has happened today. Today, I believe the 10-year bond closed at 4.65, 4.67. It is functioning at pretty close to the highest it has been in a year and some of the highest it has been in many years. Let's play a game here. Let's assume that it is 60 basis points, 70 basis points higher than the average we were having before. Remember, you are going to keep having people say: Well, the reason the interest rates are up is because of the war in Iran. They were ticking up before that because of the worldwide battle for capital. Other countries are also bingeing on debt. We have data centers and other things coming to market bingeing on debt. We are all competing with each other. Because when you borrow money, you are borrowing from the world's pool of savings. It could be your savings account, your pension, a family in China. We all put our moneys into our banks and savings institutions and investment institutions. That is what is referred to as the world's savings pool. Ray Dalio talks about this repeatedly. The problem is our need for the savings or the need for the borrowing is now starting to outstrip the world's excess capital. When that happens, interest rates go up. When you take a look at what we are doing right now, for the fun of it, let's just say it is only 60 basis points and it is over the next 10 years. Just that bond interest rate we have had recently over the last couple of months, it is $2 trillion of additional interest over the 10 years. It is called interest fragility, little bits of interest increases, and you are basically borrowing $40 trillion. That little bit kicks us in the head, and that is how you start to head toward that interest debt spiral. Let's actually dig into this: 30-year Treasury yields are approaching their longest stretch above 5 percent since 2007. It is here. It is not some theory of mine. You know, Schweikert is an idiot. He is going to talk about interest fragility. No one cares. Ta-da, it is here. I can show you some interest rate future contracts out there. Jamie Dimon, I think it was yesterday--and I am reading a third-party article--is basically saying he would not buy long-term U.S. debt, the tens, twenties, thirties. Should that tell us something? Because expectation is interest rates are going to go up, because when interest rates go up, the existing bond crashes in value. You have got to understand. It is here. It has begun. If we as a body don't start to convince the bond market that we are starting to get control of our ravenous borrowing, that bond market is going to run this country. Because--what was it--Carville basically said in the nineties, talked about how the bond market basically shaped policy. Our debt is dramatically bigger today, and our competition for borrowing--how do I put this? Mr. Speaker, how many of us believe the United States is the most creditworthy country in the world? We have the most liquidity in the markets. We are the reserve currency, though we are starting to lose that because of the way we treat our currency and the way we borrow. When Greece, Spain, and these sorts of countries can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States--Greece can sell it substantially less expensive. So can Spain. When Italy can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States, should we start to worry? Last I looked on one of my industrialized countries list we were like number 13 on the credit stack. You have got to understand what is going on here. This is one of the ones that just stresses me out. Maybe I shouldn't drink so much coffee, and maybe I should double up on my hypertension medicine. But outside of that, let's take a look here: Gross interest will surpass Social Security in 2037. This is 10 budget years from now. Our math is now saying--now, when we say gross interest, that is the interest we are paying back to Social Security, Medicare, all of the trust funds, and what we have to sell to the public. This is baseline policy, not current law, baseline policies. We have been doing it. I need you to think about something. This is with no wars. This is with no pandemics. This is with no disasters. In functionally 10 years interest is our number one expense of the United States Government. Someone out there help me have the language to move people's hearts and their intellects. This is terrifying. I know we are not supposed to tell our voters this because we are supposed to happy-talk about how much more we are going to give them. In 6 years and 2 months, the Medicare trust fund is gone. If you are in healthcare, your hospital is getting a 12 percent cut. How many are going to get to see their doctor at that hospital? During that time, the spend on Medicare goes from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. It is demographics. One or two more boards and then you will be rid of me. More than 30 percent of the Federal revenues will go towards interest in 9 budget years. We have actually done a stressor on this. So the math right now--and this is sort of baseline policy--in 9 budget years, you pay a dollar of taxes, and 31 cents of that--so this is all taxes. This isn't just income tax. It is not just tariffs. It is all taxes, and 31 cents of that dollar--and in my model because I had a couple of other stressors and slightly higher interest rates built in, but this was using the CBO baseline interest rates, which were already above, it was 33 percent. Are you ready in 9 budget years to have 30 to 33 cents out of every dollar just paying interest? This isn't crazy. This is actually already in our numbers. It is just that no one dives into them and digs through and goes, oh, dear Heaven, how could this be our country? We are going to avoid actually having the conversation until we get back and the Speaker will keep his promise to our team that have been working on this for a couple of years now of optionality. Yes, it will drive the lobbyists insane. It will drive some of the groups insane and some of the bureaucracies insane because they don't give a damn about the future of this country. What they care about is their current paycheck. I am going to save the future of this country, or at least give it one more shot before I leave here. These two are really, really important and absolutely dystopian, and I know it is hard to read. Interest costs are projected to eventually consume more than half of all revenues. Not tax revenues, not income tax. All revenues. But here is the punch line. I know this chart is a little hard to read, so I don't know if the camera can pick it up. When we are saying the 50 percent, it is just the red baseline. If interest rates were to go up to 5.2 percent--Mr. Speaker, what is the 30-year bond at right now? It is pretty much at 5.2 percent. I know that is not our blended rate, but you see the elevation. At current interest rate models, which is actually at 4.2 percent-- which I believe we are now well above because the 2-year is at 4.2 percent. Functionally, let's take a look here, and it looks like by about 2041, which sounds like a long time--it is about to become the 2027 budget year. It is not that long from here--it is half of all revenue. If interest rates go up, this is actually the collapse of your Republic because you will owe more interest than every tax receipt, every tariff, every corporate tax that everything we sell can produce. The interest load takes us over. It is called the death spiral, and we are not that far away. Some of this starts to hit where you are hitting 80 percent, 90 percent in 14 years from now. You have to understand that those higher interest rates actually just brutalize us as a country. Mr. Speaker, and to the team, last board. I do wish you were allowed to applause and be happy for these things. This is Federal interest costs under various interest rate scenarios. Look, this is a little more the way--if you and I were playing economists, we actually don't do dollar amounts. We do percentages of GDP because the GDP can grow. But often it is inflation so when we actually start to look at the actual numbers, we actually, right now, estimate this year's borrowing--now, think of this. The Treasury Secretary, the Budget Director, our own budget team, we all said that we are going to--actually, hundreds of us, I think, actually cosponsored a piece of legislation. We are going to only borrow 3 percent of GDP because we are going to grow at 3 percent of GDP, except we have a problem. As of today, interest is at 3.1 percent to 3.2 percent of GDP--not borrowing. Interest is already over that target. Does anyone pay attention to the actual math, or do we just tell each other stories? But when you start to see the gradual interest rates, we are actually starting to hit a world where I am believing a model where a decade from now, we could be having 11 percent of the entire economy just be interest. Remember, CBO's numbers from the beginning of the year--and the numbers are worse today--had us, in 9 budget years, total borrowing in 2036 being $3.1 trillion, $2.1 trillion of that just being interest, and the math is worse today. We are not going to pay it off, but we can stabilize it. By stabilizing it, the growth of the economy, those things, we have to get through the baby boomers. It is just math. It is not personal. I am not saying something to hurt someone's feelings. It is math, and I know Congress and much of our politics now are a math-free, fact-free zone. The bond market will live in facts, and, eventually, it is going to kick us in the head unless we can do some tough things to convince it that we are creditworthy. Mr. Speaker, I am yielding back because I think I used my half hour. I apologize if I hurt someone's feelings. Please send me a note. I already have prewritten apology notes. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We did what to shore up the trust funds? We did what to basically incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor force if they wanted to? We had dozens of things--I have been here 16 years, and I have spent most of that time trying to get this place to actually deal with the reality of let's save Social Security. Let's actually save Medicare. Let's do those things that help us grow. Let's adopt the technology so we can crash the price of healthcare. I have had some success on the edges, but I lose to the armies of lobbyists that are in the hallways here that lose their minds because we may change their business models. Mr. Speaker, we are now borrowing about $90,000 every second. Today, we will borrow about $7 billion. The current burn rate so far this fiscal year, just this fiscal year, we are going come in close to $2.2 to $2.3 trillion of borrowing, and yet, we have higher interest rates. How long is the bond market going to keep saying we are going to finance you because how much of the benefits that our brothers and sisters who are older have earned we are actually borrowing the money? Seniors per hundred workers--and actually, here is just the simple math. How many of us grew up always hearing you have got 23 people per retiree, and that is how we finance Social Security? I have shown some charts here where in the end of a decade from now, you have about 2.3, and it is this: In 2011, we had 21.9 working-age folks per senior. Today, actually, that number has eroded 47 percent increase in that change. It is almost a 50 percent change in that time, and it actually steepens. Part of the steepening isn't because we have more seniors. It is also because we have substantially fewer young people. All right. Mr. Speaker, 65 will continue to grow as a share of the population. In 9 budget years, 21.4 percent of the population will be in their benefit ages. Our system wasn't prepared for this. In 25 or 26 months from now, I should have double checked the math, over half of the Federal spending will go to those of us 65 and up. That is not half of the tax receipts. Remember, if we are borrowing $2.3 trillion on top--but think about that. Our government functionally is an insurance company with an Army. All right. This is actually one of my intense frustrations. Let's take a look. The trustee's report projects this significantly more optimistically than the other sources. Remember I showed you a chart there, and I was somewhat mocking the trustee's report, basically saying they have this magic thing where fertility rates crash and crash and crash, and that is within the next 9 years, and then suddenly, magically it explodes upward. No one else has that. Here is the Medicare and Social Security actuary's trustees saying, oh, well, we are going to go along, but magically when we get to 2030, they are going to start to go up. This has created a distortion. That is actually why you see groups like my Joint Economic Committee, Penn Wharton, so many of the others, saying the trustees are missing it. The debt the United States is in is dramatically more devastating. Mr. Speaker, 2030, 2035 isn't that far away. I am sure we are all going to get together and decide we are going to do a debt deficit commission. I am sure we are all going get together and lay out the incentives of how we actually manage this crisis. I am sure we are going to do those things to convince the bond markets that we are creditworthy because here is part of the frustration. Greece, today, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Greece today has a better forward credit rating than the United States. We are now 13 or 14 on the credit stack where other countries can actually sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. And I keep wondering. I have been coming behind this microphone for almost a decade and a half. We have been introducing pieces of legislation that could revolutionize the costs of healthcare, could actually make government dramatically more efficient, and I almost can't get a single Member of Congress to consponsor any of this legislation because you have to go to war with all the lobbyists because it means changing the bureaucracies or the business models out there. It is like they basically have this attitude: Screw the society. Screw my kids. Screw your retirement, as long as I don't have to tell the truth about the math. Today, your government borrowed about $90,000 a second. Yesterday, we borrowed about $90,000 a second. Tomorrow, we are going to borrow--that is like $7 billion today. We will argue for hours here on the floor for millions. I need you to see a chart. If this is a billion dollars, if this is a trillion dollars, millions is basically this tiny little--the lack of calculators here is a destruction of this Republic. There are those who actually tell me, David, it is waste and fraud. It is this and that. I have done presentations to show you our best calculations of waste and fraud. It is a problem, but it is a sliver because the majority of what we call waste and fraud is actually the waste. It is the way we have designed programs. Mr. Speaker, I don't believe my brothers and sisters here are actually willing to do the hard things and tell the truth about the math and then redesign these programs because it means getting the crap kicked out of you by the lobbying and the business models out there. That means creating a revolution of taking on the debt and deficits. We will pay a remarkable price for the fact that the Penn Wharton models within a decade had us actually already approaching the no-go numbers of being able to sell our U.S. debt. At that point the bonds explode, and the bond market runs this country. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Excellent. I am probably going to use every one of them. No, I will try to go as fast as I can here. The U.S. population age 65 and up, and I go back to 2011: 41 million. This year, I have 63 million. Okay. Wonderful. I am one of these. I am basically 64. Now, understand, my wife and I are both 64, and I have a 4-year-old and a 10-year-old, so we are very optimistic about the future, or we are out of our minds, but we all knew this was happening.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, and to the room, I apologize. I was doing a tour for a former firefighter, who actually was paralyzed in the scope of his duties, but we were close. Mr. Speaker, I am going to take 1 or 2 seconds here to try to straighten this out just a little bit. The presentation tonight is going to be a little bit technical. Sorry about that. If you don't like math, if you don't like demographics, if you don't actually want to deal with the math I am going to give you, now would be a good time to go find something on Netflix. I have been trying to make a point over and over around here that our borrowing is terrifying, and it is much worse than almost anyone is willing to talk about. We actually had some of the Joint Economic economists meet with some of the Penn Wharton modelers over the last couple of days. When they used their population statistics, some of the coming years are even uglier than we get from CBO, what we get from OMB, and actually what we get from some of the other scorers. Let's actually just sort of start this and put this in perspective and then understand there are solutions. You don't pay off the debt, but you can stabilize it. What is the number one driver of U.S. sovereign debt? It is shocking how many of even our brothers and sisters here in this building get the math wrong. It is demographics, and it is the one thing we are really not supposed to tell the truth about. Next year, there is a model that says we will have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, but we will have almost double 65 and up than we had 20-plus years ago. It is baby boomers, and we have gone decade and decade without enough children. It is just math. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just math. Once again, all right, let's do this. For those of you who have actually paid attention over the years, you have noticed that over the time we talked about discretionary outlays. Today, it is down to about 25 percent. What is blue here is what you remember that Congress actually gets to vote on. What is red here is almost all formulaic, and that is part of the problem. As Members of Congress today, we could all hold hands, sing kumbaya, love each other, get rid of every dime that is discretionary--now, that is nondefense and defense, but it is what we vote on--and you still couldn't balance the budget. Remember, last year, for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.43. So far this year--and, look, I am hoping it bends back down, but this year, the number is even worse. Interest this year, our model--just interest, total interest, so the interest we have to pay back the trust funds, the interest we have to pay the people who are willing to buy U.S. bonds, it is the second biggest expense in the Federal Government, so Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies, defense--once again, remember, defense, the thing that is in the Constitution, is actually number five. That interest may come in close to $1.3 trillion this year. That is about 20 percent. One of my charts is going to say 19, but my math is closer to 20 percent of all tax receipts go just to pay interest. I am going to say this two or three times in different ways. In 9 budget years, we have a model that says 30 to 33 percent of all the tax receipts will go just to interest. So you pay a dollar. In 9 years, what happens if a third of that money's function is just covering the interest on the debt pileup? It is important to understand this chart and why I show it. I start with it all the time. All right. Let's keep doing this. Net interest as a percentage of total revenues would approach 30 percent, and understand, we have a model that actually is over 30. It is actually as high as 33 percent. Here we are. Right now, we are in this slot here, so 19 to 20 percent of all of our tax receipts is going to interest in 9 budget years. This should terrify you. How many bridges, how much helping people get healthy, how many benefits is the interest paying? No. I mean, it does benefit those who buy the bonds, and there is the Ray Dalio theory that it is still money circulating back into the economy, but it is money that does not go to meet the mission of the Federal Government. It is basically paying for past spending. The ethical question here is: Is borrowing a tax hike? Now, for some of the antitax groups--I love them. I would cut spending dramatically. I voted that way, and I am in a tough district. Let's be honest, what is the running joke here, Mr. Speaker? No one ever got unelected by spending too much money. It is sort of perverse, but the bond market will basically be running the Federal Government in the next few years because of the influence it will have and the damage it can do to us. That is a percentage to understand. Let's actually dig in a little bit more. The boards, because I started late, are all upside down. So forgive me, I am going to be bouncing these around. The rising national debt will lower wages. This is something we have been looking at over and over. We keep talking about affordability. Two weeks ago, I brought an academic paper and showed some charts that basically said if mortgage rates--a 30-year home loan rate today is what? Today, it is running 6.5, 6.7. If we weren't borrowing as much money as we are today, it would be 5.5, a full percentage point lower. I was showing how that is several thousand dollars a year on the average home price in America. The next time someone is talking about we need to do stuff on home affordability, we absolutely do. One of the most powerful things we could do is actually convince the bond markets that the borrowing isn't going to keep going up and going up, that actually the Federal Government--and, remember, it is federal governments all over the world just bingeing because of their demographics. They now have their retirement populations. They need to finance those benefits, and almost everything we are doing now is on borrowed money. Just to understand, there is a principle out there, whether it be your home loan being actually over a full point higher in interest rates because of Federal Government borrowing, but we are also suppressing your wages. Because that capital, when it is in the market, helps a business, plant and equipment, keep investing in more productivity. Higher productivity actually means you can pay people more. Remember your old high school economics class? The two ways you raise wages: inflation--well, that doesn't get you anything; it just means your wages go up, but your purchasing power has gone down--or productivity. You are making more whatever you did because you invested in plant and equipment or better processes or better technology. That technology can't be financed because the Federal Government pushed up interest rates and consumed the capital. All right, that hopefully is making sense. Let's do this. Remember I was trying to talk about housing affordability? This is also another chart to just sort of understand what this means. On an average-priced home in my marketplace, which is the Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe sort of area, a home is just a little under $500,000 with no downpayment, so we just mortgage the whole thing. What if you could get what our model says, if we weren't borrowing so much, and get a 5.5 percent rate in today's market? If you actually look at what we have done to mortgage rates, that differential costs homeowners several thousand dollars over that year, just to understand what this does. Let's have a little more fun here. Now, I did this one because I am going to do a whole section here on labor force participation. You go, who cares? It is a big deal, and we are seeing some really funky numbers out there in some of that, and some of it is because we are getting older. Some of it is younger people are entering the labor force later, but there is some hope on that side of the ledger. But there is some difficulty here. So I decided I would actually grab a couple of slides from Arizona just to sort of demonstrate labor force participation rates in Arizona. You see this red line here? So the blue is America. Why has Arizona crashed? Well, we actually had some problems. Arizona, particularly the Phoenix and Tucson area, had become sort of the back office, the call centers, the back-office accounting centers of America. Much of this type of job has now become automated, and now we are starting to see it in our job numbers and the number of people who are actually choosing to leave the labor force because they are older and they actually have given up looking. But take a look at this chart, and you start to understand what we are seeing, and this number is actually fairly recent. This is as of May 2026, so this is old data. We always think of Arizona as being this remarkable growth center. The reality right now: We have stumbled, and we are going to have to really do some things to actually start to deal with the reality of what is going on in our labor market. As you actually take a look at it even further--just because I love my State and I care--this is the national unemployment rate. You see this spiking here? This is basically us right now, particularly what has been happening over the last several months. Our employment rates are actually really starting to spike up more; we are starting to see a real differential in Arizona compared to the rest of the country. This is what happens when you don't fixate on bringing the next generation of employment into your marketplace. All right? So let's geek out a little bit more. I am going to show you this chart because it is absurd. It is a chart that makes me-- Social Security actuaries basically published a report, what, 3 weeks ago, and, yes, I have a tabbed copy, and I meant to bring it up here, but we were out doing the tour. I want you to see something. You tell me how the Social Security actuaries came up with this number. So right here, this is actually the U.S. population and they have it falling and falling and falling. So a little beyond--so call it 2027, and then, suddenly, they have the U.S. population coming back up. We don't see this on Census Bureau data. We don't see this in some of the university data. We don't see this on some of the population statistics groups. Somehow the actuaries for Social Security actually say that we are going to get several years down. The population is going to--you know, birthrates are going to continue to fall. Fertility rates are going to continue to fall, but then, suddenly, magically, they are going to come back. And that is why so many of us are so concerned about the long-run numbers they have published, because this growth rate in fertility population, I don't think matches reality. When you have people talking about in 6 years to 6 years and 3 months, the Social Security actuaries have the trust fund being empty, but don't worry, because the long-run rate is we are in real trouble. But it actually has, we believe, completely unsupportable population statistics in it. All right. So that was my attempt to mock the Social Security actuarial report. I am sorry for me going fast, but I only have about 20 more minutes to try to do this. This chart is really, really important, and it is new to us. So net entries into the labor force. If the Social Security trust fund is empty in 6 years and 3 months, if the Medicare trust fund is empty pretty much at the same time, the model says that if we follow the law, those of us on Social Security will take a 22 percent to 24 percent cut. That means the doubling of senior poverty in 6\1/2\ years to 7 years from now. The Medicare trust fund will be empty. One of our problems in the Medicare healthcare spending is that we refuse to have a conversation of how to lower healthcare prices. We keep having discussions of how to manipulate and do financial engineering on healthcare. So we have turned healthcare into a financing issue instead of the adoption of technology, where you can functionally wear your own medical lab, you can use technology to actually refer yourself, those things. Because we are terrified to actually explain to the armies in our hallways who are here lobbying us that in less than 7 years, Medicare spending will double. It will go from $1 trillion last year to some 6 years to 7 years from now, $2 trillion, and, at that time, the trust fund is empty. If you are a hospital, you are taking at least a 12 percent cut. This is what is happening in the numbers. Why this is important is that: One of the ways you grow an economy is either with a stable or growing population, and particularly if that population has risen in skill sets. That is why so many countries around the industrialized world fight like hell for talent-based immigration. You don't bring mass poverty across the border. You go out and recruit really smart people, because they pay a hell of a lot of taxes. This chart is basically saying that in just a few years, our labor force actually starts to decrease, and that is 2.8 million in 2030. That is how many years from now, Mr. Speaker? It is 2026. So think of this. In 4 years, the data says that the U.S. available labor population actually starts to shrink by over 2.8 million people. Now, you tell me. How am I supposed to make the money, the math, the data, and the finances work for these programs? You have to do the unified theory of--whether it be a talent-based immigration system, the adoption of technology, the redesigning of incentives, you are going to have to do dozens and dozens of things, and we are not willing to do that yet. All right. Look, this is a complicated board. It doesn't work on television. It doesn't really work on a floor speech, but I just need you to understand that what we are looking at is because we are aging as a population without enough young people, that our percentages of who are available to us--this is 2026. This is 1977. It would basically explain that when I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar we spent on seniors, we spent almost $7 on people who were functionally young. Today, that number has flipped, and it has just flipped because the demographics have flipped. It is the same thing as what happened here with who is available to be in the labor force. Much of our labor force population now is much older. The jobs available for the young are half what we had when I was young. It is just baby boomers. We knew people were going to turn 65 for how many years? I mean, this place, in some ways, is so incredibly absurd in its unwillingness to basically do basic math. I remember sitting in a statistics class in around 1981, and the professor then was talking about what baby boomers meant to the economy. Here I am, a Member of Congress all these years later, and it is like we are just now discovering it. All right. Here is actually something--it is hopeful, but the next slide will actually take the wind out of your sails. So prime-age labor force participation, so the people we consider sort of in their prime working years, actually, we are doing really well here. Some of the growth in the economy, some of the investment in the economy, for prime age, we have 84 percent. But here is my problem: Labor force participation of those 55 and up has been crashing. There are lots of reasons to debate this and discuss this. Is this skill sets? Is it the adoption of technology? Is it the wealth effects of as asset prices have gone up so much, we have people who are able to retire early? It is a combination of everything, but these workers are often our most productive. So just understand that prime working-aged people are actually doing really well working and being in the labor force. Those of us who are older, we have been disappearing like crazy, and we actually see that in our productivity numbers. All right. Mr. Speaker, I warned you this was going to be a little geeky. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is going to be another presentation of basically budget, debt, my frustration with this place, and my frustration with telling the truth. Look, we are a remarkable country, no matter what you hear often from our brothers and sisters, particularly from the left, a quarter millennium of a remarkable experiment. We have brought more freedom to the world, more prosperity to the world, more ingenuity to the world, more health to the world. I think sometimes our dourness, if that is a word, our frustration-- and Heaven knows I am a sinner on this. I am terrified of our unwillingness to tell the truth about basic math. So we are going to walk behind these mikes over and over and over and desperately try to find whatever the dopamine hit is of the day, and yet, we will borrow another $6 billion, $7 billion today. Last week, when I did this, I had my little boy, who had just turned 4 years old that day, running behind us. It was so much fun. Yet, the comments we received from the folks who are unique enough to watch something like this commented on the little boy, not necessarily the math. I was trying to make the point at one moment saying: Here is my 4- year-old we have adopted. It is the greatest gift God has ever given someone, and he is healthy. We were terrified he would never be healthy. He was born with rather severe drugs. This government has made a decision we will need 104 percent of that little boy's lifetime earnings just to pay the Federal Government pensions, to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, our retirement, 104 percent of the generation of young people today, we are so upside-down mathematically. I also tried--and I am going to do it again because apparently I didn't do it very well. We passed a housing bill. I voted ``no'' because there were too many gimmicks and it made government too big. Fine, personal opinion. I actually have a background in housing economics. However, not once did someone come behind these microphones and say that one of the primary problems in affordability of you being able to purchase a home, Mr. Speaker, is the fact that if we had a normal debt load, then you would be paying 5.5 percent on today's 30-year loan. Instead you are paying 6.5 percent. Why? It is because the United States is going to borrow probably $2.3 trillion this year. We are crowding you out, Mr. Speaker. We are raising the price of money. I have given presentation after presentation saying that if we keep this up for much longer, then the bond market is going to run this country. We will exist in a fear of the weekly and monthly debt auctions. We actually brought some data just trying to show the difference between 2011, and right now the interest rate movement. This is interest rates. We are paying 1 point higher because of the scale of U.S. sovereign debt borrowing that when you buy that 30-year mortgage, Mr. Speaker, on an average priced home--and I think we used an average priced home in Arizona, not here in D.C.--you are going to pay about $2,500 more, and over the life of that loan, $76,000 more. That is just the cost of money because we, as a government, borrowed so much. We are responsible for that higher expense in the interest rates. Except for the problem here is the hallways here are full of armies of people coming into our office demanding more money. What happens when, Mr. Speaker, you and I go home? We tell the truth. Now, we make people angry because I am starting to worry: Voters, do you want us to lie to you? Is that actually what you are asking for? Do you want us to tell you things that set off a good dopamine hit, that make you feel this, but don't tell you the truth about the demographics, debt, and deficit? That is because at that point, it is not a conversation of what else we can give you. It is going to be a conversation of how we are going to fix it. The data is actually pretty darn clear. Our borrowing raises your car loan, Mr. Speaker, and raises the cost of you financing your small business. Heaven knows, it is going to cost on an average home in Tempe, Phoenix--not Scottsdale--about $76,000 more in interest. That is a knockoff effect. Let us actually start. I am going to produce a whole bunch of boards here. My rule used to be that I am going to give you the problem, Mr. Speaker, and then I am going to give you a series of solutions. I am tired of coming here with solutions and then realizing there is not a chance in hell--I can't even get cosponsors because it would mean telling the truth. When I have come here and shown the MedPAC reports, there is $1 trillion, $2 trillion of misalignment because some of it is legal on the edge. We introduced a bill. The preliminary score was $1.84 trillion of savings over 10 years just to fix some of the things in Medicare Advantage that wouldn't cut a single service, and I got told this morning in conference: David, you don't understand. It has the word Medicare. We are not allowed to talk about that in an election year, but we will fix it next year. I have been here 16 years, and it is always next year. Let us take a look at this chart. I often start with this one because so few people understand. Mr. Speaker, do you see the blue area? That is all you, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on, unless it is a reconciliation budget, except we now use reconciliation budgets to pass things, not save money. Here is your math problem: As of today, just this little net interest sliver for this fiscal year will be 20 percent of all tax receipts. So when you pay $1, 20 cents of that is just covering interest. Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you some charts here that in 9 years how big that math actually gets. But understand, your government is functionally an insurance company with an army. I love that line. Think about it. It will make sense. Nondefense and defense, that is all we vote on, and we are about to make this much bigger. People go to war with us when we are trying to cut down nondefense. Mr. Speaker, a moment of truth. Let's have some fun here. DOGE identified $0.25 trillion in potential savings modeling. What has made it through the legislative process is about $7 billion, basically what we will borrow today. I know folks aren't really good at math with lots of zeros. Our government borrows about $1 million every 13 seconds or so. In 13, 13.5 seconds, we borrow $1 million, and then $1 million. So often we will have debates here and say that this will save $3 million. I try to explain that it barely covered 30-some seconds of borrowing. We are now borrowing about 90--if you do just this fiscal year so far, so just this fiscal year, about $73,000 a second. If you do the last 12 months--understand there is a blip in there because we had the extraordinary measures where we didn't have a debt ceiling and we had to refund it. But if you do the last 12 months, we are borrowing about $98,000 per second. I know everyone is going to talk about that, right? All right, let's get to the math. Let's do some speed dating on math. Do you see this chart, Mr. Speaker? This is basically to make a point. We are in the OECD, basically the organization of developed economies. Do you notice the red one down here, Mr. Speaker? If you add up everything, Mr. Speaker, we are borrowing 7.9 percent of our entire economy. We are the worst in the entire industrialized world. Mr. Speaker, if you actually start to take a look, you start seeing countries like Greece--and those are much healthier than we are. Do you realize today Greece can sell a 10-year bond substantially cheaper than the United States? Of course, we are going to work on that and talk about it next year. Let us actually walk through some of what is going on. Remember, Mr. Speaker--I am going to try to make this point a couple of times through the presentation in some of the last slides--the primary driver of the debt is not a tax cut over here. It is our demographics. Next year the data looks like we are going to have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago and double the number 65 and up. Are we allowed to actually say that? It is not personal. It is not actually Democrat or Republican, it is just math. Mr. Speaker, I am blessed to hold the chairmanship for the Joint Economic Committee, so I have a handful of guys who all have Ph.D.'s, and we geek out on this. We are trying to find ways, and they are terrified with me. I have done presentation after presentation here of my chairmanship from Ways and Means over the Oversight Subcommittee, where the fraud we found in so many programs--can I get a piece of legislation? Can we actually have an honest discussion of fixing it? Well, we would have to take on the lobbyists. We would actually have to tell the truth. We would actually have to redesign the programs. We would actually have to have an honest conversation of some of the fraud we found in things like Medicaid and Medicare. Even then, understand, we have worked on this over and over. It is still 7 to 12 percent of the spending we can figure out is missed payments, fraud. The majority of it isn't some international syndicate coming and stealing money from us. It is things we, as Members of Congress, have allowed to happen because when we find it, we don't go back and fix the law because that would be hard because we will have to take on advertising. They will say mean things about us. ``Raising spending, not falling revenues, have driven long-term deficits.'' Here is a point: Revenues. Go back to 2015 all the way through what we have modeled. You will notice it is consistent. It is basically that the long-term projection sits about 18.8 percent of the entire economy we are collecting. Back down here was slightly below, 17.8, 17.9. It is not tax cuts. It is demographics. Here is the problem: Our spending, when we get 30 years from now, almost 28 percent of the entire economy, but I need to make a point. When you actually look at some of these charts, you are going to actually see--and I am bouncing around--if we do current policy--let me explain for those who are not budget geeks. Here is the law. In our laws, we have: Oh, taxes are going to go back up in 4 years. Oh, that program is going to get cut in 4 years. We used to have this thing called paygo, pay as you go, except in the law, there was a scam. It says if it goes beyond 5 years, we have to find offsets to pay for it, but if you write the law that it ends in 5 years, even though they never end in 5 years because we always extend it, then you don't have to score it. You don't have to score it as more long-term debt. We lie in our budget documents. Here is the current law. So last summer, 1 year ago, we had a whole fight about this. Do you use current law or current policy, even though this current law had all these things ending? So we couldn't win that so we used current policy, which actually gave it--extending of the current spending. Now, when you start to take a look, you start realizing that revenue has basically stayed the same, but now you are borrowing about or spending about 32 percent of the entire economy. Then, you take another look at it: Budget deficits under current policy will exceed 14 percent of the entire GDP. That is in 30 years. How many of you plan to be around in 30 years? If you plan to be around in 30 years, think about this: Treasury tomorrow wants to sell a 30-year bond. There is still a remarkably liquid market buying our bonds. When will the folks buying that 30-year bond start to realize: I have a problem. Thirty years from now, if we stayed with the current both law and our policy baseline, you have about 14 percent of the country's GDP just in borrowing, not spending. It is not in building things. It is just paying interest. Let's get back on track here. This is one of the things I have railed about over and over because I get frustrated with it. CBO keeps having to readjust its baseline. Why does it have to readjust its baseline? It readjusts because things happen: COVID happens; a war happens; 2008 happens; and Congress happens. Understand, if you and I take a look at what were our projections, we functionally have added just about--I think this all adds up to $1.39 trillion in additional spending in the baseline. It is geeky, but what it means is, when CBO puts out a report, it is of what they have, but they are constantly having to update it because things happen in the economy; interest rates go up; and we spend money and don't pay for it. Let's actually walk through another famous chart. Ever since the pandemic legislation--during the pandemic, we were spending about $63,000 per American citizen. Guess what. Today, that is way down. We are spending about $55,000 per American citizen, but over the next 9 years, it goes up to $66,000. If you add up all the spending, add up all the residents of the United States, citizens, $66,000 is our spend. Right now, it was $55,000. Anyone see a math problem? If you don't see the math problem--I am going to bite my tongue. Budget deficits under current law will reach $3.1 trillion by 2036, so that is 9 budget years from now, because we are working on right now--hopefully, we are finishing and passing the 2027 stuff. This is under current law. I need you to understand how devastatingly ugly this number is, and when I show you under current policy, it is even worse. This is 9 budget years from now. CBO last February said, hey, we are going to be borrowing $3.1 trillion that year, 2.1 of it will be just interest. So, the structural deficit will be only a trillion dollars, but on top of that, we owe $2.1 trillion in interest. Okay. What does that actually mean to us if we just--this is under current law. That means, in 9 budget years, 31 percent of every tax dollar that is paid, meaning income tax, payroll tax, and tariffs, everything coming in, in 9 budget years, 31 percent of all those tax collections will be just interest. It will be just interest, and this is on current law, assuming no wars, no pandemics, no market crashes, and no additional spending from Congress. If you come back over here, my math says 20 percent. The chart says 19 percent. Depending what revenues are, it could be 21. That is this year. Let's just use 20 percent. This year, when you write $100, $20 of that just went to pay interest. Anyone see a problem? Let's see. ``Budget deficits under current policy will reach $4.4 trillion.'' See what I am doing here. This one said the deficit--and I am sorry; this is a little awkward--in 9 budget years is $3.1 trillion under current law, but if we keep doing what we have been doing, which is we just extend current policy. I am sorry this is geeky, but it is math. This is going to destroy the Republic. We have made it a quarter millennium, I would like this to be another American century. I would like it to be the place my 10- year-old and my now 4-year-old prosper. Hell, I would like to have a nice, quiet retirement, but in 9 budget years, it is no longer $3.1 trillion of borrowing. It is $4.4 trillion if we follow current spending policy, current baseline spending, not current baseline law. Anyone see a problem? Mr. Speaker, are we even allowed to talk about this? Because I know the armies of folks, often both at home and in our hallways here, demanding more money, telling us they are going to say mean things about us on social media unless we hand them more checks or we do things to regulate their competition. This is what this place has become. I am terrified we have hit the point where, on Twitter and X, someone saying something mean about me is now a policy override over a calculator. Here is one of the drivers of this, one of the things that is really uncomfortable to talk about: We have a shortage of young people in the country. It is a math problem. Look, we are only a couple ticks over zero population growth right now. There are a couple datasets out there--depending on what continues with immigration policy and a couple of other things--sometime in the next 5 years, we may actually, as a country, go slightly negative. You go, oh, good. Remember, Medicare and Social Security are pay-as-you-go programs. I did the presentation a couple weeks ago on the Social Security actuary report. I am sure every Member of Congress pulled it out, read it, highlighted it, and noticed you had about 6 years and 3 months before the trust funds are empty. If we followed the law--I think the Social Security actuary report is wrong on their math, but they said in 6 years, 3 months, you get a 22 percent cut. I think it is 24 percent. If you extend that out, that is doubling senior poverty in the following year. Yay, we are going to double the number of homelessness living on the street of baby boomers. Is that moral? Are we allowed to talk about it? Allowed to fix it? Are we allowed to do the really hard things? Guess what, Mr. Speaker. At that same time, the Medicare trust fund is also empty. From last year to 2032, Medicare doubles in spending. It goes from 1 trillion to 2 trillion. The Medicare Part A trust fund, if you are a hospital, you take a 12-percent cut. That is the law. How many of you on Medicare are going to be able to see your doctor in that hospital? Start to take a look at this. In 2025, people 0 to 18, we had 76 million people but 63 million over 65. In 9 years, we will have 70 million, so we will actually have fewer people under 18, and we will have 76 million, 65 and up. I am one of them. I am 64--yes, I am 64 with a 4-year-old. Yes, I am really optimistic about the future. I am just cranky about the math. All right. Let's continue on this. Workers per Social Security beneficiary. We have got a problem. In 2011 we had 2.9. In 2025, last year, we had 2.7. It continues to do this. It is a little hard to do as a pay-as-you-go program. That is why every month when Social Security checks go out the door, the Social Security administrator reaches over to their special Treasury bills and say, Treasury, we are short because the payroll taxes don't cover all the checks going out the door. Give us some of our money back. That goes on and on for about another 6 years and 3 months, and then they don't have any more to cash in. Seniors per 100 working-age adults. 2011, we had 21.9 seniors per 100 people in the labor force. Last year, it is now 32. I am just trying to pound this point in. We prefer it to be: Oh, it is horrible Democrat policy. And they say: Oh, it is a tax policy. I have already shown you the percentage of the economy that we take in in taxes has stayed remarkably stable. The economy grows so you may have a lower tax rate but, because the economy is bigger, you are still taking in the same percentages of the GDP. U.S. population age 65 and up. 2011, we had 41 million. 2026--this is a projection for this year--we have 63 million. Estimated share of outlays by group. I know there are a lot of bars on this chart. The punch line here is actually very simple. In about 25, maybe 26 months, over half of the Federal Government spending will go to those 65 and up. Now, why is this important? Now, remember, think of baby boomers as large demographic quartiles. When I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar for seniors, there was $7 spent for those functioning under 18. That is almost reverse now. It is not really about a change in policy. It is actually a change in demographic populations. This is really important. National defense in 9 years will take 12 percent of our spending. Seniors over 65 will take 52 percent in 9 budget years. It is just math. We know it. Hell, we knew people were going to turn 65--we knew we had a baby boom 65 years ago--actually 70- some years ago. Why are we so terrified to go in front of our voters and tell the truth about math? Why are we afraid to tell them that often the crap that they see on this thing is fake? It is meant for you to click, get a nice dopamine hit, but it is not budget policy. I had a woman the other day at an event--beautiful event, wonderful people--I think it was up in Prescott, talking about this. She was absolutely positive, if we just cut this one benefit off, we could balance the budget. We spent a couple moments. We walked on the internet using our phones, and she saw it was like $9 billion was the total value of the benefit over a year. It did cover about a day and a quarter of borrowing--not spending, borrowing. She was devastated. It was as if I said something horrible to her. Is that why politicians are terrified? Is that why we are terrified to actually tell the truth to our brothers and sisters? Remember, you have a country that is borrowing about $6 billion to $7 billion every day. I started to talk about DOGE before. My economists, we helped them. I am a believer we have to have a revolution in how we provide government services: the adoption of technology, the elimination of excess positions, those things. All that has passed so far is about $7 billion in actual spending cuts that have made it through Congress, Senate, and to the President's desk for his signature. Functionally, it barely covers one day of borrowing. How many of our folks back home get a text message every other week saying: Are you ready for your DOGE check? Just send us a couple thousand dollars, and we will send you a DOGE check. Those text messages are fraud. The point of this is: It is just demographics. I am one of them. I am at the tail end, but I am a baby boomer. It basically means, in 9 budget years, 21.4 percent of our population will be 65 and up. We will have moved into our earned benefit years: Medicare, Social Security, military or public service retirement, whatever it is. Then you take other calculations that I am not going to geek out too much on: labor force participation, the number of our population that is actually in the labor force, and then we have a math problem. What is the moral obligation of those of us who are elected to actually know what--sorry, I can't curse on the floor--know what the hell we are talking about, know the math, stop trying to sell shiny objects and things that basically are enraging but don't take down the republic? I will argue this debt, unless we find a way to start stabilizing it, we are not going to make it another 250 years. Is this miracle of a self-governing republic worth saving? Then it is worth telling our voters and the public the truth about our demographics, the cost of financing it, and how much trouble we are actually in. With that, Mr. Speaker, I will go back and look at all of the angry comments I am going to get because, once again, telling the truth means you get the crap kicked out of you around here. I am perfectly happy to do it. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is sort of our weekly attempt to see if we can use math to annoy people, so let's actually have some fun here. I am going to try three different things in this presentation. One, we are going to actually talk about the real driver of interest rates, housing affordability. The second thing we are going to actually talk about is sort of the cycle of fraud in so many of these government programs. Yesterday, in my Joint Economic Committee, we did a high-level fraud in government- sponsored healthcare, Medicaid, and other programs--some wonderful data. Then, the third thing, we are going to step on one of the third rails of politics, and we are going to tell the truth about demographics and the financing of Medicare and some of the things we are going to have to do to actually keep it stable. Let's actually start to tell the truth. How many of you have seen this chart? It has been one of my opening charts for year after year after year, trying to help everyone--staff, Members of Congress, anyone who is crazy enough to watch this--with the reality. You see the blue area here? That is functionally the only thing a Member of Congress gets to vote on. You get to vote on defense and nondefense discretionary. Everything else is substantially on formula. Why this is so important is that I keep trying to explain to people to understand that Social Security is the number one spend. It is going to come in about $1.65 trillion. Interest is the second biggest spend in our government at $1.2 trillion. Medicare is $1.1 trillion. Medicaid and ObamaCare, ACA subsidies, are about a trillion. Defense is actually number 5. The thing that is in the Constitution is number 5 in our spending stack, and we have a problem. If anyone was paying attention in the math there, if we are going to take in $5, $5.5, $5.25 trillion in tax receipts, did you notice that by the time I got to the Medicaid ACA subsidies, we were out of money? That means this year, my math is we are going to borrow about $2 to $2.3 trillion. Once again--think about this, Mr. Speaker--last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.43. Remember, Congress just passed the housing bill. I voted no on it because there are a number of things in there--being a guy who actually has a background and actually even a degree in finance and housing, I don't believe it built another house. It created some programs, expanded this and that, but it didn't produce another house. It didn't do the things necessary. One of the hardest parts is having an honest conversation around here--I am going to show you. We have actually done some academic literature. Your 30-year mortgage today is going to be at 6.5 percent. Mr. Speaker, how would you like to be 5.5 percent? Do you know why it is a full point higher? U.S. government borrowing. When almost every single day we are borrowing about $7 billion, about $98,000 a second, you are competing with your own government. Here, we put together a couple of helpful charts. Housing affordability sensitivity to interest rates--think about this. If we were at 5.5 percent--and this is sort of using what would be a mean mortgage size in my community, Tempe, Scottsdale, your house payment would be $2,828. Add in that extra 1 percent of higher interest rates because we borrowed so damn much money, it is not $2,800. It is $3,100 a month. That premium that you are paying is an object of our borrowing. Did you hear a single discussion around this place saying, hey, we are going to talk about housing affordability, maybe we could actually convince the debt markets we are going to stabilize our borrowing. Instead, every data point we have, it gets dramatically worse over the next 10 years, and it is the thing we are not allowed to tell the truth about, Mr. Speaker. We have a problem. Some of the math says, next year, we will have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, but we will have double the number of 65 and up. I will be one of them. If you look around somewhere here, I think my 4-year-old is running around--yes, my little boy turns 4 today. I am 64 years old, and I have a 4-year-old and a 10- year-old and a wife my age because we are really optimistic about the future, or we did really bad retirement planning. Look, this is just math. I have tried presenting this, and Members of Congress get mad at me because the hallways here are full of people showing up at our offices right now demanding more money. So let's actually have a little fun here. ``Household Cost Impact of Legislative Fiscal Policy. Cumulative Legislative Contribution Since 2015''--what the hell does that mean? It basically is saying if you and I go back to 2015 and had 30-year mortgages, just the amount of borrowing the Federal Government does has made that 30-year mortgage $76,000 more over that 30-year time. That is what a single point of interest on an average loan is in my part of the country. What is the likelihood that we are going to convince our brothers and sisters here that we are going to borrow less money? The frustrating thing is you and I will go home, and we will have a townhall or meetings, and this and that, and the public will turn to us and say: It is all waste and fraud. I am going to show you the slides. Waste and fraud are a big deal, but it is a sliver. Our problem is our government functionally is an insurance company with an army, and we are terrified to tell the truth about it. So let's actually have some fun here. Let's actually try to understand where the real mismanagement of spending is. We have more spending and leakage. What is leakage? I would argue leakage is what we in the Joint Economic Committee have identified over and over when we have written a piece of legislation poorly or the lawyers, or CMS, or the Treasury have actually designed it, where the smart lawyers out there find ways to exploit it. We have done entire presentations here on something called Medicare part C, Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, 55 percent of our brothers and sisters on Medicare use this managed care model. There is something in there called risk scoring. There's something called a MedPAC report. It is about that thick. We write it. We get it every year. No one bothers to read it. It basically says: Hey, Member of Congress, there is $100 billion, $150 billion a year in what we would define as leakage, where these insurance companies are able to come in and score grandma as being sicker and, therefore, they get risk scoring, additional cash. Well, that extra spending means we have to raise our borrowing. Do you understand the problem? I just showed you our borrowing is raising your interest rates. We get over here, and higher interest rates cause us a real problem because we make everything less affordable, and now interest is the second biggest expense in our government. Some of the models actually say that in a decade, interest will be our number one expenditure. Look, when you have an almost $40 trillion debt, CBO's own report said in 9 budget years--and this is without the recent higher interest rates, without some of the additional supplementals and other borrowing and spending we are about to do--in 9 years, the deficit is going to be $3.1 trillion, and $2.1 trillion of that was just interest. $1 trillion was actually the structural deficit. Hey, we are spending too much money. Over here was $2.1 trillion that was just interest, and there becomes the fragility. I love that fancy word. Fragility means small movements of interest going up, and it is a technical economic term, Mr. Speaker. It means we are screwed. The reality of it is, there is this whole concept--I have done presentation after presentation after presentation about it--that is called interest rate fragility. The bond market is about to run this country. We aren't. What are we going to do to convince that bond market--because, remember, we borrow money. The entire industrialized world is borrowing money. China is borrowing money. Japan is borrowing money. Now Germany is borrowing money. We are competing with everyone for what is left in the world's savings. What happens in the industrialized world when people are getting older, and they are moving into their retirement years, and they are not saving in the same numbers? You start to have this stress. Ray Dalio talks about this all the time, and that is the world's savings compared to the borrowing appetite. We have got a mismatch, and that means interest rates go up. Let's actually start to dig through some of the perversities we identified in our Joint Economic Committee hearing yesterday, when we were talking about where some of the leakage is in programs we have designed. This isn't a--well, some of it is. This isn't something where foreign nationals sneak into the country and set up a scam. Some of this is we wrote a law, and we just did a really crappy job writing it. So High New York Caregiver Pay--Medicare actually has a program where States can set up a program where it is visiting. So you can have your child, your cousin, your sister visit you on your Medicaid. We actually have States like New York where the caregivers' salaries, just these people who are coming and visiting you, are 50 grand. Well, what happens if I come to you and say, over the last 5 years, this program in New York City was the number one job creator? You start to actually look at what is happening by categories, so Federal outlays by major categories. We are going to bounce back and forth to try to make the point that it is how we have designed the policy. In 2011, you actually start to see where the leakage was. Here we are in 2026, and we are spending $7.449 billion. Do you understand the problem? Our tax receipts are only going to be about 5\1/2\ if we are lucky. The rest of this ends up being borrowed. So let's actually do the board that actually annoys most people here when we get behind these microphones and say: It is waste and fraud. We can balance the budget if we just got rid of that. We can make a difference, but our best estimate is government fraud is almost 7 percent of the spending. Think of that. We calculated it at 6.9 percent of our spending. Did I mention a little while ago that last year, for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.43? This is a hell of a lot of money, but it is 7 percent. Are you going to help me find the other almost 35 percent we need? That is actually structural. That is how we have designed programs. We have created incentives to basically exploit the system, not help people get healthier, not do the most efficient things, but the most profitable things. Then armies of lobbyists are all up and down these hallways to stop us from fixing this. Once again, Mr. Speaker, our best estimates, fraud in the Federal Government, if you do everything, is under 7 percent. Here are some of the numbers that get really uncomfortable: a large share of Medicare spending on age 65. So this is the distribution, just so you understand. We calculate that over the next 6 years, Medicare spending will double. We will basically go from $1 trillion last year to $2 trillion per year. It is not a conspiracy. It is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is just we got older, and baby boomers are moving into the higher utilization year of their healthcare benefits. I have had this question over and over, but what about all the people that aren't 65? Well, look, you have some of this population over here, renal failure, other certain categories, where you are able to enroll in Medicare, but it is still a very small population. The majority, 82 percent of the population, on Medicare is 65 and up. It is an earned benefit. Here is one of the punch lines. Mr. Speaker, anyone who is willing to listen--and this is just math. It is not personal; it is just math--what do you think we spend as a Federal Government? Remember, the Medicare trust fund only takes care of a portion of Medicare spending. The majority of Medicare spending actually comes out of the general fund and your copays. So let's take a look here. Here we are in 2026. Your Federal Government spends about $20,000 per enrollee in Medicare. In 9 budget years, it is $34,000 a year. Now, what, there are 67 million baby boomers. Does anyone start to see a math problem? Medicare spending on people 65 and up will accelerate--and this acceleration is just demographics. As the baby boomer population gets older, they are moving into higher utilization years. Okay. So we can actually take a look at this. Think of this. In 2035, $2.13 trillion. So in 9 budget years, over $2 trillion will just be the Medicare budget. Now you start to see what I mean when I talk about that the debt is substantially demographics. Let's see how many more of these we want to torture you with. Medicare spending will continue to expand. Look, this year, it is a little over 4 percent of GDP. In 9 budget years, it is over 5.6 percent of GDP. Do you remember how we in the House, the Budget Committee, the Treasury, we all talked about how we want to get down to 3 percent of borrowing--3 percent of the entire economy. Okay. That is great. If you add up everything, including the borrowing from the trust funds, this year, we are right now getting close to 7 percent of the entire economy is being borrowed. Does anyone see the irony? In a few years, just Medicare is taking 5.6 percent of the entire economy, just for that one program. All right. Let's see what else we can do here that actually drives people a little bit insane. This is how bad we have been in our projections and not understanding. Now, understand, since 2011, think of the things that have happened. We had the financing of the mortgage bubble from 2008. We had COVID. We have actually had these things hit. But debt held by the public per capita--and remember when we were in 2011, we were basically $33,000 per capita. Today, we are over $92,000, and that is a 176 percent increase since 2011. This breaks my heart. When I got elected, I was part of the Tea Party wave. We basically were pledging fiscal sanity and fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. I am not sure we are doing either of those these days. So when I am showing you those charts, I am using the CBO projections. Remember, they were saying this year we were going to borrow about $1.7 trillion. My math is saying we are up to $2.3 trillion. Maybe I am a bit pessimistic, but CBO's own calculation is, in 2035, we are over $2.5 trillion in borrowing. If you actually look at their February numbers, they had $3.1 trillion. Okay. Let's see if we can make some of this make sense. This is always difficult to talk about, and what I am arguing for is we, as policymakers--what can we adopt? What can we do? I have done entire presentations here week after week after week of here are ways we can get rid of duplicative MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and put those scans on your device so that when you go to your next doctor, it is there and we get rid of the duplicates. We think that could be as much as $35 billion in 1 year, $350 billion over 10 years. The lobbyists hate that idea because of the excess spending. My reason for my rambling is there are solutions. You are not magically tomorrow going to say that 40 years of falling fertility rates, 65 years of knowing we had baby boomers--the demographics aren't magically going to change. What are we about to do to grow productivity so fast that we can make up for a country that is now at zero population growth and that Census had a prediction that sometime in the next 5 years, we will actually have 1 or 2 years with negative population growth. You are not used to hearing that about America, but take a look at this. Seniors per 100 working age adults, and I go back to 2011. I had 21 seniors for every 100. In 2025, the last year where we had the data, it went from 21.9 to 32.2. Just trying to make the argument, Medicare, Social Security, today's worker pays for todays' retiree. The total FICA tax and the total payroll tax don't cover the benefits going out the door. That is why they have to reach in and cash in their special T bills, their special Treasury bills. That trust fund in the Social Security actuary report that came out a week ago basically says that in a little over 6 years, it is gone. The trust fund is gone. Now, we can geek out for a while and explain that we already started borrowing that money internally because Treasury has already spent it, but Social Security holds those T bills so they cash them in. Treasury has to go out and borrow the money to send them the money so they can send their checks out. But under current law, when that trust fund is gone in 6 years, 3 months, everyone over 65 getting a Social Security check under current law gets a 22 to 24 percent cut. We will double the poverty of seniors at that time. The U.S. population age 65 and up in 2011, 41 million; 2026, so the year we are in right now, 63 million. It is just math. What drives me insane around here, just makes me angry, it is math. Didn't we sort of know how old we were getting? Didn't we know about baby boomers? Heaven, in the early 1980s, I remember sitting in a statistics class and the professor at that time was talking about this, and that is 40 years ago. Here is one of the toughest things: The population of young people is in decline as the population of 65 increases. For those of you who are uncomfortable with the discussions I have had on this floor of legalizing technology that could disrupt the price of healthcare, of moving to a talent-based immigration system instead of the migration of large populations of poverty into the country, of designing systems, of cures--see if I can make this make sense. So much of our spending around here is to maintain misery. I would argue that the most moral thing we can do, particularly in healthcare, is the elimination of a disease, moving toward a cure. I will give you the classic example of 15 years ago, Hepatitis C, we had hospitals all around the country getting ready to put up liver transplant centers. And then a drug comes along--it was expensive--what is it--Sovaldi, and then a competitor right after that crashed the price. Now those liver transplant centers are not needed. Would you believe, Mr. Speaker, we had lobbyists here trying to slow down access to the drug so those folks who had built the liver transplant centers could actually amortize their costs? If this is our demographics, are we going to design policies where we can actually disrupt the cost of delivering healthcare? Yet, every time I talk about this, I realize we are not only talking about disrupting bureaucracies; we are talking about disrupting business models, particularly in healthcare. Cures are moral, and they are really amazing economics. A while back, I did a series of presentations on something we are not supposed to talk about but we really should: that 47 percent of U.S. healthcare was somehow related to obesity. Think about what I just said: 47 percent of U.S. healthcare was related to obesity. Maybe it would be moral and really good economics and just compassionate saying: What are we doing in nutrition support? What are we doing in gamification of helping people eat healthier, deal with multichronic conditions? What are we doing in access to new drug categories and other things that could help our brothers and sisters get healthier and the economic value of that? It turns out being the single biggest thing you could do is to reduce U.S. borrowing. It turns out, Mr. Speaker, those folks who talk about MAHA and these things, they are actually partially exactly correct. Health. If the biggest growth of our spending is within those healthcare categories, what can we do to lower the price of healthcare? Is it rationing or working for it using technology and other things to help our brothers and sisters get healthier? All right. I am going to see if I have one last board here. All right. Apparently, we didn't print it. Mr. Speaker, we basically just ran through sort of three categories. U.S. debt is raising the cost for all of you. You are paying higher interest rates on your credit card, your mortgage, and your car loan because of the insatiable appetite of the Federal Government. And, let's be honest, the insatiable appetite of borrowing from the Federal Government is because our public actually demands it. They want things. They don't want to be told no. Number two, we talked about waste and fraud and how real it is, but it is structural in so many of our programs. It is a profit model for many of those who use these programs, but even then it is still under 7 percent. The third thing is the reality of what we are as a country. It is demographics. We have a lack of young people. We are getting older. We have a whole bunch of benefits that we are obligated to because we made promises. We made a societal contract. I can give you a path that we keep our promises, Mr. Speaker, but every day we refuse to deal with the reality of the math it makes it that much harder to protect the future. The little boy that is sitting behind me, he turned 4 years old today. The math says if you use the 6 percent generational discount rate, which is reasonable in today's world, we need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government. Is this really what we decided we are going to do to our kids and our grandkids? It is what we have done. 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, I first came up here to talk about three of the bills, which were in waste and fraud, but I will make a simple point being from a border State. The chaos that was allowed to happen in my State and other border States for functionally 4 years, millions and millions and millions and millions, you didn't think there was ever going to be a societal cost, a government cost? We have done entire presentations here on data from the Joint Economic Committee. Take a look at the Social Security actuary report of the suppression of working people's wages because of the importation of low-skill populations. If you care about people and economics and wage growth, take some responsibility for the chaos you brought to my State and so much of this country. Mr. Speaker, we are on a battle right now trying to explain the term so many of us all use, which is ``waste and fraud.'' We have got three bills on this. It is wonderful. Now, we need to actually add some of the definitions and the mechanics of how we are going to take it on. Those of us on the Joint Economic Committee have been producing some reports that basically say that we have access to technology today so that the fraudulent checks never ever go out the door. I will argue that the model we use today is perverse. Pay someone and then let's hire lots of auditors, lots of lawyers, lots of law enforcement, and let's chase it down. How often does someone ever go to prison? How often do we ever get any of the money back? Mr. Speaker, my first request is, as we move forward on this agenda of taking on waste and fraud--this shouldn't be partisan, but it is technology. We need to take that on. The second thing--and this one I have an absolute passion for because it is a level of immorality that the criminals are producing all over the world. There are headlines and stories. Have you read the stories of basically the enslavement of thousands of people in these scam farms where they are basically locked up and their job is to scam the elderly in the United States, to scam working people all over the Western world? This is an article from just a couple days ago. We have the technology. Mr. Speaker, the Joint Economic Committee, Republican and Democrat, sent a letter to the big telephone companies, the ISP providers, saying: Moving forward, are you providing us with the technology that would stop the scam farms from being able to call grandma and do the evil of stealing billions and billions and billions? This is a bipartisan approach, and it exists. If you have actually seen some of the videos of the misery these fraudsters and these criminal organizations are doing to people, being collected off the streets all over the South Pacific region and being locked up in scam farms in Cambodia--

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am trying to talk fast. I had a lot of coffee. This is the hardest part here. When we say waste and fraud, the waste is often the way we have designed programs where the rent seekers, whether it be in Medicare Advantage, whether it be in Medicare, whether it be the stories of the hospice fraud of New York where the visitation is actually the fastest growing job production in New York City over the last 5 years. We are going to have to also take on pieces of legislation that we have passed and stop the scammers from scamming us on that.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I know it has been a long day for everyone, but I have a couple things to walk through. One of the themes we have had the last couple weeks is waste and fraud. I thought it would be important to actually come here and sort of show what we calculate the math to be, where it comes from, and then something huge. Today was also the issuance of the annual Social Security actuarial report. I have not read the whole thing. I have just gone to the basic tables. I promise you I will read it over the next couple of weeks. I am going to make some commentary. Some of it is going to be based on last year's report, but we also have the CBO analysis and some of the outside groups and where the math doesn't match. But I need all of us to grow up and understand some of the realities out there. This last weekend, I had the joy--I am traveling around the State, running for Governor, because I am leaving this insane--excuse me--this fine place. Some of the folks will come up to you and say things like: Well, if you just got rid of the waste and fraud. Look, it is huge, but I am going to show you some of the charts of what the reality is on the percentage of our spending. From joint economists, our best estimate right now is we are going to borrow $2 trillion this year. My personal number--I am the outlier--is we are going to borrow about $2.2 trillion, but then I am a little more pessimistic. Remember, when we went into this year, we were going to borrow $1.7 trillion or $1.6 trillion. There are some games we play in that, for those who are keeping score, like: Hey, here are student loans. We are going to credit that back because we are not writing them off. Does that actually go on the books as a credit even though there is no cash that comes with it? These are the sorts of things, if you really want to understand government accounting, that will drive you insane. Let's first actually do some stuff on waste and fraud. This is the full kit and caboodle, or whatever colloquialism I can come up with, that estimating government fraud would cover 71 days of borrowing. Now, remember, that is on the assumption that we are borrowing about 7-some-billion dollars a day. Take the high and the low, but this is everything. These are the bad actors from other parts of the world that have figured out how to steal from unemployment by fraud. These are the corporations that found leakage that have actually been able to designate people as sicker than they actually are so they get the risk premiums in some of the programs. It is a stunning amount of money. But if we borrow $2.2 trillion this year, it actually covers about a quarter of our borrowing. But when you start to think about that, it is 71 days if you actually do the mean here. It is a big deal, but it doesn't solve our problems. My frustration is, this place has a habit of saying: We are against waste and fraud. Let's do a piece of legislation. Let's do another analysis of waste and fraud. Let's actually say we condemn fraudsters. Damn it. How many years have some of us worked on just simple concepts? There are these things--what do you call them, Mr. Speaker? Oh, yeah, computers and data. If someone is billing and you have a dozen different organizations billing the same P.O. box, maybe you have hospice fraud. If you have a Social Security number being used over and over and over, maybe there is a problem. If you have data that says: Hey, this person is saying they made $24,000 a year last year so they deserve these credits as our society, but we have data that shows their consumption was $88,000, maybe we should look at this. We have the systems today that we could have stopped the $2.8 billion of sober living home fraud that basically punished Native Americans in my State with a simple data system. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just dragging this government into maybe this century of technology instead of doing another resolution. It is like the absurdity of--absolutely, we all vote for it--let's do a balanced budget. Great. Tell me how. I will tell you how to do it. You won't like it, but there is a path to do it. We actually have some math that says if you told me I can balance the budget next year, I can do it. We have to cut almost half of all Federal spending because of the economic effects. Why is it so hard for us to tell the truth about math? Let's actually get ourselves in some real trouble here. All right. This is using the most optimistic number saying, Mr. Speaker, we are going to be able to stomp out every bit of fraud, waste, misalignment, and exploitation in this government. We are going to spend--estimated government fraud is almost 7.8 percent of the outlays for this year. That is a remarkable amount of money. It is remarkable. Do you really think we are going to get all of it? How about if we could get half of it? How about if we could get a third of it? Our economists think we can nail down a third of this waste and fraud if you just take some of the legislation we have worked on for years of the use of data, matching benefits, matching Social Security numbers, matching addresses, matching codes coming out of CMS, matching these things. Why is it so scary? I will tell you, some of the lobbyists marching down the hallways hate this stuff. How many times have I come behind this microphone and say, you know, let me give you an easy, intellectual one to process? We did some analysis almost a year ago--you are a doctor. An MRI scan, an ultrasound, a CT, an x-ray. We think there could have been $25 to $35 billion last year in duplication. You know, you bust up your knee on the ski slope, and you get an MRI. They patch you up, you go home, and a week later before the ortho is about to work, you do it again--why do it again when you can attach that scan to a simple app right here? You put it up on the screen. If it isn't good enough, then redo it. Something as simple as that, that is $350 billion on the outside over 10 years. Why is that scary around here? However, it is. Does it annoy some of the lobbyists? Does it annoy some of the real estate investment trusts that have been putting up MRI centers? Does it annoy the equipment sales? Look, I am sure they are all wonderful people, but if you and I were operating in the real world and not in government, we would be insisting on these things that say we are not taking away benefits, we are using technology. In many ways, I would argue it makes people's lives better, faster, cheaper to stop these duplications. That is in this number we are calling waste and fraud. Understand, when you get the politician in front of you saying: We are going to stomp out waste and fraud, and then they make it sound like it is someone from the other side of the world stealing from us, that is some of it. However, the vast majority that is in these numbers is how we have designed benefits, how we have designed healthcare reimbursements, how we have designed these programs. How do we work with our States, our vendors, all the bureaucracy to actually say let's just do the things that technology now allows us to do to stop the American taxpayers from being bled, being scammed. Now, the number of times I have come behind this microphone and said Social Security trust fund, the Medicare trust fund, a little over 6 years, and I have actually had debates--as a matter of fact, we had some sparring today--where I spoke for a couple moments, and the Democrat who was speaking said: Yes, but illegals pay into Social Security. Yes, but if you actually read the Social Security actuary report, it would have shown you, yes, they are paying into fake Social Security numbers--okay, that is a little money--but the suppression of wages that happen from the millions and millions and millions and millions of people that came across the border in the Biden years is greater than. It is in the tables. I know, it would require reading the Social Security actuary report and maybe pulling out a calculator and doing some math. One of the things that is going on in our country right now, particularly as we arrogantly often say: the lower quartiles of education and labor. Why are they getting poorer? Have you looked at the wage growth numbers of our working class brothers and sisters, particularly those without high skills, where they sell their labor? They are out hanging drywall, and now they are competing with how many potentially millions of people that came across the border during those years that are competing with them selling their labor. That was the great cruelty. I know I am trying to think like an economist. I am just wired that way. I would argue, the morality of prosperity is what we as conservatives believe in, and trying to explain all the horrible things policy wise, our inability to fixate on making people's lives better. We talk about affordability. The fastest way you get affordability is wage growth because to magically start to make prices come down, you have to change systems and supply chains, legalize automation of ports, all the things that the unions and everyone else is going to come lobby and scream at us. Let's actually walk through a couple things that were out there in that Social Security actuary report today and from last year so there is an understanding. I got up here last summer and said my math, my Joint Economic economists on the Republican side, we were guessing about sometime in late, mid-2032. We nailed it. We got the number right. The only controversy right now is the Social Security actuary report that came out today said it is a 22 percent cut in 6 years. CBO said it was a 24 percent cut. My folks say 24 percent cut. Both are miserable, both will double senior poverty 7 years from now. We will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street 7 years from now. How many times have you seen people come behind the microphones today--because the report is out--and actually say, yeah, this is immoral, maybe we should actually hold hands, get the crap kicked out of us because we are telling the truth about the math? Instead, in this place--and God knows I have gone through it election after election after election--where the Democrat consultants say: Oh, Schweikert used the words ``Social Security,'' he used the word ``Medicare,'' let's beat the crap out of him. Then you wonder why Members here are scared to death to actually save these trust funds, save our brothers and sisters who are seniors from poverty. It is because we are not allowed to talk about it. Then you will get some idiot who says: Well, we will just raise the taxes, that covers it. It doesn't. I have done presentation after presentation after presentation showing just even raising the cap doesn't come close to covering, 2033, Mr. Speaker, the money needed to cover the Social Security shortfall and the Medicare shortfall--because, remember, the Medicare trust fund is also empty at the same time. This was our calculation from last year. We actually haven't had time to recalculate. We believe it is more now with $638 billion in a single year. There is this misunderstanding. Let's just call it a misunderstanding. I would never say people just make crap up around here. Let's take a look, just to understand how fast the Social Security trust fund is eroding. In 2026, we have got $2 trillion in there, and it is loans to the general fund. It is paid interest. It is actually paid a pretty darn good interest rate. When people say: They stole the money. No, no, no. Just like you might have bought a note, a T-bill, a bond from the Federal government, and the Federal Government every 6 months pays you interest, and then at the end you get your money back, that is the exact same thing the trust funds did. Here is the problem: Then next year, there is $1.9 trillion in the fund, and then you get over here, and, boom, in 2031 there is nothing left in the trust fund. Then you start to walk into 2032, and it is empty. The debate now is: What month in 2032 is it gone? What is happening here? The checks going out the door are bigger than the tax receipts coming in from payroll taxes. Every month, Social Security says that we hold all these, let's call them magic Social Security T bills. They call the Treasury and say: Hey, guys, I have to make my monthly Social Security checks. Please send us some cash. Treasury goes and says that, this month, they have some tax collection. They send a check from that. This month, they don't have enough, so they sell some debt. If you ever look at the Treasury statement, Mr. Speaker, they explain how they finance it. It is called the Treasury management system. That is how fast the numbers are eroding, and it is basically because of baby boomers. I am one of them. What is it? There are 67 million of us born during that time, and now we are down to the last few years of them moving into their benefits. This is what happened. We functionally have a country without enough children, and we haven't had enough children starting 40 years ago. Now, we are going to pay the price for it. You start to look at some of these, Mr. Speaker, and the reason I put this one up, and I will tell you, this is done by my economists and some of the others. I actually believe the numbers are a little more dour, but the math is the math. Social Security, Medicare, and net interest account for 81 percent of the spending growth over the next 10 years. In 9 budget years from now, we calculate--and this is before the rise of interest rates that have happened the last 4 months. CBO calculated that in 2036, the annual debt will be $3.1 trillion, $2.1 trillion of it just being interest and the $1 trillion being the baseline deficit. Heaven forbid, if interest rates go up, these numbers get much, much uglier. I am trying to help folks understand. Once we cover Social Security, once we cover Medicare, then we have to pay the interest bill. That is the majority of the spending growth. The rest of the spending growth, 19 percent, is everything else, and if interest is a little bigger, it is actually almost all the spending growth. It is uncomfortable to talk about, but it is demographics. Mr. Speaker, there is a dataset out there that says that next year we are functioning at the same or fewer children than we had 20 years ago, but double the number 65 and up. That is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is just demographics. Now, I would argue it is caused by a number of social policies and then other things that the Democrats promoted, but now some of us have to figure out a way to manage this and tell the truth on how we are going to keep our promises to seniors. Every day we wait, we make it a bit harder for ourselves. Let's walk through a little bit of this. In 2026, old-age and survivors account with Social Security, annual balances are much worse than previously predicted. This is what we had in 2025. It was up here. This is population. Now, we are starting to believe our population falls further. The problem is if you actually go and look at the Census Bureau numbers, Mr. Speaker, CBO numbers, they are actually way down here. They are actually much worse than the numbers the Social Security actuaries are using. The head of Social Security is going to be in front of Ways and Means in the next couple of weeks, and we need to ask him why the other demographers are actually saying that fertility calculations in future years are much worse than Social Security is using. This should scare the hell out of us because it means these numbers that are dour are actually worse. I know some of this is geeky, but it is important. This is millions and millions of people who were planning for their retirement. How many of them are prepared for a 22- or 24-percent cut just a few years from now? Where is the morality of this place? All I am trying to do is show on this, this is the trustee calculation in future years. This is everyone else's calculation that we trust. Mr. Speaker, that is one hell of a gap. We need to come up with a way to either say that when we produce the Social Security actuary report, we as policymakers should actually be reading it and doing something instead of hiding from it, and maybe also add in there saying we are going to also other academic demographers, and we are also going to add maybe the Census Bureau, which has had, historically, the most accurate numbers of fertility rates. As a matter of fact, I think there is a new number that came out that the United States is now down to 1.57 births per thousand. You realize our fertility rates are now under many countries in Europe now, Mr. Speaker, and we thought they were crashing and burning. We are. Let's do a couple more of these. All I am trying to do is make this make sense. The trustee population projections are significantly more optimistic than other sources, Census Bureau, and Congressional Budget Office. I am saying it again another way. These gaps, because they are calculating, suddenly we are going to actually have fertility rates going up. That is wonderful. Please, Social Security actuaries, I look forward to the explanation of how you came up with that because no one else has that number. Understand what these numbers mean, Mr. Speaker. The national effects of Social Security insolvency is basically the depletion of the trust fund in what, 6 years, 3 months on recipients, 24, 27 percent benefit cuts over those years. The Social Security actuary report said 22. Everyone else will say 24. I will give them 22. I think my 24 percent number is more correct. Monthly cuts exceed $500, so in 29 States, basically they are adding up how much of the population's average income they paid into Social Security. Remember, a number of people don't understand, Mr. Speaker, Social Security is means-adjusted. High-income earners get less back of the taxes they paid in. Low-income earners actually often get much more than the FICA taxes they paid in. Mr. Speaker, if you are a poor senior, are you ready for a $500-a- month cut? Let's take a look at my State, Arizona. Insolvency of Social Security, what does it mean to my recipients, my folks who receive a Social Security check in Arizona? There will be estimated monthly cuts of $511, and this starts in 6 years. That will affect $8.2 billion in benefits lost a year, and 18.3 percent of the residents are affected in my State. Mr. Speaker, this is an avalanche coming at us. It is really hard to fix. It is really expensive to fix. Every day that we wait, we make it worse. The ugliest part of this punch line: The Medicare trust fund is empty almost at the same time, so hospitals are going to take about a 12- percent cut, the Medicare part A trust fund. Yet, the political class, because they either are good at math or they are terrified to tell the voters the truth, on Social Security, you functionally get, for the average couple, the money you put in plus a tiny bit. It is a horrible rate of return. If 25 years ago we had done what President Bush and others had talked about saying--just a little bit of your Social Security money going into side accounts--the retiring population today would be so much more prosperous. Democrats and unions crushed that. It is on them. They should be the ones standing up and saying: We apologize. We are going to create a wave of poverty, but, hey, we are just going to tax the hell out of people who are still working. At least they could admit what they did. The hardest part is also showing chart after chart after chart--it is Medicare that is actually the biggest contributor to U.S. sovereign debt. The average couple, the dollars they put in, they are going to get about $6 back. That is a pretty good rate of return. That is because we, as a body, have been terrified to fix the cost of delivering healthcare. We know there is waste and fraud. Mr. Speaker, do you remember the couple of charts we started with? When the MedPAC report comes to us and says that it is like $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion of not fraud, because it is--well, partially it is fraud. What would that be worth if we just fixed the misalignment in Medicare Advantage, let alone all the durable medical equipment and all the things that are now happening with Medicaid, whether it be the scams we found in New York, where you hire family members to be the visitor. In New York City over the last 5 years, it is the number one job creator. For every 1,000 people 65 and up in New York City, they have--what was the number? It was like 141 signed up for this program. Even the Democrat Governor of New York says this is pretty much a scam. Why is it so hard for us to step up and fix these things? The first time I gave a presentation on this a couple months ago, it was fascinating. All of a sudden there were articles popping up on the internet, I think written by AI, beating the crap out of me. It turns out they have their own lobbyists for the fraud. That is how perverse this society has become. The fraudsters now have lobbyists. Mr. Speaker, I am fixated on debt, deficits, and demographics because I am going to argue that we have a country that about every 13\1/2\ seconds we are borrowing a million dollars. Yet today even, we have debates around here and we are arguing about saving a couple million dollars. That is great, but we borrowed more money during the debate than the debate actually would save if it became law. That is how screwed up we are. Mr. Speaker, I beg of you and anyone out there that is listening, can we do something real? I have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old that we have adopted. The data says that we will need a 104 percent of little Matthew's lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of this Federal Government. That means every dime he will make plus 4 percent. We as a society have decided the next generation will be poorer than we are. Welcome to the morality of the modern Congress. 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, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Carter), my friend. Honoring Deano's Italian

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Georgia. Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually try to do something that is a little complex, so I apologize. I apologize for those trying to keep track. If I start speaking like a machine gun--once again, I have had a stunning amount of coffee--just wave at me, and I will slow down. I am going to try to actually explain and walk through what we talk about constantly, and that is waste and fraud. I have got three silos here, and I am going to try to fight for some understanding: What is real in its fiscal impact. What is sort of commercial fraud. Hey, we screwed up in the way we wrote a piece of legislation. The administration, the bureaucrats actually have allowed leakage--some of the leakage being hundreds of billions of dollars. And over here are bad actors, you know, the group from Nigeria that has actually been conning unemployment fraud like we went through during COVID. I also need to actually try to explain debt and deficits when our borrowing is stunning. So I was going to just start with this article. It is something simple, but I am going to use it as a benchmark. This convicted felon gets a million dollars a year to sell obsolete internet services. You paid for it. So we have a con artist that set up an internet company, got a government contract. He gets a million dollars a year. It is outrageous. We should actually have the technology, the discipline, the way we write legislation, the way we do our appropriations to stop it. But you have got to understand a million dollars is what we borrow about every 12 to 15 seconds. I need to put this in perspective, because so often here we get our brothers and sisters, Members of Congress, come behind these microphones, and we talk about what we are going to save on something. They don't seem to understand the burn rate. I think yesterday, we hit $94,000 a second in borrowing. So often the debate here, more money has been borrowed in the debate than the actual piece of legislation is going to save. So let's actually try to walk through this and walk through these sorts of silos and then understand the punch line. I am going to do this three or four times. A number of the things you would consider fraud, I consider fraud. There are lobbyists outside in this hallway, it is their client's business model. That is what makes this so difficult. When you get groups from even your home district coming and saying, ``David, you don't want to reform this. That is our business model. We would have to change things,'' that is actually the real punch line when we use the term ``waste and fraud.'' Let's start with the board we often start with just so, once again, we have a benchmark of understanding. Your country is going to borrow about $2 trillion this year, and there is some noise in that number. It is actually--in some ways, we would score it as more in the Joint Economic Committee because we actually are crediting ourselves back some of the student loan money, but let's just stick with $2 trillion. Do you see here in the blue? That is really what we vote on, nondefense, discretionary, and defense. Most of this red, almost all of it, is formulaic, but this is actually where much of the fraud is. Maybe that is the reason we don't touch it enough because the fraud is in Medicare, the fraud is in Medicaid, and the fraud is in other programs that are on autopilot. They are formulaic. You reached a certain age. You get this benefit. You have paid into the system. You get this benefit. You fall under a certain income. You get this benefit, except within there, particularly in the Medicaid system--you have seen the analysis the Joint Economic Committee has done, or my joint economic Republicans have done over the last year on the number of ways States--States--are the driver of the fraud. So let's actually walk through that. If I came to you right now and told you that New York, the number of home healthcare aides--this is a Medicaid program where grandma is poor, she needs help, I have someone at home who needs help, and there is a program that came really out of COVID or was expanded out of COVID where I can actually hire my friends, my families, my nieces, my nephews. What happens, for every 1,000 residents in New York over age 65 in 2024, which is when we have the data, for New York, I have 171 people. So think of that: 1,000 people over age 65, I have 171 people receiving a check for this program. I have shown some charts here in the past that this was the number one job creator, I think, in New York City over the last couple of years. Is that fraud? I think it is, but it is leakage in the design of the system. We are being cheated by the State of New York, and then you start to take a look. Well, New York is 171, but California, for every 1,000 people over age 65, they have 139 people receiving these checks. The fascinating thing is that when we first exposed this months ago-- and we had Secretary Kennedy in front of us about a month ago and we actually talked about this in the hearing, and he said that it is one of the most outrageous things that he has ever come across in his time at HHS--the month before that, my office was full of people angry at me. There are people buying editorials. That is one of the great scams right now is to set up AI, you put up an editorial, and there is almost anyone who will publish it because that is actually a lobbyist for this leakage, and this is billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. Remember, if New York had the same cost of its Medicaid system--not Medicare--Medicaid--this is healthcare for the poor--and they had the same average cost as the rest of the country, it is $50 billion a year. It is $50 billion a year. So at one point, I showed you the article. It is outrageous. It is $1 million, about 15 seconds of borrowing. We are going to borrow about $7 billion today, so $50 billion starts making an impact. Starting to understand the scale of these numbers, and you start to realize that the top 15 producers by spending per claim, you start to actually look at some of the things. California actually has some magic. They must have some magic with their Medicaid system because they are able to create their own codes. Within those codes, we have one that is called Medi-Cal Personal Care Services Program, and this has been around since--2019 to 2024 is my data. On average, that code costs $876. Most of that money is paid for you by Federal taxpayers. Is this waste and fraud? Well, it is unlike any other State. It is unlike any other code. This is an example, when you hear the politicians say ``I am going to get rid of waste and fraud,'' and we make it sound like it is somebody snuck across the border and stole money or someone on the internet from the other side of the world stole money, all of those are true, but it is the design of the system that we have developed. In the end of this stack, I am going to walk through a series of solutions, but understand that when we tried to just trim down some of the growth of Medicaid spending last summer and the left just attacked, attacked, attacked, and we would show, but what about this fraud, what about this fraud, what about this fraud, the discussion goes silent. It is in the math. This stuff was being audited during the last Democratic nomination. We just never fixed it. So you start to take a look at ``Top 15 Producers by Medicare Claims,'' and you start to look back to the personal care. It turns out that there were 1,000,257 claims filed under this. The scale--to understand the scale of some of these frauds, this is in the billions, and we allow this. Does this meet your definition of waste and fraud, because HHS--we are going to walk through a series of things that MedPAC has tried to identify for years that we can't seem to get enough votes here to even run a piece of legislation to try to fix it. Look, a couple more of these boards, and then we are going to have some fun with some headlines, which is something I almost never do, but I am trying to find a way to explain most of the leakage in this government. It isn't some dodgy person in a dark room. It is actually how we are administering our programs and how poorly we are doing our jobs. All right. ``Top 15 Producers by Medicaid Spending.'' Personal care services. Think of this: $139 billion from 2019 to 2024. It is $139 billion. That starts to add up to be real money. Maybe instead of screwing around this place where we are trying to do rounding errors or covering seconds of borrowing--which even in some of the debates earlier today, that is what we were doing--how about we start going after the things that have b's in front of it. I am going to show you a couple where there are t's in front of it, trillions in front of it. If we are going to actually try to convince the brothers and sisters, the taxpayers, the voters, and the American citizenry of what is going on--debt and deficits and demographics in this State--that in a little over 6 years, Medicare trust fund is empty, and hospitals, those that get their Medicare part A money, are going to take a 12 percent cut, and guess what is also happening around this same time. The Social Security trust fund is empty, and people on Social Security, under the current law, are going to take a 24 percent cut, and we are going to double poverty. How are we going to turn to people and say that this is over $630 billion to fix it in just a single year, and the next year is more and the next year is more? How many people are going to look at us and say that you have not taken care of the waste and fraud problem. How am I going to trust you to actually make me take a cut or make me pay more taxes or redesign the systems or do other things? We have to build some trust, and you build the trust by stopping this insanity. Let's actually have a little bit more fun here. The New York Post headline, ``Notoriously Fraudulent New York Health Program Lost $1.2 Billion to Scammers and Middlemen.'' It was ten times--ten times--the money stolen in Minnesota. Why haven't you heard about this? If scammers are bleeding our Medicaid systems around the State, why is it so hard to actually say-- we hold hearings on this. We have discussions about it, and then we produce a piece of legislation, and it is almost impossible to get sponsors on it because the next moment, it turns out that some of these middlemen that you and I would consider fraudsters hire lobbyists or actually bring groups of people here saying ``But that is our business model.'' You start to look at other things. You start to look at other things, City Journal, ``Gavin Newsom's Empire of Fraud: California has lost at least $180 billion to fraud, according to officials and experts.'' It is program after program after program after program. $180 billion is real money. Is the California delegation willing to help us fix this? Here is your problem. You start to look at some of these things: unemployment fraud, $32.6 billion; Medicaid fraud, that one was only $178 million; homeless spending, let's see, billions and billions, doesn't actually give me a number. You start to look at these things, and the waste and fraud are in the design of our programs. There is the fraud where somebody stole your Social Security number and did this, but the real money is how poorly we designed the programs that are meant to help our brothers and sisters, particularly those in poverty. Let's have some more fun with this, if you call this fun. CalMatters, sham hospice scheme--remember, this is something my team--I chair the Oversight Subcommittee in the Ways and Means Committee. We have been now working on this for months and months and months. ``Sham hospice schemes are bilking Medicare,'' and some Medicaid, ``and harming California seniors.'' We actually believe this scheme--if you have been reading the papers, L.A. Times and I believe The Wall Street Journal have done stories on this. The amount of fraud, particularly in L.A. County, on hospice-- these are some of the most frail in our society. These are supposed to be the brothers and sisters we are loving as they are near ending life, except there is an entire fraud network. I am going to actually show you--let's just talk about it before I try to show you. Someone finally did a little bit of data and found there are hospices where there are half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen at the same P.O. Box, and it went on for years. Are we really that moronic to not run a simple data system and say: Wait, does this make sense? I have multiple hospices billing from the same P.O. Box. Does this make any sense? Let's take a look at some more headlines: HHS Office of Inspector General report highlights CMS potentially overpaid Medicare Advantage organizations $462 million based on current unreported--I want to explain this one. Let's get a little complicated. This is what they call MedPAC. This is the group of experts and auditors that look mostly at Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is now 55 percent of all of our seniors who choose Medicare. They choose not part A, part B, but they go on what is called Medicare part C. That is Medicare Advantage. In here, the latest report says, it comes in about 114 percent higher than fee-for-service. Medicare Advantage was supposed to come in at 95 percent of the cost. That difference, about $1.6 to $2 trillion over 10 years, it turns out it is real money. How many Members of Congress have bothered to actually break this binder and read these MedPAC reports? I introduced a piece of legislation a year ago to not cut services but to get rid of the risk scoring and the star rating, all the ways it was being defrauded, and that is what this board is about. What happens when you have people in Medicare Advantage is that the insurer is going out and saying an acute stroke diagnosis code, except the data says it is a fake code. It is not something anyone has. That is how they are defrauding Medicare Advantage. It is not a cut of services we are talking about. Yet, the number of lobbyists and the number of social media platforms that are somehow paid by those PR firms beat the crap out of those of us who have been trying to fix it. Is this what you consider waste and fraud? Of course, it is. The difference is, those of us trying to fix it have to take on an army of people who make their money from it. That is actually, if you want to start to stabilize, even demonstrate to bond markets we are starting to take serious our leakage, our bleeding, our borrowing--remember, we are going to borrow $7 billion to $8 billion just today. Where are my brothers and sisters here who will tell you how conservative they are, how tough they are, how truth-teller they are? How many of them are going to sponsor the legislation to help me fix this? So far, for almost 1 year, not a single sponsor other than myself. Let's actually go through some more. Let's go through my home. Actually, no, let's do Minnesota first. Minnesota is always fun to go through. All right, 5 Eyewitness News: ``Audits--Lack of security reviews left Minnesota's SNAP system vulnerable to breaches, fraud.'' If you have read the story of nutrition support, we are trying to help the most vulnerable in our society, and it is full of fraudsters and fraudsters and fraudsters. How does someone not catch it when the same Social Security number is used over and over, when there is no Social Security number, when the same location has more people signed up for a benefit than there are people in that immediate area? Keep that in mind because I am going to walk you through some of the solutions, but this stuff is absolutely outrageous, and then you start to take a look. Channel 7 Eyewitness News: `` `Ghost students' can steal your identity, enroll you in school, and take loans out in your name.'' We had people getting student loans who don't exist. Many of them had been buying your personal ID, your personal information, on the dark web, signing you up, putting you in debt. Then, you get to figure out how to unwind it as they are walking away with the money. This is another sense of the incompetent design in these programs. All right, a little bit more, and this one, I happen to actually have had a fascinating experience with: ``Arizona sober living crisis: 140 indicted in billion-dollar Medicaid scheme.'' We think it is $2.8 billion. Let me walk you through this. We call this the sober living home scam in Arizona. Two Christmases ago, this last Christmas--we have sort of a family tradition. We go up to the Navajo Nation. We will call it the Nation. My parents used to do some work up there more as part of a church group. We have actually been up there and installed Starlink satellite dishes so that some of what we call chapter houses actually could have broadband, so they could have telehealth. My little girl has actually helped to do sheep herding. It is a fascinating place. It is monstrous. I have had friends on the Navajo Nation come up to me and say: David, you realize my uncle disappeared 7 years ago? A van showed up here in Kayenta. They were recruiting people who might have had a drinking problem. They put them in the van, and they disappeared. It turns out, they were being driven down to Phoenix, being stuck in a sober living home, being billed to the Medicaid system, which we call AHCCCS, Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. Then, when the benefit was over, they were thrown out and rolled to another sober living home. I had multiple acquaintances, friends from the Navajo Nation, say they have family members they can't find. They have disappeared. This is beyond the fraud of stealing $2.8 billion. Most of it actually isn't State money. It is also Federal money because of the way the match works. There are people who have died. People have lost their lives because of how criminal this was, and it went on for a decade. Then, our model is, we are going to indict a bunch of people. We are never going to get the money back. Almost none of these people will ever really go to jail or prison. Have we lost our minds? Yes, we have. DOJ announces a record-breaking take down of healthcare fraud schemes--okay, let's actually walk through a couple. The Justice Department has cracked down on a Pakistani national who allegedly orchestrated a $650 million fraud scheme in Arizona's Medicaid system. How does this happen? How many times have you actually heard the attorney general, the county attorneys, these things, get up and say: We finally busted a fraud scheme that has been going on for years and years, and there is this much money missing. Now, all the money got shipped overseas, so we are not going to get any of it back, but we are going to file indictments on people who are not in the country anymore or were never in the country. Have we lost our minds? So here are a couple more of these because I am under a clock here. ``DOJ and CMS healthcare 2025 fraud crackdown.'' If you take a look at--and you have got to give the Trump administration, you have got to give Kennedy, you have got to give Dr. Oz credit because they are trying. Look at the chart. $1.3 billion and trying to crack down and stop some of the fraud. But here is your problem: Just Medicare will spend $1.1 trillion this year. So you have got to understand the scale. $1 billion is a stunning amount of money. A trillion is a thousand billion dollars. So start to look at these. Now, this one I wanted to use as an example of how perverse Washington, D.C., and Congress have become. Let's look at this headline: ``Duplication of radiology imaging studies . . .'' What is the cost? My economists last year, we did--and it is a rough estimate--we were coming up with $25 billion to $35 billion in duplicative scans. You bust up your knee. You are out snow skiing. You get an MRI on your knee. Then you go to your hometown, and what is the first thing that happens? They redo the scan. CTs, MRIs, ultrasounds, X-rays. We have been proposing a simple idea. Take the scan when you get it. Attach it to your smartphone, and it travels with you. When you get to your doctor or your next appointment, they hit a button, and, boom, it is up on the big screen, and they can see, oh, yes, you have a fracture or you don't have a fracture. Let's say at the top end my economist came up with $35 billion. I have already had multiple lobbyists in my office doing everything they can to stop that piece of legislation from ever getting a hearing because it turns out the duplicate scans are their business model. So the point I am trying to sell here is: You and I, we go out on the stump, and we say we are going to go after waste and fraud, except the lobbyist in the back of the room is pissed at us because that fraud that you and I know does not make you healthier, does not make society better, does not provide an actual service is their business model. ``South Florida man sentenced in $2.2 million Medicare fraud and money laundering scheme . . .'' How many times have you picked up a newspaper publication or gone online and heard the stories about durable medical equipment fraud in South Florida. How is it possible it still goes on in a time with the technology we have. Let's see, what else do I have on this one. ``Pasadena clinic receives $34 million in Medicare skin graft scam . . .'' Oh, this one was fun. It turns out we spend about 4, 5 years here trying to stop this, and they lobbied. It was one of the craziest things ever. Companies that ended up getting indicted were here with their CEOs lobbying us not to reform the system. This is where they would grow skin--diabetic retinopathy, these things, you know, skin patches, and all the sudden the price skyrocketed because the way the codes and the billing worked. Eventually CMS had to come in and do Congress' job for them because Congress was so incompetent we couldn't actually do it. CMS came in and said we are just stopping it. We are going to allow this handful of companies to do it because at least they have some trusted history, and they were screaming at us. It turns out when we did the research on them, the number that were absolute fraudsters--billions and billions of dollars were stolen. Once again, the Medicare trust fund is gone in 6 years, and we are not fixing these things. Look, I am going to do a little skipping to the end because we are running out of time. Please, give CMS some love and support because working with my office we are finally starting to act like professionals and do things that the private sector has been doing for 20 years. Here is a simple example. How many of you have a credit card? How many of you have ever used your credit card in a spot you are not normally at? How many of you, the moment you start using the credit card you start getting text messages and phone calls saying: Hey, is this actually you? That is a data system from 20 years ago. You are telling me that as we start to protect consumers and strengthen the programs, as we are starting to actually build models to start to protect and stop some of the bad payments, we don't have the technology? Of course, we have the technology. It is off-the-shelf technology. We have a data person who has come to our office multiple times who is an expert in stopping fraud in healthcare. He said: Do you realize that there is a package that is $1,500 a month that would have stopped that sober living home fraud in Arizona? We would have seen that things don't match. The addresses don't match. The Social Security numbers don't match. There are multiple billings that roll and roll and roll. When you have $11.7 billion saved just by the Treasury Department building a system that is sort of a do not pay list--let me give you an example that is from 20-plus years ago. Twenty-plus years ago I was the Maricopa County treasurer. We did this thing called positive pay, and it wasn't new technology. Here are our payees, the people we are going to pay checks to, we owe, because as the county treasurer you are the guy issuing the checks to pay for things. And over here is the list. When they didn't match, we didn't pay. That is 20-plus-year-old technology. Treasury has started to do a version of that, and it has already saved over $11 billion stopping fraudulent checks going out the door. I want to make an argument in my last couple minutes before I hit the end of my time. What we do in government is insane. How many of you would build a business model where I am going to pay 6 percent, 7 percent of my payments are going to be fraud, but don't worry about that. Eventually we are going to hire a bunch of auditors. Then we will hire some lawyers. And then we will hire some law enforcement. And then we will try to go recover the money. Of course, we never actually recover the money. And most of the time we never get to put someone in prison, but we will get to do great press releases. The age of hiring buildings full of auditors and lawyers is over. We live in the time of technology where these checks should never, ever, ever--the fraudulent checks should never get out the door. If you read any of the data magazines or articles or talk to some of the experts we are starting to develop here, we can catch this and stop it. Mr. Speaker, the argument I am trying to make here, and if I haven't done it particularly elegantly, I am trying, is we need the public to believe we have finally woken up and become great stewards of their money. The reality of the waste and fraud is huge, but the scale of our borrowing, the scale of our debt, which is driven by our demographics-- next year, we are going to have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago and double the number of 65 and up. In 28 months, over half of Federal spending will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. We are going to have to deal with the reality of our demographics and our math. Maybe the public will believe us when we can also say we stopped the scam artists. We stopped the missed design. We stopped the way we have screwed up the model on Medicare, Medicaid, and so many of the programs which were designed to help people and not enrich fraudsters. Mr. Speaker, I think we are up against time, so 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, have you ever had a moment where you think back over the last dozen years, and you really, really miss something we used to call the Tea Party? Do you remember, for those of us who were involved in that, what was the premise? The premise was fairly simple. We cared about the fiscal status of our country and following the Constitution. Today, a dozen years later since the Tea Party was basically put out of business, do I have any of my brothers and sisters out there who actually care about what is going on? My preference is when I do these sort of weekly presentations, I put my Joint Economic chairman hat on or my Oversight and Ways and Means hat on. This time, I am just going to try to be the guy who cares about financing the U.S. debt and what the hell is going on right now. Often, when I do these, I like to say: Here is the problem, and here are some solutions. This time you are just getting problems, and then the reality of what it means. I am going to do this three or four times in this presentation, so if anyone is listening, think about this: From February until this week, the movement on U.S. interest rates, if you do it over 10 years, it is over $2 trillion of additional interest. That is not $2 trillion we get to spend on a new aircraft carrier or building roads or helping our brothers and sisters get healthier. It is $2 trillion to the bond market. I have come behind this microphone for a decade and a half. I have been criticized by many of those who actually care about the economics of the country, I have been criticized for saying the bond market very soon will be the dominant player in this government. David, how can you say things like this? It is happening. Let's start with this slide that we keep doing because the math is wrong now. A couple years ago when I used to do this, discretionary outlays were 27, 28 percent of spending. Now, it is down to 25 percent of the spending. This is all a Member of Congress votes on unless you have a reconciliation budget, and you see how well we are doing on those right now. So nondefense and defense. Basically, the other 75 percent of spending is on autopilot. You get these folks who come in here--we did one about 3 or 4 weeks ago where we basically said: We are going to do a resolution to balance the budget. There were no ideas with it, there was no discipline with it, there was no telling the truth with it, but we did a resolution so we can all put it on our political brochures and say we voted for a balanced budget. The economists I have on the Joint Economic Committee, we were spitballing some of the math on that, I can balance the budget next year. I have got to cut half of U.S. Federal spending. Last year, for every dollar in, we spent $1.43. So far this fiscal year, for every dollar in, we have spent $1.47. Now, that will balance out a little bit because there is a spike in there from last year's debt ceiling when we had to refund many of the accounts, but when you look at this chart, there is something really important to get your heads around. I am running for Governor in Arizona. I have given up on this place. As I am traveling around the State, I will do part of my presentation on what is really happening in the Federal Government and why it is so important to get the finances of your own State really solid because some of the revenue sharing that goes to the States--which is almost half my State's budget, our total spending--is going to start to dry up because every dime we send to the States is borrowed. Do you see this number over here, interest? Our calculation says right now the interest this fiscal year, the one we are in right now, will come in over or around $1.2 trillion. Stop and think about what I am sharing with you. Social Security, $1.6 trillion; interest, 1.2; Medicare, about 1.1. Remember, Medicare doubles in spending over the next 6 to 7 years, and in 6 years the trust fund is actually gone. Number four is actually Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies. Defense, the thing that is actually in the Constitution, is number five on our spending stack. When we go home and we sit there with our constituents, and we do things like happened today to me--so we are doing a Ways and Means markup, and there were good, simple bills that should have been bipartisan, but every Democrat had to get their little video of attacking the President, so we had to sit there for several hours. Okay, great, that is the theater of what we do here in Congress now. However, down the hallway and in the basement, a Republican Study Committee was trying to do a debt fraud forum. They had some really good people there. They had people who had been working on the issue of waste and fraud, and they had one gentleman who has written some really amazing articles. He has researched where he found millions of dollars of fraud. My problem is I was actually doing the math of what I was listening to. Mr. Speaker, how long does it take us to borrow--not spend, borrow-- $1 million? Every 12 seconds, every 12 seconds, we borrow another $1 million. Everything that was being discussed in the room didn't even actually add up to a whole minute worth of borrowing. Here is the problem in this place: Because of the financial illiteracy--sorry, I withdraw that, that is being a little mean--the lack of batteries in the calculators around here, you will see Members come behind these microphones on both sides: We are going to save $1 million, $10 million, $20 million on this, and we will have borrowed more money on the debate on the piece of legislation than the bill saves. Yesterday, we crossed over $90,000 every second in borrowing. We will borrow over $7.7-plus billion today. Is anyone listening? Do I say it in a way that is not understandable? Is there another way I can make my charts so it is absorbable? Are we a society where the desire for government spending--because there are tens of thousands of people from home, from lobbyists, others walking up and down our hallways, in our offices all day long telling us how much they care about the debt and deficits, and then they demand more money. We can stabilize the debt. We can convince the bond markets to give us lower interest rates. For those of you who are watching, and you think, well, we will just have the Federal Reserve lower interest rates. It doesn't work that way. God. Do you remember your high school economics class? The Federal Reserve, the Fed funds rate, the open window policies basically are what we call the short end of the curve. They basically influence those things that are 2 years and shorter. Your mortgage is based on the 10-year instrument. That is a market rate, and it is based on the borrowing of excess savings that is loaned to sovereigns, your mortgage, and everything else, from the entire world. It is not just financed from us here in the United States. It is the entire world. The entire world--at least most of the industrialized world--is bingeing on debt. You have to understand: We have to convince the world debt markets that we are going to tame inflation, that we are creditworthy, and that we are going to get our act together. There is a report that came out just about an hour ago--honestly, I have only read the first half of it--that basically was doing the calculations that even publicly sold debt, in 9 budget years, will be over 126 percent of debt-to-GDP. We just passed 100 percent. Does anyone care? In slightly over 6 years, if you are on Social Security, you get a 24-percent cut in your check. That is the law. In 6 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In a little over 6 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Does anyone care? Is anyone here willing to tell the truth? Yes, you will have the other side beat the crap out of you. You will have some of your own people in a primary saying: He talked about Social Security and Medicare. I am just trying to save it. For the idiots that go around saying, ``Well, we will just raise this tax,'' understand that, in 2033, to cover the shortfall of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds is over $638 billion just that year, just to cover the first year, and then it goes up and goes up and goes up. It is demographics. We don't have enough children. We don't have enough young people. We don't have enough young workers in our society. It is math. Your country basically is at zero population growth. The Census Bureau, about a month ago, did a report. If you dig through it, sometime in the next 5 years--I think the benchmark was 3 years--the United States at current policy goes negative in population. Those people go, yay, we are going to get smaller. Fine. You figure out and tell me how I am going to finance Social Security and Medicare. You tell me how I finance the debt. You tell me how I am going to convince the bond markets not to keep raising our interest rates. I know how to do it. I have come behind this damn microphone how many times and talked about the unified theory of you are going to have to adopt technology, and you are going to have to revolutionize the cost of healthcare. That is one of the things we are about to talk about. You are going to have to move to a talent-based immigration system so the population you bring into the country maximizes economic growth and tax collections. You don't have a choice anymore. You can't import mass poverty anymore. There is a way to stabilize the math, Mr. Speaker. We would just have to do everything at once, and we would have to do hard things. Two days ago, I had a couple of Ph.D.'s--I think they were from Brown University--visiting. One of their researchers was meeting with my economists from the Joint Economic Committee. All we focused on was what was going on in Medicare, not Medicaid, the benefit we promised our seniors. We were talking about the hundreds of billions of dollars that--you hear some people come behind the mike and say that we will call it waste and fraud, but it is legal because we screwed up the laws, the rules, the mechanisms, and the reimbursements. Is this place willing to do the hard things? Let's just walk through one simple conceptual idea. We did a research project a year ago just on duplicative scans. You have an MRI, an x-ray, an ultrasound, and a CT. The top end of the number was almost $35 billion in the United States in a year. You hurt your knee skiing. You go to the town and get an MRI of your knee. They send it. You go back to your home community a week later, and they do it again, instead of attaching that scan to your phone. I did a piece of legislation saying: Hey, when you can, attach the scan to an app or something so it is portable with you. That didn't cut your service. That didn't make you less healthy. It just potentially saved $35 billion a year, over almost $400 billion over 10 years. Is that bill ever going to get a hearing? The next day, I had lobbyists walking up and down the hallways here saying: David, you don't understand. Those duplicative scans are our profit margin. We have dozens and dozens of ideas and things we have scored and pieces of legislation to revolutionize the cost of government. Here is the fraud about talking about fraud. Please, someone quote me on this and attack me on it. Members of Congress, both on the left and the right, want free options. Oh, it was fraud from a foreigner. That way there are no constituents, no lobbyists, no one in our home districts making money on it. If you actually read the documents from our auditors, from MedPAC, from others that are doing their work, we know where there is hundreds of billions of dollars. The problem is, that money has constituents. There are people who make their living on it. They cover their investments on it. Look at how many times a handful of us have tried to provide options in healthcare, but it would change your business model, and the next day we get the crap kicked out of us. I worked on telehealth for years and years. I was never going to get a hearing on it because groups that made their money having you walk into the urgent care center, walk into their emergency room, would spend whatever was necessary to stop it. The only reason you have telehealth today is COVID, and it is still getting dialed back, access to that digital health. The fact of the matter is, today, you can wear a medical lab on you. The newest version of the Apple Watch is an FDA-approved medical device for the heart. As that technology gets better and better and the FDA approves more things, should that technology be allowed to prescribe, if it is statistically competent? Yes? No? It would help crash the price of healthcare. It would help dramatically raise access to healthcare. As we provide digital health and the ability to have communication, WiFi, those things, and broadband in most rural parts of our country, you could have revolutionary access to healthcare. There will be lobbyists in this hallway tomorrow trying to stop me and being angry because I even talked about this. Everything here is about the money. Remember, when you think about the pie chart of Federal budgets and spending, your Members of Congress are only voting on 25 percent of it. The rest of it is a formula. Interest now is the number two expense in government. Medicare is going to double in spending over the next 6 to 7 years. It is demographics. Next year, we will have fewer 18-year-olds than we had 20 years ago, but double the number of 65 and up. In 28, 29 months, over half of our Federal spending will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up, and I will be one of them. We are going to do what? We are going to do what? We are just going to make more promises? We are going to run more fake ``we are going to balance the budget'' bills with no plans. Let's actually walk through a couple of things that are also really uncomfortable. Debt financing costs double in 10 years. This is already where we are at. The CBO baseline budget from last February had, in 9 budget years, the U.S. debt--now, this is before the move in interest rates. This is even before some of the additional spending proposals that have come up. In 9 years, U.S. debt, borrowing, will be $3.1 trillion. Mr. Speaker, think about this point. That is $2.1 trillion of that borrowing in 9 budget years, 10 years from now, is just interest. $1 trillion is the structural debt. The other $2.1 trillion is just interest coverage. What has happened just in the movement of our bond markets in the last couple months, if this is the new benchmark for interest rates, could even come down. We are up about, what, 70 basis points since the low in February. That is over $2 trillion of additional interest over 10 years. I know it is math. We are supposed to tell stories about crazy things, or bad people, or illegal immigrants. This is what is going to take down our Republic. This is what is going to destroy your retirement, Mr. Speaker. This is what is going to take my 3 year old and make my kids the first generation who truly lives poorer than their parents. Let's walk through just a little more fun with charts and math. Mr. Speaker, just for the fun of it, we are up over 60 basis points. We are actually closer to 70, but let's use 60 because some of the interest rates went back a little bit today. We say that over 10 years that is over $2 trillion on today's projected budget and spending and current debt. Now, if we plus up defense, if we plus up other things, then that number gets even uglier. But, right now, just structurally, it is called interest fragility. I am sorry. Someone may be watching and have a better word for it that is not so complicated because the other day I was at a meeting and I had to explain fragility. The bond market is about to run this country. When small movements of interest rates when carried out over the decade are a couple of trillion dollars in additional interest, doesn't this freak out anyone? Mr. Speaker, I was going to bring a bunch of charts and show: Hey, here is the sensitivity to interest rates, and here is what is going on. We habitually attack the Congressional Budget Office when they tell us things we don't like. It turns out when actually looking at the projections and what is happening, the CBO has actually been the most accurate. The House Budget Resolution is the second most accurate. OMB is a little too optimistic. And that is on the 10-year. When we look at it on--even looking at the 3-month, it is the same thing. There are only a couple of other points I want to make here, average interest rates by security type. Now, Mr. Speaker, you go: Who cares? This year, our government will have to refinance almost $11 trillion. We are going to borrow about $2 trillion, let's call it virgin, in new issuances. But here is your, remember that big word, Mr. Speaker, ``interest fragility''? Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you a chart here in a moment where a bunch of what we do--there are these things called notes and bonds. They actually are just different names for different durations, but a bunch of our debt we keep very short. Now, that is actually what the Federal Reserve also does have an impact on, on the Fed's funds rates. However, the 2-year, right now, is over 4 percent. Guess what, Mr. Speaker? We have a whole bunch of our debt that every 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, we have to come back to the market and refinance, so if something goes haywire during that time, we are subject to that. I think last year and the year before that, we had 3, 4 months where we had to borrow money to have enough money to cover other borrowing. Now, yes, tax receipts are cyclical because we are an income tax-based government. The reason I show this is these right here are notes. This is basically debt from, think of it as 5 years to 10 years, but you see this big thing here, Mr. Speaker, bills? Twenty-one percent of our debt, that is all short term, that is coming to market, coming to market, coming to market because it rolls off, and we have to refinance, it rolls off, we have to refinance, it rolls off. When we have this much that is short, bonds here are over 10, but even today, Mr. Speaker, the 30-year bond, the 20-year bond--remember, 20 is sort of a stepchild so it often has a bit of a premium on it. The 30-year I think was coming in at 4.1, 4.16, something like that. It has been a day or so since I looked at it. Mr. Speaker, do you care about your mortgage rate? What is it, 30-year conforming home loans are over what, 6, 6.5? We want lower interest rates. We want an economy that has more capital for plants, equipment, new technology and new jobs to make us more productive so we can raise wages. We can't have a government that chews up every damn dime. A child born today, and I know I have said this over and over, and I am waiting for the moment--the reason I say it is that no one seems to care about it enough to say: Well, David, that number scared the crap out of me. A child born today, Mr. Speaker, we need 104 percent of that child's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions. Is that Republican or Democrat? I would just say it is absolutely immoral. We are going to squander one of our reconciliation budgets. A reconciliation budget is a way to get around the filibuster in the Senate. It has all sorts of rules coming from the 1974 Budget Control Act. I understand we have got to get the final portion of the DHS budget through, and I know we are having all sorts of fights on it, but why don't we do something simply moral on it and say: We have dozens of ideas and bills that don't take away peoples' service but could help us at least try to convince the bond markets we are paying attention to the debt and actually cut the waste and fraud and cut some of the spending and realign some of the programs where we would make peoples' lives better. But that would be hard, and we would have to say no to a bunch of lobbyists, and we are scared to death to do it. So those of you with kids, Mr. Speaker, give them a hug tonight and apologize to them for me--as I am going to do with my 3-year-old who graduated the first part of preschool today--for what I have done to his economic future. These numbers are so ugly. We have also done it to your retirement. Mr. Speaker, I am going to find some other place to be angry, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am actually going to try something that we have done over and over. I apologize; I have had a lot of coffee. If I start talking like a machine gun, just start waving at me. I am going to try one more time to communicate to the thousands of televisions we are on around the campus. Hopefully, there are still staff, interns, and others who actually care about our economic future. Maybe there are a few Members. Maybe there are actually some really smart people out on C-SPAN, because I am often remarkably impressed when these floor speeches go up on YouTube or other things at some of the comments. I am also heartbroken about the thousands of Russian bots and other things that may crop up. Let's do some basic reality, and I am going to walk through some of these numbers. As of today, for the last 12 months, so more than just within the fiscal year, the last 12 months--so I pick up the tax cycle, and I pick up everything else--we are borrowing about $87,000 a second, every second of every day. Yet, I will go home and give a speech. I am leaving this place. I am running for Governor in Arizona. I will speak in front of people, watch their faces when I try to explain, here is what the math is, here is what is going on. My 3-year-old son that we have adopted--a miracle, absolute miracle-- this government needs 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay Federal pensions, not the military, not the rest of the government; just to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, just the pension benefits. Madam Speaker, we need his entire lifetime earnings plus another 4 percent. Is that moral? Didn't we have one of our Founding Fathers say a generation should be responsible for its own debts? Yet, we will have borrowed about $7.5 billion, $7.7 billion today. Let's actually walk through some of the things that are actual math, a couple of the solutions. My tense frustration around here--and I accept a whole bunch of our Members are lawyers. Bless their precious hearts. Could they buy a calculator? Because it is beyond Republican versus Democrat. I think we have much better fiscal economic growth ideas, but it is demographics. In 1 year from now, we will have fewer people under 18 years of age than we had 20 years ago but double our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. In 29 months, 29 months, over half the Federal spending will go to those 65 and up. Are we allowed to tell that truth? This is the report from the Treasury that was put out about 3 weeks ago. I know we all as Members of Congress grabbed it and read some of the projections in here, but some of the math in here made it very, very, very clear, except you had to work the graphs and play with the calculations and numbers because sometimes it is really uncomfortable telling these things when you actually had numbers, 30 years from now the United States having about 250 percent debt to GDP. When you actually took a look, if you do State and local debt right now, we are over 126 percent debt to GDP. When you actually start to look at other reports of the solvency issues in regard to Social Security, Medicare, is it moral that in about 6 years and 3 months the Social Security Trust Fund is empty? In 6 years and 3 months, if we follow the law as it is written today and don't fix things, those on Social Security will get a 24 percent cut. The math says in the following year we will double the poverty of seniors. We will basically double. We will double the number of baby boomers that live on the street. Madam Speaker, in a little over 6 years, the Medicare Trust Fund is empty and hospitals in your district and my district take a 12 percent cut. How many of them will remain open? It is the math. How many times, for anyone who is crazy enough to watch us, who has actually watched the people coming behind these microphones, have actually heard Members of Congress get up and say the greatest systemic threat to our society, to our culture, to this Nation is our debt and demographics? Why aren't we willing to have a conversation about it? Why aren't we willing to tell the truth? Yet, a couple of weeks ago we had a balanced budget bill, and, actually, I think it failed, but it is part of the scam we engage in. We all go out and vote for it and say, ``I voted for a balanced budget,'' but I am never going to tell you how we are going to get there because the actual path is really hard. I have come to the floor multiple times and done entire presentations on the MedPAC report. Those are functions of the models and auditors of Medicare. There is a thing called Medicare Part C, Medicare Advantage. I absolutely support it, but I want it to be the model that was originally designed by Senator Frist in 2005 that said we are going to build a model where it is capitated care. We are going to try to incentivize the insurance company to make its money by helping the population be healthier instead of constantly scoring people as sicker. This report basically says there is about a $1.5 trillion, $2 trillion over 10 years. We won't call it fraud because it is not. They are following the rules. We are the idiots that wrote the rules. Part of those rules were changed during Obama Care. If I came to you, Madam Speaker, and said I can find you $1 trillion, $1.5 trillion, $2 trillion, we have a piece of legislation to align that program with the incentives to keep people healthier. Our preliminary score was $1.84 trillion, and the calculation said it would actually help the population of seniors on Medicare Advantage, which is 55 percent of the population, be healthier because the insurance companies that manage the program would be incentivized to make you, help you, work with you to be healthier. I can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor the bill because it has the word ``Medicare'' in it, because, God forbid, we tell the truth around here. Let's actually do some more math. Here is another report that was out on the dispatch. It is a long format, leans conservative, leans real free market, but talking about even if we use current CBO math, my little boy who is 3 years old today, when he turns 33, the United States will have a couple hundred trillion dollars in debt when my little boy is 33 years old, and that was using the previous CBO numbers. The problem is the previous CBO numbers are now wrong. Since February until today--since February until today, you have about what they call 40 basis points of increase in interest rates. Okay, big deal. Forty basis points of interest if it sticks for the next 10 years, that is over $1.3 trillion in additional interest. Let's do this again. Social Security is our biggest spend in the Federal Government. Okay. It is an earned benefit. You earned it. We owe it. We are going to spend about $1.6 trillion this year. Anyone want to guess what the second biggest spend is? Interest. If you do the interest that we owe to those who bought our bonds and the money we have also borrowed from the trust funds, we are going to pay over $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion this year just in interest. Okay. What is the third biggest expense? Medicare, about $1.1 trillion, and Medicare will double, double in spending over the next 7 years. So it goes to $2 trillion. Number four is actually Medicaid and Obama Care subsidies, ACA subsidies. Number five is actually defense. The thing that is actually in the U.S. Constitution is the number five in our spending stack. Let's actually have a little fun. We are going to take in about $5 trillion, $5.25 trillion in tax receipts. Okay. Let's say we made a deal. We are only going to spend what we get. Okay. So I just covered Social Security, 1.6. We are going to cover interest, about 1.2. We are going to cover Medicare, about 1.1. We are going to cover Medicaid and ACA subsidies, about 1. You basically right there have spent every dime of tax receipts. Your government is basically an insurance company with an army, and the army is on borrowed money. The rest of the government is on borrowed money. When we send money to the States, my State of Arizona, our appropriated budget is about $17.8 billion, $17.9 billion. Total spending is closer to $73 billion, $74 billion. What is that differential? Well, almost half the spending of my State of Arizona is actually revenue sharing, programs, matching things that we send from the Federal Government, except that money is borrowed. If you are a State government, are you prepared for when this place can't even afford to meet those obligations because everything we are doing is on borrowed money? It is important to think about. I have done entire presentations here talking about the concept of interest fragility, and no one cares until the moment you have a failed bond auction. Now our experts are actually saying that the age of lower interest rates probably isn't coming upon us. You do realize the 2-year instrument of United States debt has been hovering about 4 percent. You go, oh, why are you talking about math? The Federal funds rate is down here. We always say, well, if the Fed would lower interest rates--once again, basic economics. The Federal funds rate is only on what they call the short end of the curve. It has very little effect on the 10 years and up. The 30-year bond went over 5 percent this week. It is the highest interest rate in 19 years. Does anyone talk about it? Remember, we borrow money. The world is borrowing money. The Chinese Government and other governments are bingeing on debt. The industrialized world has gotten old. We have much of our population that is moving out of its productive years and moving into its retirement benefit years. We have a society all over the industrialized world where population is flat or shrinking. Our Census Bureau, a couple of weeks ago, put out an abstract. If you actually read through their tables, they had the United States highly likely sometime in the next 5 years going negative--United States going negative on population growth. I showed that slide in a speech I gave last week at home, and I had this woman say: ``Yay.'' I said: ``Okay. You think there are too many people. Fine. How do you want me to finance Social Security and Medicare and all the other benefits?'' She just stared at me and said: ``Well, tax rich people.'' Now, this is a Republican meeting. I just happened to have in my binder a chart that showed her that we can take every dime from those rich people, and you pay for the government for about 8 months or 9 months. Then, I asked her: ``How would you like to finance things?'' All I got was this stare because, look, when you have a world where people get their news from this thing, when much of what people know is either doomscrolling or clickbait, I beg of you--this is important. This is the survival of our Republic. We have made it 250 years. Do my kids deserve to be in this country? Does this deserve to be another American century? It can be. I have done presentation after presentation after presentation on how we can crash the price of healthcare; how we can adopt technology to do things better, faster, and cheaper; and how we can stabilize debt. Remember, all the rage around here about 2 months ago was that we are going to pass a motion to borrow only 3 percent of GDP. Love it. Madam Speaker, at this moment, we are pushing--I think 3.4 percent or 3.5 percent of GDP is just interest from the Federal Government. You tell me what spending you want to cut, and then you tell me what bonds we are going to pay off. There is a math experiment that is very simple. Remember how we passed a balanced budget amendment a couple of weeks ago, but no one was willing to tell you how to get there. If, next year, we wanted to balance the budget, I can do it. You have to cut half of Federal spending. If you do the feedback effects in the economy, you would have to cut one-half of Federal spending. I need you to think about what I am saying here, so let's do this. This is as we built the budget. Do you see this blue area, nondefense discretionary, defense? That is the only thing a Member of Congress gets to vote on, unless it is a reconciliation budget, and then we have been wasting those because we have been unwilling to tell the truth and do the cuts that are required, to start to tell the bond market that we are serious to bring down interest rates. Once again, the way you bring down interest rates: convince the bond markets that we are incredibly creditworthy, that we are doing the things that are not inflating the economy by pumping all sorts of borrowed spending into the economy, and, therefore, raising interest rates by raising inflation. The rest of the red is on autopilot. The problem is that if you want to look at the pie, every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed, and a big chunk of--choose whatever you want--is borrowed. How long can we keep doing this? Seriously, how long can we keep doing this? I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am No. 4 on the Ways and Means Committee. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee. I have been doing all the waste and fraud investigations I can, whether it be hospice care, particularly in L.A. County--it is trying to expose the things going on in New York, the organ procurement fraud, all the work we have done on trying to fix the misalignment in Medicare Advantage. Yet, the armies of lobbyists up and down these hallways--many of them are wonderful people--the armies of people from our home districts who come into our office who tell us how much they want us to cut spending--no, they don't ask us to cut spending, do they? I will do a presentation to my own people from Arizona and say: ``Here is what we are up against.'' They will say: ``That is very interesting. Now, will you listen to my request for more spending?'' The other one that is even more perverse is that we get businesses that come into our office and try to explain how they want us to regulate their competition. I thought we were the free market party. I thought we were the party that believed prosperity was moral, that the way you help our brothers and sisters be less poor is an economy that works, that allocates its resources where you maximize prosperity. Are we doing that right now? The math basically says that when you do the adjustments for inflation--now, a lot of this is the inflation from 4 years or 5 years ago. The people in my State are still poorer today than they were 5 years ago. Wage growth hasn't even gotten close to catching up. Where is the fixation on the people who we claim that we care about and love? We are conservatives. We are supposed to love people. We are supposed to believe in freedom. We are supposed to believe in prosperity, but we are so busy selling shiny objects so we can get on cable news or be a YouTube celebrity or a Twitter celebrity tonight, we make crap up. We do salacious things. We throw out things where we have never told the truth about the underlying math, or we know that the math doesn't work. My Joint Economic Committee did our report, the Republican side, and we did something really hard. We spent months working on this. We talked about a unified theory: Here is how we bring prosperity back. Here is how we bring wage growth back. Here is how we start to stabilize the U.S. debt. Yet, you have to be willing to tell the truth. Yet, the troll army: ``Well, they talked about talent-based immigration.'' I also talked about ending H-1B visas because of the misallocation in wage suppression and going to a model that would actually increase wages, but you have to be willing to read the report. Yes, it is hundreds of pages, and there are fancy formulas in there that, unless you had advanced calculus, you are not going to get the math, but we do the explanation under it. The rest of the reading is actually pretty easy. The reason we wrote this is that we are trying to make the point that we can do this. There is a mathematical policy way that we can bring back prosperity. We can bring back actual affordability, your retirement. My kids have a chance. Other than six of us and half of those reading it to try to find a way to attack us, and the other half because they don't have a life, please, someone out there read the Joint Economic Report from the Republicans. We worked hard on this. The math, in some ways, is brilliant. The policies work, but there are things in there that are controversial. You are going to have to talk about automation, accepting technology, bringing the benefits of possible automation, labor substitution to grow the economy, two things to raise up wages. It is possible, but we have to tell the truth, and we have a real situation in our country. I know this chart is a little hard to read, but I have a simple point I am trying to make. If you go back to 2019, all the way to April, where we are at right now, and you basically take a look at all nonfarm growth, it is actually up only about 4 percent. What is way up here that has had a 24 percent growth? What has had the 17 percent growth? Those are, functionally, employment from welfare programs. This is like, I think, in Medicaid, visiting family members, getting signed up, and getting paid for it. This is essentially welfare services in healthcare. The problem with healthcare is--what is it?--about 67 percent, maybe even more, of healthcare dollars come from the Federal Government. In my State of Arizona, last year, we produced only 24,000 new jobs. Every single one of those new jobs was in healthcare and welfare services. Private-sector jobs actually fell. Last month in Arizona, we lost about 10,800 jobs. Private-sector jobs shrank. We are now either 47th or 45th from the bottom or to the bottom in affordability in Arizona. Of my three wage categories, two of the wage categories went down. They lost--not even inflation adjusted, the raw number--they lost salary structure. Why do we care? Look, you try to explain the basic math on these things. Do we care and love our brothers and sisters? We are tracking this, and I am trying to get better data. This chart is a little hard to read, but those little tops you see with the orange and the yellow? Those are delinquencies. Those are delinquencies that are starting to grow economically in our society, people who are having trouble making their mortgage payment, people who are having trouble making their car payment. I don't think this even has student loans in it. The fact of the matter is, we did some really good things in the tax policy last year, but we haven't done all the other things that are required from us to get the economy roaring to open up markets. Look, when it is illegal in the United States to modernize a port--we have the least efficient ports in the industrialized world. I know that is uncomfortable because I just made a union mad by saying that, but the fact of the matter is we care about pricing. We care about supply chains. We care about inflation. We care about affordability, but then we are going to basically do the very things that stop the efficiencies in our economy. Maybe we could legalize the very technologies, the very things in our world that would make the world more prosperous. Are we too busy pandering to the last group of lobbyists that came into our office? Look, a local example, just because I care about this: I used to be the Maricopa County treasurer. Maricopa County is the most populous county in the United States. All right. I was the tax collector. I was the investment officer. I was the bank. So I had a really good staff. We did lots of great things. If I walk in tomorrow and say, all right, let's get rid of the income tax in my State, that is great. I love it. It is about 31 percent of the budget that is appropriated. Okay. Tell me what you want to cut. Tell me where we are going to move, because understand, if you wanted to make that up and say we are just going to cut it on the income tax and move it to the property tax, you just doubled grandma's property taxes. Is that your plan? Is that what we are actually going to do? Now, we have actually offered ideas to lower the cost of government where we think we can cut that rate down by a third, 40 percent, but you systematically have to have a plan to do things. It is the same thing here. We talk a big game, but you notice we avoid telling the truth about the details of what it takes. And I think the public, the voters we represent, the voters we claim we care about, have gotten to the point where they are tired of the fraud. If you are going to give us an idea, tell us how you get there. Tell us the math. I have used the sarcastic comments behind this microphone a dozen times. I work in a math-free zone. If you are going to make a proposal, maybe we should try something new, Madam Speaker. If we are going to make a proposal, demonstrate how you are going to get there. Demonstrate how the math actually works. There are ways to make it happen. Nothing is easy, but it is doable. Lay out a plan. Look, we have been doing presentations around Arizona on how we could crash the price of our Medicaid system. It will take a couple years, but through technology, helping our brothers and sisters be healthier, we think we can remove hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. We can end fraud in much of our government programs tomorrow by simple adoption of data systems. So think about this: One of the great perversities--and actually part of it is in this MedPAC book. If you look at it, we pay fraudsters, and then the current government model is we hire auditors, and then we hire lawyers. How often do we ever get any money back? How often do people actually end up in jail? May I propose a suggestion? Stop letting the damn money go out the door in the first place. The pay and chase model is from a different century, a different decade. We have the technology today, whether you want to call it AI, algorithmic, the fact of the matter is someone is requesting benefits. Their data doesn't match. These hospices that were popping up all over L.A. County, the first time we start to look at their data, we knew they were a fraud. The fact of the matter is we have the technology today; we can stop the waste and fraud in government. Maybe the public would start to believe in us again if they knew their money wasn't going to fraudsters. We can do that particularly at my State level where we had, what, $2.8 billion in sober living home fraud that could have been caught, I have been told, by a $1,500 simple accounting AI package. It would have seen it immediately, and it would have saved $2.8 billion. Is that Republican or Democrat? Now, I know it upsets the people that are the auditors, the people that make their living, but this needs to be about the taxpayers and about the American people. We have ways to fix these things. Why don't we have the intellectual gravitas or whatever fancy word we want to use around this place to actually try and do it instead of continuing to do the trite? Madam Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating me, and I did mention I have had a lot of caffeine already today. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask the chairman whether it is tireless or annoying. It is one or the other. Look, I have an absolute fixation, and I have got to thank my Democratic colleague and a number of the team here for tolerating my fixation on the fact that one of the ways you work within the IRS budget to make things more efficient is the adoption of technology. Imagine a world--because it is the one we live in--where some of the number one calls we get to my district office are IRS questions: Where is my refund? Do I owe money? I can't get someone to pick up the phone. How do I get information? This piece of legislation is a great start. It will provide wonderful visibility. The concept that on this thing we all walk around with, this supercomputer we have in our pocket, I can go on and actually see the dashboard. I can see: Hey, I owe money. I have money coming back. Here is where it is in process. Here are my different years. The ability to actually have a system that calls you back. In many ways, these are technologies the private sector has had for a decade. In many ways, these are actually technologies that we have been talking about in the Ways and Means Committee for almost a decade, but now we finally have a fairly simple piece of legislation here that means that taxpayers in the next couple of years will be able to log on an absolutely private login system, so we protect their identity, protect their privacy, but they will be able to see the information. By the ability to see that dashboard, that dashboard means they don't have to be picking up the phone and calling the IRS. They don't have to be sitting there on hold for hours. They don't have to be--I would argue, if you want taxpayer participation in a voluntary tax system as we are, make it easy to understand where you are at, what you owe, and what is owed to you. Mr. Speaker, I also thank the Ways and Means staff. I would like to go further, but this is a terrific start.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, there is a certain irony to having the message from the Senate come in just as I am about to actually walk through some of the absolutely fraudulent math in their document, but we will get to that. Let's see. I have been in Congress now 16 years. I believe I am almost to a record, at least over the last decade, of coming here to the floor doing math, doing budget presentations, talking about the demographics, talking about what is going on, and realizing, is there anyone listening? You know, we will do shiny objects all day long: I am enraged about the President doing this or I am mad about Biden doing this. You hear something, and at the same time, Mr. Speaker, I believe today we will borrow $87,000, $88,000 every second. Every second. In 6 years--I think my math is 6 years, 4 months. If you are on Social Security, the way the law is as of today, you get a 24 percent cut in your check in 6 years, 4 months. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones the last 6 months, other than myself, and say we have a moral obligation to deal with this? In 6 years, what, 3 months, the Medicare trust fund is gone, and if you are a hospital, you are getting a 12 percent cut. Do you think you are going to get to see your doctor? How many people have come behind these microphones and said: Here is a path to reform the price of healthcare? We are not supposed to talk about these things, particularly because it is always an election year. I have a 3-year-old we have adopted. He is the greatest gift God has ever given someone. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- that is reasonable, it might be slightly high--you need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government. Is there any understanding out there of what we have done to your retirement, what we have done to our kids? Does anyone actually care about the math? We are going to walk through it one more time, and this time I am going to try to make an impassioned plea. We just had a reconciliation. Remember, the 1974 Budget Control Act built this reconciliation process where you could get around the filibuster in the Senate. The reason we do it is to get around the filibuster in the Senate. Instead, we are going to do the skinny one, as it is being talked about because it is a way to get the DHS funding because the Democrats won't work with us on the budget. However, when we do it, we are giving up an opportunity to maybe actually tell the truth about where the finances are of this country. The hallways this week have been full of tens and tens of thousands of lobbyists, people lobbying and saying: I just need more money for my thing. Then you go and point out, saying--one of the best examples I have is DOGE, okay? Remember when DOGE started, we are going to save $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion. Then by the time it was done, if you go to the DOGE.gov website, it is a couple hundred billion, maybe 250. The actual executed portion in this fiscal year is 7. I think that is Congress' fault because there were a lot of ideas we haven't executed because we would have to go tell the truth to people. However, Mr. Speaker, we will borrow more money today, borrow more money today than every dime that DOGE saved us that we put into law. Think about the theater. Think about the speeches. Think about the angry people on cable television talking about it. This is a math-free zone. All right. This is our traditional pie chart. You see the blue portion? That is what I, as a Member of Congress, what every Member of Congress, that is all we get to vote on unless it is a budget reconciliation, and therefore we are allowed to talk about mandatory spending. Understand, this blue area, every dime is borrowed and about $500 billion of Medicare and other things. We had actually--I think it was a year ago because that is the date I had. I think we had multiple months where we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. Now, it will change because we just had our month of tax collection we are in, but if you do the first 6 months of this fiscal year, for every dollar that came into this government, we spent $1.47. Yet, the philosophy around here is, no one ever got unelected by spending too much money, and it is true. I am running for Governor in Arizona. I have given up on trying to save Congress. I will meet incredible people that are stressed out of their mind. They are poorer today than they were in past years because of inflation and wages haven't closed that gap. Then you talk to them about why was there inflation, and I would argue it is the scale of the spending. It is the scale of the borrowing and the lack of fixation on things that raise productivity because wages go up. Remember your high school economics class. What are the two things that raise wages? Inflation--which that doesn't get you anything. It raises wages, but your purchasing power gets eaten away--and productivity. We are starting to see the productivity curve. I would argue that much of that is because of some of the things we have done in the tax legislation over the last year, but we still haven't closed the gap from the Biden inflation years. My brothers and sisters in Arizona, if you are in the working class, you are poorer today when we do your purchasing power than you were 5 years ago, and yet we have another problem. Here is the demographics update from the Census Bureau of the United States. If you dig through it, it basically will tell you a prediction that sometime in the next 5 years, the United States almost goes to negative population growth. It will tell you at this moment we are pretty much at zero or flat population growth. I will get some people that say: Oh, that is wonderful. Great. You tell me how to finance your Social Security and your Medicare because those are designed as Pay-As- You-Go programs. Today's workers pay for today's recipients. You earned it. I have got to figure out a way to finance it. Then my Democrat colleagues say: Oh, we will just raise taxes. Think of this: 2032, 6 years from now, Social Security-Medicare trust fund is gone. Seven years from now, 2033, just to cover that shortfall, our rough estimate is $638 billion of tax hikes for that 1 year. The next year is more and the next year is more. If you run for United States Senate, in your first term in the Senate, the trust funds are gone. During the next Presidential term, the trust funds are gone. The math is so much easier if we step up and deal with it today because we actually get a few more years of actuarial math. I would argue the fact we don't deal with it is absolutely immoral. The fact that when I walk into the political meetings and almost get booed because you got to stop telling people the truth about the math. Let's go talk about more shiny objects, more things to enrage you, and more things that basically are tabloid television to distract you from the fact that, I think, during this speech, we are going to borrow another $250 million, $300 million. Because if we are borrowing about $88,000 a second, that is $270 million an hour. It is insane. Let's actually walk some more through this. Last week was tax day. If you as just a regular middle of the road American, middle income, those things, the day after tax day was your tax freedom day. If you add up the Federal income tax, the State income tax, property taxes, those things, that is where we are at. How do you build an argument that we have a spending problem when in less than 3 years the majority of our spending goes to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. It is a demographic problem, back to what the census was telling us. We got a math problem, and it turns out it is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is demographics. Now, I believe the Democrats absolutely refuse to tell the truth. We will tax rich people. Then I come here and show the math saying, you can take every dime from every ultrarich person in America and you can only pay for 9 months of operating this government. You can actually do every tax that has been offered by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and it actually produces about 2 percent of GDP. So far this fiscal year, we are borrowing almost 8 percent of GDP. Anyone see a math problem? Rage is a political tactic. Welcome to what the political class lives on. If you take a look at net receipts--the reason I show this chart is, we are going to have to do something that is also really difficult. The majority of income to your Federal Government comes from income taxes, but if you look at our economic growth, much of our growth right now is because of building datacenters and capital projects. This dark purple here, that is individual income taxes. This lighter blue here, that is what we call payroll taxes. That is your Social Security contribution, that is your Medicare contribution, and that is your unemployment contributions. This over here, when you start to actually look at these much smaller pieces, that is corporate income taxes. That is customs duties. We got a tax problem because this is fairly stagnant. Why is it stagnant? It is because labor force participation, our brothers and sisters, are getting older. They have saved up their money and are able to retire. The growth in the economy is essentially because of capital expenditures, not of wage growth. We have to cap what we call an income tax stat, income to government's problem in the formula, but yet look at our outlays. I know this is sort of crazy to look at. This is Social Security. That is obligated. Remember, every month we have to borrow. Social Security holds--think of them as Treasury bills. They hand them over to the Treasury. Treasury cashes them in, and gives Social Security money. We pay interest--actually, it is a fairly decent interest rate back to the trust fund, back to Social Security. That is what runs out in a little over 6 years. You see this black line here. This is the spending that absolutely just lives on the credit card. How do I get people to actually read? Go look at the CBO report from February. It basically says in 9 budget years, we will have a $3.1 trillion running deficit. $1 trillion is structural, meaning we are overspending by a trillion, but another $2.1 trillion is just interest, and that was assuming the interest rates from the end of last year. You are heading toward a time where interest--it is a decade-plus out, but interest will be the single biggest cost in this government. I will get people saying: Well, foreigners. The vast majority of debt is held by us. I used to be Maricopa County Treasurer years ago. We would actually take the tax collections from our school districts, from the 3,300 taxing districts I had--Maricopa County is a huge, huge, huge county and we would invest in T-bills and full faith and credits and those things to keep the money safe, but also get a little bit of interest. China, other governments have been slowly getting rid of U.S. debt because they need it just to cover their own spending and my fear is the extraordinary privilege that we have as a country is really two things, Mr. Speaker. We are the reserve currency of the world. Meaning, the world trades in our currency. It is one of the reasons there is such an appetite for U.S. debt because they need that debt. You are actually seeing some of the discussions right now as the war is going on of some countries not having enough U.S. currency for their pledges and the opportunity to offer swaps and those things. That is just the plumbing of money around the world. What happens if we lose full faith and credit, or we stop being the reserve currency, or just become it less, where you need much fewer dollars because there is other baskets that are commodity-backed? That is a real problem because our interest rates go up. The second extraordinary privilege that we have, which we are going to have to have an honest conversation on the way to exploit it, is smart people, productive people, and entrepreneurial people want to do business here. They want to live here. This is an amazing country. President Trump talks about this repeatedly. We are insane often. We educate people at our institutions. ``You have an engineering degree. Go home. We are sending you out of the country to compete with us.'' Did I mention that we are basically at zero population growth? I did a presentation a couple of weeks ago showing the abstract, a really interesting--I think it was the Manhattan Institute that did this report saying that populations that Biden allowed to come across the border, if we do the means of calculations, that cost us about $100,000 per person in additional actual loss, spending. Yet, some who we keep here, who we just educated, who have an engineering degree, master's degree, or a graduate degree, we make $3 million in taxes off of them. You cannot make the unified theory of stabilizing U.S. borrowing unless you adopt technology and unless you do a massive reform of our healthcare spending. Legalized competition, this concept of creative destruction that used to drive the next generation of innovation, think about it. I think this Congress, if Blockbuster Video had come in here, handed out enough checks and hired enough lobbyists, we would have slowed down the internet to stop Netflix. We live the destruction all the time, and we have almost stopped it. Remember the lobbyists I was just complaining about running in? Many of them are wonderful people. They are nice. They are hired to do their job. It is part of the First Amendment. You have the right to actually petition your government, tell a story, those things. Yet, often it is money or block my competition. We need to deal with the reality. The rest of the world is stealing our smart people, many of the ones who we educate. We need them here because we need their productive capacity. We have to start growing. Remember the whole wage thing? Wages go up by productivity. We need them, and then, we need to convince the debt markets that we are going to do something on debt because, Mr. Speaker, another fun point you will like: Today, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States can. According to the world debt markets today, Greece and about a dozen other countries have a better credit rating on a 10-year bond-- actually, it was a 10-year paper--than the United States. Doesn't that tell anyone anything? Is anyone listening? It is an election year, so maybe it is just another year of avoiding the truth, not saving the future, basically doing and saying whatever is necessary to win the next election. Look, I am in a 50-50 district. I campaign on fiscal sanity. It turns out that if you tell people the truth, the voters are often so much smarter than the elected class. They get it. They don't like it, but wouldn't it be amazing if our campaigns were run on: Here is my idea to save Social Security. Here is my idea to save Medicare. Here is my idea to grow the economy. Here is my idea to save the future for our kids and your retirement. Instead, we are going to run our campaigns beating the ever-living you know what out of each other, just like you have seen some of the other presentations here on the floor already today, where it is personality wars because that is what will get you onto cable news tonight. Just to make the point one more time, all around the country, we are closing schools. It is not some sinister plot. We have far too many school buses. We have far too many school districts. We have far too many school buildings. Why? Because we don't have enough kids. Next year, there will be fewer 18-year-olds in America than there were 20 years ago. Next year, there will be double those of us--I just turned 64, so next year, I am 65--who are 65 and up. It is math. I remember sitting with a statistics professor at Arizona State University in 1982, I think, and she was making the point: Hey, you guys have a problem. There is this like 76 million, those within this baby boomer quartile. How are you going to finance it? Apparently, we knew there were baby boomers coming 65 years ago. I am really glad we planned for it. Now, we have to deal with telling the truth, and this is why this is the stuff that gets most politicians unelected, because you are not prepared for all the groups out there that are paid to lie to you as voters. Remember--what the hell. Tell the truth. We had the insurance executives in front of the Ways and Means Committee about 1 month ago, groups like AARP, that will do one--actually, I will tell you that the group in Arizona is fairly impressive. They do some good things. Yet, the CEO of one of the biggest insurance companies in America said: ``Oh, yeah. Last year, we gave them $9 billion to basically advocate for our Medicare Advantage program.'' What happens when everything has become about the money? You start to look at this, and this is sort of the running debt and unfunded liabilities. This isn't mine. This isn't from my Joint Economic Committee team. This is from the CBO: $88.4 trillion is the 75-year unfunded liability. If you actually look at the 30-year, it is actually pretty much the same because the calculation of the population is going to the reward. You start to look at these. You don't think the bond market is going to say: ``Hey, I am not buying a 30-year U.S. bond''? It is just math. It is not my opinion. It is just math. We start to actually look--okay, so this one will drive people insane, but it turns out that I have to give the Trump administration and Treasury some credit. They put out the fiscal report of the United States Government about 2 weeks ago. It is really well written. For anyone who is geeky, it is not that hard to read. Give up 2 hours of not watching Netflix and just skim through it. In this report, I had to actually pull out my calculator because they don't actually say it, but it is in the charts. Congressional Budget Office says, 30 years from now, so my little boy, who is 3 years old, when he is 33 years old--hopefully, just getting his family and his career and those things going--CBO says we will be about a 175-percent debt-to-GDP ratio. Okay. That may not mean a lot to you, but that is big. This number looks like it is more like 250 percent, coming from the Treasury 2 weeks ago. Why this is a stressor, I will get the brain trust around here who says: ``Oh, we have lots of assets.'' We do, but here are the assets, as calculated by the Treasury, basically saying that, total assets, we have about $6 trillion held by the Federal Government, but we have $47.8 trillion of liabilities--$47.8 trillion. This isn't my opinion. It is from our own Treasury Department 2 weeks ago. Does anyone see a math problem? How many people did you see come behind these microphones or on cable news in the last week, saying that even the Trump administration's Treasury, which has some really smart people over there, put out a report? Since we all are Members of Congress, we are the management board of the biggest entity in the world economy-wise. We all read this, right? Then, we wonder why Congress' credibility is getting pretty close to zero. We don't do the actual job. I have just two or three things here, and then we are going to talk about what the Senate just sent us, debt financing costs over the next 10 years. Mr. Speaker, a while back, we did a budget resolution. That budget resolution says we are going to all agree that we are going to actually only borrow 3 percent of GDP. Actually, you would make the world debt markets and those things much more happy. We have a little technical problem. So far, as of last month, our financing costs, just the interest, is 3.3 percent of GDP. First 6, 7 months of this fiscal year, we are borrowing almost 8 percent of GDP. We do these things that are absolute theatrical fraud. A couple of weeks ago, we did a balanced budget amendment, which did fail, but there was absolutely no discussion of the fact that if you were to balance the budget today, which I can do, you have to cut half of Federal spending to make it work with the economic effects. Do we ever tell people that, go to our townhalls and say: ``I am for a balanced budget, and if we do it next year, I have to cut half of Federal spending to make it work.'' People don't understand the scale. Remember, a year ago, for every dollar in, we spent $1.43. So far this fiscal year, every dollar in, we are spending $1.47. Here is what is terrifying. We think this number has just gone up because now the long-run projected interest rates are higher. In 9 budget years, 4.6 percent of the entire economy will just be interest. Functionally, in 9 budget years, interest will be almost the same as all of Social Security spending. Look, today, Social Security is like $1.6, $1.7 trillion this year. Interest will be 1.2, if you do also the interest that we have to pay back to the trust funds. Welcome to our world. I think one of the debt research groups put out a paper yesterday or the day before just talking about a 1-percent rise in interest rate, $3.4 trillion additional spending. Yet, every single day, we seem to do things that just scare the crap out of our bankers because we have to turn to our brothers and sisters, whether the county treasurers, other governments, other people, other investors, a little family in the Midwest who saves up their money and buys government debt, and they are starting to worry if we are ever going to take this seriously. Let's actually have some fun on this. This is the Senate budget resolution that just got delivered. As I started this presentation, it just got delivered. There is a small problem. Let's start with the thing that enrages me the most. We passed an agreement that we were going to move to 3 percent of the economy size in borrowing. Using this Senate resolution's own math, you would actually have to cut $9.74 trillion in spending--they don't say how--in actual spending. Remember, you would also have to reduce net interest by another $1.5 trillion. See that little chart on the bottom, that is actually what the Senate resolution pretends we are going to do. You start looking at these things--let's see if I have it. So this is the big boy chart. See that? So they sent us this resolution today. We are going to combine those two. We are going to pretend there is $10 trillion that is going to disappear over the next 10 years. Do we have a moral obligation to tell each other, tell the public, tell the bond markets, tell our bankers how we are going to do that? Remember the beginning pie chart. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, plus another almost half a trillion dollars comes out of mandatory spending that is borrowed. We are going to accept a budget resolution that says: Hey, don't worry. There is going to be like $10 trillion that is just magically going to disappear. This is us. Maybe the philosophy that no one ever gets unelected by spending too much money is telling the truth about the math. I will throw everything I have at this, and eventually, you guys will vote over the top of me. I will go home just mad as hell, and my wife will look at me and say: ``Why the hell are you still there?'' Then, I will hug my kids, and I will apologize to my kids for what we have done to them. Then, I will go to my next set of meetings at my office, and there will be groups of people demanding more money. Look, this chart is almost a bit hard to understand. This is basically the budget resolution that just came from the Senate, saying, magically, we are going to be down here. This is 3 percent, but here is actually the CBO projection. Now, understand we are running hotter than the CBO projection of debt to GDP, but we are going to pretend that somehow this gap is just going to disappear. Then, when you start to look at the reality, Senate budget resolution functional changes are $1.4 trillion higher than baseline. Remember, this is something that should have happened in regular appropriations. We are having to use a budget reconciliation because our brothers and sisters on the left side, the Democrats, basically are terrified of their base. They can't vote for DHS funding because there is immigration enforcement, but it gives me a chance to sort of show, when discretionary money spending is all borrowed, it has debt effects. Are we going to squander a budget reconciliation where we only need 50 votes, plus the Vice President, or 51 votes in the Senate? Are we going to walk away from a chance to just pay for it? Are we going to walk away from the chance to do some budgetary reforms? We talk about waste and fraud all the time. How many times have I come on this floor and talked about things like I love Medicare Advantage? I love the concept of a program where you make a profit by helping seniors be healthier. Look, some people might be doctors around here and actually understand how this works. Instead, we have report after report and Wall Street Journal articles that talk about, hey, we are going to make our money by scoring people sicker and get the spiff, even though often these people don't actually have that disease or the ailments that we are paying premiums on. It's called risk scoring. Get rid of the risk scoring, pay more upfront, and then incentivize, saying you are going to make a profit by helping our brothers and sisters be healthier. Fifty-five percent of the population is on Medicare part C, Medicare Advantage. For anyone who is listening, particularly if you are one of the lobbyists, I want to save Medicare Advantage. You are going to run it into a brick wall if we don't do some of the reforms because, at some point, the left is going to take over here, and they will crush this. Help me do the honorable thing of making a system that works because the MedPAC reports themselves say it is potentially as high as $2 trillion we can save over 10 years. It is live for today, spend for today, grab every dime you can for today, get your bonus today, and burn down the future. These numbers--what is the joke one of our Members says? The math ain't mathing. This is more just to help understand, when every dime of discretionary spending is borrowed, this is just--not just. The $70 billion baseline, understand the Senate resolution is not for $70 billion. It is actually $70 billion in this committee and $70 billion in this committee. I think if I can add that up, that is $140 billion, but we are going to pretend they are only going to authorize to the $70 billion, even though each committee has the $70 billion, but I respect it because we know our Senate colleagues won't pork it up, right? This is 70, but you start to look at the chart and understand this is if it was an even spending. That isn't the resolution. I am going to show you another chart where it is all front-loaded. You start to see this purple here, the light purple, that is just the financing cost of DHS spending. That could have gone through regular appropriations just because we borrow all this money. We don't pay for it. What happens if--what the real request is that we front-load it. So when you do this, you spend it today and pay additional interest because you have loaded up the debt. The scale of that debt, when you start to get out to 2035, the interest is more than the DHS spending from just that program. There is this term called ``interest fragility.'' It basically says the greatest threat to this country anymore is the fact that we are about to hand the bond market control of the government. They are going to decide what we can do, what we can't do, what we can pay for, what we can't pay for. You think I am making it up. Wait until the first day we have a failed bond or just a stressed bond auction, and you watch this place pucker up and realize the sky is falling. You have a budget reconciliation that just came to us. Mr. Speaker, how do we get this body to do a single thing that is honorable? Let's cut some spending. Let's do the reforms. Let's change some of the program designs that we all promised we were going to do, that the Speaker actually promised me we were going to do, and convince the bond markets that we are not a bunch of children who don't tell the truth to our voters. Maybe we will be rewarded by those lower interest rates that the President talks about that we need for housing and for everything else in our economy. We are not getting that lower interest rate until we convince the bond markets that we are not out of our minds. 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, wouldn't it be fun if we actually did these sorts of discussions and debates sort of like we do term papers where you actually have to give the footnote of where the numbers come from. That is because I hear numbers from my brothers and sisters on the left, and I say: Where did that come from? So the first number I am going to give you today, Mr. Speaker, from the Joint Economic Committee, tomorrow is the first day that you actually work for yourself, meaning the first 3\1/2\ months you have been working to pay taxes, whether it be your property taxes, State income taxes, or Federal taxes, Mr. Speaker. This is for the middle income of our brothers and sisters. Welcome to Tax Freedom Day, which technically might be actually tomorrow. The rest of the numbers I will give you, Mr. Speaker--if you want to go on to the Senate Finance Committee's website, you will actually find the facts and the numbers. I would love someone who is actually a researcher and likes to look at them, look and then compare them to what the Democrats say and what we say. For Arizona, we were one of the epicenters of inflation. Our brothers and sisters in our State, after the Biden years of inflation, their wages are just now starting to catch up. Our brothers and sisters were poorer. One of the things we did in the tax bill last summer is we actually found a way to use the tax system to raise wages, whether it be because of paying less taxes or some of the economic growth. So let's actually walk through some of the numbers. For a couple, there is a $6,800 real wage increase. You can find that on the Senate's website, Mr. Speaker, $7,400 to $10,600 real take-home pay increase for the average Arizona family. Remember, Mr. Speaker, this is a State that was crushed. I think when the Biden inflation years were over, we came in number two in the country. Our brothers and sisters in that hardworking middle class are still poorer today because we are just now starting to catch up. I am actually taking a look at small business. I have 514,000 small businesses that now have the 20 percent deduction locked in. Mr. Speaker, tell me that isn't stability, when you start to walk through things like the $6,000 bonus deduction for seniors in that middle realm of income. These things are remarkably important to growth, stability, and actually having to deal with the fact that inflation is the biggest tax in the last 40 years, those years of the Biden inflation. Inflation is a tax. In many ways what we did here in tax reform, we are just trying to make things a little more even for those working brothers and sisters. I have 822,000 families in Arizona who got an increase in the child deduction of $2,200. I thought that was something the left actually liked. When you start to walk through our work, Mr. Speaker, to try to make life better for my brothers and sisters in Arizona, that is why this was so important.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I have a number of things to go over. Mr. Speaker, do you remember over the last few years the number of discussions we would have at home, saying drain the swamp? What was the term, swamp critters? We have been collecting a number of articles and trying to figure out why it is so hard to actually do policy that makes our brothers' and sisters' lives easier, better, healthier, and more prosperous. I am starting to come to the conclusion that for so many of our brothers and sisters who are at home who are watching Members of Congress, and they somehow think this is the swamp, it is part of it. We came across a number of stories that looked like they had been properly vetted, where the lobbyist community is handing out money to people. This was more on the conservative side, particularly some of our conservative publications, handing them cash to write stories to promote whatever that lobbyist wanted. I have been behind this microphone before, and I have actually shown repeatedly, here are influencers on the internet, more from my side, here are some MAGA influencers that were taking money. Maybe we should have caught it more quickly when it was the 23-year-old attractive person talking about Medicare Advantage and saying: I am sure she is an expert on Medicare Advantage. It turns out we had a series of I guess it was the broker community and those things in Medicare part C paying them to warp the information for the American people to try to understand for those who of us to get up here and try to reform this place, reform how we are trying to spend our money, to try to take on the U.S. debt, that the swamp is now on your information that is coming through this device. You have to understand, Mr. Speaker, I actually have some articles from 1 year ago. It turns out, some of the biggest snack food producers were trying to stop Congress through social media influencers. They were paying social media influencers to stop having a conversation about GLP-1 semaglutides like Ozempic. That is how perverse this place has become. I have learned, and I truly believe this, that almost everything in Washington, D.C., is actually about the money. What happens when the armies of folks are walking up and down our Halls here? Are they here because they want a freer society? Is it because they are fixated on the morality of the prosperity of growth and of opportunity for all people? Are they here to try to get us to put up pieces of legislation that stop their competition and that stop creative destruction in the economy, even though that is how you get better, faster, and cheaper? Is it how they want us to hand them cash? Mr. Speaker, I am going to show some boards from the Treasury's detailed balance sheet. The level of financial trouble our Republic is in is remarkable. If anyone is watching C-SPAN over the last day or 2, how many people have you actually seen coming behind these microphones that actually care? This is the chart I have typically started with, and the reason I do this is to say: Hey, you see this blue portion of this board? That is what we get to vote on as Members of Congress. Everything else in the red is on autopilot. We only vote on about 25 percent of the spending here in Congress. The rest is formula. It is mandatory spending. However, it is worse than that. A couple days ago, the Treasury, as they are required by statute, did the sort of here is the balance sheet of America, here is where we are financially. Did anyone see the stories--you have got to read some of the geeky sort of financial press--that America actually had negative? Functionally, here is what was on the Treasury's balance sheets, saying, hey, America, currently--these are current liabilities. These aren't the unfunded liabilities for the future. These are current obligations. We owe $47.8 trillion in current liabilities, and we have $6 trillion in assets. This is from the Treasury statement. Doesn't this terrify anyone? Is it still just a calculator/math-free zone or is it more important that when the paid influencers, the paid person on conservative media by a lobbyist is saying: Oh, they might actually look at making us reform our program. We are going to hand some money to one of these authors so they will say: Oh, reform is bad, it's not Republican. Of course, it is Republican. We believe in markets. At least we used to. Let's actually talk about how bad this math is. I am going to go straight to the punch line. If you actually just do the 75-year Social Security and Medicare obligations, you are at $88.4 trillion of unfunded liabilities, and these numbers probably aren't dystopian enough. Look, a week ago, I did a whole presentation here, and we partially talked about the unified theory of how we stabilize the debt. I have seen the applause in some of the financial articles on CNBC, Bloomberg saying: Well, there are some Members of Congress trying to do a piece of legislation to get us to 3 percent of debt to GDP. Wonderful idea. At this moment, just interest is well above 3 percent of GDP. So far this year--so we are 6 months into the fiscal year--over 7.3 percent of the entire economy is being borrowed by the Federal Government. But don't worry, we are going to do that 3 percent thing even though the latest GDP numbers are below that. If I had told you a decade, two decades ago that just the interest being paid by the Federal Government on our debt is bigger than the growth of the country, you would have thrown up your hands and said: Well, it is all over then. Yet, we look the other way because we are too busy doing the damn shiny objects around here that will get us on cable news tonight or on social media. We can do the shiny object, get some dopamine hits, maybe get some people giving us money on text message fundraising. We are heading to well over $88 trillion in liabilities. What do we do? I came here a month ago and showed part of the report that said a child born today, if you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- that might be a little bit high, it is a little geeky, but it is within the margin--this country needs 104 percent of that child's lifetime earnings just to pay the Federal Government pensions. I have a 3-year-old. Our obligations right now require taking every dime my little Matthew will ever earn just to pay the Federal Government pensions. Part of this, Mr. Speaker, is the math of demographics. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough children. We are functionally at zero population growth. There is a math set--I had some of the Heritage demographers in my office today. They have a model that says in the next few years we could actually go negative in population as a country. For some people, oh, yay, that is great, less traffic. Okay. You tell me how I am going to finance Social Security. You tell me how I am going to finance Medicare. In now less than 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In less than 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. At that time, we double the poverty of seniors, we will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street. That is the morality now of this place. Why am I the only idiot who comes behind the microphone and does this every week? Okay. God gave me a gift. I am pretty good at math. I will have Members of Congress who see me in the hallway and turn around and walk away from me because I am going to pitch them an idea of here is how we save Medicare Advantage, here is how we save Social Security, here is how we do this. I have pieces of legislation to do some of these things. Oh, David, you don't understand, we have been told by our political-- and this is Democrats, too--we have been told by our political consultants we are not allowed to use those words because we might actually have to explain what the hell is actually going on. You have the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago. We have double the number of 65 and up. I turned 64 a couple weeks ago. Maybe I am pathologically optimistic. We have adopted a 3-year- old, and I have a 10-year-old. Do they deserve to live better? Every math set right now says our kids will be the first American generation to be poorer than their parents. A child born today, my 3- year-old, let's use my 3-year-old as an example. When my 3-year-old is, I think it is 22, 21, 23, right in there, every tax, every one, every single tax in America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. Why am I the jerk that gets up and does math and people look at him and say, oh, David, we are not allowed to talk about that. We will deal with that after the next election. Have you noticed there is always another election? I have been getting that same answer for 15 years here: David, we can't talk about that. It is mandatory spending. We can't go around and tell the truth. It is fixable. There are things you can do. We have presented over and over and over and over ways you could crash the price of healthcare using technology, the morality of cures, the morality of helping our brothers and sisters get healthier, convincing the bond markets that we are creditworthy. Right now we pay more--so, Greece, today Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. That is what the world debt markets think of us. I could geek out and walk through what happened a couple days ago in the 2-year auction we had and how badly subscribed it was. Maybe it is the war, maybe it is other things. This isn't a game, and this is somewhat unique. Look, I have some books. I collect economic books. One of my books talks about 5,000 years of economic history. There are lots and lots and lots of stories of societies that built up lots of debt and collapsed. Okay. I could not find a story in there that walked through the economics of a society that built up lots of debt and started to have fewer people, zero population growth. Tell me how that math works. We have a unified theory. I have been behind this microphone dozens and dozens and dozens of times. I am saying, the adoption of technology, synthetic biology, deregulation, smart regulation, a talent-based immigration system--we basically have a dozen things that have to go into this just to stabilize where we are in debt. Mr. Speaker, do you think this place is intellectually prepared to do anything that is difficult? We are going to go home and stand in front of our constituents and talk about shiny objects. Mr. Speaker, as of today, we are borrowing $88,000 a second. Mr. Speaker, as of today, we borrowed, I think, $7.5 billion today, yesterday, tomorrow. Maybe we just shouldn't give a damn about math, but it is going to win. The math always wins. Look, my staff wanted me to use this board to try to put it in perspective of if it was your household. In your household you basically earn $52,000 a year. This is the Federal budget right now, but you spend $73,000 this year. If you do the accumulation beyond the fact that you went 20 grand into debt this year, if you add up all the years of debt for your household, and this would be your household as divided by the Federal debt, it is $1.3 million upside down. Next year, these numbers get worse and the year after that it gets worse. Part of the reason is--help me grow the economy, help me find how we balance our tax base. I am a free market economist. I believe in as low taxes as possible. But is borrowing a tax? This is a really interesting, intellectual question that the left has to have and we on the right have to have. Is borrowing a tax? The family budget this year, you made $52,000. We are going to spend $73,000, so we borrowed $20,000 this year. I am going to argue it is a tax. It is just a tax with interest. Are you and I going to pay it? Because the philosophy around here is it is going to be our kids that are going to pay it and our grandkids that are going to pay it, and I am going to argue the numbers are eroding so fast. Remember, 6.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is gone. Mr. Speaker, 6.5 years from now, the Medicare trust fund is gone. Just to cover that shortfall for the first year is $638 billion. You run for United States Senate, this happens in your first term. This is not way off in the future. It is here. Yet, when some of us have tried to do the debt and deficit commission, we get these people coming in, lobbying, beating the crap out of us on social media, on conservative press, and now we find out they are being paid. It is absolutely immoral what we are doing, and it is your retirement, and it is my kids and every child out there. How is accepting a society that says: Oh, screw it. We are just going to make sure our kids are poorer, but at least we are going to get stuff until the bond market decides they are actually in charge of this country. It is almost there. Let's actually do some more math. We have some new ways to try to describe the scale of the problem. I know this is hard to read, but I am going to do my best to make this understandable. You actually see net receipts by category. Do you see this dark blue here? That is individual income taxes. That is one of the crazy things those of us on Ways and Means need to actually start having a conversation on how we are going to deal with, because we are seeing right now in the GDP growth we are getting in the country, more of it is coming from capital than workers. We are building big datacenters, automation, the technology, but it is not necessarily from wage growth, which actually is a whole other speech and freaks me out because we have got to raise wage growth to make up for the years of the Biden inflation. Then take a look over here. This is payroll taxes. This is the taxes you pay for your Social Security, for your Medicare, for unemployment. Part of the deep secret here, please don't tell anyone on Social Security, an average couple retiring today gets about a $76,000 spiff. Here is what we paid in, you get an extra $76,000. Horrible, horrible rate of return. However, Democrats made sure that 20 years ago, 25 years ago when there was a temp saying: Could we build a little, tiny 15 percent sidecar, you can invest in the market. That would mean you would have been dramatically wealthier today. They killed that. They should be responsible for much of the poverty that is going to exist in our senior population. It was Democrats that chose to do that. The dirty secret on this portion here is that same couple for every dollar they put into Medicare tax, they are getting $6 to $7 back. That is one of the primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt, that and interest, healthcare and interest. We got older, and we owe $39 trillion. $30 trillion is functionally sold to the markets, but that other $9 trillion that we borrow internally, we still pay interest on it. It is still a liability. We still have to pay it back. These little slivers over here are customs and corporate taxes. That is our receipts. Here is our net outlays. You notice this little black box here? This is all borrowed. This is what the taxes cover. A week ago, we had a balance budget amendment, which I voted for, but folks had no understanding that the economic literature basically says: If you want to balance the budget today, you have to cut almost half of U.S. spending. Understand that. Last year, for every dollar that came in, we spent a $1.43. With the economic effects, if you said tomorrow, David, I demand you balance the budget. I can do it. Tell me which half of the spending you want me to cut. Because right now--this is Social Security right here. Actually, I think Medicare is here. Other mandatory, this is your VA pension. Those things that are built-in that we are obligated to formula. You start to look over here, this is net interest. Remember, net interest--actually, it should be gross interest. Total interest right now is the second biggest expenditure in your Federal Government. Defense is actually number 5. The thing that is in the Constitution is number 5 on our stack: Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare subsidies and defense. If you came in here right now and said: David, balance the budget. I can do it. You tell me how much defense, nondefense, Medicaid, they all have to go away, and because of the economic effects, this black line moves in and you would actually have to start cutting Medicare. It is math. It is not personal. It is just something that comes off of a calculator and someone who is literate enough to actually look at the numbers. David, it is really bad politics telling people the truth. I am in a 50/50 district. Now, I am in one of the best educated districts in America. It turns out you can get elected in a real tough district. You can even get--don't tell anyone, but you can get smart, educated Independents and Democrats to vote for you. They may not like you, but they, at least, know you are intellectually credible. When was the last time we actually gave a damn about being intellectually credible around this place? Net outlays for interest over 10 years. Right now, remember, I mentioned just interest--and actually the number is higher than this-- my math is coming in at $1.2 trillion of interest this year. You are well over 3 percent. We are going to go down to 3 percent. That is actually what the Treasury Secretary and others say. I agree, but we are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy at this moment. You tell me what part you want me to cut. CBO's report, what was it, 2 weeks ago, basically says that in 9 years we are going to be borrowing $3.1 trillion a year. That is before the war. That is before the request for supplementals. That is before these new healthcare calculations. We are going to be borrowing $3.1 trillion. This is couple weeks ago, CBO report. $2.1 trillion of that will just be interest, one will actually be structural deficit. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I apologize. I am going to talk faster. No, I won't do that to you. As some of you know, I have a coffee problem, and I have only had like nine cups today. I am not shaking, and I am trying not to talk like a machine gun. Mr. Speaker, I have this chart. You can find this chart if you really care about it. It basically talks about interest fragility. What is interest fragility? It is when interest goes up, interest rates go up, and what that means to the debt. When you start looking at a chart like this--so, think about this. For 1 year, a 10-percent increase, so essentially 10 basis points, it is about $4.1 billion. You start to see when you actually go out 10 years and start looking at, hey, if we had 1 point of interest--now, this is on the base debt right now, publicly sold debt, not the full debt, but the publicly sold debt. That comes out to $3.1 trillion, a single point for 10 years. What happens when the bond market has more influence and changes our spending patterns more than this place does? I had people say--as we were trying to do the big, beautiful bill, and then we were supposed to do the second reconciliation to pay for a big chunk of it--but that would be too difficult. We might have to talk about fixing Medicare and Medicare Advantage. Look, go read the reports that are stacked up on my desk that say you have a couple of trillion dollars of waste, fraud, and misalignment. The Wall Street Journal does article after article after article, full- page things on it, saying, hey, the high grading, that is $100 billion a year. We are going to do what about it, Mr. Speaker? Oh, but we would have to explain it. What is wrong with us? Unless we convince the world debt markets--remember, we are the biggest debtor in the world. You want lower mortgage rates? Convince the debt markets because the Federal Reserve only affects the short end of the curve. Your mortgage is based off the 10-year. The 10-year is a market rate, not a Federal Reserve rate. How many politicians around here: We have to beat up the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. That is on the 2-year, the short end of the curve, maybe even less. Convince the debt markets that we are actually going to stabilize our debt. We have a 40-year cycle. Those of us who are baby boomers, to move on to our reward before we get back to the more normal demographics--those normal demographics may never come because the fertility rate in the Western world continues to fall. Look, there are things we can do. This is the type of improper payments. I have been working on this for years. Stop the waste and fraud in government. It is billions and billions of dollars. If you are borrowing $220 billion to $230 billion every single month, we can get rid of every improper payment. We don't even cover a month's worth of borrowing. We still have to do this. It turns out that the most powerful way to fix something like this, Mr. Speaker, is not a whole bunch of new laws, not buildings full of auditors, buildings full of lawyers. It is data scientists. Look, I chair the Oversight Subcommittee of Ways and Means. We have investigations going on into Medicare part C, hospice care, and organ procurement. How are we finding these things? We hired a data scientist. Mr. Speaker, there is hope. There is a way to do this. We just need to step up our game and become more intellectually curious and robust. With that, maybe we can stabilize the future for your retirement and our kids. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually do something with a little meat on the bones today. I have to walk through the math. Repeatedly, I have come behind this microphone over the last decade, trying to walk through our Joint Economic Committee's, my office's, and my personal unified theory. The unified theory is a fairly simple concept: We have an incredibly complex problem. Last year, for every dollar this country took in, we spent $1.43. Yesterday, we hit over $39 trillion in borrowing. We have been borrowing, so far this year, about--actually, if you do this fiscal year, it is over eight, but over the last 12 months, it is like $7 billion a day. You realize that yesterday we hit $87,400 per second in borrowing. Our unified theory is, you can't just pretend and say, oh, we are going to pass a balanced budget amendment, so everything will be fine. I am going to show you in the charts where the math, where the money, and where the demographics actually go, but you are going to have to do lots of things. You are going to have to adopt technology. You will have to adopt smart regulations. You will have to legalize competition, which, remember, this place constantly uses legislation, rules, and other things to basically stop competition. Creative destruction is actually a basic economic principle of free markets, except here in Congress. We are also going to talk about--and this is the tough thing--we are going to talk about moving to a talent-based immigration system because I cannot make any of the rest of these numbers actually work in a society right now where the United States is basically at zero population growth. Last year, the preliminary number is that we grew maybe 400,000. There is a chance this year we are even closer to zero population growth. You have to embrace it. It is math. It is not Republican and Democrat. It is not my feelings. It is math. We functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, and double the number who are 65 and up. It is demographics, yet we lie our heinies off about it. Remember, yesterday--and I voted yes--we had a ``we are going to balance the budget'' bill. Okay, great. Love it. Do you understand, with the economic impacts, if you told me to balance the budget tomorrow, I can, but you just have to tell me what half of Federal spending we are ending. It would require cutting Federal spending by 50 percent when you do the economic effects. That is the reality, so we don't tell the truth around here. We use these platitudes. It is great on campaign brochures, but it is crap math. Let's actually start walking through reality. Then, I am going to actually try to tell the truth about what the Biden-era years of immigration cost us--millions and millions and millions of low-skilled. The fact of the matter is--I am going to show you the math, but I am also going to show you the math of what high- skill, talent-based immigration does for the finances of this country. First off, we have an updated chart here, and it still needs another update because of interest rates being higher. Today, only 25.2 percent of spending is voted on by Members of Congress. Mr. Speaker, you and I only get to vote on this blue portion. Everything in red is on autopilot. Right now, we have net interest at $1.39 trillion. We actually believe that is actually going to come in closer to $1.112 because of higher interest rates and some of the refinancing demands, but this is based on the CBO report from 2 weeks ago. If you use our math right now, Medicare is coming in at $1.666 trillion. Social Security is number one. We actually believe interest is number two. Medicare will be number three, but I need you to look at my chart right now. Do you see this Medicare number of $1.63 trillion? In 6\1/2\ years, we go from $1 trillion on Medicare to $2 trillion. In 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you are a hospital getting Medicare part A--remember, there is A, B, C is Medicare Advantage, and D is drugs. If you get your resources from Medicare part A, you are getting a 12-percent cut. That is the new updated number from CBO. Mr. Speaker, in 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In 6\1/2\ years, you get a 24 percent cut in your Social Security check. We will double the poverty of seniors in 6\1/2\ years. For my Democratic colleagues who keep saying: Well, just raise taxes. Okay, great. This happens in 2032. By 2033, to cover the Medicare shortfall and the Social Security trust fund fall with the trust funds empty, you have got to give us $638 billion, I think is the first year of the shortfall. If defense is $1 trillion, start thinking about that. It is like 60 percent of the entire defense budget is your shortfall. How often are the conversations behind these microphones absolutely vacuous because this place doesn't own calculators or doesn't have the moral aptitude to tell the truth about the math and the misery we are going to put on our brothers and sisters in this country if we don't step up and fix it. I am in a 50-50 district. For years and years, I come behind this microphone. I introduce bills to fix the--MedPAC tells us there is almost $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in misalignment in Medicare Advantage. Who is the idiot who lays out a bill to fix it and then can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor it with him? The fact of the matter is there is a way--you are not going to pay off the debt. You are just trying to stabilize it. We have got a lot of wonderful articles saying: Well, there is a group in Congress that talk about holding the deficit to 3 percent of GDP. Our interest is over 3 percent of GDP this year. The CBO report from 2 weeks ago says: In 9 years the structural deficit of this country is $3.1 trillion; and $2.1 trillion of that is just interest. So, yay, we have gotten the deficit down to $1 trillion; but our interest load is so big. Remember, Mr. Speaker, the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and our healthcare costs. Are we willing to have that revolution in how we provide healthcare? Legalize technology. Push for the cures. Diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. Maybe helping our brothers and sisters be healthier turns out to be one of the greatest economic benefits of society when 47 percent of U.S. healthcare is associated with obesity. Maybe we should change the farm bill. Maybe we should change nutrition support. Maybe we should actually think about helping people be healthier. It is great economics, and it is good for our brothers and sisters. Oh, but that will piss off--sorry--yeah, lots of the moneyed interest. That means the hospitals and the others who make money on sick people. This place is absolutely immoral and perverse. I find myself getting angrier and angrier. I have given up. I am leaving this place. I am going to go run for Governor in Arizona. Maybe I can save Arizona because I can't get my brothers and sisters here to do hard things because it is hard. I have a 3-year-old that we have adopted. I am 64. My wife is my age. Maybe we are insane. It is the greatest gift God has ever given someone. We need 104 percent of my little boy's lifetime income. We need 104 percent of my little boy's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions. In 33 months, over half of Federal spending will go to those 65 and up. The math problem is we have gone 40 years and there are not enough children. Mr. Speaker, you heard me a moment ago say we are functionally at zero population growth. There is actually one analyst out there that has us at negative population growth because of the people leaving the country. They come to me, and our hallways are full of people demanding more money. Many of them are things we agree with and we love. We just have to borrow everything. Let's walk through just, first off, the reality of the math. Then I am going to make the argument to move, to revolutionize our immigration system to a talent-based immigration system that the rest of the industrialized world has moved to. Let's take a look. There were 3.6 million babies born last year. Okay. Think of this. For every baby that was born last year, that same year we put $600,000 on their credit card in a single year. That is the ratio of our borrowing because we have so few children. Our model is we are down to 1.59 fertility rate. France actually has a higher fertility rate than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Are we going to tell the truth? Some of my charts are a little bit geeky. The basic principle of this is here is our available workforce. Here is our labor force participation. We are getting down. We are going to be basically getting close to 61, 60 percent of our population in the labor force. It is just demographics. We had the baby boom. I remember back in the early 1980s I was sitting in a statistics class. I had a professor back then; she was talking about we need to get ready. We had this population bubble. How did we know 40 years ago that we had a baby boom bubble? Her model was not dour enough for the fact that starting in the 1980s, fertility rates in the United States--and now it has gotten steeper and steeper and steeper. It is all over the industrialized world. We have got to understand. This isn't just the United States. The United States is just better off. What is one of the miracles we have as Americans? We are the reserve currency of the world. People want to trade in U.S. dollars. The second advantage we have over the rest of the world is people want to move here. They want to start businesses here. They want to do their research here. They want to bring their talents here. How do we leverage that to maximize economic growth? If we are at a zero population growth and we need to make up for the years of Biden inflation, the way we do that, the way we do affordability is not somehow magically make prices go down. It is we raise wages. We raise wages by--remember your high school economics class? There are two ways wages go up. One is inflation. That doesn't get us anything. It is productivity. Wages go up by productivity. We invest in capital equipment. We build a tax system that encourages investment. We bring in the talent that makes us more productive as a society. This chart is going to upset people, but it is vetted math. It is vetted math. Take a look. These are the populations that deposit a 30- year impact on the Federal budget. If you get over here, people with STEM, with a master's, with a Ph.D., they functionally add about two-- let's get this right. That individual adds about $2.5 million in taxes they pay. We always talk about the DACA recipient with the Ph.D., but that is not the mean. They are positive. But they are not positive by very much. This is the abstract. You can actually see detailed methods to look at this on, I think it is the Manhattan Institute. Their immigration study actually has a whole thing where we can put in someone with this education of this age--remember age is very sensitive on these numbers. We can actually see what type of immigration system maximizes the benefit to America. Remember that if you want our Social Security, if you want our Medicare, it is a moral, societal obligation we have to you. Help me make the finances work. We need this as part of the unified theory to make the math work. Let's actually do something--this is my favorite chart of the week. This will upset some of my Democrat colleagues, but it is called math. Here are populations with less than a high school education. We calculate over those 30 years they cost society about $100,000. They cost. What happened at the border during the Biden years, the millions and millions and millions and millions of people that crossed, each one of those, on average, is going to cost us $100,000 over the next three decades. If we come over here, these are people with graduate degrees. We collect over $3 million from them in taxes. Does anyone start to see just here on this chart the basic math that if we are going to start to bend our debt curve, yes, we have to adopt technology. We have to add competition in our society. We have to revolutionize the price of healthcare, and we need to move to a talent- based immigration system. Remember, we are, functionally, the last country in the industrialized world that uses a familial--a family--sponsorship model, and for a lot of my religious groups: David, it is moral. We like being able to sponsor our family. I understand. Tell me how I deal with the bankruptcy of Medicare. Tell me how I deal with the 24 percent cut in Social Security coming in 6\1/2\ years. That is moral also, and there is a way that I can slow down this hemorrhaging of cash. Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the last 12 months, we have borrowed $2.77 trillion. We thought this fiscal year, we would come in about $1.7 trillion, $1.8 trillion. Running math right now is we are way off, and are we heading toward a supplemental? Are we heading to other things? Why is telling the truth so hard around here? Why is doing hard things--well, maybe it is because they are hard things, answering my own question. I actually think that the voters understand that there is something really screwed up out there. They may not understand all of these details. They may not--look, I am blessed. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on the Ways and Means Committee. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee. I have six--well, five--one is actually, I think, defending his Ph.D. Let's call it six Ph.D. economists. Most people in their life don't have a bunch of freaky smart people shoving information into their head all day long, my one great joy in this job. There are solutions to stabilize the debt. We are still going to borrow. It is demographics. Help me. Help us. Help our brothers and sisters in this country. We have to do these things. Oh, David, we can't talk about Medicare or Social Security or, Heaven forbid, ever use the word ``immigration.'' The trolls on the internet will say mean things about us. So we are willing to have grandma live in poverty because we are worried about trolls on Twitter? Is that really what we have become? Look, tax revenues from a 30-year-old immigrant with a college degree versus someone with just no high school diploma, income tax, we functionally get $80,000. The person without the high school degree, almost nothing. It is just you start to look at the economics. Stop using the word ``immigration'' and only visualize people running across Eagle Pass in Texas. The fact of the matter is, also, if we can fix our system--and I am going to show you some quotes from President Trump. President Trump has talked about this repeatedly saying that it is insane that this country educates people and then sends them home to compete with us. How do I get this body to start actually understanding policy is economics, and economics is math? You start to look at--this number is wrong already. We were looking at saying, hey, you know, there is-- okay. I need to explain this. The 2025 deficit, we book as $1.7 trillion. Now, you understand we played some games with it. We rolled the student loans, pulled them back so we got a credit. There were certain bills we owed. We paid them in October instead of the end of September. So we played some games to lower that number, but I need you to look at what was going on. Mr. Speaker, 70 percent of our spending just went to net interest, and 16 percent went to defense. Interest was more than defense last year. Think of this: 2025 fiscal year, Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid, and it is Obama subsidies and defense. Defense was number five. The thing that is in the Constitution was number five in our spending stack. The majority of our spending in 33 months--and I will be one of them--will go to those 65 and up. I will say it again for, like, the fourth or fifth time. It is demographics. We don't have enough young people in our society, and the baby boomers are moving into their earned benefit years. Can we think we are just going to borrow all of the money? Do we really think the credit markets are going to keep loaning us, like right now, $7 billion today, $87,000 for every second I stand here? We have debates on this floor that the money borrowed during the debate is more than the entire debate was trying to save because we want shiny objects because it looks good on social media. It gets me on FOX News tonight, as the finances of our country burn down. Look, estimated share of outlays by group--and this upsets people, but I am trying to make a point. So I am a kid in the 1970s. Yes, disco and bell bottom pants. It was not a pretty time. At that time, the rough estimate is children, those under 18, got about $7 of Federal resources for every dollar that went to 65 and up. Today, that is reversed. That is just because of our population dynamics, but it is going to get bigger and bigger. The reason I grabbed this chart is to show that, in 2036, we will be well--and it has actually happened. Our math is 33 months. The majority, more than half of all Federal spending will be to those 65 and up, but take a look down here. For those under 18, we are going to be under 6 percent. Am I insane for coming to the floor and actually telling people the very math that is in all of our publications? No one seems willing to open up the binders and actually read them. Look, I want to give President Trump credit. He has repeatedly stood up in front of audiences, stood up in front of crowds, stood up in front of the cameras and talked about the insanity of having a country that is not attracting and keeping talent. Before I do the President's quotes, I have a professor friend who used to talk about this--and when I say ``used to,'' it is a couple of years ago--the 1980s, the 1990s, the war had conflict over hydrocarbons. We need oil. Last decade, rare earths. His model basically says that in this decade, next decade, and probably the one after that, the world is going to compete for smart people, people who are educated, people who have entrepreneurial skills, people who have unique talents because there is going to be so few young people, and those with the degrees that grow economies, that create productivity, therefore raise our wages, we are all going to fight over them. Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, all of these countries have built talent-based immigration systems. Do you know who hasn't shown up, Mr. Speaker? United States because we are so terrified to have an adult, professional, academic, economic-based discussion of we are falling behind. Talent is portable. Do you have a graduate degree? Do you have an engineering or STEM degree? What is it--I co-chair the Singapore Caucus. I think in 6 weeks, you can get status to live in Singapore. Do you know what we do to that person here in the United States? We send them home to compete with us, to another country. Have we lost our minds? Look, we have a whole bunch of boards from President Trump's quotes talking about this. Because we are often intellectually vacuous when we are in front of a camera, when we are talking to our folks at home, it is immigration. We immediately grab the hordes coming across the border. I just showed you that is costing us a fortune. Months ago, we did an entire report that showed what President Biden allowed to happen at the border will suppress wages for the working poor for a decade. What they did made the working poor poorer in this country for a decade. You hang drywall. Now, you are competing against how many other people who hang drywall? We have the academic research, the economic research, and the economic modelling that make it clear that if we could flip over to what the rest of the industrialized world is now doing, a talent-based immigration system, it gives us a fighting chance. It raises tax receipts. It raises wages when designed correctly. As part of my last portion here, we have been working for a year with our economists and some of my office staff to rewrite--and we are doing some pretty radical stuff. We have been following the papers that say the H-1B model actually does create certain wage suppression because that visa is owned by an employer. If you want to get lobbied and have people really angry, say that. The fact of the matter is that a model that allows the talent to get a job sponsorship, but you are portable within the economy, gets rid of that wage suppression. I believe we can move to an economic model that grows wages and the economy, and helps us stabilize this insane growth of our debt. There is hope, Mr. Speaker. It just requires us to do hard things and stop living behind folklore and start living behind a calculator. That is my pitch, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.