[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 50 (Tuesday, March 27, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H1638-H1639]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       WE NEED TO TELL THE TRUTH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is something we try to do out of my 
office every few months, where we try to update a number of the budget 
numbers we're seeing coming from particularly the President and try to 
put them in some perspective. I thought this would be one of those 
opportunities--because we're about to work on the budget for the rest 
of this week--to stand here and help everyone understand some really 
scary things that are out there in the numbers and some things we've 
been talking about for the last year and the fact that they're getting 
worse.
  Mr. Speaker, you also, being my friend from Arizona, you've actually 
heard me tell this story.
  A year ago, we stood here and did this presentation. When I got back 
to the office, my phone was ringing. I reached down and picked it up, 
and it was a gentleman from my district who was nice enough but kept 
telling me over and over that he didn't believe me, that the numbers 
didn't feel right. After about a half an hour of discussing it with 
him, I probably was a little too harsh. I said: I don't know where the 
feelings key is on my calculator. I think at that point he hung up on 
me.
  Look, the numbers are real. It doesn't feel warm and fuzzy, but it's 
real.
  I'm actually going to break one of the congressional rules in 
communication where we're often supposed to talk at a 30,000-foot 
level. I'm going to drive down into some of the weeds here, but it's 
important. This is the future of our country. This is our destiny, 
unless we make some substantial changes.
  The first slide up here--and all of these are going to be up on our 
Web site within the next week, the congressional Web site--is just 
trying to demonstrate how unrealistic many of these numbers coming from 
the White House are.
  The year 2008 was the peak of revenues into the Federal Government. 
We'll give you an idea. The President is saying in 5 years that 
revenues are going to be up 50 percent from that peak in 2008. So we're 
going to have this dramatic rise in revenues over the next 5 years, and 
that's where their deficit projections are coming from.
  Guess what? On the slides I'm going to show you, we still use the 
President's numbers. What I want you to understand is that they are 
based on, I think, substantial fantasy when you start to understand the 
White House's use of what they are predicting as revenues and GDP 
growth.
  As we go through these--and I'm going to throw a lot of slides here. 
The next two slides are the easiest to understand and hopefully tell 
the greatest part of the story.
  This is 2011. Sixty-three percent of all of our spending is Medicare, 
Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans benefits. 
We'll call those the mandatory spending. Many people call them the 
entitlements.
  This year, 37 percent of our spending is what we'll call 
discretionary, military, and the line of alphabet agencies that we all 
think of. It's foreign aid, veterans, all discretionary over here. It's 
37 percent of the spending. This is this year. Do you see, 63, 37? What 
happens a year from now?
  In 2017, basically 5 budget years from now, you notice a little 
difference. We went from 63 percent to 75 percent which is now in 
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, and veterans 
benefits. Five years from now, 75 percent of our budget is in mandatory 
entitlement spending, and the discretionary keeps getting smaller and 
smaller and smaller in real dollars.
  I'm going to show you some slides in a little bit that are going to 
demonstrate that even the military goes down in real dollars. No more 
of this discussion of, well, you guys are just slowing down the growth. 
No, it actually goes down in real dollars. This is our future.
  Understand, the mandatory and entitlement side is growing so fast 
that in about 10 or 11 years, if you held everything even, it would 
consume every dollar of the budget. There's no more military; there's 
no more discretionary. Everything is Medicare, Medicaid, Social 
Security, interest on the debt, and veterans benefits.
  This is our future. We need to tell the truth.
  Look, Washington, D.C., has had a bad habit of avoiding a lot of 
these hard decisions that are ahead of us, and it's almost like they 
forgot there were going to be baby boomers. We knew people were going 
to turn 65 for how many years? Sixty-five years.
  We're now into year one of the baby boomers retiring at the end of 
the next 17 years. At the end of the 18-year cycle of baby boomers, 
about 36 percent, 37 percent of our population will be on Social 
Security. You have to understand that's about 76, 78 million of our 
friends and neighbors who will be over 65.
  This should have been decades of planning for that retirement, for 
that baby boom, and Washington, D.C., did not do it. Now Members of 
this House--and I'm one of the freshmen here; I've been here 15 
months--need to step up

[[Page H1639]]

and tell the truth to the American people that this is our future. If 
we don't deal with it today, we're going to deal with devastating 
consequences a couple of years from now.
  In the next couple of slides, I'm going to try to demonstrate the 
numbers and how they break down.

                              {time}  2010

  And I'm sorry. I know I'm throwing lots of slides, but one more time, 
this is important. This is our future.
  This is 2011. Everything you see in the blue is the mandatory 
spending we were just talking about. So you get some sort of sense of 
what it is. Here's Social Security. Here's what we'll call the welfare 
programs. Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt.
  We are one of the luckiest people to ever live, when you think about 
this year. We expect to spend only about $229 billion on interest on 
our debt. Well, understand, our debt now is what, $15.5 trillion. About 
$11 trillion plus of that is what we call publicly-held debt.
  This is important to understand. A big chunk of our debt we borrow 
internally. We reach into Social Security, into the Medicare part A 
trust fund, and other places. But the $11 trillion-plus that we have to 
go out on open markets and sell, that's our great risk because we are 
beholden to what interest rate the market's willing to buy our debt 
for.
  This year, with these incredibly low interest rates, I mean, what, a 
10-year bond today is what, 2.25? We're only going to spend about $229 
billion this year is our projection for that $11 trillion of publicly-
held debt.
  But what happens when we go to normal interest rates? And at the same 
time, just like this last year where we borrowed what, another $1.4 
trillion, you've got to understand, here it becomes one of our 
Achilles' heels.
  We go from, in 2011, that $229 billion in interest, to in 2017, we 
expect interest to be $565 billion. Understand, that's basically, in 
2017, what defense is. Our interest on the debt will equal what defense 
is.
  And as we walk through these numbers, please understand, it's 
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans 
benefits that are exploding because of the demographic issues. It's 
math. And this is our future.
  And you'll notice, as we were showing in the previous chart, 
discretionary now is down to 25 percent of all spending; 75 percent is 
those mandatory--what we like to call entitlements. And this is our 
future.
  As I was just trying to share, and this is important because I got 
this question at a town hall this last Saturday. Well, when you say 
that defense is going to be taking all sorts of cuts, you mean just 
cuts in the growth.
  No, I mean in real dollars. We expect, the way the budgets are being 
laid out right now, the way the President's numbers are, by 2017, 
actual, real dollars, not adjusted for inflation, not the projection or 
a portion of growth, real dollars are going to be substantially less 
than they are today. Our projected 2012 budget about $709 billion. In 
2017, $582 billion.
  What are the Federal Government's constitutional obligations? 
Protection of the country? Defense? And you'll notice, in real dollars, 
it's going down. So what will even be the purchasing power of that 
money 5 years from now?
  And you'll start to understand the reality of what's going on. And 
please understand, it's being driven, why? Because the mandatory 
spending, the entitlements are continuing to explode, so everything 
else in government will shrink and be crushed.
  We thought we would try to find even a little more detail. These are 
brand new slides for us, and these will all be up on our Web site 
hopefully some time this week, and sort of helping put percentages on 
the numbers.
  You saw the big graph of, hey, in 5 years, 75 percent of all of our 
spending is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, 
veterans benefits. But we thought we'd show--here are the current 
percentages so you can see what's going on there.
  This is 2011. Defense is 18.8. In 5 years defense will be 12.4 
percent of the budget.
  Department of Health and Human Services, which is substantially 
Medicare and Medicaid, this year is 24.7 percent of the spending. In 5 
years, it's 26.8.
  But where else is the explosion?
  Department of Treasury, which is substantially debt, paying interest 
on our debt, will go from 14.9 percent of the total budget in 5 years 
to 20.5 percent.
  What I'm trying to demonstrate here is we're being consumed by our 
own interest, having to finance our own debt. We're being consumed by 
the basic demographics of our Nation because Washington, D.C., did not 
tell us the truth, did not set aside the resources that were absolutely 
necessary to deal with the baby boomer population, and we're going to 
have 76 million of our brothers and sisters in this baby boom cycle 
over this 18 years. Remember, when it's done, it's 36, 37 percent of 
the population on Social Security.
  I'm fearful, unless we step up and make the policy changes that are 
absolutely necessary--and thank heaven for Paul Ryan and many of the 
hardworking Budget members here in the House that are laying out the 
truth. They're laying out what is absolutely necessary to keep this 
Republic operating and to tell the truth about the budget and the 
numbers.
  So one of the things we got this last weekend back home, I had a 
couple come up to me pointing their finger saying, well, if you would 
just do things like the Buffett Rule, if you would do things like that, 
you would solve the problems.
  One of the things we love to do in our office is, how do you make big 
numbers understandable, because, let's face it, when I stand here and 
talk about $15.5 trillion in debt, or talk about this, talk about that, 
it often is overwhelming numberwise. So we came up with this idea of a 
clock, and we've done this for a number of different things.
  Now, here's the good news and the bad news. We're borrowing a lot 
less money right now than we were borrowing a year ago. That's the good 
news. The bad news is we're still borrowing $3.5 billion every single 
day, and we project for the next 365 days $3.5 billion every single 
day.
  But when you hear the President, when you hear many of my friends on 
the left say, well, if we just had something like the Buffett Rule, 
where these rich people have to pay all these extra taxes because 
they're escaping, what does it actually pay? What does it actually 
mean?

  If you use the President's own model and don't pretend that there is 
going to be certain tax avoidance and smart lawyers finding ways around 
it, and that it doesn't slow down the economy and doesn't change 
people's behaviors and all the other things that happen when you raise 
a tax and live in math fantasy, so every dime comes into the Federal 
Government, what does it actually buy us?
  Well, we did the math on it, and we figured out it would pay for 3 
minutes and 30 seconds of that daily borrowing. So when you see Members 
walk up to these microphones and talk about things like well, if we 
just had the Buffett Rule, we would be fine, they're not telling you 
the truth.
  Or it's back to that story before--they found a feelings button on 
their calculator, and it makes them feel better, but it's not real 
math.
  The entire Buffett Rule would pay for 3 minutes and 30 seconds of 
borrowing a day, at the current rate of borrowing, which is $3.5 
billion a day.
  Mr. Speaker, I know this is a lot of math. I know these are a lot of 
numbers to throw out, but it's our future. When you see what's happened 
in Europe, when you realize people in Greece and so many other 
countries lived in a fantasy, and a lot of it was perpetuated by their 
own governments not telling them the truth--well, I'm telling you the 
truth, and I'm using the President's own numbers to get there. It's why 
the decisions that are going to be made here this week, as we start to 
set out our budget documents, it's why we desperately need the Senate 
to step up and tell the truth to the American people, that if you want 
to save this Republic, we've got to deal with the reality of our math, 
because our math is the single most dangerous thing to this Republic 
right now.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of time.

                          ____________________