[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 77 (Tuesday, May 19, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H3378-H3382]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    MANDATED FIXED WHEELCHAIR LIFTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to do a budget presentation 
in a couple of moments, but I wanted to actually come up here and, with 
my good friend from South Carolina, Mick Mulvaney, talk about a little 
article that popped up in The Economist last week, and there is the 
issue.
  This place has fairly short memories, but about 2 years ago, there 
were a handful of us coming here and talking about sort of an esoteric 
issue, something called--what is it--wheelchair lifts.
  For those of us who represent resort areas, I am blessed to represent 
the community of Scottsdale, a wonderful area. I had one of my resort 
owners call me, and in a fairly gruff voice, saying: ``David, do you 
know what the Justice Department is doing to me? I have seven pools and 
Jacuzzis, and apparently, I have to put permanent fixed wheelchair 
lifts at every pool and Jacuzzi.''
  He said: ``I want to be sensitive and caring to my mobility-
challenged guests.''
  He went on to tell me the story that for 10 years, he had had a 
portable wheelchair lift, and it had never been requested. Here we are, 
2 years later. He has torn up his landscaping; he has put in the units. 
Guess what is now happening?
  He has called me and told me that now his insurance rates are 
starting to really bounce up because of unattractive nuisance. The very 
things Mick Mulvaney predicted, I like to say I predicted 2 years ago, 
are coming true.
  I would like to yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. 
Mulvaney). Tell us the other side of the story of what is going on.
  Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Schweikert, thank you for the opportunity to talk 
about this a little bit without the pressures of the 2-minute timer or 
a 3-minute timer, actually talk about something in detail for a change 
in this House because it merits the discussion.
  My experience with it, Mr. Schweikert, was exactly the same as 
yours--they are not exactly the same. I am not from the resort part of 
South Carolina. Mr. Sanford and Mr. Rice get that. I am from the more 
rural inland part of the State; but we have got a lot of freeways and a 
lot of small businesses operating hotels, a lot of them owned by Asian 
Americans.
  I was approached by a group of Indian American hotel owners last 
year. These are folks, mom-and-pop operations, that might own one 
hotel, they might own two. They told me the same story you just told 
about these pool lifts having to go in.
  A lot of them, like your friends with the resorts, had the portable 
lifts, so if anybody ever asked for help getting into and out of a pool 
by themselves, they had the ability to do that. Of course, similar to 
your story, none of them had ever been asked.
  The Department of Justice came in and said: You know what, we are 
going to require you, under the terms of the Americans with 
Disabilities Act, to put these fixed pool lifts in every single body of 
water that you have; so if you have a regular size pool, a kiddie pool, 
and a hot tub, that is three of these fixed lifts.
  It was a tremendous burden on these small businesses who, as you 
mentioned, wanted to help folks who needed help in getting in and out 
of the pool, but just wanted to do it with a portable machine, as 
opposed to a standard machine.

                              {time}  1900

  They came in, and they said: Look, Mr. Mulvaney, we have seen this 
act before. This is how we got rid of diving boards. This is why we 
don't have any diving boards.
  Years ago, people said they were an attractive nuisance. Kids were 
jumping off of them and hurting themselves, so now that entire 
generation of Americans has grown up without diving boards.
  What is going to happen now is that the next generation of Americans 
is going to grow up without swimming pools at hotels for the exact 
reason that you have just mentioned.
  We spent 40 years getting rid of these things that children could 
climb up on and jump off of into the pool, and now the Department of 
Justice has required these hotel owners to come in and put the exact 
same thing back in.
  It is no longer a diving board. Now it is a mechanical chair. But to 
an 8-year-old, it looks like something to climb up and jump off of. So 
they were lamenting the fact not only that their business is going to 
be hurt but that part of the enjoyment of coming to the hotel would be 
gone and not available to their customers, and that eventually, you 
would see them start filling in their swimming pools. Unfortunately, I 
think that is the way that we are moving.
  But they also talked about something--and this is to the point of the 
article that you just mentioned, The Economist from April 25, which is 
that there was a private right of action in the regulations that came 
forward. And what this means, to folks who aren't familiar with what 
that means, is that anybody can sue. In fact, in the United States of 
America, when anybody can sue, typically, anybody does sue.
  The article goes into great length about one very, very energetic 
plaintiff who filed 529 lawsuits against small-business owners at 
hotels throughout the southeast. In fact, in one particular period of 
time, they hit 50 hotels in a row shortly after the regulation became 
effective so that they could file their lawsuit against the hotel 
owners.
  I will read one of my favorite passages in the article, which is 
something that should be enlightening for all of us: ``There is 
evidence that lawyers explicitly target small businesses, which are 
more likely to pay up without a fight.''
  There we go. That is what we have done in the name of helping people 
whom folks were already trying to help. But in the name of having the 
government tell small business and large business how to help people, 
what do we end up with? Essentially a jobs bill for the plaintiff's 
bar.
  Before we started today, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) 
and I were talking about why we were going to take a few minutes to 
talk about this.
  As my friend from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, said before he left: 
``Everybody always says, `I hate to say I told you so,' but the truth 
of the matter is, people love saying, `I told you so.'''
  This is exactly what we said would happen. And why the Department of 
Justice saw fit to single out small business hoteliers who were already 
trying to help people and say, You know what, we know better than you 
how to help people. You think these portable units are good? Well, we 
think the fixed units are better. And trust us because we are from the 
government, and we are here to help you.

[[Page H3379]]

  What do we end up with as a result of the government trying to fix 
the problem? We end up with small businesses making less money. And I 
know not a lot of people are sympathetic to that. I certainly am. I 
used to be a small-business person. And believe me, the people who 
worked for me liked it when I made money. So did I. But I recognize the 
fact that a lot of people are not sympathetic to small business. But 
small business makes less money.
  Kids are going to have less access to swimming pools as they travel 
the country. Think about that for a second. How absurd is that, that we 
are going to end up filling in swimming pools in order to prevent 
lawsuits.
  And then lastly, and the worst is, you will end up with a situation 
where all we have done is empower a small group of overzealous trial 
lawyers and their plaintiffs.
  It is a sad story but one that we hear again and again in America. 
And I only hope that the next time the government comes up with an idea 
like this on how to fix things, they will look to what is happening now 
to the small-business hotel owners as an example of government gone 
wrong.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I remember you and I having this conversation on the 
floor and particularly Members from the left coming to the microphone 
and basically scolding me on how insensitive I was.
  Now I realize that my father may have been right about something. He 
said: ``It is almost always about the money.''
  When you look at The Economist article, you start to realize that 
this was a jobs act for the Democrat supporters and the trial bar 
because they are running up and down our communities, suing small 
businesses.
  And I believe you are absolutely correct: our future will be hotels 
and resorts without pools at all.
  Once again, the folks in the opposition questioned our sensitivity, 
our love for our brothers and sisters. And we were trying to say, This 
is the economic argument, and here is the litigious argument. And we 
lost.
  The administration basically gave into the trial bar, and now we do 
have the ``I told you so.''
  Mr. MULVANEY. I would suggest to you, Mr. Schweikert, that you were, 
in fact, being insensitive: you were being insensitive to the trial 
bar.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Darn it. I knew I was doing something wrong.
  Mr. MULVANEY. Listen, I had the same experience as you did, Mr. 
Schweikert. I was in the Longworth House Office Building a couple years 
back. You and I wrote a bill together to try to either delay or prevent 
the DOJ from putting this regulation into effect, and we had people 
literally protesting outside of our office, folks from the disability 
community who wanted this particular accommodation. And I am completely 
sympathetic to that.
  What I think they failed to see at the time and failed to grasp was, 
number one, they were already being accommodated. My guess is that 99.9 
percent of the people who came to protest had never asked to use one of 
these portable lifts at hoteliers, so they were not aware of the fact 
that they were there but, at the same time, they never gave any thought 
to the unintended consequences of this particular piece of regulation 
that the DOJ promulgated. And I think that, again, is a lesson to be 
learned.
  A government that is big enough to give you everything that you want 
is big enough to take from you everything that you have. And this, in a 
very small way, is what we saw in the promulgation of this particular 
regulation.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The closing thought on this colloquy:
  We are already seeing the insurance world starting to charge higher 
and higher and higher fees for apartments, hotels, resorts that have 
these lifts, these permanent platforms. It is because they are already 
modeling the risk that someone--hopefully not with alcohol involved--
but someone is going to crawl up on top of one and jump in. The same 
litigation profile that removed diving boards 20, 30 years ago, the 
other side basically has driven us to. And they are going to be our 
brothers and sisters out there. There are going to be some that are 
going to be hurt, maybe hurt severely, and ultimately, what is our 
future? The removal of the swimming pools.

  We have got to thank the folks on the left that weren't willing to 
discuss rational economics and the DOJ, once again, for making a bunch 
of money for their trial bar friends.
  Mr. MULVANEY. We will get equality, Mr. Schweikert. We will have 
equal access to the swimming pools under this regulation because no one 
will have the access. That will be the ultimate result here.
  In an effort to make it accessible to everybody, we will end up 
making it accessible to no one, and in the final analysis, that is a 
sad state of equality that I don't think anybody should applaud.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. This is not a petty little issue. This is just a 
simple example that we talk about here almost every day of the runaway 
arrogance of Washington believing they are going to run our businesses, 
run our lives, and sort of the obvious outcomes that turn out to be 
fairly disastrous.
  So, Mr. Mulvaney, I appreciate you coming down and giving us some of 
your time.
  Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Schweikert, thank you for the opportunity.


                               The Budget

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to set up here in a second. I 
am going to actually walk through something we have been working on in 
our office now for the last month, and that is, what is really going on 
in budget numbers.
  We did a budget town hall about 2 weeks ago in Scottsdale. And I 
always like to start it with a simple question that says, How many of 
you are tired of seeing us in Congress fight with each other? And the 
hands always go up, and they say, Yes, you have to stop fighting with 
each other.
  And I always try to make the point: it is about the money. You need 
to understand how bad the underlying financial data is and what is 
really going on in the scale of debt and deficits and just the sheer 
scale of spending but also where that spending is going because we have 
so many of my brothers and sisters here, we go out and campaign and say 
things like: We are going to take care of waste and fraud. We are going 
to take care of this and foreign aid. We are going to do this and that. 
And they are not providing an honest picture of where the money is and 
where it actually goes.
  So we are going to do about 10 of these boards. I know it is going to 
get technical.
  When you run for Congress, one of the first things that happens, if 
you are a numbers guy, the pollster and the consultants sit you down 
and say, You can't use big numbers. People won't understand them.
  In this presentation, I am going to treat everyone like adults--these 
aren't Republican numbers; they are not even Democrat numbers, though 
the majority of these slides actually do come from the White House--to 
understand what is actually underlying in the data and how quickly it 
is eroding.
  Two points of reference: For decades, we used to talk about how we 
were going to hit this inflection point when baby boomers began moving 
into retirement and what was going to happen to the debt curve and what 
was going to happen to the curve of consumption of the entitlements.
  Guess what. We are now well into that inflection point. It has begun, 
and Congress has done very, very, very little in regards to mandatory 
spending. You are going to see on these boards that that is actually 
what may take us down as a Republic.
  So this is 2010. Let's just do this as a reference. And remember, 
2010 was a year when there was still lots of stimulus money, lots of 
other spending out there.
  You see the blue. The blue is what we refer to as mandatory spending. 
It is primarily Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, some transfer 
programs, interest, veterans, and the new health care law.
  Okay. In 2010, about 63 percent of our spending was in that blue 
area; 37 percent was what we call discretionary. That is what we get to 
vote on here because what is in the blue is in formulas.
  I have been here a little over 4 years. I have really had absolutely 
no influence on that blue area. It is a formula. You hit a certain age, 
you get a certain benefit.
  But I want you to watch what is happening in that entitlement, in 
that

[[Page H3380]]

mandatory spending. And, yes, this is the very discussion that gets 
people unelected because people get very upset, but we have to have an 
adult conversation of what is really going on here.
  So we are going to do a couple of these slides just to sort of create 
a reference.
  Here is where we are this year. And you remember, on that slide, I 
think the blue area was about 63 percent of our total spending. This 
year, it is 69 percent of our total spending. And obviously then the 
discretionary, what we get to vote on as Members, has now gone down to 
31 percent.
  Do you notice the movement? And that is just in the last 5 years.
  So where are we going? Well, right now, to give you a different way 
of looking at this, this is our 2015 modeling from the White House. 
This green area is our revenues. That is the total revenues coming into 
your Federal Government. That purple area is our debt. That is what we 
are going to borrow this year to make up for our shortfalls, though you 
will be happy to know that, as of about 48 hours ago, the 
administration changed the debt number from $576 billion for the 2015 
fiscal year to--now it is going to be $582.5 billion. This continues to 
erode.
  We are going to talk about that at the end here, what is actually 
going on in GDP, on economic growth in this country. And if we do not 
develop a growth-oriented agenda, we can't meet our obligations. We 
cannot keep those promises we have made.
  And with that, I stand here in shock of how often we engage in these 
debates, and it is not a growth-oriented focus.
  So one thing on this slide I really want you to get: blue over here 
is mandatory spending. The red is discretionary, with defense. Defense 
is considered discretionary. We have to borrow either every dime of 
defense or every dime of everything else, other than defense and 
mandatory or discretionary--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, 
interest on the debt, veterans benefits, and the new health care law.

                              {time}  1915

  Mr. Speaker, we have to borrow either every dime of defense or every 
dime of discretionary other than defense, and that is in this year's 
budget. That is how quickly this is moving away from us.
  So what happens if we look way off into the future, like 4 years from 
now? 2020 is only 4 years from now. When I first got elected in 2011, I 
did a presentation here. The numbers I am going to show you that happen 
in 4 years were not supposed to happen until 9 years from now. This is 
to give you an idea of how quickly the numbers are eroding. Yet I hear 
almost no one talking about it.
  So we are going to be working on that budget in 4 years. Do you 
remember that 2010 slide? Sixty-three percent of our spending went to 
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' 
benefits, and the new healthcare law. Well, it is going to be 76 
percent--76--three-quarters of all of our spending. We are only going 
to be voting on 24 percent of the budget, and half of that will be 
defense.
  I don't know if anyone knows, because these numbers are small and it 
is hard to watch, what we will be spending in 2020 on discretionary. So 
defense and all the litany of programs you think of are basically going 
to be almost identical to what we were spending 10 years earlier. I 
will hold that up as one of the successes of the Republican House. We 
have been very disciplined on spending on what we had the ability to 
influence, which was the discretionary budget, but the formulaic 
portion of our budget, entitlements, continues to explode. It is almost 
as if Washington, D.C., did not know that there was a baby boom, did 
not know people were going to be turning 65, did not know that 76 
million of our brothers and sisters were born in about an 18-year 
period of time, and now we are into the third year of baby boomers 
beginning to retire, and that inflection has begun.
  So just as a reference, because I often get asked for this slide--and 
we are putting these slides up on our Web site--there is the spending 
pie chart for this year. You will see the blue area is all the way to 
here: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the transfer programs also 
including the new healthcare law, interest on the debt, veterans' 
benefits.
  Two weeks ago when we were doing a budget presentation in my hometown 
of Scottsdale-Phoenix, I had one woman who was absolutely positive, if 
we would cut foreign aid, we would be just fine here. It is important 
to understand. Do you see this little red area here? Foreign aid would 
be ultimately nothing but a small sliver within that. Yes, it is 
something, but in many ways, it is theater.
  If you have a politician standing in front of you and they are not 
talking about the mandatory spending and the speed of its growth, you 
are not having an honest budget discussion. It is hard because in many 
places around the country, when you stand behind a microphone and hold 
up these boards and start to say that we need to have an honest 
conversation about the math underlying Medicare, Medicaid, Social 
Security, and what is going to happen on interest on the debt, the new 
healthcare law and its cost projections blowing through the ceiling, 
and veterans' benefits, often those Members who have tried to have that 
conversation get unelected.
  But if you have someone walk in to our door here and say, ``David, we 
so desperately need new spending on this,'' we often pull out our 
charts and say, ``You are absolutely right. This would be wonderful. Do 
you have a solution to help me refine and deal with and manage the 
explosion of the cost in Medicare?'' And they just stare at you like we 
are not allowed to talk about that. But that is what is going on here.
  So let's do another slide to just sort of see how the numbers really 
are exploding. If I came to you and said, hey, in 4 years, that 3.8--
and it is actually a $3.75 billion budget we are going to have this 
year. So 3.756 trillion--sorry, not billion, trillion. So we are going 
to spend $3.8 trillion this year. In 4 years, we are going to be 
spending an additional $1 trillion on top of that, an additional 
trillion, and every dime of that is going into mandatory spending. It 
is not going into health research; it is not going into new parts; it 
is not going into building a new aircraft carrier; and it is not going 
into all these programs that we all talk about because it is easy 
politics. Every dime of that additional trillion dollars in 4 years 
from now will be in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on 
the debt, veterans' benefits, and the new healthcare law.
  How many times have you heard that? This is right in front of us. 
This is what is going on. Your government is growing at an exponential 
pace, but it is not in the area where we, as Members of Congress, get 
to vote because it is in the formula areas, the mandatory spending.
  Are you starting to see a theme in this discussion and on the slides? 
I am trying to build an understanding out there with both my brothers 
and sisters here in Congress and the public out there that if we are 
not willing to have honest conversations, particularly with this coming 
Presidential election, about entitlements, mandatory spending, and ways 
we can manage them--and it is not cuts, but there are much better ways 
we can deliver these.
  You put all the programs, all the promises we have made at risk 
because just pretending everything is going to be fine means you are 
basically dooming them to a really ugly future, or the country to an 
ugly future. So, Mr. Speaker, this gives you an interesting projection.
  Now, if we go beyond that 2020 slide, if we go 9 years out--9 years 
out--we will be running over trillion-dollar deficits, and that is 
using the current GDP projections for the future, which we are going to 
talk about that model on the very end slide. There is something 
horribly wrong in how we are modeling our future income growth into 
this country.
  The math is real. I know it is uncomfortable and it is almost 
sacrilegious to many of the political people here, saying: Well, we are 
not allowed to talk about that. David, why are you such a downer? Don't 
you want to get reelected? Why aren't you doing happy talk?

[[Page H3381]]

  I am optimistic about the country. I am optimistic about some things 
happening out there in the economy despite government. But you have to 
understand, in 9 years, interest will be $1 trillion. And think about 
this: it is almost going to be approaching all discretionary. At that 
time, in 9 years, we will be about $1.4 trillion in interest. Our best 
interest projection is over $1 trillion.
  The chart, when you go a couple years out, we will be spending more 
money on interest than all of defense, all of discretionary, all of 
education, all of parts, all of health research, everything else. That 
is what we are doing. We are creating this trap where, as we build more 
and more debt and build more and more debt and build more and more 
debt, that becomes our Achilles heal. That becomes our fragility in 
this country.
  So once again, remember that earlier slide where I went over there 
and marked that now this year's deficit projection is $582.5 billion, 
and that is coming from the White House as of about 2 days ago.
  We had someone in our office earlier today. We were trying to do some 
modeling. If GDP continues to do what we think is happening right now, 
we could be having a discussion this coming October that the 2015 
shortfall was almost $600 billion. You do realize that is approaching 
double what the optimistic projections were last year for 2015.

  There is something horribly wrong out there. It is a combination of 
lack of economic growth and, let's be honest, the mandatory spending, 
the entitlements, are growing faster than the underlying models we have 
built.
  So this is an interesting slide just to give you the point of talking 
about inflection. It is a fancy word that a lot of the statisticians 
like to use, and we politicians will use it. But there it, and it has 
begun. We are well into it.
  Do you see where those blue lines start to explode? But do you notice 
something interesting? The red lines, from about here over basically 
stay substantially flat. That is the discretionary spending. That is 
what we get to vote on. That is your defense. That is everything else 
other than the mandatory spending.
  But what is exploding through the ceiling? It looks like Washington, 
D.C., failed to understand the demographic issues that were heading 
towards this country and systematically avoided them, because I am sure 
it had nothing to do with my brothers and sisters often caring more 
about their next election than having to go through the painful process 
of educating our voters to understand this is your greatest threat, I 
believe, to our Republic.
  One more slide to put this in perspective. The blue line is interest. 
The red line is all--all--of defense spending. Do you notice something, 
that in about 7 years, 6\1/2\ years, we are now spending more money in 
interest than all of defense? All of defense. It is 6 years away. 
Actually, in reality, my math is closer to 5\1/2\, but we will use the 
6 years.
  Think about that. We will be spending more money in interest on U.S. 
sovereign debt than we are spending on all defense of the Nation. It is 
absurd. And this is what we are about to hand to our kids. As a matter 
of fact, this is no longer about our kids. This is about us now. The 
numbers have eroded so fast, it is here. And the happy talk that we 
were doing just 1 year ago, particularly coming from the 
administration, has not turned out to be true.
  So one of the things that is going on out there, can you regulate 
yourself to prosperity? Can you tax yourself to prosperity? Can you, in 
an arrogant fashion, have a bureaucracy that is so inept, its ability 
to even when we do bipartisan, pro-growth pieces of legislation like 
the JOBS Act--we all got together here 3 years ago and did the JOBS 
Act. You do realize there are still substantial portions of that piece 
of legislation that are still sitting at the SEC that still don't have 
their rules because of the underlying politics behind them? They are 3 
years beyond their due date, but we still don't have them.
  There is something horribly wrong in this government if we don't have 
an honest discussion and actually then do something about our Tax Code, 
our regulatory code, access to opportunity, and then the difficult one, 
the design within our entitlement state, which is something the 
Republicans for the last 4 years, 5 years, have been putting into our 
budget.
  Do you all remember the television commercial of the Paul Ryan look-
alike throwing grandma over the cliff? Great politics, horrible math, 
because the Republicans, Paul Ryan and the rest of us, stood up and 
said that we are willing to actually propose a model that saves 
Medicare and deals with this curve that consumes everything in our 
path. It is really bad politics; it is honest math. And we get the crap 
kicked out of us for telling the truth.
  So now we get to look at a slide like this. We were projecting 3.1 
percent GDP for this year. As of a few hours ago, the Atlanta Fed, 
which actually does this really interesting modeling of collecting 
current statistics and constantly adjusting their GDP projections, now 
has us not at 3.1 percent GDP for this year--and remember, every point 
of GDP is--it matters what velocity model you use--about $80 billion to 
$100 billion of revenue. So you start to realize that a couple of 
points of GDP is a big deal. The Atlanta Fed's GDP calculation on their 
Web site now is 0.7 percent GDP coming in in this quarter, and the 
indicators look like we are going to get additional downward revisions 
on the first quarter.
  Mr. Speaker, we are in trouble. Yes, the politicians will get up here 
and blame each other and blame each other, but it doesn't make the math 
go away.

                              {time}  1930

  The other thing is also--and this is one of my pet peeves here--we 
systematically do not tell the truth, and this is a Republican and 
Democrat problem. Some of it is because we use really bad modeling 
data, really bad underlying statistics; we underestimate the swings 
during boom times and slowdowns. We systematically have blown our GDP 
calculation; but understand, that GDP calculation has a lot to do with 
what we model as our spending, has a lot to do with what ends up 
happening on our debt.
  If you look at this chart, the red is what real GDP turned out to be; 
the blue was our projection, and systematically, we are dramatically 
under the projection. It looks like this year we are crashing and 
burning. I am desperately hoping the third quarter and the fourth 
quarter get really healthy, but there is something horribly wrong out 
there.
  Is this administration, are my brothers and sisters on the left, 
finally willing to have that conversation about the Tax Code, about our 
regulatory state, those very things that--let's face it--are stymying 
future growth and our ability to save this country?
  One last slide just to sort of provide an opportunity--for those of 
you who have an interest in watching some of these numbers, and there 
are those out there who are also sort of numbers geeks, this is that 
GDPNow. Yes, it is often a pessimistic calculator; except for the small 
problem is, the last couple of years, it has actually been the accurate 
calculator of actual GDP growth. This is right off the GDPNow Web site 
from the Atlanta Fed, showing it looks like, now, we are all the way 
down to a .7 percent GDP growth in the second quarter.
  A little bit else on this and then I will stop this thing I am doing, 
which may be bordering on a tirade. If you are particularly geeky, last 
week, you would have seen the Journal of Economic Perspectives did an 
entire report on Social Security calculations.
  There is a handful of folks here with all sorts of letters behind 
their names, mostly Ph.D., talking about Social Security is actually in 
worse shape than we tell people, that they are close to $1 trillion 
additional underfunded in the latest projections, and that some of the 
modeling are simple things like we are actually using really bad life 
expectancy tables.
  Now, I have incredible respect for the actuaries over at Medicare and 
Social Security; I think they deal with some amazing data sets, but 
some of the Nation's finest economists and Ph.D. economists are 
starting to write public articles, saying: We are in real trouble here.
  Remember, last year, when the Mercatus did their detailed projection 
on unfunded liabilities and debt for the United States, they came in 
with a number that scared me half to death. They actually came in with 
a number

[[Page H3382]]

of $205 trillion, as if you did GAAP standard accounting, not 
government accounting, standard accounting for the debt of this Nation 
and our unfunded liabilities.
  Go on the Internet right now, and look up what is the wealth of the 
world. Some of the best models say the wealth of the world is about 
$180 trillion. We have universities out there modeling that U.S. 
sovereign debt and unfunded liabilities are over $200 trillion. Our 
unfunded liabilities are greater than the wealth of the world.
  We are better than this. This is the greatest issue in front of us, 
and we spend so little time actually having an honest discussion about 
the math.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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