[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 111 (Wednesday, June 28, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H5289-H5293]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEBT AND DEFICIT
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bergman). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert)
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio
(Ms. Kaptur), who has always treated me very kindly.
NAFTA Negotiations
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, as NAFTA renegotiation approaches, I rise to
call attention to the mammoth U.S. trade deficit with our NAFTA nation
partners.
Our current deficit with NAFTA nations is $74 billion. This red on
the chart translates into tens of thousands of lost U.S. jobs, all
while wages are depressed for North America's struggling workers. Since
NAFTA's passage, there hasn't been a single year of trade balance for
this country. That translates into lost jobs.
Thus far, President Trump has failed to correct these trade deficits.
In fact, the trade deficit this year has ballooned to more than $22
billion from the same period in 2016.
Balanced trade accounts in 5 years should be first on our agenda. My
bill, the Balancing Trade Act, H.R. 2766, requires the administration
to address trade deficits of more than $10 billion with any nation.
As negotiations near, let's focus on key principles such as
vigorously enforcing a first world rule of law; including labor
provisions that allow workers across this continent to improve their
standard of living and outlaw labor trafficking; enact environmental
standards for human health and forge an agricultural labor agreement
that helps displaced farmers; reform the unaccountable tribunals called
Investor-State Dispute Settlements so that they work for people, not
just big corporations; address currency manipulation; and, finally,
stamp out the illegal drug trade that is plaguing this continent.
The wealth NAFTA created has not been shared by all, but only a very
few, and often only the very rich. Our foundational principle for NAFTA
reform must be free and fair trade among free people with a rule of
law.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is one of those things I partially
do, I think, as therapy. About once every other month, I ask for a
block of time to try to take a bunch of very complex numbers and try to
find ways to put them on boards and demonstrate them.
I am going to take a little divergence just for a moment or two, in
response to some of the things I have heard today. We are actually
going to focus on debt and deficit and what is actually demographically
driving them, what is really happening in this country, and what is
going to drive all public policy in our life.
You have had a handful of things said about the ACA--many people know
it as ObamaCare--and our replacement. I know some of the things that
the Senate is working on.
There is a math problem--and it is very simple--in the individual
market. So if you hear someone turn to you and say, This is about
healthcare for everyone or this is employer-based, or Medicare, it is
not.
In my congressional district, less than 2 percent of my population
actually purchased in the individual market. So you have to start
putting this in perspective.
Here is your math problem. Because the prices kept moving up and the
deductibles kept becoming larger and larger, half of our population--
that 50 percent that only uses 3 percent of healthcare dollars--stopped
buying.
I came across a number earlier this week--I haven't had a chance to
vet it, but it was in a publication--saying that, of the 18- to 30-
year-old population that would be in the individual purchasing market,
only about 17 percent of them were actually buying the insurance.
So those of you who do math, you start to understand what happens in
a world where half the population that really uses very little
healthcare services doesn't buy a product and those who are purchasing
it are those who are the high users of it.
Remember, 50 percent of all healthcare dollars are used by 5 percent
of the population. So you start to see it is this hockey stick curve
that shoots up. That is the math problem that is trying to be fixed.
In the last 3 years, if you are from Arizona, you have had a 190
percent price hike in the mean plan and you have a single choice. So if
we are going to be intellectually honest, should we hold our brothers
and sisters around here to their own words and their own promises? You
remember the promises a few years ago about keep your doctor, $2,500
discount, lots of choices, lots of options, well, in Arizona, your
prices have skyrocketed, you didn't get to keep your doctor, and you
now have a single choice.
{time} 1745
That is the reality of the math. Sometimes it is just so hard sitting
here when you hear people just pulling things out of the air, and then
you go to the bill and say: But I can't find that.
And you get these weird logic trains that if this happened and a
meteor hit here and this and that. At some point we need to be honest
with the American people saying it is a math problem. This is not about
removing costs from the healthcare system. It is actually moving
around, how you fairly distribute the cost of it.
This summer now we are starting to work on it, just like we voted on
about an hour ago a piece of legislation that starts to remove cost out
of the system. It is these future pieces of legislation, like the tort
liability bill that was just passed out of the House here, that will
actually start to drive down costs.
Remember a really important conceptual idea: in 1986, there was a law
passed here, signed by President Reagan, that said you cannot deny an
American health services if they show up at the emergency room, if they
show up at the hospital.
So if you actually look at the number of procedures in society in the
last 30, 31 years, pre-ACA, after the ACA came into effect, what we see
in the future, we haven't removed procedures and costs. We have just
moved the money around.
All right. So what is happening in our country? Do you remember when
the President introduced his budget, what, about 6 weeks ago, 2 months
ago, and the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and the crying?
We have a math problem, and it is based on demographics. We are going
to see this multiple times in these slides. I am one of them. I am at
the very tail end. I am a baby boomer. There are 76 million of us who
are baby boomers, who are heading towards retirement. That demographic
curve is changing the cost structure of government.
On the slide you see next to me, this is 9 years from now. Remember,
we are
[[Page H5290]]
working on, what, the 2018 budget? So actually less than that. This is
what the world will look like in 2026.
Do you see the Social Security being 24 percent of all spending? Do
you see Medicare being 19 percent of all spending? Do you see interest
on the debt?
If you start to add up everything, you have to understand the world
we are in is we are heading toward a time where three-quarters of
spending--actually, even more than that are what we call mandatory.
They are formulas. You get this benefit because you turned a certain
age. You get this benefit because you fell under a certain income. You
get this benefit because you served in the military.
But what so many of us talk about as being government is becoming
tiny. In 2026, which is not that long from now, 11 percent of the
budget is going to be defense; 11 percent of the budget will be
nondefense. So that is your parks, that is your medical research, that
is your education. That is this branch of government. That is all the
branches of government. So 22 percent will be what we call
discretionary. It is what I get to come down here and vote on because
everything else is run by a formula.
So if you are someone who comes to me and says: I really think we
should be going to Mars. I really think we should be doing this type of
healthcare research. I really think we need this money in education.
Okay. I agree they are all incredibly important in our society. Are
you going to help me find a way to reform what we call mandatory
spending, entitlements?
Entitlements--because of the aging of our population--is the primary
driver, are consuming every incremental dollar.
In a decade, this government will be spending $1 trillion more, and
every dime of that will functionally have gone into entitlements. We
will have gone 10 years where what we call discretionary spending--you
know, these little two parts here--has stayed flat for a decade.
This huge growth in government is actually in Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security. Certain other entitlements are things you get because
you fell below a certain income, and interest on the debt. Until we are
actually honest about this--because it is so dangerous for a political
person to even say the words ``Medicare''--we have to look at the
numbers and understand the trust funds are bleeding.
If you really want to protect our brothers and sisters and protect
retirees, some of these are things we should have done a decade ago.
And we keep avoiding them because so often Washington cares more about
the political up side of attacking each side from even mentioning what
is going on demographically and in these numbers.
We are going to try to run through a bunch of these slides. Some of
them, I apologize, when you blow them up on the big printer, they are
going to get a little fuzzy, but we are going to just try to walk
through these numbers. Hopefully, they will make some sense.
Why is this slide up?
This one is really important.
When you get down to the very last bar chart, do you happen to notice
something? You notice how they basically touch each other.
That is 2027.
How many years from now--how many budget years from now?
So about 9 budget years from now.
Do you see the lighter blue?
Okay. That is Social Security. The gray is the Medicare. Then the
Medicaid. Then you get up to net interest. Then you see the green at
the very top, and that is other mandatory.
Oh, heaven. Do you understand what that slide is telling you?
That is saying, in 9 years, just the mandatory spending consumes all
revenues, meaning defense will be on borrowed money, meaning almost
everything you think of as government--once again, the Park Service,
medical research, education--will be on borrowed money.
At that point we are going to be borrowing probably a little over $1
trillion a year every year, and it gets worse and worse.
I am incredibly blessed. I have a 20-month-old, and since the
blessing of her coming into my life and my wife's life, I think
constantly: In the time I am spending here in Congress, what am I
handing to her?
Because right now the game is we spend it today, we consume it today,
and we are going to let our kids and our grandkids pay it back.
How does this become ethical?
Yet if you listen to the speeches that happened on this floor today,
it was speech after speech of: We want more money for something.
At the same time--this is important--do you know how much we are
going to borrow today?
We are going to borrow over $1.6 billion today.
I have 1 hour to speak here to you. Hopefully, if we are all blessed,
I won't go that long.
Okay. So $1.6 billion divided by 24. Sixty-six million dollars an
hour.
Start to divide that and just think about that is just the borrowing
side of spending, because we are going to spend about $11 billion today
on a $4 trillion-plus budget. So just understand that this is where we
are going. This is already baked into the cake. This is the math.
It is time for almost revolutionary thoughts on we need to look at
the budget holistically. That means no longer having this little silo
over here of this is discretionary, this is mandatory; and if you even
talk about mandatory, you lose your political office.
In many ways, this one is sort of doing the same thing but letting
you see what is happening on the debt side.
Now, why is the debt side so incredibly important to also focus on?
We have to pay interest on it. We are borrowing money from your
retirement, from the Union retirement, from the State retirement, but
we are also borrowing money from a thrifty family in China, and we owe
interest on it. We also make ourselves, as a nation, much more fragile
to the world markets.
We have been incredibly lucky the last few years of these stunningly
low interest rates.
How many of you actually believe the interest rates when you look at
a 10-year instrument today that I think was at 2.2 and believe that is
normal?
If we actually just moved back to nominal interest rates, our
interest would grow very quickly in the next couple of years to be
greater than our entire defense budget.
As you look at this slide, look out to 2026, many years from now,
except it is not that long from now. Do you see the green bar up there?
That is total debt. That total debt is starting to crash in on $30
trillion.
A bit of trivia. You often hear the differential people say: Well,
there is public debt and there is publicly issued debt, and then there
is debt where we borrow from the trust funds. Okay. And many of the
economists really only score debt that is sold in the open markets.
Okay. Fine. I understand that is the practice, but there is something
that is intellectually lazy, because we still owe the money back to the
Medicare trust fund, to the Social Security trust fund. It has been a
while since I checked this, but I think last year I checked, and we
were paying a 3.1 percent interest spiff. So we pay a higher interest
rate for borrowing those moneys out of those trust funds.
Do we have an obligation to pay that back?
Of course we do. But for the intellectually lazy, it is just so much
more comforting to say: Well, let's just not look at that because, if
we look at that, we are already over 100 percent of debt-to-GDP when we
put in those dollars we have loaned to the general fund. Let's just
call it that.
Let's move on to the next one. If you look at this slide, you notice
there is starting to be a theme here. I am trying desperately to get my
brothers and sisters in this body to understand the greatest threat to
our society is the money we are spending that we actually don't have a
way to pay for. If you actually look at demographics and where this
debt curves, it just blows off the charts.
This is an interesting little slide. This is a CBO slide for 2027.
When you actually look at it saying: Okay. What does the world look
like if mandatory-- Okay. Do you see the blue?
That is mandatory and defense spending. Because many people say:
Look, we are going to spend on defense.
We will be down to only--11 percent of this budget will be things you
think of as government. Everything else will be entitlements or
defense.
[[Page H5291]]
Just as a perspective, we did this slide just so you could sort of
see. I hear candidates running for office say: We are going to take
care of waste and fraud, and that will balance the budget.
Really? When only 11 percent of the budget in just a few years will
be everything that isn't mandatory or isn't defense?
You have got to understand the scale.
This one is a little hard to read. I am going to reach over to it and
play with my pen.
When you actually look at this, what I am begging of you also to
understand is--I think this is the 2016 year--we spent actually a bit
over $3.9 trillion, but we only took in $3.3 trillion.
You see the nature of the differential?
{time} 1800
And when you start to look at, first off, the beige there in the
upper, we have been really blessed with incredibly low interest rates.
So at a time where we should have actually been having an interest bill
that would have been approaching a few hundred billion, we had less
than $250 billion.
Now, the dear Lord and the interest markets have been very, very kind
to us. When you actually look at the curve, so much of the spending,
once again, is what we call mandatory. But if you actually look at--we
will call it the rust over there, something most people don't
understand. I am going to reach over and point to what is the
individual income tax portion. What most people don't understand is the
individual income tax is the majority of the income to this country
that is not intended for one of the trust funds.
If you actually look at the corporate income tax, it has been going
up, but it is still a fairly small sliver. Now, why did that change?
And so often I will get people that bring me charts and say: ``David,
25, 30 years ago, the corporations paid so much more.'' Well, also, 25,
30 years ago, there was this new concept of pass-throughs: LLCs and
partnerships.
So what happened is many things that used to be corporations in the
fifties, sixties, seventies, up and through the eighties, at the end of
the eighties there was this revolution where States all over said: Hey,
why don't we create these pass-through entities; they're more tax
efficient.
How many of you actually have had an LLC? Well, that is a pass-
through entity. But that is where you actually see the shift of
corporate taxes going down and individual taxes going up. It is not
that corporations all of a sudden start escaping taxes. It is their
taxes now were actually booked as individual income. Just to
understand, so when you see those charts, you have got to be able to
sort of process and think that through.
This is sort of important to understand where the taxes are. But, do
you see that circle there, that 40 percent of the entire curve? That is
payroll taxes. That is the income that goes into your unemployment,
your Social Security disability, your Social Security, your Medicare.
Those are revenues that are specifically for either your retirement
future, if you have a break in your employment, or, God forbid, you
become permanently or temporarily disabled, with Social Security
disability having its definition of what temporarily disabled is.
Just to understand, those are our revenue sources.
Then you will see the little slivers on the bottom, and some of that
is tariffs and some of the other fees that come in, partially through
trade.
I know, sometimes these slides are a little hard to see, so we
actually blew a couple of them up. The idea here was just so you could
actually see the total revenues.
Now, this is for 2017, so this is our projection of what is going on
this year.
And my wife, right about now is when she would typically start
texting me and saying I am putting everybody to sleep. But I am married
to an accountant, so that could explain why we have no friends.
That is the payroll taxes.
Do you see the far side? Let's call it turquoise. That is the
individual income tax. That is why those of us on the Ways and Means
Committee, when we are actually working on tax reform, many of us
believe we have to sort of do an organic, a unified budget or a tax
reform proposal that actually does everything from what you see here,
corporate, which actually is much of our job engine, over to the
individual, which is also now a huge portion of our job engine.
Do not let someone just talk about lowering rates and not also
understand that what you see on the individual side may be what you pay
as a worker, but also, if you are an employer but you are organized as
an LLC or partnership or pass-through, you are also on that side, just
to know it is out there.
Now we get to some of the more fun stuff.
You were just looking at some of our revenues. We already know that
this year, if you use the President's budget--or Office of Budget and
Management--we are about $600 billion short. If we use that of the
Congressional Budget Office, we are, let's just call it, $550 billion
short, meaning we are spending that much more money than we are taking
in.
But, once again, let's actually just look at where we are spending
the money. So the turquoise, Social Security, Medicare, and other
health programs, so Medicare and Medicaid. National defense is this.
Then come over here. This is everything else, and this is interest.
So, last year, we spent about $245 billion in interest. This year, we
are still blessed with incredibly low interest rates. We are only
expecting about $266 billion in interest. Still stunning amounts of
money. But the little white area is what most people will think of as
government.
So if you look at last year--and the nice thing about using this one
is it is booked. We know what it is. We took in $3.3 trillion; we spent
$3.9 trillion. You already start to see the structural difference.
So, if you actually start to come over here, now this is much better
than it was a few years ago. The problem is, in this fairly strong
economy, it is closed, and now, demographically, it is about to start
to move away from us. This is the line you always have to constantly
think about.
If that is my revenues and I drop my line down, you have to start
understanding that everything beyond that line is borrowed money. Just
visually, I have always found this easiest when you actually start to
show different groups saying: ``Look, this is just where we are at.''
And then you will stand up and say: ``Hey, why don't we do this? Tell
me what I can cut because you want a balanced budget this year.''
All right. Understand the math. If we are going to borrow $600
billion, that is most of defense.
Okay. How about the other side, everything else we call
discretionary? We could actually eliminate all of it and, believe it or
not, you still don't have enough money to cover the borrowing. So, if
you are borrowing $600 billion this year, I believe that is greater
than all of the nondefense spending in the government this year.
So let's actually start going through a little bit more where we are
at and what is actually about to happen. The frustrating thing here is
we have a number of charts that we have worked on about why we have
been so off on our economic growth projections. If you go back a couple
of years ago, we had these fairly rosy pictures where we were going to
be, yet the country has not grown nearly fast enough.
We are hoping this year, with the new administration, you are
actually starting to see economic growth that will take care of a lot
of these sins. I think GDP now, as of a couple of days ago, the Atlanta
Fed's calculator was at about 2.9 percent of GDP. You would like to be
substantially higher, but if we could hold 2.9 through the rest of the
year, we will take it because it is so much healthier than where we
have been the last few years.
Why this is important is, I just want to show, the Congressional
Budget Office's baseline for 2017, $559 billion more spending than we
are taking in. But I am going to reach way over here and say, hey, what
does the world look like 10 years from now? Ten years from now it is
saying the annual shortfall, the annual borrowing, will be 1.4--
actually, let's be accurate--$1.408 trillion.
So just the borrowing in 9 budget years will be greater than all of
the discretionary spending of this year.
[[Page H5292]]
And it is growth in entitlements; it is growth in mandatory spending.
Why isn't that what you hear behind these microphones all day long? I
have to believe that those of us who get behind those microphones, we
love our kids and we love our grandkids, but this is absolute
decimation of the future.
And do not blame the parts of the government that we vote for, the
discretionary, because the math doesn't show that. When you actually
take a look at this, you see the darker and the lighter. The darker is
defense, the lighter is nondefense.
One more time, I know this is sort of geeky. But if you actually look
from 1996 to 2001, yes, we have had certain economic upheavals; we have
had an attack on our country. But if you actually look at the
percentages of gross domestic product, which is how so many economists
sort of look at our spending and say, ``Hey, you are spending 3 percent
over here of your GDP on defense,'' it is pretty much identical where
we were last year as to where we were 10 years or 20 years earlier.
So, once again, what is exploding on us? Well, if you want to break
it down, if you actually look at the different categories--and we are
only going to do this slide for a second--the different categories will
have stayed almost flat in the discretionary area for 10 years.
So what is happening in our society? We are getting older. Something
I thought was just fascinating because I have a great interest in the
reality: We knew people were going to be turning 65. We knew baby
boomers were going to be turning 65 for how many years? This body knew
we had 76 million of our brothers and sisters who were born in an 18-
year period that would be moving into their time with their earned
benefits, and we did what to prepare for it? So we are now about our
fifth year into the baby boomers retiring, and we are now beyond the
inflection point.
If you went to school many years ago and you sat in a demographics
class, they talked about, oh, in the 2000s, there is going to be this
time where you are coming up against this inflection where the spending
is going to explode.
You are going to see a couple of slides in a moment where I am going
to show you what has happened now where, when I was a child, for every
$4 spent for children, $1 was spent for seniors. Today, that is
reversed. There is some math difference in there and there is some
population difference, but that is where we are at.
This is an interesting slide. You do understand, as a nation, we
functionally have zero population growth without immigration. In about
25 or 30 years, the country of Nigeria will have more population than
the United States. So when you hear someone talk, saying, ``Well, I am
uncomfortable with trade,'' they have got to understand, if we need
consumers for our products, we need to be finding these countries that
are going to have lots of young people, and they are our future
markets.
We in the United States are moving down. I think our average age this
year is 37.2, and that will continue to go up for about the next 25
years.
I just put this up because it is fascinating seeing where the young
people are going to be in the world, and we need to start thinking
about, if we are getting older as a society, how do we still use our
intellectual prowess, our creativity, our manufacturing prowess to make
things that are desirable to growing populations, and let's make sure
we have built a world and environment here where we can sell things to
them.
{time} 1815
Because if we don't, we don't have the market ourselves. We are not
going to have enough young consumers. So you have got to take that into
reality.
Once again, this one is a tough chart. It is on here just basically
to understand what is happening in the world. What is incredibly
fascinating is many Americans see China as our primary competitor, and
in many products they are.
On high-value products, countries like Germany, actually, are more of
a competitor. But do you see this line here, this collapse? That is the
Chinese demographics. If you understand that line, you understand a lot
of things that China is doing around the world in trying to buy assets
that produce income so they will actually have an income stream to
start paying for their senior population.
The United States is this dark here, and you will see--here is where
we are at. We are sliding. But look at how many of our trading partners
also are in the same demographic curve. It is just worth understanding
that when you see many of us who lean towards being free traders, we
are looking for where there are populations in the world that we can go
sell things to. I am an American; I want to sell you something.
Now, within the Nation, just fascination, if year 2000 the average
age in the United States was 35.3, 16 years later, we are 37.9, that is
a huge shift. I know that may not seem like a big difference when you
start talking about two-and-a-half some points. That is a big shift in
16 years on average age.
But also what is fascinating is for those of us out in the West, we
will actually be somewhat younger than the middle of the country and
back East. I am blessed to be from Maricopa County, Arizona, the
fastest growing county in the country. Come visit us. But it is also to
understand that this aging of America also is going to require
different societal needs, and different States are going to have very
different approaches.
If you actually look at a State like Utah, it remains fairly young.
Some of our States back East actually get quite old and are going to
actually have very different societal needs.
This is the mandatory spending chart. I actually wanted to spend just
a moment over here on some of the percentages. This one I know is
really hard to read, but if you actually start to look at the second
part over here, ``discretionary,'' do you see all of those little tiny
percentages? This is where a lot of our discussions get very
disingenuous around here.
We will have people coming behind these microphones almost acting
like their hair is on fire because some dollars have been removed from
this agency, or dollars are going to be removed from this spending
program, and the unwillingness to understand the scale that we are
talking about. It is just real simple.
If that is every dollar of discretionary spending plus defense, and
every dollar of mandatory, the mandatory is what, two-and-a-half times
bigger? So if you are going to have a discussion of spending
priorities, are we going to be a mature enough group to actually deal
with the reality where the dollars are at? I promise, we are down to
the last couple of these.
So the share of the budget outlays, and this one is more--I am not
being judgemental on this. It is just more of a thought experiment.
This is actually from the Urban Institute, which it is always
interesting to see a Republican using charts from the Urban Institute.
This is a couple of years old, and the chart now is actually more
aggressive. I just couldn't get the newest one printed.
Do you see this little edge right here? This is sort of the Federal
spending. Ten percent is going to children. Forty-one percent of the
spending goes to seniors. It is just a thought experiment. We want to
honor and keep our commitments to the earned entitlements, but the
reality of the demographics keep moving up, and as we keep those
commitments, the pressure on everything else is going to get much more
cantankerous, much more cranky, much more difficult.
We have a saying in our office: It is always about the money. Some of
the disharmony you hear around here is going to get louder because, as
you have already seen, the trillion-dollar engine over the next few
years that consumes the next trillion dollars is all mandatory
spending, is all demographics. So that is just another thought
experiment.
Every once in while we will get the people who come to us and say:
Hey, David, why don't you remove this program or that program? One more
time, we are borrowing--so much for my writing--$1.6 billion every
single day. And that is just the borrowing side, and we are spending
close to $11 billion every single day.
So on occasion, you will get a group that comes in and says: David,
we want you to get rid of all foreign aid, but we want to make sure you
still protect
[[Page H5293]]
Israel, and we still want to help the countries that are trying to help
us deal with narcotics.
And you start to get down and say: Okay, so you want us to cut half
of the foreign aid budget?
Okay, great. Well, that would be about 14 days of borrowing--not
spending, borrowing. Because remember, we are borrowing $1.6 billion
every day. And there becomes the intellectual problem where you will
get an individual who comes in and says: David, just take care of the
waste and fraud. And there is waste and fraud out there, and we are
going to have to do it. And we are going to have to be much more
disciplined in the adoption and the use of technology.
But a lot of that language is gimmickry until you have someone who is
willing to step up and actually just talk about the demographics that
are our Nation.
So think about this: I will have stood behind this microphone--let's
just pretend it is an hour. Do you feel like you got $66 million worth
of speechifying? Because we are borrowing $66 million a minute, $1.6
billion a day, and it is just not that.
One of the reasons this is such a powerful chart--and this is from a
private organization that does the U.S. debt clock. You do realize, the
majority of debt in this country is borrowed.
There was an article in Politico a couple of years ago that did this
brilliant job. If you actually think about this, all of the student
loans, all of the mortgages that have Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie
Mae, SBA, all of these things, it was somewhere around 63 or 64 percent
of all debt in the United States, you and I as taxpayers guarantee.
The unfunded liabilities in Medicare itself over the 75 years, many
actuaries have over $100 trillion. So when you see us fussing with each
other down here, it is almost always about the money. And until we are
willing to start talking about these numbers that are spinning out of
control, the fussing is just going to get more and more angry until we
step up and deal with the reality of what is driving our future, and
that is demographics.
Mr. Speaker, with that I yield back the balance of my time.
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