[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 122 (Wednesday, July 19, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H6033-H6037]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICA'S DEBT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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 my friend from Indiana (Mr.
Hollingsworth).
Costly and Burdensome Regulations
Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arizona for
yielding to me. I promise to be brief.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about something that Hoosiers back
home are talking to me about every single day, and that is to rise to
express my support for those struggling against burdensome and costly
regulations, those costly regulations that are hurting Hoosier
businesses from being able to get their products to market, from
ultimately being able to grow their enterprises, and from ultimately
being able to hire more Hoosiers.
When Democrats passed the Dodd-Frank Act, they promised a success for
Main Street. Instead, Dodd-Frank has become a nightmare for businesses
on Main Street.
Specifically, while I was back home just a few weeks ago, I met with
two businesses working hard to do right by their customers and
employees but confounded by section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act.
Section 1502 requires businesses to disclose due diligence on the
source and chain of custody of ``conflict minerals,'' as well as hire a
third party to honor their due diligence and subsequently submit a
report to the SEC on those measures. According to its Democratic
authors, this provision would only affect the biggest of companies, but
those companies have to bring in all of their suppliers, all of their
vendors in order to comply, which affects many small businesses across
Indiana's Ninth District.
One of those firms is Best Home Furnishings in Paoli. They
manufacture quality furniture across Indiana, and I was astounded to
learn the lengths they must go through in order to comply with this
regulation. They travel far abroad to verify the wood is conflict-free.
And even after all that time-consuming and very costly travel, they are
left wondering, despite all of their best efforts, if they are making
any impact on those areas that are far from their plants, far from
their customers, and far from their employees.
Another such example is Key Electronics, a manufacturer that is
working on electronics in Indiana to get through opioid withdrawals for
many Hoosiers who are afflicted by this scourge on our communities. It
is a laudable goal, but they are hamstrung by the thousands and
thousands of dollars they pay to ensure the customers that they work
with ultimately get this third-party audit on them and all of their
vendors. This challenging business with very thin margins is being
limited in what they can invest in innovative, desperately needed
therapy for those addicted to opioids.
For every dollar and every moment that a businessowner has to spend
complying with this outrageous and unnecessary regulation, those are
minutes and dollars that are not directed towards job creation, not
directed towards investing in America's future,
[[Page H6034]]
and not directed towards fulfilling their and, ultimately, their
employees' dreams.
Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with my colleagues in this
Congress to bring an end to the excessive job-killing regulations that
stand between Hoosiers and their entrepreneurial dreams.
Give Americans Back Their Healthcare System
Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about how
regulations and restrictions in healthcare space are preventing new
innovations from being able to deliver better care to Hoosiers back
home.
I recently met with a local business just outside of my district,
Mainstreet Health Investments, who is working hard to develop new rapid
recovery centers that are truly better in matching patients' needs with
services provided.
For example, when a patient has knee surgery, they only need a
hospital for a very limited window during their period of acute care.
They need that hospital for such immediate recovery, but, hours after
that, they can be transferred to a different recovery center, one that
better matches their needs as a patient, enabling them to recover much
more quickly and enabling us all to save significant dollars by
matching that care with the needs that they have.
Frankly, I have been amazed at the quality of these rapid recovery
centers, where the patient is truly focused on, in a holistic manner,
such that they can develop and have physical therapy right there in
that location. It is innovations just like these rapid recovery centers
that they are building that will help deliver better cures to more
Americans.
This is how we make a healthcare system that is not only more
affordable, not only more accessible, but also better for patients in
the long run. I want it to be just as effective, in addition to
affordable and accessible.
What stands in the way? What is standing in their way is certainly
government bureaucracy, a government that is retarding a level of
innovation, retarding their ability to grow and build more of these
facilities across the country despite the demonstrated need and the
demonstrated benefit to those patients.
So I wanted to talk about those regulations and how they stand in the
way of Americans and Hoosiers who are trying to get ahead, trying to
get their companies get ahead, trying to help their fellow employees
get ahead, and, ultimately, that will, together, help America get
ahead.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons for taking this
time--and it was only about 3 weeks ago we actually took the leadership
hour and we did a series of presentations on what was happening in debt
and the excessive spending in the Federal Government, what was driving
it and what was happening with mandatory spending. Then the very next
morning, CBO issued an update.
Have you ever had one of those moments in your life where you just
spent almost an hour on the floor walking through the numbers, and you
get a document and you start digging into it, and you find out a number
of the things you presented just 14 hours earlier were wrong? But,
sadly, they were wrong in the wrong direction, if there is such a way
to phrase it.
Think of this: From January's Congressional Budget Office number
until June's number, the U.S. debt deficit this year, the U.S. deficit
this year, grew by $134 billion as our projection for the end of the
year. So, functionally, the deficit for 2017, the fiscal year we are
in, we will come very close to $700 billion this year.
{time} 1900
It is going to be 693 is the projection. And if anyone saw--I think
it was yesterday or the day before--Mick Mulvaney over at OMB, was
projecting, from the White House's calculations, that the deficit this
year was going to be about $704 billion.
So we put together this slide next to me just to make it clear how
much that is, to just sort of understand what is going on and trying to
put this in perspective.
Okay. So we are going to use the CBO number because, you know, it is
the Congressional Budget Office. So $693 billion is going to be
borrowed for 2017, the year we are in right now.
Well, think about that. That is $1.89 billion every single day. That
is $79 million every hour; $1.3 million every minute. And, what, $1,900
every second? And that is what we are borrowing. So if I take up an
hour here, you all get to make a decision if my hour here was worth $79
million of borrowing.
Why is this sort of devastating in the numbers when you really start
to dig into this CBO report?
Well, first let me give you one of the things that bothered me the
most. This is a big deal when, from January to June, our excessive
spending and borrowing number actually increases by 25 percent and it
got almost zero press.
We are living in a society right now where, if there is a shiny
object, a tweet, another story, the press, even a lot of the Members of
this body, run talk about that. And I will make you the argument that
the greatest systemic threat to this society are these numbers because
the fact we are going to borrow $134 billion more than we were already
projecting, it is worse than that.
If you were to step back 1 year ago, 1 year ago we thought this
year's deficit was going to be about $450 billion. I mean, it is still
outrageous. In a year's time that number now is kissing up to $700
billion this year.
To understand the scale of that, we are going to actually do some of
our slides. And the first one we are going to put up is the slide from
3 weeks ago, and the punch line on it is the numbers are worse than
this. I just wasn't going to use up a whole bunch of ink and print a
new one. But this is important to understand.
So this is where we think we are going. This is what is in the CBO
report. But do you see actually the blue areas? That is sort of
spending that is on autopilot. When we say autopilot, it is by formula.
You reach a certain age, you get certain benefits. You fall below a
certain income, you get certain benefits. We borrow money, we pay back
the interest. You have served honorably in the military, you qualify
for certain benefits.
But this is 2026, so this is functionally 9 budget years from now.
Understand where we will be. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, other
things that are formula driven, you fall below a certain income, you
get interest on the debt.
And you start to realize only 22 percent of all spending in 9 years
will be things that functionally get voted on here. Everything else
will be by formula. Your government is very quickly becoming a health
insurer with an army, an insurance company with an army.
What is fascinating is--think about this--this year we are going to
kiss up close to $700 billion in borrowing. That is more than all
discretionary spending on nonmilitary discretionary spending. So think
about that. If you came to me and said, ``David, I want you to only
spend exactly what you are taking in right now,'' you get to help me
make a decision. If I am not allowed to touch mandatory spending, the
entitlements, do you remove the entire military, or do you remove
everything else you think of as government, the Park Service, the FDA,
the FBI?
Everything else is government because all of that is living on
borrowed money. And somehow we desperately must find a way for the
American public to understand the scale and how quickly these numbers
are moving away from us.
In 5 years, so those folks who are 60 years old today, they are at
the peak of what we call the ``Baby Boom.'' So in 5 years from now, we
actually hit the peak of our brothers and sisters who will receive
their retirement benefits, if they take them at 65. And you start to
look at the numbers. And we are going to--let's switch to the next
slide. And you will actually start to see that curve steepening.
We are going to show a slide in a couple of boards from here that
starts to show you at what point we are running these trillion-dollar
deficits.
The next point I also wanted to make that was here in the CBO report
is, when we borrow an additional $134 billion on top of what we already
projected--so close to $700 billion this year--that is now part of the
rolling debt. That is part of--now we are going to be paying interest
on that for generations because our inflection point to
[[Page H6035]]
pay down the debt is moving farther away from us every day because--you
saw the previous slide--every day we are borrowing pretty close to $1.9
billion every single day.
So why this slide is important is--just understand--in 9 budget
years, if you said, ``David, I want you to deal with the debt. I don't
want you to do it today because I don't want to lose any benefits. I
don't want to talk about the complications of what happens if we had to
deal with the reality of trying to make the combination of making the
economy grow and having to deal with entitlement reform,'' but in 9
years, only 11 percent of the budget would be nondefense, non-
entitlement.
And the amazing thing is, that number will stay almost identical for
the next 10 years. So almost all the growth, a trillion-plus dollars of
growth in those 9 years is coming almost solely from Medicare,
Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits,
but mostly Medicare.
It is really difficult to talk about, but if you actually look in the
CBO numbers, you understand, we have a couple of our key trust funds
that start to run out of money within the 10-year window. So let's
actually switch slides and try to--and a couple of these are going to
be repetitive for a point, so it starts to become more absorbable of
what is actually really going on in these underlying numbers.
So we put this one together just to sort of have a sense of what has
happened. What happened from when we were estimating in 2016, the
Congressional Budget Office gave us a number, so this is a year ago. We
were building our budgets. We were building our projections. We were
building our cost analysis on how much interest financing, these
things. This is a year ago. We thought we were going to borrow $544
billion, still an outrageous amount of money.
Here we are a year later and we are going to come close to $700
billion. Then in January, from a year ago--so this last January--it
moved up to, hey, we are going to borrow $559 billion. Not a lot of
movement. And then 6 months later, it blows off the charts. And now all
of a sudden, we know from the CBO number, it is $693 billion of
borrowing this year.
The OMB number, I know the chart over here I think is saying 702. I
could swear I saw 704, but let's just call it $700 billion.
This is an intense frustration because, if you actually listen to
many of us as we get behind these mikes, we will argue and fight and
fuss often on things that, when you actually add them up, are pretty
small, sometimes bordering on petty, that don't really have a
multiplier effect into the future.
Yet, how much discussion have you heard behind these microphones in
the last 3 weeks, since the CBO report came out, the update came out
that, hey, from January to June, somehow the number just grew by 25
percent; we just added another $134 billion of borrowing this year?
This isn't way off into the future. It is this year. And guess what.
We are going to be financing that for as long as anyone who is probably
watching this or listening to this in this room is alive.
Can we go to the next slide. We are heading toward a time where the
growth of this debt, the growth in mandatory spending is moving to
crushing everything else we care about. So if you happen to be someone
who is a Member of this body and you care passionately about education,
you must understand that the mandatory spending is going to crush it.
If you care about the environment and other programs, the finding
resources to pay for those things is gone.
If you care desperately about defense, defense is going to be
competing for scarcer and scarcer dollars because those dollars are
promised in our mandatory spending, our entitlements.
So the only reason I threw this one up was just getting a sense that
just the movement from January to June--the chart may not look like a
big deal, but we are dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars here.
You see that little separation between the red line and the blue
line?
That separation is 6 months. This isn't a game. It shouldn't be
partisan. The numbers are the numbers, and Congress cannot continue to
exist in a math-free zone.
So--and I am sorry. This is actually--I have toned down my charts
because I was getting made fun of by making too many of them, and,
actually, I was. I think I killed one of the big printers here on
Capitol Hill, but that is another discussion.
So let's actually sort of look at this one. This is functionally 2017
to 2027. So the 10-year window, which we use constantly around here.
Just understand what this constant growth of the debt does in the mix
of our priorities that we are able to pay for.
Where is the money? Where does it ultimately come from? Where does it
go?
So if we are here right now, the first bar is spending. The second
bar is revenues or pay-fors or mechanics. You know, some of it is
borrowing, some of it is payroll taxes, and other things. Then the same
thing for 2027.
So let's first take a look at where we are at right now, and this is
by gross domestic product. So they tell me this is a much more elegant
way to sort of understand how much of our society's economy is going
into finance government--is going into finance government's debt. And
none of these numbers have State and local. This is just us at the
Federal Government level.
So take a look. This year, hey, about 1.4 percent of our GDP, of the
economic muscle of our society is going into financing our excessive
spending, our debt. In 10 years, it is 2.9 percent. So it is the entire
economy, close to 3 percent of it is going to be grabbed just to pay
for debt.
But when you also start to look at--you see that black portion on the
top? In 2017, the excessive spending here, without revenue--so it is
borrowing--is 3.6 percent of our entire GDP went to borrowing. In 10
years, it is 5.2, and it keeps growing, and it really starts to take
off.
Remember we had the comment ``in 5 years, we hit the peak of the Baby
Boom moving into retirement.'' And if you see the curve, it steepens
and, over the next couple of decades, it blows off the charts.
So you actually start to look at the mix of: What are our resources?
What do we have?
Well, let's just go to the 2027. So that is this. So, functionally, 6
percent of our entire economy will be going to Social Security; 6.9
percent of our GDP will be going to healthcare programs. Another 2.5
percent of our society's GDP will be going to other mandatory programs.
Only 5.4 will be going to everything we call discretionary, and part
of that is also defense. So about half of that will be defense and half
of that will be other discretionary programs.
{time} 1915
This is where we are moving prioritywise. The growth of these
programs consume everything in their path.
One of the things we actually talked about 3 weeks ago when we were
behind this microphone--look, there are demographic changes, but when I
was a kid, $4 were spent for young people for every dollar that was
spent for our, what we will call, seniors. Today, that is reversed.
Today, we will spend $4 for seniors for every dollar spent for young
people, and that curve continues to move away from us. So just
understand, that is the decision this body, this society, has made as
our priorities.
Now, why this slide is so incredibly important to understand, if you
see the blue there--and, look, I am blessed to be on the Social
Security Committee in Ways and Means. We just had the actuary report,
and Social Security has problems, but it is not a crisis. It is
fixable. As a matter of fact, any well meaning people, a handful of
them could get in a room and in a day fix the unfunded liabilities,
which I think is 22, $24 trillion over the 75-year window for Social
Security.
What should terrify you are the numbers I am about to point out that
are actually within Medicare. Let's actually just sort of reach over
here, and forgive me for leaning over. Let's say you are 50 years old
today. We are going to use 65 as the benchmark for retirement. You are
going to be retiring in 2030. You see the gray here? Over your career,
over your work life, the average person who will be retiring in 2030
will have put in $179,000 into Medicare.
[[Page H6036]]
But do you see this side? They are going to receive $621,000 in
benefits. The person who is 60 years old today, in the average, and
these are means, the person who is 60 today, retiring in 5 years, will
have paid $179,000 in part of their FICA tax going to Medicare. Over
their years of retirement, because of longevity, because of healthcare
costs, because of a series of different things, they are going to take
out $621,000.
Now, I need you to start to multiply those types of differentials
where we put in this, we are taking this out, and multiply it times 76
million of our brothers and sisters who we define as baby boomers.
Do you see the math problem?
This slide isn't from some conservative group. I believe it is from
the Urban Institute. This is just reality.
Let's say you happen to be my most liberal constituent, and you care
desperately about the preservation of these entitlements and of
Medicare. You should be the first one lining up with me and others
around here from both sides of the aisle saying: We must do two key
things. We must adopt policies that maximize economic growth, because
whether it be tax reform, whether it be regulatory reform, whether it
be immigration reform, all these things, but primarily tax reform, we
must do those policies that drive economic growth, because a growing
economy solves a lot of problems, but it doesn't come close to dealing
with these types of shortfalls.
So the second thing that must be done, and it is going to take fair-
minded people on both sides of the aisle, we are going to have to do
entitlement reform. It is just the math.
When someone gets behind one of these microphones or is running for
office and they say, ``Well, if we just get rid of waste and fraud, or
if we just get rid of foreign aid, or if we just get rid of this,'' I
am sorry, they need to go out and invest in a calculator. That is not
what the underlying numbers say.
And to try to double down on a couple of these points, to understand
how fast these numbers are moving away from us, in 2022--it sounds like
a long time from now, but, look, we are working on the 2018 budget
right now. So, what, four budget years from now? Every year, we are
going to be running a $1 trillion deficit, and it grows and grows. That
$1 trillion of borrowing in 2022 has to be financed.
We are working on this chart. It is a little more complicated, so you
are not going to see it for another month or so. As you are borrowing
more money and interest rates go up, you do understand it is not just
the money we are borrowing this year. When we move up the interest
rates because we are out there in the markets sucking up the capital,
pulling the capital in, when we raise interest rates, there are about
$2.5 trillion of our $14-plus trillion of publicly held debt that is
refinanced every year. So it is not just the interest we pay on new
borrowing. Like, right now, almost $1.9 billion had to be borrowed
today. It is not just the interest we are going to pay on that, but it
is the effect on everything that is refinanced every year, every day,
every month, every quarter, because as those interest rates move up, we
have to change the financing.
Just understand, when you look at this chart just how fast--and this
is just the borrowing number--how it explodes away from us. So in 2027,
10 years from now, annual deficit, $1.463 trillion of just borrowing.
That is 9 budget years from now.
You realize, if you add that up, I believe that is more than all
military and all other discretionary spending we are spending today.
Please understand how fast these numbers are moving away from us and
start demanding that we, as Members of Congress, toughen up and do
those things that are really difficult, really hard, and the
willingness to tell the truth of what is driving these debts and
deficits.
My primary reason for putting up this chart is that I am a huge fan
that we have to do sort of this holistic approach, that it is now
incumbent upon us as policymakers to do everything and do everything at
once. You can't just have us say we need to do healthcare reform
because almost no one in the country who is outside that world is
paying attention to what it is doing to the debt and deficit, blowing
them off the charts.
Then we have those of us who are focused right now on doing tax
reform. We talk about our book of specialty, and people who care about
immigration, care about this, care about that. The reality is we have
to do it all. We have to do it all at the same time to maximize
economic growth.
The GDP indicator today from the Atlanta Fed, we call it GDPNow--it
is a wonderful website. It is a great app--I think has us at 2.5
percent GDP. Okay. That is better than we have been.
The new CBO baseline built into this next 10-year projection is
saying 1.9 percent GDP growth. That is unacceptable because these
numbers continue to remain incredibly ugly if we grow at that speed.
But if we were to be at 3, 3.5, the numbers get much easier to deal
with. But this chart is really important and a little tough to absorb,
but it basically demonstrates, even with additional growth, we are
still going to have to do entitlement reform, and it is going to have
to be on a fairly large scale.
Growth makes it just a lot easier and makes it so we can do a much
longer onramp for our brothers and sisters who are right now planning
for retirement or other benefit programs that are out there.
So in this next slide, I wanted to show it because I wanted to
actually use it to talk about--I know right now there is a lot of
consternation of what is happening over in the Senate in regards to
healthcare, and I think constantly there is a lot of misinformation
about the healthcare bill we did here in the House, what I have read of
what has been worked on in the Senate.
So let's first get a couple things very clear. If you hear a
commentator, if you are someone behind one of these mics, talk about,
``Well, it is one-sixth of the economy and that is what is in this
bill,'' they didn't read the bill.
The ACA replacement is almost exclusively about the small portion of
our society that is in the individual market. They don't get their
healthcare from an employer. They don't get their healthcare from
Medicare. They don't get their healthcare from the VA. They don't get
their healthcare from Indian Health Service or TRICARE or all these
other ways. They are the plumber. They are my wife and I when we were
running our own business.
In my congressional district, it is only 2 percent of my population.
In my State, it is only 4 percent of my population. That was the
population that was having great difficulties if they held a
preexisting condition. Well, this society now, we have all come to
terms, we are a guaranteed-issue society. That was in our bill when it
passed. But that is still a tiny portion of the society that is in that
individual market. In a State like mine, Arizona, you have a single
choice, huge price hikes, and none of that was what was promised.
When you start to look at the math on the deductibles and then the
price, so many of our brothers and sisters out there who should be in
that individual market are basically saying: I would rather pay the
fine; let them try to catch me. Because we have already talked about
them. We did a whole presentation, I think, about 6 weeks ago, 2 months
ago, that were in this ratcheting problem. Half of our population who
should be in that individual market, let's just call them the healthy,
50 percent of that population who only use about 3 percent of the
healthcare dollars, they basically said: It is too expensive; I am not
buying.
But every time someone who is a part of that healthy portion of the
curve says ``Yeah, you have mandatory purchase, but I am still not
going to buy'' and doesn't purchase, you end up in this ratcheting
effect. And the ratcheting effect, it gets more expensive, so more drop
out; gets more expensive, more drop out. And that has been the crisis
that is the ACA. Most people know it as ObamaCare, but to be
respectful, let's call it the ACA.
It has an actuarial, structural death spiral. So our attempt was:
Could you do a series of things that would lower the premiums enough
for that 50 percent of the population who only uses 3 percent of the
healthcare dollars to get them to actually buy? Mandatory. Hasn't
worked. Maybe really well-priced coverage would work, because when they
participate, the curve flattens out. Because right now, it looks like a
hockey stick, and we know there
[[Page H6037]]
is functionally a tiny percent of our population, I think it is like 5
percent of the population, equals almost 50 percent of all the
spending.
So the reason this chart is up here, we were trying to find an
elegant way to try to say those of us who, like myself, I have fairly
severe asthma, but folks with chronic conditions, diabetes,
particularly if it is not managed, other things, that is actually 84
percent of all healthcare costs.
When we did the risk-sharing amendment for the ACA replacement bill,
we were trying to fixate on that continuity of care. How do you finance
that continuity of care for our brothers and sisters, particularly
those who have those chronic conditions, to make sure that is
continuity of care between themselves, their doctors, their healthcare
institution, the insurer? I thought we did a fairly elegant job of
drafting that and then putting real resources behind it.
But this is important to understand, the outlier of our brothers and
sisters out there, those of us who have preexisting conditions or who
have chronic conditions, end up being the cost drivers in our
healthcare.
So our ability to be creative, our ability to say: If you have one of
those in your pocket, can this actually be part of your healthcare
management? Are we going to accept the reality that someone with a
chronic condition should be allowed to pick up their phone and use
FaceTime to talk to their doctor?
{time} 1930
Should a poor person be allowed to use their phone to consult their
doctor? Should they be allowed to wear sensors and other things? There
are some incredibly creative things rolling onto the market there to
help our brothers and sisters with chronic illness. This body needs to
be prepared to adopt them, because here is the punch line: whether it
had been the ACA, whether it had been a replacement, had almost nothing
actually to do with healthcare. It had to do with who pays. This was
about the money: who pays, who gets the money.
Because remember, it was in 1986--31 years ago--a piece of
legislation was passed basically saying you cannot deny someone medical
services. You show up to the emergency room, you show up in the
hospital, you are getting your medical services, and you can actually
see this in the data. For the last 30 years, the number of procedures,
particularly the stuff it costs, has been laid much the same.
So when you have people saying, ``Oh, you are not going to be able to
get healthcare,'' we have been a society for 30-plus years that has
sort of a guarantee of delivery of health services. The great battle is
who pays.
Do you remember a few years ago when we had the great consternation
of dispro share, uncompensated care. I worked on those issues. And now
all of these years later, we are basically trying to make an argument
of who pays, how do we pay, how do we get more healthy--that is 20-,
30-, 40-year-olds who are healthy, how do we get more of them,
particularly in the individual markets, to participate?
Then the second half is Medicaid. This is a strange city because it
is one of those cities, when you actually look at the dollars, even
though the dollars are going to continue to grow and grow and grow, so
many people define that as a cut. But remember, we were looking at the
exploding deficit debt numbers. We have to deal with the reality. We
are in real trouble, and we are going to have to step up and start
being honest with each other about what is happening in the underlying
math here.
So I know this is a little diversion from what was in the CBO report,
but once again, you saw on the charts that the healthcare and
healthcare entitlement numbers were substantially driving the deficits.
Now you actually sort of see what is in the underlying part of that
population.
We will go back to the beginning again. Hopefully, I haven't spoken
for a whole hour, for your sake and mine. But one more time: this year,
according to CBO, 3 weeks ago--and you have heard lots of talk about
it, right? That was me being sarcastic--$193 billion of borrowing this
year. We are going to borrow almost $1.9 billion every day, $79 million
every hour. I have been here an hour. Has this been worth $79 million
to you?
But think about it--and I know I misspoke earlier, so that is one of
the reasons I wanted to put this board up. It is $21,900, $21,900 every
second of borrowing.
I have a 21-month-old. It is the greatest gift the good Lord has ever
given my wife and me.
I pray for the birth mother every night, saying, ``Thank you.''
But if you look at the charts, when she hits her peak earning years,
her tax rates are going to be double, maybe even more, of what I would
pay today.
The economic growth is probably crushed by the amount of debt; and a
lot of the calculations, if we step out 30 years, the computers can't
even model them anymore. Because, understand, there are some amazing
numbers in here that functionally, in 9 budget years, we are at 91
percent debt to GDP on publicly held debt. That is not the money we
borrowed from the trust funds.
So the question I ask--I love my little girl. How many of you love
your kids? How many of you love your grandkids? How many of you love
this country? How many of you want this country to have an amazing
future, because it can. This is all fixable. Just every single day we
wait, we make it so much more difficult.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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