[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 35 (Tuesday, February 26, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H2229-H2231]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                FIVE PILLARS OF WHAT WE BELIEVE SAVES US

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, many of us really appreciate when you 
stay here and listen to us because we know a lot of folks out there 
don't appreciate it. It is sort of a gift of your time to be with us. 
When we were in the majority, I spent much of my freshman term sitting 
in that chair.
  What we are going to do tonight is this sort of a continuation of a 
theme. We have already heard tonight, and over the last couple weeks, 
discussions of debt, discussions of what is happening in Medicare, and, 
actually, I want to come here behind this microphone and talk about 
what I believe is a solution.

                              {time}  2015

  I genuinely believe over the last few years, we have put together at 
least the backbone of enough math to talk about the reality. But let's 
first sort of set up the discussion if you haven't watched some of our 
other floor presentations since the beginning of this session.
  Every week, every other week, we try to take a half an hour and walk 
through our five pillars of what we believe saves us. Understand, in 9 
years, 50 percent of all of the noninterest spending that this Congress 
will do will be to those 65 and over.
  Understand, in 9 years, the 74 million baby boomers will actually be 
in their benefit cycle. They will be 65 and up.
  In 9 years, two workers for one retiree. And when you start to look 
at the future of our debt, understand--and this is hard because so many 
don't want to hear it, and it is not Republican or Democrat, it is 
demographics. If you look at our society, we are getting older very 
fast; our birth rates have substantially collapsed. Family formation, 
we have some real issues out there.
  So what do you do as a society? We have promises that have been made, 
earned entitlements out there, your Social Security, your Medicare, and 
you have earned those. That is part of your societal contract with this 
government, but we don't have the cash to pay over the next 30 years.
  How do we get there? I am going to tell you. I am still optimistic 
there is a path. I see some of these slides and these boards through 
the eyes of my daughter. I have a 3-year-old daughter. Best little girl 
ever. We actually have a coffee mug at home that says that.
  Doesn't she have the right to live as well as the generations that 
have gone before her? Doesn't she have the right to have that sort of 
optimistic opportunity? I actually believe that is not lost in our 
society. But as you even saw on the floor today, we do political 
theater here because complex policy is hard. It actually requires math, 
and Congress is substantially a math-free zone.
  So we always start with this chart. Understand, I believe there are 
five pillars, and you can mix them up any way you want to.
  Immigration. How do you design an immigration system in the future 
that maximizes talent importation to the Nation? Because you need to 
maximize economic philosophy as soon as possible. That is what the rest 
of the world has done. Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, and 
Canada have moved to talent-based systems because they figured out that 
there is something elegant about that model.
  Now, let's be honest. I don't care what gender you are. I don't care 
your religion. I don't care your race. I don't care who you cuddle 
with. I don't care about those things. We care about the talent you 
bring to our society to maximize economic growth. I actually think it 
is a much more elegant model than we use today in immigration.
  Economic growth. We must hunker down and embrace tax policy, 
regulatory policy, and trade policy that maximizes economic vitality. 
The velocity of the size of this economy must continue to grow, and 
grow at a fairly substantial rate. If you look at the data, 91 percent 
of the spending increases from this government from 2008 to 2028 are 
functionally three things: interest, Social Security, and healthcare 
entitlements.
  So we are all going to talk about debt. It is a threat to our 
society. When we are going to have the honest conversation, it is 
substantially driven by our demographics and our healthcare costs.
  The next one we are going to talk about is labor force participation. 
We are going to spend time tonight on that. I know it is a dry subject, 
but this is actually trying to be intellectually honest. This is a 
moment where if you are going to call our office and say we want 
solutions, we are working through it. But it is not trite.
  My father used to have a saying. We were just talking about it over 
in the corner. For every complex problem, there is a simple solution 
that is absolutely wrong. It turns out, complex problems require 
complex solutions.
  We are going to talk tonight about labor force participation. How do 
we get as many Americans across the board to participate in the 
economic vitality? It turns out that has an amazing effect; everything 
from our healthcare costs, to tax collections, to just the economic 
growth.
  The next two, there is a technology revolution about to happen in 
healthcare. It is also happening in environment. In the next couple of 
weeks we are going to come here and show some of the amazing 
technologies that are out there that actually make some of the 
environmental discussion seem sort of passe when you understand the 
technology that is on the cusp of rolling out.
  Let's talk about healthcare right now. I have come here to the floor 
over the last couple of weeks and shown things like--we nicknamed it in 
our office the flu kazoo--something a material science professor has 
developed; you blow into it, and it instantly tells you if you have a 
viral infection, and in the backbone, it could automatically order your 
antivirals. Start thinking about the revolution that would happen in 
the cost curve of healthcare if we had substantial change in autonomous 
healthcare.
  In the Phoenix area, we have an organization that now, I believe, has 
seven of these autonomous healthcare clinics where you go in, you sign 
up on an iPad, you take a picture of your insurance card, your driver's 
license, you go in and you put your arm in, you pick this up, you shine 
it in your throat, your ear, and your nose, and the algorithm is able 
to do amazingly accurate calculations of your health.
  Think about that type of technology when it is in your pocket. You 
have all seen the pocket size, the size of your

[[Page H2230]]

smartphone that is now an ultrasound. It is completely portable. We 
must, as a body--and this is at our State legislature, but particularly 
this body--we must break down these barriers to the technology 
disruption that could be a revolution in lowering healthcare costs.

  You have got to be intellectually honest. The ACA, the Republican 
alternatives, in much of the discussion, we are not actually having a 
discussion about lowering healthcare costs. We are having discussions 
about who gets to pay.
  It is time that we embrace and truly draw in the technology that can 
be that very disruption. We have a running joke in our office: Did you 
go to Blockbuster Video last weekend? We all live it. It is now time 
that we understand that our future healthcare costs are an Achilles' 
heel to this society because of our demographics and just where the 
costs are going.
  There is another part of that. We are going to actually do a floor 
presentation, probably at the end of the month. There are incredible 
disrupters coming in the pharmaceutical world. We just had some 
information and we think, actually by the end of this year, there may 
be a single shot cure for hemophilia A. That is only about 8,000 of our 
brothers and sisters in the country, and it is going to be really 
expensive, but it cures.
  What happens as we continue to see these biological, genomic 
pharmaceuticals rolling out that actually cure? Or the one that we were 
reading about today, that stabilizes our populations who have ALS?
  What does that mean to the cost curve of the 50 percent of healthcare 
spending that is to the 5 percent of our population that have chronic 
conditions?
  The last one I am going to give you is, it is time to rethink the 
incentives--and this one will always be tough--in Social Security, in 
Medicare. How do we encourage an individual to stay in the labor force? 
Are there things we can do to encourage waiting to take benefits? And 
these are math. It is just actuarial science.
  So today we are going to talk about labor force participation. Isn't 
that exciting? The first slide I have already mentioned, this is from 
the CBO report 3 weeks ago, and I was shocked it didn't get much press 
or discussion in this body because it is math.
  But if you look at this chart, what it is trying to say is, in 
functionally 9 years, half of the spending of this body--if you remove 
interest--half of the spending will be to those 65 and older.
  It is just demographics. We got older as a society. In 9 years it is 
the end of the baby boomers, because they have moved into being 65 and 
older.
  But if you had seen this chart and then matched it up to where you 
start to see the debt and spending curves move up, you understand they 
are in sync: if you care about the debt, if you care about spending, if 
you care about opportunity in our society, understand the demographic 
headwinds and what we must do to face that.
  So one of the reasons for this slide, and I know these are a little 
tough to watch, but what I want you to sort of see is this is 2000. At 
that time, actually over 67 percent of our population was in the labor 
force. It functionally collapsed after 2008 and never returned.
  The blessing is this last year we have had a little bit of a blip. 
There were these really smart economists who said: Hey, you are never 
going to get back up to 62, 63 percent of labor force participation. I 
believe we are now around 61 or 62. We actually need to find a way to 
get back to that 67 percent of our brothers and sisters all up and down 
our society being in the labor force, having the honor, the elegance of 
working.
  There were some amazing numbers last December, if you actually broke 
into what was in those statistics, of the number of organizations, the 
number of companies that were actually reaching out to the handicapped 
community and making accommodations and hiring.
  There are actually--and we are going to touch on this--some parts of 
our society are moving into the labor force, particularly in the 
millennials, and we are seeing parts that are not. Countries like Japan 
that actually have faced this, are facing it, have actually been trying 
to design incentives and programs for even those who are older, who are 
healthy, who are capable, who are desirous to be welcomed to stay or 
enter back into the labor force.
  It is a barbell. We have a problem with part of our younger 
population, and then, obviously, our older population--which we have so 
much talent--that are retiring. We are going to have to have an honest 
incentives discussion design to maintain this labor force philosophy.
  If you actually look at what is going on in our society right now, if 
I had come to you 2 years ago and said: Hey, we are going to see all 
sorts of quartiles in our society have some of the lowest unemployment 
in modern history, I think I would have just gotten blank stares. But 
it is happening. And with that incredible, almost full-employment 
society, we are actually seeing--and particularly in markets like 
Arizona--we are actually now seeing wages really starting to move. This 
is wonderful. This is something we needed, functionally, for a decade 
or two.
  We can do a much more complicated discussion of some of the 
incentives that were built in the tax reform last year that encouraged 
investment in plant and equipment to push up productivity. Productivity 
allows you to be able to pay people more. But those are the sorts of 
things you talk about. How do you maintain economic vitality?
  When we actually look at some of the unemployment numbers, there is 
something missing. Understand, when we look at unemployment numbers, we 
are looking at people who are actively looking, actively searching for 
employment. We actually have a real problem in parts of millennial 
males and others, so how do we reach out and design incentives to stay 
in?
  We are also going to go to some of the other tougher questions, and 
that is: Is it time to rethink things like Social Security disability 
and say, hey, if you earn $24,000, or you hit this point, you hit a 
cliff. Your benefits disappear. If you are on other safety-net 
programs, if you earn a certain amount, you hit a cliff, and it 
disappears.
  We need to have a brutally honest conversation of, is that incentive 
of that cliff an incentive not to enter the labor force? What would 
happen if we would work out the math so it was a much more gradual 
glide slope to draw those individuals into labor participation? Because 
if we are almost a full-employment society but we still had millions 
and millions of Americans who are choosing not to participate in the 
economy and we really need them in our economy, we have got to look to 
what are the disincentives.

                              {time}  2030

  It is about time that we actually start to have those social 
entitlement conversations. I know for both Republicans and Democrats, 
these are tough because it requires math. It requires us to work 
through certain ideological folklore. But if you want the wholistic 
solution to make it through the next 30 years, this labor force 
participation is one of those five pillars.
  The reason I actually did this slide is--this one is a little geeky--
but it is actually trying to walk through what has been happening. I am 
not going to walk through all the detail, but we recently had this 
wonderful pop of sort of in the population of 25 to 34 females entering 
the workforce. That was one of the great things that we actually saw 
last December. Great.
  We need to understand why millennial women are entering the workforce 
in these sorts of numbers, what we learn from that, and what we do now 
for the millions of millennial males who are still dramatically 
underrepresented in the economy.
  Data shows millennial women dominating the current job market. Look 
at this separation right here and why this is so important. Remember 
how I was just saying something has been happening in the last couple 
quarters where millennial females are entering, but millennial males is 
the lower line. This is a conceptual problem, but it is real math.
  Remember we talked about our barbell? We have those who are older. 
How do we create incentives to enter and stay in the labor force? How 
do we reach out to our younger population, get them, incentivize them, 
and work with them to get them into the labor force? Functionally, we 
just do not have a choice.

[[Page H2231]]

  Let me grab another slide. We will put these up in our office. 
Remember, this sort of presentation is for those who really care about 
digging in to the actual math of policy. So often, what we end up doing 
on the floor is political theater and folklore.
  If you look at some of these lines--and I know this is a long time 
ago--but if you and I were to step back to 1967 and look at the data 
for males, we had 97 percent of working-age males in the labor force. 
Today, if we did that same thing, I think we are at about 88. It falls, 
87, 88.
  One of the big things that helped us grow the economy is female 
participation in the economy. But we need to find a way to get this 
back up. We are just talking a few points, but those few points of a 
few more million stepping back into the labor market have substantial 
economic impact.
  I want to talk about a story from Arizona. I have had this discussion 
with a couple of my Democratic friends. Within that, we have talked 
about incarceration rates and some of the other things that end up 
becoming impairments for young males to be in the labor force.
  In Arizona right now, we have such a shortage of skilled trades--
electricians and carpenters--that a number of the businesses in 
Arizona--actually, I approached our Governor, Governor Ducey, and said: 
Help us. We are willing to take our own money and go into Arizona 
correctional facilities and do a training program that is, when someone 
is going to be on parole in just a few months, we will train them, and 
we will guarantee that we will hire them. It doesn't mean a guarantee 
that they will keep them.
  So last year, we brought this young man out from Arizona. We brought 
him to the Ways and Means Committee. He sat down in this beautiful 
room. The Ways and Means Committee room, it is just very big and very 
ornate. He didn't look like our typical witness, with a number of 
piercings and a number of tattoos around the neck. He looked up when it 
was his turn to tell his story, and he hesitated for a moment and 
started with: I am a three-time convicted felon.
  He went on to tell his story of how he was an addict and the other 
times he had gotten out of prison, he had relapsed. He had lost his 
family. He had lost everything. He had lost contact with his child.
  He was a few months from his opportunity to go on probation and leave 
the correctional facility, and he saw this flyer that said: We are 
doing training for electricians. We guarantee we will hire you--it 
doesn't mean we are going to keep you--if you pass this very basic 
course.
  He said: Why not?
  He took this electrician course while in prison, while it was paid 
for by private industry because the job market is so tight they are 
willing to take risks on all sorts of populations to get them back into 
the work environment.
  He graduated. He started at just a little over minimum wage. A year 
later, he was making, I think, $23-something an hour. He said he hadn't 
relapsed because he is working too much. He said he is back with his 
family. He gets to see his child. There are these incredibly human 
stories.
  If we are in a society right now that is almost at full employment 
for those looking for employment, how do we reach out to those whom our 
society gave up on or who gave up on themselves? How do we as 
policymakers design those incentives, design the social entitlement 
programs, and design our society where we want everyone to have this 
opportunity within our communities and our society?
  It was one of the most touching and amazing hearings, because when 
you looked at those of us sitting up on the dais, there were actually 
tears hearing his story and realizing there is hope, that this economic 
vitality provides opportunity and hope.
  We turn it into a political football because it is not our side that 
wants to get credit, or their side wants to get credit. We need to get 
beyond that, because if we don't get this math right, my 3-year-old 
little girl won't have the same type of future I have had.
  There is a path to make this work and continue to have an economy, a 
nation, that grows and provides opportunities. Understand, when the 
United States grows, the world benefits.
  But we have those five pillars. Is this body capable of stepping up 
and doing things that are complex without a simple solution?
  Madam Speaker, I so desperately hope so. With that, I yield back the 
balance of my time.

                          ____________________