[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 70 (Tuesday, April 30, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H3333-H3336]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  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. Mr. Speaker, let me take a quick moment and sort of 
get adjusted here.
  We are going to spend a couple of minutes walking through some things 
that I think are exciting, hopeful, and worth getting our heads around.
  Every week, I try to come to this microphone when we are here to talk 
about what I believe makes the future really bright for all of us, 
everyone from my 3-year-old--or 3\1/2\-year-old, as she corrects me--
little girl to someone who is moving into their retirement years.
  Once again, what is the greatest fragility in our society? This is 
one that is hard for us to get our heads around or even talk about. It 
is our demographics.
  Whether we like it or not, baby boomers are retiring, and we have 74 
million baby boomers. The last baby boomer will hit 65 in about 8\1/2\ 
years.
  In 8\1/2\ years, two workers, one retiree. In 8\1/2\ years, 50 
percent of our spending from this body, less interest, will be to those 
65 and up.
  It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is 
demographics.
  At the same time, we have a substantial collapse, fall, in our 
birthrates. As you know, our birthrates now are well below the 
replacement rates.
  What do you do as a society? What do you do as a government? What do 
we do as a body here that is making public policy to make the future 
bright?
  We keep coming to the floor and talking about that we believe there 
are, functionally, five elements. It is the adoption of technology. It 
is the adoption of economic policies that maximize economic growth 
through tax policy that creates investment in new technology for 
productivity; immigration policy that maximizes new Americans having 
talents that help us grow the economy; regulatory policy that uses 
technology and information to regulate instead of bureaucratic filing 
in file cabinets, functionally; incentives to stay in the workforce and 
incentives to enter the workforce.
  As we have seen recently, millennial females are moving into the 
workforce. We still have a problem with millennial males.
  How about someone who is older? Can we do certain incentives in 
Social Security, Medicare, and other earned benefits to encourage 
staying in the workforce or even creating a second career? We are going 
to have to redesign a bit of those incentives that are in the current 
earned benefits.
  Can you create some incentives on Social Security, saying, ``If you 
will continue to work, we are going to do these things?'' Because that 
labor force participation is so important.
  We have worked through these. Now we try to come in and show what we 
see working in our society. Then, I want to talk a little bit about one 
of these things, and that is the adoption of technology.
  This week, the majority, the Democrats, will have a resolution on the 
floor about the Paris climate accords. I want to walk a bit through how 
technology, pro-growth technology, is the solution. I am going to show 
you some of the really optimistic things happening out there.
  Let's start swapping a couple of these boards. First, I apologize for 
the first slide. The scale is a little off, but it is basically to make 
a simple point.
  I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. We had the debate 
in December 2017. Over here, I was hearing how the world was coming to 
an end, how revenues were going to collapse. It turns out that now we 
at least have a good, comparable dataset. What is the term? ``Ceteris 
paribus,'' where you can equal to equal.
  In 2017, before there was tax reform, the first 6 months, and now we 
have the 2019 first 6 months. Guess what? Revenues are up, even though 
we are already in the tax reform environment.
  I was waved off by some much more sensitive staffers. We had a list 
of quotes from the majority, things they said, their predictions, what 
their economists said. I am not going to read them.
  But do understand, think about some of the crazy things we heard 
about what tax reform was going to do to the revenues of the country, 
what it was going to do to the economy, what it was going to do to 
employment, what it was going to do to labor force participation.

[[Page H3334]]

  They were all wrong. It is working. Take a look at our economic 
growth. Take a look at unemployment.
  If I had come to you a couple of years ago before tax reform and said 
our society is going to have more jobs than we have available workers, 
what would you have said?
  But it is reality. It is happening. We are seeing data within what 
they call the U-6, the underlying parts of the unemployment statistics 
of our brothers and sisters who have handicaps, who have been long-term 
unemployed, who have other life difficulties, moving into the labor 
force.

  There should be joy in this body and also joy for the fact that all 
the predictions were wrong, that revenues are--or ``receipts'' is the 
proper term. Receipts are up. These 6 months with tax reform compared 
to the 6 months where we didn't have tax reform, we are taking in more 
money.
  Will we ever get an apology from all those who predicted doom and 
gloom? Of course not. But could we just have a little bit of joy that 
they were wrong, that the math is good, that good things are happening 
in this society?
  We need to do more of it because, without the growth, there is no way 
we will keep our promises on Social Security and Medicare and so many 
other things. We must have economic growth.
  This slide right here I am going to leave here for just a second, 
this slide here, 2017. We don't use, really, the 2018 fiscal year 
because the first 6 months had part of it within tax reform, without 
tax reform. But then the gray you see up here is the 2019 first 6 
months. That is what that is.
  I know I get teased a lot about the slides, but at some point, if you 
are talking about math--and substantially, for all of us who are 
Members here, we work in a math-free zone. It is a sin of both parties 
because we often try to make public policy by our feelings instead of 
by our facts.
  When we do public policy by feelings, I will make the argument that 
we hurt people because we intended good stuff, but we just got our 
facts wrong. Could you imagine if we did more like this where we looked 
at the real math and the real facts?
  This is a month-to-month comparison. It shows you some months it has 
been a little more, some months it has been a little less. But, 
overall, $10 billion over 2017. The first 6 months, when you compare 
them, it is working. It is working.
  When you start to look at the revenues that are coming in, in what we 
call FICA taxes--Social Security, unemployment, Medicare--good things 
are happening.
  You saw it 10 days ago when the Social Security actuaries put out 
their report. You saw things like Social Security disability go from 
being incredibly fragile, within just a couple of years of running out 
of money, to gaining 20 years of actuarial life. Some of that was 
public policy. Some of that is the fact that people are working.
  You see other parts of the program gaining a year's worth of life. 
That is a big deal when you consider the types of numbers we are 
talking about. It is working. The growth is providing us, as a body, an 
opportunity to do positive things for our community, for our country, 
for our States. Instead, we just seem to banter around here, doing 
crazy.
  Let's walk around a couple of other things. Do you remember the 
predictions? This was the long-term, freaky-smart economists, 
particularly on the left but even some of ours on the right, who were 
predicting before tax reform that the baseline economic growth on the 
horizon was about 1.9, 1.8. That is where we were going to grow. Also, 
the math that, over the 10 years, if you wanted to pay for tax reform, 
we only needed a 0.4 percent growth.
  Well, guess what? If you look at this chart and realize, since tax 
reform, what has happened in the GDP expansion, we are blowing through 
those numbers.
  Now, it is too early to ever make a prediction like, well, the 
additional productivity, the additional number of folks working, the 
less demand on social entitlements because there is work, the number of 
Americans who now have healthcare because they are working and all 
these good things that are happening in our society.
  But the fact of the matter is, if you look at this chart and look at 
the growth in the size of our economy--and this is a big economy, so 
when it grows 3 percent, it is a tremendous amount of economic 
expansion--we are seeing numbers that, once again, these really smart 
economists were telling us we could not hit.
  Where is the joy around here? Whether you are on the left or the 
right, if you care about people, if you claim you truly love and care 
about people, the fact is that so many of them have work now and their 
wages are going up, particularly for our brothers and sisters who are--
sorry to use the geeky term--at the lowest quartiles.
  Do you remember the discussions only a couple of years ago that, if 
someone hadn't finished high school, they were destined to spend their 
lives on the edge of poverty?
  What have we seen in the last dozen months? That that is the quartile 
having the fastest movement in their wages.
  There should be joy that something is breaking out, that something is 
happening out there when you see another 400,000 manufacturing jobs 
coming back to the United States.
  Remember ``manufacturing is dead''? Except it isn't. We did tax 
policy that encouraged investment in plants and equipment to raise 
productivity.
  Why is that so important? When someone gets a wage increase, when you 
pay an American more money, what is the classic economic formula? It is 
inflation plus an improvement in productivity. Wages go up according to 
inflation and productivity.
  What happens when American businesses, particularly in the 
manufacturing side, across the country are buying new plants and 
equipment because of the incentives in tax reform? All of a sudden, we 
are starting to see it is working. Spiking of productivity is 
happening.
  We have a labor shortage. Wages are going up. Shouldn't there be joy 
that the brothers and sisters out there who were being written off by 
the really smart economists just a couple of years ago are back and 
good things are happening?
  To be a little bit gratuitous, I know these are hard to read, but if 
you just look at the trend lines on the employment chart and think 
about some of the other different quartiles, when we geek out on the 
Joint Economic Committee, and those of our brothers and sisters who are 
Hispanic or African American or females or other quartiles, where we 
try to break down and see what is happening in employment statistics, 
we are hitting numbers that we have never hit before in our society. 
Something is working.

                              {time}  1600

  How much happy talk have you heard around here? In many ways, is it 
just the nature of this institution is just the rage-based politics 
that we bathe in today? There are good things happening. We should be 
working on public policy to make more of this happen and more of this 
so this continues, so we are a society of opportunity.
  So this one is just sort of looking at--I want to double-check 
myself. This one I put up just because it was a fascinating breakout, 
and this was actually more from last December and then looking at what 
is happening.
  We had actually been having something called a labor force 
participation issue. It is sort of a geeky way of saying, for a society 
to grow, you often need two components.
  You need capital stock. You need money that people can borrow to 
invest and to plant in equipment. Well, it turns out the predictions 
that were happening about tax reform, that capital stock was going to 
dry up, that everyone was going to go out and spend the money and this 
and that, it turns out savings, we have plenty of capital. Savings 
rates went up.
  The second part was labor supply, and that one we have; we have a 
real issue. What do you do to encourage Americans who are not in the 
labor pool to enter it?
  Then last December, we had this unusual thing. All of a sudden, the 
numbers within what we call millennials, millennial females started 
entering the labor force, and all of a sudden, we went over the 60--
what? We had 62 or, I think, 62.3 percent labor force participation--I 
am doing it from memory--a

[[Page H3335]]

number that lots of those smart economists just a couple years ago told 
us we were not going to see again for another 30 years. It has 
happened.
  Maybe it is time we as a body have an honest conversation that a lot 
of the economists who have been advising us are wrong, and the spirit 
of entrepreneurism, of capitalism, those things are actually working in 
our society and providing real benefits.
  Look, as a guy coming to the microphone with lots of charts, but the 
math is the math. Even though we work in a math-free zone on occasion, 
there are really good numbers in this.
  So I want to actually sort of touch on something else as we look at 
our pillars of the future of economic growth in our society.
  You have heard discussions of the Green New Deal or environmental 
protection as almost a Malthusian concept that the economy must shrink 
to meet these numbers. We want to argue that is absolutely wrong.
  The basic math set: Why has the United States done so phenomenally 
well in removing ACO2, a man-made CO2, from the 
environment? It is because of our migration to natural gas. We have 
gotten dramatically more clean, efficient in our energy production in 
the last decade, decade and a half because of natural gas.
  Well, in that case we should produce more natural gas, right? It is 
working. But there are actually other disruptions of technology, and we 
are just going to throw a couple of them up just for the thought 
experiment, to understand.
  If this were, once again, a couple years ago, the concept of pulling 
CO2 out of the air was almost considered absurd--except for 
the fact it is happening. It is actually in Canada, but there is 
actually a facility that is going to be going online to almost, say, 
what you would call an industrial scale that will pull CO2 
out of the air incredibly efficiently.
  It is a crazy concept, just crazy, except it works. The technology is 
out there.
  How many of us, as we are debating meeting the Paris accord numbers, 
are saying here are actually things we can do to get us to the Paris 
accord commitments, which we are going to come really close. If we 
would adopt certain technologies, we get there.
  I am going to ask you to reverse some of those slides so we actually 
talk about the nuclear power first. No, that is carbon capture. Yes.
  Sorry. We were running late, so we ran up here with the boards.
  This is just a quick thought experiment for folks to understand for 
clean power generation, and this is a couple years old. I think this 
slide is based on 2015 numbers.
  Do you see the yellow side? That is all the solar that was new 
generation capacity in the entire country in 2015.
  The other side, the multicolored over here, was the amount of 
absolutely clean nuclear power generation that went off-line. So even 
though 2015 was a remarkable year of new, clean solar generation, we 
actually didn't really gain that much because clean nuclear power 
generation went off-line.
  So this is the occasion of it is great to be joyful about one, but 
you need to make sure you have your math understanding what is going 
on.
  Now, for us in Arizona, there is often this debate, the discussion of 
uranium. I don't want to geek out too much, but over the last 15 years 
or so, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and world energy markets 
on the nuclear side, there was high-grade uranium, almost weapons-
grade, that was being stepped down to go into reactors. Most of that 
now has been used up.
  So, actually, that slide. This is carbon capture. So what would 
happen to you if I came to you today and said it looks like our 
national labs have actually had a technology breakthrough that is 
stunning?
  So, instead of us who are not too far from the Grand Canyon where we 
do the drilling to pull uranium out of the ground, which is always 
controversial because you worry about water supplies, but we need the 
uranium for all sorts of things in our society, what happens if there 
is never another land uranium mine again? Because we worked out the 
technology to pull uranium out of seawater. It has happened. It has 
happened.
  Where is the joy around this place that technology is breaking 
through and providing us this sort of clean energy future in things 
that were just sort of academic fantasies just a few years ago and the 
technology is breaking through? This is wonderful. It is exciting, and 
there should be joy on all sides.

  So let's actually go to this next one, and I am sorry for bouncing 
you back and forth.
  Outside Houston is an experimental natural gas generation facility. 
It doesn't have a smokestack. It basically actually uses the 
CO2 to spin the turbines. No smokestack. They capture every 
bit of the CO2, and they are actually apparently going to go 
from, I think it is--forgive me if I got my math wrong--30 megawatts to 
300. They are going to go to an industrial- or utility-grade scale.
  But the fact of the matter is they are generating power without a 
smokestack, and they capture every bit of the CO2 and can 
sell it, convert it into other products. We have the technology. It is 
up and running right now. They worked it out.
  This should be joyful. If you want to actually have a bright powered 
future that provides the energy for the economy so the economy grows so 
we can keep our financial commitments but we want to protect the 
environment, we need to be talking about how we are going to bring more 
of this type of technology into our communities instead of sort of the 
Malthusian craziness of things that are in things like the Green New 
Deal, where we are going shut down this, shut down that, shut down 
this. There is a progrowth way to get there.
  Those of us on the Ways and Means Committee even a year ago, 
Republicans and Democrats, we actually passed some more tax credit 
incentives for when you produce the CO2, where do you put 
it? Well, you actually can get a little bit of credit if you put it in 
plastic or cement or put it in the curb that is being put into your 
neighborhood or actually put it into the ground to do recovery to bring 
up more hydrocarbons.
  It is actually just really exciting, and the technology is working. 
We need to be talking about technology and its future and the 
disruption it is bringing and the bright, cleaner future environment it 
brings with it.
  I brought this slide up because it is part of the thought experiment 
on this theme. Who here is concerned about plastic in the ocean? I 
mean, look, the Speaker is a good guy. He understands. I was a big 
scuba diver before I got this job. Now there is never time.
  Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, 8 of 
them in Southeast Asia, 2 in Africa. It is not the straw that you are 
going to not be allowed to use here in D.C. It is not the plastics in 
the United States. It is that 10 rivers bring 90 percent of the plastic 
in the ocean.
  If we actually cared about plastic in the ocean, wouldn't we actually 
take our foreign aid, our environmental aid, our technology aid and 
say: ``We know where the plastic in the ocean is coming from. Let's go 
help those 10 rivers, 8 of them in Asia, 2 in Africa. Let's help them 
get cleaner''?
  That is Republican, Democrat, we want clean oceans. If you care about 
the plastic issue, doing crazy things like: ``Well, I am going to 
actually affirm that I am a good person and I care by banning straws in 
my community even though it will have absolutely zero effect of making 
the oceans cleaner''--because, in the United States, our plastic 
substantially does not end up in the ocean. Let's stop the theater and 
do things that actually provide solutions.
  This one just drives me insane because I care a lot about it. And it 
could be from the Foreign Affairs Committee to Natural Resources to 
Energy and Commerce, they should all say: ``Hey, what do we do to help 
other countries not pump plastic into our oceans from those 10 
rivers?'' And if you did that, instantly, you just stopped 90 percent 
of the plastic waste going into the ocean.
  That is a solution, but that is actually using--what is that crazy 
thing? Oh, yes--math to do public policy instead of feelings. But 
instead, around here, we get rewarded for doing theatrics.

[[Page H3336]]

  Now, the next board we are going to put up is the great thought 
experiment, and this one actually is the ultimate disruption that I 
think may even happen in my lifetime, and I may lack some of the 
elegance or eloquence--excuse me--on how to describe it.
  You all remember your high school or college botany biology class. 
You know, a plant cell from a couple million years ago, it has a 
certain issue of it wants to grow and it grabs an oxygen cell when it 
meant to grab a carbon molecule. Sorry. And then it spends lots of 
energy purging that one because ``I don't want the oxygen molecule; I 
want the carbon molecule to grow.''
  Okay. I don't mean to geek out, but it is a big deal. It is an 
inherent inefficiency in our plants that is a couple million years old.
  It turns out, United States Government and a couple of university 
labs may have broken the code on the Holy Grail of plant biology, and 
with a tweak in the genetic code, a 40 percent improvement in growth.
  Do the thought experiment with me. What happens tomorrow if, on the 
same piece of land you are growing soybeans or corn or cotton or grass 
in your yard, you have a 40 percent improvement in efficiency? How much 
less water are you using? How much less fertilizer are you using? How 
much less fuel? How much less land?
  It also means, mathematically, you also feed the world for the next 
couple hundred years.
  World agriculture, if you wanted to do part of the thought 
experiment, world agriculture produces 2.2 times the amount of 
greenhouse gasses as every car on Earth. Think about that. So world 
agriculture, the math is you produce about 2.2 times more greenhouse 
gasses than every car on Earth. The adoption of this genetic change in 
our agriculture around the world would be as if you removed every 
single car off the face of the Earth. That is a disruption.
  Now, it is going to also have implications on what agricultural land 
is worth. I mean, it will have a huge disruption across the world. But 
if you truly claim you care about the environment, and someone like me 
who does taxes and financial and economic growth as their specialty 
here in Congress reads articles like this and sees the disruption in 
the future for the environment, why isn't this the discussion here?
  If this is real, and we all know in seed stock, you can roll it out 
in just a few years. What would happen if in just a few years, it would 
be like you removed every single car off the face of the Earth? That is 
what something like this equals.
  We should be joyful here. We live in a time where technology is 
moving so fast it is presenting us solutions, and we need to stop the 
debates around this place that sound like we are all still in the 
1990s.
  The solutions are all around us, they are rolling out of our labs, 
they are rolling out of actually people's garages. Smart people all 
around us and around the world are producing the solutions. We need to 
embrace and move those forward, or we can do what we are doing here so 
far this year, and that is engage in the political theater of rage and 
completely avoid the optimism of the solutions that are at our 
doorstep.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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