[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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