[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 93 (Tuesday, June 4, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H4305-H4308]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE FIVE PILLARS

  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, I would say of the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Garamendi), it is always fun listening to him, because, 
look, we are friends. We are ideologically separated by about, let's 
call it a small ocean, but I think there is this passion of we can do 
things in our society that are good.
  Mr. Speaker, I have really appreciated Mr. Garamendi sort of 
embracing in some of our personal conversations my sort of techno-
utopianism that the problems the gentleman sees, the problems I see, 
that there may be technology that is about to disrupt society in an 
incredibly positive way.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am happy to yield.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman does realize how many 
people are creeping out at this moment that we are friendly to each 
other.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, a Republican and Democrat talking to each 
other across the aisle.
  Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate the gentleman. I have followed him, 
and he has followed me, and we have had the opportunity to talk. I am 
just not prepared tonight to go into the kind of detail the gentleman 
is about to, but he is absolutely correct. There are solutions. There 
are solutions to the problems that confront this Nation, confront 
individuals in the Nation.

[[Page H4306]]

  Mr. Speaker, I know Mr. Schweikert is going to pick up some of that 
in the next few minutes as he talks about it, and I am going to sit 
down and listen to the gentleman.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we really need to talk about Mr. 
Garamendi's idea of entertainment.
  Mr. Speaker, look, this is actually a point I wish more of our 
constituents would actually see. We are actually quite friendly to each 
other, even those of us who may have, you know, what is pictured as an 
ideological chasm. Oddly enough, we all see many of the same problems, 
and we are trying to find a way to get there.
  So tonight I wanted to do just one or two things, because I have 
picked up a couple of articles in the news over this last week that I 
actually find greatly optimistic.
  So let's actually sort of start with our five pillars. And I do this 
over and over, because, one more time, what do many of us, the 
economists, the staff, the really smart people that are here, and then 
those of us who are regular Members who were just elected, what is in 
many ways the greatest threat to our society?
  We have made lots and lots of promises, and we don't have the 
resources to keep those promises to those who have earned benefits.
  We actually have a demographic curve. As a country, we are getting 
older very, very fast. In about eight and a half years: two workers, 
one retiree. In about eight and a half years, 50 percent of the 
spending in this body will be, less interest, to those 65 and older.
  Are we as a government, are we as a society going to keep our 
promises?
  Mathematically, this has been a passion of mine for a few years now, 
trying to find a pro-growth, optimistic way we keep our promises so my 
little 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter has the same opportunities I have 
had.
  So the five pillars we have been working on is how do I start with--I 
am going to start with the very top--technology disruption.
  Tonight I am going to talk about a couple of really optimistic things 
that are happening in healthcare technology that will keep us healthier 
and potentially crash the price of healthcare.
  I am going to talk about some things that are happening in 
environmental technology that are going to lower the costs, make energy 
available so the economy can keep growing and yet the environment is 
cleaner and healthier.
  We are going to talk about employment. How do we actually have more 
of our brothers and sisters out there enter the workforce, stay in the 
workforce?
  There is this concept of labor force participation. And the 
economists for years now have said as the baby boomers are moving into 
retirement, labor force participation is going to crash mathematically.
  We have also had this fragility, this difficulty of millennial 
males--oddly enough, about 6, 7 months ago, millennial females really 
started to enter the workforce in droves. We still have a problem with 
millennial males.
  There is also some really interesting data popping up that the number 
of Americans, by choice, who are over 70 years old, but they are happy, 
and they are healthy, are choosing to stay in the labor force. We have 
had almost, I think it was like--the article was talking about a 50 
percent rise in seniors staying in the labor force just as a choice by 
lifestyle, some because they need the money, many because they are 
healthy, and they want to be productive. And that is actually really 
good for society.
  We are actually going to touch on having to deal with earned benefits 
and how we should design those earned benefits. Could we make some 
offers within those, saying, if you are willing to stay in the labor 
force, if you are healthy and you can do that, should we give you some 
spiffs in your benefits. If you are able to stay on your private 
insurance for a while, could we do some things.
  It is sort of entitlement reform in a very positive fashion. It has 
to do with, how do we maximize economic expansion and choice for those 
who are seniors?
  Population stability. Birth rates have collapsed in our country. We 
just have to deal with the reality of the math. How do we incentivize 
family formation in an effective way? This one has been really 
difficult.
  We have had an ongoing sort of research project in our office for a 
couple of years now looking at things being done in Canada and 
Scandinavia and other parts of the world, even Hungary, and how 
ineffective so many programs have been in encouraging family formation. 
We are going to have to come up with sort of an American version of 
what works there.
  Let's face it. Having a little person, they are expensive. It is the 
greatest joy of our lives, my wife and I, but we are going to have to 
talk about how we help in family formation.
  Then also the other side of that concept of population stability is, 
what do we do in immigration? How do we design immigration to maximize 
economic vitality?
  This is going to be a little off subject, but close; I was sort of 
heartbroken about a vote we had here 3 hours ago. H.R. 6, it was 
dealing with the DACA populations. What happens when the body here 
engages in votes that become theatrical, become about exciting your 
base, and have no chance of becoming law?
  If the majority here had been serious and really wanted a solution 
for the young people in DACA, there would have been this opportunity to 
come over, talk with Republicans, because many of us have voted for 
immigration reform that actually had modules that solved much of the 
DACA issue, but they had to come together, because that piece of 
legislation will not move through the Senate, will not get the 
President's signature.

  In some ways, it is actually sort of cruel to exploit a population 
with promises and a piece of legislation that we know is never going to 
move, and that there was an opportunity to do something that could 
have, if we had actually worked together.
  I don't know if the fear is doing something that would be seen as 
bipartisan with this White House, whether the issue is too powerful, 
but it breaks my heart when there are actually paths that, if we had 
done border security, if we had done some rationalization of the 
dysfunctional mechanisms we have right now on those asking for asylum, 
we could have packaged that with a solution for much of the DACA 
population and it could have actually moved through the Senate, it 
could have gotten the President's signature.
  Instead, we just did theatrics.
  Sorry to go off sort of the script here.
  So population stability.
  Then the last one here, economic growth. What do we do as a 
government, as a legislative body to maximize economic expansion?
  My theory here is economic expansion is moral. Think about it. 
Whether it be the Tax Code, whether it be doing smart things 
modernizing regulation, whether it be doing smart things with trade, it 
is moral when we have economic growth.
  How many of our brothers and sisters--that if you read the 
economists' papers a couple years ago--who hadn't finished high school, 
they were being written off as the permanent underclass in our society. 
And today that very population is the population that has the fastest 
growing wages and almost full employment. That is a moral thing.
  If you actually will come to downtown Phoenix, we have this homeless 
campus in downtown Phoenix. There is an organization called St. Joseph 
the Worker. My understanding is they have been around for a hundred-
some years, and their job is to get populations that have had some of 
the most horrible experiences in life and find them jobs.

                              {time}  2045

  You walk in the door and they have a stack of job offers on top of 
the desk saying: We just need someone to come to our restaurant and 
help us. We just need someone to come to our little warehouse and help 
us stock shelves.
  What does it mean in a society where you have more jobs than you have 
available workers? I will argue that that is incredibly moral, and 
there should almost be joy in our society right now if we could pull 
away the sort of rage partisan blinders right now and say: Isn't this a 
neat thing? How do we do more of it?
  It turns out that economic growth is crucial if we are going to keep 
our promises, if we intend to keep our promises on Medicare, if we 
intend to

[[Page H4307]]

keep our promises on Social Security. Unless you do all five of these 
things and do all five of those well and very soon, mathematically, it 
is almost impossible to keep our promises. It is not Republican or 
Democrat; it is demographics.
  I want to talk about some of the positive things that technology, 
that some of these things are bringing, and that is one of our key 
points here. This is the week we call sort of Member Week, where 
Members come to different committees of jurisdiction and sort of pitch 
their ideas.
  So two or three times today in the Ways and Means Committee, we had 
Members come and talk about their passion for dealing with different 
types of cancers: colorectal screening, lung cancer, these other 
things, and then the current mechanism.
  My pitch to everyone who cares about those issues is: You are 
absolutely right. We need to protect our brothers and sisters in this 
country by having those types of screenings to find those cancers as 
early as possible and deal with them, but we need to write the 
legislation in a fashion where it is future proofed.
  I am sure everyone saw these articles that have popped up just in the 
last couple of weeks. It turns out there is a breakthrough in blood 
tests.
  Where, in the old days, we would do a blood test, you would look for 
a certain titer, know your body had had an immune reaction to 
something, what happens when you can do a blood test that looks for the 
cascade--we will call it the throwing off the dead parts of a cancer 
cell--and finds that and says: Hey, we just found this little piece of 
this DNA; we know that is a cancer DNA; we know what type of cancer it 
is; and because of that marker, we can even know where it is?
  It turns out this is in trials right now, and it is having tremendous 
success. We need to future proof our legislation around here that it is 
not enough to care about our brothers and sisters and that we are going 
to make sure our society is providing cancer screenings, but that it is 
future proofed that when a blood test is the least invasive, most 
efficient, cost efficient, easiest to provide, and actually will crash 
parts of the price of healthcare in finding these cancers early, but 
also being available as a methodology, when we do this in large scale, 
being dramatically less expensive than what we use today.
  So part of my pitch here and the reason I do this every week or two 
is: Understand this disruption of these technologies are here. We need 
to future proof what we do legislatively because this is a big deal.
  Think of a blood test where you can find several types of cancer if 
you have it and you can find it within a couple of hours. This is a big 
deal. So this is exciting.
  The next one I have talked about two or three times here, but it is 
the simplest example of another thing we need to do here.
  As we are talking about economic growth, it is also, what do we do to 
disrupt the price of healthcare? Remember the stupid conversation we 
have had in this place for years now in regards to healthcare hasn't 
been about the cost, it has been about who pays and who gets 
subsidized. My passion is we need to think differently.
  I have come here and done multiple presentations on the new wearable 
technologies: the pill bottle that tells you when you have opened it, 
the things where you can blow into it and it will diagnose whether you 
have a viral infection, and the algorithm can bounce off your phone's 
medical records and instantly order your antivirals. That is a 
disruption. That lowers the price of healthcare. You got healthier, and 
you didn't infect everyone else in your family and your business.
  We need to promote these technologies, but there is the other side 
that is coming.
  Well over 50 percent of our healthcare spending is to those with 
chronic conditions. So 5 percent of our population has those chronic 
conditions, but they are well over 50 percent of our spending. What 
happens if we started to invest in curing them, curing our brothers and 
sisters of chronic conditions?
  Well, guess what Congress did a few years ago? The Cures Act and some 
of these other things, we put lots of money into researching cures. And 
now, with some of the new technology and now the next generation of 
CRISPR and all these other things that are coming, we are going to have 
pharmaceuticals like this. I think they are often referred to as 
biologicals. My hope is it is November, but sometime within the next 12 
months, we expect to have a single shot cure for hemophilia.
  I use this as an example because, apparently, there are a number of 
drugs in this sort of category that are coming: a single shot cure for 
the 8,000-plus of our brothers and sisters in the country who have 
hemophilia A. Now, maybe a million and a half dollars a shot.
  So over here we have talked about the technology that keeps us 
healthy. Over here, I want us to talk about and start to get our heads 
around: How do we finance really expensive but miracle cures? How do we 
build a healthcare bond, a mechanism where, hey, we are going to have 
all these savings in the future. Can we pull some of that forward or 
commit that savings to actually finance a bond so, when a 
pharmaceutical like this is available, you cure the 8,000 Americans who 
have hemophilia?
  Back to our 5 percent of our population who have chronic conditions. 
What happens if we can cure just a couple percent of that? It is a big 
deal. It would change the cost curve of healthcare. This is a radically 
different way of thinking about healthcare.

  So what happens when stories like this actually prove out to be true 
that those who are suffering with ALS, that sometime in the next year 
or two, we are going to have a pharmaceutical, it does not cure at this 
point, but it stabilizes the horrible regression of one's life and 
abilities that are chewed up by ALS?
  Stop. You may have to have this injection a couple times a year, 
maybe four times a year. It may be $100,000 per injection. How do we 
come up with a methodology that finances such a thing because the cost 
of the progression of this disease is stunningly expensive, and it is 
just the right thing to do?
  It turns out the debate we have had in this place for years of who 
pays and who subsidizes now can be a discussion of: How do we use 
technology to disrupt the price of healthcare? How do we get healthier 
and personal control of our healthcare instead of a collectivist 
vision? And how do we finance these incredible disruptive 
pharmaceuticals that are coming that either stabilize or cure that 
portion of our society who have chronic conditions, who are suffering, 
but are also much of our healthcare cost?
  This is good news. These are exciting. There should be joy in this 
place that we are part of a time that can have this type of curative 
approach to healthcare and make these sorts of differences.
  So, look, those are a couple of the happy things. If we do our job 
well, if we get the financing right, we can have this type of 
disruption and see it in the cost curve of healthcare.
  So now I want to sort of jump to some of the other discussions that 
have been around this body, particularly today, a little bit yesterday, 
on greenhouse gases, on climate change, on those things. My frustration 
with this is great rhetoric, really bad math.
  So let's actually talk about a couple of things that have been going 
on and why the rhetoric doesn't match reality.
  I believe, actually, technology and those on the more conservative 
side actually have solutions that grow the economy, provide 
opportunities for our family, provide the opportunities. Remember our 
five points that, if we don't have the economic expansion, we can't 
keep our promises.
  So just as a point of reference, I brought these two slides again. 
This one is from 2015. The yellow over there is all the photovoltaic in 
the country that was added in 2015. It was a miraculous year, over 38 
gigawatts of new generation, power generation, solar. Isn't that 
wonderful? Except we took 33 gigawatts of power generation out of 
nuclear.
  We really didn't gain that much in clean noncarbon-producing or 
nongreenhouse-producing energy. You can't have one without the other. 
You can't run around and say: Didn't we do

[[Page H4308]]

great? Look, we added all the solar, how much cleaner the world got. 
Oh, by the way, we shut down all this nuclear, so actually our baseload 
didn't really go anywhere.
  Well, it turns out that math was pretty much the exact same the next 
year. Once again, the yellow is the photovoltaic that was added. The 
multicolor here is the amount of nuclear that came offline. It turns 
out more nuclear came offline, in a weird way, because of the loss of 
all that nuclear baseload generation.
  The photovoltaic that came to the market, which is wonderful--I am 
from Arizona. I love it. But we didn't get any better on power 
generation that doesn't produce greenhouse gases.
  So once again, around here, we need to open our minds and understand 
just sort of basic math that you can't be joyful about one and not be 
supportive of the other and actually be making mathematical progress. 
It is just math.
  So back to a thought experiment. I did this on the floor the other 
day, and I am going to do it again just because it did create some 
really interesting phone calls.
  I am going to believe this one here might end up being the single 
biggest disruption in my life. And forgive me if I don't get everything 
perfect here, but about 4 or 5 months ago, reading some strange 
journal--that is what happens when you are on a plane 10 hours a week; 
you read a lot of stuff--there was this article. We have vetted it 
repeatedly, and it appears it is real.
  U.S. labs from universities have sort of broken the Holy Grail in 
regards to plant biology. Bear with me. This is a big deal.
  What would happen tomorrow if the next generation of agriculture was 
40 percent more productive? It would be a miracle. You would feed the 
world for the next 250 years.
  Think about if you had a 40 percent improvement in agriculture, how 
much less water, fuel, what does it do to land prices?
  Well, it turns out if you really care about the environment and 
greenhouse gases, here is your thought experiment I want you to 
struggle through.
  World agriculture produces about 2.2 times more greenhouse gases than 
every car on Earth. So if you had a 40 percent improvement in 
agriculture productivity, it would be as if you removed every car off 
the face of the Earth. You just have to be willing to eat seed stock 
that functionally, actually, is a type of GMO.
  Now, all they did is change some of the cell biology so it grabs the 
carbon molecule every time instead of accidentally grabbing the oxygen 
molecule and then spending lots of energy trying to purge the oxygen, 
which apparently is just one of the inherent faults in nature. They 
fixed it.

                              {time}  2100

  They did it with tobacco plants. We always use tobacco plants because 
that is a genome we have known. I guess that is the first one we broke. 
But now they are moving into other types of agricultural stock.
  Be prepared. Watch for this. This technology may be one of the 
biggest disruptions.
  But as a body, when we talk about global warming, when we talk about 
this, how much of this body is ready to understand there is technology 
coming? Are Members willing to embrace the technology instead of the 
sort of Malthusian view that we need to shrink as an economy, that we 
need to be controlled, that we need to be managed? Or do Members allow 
these market forces to be incredibly disruptive?
  I didn't bring the slides this time, but in that same stock, think 
about some of the other things going on. Apparently, there has been a 
huge breakthrough in the technology of pulling carbon right out of the 
air, being able to take that carbon, mix it with some other chemicals, 
and turn it back into a fuel stock--negative carbon emission, 
economically done. I am looking forward to the joy coming from my 
environmental friends who understand.
  We have already proven that carbon sequestration works. We have 
proven that we can generate power with coal, with natural gas, without 
a smokestack, and capture every bit of carbon and then reuse it, 
sequester it, if we choose. But now we are going to negative carbon 
mining.
  Why that is really important is, how many people believe that China 
with the 30-plus new coal plants that are going up as part of the Belt 
and Road Initiative, that they are going to have lots of great 
scrubbers on them?
  Once again, if the goal is to punish the United States, great, the 
rhetoric is brilliant. If the goal is to grow as a society but still be 
cleaner, go with pro-economic expansion embracing of technology and let 
us have jobs. Let us have economic expansion so we can keep our 
promises.
  The last thought experiment I am going to give tonight, remember how 
a little while ago I mentioned this is sort of Member week? We call it 
pitch week, where a Member will come pitch their priorities, pitch 
their ideas in the different committees of jurisdiction. We are hoping 
that Members we are already working with will go to the committees that 
do certain types of foreign aid.
  How many out there care about plastic in the ocean? How many think 
banning straws in communities is going to do anything about plastic in 
the ocean? If a Member believes that, they have been conned. It is 
great virtue signaling, ``Hey, I am banning straws,'' but it is absurd.
  Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 
rivers, eight of them in Asia, two in Africa. Let's do something that 
actually works.
  If we are going to have foreign aid and some of the environmental 
programs and these things that are out in the world, let's go to those 
10 rivers and start removing the plastic.
  Let's add value. Let's do those things. If 90 percent of the plastic 
in the ocean is coming from 10 rivers--eight in Asia, two in Africa--we 
know where it is coming from. It may not provide the virtue signaling 
opportunity that we enjoy around here, but it would make the oceans 
cleaner.
  For once, could we drop some of the political theater? Just like the 
vote we had earlier today, where it is great politics, gins up the 
base, gives us something to rally around, but it doesn't accomplish 
anything.
  Mr. Speaker, please, to my Democratic friends, to my Republican 
friends, are we here to do good?
  My pitch to Members is that we know the problems, and we know the 
math--let's be honest about that math--so let's actually do things.
  In the next week or two, when we are starting to put together our 
appropriations, our policy sets, is there anyone out there on the other 
side who will help me say, for the 10 rivers in the world that are 90 
percent of the plastic in the ocean, can we adjust that bilateral aid, 
the foreign aid, the environmental guidance, the other things we do, go 
to those 10 rivers and start to do something? We might lose the 
political issue and make the environment better. Or will we just stick 
around here and say that we don't need to solve the problem because we 
want to be able to talk about it?
  Sorry for the sarcasm, but I am frustrated that we are living in a 
time of amazing opportunity, of technology disruption, where if Members 
really care about healthcare, we are on the cusp of a crash of its 
price, but yet its quality and its cures are here. Can we break down 
some of the barriers that are stopping us from getting there?
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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