[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 145 (Wednesday, September 11, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H7656-H7658]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            REMEMBERING 9/11

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Maloney for 
telling the story. You know, it is not just New Yorkers, I can't 
imagine there is an American who doesn't remember exactly where they 
were in that horrific moment. And it's a moment yet where those of us 
in the West and all over the country ached to see what happened to your 
community.
  Mrs. CAROLYN B. MALONEY of New York. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I yield to the gentlewoman from New York.
  Mrs. CAROLYN B. MALONEY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the 
gentleman and all of my colleagues for all of the support and the 
effort to rebuild and make this country stronger. We literally rewrote 
the whole intelligence system and defense system of the Nation and took 
really massive steps to restructure our government and our country to 
be able to respond and protect our citizens. It was a unified, 
determined effort.
  I thank all of my colleagues for all of their help for New York and 
for all of their help for the Pentagon and Shanksville, and, mostly, 
for being part of an effort to rebuild and make this country stronger 
to be able to prevent future attacks.
  I thank Members so much for their kind words. My constituents in my 
city deeply appreciate it.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Maloney. We 
always have to be careful when we are friends not to go around calling 
each other by our first names.
  But I was not here at the time of 9/11, I did not come for another 
decade. And yet today, even with the young people we have in our office 
that were just children, I mean young children, and you can still feel 
that sort of somber tone. It is a powerful example and something that 
is devastating. And we can come together. I desperately wish there were 
more opportunities where we remember, not the horror, but the fact that 
there was unity. And how do we deal in a world right now where so much 
of our politics is toxic and in not allowing that broken sort of 
political system to ever sort of be more powerful than those moments 
where we must come together and both heal, deal with the heartbreak and 
then also make sure it never ever happens again.
  So my reason for being on the floor this evening is I wanted to spend 
a moment and just touch on 9/11 and how that just affects so many of 
us. I am told now in Arizona we have 30 or 40 of those first responders 
or others who were affected who are receiving their healthcare in our 
community. I know of only one or two Arizonans, I believe, who lost 
their lives, so we always sort of pull back to our communities and 
personalize it.


                         The Math Doesn't Work

  Mr. SCHWEICHERT. Mr. Speaker, just before we got back there was a 
jobs report, and I know that it is going to be a little geeky, but I 
wanted to go walk through some of those underlying numbers that lay in 
there. And it's actually good news, the fact that there are really 
terrific things happening in our economy.
  But I still want to put it in context: I have been coming to this 
microphone for quite a while now to say, What is the biggest issue we 
as a society have?
  If you think of my little girl that is going to turn 4 next month, 
what is the biggest impairment to her economic future? And we are going 
to walk through some of the math, but we are going to also walk through 
some of the solutions, because it turns out it is demographics.
  We always put up this slide to basically sort of point out that the 
days of yesteryear, where Members would get behind these microphones 
and say, Well, if we just raise the tax on this population, or if we 
just do this entitlement reform over here, or we just do premium 
support over here that the fact of the matter is that 30 years from 
now, if you remove Social Security and Medicare from the budget, this 
country is 20-some-trillion dollars cash positive. If you pull Social 
Security and Medicare back into the math, we are $100 trillion upside 
down. Mathematically, we just can't get there.
  And so, if we actually care about keeping our promises to those, you 
know, the 10,300 Americans that turn 65 every single day and start to 
move into their benefits, we really need to get serious, because we are 
already in a time--we don't tell the public this because it is hard. We 
are not honest, I believe, with ourselves, but there is already things 
Congress would desperately like to be doing, our constituents would 
desperately like us to do that we are not doing because of the squeeze-
out factor that is already happening because of our demographics.
  There is this thing called baby boomers. I am one of them. And the 
math to keep our promises basically takes away the resources that would 
be doing other things. And they are promises, we have to keep them.
  So how do you create the economic vitality, the labor force and all 
those other things? And we are going to spend a little bit of time on 
labor force today.
  So just some points of reference. Every 5 years just the growth of 
Social Security and Medicare healthcare entitlements, just the growth 
portion equals the entire Defense Department. So if you came into the 
office and said, ``David, tomorrow my solution for being able to keep 
our promises in Medicare is let's just get rid of the Pentagon,'' you 
only covered the growth portion of the spending for Social Security and 
Medicare healthcare entitlements for 5 years. So then every 10 years, 
two full Pentagons is just the growth. Ninety-one percent of the 
spending increases that are basically slated for the next 10 years are 
solely the growth in Social Security and Medicare.
  Understand, it is math. It is not Republican or Democrat. And we have 
lunacy around here. We have done this on the floor before, where we 
walk through some of the solutions that are thrown out that are 
completely make-believe. Well, if we just raised taxes on the rich and 
do this, if we just raised this number, and you understand, the math 
doesn't work. You are going to have to do something that is really hard 
for a broken political system. And we are going to have to do something 
that is big, complex, and actually holistic.
  So one of the reasons we put this board up almost every time we are 
behind this microphone is trying to say, We actually sort of have come 
up with about five pillars, everything from, you know, one pillar being 
tax policy, trade policy, regulatory policy to maximize economic 
velocity, incentives to be in the labor force to maximize that, because 
labor force participation is crucial.
  Let's explain. After tax reform, the modelers kept coming back and 
saying, We believe the headwinds for the economic growth are going to 
be what they call capital stock, savings. Will the country have cash in 
its banks and those things?
  Well, we have already blown the wheels off or the charts off or 
however you want to say it in everything from repatriated cash coming 
back into the country which has been substantially greater than we have 
ever expected. Foreign investments. But also, Americans have been 
saving substantially more of the tax reform savings to them than we 
actually modelled.
  But it was labor force. And we are going to come back to that because 
there is actually some really interesting, good news, but we have got 
to get our heads around it, but the two headwinds were labor force and 
capital stock.

                              {time}  1830

  We have proven capital stock is working in our favor, and all of a 
sudden, we got a jobs report that looks like the labor force. This 
violates all the smart people and the demographers who never thought 
that, at this point in our demographic cycle, we would be hitting these 
numbers.
  Another thing we talk about is, how do we have population stability? 
Immigration, family formation. Our birth

[[Page H7657]]

rates, now we are at functionally negative population growth if we look 
at domestic birth rates. That is a real problem. If we are going to 
redesign immigration, can we move to a talent-based immigration system 
so it maximizes economic velocity?
  Once again, you see a theme here. We must grow like crazy.
  Other things: Can we put incentives into our earned entitlement 
programs? When you earn your Social Security, you earn your Medicare, 
could we build some incentives in there saying, if you are healthy and 
feel of sharp mind, or if you want to be an entrepreneur, what can we 
do as incentives to stay in the labor force, to continue that, because 
we need you?
  We have done some time on the floor where we have walked through 
things that are happening in countries like Japan, where they are 
desperately trying to get populations to stay or come back into the 
labor force just for economic survival.
  The one we have had the most fun with behind this microphone--and the 
next slide will make some sense, and then we will go on to the labor 
force issues--is that I believe we are in a time when technology may be 
one of the things that saves us. We have done time on this floor where 
we have walked through amazing technology that is about to do 
stunningly great things for the environment.
  We now have a couple of big experimental power plants that are 
working outside of Houston where they are burning coal and natural gas 
with no smokestack. They are collecting every bit of the 
CO2.
  We have proven that technology works. Now we have had a breakthrough 
on being able to carbon mine the air. We have learned how to do a 
couple things. There is a type of genetic engineering in certain food 
stocks so your cow doesn't produce as much methane. Remember, twice as 
much comes out of the mouth as--a bit of trivia.
  It turns out, instead of just regulating and controlling and crushing 
the very economic growth we must have to be able to keep our social 
entitlement promises, let's embrace technology.
  There is technology that is about to be a disruption in healthcare 
costs. Our problem is that we have to legalize it.
  Are you prepared to allow technology to write you a prescription if 
we can demonstrate that the algorithms and the sensors and those things 
are incredibly accurate? Are we prepared to work out some financing 
mechanisms for these new biological drugs that are about to cure 
diseases that are crushing to both individuals and families but also to 
the economics of healthcare?
  Remember, 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have chronic 
conditions are the majority of our healthcare expenditures.
  Where is the excitement and optimism that there are a number of these 
horrible, horrible afflictions that are about to be cured?
  I have been up here and brought the charts and those things about 
diseases like hemophilia. The fact is that we believe we are heading to 
a single-shot cure. The 8,600--I believe that is the accurate number--
of our brothers and sisters who suffer hemophilia, which is a horribly 
expensive disease, can be cured, but the drug is also really expensive. 
For instance, are we prepared to think through how we finance cures, a 
drug that stabilizes ALS but is going to be really expensive?
  What happens when I can use technology on one end to keep us healthy 
and technology on the other end to cure?
  This has to be a radically different way to think about how we are 
going to crush the price of healthcare than the insanity, the 
mathematical insanity, that seems to be part of our public discourse 
right now of, ``Well, let's just nationalize healthcare,'' because that 
removes no costs. If you lay it out and look at the underlying math, it 
doesn't save anything. It is just, once again, playing the game of 
shifting.
  Shifting things, like the debate we have had for the last 10 years 
between Republicans and Democrats on who gets subsidized, who has to 
pay, who should pay, and who gets subsidized, it is absurdity.
  We now need to do those things that reduce the price or cure our 
brothers and sisters who have these afflictions.
  As we are walking through the math, and we went back and double-
vetted this a couple of hours ago, and we talked about this before, if 
you look at the next 30 years and remove Social Security and Medicare, 
our country is $23.1 trillion cash positive. If you take Social 
Security, Medicare, and their associated interest costs on the 
borrowing, we are over $100 trillion negative.
  If you look carefully, it is not Social Security. Social Security is 
a big deal, but two-thirds-plus of it is Medicare.
  We need to have a fixation on what we do as a society to crack the 
cost of healthcare. That is why we are working on a piece of 
legislation in our office to allow technology to be truly--think about 
a Blockbuster video moment.
  How many of us went to Blockbuster video last weekend? I know it is a 
silly example, but it is a good one because didn't it feel like, 
overnight, we used to go get those little silver disks, and now we go 
home and hit a button?
  We, as a society, engage in technology disruption all the time.
  The problem with healthcare, similar to what we have in education, is 
that we have so much government intrusion in it, so much government 
regulation, so much trying to keep people safe. The ability to 
have technology innovation that crashes the price--we have all seen 
some of the new wearables and some of the things you can blow into that 
look like they are going to diagnose everything from several types of 
cancer to being able to tell if you have the flu. The algorithms 
associated with that, if we can demonstrate they are highly accurate, 
what should they be allowed to do?

  That disruption is coming, but what do we do about this? We know what 
is driving the debt and what is going to drive us off the rails.
  Could I beg of us, as policymakers, to fixate on the revolution that 
changes this cost curve? Instead, we will do absolutely ridiculous--my 
father used to refer to it as the shiny object theory. It is, you could 
have something that is incredibly important in your life, but if I can 
come up with a shiny object over here and wave it around and, in this 
case, get the press and others and maybe talk radio and maybe the cable 
news, we will talk about the shiny object. We will go run over and 
worry about that and deal with that, even though this over here is the 
thing that is so critical to the survival of our society.
  Let's talk about where we are having some success right now.
  It was only a couple years ago--I remember it was the Joint Economic 
Committee--we were sitting down with some demographers and researchers. 
We were talking about the aging of America and how labor force 
participation was going to crash. Because of that, we were going to see 
a real headwind in our ability to grow as a society, as an economy.
  Without growth, we are not going to have the revenues. We are not 
going to have all those pillars that we talked about in the beginning 
moving forward.
  Last Friday, we got the unemployment numbers. Underneath it, there is 
that thing called the U6 data where you start to dive into it and 
understand what is really going on.
  As we get ready to walk through these really positive things, I need 
everybody to work with me on a concept. How do we have a society--and 
let me grab my little notes here--that, all of a sudden, we have 163.4 
million Americans working? We are now back above 63 percent labor force 
participation. We are back up to, like, 63.2, which those very 
researchers in that meeting a couple of years ago said by now we would 
be maybe as low as in the high 50s, that the available labor was going 
to crash.
  You start to understand that there is a miracle happening in our 
society because, to quote some of the folks recently, workers came out 
of the woodwork this last month and have been entering the labor force.
  The best way I can describe this is, remember a few years ago when we 
used to come behind these microphones and talk about the real 
unemployment data: Hey, I know they are saying we are only at 6 percent 
unemployment, but if you add in all those people who are not looking 
for work, discouraged workers, if I can use a pop-culture term from the 
1980s, worn-out workers, the unemployment rate was 14, 16, 18 percent 
of the society.

[[Page H7658]]

  We have data that, last month, when they do the real unemployment 
calculation, it is the lowest it has been in modern times. We are back 
at 7 percent and ticking lower. The official unemployment rate stayed 
at 3.7.
  Work with me here. The official unemployment rate doesn't change, but 
we know we had a few hundred thousand new entries into the labor force. 
A big chunk of that was not being calculated in unemployment numbers 
because they weren't even looking. Something happened in society where, 
all of a sudden, folks who were underemployed, who had not been 
looking, all of a sudden came back.
  This is really, really important. I know it is geeky, but the math is 
absolutely critical.
  The other thing that was happening was, if you dug into that 
unemployment report on Friday, if you take the last 3 months, all of a 
sudden, wages and productivity have started to spike. If you analyze 
the last 3 months, all of a sudden, wages are moving at about a 4.2 
percent increase in a time with very low inflation.
  We all remember our econ classes. What are the two things that make 
an employer pay you more money? It was really simple. It was 
productivity and inflation.
  What happens if we are in a world where there is very little 
inflation and, all of a sudden, we are paying people more? It turns out 
maybe we have to add a little labor force squeeze, a society with more 
jobs than available workers. All of a sudden, we get the spike of 
productivity we see in the last 3 months. These are good things.
  We have talked behind these microphones for years now about how 
working men and women aren't getting ahead, that the actual real wages 
have stayed flat for a couple of decades, except for substantially this 
last year. We really should figure out what are we doing right and 
continue to do more of it.
  Look, it is math. Is it Republican math or Democratic math? It is 
math, but something is working in our society where they are coming 
back into the labor force.
  Look, why isn't there joy in this place? Has our partisanship become 
so dark that something that would be a conversation of joy, a 3.3 
percent unemployment rate for adult women--this is close to the 1953 
rate, and in 1953, it was a dramatically smaller population that was 
looking.
  How about a 5.5 percent African American unemployment rate, a record 
low? Where's the joy? A 4.2 percent Hispanic American unemployment rate 
has now tied the all-time record low. A 3.3 percent unemployment rate 
for adult women, near the lowest rate since 1953. A 2.8 percent Asian 
American unemployment rate, almost touching up against the record low.
  If you want to take prime age, which there is a whole reason we 
calculate that for productivity numbers, a 76.3 percent labor force 
participation, the highest rate since February 2002, and an 80 percent 
prime age, 25 to 54, employment rate for the first time since 2008.
  There are other numbers in here.

                              {time}  1845

  You would actually think for a moment there would be some level of 
joy of something is working in our society, where the very people we 
walk around here claiming that we are fighting for and that we care 
about is working. We just need to figure out what is working and do 
more of it.
  U.S. household income finally matches the 1999 peak, while the 
poverty rate is at its lowest since 2001.
  How many of you actually saw that discussed over this weekend and 
over the last couple of days?
  It is working. For the first time, most new working age hires in the 
U.S. are people of color. It is working.
  When I get up behind this mike and I keep trying to say we have these 
five pillars that we need all of these cylinders to be clicking to be 
able to grow the economy so we can generate the revenues, so we 
actually have a fighting chance to keep our promises, that labor force 
participation one is working right now.
  Doesn't this body understand how powerful this is?
  They will be out tomorrow, and it is always dangerous to guess, but 
last month you saw the reality of what we call receipts, tax receipts. 
Tax receipts so far this year are functionally 3.1 percent higher. They 
have grown. They are the highest in U.S. history. And if you actually 
use even what they call inflation adjusted dollars, it is the second 
highest in history.
  So the misinformation campaign saying, well, tax reform didn't--no, 
tax reform is working. The revenue receipts are up.
  If we could actually get some decent data on understanding social 
needs, Social Security and disability, we know the numbers have fallen. 
TANF needs have fallen. Many of these are no longer needing the U.S. 
Government subsidies, our taxpayer dollars, because they are working 
again.
  Where is the joy? Yet why is the spending functionally up about 6\1/
2\ percent?
  Well, a big portion of that was displaced on what we call 
discretionary, but a big portion of that growth is demographics. We 
don't do a particularly honest job of showing in a chart saying, look, 
this is on autopilot.
  Every day, 10,300 Americans turn 65, they move into benefits, and we 
have set aside not nearly enough resources to cover that. As a matter 
of fact, the Medicare part A portion of the trust fund is gone in a 
couple of years.
  So as we walk through this--and this chart is almost impossible to 
read and understand, but the trendline of African American women, of 
Hispanics, of White workers, of African American men, of Hispanics and 
others coming back into the labor force is a miracle. It is a 
demonstration of our five-pillar proposal of how we grow, how we deal 
with those healthcare costs that are the driver of the crushing debt 
that is coming down upon us not tomorrow, but today.
  One of the pillars is actually working right now. We have 
demonstrated that sort of holistic theory that, when you get tax policy 
right, regulatory policy right--could you imagine, when we finally get 
ourselves and some of the trade issues all cleaned up, where we can go 
economically?
  But it is a demonstration that, economically, this affects what is 
happening over here on people's ability to have the honor of work.
  Mr. Speaker, I just desperately wish, when we have our debates--I 
know we are always going to have those moments where we have to do the 
shiny object because that is great politics, but the demographics and 
over $100 trillion of debt being handed to my little girl over the next 
three decades is a level of cruelty.
  And it is not Republican or Democrat, it is math, could we ever get 
our heads around the fact of doing those things that remove that 
cruelty and make the next three decades for my little girl, for all of 
us, one of the most amazing portions of American history.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________