[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.
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