[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 155 (Wednesday, September 25, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H7980-H7983]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1845
                           GOOD ECONOMIC NEWS

  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. Madam Speaker, this is going to be one of those 
evenings where I am going to try to actually go through sort of complex 
numbers, but a lot of it is incredibly optimistic.
  I am going to do two things tonight:
  Part of this is just some frustration on numbers that I keep seeing 
out there that aren't being discussed here in this body that are 
incredibly optimistic in the economy.
  And the second thing is: I want to talk about, remember last week the 
theme was global warming, climate change, the environment, and I had my 
issue of The Economist on what is called the climate issue?
  I want to talk about some really amazing technologies that I can't 
believe weren't discussed last week that are actually about to create 
stunning breakthroughs.
  So, let's first actually talk through this. I have this intense 
frustration that my brothers and sisters on the left, and even a number 
of us on the right, don't talk enough or at all about the amazing good 
things happening to the American worker, to people out there who had a 
pretty rough previous decade.
  The math is the math. So the premise I want to give right now is 
economic growth is moral because it uplifts, it makes work valuable, it 
improves your future, your retirement, and your ability to take care of 
your kids. Economic growth is moral.
  The reason I have this particular board up--and we try to do this 
every week--is what are some of the greatest threats to our society?
  I actually believe it is the stunning size of our unfunded 
liabilities. Once again--and I say this almost every week when I am 
behind this microphone--the next 30 years, if you take Social Security 
and Medicare and remove it from the 30-year window, this country, the 
Federal Government, the CBO projection, $23 trillion in the bank, if we 
pull Social Security and Medicare into that number, then we are $103 
trillion in debt--negative.
  That is not Republican or Democrat math, it is just demographics. 
There are 74 million of us who are baby boomers. We are moving into our 
earned benefits, and the honest truth is, the resources that were 
required to meet these earned benefits were never set aside.
  So how do we keep our commitments?
  We are actually proposing over and over and over that it is a 
combination. There is no magic bullet. It is a combination. Madam 
Speaker, you have got to grow the economy like crazy. So tax policy 
that grows and expands, trade policy that grows and expands, 
immigration policy that grows and expands, regulatory policy that grows 
and expands, and incentives to be in the labor force that grow and 
expand the economy.
  The adoption of disruptive technology to change the price of 
healthcare is absolutely necessary. We need incentives for Americans 
who are older and who feel they are healthy and still want to work, to 
stay in the labor force. We go over these details over and over and 
over again.
  There is a way to make the math survivable without some of the lunacy 
of functionally almost buying constituencies with outlandish promises, 
just managing the reality of our demographics and our current promises. 
Once again, every 5 years, just the

[[Page H7981]]

growth in Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements--just 
the growth--will equal the Defense Department. That means every 10 
years two Defense Departments is just the growth.
  CBO projects that in the next 10 years, 91 percent of the growth will 
be in spending on Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare 
entitlements. Much of that is calculated with actually a new much, much 
lower medical inflation. It is demographics. It is population shifts 
moving into those benefits.
  You would think, Madam Speaker, if those who come behind these 
microphones actually loved and cared for their brothers and sisters, 
they would actually try something new, and that would be invest in a 
calculator, tell the truth about the math, come together, and make it 
work. We believe there is a way to make it work.
  Part of the reason I am behind the microphone tonight is I want to 
talk about some of the amazing things that are happening, proving the 
first part of that discussion, that you can change the economic cycle. 
I have been on the Joint Economic Committee now for years. And these 
freaky smart professors, demographers, and economists would come and 
sit in front of us and say: David, it looks like your future is a 1.8, 
maybe a 1.9 GDP growth. We are going to have a labor force that is 
going to fall somewhere into the mid-50s as people retire, because 
remember 10,300 Americans turn 65 every single day.
  That was our future, Madam Speaker, and you couldn't make this math 
work at all.
  So how many times did you hear the term a fiscal cliff is coming?
  Then this crazy thing has happened the last couple of years where we 
changed our tax law and we updated our regulatory environment. We are 
still negotiating, trying to update our trade environment. But just 
those couple of levers changed the economic life for so many Americans. 
Yet this place is so incredibly sour, I don't know why there is not 
joy.
  I want to walk through some of these numbers. Look, these are just 
some of the headlines. Associated Press said that U.S. household income 
finally matches 1990 peak, while poverty rate hits its lowest since 
2001. That is what they call inflation-adjusted dollars. We had a lost 
decade. We had a couple of lost decades. We are back.
  For the first time, most new working-age hires in the U.S. are people 
of color. It turns out, when we would sit in the Joint Economic 
Committee a couple years ago, we would hear that those who didn't have 
graduate degrees, those who didn't finish high school and who didn't 
have these particular skill sets were going to be consigned to the 
permanent underclasses.

  Besides just the common cruelty of accepting that, the darkness of 
accepting that, it turns out it wasn't true.
  Why isn't there joy?
  This is an editorial from The Wall Street Journal from the editorial 
board on the 20th, and there are some numbers in here we have been 
tracking. They did a fine job sort of lumping it together. But we all 
saw it here on this floor in some of those 1-minute comments a couple 
weeks ago, a number of our brothers and sisters on the left were just 
outraged that in 2018, Medicaid rolls declined.
  Do you know why they declined?
  It turns out they declined because workers' earnings increased by 3.4 
percent while the poverty rate decreased by another half a percent. So 
now the poverty rate is at 11.8. It is still unacceptably high. It is 
also the lowest since 2001, and some of the fastest reduction of 
poverty in U.S. history was just last year.
  If you say you care about those who don't have many of the same 
opportunities or haven't had them in life, Madam Speaker, shouldn't 
there be just a little recognition there is something pretty amazing 
happening out there in the economy for these folks who were being 
written off as being part of the permanent underclass? Yet they have 
the fastest growing wages in those lower quartiles.
  I am sorry. I know I get behind this microphone and often sound like 
an accountant on steroids. I struggle with a way to make this sort of a 
powerful story, a powerful narrative. So many of our brothers and 
sisters around here get behind this microphone and are great at telling 
stories. But understanding this math--I don't care if you are Democrat 
or Republican, Madam Speaker, you should be joyful that something is 
working out there, and you would think policy-wise we would have a 
discussion of how we keep it going.
  Some more from this editorial: Full-Time, year-round workers 
increased by 2.3 million in 2018. Employment gains were the biggest 
among minorities, female-led households. The share of workers in 
female-led households who worked full-time year-round increased by 4.2 
percent, and among Hispanics 3.6 percent.
  It is the next paragraph that caught my eye when I was reading this 
on the airplane, and I can't believe it wasn't headlined around this 
country, because we all talk about how we care about those who have had 
a really rough decade, those who have been poor, and those who are 
fighting and struggling to feed their families and move up.
  As a result, real median earnings--and let's stop for a moment. When 
you hear the words ``real median earnings,'' Madam Speaker, what does 
that mean?
  It is something we call inflation-adjusted dollars. So, if we tell 
you your income went up 2 percent, but last year inflation was 1 
percent, you only went up 1 percent. So when you hear the term real 
dollars or constant dollars or adjusted dollars, it means we have made 
up for inflation, so your purchasing power is held constant.
  As a result, real median earnings for female households with no 
spouse present jumped 7.6 last year.
  How many speeches have been given on this floor over the last decade 
about that population and the crushing burden of poverty?
  More happened last year than had happened in the previous few years 
in moving that population out of poverty.
  I am sure our brothers and sisters on the left when they hear the 
actual math will be joyful because they care about these folks, right?
  The poverty rate among female households declined 2.7 percent for 
African Americans--Blacks--4 percent for Hispanics, and 7.1 percent for 
their children. Those are amazing numbers.
  It is part of my point that I keep trying to make over and over. 
Economic growth is moral.
  But what was more important, because the irony of this editorial, the 
real cure for inequality, it turns out that the share of households 
making less than $35,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars has fallen 1.2 
percent, because they were making more. But when you actually look at 
the amount where the income growth was, it wasn't at the upper 
quartiles of income. It looks like the growth in income with what they 
say in the lower quartiles. Meaning, as this editorial--and we still 
don't have the math yet, but we are tracking it, we are probably not 
going to have it for another year when we look back at 2019--but 
preliminarily, 2019 may be the year, the first year in modern times, 
where income inequality actually shrinks.
  It is not because the wealthy didn't get wealthier. It is because 
those in the lower income finally were receiving pay raises, because 
they are finally working in a world where there are more jobs than 
there is available labor, so their labor is more valuable.
  Isn't that exciting?
  Shouldn't we all get together, Republicans and Democrats, and figure 
out how to do more of this?

                              {time}  1900

  The editorial touches on this, but I want to give an explanation. As 
10,300 Americans retire every day, those are often individuals who are 
near the peak of their earning cycle, their lifetime earnings.
  The economists for years and years had said they expected to see 
certain mean income fall because high-skilled workers, because of their 
time in the workforce, they were retiring and their salary was going to 
come out. Younger workers weren't being paid as much. It turns out, 
some of our youngest workers have had some of the biggest pops in 
income.
  Mean incomes increased in households between the ages of 15 to 24 and 
25 to 34 by 9.1 percent and 5 percent, respectively. It turns out our 
young workers had some of the most aggressive, positive pay raises in 
all of society.

[[Page H7982]]

  How much have we heard that on our media? How about our financial 
press? How much here on the floor? How much from those who care about 
social policies?
  Look, the reality of it is that something pretty amazing is happening 
out there in our economy. When you saw the August unemployment numbers 
of how many Americans who were not even looking came back into the 
labor force, because, back to our previous point, labor force 
participation, a growing economy, is moral. It is something that I hope 
everyone here, no matter what your ideology, is joyful about. That 
economic expansion, we are starting to see it in the early data from 
CBO, and soon, hopefully, the Social Security actuaries. The dates of 
running out of money in our earned entitlement programs are getting 
pushed off because of the amount of payroll taxes that are coming in.
  As you look at these numbers, try to absorb how stunning. Earnings 
for single female households in just 2018--we are not talking multiple 
years--just 2018 of 7.6 percent. If I had shown up here a couple of 
years ago and said that is what 2018 was going to produce, you would 
have laughed me out of the place, but it happened.
  Poverty rates for female households are down 2.7 percent; for 
Hispanic, down 4 percent. The 2.7 is African American.
  Hasn't this also been the goal around here? We were going to find 
policies that created a level, egalitarian sort of equity in 
participating in the American Dream, the economic expansion. It is 
happening.
  I am sure when my brothers and sisters on the left see these numbers, 
they will soon be coming to these microphones overjoyed, joyful, 
excited that the policies from the Republicans over the last couple of 
years have brought economic numbers that a lot of those really smart 
professors, economists, and demographers who sat in front of us over 
the last decade said were impossible.
  We need to rethink. If you claim you care, maybe we should engage in 
policies that really do work. Just as the Wall Street editorial makes 
very, very clear, we have seen distribution not lift people out of 
poverty. In many ways, the math has kept them in poverty. But the 
economic expansion, the economic miracle from the last couple of years, 
is working. Maybe we should consider doing more of it. So, look, that 
is just an intense frustration I have.
  I want to start with this slide, sort of as the thought experiment. I 
am someone who cares a lot about the environment, but I also care about 
telling the truth about the math. Virtue signaling does not make the 
environment healthier and cleaner. It may get you reelected. It may get 
you some nice comments on Twitter or a blog. It doesn't make the 
environment better. So every once in a while I will bring this slide 
up.
  D.C. is one of the communities that has banned straws. Bless them. 
How many U.S. straws end up in the ocean? Oh, pretty much none.
  Madam Speaker, 90 percent of the ocean plastic--and I am someone, 
before I got this job--look, I am blessed to represent one of the 
greatest districts you can imagine, lots of smart people, lots of 
people who care. Lots of people have chosen to move their lives, their 
existence, their prosperity, and work hard in the Phoenix-Scottsdale 
area. But when you are in the desert, you used to love to go to the 
ocean and go scuba diving. So plastic in the ocean was always one those 
things you talked about, you cared about.
  Madam Speaker, 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 
rivers, eight of them in Asia, two of them in Africa. If you cared 
about plastic in the ocean, you would do something that is simple and 
logical: Go to the 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the 
ocean and do something.
  A number of us on the Republican side are trying to find ways to 
adjust parts of our foreign policy, our environmental aid, some of our 
engineering skills, and those things to these locations of these 10 
rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean. It is 
absolutely fascinating the reaction I have had from some of our 
brothers and sisters who just stare at me because--well, that pretty 
much ends the virtue signaling of: We are going to get rid of straws, 
even though 90 percent of the problem is these 10 rivers, eight in 
Asia, two in Africa.
  If you claim you care, learn the actual facts, because virtue 
signaling does not make this world cleaner.
  Let's talk about this last week and optimism. Amazing article, a 
company called TerraPower, and apparently, Bill Gates is a substantial 
investor in it. It is a new, dramatically more efficient type of 
nuclear power. There were some numbers in the article that I thought 
were important for the continuation of the thought experiment.
  About 20 percent of America's electric power comes from nuclear. 
Seventeen percent comes from renewables. Nuclear still is more than 
renewables. About 63 percent is from fossil fuels.
  Here is the problem with that: If you take a look, the column over 
here on my right--if you are watching this, your left--are different 
nuclear power generation that has been shut down or is being shut down. 
This goes back to 2016. That was some of the newest data I could find. 
The other side is photovoltaic.
  Do you notice something? The two lines are almost identical. If you 
are someone that is giddy--and look, I am from Arizona. We love our 
photovoltaic, but we also have the largest nuclear power plant, which 
is run by Arizona Public Service, in the country at amazing uptime. 
They do an amazing job running that facility. But this is nuclear power 
coming offline. That is photovoltaic going online.
  You will notice there is no net positive. If you are someone that 
cares about CO2, greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere, 
unless you are stabilizing nuclear power, instead of taking it offline, 
you didn't get anywhere. But we reward virtue signaling around here and 
not actual math.
  Let's talk some more about the good news and some of the technology 
breakthroughs that are happening around us. This one is one of my 
favorites because something the Committee on Ways and Means did last 
year--and we did it bipartisan, demonstrating you can do these things--
is we updated what we call the carbon sequestration tax credit.
  This is a facility that is up and running--what is it?--outside the 
Houston area, in Texas. I hope I don't butcher the technology, but it 
is a natural gas-fired power plant with no smokestack. They figured out 
how to take the natural gas, explode it, slam it through the turbines, 
spin the turbines, produce electricity, and on the other end, capture 
all the CO2. Then they sell it, recycle it. Now we are 
learning they can take that CO2, and through a process--I 
think you have to put it to like 150 bars of pressure and those 
things--it turns out it becomes an incredibly clean-burning fuel 
because it is really pure carbon.
  This facility, I think--if I remember the article--they are trying 
now to find funding to go up to around 300 megawatts. But they have 
proven you can burn a hydrocarbon, produce baseload electrical power, 
and not have a smokestack.
  The technology is up and running today and, apparently, a few miles 
away, there is another plant that is doing the same experiment with 
coal and no smokestack.
  This is a big deal, but there are many of us who also think of the 
greenhouse gas issue as global. When you have countries like China and 
its Belt and Road Initiative, it is bringing on 32, 33 coal-fired power 
plants with functionally almost no greenhouse gas mitigation, carbon 
capture. They are not using the newest technology.
  What happens to a world where someone like myself says that we need 
the economic growth, that we don't have the economic growth, that we 
can never keep our economic promises that we have made to our seniors? 
Retirement security is crucial to economic expansion, but we want a 
clean environment.
  The lunacy of some of the proposals, I beg of them, please, come by 
our office. We have binders of the disruptive technology that is coming 
out. This is one that I think we have to be joyful about.
  How many of you have ever heard the discussion of negative carbon 
emissions? We have discussed this concept for 100 years. You can pull 
CO2 out of the air.
  It turns out this facility is up and running in its pilot project. 
Bill Gates

[[Page H7983]]

is also a funder of this. It is in Canada. I wish it was in Arizona. 
They are claiming right now that their facility can pull carbon out of 
the air for about $100 to $150 a ton, capture that carbon, package it, 
and make a clean-burning fuel out of it.
  If the rest of the world continues to go the way it is going, the 
concept that we now have the technology to yank carbon out of the air, 
and if it is really heading toward $100 a ton, it is at the threshold 
where it is economical because, it turns out, the dollar values--some 
of the sequestration tax credits we do, but also the ability to convert 
it back into a fuel, it is almost in the money.
  This is exciting. How many did you hear talk about this technology 
over the last 10 days? It is here.
  My beloved university, Arizona State University, the biggest 
university in the United States, has an entire center devoted to this 
concept of technology that is a negative carbon sink. Functionally, it 
pulls carbon right out of the air. Their technology is passive, where 
the other one is active.
  The professor working on this--I have met with him--freaky smart. He 
has a joyful view that basically says let's let the technology compete. 
Whoever does it the best will win.
  This one is more a distributive model of this passive collection 
where you can put it in lots of locations. Part of it is the cover for 
your bus stop, but it is also pulling carbon out of the air.
  The technology is here, so the Malthusians of this place--and if you 
don't know what that means, please go look it up--somehow think we need 
to go back and live in the dark ages, basically, or that man has 
demonstrated over and over technology is a disruption.
  Look, when I was growing up, I remember having a teacher read us the 
Population Bomb, scaring me to death that by the late 1970s, we were 
all going to be starving. How many of our kids out there today hear the 
propaganda on some of the reactionaries, the folklore about what is 
happening out there, that they are going to be in a planet that is 
burning up in their late teenage years?
  The issues are real, but so are the technology solutions. It turns 
out solutions often aren't as elegant as a great speech with lots of 
virtue signaling.
  I am very proud of the things that are happening out there.
  A final bit of this thought experiment is, years ago, we were 
blessed--we had a Ph.D. of physics. I think he is now--well, he is at 
one of those special agencies that does really complex stuff right now. 
But he did a math experiment for us. Methane, in our formula, was 
considered 84 times more greenhouse-causing in its first year than 
carbon. So, okay, you get 84-to-1.

                              {time}  1915

  He came to me with this math experiment saying, if you could build a 
substantial pipeline or multiple pipelines in west Texas and a couple 
other large hydrocarbon-producing areas and it was designed to capture 
methane and take that methane and pull it in in enough density to 
actually convert it to a fuel, and then he had that and a couple other 
things, you hit the Paris accord numbers.
  Isn't that exciting? How many of our brothers and sisters here are 
already saying we need to be building a bunch more pipelines to go 
collect that methane so we can capture it, compress it, make sure it 
doesn't go into the air--except pipelines are, functionally, part of 
the religious process here and need to be opposed.
  If anyone is watching, listening, go look this up: photosynthesis, 40 
percent. I actually believe this may be the single most disruptive bit 
of technology in our lifetimes.
  It looks like the inherent problem of plants. You remember all of 
your high school biology class where we were told plant cells have had, 
for millions of years, a small flaw. Sometimes they really, really want 
that carbon molecule so they can make a sugar out of it and, instead, 
they grab an oxygen molecule.
  Apparently, through synthetic biology, they figured out how to 
rearrange that plant cell so it always grabs the carbon. It grows the 
sugar, and the plants grow 40 percent more efficient.
  Think about that. What would happen if that technology was part of 
our commodity crops, our fresh produce, the things we eat. The world 
would feed itself for another 250 years. It would mean 40 percent less 
land, 40 percent less water, 40 percent less fertilizer.
  It turns out, world agriculture produces 2.2 times the greenhouse 
gases of every car on Earth. Do you know, if you had this type of 
technology as the crops for around the world, it would be equal to 
removing every car off the face of the Earth?
  And, yes, it is a GMO, because the fix was done through a type of 
synthetic biology.
  But it would equal removing every car off the face of the Earth.
  These are joyful thought experiments, but the technology is real, and 
it is here. We have to figure out, as a body, how we adopt these things 
that it proves we can grow as a society, we can grow economically as a 
world.
  My soon-to-be 4-year-old little girl can have an amazing future. We 
don't have to be terrified about the debt cliff that is going to crush 
us because we grew. And we can have the amazing clean environment and 
deal with the issues of greenhouse gases.
  Are we ready to pull our heads out and actually do that crazy thing 
of reading and math and understand the technology disruption is in 
front of us?
  Madam Speaker, are we ready to adopt, embrace the technology 
disruption that allows us to grow, prosper, and meet so many of our 
goals?
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________