[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 4 (Wednesday, January 8, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H53-H56]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
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THE MATH IS ALWAYS THE MATH
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Cunningham). 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 will cover two or three different
subjects today, a little different than we typically come and we walk
through some of the economic data and the concept of I believe the
greatest threat to our society is not telling the truth about the scale
of the unfunded liabilities, the promises we have made and the fact of
the matter that there is no mathematical way we keep those promises.
I have the blessing of being here in Congress. I have been here 9
years, and I have grown to just this intense frustration that we do
math through a partisan lens.
We have a family saying: The math always wins; the math always
eventually wins. So why is it so hard in this place to actually tell
the truth, to own a calculator and say: Here is what is going to
happen; here are our demographics, but here are also the good things
that are working?
Another thing I actually got from my father years ago is: Figure out
what works, and do more of that; figure out what doesn't work, and do
less of that.
So think about this.
Over the Christmas break, I did lots and lots of reading and was
absolutely just furious and frustrated with a number of columns that I
came across talking about the 2-year anniversary of tax reform where we
rewrote much of the tax code to grow the U.S. economy, and we had some
of the, I will call them, the smartest--at least, the most well-known--
economist commentators on the left side trashing the tax reform.
Except, you will notice, if any of you pull up those articles--if you
are willing to--go back and look at the fact they use almost no math in
them. There are no numbers: We just didn't like this. We thought they
should have done this.
Having the blessing of being on the Committee on Ways and Means,
having the blessing of having worked on the tax reform, I do understand
much of what the corporate portion of tax reform was based on: the
Obama administration's recommendations and modeling to make us
competitive in the world again.
But, once again, we work in a place where, if I walk into the room
and I am a conservative and I say the sky is blue, instantly, there is
this knee-jerk reaction from my brothers and sisters
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on the other side--and, please, understand, we are sinners, too--who
say, no, it is not.
The math is the math.
So just for the fun of it, I pulled up a number of the headlines from
2 years ago when we were working on tax reform, when we had just
finished tax reform. Liberal columnist after liberal columnist
basically spoke of Armageddon, spoke that the world is going to fall
apart, said this is going to crush and hurt people.
Mr. Speaker, understand, the last 2 years have been some of the most
remarkable progress in modern U.S. history for the working poor.
We come behind these microphones and we pretend we care about the
poor, particularly the working poor. Do you understand what is
happening in the math? Because the math will always win, and the math
is the truth.
When we did tax reform a couple years ago, did you think we would
live in a country with more jobs than workers, where the bottom 10
percent of workers, income-wise--what we refer to as the working poor--
would have wages growing more than two times the mean and, in some
quarters, almost four times the mean in wages?
I know the math gets a little confusing, but it is important. You
can't walk around here and say you care about the poor, particularly
the working poor, and then not have some little joy in your heart about
what has gone on the last 2 years, particularly this last year.
Remember, last year, a woman with no partner in the house had a 7.6
percent growth in wages. We are seeing remarkable growth in wages for
the very folks who have been most dispossessed over the previous
decade. And, yes, I will have a chart that actually shows that.
Why is the truth off your calculator seen through partisan lenses?
Why can't we just take a breath and say, hey, something really is
working. Was it tax reform? Was it some of the things done regulatory-
wise?
Because, remember, if you go back just a couple years ago--and I have
sat on the Joint Economic Committee now for a few years--we were being
told, with the headwinds of our demographics, we were in for
stagnation. Do you remember 4 years ago? 5 years ago? 3 years ago? That
was the new normal.
Do we get an apology from the folks who wrote these headlines that
had been so dramatically wrong?
Let's just walk through some of the tax reform data so we are
actually living in the reality of the math, and there is a simple point
I want to make.
2017 fiscal year, so the end of the fiscal year, and then during that
time we were working on tax reform, do you know what the growth and
receipts were for this country? They were 1 percent. They were 1
percent--functionally, not even at inflation. We were falling behind.
And this is under the old tax code that the writers of those headlines
were functionally defending.
Do you know what tax receipts--we don't call it revenues; we call it
receipts--were at the end of last fiscal year, the one we ended at the
end of September? We grew slightly more than 4 percent in our receipts.
Now, we still have a spending problem around here. We have a
tremendous demographics problem. That is one of the other things we
never tell the truth about is the substantial portion of our spending
is actually driven by our demographics, which isn't Republican or
Democratic.
We are getting older very quickly as a society. But, once again, are
we able to get up in front of our groups at home or fellow Members of
Congress and not see the math through partisan lenses, because the math
is the math.
Our birthrates have collapsed as a society. Remember, we had only 12
States last year, in really good economic times, that actually had
growth in their birthrates, and some of those were just by a couple
hundred.
We need to tell the truth about the math.
And I have been coming behind this microphone almost every week we
are here saying there is a unified theory of, if you do the things that
are necessary in tax reform, as we are talking about right now, and do
the things necessary in immigration, do the things in labor force
participation, encouragement, if you do the things in adoption of
technology that crashes the price of healthcare, if you do these things
and bring them all together, we can make the math work where we do not
get crushed, as a nation, by our debt.
But we can't even do simple things by agreeing upon it. We can't even
agree when the math actually says it worked. We still have to spin it
through partisan lenses.
So the chart next to me is just very, very, very simple. It is `17,
`18, `19 receipts--not revenues, receipts. Do you notice something?
Remember, the columnists before, the economists, my brothers and
sisters on the left were telling us revenues are going to crash, it is
the Armageddon, this is the Apocalypse--except for one small problem:
We have had some of the fastest growing revenues we have had in modern
times.
The math is the math.
And, look, I have been there. I have been one of those who believe
something. You get the data, and you have to swallow and say: I was
wrong.
Except this place is incapable of stepping up and saying: Hey,
something is working. Maybe we should figure out what is working and
find a way to do more of it.
Because, once again, this has been some of the most remarkable wage
growth for our brothers and sisters, particularly in the lower
quartiles. I hate that terminology, but if you want to designate the
working poor, we have had more movement.
And there are a couple modelers out there--I don't know if the
numbers will be real--looking at the 2019 fiscal year and saying that
might be the first year where wage and equality actually stayed flat or
didn't grow or maybe even shrank because those at the lower income
spectrum have had the fastest growing wage movement. Why can't we take
some joy in that and work on it?
The fact of the matter is the math is the math. So a simple point:
2017.
One more time, 2017, the fiscal year before tax reform, 1 percent
growth in revenues, receipts; last fiscal year, over 4 percent growth
under the new tax code.
How is that possible?
It turns out it is, and it was possible in a really joyous way
because people were working.
If you take a step back and think of so many of the programs we have
as the safety net to help our brothers and sisters when they are in
hard times, there should have been dramatically less demand on those
programs because so many people were working.
If you look at the BLS numbers, Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers,
the numbers that have moved back into the labor force were now--what?--
over 63 percent labor force participation. I can show you an economic
paper from 3 or 4 years ago saying we were never going to get close to
that again until we get through the baby boomers.
Something is working.
We are seeing numbers where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of people are coming back into the labor force who were not
even looking. Why isn't this joyful?
Look, let me relay a simple experience.
The Phoenix area, we have a homeless campus. I have been, on and off,
involved with it for many, many years. I believe we do something very,
very well. We do a concentration of services with many churches and
charities: Over here, dental work; over here, you get your ID; over
here, there is like 24-hour-a-day AA meetings and here are some bunk
beds for those; over here, St. Joseph the Worker that will help
individuals get work, the Catholic charity. And they have a situation
where they have a stack of job opportunities because there is such a
labor shortage in the Phoenix market.
I am very pleased we just worked out a deal, or they worked out a
deal, with Lyft to help deal with the transition barrier of getting
these individuals to work.
But shouldn't there be joy in this body and our society that there is
such a labor shortage that businesses and organizations are taking
chances on the folks we used to just completely write off?
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Remember, it was only a couple of years ago, we would give speeches
around here; if you hadn't finished high school, if you hadn't
developed certain skills you were going to be part of the permanent
underclass. We were writing
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you off. We were walking away from you as a society.
And guess what happened?
Something happened, whether it be the Tax Code or other things that
we have done that there is such a demand for their labor, for their
work, and their wages are going up faster than any other quartile.
You can't come behind these microphones and give speeches about how
you care, and then not actually take a step back and say, something is
working. How do we do more of it?
So let's actually take a look at the reality of the math of the last
couple of decades. The red line are the high-income earners. The blue
line are those in the 25 percent or lower quartile. So let's call it
the bottom-25-percent quartile.
And I know this geeks out, but let's go to about 2010 and over. And
you see through 2010, 2015, about 2016, higher-income earners were
winning the battle. Huge separation. They were making money, while that
lower population that we were walking away from, that didn't have the
high school education, didn't have the higher skill set, their wages
were crashing.
And then something happened over here. That's about the time of tax
reform. Do you notice the separation?
It turns out their labor became valuable, became something in demand,
became something that employers had to pay more for. Isn't that what we
were trying to accomplish? It is in the math.
So it frustrates me that you will come across these articles that
completely demagogue tax reform; refuse to actually use the math; and
then not embrace the fact that it has been one of the most remarkable
couple of years in modern history in the United States of the working
poor starting to see their wages move forward, move up, their labor
having value in our society again.
Look, for many of us, we truly believe economic growth is moral. It
helps families; it helps individuals; it helps self-worth. It produces
opportunity.
Yet, we seem to completely turn the discussion of the things that
create that economic growth into a partisan battle, a partisan malaise.
And it breaks my heart, because the chart I just put up, this is the
greatest threat not only to my 4-year-old daughter, but I believe to
every American.
Do you understand what is coming at us?
This is a 30-year chart. It is not inflation-adjusted. But the math
is true and honest because it is done by an outside group that is
nonpartisan.
If I strip Social Security and Medicare out of the 30-year number--we
have $23 trillion in the bank. If you pull Social Security and mostly,
it is mostly Medicare, back in, the promise, these are earned promises
that we have a moral obligation to keep, we are $103 trillion in debt.
This is over the next 30 years.
Isn't that an incredible moral obligation for this body to tell the
truth on? Because these sorts of numbers, you can take every dime of
the rich and you don't get anywhere near it. You can cut the benefits,
and you still don't get--you cannot deal with these numbers and not
crash the U.S. economy and crash the world economy by doing so.
Our office, and a handful of others, we have been trying to make the
argument: tax reform, grow the economy. Incentives to be in the labor
force, grow the economy. Legalize technology that can crash the price
of healthcare because so much of this Medicare here, that is the
massive driver of the debt.
We can have disruptions. Do you realize almost 30 percent of that
Medicare spending is just going to be diabetes? So investment in
diabetes research is a smart investment.
But also, so are other technologies. The thing you can blow into that
instantly tells you you have the flu, and allowing it, that technology,
to be part of how you keep yourself healthy.
But the reality here is, there is no magic bullet. You have got to
grow the economy. And we have demonstrated the growth in these 24
months since we did tax reform it is working. One of the pillars is
working. How do we build off of it? Because you don't try to make major
policy changes in a time of economic stress. Do it in a time when you
actually have economic stability and build off of it, because this is
the greatest threat to our society. It is demographics. It is not
Republican or Democrat.
It is baby boomers. There are 74 million of us who were born in an
18-year period. We earned our benefits. The problem is--what is it? For
the Medicare spending, we will put in, what? $150,000. We are going to
take out close to $500,000. Now multiply that difference by 74 million.
These are the issues that should be driving every bit of policy.
The simple way is to give this a thought experiment: the next 5
years, just the growth--next 5 years, just the growth of Social
Security, Medicare, and the other healthcare entitlements, just the
growth, equals the entire Defense Department spending.
So if you start to do that math, you could functionally get rid of
every portion of discretionary spending except defense, and you buy
yourself 5 years.
I know this is uncomfortable. It is very hard to go home and talk to
constituents that, on the Republican side, we can take care of waste
and fraud. On the Democrat side, we can tax rich people more. That math
is completely fraudulent.
Why is it so hard to pull out a calculator?
I accept we work substantially in a math-free zone, but when we do
math, don't see it through the lenses of partisanship. It is math.
So, look, I wanted to do a little cheerleading for my home. I am
blessed to be from Arizona. We have worked really hard to be friendly
to those who are willing to come to our state and open up new
businesses. We have worked really hard to limit the bureaucracy. We
have worked really hard to make it easy, as a State, for you to file
paperwork online, to do these things efficiently, and our State has
benefited.
We are functioning at the very top of economic growth, population
growth. There have actually even been quarters in the last couple of
years where we have also had the fastest wage growth.
But it is a demonstration that many, many Americans are making
economic decisions, packing up their lives in a lot of parts of the
country and moving to places like Arizona. I think we are number three
in total growth. And when you consider we are only a State of about
7.25 million people, when you add, you know, when you do the per
population growth, we are at the very top.
Arizona, we should be very, very proud. We have been very
disciplined. We have built good infrastructure. We have managed our
water supplies. Power, electrical power is abundant. And we have been
friendly to those willing to bring businesses because they create jobs,
they create opportunities. They create growth in wages.
Now, it looks like the rest of the country is starting to see the
headlines. So a community I grew up around, Scottsdale, I believe, just
got rated number one for being able to find a job. Much of the rest of
the community, incredibly well.
But think of some of the--I am trying to build an argument here that
if economic growth is moral, then you see headlines like this, where
when we do surveys about food insecurity, food insecurity is the lowest
in a decade because of that economic growth, because of those folks
that we were writing off just a couple of years ago who now, their
labor is in demand, their wages are up, and we start to see headlines
like ``Food Insecurity At a Decade Low in Arizona.''
Why is it so hard to understand doing smart tax policy, doing so many
other smart economic policies truly are the path to helping our
brothers and sisters who have less?
We always start and end with this chart. If we care about what is
actually going on, if Congress intends to keep the promises to
Americans for their Social Security and Medicare, if we believe it is a
moral obligation of our society to keep that promise, then you need to
deal with the reality that the unfunded liabilities are monstrous.
There is a path, but it is not a path of paying off the debt. It is
basically a path of, I believe, in our model in our office, staying
about 95 percent debt to GDP, so we don't blow up and get through the
demographic bubble that is those of us who are baby boomers. But we
have to do everything. You have to have that and legalize technology
that crashes the price of so
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many things, makes the environment cleaner, makes healthcare much more
affordable and available. Employment, we have to do everything for
those who are older, to encourage them to participate in the labor
force. Add some ``spiffs,'' add some benefits.
How do we get millennial men that are still dramatically
underperforming in showing up in the labor force?
About a year ago, we had an amazing breakthrough, mathematically-
wise, millennial females entering the workforce.
Every policy that moves through here we should test; does this
benefit economic growth?
When we work on immigration policy, are we doing a talent-based
immigration system, where we don't care about your religion, your
gender, or who you cuddle with or anything like that? We care about the
economic vitality you bring to our society.
How do we encourage family formation?
Think of that. This one article here talks about only 12 States
actually had positive birth rates over the previous year.
I know we get caught up in today's shiny object; you know, whether it
is the we hate the President side of this room, or we feel we are stuck
defending. And we are completely missing what is going to end up
driving all public policy in the next couple of years, and that is the
fact that we are going to be crushed by our debt.
There is a path. My fear is this current Congress, are we actually
capable of doing complex policy, lots of complex policy on every issue,
and seeing it as a unified theory to maximize economic vitality so we
actually have the receipts, so we keep the promises that we go home and
tell our constituents we are working for? But, yet, then we come here
and we deny basic math.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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