[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 47 (Wednesday, March 11, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H1655-H1658]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  PUTTING ECONOMIC REPORTS IN CONTEXT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we try to come here every week to do 
sort of a combination of economic reports and what we believe is a 
solution to long-term debt.
  Often, we sort of get a little, shall we say, technical, if not a bit 
geeky. But, tonight, I am going to try to do a little bit of that but 
also try to put it in context to where I think we are.
  We in the Joint Economic Committee, and also even some of the staff 
from the Ways and Means Committee--and bless their souls for tolerating 
my questions. They have been very helpful, but there is still a lot of 
things we don't know. But I want to start off with encouragement.
  About 20 minutes ago, I got off the phone with my father. My father 
is in his mid-eighties, still doing pretty darn well but still has some 
health issues.
  How do you turn to a family member like that--he is blessed to live 
in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is just a beautiful, beautiful place--and 
say, ``Father, for the next few weeks, you may want to not go to the 
different activities,'' which I know he loves, the art shows, the art 
walks, and all of these other things that are activities in our 
community.
  For the next few weeks, because of the things we are learning about 
the coronavirus, the populations that appear to be most at risk are 
those with a series of health issues. Do you have heart issues? Do you 
have diabetes? Do you have lung issues? Particularly, are you in your 
seventies or, in my father's case, mid-eighties?
  Sort of the moral outreach I am going to ask everyone to think about 
is my call to him: ``Hey, we have family in the neighborhood. If we can 
convince you to maybe spend a little bit more time around the house and 
avoid crowds and some of your activities, we will be happy to make sure 
food and things are dropped off at the house. If you need your 
pharmaceuticals picked up, we will be happy to go out and do that. We 
will try to be good family and be supportive.''
  Why don't we take that same concept, as both Democrats and 
Republicans, and say to the VFW, the Legion, my Knights of Columbus 
club, or some of the other things in our community: Are you reaching 
out to the seniors in your community?

                              {time}  1900

  Are you reaching out to those who may have certain health issues?

[[Page H1656]]

  If they are making the decision to follow what our county and State 
health departments are suggesting, what the CDC, HHS, and the others 
are suggesting, that, if you are in those more statistically vulnerable 
populations, you are going to stay home, avoid the crowds, those 
things, at least for a few weeks, what do we as a community do? What do 
those organizations do to reach out to their friends and their members 
and let them know they are loved and let them know we care, but also 
provide a little bit of that human contact, even if it is through the 
phone, even if it is through FaceTime.
  We were having the conversation of putting my little daughter a 
little more so he could FaceTime and have that contact with his 
granddaughter, but also picking up the food, the pharmaceuticals, and 
other things so that we don't create a situation where we take a 
vulnerable population and make them isolated from everyone else; so 
just a little moment of kindness, a little moment of thought.
  If it is our grandparents or the friend from over at the VFW and they 
happen to be in those age brackets, they have what they call morbidity, 
comorbidities--and I always mispronounce that, so forgive me--what do 
we as a community do to try to actually reach out and be supportive and 
be helpful?
  These are the sorts of things that those of us who are Members of 
Congress go to, all these briefings. We hear all the statistics. We are 
moving money around. We are trying to get the manufacturing and testing 
of all these things where they need to go. And a lot of good things are 
happening.
  We know there are a lot of really smart people going as fast as they 
can, but now is the moment also for a lot of us in our communities to 
reach out and say: Look, the experts are saying, at least for the next 
few weeks, maybe the best thing is, if you are in that defined 
vulnerable population, stay home.
  How do we, as their friends and neighbors, make sure that they are 
not feeling locked away and isolated, that they are still loved and 
they are still part of our community? It is also our moral obligation 
to reach out and help our neighbors, bringing things to their doorstep.
  So, actually, what I am calling for--that is not Republican or 
Democrat; it is actually being human--is that idea of let's make that 
happen.
  This evening I am going to do a telephone townhall in our district. 
That is actually going to be one of the themes. We have already been on 
the phone reaching out to a number of the veterans service 
organizations because we know, in a lot of their organizations, their 
mean ages are much, much older.
  So how do we get the younger veterans now to actually be that contact 
with the world for those older veterans who may be choosing to isolate 
for a little bit?
  Madam Speaker, math is math. We see the data that so many who are 
young seem to be doing just great. Someone like myself, I am a fairly 
severe asthmatic. I worry a little bit. But we are washing our hands, 
and we are taking the basic precautions you would take during any 
severe flu season.
  We actually now have a little timer in our office, and every couple 
of hours, we are washing the doorknobs and doing things like that. It 
is a little compulsive, but it is the right thing to do.
  So I just ask all of us, don't be macabre, don't be looking down. 
This is just part of life. But let's treat it like adults. Let's 
respect the professionals and their talents and the information they 
are providing us and let's work through this. Let's do the right 
things. But also, let's not isolate those populations we are being told 
are vulnerable.
  On one hand, we are saying: You really should stay out of crowds, 
stay out of these things for a few weeks. We have the moral obligation 
to make them know they are still loved and cared for.
  All right. A couple of things I do want to go through because we are 
trying to get our head around what is happening economically.
  The fact of the matter is we just don't know yet. We don't have 
enough inbound data. I can give you some great data where we were a 
week ago. Has that changed? I promise you it has changed. But how much?
  The good news is we went into this March actually surprisingly 
economically healthy. Do you remember last Friday, the jobs report 
number?
  Now, remember, that jobs report number is looking back over the last 
month and working out particularly over the last week and the hires. 
But when you are gaining over 273,000 new jobs, Madam Speaker, that is 
pretty amazing, particularly where we were in the cycle.
  Forgive me for reaching back here. I hope I am not breaking a 
protocol, but I actually subscribe to an app called GDP Now. It is the 
Atlanta Fed's calculator.
  On March 6--that is the last update--they were at 3.1 percent GDP for 
this quarter. That is wonderful.
  Do I think we are going to end up there? Probably not. But it at 
least lets you know there was something really, really positive 
happening in the economy.
  When you start seeing numbers like this where we were hitting 3.5 
percent unemployment--and I am going to touch on that just because I am 
fascinated with labor force participation and what that means to 
economic growth, but also what it means to the numbers of people in our 
community who are choosing to come back into the labor force, come back 
to work.
  These are people who quit. There are fancy economic terms of the 
marginally detached, but from a societal standpoint and from an 
economic standpoint, when those who are not looking all of a sudden 
start popping up in the data as coming back into the labor force, these 
are wonderful things. We were clicking along pretty darn well.
  When you start looking at this February jobs report, we, as all 
Americans, should have been really happy with the economic robustness 
and stability.
  I am also going to show another board and demonstrate how we are also 
the engine that is basically saving the rest of the world economically. 
We are pulling the rest of the world along where, just a few years ago, 
3 years ago, the rest of the world was actually moving up and they were 
sort of pulling us along. Now that is somewhat reversed.

  You always have to put that in context, Madam Speaker, because it 
gives you a sense of how strong the last couple years have been 
economically, particularly for labor markets.
  I have been behind this mike a dozen times showing the wage charts 
and the miracle that has really happened the last couple years for the 
working poor.
  It is a certain societal cruelty we have had for the last couple 
decades of our brothers and sisters who didn't have particular skills 
or may not have finished high school, the really smart economists were 
functionally writing them off. They were going to be part of the 
permanent underclass.
  In many ways, if you sort of step back, there is a level of cruelty 
in just taking any American and saying: You don't have certain things 
we think the economy is going to look for. We are writing you off.
  One of the great miracles we have had in the last couple years is 
that population, that bottom 10 percent of income earners--we refer to 
them as the working poor because they often have very moderate to low 
to none in the way of skills--their wages have actually been going up 
the fastest, double the mean of everyone else.
  So part of our theme is also growth is moral. You can see it in 
society in how many people who have had a pretty rough decade seem to 
have come back the last couple of years.
  But now we are going to have to face the issues of what do the next 
couple months look like with the coronavirus, what sort of disruption, 
what do we do as a body to maximize economic stability, also be 
rational, and then get back to the pattern that actually was helping so 
many Americans start to have these opportunities.
  Madam Speaker, hopefully, that doesn't become partisan. Hopefully, 
that is just math and smart people coming up with ways, because those 
policies actually affect people's lives. That is the decision whether 
you can buy that new vehicle or buy a house or some of these other 
opportunities out there.
  This slide is one we have been working on as a concept. It is a 
little noisy,

[[Page H1657]]

and these are really hard types of charts to read and look at, but it 
is really important.
  We had lots of smart people a couple years ago basically saying that, 
as we are getting older as a society, we are never getting back to 
those days of the mid-1960s and labor force participation. It is just 
not going to happen.
  Then we started to break apart some of the numbers, and we found this 
really interesting thing out there: We have, functionally, millions of 
Americans who were not looking--they basically had quit in previous 
years--who suddenly are coming back into the labor force.
  So this is a slide of the share of newly employed from outside the 
labor force. So these are folks we don't consider traditionally as, 
well, they are part of our unemployment statistics or they are part of 
the rolling--they are getting unemployment benefits, or they have been 
looking, or even outside the marginally attached population. These are, 
functionally, folks who were not even looking.
  What is stunning is you can see the wild ride we have had. Post the 
2008 recession, this population had just sort of detached. They were in 
the mid-fifties of looking at working, coming into the labor force. 
Today, this population is starting to approach the mid-seventies, and 
it has substantially happened in just the last couple of years.
  I want to argue that is a combination of lots of complex things, and 
it is something we don't talk about enough. Because there has been wage 
growth, the value of their labor has gone up.
  You may actually get some things that are uncomfortable to talk 
about, Madam Speaker, and the numbers are difficult, so it is still 
theoretical. Some things have happened with immigration that have also 
made their labor, possibly, more valuable.
  The other thing also is that work has changed, where, if you or I 
went back 10 or 15 years ago for parts of this population, they are not 
picking up bags of concrete. Now their work has changed. Is that part 
of it?
  We have these fancy economists who come in and walk through all these 
different reasons, and we are trying to get our head around it, but the 
one thing we know is that there is something good happening in our 
society.
  How do we as policymakers, those of us on the more conservative side, 
our brothers and sisters who might be on the more liberal side, and 
some of the people in the middle who call themselves moderate, how do 
we actually come up with ways to keep these good things happening? How 
do you do that in a society right now where our politics are often so 
polarizing?
  I want to argue we actually have a moral obligation to figure out 
things that are working, figure out what is making them work, and do 
more of it.
  This is a slide I am just putting up because it rounds out a 
discussion we were having a couple of weeks ago about what is happening 
in the world.
  If you see the blue, Madam Speaker, that is the G-7. That actually 
has the United States in it. If you look at the orange, that is 
actually the G-7 without the United States. So call it the G-6, I 
guess. The green is the United States.
  If we go back to the numbers that were coming out in 2017, you see 
the rest of the world through economic growth was very similar to the 
United States. They were helping us; we were helping them. But you can 
also see the last couple years the United States' economic growth has 
dramatically surpassed the rest of the industrialized world, the big 
economies.
  There is this push-pull concept in economic growth. In the last 
couple years, we are basically--if you look at the last two sections of 
the graph, you start to understand that we are the engine that 
functionally has been keeping much of the rest of the world afloat. You 
can also see the incredible spike in growth and the continued growth 
post-tax reform.

  The fact of the matter is what we did in the U.S. tax reform and the 
economic growth that it brought did things for the entire world. It is 
in the charts. It is in the data.
  The other thing I want to put up, and I try to put this up about once 
a month just because it is that continuing conversation that we often 
get lost in our rhetoric and we get a piece of rhetoric in our head, we 
get behind microphones, we say it over and over and then, later on, 
find out that the math actually doesn't match the rhetoric.
  This is actually what we call tax receipts. Many of you will think of 
it as revenues, but the proper term from the IRS and those of us on the 
Ways and Means Committee is ``receipts.'' These are revenues as they 
are booked into Treasury. It is just really, really important to get 
your head around this.
  In 2017, `18, and `19, even though we are post-tax reform and we had 
lots of really smart people--Members of Congress and economists--who 
were saying that this chart was going to crash this way, it didn't. As 
a matter of fact, if you look at this chart, those are the highest 
receipts in U.S. history.

                              {time}  1915

  So I beg of us--at some point those folks who will spend their time 
attacking the tax reform--I understand it is an election year--attempt 
to tell the truth about the math. And the ultimate test is: Are we 
getting the revenues in or not?
  Now, the mix of the revenues has changed. Corporate taxes are down. 
Individual taxes are way up, particularly payroll, because more 
Americans are working. But that was the idea. And it wasn't just a 
Republican idea. If you actually go back during the Obama years, 
President Obama's economic team actually recommended much of the same 
thing in corporate taxes.
  The difference is, it happened over here, so, therefore, it must be 
vilified, even though that is truly unfair. This has been an economic 
concept for years. We finally got it delivered, and it is working.
  This is the chart that I will often get the most phone calls about, 
and it is getting a little dated. We need to update it. The chart is 
not adjusted with constant dollars. That means over the next 30 years--
this is a 30-year chart--you would probably reduce the numbers by a 
third, and that just means adjusting the purchasing power of today's 
dollar for an inflated dollar in the future.
  The chart is very, very simple, though. And it is one where I am 
trying to communicate the future debt--and it is overwhelming--that is 
coming is demographics. It is those of us who are baby boomers; we are 
getting older. We have earned benefits. We have earned Social Security. 
We have earned Medicare. We just have a small problem. We didn't set 
aside the actual cash.
  So here is a simple thought experiment with this chart:
  This is Social Security. This is Medicare. If we would pull those 
out, 30 years from now--actually now, it is like 28 years--we would 
have $23 trillion in the bank. But if we roll Social Security and 
Medicare back in, Social Security and Medicare's shortfall is $103 
trillion at the end of that 30 years, meaning when you add these two 
together, you are functionally at an $80 trillion debt.
  And what is really hard for this body to talk about is saying we have 
made promises, we are going to have to find a way to keep them. So 
every week we try to come here and say, ``there is a way to do that.'' 
But you have to be willing to engage in something that sometimes is 
disharmonious around here, and sometimes just a little complicated. 
Because let's face it, as a body, we have difficulty doing one major 
concept, and our argument is you need to do dozens of things, and we 
almost need to do all of them immediately.
  And what is so frustrating and heartbreaking is almost all of these 
turn partisan. And the ones that are technology we will find a way to 
make partisan and they are all absolutely necessary to create the 
economic growth, to create the price disruption in healthcare. As you 
just saw, most of that $80 trillion debt at the end of that 30 years is 
Medicare.
  I use this slide over and over, but we are trying to make an 
argument. A tax code, a regulatory code, an immigration code that 
maximizes economic expansion, incentives to be in the labor force.
  And think about that. We right now still have a problem with 
millennial males coming into the labor force. We have had a miracle in 
the last 20 months of millennial females coming back in. They are 
coming in like crazy. We still have a problem with millennial men.

[[Page H1658]]

  How about people who are older? Can you design incentives in the 
Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits to stay or come back into 
the labor force with their talents?
  The other one is: Are we willing to actually unleash technology? And 
these are the presentations I have enjoyed the most. Just last week, I 
was here on the floor showing things, technology-wise, that could crash 
the price of healthcare. We actually brought in a slide a couple of 
weeks ago saying there was a major success in being able to put in T-
cells that grew pancreatic cells, and those pancreatic cells in a mouse 
looked like they were growing insulin.
  Now, when you go from a mouse experiment to humans, it is a decade. 
But the previous slide, you saw the math for Medicare--and Medicare is 
the key driver of U.S. debt in the future--30 percent of Medicare's 
debt is just diabetes. As a body, let's make sure the resources, the 
talents, the mechanisms, the encouragement, all the things we can do to 
create those disruptions is not a cure for something like diabetes 
because it is good policy. It is the moral, ethical thing to do, and it 
is also an amazing change in U.S. debt if you just cured diabetes.
  Now diabetes, it turns out, is complicated. There are autoimmune 
issues. There are lifestyle issues. There is 1 and 2. It is 
complicated. But that is the way we need to be thinking around here if 
we are going to have an impact.
  Well, it turns out in that same discussion of technology, a couple of 
years ago, I became fascinated with the concept of a universal flu 
vaccine. And the Gates Foundation, I believe, has moved $60 million 
there. I believe Congress, a couple of years ago, we started to move 
some lines of research money into that concept. Now, we are told it is 
complicated, but we may be a couple of years away from actually having 
a universal flu vaccine.
  So think about the societal economic disruption we believe we are 
stepping into right now. Now, it is not going to last forever, but it 
will last for a little while. Just that technology of something like a 
universal flu vaccine may become the solution that this type of viral--
this economic disruption, societal health disruption, never happens 
again.
  My argument is, I think, fairly elegant. We need to do all these 
growth and cost and technology disruptions. And if we do them, I 
believe we can make an argument that the ability to keep promises--our 
promises for Social Security, our promises for Medicare--there is a 
path. It is just uncomfortable to talk about these things, because when 
you use the word ``disruption,'' that often means someone's business 
model, someone's current technology.

  We have used the example dozens of time here on the floor: ``How many 
of you went to Blockbuster Video last weekend?'' Of course not. The 
technology changed. Now, you hit a button at home and you stream your 
entertainment.
  We need to make sure that those types of disruptions are now 
happening in environment and healthcare technology, and who knows what 
else. We also see some of them even now coming in energy generation.
  So there is a path. We don't have to be dour as we think about the 
future of the United States. It is actually incredibly optimistic. But 
to make the optimism a reality, this body needs to stop being 
dysfunctional. We cannot spend another year of our lives like we did 
last year, functionally accomplishing nothing of value. We are better 
than that. We know there is a path. We actually know the math. Now, 
let's just get our act together.

                          ____________________