[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 52 (Friday, March 19, 2021)]
[House]
[Pages H1606-H1609]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     HONORING REV. DR. C.T. WRIGHT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to do a couple of things 
right now, and one of the first ones is a little conversation about 
someone we lost in my community who actually was a friend and a 
neighbor and had an impact in ways that are hard to describe. I 
desperately wish the Members of this body could have spent time with 
him and his wife.
  It is Rev. Dr. Professor C.T. Wright. What was so unique about him is 
that he was a big man, and he had a voice that carried. You would have 
conversations with him, Madam Speaker, and realize just how incredibly 
brilliant he was.
  He was born in Georgia. He struggled and worked his way up. He ended 
up with a Ph.D. in history from Boston College. He became a civil 
rights leader, yet when you would talk to him about that, Reverend 
Wright--Dr. Wright--actually often wouldn't refer to himself as a civil 
rights leader. He would say: I want to lead for humanity.
  He loved people. It was a different view. He took his struggles, his 
success, and his academic prowess and said: We are going to make 
people's lives better. Why would you dare focus on the color of their 
skin?
  I remember one of the most interesting conversations I had with him 
where he and I were in the back of the room and talked, and he saw many 
of--actually, almost an example of what we just saw on the floor--the 
discussions of politics and race, and said: David, it is class and 
opportunity that divides us. It is not our color; it is our 
opportunity.
  Dr. Wright was just a powerful and brilliant man.
  Madam Speaker, you see his wife there, Mary. They were married in 
1974. Mary was the epitome of love.
  How many of us in our life have that one person?
  I am blessed to have a 5-year-old little girl. But even when she was 
younger, when she would see Mary, Mary would sort of scream, and the 
two of them would run over and hug each other. She was just the epitome 
of love.
  That made them incredibly powerful, as you felt good by just knowing 
Dr. Wright and Mary Wright in your community.
  The other thing that also made him unique was that he was a 
passionate conservative. He was a Republican elector. He was the 
chairman of our clemency board, and he was on my community school 
board. He was brilliant, and he cared about humanity. He ran charities 
and foundations to help all people. They helped people on the continent 
of Africa and even people all through our community. He was a powerful 
force for good because he was good, because he was passionate, and 
because he was caring.
  We lost both Mary and Dr. Wright last year.
  I am going to put in a much more detailed CV because his history goes 
on page after page, and we will put that in the Congressional Record.
  Individuals like them bring us together and also make us better. It 
breaks my heart that more will not get to spend time with him because, 
after a couple of minutes with him and Mary, you felt different.
  The last thing I will say is he loved to give the opening prayer at 
Republican meetings. What was always so fascinating, Madam Speaker, is 
you would watch the room, and the room ends up standing and clapping. I 
was waiting for an altar call. Now, I am Catholic, so I am not used to 
the concept of an altar call, but watching someone be able to have so 
much energy, vigor, enthusiasm, love for people, and love for believing 
that conservatism is how you free people, he made an impact. He made an 
impact on my life, my family's life, my community, and my State, and I 
believe he made an impact on this country.
  Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the memory of Dr. C.T. Wright, a 
passionate, faithful, and devoted public servant and valued neighbor. 
C.T. will be remembered as a mentor and true leader throughout the 
education, criminal justice, and faith communities in Arizona. He 
devoted much of his life to civil rights and education, working for 
many of the country's historically black colleges and universities, 
where he then moved on to his passion to help with human rights. He 
founded the Light of Hope Institute, which promotes human rights around 
the world. He also served as a delegate for the Electoral College and 
met six presidents. C.T. frequently led prayers at campaign rallies and 
promoted faith. He proudly served as the Chairman of the Board of 
Executive Clemency.
  C.T. Wright had great passion for his family, education, faith, and 
freedom. Many will always remember and consider him as their brother. 
He leaves behind a great legacy that has reached out to communities 
across Arizona. He was a thoughtful, compassionate, and kind man who 
always cared for others while ensuring a good future for all.
  C.T. Wright served countless communities unselfishly and served and 
as a great leader. May we continue to honor his memory through our 
passion and service to our communities.


                       Revisiting Net Neutrality

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I want to do a handful of other things 
because, with the craziness of our schedule, we haven't had a chance to 
sort of walk through a lot of policy thoughts. But there was one that 
has been bugging me. I have the hour, so I was going to share something 
that has just been in my craw for a while.

[[Page H1607]]

  Do we all remember a few years ago--ancient history; in politics, we 
seem to have, shall we say, the attention span of a gnat--one of the 
pop culture debates we on the right and left were having was something 
called net neutrality? The Democrats were all into net neutrality, even 
though, I will debate, most of this body had no idea what net 
neutrality was. I want to sort of argue that thank heaven and thank the 
internet gods that the Democrat net neutrality push only lasted 1 year 
or think about how miserable this last year would have been.
  We should be held accountable for our policy beliefs. This is an 
occasion where I have heard no one get up here and talk about what 
society would have looked like in the United States during the pandemic 
if the Democrats' net neutrality policy--remember, they did it for 1 
year, through regulatory fiat.
  The only reason I show this chart is, do you see, Madam Speaker, the 
crash here in spending? It was scheduled to continue to crash in 
spending. That spending was the internet--the pipes, the robustness, 
the speed, and the carrying capacity of the internet--which crashed 
during the Democrat administration's FCC 1 year of functionally doing 
an administrative fiat of net neutrality.
  If that line had continued, how many of you were educating your kids 
on Zoom? How many of you were holding meetings on the internet? How 
many of you had to work from home? How many of us in this body were 
doing committee hearings over the internet?
  Yet, the internet in the United States in 2017, 2018, and 2019 
actually got dramatically more robust and dramatically faster. In many 
communities--particularly on the East Coast, oddly enough--there are 
communities that doubled their speed and the robustness of the pipes.

                              {time}  1330

  It happened because of the massive investment because, thank heaven, 
the crazy policy of what was net neutrality was taken away.
  We need to be honest. Sometimes one needs to be willing to walk up 
and admit, hey, that was a really stupid idea. The one reason this 
country was able to have this disruption and transfer to basically a 
knowledge-based, web-based, internet-based economy was because the 
crazy policies that came with net neutrality of having a robust 
internet only lasted 1 year.
  You can actually see that this is what happened. This is us. This is 
America trying to survive economically and educationally. When you see 
these charts, this was not possible. If that trend, regulatorily, and 
then therefore investment-wise that started in 2016, when the policy 
shift happened, if it had lasted more than a year, this year would have 
been a lot different.
  It is just an occasion where 4 years ago, 5 years ago, some of us 
would get up here and try to explain what it would mean to the 
efficiency, the robustness, the opportunity for even gamers being able 
to use the internet, and we would get great rhetorical comments back, 
often having nothing to actually do with how the internet worked. Thank 
heaven another bad policy only lasted a short time.


                       Building a Robust Economy

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, the other thing I also want to talk 
about is why so many of us who actually own calculators are intensely 
concerned about the left's policy in the last couple of months.
  This is one of those things that I genuinely believe both sides here 
passionately care about and want society to do well, to have 
opportunity, the working poor to become less poor, the poor to become 
less poor, the middle class to be able to thrive; but we just see the 
basics of economics differently.
  I want to spend just a couple of moments and walk through what is 
fact, and we have the facts. Now, first off, how many times over, and 
over, and over do we hear, Hey, post-tax reform, the rich are getting 
richer; the poor are getting poorer?
  That is mathematically absolutely not true. It is a lie.
  It turns out, policies like we have been engaged in just recently 
make the wealthy wealthier. It is a simple thought. When you pump 
massive amounts of liquidity into a society, into an economy, those 
people who own assets get richer. Their stocks go up, their house 
values go up, and other assets they have go up.
  But if you are part of the poor or working poor, how many stocks do 
you own? How much real estate do you own?
  Yet the basic economic principles that you get to look at over and 
over, the $1.9 trillion spending bill violated almost all of the 
principles.
  So you say, okay, so we are going to deliver actual checks. Great. 
Okay. That will have an impact for several months. It will reduce 
poverty for several months, but it doesn't change the base.
  A year later, are you being paid more? Are there more job 
opportunities? Is your labor valuable?
  Because the remarkable thing that happened in 2018 and 2019 is the 
working poor, their labor became valuable. They became essential to the 
society, to economic growth.
  I sat through joint economic hearings in previous years and listened 
to the arrogance of the economists, the arrogance of the political 
class who said: Well, they didn't finish high school. They are going to 
be part of the permanent underclass. We will just find a way to 
subsidize them and write them off in society instead of making them 
valuable.
  And that is what we have gone back and done again. And the problem is 
that we have done it in a way where we think we have big hearts. We are 
going to send checks.
  But what about the year after? Did they make their labor, their skill 
sets, or their lack of skill sets, desirable in the economy?
  So a simple point--and if I actually even had better data, this would 
even be more dramatic--in 2013 to 2019, you can see the orange there, 
and that is actually pretty much the wealthy in our country.
  Under the previous administration, you can see--and when I say 
``previous,'' I am talking Obama--the wealthy got substantially 
wealthier than the poor, and it is because the lack of understanding of 
what creates economic vitality. This here is almost solely 2018 and 
2019. The poor got wealthier; not the rich, the poor.
  The working poor moved up dramatically faster than the rich.
  Why?
  Well, it turns out, tax reform moved lots of capital into making 
plants and equipment more efficient, meaning you pay people more.
  You all remember your basic economics class. What are the two things 
that raises someone's wages?
  Inflation--which means you paid more, but you didn't get anything 
more--and productivity.
  When you raise a business's, the society's, the community's 
productivity, people get paid more. That is what was happening here. We 
made the working poor less poor through tax; regulatory; and 
immigration policy, which is something I will touch on at the end 
because it is very uncomfortable for a lot of people to talk about.
  Immigration policy is complex from an economic standpoint, but if you 
love and care for those who are just struggling and trying to survive, 
they may not have had the opportunity to go to grad school or college. 
They may not have even graduated high school, but they are out there 
trying to provide for themselves and their families and the people they 
love and care for.
  Why do we adopt policies like this that don't make their labor 
valuable, and then we choose to flood the market with similar skill 
sets to devalue the labor?
  There is this weird duplicity that happens here, where we talk about 
helping those who need help, and then we engage in policies, whether it 
be immigration policy, regulatory policy, particularly tax and spending 
policy, that ends up crushing the very people we claim we are trying to 
help.

  I know charts are annoying, but the math is the math. If you look at 
this one, you start to see the percentage of American households that 
were in poverty. We had substantially plateaued. We weren't getting 
better as a society. And then all of a sudden over here, you see we 
started doing what was necessary to expand, create opportunity. And, 
yes, it meant getting businesses to have to compete with each other by 
putting money into more efficient equipment and doing things that 
lifted Americans and created value for labor, even the very low-skilled 
labor.

[[Page H1608]]

  You start to see in 2018 and 2019, America hitting its lowest poverty 
rates ever; income, food insecurity, the lowest ever. The working 
poor's labor became valuable. And if you actually want to go into the 
subsets--which I have chart after chart after chart--if you claim you 
care about African-American females or this subset or that subset, you 
see that some of those subsets have movement in the value of their 
talents and their labor, which was remarkable.
  We had, I think, a quarter in early 2019, or it was late 2018, where 
African-American women had almost a double-digit rise in wages in an 
entire year. It was like a 7.3 percent rise in wages.
  I know, as a Republican, we have this bad habit of sounding like 
accountants on steroids, but these numbers really do mean something. It 
is people. It is how they feed their family, how they save for 
retirement, how they have an opportunity. There were amazing things 
happening.
  We talk a lot about income inequality, which I actually have a 
personal fixation on this. And if you actually look at the first time 
we had major movement in the drop of income inequality in this society, 
it was 2018 and 2019. And it wasn't because rich people got less rich. 
It was because the poor, the working poor got dramatically less poor.
  We adopted policies that made their labor valuable. Then the pandemic 
hit and we had to rebuild.
  But are we rebuilding in a way that makes their labor valuable?
  I am going to make an argument that what we just did, we are going to 
get a nice little sugar high, but for a very short time.
  And then the next day, what are their job prospects?
  If you are someone who didn't finish high school, but you are willing 
to work your heart out, you are willing to learn, what opportunities 
did the last spending bill provide for that person? How many new jobs 
did it help create? How much economic expansion? How many capital 
expenditures to make their jobs more productive so they can be paid 
more?
  Instead, what we did is we said: Here is some money, and, oh, by the 
way, we are going to raise taxes over here coming later this year and 
those things, so your job prospects--it is a technical economic term--
you are screwed in the future.
  Do we think more than just the next election cycle?
  If we are going to make the poor less poor in this country, you need 
opportunity. We just spent $1.9 trillion and not a dime of it creates 
opportunity, creates what the future should look like.
  So we say we care. We both care. The problem is, I have the numbers 
that show what worked. The other side has decades of doing the same 
thing and income inequality and poverty didn't get better. They are 
blips. But those blips were from direct cash, unless the plan is just, 
hey, we are going to do direct cash forever and ever and ever, and that 
is really going to be great for society and the psyche of our society.
  Once again, I am sorry to do this, and I hate this term, but it is 
the only one the economists around here all use, which is 
``quartiles.'' Here is the lowest income quartile. Take a look at 2019, 
if you are willing to embrace math.
  I always thought that would be the great Christmas gift around here, 
is to buy everyone a calculator. A family joke is: Daddy works in a 
math-free zone.
  It was a remarkable change in the value of those workers and what 
they were paid, and it is because their talent, their labor that they 
had to offer became more valuable.
  Look at what happened in 2019. That is what changes a society, 
because the idea is, you build a base, and then the next year you build 
on it, and then the next year you build on it, and the next year you 
build on it. That is one way to remove lots of your society out of 
poverty.
  The other is to do what the Democrats are doing right now and saying: 
We are going to send you a check.
  Okay. What happens the day the check is gone? Did you make society 
more prosperous? Did you take the working poor of our country and make 
it so the value of their labor that they offer is more valuable the 
next day, and the next day, and the next day?
  You didn't. The only way you basically have to backfill is you have 
got to send another check. It is just societal suicide and lunacy.
  I understand pandering and politics, but at some point you wish you 
had a quiet room with some economists to say: How do we have a 
revolution in our society that we have dramatically less poor and the 
working poor are dramatically less poor? And how do we get there? And 
how do we do this over the next decade?
  Because I will make you the argument that what was happening 
particularly in 2018 and 2019 were remarkable numbers. So let's go to 
the next quartile up. It turns out the same thing was happening.
  And when you actually look at the stratification of these quartiles--
I am sorry, it is geeky--the lowest quartile, a traditionally very, 
very low skill set. Second quartile, up some skill set. And you 
actually see remarkable--I mean, a $2,600 increase in the value of 
their labor for the second quartile, which is still poverty. It is 
working poor, but this quartile, if you look at that, that is 
remarkable.
  This is actually accounting for earning of tax credit and transfer 
payments, working through what was economic, and it was the value of 
their labor.

                              {time}  1345

  Once again, for all of us that keep coming behind these microphones--
and, you know, particularly the darkness of this body right now, we see 
so much of the debate being about the pigment of someone's skin instead 
of the economic circumstances, the class, as Dr. Wright would often 
refer to, and what we do to create opportunity.
  And this chart here basically is just pure salary. What happened to 
the mean weekly, real earnings? Now, remember, these are inflationary 
adjusted. So I do my best to make sure the math is as honest as 
possible. And when you actually start to see the quartiles of African-
American wages taking a huge spike up in 2018 and 2019--Anglos, 
Hispanics--really the growth rate in their wages was remarkable. And 
there are some other charts, which are really hard to read, that are a 
little geeky, that say, okay, here is the level of skill set, 
educational attainment, those things.
  It turns out, we had such a robust economy that those who are often 
at the tail end of educational attainment actually had the fastest 
growth in wages.
  So you go back to the earlier chart, saying, turns out the working 
poor got substantially less poor, the rich got richer, but nothing at 
the same percentages. And that is why the economic inequality shrank. 
That is the honest math. Yet, you don't hear it in the rhetoric here, 
because the rhetorical divide of our society is so much more powerful 
and desired, because it is about winning the next election than 
actually doing what is important to make society great.
  So right now--and this is a hard one to talk about, because we have 
so politicized it that trying to look at it through an economic lens is 
really hard. I will get folks--whenever I start to walk through these 
numbers, folks will send me crazy stuff. And I am trying to say this 
isn't about ethnicity; this is--I am doing labor economics.
  Janet Yellen is supposed to be a brilliant labor economist, yet when 
you hear her speeches recently--or now that she is Treasury Secretary--
it rips your heart out, saying, at least take a breath and compliment 
what happened in the previous couple of years, but that would mean 
saying something nice to free market economics.
  Right now, we estimate--and this is the best number I can get my 
hands on--that about 4\1/2\ percent of the labor force is undocumented.
  In a society right now where, if you actually really dive into labor 
force participation numbers, unemployment is probably double the number 
we post. You know, people who should be in the labor pool aren't there, 
the folks who were the miracle of, particularly, 2018 and 2019, the 
number of folks who came back into the labor force--remember, we 
actually had some quarters there with some weird numbers where 
unemployment actually sort of flatlined, but the number of workers in 
the United States exploded. How does that happen?

[[Page H1609]]

  It means you have such a robust economy that you are drawing people 
back in.
  The crisis we live in today is so many Americans, particularly female 
workers, are now out of the labor force, with almost no intention of 
coming back in. What is devastating about that is we just passed 
legislation here that will reinforce the incentive not to come back in. 
Because, instead of designing the Democrat's $1.9 trillion spending 
bill saying, We are going to incentivize; we are going to help you; you 
can keep some of this money; and we are going to incentivize an 
employer to hire you, building that type of economy. It is, Here is 
something; you can have it if you work; you can have it if you just 
choose to stay home. There is no incentive there to come back into the 
labor market.
  And why is this so darn important? Why do I fixate on this?
  Post-tax reform, if you actually looked at the changes in revenues--
remember, we had the second and third highest, adjusted for inflation, 
tax receipts in U.S. history post-tax reform, post the lower rates. It 
is because the economy, the pie, got so much bigger. But what was so 
special about that is the trust funds that so many of us had worked on, 
that--we were really worried how fast the Medicare trust fund was 
collapsing, the Social Security trust fund was collapsing. The 
actuarial life of them popped, it got longer. It is because we had so 
many more workers who were paying into it.
  Remember, we have a pay-as-you-go system. When you hear the words 
``trust fund,'' there is really very little cash in those trust funds.
  If you care about protecting Social Security, if you care about 
protecting Medicare, if you care about society and these promises we 
have made, you would think the economics, the policy we are adopting 
here, are about maximizing opportunity employment, not trying to patch 
over pain that we are suffering right now in a way that makes the next 
day painful again.
  So the last thing--and it actually does tie in. I am going to 
personalize this a little bit. I am blessed to live in a community 
where my school is open.
  The greatest gift that has ever been given to me in my life, and my 
wife, is we have a little girl. Many know we struggled for years, and 
we were able to adopt a little girl. She is the greatest joy you can 
imagine.
  She is in higher education now. She is in kindergarten. And this 
summer, for her first month--this is back in August--she had to sit at 
home behind a little laptop doing Zoom class, as a kindergartner. At 
that time she was 4\3/4\. She tested in early.
  And she was miserable. I had a little girl--I didn't know this could 
happen, that a child that young could be depressed. She was miserable.
  ``Daddy, can I go to Washington with you?''
  ``Daddy, can I go to work with you?''
  ``Daddy, don't make me sit behind the computer.''
  ``Daddy, I don't like this.''
  And then after about 3\1/2\ weeks, the school district actually 
followed the science. Not the politics; they followed the science. Not 
the teachers' union; they followed the science. They started letting 
the little people into school. They took the proper precautions, and my 
little girl wears a mask and they sterilize their hands. They follow 
rational precautions.

  Within just days, it is like I had a different little girl. She was 
joyful. She was happy. She announced she had a boyfriend. Daddy is not 
happy about that.
  If that is my personal experience, what have we done to our society? 
What have we done to the next generation?
  I came here last week and did a series of presentations of what we 
have done to individual future earning power, particularly the 
categories we just talked about, the working poor, their future 
earnings, their future income. We have crushed them, because today's 
success builds on the next. What happens when you take an entire year 
away from so many people's career paths, from building their base?
  Now, this is international, but we came across this; it is a sense of 
well-being of young people and older people from around the world.
  We all saw that article from about a month ago about Las Vegas County 
and the number of suicides of children. And this one, when you look at 
it, it is our kids. We have devastated our kids.
  My fear is we are going to spend decades making up for the schools 
being closed, the access to nutrition, the access to counseling, and 
the access to just human relationships. Why would we ever allow our 
public policy to do this sort of violence to the health and well-being 
and psyche of the children that we claim we care about, because the 
teachers' union has a different agenda?
  I hope we, as Members, and I hope America remembers what happened 
here. I also hope the next time the left comes with a massive spending 
bill, they understand how much that money needs to go into repairing 
the damage we have done to our children, to the next generation, and 
being willing to recognize that we didn't follow the science; we 
followed the politics.
  Madam Speaker, I wish us all a fine time at home. I hope now that the 
world is getting healthier, we can spend time with our constituents. 
Maybe when we come back in a couple weeks, we can still be partisan, we 
can still duke it out, but we actually make policy by rational math 
instead of the wedge of politics.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________