[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 69 (Wednesday, April 21, 2021)]
[House]
[Pages H2047-H2050]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    UNEMPLOYMENT BY EDUCATION LEVEL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is going to be one of those 
evenings where you have a lot of things to share, but they are actually 
really about two subjects. And I am going to ask us to try to think 
about things a little bit differently. And as is my bad habit, I 
brought a number of charts to just try to get our heads around it.
  Some of what I am going to share tonight--I am going to try to dial 
back the sarcasm, but we have got to get our heads around facts and 
reality.
  One of the first things I want to go through is what we did 
employment-wise, who got hurt during this last year.
  Our brothers and sisters who have sort of less-than-a-high-school 
education, if you see this green chart right there, this is sort of 
talking about the unemployment levels for those who are lower on 
education.
  You have got to understand, this last year was absolutely crushing to 
our brothers and sisters who really either didn't graduate high school 
or barely graduated high school. Their value that they sell is their 
labor. And the numbers are still just really, really high. Look at the 
disproportion between those of us who have bachelor's degrees or 
graduate degrees. We had a blip, but not much of one.
  Individuals here who didn't graduate high school, they are getting 
their heads kicked in, and they still are. So we are going to talk 
about some of the policy going around us.

                              {time}  2045

  And the next part is, it is beyond just unemployment. For those of us 
in the Joint Economic Committee, those on Ways and Means, those who 
actually pay attention to the numbers, the U-6, and all these things 
put out by the Labor Department, the real number we need to pay 
attention to is actually something called labor force participation.
  What does it mean when someone is not in the labor force with their 
skill sets, age?
  Their attachment to work gets broader and more difficult to reattach. 
Their ability to climb to a supervisor or watch their pay go up gets 
really damaged.
  And on this one, do you see this line down here?
  We are, right now, seeing some labor force participation by education 
levels. For those who didn't finish high school, half of them aren't in 
the labor force.
  Do you understand what is going on right now with what we would 
traditionally refer to as the working poor, except they are not 
working?
  Now, part of this is because of the absurd policies we have engaged 
in. What happens when you make public policy by your heart, by 
feelings, instead of math, instead of facts, instead of actual 
compassion that understands what makes someone's life better?
  We just financed keeping people out of the labor force.
  Do you understand? Do we understand? Do we understand? As a body, do 
we understand what we just did to the future earning powers of those 
individuals that we incentivized not to be in the labor force?
  And we are already seeing it.
  Was the goal here to make these individuals permanently poor?
  Because that is what we are accomplishing right now.
  So, obviously, because the rhetoric around here, particularly from 
the left, is that they care about the working poor, we would be seeing 
public policy that actually takes care and helps the working poor, 
makes the value of their labor more valuable.
  What is the single number one thing that crushes the labor value of 
the working poor?
  It turns out--and we were a little surprised, but we did a bunch of 
research--it is when you have an open

[[Page H2048]]

border policy, because, all of a sudden, you have those who actually--
their value economically is selling their labor.
  You now have decided you are going to make them compete with those 
coming across the border. And, on occasion, we will be here on the 
floor and we will hear arguments about compassion for individuals from 
around the world who have presented themselves at our border in 
Arizona. And I just desperately wonder, Where the hell is the 
compassion for the working poor in our own country?
  Here is the math. I mean, you know, the peak pandemic unemployment 
rate was well over 20 percent for those who didn't finish high school, 
for those who basically--their economic value is their labor. But it is 
worse than that. When you have an open border policy, you have 
basically crushed their wages. Their future wages go negative.
  You know, I know we all just heard an hour of border policy and those 
things. Maybe I see too much of the world through sort of an economic 
lens, but I think that is also a fairer lens. It is not meant to be 
brutality right or left. It is a love and compassion for those in our 
society who were being left behind for so long. We are crushing them 
again.
  I mean, the best math we have come up with is if you didn't finish 
high school and you have a society that has moved to open borders, 
which functionally is the math you have added hundreds of thousands of 
new moderate- to low-skill workers.
  What is the value of the skills or lack of skills of a population who 
are already with you?
  On the chart, it goes down well over 6 percent. They are going to be 
paid less. We have just created more poverty not by those who have 
presented themselves at the border, but to our domestic population 
here.
  This is a type of economic cruelty. I mean, it may be a little 
rhetorically flamboyant, but it is a type of economic cruelty on the 
very population that so many of us here talk about we care, talk about 
we want to help. And what is going on right now to the working poor 
with the policy, particularly being promulgated by the left, is 
crushing. And this is just the open border side.
  Do we understand that what we have also done economically?
  Say I came to you tomorrow and said, Hey, here is what we are going 
to do. We are going to pump stunning amounts of money into the economy, 
and we are going to look the other way when we start to see inflation 
on commodity prices, on food prices, and on a lot of the basics. A lot 
of our constituents are going to shrug, and say, Okay, a little bit of 
inflation, fine.
  Has anyone also talked about what inflation does to the working poor?
  The fact of the matter is, when you start to look at the actual 
data--if you are in the top 10 percent of income, a little bit of 
inflation actually makes you wealthier because you own real estate, you 
own assets. They become more valuable. But if you are an individual 
where a substantial portion of your income just goes to pay your food 
bill--what we have engaged in in economic policy this last year is 
substantially malpractice. We are making their lives miserable. And the 
solution from the left is, well, we will just subsidize them more.
  So let's talk about that. Do we understand what you have just done?
  If I incentivize you by--we are going to send you a check, and then 
we are going to give you an additional monthly check, an enhanced 
unemployment benefit, and we will give you maybe some more money for 
this and that. None of those things incentivize you, saying, we know 
you need help, we are going to help you get reattached to work so you 
can gain skills, so you can move up in the organization, so your wages 
can go up so there is actually productivity in the society, so you are 
actually paying taxes into what is your Social Security and Medicare 
account, so you have, what is it, your 60 quarters, all of those things 
that are so important to raising the poor out of poverty.

  Instead, we have done just the opposite. We have financially 
incentivized millions of Americans not to be part of the labor pool. We 
have incentivized millions of Americans for a year to not gain the 
skill sets, the labor attachment.
  There are some of our economists we are talking to that say we are 
going to spend decades paying for this. And it is right in front of us. 
We all knew what we were doing. It was just easy, because creating 
policy says, hey, we are going to give you this to help you work 
through the devastation of this last year, but here is the incentive to 
get back in the labor pool and the market.
  So when we actually have our small employers complain to us that they 
can't hire anyone, yet at the same time--we go back to my previous 
slide about labor participation. We have millions and millions and 
millions of Americans who aren't working. Unemployment has been going 
down. It is because these folks have dropped out. They are not counted 
as unemployed.
  We will pay a devastating societal price for doing this to so many 
people.
  And why is this so important and why is it such a contrast to where 
we were in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020?
  Do you understand what a miracle we were living for a couple of years 
there?
  The fact of the matter is, if you look at income and equality, which 
used to be the harbinger of society fairness after tax reform, as to 
the regulatory reform, after making labor valuable for our working 
poor, they got dramatically less poor, and we have lost that.
  In this last year, we have basically wiped out one of the steepest 
curves of progress in economic history of the United States. You take a 
look at this chart and you start to think about the wage gains that 
Hispanics, African Americans, Asians were having. Their wage gains were 
going up much faster than Anglos.
  This is what we all claim we desire. This makes a much fairer, more 
egalitarian society. We made the value of our brothers' and sisters' 
talents, skills, labor, much more valuable. And then now we have 
adopted policies that crush them. We have done everything half-ass 
backwards.
  And you start to take a look at what happened after tax reform, 
regulatory reform, and many of the things we did before. It really was 
just stunning. One of the most interesting numbers was the value of 
female participation in the economy. Remember, before the pandemic, we 
actually had more females working than males. They had a dramatically 
faster wage gain. We had one of the year's--actually, I think if I do 
2018, 2019, African-American females had double-digit wage gains, 
finally.
  The rhetoric in this place for decades: We need to think and care 
about the working poor.
  Suddenly, economic policy did something for the working poor. It just 
happened to be making tax policy and regulatory policy that invested in 
plants and equipment and technology that made those businesses more 
productive. Meaning--because you all remember your elementary economics 
class.
  What are the two common factors that change your wages?
  Inflation. Okay. That doesn't get you anywhere. Your wages go up just 
to catch up with buying the same thing with more dollars.
  Productivity. Wages go up with productivity. This was a productivity 
curve because of what was done in tax reform. And it was the 
beneficiaries--they weren't rich people. They were poor people, except 
it is heresy to tell the truth with the math around here.
  So what breaks my heart is we have come so far and we have lost it. 
We keep adopting policies, whether it is what is going on at the 
border, what we have done to subsidize people not to join the labor 
pool, what we have done to promote inflation. All these are things that 
will crush the working poor.
  Once again, if you take a look at just the employment groups of the 
population that had just amazing growth, Hispanic women, African-
American women and men, White men, down here, White women. It was all 
the groups that my brothers and sisters on the left claim they care 
about. In 2018, 2019, these numbers are miraculous. They aren't little 
fractions. These are big deals.
  So why would this body on one hand be rhetorically--that this is the 
populations they care about, and then turn around and knife them with 
economic policy that will make the working poor poorer.
  Is it they don't know better? Is it they are just leading with their 
hearts

[[Page H2049]]

and their feeling instead of some calculator math?
  I do this because there is a path. We can be compassionate, but we 
need to understand what makes poor people less poor. What actually 
drives income and equality. It is not trying to make rich people less 
rich. The idea is to make the multitudes of poor people less poor.
  And I can give you sort of a disruptive thought. In Ways and Means, 
we have had hearings and discussions of the healthcare outcome 
differential by populations from COVID. It is absolutely real. If you 
are a Native American, which I represent a couple of Tribal communities 
that are good friends; if you happen to be an urban minority, you have 
had much worse healthcare outcomes.
  But if you want to be honest about what you are seeing, is that 
racist?
  Well, the data says no. What it says is there were precursors in 
those communities of health presentations that were much worse. So if 
you take a look at the charts--and we are working on this chart now--
the early numbers are fascinating.
  Take a look at an urban minority population, my diabetes, my 
hypertension, the still use of tobacco products, and you line that up 
with the bad outcomes from COVID, they almost line up exactly.

                              {time}  2100

  Madam Speaker, if you give a damn about poor people, minority 
populations--and my Native Americans who are suffering in remarkable 
numbers from diabetes, which actually turns out to be the key precursor 
for why they have had such horrible outcomes during COVID--then it is 
time to step up and say that we can basically do the typical vision of 
the left which will put in some more health clinics, because we are 
going to try to make your misery more tolerable, or we can do a 
disruption and end the misery.
  It is time for something like an Operation Warp Speed for diabetes. 
Instead of patching over the misery, let's find a way to cure it. I 
understand type 1 autoimmune, type 2 lifestyle, these are complicated 
and difficult. But if I came to you a couple years ago and said, mRNA 
vaccines, we are going to do it in just several months, you would have 
thought I was out of my mind, Madam Speaker. You see the discussions 
now that we just leaped 10 years in technology of using the mRNA. We 
are functioning, it is a software problem now.
  The ability to cure virus infections, a number of cancers, and a 
number of other diseases is now a software problem. We are on the edge 
of miracles.
  Is this going to be the continued policy of, well, we are going to 
just patch over people's miseries, or are we going to cure them?
  There are some brilliant examples in just the last couple years.
  Do you remember hepatitis C, the projections it was going to cost for 
the coming liver transplants and the number of people who had served in 
the military who were going to be dying miserable deaths waiting for 
that liver transplant?
  Then what did we do?
  We came up with a cure. The cure was really expensive at first--
dramatically less expensive than a liver transplant--and now with 
competition and technology we have crashed the price.
  We have a cure for hemophilia.
  Madam Speaker, you saw that with the mRNA technology, we may be on 
the cusp finally for a vaccine for HIV.
  As a body and as Members, we talk about how much we love and care 
about the minority populations we represent, and then we are not 
willing to think disruptively on what ends the misery. We seem to have 
our heads stuck somewhere decades ago that we are just going to make 
the misery more tolerable. My passion is let's make it go away.
  Madam Speaker, if you really care about healthcare differentials 
between ethnic populations, understand what caused it--we have that 
data--and go at it. Let's cure it.
  It turns out over the next 30 years--the best number I have come up 
with for the next 30 years of Medicare--Medicare will be the primary 
driver of U.S. debt. Ten years from now, we are at $42 trillion of debt 
and the curve steepens. It is demographics. It is just baby boomers are 
getting older, and we are going to consume a lot of resources. But it 
turns out 30 percent of that healthcare spending in Medicare, it 
actually turns out that over 30 percent is diabetes.
  If compassion and love for our brothers and sisters in curing 
something like diabetes isn't what drives you, Madam Speaker, how about 
just the debt?
  The single biggest impact we can have on the debt, it turns out, 
would be a cure for diabetes.
  So if you are a fiscal hawk, Madam Speaker, go at it. If you claim to 
be compassionate, go at it. If you want to keep people just having a 
nicer way to suffer, then leave the types of policies we are doing 
right now where we are going to do a patchwork quilt of a couple more 
healthcare centers.
  So, Madam Speaker, I am incredibly distressed that the Democrat 
policies adopted so far this year, when you lay them out--when our 
brothers and sisters who are on the sidelines, because they have been 
able to financially live--survive, if that is what you want to call it, 
and they are out of the workforce, what is their economic skill set a 
year from now when the rug is pulled out from underneath them when we 
go back to something semi more normal?
  What violence have we done to their futures?
  I hope someone out there is listening and thinking about this.
  One of the other things I want to walk through is: my understanding 
is, over the next couple weeks we will talk infrastructure, we will 
talk the environment, we will talk global warming, and we will talk 
greenhouse gasses.
  Can I beg of some of the folks around here to actually read?
  The amount of folklore that is spewed at these microphones is just 
intensely frustrating.
  Madam Speaker, can I give you a simple, simple example?
  I have used this one before, but it is sort of the hallmark of the 
thought experiment.
  Madam Speaker, if I came to you tomorrow and asked you: Do you care 
about plastic in the oceans?
  Yes.
  Should we get rid of plastic straws in Washington, D.C., in your 
community?
  Of course.
  How many plastic straws are in the ocean from North America?
  None.
  We do an amazingly good job in our waste management, so why is there 
so much plastic floating in the ocean?
  It doesn't come from the U.S. straws. There are 10 rivers in the 
world. Nine of them are in Asia and two are in Africa that account for 
90 percent of the plastic in the oceans.
  Getting rid of your plastic straws is called virtue signaling. Hey, 
look at me, I care. Except that caring doesn't do anything. It may make 
you feel better, it may give you a selfie you can put up on your social 
media, but it didn't do anything.
  Madam Speaker, if you actually cared about plastic in the ocean--and 
we have dozens of variations of this type of thing where we have 
folklore around the environment.

  We need to start doing the math. Go to the 10 rivers--eight in Asia 
and two in Africa--and finance the collection of the plastic. Create 
the recycling. Yes, it is a type of foreign aid. Yes, it is the 
adoption of technology. But if you want to deal with 90 percent of the 
plastic in the ocean, then go to where the plastic in the ocean is 
coming from, and it is not straws in your community. That is theater. 
This place rewards theater. We get campaign contributions from theater. 
We get behind these microphones so we can do theater.
  If you actually give a darn, Madam Speaker, then do something where 
the math actually says it has an actual impact.
  One of the other proofs--and oddly enough, we relate this to tax 
policy. One of the really neat things that has been happening the last 
several years--and this goes back to the Obama administration and the 
last administration--do you see this line here, Madam Speaker?
  That is GDP growth. This curve coming down, particularly after tax 
reform where the curve dramatically steepens--we are still working on 
our 2019 numbers, we believe it steepens even more--this is greenhouse 
gases going into the environment.
  Do you notice something, Madam Speaker?

[[Page H2050]]

  We were growing as a society and economy, yet environmental 
pollutants were crashing. We believe some of this inflection had to do 
with tax reform, the expensing portion where a company can say, I get 
to deduct 100 percent of the new, cleaner, better, faster, cheaper and 
more environmentally sensitive equipment, and we saw massive capital 
expenditures where productivity went up and greenhouse gases came down.
  It is a demonstration that if you get the regulatory and the tax 
policy right, you can have economic growth. People can have those 
opportunities. It doesn't have to be a Malthusian world where you crush 
people.
  Some of this is new. If I came to you right now and said, hey, here 
is a ton of carbon, here is a ton of methane, the math is changed. So 
that is why a lot of the environmental calculations have changed the 
last couple years.
  My best guess is, from the latest things I am reading, methane has 
about a 9-1 ratio as a greenhouse effect. But also its half-life has 
been cut back dramatically in some of the formulas. If you wanted to 
have a remarkable impact on greenhouse gases, then stop the flaring and 
design a way to go collect the methane where we are producing natural 
gas.
  It turns out we now have the technology where you pull up a truck, it 
super chills, compresses it, takes it away, and it is useable fuel; and 
it has a remarkable calculus.
  We actually did a thought experiment--actually, it was more of a math 
experiment. I was blessed to have a Ph.D. of nuclear physics on staff, 
so his math was just remarkably good.
  We did a thought experiment. If I could run a major pipeline through 
west Texas capturing methane, did you know you basically come within a 
fraction of hitting the Paris accords, Madam Speaker?
  When I proposed that to a number of my Democrat colleagues who are my 
friends, they said, David, I love the math. This is exciting. But you 
have to understand, I can't support a pipeline, because pipelines are 
heresy on our side.

                              {time}  2110

  I said, if we would basically find the tax regulatory policy to make 
a pipeline work like this that collects methane where you compress it 
and make it a usable fuel, it turns out you could get all the way to 
the Paris accord by a single major project.
  Yes, David, but you don't understand. It is actually not about 
hitting the numbers. It is about surviving politically.
  I am going to beg of us to start using actual math and science 
instead of worrying about our next campaign contribution or our 
feelings.
  The last one on this tirade--and when we come back, we have a stack 
of these. There is a revolutionary technology that is happening at this 
moment. Remember that curve we showed where we were having economic 
growth, GDP growth, yet greenhouse gases, particularly carbon, were 
going down for the United States? We can make that curve dramatically 
steeper.
  This is a facility that is about to be built by Occidental Petroleum 
in west Texas. There has also been a remarkable improvement in the 
technology. MIT, about a year ago, had a major breakthrough and almost 
doubled the capacity of taking ambient air and pulling carbon right out 
of it. It is almost carbon mining out of the air.
  This is a really big facility about to go in. They are going to take 
the carbon and shove it back into the ground. It is a negative 
calculator. We should be finding joy as conservatives and liberals that 
technology has brought us these types of opportunities.
  If we get the regulatory, if we get the Tax Code, and we update our 
thinking to this century, we can stop arguing about greenhouse gases 
and how much of the economy and how many people you want to unemploy 
or, you know, green jobs don't pay as much, and say: Let's just have 
the disruption in the economy like we always do. Let's promote the 
things that make our world cleaner, healthier, more prosperous. Then, 
if we do things like this, maybe we end the economic violence on the 
working poor.
  Maybe this could be a really amazing decade instead of what I see 
going on right now, where we are pandering to functional extremists in 
so many of the environmental and other types of communities. They may 
be passionate, but their math is really, really bad.
  Madam Speaker, I think I have had far too much caffeine today. I 
yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________