[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 187 (Monday, October 25, 2021)]
[House]
[Pages H5860-H5864]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   DEMOGRAPHICS IS OUR BIGGEST THREAT

  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 try something for the 
next hour, and it is going to be one of those presentations that is 
always a little on the difficult side because we are going to talk 
about things a lot of this place and a lot of the country doesn't want 
to hear, but we call it math.
  The first premise, I need to ask all of us, if I were to walk into a 
room of Democrats, people on the left, or people on the right, and say, 
``What is the biggest threat over the next couple of decades that is 
facing your country?'' you would hear all sorts of things.
  You know, a couple of years ago, with the Democrats, it was Russia, 
Russia. Today, it may be this and that. I am going to argue it is 
demographics. And you go, huh?
  We are going to do almost 38 boards here, walking through the 
national debt, deficit spending, spending priorities, and the reality 
on where there are revenues, taxes, what we call receipts. Then you 
have to ask yourself, does the next generation, and the generation 
after that, and the generation after that, do they have the right to 
live in a country where there is some prosperity, or has Washington, 
D.C., decided to just destroy those who are heading toward retirement, 
those who are heading toward elementary school and their future?
  Let's actually sort of walk through some of the realities of the 
math. And I am not going to even bother with 1965 and what the mix was.
  You have to understand, in 2021, 77 percent of all the spending in 
this place, 77 percent of all the spending, was what we called 
mandatory, formula, Social Security, Medicare, formulas. Only 10 
percent was defense, and 13 percent was everything else in government.
  If you like to think that, well, you have lots of prodefense 
Democrats and, obviously, prodefense Republicans, then mandatory is a 
formula that you don't even vote on here. You are electing Members of 
Congress to come and vote on 13 percent of the spending in this budget 
cycle. This is how out of whack it is. And we are going to walk through 
how much of this mandatory is demographics.
  Look, getting older is not Republican or Democrat, but it is math. It 
is going to happen. So let's actually walk through a couple of the 
realities here.
  I just threw this chart together. I know it is impossible to read on 
camera and those things. But the point is simple. Today, Social 
Security is 23 percent of all the spending; national defense is 15; 
Medicare is 14. In a couple of years, all those change. I could even

[[Page H5861]]

show you some charts that, if interest rates tick up even a little bit, 
defense actually starts to fall to fourth very, very soon.
  To give you an idea, when you actually get up in front of audiences--
and for conservative audiences, the folklore a decade ago was, well, 
waste and fraud, foreign aid, and then you would pull out this chart 
and show that it is a fraction of a percent.
  Fine, maybe we should do something different in foreign aid. Yes, the 
spending from this year has massive fraud in it. But the long-term 
impact of those is nothing compared to the fact--and I am going to have 
to be honest and have a conversation about how we save, how we protect 
Medicare and Social Security, because what is going on around this 
place--you get politician after politician behind these microphones and 
saying, I am going to protect Medicare, and I am going to protect your 
Social Security, while they are driving it into the ground.
  So let's actually start to walk through how fast it is eroding. From 
2019 to 2031--and 2031 is what? How many years from now? It is 
functionally nine budget cycles from now. We will have doubled debt. 
You have to understand how fast this is eroding from us.
  The more current numbers, because this slide was done about a year or 
two ago, it is actually much worse with the spending during the 
pandemic. So let's actually start to also walk through what we need to 
understand. Social Security, healthcare, entitlements, and interest 
costs drive 90 percent of the 2008 to 2031 spending hikes.
  Let's back that up. If you take a look at Social Security, Medicare, 
and then the interest attached to those, that is what drives the 
deficit.
  Remember our earlier comment: It is our demographics. And this place 
is unwilling to actually have honest conversations of how we are going 
to protect access to those earned benefits because the numbers are so 
big and so scary.
  What do you have? What do you have here even today? Member after 
Member running to the microphones talking about how we are going to 
functionally give away more.
  But if you are under 50, we are about to make your future--as a 
matter of fact, it is already baked into the cake. Your future is 
really dangerous right now.

                              {time}  2030

  So let's actually walk a little bit more through what the slides look 
like. Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls drive nearly 
entire 2019 to 2031 nonpandemic--so this is before the pandemic--and 
you start to understand that this is before the pandemic calculations. 
We were heading towards about $2.2 trillion a year in borrowing before 
the pandemic. That is the baseline number.
  When you actually start to really understand that--this is the 
general revenues. And when you start to add up all the shortfalls, you 
are heading towards a time where functionally a 30-year government is 
living on borrowed money.
  So let's actually do a little bit more. You have all seen this slide. 
Lots of people like to use it. You know, the national debt is set to 
match the World War II peak within a decade. Well, guess what? We are 
pretty much there. We have pretty much now have hit what they call the 
percentage of GDP.
  Why do we use that? Because there is this theory that says the size 
of the economy is what allows you to borrow money, and as long as you 
don't borrow too much money where the interest costs start to burden 
the availability of what they call capital stock, for an economy to 
grow, the economy to have new investments.
  The fear is--remember, it wasn't that long ago we used to talk about, 
well, when we hit 100 percent of GDP, that means the borrowing, the 
publicly borrowed money will be the size of the economy. Guess what? We 
have already surpassed that. We have done it.
  You are going to see some boards here that should terrify you.
  Long-term baseline. Now, I have got to give credit where credit is 
due. Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl, basically what he does is take 
the CBO numbers, and I think some from Joint Tax, and tries to make 
them digestible. He also lays out what the short-term, which is 10-
year, 20-year, and 30-year layouts are. You can go right now to that 
website and download these same charts for yourself.
  But the long-term baseline shows absolutely unsustainable debt; and 
this side has gotten worse since last year when we printed it, because 
it actually had in 2050. So functionally in less than 30 years, we were 
approaching up to 195 percent of debt, borrowed money, the size of the 
total economy, so functionally twice the size of the economy. That 
number has actually now gotten much worse because of what we have done 
in the pandemic financing and a whole bunch of the other promises that 
have come in and the other spending that has happened during unified 
government from the left.
  So once again, trying to actually demonstrate, it is not falling 
revenues. We have dozens of charts--and I only brought a couple of 
them--on the slide deck that make it very clear, when you look at--and 
this redline is what in Ways and Means we would call receipts. Most 
people think of it as tax revenues. It is basically where it has always 
been.
  If you actually go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was about 17.3 
percent of GDP came in as revenues, as taxes. Now, we are actually 
heading towards a time where it is about 18.5 percent. So it is 
actually higher. But what is this line here? You see this? Okay, that 
is the pandemic.
  But then you get back to the trend line. Why is the trend line 
exploding in that direction with 31.8 percent more spending than 
revenues? It is demographics, healthcare costs.
  So let's actually do another one. Medicare part A and Social Security 
trust funds face bankruptcy. The Medicare trust fund is gone in about 6 
years. Remember, post tax cuts and reform, you know, when we reformed 
the tax code, because the economy was growing so fast and so many 
people were working, we actually at that time went from 4 years left in 
the part A trust fund of Medicare--remember, only the hospital portion 
of Medicare has a trust fund. Everything else comes out of the general 
fund. We actually added a couple of years, because there were so many 
people working and, therefore, paying their FICA taxes.
  But does this concern anyone that the Social Security trust fund is 
gone? The Medicare, the hospital portion of the trust fund, is gone in 
functionally 5 years. Is anyone paying attention? Or, once again, will 
we try to manage this by crisis? But the scale of these numbers is just 
stunning, and then we live in this financial fantasy world in this 
place.
  Here is the slide. I have done a version of this slide for a decade 
now, and I have been booed in front of audiences for telling them the 
truth. There is something wrong in our psyche when we are so used to 
politicians lying to us that we almost want them to not tell us the 
truth; it hurts too much.
  Now, I have been on this floor dozens and dozens and dozens of time 
saying there is a path. The future doesn't have to be this dystopian, 
debt-laden financial collapse. There is a path. But you have to have a 
revolution in the cost of healthcare and economic growth. There is a 
series of things, and you have to do all of them together.
  The thing that terrifies me the most is how many times do you have 
anyone come behind these microphones and talk about the scale of the 
debt that is coming or solutions to it.
  The fact of the matter is, I don't know if our public votes on this. 
God knows, you don't raise money telling people the truth about what is 
going on. But I have a 6-year-old daughter. Doesn't she deserve to live 
in a prosperous country? Because this is going to crush prosperity for 
everyone, and it is going to wipe out lots of people in retirement.
  Once again, you have got to understand, this chart, this is 
Congressional Budget Office numbers, which say in about 29 years, we 
have $112 trillion of borrowing, debt. This is an inflation adjusted 
number, so this is in constant dollars.
  You are going to notice, the entire 30-year debt comes from Medicare 
and then Social Security. The rest of the budget is actually in 
balance.
  If this place isn't willing to have a revolution in the cost of 
delivering healthcare to our brothers and sisters and our seniors, our 
future is really ugly.

[[Page H5862]]

  You have got to understand. There is a fraud around here. You will 
get people from the left saying, well, we should do Medicare for all. 
Medicare for all is a financing bill. It does nothing to the cost of 
healthcare. ObamaCare, the ACA, was a financing bill. It was about who 
got subsidized and who had to pay. The Republican alternative was a 
financing bill. It was about who had to pay and who got subsidized. 
None of them are doing things that change the cost of healthcare.
  I didn't bring the slide here, because I did it just 2 weeks ago, 
that shows 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes. The single 
most powerful thing you could do to help the United States in its 
sovereign debt and to end misery in our minority communities and my 
Tribal communities out in Arizona is do an operation warp speed, go 
after type 2 diabetes. Isn't that something Republicans and Democrats 
could agree upon? And guess what? It has amazing economic impact.
  We are working on a math problem right now. We actually believe 
solving diabetes could be one of the single biggest things you could do 
to income inequality, because you take a look at some of our urban 
minority populations that suffer from diabetes and some of my Tribal 
communities out west, and if you normalize, saying, what would happen--
what would this population's income and prosperity look like if you 
cured diabetes, that income inequality number shrinks dramatically. It 
is not a bunch of transfer payments; it is solving people's misery. But 
it is a little hard campaigning on something that is complicated, isn't 
it?
  So this is the slide, out of everything I am going to show, that I 
actually see in my dreams. It really, really bothers me, because I 
don't have really elegant ways to explain how dystopian this number is.
  Projected 2051 budget deficits are entirely driven by Social Security 
and Medicare. But do you see this number here? It is basically saying 
almost 21 percent of the entire GDP will be outlays for Social Security 
and Medicare, but revenues will only be 6 percent. This gap here is 
solely living on borrowed money. This over here is the rest of the 
budget. Turns out that for the rest of the budget, revenues are 
outpacing the spending. That is all other government. That is defense, 
that is environment, that is everything, including education. But this 
gap right here is what brings us to that $112 trillion of borrowing in 
the next 29 years.
  You have got to get your head around this. That is assuming the CBO 
numbers, that there are no recessions, there are no economic slowdowns, 
there are no major terrorists attacks that slow down the economy, and 
there is not another pandemic. That is a baseline number. Do you 
understand how fragile we have made this economy because we are 
unwilling to tell the truth about these numbers?
  I had a political consultant once tell me: Schweikert, you can't tell 
the truth about the debt and financing, because it will get you 
unelected. I am incredibly blessed. I represent North Maricopa County, 
so Scottsdale, Carefree, Cave Creek, Paradise Valley, Fountain Hills. I 
represent a bunch of really smart people, and they are not happy when I 
show them this, but they understand it is math.
  I don't get my head around how this becomes partisan, because you are 
going to see, if you take a look at the pieces of legislation the left 
drops, they are trying to expand the programs at the same time they are 
collapsing. I mean, the lunacy.
  So let's take a look, do the same thing, trying to get our heads 
around this. Remember, this slide was done before the pandemic scale of 
borrowing, which we are going to be paying interest on that for decades 
and decades and decades, because we never pay it off.
  Social Security faces functionally a $35 trillion shortfall over the 
next 30 years. Now, it is 29 years. $32 trillion, if you include the 
trust fund balance. So functionally just Social Security has a $32 
trillion shortfall over the next 29 years, okay?
  Oddly enough, we could sit down around the table, and that $32 
trillion shortfall on Social Security, we can figure that out, because 
being a defined benefit system as it is, the math, you have about a 
dozen or two dozen levers where you can say we are going to stop 
subsidizing really, really, really rich people, we are going to do 
this, we are going to do that. There are to deal with that.
  The one that is just brutal, math-wise, is this one. So Social 
Security is $32 trillion short. Medicare is $78 trillion short. And 
this one is much more difficult. Yet, the solution around here is, 
well, we will just subsidize more people and borrow the money.
  There is a path, but you have got to be willing to functionally 
legalize technology and disrupt the cost of healthcare.
  And there are some amazingly good things happening. Actually, with 
the messenger RNA, there are so many diseases that, if we invest in, we 
could actually cure misery today and reap the benefits in the future. 
And I have only come to the floor dozens of times trying to share that 
math.
  So once again, let's take a look. This is also something that is 
disharmonious to what a lot of people believe. The typical retiring 
couple--and this is before the pandemic--will receive $3 in Medicare 
for every dollar they paid in.
  Now, Social Security, you functionally get really close to what you 
put into it. Social Security is a fairly square deal. Medicare, we have 
a problem.
  That typical retiring couple, 2 years ago, when Brian Riedl was doing 
this math, would put in about $161,000 in a lifetime, and they were 
taking out, or receiving benefits, of about $522,000. That gap right 
there is almost the sole primary driver of most of the U.S. sovereign 
debt over the next 30 years.
  If we are willing to actually have an honest conversation of what do 
we do to keep our brothers and sisters healthy, to provide access and 
resources, but do it in a modern way and could we bend this cost 
differential here? Because if we do that--remember, we were just 
talking a moment ago. Thirty-one percent of this is just diabetes in 
our seniors. If you took that on, that is the single greatest thing you 
could do to bending this curve and saving the economic future of this 
society.

                              {time}  2045

  We also need to deal with a bit of the folklore. Now, this is 
folklore that comes from the left. You do realize the Tax Code has 
already been getting more progressive. You do realize the 2017 tax 
reform was more progressive than the Tax Code before 2017.
  And look, when you actually go back to the 1980s, 1990s, the top 20 
percent at that time were all paying about 60 percent of all income 
taxes. Today, they are paying 70 percent. This is the top 20 percent.
  So it is folklore. Now, it is good political folklore. It is good 
campaign folklore. We are going to make the rich pay their fair share. 
Fine, stop subsidizing them.
  We have already done a demonstration here repeatedly that we come up 
with a trillion, a trillion-four over 10 years of direct subsidies to 
the really, really, really rich. So the absurdity that is in the 
current tax plan being offered by the Democrats is: Let's do this. 
Let's raise their taxes. Oh, by the way, wink, wink, nod, nod, you make 
$800,000 a year, we are going to give you tax credits of $118,000 if 
you buy what Democrats tell you to buy.
  Okay. Why not go further? Why not remove the trillion, trillion-four 
in direct subsidies that we give to the rich and then put that toward 
balancing some of these--well, actually slowing the erosion? Because 
you are not going to balance this.
  Any politician that gets up and says we are going to balance the 
budget; we are going to pay off the debt and deficits isn't being 
forthright. Our job is just to stabilize it at this point because the 
numbers are so large. If you get someone that comes behind these 
microphones and throws out the rhetoric of, well, it is foreign aid, it 
is waste and fraud. Well, we are going to balance the budget by doing 
this. Buy them batteries for their calculator because they obviously 
don't have them.
  This comes back to dealing with the reality. No defense cuts, taxing 
millionaires cannot finance current deficits. The progressive wish 
list. The proposals that the left has proposed this year functionally--
the free college, the job guarantees, the Medicare for all--you start 
to add that up, and if you start to wipe out everything else, you 
functionally have just blown up the deficit by another 34 percent. The 
math just doesn't work.

[[Page H5863]]

  So let's actually sort of walk through this. It is important. 
President Biden promised in his campaign $11 trillion of new spending 
over 10 years. $11 trillion in new spending. And look, they are all 
cited. They are either CBO or Committee for a Responsible Budget. But 
you start to look at it, this is just the campaign promises of $11 
trillion of new spending on top of what is the $4-plus trillion 
baseline budget, plus the couple trillion additional we did over the 
last two years.
  Now you have, what was it, the original scoring of the Build Back 
Better plan was, what? They claimed $3\1/2\--but it really scored out 
to $5, $5\1/2\ trillion. This is the lunacy we are at.
  And, yet, if you come and add up every potential tax hike the left 
talks about--you know, get rid of any changes we did in tax reform that 
created the great growth--you actually start to take all income over 
$200,000 and just take 50 percent of it. Hey, you make $200,000, we 
take 50 percent of it. You do all the tax hikes that are on the entire 
list of the Democrats. Over a decade, you functionally raise $12 
trillion. Okay. The deficit already projected before the pandemic was 
going to be over $13 trillion at that time. And that is not assuming 
you just blew up the economy, you slowed down growth.
  Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 33 minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I know this is a lot of boards, but in 
some ways you need it to try to drill in. We hate talking about this 
around here. I can't tell you--I will start to do these presentations 
even with some of my conservative brothers and sisters, and they run 
away from me. But it is the math.
  The progressive programs overwhelmingly benefit the rich. This is one 
of my fixations here because I think this is something the left and 
those of us on the right could actually come to an agreement on. Let's 
stop subsidizing the rich. The things we provide to families with high 
incomes, and you actually walk through the amount--we actually brought 
a presentation to the floor a couple weeks ago and showed a trillion, a 
trillion-four-hundred-thousand dollars that goes to the very top 
quartile. That is the lunacy that is going on around here, we want to 
tax the rich, but we are going to turn around and hand it back to them. 
You know, if it is my fourth house and I happen to buy it on a beach, 
should I be getting subsidized flood insurance?
  The Biden budget proposals would add $8.8 trillion in debt over the 
next decade, and that is with the Biden tax hikes. How often are we 
talking about that around here? That is how CBO scores it.
  Even eliminating all defense spending doesn't get you close to 
actually making a difference in the long-term debt.
  Think of this. This is the defense line. And the baseline is 
basically projected to sit about now for the future decades at about 
3\1/2\ to 4 percent of GDP. But you start taking a look and go out to 
that 2050 number, we are at almost 16 percent of GDP. The size of the 
economy will just be the spending on Social Security and Medicare. Does 
anyone sort of see a difference, hey, 4 to 16?
  This is the reality, but yet, we will get people who will come behind 
these microphones, Members, and say, if we would cut defense, if we 
would do this, we will balance it. No, you won't. That is not the math, 
and you know it is not the math. We need to stop misinforming--my wife 
would refer to it as lying--the public and start telling the truth and 
treat them like adults about what is going on.
  Remember, the problem ultimately isn't Republican or Democrat. It is 
demographics. We as a society have made lots of promises, and if we are 
going to keep them, we need to tell the truth about the math.

  It turns out the growth in the economy is crucial, even with my most 
optimistic math. When we have come here and said we can have a 
revolution in the cost of delivering healthcare, we can do all these 
things, the linchpin of it is you must have the economic growth.
  You actually take a look during when President Obama oversaw about 
half a trillion of new taxes, and we functionally lost $3.2 trillion of 
economic expansion. If we are going to raise taxes, you have got to 
think it through in a way that what is the economic growth effect at 
the end of the decade, the next decade, and the decade after that. 
Because if we don't keep growing the size of this economy, that ratio 
of borrowing--because the borrowing is exploding. If you aren't growing 
the economy as fast, there is a technical economic term for it. It is 
called ``We are screwed.''
  Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income 
families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget. Take 
everything. Take all the money from upper income. Take all the money 
from small businesses, and you still don't get close to balancing.
  We all know this. Why is this place so incapable of telling the 
truth? I mean, are we that addicted to the spending? Our constituents, 
our voters, our contributors, are they that addicted to us handing them 
checks?
  But this is the basic chart. It makes it very, very clear. You can't 
solve the long-term budget even if you go out and confiscate 100 
percent of small businesses' wealth and the upper income's wealth.
  Here's where the reality should be terrifying you. National debt is 
projected to leap from 200 percent to 328 percent of GDP, depending on 
if those Biden proposals pass and if there are any interest rate 
changes. So you start taking a look at this. When you start to see $328 
trillion of spending in 28 years, 29 years, you get this sort of 
number, if the Biden proposals pass and interest rates go up by 1 
percent. You have got to understand how fragile we are.
  Is there anyone around here that is a fan of Taleb, the guy that 
wrote ``Black Swan?'' In ``Antifragile'', he talks about how you can 
see these things coming, do things not to make yourself--because there 
are going to be other economic black swans. We have made this country 
incredibly, economically fragile because these numbers are coming.
  Now, this one happens to come if the Biden administration and the 
Democrats here get their proposals. But even if they don't, you are 
still well over 200 percent of debt-to-GDP as the baseline.
  The share of Federal tax revenues spent on interest on the national 
debt is projected to surge. Okay.
  Here's a simple thought experiment. Today interest, with our 
incredibly low interest rates, is about 9 percent of GDP. If we get two 
points of an interest rate hike, in 2051, 100 percent of GDP is just 
interest.
  Doesn't this terrify anyone else? I can't be alone in looking at 
these numbers and just panicked for my society, for my country, my 
daughter.
  Since 1990, nondefense discretionary spending has grown four times 
faster than defense. This is important because we keep seeing people 
come behind these microphones talking about the skyrocketing cost of 
defense. Nondiscretionary is growing four times faster. Over the last 
20 years, four times faster. And you saw it in the opening slide that 
basically said 70 percent of all of our spending is mandatory today, 10 
percent is defense, and everything else is what we really get to vote 
on.
  Coronavirus legislation--and we are all guilty on this; Democrats 
substantially more guilty, but we are all guilty--pushed the 2020 and 
2021 Federal spending past $50,000 per household. So if you are a 
household out there during this pandemic cycle, do you feel you got 
$50,000 worth of value? Because you are going to pay for it for the 
rest of your lives, the rest of your kids' lives, the rest of your 
grandkids' lives with lots of interest. Functionally, this spike you 
see here was $50,000 per household. That is what we did during the 
pandemic.
  And you have got to understand, we have had an incredible free ride 
the last couple years. The Federal Reserve has functionally financed 
our debt. And now we are financing our own inflation.
  I am sure some of you have been to a grocery store, filled up your 
gas tank. Welcome to what happens when you do Keynesian economics.
  Here's the reality: Do you see the little line down here? This is 
China. This is Japan. This is the rest of the world. This is the 
Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is functionally about five

[[Page H5864]]

times more financing our debt than China and Japan together. We are 
playing a shell game ourselves. We are financing our own debt. And then 
you wonder why you have inflation.

                              {time}  2100

  And we have all been in this body, and I know there is always angst 
when we get near the debt ceiling, but the fact of the matter is if you 
take a look at the last 40 years, almost the only times we have 
actually had any attempt to bend the spending curve, bend the borrowing 
curve, bend the debt curve have been out of negotiations to raise the 
debt ceiling.
  Budget deals, we have had a number of them. Remember the Budget 
Control Act and some of the others?
  Now, the problem is, we have had some of these where we set base 
lines and they were actually sort of working, and then this place all 
runs away from them. But there is a fraud in those, and that was they 
were always tied to discretionary spending, not the mandatory that is 
functionally driving the debt.
  Some of my brothers and sisters on the left have said, well, it was 
tax reform. That is just not true. If you actually look at the 
contributor debt, if everything from tax reform was extended 
permanently, it is a tiny fraction, and that is assuming without CBO--
remember CBO wasn't giving us the value for all the economic growth we 
particularly had in 2018 and 2019. But that is not the math.
  And the six major deficit reduction deals that we have had since 
1983, if you take a look at them, almost all of it was under 
discretionary. It saved us some money in interest. We did raise some 
more taxes. We did a little bit in the early eighties under Ronald 
Reagan on mandatory Social Security, but you take a look at them, and 
they had a pretty darn impressive effect. Remember the surpluses in the 
late nineties? But today we have let it get away from us.
  And you take a look at what became of the $1.7 billion in promised--
remember 2013 until this year there was supposed to be about $1.7 
trillion in functional reductions in spending? Do you remember the 
Budget Control Act? Except what happened?
  Well, time after time both Republicans and Democrats came here and 
whittled it away because we wanted to spend more money, and we lost 
much of the value. So we did gain about a trillion dollars of savings 
over those 10 years. It could have been double that if we hadn't 
whittled it away.
  The last thing, and I hope our brothers and sisters on the left will 
actually step up and help us on this one. The current number is 
actually substantially higher than this because this slide now is a 
couple months old, but we think we have identified over $200 billion in 
functionally missed and fraudulent claims and payments during the 
pandemic. You have seen some of the crazy stories of how much fraud 
there has been in unemployment in California.
  We need to tell the truth about the healthcare costs, Medicare 
driving our debt. But I believe in a holistic theory. You need to go 
after everything. You need to go after what we know is the fraud from 
the last 2 years. We also need to tell the truth about bending the 
curve on delivering healthcare. And there are ways to do it. This place 
just needs to stop being so fearful of telling the truth about the debt 
and deficits because if we don't grow up and take this head on it is 
going to take our head off.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________