[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 23 (Friday, February 4, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H966-H971]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1200
                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Leger Fernandez). 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, before we begin, I actually want to 
yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert).


                  Honoring the Life of Tristan Krogius

  Mr. CALVERT. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Madam Speaker, I rise to honor Tristan Krogius, father of our former 
House colleague, Mimi Walters.
  Tris passed away peacefully on December 30, 2021. He was born in 
Tammerfors, Finland, and emigrated to New York with his family in 1939 
as a refugee from the Russian invasion of Finland.
  Tris attended the University of New Mexico on an NROTC scholarship 
and served as a marine officer from 1954 to 1960. In 1952, he and the 
love of his life, Barbara Brophy, eloped. After Tris left the Marine 
Corps, he began a business career in California.
  Tris rose to become president of Hunt-Wesson, Frozen and Refrigerated 
Foods, and later president of Dalgety Limited's U.S. food division. In 
1987, he retired as president and CEO of Tenneco West and, after 
retiring, Tris earned a law degree in 1990 and was admitted to the 
California bar.
  Tris was an active member of his community. He was past board 
president and CEO of the South Coast Medical Center in Laguna Beach and 
was a director of many nonprofit organizations.
  Tris is survived by his wife of 69 years, Barbara; their six children 
and their spouses; 19 grandchildren; and four great grandchildren.
  Tris will be remembered for the extraordinary example that he set for 
his life.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, we all get behind these microphones on 
occasion and we want to share something. And tonight, I am going to try 
to stay on a theme. I am going to try to walk through one of my intense 
frustrations around here that we keep making public policy.
  Let's be honest. We just passed--the Democrats, I don't think a 
single Republican voted for it--a $350 billion bill that originally was 
labeled as America COMPETES Act. But if you look at the math in it and 
the spending in it, it is functionally, hey, let's give lots of money 
to our special interests who actually support them politically.
  So here's the theme. If I came to any Member of Congress, any one of 
our staff, anyone out there listening in the public and said, What 
makes people poor? Seriously. What makes our brothers and sisters who 
are working poor poor?
  And you get these discussions, Oh, we don't tax rich people enough 
and transfer their wealth, or we don't do this, or we don't do that. 
And it turns out, when you actually look at the math, almost none of 
those things are actually true.
  It is complicated. So we have been doing a project for almost a year 
in our office, of trying to understand what is different. So we held a 
hearing recently, on health disparities. Guess what?
  There really are health disparities between certain urban minority 
populations, my Tribal communities in the Southwest. But why?
  Also, take a look. There is crime, crime differential. When someone 
steals your stuff or breaks your bones, you're not able to go to work, 
you're not able to accumulate.
  You actually start to look at all these things that are societal 
factors. You open up the border, you are competing against others with 
similar skill sets, labor sets.
  And my argument is, over this last 12 months of unified leftist, 
unified Democrat control of government, we are just crushing people. We 
are crushing

[[Page H967]]

the working poor. We are crushing the middle class. And the data--I am 
going to prove it.
  But one of the most interesting things we have been looking at--and 
we have actually taken some ridicule for fixating on this, but the math 
is the math.
  I would typically start these presentations with take a look at the 
accumulation of U.S. sovereign debt. It is exploding. Twenty-nine 
years, $12 trillion, and that is based on last year's CBO math. It is 
Social Security and Medicare, primarily Medicare. But 31 percent of 
Medicare spending and borrowing is just diabetes.
  But also, that other project we have been doing of what makes certain 
populations poor. Well, it turns out our brothers and sisters who are 
often working poor or just trying to survive, have dramatically higher 
health problems, and it is primarily diabetes. In rural poverty, in my 
Tribal poverty, in my urban poverty, look at the diabetic numbers.
  So wouldn't the most compassionate thing be to not do what the left 
keeps saying, we are going to build more clinics, help people live with 
their misery. But how about doing something revolutionary? How about 
curing, how about investing in curing our brothers and sisters who 
suffer?
  And we are working, and it is hard, and it is difficult math. But 
what would happen if you got a cure to income inequality? Well, then 
you would have to eventually adjust for crime and open borders and all 
the other things that we are going to talk about.
  And we have taken some ridicule saying, well, type 1, type 2 
diabetes, you can't--well, it turns out we have been tracking the 
science. And there was a time we used to have this constant debate here 
where Democrats would accuse Republicans of not following the science. 
And we are obviously, particularly with COVID, accusing the Democrats.
  But does anyone here actually have an alert on their search engines 
to track the news stories of some of the really amazing stuff 
happening?
  So this is a story, functionally, from yesterday, and it is a unique 
approach. They are functionally doing a CRISPR-altered stem cell. And 
the beauty of that is, what happens if I can get your body to start 
producing insulin again?

  And because we know type 1 diabetes, and part of type 2, is an 
autoimmune reaction. Your body is killing the cells that produce 
insulin. And so with that little bit of CRISPR technology, your body 
doesn't recognize it, and doesn't kill the very cell that is producing 
the ability to take on your glucose. It has begun. It has actually 
moved into type 1.
  So think of this. We just spent $350 billion--well, at least the 
Democrats are trying to--and something like this, if you had done a 
version of Operation Warp Speed or call it whatever you want if that is 
too Trumpian for the left.
  But the single biggest driver of U.S. debt is diabetes; 33 percent of 
all healthcare spending; 31 percent of Medicare spending. You would 
think this place would be almost giddy.
  Now, maybe it doesn't work maybe, ultimately. But the ability to say, 
we are going to do something that is noble, compassionate, loving, and 
cure the misery instead of keeping populations sort of trapped in their 
misery because they are beholden to one political party's largesse.
  It is beginning. This is the type of disruption--this is symbolic of 
the type of disruption that makes the country wealthier, more 
prosperous, and minimizes misery. And we have been talking about this 
technology coming for about a year. Why are we not doing more investing 
in it?
  So the White House has an initiative. Wonderful, but they need to 
redesign--and the same thing here in the House--we need to redesign 
where the resources of primary research, or the incentive to bring a 
product to market, or the timing it takes to make it through the math 
of a phase one, phase two, phase three.
  We do it the wrong way. Just as the Democrats' bill they just passed 
where it is command and control, it is almost a 5-year plan. The 
Federal Government will decide who gets a grant, who doesn't get a 
grant. You now have to come be really nice to the administration and 
your Member of Congress if you want money for your business.
  The arrogance of this place. One of the hazards of Members of 
Congress--it is like that running joke: What are the two times in life 
you think you know everything? When you are 13 years old, and the day 
after you get elected to Congress.
  The debate here often sounds like it is a decade out of date. But 
think about the board I was just showing. If there really is--and it is 
now in phase one trial--an ability to cure type 1 and make a dramatic 
difference in type 2, try to understand what that means for the 
financials of the country and the world, what that actually means for 
health and misery.
  But also, what it potentially means for populations that we talk 
about constantly, we virtue-signal constantly, but we don't actually do 
something in raising their living standards, raising their economics, 
closing income inequality,
  And instead, we are in a body right now with unified Democrat control 
where the solution is, send someone a check. Well, sending someone a 
check doesn't end the misery. Disruptive technology like this is what 
cures the misery that is what we should be almost evangelizing here. 
And I know that is hard.
  So let's talk about some of the other things that make the working 
class poorer, the working poor substantially poorer. We saw--and I know 
there have been many Members here who have come and talked about 
inflation, but I don't think we have understood the misery it 
ultimately brings. And it is the slow type of misery, because every 
time we go to the grocery store, that piece of protein you wanted, or 
that milk, or something else gets a little bit more expensive. Your 
paycheck may have gone up, but somehow everything you are buying goes 
up more.
  And we are going to walk through a couple of boards here, just 
showing the fact of the matter under Democratic unified control of 
government, our society has actually gotten poorer, even though we have 
pumped stunning amounts of money, of cash into the society, and we are 
going to sort of show that.
  So understand, we all saw the number at the end of the year, 7 
percent inflation. In my home, I am from the Phoenix area, we are 
approaching 9 percent, a lot of that is driven by housing. Imagine what 
this index did to homelessness.
  We are going to see some statistics here of the narcotics and other 
things that have been coming across the border now that we have sort of 
an open border policy from the left.
  And instead, I would like to talk about the economics and the misery 
such policies have brought and how it all ties together.
  So let's go back a little more on inflation. If you think about 
inflation, how many times have you heard our brothers and sisters on 
the left get behind their microphones and talk about, it is increasing 
inequality?

  So I thought that was the Holy Grail here. Close inequality. But yet, 
their policies keep growing it. We are seeing some numbers here where 
there is about $3,500 of additional spread of inequality, driven by a 
single year's worth of policies that drove up inflation.
  And the solution from the left is well, we are going to send them 
another check, even though the check is actually what substantially 
drove creating inflation.
  Remember, basic economics. Remember your elementary school and your 
high school economics class. What is inflation? It is too many dollars 
chasing too few goods and services. Real simple. The real world is 
actually a little more complicated, but that is classic.
  So you have two things: You can keep jacking up interest rates to 
squeeze out liquidity of dollars chasing those goods or, or and, or 
plus, you can do the other side, like we did in 1981. They raised 
interest rates.
  But people forget, the first year of President Reagan, even with a 
Democrat Congress, they adopted tax cuts and policies to make more 
stuff. If you have lots of dollars out that chasing things, you have 
got a couple of solutions. You could squeeze the dollars out of the 
economy to lower inflation, or you can make more stuff, because it is 
too many dollars chasing not enough goods.

[[Page H968]]

  Okay. Make more stuff. It is a classic supply-side solution. Make the 
tax code, the regulatory code, the incentives to make more stuff.
  Instead, we just passed a $350 billion bill that functionally puts 
government in charge of grants and control of what they want, instead 
of the information part of the market, where resources, where the 
ability to act quickly, we should be incentivizing the animal spirits 
to go make more stuff as a way to lower this inflation that is crushing 
people. And it is a much more elegant way because it creates jobs, it 
creates products. But for some reason, the left is almost maniacal in a 
Keynesian view of the world saying, well, do lots of stimulus.

                              {time}  1215

  Madam Speaker, they seem unwilling to even accept the data produced 
by their side that says they have raised the misery of so many 
Americans.
  Understand that the math at the end of the year was pretty simple. 
Inflation went up, and people's wages went up, but there is a gap. The 
gap keeps growing, and that gap is the fact you got poorer last year.
  This is the one that I am still just shocked there is not more 
discussion about. If you see the percentage of monthly change in real 
wages--remember, you may get your paycheck. Your paycheck may go up. If 
your rent, your fuel, your food, everything else in your life went up 
more--you see how many months people got poorer.
  If you look at the way we are doing policy here, it is the 
administration and my Democratic colleagues' willingness to continue to 
spend money at just stunning levels in ways that the economics say you 
are going to actually make people poorer. Planned economy hasn't worked 
particularly well anywhere in the world.
  You start to see the data of the gap, and we have not tried to 
present this in a mean way. The fact of the matter is, the Democrat 
policies--remember, they took over Congress 3 years ago. They now have 
unified government after the last election. The gap between the wealthy 
and the poor is growing.
  Do you remember 2018 and 2019 and the vicious rhetoric that came from 
our brothers and sisters on the left after we did tax reform? Yet, in 
modern economic times, it was the greatest success we have had in 
shrinking income inequality. You are going to see some boards here 
where food insecurity, it worked.
  Our brothers and sisters on the lower quartiles--and I always hate 
that term. The fact of the matter is, they became dramatically less 
poor. Then when the Democrats take power, they abandon the very things 
that were working. Their policies, at some point you have to admit to 
everyone, because we are feeling and seeing it, you have made the rich 
richer; you have made the poor poorer; you have increased the misery.
  Madam Speaker, we all know the saying. When something isn't working, 
stop it. Take a breath. Take a look at what was working. It turns out 
the ideological calcification that is Congress now is more important to 
that dogma than what actually works.
  So, we sort of walk through these. I know this seems like a lot, but 
we keep trying to make the point over and over that the data is 
factual. It is not just information by virtue signaling. The data is 
the data is the data.
  This is my comment from the quartile. So these are our brothers and 
sisters. We are calling them the lower 20 percent. Well, how much of 
their income goes to housing, transportation, food?
  Now, you notice these numbers are off the chart. That is because they 
also receive subsidies, earned income tax credits, other things we do 
to try to make their life less miserable.
  Somewhere along the way, this body forgot that if you are poor, I 
mean truly poor, that bottom 20 percent, the majority of your income 
goes to housing. What did the Democrats accomplish this last year? We 
blew up the price of rent.
  There were speeches from a number of us from 1 to 2 years ago, saying 
you need to create the safety net. You need to create a bottom so the 
economy snaps back, but be careful. When you create too much liquidity, 
government spending, you are going to blow up the cost of everything 
for people. It happened.
  What is the solution? The left now talks about doing another stimulus 
bill to make their lives even more miserable.
  Maybe it is the arrogance of: These folks in the poorer quartiles, 
they have been indoctrinated. They are going to vote for the left. So 
just abuse the crap out of them. They are still going to vote for you.
  The fact of the matter is, if you look at the real data of who votes 
for the Democrats anymore, it is the urban elite. That is who finances 
their campaigns. It is no longer the working men and women. They 
migrated much more to the Republican side.
  So maybe what I am seeing is politically logical, but economically, 
it is brutal. The math is the math. At some point behind the math are 
people who are suffering.
  Think about this. You just saw on the chart where the lowest couple 
of quartiles spend most of their money just trying to do housing. Take 
a look at what we have done to the housing prices. This is mostly rent. 
You know, when you are in that bottom third, you are a renter. How many 
people right now who are renting we now are responsible for economic 
policies, liquidity of cash, where we have blown up the cost of 
housing, blown up the cost of rent, that we now will have trapped so 
much of America into being permanent renters for the rest of their 
lives? They are never going to build that savings account that owning a 
house is and that became part of being able to retire and is part of 
the American Dream.
  The math is the math. You look at African Americans, Latino 
populations, and the amount that has moved into struggling just to 
cover the rent, it has blown up dramatically.
  This just doesn't disappear. You don't wake up tomorrow and say, hey, 
we decided we are going to do economic policies, regulatory policies, 
tax policies. So we make a lot more stuff. Yes, the Federal Reserve 
pulls liquidity out. It fixes inflation. Oh, isn't it neat? All the 
rents went back down.
  It doesn't work that way. How long before these populations get their 
incomes back where they can actually survive, where just the cost of 
having a place to live isn't consuming almost every dollar of their 
lives?
  We don't talk enough about the policies here and the misery they have 
created. Yet, we have pumped so much cash into the system that we take 
a look at State and local, and they are sitting on boatloads of cash.
  There is another really interesting trend line here. How did this 
happen? We had the speeches here 1 year ago, 1\1/2\ years ago. The 
world is coming apart. The world is falling apart. Yet, somehow state 
and local tax receipts actually held up dramatically well. We overshot 
the mark.

  Then what did we do? Even though we knew they were doing just fine, 
the actual fall in receipts, which is the proper term for tax 
collections, was marginal. What did the Democrat policy do? Let's send 
them more cash because that is their constituents.
  I want to walk through some of the other aspects that we believe left 
policies are making the working poor, the middle class, poorer. Here is 
a simple concept. I have said it over and over, but you have to 
understand it is this layering effect.
  Let's say you are that individual that didn't graduate high school. 
The value you bring to work is your willingness to work. So you are the 
person hanging drywall. You are doing labor. You are doing landscaping. 
Your goal is one day you hope to own the landscaping company. You hope 
to own the plaster company. What you sell is your labor and your 
willingness to work.
  What are the two ways you crush that population economically? We just 
did the inflation. We saw how much of their income now is going to just 
surviving.
  The second thing you do is you make them compete against millions of 
others with similar skill sets. So there is this great economic 
argument. If you want to grow American GDP, immigration is a big deal, 
but it has to be immigration that has a multiplier effect on everything 
from tax receipts to productivity. You don't import massive poverty.
  It is uncomfortable to talk about it this way. The fact of the matter 
is,

[[Page H969]]

being a border state, what is happening at our border? You are not 
bringing folks who grow the economy. The data says actually what you 
are doing is you are making the working poor poorer.
  I don't know how often anyone here will talk about our crisis at the 
border, which is real. Come to Arizona. Go to Texas. The societal 
impact, when you do it this way, we can get into some of the really 
interesting economic data saying, hey, when populations leave this 
country, you have just actually wiped out the ambitious populations 
because these are people willing to pack up and leave. You actually 
hurt the departing country. The fact of the matter is, you also hurt 
the folks here.
  The numbers at the border are just stunning. I mean, when you start 
thinking of, during this administration, a couple of million folks, 
they may be wonderful people. It is not about them. It is the impact of 
the very people we claim we care about, that we claim we are trying to 
help. We claim we are trying to close income inequality. We claim we 
are trying to make the poor less poor. Then we do everything we can to 
crush them.
  It is just the economics. I just can't figure out what the left is 
doing intellectually. They know this number. If it was a decade, 10, 15 
years ago, all the literature we keep finding, it was Democrats who 
were fixated on locking down the border because they knew it hurt the 
poor and the working poor. They used to accuse Republicans of wanting 
open borders to push down labor values. Do you remember? It wasn't that 
long ago. The argument was flipped.
  There goes my theory that maybe the left truly has abandoned working 
men and women in this country because they are no longer their 
defenders. They are almost the defenders of someone who needs a cheap 
landscaper.
  The border numbers are real. I mean, when you start seeing the data 
coming from the administration itself, they make it really hard to find 
the actual facts. When you see numbers that are 278 percent increases, 
you start to realize what this is going to mean.
  There is a great paper. We came here and talked about it a few months 
ago. It is a decade old. It talks about what happens when you get these 
waves of illegal crossing, and they get rolled into your economy. It 
was talking that it would take a decade for that lower quartile, the 
poor middle class, the working poor, for their incomes to start to come 
up.
  It was solely a division of a number of people with similar skill 
sets attacking the same types of positions and work. It was a Democrat 
paper. I mean, it was written by folks who made it very clear they were 
on the left.
  Isn't it fascinating how quickly the understanding of demographics 
and population dynamics--what it does to the very people that our 
friends on that side used to say they cared about?
  We do lots of virtue signaling here and lots of pretty words. The 
data is the data is the data. The policies are the policies. The 
policies are killing the middle class. They are killing the working 
poor.
  You start to look at these things, and here is the great irony. Think 
of this. Last year, the last 2 years, legal visas have collapsed. At 
the same time, you have these huge runs at our border. Now, this 
probably requires a much more deep dive on economic multipliers and 
certain types of skill sets and those things. The fact of the matter 
is, these populations up here, we know we get an economic multiplier. 
These populations over here, it is uncomfortable, but it is the math. 
It becomes a contribution from society to them.
  We did a presentation about a year ago and talked about if you saw 
what was happening in the entire industrialized world--remember, the 
only place in the world right now with positive fertility rates is sub-
Saharan Africa. I know this is geeky, but it is important. I know it is 
not politics by shiny object, which is now what Congress is about. This 
is important. The Western world is collapsing demographically and 
fertility-wise.

                              {time}  1230

  The driver of U.S. sovereign debt is our demographics. We are getting 
older. Somehow Congress didn't figure out there were baby boomers until 
the last year or two, and now they still don't really want to talk 
about it; so for 65 years they just didn't know we were coming.
  But what happens when you even see data--China's demographics are 
collapsing. Europe's we know have been collapsing. Even countries like 
India, we are seeing their fertility rates fall off rather 
dramatically.
  The model basically says in the coming two, three decades, it won't 
be worldwide fights over hydrocarbons like we had functionally in the 
1970s or rare earths. Remember how many people would come behind these 
mikes just a couple years ago, rare earths, we are all going to go to 
war over rare earths.
  Turns out now that we know how to do the iron-air battery and all 
these other things, the rare earth consumption looks like there may be 
a path around the massive needs.
  It turns out over the next couple decades it is going to be the 
battle for smart people, and that is a really interesting thing to 
think about.
  So if we do the brilliant thing with unified leftist government, we 
make sure that legal visas, legal immigration crashes, but we open up 
our border to bring in more poverty and misery to even our own poor. I 
mean, you can't make this stuff up. It is just like every policy set 
has great headlines, great talking points, acting like you are caring, 
and you are completely avoiding the misery Democrat policies keep 
bringing to the society.
  And then there are the things we sort of call second-degree, third-
degree effects when you open up the border. Come to my community of 
Phoenix, see the dramatic increase in homelessness. Does anyone else 
out there care? I did a ride-along a couple weeks ago with a neighbor 
who is an officer, and we spent 4 or 5 hours driving around. He has 
been doing this, like, 28 years, and he's telling me he has never, ever 
seen--that the homeless population has doubled; the crime, people 
breaking in and stealing stuff, but they are stealing stuff from other 
poor people. The violence.
  And then we start to see the data of my southern border in Arizona, 
the amount of narcotics. One of the classic--if you want to play 
economist, the price of drugs that are killing people has crashed. When 
you see the narcotics fall in price, what does that tell you? There is 
a hell of a lot of them.
  So, okay, maybe it is leftist orthodoxy you need an open border, but 
did they have to flood my neighborhoods with narcotics? Did they have 
to spike the homelessness around the country, particularly in Phoenix? 
Did they have to make more people's lives miserable? Because that is 
what the policies of this administration and the Democrats who control 
this place have done. I don't think they meant to do it.
  It was obvious if they thought like an economist instead of virtue 
signaling for policy. Remember, we make policy now around here by 
feelings, by what we can say behind these microphones to get someone to 
send us money, even if it is crap and really hurts people.
  And you start to see the misery the Democrat policies have put on our 
streets. And of course their solution, well, we are going to send them 
a check. Of course, the check will also continue the cycle of 
inflation, making people poorer. It is just--I almost wish we could 
have, where there is no television cameras, no mikes, put ourselves in 
a room with a couple people who own calculators and say: Let's walk 
through what has worked in the last 25 years and the things that 
haven't worked.
  Madam Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 25 minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
  Then when you are done doing your ride-along with the Phoenix city 
policeman, he is heartbroken. He has actually even moved out of the 
very neighborhood that he loved, that he has patrolled because even he 
thinks the property crime, the violent crime, the people living in the 
alleys has become too much for even him and his wife.
  But the other thing he talked about was how many overdose deaths, how 
many people--now, we need to accept, a lot of this is a combination of 
COVID policy, economic policy. We are hunting for the 2021 number, but 
everything we have gotten so far, we have created misery out there.

[[Page H970]]

  Go pick up your community newspaper. Do they even still talk about 
how many have died from overdoses or has it just become so commonplace 
it is not worth reporting on that type of misery anymore?
  And then you start to look at the crime statistics. And, look, 
Democrats often accuse Republicans of talking about crime to scare 
people. That is not where I am at. My district is an urban-suburban 
district. I care about these lives, but I also am fascinated by the 
economics of it.
  Well, it turns out we did inflation, we did housing, we did the 
devaluing of people's labor by opening up the border, but we almost 
never have the conversation of how do you move out of poverty when 
people keep stealing your stuff?
  I have what I will call an acquaintance, he is almost a friend. As a 
kid I used to hang drywall. He still has the drywall business. Now he 
has passed it on to his kids and his grandkids, and they are really 
good. They can do a level 5 smooth coat. That has always been my dream 
to learn how to do that the right way. It is a weird hobby. And he 
talks about they are now not doing projects in certain areas because 
people keep stealing their stuff, and it is really hard to keep people 
employed. It is really hard to be that micro-entrepreneur where you are 
selling your talent, and your talent is functionally your willingness 
to show up and the fact you have a couple drywall spades.
  So we are also working on a project now in our office to try to 
understand how much of income inequality, people being poor, is the 
fact that they live in a crime-ridden area, crime-ridden ZIP Code where 
people keep breaking their bones and stealing their stuff; and by 
stealing their stuff, they can't accumulate assets, and how much of 
that stuff was the very things they need for work.

  And then you overlay just the incredible spike of deaths, of murders 
that are happening in parts of the country. Now, maybe this is a 
societal reaction to locking up parts of the population, idleness. I 
don't know. I am not a sociologist. But we have to understand, so many 
of our urban areas across the country, there is misery.
  But there is hope. If we could get our policy sets correct around 
here, there is incredible hope because we do have a society that 
desperately, an economy that desperately, a country that desperately 
needs people. They need workers. You see the workforce shortage 
continues even with today's numbers.
  We need to talk a little--I will do this; this might be a weird 
transition. Really good unemployment numbers today. Even though 
unemployment actually went up as a percentage, but the number of jobs, 
which that is a good sign, people being willing to take the jobs, be a 
little careful, we need to retake a look at what they call the labor 
force participation number because it has been reindexed. Every year 
you actually try to do a calculation.
  We haven't had a chance to look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 
underlying numbers. There was a beautiful spike in labor force 
participation. We need to figure out how much of that, though, is they 
changed the numbers of the population that is available to be in the 
labor force. But today was a good number.
  But the wage inflation number was really dangerous because we have 
talked about one of our models we have in the Joint Economic Committee 
is that if we spike much more, we are on the cusp of a wage-price 
spiral. And that is just a great way to create misery in the society 
because those are really hard to break.
  Once again, we were doing, in 2018-2019--I believe much of it came 
because we fixed some great inequities in our Tax Code. But something, 
if you start to look at the data, why in this last year has there been 
this massive number of retirees--a million and a half more--than we 
ever modeled for? Why are so many people basically saying screw this, I 
am out of the labor market, I am disappearing?
  At the very time that if we were actually doing policy where you 
wanted to deal with the debt, you wanted to be able to keep having 
enough receipts, tax revenues to be able to keep our commitments on 
Social Security and Medicare, if you wanted to lower the misery in the 
country, you would be doing policies that would be trying to get young 
males into the workforce--there is a weird number there where they are 
not showing up for the workforce--but also folks who are eligible for 
retirement, early retirement, to stay in the workforce.
  Those are policies that I think Republicans and Democrats could agree 
upon, labor and business could agree upon, and yet I sometimes feel 
really lonely around here talking about these things. But it's the 
math. You see these numbers. When you are losing a million and a half 
folks who are choosing to retire early, you do realize the data 
basically says a large portion of these people in a few years, 
particularly if inflation continues for the next couple years, will be 
in poverty.
  One of the greatest ways to minimize poverty for folks in their 
retirement years is to have them delay retirement. Something is 
perverse out there when we have created a society that is incentivized 
to go take your Social Security at 62 and take the cuts, the lower 
benefit. I am just really concerned about this.
  And then you start to take a look at other population dynamics. And 
this goes back to my earlier statement that I believe in this coming 
decade, actually the decade we are in and the next one, the fight for 
smart people will be akin to the pursuit of rare earths or hydrocarbons 
or those things from the past.
  You see it, this is happening all around us. There is a collapse in 
the demographics. This is China, U.S., Europe, and it is for all of us. 
We are less bad than some of the others, but it is miserable. And it is 
the great opportunity of saying if we would fix the Tax Code--and, yes, 
maybe it is time to look at border adjustability, so we stop having the 
arbitrage, and when we try to sell things there is this massive tax 
arbitrage of manufactured goods from the United States.
  But this is our reality. And yet this place will live on being 
enraged over the next mask mandate or this or that. Those are big 
deals. But they are not what is going to wipe out this Republic. Being 
unwilling to deal with the fact of our math.
  And so think about this. We should be ashamed--and Republicans have 
part of this, too, as part of our sin. A small part, but part of it. We 
have been trying to do the math. Take a guess how much money we handed 
out per family in COVID aid. It is out there. So think of this.
  I just showed you a bunch of slides saying working men and women have 
gotten poorer in the last year, but the debt exploded in the last 2 
years, and now we are doing the math, saying, do you realize we put out 
over $76,000 per household in cash, that was COVID cash? Over $76,000. 
That is our best math at this point. And we have been having to go up 
and down different budget reports.
  But do you feel, anyone here in this room or around the country, do 
you feel you got $76,000 worth of value the last 18 months? But that is 
what we spent, and that is what we tacked onto my little girl's bonds 
that she gets to pay for.

                              {time}  1245

  Maybe the concept of throwing more and more cash and blowing up 
inflation and destroying the incentive to work and delinking society 
from the nobility of work--oh, by the way, that work actually makes 
them much less poor. Now you actually start to see that, over the last 
couple years, it made more sense not to participate in society.
  This is what we did. Maybe they weren't thinking, maybe they didn't 
mean to, but this is what we did. So we delinked--we functionally 
financed staying home.
  Then the last little perversity of just from today, you will hear 
many of the left try to tout that $350 billion bill they just passed 
here in the House. If you dig through it, it is like, you know, a 5-
year plan, government-planned economy. It really is sort of terrifying. 
But there is a little gem stuck in the left's bill they just passed.
  Do you realize in there you have the pandemic ending in 2025? It is 
not based on: Hey, we have antivirals now. Hey, we have vaccines now. 
Hey, we now have home PCR tests. We have all the things we said we 
needed. They are here, but instead, we are going to keep the pandemic 
going--and that is what you all just voted on--until 2025.

[[Page H971]]

  My argument is, it is about the money. The pandemic declaration has 
become a conduit to hand out cash, hand out cash to your favorite 
groups to make corporate America, hospitals, and others addicted to the 
Democratic Party because they are handing out cash. And now, we just 
passed a piece of legislation that says the pandemic ends in 2025.
  I beg someone out there: Please listen. Turn course on the policies. 
Come up with a unified theory that moves prosperity because economic 
growth, prosperity, is moral. But almost every act moved by the 
Democrats this year, almost every initiative from this White House, has 
made America poorer. It has made America more dangerous. And now, they 
are passing pieces of legislation to make sure we stay in this sort of 
dystopian chaos for years more.
  Take a breath. Look at the data. Look at the misery this place has 
created over the last year. And seriously, I beg of you, consider 
having some self-awareness and some reflection and stop it.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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