[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 57 (Thursday, March 31, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H4056-H4061]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  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. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West 
Virginia (Mr. Mooney).


              Partisan Games--Supreme Court Justice Thomas

  Mr. MOONEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for yielding me time.
  Mr. Speaker, one of the latest partisan games being pushed by the 
radical left is the call for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to 
recuse himself from certain cases or face impeachment.
  These demands stem from an email and other digital private 
communications of Justice Thomas' wife to and from government officials 
at the time.
  If it becomes the standard that an elected official or a judge or a 
commissioner or other government appointees can be attacked because of 
the views and political actions of a spouse, then everyone is fair 
game.
  How many members of the Democratic Caucus would like to be held 
accountable for the politics or actions of their spouse? How many 
governors, State legislators, or judges at any level would be able to 
withstand an assault based on the beliefs of their husband or wife? No 
good will come of this effort.
  There are those who argue that the radical left wants such a toxic 
environment. The feeling is that those who

[[Page H4057]]

wish to radically transform America know that they are facing a harsh 
verdict from the American people come this November. These activist 
partisans are willing to literally throw our country into a frenzy of 
hate, suspicion, and personal vendetta in order to divert attention 
from the failure of their policies.
  I pray that the members of the Democratic Caucus making these 
extremist demands are ignored and that statesmen can take the lead. But 
if, once again, the Democrat leadership is so beholden to the extremist 
fringe that they send us into such a fight, you will not succeed.
  I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding me the time.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a tricky 
presentation, and I want to apologize immediately to those who have to 
try take down our words. But tonight, I am going to actually try to 
focus on solutions.
  Last week, I spent an hour behind this microphone begging our friends 
on the left, begging our Democrat colleagues to stop doing much of what 
they have been doing. And I demonstrated that it has been hurting 
people. Last year was miserable for the working poor, for the poor, for 
the middle class.
  And in some ways, it is our own fault in this body because 
intellectually, this place is calcified--that is my word of the day. 
Because we see the math. We see the facts. And we have the folks lay 
out what is going to happen. But because it is already part of, 
particularly in this case, the left's dogma, we do it anyway. And then 
we act surprised here a year later when my community had 10.9 percent 
inflation last year.
  Year over year, how many people is that crushing? And now we are 
seeing some data. And this is important; this isn't transitory. A 
number of the most powerful modelers in the economic world in this 
country are now starting to ring the alarm bells of both: We are 
heading towards a recession and that inflation may now be with us for 
decades because of how we have screwed things up in this place.

  First, this is as of almost today, you have Goldman Sachs now saying 
there is a 27\1/2\ percent chance of a recession--not a slowdown, a 
recession, which means two quarters of negative GDP by the end of this 
year.
  Citi is at 25 percent.
  J.P. Morgan is still at 15, which were the numbers from last week.
  These numbers have skyrocketed. If you and I looked at this three 
weeks ago, it was 9 percent.
  Does anyone here actually care about people? Do you care about 
working men and women? Do you understand what a recession does to 
people? How long it takes to get your feet back underneath you? Let 
alone the head kick we are giving to the American public with 
inflation.
  So here is my goal. I am going to race through just a boatload of 
slides here, and I am going to throw out concept after concept after 
concept. Some of them are marginal. Some of them you are going to go, 
Oh, that makes sense.
  But the point is, there are actually solutions. If the left would 
ever allow us to offer a genuine amendment in committee, to actually 
have a genuine discussion and debate, maybe we could change some hearts 
and minds in this place, or just even enlighten some intellect around 
here. But that isn't what this place does.
  So let's actually start to walk through the bill that a number of 
folks are so giddy about today.
  I am fixated on diabetes because of what it does and the misery to 
parts of my district. I represent a Tribal community that is number 2 
as a percentage of population who suffer from diabetes. Come to the 
reservation. I will introduce you to families that I have known where 
mom has her feet cut off.
  But to tout the bill that was passed here today as a solution is an 
absolute fraud. You do realize the con job that the Democrats are 
touting here? And I am not sure it is purposeful. I don't think they 
spent time understanding.
  First, you basically created a subsidy bill for Big Pharma. 
Congratulations. You didn't reduce the price. What you did is you 
created, functionally, $20 billion of subsidy to buy down the price of 
insulin. And you bought it down with a fraud because you are doing a--
well, we are going to pretend that the Trump administration's rule in 
regard to rebates is in effect, which it was never going into effect. 
So you made magic money again.
  And at the same time, you just took away the pressure we could have 
done together to actually get a real solution on the price of insulin. 
And some of that solution could have been something as simple as the 
co-op that is in construction right now, that is saying they are going 
to bring $30 a vial, $55 a box--and a box is 5 vials--of insulin to 
market in a year.
  So if we were actually doing solutions here, the Democrats' bill, 
working with Republicans, would have been, We are going to put it in 
the stack for licensing and permitting. We are going to put aside some 
money to make sure that they get their factory up and running in 
Virginia as soon as possible.
  And, oh, by the way, this is substantially less expensive than the 
subsidized version that is going to cost society $20 billion. And you 
are handing that to Big Pharma. Isn't that amusing?
  I mean, amusing the speechifying here. And the Democrats' approach to 
helping people who can't afford their insulin is to blow up the market, 
screw up the incentives, and then screw up the actual solution. And the 
solution is coming.
  Does anyone actually subscribe to something where they read?
  And you have got to understand, we need to go--and the whole debate 
around diabetes, we have got to go much, much further.
  Mr. Speaker, 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes; 33 
percent of all healthcare spending. Understand, in 29 years, the United 
States is scheduled to have about $112 trillion of borrowed money in 
today's dollars.
  Mr. Speaker, 75 percent of that is just Medicare, but if 31 percent 
of Medicare spending is diabetes, cure it. And you go, But, David, how 
would we do that?
  Well, I have been to this floor a dozen times over the last 12 months 
saying the research is happening. The early numbers look good.
  Guess what? It succeeded. Hey, the phase 1s worked. Now we are 
actually on another set of phase 1s where they are actually using 
CRISPR to tag the stem cell that has become an isolate cell to make it 
so you can do a biofoundry. And it could be a production line, so it 
doesn't even need to come from your skin to get the stem cells.

                              {time}  1815

  Meaning, if we would get our reimbursement sets straight here, our 
licensing sets straight here, our incentives lined up. The modelers say 
in about 5 years you could actually be rolling out--the cure to type 1 
is actually the easy part, it is the cure to type 2 which is much more 
difficult. We have to have a brutal conversation of nutrition support 
and maybe nutrition support that is healthy.
  Encouraging our brothers and sisters in my Tribal communities, the 
lifestyles and things, to be ready to actually accept the cure. But the 
fact of the matter is it is here. So what did the Democrats just do? 
They did a subsidy bill for insulin that is going to cost $20 billion. 
How about if they had taken that $20 billion and put it into the price 
for getting this cure to market?
  It is just an example we don't seem to get our heads around. The 
world works in incentives and disincentives. We have made it so 
bureaucratic and so expensive that we are in an incumbent protection 
racket here. It is not incumbent Members of Congress, it is incumbent 
bureaucracies, incumbent business models, and the disruptions like this 
that would end so much misery and also be the single biggest thing we 
can do to affect the debt in this country.
  We applaud ourselves for voting through a bill that actually will 
have made things worse. If there is an economist in the room and you 
walk through saying, well, because you just functionally government-
subsidized this, you just took away the pricing pressure to actually 
have the revolution of both the cost and the cure.
  I am begging my brothers and sisters here to think. There is this 
incredible hope. They have already had the successes in the phase ones, 
and now the ability to actually tag it and make it

[[Page H4058]]

so you don't need to be on anti-rejection drugs. Think about what it 
means to the health of the country.
  Why would I go to diabetes right after showing you that the 
projections of a recession at the end of this year are skyrocketing 
because you are heading in an approach where you are making a 
substantial portion of our population--making them available to 
participate in the economy.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to throw out a really uncomfortable subject 
for a second. I am the senior Republican on the Joint Economic 
Committee and we have been trying a little side project for almost a 
year. What makes people poor? What is the real cause of income 
inequality? And unlike the rhetorical crap virtue signaling that is 
said around here, we are actually starting to find out there are a lot 
of things, but health, education, things of that nature that we can 
affect are actually major precursors, then you look at the amount of 
the population that is in the lower quartiles that either they or their 
family or because they have someone who is horribly sick substantially 
because of renal failure or diabetes.
  My other side of the argument is why this is moral to pursue. It also 
would end lots of misery. It would actually really help the poor. It 
actually might squeeze down income inequality. It is sort of the 
trifecta. Yet, I will do these presentations on how it works and that 
it would be amazing for economic growth, and if it truly brought more 
of our brothers and sisters to be able to participate in the economy, 
it would also be really good for inflation, too.
  I have done this slide multiple times. I'm trying to sort of explain 
the mechanisms of a stem cell and you can now direct--think of it as a 
biofoundry mechanism, sort of like CRISPR. You can direct that stem 
cell to become an insulin-producing cell. In the previous slide you can 
walk through how you can actually do this in a fashion that it can be 
almost a factory production. So even beyond the personalized medicine 
concept.
  Why this is so important is we are on the cusp of a revolution to 
make people's lives so much better--so much healthier. Instead, what we 
have done in this place over the last 12 months is we have set off 
inflation. We have set off crime. We have set off homelessness because 
of really, really bad policies. Lots of great virtue signaling. There 
have been beautiful speeches behind these microphones telling you how 
much we care and how we feel, and then the economics are just horrible.
  Some more of the disruption that I believe would be great for the 
country--and the technology is already here, we just have to learn how 
to legalize it--is your ability to wear something on your wrist. This 
is one of my favorites. I am just going to walk you through a concept.
  This is a breath biopsy. A couple versions of this out there think it 
would be a couple hundred dollars, at most, and you could have 
functionally a medical lab in your medicine cabinet at home. Blow into 
it. Within a couple moments it tells you: Hey, guess what, you have a 
virus. It can then bang off your medical records, order your 
antivirals, and maybe Lyft or someone can drop it off at your house in 
a couple hours.
  Would that make your life easier? Would that give you more time with 
your family and faster to get healed? Would it help crash parts of 
healthcare costs? Remember, three-quarters of that $112 trillion is 
healthcare, it is Medicare. Healthcare is what is substantially 
bankrupting this country.
  Do you know what the problem with that technology is? It is illegal. 
The fact of the matter is you would let this breath biopsy be able to 
order your antivirals, allow the algorithm--and the data says the 
algorithm is more accurate than those of us that are humans. I know 
that just hurt a bunch of people's feelings.
  If you legalize the technology you could have a disruption in the 
price of healthcare. You could make this society--our country--
dramatically more efficient and give us more time with our families and 
be healthy. It would be an economic virtuous cycle and a healthy one. 
It would just require us around here to actually have to deal with the 
avalanche of lobbyists that hate this technology. As I said before, we 
are sort of calcified intellectually around here, aren't we?
  Mr. Speaker, now I want to talk about the heresy that is in President 
Biden's budget and the solutions. How many times have you gotten up 
here and seen the Speaker herself, multiple times--tax reform in 2017 
was for the rich. No, it wasn't. CBO--more revenues came in. Corporate 
tax receipts leaped 75 percent after we reformed the tax code a couple 
years ago.

  The fact of the matter is--what we call receipts in Ways and Means, 
revenues as most people would think of--coming into in government went 
up dramatically. Why that was so important is that 2018 and 2019 were 
our most successful years in modern economic history of poor people 
getting less poor, the middle class doing better, income inequality 
shrinking, food insecurity shrinking.
  Minority populations had the biggest movement ever in U.S. history in 
getting less poor, getting wealthier. That income inequality gap shrank 
because we got the tax incentives correct. But because it was 
Republicans that did it, there is this running away from it--we have 
seen--great job, guys. Think about what has happened to this country in 
1 year.
  You are poorer today than you were 1 year ago. The fact of the matter 
is the setting off of inflation--God knows some of the other things 
that have gone on and we are going to touch on them--we are poorer 
today than we were 1 year ago. Yes, there was COVID. We stood behind 
these microphones a year ago and said, you don't want to keep dumping 
money the way you are doing, you are going to set off inflation. They 
told us to go jump in the lake. Congratulations, they did it.
  Now some of the economists are telling us a recession by the end of 
the year, oh, and maybe 10 years of an inflationary cycle before we can 
squeeze it out of the system.
  Once again, if you actually look at the charts, it was actually 
working women that exploded. This big of a movement here--I know this 
chart doesn't express it--that type of steep curve increasing is 
remarkable. It is just remarkable in what happened after tax reform.
  It was actually working women, substantially those from minority 
populations, that had just remarkable increases in income. They are the 
ones that also got crushed during the way we approached the pandemic. 
Anyone that tells you, oh, it was this huge give-away of money.
  Well, it is sort of amazing because it was the second and the third 
highest receipts or revenues in 2018 and 2019. You got to remember 
there was a little bit of a con in 2017 because the expensing went in--
you could expense in the last quarter before the tax reform. So the 
fourth quarter of 2017 you could begin expensing. So this actually had 
some of the economic growth effects pulled into the previous year--I 
know I am geeking out a bit--but it continued.
  One of the reasons we actually economically held up pretty well is 
the Democrats haven't been able to repeal the 2017 tax reform. And I 
know this slide is a little hard to see, but it is the best one we 
could put together in the short timeframe. Guess what? We crossed over 
$4 trillion in revenues and receipts.
  If you go back--think about that, it was only a couple years earlier 
that we were at $3.3 trillion. You understand, that is like a $700 
billion increase in receipts in a time when the Democrats told us we 
had eviscerated the tax code and gave it all away. At some point the 
calculator does tell the truth.
  So back to our earlier thesis. Getting the tax system correct is 
amazing for the economics. This is the other side of the question I 
want to ask. How many here believe growth is moral? I will try to argue 
over and over that economic growth creates opportunity, and those 
opportunities driven by that growth is moral. I wish I could just get 
us to focus on--that growth also is a way we survive the debt bubble 
that is expanding like an alligator mouth. Here is the size of our 
economy and here is the scale of the debt.
  You do understand that CBO basically says in 9 years, every single 
year just our interest payment will be $1 trillion. That is where we 
are heading. Here is a crazy thought. If I needed to tap down inflation 
today but I wanted to do it by not solely having the Federal Reserve do 
monetary policy, which

[[Page H4059]]

is squeezing cash out of the system--remember, inflation is what, too 
many dollars chasing too few goods. You have the monetary side of 
inflation pull the dollars out of the economy. The other side is to 
make more stuff.
  This year, expensing. The reality of it--tax reform--it was the 
expensing that drove much of the economic expansion, the investment in 
productivity, it goes to 80 percent this fiscal year and then drops 
down I think to 60 percent the next year. Do a mechanism where you add 
a bonus.
  If you say: Business, if you are willing to take some of that cash 
functioning out of the system and go invest it in productivity capital, 
buy a new plant, put in new equipment, do things that will make it so 
you can pay workers more. We make more stuff because when we have more 
stuff you knock down inflation because it is now the number of dollars 
divided by numbers of stuff. Crazy idea.

                              {time}  1830

  Do a tax adjustment.
  Mr. Speaker, say we are going to give you a bonus on your expenses to 
encourage you to take that money out of liquidity and buy things that 
make us more productive as a country. It is a win-win, and it has the 
benefit of being a long-term benefit to society.
  It is sort of. We have been working on this. This is just as a 
thought experiment. And it may not be brilliant, but it is more the 
concept of right now. Today there are too many dollars chasing too few 
goods. Then create a deal with business in America saying, Hey, if you 
take some cash, set it aside, functionally, ah, screw it, and you are 
going to put it into new equipment that makes it more efficient so you 
can have more goods, better transportation, better supply chains, that 
is what we want to incentivize instead of trying to buy things today 
and shove them in a warehouse because you are worried the price is 
going to go up tomorrow.
  This is the type of thought experiments policy we should be pursuing, 
Mr. Speaker, if you need to knock down inflation but you want to do it 
by growing as an economy.
  Instead, around here, we are going to sit around on our backsides and 
let the Federal Reserve basically squeeze us out and put many people 
through months and months and months of recessionary misery because 
that is how we are going to knock down inflation.
  Another part of the thought experiment: I have some new areas--if I 
am blessed enough to represent in the coming cycle--and we did some 
polling. And they came back that crime is their number one issue.
  I went on a ride-along with a sergeant who is actually a friend. He 
was showing me neighborhoods saying, You do realize the homelessness in 
these neighborhoods has doubled in a year. Doubled. He is explaining to 
me that someone now can get high for a fraction of the cost they could 
a year ago. Every single one of those are what we call knockoff 
effects, second-degree, third-degree effects.
  Do you all remember your high school economics class?
  You opened up the borders. What did you think was going to happen?
  My community of Phoenix is flooded with narcotics. As a matter of 
fact, we just had a bust a couple months ago. There was enough fentanyl 
to kill every single resident in Arizona.
  So the compassion that this administration and Speaker Pelosi wanted 
to show for the border, thank you, because you are killing my 
neighbors.
  The homelessness--I don't believe the Phoenix market is the only area 
that is seeing incredible increases in homelessness. The crime--go on 
to the city of Phoenix's heat map and click, click, click, and you can 
see the expansion of the crime and where it is moving and the number of 
overdoses.
  The fact of the matter is when you screw up a policy, then you need 
to think through the knockoff effects.
  You screwed up the border policy.
  How much misery did you bring to society?
  Remember, we have done a number of presentations.
  What are the two ways you make the working middle class or the 
working lower class poorer?
  Inflation. We are doing a great job at that. And you flood the 
marketplace with people with similar skill sets. So if you are that 
individual who may not have finished high school, but you are a good 
drywaller and you are busting your backside--and it is hard work; I 
hung drywall as a young man--we just flooded the marketplace with 
people of similar skill sets.
  Does anyone around here own a basic economics book?
  So let's go to a couple other things. So the principle there is, get 
the border policy right because there is this incredible irony--legal 
immigration for individuals with specific talent sets that we actually 
need in this society, the young man who just got his Ph.D. at Arizona 
State University and is leaving because the State Department's ability 
to process visas and ability to be immigration has functionally become 
nonexistent in the last 2 years. But over here, a couple million cross 
the border.
  Does anyone see just the weird irony of the Democrats' policies of, 
they hurt?
  I don't think they were meant to hurt. I think they had the virtue 
signaling quality of sounding compassionate, but that is not what has 
happened.
  So let's actually walk through a couple of things that are actually 
additional solutions.
  How many times do we talk about supply chains?
  And you have seen the latest data. It basically says--and I am not 
going to argue with it because I haven't had a chance to break down the 
numbers--half of inflation is we spent too damn much money. But half of 
inflation is second degree knockoff effects in supply chains.
  So we just did the transportation bill. The transportation bill was 
substantially green oriented, very little of the money actually went to 
roads and bridges. None of it actually went to disruptive technologies.
  But there are ideas like this, where this was some SpaceX engineers 
who are out raising capital to build this, where you would actually 
have autonomous trains. So you pull a container off, stick it on one of 
these, the autonomous lorry right underneath it on the track drives it 
to the warehouse it is supposed to be dropped off at.
  So you are telling me we have a crisis in truck drivers in the 
Alameda Corridor outside L.A. Our ability to use technology, why didn't 
we incentivize this sort of thing?
  But do you want to know what the Democrats chose to incentivize in 
their Build Back Better, Mr. Speaker?
  It wasn't creative things to make us more productive as a society. It 
was ideas like this: in their legislation it is illegal for the ports 
to automate.
  Huh?
  But they just told us that they were trying to fix the supply 
chains--except for the numbers of giveaways to the unions they put into 
their legislation that you can't automate the ports.

  So on one hand, Mr. Speaker, you have breakthrough technology that 
says that we think we have a way to move these containers. And then the 
next thing that the brain trust around here does policy-wise is, we are 
going to make it illegal for you to do the automation that would move 
the supply chains that you are telling us is half the inflationary 
spike.
  There are solutions. Stop putting up these impediments and start 
embracing the technology to fix the problem.
  Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time I have remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 29 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. So in the President's proposal, in the Democrats' 
proposals, they want to tax the rich more. The new President Biden's 
budget, I think, has 36 new taxes in it. But here is the great irony. 
Okay. So they want to do this one tax where they want to functionally 
tax unrealized capital or unrealized gains which is the taking--it will 
be ruled unconstitutional. But it is an interesting concept. We want to 
make a simple proposal that something both Republicans and Democrats 
might agree upon, stop subsidizing the rich. We have come here to this 
floor a couple of times and shown there are $1.4 trillion every 10 
years that the left subsidizes the rich.
  And so what do the Democrats do?
  They say: We need to tax the rich more.
  Okay. And then they put in Build Back Better you can make $800,000 a

[[Page H4060]]

year and we are going to hand you $125,000 of tax credits--not tax 
deductions--credits.
  Does anyone see the lunacy going on here?
  So the virtue signaling is rich people aren't paying enough, and then 
over here we are going to give them 1 trillion-plus dollars in 
subsidies, and then they are going to add more in their Build Back 
Better for more rich people to have more subsidies. It is just 
infuriating.
  Does anyone actually read this stuff?
  Does anyone own a calculator?
  Mr. Speaker, you start to see the numbers.
  I have a number of these slides here, and the point is really simple: 
policy after policy, if you can afford your fourth $6-million house on 
a beach somewhere, do you deserve subsidized flood insurance?
  But all through this government there are items like that where we 
wink and nod, we say we are going to tax rich people more, and then we 
are handing out massive subsidies.
  As a Republican, I want to cut spending. You say you want more 
revenues, Mr. Speaker. Great. Stop putting through the Tax Code, 
regulatory code, these programs of wink, wink, nod, nod, a bunch of 
subsidies to people who write checks.
  So, Mr. Speaker, you have had a number of, particularly, Republicans 
who have come behind the microphone and said: You canceled the Keystone 
pipeline. You made it really hard to put new land into production for 
pulling hydrocarbons out.
  That is actually not the big thing that the left did. What the left 
did are things like this where the Securities and Exchange Commission 
is functionally adding new rules that if you invest in hydrocarbons or 
you are a pension system or these, you are going to have to fill out 
paperwork to explain your effect on global warming.
  What are your effects on carbon?
  They functionally did what we call, they screwed up the capital 
stack. So you could have a natural gas field that was substantially 
shut down when prices collapsed during the pandemic. It is ready to go, 
but you need a bunch of capital to put it back into production.
  And where do you go to get a loan, Mr. Speaker?
  The Democrats did something brilliant, if the goal was to make us 
much poorer and dependent on foreign countries' hydrocarbons like 
Venezuela. They said, Okay. We can do the regulatory side, by that is a 
little bit obvious, but if we make it so no one can get capital to 
actually put these fields into production, they have succeeded.
  Do not let someone try to con you, Mr. Speaker, that what you are 
paying at the gas pump today and what you had to pay for your heating 
bill yesterday happened because of Putin's invasion. Natural gas prices 
exploded last September, October.
  Mr. Speaker, do you remember this room being full of people wanting 
to talk about how we are going to survive the winter heating bills?
  That was because if this. It didn't just happen.
  But my proposal is, okay. I am fascinated with the use of natural 
gas. Our friends on the left, our brothers and sisters on the left, 
say, But, David, yes, it may burn about half the CO 2 emitting as coal, 
but there is methane.
  Let's see if I can find this slide. The technology that is out there 
to basically gobble up methane--and maybe this works, maybe it doesn't 
work, but the fact that the technology exists and it has been 
scientifically proven to work, why wouldn't we pursue that saying: If 
you could get your natural gas out--because remember, President Biden 
just promised we are going to ship a bunch of liquified natural gas to 
Europe, except we don't really have the production right now and you 
can't get capital for it and the left is going to protest leakage from 
methane. Well, it turns out you can take clay, a copper oxide--so it is 
kitty litter. Think about that. It is a cheap solution to absorb that 
methane.
  Why wouldn't we bring the brain trusts around here and say, We need 
the natural gas desperately. Some are worried about the methane bleed. 
Fine. Let's find a solution. It turns out there may be a really 
inexpensive one.
  Why don't we invest and pursue it?
  There are solutions.
  Instead, around here, it is the Malthusian economics of let's just 
shut it down and see how long people are willing to live in poverty and 
misery.
  The transportation bill again: What is one of the most powerful 
things you can do to move traffic in urban areas and suburban areas, 
Mr. Speaker?
  Technology. It turns out if you actually care about the environment 
and you want to move more traffic, invest in the technology that 
synchronizes the stoplights that tell you when school is out, so it 
synchronizes the lights, the on-ramps to a freeway that tell you when 
an ambulance is coming. The studies over and over and over say whether 
it be in an algorithm or an AI-managed smart grid system for traffic is 
one of the most impactful things you can do, Mr. Speaker, to clean the 
air because you move the traffic.
  We couldn't get anyone here willing to even listen to one of our 
amendments on the left about promoting that type of technology.
  There is a biotech revolution going on around us and substantially 
this is happening because of what we did in that 2017 tax reform which 
moved--exploded--the investments. Whether it be messenger RNA, my 
fascination with synthetic biology, the stem cells, there are disease 
after disease after disease and misery after misery we are about to 
cure. We know how to cure hemophilia now. I think we are on the cusp of 
knowing how to cure sickle cell anemia, an incredibly painful disease. 
They are here.
  This place should be doing everything we can to promote getting those 
things to market safely and quickly, as fast as we can to end the 
misery. By the way, it has amazing financial benefits to the economy 
and to our tax base.
  And you start to look at the innovations that are coming right now 
from the biotech industry.

                              {time}  1845

  One of the reasons I did this--and I didn't bring the other slides. 
Then, the left offers their H.R. 3, which, functionally, the 
economists, even the leftwing economists, said, yes, it will lower some 
drug prices, because we are basically going to do scarcity pricing. 
Functionally, we are going to say you can't have certain drugs if it 
costs more than a certain amount, like they do in Europe. But it will 
also crash the capital stock once again. A lot of you are going to die 
because you are not going to get this next generation of cure, and this 
amazing cycle of cures that are coming goes away--great virtue 
signaling.
  The left will tell you they are about to do a piece of legislation to 
lower drug prices, and we all go ``yay,'' because they are too high. 
But by the end of the decade, there are fewer cures, and the value goes 
away because you didn't remove people from being sick.
  It is all about curing people. In the misery, help bring those cures 
to market.
  Personalized medicine, let's legalize it. I showed you the wearables, 
those things. This here should be part of your ability to stay healthy. 
Legalize it.
  Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time is remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 19 minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Forgive me. I have been trying to talk fast so as to 
not chew it all up.
  Mr. Speaker, in a couple of the pieces of legislation that passed 
here, we have put aside boatloads of cash to run wire to rural America, 
and they deserve to have internet access.
  I thought this slide was amusing, but you are actually seeing it 
happening in Ukraine right now. These are a bunch of little kitties in 
a Starlink satellite dish because apparently a Starlink satellite dish 
stays a bit warm in the winter so it defrosts itself. See, it is cute--
kitties.
  But the fact of the matter is, every inch of North America now has 
broadband internet. It is a bunch of satellites flying over us.
  So, let me get this straight: In Ukraine, they are now using this, 
Starlink, to be able to communicate, but we can't seem to get our 
brothers and sisters here in the House of Representatives to understand 
there is a solution to broadband all over the country. They just happen 
to be flying in low-Earth orbit above our heads. It is here.
  Instead, we are going to turn around and put out billions and 
billions and

[[Page H4061]]

billions and billions of dollars of subsidies to put more fiber and 
more wire in the ground to the middle of nowhere.
  Mr. Speaker, there is a huge disruption coming. We need to make sure 
that our regulatory and policy sets are ready for this.
  This is another thing that would also dramatically help this coming 
decade's inflation cycle. Researchers, particularly at the University 
of Illinois, have done this remarkable thing. I did a series of 
presentations on this a year ago. I will do this real quick.
  You-all remember your high school biology class. You remember a C4 
plant, plants that really, really want carbon to turn it into a sugar 
and grow. But they accidentally grab an oxygen molecule, and they have 
to spend all of this energy purging that oxygen molecule and go back 
and try to get a carbon molecule. I know this is a little geeky, but it 
is important to get our heads around it.
  They have come up with a way to tweak the plant so, every time, it 
always grabs the carbon so it turns it into a sugar. Some plants will 
grow 40 percent more efficiently on the same land, the same fertilizer, 
and the same water. You do realize, just that basic math--and it won't 
turn out this way, but just conceptually--that is like removing every 
car off the face of the Earth.
  If our brothers and sisters really care about the environment, they 
would be running as fast as they can to allow these types of available 
technologies to feed the world and feed our country. Yes, it would be a 
disruption, but these things exist.
  Mr. Speaker, the other topic I want to touch on is a tax policy. This 
is a conceptual one.
  How many of you have ever heard of a VAT tax, a value-added tax? 
Okay, so much for the enthusiasm.
  A value-added tax is what substantially most of the rest of the world 
uses. If we are going to have a conversation about: We want businesses 
back in the United States; we want manufacturing back in the United 
States; we want to take on China; we are going to do tariffs; we are 
going to do these regulations; and we are going to do import and export 
controls--great. Realize most of those aren't really going to do much. 
Here is how I am going to try to explain what the rest of the world 
does to stick it to the United States.
  This is a picture of a beautiful Audi. Let's pretend it is a $100,000 
car. My guess is, this one is a little more expensive. It is being made 
in Germany, but someone in Scottsdale, Arizona, is about to buy this 
Audi.
  When it is in Germany, there is a 19 percent VAT tax on it, a value-
added tax. But the moment it leaves the shore of Germany and is on its 
way to the United States, the car has been exported. They give them 
back the $19,000, that 19 percent. When it comes to the United States, 
it is $19,000 less than it was sitting there in Germany. When it hits 
our shore, we put a small tariff or duty on it.
  But the $100,000 Tesla that is made in Texas, when someone in Germany 
is buying it, it has all the tax load--corporate tax, income tax, all 
the other things that we would do in the United States--in that price. 
When this car leaves the United States, we don't refund 19 percent of 
the taxes. It hits the German shore, and they put that $19,000 on top 
of the price.
  So, we get it both ways, coming and going. When we want to export, 
other countries put their VAT tax on our products. But when they send a 
product to us, they take it off.
  We can be incredibly competitive. We can automate in ways to make up 
for labor differential costs. Our energy costs are actually much more 
competitive than the rest of the world.

  Why isn't all manufacturing in the United States right now? It is 
because we are basically getting arbitraged on the value-added tax 
because the rest of the world refunds it. Until we fix that, all the 
talk of ``we want made in America,'' the math doesn't work.
  There are a couple of creative solutions. They are technically 
difficult, where you would have to take that refunded VAT and put it 
back on at our shore, so, functionally, everyone is treated exactly the 
same. The $100,000 American-made car and the $100,000 German-made car 
have the same tax load when they are being sold in their respective 
countries.
  I have been trying to figure out a way to try to explain this concept 
simply, but the tax system, the current tax system as it is, is one of 
the reasons it is so difficult to compete with other countries' 
manufacturing, because they refund that value-added tax.
  Mr. Speaker, the last thing is, I am truly worried about something. I 
believe it is going to affect the United States, but I fear it is going 
to affect the entire world.
  How many of you have seen the stories that a number of the agrarian 
economists, food economists, believe that this coming fall, parts of 
the world are going to starve?
  The price of fertilizer is up dramatically. The price of grain is up 
dramatically. Putin's war on Ukraine has screwed up the grain markets.
  Do we have a moral obligation to step up and understand that, 6 
months from now, part of the world may be starving? What happens in the 
world when you have people going hungry? You have violence and horrible 
things happening.
  We see it coming. All the things we are seeing in the futures 
markets, the price of fertilizer blowing up, if they don't actually 
affect food supplies, if I am wrong, it is a free option. But if I am 
right, we should be pulling the alarm cord.
  We should be begging farmers--in our farm policy, our ag committee, 
we should be removing set-asides, encouraging ways to take corn that 
would be used to make corn-based ethanol and turn it into animal feed, 
using the rotation that is already happening to soy because soy only 
uses--it is not my specialty--a quarter or a third of the amount of 
fertilizer.
  If this is about to happen to the world, and we see it 6 months 
ahead, what is our moral obligation to pull that alarm cord and get it 
right? By getting it right, we also help our own inflation and maybe a 
couple of million people don't die in sub-Saharan Africa.
  Mr. Speaker, I know that was a lot of different subjects thrown 
really quickly. If someone is interested, almost everything I touched 
on, we have done much longer presentations on how the policy would 
work, how it would help inflation, how it would make people's lives 
healthier and better.
  But my point tonight is a really simple one. Stop doing the things 
that ultimately are hurting people. Start looking for the optimism and 
the opportunity that can make America more prosperous, that can make 
the poor less poor, and that can actually knock down inflation. It 
would actually be able to be done together.
  A lot of these ideas aren't actually Republican or Democrat. They are 
just disruptive. If we would embrace the disruption, this could be an 
amazing decade. Right now, the data we are getting today, we may be in 
for years of misery because of policy from this last year.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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