[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 190 (Wednesday, December 7, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H8818-H8821]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        THE MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, forgive me as I get myself somewhat 
organized as is the chaos when you use lots of boards.
  Madam Speaker, we are going to sort of do something in sort of a 
continuation on a theme.
  A couple weeks ago, I was behind the microphones here, and it is 
something I have done a lot, and I walked through just how much trouble 
we are in as a society. The debt is coming, and it turns out that debt 
is not Democrat or Republican, it is demographics; we got old.
  But before I start to walk through what I believe is the thought 
process of the solutions that actually can save us, I am going to ask 
some favors of anyone who is crazy enough to give us time to watch some 
of this.
  I actually do read the comments when these things are put out on 
social media. When you look around the room, there is almost no one 
here, but we are on several hundred televisions right now around the 
campus. Right now in offices in the buildings there are young people 
working on policy papers who have this on their screen. This is part of 
the way we communicate with each other. There is a purpose.
  The second thing I am going to ask, as I start to walk through these 
ideas, is open your minds. Some of these will offend Republicans. Some 
are going to offend Democrats. But the math, the math is true. And the 
family motto: ``The math will always win.''
  There is hope out there, but every single day this place continues to 
operate like a clown show. And I am sorry, that was very mean to 
clowns. Being sarcastic and being mean, the scale of what is coming at 
us and the immorality of not dealing with it terrifies me. So we are 
going to do a quick recap.
  The next 30 years--and these are last year's CBO numbers, this is 
before inflation has been calculated in--we functionally have, and the 
newest one was 114, this one is $116 trillion of borrowed money coming. 
That is in today's dollars.
  So think about that. On this board we are going to borrow $116 
trillion or $114 trillion. We have about $1.9 trillion--we are in the 
positive.
  So where is all the borrowing coming from?
  Every dime of borrowing over the next 30 years, 75 percent of it is 
Medicare, 25 is a shortfall in Social Security.

                              {time}  2120

  That is immoral. But it is math. We got old. Baby boomers started 
retiring. It is math.
  How many conversations have happened on the floor today saying: Hey, 
this is going to drive all public policy because it is going to consume 
every dollar?
  This is the reality.
  Madam Speaker, we are in the process of adopting a little boy right 
now. He is 5 months old. He has been with us since his first few days 
of life. It is a joy. When he turns 25, we have to double--his tax rate 
will have to have doubled what we all pay, and that is just to maintain 
the baseline of services.
  So if you think about where you are going to be 20 years from now, 
Madam Speaker, 25 years from now, are you ready to pay double the 
taxes?
  We make businesses actually do disclosures now saying: Well, global 
warming, environmental change, you should have to disclose that.
  Damn it, should those same businesses have to disclose the fact that 
their tax rates are doubling over the next couple of decades?
  It is baked in the cake. It is this math. Unless you have a 
revolution in two areas: crashing the cost of healthcare and economic 
growth. And growth is moral. Think about the end of 2017, 2018, and 
2019 when the poor got dramatically less poor, the middle class got 
much more prosperous, and income inequality shrank dramatically. It is 
moral.
  In this place we are going to fight over the stupidest things because 
it is easy to understand, it is theatrical, and I have $100-plus 
trillion of crushing debt coming on top of the $31 trillion already out 
there, and that is going to crush all of you.
  If you think you are retiring, Madam Speaker, if you think my little 
boy or my 7-year-old girl, when they hit their peak earning years, are 
going to live more prosperous than we do, then we need to engage in 
some sort thought revolution, and that is what I am asking everyone to 
give me. I am going to do this in a couple of series, so this is going 
to be over a couple of nights. But I also need you to understand how 
dangerous it is.
  Debt markets are smart. Those debt markets out there where we are 
having to borrow trillions see Congress is actually starting to take 
this stuff seriously, we will be benefited by the price of money into 
the future.
  Right now they don't think we are taking it seriously.
  Do understand, Madam Speaker, if interest rates on U.S. sovereign 
debt go up 2 points--my math says about 25 years, this board was 
actually originally off a print that said 30 years--then every single 
dime of U.S. tax receipts goes just to cover interest. We need to take 
a step back and think about that. We are piling on so much debt, and 
the curve expands. In about a decade, we are running into almost 
structural $2-trillion-a-year deficits, and it gets bigger from there.
  It is demographics. Almost every dime of that borrowing--75 percent 
will be Medicare and 25 percent will be Social Security--yet around 
here we will beat the crap out of each other for even mentioning Social 
Security and Medicare. But to save it is to actually understand the 
math.
  What would happen if we don't convince debt markets that we are going 
to take this debt seriously?
  The CBO model that was a year ago was, hey, the mean interest rate on 
U.S. sovereigns is going to be like 1.78. Now it is like 2.8. But if it 
remained around 4, you do realize, Madam Speaker, in two decades every 
dime just goes to interest. This is what we are handing to our kids.
  So I also need to crush some of the stupidity out there. I accept the 
political class in our campaigns and those things, there has been a 
certain lack of truthfulness. Democrats will say: Well, let's tax rich 
people.
  Do you realize, Madam Speaker, if you took every billionaire in 
America and took every dime they had--every dime, and the price of 
their yachts didn't crash--if you took every dime, then you could run 
the government for maybe 7\1/2\ months. Now, you would crash us into a 
massive depression. The scale of this spending and the debt is just 
ginormous. I love that word.
  But also for us on the conservative side, we often have our people 
who get behind the microphone and say: If we

[[Page H8819]]

got rid of foreign aid; get rid of every dime of foreign aid.
  Last year I think foreign aid is about $38 billion. Let's see, last 
year we were borrowing $26 billion, $26,444,000,000 every week. So get 
rid of every dime of foreign aid, that is what, 10\1/2\, 11 days?
  What are you going to do with the rest of the year?
  Think of that. Every dime of foreign aid, maybe 11, 12 days of 
borrowing; and remember, our borrowing is going to double functionally 
over the next 10 years.
  We need to tell the truth about the scale. So if I get one more 
person on my side saying: Well, if we got rid of waste and fraud or 
foreign aid; or they say: Just tax the rich people more--the math 
doesn't work. It is great campaign rhetoric and looks good in a 
brochure.
  So you saw in the first chart we have $114 trillion of borrowing, and 
that is last year's number before inflation coming.
  There are solutions. So let's actually start to be optimistic because 
there is hope. But we first also have to have that moment of reality. 
Stop talking about things that are rounding errors. We should still do 
some of them, like price transparency. Many of us on the Republican 
side believe very much that you should know what the price of 
everything in healthcare is.
  Great. Let's do it. But the best academic study says: Well, maybe 
about 1 percent, 0.1 to 0.7 is what the academic studies said if you 
have price transparency because we have the third-party payer system.
  It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. But don't think it makes that big 
of a deal in a society while I have healthcare markets around the 
United States that just had 16 percent inflation. Think of that. The 
healthcare costs in some of these markets went up 16 percent.

  Madam Speaker, if you want to see a lot of detail, go to Brian 
Riddell's charts, Manhattan Institute. This is one of them. It talks 
about all the different ideas, both particularly from the right and 
mostly from left: If we did this sort of tax, then here is how much 
more tax we get over a decade of GDP.
  When you start to add it up, then you start to realize that none of 
these get you even close. If you double the tax rate, take people and 
move them from 35 to 50 to 60 to 70 percent tax rate, then you don't 
get anything. And that is without an attempt to do the economic effects 
because there is a math reality that those ones in the tax world--I am 
on the Committee of Ways and Means--and it is for 100-plus years.
  When we lower taxes, we basically seem to get about that 18, 19 
percent of GDP, the size of the economy, in taxes. When we have raised 
taxes in the United States, you seem to get about that 18 or 19 percent 
of GDP in taxes. It is math, and you have got lots of history on this. 
So when you have raised taxes, we are still getting this size, much of 
the economy, but the economy gets smaller. When you have lower taxes, 
the economy gets bigger, and you get this percentage.
  It turns out that right now we are getting almost $1 trillion more in 
receipts, revenues, and taxes than we were getting just a couple of 
years ago. A lot of that is based on the growth that came after tax 
reform. A lot of it was the amazing amount of government spending here 
that we had some of that stimulus that we are going to take some taxes 
in on money we put out; we still have to borrow the money, so we are 
screwed from that--sorry, an economic term. But the fact of the matter 
is, a lot of the folks who predicted: Oh, revenues are going to crash.
  They didn't. Society got much more productive.
  Expensing turns out to be most valuable thing in tax reform because 
it forced us to do investment and growth. At one point we will talk 
about that.
  So let's talk about right now the primary driver of U.S. debt over 
the next 30 years. Some reality: 5 percent of our brothers and sisters 
are over 50 percent of all of our healthcare spending. Now, these are 
our friends, our neighbors, and our family members who have multiple 
chronic conditions.
  The majority of healthcare spending comes through government. The 
majority of this population is getting their healthcare through 
government. If this is the primary driver of costs in our society and 
the primary driver of debt, wouldn't we think about what we can do 
about that 5 percent of our society that is out there suffering?
  It is worth thinking about.
  So if I came to you right now, Madam Speaker, and said: Let our ideas 
we have out there that are doable in divided government that won't 
scare people too much or won't bring the armies of lobbyists down 
saying: Oh, we are screwing up their business model, but also have that 
morality of actually potentially working and doing something good--I am 
going to start with something really simple and then get more 
complicated--what would happen, Madam Speaker, if I came to all of us 
and said: Did you know that it is estimated that 16 percent of all 
healthcare spending is people just not taking their meds?
  So I have hypertension. I take a calcium inhibitor. I don't stroke 
out, and it is a really, really, cheap, cheap pill. As long as you take 
it, it is incredibly effective.
  Madam Speaker, how many people do you know who take statins for their 
cholesterol?
  There are drug regimens where if you take them and take them 
according to the prescription, you are healthy, and you are safe. But 
when you don't, you stroke out, and that costs hundreds and hundreds 
and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  It turns out that is 16 percent of all healthcare spending. You do 
realize that is over a half a trillion dollars a year in healthcare 
spending.
  So why wouldn't we have a conversation around this place and say: 
Okay, we all walk around with these little supercomputers in our 
pocket, we have seen these studies now saying that people not adhering 
to their pharmaceutical regimen to stay stable is over 16 percent of 
healthcare spending, why wouldn't you do something silly like a 
solution?

                              {time}  2130

  It turns out that they have pill bottle caps that beep at you if you 
don't open them in the morning. When you are really busy running around 
saying, oh, I forgot to take my calcium inhibitor for my hypertension, 
the thing is beeping at you. The other ones also will beep at your 
phone.
  I know this sounds silly, but could you imagine, instead of 16 
percent of healthcare being the cost of people having not maintained 
theirs, we cut it in half? That is $250 billion, $300 billion a year, 
and it would have been what, a $0.99 to $2 pill bottle cap that beeps 
at you, or the one that dispenses for grandma her mixture of pills that 
she is having trouble remembering.
  We are walking through simple ideas that could pass here. Why 
wouldn't we have this discussion? There are other derivatives and 
discussions that make people uncomfortable, like for high-priced 
medicines. Put them in sterile packaging so if someone passes away, 
they can go back to the health co-op or whatever is out there and reuse 
them. There are all sorts of these ideas.
  Think about something as simple as this. This is half a trillion 
dollars a year. For something you need, why wouldn't we invest and say, 
hey, put the pill bottle cap on that beeps at you if you don't open it 
in the morning? Is this simple enough conceptually?
  There are ideas like this that have massive dollar impacts, and we 
never even discuss them because they are simple to absorb.
  I have been here multiple times and talked about the item you can 
blow into. In our office, we have nicknamed it the flu kazoo because 
that was cute, people got it, but it is a breath biopsy.
  I showed it, I think, a couple of weeks ago on the floor, that there 
are all things where you can functionally have a medical lab in your 
home medicine cabinet.
  But here is the disruption. This is what makes so many people angry. 
If I brought you something right now, for a couple hundred dollars, you 
could have it in your home medicine cabinet. You could blow into it and 
instantly tell you if you have the flu, instantly bang off your medical 
records, instantly order your antiviral, and Lyft or Uber could drop it 
off at your house in 2 hours. Wouldn't you like that?
  For everyone here who talks about accessibility, remember, I just 
talked about having a little person at home. It is a lot easier to blow 
into that thing for the breath biopsy and get the prescription 
delivered than it is to go wait

[[Page H8820]]

in an emergency room or try to get that doctor's appointment.
  Believe it or not, that technology is illegal. The way our laws are 
set up right now, that disruptive technology is illegal. It is crazy.
  Why wouldn't you allow that algorithm that statistically is more 
accurate than a human to write a prescription? Would it make your life 
better?
  Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 12 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Excellent. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
  This is part of what we are talking about: Legalize the technology 
that will make our lives easier, better, faster, raise accessibility, 
and, yes, it is going to cause a disruption.
  If you are an investor in the urgent care system, you may not like 
telemedicine. You may not like these things. But how many of us used to 
go to Blockbuster Video, stand in line, and have the nice person hand 
us a suggestion on a movie because the one we really wanted wasn't 
there?
  If they had hired enough lobbyists, would this place have slowed down 
the internet to keep Netflix?
  I need you to think this way, and this is what I am asking anyone 
that is viewing. It is the reality of it, when you looked at that first 
slide, and we talked about trillions and trillions of that coming from 
just the shortfall in Medicare.
  If this were 20 years ago or 25 years ago, you would have this debate 
with the left or the right. Well, we are going to do entitlement 
reform. No, we are not.
  Does anyone remember the experience that this body had back in the 
early 2000s when someone was willing to talk about trying to save 
Social Security back then, and it became political ads, fundraising?
  The math was true, but the politics were great to destroy then George 
Bush and the people that were willing to tell the truth about the math. 
This place will pay lip service, but it is not going to happen.
  The path I am proposing is embracing what we have gotten really good 
at in this country. I mean, this is a supercomputer. Think of the power 
that is in this thing.
  Yes, it is an iPhone. It is expensive. But it is--what?--10,000 times 
more powerful than the old IBM PC I used to have. Take that concept, 
and what would happen if we would legalize technology to crash the 
price of healthcare?
  What is one of the biggest drivers of healthcare costs in the 
country? The number one? It is a little uncomfortable to talk about. It 
is diabetes.
  The fact of the matter is 31 percent of all Medicare--Medicare, not 
Medicaid--Medicare spending is related to diabetes, and 33 percent of 
all healthcare spending is related to diabetes. It is crazy.
  I represent a Tribal community that is actually pretty well off. They 
are incredibly well-managed, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Tribal 
community right alongside Scottsdale, and they have gaming, sports, and 
all sorts of other things.
  They are very good at what they do, and they are the second highest 
per capita population, I think, in the world for diabetes. Their sister 
Tribe, Gila River, is number one.
  Is it moral if I came to you right now and said, there is a path, and 
yes, it might not ultimately work, but there is a path out there of a 
stem cell treatment working with CRISPR where they have tagged it so 
you don't need antirejection drugs?
  Yes, it is type 1, but there is a proof of concept that is starting 
to work where they have actually had a handful of Americans who they 
have been able to transfer the stem cells, and their islet cells are 
now producing insulin.
  Remember, I just told you 33 percent of all healthcare spending is 31 
percent of all Medicare. It would be the single biggest thing you could 
do for debt. It would also be one of the most moral things you could do 
for our brothers and sisters who are out there suffering, who are going 
blind and losing parts of their feet.
  There is math out there that health may be one of the primary drivers 
of income inequality in society. You can't work if you have a family 
member who you are having to take care of because disease is ravaging 
them.
  This is forcing the body to think differently, that if a cure is 
moral, but it is also really good economics and would help us take on 
the primary driver of our future debt with healthcare, why wouldn't you 
fixate on that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters that have chronic 
conditions that are over 50 percent of all healthcare spending?
  The 31 percent that is actually Medicare, that is just diabetes. How 
about a Moonshot? If I came to you right now and said they are having 
some success, why can't we bring these?
  I have been trying now, under Democrat control for a couple of years, 
and look. Being in the minority, we basically get told to go to hell. I 
will talk to my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side, and they say 
that is amazing but don't believe it.
  Shouldn't we go out and build a bunch more diabetes centers? Great. 
You are going to help people manage their misery. How about curing it? 
Isn't this the moral thing to do?
  By the way, it would be the single most powerful thing you could do 
for U.S. sovereign debt and my 5-month-old's economic future and your 
retirement.
  This is just a taste of the disruptive ideas we are going to try to 
bring here over the next handful of times I get in front of the floor.
  There is hope, but this body needs to start thinking that we care. 
This body needs to start acting like we give a damn. Instead, we spend 
so much time doing theater.
  Look, I care a lot about what is on Hunter Biden's laptop. Well, not 
really. I do care about the media hiding it and screwing with our 
elections. That is important.

                              {time}  2140

  They mentioned at the end of the decade or so we are going to have $2 
million a year deficit and it goes up from there.
  You have got to decide: Are you going to save the Republic?
  Are you going to embrace the morality of the prosperity?
  Start understanding the science, the synthetic biology, the 
opportunities around us where we can cure people. Because I am going to 
argue that finding a path, whether it be the single shot cure that is 
now available for hemophilia, which is really expensive, but it cures 
hemophilia.
  Now, we should probably come together as a body and say, hey, why 
don't we work out a financing mechanism so we can use the future 
savings to pay for the purchase of the drug today? Because wouldn't 
that be the moral thing to do. And, oh, by the way, it gets rid of that 
chronic condition.
  Sickle cell anemia, we are so close. There are so many things out 
there where--we talk about the lack of productivity in society.
  What would happen if we cured so many of our brothers and sisters so 
that they are able to participate in the economics?
  Part of this closing here--we are going to talk about sort of the 
unified theory to save the country. Part of that unified theory--this 
is the economics--is embracing the technology. And yes, disruption is 
scary and it may mess up your business model, but it is moral.
  Talking about immigration--really hard--but the fact of the matter 
is, importing poverty by open borders crushes the working poor because 
now that is who they are competing with. We need talent.
  With the fertility rates all across the western world, in the next 
couple decades there is going to be a fight for smart people.
  Over here is a tax code that fixates on growth. Maybe it is time to 
stop subsidizing, importing stuff from other countries, and 
functionally taxing ourselves to send things out of the country.
  You realize, we functionally crush ourselves in the way we design our 
tax code today? Why wouldn't you flip that, so you incentivize? Make it 
here.
  The other thing is regulatory. If I came to you tomorrow and said you 
could crowdsource air quality, you don't need buildings full of 
paperwork shoved in file cabinets. You could make the air cleaner, 
better, faster.
  Things like what happened to the water in Detroit or other places--
actually it wasn't Detroit. Sorry, I am from

[[Page H8821]]

out West--but the little thing that you are able to sample your water 
or the thing you can put on your lapel.
  Madam Speaker, I am going to beg of us, and I am going to bring 
boards talking about there is technology around us where we can crush 
the size of the bureaucracy to get cleaner, better, faster, healthier, 
and grow. And the growth is moral and the growth gives us a path to not 
be crushed by the debt that is coming with that.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________