[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 38 (Tuesday, February 28, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H954-H958]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            MATH ALWAYS WINS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight, we are going to try to do sort 
of the continuation on the theme, but we are going to actually end it 
up with a dozen or so solutions.
  I know the Parliamentarian said I can't hold my 8-month-old, but I 
wanted to prove the 8-month-old was real.
  Look, there are some realities I keep coming behind these microphones 
to try to explain, and I continue to be just enraged, particularly to 
my brothers and sisters on the left, by the avoidance of the math.
  My little boy, who is 8 months old, in 25 years, according to CBO, 
his taxes will have to be doubled. Corporate taxes will have to be 
doubled. Tariffs will have to be doubled. Everything has to double just 
to maintain baseline services. That is the math.
  How many discussions have you heard here even today, over the last 
month, the reality of the math? The math will always win.
  Once again, I am going to walk through some of what is really going 
on. For everyone here who says, ``We are going to balance in 10 
years,'' okay, I can do it, but you have to understand the amount of 
bloodletting that is required to actually make that math work.
  The actual structural problem is actually not on the left, not on the 
right; it is demographics, something we are terrified of.
  What the President did in his State of the Union speech was just 
unconscionable when he basically used Social Security and Medicare as 
props for his reelection instead of telling the truth. In a decade, the 
Medicare trust fund is gone. In a decade, the Social Security trust 
fund is gone.
  Does the left plan to help us fix it? If they don't, they get to be 
responsible for doubling senior poverty in this country. It is the 
math.
  I have started with this board now for multiple years. The new 
numbers are coming out, and they are actually worse. The United States 
functionally has $114 trillion of borrowing, and it is all, every dime 
of it, Social Security and Medicare. The rest of the budget actually 
has a positive balance.
  We got old. Look, I am a gray hair with a child. Maybe I am 
pathologically optimistic, but it is hard to fix a problem when you 
work in a place where your brothers and sisters will not look you in 
the eye and say: I understand the driver of our debt is our 
demographics.
  For those of you with this up on YouTube, read the comments. About 
half the folks get it. About half the folks, the absurdities are just 
heartbreaking. ``Tax rich people. That takes care of it.'' ``Get rid of 
congressional salaries.'' We actually did the math. The funny thing is, 
if you get rid of all the Senate salaries and House salaries, it is 28 
minutes of borrowing. That was last year's number. In 10 years, it is 
like 12 minutes of borrowing.
  People have no concept. You can get every dime of foreign aid, and it 
is about 12 days of the borrowing.
  Let's actually start to walk through to understand structurally how 
much trouble we are actually in.
  Reducing the discretionary spending to zero--remember, the point I am 
trying to make here is you just got rid of all the military; you just 
got rid of the White House; you just got rid of Congress; you just got 
rid of the Supreme Court; you got rid of the EPA; you got rid of the 
IRS; you got rid of everything, all discretionary money. The only thing 
you are paying is Medicare, Social Security, the earned benefits, some 
of the Medicaid, veterans benefits, what we call mandatory around here.
  When you get to about 10 years--remember, you have just wiped out the 
government; all you are doing is paying the benefits. When you actually 
remove all the mandatory, you are still having to borrow a couple 
hundred billion dollars.
  When the clown show comes and says, ``If we just got rid of this or 
that, we would be fine,'' it is not true. Your government functionally 
is an insurance company with an army, an insurance company that 
technically is broke.
  Let's walk through some of the math. I am going to do this over and 
over, and maybe one of these slides will actually help it sink in.
  I have to throw something out that is just annoying. The room is 
empty. That is okay. People are in their offices working. We are on 
thousands of televisions around this place. I have given up on so many 
of my fellow Members, but maybe the staff, maybe the staff that is 
sitting there trying to figure out the math and the policy and what is 
going to go on, maybe they are listening.
  This is where we are at. Remember, this was just done last week. The 
Congressional Budget Office updated a bunch of the math.
  Our shortfall over the next 30 years is $21 trillion on Social 
Security. Remember, Social Security still has a trust fund, but in 10 
years, the trust fund is gone.
  I don't think I brought the charts, but I have done it over and over. 
The average American who works their 40 quarters and those things, you 
get every dime you put in plus a SPIF.

                              {time}  1915

  You would have made a lot more money if you put it in the market or 
other places, but remember, there were discussions to try to do that 25 
years ago. The left went nuts, so it didn't happen. It is 
mathematically impossible to do today.
  But Medicare functionally has $48 trillion of shortfall because the 
trust fund on Medicare, which is only the part A, the hospital, part of 
the doctor portion, is empty in 10 years.
  So when you are seeing us talk about a 10-year budget, one of the 
great little lies around here is we are not telling you that on the 
11th year it gets a hell of a lot worse.
  Because are you going to backfill Medicare? Backfill Social Security?
  Transportation Trust Fund, Highway Trust Fund is also gone at that 
time, too.
  Then you put in these over the 30 years and then add in another $47 
trillion of interest. You start to understand when you are seeing the 
new scoring, looks more like a--if you do a 30-year math on it, on this 
latest CBO update, you have to do a little bit of imputing of the math, 
you're probably approaching about $128 trillion, not that $114 trillion 
on the first slide.
  It is actually over the next 9 budget years--I know one says 10--just 
Medicare goes up another trillion dollars in spend. And then it really 
starts to take off because the trust fund is gone.
  So when the President basically said we are not going to touch Social 
Security and Medicare, I agree. They are earned. They are earned. But 
where was the next sentence saying: And I plan to work with Republicans 
to keep them, to keep them solvent, to keep them here, instead of the 
clown show

[[Page H955]]

that is going on right now and saying, well, we are not allowed to talk 
about it.
  I had protestors at my office a couple days ago saying don't touch 
Social Security.
  Okay. We don't touch it in, what?
  Now it is, what, 9\1/2\ years. Are you ready for your 23 percent cut?
  Because that is what the actuaries say is coming. Then the next year 
it gets bigger, and the cut gets bigger, and the cut gets bigger, and 
the cut gets bigger. And our back-of-the-napkin math is at that time 
you functionally double senior poverty.
  So the clown show around here goes: You can't talk about Social 
Security. It has become a political issue. The President actually used 
it in the State of the Union.
  Okay. I am going to show you some of the Democrat solutions and the 
absurdity of the math.
  I need my brothers and sisters all here if you give a damn. Put some 
batteries in the calculator, hire a couple competent actuaries. 
Actually, try something even crazier, and for anyone that is watching 
or listening, go grab--you have to two different documents out there. 
The one is really an easy read, high school math. You will be fine.
  The Congressional Budget Office, about 6 weeks ago, did an update on 
Social Security. It is an easy read. A little harder read but actually 
much more impactful. Go actually get the copy of the Social Security 
Medicare actuary report--or is it Medicare Social Security actuary 
report? Either way. Dig through that, and you will understand the 
demographic curve.
  I am going to show you some demographic slides. And I promise you, I 
am going to upset some people, and maybe it is a little too geeky.
  My father used to have a saying: For every complex problem, there is 
a simple solution.
  That is absolutely wrong.
  We are talking trillions of dollars. We are talking about millions 
and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters.
  Guess what? Solutions are complex.
  Is this body capable? I don't know if it is anymore.
  Part of the problem is we have politicized everything to the point 
that we are incapable of telling the truth, because often telling the 
truth either gets you unelected or screws up the fundraising or other 
things.
  I just continue to be enraged. Does my little boy--do you deserve a 
retirement? Does he deserve a future?
  Because the wheels are coming off.
  I just showed you a slide that said 10 years from now I can wipe out 
everything you think is government, and you still have to borrow money.
  And no, China has actually been dialing down its bond holdings for a 
decade. Japan has been dialing down their bond holdings for decades.
  We now finance most of our borrowing ourselves--actually almost all 
of our borrowing ourselves. Single fail bond auction. You want to talk 
about hell?
  At a future time I will actually walk you through scenarios of what 
happens when we go to sell U.S. sovereign debt and it is 
undersubscribed and watch the interest rate go through the ceiling 
because you have to sell it.
  So let's take a quick look, just to understand the baseline structure 
of what has happened to Social Security. And once again, no one stole 
your money.
  That was a rhetorical thing that politicians did to sound like they 
cared because they didn't want to tell you the actual math, and the 
actual math was demographics.
  Social Security by the numbers: In 1960, I had 5 workers for every 
retiree, for every beneficiary.
  How far away is 2030? Come on. Seriously, can anyone help me do some 
math here?
  How far away is 2030?
  Think of that. At the end of the decade, if you are married, you and 
your partner, your spouse, you got your own retiree.
  Does that help explain part of the math problem? Understand in the 
early days for a working male on the very first year of Social 
Security, I have seen it documented that the average life expectancy 
was 64 years old, and you didn't get the benefit until you were 65.

  You see some of the design issues?
  Yes, it was a major update in, what, 1983. Tip O'Neill sitting in 
that chair over there; Ronald Reagan in the White House. They did 
difficult things. They shored it up. But now we have hit the baby boom 
curve.
  We have divided government again just like we did back in the 1980s. 
What a magical time for us both to hold hands and save it, because you 
have a math problem. You got two workers for every beneficiary.
  How much did you see the President in the state of the Union show 
like he gave a damn for anyone that is on Social Security?
  I am not going to touch it.
  Then what was his next sentence that is going off the cliff?
  There are some very creative structural ideas, almost setting up 
either a sovereign wealth fund, some incentives where you actually get 
benefited to stay in the labor market and other things. We can save it 
with no one taking a cut. It is just going to require math and a lot of 
explaining.
  This is pretty much another way of seeing the same slide of how many 
workers per retiree.
  This is for my Democrat brothers and sisters. And I know this is done 
as a percentage of the economy which, believe it or not, when you 
actually look at the actuary reports, that is how we actually 
structurally look at programs like this that require trillions of 
dollars to finance.
  We actually sort of say, here is the percentage of the economy that 
actually goes to that benefit. Total tax revenues raised in combined 
Federal, State, and payroll taxes approach 100 percent for wealthy 
taxpayers as a percentage of GDP.
  It is basically saying what would happen if we functionally took 100 
percent of the income from the wealthy. Once again, let's try this 
again, because there are a couple trolls out there saying, well oh, 
Bernie Sanders had this idea.
  Okay. He does. If you can read through it, the amount of all the 
wealth income is just to shore up Social Security, and then they forget 
three-quarters of the borrowing is Medicare. You get 4 percent of GDP 
if you take all the taxes we are already paying and then add in 
functionally 100 percent tax on the income for the wealthy.
  The problem is, the spending on just Social Security and Medicare is 
6 percent, so you still got 2 percent of the entire economy as a 
shortfall.
  And how much do you think if we took every dime of the wealthiest 
income, what do you think the economy would look like?
  What would the growth be?
  What would the investment be?
  You have to understand, I do these things, they are absurd. But the 
discussion around here is absurd.
  ``Well, if we just tax the wealthy more.'' Well, maybe we should, but 
don't think it actually fixes the problem.
  And here is where it gets more uncomfortable, but let's do some 
demographics.
  First point: I think our math says in like 19 years or 19\1/2\ years, 
the United States has more deaths than births. So in less than 20 
years, the United States has more deaths than births.
  I need you to think through that. Remember, a Social Security actuary 
is modeled for 75 years. In less than two decades, I have started 
having more deaths than births in this country.
  And you start to understand what they call--it is actually a 
demographic term--a dependency ratio. And it turns out the three 
biggest economies in the world--the United States, China, Japan--and 
this is a little hard to read but it is worth the concept. I also am an 
outlier in my belief that much of what China does is because this curve 
collapsing down here is China. It is basically what they call 
dependency ratio, the number of folks they have that will be dependent 
on a worker.
  Right now, today, they are healthier than the United States. They 
have more workers than dependents but their curve folds incredibly 
hard.
  This one is the United States. We basically sort of fall and fall and 
fall and sort of flatline.
  Japan is already in just a miserable state.
  This is happening all around the industrialized world. We don't have 
enough kids. It is math. It is demographics.

[[Page H956]]

  So are we ready to embrace some pretty radical concepts?
  There are some great authors out there that talk about how the 1970s 
and 1980s, and maybe even through part of the 1990s, the world had 
competition for what they called hydrocarbons: oil, natural gas.
  In the previous decade and right up to today, it may be a world sort 
of competition for rare-earth elements because of electrification and 
batteries and those things. The next couple decades it may be an 
international battle for smart people.
  Take a look at how many of the countries we compete with that have 
changed their immigration codes to actually recruit people who have 
skill sets. And it is not all just Ph.D.'s or electrical engineering. 
It is if you are a skilled carpenter, if you are a skilled programmer; 
if you are this or that. It is actually a really interesting and 
uncomfortable debate.
  But as you are going to see, as we talk about these charts, I can 
make the numbers work. On one hand of the ledger, we need economic 
growth, and we need a lot of it.
  Well, the way you get there is through fixing the regulatory system. 
The way you get there is from an economy that starts to become 
incredibly competitive again instead of the protection racket it has 
become today. We also have to fix the immigration system where you are 
not importing poverty, but you are importing talent, so you have 
economic growth.
  Remember, the trick here is over the coming decades I need the debt 
to not grow faster than the size of the economy. You need that, too. We 
all need it, and so does my little 8-month-old.

  We are going to compete against the world because the rest of the 
world is also--at least the industrialized world--is facing the same 
demographic collapse.
  And now we get into the stuff that becomes really uncomfortable to 
talk about, and I have to find a way, but it is math and it is policy.
  There is something really crappy going on in our society right now, 
and it is uncomfortable. I may be the only idiot who is dumb enough to 
walk up behind these microphones and talk about it, but we have a 
problem.
  We have young males entering universities, almost similar to females, 
and then not graduate. I didn't bring all the charts, but the number of 
young males, particularly under 35, who just are functionally not 
showing up in the economy.
  And why this is important?
  I am not talking about a few. I am talking about millions and 
millions and millions. We are actually even looking at some of these 
charts. And where this gets to be a tricky conversation is when you 
start to see college enrollment by gender and then the males basically 
falling off the cliff here, particularly the last few years, where 
females graduated.
  Great. This is wonderful over here. This is a real societal problem.

                              {time}  1930

  There is a cultural concept called marriageable populations, and I 
will see if I can weave this into this unified theory.
  If I have a young woman that has worked her heart out, she has 
graduated, and the pool of available spouses are people that did not 
graduate, we are actually seeing what we call a marriageability gap. 
And we see that across the board, across ethnicities, and now it is 
really starting to show up in our economic data of slowing down our 
economic growth projections.
  When you get someone who says, well, I can do this, I will do a tax 
cut here, I will do this here, and I get all this economic growth, I 
got a problem. I got a whole bunch of my society that is not entering 
either the workforce, they are not forming families, they are not 
having kids. The basic structure that builds both a society, a healthy 
community, but also actually builds that economic underpinning of that 
society. It is worth studying. It is worth digging in to.
  We got to understand what is happening with young men, because it is 
such a large number now. We see it in our economic data as basically 
stultifying--if that is a word--the economic growth.
  You have a world now where my brothers and sisters on the left, my 
Democrat colleagues run around saying, well, we have this low 
unemployment. And then you look at the available populations that 
should be in the labor force, but they don't show up in the data 
because they are not even looking.
  Remember, we have fewer people today in the labor force than we did 
before the pandemic, by millions. Then I stand up here just pissed off 
trying to say, does anyone care about the math? Because at the end of 
the decade, the wheels are coming off and they don't need to.
  This is just more of the same, just sort of showing that the 
participation of prime age males, basically, continues to decline, 
decline, decline. The other chart actually may have done a better job 
of showing the cliff.
  What have I tried to argue here? I have debt that is exploding and it 
is substantially healthcare costs. It is substantially our 
demographics. We got old.
  I have a seesaw here that if we could get both sides in balance, 
there is a way it works, but you have got to over here have growth. I 
got to have labor force participation. I have to have encouragement for 
people, whether you are older and we incentivize you, saying, hey, we 
are not going to take your side of the FICA tax if you stay in the 
labor force and you are 70 but you feel that you want to work. Great. 
We love you. Please. Thank you.
  How do I get young males back into the labor force, to get them to 
actually graduate college? This is important. If you are a university, 
please pay attention to these numbers. There is something that is 
almost crisis level going on out there.
  The adoption of technology in regulation. Do you need buildings full 
of file cabinets and paper to regulate the environment, or could you 
actually do it through technology? We are all walking around with a 
supercomputer in your pocket. Stick the little sensor on it and you 
could do air quality monitoring. I no longer need a building to file 
paperwork. I always know what is going on. You can crowdsource it.
  There are ideas like this that both disrupt, shrink the size of 
government. Government is just far too massive, and you can replace 
much of it with technology. The battles I have in Ways and Means over 
the IRS. Do you hire an army of unionized workers or do you use 
technology? If you believe there is a bunch of tax cheats out there, 
use technology to find them, or do you think an army of unionized 
workers is a much better way to do it? That is absurd.
  Growth ledger. What I am going to talk about now is some of the 
disruptive ideas. Maybe a number of these won't work. Maybe they are 
just techno utopianism, but it is the thought process. It is the mental 
discipline to start thinking through the basic idea of, if I had a 
vibrant, competitive, disruptive economy that is actually crashing the 
price of healthcare over here and growing over here, I can do the math 
on that. I can show you that we can flatten out this debt bomb that is 
about to wipe out your retirement and my kids' future.
  I want to give just a simple thought experiment, except it is real. 
Do you remember a half an hour ago, the Democrats touting in the 
Inflation Reduction Act, we are going to spend billions and billions 
and billions and billions of dollars subsidizing insulin? We are going 
to give the very companies that they used to come to the floor here and 
scream about that they were pillaging people with the cost of insulin.
  We are going to give that Big Pharma money. That is how the brain 
trust on my left here works. Right over here in Virginia, there is a 
co-op. Remember, most of the insulin formulas are off-patent.
  This group over here--and it is insurance companies, it is hospitals. 
I think a couple State Medicaid systems got together and said, screw 
it. We don't like the price the market is giving us. We are going to 
build a co-op and do it ourselves. We are going to make eight types of 
generic insulin. Oh, by the way, they are doing it less than the 
government subsidized price the Democrats pushed through where they are 
handing out billions of dollars.
  Why didn't they turn around and say, let's bring this to market much 
faster? No taxpayer money. Cheaper prices. Competition. Instead the 
Democrats'

[[Page H957]]

version was, let's just subsidize Big Pharma. How dare they act like 
they did something? They basically almost screwed up competition 
because they started subsidizing the very organizations they used to 
complain about and then made it so competition actually had to now 
compete with subsidized companies.
  Does anyone else see the absurdity around here? If you want 
competition in the pharmaceutical world, get more people making them. 
The majority of the pharmaceuticals we all consume are off-patent. 
There are some crazy articles out there that I saw this summer of super 
high-speed 3D printers that you no longer need a couple hundred million 
dollar clean facility to make your generic drug. There are alternative 
ways to produce it.

  What could we do regulatorywise, tax incentivewise, other things here 
to actually say, we want everyone and their cousin making safe, 
affordable, competitive pharmaceuticals if that is part of the fight 
that we have here saying these drug prices are too high?
  What are you going to do? The Democrats actually decided they are 
going to regulate price cap, subsidize. As a supply side conservative, 
I come back and say, screw that. Let's grab today's technology and get 
the competition flowing.
  I do not know all the details on this. I only saw part of the article 
this weekend, but this is the thought experiment I need from you.
  How many of you saw the article this weekend that Apple basically 
believes they have broken the code for a glucose monitor in the watch?
  Think about that, if you are a thinking person. If I came to you 
tomorrow and said, you can put something on your wrist--maybe it is 
not, because they are expensive, but it is the concept of the 
technology.
  I can have something on my wrist that knows my oxygen, knows my blood 
pressure, knows my heart rate, knows my temperature, and now knows my 
glucose.
  If you had all those datapoints, what could you run as an algorithm 
and also your ability to take my data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
  Could you keep me much healthier? Could you keep our brothers and 
sisters healthier? Remember; diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare 
spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending.
  If it is true this technology may be coming, just a thought 
experiment. You are all smart people. Think about it.
  What would happen if I could take my prediabetic population, even 
some of my diabetic population that may not now be on insulin and said, 
we are going to work with you so you understand what is going on?
  I represent probably the second highest per capita population in the 
world with diabetes; one of my Tribal communities in Arizona.
  Incredible people, and they are not poor. They are a gaming tribe 
alongside Scottsdale. They are very entrepreneurial. They have done 
great.
  The data may be the disruption in the price of healthcare. Why am I 
the first idiot to walk up to the floor and say, I saw this. We should 
actually investigate it. We should understand what this could mean.
  If we invited the scientists in to talk to us and say, what does the 
future look like? What would happen if it is true?
  I am going to show another thing about a stem cell treatment that is 
going on from a San Diego company that believes they may have found a 
way--I think they have cured, like, six people of type 1 diabetes, but 
it is less than a year, so you don't know the efficacy.
  The concept is there and the ability to stop someone from ever 
screwing up their islet cells.
  The reason I show this stuff is instead of saying we are just going 
to walk in, and we are going to have to cut Medicare by trillions of 
dollars, how about the crazy thing of curing people and making the 
healthcare prices dramatically lower through technology, through 
disruption?
  You have got a choice. This is not just a blunt, troglodyte approach. 
This is actually something where the society gets healthy and more 
prosperous.
  I am just going to go through some of these because for some of 
these, I have done whole presentations on the floor.
  When you start to actually read some of the literature, that we may 
be on the cusp of--I think, actually, there is a paper being presented 
in this coming week on the first data sets for a cancer vaccine, some 
of the drugs that are having just incredible success in curing people.
  You have the ability to actually have that supercomputer you carry 
around in your pocket basically actually help you manage your personal 
health.
  I have hypertension. I have to take a calcium inhibitor. I came here 
a couple weeks ago and showed, once again, another thought experiment.
  Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of all healthcare spending is? Sixteen 
percent of all healthcare spending is? This is $550 billion a year, so 
over a half a trillion dollars a year. It is calculated to be people 
not taking their pharmaceuticals.
  So you have hypertension like me. I take my calcium inhibitor. I take 
one pill every day, and I don't stroke out.
  They say 16 percent of healthcare spending is people choosing not to; 
darn it, I forgot. I didn't take the pill.
  Now, I know some people are going to say, well, you should eat 
healthy. You should exercise. Trust me; I do. I haven't touched ice 
cream in a couple years. I really miss it.
  But walk through just the concept with me, instead of your 
preconceived conceptions or notions. So 16 percent of healthcare 
spending is people not taking their pharmaceuticals appropriately so 
they stay on their rhythm.
  Grandma forgets to take her pill. You need a statin. You forget to 
take it. How about a $0.99 pill cap that beeps at you when you forgot 
to open it up that morning?
  Is that $0.99 worth what it would mean to go at $550 billion? What if 
you could just shave off a couple points of it? $200 billion; is that 
worth it?
  These are just trying to be creative instead of the folks who want to 
run around here with a chainsaw hacking apart things. Start saying 
maybe the idea is using technology so we are healthier.
  There is another article I picked up a couple days ago just to show 
the revolution that is about to be here. This now has FDA approval.
  Functionally, you can blow into it from your home medicine cabinet, 
and guess what? It is a flu test. It is a COVID test. There is another 
version coming that is actually going to be two or three other things.
  You can have it in your home medicine cabinet, and you can blow in 
it. You don't have to go to the urgent care center. You don't have to 
go to the doctor's office. You don't have to go to the emergency room. 
You don't have to go to the hospital.
  The technology is the disruption. The disruption actually crashes the 
price.

                              {time}  1945

  These are uncomfortable. I had this really neat article. It is a bit 
geeky, but it basically talks about the ability to use an X-ray. Now, 
with some of the predictive AI looking at it, it can actually do 
amazing--amazingly accurate, cheaply--diagnostics on whether you are 
going to have a risk of heart disease or other things.
  It is here, and it has gone through the efficacy trials. Do we set up 
the policy where we make these things reimbursable? Do we make these 
things so we take down the barriers because, remember, Washington often 
is more like a protection racket.
  I have done whole presentations on this from a couple of years ago. 
Yes, it has actually moved forward to some of the immunotherapies for 
some of the types of cancers. These are coming about.
  Now, the one that I talked about a couple of weeks ago was that 
possibility in regard to diabetes. We are actually bringing a couple of 
their researchers here, I think sometime next month, to talk about the 
mechanisms.
  The reason I walked through all of these, the first part of this 
presentation, is to understand how devastating the debt is. It is not 
pretend. You can't just say, ``Well, we will just pretend. We will 
print a $1 trillion coin and walk away from it.'' You have to stop the 
clown show.
  Yes, there is a whole bunch of government that we can do without, but 
you saw the very first couple of boards that basically said, 10 years 
from now, you can get rid of all of what you think is government, and 
you still have to

[[Page H958]]

borrow money. You got rid of all of defense; you got rid of all the 
discretionary; and you still have to borrow money to be able to cover 
Medicare. The punch line there was it is the next year. That was all a 
2033 number.
  The next year, 2034, the Social Security trust fund is gone--23 
percent cut. Is that going to be allowed to happen, or do we have to 
take it out of the general fund?
  Next year, 2034, the Medicare trust fund is gone. The next year, the 
transportation highway trust fund is gone.
  The second half of this was hope. I know some of this stuff is hard 
to process. It is hard sometimes to think, ``Oh, I am going to disrupt. 
I am going to functionally legalize disruption.''
  I have used this before, but it is the easiest. How many of you went 
to Blockbuster Video last week? Come on, work with me here. How many of 
you went and got that little silver disk last weekend? Of course not. 
``Schweikert, that is absurd.''
  The fact of the matter is that technology came along. We started 
streaming. Now, you have how many choices? You sit there saying you 
have too many choices, that you can't make up my mind, instead of 
standing in line for the disk that wasn't there that you really wanted 
that you promised your family, so you come home with some crappy one, 
and they are all mad at you. That is not that long ago.
  We have these types of disruptions in our society all the time. Stop 
being afraid of it.
  Congress, damn it, stop acting like a protection racket where you 
protect incumbency--not incumbent elected, incumbent bureaucracies, 
incumbent business models.
  Design the tax code. Design the regulatory code. If the Democrats 
continue insisting that they subsidize everything, fine. Design it so 
there is competition, not the chosen favorites that they want to hand a 
grant out to. That competition, I think, actually becomes the 
disruption that saves us.
  If you have a better idea, one that makes Americans healthier, more 
prosperous, fixes your future retirement, fixes my little kid's future, 
I want to hear it. Right now, this is some of the best I have, and we 
have a whole portfolio of these things.
  I beg of this place, please buy a calculator. Work through the math. 
Understand how devastating it is. Then, just try to think of a future. 
Try to think of a future that actually is incredibly hopeful, 
incredibly optimistic.
  You can't have the sort of dystopian State of the Union speech we 
had, if you actually break it down, where they know these programs are 
going off the cliff, and the left cares so much more about winning the 
next election, they are not telling the truth to their own voters, let 
alone the people who are really dependent.
  It is a level of cruelty. It is a cruelty that might work through the 
next election, but it is coming. The math always wins.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities toward the President and to direct their 
remarks to the Chair.

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