[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 66 (Thursday, April 20, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H1899-H1904]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ECONOMICS IN AMERICA

  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, I yield to the gentlewoman from Michigan 
(Mrs. McClain).
  Mrs. McCLAIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of my district, my 
State, and my country to say that the Chinese Communist Party is 
actively working to destroy America.
  From aggressive military actions to spying on Americans through 
TikTok and high-altitude balloons, the CCP is focused on becoming the 
world's number one superpower.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to make something very clear: China is not our 
friend. They are coming at us militarily, economically, and 
educationally. They are our biggest adversary.
  We know that China is targeting our country as a whole, and we also 
know that they are targeting individual States, as well.
  For example, in North Dakota, China has bought up farmland right next 
to a strategic military base. Probably the only vacant land in Nebraska 
they could find was next to a strategic military base.

  In Texas, China is using the shadow of TikTok to build a massive 
facility that will focus on spying on Americans.
  Now, in my home State of Michigan, China is tightening its grip on a 
chip manufacturing facility and establishing a facility in Big Rapids. 
The company taking over this town is called Gotion, which is actually a 
subsidiary of a company that is owned and operated by the Chinese 
Communist Party.
  When Gotion proposed this new plant, they sold a good story by 
promising 2,000 jobs and massive economic gains for the State. 
Actually, Michigan could use some economic gains for our State, but we 
know the truth. Gotion is establishing its Big Rapids plant in order to 
extend its CCP influence in Michigan. They plan to utilize Chinese EV 
chip technology and send the profits of its production right back to 
the CCP.
  By the way, those 2,000 jobs that they promised? They will be filled 
with Chinese workers implanted from Beijing to work at this facility, 
not to mention--wait for it--over $500 million in tax breaks from our 
Governor will be used to subsidize these jobs and given to Gotion.
  Let's not forget, ironically, coincidentally, that Big Rapids is home 
to Ferris State University, which just got an accreditation for their 
information security and intelligence program.

                              {time}  1130

  That seems like a coincidence, doesn't it?
  I can assure you; I am not much for coincidences.
  This is a blatant move from the Chinese Communist Party to undermine 
the State of Michigan and gain greater access to our State and our 
country.
  Make no mistake about it, this Gotion plant poses a huge threat to 
our national security. That is why I am standing before you today to 
call out Gotion and the CCP for their plot to ransack Michigan.

[[Page H1900]]

  I will not stand for this blatant attack by the Communist Party, and 
I will not sit idly by and watch this happen.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Michigan.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually try something, and these are 
always those moments where, if you don't like something that is fairly 
thick--we are going to do lots of demographics. If you don't enjoy that 
sort of stuff, don't watch this.
  I am going to try to lay out a bit of an argument of the headwinds we 
are facing as a country and a society. I am also going to point out 
that we are still dramatically better off than all of the 
industrialized world, and we have done it better over the last couple 
of decades than the rest of the industrialized world. You have to 
understand what is coming.
  There are a couple of examples where we can take a look and see what 
is happening in Japan. Is that a foreshadowing of some of our 
demographics?
  Once again, it is a chip on my shoulder as I listen to my brothers 
and sisters from the left. I just need them to step up and admit that 
in the last 2 years Americans are poorer. They get up behind the 
microphone and attack Republicans for trying to grow the economy and 
for trying to provide opportunities. As a matter of fact, a couple 
minutes ago in the 1 minute speeches we had a Member of the left get up 
and talk about supply-side economics.
  I am going, huh, where have you been the last couple of years of my 
life? You are now actually stealing our language.
  If you are a working man or woman in this country, the purchasing 
power of your paycheck--you are poorer today than the day Joe Biden was 
elected. It is math. If you want to understand why so many Americans 
are cranky or dour or in some ways just very dark on what the future 
looks like, it is because every day they go into a grocery store or to 
work, this and that, and they realize they are poorer today than they 
were a couple of years ago.
  Where is the empathy?
  Also, where is the goal to grow where we can actually make up for the 
wages not keeping up anything close to what inflation is?
  We are going to actually start to walk through--I have a lot of 
boards and I am going to do some of these very, very fast. If there is 
a staffer or someone out there watching--I try to explain to people 
that the room is substantially empty, and it is supposed to be. The 
House is done with its legislative work.
  There are thousands of people on this campus and around Washington, 
D.C., and around the country who are working for Members of Congress 
who may have this idiot, me, on their television trying to talk to them 
about economics and how we make America prosperous again.
  Let's do some of the positives. Something we don't tell each other 
enough. If you actually look at the economic conditions per capita, and 
you actually look at it from 1980 until today, you do realize the 
United States has done dramatically better than the rest of the 
industrialized world. If you actually sort of adjust all of the 
currencies to the same purchasing power, per capita income for the 
United States is around $70,000 per worker in this country. If you take 
a look at our competitors, you know, the next best one is all of 
Western Europe, they are around $46,000.
  Do understand the brain trust around here that often says that we 
should be more like Western Europe?
  Do they want us to give up that much of our economic prosperity?
  We are better. We are more prosperous. We are actually more 
innovative, and we are losing it.
  It is this prosperity that many of us are behind these mikes trying 
to defend. This is what we are trying to defend in our policy sets.
  I have another way to try to explain this. The average income in the 
United States continues to be significantly higher than other 
countries. I think on this one I used Japan and Western Europe. Our per 
capita income--if you look over here--in 1990, we were about 24 percent 
per capita income higher than Western Europe. Today, we are about 30 
percent. We still outgrew them.
  I want you to take a look at Japan. This is one of the examples I am 
going to use here when you have that demographic headwind when you are 
running out of workers.
  In 1980, we had about 17 percent to the plus side of healthier 
incomes than Japan in 1980. Today, it is 54 percent. Japan didn't 
actually shrink in their income, we grew so much more than Japan, and 
obviously, Western Europe. Let's pat ourselves on the back and then get 
back to work because we are going to lose this marginal prosperity with 
many of the policies I am seeing happening from this administration and 
from what the Democrats did to us over the last couple of years.
  Now we have to walk through the headwinds of what is really going on 
in America.
  A couple points of reference--and we went back and vetted the 
number--in about 18 years the United States will have more deaths than 
births. That is actually with current immigration models.
  If you walk through this, you are not a dying society, but you are 
fading. There are ways you make that up. Country after country after 
country have tried to change their fertility rates. We are going to do 
geeky stuff here.
  I think there is one country, I think it may be Hungary, that if you 
have a third child they give you a house. It barely adjusted the 
country's fertility rates. You need to accept this is across the 
industrialized world.

  Prosperity actually is sort of the opposite of the Malthusians, 
opposite of the idiots that wrote things like ``The Population Bomb'' 
back in the late 1960s. They were wrong. The only thing Ehrlich got 
right was the spelling of his name on his book in 1968, but the left 
still worships him.
  Prosperity actually leads to delayed marriages and less fertility. We 
are going to talk about that, but we are also going to touch on some 
other things that we could affect by policy. I am going to step out on 
a limb and talk about some things that a politician gets himself in 
trouble for, but it is math, and it is the truth.
  We have got a real problem with young males. It is blowing off the 
pages in the statistics. Let's go see how uncomfortable we can make 
each other, but it is math and the math always wins.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope--I am trying not to curse--but I don't give a 
darn if it hurts your feelings. We have got to embrace and deal with 
the facts. So let's do some facts.
  Mr. Speaker, the percentage of people 65 and over, relative to the 
number of people we have 25 to 64--so 25 to 64 is what we mean when we 
say prime working age populations, those are actually our productive 
populations.
  I actually believe in today's world--I intend never to retire because 
I am also crazy. I am 61 and I have a 9-month-old child, and, yes, my 
wife is exactly my age. I am pathologically optimistic. People like me 
are never retiring.
  The reality of it is that what we see in our society is the prime 
working age population is shrinking and the over 65 population is 
exploding. We call them baby boomers. It is like Congress completely 
forgot there were baby boomers. You look at this chart, we are here in 
the inflection years where the growth of our population that is 65 and 
older is just growing incredibly.
  Understand that in a couple of decades, if you use my ratio of prime-
age workers compared to my population of 65 and older, we get as high 
as 46 percent. That means 46 percent will be 65 and older compared to 
prime age.
  Grow your economy when almost half of your population is 65 and older 
compared to your working population. Yes, that number skews out under 
18 for a couple other reasons, and some of that is because of fertility 
and some other things trying to calculate it.
  That type of ratio you need to think through. How do you design 
economic incentives for productivity?
  What are you willing to automate?
  Are you going to run around and be terrified of chat AIs and other 
things that may add a huge productivity spike, or allow an individual 
worker to be much more productive?
  This place has to stop being terrified of technology because without 
it we are going to be buried.
  Here is another slide, basically in some ways saying the same thing. 
By

[[Page H1901]]

2042--how many years is that? It is 19 years--population growth will be 
driven entirely by net immigration. It is basically saying that in 
about 18 years--remember, we are going to have more deaths than 
births--any population change we will have at the time will be from 
immigration.
  Are we ever going to update our immigration codes saying that we want 
immigration that maximizes vitality for the country?
  You are going to go fixate more on a talent-based immigration system 
than a--I don't have a more polite way to say this. When you have an 
open border like Arizona--and come down to the border some time with 
me--you have migration of poverty. These are wonderful people. I am 
sure they are God's children.
  The fact of the matter is we have got to figure out a way to pay for 
Medicare and Social Security. We need highly productive populations to 
have the multiplier effect on the economy. The math will win.
  I know this chart is a little hard to read. The only adult population 
group expected to decrease past 2045 will be my prime working age. Our 
working productive population from economic terms is shrinking. We get 
about a decade out and we begin to shrink.
  This is a little easier to understand. The prime working age 
population is the only age group expected to decline in the long run. 
You start to see this--and I am going to show you some slides of what 
this means to economic growth.
  Part of the argument I am making here is we are fighting over the 
debt ceiling and what the budget looks like and what the long-term 
projections are. Remember, I have been to this floor, heaven knows, how 
many times over the last few years saying between today and 30 years 
from now that 100 percent of the borrowing--we are expecting to have 
about $128 trillion of borrowing in those 30 years.
  Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of that borrowing is the shortfall of 
Medicare. Remember, three-quarters of Medicare comes from the general 
fund and the Medicare part A trust fund is going to be empty in about 6 
years. The other 25 percent of that $128 trillion of borrowing will be 
if we backfill Social Security.
  You all saw--because I know this place ran out and got a copy of the 
Medicare/Social Security actuary report that came out 3 weeks ago, it 
basically said we lost another year. It is not 10 years; it is now like 
9 years and the Social Security trust fund is gone. At that moment, if 
we do not fix Social Security, we double senior poverty.
  What did the President do on that podium when we had the state of the 
Union?
  He basically made talking about fixing Social Security toxic because 
it was a better campaign issue than a moral one.
  A little bit more fun with math. An increasingly large share of 
births are happening to women 30 and over.
  Why would I show this slide?
  Basically when we are doing fertility curves and when your 
population--you have older parents--they have fewer children. I am one 
of these.

                              {time}  1145

  I have two kids, and I am in my early sixties with my wife. We are an 
outlier. We have other health issues and other things. It is actually 
becoming much more common that as we wait for prosperity, it is so hard 
to start a family; it is so hard to find a spouse; and it is so hard in 
the economics, particularly with what has happened in the last 2 years 
where, Mr. Speaker, if you are that working person and you want to get 
married but you are poorer today.
  Remember, Mr. Speaker, family formation is a derivative of a couple 
of things. It is who graduates school and your ability to find stable 
employment to have economic growth. Most people will not enter into 
family formation until you start to have that level of stability, Mr. 
Speaker.
  In the last couple years with policies here we are willing to give 
out stunning amounts of money to green energy, to this, to that, and to 
whatever favored groups to subsidize really rich people to go buy 
battery walls, and we functionally subsidize people not to actually 
participate in the labor force.
  This is where it gets uncomfortable, but the math is the math is the 
math. If we don't start to think about it, we are avoiding a really 
uncomfortable subject.
  Men, male participation, has fallen 19 percent.
  Now, I know this is like over the last 70 years, but something is 
going on in our society. We had brought in an expert a couple years 
ago, and the conversation was fascinating. It was a professor from one 
of the Ivy Leagues.
  She was saying: Look, we don't know if some of it is drugs, though we 
expect that. We don't know if some of it is video games.
  There were questions of how many young men, particularly, are put on 
hyperactive drugs during their adolescent years and other things. We 
just don't know. However, we do know that we have a crisis of young 
males coming back into society, and we need them. We need their 
participation for more than just their tax revenues from their labor.
  A healthy society is one that has the vitality where everyone is sort 
of loved and participates in the economy and has opportunity. With that 
comes sort of the American Dream of family formation and other things.
  The number has gotten ugly. A total of 13 percent of prime age males 
are not working.
  Remember, Mr. Speaker, I just walked you through some of the prime 
age male calculations of what that demographic was. Thirteen percent of 
the males in that group are not participating in the economy.
  If you want an economic pop, Mr. Speaker, then I can fix things in 
the Tax Code. I can do some incredible things here with the Ways and 
Means Committee and the Members here who actually care about economics 
to incentivize investments. However, I also have a moral issue of I 
have a huge portion of my society that has dropped out.
  We need to understand why, and we need to bring them back if not for 
economic reasons, then just for basic humanity.
  We have been trying to dive into this to understand, okay, here is 
functionally we are getting right up against the pandemic, but the new 
baseline of male labor force participation is dramatically below where 
we were before, and it just continues to steadily decline. This is a 
problem.
  I can't make much of the math work in the out years, so I get Members 
here who say: David, give me a plan to balance in 10 years.
  Mr. Speaker, do understand: I can balance. We could build a plan. We 
could all come together and balance in 10 years. Of course, the next 
day we would be out of balance.
  In 9 budget years--and I have said this, and this seems to be the 
single thing I say that upsets more people around here than anything, 
so let's do it slow.
  In 9 budget years, according to CBO's report from 6 weeks ago, we can 
get rid of every dime of the military; we can get rid of every dime of 
the rest of what we call discretionary; and that is the FBI, the 
military, the Park Service, the State Department, the White House, and 
the Supreme Court.
  Everything we think is discretionary is all gone.
  In 9 budget years, it is all gone. There is no discretionary. We 
still have to borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars to have enough 
cash flow to cover Medicare and enough cash flow to cover veterans' 
benefits, and we haven't actually calculated in the fact that the 
actuaries from Social Security and Medicare just removed a year of 
actuarial life.
  So it may be much worse because our math before was the very next 
year so that in 10 budget years it is not a couple of hundred billion 
dollars we have to borrow, it may be several hundred billion dollars we 
have to borrow if we were to backfill Social Security.
  These are demographics.
  Is that Republican or Democrat?
  It is a bit of both.
  The fact of the matter is the primary driver of our debt is 
demographics. We got old as a society, and this place needs to be 
maniacally fixated on growth, on efficiency, and on adopting the 
technologies that make healthcare less expensive but more accessible.
  If we don't do this, then this math gets really ugly really fast. We 
are not talking about something 20 years from now.
  Mr. Speaker, how many of us expect to still be us in 9 years?
  That is what we are talking about.

[[Page H1902]]

  So this is actually one of the things that is going on, and the 
number is actually worse. This is just the only chart that we have that 
we vetted.
  The number of males and females who are entering sort of our 
university world pretty much enter it about the same, except graduation 
rates: only about 40 percent of males are graduating. I think the 
number now is in the high thirties. It rolled over again over the last 
couple of years.
  Females, God bless them. We are seeing about 60 percent of those are 
graduating. It is wonderful.

  However, this number between there is actually a really uncomfortable 
conversation. It is called functional family formation gap.
  Of the many who have succeeded--they have their bachelor's degree, 
they have their master's degree, they went through the university 
process, and they graduated--what is the population of prospective 
spouses?
  Something is going on in our society where we are trying to 
understand why are there so few family formations.
  Some of the demographers who responded to our question said: You have 
a problem. You have lots of success in females making it through 
college systems and university systems, and we have some universities 
where females are graduating at twice the rate as males.
  That differential, how much of this population is comfortable 
marrying someone who also did not graduate?
  That is a tough thing. We don't talk about things like that here, but 
it is such a sizeable number now that we are actually seeing it in our 
economic data.
  So let's see, what else can we produce that actually makes us 
uncomfortable?
  This is basically the same thing we just talked about actually broken 
up by genders. This chart ends in 2020. It has actually gotten worse in 
the last couple of years. This is not a new trend. This has been going 
on, and we have been tracking this for about the last 15 years.
  We actually have been also trying to understand what happens because 
of some of these societal factors, the fact of the economics of the 
government has pumped in lots of money and done all these things. 
People are poorer because they set off inflation with much of the 
economic policies and what the Fed did but also the Inflation Reduction 
Act and all these other things where we just dumped money back into 
society and won't take responsibility for setting off inflation--to my 
brothers and sisters on the left--but with those economic headwinds, we 
are actually seeing other data of the delays in marriage formation or 
household formation.
  With that, we are recalculating how many children we expect to have 
in America.
  Understand, Mr. Speaker, half the States in the United States today 
have more deaths than births. Half the States today have more deaths 
than births, and the country in total in 18 years will have more deaths 
than births.
  By 2042, deaths are projected to exceed births in CBO's population 
growth model, and this one is already out of date. So even the CBO has 
been putting this out.
  Now, the reason I keep showing these demographic slides is do you all 
remember your high school economics class, Mr. Speaker?
  Stable populations or growing populations have the ability to have 
economic expansion.
  It is what we call--I don't want to geek out too much. It is hard to 
have that domestic gross product expanding and expanding unless we have 
populations to take the jobs or we are willing to do tax and regulatory 
code changes like a number of the countries that we compete against. I 
am going to show you some of those slides in a moment, Mr. Speaker, 
where they said: We can't get labor. We are going to incentivize 
robots. We are going to incentivize automation.
  We are going to get people who say: What about the jobs?
  We don't have people. We have school districts all over America where 
the incoming kindergartners' and first graders' population is falling. 
The schools are going to have fewer kids. They are going to be closing 
schools.
  Then they look at me like: That makes me upset.
  We have been talking about the falling fertility rates for one-
quarter of a century.
  Here is the punch line. We have worked really hard on this math. The 
Joint Economic Committee, some of the economists, and some of the 
others spent weeks because this is sort of one of those things we don't 
really find in the literature: If I have a 1 percent decrease in my 
labor population and in my labor growth, then I lose 0.6 percent of GDP 
growth. If we had 2 percent, then you lose a point, 1.2. If you had a 5 
percent decrease--and that is what some of these charts are talking 
about--in our labor force populations in the out years then we are 
losing 3 percent of our GDP growth.
  Why is this important?
  How many of us just saw that the Congressional Budget Office just 
said: Hey, we expect that in the next year or maybe the next couple of 
years the United States is only going to grow 1, 1.2 percent.
  We are already seeing it in the math.
  Yet how many idiots--excuse me--how many of us have gotten up behind 
these microphones and tried to explain that we have got to fix tax 
policy, we have got to fix regulatory policy, we have got to fix trade 
policy, and we have got to fix immigration policy?
  We are not sure how to fix demographics.
  This one is really uncomfortable because almost no one understands 
it.
  Back to mandatory spending, an oldie but a goodie.
  Why is this so important?
  This slide here is maybe 3 years old. It gets dramatically worse 
through the end of this decade.
  However, once again, our government is an insurance company with an 
army.
  This is from the 2022 budget cycle. Seventy-one percent of all of our 
spending is what we call mandatory. Some of that is earned. Mr. 
Speaker, you earned your Social Security, you earned your Medicare, and 
you earned your veterans' benefits.
  Some things you get because you fell below a certain economic income, 
Mr. Speaker. You get Medicaid or you are part of a certain tribal 
population and the United States has a treaty obligation to meet. There 
are things out there. However, the vast majority of this is what we 
would call earned benefits.
  So when we hear someone here say: Oh, it is mandatory spending. We 
are not being disrespectful. You earned these. Is part of the societal 
contract.
  Mr. Speaker, do you see this wedge over here, the defense, 
nondefense, and discretionary?
  That is what we all think of government. In 9 budget years, every 
dime of this and part of the mandatory live on borrowed money.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, walk in my door and say: David, I demand you 
balance in 10.
  I can balance in 10.
  How much of the mandatory do you want us to cut, because we can wipe 
out everything else?
  Also, are we prepared to live in a country without a defense?
  That is a violation of the U.S. Constitution, but a lot of these 
folks don't seem to give a damn--excuse me--care about what the U.S. 
Constitution says anymore as long as it doesn't inconvenience them.
  Here is the one I get the most nasty emails about: What is the 
primary driver between today and 30 years from now?
  It is not the primary driver; it is 100 percent.
  One hundred percent of the U.S. sovereign borrowing between today and 
30 years from now, 75 percent of it is basically Medicare, 25 percent 
will be if we backfill Social Security in now, what, 8 or 9 years 
because the trust fund is all empty, but what we allocate to the rest 
of the budget actually has cash in the bank.
  It is demographics. That is why we just spent the last half hour 
going over what is happening demographically to our country. Getting 
old is not Republican or Democrat. How we react to it may be.

                              {time}  1200

  Just one more time, to understand, 30 years--and this slide is 
already out of date. On hard dollars, without the financing costs, if 
we backfill it, Social Security is $21 trillion short.
  Medicare, the part that comes out of the general fund, 75 percent of 
all Medicare spending comes out of the general

[[Page H1903]]

fund. Then there is what we call the Medicare trust fund, which the 
President talked about taxing, but his new taxes only produce like $660 
billion over 10 years, which is just a fraction of the spend, believe 
it or not, and that trust fund is functionally gone. The Medicare 
shortfall is $48 trillion.
  The financing cost of those two is $47 trillion. Add it up. The 
newest number, when we add it up, is closer to $128 trillion.
  Is anyone getting the punch line here?
  We can fix Social Security. Of course, it would have been really 
helpful if the President wouldn't have made it toxic. If he had gone 
behind that microphone and said: ``I need our brothers and sisters on 
the right and left to do the moral thing. We care about our seniors. We 
are not going to allow, at the end of this decade, a doubling of senior 
poverty. We are going to work together.'' Instead, he made it toxic. 
For Medicare, we need a revolution in the cost of healthcare.
  Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 26 minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. If the Lord has mercy on us, I won't use all of that 
time.
  Federal spending, this is one I have never used on the floor. It has 
been several years ago that I remember reading--I think it might have 
been in The Economist magazine. It was talking about, in the 1970s, for 
every dollar spent on seniors, we spent $5 on young people, and that, 
today, for every $5 we spend on seniors, we only spend $1 on young 
people. It is completely reversed.
  This is basically what we are trying to say: Today, for folks 65 and 
older--and this is a 2015 number because it is the newest number I 
could find in the literature--we will spend $35,000 a year on seniors 
and $5,000 on young people. Just understand that is what happens when 
your demographic curve changes.
  We have updated this, and we have vetted it. This is conservative. We 
were careful on this number. In 1960, we had 5.1 workers for every 1 
person on Social Security. In 2035, where we are heading, we believe 
the math to be 2.3, and that number is assuming a stabilization of 
labor force participation.
  We have some other articles that say this falls down to only 2 
people, so you and your partner or you and your spouse will have 1 
person in retirement. However, we are going to use 2.3, but understand 
those differentials. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system.
  When you get the folks who say ``the lockbox,'' for years, we had 
more workers than retirees consuming, and the trust fund built up. No 
one stole your money. The cash came in, and they would loan it to 
Treasury. Treasury would give them special Treasury bills, just like 
you might take your own retirement account and say, ``I have some cash. 
I am going to buy a Treasury bond.'' That is functionally what Social 
Security did.
  For the last couple of years, they have been cashing in those 
Treasury bonds. That cashing goes faster and faster as the baby boomers 
are moving in. That is what gets used up--now, what is it?--in about 8, 
9 years.
  At that moment, Social Security lives on its cash flow, so it will be 
the cash flow from these workers. Whatever FICA taxes they pay in, that 
is what will go out the door.
  That is why, right now, the best math is we expect a 23 percent cut 
in that first year that the Social Security trust fund is expired. 
Then, the next year gets bigger and the next year it gets bigger.
  It breaks my heart because I think this is a moral obligation to fix 
this, except, once again, the left is going to use it as a political 
item for an election instead of a moral item of we are all going to 
come together to fix it.
  I was surprised by the numbers on this board. I have used it for 
years now. For anyone who says, ``Just give me the money I put in,'' 
the United States Government should grab that and run. However, once 
again, it is not Social Security.
  With Social Security, you get back every dime you put in, plus a 
little SPIF. You would have made so much more, have been so much more 
prosperous, if the left and these other groups hadn't stopped, 20-plus 
years ago, the discussion of allowing younger workers to take a tiny 
sliver of that FICA tax and put it into the markets as a private 
account. We wouldn't be facing much of this crisis today, but the 
control freaks didn't want you to have any of your own money in the 
economy.
  This slide is now a couple of years old. Social Security for a 
couple, you will pay about $625,000 in a lifetime, your 40 quarters as 
you qualify, but you are going to get back about $698,000. That is 
about a $72,000 SPIF.
  It is Medicare that is my mathematical problem. In Medicare, that 
couple will put in about $161,000 because the Medicare-only FICA tax 
you are paying is the Medicare part A trust fund. We just talked about 
that. Depending on the mix, it can be up to about a 40 percent Medicare 
spend because it is really sort of the hospital portion. However, the 
vast majority of Medicare spend comes out of the general fund. You, as 
a couple, are going to put about $161,000 of your lifetime taxes into 
Medicare. You are going to get out $522,000.
  This is based on math from a couple of years ago. We are told this is 
substantially different today because if all of you have looked at 
medical inflation numbers, medical inflation has been running about 
double mean U.S. inflation, so there is a whole bunch of ugly 
recalculations that are going to be happening around this place as we 
try to figure out what we have done to ourselves in this inflation 
fight.
  Spending on mandatory programs is expected to increase as a larger 
share of the population is in retirement age. Duh. We still thought we 
would make a nice slide out of it, though.

  Right now, functionally, a little over 5 percent of the entire 
economy is Social Security. The entire economy goes out; 5 percent of 
it is in Social Security. In a couple of decades, that goes to 6.4. So, 
Social Security, okay, it is fixable.
  Now, this is Medicare, not Medicaid, not Indian Health Services, not 
veterans, just Medicare itself. Today, the spend on that is about 5.7 
percent of the entire economy. In the next couple of decades, it goes 
well over 8 percent.
  When we get into the large numbers, we actually often use percentages 
of the entire economy. If anyone is paying attention here, when we were 
talking about those earlier slides that if we can maximize growth--
because if we are doing percentages of the size of the economy, and you 
don't want to be putting out 8-plus percent just in senior healthcare 
in the economy, grow the economy, so this number goes down.
  Change the price of healthcare by adopting technology, curing things. 
The number of times I have come to this floor and talked about what we 
could do, the number one cost in society today is what? It is diabetes. 
Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes. Thirty-one 
percent of all Medicare is diabetes.
  If I came to you and said: What is the single thing you could do to 
maximize an impact on the budget, the debt, the borrowing, and also be 
one of the most moral things you could do in society, if you cared 
about income inequality for my Tribal populations, it is not income. My 
Tribal populations, I represent the second highest per capita 
population in the world with diabetes. However, urban poor, rural poor, 
it turns out if you cared about income inequality, it is health. The 
economics, the math, is really complex because there is so much noise 
in the numbers or, as we say, noise in the data.
  Many of my brothers and sisters on the left come in and say it is 
racism, that it is education. Well, it turns out, the data may say it 
is actually health.
  As a moral society, why wouldn't we say: Okay, there are things we 
can do. We know we could actually, tomorrow, revolutionize the farm 
bill to say we are going to take on obesity in our society because we 
are killing ourselves. We are not going to hand you an EBT card that 
you can go get onion rings with.
  Yes, there are lobbyists everywhere who are now upset that I am not 
selling their onion rings. Welcome to the world. Every time you tell 
the truth about this math, you have an army of lobbyists in the hallway 
who are mad at you because you may have taken away dollars from who 
they are representing. I care so much more about the survival and 
prosperity of this country.

[[Page H1904]]

  How about the next thing? Have you seen the over-the-skin--as a 
matter of fact, I saw the article that a future Apple Watch is going to 
have a blood glucose meter in it. What would happen if our prediabetic 
population could watch what is happening to their body without pricking 
themselves, if they could see it right there on their phone? Would that 
change society if you could stabilize the prediabetic population? 
Remember, diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending.
  How about these GLP-1s? I have an article from the University of 
Southern California, which I am still upset they are moving to the Big 
Ten instead of the Pac-12, but that is a whole different discussion. 
The article basically says just the use of GLP-1s in the Medicare 
population, not Medicaid, would be a trillion bucks, a trillion-dollar 
impact to the positive. We need to study that. Is that Republican or 
Democrat, or is it just giving a darn?
  I came here a couple of weeks ago about the company that has this 
incredible stem cell that they have tagged with CRISPR so the body 
doesn't reject it, so you don't have to have antirejection drugs. It is 
in phase one that actually gets a body producing islet cells again, 
meaning your body produces insulin again. That may be at the end of the 
decade, but because of the way they are doing it, you can do it in a 
biofoundry fashion, which means you could have a production line. It 
doesn't have to be designed to you.
  Why wouldn't we, as we are doing the budget discussion and all these 
other things, set a decade vision saying we are going to stabilize 
prediabetic populations, that we are going to help our brothers and 
sisters get healthy again? Dear heavens, if it works, at the end of the 
decade, we could actually have people who rep parts of their body 
system to start producing insulin again. It would be worth trillions 
and trillions of dollars of less borrowing.
  That is a vision, and this place is incapable, almost incapable, of 
processing vision, but the reality is upon us.
  Annual spend for Medicare and Medicaid, this number is already not 
enough. By the end of the decade, it is functionally a trillion dollars 
more annually, and the majority of that money will be borrowed.

  In a weird way, I wanted to close on this. We are still the shiny 
object in the industrialized world. We are still better off than people 
we compete with. We need to embrace that but not lay on our laurels. We 
need to stop the stupid types of conversations we have here on the 
floor where we talk about the shiny object instead of the things that 
take us down as a republic, which is debt, which is actually our 
economics.
  Understand, this is what is called a dependency ratio, and it is not 
a derogatory term. It is an economic term of: Here is what I have in 
the labor market in a country, and here is how many people I have not 
in the labor market. It is not complex math.
  We hear the conversations about China, China, China. China is a 
problem, but China is on the verge of a collapse demographically. I am 
one of those who believes much of what we see China doing is they are 
running around the world trying to build annuities because with their 
one-child policy and all the other things they did, they are collapsing 
demographically. They start to roll over in the next couple of years, 
where, boom, their working population is collapsing.
  Is that why you go out and buy ports and farmland, because you are 
trying to turn the world into an annuity so you have cash flow? It is 
worth thinking about.
  Here is Japan. Japan is already way down here, and they actually sort 
of flatlined, but Japan has done incredibly creative things, incentives 
for seniors. If you are healthy and you want to, we are going to make 
it advantageous if you want to stay in the labor force. Adoption of 
technology--they have incredibly high savings rates. They are able to 
finance much of their own debt. We don't. We have a society where the 
majority of our population is living paycheck to paycheck, 
substantially because of inflation.
  We fall, but we don't fall nearly as hard. Our demographic curve is 
ugly, but it is so much less ugly than Western Europe, Japan, and 
China. The reason we did these three countries, these are the number 
one, number two, and number three size economies in the world.
  If we get the most basic tax, regulatory, immigration, adoption of 
technology policies right here, this can be a hell of a great decade. 
It can be a hell of a great century. This could once again be another 
American century.

                              {time}  1215

  I will argue it will be the decisions made in this timeframe, in this 
year and next year, because we are at the inflection.
  You see it demographically in the chart. We are at the time of 
inflection. Do we actually step up and use an IQ around here, or do we 
still sound like it is the 1990s politically?
  For everyone who is terrified of a chat AI, grow up. It could 
actually be one of the next generations of economic growth, if do you 
it right. Embrace it, learn it, get it right, and run with it.
  The new stem cell therapies; the fact we might cure diabetes, the 
fact that there are things we can do. Understand it, learn it, run with 
it.
  Fix this stupid immigration system. Close up our borders. Stop 
importing poverty. Bring in talent. There are just simple things.
  The Tax Code. Get it so it incentivizes risk taking and investment to 
grow. You don't need a Ph.D. in this stuff. You may be required to be 
literate. Maybe that is a problem.
  Our running joke here is I work in a place that is a math-free zone. 
That was meant to be funny, but it is sort of sarcastic and cruel.
  I believe really, really good things can happen. We have to get the 
policies right. My rage that I feel is I don't believe this place has 
even come close to actually having those pro-growth, those sort of 
growth is moral, what are we going to do-type conversations, and then 
to turn it into policy.
  I am exhausted. I just don't know how to drag this place over the 
line so they actually think.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________