[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 105 (Thursday, June 15, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H2950-H2953]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          OUR ECONOMIC FUTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ezell). 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 want to do a couple of things, and 
what I am going to sort of walk through is what we are seeing in the 
numbers.
  There is a sense of theater around here that I am trying to break 
through, so let's see if we can have some fun with some math.
  For those who were complaining about the caps, the spending 
reductions in the recent debt ceiling, for those who wanted more over 
here, for some of our brothers and sisters around this place who didn't 
think any of it was necessary, I need to break through and help this 
place get its head around the fact that we actually were allowed to 
negotiate on 11 percent of the spending.
  Remember, your government is functionally an insurance company with 
an army. The vast majority of our spending is on autopilot. It is 
earned benefits. You earned your Medicare. You earned your Social 
Security. You worked your 40 quarters. Veterans earned benefits. You 
get certain things if you fall under a certain income. That is called 
Medicaid. You get certain things because of treaty agreements, the 
Tribal populations.
  Those aren't formula. We don't vote for them. As a matter of fact, it 
is almost radioactive around here if we tell the truth, that it is the 
vast majority of spending. So, I am going to do some of this backward.
  A week ago Friday, two of the lead economists at Bloomberg--they call 
it Bloomberg Intelligence. You have to sort of go to the Bloomberg 
Terminal to get this. I subscribe to a couple of things, so I got the 
top line.
  Have you ever started to read something and go, oh my God, what are 
they talking about? That number can't be real. Then you bother someone 
who has an actual Bloomberg Terminal, and they pull the full printout 
on it.
  Here is the reality, and I don't know how to get folks to actually 
understand the math. Bloomberg Intelligence, the two economists said 
their model--Bloomberg has this fairly fancy model, just like we do at 
the Joint Committee on Taxation, the CBO, the Tax Foundation. Everyone 
has their models. Theirs is fairly impressive. Their model said, in 10 
years, we are at 130 percent of debt to GDP.
  Now, understand that the cuts we just did, the rebalancing, the 
flattening, the slowing down, the debt growth that we just fought 
through in the debt ceiling, we sort of took ourselves from 119 percent 
of the size of the economy at the end of the decade, or 10 years from 
now, to around 114 percent. That is a big deal.
  You figure, 10 years from now, you have a $39 trillion economy, so a 
percent is real money. We pulled it down from 119 to 114 percent. I 
think I have a board on it.
  Then, to read through the analytics from these economists saying: 
Here is your problem. Interest is dramatically higher than we have been 
modeling.
  They see inflation and, therefore, interest running longer. They also 
see healthcare costs growing faster and larger.
  If you actually think about the reading you have done this last week, 
because I know all of us around here read the technical aspects of, you 
know, whether--I am sorry. I was going to get sarcastic, and I am 
trying to dial that back.
  You start to see we are seeing this huge, very substantial spike in 
Medicare spending. It turns out a lot of our seniors actually had 
postponed lots and lots of procedures.
  You just saw, for one of the major health companies that caters to 
part D, their stock just cratered yesterday because of utilization.
  They had some other interesting things in there. Interest is up. 
Healthcare costs are up fairly dramatically. The thing I have tried to 
explain here that no one gets their head around, before the agreement--
and I am going to use rough numbers. The nondefense discretionary 
spending is $700 billion. We, functionally, just removed $100 billion. 
So, now it is $600 billion.
  Just that reduction of that $100 billion over those 10 years, they 
actually calculated that, next year, the GDP growth will be down a 
whole half a percent.
  That is huge because we were already starting to see, because of our 
demographics, we have gotten very old in society and are getting older 
very fast.
  You all know what has happened to fertility since the early nineties. 
Last year, we were down to 1.67, so in 18 years, the United States has 
more deaths than births. Half the States today already has more deaths 
than births.
  You start to say, okay, we are going to be at 1.8. There were a 
couple of projections for next year. We are a little higher than that 
if we just shaved off another half a percent.
  Then, I have folks running around here saying: Look at our pretend 
budget. We can balance in 10 years.
  Absurd.
  The borrowing this year, have you seen the numbers? Realize that you 
don't do budgeting this way. We have a fiscal year. Year to date, so if 
you do a 12-month cycle, we have now borrowed $2.1 trillion this year. 
That does not have the backfill of all the extraordinary measures that 
are getting done right now, as now the debt ceiling has been raised.

[[Page H2951]]

  $2.1 trillion is more than all defense and all discretionary, meaning 
everything you think of as government--the FBI, the White House, the 
Supreme Court, the State Department, all of it--all of government is, 
functionally, living on borrowed money.
  We weren't supposed to hit that for about 9 more years, and we have 
already hit it this year.
  Look, I hope this is wrong. I desperately hope these numbers are 
wrong, but this was Bloomberg Intelligence. Two of their lead 
economists said that when you put in these factors of the cuts in 
spending, which we have to do--you have to deal with the reality that 
it does slow down the economy, the higher interest rate cost, the 
dramatic increase in the utilization of healthcare, particularly in 
Medicare and Medicaid but mostly Medicare, 130 percent debt to GDP. 
That is 9 budget years from now.
  I beg of someone, pull out your calculator, put some batteries in it, 
and do a little math experiment for me.
  If you had 130 percent of debt to GDP, if today publicly held debt 
is--let's call it $25 trillion, $26 trillion. That is publicly held. 
That is where you haven't been borrowing from the trust fund. Publicly 
held--you had to go to market. That is doubling publicly held debt.
  Let's say it is $51 trillion. You can almost do that math in your 
head if you said you had a 5 percent strike rate, which is high. That 
is well over $2 trillion a year just in financing costs.
  Nine years from now, the interest cost is functionally equal to every 
dime you and I think of as government. We were not supposed to hit that 
for like 15, 18 years.

                              {time}  1130

  With the higher interest rates, the increased costs of healthcare, 
the fact that the economy does not look like it is going to grow much 
more than a point if we even hit the consensus number of 1.7, 1.8--9 
years, $2 trillion a year in financing costs.
  I hope it is absolutely wrong. I hope our projection on interest 
rates is way off, but this is coming off the Bloomberg model. These 
aren't slackers. These are some of the best in the world at analytics.
  Let's go to something that was more optimistic, Moody's Analytics. We 
have Bloomberg Intelligence and Moody's Analytics. Their number was 
much more optimistic. Instead of being at 114 percent of debt-to-GDP 
functionally in 9 budget years, they had it as 121 percent of debt-to-
GDP.
  Now, understand, we are supposed to be 114. Even Moody's has a few 
points above that; meaning, we will have broken through the debt-to-GDP 
more than in World War II in just the financing costs, let alone the 
drag on the economy.
  Because this government, in trying to finance all this spending--I 
will come back to where the spending is coming from--is going to 
consume much of the world's capital. We don't have a high enough 
savings rate in the United States to have an economy that grows and the 
financing. We are going to have to reach out all over the world and 
grab stunning amounts of capital.
  How much discussion have any of us heard this week, last week, the 
week before that behind these microphones about dramatically changing 
the cost of healthcare?
  When the President got behind that microphone during the State of the 
Union and said: You are not allowed to talk about Social Security, even 
though in 9 years the trust fund is gone, and we double senior poverty.
  If you are on Social Security, start planning for it. We have made it 
radioactive here to even have an honest conversation about it. In 9 
years you take a 25 percent cut in your check, therefore, we are going 
to double senior poverty and that is the morality of the State of the 
Union we had. You are not allowed to talk about it. We won't cut it. We 
won't touch it.
  How about Medicare? The Medicare Trust Fund is also gone in this 
window. The Medicare Trust Fund only pays for--I will be generous--40 
percent because it is mostly the hospital portion, the rest comes right 
out of the general fund.
  So please understand when you read something like that--and CBO was 
over here originally before the debt ceiling agreement at 119 percent 
of GDP, they brought it down to 114. Then the other analysts are 
saying, yeah, but you haven't calculated the costs of higher interests. 
You haven't calculated the fact that, as you are trying to start to 
slow down the growth of spending, you actually slow down the economy 
and the healthcare costs are going off the charts. Yet we are terrified 
to get behind these microphones and tell the public the truth.
  So one more time, an oldie but a goodie--and I will make a new slide 
one of these days. Don't look at the 1965 date. This is 2022. Seventy-
one percent of all spending in 2022 was just Medicare, Social Security, 
what we call entitlements. They are earned benefits. Some are not 
earned; some you get because you are part of certain groups or certain 
incomes.
  Defense was about 13 percent, meaning the rest of discretionary is 
16. We actually took some of that off. You couldn't negotiate on it, so 
when we were doing our negotiations, we were down to 11 percent of the 
budget. This red part of the pie grows and grows and grows. Everything 
else is flat. This consumes us, and yet we have made it politically 
dangerous to talk about it.
  You talked about Medicare. You talked about Social Security. Oh, you 
are right. My passion, one of the reasons I keep running, is I am 
trying to save them. It is a moral argument that you deserve to have 
security in your retirement. It is like having cancer and refusing to 
actually go to the doctor and talk about it.
  This is a malignancy, and it is growing dramatically faster. Just 
look at the data that came out in the last 10 days of the growth and 
spending in Medicare. In the first 7 months of this fiscal year, 
Medicare spending went up 16 percent.
  Now, a lot of that is healthcare inflation, a lot of that were 
seniors who had postponed medical services during COVID, but 16 percent 
in the first 7 months.
  Here is part of the punch line: When we talk about these big numbers, 
particularly in the time of inflation, we often use, oh, that is a 
trillion dollars. The more eloquent way is to say we are all officially 
economists, we went out and got our Ph.D., and you would talk about a 
percentage of the economy because that stays constant.
  You can have lots of inflation, a little inflation, but the 
percentage of the economy that is going to debt servicing, that is 
going to borrowing, we were projected in 9 years to be about 7, 7\1/2\ 
percent of the economy being borrowed.
  You sort of see over here--this is just the running-borrowing chart. 
We had that huge spike substantially because of COVID spending, but in 
2023, we were supposed to be at 7\1/2\ percent of the economy, the 
entire United States Government would be borrowing, but we are only 
growing at about 1.8.
  Remember that delta. It is simple math: 1.8 and over here you are 
borrowing 7\1/2\, but if we go back to what Bloomberg said, their 
economists, in 10 years that is not 7\1/2\ percent of the economy being 
borrowed, that is 13. You are growing at 1.8 and you are borrowing 13 
percent of the economy. This is Armageddon, and it is in a 10-year 
window.
  The clown show around here is either terrified to talk about it or we 
are going to make up numbers. Unless you see budget documents talking 
about dramatically changing the cost of healthcare, this starts to 
become real. Now, all of a sudden, running 7\1/2\ percent of the 
economy in borrowing will look good because if we get up near 13 
percent in a 10-year window, you think we are going to have money for 
defense. You think you are going to have money for education. You think 
you are going to have money for research. Where are you going to have 
any cash at all? You are going to be struggling for every dime you have 
to keep the retirement security benefits.

  It is math. It is demographics. What is the primary driver of U.S. 
debt? Demographics. We got old. Today, for every dollar we spend on 
young people, we spend $5 on seniors. In the 1970s, for every $5 we 
spent on young people, we spent $1 on seniors. It flipped because those 
young people were the baby boomers and they have moved through the 
python and now they are here, and we still have about 6 more years of 
baby boomers moving into retirement.
  There are 10,300 Americans turning 65 every day. Many of us weren't 
giddy,

[[Page H2952]]

but we were pleased we had started to make--understand that the debt 
ceiling deal is actually the largest cut in U.S. history. You wouldn't 
hear that from the propagandists who are trying to raise money from 
scaring the crap out of you, but it is.
  We went from 119 percent of GDP down to 113. Think of that. Our math 
in our office was 114. This is the Center for Responsible Budget. They 
had us down to 113, but our math in our office is, we picked up about 
four points of GDP in reduction in spending and just the higher 
interest rates consume maybe two, three times that savings.
  Let's sort of walk through some of what we are seeing. I try so hard 
to try to convince people because if you go right now to our social 
media for our office--and I am sure it is the same for other Members 
here, look at the crazy that you get. If you just cut foreign aid, we 
could balance the budget.
  Foreign aid is about 12 days of borrowing. At the end of the decade, 
it is half that. Just get rid of congressional salaries. Trust me, we 
are probably overpaid for our work product, but every dime of a 
Senator's salary, Members of Congress' salaries are like 18 minutes in 
an entire year of borrowing.
  We borrow a little over $50,000 a second and in 9 years, we are over 
$90,000 a second every day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year. That is 
per second, and it is all Social Security and healthcare entitlements.
  Do you see this delta here? Functionally, you can get rid of every 
dime of defense, every dime of government. There is no government at 
all, and you still will be borrowing trillions of dollars at this rate 
10 years from now.
  There is a model out there that we have talked about--now this was on 
the CBO numbers from last February that said in 9 years you can get rid 
of all of government, all of defense, and you had to borrow $300 
billion. Then a couple weeks later, we got the data that the Social 
Security Trust Fund would be emptied.
  I apologize for talking too fast. I had a lot of caffeine today.
  With the backfilling of Social Security, add another few hundred 
billion dollars a year. If these new numbers are correct, we are about 
to hit the numbers that we are supposed to hit in 9 years and we are 
hitting them now.
  Part of that is that tax receipts have taken a huge fall in the last 
month or two. If you actually dig into the data you may wonder what has 
happened. Turns out it was capital gains receipts, which makes perfect 
sense.
  Let's say you have an asset. It has gone up substantially in value 
because of inflation, not because you are more productive, not because 
it is some incredible technology. It has gone up because of inflation.
  If you sell it, you are going to pay all this capital gains tax on 
inflation because another asset you are going to go buy has also been 
inflated. There is lots of data in the literature that talks about when 
you hit inflationary cycles, the fact you have devalued the dollar, you 
have devalued people's savings, you have devalued people's retirements, 
but you also create such a distortion because you don't know what is 
actually a gain or just fluff. It is inflation, and now we are starting 
to see it in our tax receipts. It has already begun to hit us.
  I am going to do this board one more time. The number of times you 
hear, particularly our colleagues on the left, talk about, well, you 
need to just get rid of this debt ceiling. It is not right to have 
these stressors. It makes people nervous. That is part of the point. I 
know this sounds like I'm being a jerk, but you have got to understand, 
this place is incapable of doing adult work unless there is a stressor, 
whether it be the budget or the debt ceiling.
  I come here and ramble. I bring my charts. I bring my calculator. I 
have my handful of Ph.D. economists from the Joint Economic Committee. 
We do our data. You preach it to your brothers and sisters, both on the 
right and the left, and they just stare at you. It is not till you have 
something like the debt ceiling where everyone on financial television 
has their hair on fire, even though it is mostly theater because we 
have plenty of cash flow to cover the interest on our bonds, and it 
requires those inflections.
  Yet when we hit the debt ceiling when the Democrats controlled this 
place, they required more spending. Remember, the 2019 bipartisan debt 
ceiling agreement, it is scored by the Center for Responsible Budget as 
costing--that is Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats because they ran this 
place. They took a Republican President and said: We won't pass a debt 
ceiling unless you spend, in their number, $1.4 trillion.
  How many of you heard anyone talk about the fact that just a couple 
of years ago, the left demanded more spending by $1.4 trillion plus for 
them to vote out the debt ceiling?

                              {time}  1145

  Then there is rage from my brothers and sisters on the left that we 
asked to flatten the spending growth. That is how duplicitous the media 
is here. When you talk about numbers and they have lots of zeros, I 
think people immediately tune out and go hit their Netflix account.
  Here is the history. When the Democrats have been in charge and we 
hit debt ceilings, it is more spending. When the Republicans have been 
here, at least we have gotten some inflection of some fiscal sanity.
  Once again, I have used this chart every month for probably 3 years 
now, because I am trying to get it to sink in. One hundred percent of 
the next 30 years of borrowing is interest, Medicare, and if we choose 
to backfill Social Security. Everything else is flat.
  The new number on this chart, we had calculated to be about $128 
trillion. With the new numbers coming in on inflation and, therefore, 
interest costs, we think we may be a few trillion short.
  Understand what that means. If I tell you right now that 30 years 
from now, the United States Government, when you add in the cost of 
Medicare and the financing, the backfilling of Social Security and its 
financing, we have borrowed $130 trillion. If any of you plan to be 
working 23 years from now, the CBO's own math says the United States 
will have to double all U.S. taxes just to maintain the baseline 
services. That is nothing new. That is baseline services. This is the 
reality.
  Then you have the irony. We haven't had time to put together all the 
boards, because it turns out it is a lot more than I thought, the 
incredible duplicity where our brothers and sisters on the left attack 
us: They are trying to cut things.
  So the Inflation Reduction Act, which is just an Orwellian title, 
Goldman Sachs says the actual spending of the grants, handouts, tax 
specialties for their favorite companies, equals $1.2 trillion. What is 
the financing cost? Remember, that is all borrowed money. So you hand 
out borrowed money to these favorite companies. This is the Democrat 
bill. Not a single Republican voted for it. What is the financing cost 
of $1.2 trillion over forever? Because we won't have a demographics 
balance for 30 or 40 years before you can actually start to pay down 
this debt. That is the math.
  The CHIPS Act, here is $50 billion or $60 billion. You have got to go 
to the White House to get a grant, but you have got to be nice to 
Democrats in the White House to get your grant.
  The number of soft nationalization that the Democrats passed--now, 
understand, Goldman Sachs said this would be $1.2 trillion of spending 
in their Inflation Reduction Act. CBO came back about 3 weeks ago and 
doubled their estimate. Remember, when they were voting on this, they 
told the American people it will only be $2.8 trillion--excuse me--$280 
billion over the 10 years. CBO just came back and said it is $500 
billion plus. That is partially with the assumption that you can't get 
all the credits because you can't get all of these components made in 
the United States. If you could, yeah, it is 1.2.
  I know people glaze over when I use math like that. Where I am simply 
going with this is the left has spent a stunning amount of money in the 
last couple of years when they controlled this place. Then they attack 
us for trying to slow down the spending. Our beg is, hey, we want some 
caps. We want to cut discretionary spending, that 11 percent of the 
budget we were allowed to work on, that $700 billion, we are going to 
roll it down $100 billion over the 10 years, and we are heretics for 
wanting to slow this down. At the same time, interest, Medicare, and 
healthcare costs explode.
  What is the solution? Seriously, what is the solution around here? 
You can't

[[Page H2953]]

cut unless you are willing to wipe out government to get us anywhere 
close to balance. We are now heading toward the death spiral of 
interest.
  The argument we make is if the predominant driver, almost all of the 
driver of spending is healthcare, we have got to come up with a way to 
revolutionize the cost of healthcare.
  When was the last time you saw Members, both Democrat and 
Republicans, get behind this microphone willing to have a discussion 
about obesity? When have you seen us get behind this microphone and 
talk about the stunning growth of diabetes in America?
  Diabetes, it is type 2. Diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare 
spending, 31 percent of Medicare. Maybe the discussion of our brothers 
and sisters are dying in this country, there is something horribly 
wrong, but we are not supposed to talk about it. These are the same 
people that 30 years ago made the moral argument that stopping people 
from smoking was good for society and good for those individuals, but 
today we are not allowed to talk about the fact that we have about 3\1/
2\ million prime-age males missing from the labor force. Some of the 
best data we have says the number one cause is probably obesity and 
number two is drugs.
  Now, it is complicated. People are complicated. When we look at the 
data and what we did during COVID of forcing people to stay home, the 
stunning growth of morbid obesity in the United States, is it moral? Is 
it moral that we are not willing to talk about it? Do we care so little 
about our brothers and sisters that we are not going to reach out and 
save them?
  You have some opportunities. You have the farm bill coming. Are we 
willing to think like revolutionaries both in what we grow and what we 
do for nutrition support? Is it moral to hand someone an EBT card, 
which is the replacement of Food Stamps--it is the newer, better, 
faster, whatever way--and say you can use that EBT card to go buy onion 
rings?
  I believe you should be able to eat whatever you want, smoke your 
cigarettes, but you should also carry your own cost, not pawn it off on 
the rest of society. If you are willing to cover your own cost, have a 
party. If the rest of us have to pay for it, because right now it is 
borrowed money--I have an 11-month old at home we are adopting. That 
little boy, when he is functionally 23 years old, his taxes have to be 
doubled. Is that moral?
  Make the moral decision today. Change the farm bill. I know it is 
politically hard. I know it is a balancing act. Democrats have to care 
about people, too. At least I hope they do.
  Second thing I would do, there are now over-the-skin blood glucose 
monitors. We are told that there is actually now--forgive me. I won't 
say the company. One company already now has it in the watch. There is 
another one that actually has something that would actually calculate 
your calorie intake. We are told a couple of generations from now, even 
the Apple Watch will have blood glucose on it.
  If we could stabilize prediabetic populations in the United States, 
it is one of the most dramatic things you could do to stabilize debt.
  Have we ever had a conversation about that? Can we get the Budget 
Committee to actually put that in one of their footnotes that here are 
a couple positives? Republicans and Democrats--because I don't know if 
we have made that partisan yet--could actually work with each other to 
say we need to stop having our brothers and sisters in the country 
dying.
  The third one--and this one I will get crap for--is the new GLP-1s. 
The data is remarkable on how they are as appetite suppressants. We are 
doing math right now, and it is going to take us another month because 
it turns out the math is hard if you are going to do it like adults.
  If you took your populations of Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health 
Services, VA--these are government-paid-for populations--took those who 
were morbidly obese and said: We actually love and care about you. We 
are going to give you access to these because we want you to live. We 
want you to be able to participate in society.
  Here is one of the punch lines. On Monday, we had maybe the Nation's 
leader in healthcare statistics do a little forum down the hall. His 
data says--remember, this is the guy with 70 million U.S. health 
records, and it is used for mining and used for setting up drug trials, 
but he is sort of the demagogue of data. He said there are functionally 
4,000 human diseases. Of those, 2,000 have direct relationships to 
obesity. That is half the human misery.
  So we are a moral body, right? We care about people. We are going to 
have a--oh, we are not allowed to talk about it, except an idiot like 
me who is willing to get behind the microphone.
  Would it be good for productivity? Of course. Would it be good for 
people's future economic vitality, their ability to save for 
retirement? Of course. Would it be good for the debt and deficit? Of 
course. Would it be good for my little boy's future, not having to pay 
for the borrowing of today? Because that is what we do. We borrow today 
so our kids and grandkids can pay it off tomorrow.
  That is number three, the willingness to actually do the math. What 
would happen if with the GLP-1s we made a government decision that the 
math is so compelling, the economics are so compelling that we are 
going to roll these out in our populations who are suffering.
  The fourth thing, on Monday, we had one of the teams here that is 
about to begin their phase 1 on a cure for type 1 diabetes that they 
believe is applicable to type 2. It is a stem cell that does not 
require antirejection drugs. They lay it into the lining of the tummy, 
and apparently it produces these islet cells which produce insulin.
  At the end of the decade, we may have an actual cure. The math is 
like this. If someone is a type 2--type 2 is actually complex. There 
are lots of things within it. If it is the traditional type 2, obesity 
is the driver. If that weight gets back down, in about 70 percent of 
Americans, their bodies will start to produce insulin again. Thirty 
percent, the damage is done. For that 30 percent, at the end of the 
decade, it looks like there is hope.
  These are four simple, moral steps that are great economics. We are 
going to come here and complain about the debt and deficit, but at 
least I am standing here giving you one idea that actually can pass 
this body, unlike some of the fake budgets that the left, and even some 
of my friends, will roll out here that will just be pretty words, no 
math, and we will say: You see? I can get you there if we just pretend 
that we are going to grow at this rate and get rid of all of 
government.
  I will argue, and I have the math to prove it, that the path of 
taking on diabetes and its primary causes is the most elegant, most 
moral, and something that can pass and get a Presidential signature.
  If someone else has a better idea that equals trillions and trillions 
and trillions of dollars of savings in 10 years, please send it to me. 
I am happy to steal brilliant ideas.
  Mr. Speaker, how do we get our brothers and sisters, who are all 
smart--some are smarter than others--but our brothers and sisters that 
work here, whether it be staff, whether it be elected Members, to 
understand that sounding like it is the 1990s policy-wise isn't going 
to save us. The numbers are crashing dramatically faster than any of us 
even expected a few months ago.
  There is a path. There is hope. The hope only exists if we actually 
start dealing with the realities of a path that is actually doable.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________