[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 125 (Thursday, July 20, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H3879-H3884]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           OUR NATIONAL DEBT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to yield to the gentlewoman 
from Florida such time as she may consume when she is ready.
  Madam Speaker, I thank you for your patience as the clock, as you 
know right now, sped up on us, and we are all running around like crazy 
people.
  Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time for a moment as the gentlewoman is 
looking for the poster, we are going to use most of the remaining 
portion of the hour when we start. We are going to cover a lot of 
territory, so for the poor folks who have to try to keep up, just 
please wave at me if I start speaking too quickly. They never seem 
willing to throw something at me.
  Madam Speaker, I am going to one more time yield to the gentlewoman 
from Florida (Ms. Salazar), because it looks like we found the poster.


                    Honoring Carlos Alberto Montaner

  Ms. SALAZAR. Madam Speaker, he had one of the finest pens in the 
Cuban exile community in its 60 years of banishment from the island.
  There are very few writers who could capture the suffering of the 
Cuban people, a country that has paid the consequences of believing in 
a toxic political idea.
  This was a man who could warn the rest of Latin America what would 
happen if they followed and believed Fidel Castro's false promises.
  His name was Carlos Alberto Montaner, and he just passed at 80 years 
old.
  His great political mission was to see a liberated Cuba.
  I wonder how many people like him have died waiting for the island to 
be freed from the jaws of Communism?
  Thousands upon thousands.
  How will he be remembered?
  We will remember him as a good man, a decent man who was kind and 
humble. His only preoccupation was to deliver a message of freedom to 
the Cubans and to his Latin American fellow men.
  His articles were impeccable, profound, and yet accessible to anyone 
to understand. They were full of content and historical analysis 
thoroughly explaining the falsehoods that Communism promises and never 
delivers.
  Montaner's book called ``Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot'' 
is a classic. It is a manual for Latin Americans to avoid falling for 
communist tricks and to avoid falling for what Fidel Castro has 
promised this hemisphere.
  The reality is that the 20 most developed countries in the world are 
capitalist democracies. They have free markets, and they have freedom 
of expression and small government where the individual is allowed to 
decide their fate rather than some unknown bureaucrat in a distant 
government office.
  The government serves only to establish the rules of the game, and 
the winner is decided by whomever plays it best.
  Montaner was my teacher. I read his articles meticulously, and by 
taking notes on his best ideas, I learned so much from his analyses, 
not just for their brilliance but also because they were full of 
goodwill for his compatriots. They were full of freedom.
  It was an honor to know him, to interview him, and to be his friend. 
We will miss him, and I offer my deepest condolences to his widow, 
Linda and to his daughter Gina.
  In the future, democratic leaders of a liberated Cuba will owe 
Montaner a

[[Page H3880]]

special place in the island's conscience. He helped pave the road to 
the idea that democracy is the best system for humanity.
  May God cover him with His glory for he acted with purpose and honor 
in his time on Earth, always working for the love of his Latin-American 
family and admiring the American agenda.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I apologize to Ms. 
Salazar for having to speed up our clock here. It is sometimes just the 
nature of when someone else on the Democrat side cuts their time short 
or didn't show up.
  Madam Speaker, as we start to go, we are going to walk through a 
couple of things here. Part of this is actually going to be something I 
don't get to do that often. It is going to actually be optimistic with 
a potential solution that will functionally soak myself in kerosene and 
play with matches.
  I come here every week. I am incredibly terrified, and I am 
incredibly dour on what is happening with the debt, so let's actually 
first set up part of this conversation.
  We have borrowed in the last 12 months--does anyone want to give me a 
guess how much we borrowed per second--per second--in the last 12 
months?
  We borrowed $63,000 per second is what the United States Federal 
Government--Federal Government--borrowed.
  Madam Speaker, if you start to actually dig into it deeper, when you 
start to see stories popping up of cities like Chicago with a $35 
billion debt crisis coming, and that $63,000 of borrowing is just the 
Federal Government, that does not include a bunch of other types of 
pension obligations which are another--I think we had one that was 
showing another couple dozen trillion dollars of obligations. Now do 
municipal debt, now do State pension debt.
  Do understand, Madam Speaker, the debt monster is not just the fact 
that the United States functionally right now has, what, $32.5 
trillion, and out of that 25, $26 trillion of that is publicly 
borrowed.
  That difference we tried to explain is when the Treasury borrows from 
the trust fund, and the trust funds are given--so you are the Railroad 
Retirement Trust Fund, the Social Security trust fund, they are given 
sort of IOUs. They are paid interest, and they have a functionally 
negotiable security that can only be cashed in with Treasury. So if 
anyone says that they stole the money, that is just not true. They just 
inter-borrowed, but they have the obligation.
  In the coming weeks, probably when we get back from August, we are 
going to do a presentation on just the scale of borrowing.
  Madam Speaker, do you remember the debates we had here on the floor 2 
years ago of the multiemployer pension systems?
  They were bankrupt. They had no money, and our brilliant brain trust 
around here, instead of fixing them, we just sat here and said: Here, 
here is $135 billion, here is lots of cash.
  Except even that money now has been pretty much burned up.
  We have a crisis. Much of the political leaders, the union leaders, 
and others from the seventies, eighties, and nineties were unwilling to 
tell workers that we need to set aside more money to cover these costs.
  Then the other thing we didn't prepare for was healthcare costs. So I 
am going to show in here just the scale from today through 30 years the 
best calculation, without using the new interest rates on debt as we 
have had the last year, it is about $130 trillion of borrowing coming.

                              {time}  1145

  Every dime of that is demographics. Madam Speaker, 75 percent of that 
$130 trillion is the shortfall of Medicare. The other 25 percent is if 
we backfill Social Security, because remember, in 8\1/2\, 9 years, the 
Social Security trust fund is chewed up. It is gone.
  Seniors take a 25 percent cut in their check, and we double poverty 
in the senior population of America. It is immoral, but once again, we 
have no partners here to actually work on it.
  If you actually go into many of our home districts right now, the 
Democrats are running ads saying,   David Schweikert is willing to talk 
about Social Security, trying to save it. He is a horrible human being. 
They are doing this because they care more about winning the political 
debate than saving it. It is just immoral.
  Something started to happen the last 2 weeks--and I just brought up 
one of them--because the number of times the handful of us here who 
actually care about debt have almost been mocked, and then something 
happened.
  Suddenly, we have some of the most leftist publications in America--I 
mean, here is The Atlantic. It turns out that debt matters after all.
  What is happening? Our brothers and sisters on the left all of a 
sudden had an epiphany, going oh, God. Maybe what some of those people 
on the right have been saying, that it is out of control--did I mention 
$63,000 a second?
  The debate used to be you would come behind the microphones and say, 
don't you care about your grandkids? Then the math got so bad, we 
started to come and say, well, don't you care about your kids?
  It was shocking. It was just shocking, the input we would get. We 
would often get seniors saying nah, screw them. I hope that is just a 
tiny, tiny, tiny part of the population. You would be just taken back 
at some of the inbound to our office when we talk about what was 
happening in debt and that it was demographics.
  I mean, demographics aren't Republican and Democrat. Now the math has 
gotten so bad, it is no longer your grandkids, your kids; it is now you 
and I. It is those of us who will be heading into retirement. It is us.
  I'm going to show here some of the outside estimates on how bad the 
math is. If any of those outside estimates are accurate, in 9 years, 
this place is a basket case.
  There is one estimate done by Bloomberg Intelligence, and they have a 
really sophisticated model. They have some top-end economists. They are 
saying it is not the 115 percent of debt to GDP at the Congressional 
Budget Office. They say if their model is correct, it is like 130 
percent of debt to GDP, meaning just interest costs 10 years from now 
is a couple trillion dollars a year.
  The other punch line. I came here last week, and we were trying to 
recalculate what the Supreme Court's decision with regards to student 
loans meant and was that going to be a placeholder to move up and down 
some of the debt numbers.
  We basically took what Treasury was saying, and we couldn't make the 
math work. So we spent a couple days saying, okay, if we take the 
historic of the last quarter we are in of the fiscal year and say here 
are the tax receipts we typically get, here is the spending we 
typically get, we will borrow more money this year than all of defense 
and all of discretionary.
  I take back what I said last week saying, hey, we might be getting a 
bit of a reprieve. It doesn't look like the reprieve is actually in 
that math.
  One of the models, if you use the mean number--not the outliers, the 
mean--it basically says we will borrow more money than every dime of 
what you think of as government; all of defense and all of discretion. 
That is what we get to vote on. We will be on borrowed money.
  We were not supposed to be hitting numbers like that for a few more 
years, and it is a combination of multiple things.
  Healthcare costs have exploded. We know because we have documented 
this one. In the first 7 months of the year, Medicare went up 16 
percent. Spending on Medicare went up 16 percent.
  Interest is up dramatically. Next year, just interest will be 
functionally three-quarters of a trillion dollars. How many people have 
you had talk about it, that interest in just 4 or 5 years will be 
bigger than all of defense?
  Tax receipts have started--because of this great Biden economic 
economy, well, the tax receipts are starting to collapse because you 
don't go and sell assets and pay capital gains when your capital gains 
are mostly inflation. The wheels are coming off, people, and we need to 
take it seriously.
  Let's actually do a couple of our boards here and just sort of set up 
what we see happening, and then we are going to walk through something 
that is semi-hopeful.
  We always start with this chart, and one day I will actually update 
it because it is now almost 2 years old. For anyone watching, you see 
the red? Mandatory. That is on auto pilot. You

[[Page H3881]]

see the green and the blue? Okay. Let's just pretend that is like 26, 
27 percent of all of our spending. This right here, this year, every 
dime of that is borrowed.
  Your government, if you think the State Department, your poverty 
program, this, that, you care about if it is not in the mandatory, it 
is borrowed money.
  The brain trust around here that will come in and say, well, if you 
just get rid of foreign aid, foreign aid is about 12 days of borrowing.
  You can make an argument and say we need to think about ourselves. 
Ukrainian funding--okay--whether you are for it or against it, it 
functionally might be 3 weeks of borrowing in an entire year.
  Now we are actually working on the budgets, and this is just a 
placeholder. When you have someone tell you we are holding 
discretionary spending flat, or we are holding it flat from the couple 
pandemic years, which were incredible spikes, but if you actually do 
it, the right way to look at a spending chart, go pick a base year, add 
in inflation, what does that curve look like? Nondefense discretionary 
is up 154 percent if you use 1990 as your base year, and just say, here 
is inflation. Here is what the line would look like if we held it 
steady, but it is up 159 percent. Defense is only up 35 percent over 
the inflation trend line.

  I get more crap for showing this board from the poor folks who are 
having to try to build the budgets and the hallways in this place being 
full of people begging for more cash, but there is no cash. Understand. 
It is all borrowed right now.
  The trust funds. So you come in here and say the Social Security 
trust fund is gone in the 10-year window. It is all gone. The highway 
transportation fund is gone in 4 years.
  The highway trust fund, all that money is gone. The Medicare trust 
fund is actually gone about a year before the Social Security trust 
fund being the whole Part A, Medicare trust fund, the hospital portion, 
which is close to about 40 percent of all Medicare funding. The trust 
fund is gone. All these are empty--and functionally--within this 9-year 
window.
  It is actually important when the Senate passes something. Ten 
seconds of levity. When you became a freshman here, you probably had 
the same experience. You sit down--and it is always a member from 
Texas. They plop down next to you and go, David, our freshman Member of 
Congress, you see them on that side? They are Democrats. That is your 
opposition. Your true enemy is down the hall. It is called the Senate. 
That joke has been here for, like, 200 years.
  Back to being serious. I just showed you a chart that the trust funds 
are gone in the 10 years. We will need not hundreds of billions, 
trillions to backfill, particularly when you put in the Social Security 
trust fund.
  How much discussion do you hear? Instead, you see it used as 
advertising. We had a President that got behind that podium there and 
basically said, you are not allowed to talk about Medicare or Social 
Security, and the room applauded.
  A number of us have spent the last year of our lives trying to find a 
way to save it, Republicans and Democrats. Remember, when the President 
gave his State of the Union, he knifed a number of Democrat Senators, 
too, who had been willing to have an honest conversation about how we 
were going to do the moral thing and save Social Security, but it was 
just too tasty of a political issue.
  Then you get this: I get this question often when I am talking about 
U.S. sovereign debt. Yes, but all of our debt is owned by China. It is 
not true.
  The number one holder of U.S. sovereign debt is Japan. It is a little 
over a trillion out of that 25, 26 trillion that is publicly held that 
is not inner transfers.
  China now, and for the last several years, has been dialing back 
their U.S. sovereigns, meaning today, China holds about $800 billion.
  You actually go down--this is the reality. The rest of the world has 
been slowly over the last few years backing away from buying U.S. 
sovereign debt.
  What do they know that Americans don't know? Why have they decided we 
are not that safe of an investment? Is it because United States does 
sanctions? Is it because of our creditworthiness?
  The fact of the matter is foreign holdings of U.S. debt continues to 
fall, meaning we, as U.S. savers, have to finance that $63,000 we are 
borrowing every second, much more of that today. We have to finance 
with our savings.
  Then you have the insane policies that this place did over the 
previous couple years when the left controlled it, when you had a 
Democrat House, Democrat Senate, Democrat President.
  Do you remember the Inflation Reduction Act? Insane name. Had nothing 
to do with reducing inflation. It was spending money. It kept inflation 
going.
  About 2 hours ago, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis of 
these grants that they are giving away to big industries.
  Now, they are in the clean energy industries, but they are still 
really big industries. Well, it turns out the vast majority of the cash 
this government is giving out from last year's Inflation Reduction Act 
is going to foreign companies.
  Yep. Our taxpayer dollars that were supposed to help us build a U.S. 
clean energy industry functionally structured--60 percent of clean 
energy projects awarded from the IRA, Inflation Reduction Act, are 
foreign-owned businesses. Yay, policy.
  You see, we are borrowing $63,000 a second. We are crushing our kids, 
our grandkids, and many of your own retirements because they are the 
ones that have to pay this debt back, and we are doing projects funded 
by last year's legislation that was only supposed to cost about $280 
billion. Only.
  Then Goldman Sachs comes in and says, now, the spending on all of 
these grants and giveaways and these, you know, supplements 
functionally could be $1.2 trillion. CBO comes in and doubles their 
estimates. Now, we find 60 percent of that money is going to foreign 
companies.

  This is not what we were promised. The President, the Democrats, 
promised us this was to create a U.S.-based infrastructure for clean 
energy, except the vast majority of their money--our money--is now 
going to foreign companies. Great job, guys.
  It just gets worse because now we are starting to look at what is 
going on with interest. Do you understand how--well, sorry. I am trying 
not to be a jerk.
  There is a concept of fragility. How many of you have ever--I will 
use an example from Taleb's book a couple years ago.
  How many of you--you are going to go to school. For young people, it 
might be here, or those who have to go to the airport. You know if you 
leave at this time, you are always going to get there, except that one 
time out of 10, there is a car accident, and boom, you miss your 
airplane. You miss getting to class.
  The concept is fragility. If you squeeze it too tight, just-in-time 
inventories, at some moment, something breaks, and that one time you 
miss the airplane, is it worth all the other times that you got 5 extra 
minutes at home drinking coffee?
  Interest in a weird way is the same concept. Things are wonderful 
until they are not. Next year, we are estimated to borrow almost $750 
billion.
  None of that buys anything. It doesn't buy you a new bridge. It 
doesn't buy you a new program. It doesn't help you fund education. All 
of that is just paying bondholders back. $750 billion next year.
  One of the things that this chart is trying to show is if you 
actually go out and then look at some of the higher interest rate 
possibilities, the math says a single point higher interest than what 
the Congressional Budget Office was estimating a year ago--over the 30 
years, it is $30 billion or $30 trillion dollars.
  Two points higher interest over that time--actually, it is closer to 
like 25, 27 years, every dime of U.S. tax receipts goes to cover 
interest. There is no more government. That is called fragility. You 
become subject to the whims of the debt markets.

                              {time}  1200

  This chart is starting to show the changes. We are over here, and 
here is our historic. All of a sudden, what happens to the cost of 
these programs with just simple marginal increases in interest?

[[Page H3882]]

  When I talk about that $30 trillion--I am going to show it to you in 
a chart in a moment--how much of the financing of Medicare is actually 
not the delivery of healthcare but is actually the financing of the 
debt that financed the last increment of that Medicare.
  This is a chart that should scare you to death. When you start to 
realize that if you had 3 percent higher interest, which isn't a 
stretch--go back 20 years ago, and these types of interest rates were 
normal for U.S. debt. In that 30-year window, you have over 345 percent 
of debt to the size of the economy.
  You have to understand that this isn't a game. We are already right 
now at 100 percent of debt to GDP. The wheels are coming off, and we 
are going to dink around with little arguments saying, well, I have an 
idea, we are going to work on it all year, and our big success is that 
we are going to save half a percent on Medicare spending.
  We have lost our minds around here with our unwillingness to do the 
things that are difficult because we have to explain it to a reporter 
or it will be an attack ad in one of our campaigns.
  This is the end of your Republic. This basically means you will live 
in a country with, functionally, no growth and, functionally, every 
incremental dollar you have is trying to just cover the interest, the 
borrowing costs, of your country.
  It is not tax receipts. We have chart after chart that demonstrates 
it is spending. It is mostly demographics. We got old.
  A bit of trivia: In the 1970s, when I was a child--yes, I have gotten 
that old--for every $1 that went to seniors, $5 went to young people. 
Today, it is just reversed. For every $1 that goes to young people, $5 
goes to seniors.
  It is not actually really about a policy shift. Healthcare got 
dramatically more expensive. It is out of control. We cannot afford it. 
However, our demographics also changed rapidly.
  Last year, we had a 1.67 fertility rate, meaning this country will 
have more deaths in 18 years than births. Half the States in this 
country today have more deaths than births. It is demographics from not 
having children. This started back in 1990. This didn't just happen 
yesterday. The fertility rates started to collapse in 1990. They just 
accelerated the last couple of years.
  Next year, 12,000 Americans a day turn 65. Each day next year, 12,000 
Americans turn 65, and our hallways will be full of people begging for 
more cash. I can't even figure out how to finance what our current 
obligations are.
  You start to look at the reality of the money, the deficit 
projections. This is important to understand. When I say the wheels are 
coming off, go way back in history, May 2022, about a year ago. We were 
supposed to borrow $980 billion this year.
  Today, our latest adjustment on the expectation--so a year ago, we 
were going to borrow $980 billion. What happened? Why has that number 
doubled? Within 1 year, we went from $980 billion to now we are 
estimating $1.84 trillion this year. What happened in 12 months?
  Well, you have some of the Democratic tax policy, which, it turns 
out, is not raising any money and is actually slowing down parts of the 
growth in the economy. We are building factories like crazy with 
subsidized tax money that we have no workers for and no customers for. 
That is going to be brilliant.
  The best part is that money, as I just showed you, 60 percent of it 
is going to foreign-owned companies. Brilliant. However, this is pretty 
much a math-free zone.
  This is the one, and I keep showing this one because I almost have 
bad dreams about this one. I should disclose that I have a 1-year-old 
and a 7-year-old. As a matter of fact, my 7-year-old is here in 
Washington with me this week. What is their right? What do they get in 
the future because, today, the math basically says, in 23 years, all 
U.S. taxes have to have doubled. All U.S. taxes will have to double in 
that 23-year window just to maintain baseline services.
  When my little people are out of their post-doctorates--because I 
have high expectations for them--they are going to walk into an economy 
that looks nothing like what we have today.
  How many of you intend to still be alive 20 years from now? Are you 
ready to live in a country where all of your taxes will have doubled? 
Everything? That is the math. We can keep pretending it doesn't exist, 
but the math will always win.
  What was so terrifying with what we did here is, when we did the debt 
ceiling deal, we, functionally, went from, ``Hey, we are projecting to 
head toward 120, 119 percent of debt to GDP at the 10-year window,'' to 
saying, ``Hey, we are going to get it down to maybe 114, 115.''
  That is actually real money. That is $100 billion a year. Right now, 
we are spending about $700 billion this fiscal year in nondefense 
discretionary, and we are going to remove $100 billion of that. That is 
real money.
  However, because no one here actually does economics, they also don't 
understand that when you remove that $100 billion--you have to do it; 
you don't have a choice because the wheels are coming off--but you also 
slow down the economy by about half a percent of GDP if you have not 
adopted other progrowth policies, whether it be fixing parts of 
immigration, fixing parts of the tax code, fixing parts of regulation.
  However, without it, when you are doing the very cuts that you have 
to do, you also affect the growth of the economy. The really smart 
economists come in here and do the math. Moody's comes in and says, at 
the end of the 10 years, and where we are going with demographics, 
healthcare costs skyrocketing, higher interest rates, we don't think 
you are going to be down to 114, 115 percent of debt to GDP. We think 
you are going to be at 120 percent of debt to GDP.

  Okay, if you do the math, that basically means your interest cost is 
probably a trillion and a quarter a year, so you are going to spend 
that sort of money to get nothing, to just pay the bondholders.
  However, the one that takes your breath away is when the Bloomberg 
Intelligence folks ran their model, and their economists said: Hey, we 
see at the end of the 10-year window that you are going to be at 130 
percent of debt to GDP.
  If you do the math, when you are holding that sort of debt to GDP, 
that is like $2 trillion a year in just interest. Okay, pay attention 
with me--$2 trillion just in interest. I told you that this year every 
dime of discretionary is going to be borrowed. At that time, equal to 
almost every dime of discretionary, the discretionary will have grown a 
bit but stayed fairly flat. It will be pretty much just interest, 
meaning the borrowing 10-year window from now will have to be like $2.7 
trillion in a year.
  I mean, this is, functionally, 9 budget years from now. Dear Heaven, 
I hope this number is wrong, but they walk you through the math, saying 
you are going to have this many baby boomers in their benefit years. 
Due to that movement demographically, the economy is going to slow 
down. Because of what cuts you are having to do, the economy is going 
to have slowed down.
  With the higher interest rates, financing is going to cost this much, 
and we are terrified to tell our voters this because our voters get all 
upset and say: Well, if you just got rid of waste and fraud and foreign 
aid, you would be fine. For the brain trust on the left, it is that if 
you would just raise taxes on the 2 percent of the population that 
makes over $400,000, that will finance it. I showed last week that is 
all fantasy. You don't get anything close to it. However, the political 
class here relies on the fact that our voters don't care about the 
math.
  Our interest cost just this year is up 40 percent. That is a punch 
line. Remember, we were only going to borrow $980 billion. This year, 
it looks like we are going to borrow $1.84 trillion. One of the drivers 
of that is our interest cost is up 40 percent this year. How many 
people do you hear even bothering to tell you the truth?
  This is the board that also gets me in trouble every time because it 
is 2 years old, and now the numbers are much worse. It is no longer 
$116 trillion. It is about $130 trillion in debt. A hundred percent of 
the next 30 years of debt is--I have already said it twice in this; is 
anyone listening?--75 percent is the shortfall in Medicare. We don't 
have enough money for it. The other 25 percent is if we backfill Social 
Security because, remember, functionally, in 9

[[Page H3883]]

years, the Social Security trust fund is empty.
  This math was done before this inflation/interest rate cycle. You 
start to look at this and understand how much the direct spending is, 
how much the interest cost of financing those sorts of debt is. This is 
$130 trillion of borrowing over the next 30 years, and it is all 
demographics. We got old.
  Pay attention. We are going to come back to this concept of if the 
vast majority of our borrowing, of our debt, is healthcare, we are 
going to get to a couple of points where we are going to have to have 
the willingness to talk about the drivers of that spending.
  The JEC, Joint Economic Committee, on the Republican side, of which I 
am the senior Republican, Medicare spending will double. Fiscal year 
2023, it is $1 trillion. In 10 years, we, functionally, go to $3 
trillion. We are going to functionally add, over the 10 years, $22 
trillion of--do you get it? Is anyone looking?--Medicare. This is not 
Medicaid. This is not Indian Health Service. This is not VA. It is just 
Medicare, $22 trillion in that 10 years.
  Look in the hallways of this place, and it is lined up with people 
who are wonderful and smart. They worked hard and cared about their 
patients, and it is more money. We are trying to figure out, with the 
wheels falling off, is anyone willing to tell them the truth?
  JEC estimates--and this is where I am, right now, about to soak 
myself in kerosene and light myself on fire because, apparently, we are 
not allowed to actually talk to people and tell the truth. We have been 
writing the Republicans' side of the Joint Economic Committee report 
now for a couple of months. There are, functionally, five Ph.D. 
economists. There is an idiot like me doing some of the math, working 
on it. We are trying to figure out what moral approach we can take to 
save the country from the debt crisis that is here.
  Did I mention the $63,000 a second we are borrowing this last 12 
months?
  There is a chapter 3 in here, and this chapter may get me unelected, 
but we calculated the cost of obesity. I can't tell you how many 
Members here are terrified when I start to want to even have a 
conversation overseeing the math. We know that diabetes--just, 
functionally, type 2--is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. We know 
our brothers and sisters out there who have multiple comorbidities, 
that 5 percent of the population, that is over 50 percent of all of our 
healthcare spend.
  I have shown you chart after chart here, showing healthcare is the 
driver of our debt. We have 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who 
are really sick, and the most common morbidity within that population 
is obesity. Of the 4,000 human diseases--and I have this one really 
well documented--functionally, 2,000 are related to obesity, so 2,000 
out of the 4,000.
  Are we willing to basically have a moment of honesty? I am going to 
show you a couple of charts here. We are in trouble. Have you seen the 
latest obesity statistics for our kids? Have you seen the numbers of 
how many Americans are dying? It is immoral that we are terrified to 
talk about this.

                              {time}  1215

  You are going to see in the report, because we spent a lot of time 
working on the math, and they wouldn't let us use some of the more 
optimistic math because it wasn't properly vetted, so we had to find 
peer-reviewed studies with lots of math that could be recalculated and 
done.
  But we are looking at--if we could stabilize the sickest in our obese 
population, both with productivity, because you get to come back into 
society and work, but also the healthcare costs associated, it is a few 
trillion dollars in the 10-year window.
  There is a moral path to save us from the crushing debt. Are we 
willing to adopt policy that basically say we love and care for people 
and we would like them to live for a while, we would like them to not 
be miserable all the time?
  Are we willing to discuss the farm bill? Are we willing to actually 
discuss the technologies that are out there right now where the watch 
actually has blood glucose, or the portable blood glucose monitor you 
can stick on yourself.
  Are we willing to have--and I am going to show you a board here that 
talks about the GLP-1s, and this is not even with actually the new 
generation that is coming out, where FDA approves the first cellular 
therapy for Type 1 Diabetes.
  The first one is now actually approved. It gets the body to start 
producing islet cells again. It is here, and there are actually four or 
five others in phase I right now.
  Maybe we are on the cusp of technology miracles. The dear Lord gave 
us the ability to think, and it turns out really smart people are 
giving us a path. Are we willing to be smart enough?
  The Joint Economic Committee estimates related projections, 12.3 
percent of the 33 trillion, one out of every 8, functionally is, that 
spending is directly related to obesity. That is the most conservative 
of the numbers. Obesity risk.
  You all know this. I am showing stuff people know. We all know it. I 
mean, heart, what is it, 1 in 12 cancers, the number of human misery 
that is directly associated.
  Now, we get in to some of the more uncomfortable things to talk 
about. Life expectancy, for 18 years old and up, given their BMI class, 
and look, we all know there is controversy on the body mass index, but 
we have lots of data around it.
  If you care about people, what is happening in society, because 
remember, functionally, in the last 4 years, Americans' life expectancy 
has gone down. We are dying younger.
  Even when you remove COVID, and even then try to take a look, so for 
our prime-age working males, we have a data set I presented here a 
couple of weeks ago that just shocked me. It turned out, it wasn't 
drugs. Now, drugs was really close. It was actually obesity was killing 
more of our brothers in America. I didn't have a female data set to 
look at.
  How many of us are willing to actually say, wow, so if we would 
actually take on the drug problem and the obesity problem, we would add 
how many years of longevity to Americans' life? That is moral and also 
it is really good economics.
  We can see when we start to see some of these numbers, where 81 was 
almost healthy, down to 72, so they are losing almost a decade of their 
lives. You get into some of our minority populations and the numbers 
are even uglier.
  So my brothers and sisters that keep coming here and saying, let's 
talk about income inequality, it turns out some of the data says 
health, taking on diabetes, hypertension, obesity may be the single 
most moral, fast, and economically rational path if you care about 
income inequality. You have just got to be prepared for the armies of 
lobbyists who we are about to change--if we did these things and 
actually took it on, we would be changing their business models.
  Look, the number is going off the charts. This one actually just came 
out, I think, about 48 hours ago. The projections over the rest of this 
decade of how many of our young people, when we are starting to see 
some numbers where we are heading toward a time where half--the end of 
the decade--where half of our young people are technically obese.
  This is a country that took on smoking and saved how many lives? We 
have seatbelts. We have air bags. We did it because it made us safer, 
healthier, we got to live longer.
  When you are seeing a new study out, and it is a good study, and it 
is detailed, and it is a huge data set and saying, hey, at the current 
rate, in about a decade, half of our young people--are we willing to 
take this on?
  Because just the economics, just the life span, healthcare costs, you 
are going to see things in our joint economic report, if it gets 
passed. It is not a report until it is passed by the committee, and I 
hope I can get the votes of my fellow members on the committee to 
support what we wrote.
  But if it becomes an official report, you are going to see in there 
stunning amounts of money--for those who sound like accountants on 
steroids--that we would save by being healthier year.
  Then you have the other side. Look at longevity. Look at the ability 
to participate in society. Look at the ability to have family 
formation.
  This is as close as I have come up with for a unified theory of what 
we could do to save ourselves. How many

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other idiots are going to be like me and get behind the microphone and 
be willing to talk about this and get ready for the television ads? He 
was willing to talk about this.
  And here is some of the punch line. I believe this number is 
dramatically too low, but we are coming up with math that says, look, 
just the use of the GLP-1s for some of the highest BMI segments, 
potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, and that is 
without the economic effect, and that is also without the long-term 
health effects that are outside that 10-year window.
  Madam Speaker pro tem, I appreciate you sitting there letting me go 
through this. I am trying to make a point. Instead of coming to this 
mike every week after week after week saying there is something 
horribly wrong in the debt data, it is getting worse dramatically 
faster. People don't understand how fragile we are becoming as a 
society because of the threats that debt means.
  I am going to try to be better. I am going to try to demonstrate 
there is hope. There is a path.
  This is only one of about four key things I believe we could do to 
become a much more prosperous society with dramatically--we are not 
going to pay off the debt, but we could stabilize it. There is hope, 
Madam Speaker pro tem, but is anyone listening?
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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