[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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