[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 17 (Tuesday, January 30, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H305-H309]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     DOES ANYONE SEE A MATH PROBLEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Miller-Meeks). 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. Madam Speaker, I thank you and Ms. Wasserman Schultz 
and the other Members who spoke for their words. Being from Scottsdale, 
you know, my community actually has family who have been devastated by 
what is going on in Israel.
  Madam Speaker, have you ever had one of these moments where you are 
walking out here, and one of the reporters shoves their little recorder 
in your face, and it is not until the next day that you start to 
realize what you wish you would have said?
  Last week, a young man stuck his microphone in my face and says, 
Aren't you tired of going to the floor every week and saying the exact 
same thing?

                              {time}  1800

  If that is true, I apologize to the poor team here who has to try to 
write down our words, to listen to this.
  I don't think I am saying the exact same thing. It is the same theme 
because it is true. The problem is every week, it is getting worse, and 
we just do nothing.
  We are going to walk through some of the numbers of what has happened 
in the last couple weeks, and maybe someone will actually hear the 
words instead of thinking I am giving the same speech that I was giving 
a year ago because the numbers are dramatically uglier.
  If I don't talk too long, I am going to try to actually at the end 
here walk through some things that are positive, but it is just going 
to require this body to actually do something.
  Just to sort of point out that I am no longer alone, I am now 
starting to finally see in some of the mainstream press--not just the 
financial press, not just the bond press--actual coverage.
  Here is Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, under a Democrat 
President. The U.S. is in a terrible place fiscally. That is a 
Democrat. Here is the head of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Diamond: Driving 
toward a fiscal cliff.
  Now, for those of you who are fans of ``The Black Swan,'' 
``Antifragile,'' actually, I love both books. I am a little bit more of 
a George Gilder fan when it comes to economics. For anyone that knows 
who that is, you are a real geek.
  He is basically saying--and my understanding is he is quite liberal. 
He is an economist who basically predicted the black swan, and then it 
happened.
  He talks about fragility, which is something I have come here and 
talked about over and over, that with the scale of debt, the fragility 
we have created, he is basically saying: death spiral.
  Anyone care? Are these just people you want to ignore because they 
are not giving you free rein to just keep borrowing and spending?
  We are going to walk through some boards because that is sort of what 
we do here because I found when you are talking about things with 12 
zeros, no one can picture them.
  First off, to demonstrate how much uglier the numbers are today than 
they were even way back when, like last December, does anyone remember 
the wayback machine a month ago?
  Understand, CBO updated their numbers. The update was $1 trillion 
additional borrowing on what was projected.
  Our joint economic economists are working on some math right now, and 
I will show it over and over on the board.
  If we don't see some substantial turnaround in tax receipts or the 
bending of healthcare spending, we may borrow $3 trillion this year.
  I am trying to find ways to get people to pay attention. If I tell 
you at the current borrowing rate, every 140 days we click off another 
trillion dollars of borrowing. A trillion dollars every 140 days. Is 
anyone hearing this?
  Back to our wayback machine. This is a board I produced for a floor 
speech last month. I think I did this in December.
  Anyone that is really smart that is able to read really small type, 
can you catch the mistake? We were basically saying, hey, we are going 
to head toward the deficit.
  All discretionary, military included, is $1.7 trillion, and then you 
add up everything else with it, and we are going to have to borrow this 
wedge.
  Well, I will tell you right now that our prediction is somewhere 
around $2.6 trillion to $3 trillion of borrowing of our budget that we 
get to vote on.
  Remember, all this over here, as a Member of Congress, you don't vote 
on. It is Medicare. It is Medicaid. It is Indian Health Service. 
Actually, Indian Health Service is actually an appropriated items. It 
is the things that are on formula. The vast majority of our spending is 
on autopilot.
  Process this: Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. 
Plus, congratulations. It looks like every dime we vote on is borrowed 
plus another trillion dollars, so let's just assign it to something.
  $1 trillion in Medicare is going to be borrowed, and we don't vote on 
it. Next time you have someone say, well, just balance the budget. We 
are going to balance it right away.
  You can wipe out every dime in the military. You can wipe out every 
dime of what you think of as government--so there is no State 
Department, there is no Supreme Court, and there is no Congress. Maybe 
we would be better off. There is nothing. It is all gone.
  You still have to borrow another $1 trillion to cover what we call 
the earned entitlements. The wheels have come off, and we will do 
everything we can to avoid telling you the truth.
  CBO, to their credit, basically a couple weeks ago got up and said, 
hey, we screwed up. We were telling you we were going to borrow $1.6 
trillion, $1.8 trillion, maybe on the outlier, but it turns out tax 
receipts came in $477 billion lower than what we are projecting.
  It turns out that outlays, mostly healthcare costs, are up 9 percent, 
$564

[[Page H306]]

billion. Add that together. That is another $1.41 trillion on top of 
the projection we were given as we entered into this new fiscal year.
  How many Members have you heard come behind these microphones and 
even tell you the truth or where the math is at, because we don't want 
to talk about it. It terrifies us.
  It is hard to get in front of your audience. You go back home to your 
district and say, hey, guys, you remember that whole budget thing?
  Remember when I used to get up in front of you and say, we can cut 
this, or if you are a Democrat, we are going to raise these taxes over 
here, and everything will be fine? None of that is true.
  I have come behind this microphone over and over and over, soaked 
myself in kerosene, played with matches, and told the truth.

  I am blessed. I have one of the best educated districts in America. 
My folks get it. I get up in front of other audiences, and I almost get 
booed because telling the truth is painful.
  I had a conversation about 2 hours ago walking through the tunnel 
here with a Member of Congress who is smart--does more military stuff 
but smart--and he made it very clear how upset he is when he sees what 
I am doing because he has to go home and explain it.
  If you add in the $1 trillion miss from CBO, we may be out to borrow 
almost 10 percent of the entire economy this year.
  We are already running about 9, 9.6 of the entire GDP right now is 
our borrowing this year. I am going to walk through a number of boards 
but, first, let me nail down how bad the borrowing numbers are.
  Then what we are going to do is we are going to actually talk about 
the GDP numbers that came out last week, which were good, and then why 
we should be terrified that at a time when you actually may have long-
run GDP here and your borrowing is up here, something is horribly 
wrong.
  Dear God, what happens if we actually had a slowdown? What does that 
gap become? Do we actually have the capacity to keep borrowing at this 
rate?
  Will we have anyone here willing to tell the truth about the math, or 
does this continue to be a math-free zone because it is inconvenient?
  Once again, my latest math and our economist--because I am blessed--
and, thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to be the senior 
Republican over the Joint Economic Committee, so I have the economist--
we have been remarkably accurate the last couple of years.
  For those of you who signed up for the daily debt text message, thank 
you. For those of you who get it and don't like it, screw you. Math is 
math. The truth is the truth.
  It looks like we are going to head to $2.8 to $3 trillion at our 
current burn rate. Remember, the entire economy is about $27--$27\1/2\ 
trillion.
  If we hit $3 trillion in borrowing, that is more than 10 percent of 
the entire economy is in borrowed money in a single year. Is anyone 
else terrified?
  This one is important.
  When we all go home to our town halls or we are at Costco talking to 
people, how many of you understand when that person comes up to you and 
starts banging on you because they want more spending?
  Social Security is our number one spend. This fiscal year, it will be 
about $1.450 trillion. Interest now is over $1 trillion.
  The reason you see the little darker blue here is there is a 
difference in gross interest. Gross interest is the little sliver that 
we also pay when we strip the money out of the Social Security trust 
fund, and then we pay them interest.
  Every month we have to give them back some of their principal because 
they don't have enough employment tax revenues to cover the Social 
Security checks.
  That is why in 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Our 
brothers and sisters on Social Security take a 25 percent cut, and we 
double senior poverty--which is another thing we are not allowed to 
talk about here because they will run nasty ads about you saying, you 
talk about Social Security. Those that don't talk about it aren't 
trained to save it.
  Number three is Medicare. Number four is defense. That is where we 
are budget-wise this fiscal year. Defense is not number one, not number 
two, not number three--it is four. Interest is now number two.
  That is a little different than the folklore when we go home and talk 
to people in our grocery store, what they think they know. It is our 
obligation to start telling the truth.
  For those of you who do get my daily debt text message, you would 
have seen this about 2 hours ago. We are now borrowing over $85,000 
every second, and our projection is it is going to continue to go up.
  This is even with the little bounce down we had over the last couple 
months in interest rates. Now, we are back over 4.1 or sitting at 4.1.
  As you also know, Treasury, last month, decided to go shorter on the 
curve. Now they are possibly going to go longer on the curve.
  We will get the announcement, I think Wednesday, what the mix is 
going to be over the next quarter. Remember, we have to bring about $10 
trillion to market this year, this fiscal year.
  Before we were telling you that $2 trillion was going to be virgin, 
new issuances, to handle the excess spending this year.
  The other $7.9 trillion, $8 trillion, well, that was just the 
refinancing. Now, I need to stand in front of you and say there is a 
chance we are bringing $3 trillion of new issuances at this interest 
rate, and everything else gets refinanced. It is the death spiral, and 
we are so close.

  Maybe this is the time because I should say it four or five times. 
Congress has decided they don't want to be in charge.
  Let's be honest. You see the clown show we engage in around here 
where someone gets their feelings hurt or someone wants to make up some 
crap or we are going to fight over this much on discretionary.
  Yet, the fact that if you are borrowing $7.4 billion every single 
day, and we knife each other for several weeks over $16 billion of 
savings, you saved 2\1/2\ days of borrowing, but we never got around to 
the big issue, and that is the clown show we have engaged in here.
  I know I am being a jerk, but I am just so frustrated because I am 
terrified this is going to wipe out your retirement and my kids' 
future.
  I have young kids, and they are adorable, and they deserve to 
prosper. Is borrowing $85,000 a second what you all intended to hand 
your children?
  Yet, I will show it in one of these boards here, and I need to say it 
over and over and over again: Congress has decided we are not in 
charge. We are not capable.
  You want to know who is now in charge? The bond market; the U.S. bond 
market. The international bond market is now the one that is going to 
walk in one day and say, hey--and remember, this actually happened in 
the 1990s during the Clinton administration.
  There was a period there where they basically said, no, we are going 
to go on a bond purchase holiday. Interest rates spiked up. The White 
House absolutely freaked out.
  Congress actually stepped up and did something. Guess what? By the 
end of the decade, we had a substantially balanced budget.

                              {time}  1815

  It took the bond market to kick this Congress in the head. It took a 
bond market to kick the White House in the head. The numbers are 
dramatically uglier today than they were in the 1990s.
  I am just waiting for the moment when the bond vigilantes say, Hey, 
now is a great time. Let's pull the trigger. Let's go make some money 
on U.S. sovereign debt. Let's kick every U.S. taxpayer in the head 
because that Congress isn't willing to step up and do what is hard.
  But there are things we can do. The problem is every day we wait we 
are another 7.3 or $7.4 billion in debt, and every day we wait, the 
window gets narrower, and the left basically their make-believe world 
is, well, we will just tax rich people. I am going to show you that is 
a complete fantasy, and I have done that the last three times I have 
come behind these microphones.

[[Page H307]]

  What is our point? Every 140 days we are borrowing $1 trillion. Got 
that one.
  Number two. If we don't do it, the bond market will do it for us, but 
when they do, it is ugly. For every Member here, if that happens, you 
have the obligation to go home and explain why you didn't step up and 
try to do something.
  Number three, I am going to show you that the fantasy of the left, 
well, we are just going to tax rich people gets you a point and a half, 
and in a fantasy world, maybe 2 percent of the economy. For those of us 
on the right, everything we are able to cut, we might get a point. 
Maybe we get two points. But if we are borrowing almost 10 percent of 
the economy this year, does anyone see a math problem?
  2023, which was supposed to be a rough year borrowing wise. We were 
supposed to start flattening things out because in 2023 last year, we 
still had a bunch of the Democrats crazy spending on everything from 
their Inflation Reduction Act, which is a completely Orwellian name. It 
proves you can just name anything around here, and it doesn't actually 
have to do with what the legislation does. Some of the other fiscal 
stimulus, some of the infrastructure spending, CHIPS, all the things we 
were handing money out. 2023 was supposed to be the rough fiscal year, 
and in the first 3 months in 2023--last fiscal year--we borrowed $490 
billion. The first 3 months of this fiscal year we have borrowed $834 
billion. Does anyone see a math problem there?
  So, what does that mean to you and I and the sovereignty and the 
stability of your country? The national debt is expected to hit $35 
trillion during April. Remember? Last month--well, earlier this month 
we had 34. 140 days, we had $35 trillion. Oh, it gets so much better. 
That actually means if we have hit $35 billion in April, the first week 
of May, that means in September just about the time we have ended this 
fiscal year, we could be crossing $36 trillion.
  I can't wait to be going into the election cycle in November saying, 
Hey, in just this year, we clipped through 34, 35, now we are at 36. 
Hey, great job, gang. The hardest part is to stand in front of that 
audience back home and say every dime of today through the next 30 
years of borrowing CBO, Congressional Budget Office, calculates 
interest, healthcare--mostly Medicare--and then in 2033, so what is 
that, 8 budget years, 9 years from now, that first year the shortfall--
when the trust fund is gone in Social Security that first year $616 
billion shortfall. And the next year it is bigger, and the next year it 
is bigger, and the next year it is bigger.
  That is not the 10-year window. That may be in the 8-year window. But 
we are going to not talk about it because they will run nasty ads about 
us because we talked about something that we need to save. And the 
immorality, the absolute immorality about this place is we are going to 
double the poverty of senior Americans in this country in 9 years.
  The Democrats say, well, just raise the FICA tax. I will be hearing 
next week or the week after that we are killing ourselves to get 
incredibly accurate numbers. Raising the cap on those $400,000 and up 
doesn't get you anywhere close to it. Our best estimate is it only 
covers about 20 percent of the shortfall. You are still doubling senior 
poverty in that moment. And if you tax your way to fix it, you have 
consumed every dollar of available tax. You almost have now tax 
maximized everything, functionally meaning what are you going to do 
with the other two-thirds, three-quarters of the growth of the debt, 
which is mostly healthcare?
  I have come behind this microphone dozens of times showing the 
revolution we could have in healthcare costs, the revolution we could 
have by adopting technology, changing the way we do things, crash the 
costs of the debt, crash the costs of the Government, grow the economy. 
Family formation, healthcare, everything else gets better. Then you get 
screamed at walking down the hallways here because that is going to 
screw up my business model or this agency. You will shut down our 
agency. Why do you want to put us out of business? Because I am trying 
to save the country. It is just at some point it is exhausting dealing 
with the bed-wetting around here.
  You are going to have to work with me a little bit on this. We tried 
to do the GDP growth number that came out earlier--actually, I think it 
was the end of last week. It was a terrific number in many ways. But we 
took it for the last year. And then we also annualized the debt so it 
also matched the same dates. So that fancy word, ceteris paribus, 
whatever that word is, basically saying same timeframe, same dates.
  So if you actually had GDP growth from that fourth quarter of `22 to 
the fourth quarter of `23, the whole economy, every bit of the economy 
grew about $1.5 trillion. That is actually much better growth than the 
economists said we were going to have. The problem is, we borrowed $2.6 
trillion during that same time. So the borrowing actually may have been 
what was driving much of the GDP growth. We did it with debt.
  Here is just a basic thought experiment. If you are able to tax--now, 
our traditional tax we get about 17 percent of the economy. You know, 
if you lived in a fantasy world, it makes the math much easier. Say 20 
percent of the economy. If I grow $1 trillion of GDP growth, that is 
$200 billion in tax receipts.

  Does anyone see my math problem?
  So if I needed to cover $2.6 trillion of borrowing, you need a GDP 
growth dramatically bigger than this. Remember, a trillion dollars of 
GDP growth--this is just rough numbers off the top of my head--gets you 
about $200 billion. I need 10, almost 10\1/2\ times that just to 
produce enough new tax receipts to cover the debt.
  Once again, the debt is demographics. We got older, and we don't like 
to talk about it. Are we going to magically change the demographics? We 
know what is ahead of us.
  Look, here is another way to look at this. Increase in national debt 
outpaces growth in the economy by more than $1 trillion over the past 
year. Fine. That is pretty the much the same thing I was just showing 
you. And this is actually normalizing it for the time gap, so you had 
about a trillion and a half dollars of GDP growth. That is terrific. 
Still borrowed 2.6.
  Break this down. Just want to make sure because some people get 
upset. The chart I just showed you was actually borrowing to the 
public. This over here is total borrowing, gross borrowing, publicly 
held. What is the difference between gross and net sort of borrowing is 
one is where we also borrow out of the trust fund. So over here is the 
Transportation Trust Fund. Over here is Social Security. Over here is 
Medicare. Understand, that cash doesn't sit there. We do pay interest, 
and then we have to pay it back. Remember, once again, because I have 
given this presentation a dozen times, the Social Security Trust Fund, 
gone in 2023. Medicare Trust Fund, gone in 7 years. Transportation 
Trust Fund, gone in, what, 5 years? And there are a dozen other smaller 
trust funds that are all gone in that time.
  Do we have any understanding the level of recapitalization we have to 
engage in in the next 9 years? I am sure glad that today we are back 
here in Congress and behind all these microphones. We are going to 
spend some time talking about the economic survival of this country is 
our most important--it is not like it is our job.
  Here is one of the intense ironies. Tax receipts. First 3 months, tax 
receipts are up 8 percent. Being on Ways and Means, being the senior 
Republican over the Joint Economic Committee, this number is terrific. 
Mr. Speaker, 8 percent growth in our tax receipts. That is absolutely 
terrific. Oh, but gross interest is up 37 percent. Outlays are up 11.8 
percent. The deficit grew 21 percent. Does anyone see a math problem?
  If you would actually hold the deficit growth to the tax receipt 
growth, but the problem is we don't control the interest. And we don't 
control our brothers and sisters turning 65 and moving into their 
earned benefits. We have known the numbers. We knew baby boomers were 
around for, what, 65 years? It was just uncomfortable to talk about the 
actual math.
  So let's actually go into a little bit more of the fun stuff here. So 
why are so many Americans cranky? I believe this chart shows it. You 
take a look at economic growth. So the numbers of nineties, 2000s, 2009 
to 2017. Under President Trump--look at these. Under

[[Page H308]]

President Trump you had a 9.8 percent growth in your income. So far 
when you adjust for inflation, the growth of your income, you are 
negative today. You are poorer today than you were 30 months ago.
  I actually tried to explain this. Some people talk about, Well, there 
is this MAGA thing out there, and there is this populus, and these 
people are really upset. It is because they are poorer today. Working 
class Americans, our working class brothers and sisters today they are 
working their hearts out just to survive, they are poorer today.
  In my community, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, unless your wages are 
up about 20 to 22 percent over the last 30-something months, you are 
poorer today than you were 32, 33 months ago. No wonder you are cranky. 
You may not completely understand the math of inflation, and everything 
is more expensive, and how are you going to finance you next car, and 
have you seen your mortgage rates. But this shows it. And for my 
brothers and sisters on the left, have some love, have some compassion. 
Understand people are getting crushed. Stop making excuses.

                              {time}  1830

  All right. I am going to try to make this point, because we are now 
going to walk into some of the tax economics. I have used this chart a 
number of times, and it is falling apart. The point here is, if we can 
confiscate it, every dime of people that make $500,000 and up--if you 
make $500,001, that $1 is the government's. We just confiscate 
everything. We get about $1.5 trillion.
  Before, when we were doing this chart for 2024, we were walking 
around saying we are going to borrow $1.7 trillion. Does anyone get the 
joke here? It is now 6, 7 weeks later since we produced this chart, and 
it is no longer $1.7 trillion we are going to borrow. Now, it is almost 
$3 trillion at the current burn rate. We can confiscate every dime of 
people $500,000 and up, and you get about $1.7 trillion.
  One more time. I have done versions of this. The real punch line here 
is--all untaxed persons' and small businesses' adjusted gross income, 
AGI, analyzed earnings above the listed threshold. What are we saying? 
If we take every dime of $500,000 and up, I get about 5.3 percent of 
the economy. We are going to borrow over 10. It looks like we are 
heading toward borrowing 10 percent of the entire economy.
  Now, obviously if you started confiscating every dime, you crash the 
economy. It is just basically trying to demonstrate the absurdity of 
the math that seems to come from my brothers and sisters on the left.
  Let's walk through. I am going to do this one again. No, I am not 
going to make you suffer through that one.
  Go to the Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl, and go back 4 or 5 
months. I have done the whole study as a floor speech here. He gathered 
up all the studies that say what is the tax maximization rate, what 
happens if you took people over 400,000, over 500,000, and maximized 
their income taxes, maximized their estate taxes, maximized their 
capital gains taxes, maximized their corporate taxes. He did it all.
  There is this concept of tax maximization. You have to understand, if 
I tax you at 100 percent, how much tax do I get from you? Zero, because 
you are not going to work. Well, if I tax you at zero, I get zero, 
because you are going to work a lot, but you get to keep everything.
  There is this concept here, and the best models start to say once you 
start getting around 62 percent on income tax, you actually roll over 
and you actually start getting less. People say, well, back in the 
1960s and 1950s--but also understand the number of deductions you 
actually had in that time. No one actually paid those rates, because 
you got to deduct this, got to deduct your meals, got to deduct your 
interest, got to deduct your credit cards. You have got to line them 
up.
  So Brian Riedl at Manhattan Institute basically took all those taxes 
and said: I am putting everything at its maximum tax rate for these 
high-income earners, and he adjusted for the economic effects and 
basically came back and said you are going to get 1.1 to 2 percent of 
the economy in new taxes. Remember, that is the Democrats' plan: We are 
going to tax rich people, and we are going to maximize all their taxes.
  Let's say you get the 2 percent. How many times have I already 
mentioned we may be heading to--because right now, we are burning about 
7.5--no, right now we are burning almost 9 percent, if you do total 
gross borrowing, of the economy. We may hit up as high as 10. CBO 
before was projecting we would be at like 7.5 percent.
  Does anyone see a math problem? If the tax nirvana of the left gets 
you at most 2 percent, more likely 1.5, and you are borrowing 10, does 
anyone see a math problem?
  We have so many people who don't want to hear this. There are 12 
people probably watching this. If you are on the Democrat side, you 
have already turned off your television. If you are that reporter who 
stuck the mike in my face, you don't want to hear this because this 
doesn't reaffirm your sarcasm.
  For my brothers and sisters on the right, I can find you 1 or 2 
percent of the economy we can cut. There are really brutal cuts I would 
support because we don't have a choice. We have to deal with the 
morality right now. We borrow money to send it to cities, States, and 
others who actually have their own taxing authority. They are programs 
I love. Should we do that? Everything's borrowed.
  Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Duarte). The gentleman from Arizona has 
23 minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I promise I am only going to use a few 
more moments.
  There are some things I am optimistic about. I promise sometime in 
the next couple weeks, I will get here and I will actually make some 
charts. It is just in the last 30 days; the numbers have moved against 
us. The CBO has admitted they missed the numbers by over a trillion 
dollars. I am just angry that I hear no one talk about it.
  One of the presentations I did almost a year ago was talking about a 
market way to take on drug costs. I will bring the charts in the next 
week or so. The actual drug costs as our total healthcare costs are 
actually pretty darn small. Then you have a substitution effect of how 
many procedures, medical surgeries, other things, no longer need to 
happen, how many people actually get healthier. What I was trying to 
sell was a theory.
  The Democrats want to do a rationing price control model, 
functionally what is used in Europe. Let me see if I can try to explain 
this. In Europe, you actually have a formula that says if a certain 
drug doesn't create an additional quality life year and it costs more 
than a certain dollar amount, you don't get it. It has been a couple 
years since I did this. Great Britain had one where if the drug was 
more than about $13,000 a year but didn't create an additional quality 
life year, they just didn't buy it. It is a type of rationing, sort of 
a cost cap on functionally your life.
  That is what the Democrats' H.R. 3 from a couple years ago did. It 
actually created a rationing with a cap. That is what they actually did 
in their Inflation Reduction Act. They are very proud they are going to 
start negotiating prices on 10 drugs. Fine. Doesn't do much. Look at 
the actual economic effect. It doesn't really do much.

  Let's actually think about some of the crazy things that have started 
to happen in the pharmaceutical marketplace over the last few months 
and what we could do policy-wise to keep this disruption moving faster 
and faster and faster to disrupt the price of drugs.
  Here is a bit of trivia. Our generic drugs, off-patent drugs, in 
America, more expensive or less expensive than the rest of the world? 
They are about 16 percent less expensive in the United States than they 
are in Europe. Those are the off-patent drugs. It is the patent ones 
where we get our heads kicked in.
  How do you take the entire drug ecosystem and change it? Think of 
some of the things that are going on around us. You just had one of the 
large PBMs, benefit purchasing managers, say: We are changing our 
model. It is no longer this formulary. We are just going to buy drugs 
at the best negotiated price and going to do this sliver of markup and 
going to sell them at that.

[[Page H309]]

  The complaint that they were playing games and some drugs they were 
making really expensive and some they were selling cheaper, that is 
over. Now, you actually had one of the major manufacturers say: Screw 
it. We are going around this, and we are selling directly to our 
customers. The manufactures now are going to sell directly to the 
customers.
  Okay. Then you have others, which I am fascinated with, companies 
like Civica, which actually isn't a company. It is a co-op. As a co-op, 
everything from the State Medicaid system to an insurance company to 
hospitals and this and that, they are taking generic drugs and they are 
making them themselves. This is one of my arguments about insulin 
prices. They are making eight versions of generic insulins, and they 
intend to sell it for less than the Democrats' subsidized price.
  The Democrats come behind these microphones and say: We hate Big 
Pharma. Then their plan is they turn around and say: Let's give $16 
billion to Big Pharma, buy down the price of insulin, and we will tell 
people we actually did something. Yet, a co-op is going to do the same 
thing without government money and do it for less. Does anyone see a 
problem here?
  Then by them doing the $16 billion, handing that money to Big Pharma, 
they actually make the concept of putting together co-ops to actually 
make generic drugs more difficult. It is just, once again, insanity.
  One of the weight-loss drugs, one of the molecules--it is not 
semaglutide. It is the first molecule that was patented. That one came 
off patent January 1. I think I am allowed to say it, because we have 
actually been having a lot of conversations with some of the generic 
drug manufacturers. Expect in May to see one of these diet drugs that 
actually produce the hormone, do those things, will be generic. We know 
some of those have been just stunning miracles. There are some great 
studies out there that actually their effectiveness may change the U.S. 
economy.
  What else is going on? You just saw Florida got the right to reimport 
from Canada. My understanding in Colorado, I think there are a couple 
of Indian Tribes which are making applications to the FDA to reimport. 
Some of the economists say, oh, that is not going to make much of a 
difference.
  It is not about it making a difference. It is the concept that, for 
many of us who love markets--you may see it as chaos. I actually see it 
as markets battling each other to bring things to the public faster, 
better, cheaper, provide optionality, different silos where you can 
purchase. Through that, we increase your choice, your optionality, and 
we maximize price efficiency. You actually see these incredible things 
happening.
  Now, there is a whole new world we are going to have to figure out. 
If that is happening on this side of the ledger--and then what did you 
also see? I think it was in December, we had the first genetic drug 
that cures sickle cell anemia come out of the FDA. They changed the 
genetics, and it is now approved and out the door. It is really 
expensive. Why it is a miracle is because now we know how to do it. We 
actually know how to do an actual genetic drug.
  One of the most powerful things we can do for this society is no 
longer engaging in what the left so often does, which is ration, 
subsidize, and maintain your misery.
  There is a group of us here who believe cures are the greatest 
morality and also the best economics.
  Mr. Speaker, there is hope, but until we actually start to tell the 
truth about how fast the debt is moving against us--the window is 
closing on us fast. For so many of our Democrat colleagues, the con 
used to be we will stall, stall, stall, stall, the Republicans will get 
squeezed, and they will have to agree to tax hikes because that will be 
the only option that is left. The problem is the debt is so huge. To 
quote my 8-year-old, the debt is so ginormous that the tax option only 
closes a small portion. The solution is in policy.
  I desperately had hoped we would be up and working on things like a 
debt and deficit commission. For those who are freaked out that they 
might raise taxes, they might cut programs, they might do everything, 
but the vast majority of saving this country from the death spiral of 
its debt is actually in policy.
  The problem is, when you do policy, you take on a whole lot of 
business models, bureaucracies, and you force people to compete 
differently. This place is often a protection racket. It is a 
protection racket of this business model or of this bureaucracy. The 
morality is in the disruption. It is also our path where we save 
ourselves.

                              {time}  1845

  If we wait much longer, it doesn't matter; the bond market will be 
the one that actually runs this place, runs this government, because we 
will have basically walked away from our chance to be the influencers.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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