[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 39 (Tuesday, March 5, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H809-H814]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
                      OUT-OF-CONTROL NATIONAL DEBT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Chavez-DeRemer). 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, we are actually going to try three 
things tonight, and I apologize to anyone who doesn't like math or 
complexity. Originally, I promised I was going to do something simpler 
tonight, and let's just say it didn't work out.
  The three things we are going to try doing this evening: One, I want 
to spend a few minutes talking about folklore. The things we get as 
Members of Congress--this is both for the folks on the left and the 
right--the comments we get, things people believe, and I want to walk 
through a little bit of that. I want to do sort of an update status on 
what is happening financially. Then I am going to broach a subject that 
is really uncomfortable, and that is going to be talking about the 
future. I am going to talk about fertility rates and what that means to 
being able to finance Social Security and other things.
  For anyone who does not like math, please just go watch something on 
Netflix right now.
  A couple weeks ago, I did a whole presentation on the work we have 
done on what it takes financially to save Social Security. One of the 
things I have been genuinely angry about--and I

[[Page H810]]

have been angry about it for years--is the left uses Social Security as 
a weapon, and our folks are terrified to talk about it because every 
time we talk about trying to save it, we get attacked. Then my brothers 
and sisters on the left will say: Just raise the cap.
  We have shown the math. We had two Ph.D. economists spend months 
working out the math, and raising the caps doesn't get you anywhere 
close to stabilizing it.
  There is the immortality of this place being willing to double senior 
poverty in 9 years. You do understand, even if you raise the caps--I 
showed the math--that you are still having about a $400 billion 
shortfall in the first year. If you did all the taxes, you might cut 
that down to a $250 billion or $300 billion shortfall.
  Today's math says the average couple in 2034 will take a $17,400 cut. 
We will double senior poverty.
  Is that a Republican or Democrat perversity? I will just argue it is 
a moral one.
  Why can't we actually work on the math? When I chaired the 
Subcommittee on Social Security, every time I tried to do a roomful of 
actuaries and those things, my brothers and sisters on the left found 
more joy in the politics, because it is a powerful issue.
  It is absolutely immoral what we are doing. There is this concept of 
a black swan. That is something that sneaks up on you and blows you up. 
There is this concept of a white swan. You see it coming, and you don't 
do anything.
  We have the actuary reports in front of us. I know this is a math-
free zone, so one of first things I want to walk through is the concept 
of--when I did the speech a couple weeks ago, it had a couple hundred 
thousand views on YouTube. God bless. Yea. Then you read through the 
comments. Those of us in Congress know that about half our comments are 
bots. A lot of them are Russian bots, which is hysterical. When you 
read through some of them, they say: They stole my Social Security 
money.
  Okay. Let's do math and sort of walk through this because this is 
really important to understand. The Social Security trust fund built 
up, built up, built up, particularly with the baby boomers, because 
there was a population bubble that actually built up those tax 
receipts. It had $3 trillion or $4 trillion in it. Now that has rolled 
over.
  No one stole the money. What happened was, you don't just let the 
cash sit there. The cash was actually loaned to the Treasury, and the 
Treasury gives a T bill, a type of Treasury bond, just like if you 
walked into your bank and said: I want a U.S. T bill.
  Same thing. Twice a year, the Treasury pays interest.
  The problem right now, when you hear many of us get behind these 
microphones and talk about the Social Security trust fund getting 
emptied, is the amount of tax receipts that come in. Your FICA tax 
every month doesn't cover all the checks that are going out. Every 
month, they have to take a little bit of one of their T bills, Treasury 
bills, and hand it to the Treasury and say: We need some cash. We need 
some cash. Give us some cash so we can make this month's Social 
Security payments.
  Every time they do that, they use up a little bit of that savings 
account. It is that savings account, the trust fund, that is emptied in 
2033 or 2034.
  The Social Security trust fund, just like the transportation trust 
fund, just like the airline trust fund, all the trust funds that are 
borrowed from, they are paid interest.
  I am going to get this wrong. Treasury pays interest twice a year to 
the Social Security trust fund. I think last month may have been $30 
billion, $40 billion. The mean interest rate is right about market.
  For everyone who says: They stole my money.
  It is there. The average couple will get about a $70,000, $72,000 
spiff. The money they pay into Social Security over their lifetime, the 
average will get about $70,000, $72,000.
  Now, understand, that is a crap rate of return. If 20 years ago, when 
it was being discussed, you had been able to take a little sliver of 
that money and put it in the market, you would have had a ginormous--I 
love that word--a larger rate of return.
  The politics of that became toxic. There were lots of campaigns 
saying: You are trying to privatize.
  Okay. That world is gone. It is Medicare that actually has the huge 
problem of for every dollar you put in, you get almost $5 back. Social 
Security, you get pretty much the money you put in. Crappy rate of 
return, but you get that back. That is the first folklore I wanted to 
go over.
  Number two, you saw in the comments: Why aren't there people there?

  If this room was full as I am giving this presentation, we have got a 
problem. When you are sitting in this room--this is for voting. This is 
for debating. This is not necessarily where you do your work. You do 
your work in your meetings, in your subcommittees and your primary 
committees. When you see the room empty, this is how it is supposed to 
be.
  Now, when you have an idiot like me behind one of these mikes, you 
are probably on a thousand televisions. A lot of these presentations I 
do, I am as much here to talk to staff and try to educate them on what 
is going on in the math. That is actually one of the things you look 
for.
  Another one, I have this neighbor--a wonderful guy--loves screwing 
with me. About every 6 weeks, he sends me this text message with this 
article that is completely fake. He says: David, why do you get 100 
percent of your pension? You got it on the first day. Why do you run 
again?
  None of that is true. That is all made up. For, I think, 25, 30 
years, the pension system we have is pretty much identical to the 
forest ranger.
  The only reason I say those things is I believe, when you see those 
sort of comments and posts and other things, it is an attempt to 
distract, an attempt to avoid dealing with what is really going on 
around us.
  One of the points I wanted to go to tonight is what is happening. The 
economy is actually fairly decent right now. GDP growth is fairly 
decent. However, I want to make a point, because we did the math just 
before coming to the floor. We are what, 5 months into the fiscal year? 
We have added $1.243 trillion in that 5 months.
  My current math is of right now about every 123 to 125 days, at the 
current borrowing per day, we are adding another trillion dollars. This 
is in a time when the economy is pretty good. Since October 1, right 
now we are borrowing about $7.9 billion every day. You have got to 
understand what that ultimately means to us, because it has actually 
been accelerating. I think on Friday we set our all-time record. I 
think we were up to borrowing $95,000 a second.
  Almost 100 percent of that growth is interest--you are going to see 
this over and over in the charts--interest and healthcare costs. It is 
Medicare. It is things that we are not allowed to talk about. They are 
on autopilot. If it continues, my math says we are heading toward about 
a $2.6, $2.7 trillion borrow this year, in a year where the economy is 
doing fairly well. If today's math held up, you do realize you are 
broaching $3 trillion.
  Now, I am hoping we are going to have really good April tax receipts. 
That means right now, if you take where we are at and average it, from 
the first day of this fiscal year, for the 5 months, right now our math 
is $2.9 trillion for this year borrowed. That is substantially higher 
than CBO predicted 6 weeks ago, and that is right off the Treasury's 
website.
  Let's actually walk through reality and try to understand. My 
personal theory is we have lots of crazy conversations around here 
because we are desperate to avoid telling the public, or even 
ourselves, the truth. Every single dollar you and I, as Members of 
Congress, vote on is borrowed. Every single dollar we vote on is 
borrowed. The way we are going this year, every single dollar we vote 
on is borrowed plus maybe a trillion dollars of Medicare will be 
borrowed. We don't get to vote on that. That is on autopilot.
  My point is trying to understand how much--now, this number is no 
longer about 73 percent; we think it is actually approaching 75 
percent--will be on mandatory because of the growth of interest.
  We made this board a couple days ago, and then it popped, so it 
wasn't $93,000, it was almost $95,000 a second, but I didn't want to 
waste the ink and print a new one.

[[Page H811]]

  Why do the second? Because it is understandable. Let's be brutally 
honest. How many of us can see 12 zeros in our head? One of my great 
sins in trying to communicate my stress about this, my fear is I am up 
here saying: It is a trillion dollars. No one knows what the hell a 
trillion dollars is. It is 12 zeros. Every second, we borrow 
substantially more than the average wage of Americans. Maybe that hits 
home.
  Let's actually walk through what is going on, and then my sarcasm 
here is going to be my anger at myself, my brothers and sisters here, 
particularly on the left, but also on the right. We have been debating 
and fighting over things that don't even qualify as a day's borrowing. 
We bring this place to its knees. We remove a Speaker, we do this and 
that, and then you realize the amount of dollars being fought over only 
equal a couple days' worth of borrowing. Darn it, it got us on 
television. I got to raise some money on the internet. It is that type 
of false prophet that I will argue is our demise, because if I can get 
you to fixate on the shiny objects, you are never going to be willing 
to absorb the truth on how ugly these numbers are.
  This is where we are heading toward right now for 2024. Social 
Security will be our number one spend. The baseline looks like it is 
ticking up. We are seeing something interesting where the number of 
retirees asking for benefits is actually ticking a little faster than 
we expected; $1.450 trillion, the number one spend, Social Security.

                              {time}  1945

  Interest, both gross and potentially net, but gross interest now is 
our second biggest spend. I just had to redo the math because our math 
right now looks like, for 2024, we are going to cross $1.1 trillion of 
just interest this year.
  I know for many people who are forced because you are employed to sit 
here and listen to an idiot like me talk, you have heard this before, 
but it doesn't seem to sink in.
  Is pay $1.1 trillion Republican or Democrat? It is math.
  Yet, we are not allowed to actually talk about it because the 
hallways in this place are full of people coming to our doors wanting 
more spending, and when you point this out to them, they will often 
say: Well, take it from someone else. I want my money.
  It is not your money. It is the taxpayers' money.
  On Medicare--and Medicare is rising rapidly--healthcare costs, and 
then defense, for all of my brothers and sisters on the left who always 
say: Cut defense, cut defense.
  Okay, it is sort of stupid, but it is the number four expense. It is 
not number one.
  How often would you and I go home to our constituents and say: What 
is the biggest spend in government?
  Oh, it is defense.
  No. Defense is now number four.
  Moreover, at the trendline, in the next few years, healthcare will 
actually be number one; interest will be number two; and Social 
Security, believe it or not, will be number three or right tied to it. 
It is a very tight number there.
  Let's actually walk through the '24 spend because I want to be able 
to get our heads around this. Social Security was a fascinating number, 
and we have been trying to also average in the new appropriations 
bills. Remember, Madam Speaker, we are just now finishing up our 2024, 
so we are only 5 months late. It is the net interest because the United 
States does something no other industrialized country does. We play a 
game with how we describe our borrowing: Oh, that is borrowing from the 
public. This is borrowing from the trust funds.
  If anyone is listening right now and you question this, go on the 
OECD. Google right now, or your favorite search engine: What is the 
debt to GDP of the United States according to OECD?
  You are going to get a number that is like 144 percent because they 
don't let the scam artists say: Well, you borrowed it from yourself, 
but you still have to pay it back, and you are going to have to 
actually borrow money while you pay it back while you are paying 
interest for it.
  It is a con. We should never allow discussions in this place and not 
use the terms ``gross borrowing'' because, what, is it magic money? We 
don't have to pay it back? It is just money we didn't have to go float 
publicly traded bonds for, but we still have to pay it back.
  The reason I built this chart is I wanted you to see a line right 
here. Even the net interest, so the publicly borrowed money, the 
interest we will pay on that is still the second biggest spend in this 
government. I will say it, and it will probably just land on deaf ears.
  Let's actually walk through something that is really uncomfortable, 
and it is going to tie in. One of my fixations is: How do you stabilize 
borrowing so that borrowing equals what our economic growth is?
  Madam Speaker, I am going to show you some charts here later. This is 
for the people who actually care about economics.
  Here is the growth of the country, and here is the debt of the 
country. If you could ever bring the GDP growth and the debt in line, 
then you have created stability. Nonetheless, we have some crazy 
headwinds. There are also some crazy opportunities happening to us. 
There are good things happening out there. Will Congress be the barrier 
or the adoption of them? Right now, we are the problem because we are 
scared of our own shadows.
  Madam Speaker, if I came to you right now and said: Let's come up 
with a way to stabilize Social Security, and let's stabilize Medicare. 
It is moral. It is our moral obligation. We made a social contract in 
this society.
  Okay, we have a problem, and it is all something almost no one here 
ever talks about: We are not having children. United States' fertility 
rates have collapsed.
  This number is wrong. Our latest number for last year is not 1.64; it 
is 1.63. France has a higher fertility rate than the United States. 
Even when you adjust for the immigration population, they still have a 
dramatically higher fertility rate. Most of Western Europe looks like 
us, and we are worse than a whole bunch of the world.
  Madam Speaker, how do you and I set public policy so 25 years from 
now--remember, Social Security is substantially a pay-as-you-go system. 
Today's workers are functionally paying for today's retirees. The trust 
fund was the shock absorber. The trust fund is disappearing, but my 
future generation of workers is going to be smaller.
  Madam Speaker, you are already seeing this in school districts all 
over America. The number of students they have is shrinking.
  Are we willing to have the really interesting discussion of, okay, 
are there things we could do economically to promote family formation 
so there are more children?
  There are things we could do to help, but almost every country that 
has tried has not been able to change fertility rates. I think in 
Hungary I saw something like the third child, they buy you a house. The 
fourth child, you get some sort of prize. It has barely ticked up their 
fertility rates. It is a really difficult question happening all over 
the industrialized world.
  If you can't really change it, Madam Speaker, do you actually build 
public policy to deal with it? Do you accept the fact that we are going 
to have a lot more automation? That means capital investment. Are we 
going to have to find ways to safely adopt artificial intelligence into 
society so that the labor force is maximized in its value, what they 
earn, and productivity? Those are policies we need to work on.

  You have seen the intellectual capital of the conversations we have 
on the floor here, Madam Speaker. How many of them are actually ready 
to actually have the reality of: Hey, we need to set policies.
  Is it Republican or Democratic? It is demographics. It is life.
  I am going to bounce to the next two boards because there is a punch 
line here we need to absorb.
  This is a little uncomfortable, but this was deaths that are 
projected to exceed births. The new math, in 15 years, you have to 
understand what a big deal this is, Madam Speaker. I came behind this 
microphone a couple of years ago, and I got some real crap that was 
sent to my office. I think at that time I was saying: Hey, in 21 or 22 
years, we are going to have more deaths than births in this country. 
Then it became 18 years. Then it became 17 years. The new math is 15

[[Page H812]]

years. In 15 years, the United States will have more deaths than 
births.
  The blip you see here is the pandemic, but if you actually look at 
the line, Madam Speaker, you can sort of understand. Here is our 
crossing. Somewhere a little before 2040, which is 15 years, we have 
more deaths than births.
  Now, try to stabilize long-term benefits. There are ways to do it. 
This Congress right now is mathematically incapable of owning a 
calculator, but there are ways to do it. We can't even put together a 
debt and deficit commission to have an honest conversation about what 
is happening in our society demographically, borrowing-wise or 
interest-rate-wise, because maybe it will affect the next election.
  Does anybody actually care about their own pensions let alone their 
kids' and their grandkids'?
  We lied. There is not magic money out there. This inflation cycle 
proved to those who believed in modern monetary policy, ta-da, you have 
36 months of high inflation. That is the ultimate proof that the magic 
money theory didn't work.
  Here is the punch line: Social Security actuaries is the green line. 
They actually had fertility rates going up. These were our baselines. 
The baselines also already have continued to show that they are wrong.
  Madam Speaker, be prepared over the next year to see dramatically 
different numbers coming at us on what our future looks like when 
financing this society because our next generation is going to be 
smaller.
  It is just math. There are ways to make it work. There are ways to 
make this a society of prosperity. It just requires intellectual 
capital, and that is something I am not sure we are ready to do.
  Let's do a quick run-through. This was just the first 3 months, and I 
brought these boards back because I saw some things over the weekend 
where people were just making up the numbers. It is not that hard. You 
can go right to the Treasury's website. You have to own a calculator. 
Spend an hour laying it out. You know how to work Excel.
  The national debt increased in the first 3 months. This was 
important. This is the 2024 number: $834 billion. If this is the first 
3 months, and it is $834 billion, now I can hope maybe there will be 
magic tax receipts, but multiply that times four, and you will see what 
we are projecting.
  The part of the punch line is interest continues to grow. I am going 
to show you why some of this is, but in the first 3 months, we spent 
$288 billion in interest, and that number will keep getting bigger and 
bigger because this year--and there is a debate on how much because the 
Treasury announced they are going to be financing rolling some of the 
debt shorter on the curve.
  Let's say we had a year where we are going to borrow $2.8 trillion 
new issuances, but you still have about $7.9 trillion that comes due. 
It is bonds that have been sold in the past. When they come due, 
particularly if they are bonds sold 3, 4, or 5 years ago with very low 
interest rates, what happens? They are now sold at the newer, higher 
interest rate, and that is the modeling problem.
  Madam Speaker, do you remember one of the first boards I showed you, 
that we expect interest this year to be $1.1 trillion? A lot of that is 
because the amount of debt is coming due. It is coming due, and we 
stayed very short on the curve instead of what I begged for a few years 
ago saying: Please, go long in the curve. Go long because that way at 
least you locked it in.
  Understand, because Congress doesn't want to be in charge because you 
have a White House here that makes crap up--and I can prove that on a 
bunch of the numbers that they published last year--the bond market now 
runs this country.
  Madam Speaker, hear my words. The first time the bond market gets 
cranky, the first time we have an undersubscribed auction, watch how 
fast this place comes in and we capitulate. It doesn't have to happen, 
but because we have abdicated our jobs, we have basically made a 
decision--and this happened actually not that long ago.
  Go ask some people who were involved in the Clinton administration. 
Go ask Newt Gingrich. Some of the people were around when the bond 
market hiccupped. The debt situation then was dramatically better than 
today. This Congress stood at attention and did what they needed to do 
to make the bond market happy. That is because if you have a failed 
bond auction, Madam Speaker, then you will see society have a really 
bad day.
  Let's walk a little more through some of these.
  The total interest costs continue to rise very quickly. I am just 
trying to make a point here. The first 4 months, if this was 2021, we 
spent $159 billion in interest. This year, our first 4 months, was $357 
billion.
  Remember my point I was trying to make, Madam Speaker, interest and 
healthcare costs--we are going to knife each other here over 
discretionary.
  Understand, Madam Speaker, I have some things I would do in 
discretionary. I am going to talk about it, and I promise you there 
will be a television ad attacking me, but it is honest.
  Nonetheless, we don't control this. The thing we can do is if we 
convince the bond markets we are taking the debt seriously, then maybe 
the interest rates to buy our debt will get more efficient and get 
lower.
  Be that as it may, the only way the bond market gives us that spiff 
is because we do our work, and we have proven over and over we are 
incapable of doing our work.

                              {time}  2000

  This was my calculation as of a week and a half ago, and now it has 
gone up again, but we were basically trying to say--my frustration was, 
last September, we were projecting interest is only going to be $709 
billion. Then, when we got a little beyond that from October to 
January, we borrowed 357, and then you started to annualize that, and 
that is how you are getting closer. Now that is actually going up from 
that.
  I am just trying to make a point. CBO, OMB, a lot of the people 
around us, they are good people. Their projections--something has gone 
horribly wrong in our math and our modeling. We keep being really off 
the mark. These are dangerous.
  If you are on the left and you care about social welfare policy and 
the ability to afford that, if you are on the right and your fixation 
is economic prosperity and opportunity, we are going to crush both 
sides. It is right in front of us, and we do almost nothing to tell the 
truth about it.
  I brought some boards about interest rates. I don't know if anyone 
really cares, but when you start to understand that the differences out 
there--marketable and unmarketable--unmarketable are payments to trust 
funds and other things; marketable is you have a bond and you can sell 
it tomorrow--you have those interest rates and outstanding debt. Also, 
remember, much of this debt had been sold down here in the trough, 
around 1\1/2\ or so was the mean yield. Now it is coming in at well 
over 3. You say: What? Just understand that difference is you just 
doubled your interest costs.
  Let's go into something that is uncomfortable. One of the first 
boards I showed, I showed that every dime a Member of Congress votes on 
is borrowed.
  I haven't vetted this. It was actually, I think, in an article in 
``The New York Times,'' so God knows if that is accurate. The budget 
bills that will be coming to us in the next couple weeks will have 
around 7,000-plus earmarks in them. Now, the earmarks are only a tiny, 
tiny fraction of the spending, okay? Accept what it is.
  A really uncomfortable question: Is it actually moral--is it good 
economics to borrow money, because that is what we are doing--
everything we are going to vote on here is we are borrowing money, and 
many of these are things I like. However, is it appropriate to borrow 
money here and send it to entities that actually have their own taxing 
authority?
  It gets better. It turns out we spent a little time looking at 
municipal bond debt earlier today. Do you know cities, States, 
counties, particularly the highest rated ones, those with AAAs, and you 
have to do the tax adjustment because muni bonds have certain tax 
benefits, many of them actually have lower interest rates than the 
United States sovereign debt, so a well-run

[[Page H813]]

city with a really good credit rating actually gets to float bonds at 
lower interest rates than we do.
  That should tell you something. Is it rational, moral, that we borrow 
money and send it to entities that have both their own taxing and 
borrowing authority, and many of those entities actually can borrow 
money at equal to or better than what we are paying over here?
  Of nondefense discretionary, about 40 percent of the money in that 
nondefense discretionary is money that we are sending to entities that 
have their own taxing and borrowing authority.
  Now, we would all probably get unelected the next day because people 
would lose their mind saying: We thought that was free money. It is 
free money, except we are borrowing it and paying interest on it.
  Those are the types of things, are we capable of having an honest 
discussion about it? Of course not, but we could try.
  All right. A couple more here, and then I am going to go back to the 
office and have more coffee.
  There is often an argument, you can borrow money, but you need in the 
long run to keep it close to the growth of your economy. How often do 
you hear people talk about the debt to GDP and the fact that the United 
States now is functionally at 100 percent of public and borrowed and, 
if you do total gross, you are well over 140 percent of debt to GDP?
  Let's use that entity, and then we adjust for inflation, because 
remember a dollar the day President Biden came into office and a dollar 
today, that dollar today is worth 22, maybe 23 percent less, so you 
have to do all these inflation calculators.
  However, this is actually--what is the fancy word--``ceteris 
paribus,'' ``all things being equal.'' I am trying to point out the 
increase in national debt. This is the increase in GDP over 2023. If 
this growth here in this debt were right about this green line, you 
would actually have been stable.
  In a weird way, when you have a politician stand in front of you and 
say: We are going to pay it off. Really? Did I mention every dime we 
vote on is now borrowed, plus close to a trillion dollars of things we 
don't even get to vote on, mandatory spending, things like Medicare, is 
borrowed?
  It would be nirvana if we could just work our heinies off and get 
stability, bring down the growth of this debt so it would match our 
growth rates. The benefit of that is, for the left, if they want to 
spend more money, great. Growing the economy more creates more 
capacity; more tax receipts, more borrowing capacity.
  For those of us who want to cut, we actually know the number we are 
working towards. That is how we would do it if we had put on our 
economist hat.
  Same concept, just a little bit differently done. Increase in 
national debt outpaced growth in the economy by more than $1 trillion 
over the past year, and that is what that bond market is going to be 
looking at. It is that debt to GDP and when does it hit stress; when 
does a spike in interest rates; when does a recession; when does a 
pandemic; when does a war make it so in all likelihood you will be paid 
back your interest and your principal?
  Understand, when the United States actually has--and, dear God, 
please don't ever let it happen--that moment of stress, that failed 
auction, we put the entire world into a depression. The entire world, 
let alone your pension, let alone my kids' future, depends on 
us getting our act together here.

  The last chart--and this one is a little difficult because there are 
some anomalies in the numbers, but we didn't have time to fix it. On 
occasion, we will go all the way back to 2000. Now, remember, 2000 had 
an unusual tax collection year because, the year or two before that, 
there were massive capital gains because of the dot-com bubble, so the 
number is always distorted.
  Anyway, for that year, we collected 20 percent of GDP in taxes. The 
long-run average has been about 17.8.
  Let's actually go to 2023. That year, we collected 16.5 percent of 
GDP in taxes. We still had some of the legacy of COVID and some other 
things.
  However, the other part of this chart, I am trying to show you the 
hierarchy of spending--Social Security, Medicare, defense, others--and 
you start to see this spending up here, when you start seeing that 
green, well, the green is nothing but interest.
  Our problem is, even with the projections, which I hope are right, 
that long run over the next 8 years or so, we start getting up close to 
18 percent of the economy in tax receipts. Great.
  The gap still continues to widen, and most of that widening is our 
projection of the benefits we have promised our brothers and sisters 
who get older--or the 67 million of us who are baby boomers--our 
healthcare benefits, the interest we owe, and then back to the point 
earlier.
  What do these numbers look like in 2033, 2034, when the Social 
Security trust fund is empty? Will the policy be we are going to raise 
taxes? Okay. Except I have already done the presentation multiple times 
on the floor where I have brought in the economic data from both 
liberal groups and other groups that showed even tax maximization. This 
is the punch line.
  Please understand. The tax maximization, when you do the economic 
effect, you get about a point and a half of GDP. So you take people 
worth $400,000 and tax maximize everything for them--tax maximize their 
income tax, their capital gains tax, their estate tax, you just do it 
all--you get about a point and a half of GDP. Great.
  And then, over here, for those of us who want to cut things, you take 
everything that has been discussed in discretionary--the debate we have 
had in this place the last several months--and it is a fraction of a 
fraction of a percent. It is not even a rounding error. You would have 
to change programs, change spending, adopt technology, make people 
healthier.
  Understand, the single biggest thing you can do to bring down 
borrowing over the next decade, take on things like diabetes, which is 
33 percent of all healthcare spending. It would be moral. Is that 
Republican or Democrat? It is just the right thing to do.
  How many brilliant discussions have you seen behind these microphones 
of saying we are actually looking for real solutions? No, we are too 
busy knifing each other.
  I can find about a point and a half--a point of GDP to cut. Okay. I 
have got a point and a half over here, let's say it is a point and a 
half over here on this end. This year, so far, we are borrowing 9.6 
percent of the entire economy, 9.6 of all GDP, and all the solutions 
are a fraction of that.
  Yet, the left is going to come behind the microphone and say: We 
don't tax rich people enough. The right is going to come in saying: It 
is foreign aid and spending. Well, foreign aid equals around 7, 8 days, 
maybe 9 days of borrowing, every dime of it.
  Why can't we just tell the truth?
  Madam Speaker, every dime of borrowing from today through the next 30 
years is demographics, and maybe telling the truth gets me unelected, 
but, dammit, it is worth telling the truth. It is demographics. It is 
interest on what has been borrowed and what is to be borrowed. It is 
healthcare, particularly Medicare, and if, 8, 9 years from now, when 
the Social Security trust fund is emptied--remember, the math is the 
very first year of the shortfall is $616 billion.
  How do we backfill that? If you try to backfill through taxes, fine. 
You have to accept the economic effects of how much you just slowed 
down the economy and how you slowed down other tax receipts.
  Do you do it through borrowing? Well, then it explodes, and that is 
how you see some projections that, 30 years from now, U.S. sovereign 
debt will be $130 trillion. Between now and then, how many people 
around the world and how many people in this country are going to be 
willing to buy our debt?
  Do our work, take it seriously, put together the debt and deficit 
commission. Demonstrate to the people who want to save and buy U.S. 
debt that we are taking paying them back seriously. Take it seriously 
that my--I have very young kids. They deserve a future. Also make it so 
that people who want to enjoy their retirement understand the 
stability, retirement security. We all say it, and almost none of us 
are willing to actually do the work for it.
  Madam Speaker, I am going to go have some more coffee, and I yield 
back the balance of my time.

[[Page H814]]

  

                          ____________________