[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 74 (Tuesday, April 30, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H2763-H2767]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1915
                     FOCUSING ON DEBT, BOND MARKETS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia 
(Mr. Austin Scott).
  Mr. AUSTIN SCOTT of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from 
Arizona for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, yesterday, we were joined in this Capitol by the family 
of Colonel Ralph Puckett. Colonel Puckett passed away at the age of 97, 
and in just a minute, I would like to read to you the official citation 
of his Medal of Honor.
  Before I read the Medal of Honor Citation, I want you to recognize 
this man, outside of being a warrior's warrior, was one of the most 
wonderful people who I have ever had the privilege to meet. That 
warrior's warrior, though, had a Distinguished Service Cross, two 
Silver Stars, two Bronze Star Medals with combat V, and five Purple 
Hearts, as well as many other awards. What a blessing it was that we, 
as the United States of America, got to know Colonel Ralph Puckett.
  Mr. Speaker, the official citation:
  ``The President of United States of America, authorized by act of 
Congress, March 3, 1863, has awarded, in the name of Congress, the 
Medal of Honor to First Lieutenant Ralph Puckett, Jr., United States 
Army, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life 
above and beyond the call of duty.
  ``First Lieutenant Ralph Puckett, Jr., distinguished himself by acts 
of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while 
serving as the commander, 8th U.S. Army Ranger Company during the 
period of 25 November 1950 through 26 November 1950, in Korea.
  ``As his unit commenced a daylight attack on Hill 205, the enemy 
directed mortar, machine gun, and small arms fire against the advancing 
force. To obtain supporting fire, First Lieutenant Puckett mounted the 
closest tank, exposing himself to the deadly enemy fire. Leaping from 
the tank, he shouted words of encouragement to his men and began to 
lead the Rangers in the attack.
  ``Almost immediately, enemy fire threatened the success of the attack 
by pinning down one platoon. Leaving the safety of his position with 
full knowledge of the danger, First Lieutenant Puckett intentionally 
ran across an open area three times to draw enemy fire, thereby 
allowing the Rangers to locate and destroy the enemy positions and to 
seize Hill 205.
  ``During the night, the enemy launched a counterattack that lasted 4 
hours. Over the course of the counterattack, the Rangers were inspired 
and motivated by the extraordinary leadership and courageous example 
exhibited by First Lieutenant Puckett. As a result, five human wave 
attacks by a battalion strength enemy element were repulsed.
  ``During the first attack, First Lieutenant Puckett was wounded by 
grenade fragments but refused evacuation and continually directed 
artillery support that decimated attacking enemy formations, repeatedly 
abandoned positions of relative safety to make his way from foxhole to 
foxhole to check the company's perimeter, and distribute ammunition 
amongst the Rangers.
  ``When the enemy launched a sixth attack, it became clear to First 
Lieutenant Puckett that the position was untenable due to the 
unavailability of supporting artillery fire. During this attack, two 
enemy mortar rounds landed in his foxhole, inflicting grievous wounds, 
which limited his mobility.
  ``Knowing his men were in a precarious situation, First Lieutenant 
Puckett commanded the Rangers to leave him behind and evacuate the 
area. Feeling a sense of duty to aid him, the Rangers refused the order 
and staged an effort to retrieve him from the foxhole while still under 
fire from the enemy.
  ``Ultimately, the Rangers succeeded in retrieving First Lieutenant 
Puckett, and they moved to the bottom of the hill, where First 
Lieutenant Puckett called for devastating artillery fire on the top of 
the enemy-controlled hill.
  ``First Lieutenant Puckett's extraordinary heroism and selflessness 
above and beyond the call of duty were in keeping with the highest 
traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, 
his unit, and the United States Army.''
  Mr. Speaker, may Ralph Puckett, Jr., lie in peace.
  Lord, thank You for allowing us the privilege of this man.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to explain something. 
I have come behind this mike a number of times, and I have had a little 
trouble. Apparently, I am not communicating well, so I am going to try 
a

[[Page H2764]]

slightly different way. Let's back up a bit.
  I think I was behind this mike 2 weeks ago and then the week before 
that and probably the week before that. One of my comments was that I 
can't figure out how the United States can have a 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, at one 
point, GDP growth and still be borrowing at the rate we are borrowing.
  Remember, a week or so ago, we had 3 days during that week when we 
went over a $100,000 a second borrowing. We see tax receipts up 7-plus 
percent, yet we are still burning through cash at an incredible rate 
and having to borrow.
  It turns out, last Friday, we got the punch line. We were wrong. The 
Atlanta Fed and others had their math wrong. We got an update. We were 
all thinking that the GDP the Atlanta Fed had been estimating the first 
quarter of this calendar year--not fiscal year, calendar year--was 
sitting at about 2.7 percent. They came in and said no, they were 
wrong. It looks like we are at about 1.6 percent.
  That is a big deal, and it helps explain why we were having such 
difficulty getting the math to line up. Why is this a big deal? The 
other concept I have been trying to sell and trying to sink into our 
skulls here is the bankers, the people who buy U.S. sovereign debt, 
when you have to borrow $2 trillion, $3 trillion a year, and refinance 
several trillion a year--don't make the bond markets upset with you.
  As of today, the 2-year note went over 5.05 percent. We are not there 
yet, but we are almost to last year's highs. It is the highest this 
calendar year, but we are back to really expensive debt. I have some 
data here that says we are still not back to the historical average of 
where U.S. debt should be.
  If I came to you right now and said one of the reasons Members of 
Congress need to act like adults, besides our obligation to govern, is: 
Do you really want to make your bankers nervous?
  Think about this. We were playing around with some math the other 
day. It is hard math to do because you have to figure out how much 
comes to market in U.S. sovereigns that have to be refinanced, how much 
are virgin issues, saying this is our excess spending this year. We 
were playing with numbers. Remember, 1 point of interest has 100 basis 
points in it, so 1 basis point,
1/100th of percent of interest in a 365-day calendar year, would be 
about maybe $800 million.
  Think of some of the things we fight over here and the words we 
sometimes say on this floor. You can actually watch bond markets go: 
These people aren't serious about ever paying us back.
  The second concept here is that as we walk through this, remember, we 
fixate on the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve does the short end 
of interest rates, the 2 years. That is where they have influence. When 
you start to look at 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years, the debt market 
is saying: Do we get paid back? What will U.S. inflation be? What is 
governance going to be? Are they going to play some games with how they 
pay? Are they going to raise taxes dramatically? So, we are going to be 
fixing this instrument, and then U.S. taxes go up here, and our actual 
rate of return crashes.
  For my brothers and sisters here on the left and the right, be 
careful when you want to engage in the nihilism, the burn the place 
down. You think it is sort of fun. One of these days, the bond market 
is going to look at us, and this happened in the 1990s--we have already 
had a couple of bond auctions in the last 12 months that were 
undersubscribed the way we thought they would be. You are actually now 
seeing articles saying American bonds are getting harder to sell. I 
think that was from The Wall Street Journal this last week. You have to 
understand that you are playing games with fire.
  Interest this year, if today's interest rates hold, we are 
approaching $1.2 trillion this fiscal year. That means Social Security 
is $1.45 trillion; interest is $1.2 trillion; Medicare is underneath 
that; and defense is number four.
  One of the punch lines I wanted to bring. Just so you can see it is--
we threw together a little chart. Remember, these are just 12 
countries, and then the United States. We are number 13 on there. The 
markets price U.S. debt higher, meaning they consider it more risky. 
Risk comes in many forms when you start to look at debt markets, from 
what is the inflation, what is the likelihood to be paid back, are 
there going to be other risk profiles, what is happening to the country 
demographically.
  When you start to realize the United States right now pays higher 
interest rates on a 10-year bond than Greece, higher than the United 
Kingdom, Canada, the Republic of Korea, Greece, Spain, France, Germany, 
Japan, and Switzerland. They are down here at the bottom. Understand, 
you take these industrialized countries, we are functionally number 14 
on the price.
  King dollar, the currency that is used all over the world for 
exchanges--most transactions in the world, we represent about 46 to 48 
percent of all transactions. We dominate that as a reserve currency.
  Yet, because of how our inflation runs, because of how our governance 
has been running, because of our demographics, because of what we are 
talking about in taxes and plans to grow the economy and the stunning 
amount of debt we are borrowing, we have 13 countries in the 
industrialized world that have cheaper 10-year bonds than we do.
  I am trying to find some way to help this body sort of understand 
that now you have the responsibility--you are going to come and argue 
and say I am going to cut this spending. Great. God bless you. Do it, 
but if you are going to come behind these mikes and say you are going 
to burn the place down, you may make markets here and around the world 
just nervous enough that with a few ticks, you just cost billions and 
billions.
  Remember, we are borrowing about $8.5 billion a day. Think of some of 
the debates we have here. We are knifing each other for fractions of 
that because we are not willing to tell the truth. The hardest truth I 
say over and over--and maybe I am an idiot for doing it--from today 
through the next 30 years--remember, I used to come here with a chart 
that said 30-year debt from now is $116 trillion. Then I brought one 
that was $130 trillion. Then CBO, about 2 to 3 weeks ago, said, no, 
Schweikert, you are wrong. It is going to be $141 trillion 30 years 
from now. A hundred percent of that is borrowing--interest, healthcare, 
almost all Medicare.
  Then, 8, 9 years from now, when the Social Security trust fund has 
been emptied out and seniors are about to take a 25 percent cut and we 
are about to double senior poverty, do we make a political decision to 
reach into the general fund and make up that difference?
  Those three things are 100 percent of that increase in debt over the 
next 30 years. The rest of the budget is pretty much flat.
  That is hard for us to process because we don't want to tell each 
other the truth. The earned benefits--Medicare, Social Security--and 
then our obligation to pay the interest on the money we have borrowed 
is the primary driver of our debt, but we are going to do a clown show 
here and say we don't tax rich people enough. Then, I show up with the 
reports that basically when you go over the numbers--and I have done 
entire floor speeches just on this report--when you did every bit of 
taxes on the $400,000 and up, you maximize their capital gains tax, 
maximize their income tax, maximize their estate tax, maximize 
everything, and then you adjust for its effect on the economy, you get 
about 1.5, 1.6 percent of GDP.
  The last 366 days--remember, it is a leap year--we have borrowed over 
9 percent of GDP. The running average I think for this fiscal year--
remember, fiscal year is different than a calendar year--I think we are 
in the mid-4s, 4 percent of GDP.

                              {time}  1930

  The entire tax scheme--well, except for unrealized capital gains, 
which is a bizarre idea that the Democrats have, which is hey, you have 
a house, so you own a piece of real estate. You're over 400, we want a 
tax gain you haven't recognized yet, although most of that gain is 
probably inflation. Work with me here. The Democrats' tax scheme of 
taxing the rich, if you do tax maximization, the concept of I maximize 
your income tax before the number rolls over.
  We maximized your estate tax before you start getting rid of assets 
or are done building them, or we've maximized your capital gains before 
you say, we are never selling this.

[[Page H2765]]

  You get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP when you do the economic effects. 
The last 366 days we were borrowing about 9 percent.
  For those of us who want to cut things, if you start to look at the 
chart, remember, the blue is what we get to vote on.
  Everything in the red is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and 
interest. Well, now interest is much higher. There are other mandatory 
programs. We only get to vote on about 25, 26 percent of the budget.
  If you split out defense, out of that $7 trillion spending of your 
U.S. Government, we get to vote on about $965 billion. So less than 
one-seventh is nondefense discretionary, and that is where all the 
cuts--now, I can cut it dramatically. We could get rid of all of it. 
You get rid of all $965 billion in nondefense discretionary, so there 
is no Park Service, no FBI, none of this. It is all gone. We are 
heading towards borrowing about $2.8 trillion. You don't get anywhere 
close to balancing the budget, and that is getting rid of almost 
everything you think of as government.
  There seems to be this unwillingness to understand the scale of the 
borrowing. We may come back to that chart.
  Once again, I also need to help folks sort of understand the 
voracious appetite we are bringing to market on debt.
  There was a bizarre article I was looking at just before coming to 
the floor, some economist who I have never heard of trying to argue--
must have been some leftwing radical--saying, don't worry, debt is 
fine. The Treasury numbers aren't that bad.
  Of course, he sort of missed the numbers. I have noticed it was one 
of those classic articles with lots of feelings explained but no actual 
math in it.
  This may be a little hard to see. You see this spike here? That is 
the peak of the spending during the pandemic.
  Here is we are today. Don't know if you can see it on this chart 
because these little bars are really small, but our borrowing is higher 
than during the peak of the pandemic.
  If someone out there has a more brilliant way to try to explain, we 
are making ourselves fragile to interest rate exposure to the markets.
  The bond market very soon will run this government. Think about that.
  I think it is Carville which had a--I think it was in his book. He 
commented that in his next life, he wants to come back as the U.S. bond 
market. This actually happened in the nineties when the bond market was 
a little cranky about something. He makes the point that the next day, 
he had Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton working it out and making 
the bond markets calm.
  Today's debt to GDP is dramatically higher than it was back then. 
Does anyone actually think at all about what would happen if we had a 
failed bond market, a bond auction in the United States?
  Now, I actually believe Treasury is doing a fairly competent job of 
trying to smooth it out. They are trying to give lots of visibility. We 
are going to be borrowing--except how many of you watch what happened 
yesterday? They put out their refunding notice saying, hey, it turns 
out, well, this quarter we are going to have to borrow about $41 
billion more than we expected.
  The next moment, you have a 2-year bond, excuse me, a 2-year note. 
There is a different definition when it is 2 years shorter, paper 
shorter.
  It was a 2-year note that went over 5 percent, and it has remained 
there today. This stuff gets expensive when you are borrowing trillions 
and trillions and trillions and trillions.
  I am trying to help our brothers and sisters understand. Those of you 
who think that we are going to go back to normal, the last 10 years 
weren't normal.
  There are already books out on what an interesting experiment the 
previous decade was with artificially low interest rates, except now we 
spent the last 3 years with inflation sort of paying for it.
  Here was the last, functionally, 10 years with 2.2 as an average on 
U.S. sovereign. Here is where we are right now, and this is low.
  We did this, oh, I think 6 weeks ago. We had 3.3. I think it is 
substantially higher right now. If you go back from 1975 to 2001, the 
average on U.S. sovereign debt was 7\1/2\ percent. Even when we strip 
out the early 1980s, the Volcker years when they were trying to crush 
inflation, you get a number that actually is still in the mid to high 
sixes.
  What happens if we go back to that? If that is normal, if that is 
nominal, how many of your businesses, how many of your lives, how much 
of this U.S. debt will we have to refinance?
  This year, a little under $10 trillion will come to market. That is 
the stuff we have to refinance. Remember, part of that refinancing is 
when you stay very short on what they call the curve, which is a fancy 
way of saying we are going to borrow some 30 days, and 1 years, and 2 
years, and 5 years, and 10 years. The short stuff here you have to 
refinance over and over and over. When interest rates are this high on 
U.S. sovereign debt, and you have $10 trillion coming to market, maybe 
2 or 3 of that is new debt, the rest is refinanced.
  What would happen if you had a spike back to normal? Remember, we are 
already modeling right now approaching $1.2 trillion in interest this 
fiscal year, becoming the second biggest expense in U.S. Government.

  I have this chart. I didn't have time. I was going to cross it out 
again. I do need to explain one thing because I want to be technically 
accurate.
  You will actually see U.S. debt referred to as ``publicly held total 
debt.'' Publicly held is what goes to auction. That is what you are 
often worried about because that has the interest rate fragility. That 
goes out and people bid on it. It might be your pension plan. It might 
be your savings. It might be some nice family on the other side of the 
world that walks into their neighborhood bank and says: We want 
something safe that we can get some interest on, and they pull that 
money and come out and buy a U.S. bond.
  Then over here is the big number. That is where my 1.2 number is. 
Treasury, I think a month ago, came out and said their number then was 
$1.1436 trillion. With the higher interest rates--I am just doing a 
back of the envelope calculation--it is higher than that.
  That is total borrowing. That is when they reach over and borrow the 
cash out of Social Security. They reach in and borrow the cash out of 
Medicare Part A. They borrow the cash out of the transportation fund, 
the railroad retirement fund, all these trust funds out there, except 
they have to pay interest on that, and eventually, they have to pay it 
back.
  We are actually looking at some weird numbers right now because 
remember, every month Social Security has to take all the tax receipts 
and reach in and grab a little bit of the trust fund money because the 
tax receipts--because we have the growth--as we have gotten older, the 
growth of those in their earned benefit years and the number of 
workers.
  Even though employment and labor force participation are excellent 
right now, we still have to reach into the Social Security trust fund. 
It gives you a sense of how tough U.S. demographics are.
  I have come behind the mike multiple times and pointed out that in 15 
years the United States is probably going to have more deaths than 
births. We didn't make a chart on it. We should have.
  How many of you also saw last Friday the estimate for last year's 
fertility rates? There was some jerk out there that was going at me 
because I was using a number of 1.63.
  Turns out he is right. I was wrong. The number was 1.62. It was even 
worse. The United States now has lower births, fertility rates, than 
much of western Europe.
  Why is that important? If you have sort of pay-as-you-go systems 
where today's workers are contributing into pools that help pay for 
today's retirees, and the number of workers is going to be shrinking in 
the coming decades, besides the dislocation that is going to be 
happening, your local elementary school may wake up and, all of a 
sudden, start to have fewer kindergartners coming in and fewer second 
graders and fourth graders and so on. We are already seeing that in 
some of the school districts in Arizona, and we are a growth State.
  The point I am trying to nail down is: our bond rates are higher than 
13 other industrialized countries. Should that tell you what the bond 
markets think about us? This is actually a more

[[Page H2766]]

recent phenomenon, seeing this differential with this many. What does 
that tell you about what the world thinks about our controlling 
inflation, about our governance, our demographics, our tax policy?
  When you saw last week the IMF--when the IMF is putting in their 
international report on debt and taking a swipe at the United States 
saying, two things that were fascinating: they are worried about us and 
our scale of borrowing, and the fact that the United States and China 
are the two big economies sopping up much of the world credit.
  We are actually crushing much of the developing world because we are 
consuming all the money that would be helping them build up their 
economies. There is some ugly stuff in here.
  For all my Democrat colleagues who run around and talk about the 
morality of helping the developing world, it turns out our voracious 
appetite to spend and spend and spend and spend and spend and not tell 
the truth, and interest and healthcare are our primary drivers.
  What are you willing to do to help us change the price of healthcare, 
not the financing of it? ObamaCare was a financing bill. Medicare for 
all is a financing bill. They don't actually change the cost by using 
technology to make people healthier and crash the price of healthcare. 
Even when the IMF is going at us, maybe we should think about that it 
is sort of embarrassing.
  When you actually have people that--I have never met him. I know he 
is controversial. I don't think he is any Republican. Larry Fink, in 
his shareholder newsletter, is actually putting out information saying, 
he is worried about U.S. borrowing and the scale of it. When you all 
saw Jamie Dimon in his comments, he is worried about it.
  Don't listen to me. Maybe some of the people that have armies of 
economists that work for them, maybe they are worth actually giving 
some mind to instead of some idiot on social media who is making crap 
up.
  You have to understand. If you have someone also do this: David, we 
are just going to grow ourselves out of the debt.
  Okay. I showed you a chart a moment ago that last Friday, they 
recalculated--put out the official calculation. It may get updated one 
or two more times, but the first quarter fell down to 1.6.
  Here is how you have to understand this. Here is, functionally, our 
borrowing. This is publicly held debt. This is the GDP growth from 
2023.

                              {time}  1945

  Until this growth is actually beyond the borrowing, because you go 
out and borrow a trillion dollars, we have got to pay interest on a 
trillion dollars. If the GDP, the size of our economy, grows a trillion 
dollars, we only get 17, 18 percent of that in tax receipts. Are you 
with me? When someone says we are going to borrow a trillion dollars 
but we will grow the economy a trillion, the math doesn't work that 
way.
  I have shown you these charts before. When we have had very high 
marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP. When we have had 
very low marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes to 
the U.S. Government. There is a whole formula why that works that way.
  You need the growth. You desperately have to have the growth. I can't 
make the math work without really good growth, but it doesn't come 
anywhere close, doesn't come anywhere mathematically close to closing 
the gap of our borrowing.
  You have got to understand how dystopian this future looks. This 
chart is already getting a little out of date, but we see deficits 
reaching 14 percent of GDP in 30 years. We seem to be racing pretty 
hard to get there. You see this gap? This is the history of tax 
receipts. When we have had high marginal tax rates or low marginal tax 
rates. They have the model actually going up to 17.9 near the end of 
the next 30 years, but we also have our spending at 31.9.
  What is the chance we get anywhere near the end of this without this 
economy collapsing, without the people we need to borrow money from 
saying they are not loaning to the United States Government anymore? 
What happens when we have to make the decision that we are just going 
to inflate the debt, we are going to wipe out your savings; we are 
going to set off inflation, we are going to have to lower your COLA, so 
we make everyone poorer in America, but we are going to use that as the 
hidden tax? Understand, actually the biggest tax in modern history has 
been the last 3 years of inflation.
  I am going to say this multiple times before I finish this 
presentation. My district, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, if you don't 
make, I think it is, 23.6 percent more than, I believe, the day 
President Biden took office, you are poorer today. Do you think that 
could explain why some people are cranky?
  Let's walk through this. I was trying to explain this a moment ago. 
The last 366 days, we are borrowing slightly over 9 percent of GDP. If 
you go from the fiscal year, October 1, we are already borrowing over 
4.2 percent of the economy.
  This is what I was just trying to share. If you go back to January of 
2017--remember, we didn't do tax reform until December of 2017--to 
January of 2021, right before the pandemic, if you were a production 
and nonsupervisory employee, your income went up 9.8 percent. Today, 
since January 2021, when Biden took office, you are 2.7 percent poorer. 
If you want to understand why people feel stress, much of our society 
is poorer today because of that hidden tax called inflation.
  One more time: Remember, when we tell you we are going to cut our way 
to prosperity or we are going to tax our way to prosperity, that is 
just stupid. That is not how the math works.
  You see this chart next to me? We only get to vote on that blue 
portion, and half that blue portion is defense. How much of that do you 
want cut? This is what you are playing with, and that is why we need to 
create a revolution of technology to change the cost of the services we 
provide.
  Now, let's talk a little bit about hope, something I don't do enough 
of because there is so much crappy news around here. There are some 
really, really helpful things in technology. I have stacks of these 
things because I sit on an airplane 10 hours a week when I go back and 
forth from D.C. back home to Arizona.
  There are some amazing things happening. About 3 weeks ago, a month 
ago, we had the first new drug that was developed completely by 
artificial intelligence. We now have some papers coming out of a 
cervical cancer screening that is done with AI that has remarkable 
accuracy, an AI for skin cancer detection where it is doing remarkably 
high-quality detection, and a stethoscope that uses AI in the 
background to identify whether there is going to be heart failure. That 
is remarkable.
  There are these amazing things happening. We now know how to cure 
sickle cell anemia, which is the first genetic-altering drug. Now that 
we know how to do it, you are going to see all sorts of other things.
  If you are a geek watching this, look up ``inverse vaccine'' and read 
about the hope of the things that it might do.
  There are also other crazy things outside of healthcare. Here is one 
where a robot goes out and fixes potholes and dramatically cuts the 
cost of road maintenance.
  Here is actually one that is fascinating. They actually came up with 
this crazy idea of how to get hydrogen to businesses. We have been 
talking about how we want to have hydrogen as one of our additional 
energy sources. Hydrogen is fairly efficiently made with natural gas 
and electrolysis. Instead of building a big electrolysis center, their 
model is you already have a gas line to your business, so we will just 
build a piece of equipment right there where you convert it right there 
and burn the hydrogen in your facility.
  There are brilliant disruptions coming that will grow this economy, 
that will actually help us make government smaller.
  We have a piece of legislation, and I don't know if I will ever get a 
hearing on it around here, but we should. The GAO just announced about 
a month and a half ago, two months ago, for the eighth year in a row, 
the Pentagon is unauditable. They can't audit it. They have no idea 
what the inventories are, all of the things we should know in an audit.

[[Page H2767]]

  Why do we tolerate that? Why isn't this body losing its mind over 
something like that, just from a national security standpoint? Maybe 
they need more. Maybe they need less. Maybe we have too much of 
something. We don't know. When you walk around the campus here, there 
are all sorts of people in uniforms and all sorts of people from 
defense contractors saying we need more of this. How do we know? We 
can't audit you.

  Turns out that a couple of the biggest and couple of smallest audit 
companies, CPA companies, compliance companies, have come up with Audit 
AI, artificial intelligence that crawls through the books, crawls 
through the inventories, and crawls through the asset lists. You can 
use AI to audit the Pentagon. If that works, you could use AI to look 
for fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. How about durable 
equipment fraud that you read about so often? You could use AI for 
that.
  Right now, there has been an experiment--and I haven't gotten the 
final report of how well it works--but if you call the IRS during this 
tax season, there is a very good chance the individual you are talking 
with is a ChatGPT, a chat computer. My understanding is that the 
satisfaction was higher talking to the AI because it stayed on the 
phone with you longer and would work through helping you fill out your 
form. Those are ways to use technology to make this government smaller.
  I have already done whole presentations on the morality of this 
government using its resources to cure diseases because it turns out it 
is really good economics. It is moral. The knockoff effects, what they 
called second degree, third degree, fourth degree--there are a whole 
series of things you calculate.
  How about family formation or less people dying. Remember, we are 
about to have the fifth year in a row where a prime age male's life 
expectancy is shorter, but this body will knife each other when we are 
just trying to add technology to telehealth because it will force 
someone out there to change their business model and maybe also find a 
better, faster, cheaper way to do it because they have to compete 
against technology.
  I will argue disruption and adopting the technology is the only path 
I can mathematically come up with to crash this debt or stabilize it. 
We just need to stabilize it, so the debt doesn't grow faster than the 
economy. To do that, you are going to disrupt bureaucracies, you are 
going to disrupt incumbent business models, and that is the way America 
is supposed to work.
  There is a reason you didn't go to Blockbuster Video last weekend. 
The technology has changed. You don't stand in line for your little 
silver disc anymore. You go home and hit a button and you have how many 
streaming services? If Blockbuster video had hired enough lobbyists, 
this place probably would have slowed down the internet for them. That 
is mean, but I am trying to get people to think.
  We have got to get ourselves to push. We have got to be willing to 
disrupt, because I will argue we are Americans, and we are supposed to 
do things better every day. The cures, changing the way government 
works, making our economy constantly evolve, becoming better, faster, 
cheaper, and more affordable.
  It basically comes down to a single line: Prosperity is moral. If you 
looked at the inflation data, the new GDP data that came out on Friday, 
we are on the cusp of going back to something horrible from almost 40 
years ago called stagflation. That is immoral. This body can make that 
not happen, and we can make this a prosperous future. I believe we only 
have 3 to 5 years to embrace the disruption, but if we don't do it, we 
have engaged in a really immoral act here.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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