[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 98 (Tuesday, June 11, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H3718-H3720]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                THE MATH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, every week I come behind this 
microphone, and I walk through the demographics and the debt and try to 
demonstrate that the primary driver of debt is our demographics and our 
health.
  I have brought lots and lots of charts here over the last couple 
years sort of demonstrating the death spiral the country is heading 
towards. Total interest this year is going to be maybe just a little 
shy of $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in 
this government. Social Security will be about $1.480 trillion; 
interest $1.2 trillion, and then, believe it or not, Defense and 
Medicare are fighting for who is going to be third and fourth.
  I thought it would actually be more honorable to come behind this 
mike and say, all right, we have defined the problem over and over and 
over and over. I don't seem to be making much progress with my brothers 
and sisters being willing to accept the actual math because our friends 
from the left say tax rich people more and that will take care of the 
problem. Then we show them the economic papers that make it clear that 
you can maximize people's taxes for those over $400,000 on their income 
tax, their estate tax, the whole list of taxes, and when you do 
economic effects, you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP.
  For us on the right, we have all sorts of things we want to cut, but 
if we are limited to only nondefense discretionary, we come up with 
about 1 percent of GDP.
  The problem is this year we are borrowing close to--I think our run 
rate in the last 365 days is like 8 percent of GDP. The long run is 6, 
7, 8 percent over the years.
  Does anyone see the math problem?
  When the left's solutions and the right's solutions are combined, you 
get 2\1/2\ percent, and you are borrowing 6, 7, 8 percent of GDP, the 
size of the economy, maybe we need to have a brutally honest 
conversation of what is the driver of debt and the things that provide 
a solution that also have a chance of passing here.
  Here is the board that gets the most complaints to my office, so 
let's do it again.
  From today through the next 30 years--and this is in the President's 
math, this is in the CBO's math, this is in the outside group's math--
100 percent of the debt from today through the next 30 years is 
interest and healthcare, and if in a decade from now the decision is, 
hey, the Social Security trust fund is gone, and we are not going to 
let people take a 21 to 25 percent cut and double senior poverty and we 
backfill Social Security.
  So right here, the new number isn't 116. This is my older board. I 
think it is somewhere now in the 120, $130 trillion in 30 years. The 
rest of the budget is flat. It pretty much grows with the growth of the 
economy. It is healthcare. If you want to disrupt debt, make this 
society healthier or adopt technology that makes government smaller.
  Let's sort of actually walk through some of these things. I brought 
this board again just to reemphasize what I was just saying. The new 
number on Social Security for this coming year is $1.480 trillion. My 
math actually has the interest being a little bit higher, and then you 
see Defense and Medicare.
  Think of that. When you think Defense and Medicare are now down here 
third and fourth, and Medicare--I think Medicare is spending maybe 
upwards as much as 10 percent so far this year.
  Let's see, if I came to you and said, all right, here is the stack of 
solutions, in previous years I would come here with all sorts of 
charts, and I would show sort of my holistic unified theory, saying you 
had to do things in immigration, you had to do things in fixing the tax 
code to maximize investment in growth. Over here you had to legalize 
adoption of technology to crash the price of healthcare. Over here you 
had to do things to make the society much more competitive and less 
oligopolies in our economy; you know, big players.
  I kept trying to show--and we had like 20, 21 things you had to do 
almost at the same time. I felt like I was making no progress.
  The reality of it is, we are in real trouble. A couple weeks ago I 
came here and did the demographics, and I knew everyone was right on 
the edge of their seats wanting to understand the demographics, except 
demographics is your destiny.
  In 15 years, we model this country has more deaths than births. 
Understand what is going on. Yet, you have your Medicare system, your 
Social Security that are sort of a pay-as-you-go system, but the number 
of children, the number of young people, the number of future workers 
we are going to have in this society--we are in trouble.
  You are going to have to do things like technology substitution.
  What the hell does that mean? We are going to walk through some of 
that.
  I have a stack of articles, some boards, and we are going to walk 
through one of those pillars that we talk about. The two biggest 
changes I expect in society, in the economy, and in the world over the 
next decade or two will be synthetic biology and artificial 
intelligence.
  Let's talk about one of the things on our list of like 21 disruptions 
of what we could fixate on policy-wise to make government smaller, more 
efficient, and more moral, and maybe your retirement doesn't have to 
implode on you, and maybe my little kids--yes, I have young kids--have 
a future because the math says right now that child that is young today 
will be poorer than their parents.

                              {time}  2030

  It is the first time in U.S. history when the expectation is, the 
math says, this young generation is going to be poorer. Does anyone see 
just the apocalyptic immorality in that?
  So what is going on here? Why are we so terrified to tell the truth?
  Mr. Speaker, I will tell you one of the reasons you should tell the 
truth. You come here and walk people through the actual math of Social 
Security and Medicare, how we are going to save it, what we have to do, 
and you will get attack ads because, God forbid, you told the truth. 
This side particularly over there cares much more about winning the 
next election than saving this country, saving your retirement, the 
morality of you receiving the earned benefits you worked for.
  It is because the politics are so much more important. Winning the 
next election is so much more important than doing what is right.
  Let's actually sort of walk through some ideas here.
  First off, I am going to do this in the next couple of weeks. There 
are now starting to be economic models and discussions talking about 
how the debt is going to make us all poorer and how it is starting to 
do that.
  The fact is, as far as your taxes, I have shown things here where 
every dime a Member of Congress votes on today is on borrowed money. So 
far this fiscal year, every dime of discretionary, every dime of 
defense, and, actually, one-quarter of Medicare are on

[[Page H3719]]

borrowed money. The fact is that this year, you are going to spend 
about $1.2 trillion of your tax receipts in interest.
  Remember, Mr. Speaker, over the last 12 months, I think we have had 1 
or 2 months, maybe 3 months, where we actually had to borrow money to 
pay for our borrowed money to pay the interest.
  Think about that, Mr. Speaker. The fact of the matter is that now we 
are starting to see the economists do articles explaining we are all 
going to be poorer because of the financing costs now on this debt and 
deficit.
  Let's actually walk through what you would do if I came to you right 
now, Mr. Speaker, and said that you live in a time of miracles. We are 
curing diseases, and we are going to cure more diseases. We don't have 
to live with misery. We are on the cusp of having major disruptions in 
diabetes and other diseases. We could make government more efficient 
and smaller.
  Let's actually just talk about artificial intelligence tonight. There 
is an article from Stars and Stripes talking about the Pentagon being 
substantially unauditable. We do not know where almost $4 trillion in 
assets are. There are parts of this article and parts of other articles 
here talking about the Pentagon buying things because they don't know 
if they have it in inventory.
  There are other articles saying that we could actually use technology 
to crawl through government, and it would be the ultimate 
whistleblower.
  Some of us have been trying, saying: Why don't we do something 
creative?
  Mr. Speaker, I need you to think, if you watch too much cable 
television over here, AI is going to destroy the world. There is 
generative artificial intelligence that crawls through and can write 
its code. Over here is a stack that just wants accounting data, that 
just is looking for assets, inventories, liabilities, and those things. 
That is what we are talking about at this moment.
  How about if we did something creative? If you have just had I think 
the eighth year where the Pentagon has functionally come back as 
unauditable because we cannot do the asset list, how about allowing an 
artificial intelligence crawler, an artificial intelligence accounting 
package, to go up and down those assets lists and identify what we own, 
what we don't own, what we think we have, what we don't think we have, 
and what we really own so you don't get crazy articles like this one 
from Stars and Stripes basically saying: This was not surprising. 
Pentagon again failed its audit, and $3.8 trillion in military assets, 
we are not sure where the hell they are.
  We are going to offer this as an amendment in the next day or so on 
the national defense authorization bill. We will see if our brothers 
and sisters here are willing to say maybe some technology is better 
than building after building full of people looking at accounting lists 
unable to figure out what the hell it says. Maybe we should actually 
protect the American taxpayer but also protect our national defense by 
knowing what we own and what we don't own.
  It is a simple solution. It is also the adoption and the future of 
what could we do in this government if we would allow artificial 
intelligence crawlers to go up and down inventories, assets, where 
there is misallocation, where there is proper allocation, and where 
there are people who may be playing games with resources.
  Why wouldn't we do that? The Government Accountability Office can 
only do so much, but the crowdsourcing of the data, the constant 
crawling, this exists today. Let's do it. It is just, once again, the 
concept of: Can we use technology to make government smaller? Of 
course, we can.
  Mr. Speaker, I have to be brutally honest. Here is an article that 
was talking about using artificial intelligence in certain parts of 
healthcare. It was a crash and burn, but if you actually get into the 
academic article, they were using ChatGPT. May I suggest you don't try 
to use chat as your diagnostician?
  However, it turns out I have four or five times more articles talking 
about when they use specific artificial intelligence designed to look 
at cancer and other things. It was remarkable.
  Let's actually sort of go on through the changing of government. What 
would happen if you have had the experience of trying to call the IRS 
and sit on hold, and then you get to someone and talk to someone who 
may not have the specialty, may not understand what you are asking.
  There is an experiment. I have to give the IRS credit on this one. It 
is a small experiment. They did it last tax season and this tax season: 
For a small portion, when you called, you were actually talking to a 
chat AI.

  Think about the experiment that they agreed to do and where this may 
take us. Imagine if you called the IRS, Mr. Speaker, and it stays on 
the phone with you because it picks up the phone because it has 
ultimate capacity because you are actually talking to a plain language 
computer that sounds every bit like a person. It stays on the phone 
with you, listens to you, and walks you through how to fill out your 
form. If you need the form, it can email it to you. It can text it to 
you. It can even walk you through other forms you might need because of 
what you are doing.
  That is morality, and it would make government less expensive. It 
would shrink the size of government. This is heresy and brutal, but the 
fact of the matter is that people are really expensive in government.
  One of the ways you can start cutting budgets, yet you still want 
efficiency and the morality of accessibility for the public, Mr. 
Speaker, is to start thinking about many government agencies because 
they are always marching in here complaining that they can't hire 
anyone. Well, let's replace those slots with technology that will give 
you the answers you are looking for because it has the full information 
set in front of it. This is the moral way to do it.
  Let's walk through some of this more. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, 
right now and said: What is the most powerful thing you could do if I 
only gave you several months and you had to come up with some way to 
disrupt the cost of healthcare?
  We estimate and have multiple academic articles that say that about 
16 percent of all healthcare spending is people failing to stay on 
their pharmaceutical regime. They have hypertension. They don't take 
their calcium inhibitor. They have cholesterol that is clogging their 
arteries. They don't take their statin. They don't adhere.
  It turns out you could do things just like this where is it really 
artificial intelligence or just using basic technology where the pill 
bottle cap beeps at you and says: Hey, you haven't opened me today, and 
it is really important because this pill only costs 7 cents, but if you 
stroke out, it could be $1 million.
  It turns out on my next board I think there is a math problem here. 
This one basically says that the estimate for people not taking their 
prescriptions is $528 billion per year. My math was closer to $600 
billion. I think my math is right, because if it is 16, 17 percent of 
all healthcare spent, this is simple. It is moral. It is not really 
artificial intelligence, but it is use of technology to crash the price 
of delivering healthcare. We have had pieces of legislation in this 
place for years saying: Why don't we just start drug adherence so 
people stay healthier? David, we can't run a bill like that. We would 
have to explain it.
  Mr. Speaker, here is an article I grabbed just 2 days ago about the 
largest ever antibiotic discovery by artificial intelligence. We just 
discovered a whole new category of antibiotics.
  Mr. Speaker, do you remember the panic over the previous couple of 
years that so many of our antibiotics were becoming inefficient and 
superbugs? Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Artificial intelligence may have 
just discovered new ones to actually work through it.
  This is an Apple Watch on here, but about 3 weeks ago, Apple just got 
its next generation of watch approved by the FDA for monitoring your 
heart. Now, the heart portion of it is a medical device.
  Mr. Speaker, I want you to think about the morality. We keep talking 
about how we keep our brothers and sisters healthier, yet we are 
heading toward a world--and I am going to show some more boards in this 
concept--where you can have it on your wrist, the thing you are able to 
blow into, the thing you lick, the sort of personal medical lab you can 
have in your home medicine cabinet or on your body.

[[Page H3720]]

  I met with some folks a week ago. Forgive me if I mispronounce this, 
sepsis. You had surgery, and once the doctors, nurses, and medical 
professionals see it, it is often really dangerous, but using AI and a 
couple sensors on your body, they can see the tiny movements in 
temperature and the tiny changes in respiration and know there is 
something going on and know there is something that has to be dealt 
with.
  How much healthier would we be by just adopting that bit of 
technology? It is here. It is here already, and now we are living in a 
world where you can actually have a medical lab attached to you.
  Why don't we actually legalize some of this technology? The thing you 
can blow into that has an incredibly high level of accuracy can tell 
you that you have a virus, can bang off your phone your medical records 
and know you are not allergic to a certain antiviral and order your 
antivirals.
  You know that is essentially illegal in this country. Your ability to 
have that breath biopsy, that flu kazoo, is functionally illegal, but 
it would help crash the price of healthcare, and you would be 
healthier.
  There is an army of people in these hallways around here demanding 
that we need to subsidize more people because we don't have enough 
medical professionals because we are getting older. Yes, we have been 
talking about that for years. Maybe we could do some substitution 
effects with technology and the morality of having a healthier society.
  Mr. Speaker, we are about to see a revolution in cures. One of our 
arguments is that the most moral thing this Congress can do is not help 
you maintain your misery. It is one of my great angers at our Democrat 
colleagues.
  You realize they passed legislation that functionally hands $16 
billion of your tax money to Big Pharma. Yes, I am using their 
language, not mine, their language, Big Pharma. We are going to give 
$16 billion to buy down the price of insulin. At the same time, 75 
miles from here, there is a co-op making three types of generic 
insulin. Go look them up, Civic RX. Three types are cheaper than the 
subsidized price, but the Democrats have an ability to basically have 
it both ways: Big Pharma is evil. Here is some cash. Here is $16 
billion.
  Their idea of morality is that they are going to functionally finance 
your misery.
  Over on our side, I have been passionately trying to get this place 
to fixate on some of the cures. We think we are getting close to a cure 
for type 1. There are some miracles happening on type 2.
  Actually, in a week, this Friday, we are going to publish a report in 
the Joint Economic Committee that I am going to get crap for, but you 
are going to see a top line number that, over the next 10 years, 
obesity will cost this country as high as $9.1 trillion over the next 
10 years, the single biggest spend in this government. Our brothers and 
sisters are dying. I think we are about to have the fifth year in a row 
where prime-age males are dying younger.

                              {time}  2045

  Think of that. You have a country where people's life expectancy is 
falling. We are going to pass a farm bill, nutrition support, and not 
actually think about should it actually be nutrition support, or is it 
calorie support?
  This government fights against itself. We actually give you an EBT 
card to go buy onion rings, and on this side we are going to cover your 
healthcare costs when you are sick. Have we lost our--yes, we have lost 
our minds, but we are actually seeing all sorts of data, and I have 
some of the articles here.
  AI tool finds variant for heart disease. AI figured out there are 17 
genes to look at that will actually give us an indicator if you are 
going to have certain types of heart disease.
  AI traces mysterious metastatic cancer to its source. This is one of 
the most fascinating, and I actually have almost a binder just on this 
one. How Google's new AI could revolutionize medicine, but if you go on 
there because I know all of you are really smart and you read this 
crazy stuff--I mean, you have all read about the Google Fold, folding 
of protein over certain things so it can be actually delivered and 
actually withstand in your body and actually start to help cure you.
  You live in the time of miracles, and this place here is one of the 
biggest barriers to those miracles coming to market. It is absolutely 
immoral.
  FDA does some amazing things, but it was designed decades and decades 
and decades ago. We have these things called supercomputers today. We 
have AI that can grind through data and look at article after article 
and population statistics and these things.
  There is actually lots of data right now saying we can cut the time 
down in half bringing cures and miracles to market. I would argue this 
is our obligation. This is people's lives. Besides the fact of the 
morality, it is also really good economics and would be great for the 
borrowing.
  Remember, we are hovering between sort of $80,000 and $100,000 a 
second in borrowing. The majority of that growth in borrowing is 
interest and healthcare costs. Crash the price of healthcare.
  Incorporating AI creates cost savings. We actually had some success 
in this idea last week. We were able to get two AI amendments attached 
to the VA bill, just to actually start with the claims side, the 
bureaucracy side, to actually move some of that faster.
  The vast majority of our brothers and sisters here, it started to 
pass. Even though maybe the union didn't like it, but this is the right 
thing to do. We started.
  We actually got another one passed. This is just for the VA, but 
toward studying how we streamline and mitigate the financing mechanisms 
to make the VA more efficient and much more nimble and actually reduce 
the cost. These are just inch by inch by inch.
  Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 4 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oh, heaven forbid. I don't know if I could actually 
talk any faster. I'm so sorry. Sometimes I start to talk like a machine 
gun.
  Mr. Speaker, another piece of legislation we have is you talk to 
doctors' offices, you talk to surgery centers, you talk to clinics, and 
they will tell you half their cost is just administrative, the people 
having to do the back paperwork, the people in the front office.
  Just walk through a concept because this actually exists today. You 
walk up to the counter in your surgery center or your doctor's office. 
You talk to a screen, and it writes down. You don't actually have to 
fill out the little thing on the pad.
  You say: Hi, I am David, and here is my number. Here is this. Here is 
that.
  In the back office, they use technology, not a room full of clerks 
doing paperwork to fight back and forth with the insurance company. You 
could crash the price of a healthcare clinic in half. We already have 
some companies starting to do this.
  Mr. Speaker, we have another one that starts to actually help the 
concept of telehealth. Why isn't it digital health, the ability to use 
technology to help you take care of yourself?
  Then, article after article that we live in the time of miracles. How 
do I get my brothers and sisters here to help us realize if we would 
just change some of the incentives in this place? There is another 
generation of miracle drugs coming. There is actually the ability of 
another generation of things that cure people.
  I keep trying to argue here. You want to crash the debt and deficits? 
You want to crash spending? Cure diseases. Make people's lives less 
miserable. There will be armies of lobbyists in our hallways because 
these disrupt their business models.
  I am going to ask our brothers and sisters here to do the right 
thing. Don't be afraid of the technology. The disruption is the 
morality, is the future, and is one of the ways and just one of the 
levers that we save ourselves from this crashing and crushing debt.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________