[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 109 (Friday, June 28, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4431-H4436]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
JOINT ECONOMIC REPORT CONCERNS AND SOLUTIONS
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. Madam Speaker, Congressman Al Green and I are almost
oceans apart, as a traditional Democrat and a conservative Republican.
Yet, since the day I have been here, he has always been remarkably kind
to me. He is one of my little girl's favorite people because he is
sweet to her.
I think it is a demonstration that we may see lots of the world
differently--and he knows I am passionately trying to convince him that
the morality of making people healthier is the most powerful thing we
can do on income inequality and some of the afflictions that exist in
our society today. One day, I am going to close that deal. I thank the
gentleman for being so kind to my family and me.
Madam Speaker, this one is going to be a little thick. I apologize
right now to the person who has to try to take these words down.
Last Friday, we issued the Joint Economic Report. The Joint Economic
Committee has a really neat history. In 1956, I think, it was
chartered. Right now, I am finishing up the autobiography of Milton
Friedman, and he talks about the number of times he came in front of
the committee and presented ideas.
It is a unique committee. It is Senate and House, and we rotate the
chairmanship back and forth between the Senate and House. So, this
year, Mr. Heinrich in the Senate has the chairmanship. I have the vice
chairmanship. If we are blessed to remain in the majority and the
Speaker so chooses to let me keep the chairmanship, it comes back to
me.
As Republicans, we tried to do something last year and this year,
which was, instead of just taking shots at the President's economic
reports, the President's budget, we not only pointed out where they
were wrong mathematically, but we also pointed out solutions.
The hardest part here is trying to get the heads around this place,
the thinking around this place, the intellectual calcification that is
this place, and get them to understand the baseline math and how
incredibly difficult it is.
I am going to say this three or four times as we are going through
this. I know we are in the time of election year math, so like last
night's debate, there were a couple of moments when I
[[Page H4432]]
had to shut the television off because I am bouncing off the ceiling,
saying that is my President, like what he said about Social Security,
that if we tax rich people by like 1 percent or so, we are fine.
I have done presentation after presentation after presentation here
with five Ph.D. economists showing, hey, raise the cap for everyone
over $400,000, you cover about 38 percent of the shortfall.
Mr. President, learn your math because when you say that in front of
a national audience, you steal away the seriousness of how we have a
discussion, a debate, a mechanism to fix the real problem because now
you have millions and millions of people saying that the President said
it, so it must be true. You make our job so hard, trying to make a
calculator do its job, because, at some point, the math is going to
win. Your feelings are not.
Let's start to do some basic education on what is in the Joint
Economic Report. I am going to walk through the scale that has moved
against us, some of the things in the report that we find very
concerning, and then we are going to walk through some of our
solutions.
The point we have made over and over is the left's tax policy that
they are going to tax people over $400,000, maximize their income tax,
their estate tax, their capital gains tax, all these things. You can
only get about 1.5 percent of the GDP of the economy.
For us on the conservative side, we want to cut, but if you limit
your cuts to only nondefense discretionary, you can only get about 1
percent of GDP. Add those two together, every tax, every cut, and you
have 2\1/2\ percent of GDP. This year, we are borrowing--what?--8,
almost 9 percent of GDP. Does anyone see a math problem? It turns out
what is great rhetoric, great campaign slogans, is crap math.
Let's do some real math. First off, for all of my brothers and
sisters who--and if you are upset watching at home and see that the
Chamber is empty, that is because we are on 1,000 televisions on the
campus, and part of this presentation is not only to Members of
Congress but to their staff because often the staff are the ones who
are young. We are talking about their future, and maybe they will help
their Members understand actual math.
We are now at 74 percent of all U.S. spending. Seventy-four percent
is now on autopilot. Meaning, 74 percent is mandatory spending, so the
next time you have someone from the political class say that if we just
get rid of foreign aid, we will be fine, you can point out to them that
it just covered maybe a week, a week and a half of borrowing.
If you are burning through $8 billion to $9 billion a day, you have
to understand--stop lying to the voters. Stop making crap up because,
at some point, the bond market will be the ones in charge of this
country. When you are borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every day,
when you have to bring almost $120 trillion to market this year, both
in virgin and refinance, when the bond market gets cranky, it gets
really expensive for us.
Here is a point on this chart. Seventy-four percent is in mandatory
spending. Madam Speaker, you and I don't get to vote on any of that. We
have done it as a formula. Every dime a Member of Congress now votes on
is borrowed and a sliver of Medicare. A sliver of even the mandatory
now has to be borrowed money.
When we go home and talk to our constituents about balancing the
budget, if I get rid of every dime of defense, we still have to borrow.
If we get rid of every dime of nondefense discretionary, that is the
State Department, the Park Service, the FBI, all of those, you just get
rid of all of government and no military, those add up to $900 billion
and $800 billion, so $1.8 trillion, to just make the math simple. We
are going to borrow $2.3, maybe $2.5 trillion this year. Now, find me
the half a trillion dollars in Medicare or other mandatory spending you
want gone.
The next time you have someone say just balance the budget, that is
not how the math works. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on today
is borrowed, and a big sliver of mandatory spending now is on borrowed
money. It is math. The math will win, but this place is unwilling to
bathe in the facts.
We updated this chart. I don't know about the colors. This number got
slightly better. I think there is a mistake in it because it is
basically calculated that there are no recessions, no wars, no
pandemics, nothing else in here.
From today through the next 30 years, the CBO update from last week
basically says, over 30 years, you are going to borrow about $115
trillion, $116 trillion. One hundred percent of the borrowing over that
30 years is demographics.
How many times do you hear anyone around here say that? It is
healthcare, almost all Medicare, and a decade from now, when the Social
Security trust fund is gone, do we just borrow, use general fund
receipts to make up that shortfall, or will this place have the guts
and a President who stops making crap up and gives us the opportunity
to have Republicans, Democrats, the White House, maybe some actual
econometricians, and people who have calculators come up with a
solution to fix it.
Social Security and Medicare run a $124 trillion deficit over the
next 30 years, but the rest of the Federal Government has about a $9
trillion surplus because their growth rate is expected to run slower
than the growth of tax receipts.
How do I get people to understand here that if you want to save the
Republic, legalize the technology and bathe in the ways to crash the
price of healthcare? We have done how many presentations here to say,
here are cures, the cures are moral, and here is technology that would
free you, give you more time, make you healthier, so can we legalize
it?
As I have said over and over, this place has become a protection
racket. It is a protection of incumbency, not incumbent Members of
Congress but incumbent bureaucracies and often people's business
models.
This board is really important. You can go to CBO and look it up
yourself, or I think even Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has
tried to put out an updated deck of slides to make it easier to read.
Let's walk through a couple other things here. We worked through part
of this in our Joint Economic Report, but this was basically straight
out of CBO. CBO projects that net interest and mandatory program
spending will exceed revenues--it really should say receipts because
revenue is something you earn; receipts are something you confiscate--
will exceed revenues by $1.689 trillion over the next 10 years.
It is simply saying that if you put in the mandatory programs and the
interest we owe, it consumes every dollar of tax receipts. If you come
and say, David, tomorrow I need you to balance the budget, I can do it,
but you have to be prepared to have no more military, to have no more
government. We are just going to do the entitlements, the earned
entitlements, earned benefits, and then pay the interest back to our
bondholders. That is reality. It is called math.
What else was in both the Joint Economic Report and then also backed
up by the Congressional Budget Office this last week? In 9 budget
years, net borrowing--we are going to talk about the difference between
net borrowing and gross borrowing--is $50.6 trillion. When we say net,
this is the stuff we have to sell to the public, to the nice family in
China that takes their savings and is willing to buy a U.S. savings
bond, your retirement that goes out and buys a U.S. savings bond.
We are about to continue to consume--right now, China and the United
States are basically consuming much of the world's savings, investment
capital. We are just chewing it up. In 9 budget years, we are over $50
trillion in publicly borrowed money, but where I think that number is a
bit of a fraud is because we also take things like the money in Social
Security, U.S. Railroad Retirement, and all these others and borrow
that.
Now, we do pay interest back, which is something that is a bit of a
controversy for us on the economic side because we will show it as a
benefit. ``Look, we have this money,'' but we often don't show the
interest we are paying back, but we owe interest.
{time} 1215
If you add in the internal borrowing, the gross borrowing in 9 budget
years is $56 trillion. Why isn't there a sense
[[Page H4433]]
of panic around here? Didn't anyone bother to grab the Joint Economic
Report or the CBO report? We went out of our way to write our chapters
so they are readable.
Yeah, it is a funky-looking book. It looks like the type of thing
where there will be 12 people that will read it, and it will sit on a
shelf with dust on it. If you actually give a damn, learn the math
because we talk in there about ways to help stabilize U.S. debt.
If I come to you right now and say: In 9 budget years, you are
crossing $50 trillion in borrowing, why wasn't everyone who came behind
these microphones this week talking about this? Am I just an idiot for
coming behind this mike week after week, year after year?
I get people saying: Well, I am going to save a million dollars on
this amendment, and you start to say: Great. I am proud of you. Thank
you for doing it. Do you realize we borrowed more during the debate
than the amendment saves because we are not willing to talk about the
actual drivers of debt?
It is healthcare costs. It is our demographics. Now it is in the
interest we have to pay because the United States is now No. 14 on the
credit stack. That means Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than
the United States today.
I need you to process that. One of the reasons the United States bond
rates are so high is, if you read the S&P, read the Moody's, since I am
told a bunch of people here are literate, in there, it says: We don't
trust the United States Congress' governance. We pay a risk premium
because we don't look serious about our debt.
Think of that. There are 13 other countries that get to sell a 10-
year bond cheaper than the United States, and we are the reserve
currency. There will be some troll on some fake internet site saying:
Well, if we just didn't give money to this, we would be fine. Grow up.
Just grow up. Deal with the reality.
I am sorry. I have had a stunning amount of caffeine, and I am
unwilling to cut back. If someone can start a 12-step program for
coffee, I am going to be your first member, but I want to hold the
meetings in a Starbucks. Actually, I have been backed off of Starbucks.
Let's do Black Rock Coffee or something else.
Interest and mandatory program spending will exceed revenues for
fiscal year 2024. Guess what fiscal year we are in right now. This
isn't some projection for the future. This is today. All discretionary
spending is borrowed. I just tried to create another chart to make the
point. Everything you think of as government today is borrowed.
Also, in this, we actually think there are a couple of problems on
those total receipts. It is a little quirky. We give ourselves credit
for interest received but when we don't actually charge ourselves for
the credit paid, that sort of stuff.
Basically, the point is: Everything you think of as government is
borrowed. When I would talk about that a few years ago, I would have
Members here saying: David, you have to stop making up stuff. You are
scaring my voters. Ta-dah, it happened. It is real.
This chart is a little tougher, but I am trying to point out what the
majority of income tax pays for. If you actually take every dime of
income tax and you add it up, this year, 36.9 percent of all income tax
will go just toward Medicare.
Then you add in another 36.5 percent. That is net interest. If you
want to be honest, you will do the gross interest, which is closer to
40 percent. Start to think about that. In this year, almost all of the
income tax is consumed by interest and Medicare.
When we go out in time, it starts being beyond that. In 9 budget
years, you will start having 43.1 percent of all income tax that will
go toward Medicare. Another 42.3 percent will just go toward interest.
If you, once again, plug in all net interest, it is closer to 45.
That means, in 9 years--remember, we are an income tax-based tax
system here and the majority of U.S. receipts come from income tax--we
can't cover our interest and Medicare. We actually cross this
threshold, I think, in, like, 5 years, meaning every dime of tax you
pay will basically just be covering Medicare and covering interest.
Getting older, turning 65, and your earned benefits, is that
Democrat? Is it Republican? It is just demographics. I am going to
spend some time here talking about what has happened in the world since
1990. We spent a lot of time in the Joint Economic Report talking about
this. We slowed down having children in 1990.
I am going to actually walk through a couple of things here in some
of the updated reports. There is a very good chance the data is now
looking like, last year, the entire world actually decreased in
population. If any of you have your economics degree or actually read,
you have to start to understand what happens to a world's growth,
economic vitality, GDP growth, productivity, when the entire world may
be starting to shrink populationwise.
Let's walk through a few more of these. Deficit reduction from
granting permanent residency to legal immigrants with advanced STEM
degrees. We are going to start to walk through some of the things. We
say: We have to understand what is going on around us. If I come to you
and say: The population in the United States has just flattened out--
and forgive the little Post-its here, but even our own charts were
wrong--last year, the best data says the United States fell to 1.62
children fertility rate, basically meaning the United States population
has flattened out.
I am going to show you one right here. Let's see if I can make this
make sense. We are calculating that, in 15 years, United States will
have more deaths than births. The United States, in 15 years, will have
more deaths than births. We are a dying society. We need to grow up and
accept it and realize the morality. We can fix it.
There is no society in the entire world that has been able to change
its fertility rates. It is beyond me. Is it cultural? Is it economic?
Is it technology? All I can tell you is country after country after
country, they call it natalist policies. It hasn't worked, so maybe we
should start to prepare for the morality of is it moral to live in a
country where you are having your fifth year in a row where prime-age
males are dying younger?
We are going to talk about why. Be prepared. We are now looking at
numbers that we were not supposed to see for a decade, and they are
already here. Go to Mass. Go to your mall. Go to this. And realize when
you look around that we are all gray hairs.
I accept. My wife and I, we are both 62, and I have a 2-year-old, who
turned 2 this week, and an 8-year-old. We adopted. It took us 10 years
to do that. Yes, I have the old dad problem, but maybe once you have
the hug of that child, you start to say: Maybe I have a moral
obligation because the math says my children, when they enter the
workforce, will be poorer.
It will be the first generation in U.S. history which will be poorer
than their parents. Is that moral because that is what we have done?
Remember the charts I was showing you before of how much we are going
to borrow to maintain the benefits? Remember, in 9 budget years,
between 9 and 10 years, 23 percent of this society will be 65 and
older.
It is coming. It is not a black swan. It is not going to sneak up and
bite us. It is a white swan. We see it. We are just going to live in
avoidance because we have people like last night, my own President, say
things that were mathematically absurd instead of using the moral
opportunity to basically say: We need to take this seriously.
Those children and this senior have the right to live in a society
where they can prosper. There are things we can do policywise, but we
are terrified to actually think because it requires thinking.
You don't need to see that one. It is basically a chart showing the
collapse of populations.
Let's actually walk through solutions. We spent months with
economists--many of these staff are much smarter than I am--saying: We
already have things like the MedPAC report that was put out 1 month or
2 months ago that actually tells us that, by 2030, so just 5-some years
from now, 22 percent of all income tax revenues are expected to be
transferred to just Medicare.
It is here. I mean, if any of you act surprised a few years from now,
it is your own fault. It has been being handed to us week after week by
the economists who were warning us. If I came
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to you tomorrow and said: All right, Schweikert. We are going to do
things. We are actually going to find ways to actually deal with our
population flattening out and the incredibly high interest because, in
fact, we are just moving back to normal, interest coverage and costs.
By the way, we have a population that is getting older very, very
fast, and they have their earned benefits. We made a deal. You earned
your benefits. You worked your 40 quarters. You get your Social
Security. You worked a certain amount. You get your Medicare. It is our
societal contract.
How do we pay for it? If someone says: We are just going to grow our
way out. Back to the math we already did. All the taxes at about 1.5
percent of GDP and all of our cuts, which we should do, about 1 percent
of GDP, the baseline is borrowing about 6 to 7 percent of GDP. This
year, we are just a couple of points above that baseline. You have a
massive math gap there. Our rhetoric doesn't actually match reality.
Let's actually walk through one. One of the things we have talked
about is, if this data is true, that the entire world last year may
have had zero population growth, which is crazy to think about. Think
about all the things. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you had that
book, ``The Population Bomb.'' The only thing that the author actually
got right was the spelling of his own name.
It was wrong. The Malthusians have been with us for centuries, and
they continue to be wrong. We are Americans. God gave us incredible
talents and gifts to solve problems. Why don't we think about that?
I want to make an economic argument. In the 1970s and 1980s, the
world fought for hydrocarbons. In the last decade, we fought for rare
earths. In the future, we are going to fight for smart people. Why
don't we start to fix our policies?
President Trump, to his credit, actually said last week: You know, if
you had come to the United States and gotten a university degree and
you can contribute to society, maybe we should keep you. That is from
President Trump.
We have actually found the economic baselines that are saying you can
grow by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars the
size of the economy. Just keep the people who have talent.
My argument is that talent can be a skilled carpenter or a synthetic
biologist. If you are going to grow with society at the same time the
number of children--remember, we are closing schools all over this
country, except we don't like to talk about it because we don't have
enough children. Maybe actually keeping those who pay taxes, grow the
economy, make your life better, and maybe make you healthier, we should
fix our immigration system.
You lock down the border. You don't import poverty. All right. This
is a non sequitur, but let's do it. The immorality of the open border
and the cruelty, you are the family whose mom and dad didn't graduate
high school. You basically sell your talents. You tell your willingness
to work. You hang drywall.
What happens when, tomorrow, I add 4, 5, 6, 7 million people with
similar skill sets? What happened to your income? The data is showing
that what the President did on the border has made poor people poorer.
We are working on a paper right now to also show that, when you add
several million people with a limited housing stock, particularly the
least expensive types of housing, much of the reason that inflation and
that pricing went up: border policy. If you want to understand why you
can't afford an apartment and you are working your heart out, it is
border policy. It is economics. It is just math.
{time} 1230
Oh, David, you are not allowed to talk about that. Screw that. Tell
the truth.
Let's walk through a few other things here.
If I came to you and said, interest in healthcare costs are the
primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt. Why don't we find the most
moral approach to help our brothers and sisters who are sick?
There is an entire chapter in here that walks through the math, and
it has a point in here that drives people insane, but the math is good:
Obesity may add $9.1 trillion of additional costs to the United States.
It turns out that the most powerful thing you can do to stabilize
U.S. borrowing and the morality of letting people live longer is take
on obesity.
Is this place ready to have a conversation about changing the farm
bill and nutrition support? Is it moral or nutritional support to hand
somebody an EBT card to go buy onion rings? What are we going to do on
the healthcare front?
The technology is out there. We have learned that obesity is not just
about willpower. Our brains are all wired differently. That is
absolutely certified now. We need to help our brothers and sisters.
The sidecar to that is, we have known for decades that 5 percent of
our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are over
half of our healthcare spending. The dataset for this 5 percent
majority is obese. Help them. Don't mock them. Don't shame them. Help
them.
Once again, when you are having your fifth year of prime-age males
dying younger, we think it is drugs. No. We have looked at the data.
Turns out, drugs are way up there. Just above drugs is obesity,
actually.
I would argue this place is absolutely immoral because of its
unwillingness to tell the truth.
If I come to you and say, the Joint Economic report spent years
putting together the data and refining the data to demonstrate that the
excess healthcare costs of obesity to this country over the next 10
years is $9.1 trillion. Why isn't this an alarm bell?
We have gotten some very nice editorials: It is neat that Mr.
Schweikert is willing to tell the truth about where the real driver of
debt and deficits are and things we could actually fix. Yet the brain
trust around here just says, let's raise taxes, let's just cut things.
It doesn't get you even close.
We need to change policy. Changing policy would require thinking and
we would have rooms full of lobbyists that don't want us to change
their business model. We need to have bureaucracies that will think
differently.
I am going to show you in a couple other slides that you can replace
much of the bureaucratics with AI, which is another thing we need to
do.
I did a whole presentation a year ago which said in the United
States, 33 percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes, mostly type
2. I showed you that Medicare is now the primary driver of U.S. debt,
along with interest. Thirty-one percent of Medicare is now diabetes.
If we could actually help our brothers and sisters, why don't we do
it?
Because we have an industry around us that needs sick people. It is
about the money; it is not about solving their misery.
Instead of me being a complete jerk over here, if you look at the
differences in how we approach policy, my brothers and sisters on the
left want to build more clinics so we can help people manage their
misery. On our side we keep saying we are seeing research that there is
a cure.
Move the money and cure people. Ending someone's misery is much
better than helping them maintain it. They are radically different
views in the morality of cures.
When I come to you and say: If you took this number on, it would be
one of the single biggest things you could do to save Medicare and its
future and end a hell of a lot of misery for our brothers and sisters
who are older.
Let's actually walk through actual solutions. If I came to you right
now and asked: What is the single biggest thing you could do to disrupt
spending? I am going to give you 6 months to do it. I need you to do a
revolution today. I need you to actually think like a utopian
economist, and you could execute it.
Sixteen percent of all U.S. healthcare is calculated to be people not
taking their statins, their calcium inhibitor.
Can you believe I have hypertension, Madam Speaker? Can you believe I
am wound a little tight? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor,
apparently, I won't stroke out. The pill is just a few pennies.
It turns out we could help our brothers and sisters with a little
$0.99 pill-bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning, saying, hey,
you really
[[Page H4435]]
should take your drugs, so you stay healthy.
We calculate this to be almost $600 billion this year. Sixteen
percent of healthcare is about $600 billion.
How about just the technology of having this stupid thing beep at you
in the morning, saying, hey, did you check your insulin? Did you take
your calcium inhibitor? Did you take your statin? We have the pill-
bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning. This stuff all exists. It
is incredibly cheap. We could do it.
Yet we have lobbyists here who oppose trying to get people healthy.
It is just absurd.
Let's actually walk through a couple of other technology solutions.
Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to my time remaining.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Hageman). The gentleman from Arizona has
25 minutes remaining.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, what would happen if I came to you
tomorrow and said: Hey, you know that thing you can wear on your wrist,
the FDA about 3 weeks ago said it was for your heart, it is a medical
device.
Apple got its watch certified as a medical device because the next
generation is so at good managing hearts.
What if there is a Dexcom or something else you can put on your arm
that is over the counter that helps you manage your blood glucose? What
if there is something you can blow into that tells you you have a
virus? We are going to order your antivirals.
Those technologies actually exist, and this place lays layer after
layer after layer of bureaucratic crap down to make it unable to write
you a script.
My understanding is that the AMA is going to oppose me in my election
because I am trying to cut the price of healthcare and make your life
healthier and better.
Unlike the Democrats who play these stupid games of we are going to
help people get their insulin less expensive, let's give Big Pharma $16
billion and we will buy down the price.
How about doing things to actually make it so the co-ops, like Civica
RX down the street that makes insulin cheaper, why would we have
promoted crashing the price instead of subsidizing Big Pharma?
It is actually insane. The left basically wants industrial policy to
control you.
We want markets to crash the price and make people healthier. Let's
legalize the technology. It is moral.
People have the right to take care of themselves. They have the right
to be healthy. They have the right to use this technology, and this
place substantially keeps it illegal.
Let's do some other things. What would happen if I could adopt
artificial intelligence to make your life of having to deal with
government better, faster, cheaper, and a lot more accurate?
We are working on an experiment with the IRS, and it is still crap.
There was a report that came out just a couple days ago saying only
about 80 percent of the calls are getting answered, which is
dramatically better than 4 or 5 years ago when it was 5 percent of the
calls.
We have a level of AI chat--because you build a stack and it is just
an expert on this; it is not terminator; it is not a generative AI--
that says, I just need help on this form. How do I fill it out? If you
use technology, the voice will stay on the phone with you. It will help
you fill out your form. It will even email or text you the form you
need. Maybe even send you the video so you know how to do it.
You could crash the cost of government by adopting technology. The
IRS has already hired 6,000 more people to answer the phone. What is
the pension cost on that? I am not being mean, but at some point I have
got to figure out how to finance these things when technology would
have been faster, better, more accurate, and you could have called in
the middle of the night.
I have gotten some of this. To my brothers and sisters here, they
have actually helped me. For the VA, for the IRS, for the Pentagon, we
have actually been able to get a number of our AI amendments to do
things like this.
We actually got attached to the NDAA something called the AUDIT Act.
Turns out, I think we are in our eighth year where the audit of the
Pentagon has been incapable of knowing the assets. The audit of the
Pentagon is a failure. They can't audit it. It is unauditable.
Turns out, we were able to get the amendments attached saying just
use technology. Let the technology crawl through the data: Every
invoice, every receipt, every this, every that, and find where all the
assets are. We think there is $4 trillion of assets we can't identify
in the Pentagon. It is absurd, and a technology package solves that.
I have offered this for years. All I've heard is: David, we can't do
that. Turns out, this year--maybe I am making some progress because
this got attached. We are finally going in the right direction.
Let's actually walk through a couple of other things.
AI's integration could add trillions of dollars to the global
economy. There is a point out there that in the high end if we allowed
technology to make governments more efficient, society more efficient,
you could add a few trillion dollars in global expansion.
Remember before how I was talking about what happens if the world is
flat population growthwise? Where do you get the productivity?
Remember your high school economics class? What are the two ways you
are paid more? Inflation; well, that is crap because you basically
tread water. The other is productivity. Your salary goes up because of
productivity.
Help the productivity enter our country and the world and let's have
a more prosperous country.
How many of you hear complaints over and over from patients, from
doctors, from hospitals, from clinics, from insurance companies,
everyone is mad at each other. They don't pay my claim. They don't do
the claim right.
We have a piece of legislation called Clean Claims. Just use
technology to do it. We estimate for many medical clinics and doctors,
we can cut their costs in half. What would happen to your price of
getting healthcare if the doctor, the clinic, the surgery center you go
to its overall cost is half? You want to change the price of
healthcare. Do you do it by just changing the financing? That is all
ObamaCare was.
Remember, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It moved from who pays here
to who gets subsidized. It just moved it to these folks get subsidized,
so these people get to pay. In reality we just borrow the money now.
Those are financing bills; they don't change what we pay. The
technology changes what we pay.
We have had multiple amendments we put together to actually study how
we can do things better, faster, cheaper, and healthier. Instead of
just putting a roomful of people together, it turns out AI can do the
study in days and tell us how we can help our veterans have better,
healthier outcomes and crash the price.
We were able to get this attached. We are starting to make some
progress. We did the same thing in other parts. We were able to move a
million dollars around to actually administer veterans' benefits
better, faster, cheaper, and you don't need an army of people to do it.
Madam Speaker, in a moment, I will yield to the gentleman from Texas
because he needed a couple minutes to share some things.
I will make the point that the Joint Economic Committee Republicans
didn't just do the typical sniping at the Democrats or the President.
We worked through the math and the scale of the actual problems ahead
of us, and then we actually laid out ways we could make it a better,
healthier, more productive, more prosperous society.
Is this body actually capable of reading a couple chapters, working
with us, and saying, okay, maybe we could adopt some policies that
crash borrowing, grow the economy, and make everyone's lives better?
There is a path.
{time} 1245
The other dystopian part, though, is I think we only have 3 to 5
years, and then at that part, the bond market runs your country because
everything we do will be to keep the bond market from ever getting
nervous.
As we calculate this year a single basis point--one point of interest
is 100 basis points. A single basis point is $800 million, meaning
sometimes when the clowns show up--excuse me. The Members of Congress
here do dumb things. We can actually see the market stressing out.
[[Page H4436]]
Sometimes just because someone here says something outrageous, the
next day, it costs you a few billion dollars in additional interest.
Remember, we are still borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every
day.
To those of us who are baby boomers, do I have a moral obligation to
keep your retirement solid but also not destroy the future of the
younger generation?
We can do it. You are just going to have to sort of realize the
solution is complex. There is a way to get there.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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